We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Tony Perkins a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Tony, thanks for joining us today. Alright – so having the idea is one thing, but going from idea to execution is where countless people drop the ball. Can you talk to us about your journey from idea to execution?

I had just moved to Los Angeles from Beijing, China where I spent 4 years as a broadcast sports journalist covering the 2008 Olympic games among other events for television. Upon arriving back in the United States, I realized I had accumulated so much experience as a news and sports reporter that the next logical step was to be an independent storyteller – writing the second draft of history.

I wanted to start at the beginning: what were the stories that sparked my interest in journalism in the first place? I tracked down events I’d read about when I was as young as 10, and began to research the details from a modern perspective.

That research evolved into two blogs: one focused on forgotten happenings from the early 1960s, and the other looking at the behavior of spectators at 1970s sporting events. Entries from the two blogs ultimately turned into chapters that created my first two non-fiction narrative books.

Tony, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My parents said I learned to read by scanning through newspapers delivered to our door when I was 5 years old. It was the mid-1960s, and they encouraged my interest in news events of those years by scheduling family vacations around the different places I’d read about: Washington D. C., New York City, and the Florida Space Coast. Traveling to those seemingly exotic, high-energy places from a small Midwestern city really opened up the world of storytelling for me.

By the time I reached high school, I was so obsessed with being a sports announcer that I recorded the soon-to-be legendary voices behind the great games on radio and television: baseball’s Harry Carry from Chicago, Bob Costas in St. Louis, Al Michaels in Cincinnati, and TV’s Dick Enberg. Studying their announcing style, I recognized they weren’t just describing the action, they were telling stories that were compelling to listen to.

I considered storytelling as a journalist to be a calling, and upon my graduation from college I found that the most effective way to make a living was to diversify my interests to include all kinds of news stories. I eventually found my footing as a general assignment reporter working at radio and television newsrooms. As a crime reporter, I covered the lurid story of serial killer Jeffery Dahmer in Milwaukee. As a culture reporter, I chronicled the first night baseball game at Chicago’s venerable Wrigley Field. In Indianapolis, I covered ten runnings of the annual Indianapolis 500 motorsports spectacular, along with a personal favorite, college basketball’s Final Four championship game.

I accomplished a career milestone with an assignment at the 2008 Beijing Olympic games. The opening ceremony occurred exactly 20 years after I covered that historic night baseball game in Chicago. During my time working overseas, I developed the idea of looking back on historic news and sports events through a 21st century lens, concentrating on the changes that transpired in culture and society over the years. Instead of creating a documentary, I chose to use my writing talent to produce a series of books on the subject.

Are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

One of the best experiences for a writer is the ability to observe life through traveling. Dating back to Ernest Hemingway’s depiction of Spanish bullfighting in his classic “Death in the Afternoon,” and before that, Welsh journalist Henry Stanley’s fabled quest to find missionary David Livingstone in Africa, writers have thrilled readers with the adventure of a life overseas. Thanks to current technology, working remotely has become a staple of today’s generation of creative nomads, but I wish I had taken the road less traveled in my early career. I believe stories begin with people, and the greater variety of people and places you can visit, the better. It’s been the basis of my creative evolution as a storyteller.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Trying to make a living as a creative has never been easy, and I had to last through several uneven moments. A career as a radio or television journalist often meant a contract that lasted for only a few months to a couple of years before a change in format or management forced a move to another city in another part of the country. I worked at two television newsrooms in Knoxville, Tennessee over the span of 5 years when I really wanted to be a reporter in Chicago. Ultimately, I was released from my contract to pursue that dream, only to find doors to the Chicago market shut tight.

I ended up in Rockford, an Illinois community 90 miles west of Chicago. The residents there were living through the economic shock of the downsizing a Chrysler manufacturing plant, the city’s biggest employer. The stories available there were certainly not those which I imagined telling, but they were important nonetheless and compelling in their own right. I was only in Rockford for two years, but working there taught me a key lesson that any story that involves people rising above difficult times is a story worth telling.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.aeperkins.online
• Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/aeperkins/
• Twitter: PerkinsSportsTV
• Youtube: second_draft827

Image Credits
Tony Perkins