Athletes have become a big part of my practice lately. I’ve written for a coach, a memoir of someone’s teenage years as a wrestler, an NFL book and others.
What surprised me is how many of them want the book to make a point. The wrestler wanted young people to understand that life has turning points, and sometimes you have to accept them for what they are.
Others wanted readers to see the hardship behind the highlights, or how one moment in their career made them a man. Almost none of them wanted a scrapbook of stats and scores.
I enjoy this work, and I think athletes make some of the best memoir subjects there are, because their sport forced them to learn things most people never have to. What I can’t stand is the ghostwritten sports book that reads like a season recap. It wastes a life that had far more in it.
How do athletes work with a ghostwriter on a sports memoir?
Mostly through conversation. The ghostwriter interviews you over weeks or months, gathers material from people and records around you, and writes the book in your voice. You review the chapters and correct anything that isn’t right. Your job is to remember and to talk. The ghostwriter handles the writing. Most published sports memoirs are written this way, often with a credit such as “with” or “and” alongside the athlete’s name. There’s nothing unusual about it, and readers know athletes are busy.
What I can’t stand is the ghostwritten sports book that reads like a season recap.
No athlete should feel embarrassed about using a ghostwriter. The skills that took you to the top of your sport have nothing to do with building a book, and nobody reading it expects you to have both.
Can a ghostwriter work around my training and travel schedule?
A good sports ghostwriter expects to. Interviews happen in short sessions by phone or video from hotel rooms, team buses and the off days between games. Some athletes record voice memos after games or practices while memories are fresh. The heaviest interviewing happens in the offseason, with lighter check-ins during the season. Tell your ghostwriter your calendar up front: training blocks, travel, the playoffs, the offseason. The schedule for the book should fit your life.
Should an athlete start a ghostwritten memoir during their career or after?
Either can work, and there are good reasons to start before you retire. Details fade quickly, as the hockey player found out. Starting while you’re still playing, even just recording memories and gathering material, preserves what you’ll want later.
Some athletes publish during their careers, around a milestone, a championship or a comeback, when public interest is highest. Others write near the end, so the book covers the full arc.
Retirement books have the advantage of hindsight: what the career cost, what it meant, and what came after. A good ghostwriter can help you decide when the story is ready to be published, even if the gathering starts years earlier.
Do I need my team or league’s permission for a ghostwritten book?
Check before you start. Player contracts, league rules, team policies, sponsorship deals and agency agreements can include provisions about public statements, confidential information, use of team trademarks and logos, and commercial activities.
Some affect what you can say about teammates, coaches or internal matters. Some require approval for certain uses of team names or images.
Skip this and you can lose the book. I’d hate for an athlete to spend months on interviews and then learn that a clause in a sponsorship deal blocks the chapter they cared about most. Have your agent and a lawyer review the relevant agreements before the interviews begin. My article on writing about real people and organizations without getting sued covers the general legal side.
How does a ghostwritten sports memoir handle teammates, coaches and rivals?
With fairness, and with an eye on relationships you’ll still have. The sports world is small. People you write about will read the book, and some of them will still be in your life for decades.
Tell the truth about conflicts, but lead with your own experience instead of attacking others.
Anything factual and negative about a real person needs to be accurate and reviewed by a lawyer. Private matters, such as a teammate’s addiction or a coach’s family troubles, belong to them and stay out of your book. Many sports memoirs are strongest when they’re generous toward the people around the athlete, including rivals.
A book that settles an old score with a coach or a teammate makes the author look small, and the author has to live with that in a very small world. I’d steer any athlete away from that chapter.
How does a ghostwriter capture an athlete’s voice?
By listening to how you talk. Sports memoirs that fail sound like a sportswriter describing the athlete. The ones that work sound like the athlete telling the story across a table, with your phrases, your humor and the way you talk about the game.
The ghostwriter will study your interviews, press conferences, podcast appearances and social media to catch your natural voice. They’ll ask for the stories you tell teammates instead of the ones you give reporters. My article on how ghostwriters capture your voice covers the method.
Get this wrong and the book fails even when every fact is right. Your teammates will read a few pages, decide it doesn’t sound like you, and put it down.
What should a ghostwritten sports memoir include beyond the games?
The games are the frame. Readers come for what happened around them: the injury that nearly ended it, the doubt nobody saw, the people who gave things up so the athlete could keep playing, and who the athlete became once it was over. Leave those out and you’ve thrown away the one thing a sports memoir offers that a highlight reel can’t.
Decide the point first and let the games serve it. The wrestling memoir I wrote used individual matches only where they showed a turning point, and the book is stronger for everything it left out.
- ► Where you came from and who pushed you, or held you back.
- ► The sacrifices: the missed birthdays, the injuries, the pain you played through.
- ► The fear and doubt nobody saw, before big games and after injuries.
- ► The locker room: the friendships, the tensions, the characters.
- ► The business of sports: trades, contracts, agents, money.
- ► What happened to your body and mind over a career.
- ► Life after the game, if you’ve reached it.
Fans want to know what it was really like. Give them the parts the cameras never saw.
My take
Start the book while you’re still playing. The details fade once the career ends, and a season full of travel still leaves plenty of short gaps for interviews on the road. Check your team, league and sponsor contracts first. Then find a writer who wants the stories you tell teammates. The games are the frame. The injuries, the doubt and the people who gave things up are why fans buy the book.
When should an athlete call a ghostwriter?
Call sooner than most athletes do. Seasons blur, and the details that make a sports memoir worth reading, the locker room, the injury, the phone call about the trade, fade faster than anyone expects. Start recording memories while you’re still playing, even if the book waits for retirement, and pick the point you want the book to make. I’d hate to see a career worth a book shrink to a few stories told at banquets because nobody wrote them down in time.
My process for public figures covers how I work around a season, the Book Discovery Intensive is a way to find the book’s point before committing, and my ghostwriting services cover the full memoir.
Athletes rarely have time to write, so a ghostwriter fills the gap. The Ghostwriting Advantage covers how to get your book written for you, based on the 54+ books I’ve ghostwritten.
