The phone rang at 9 a.m. on the dot. With only one landline in the house, Chris Ballard PO ’95 had made sure to warn his family to stay away for the morning in anticipation. On the other end of the call was John Ware, a New York literary agent, and the only person that had responded to Ballard’s letters.
The year was 1996. Ballard, freshly graduated from Pomona College, had decided on a different path than many of his peers: to write a guidebook on pickup basketball across the country. Flipping through his phone book, he mailed pitch letters to as many agents as he could find, and got only one response.
“My parents weren’t particularly enthused about the chances of success at the time,” Ballard said. “It did not perhaps sound like the same postgrad plans as many of my colleagues there, but I was really passionate about it.”
Despite his parents’ initial doubt, Ware’s call set the plan in motion, giving the young Ballard enough money to set out on the national search for pickup games.
“[Ware] called, and I may have adopted a deeper voice than normal,” Ballard said. “He got interested, and I put together a proposal. [The advance] was enough for me to spend five grand on an old passenger van … and my dad helped me build a bed in the back … When I finally met John Ware for lunch in New York, nine months later, he was shocked at how young I was.”
After a six-month odyssey across the country, surveying the nation’s local pickup courts, Ballard published “Hoops Nation: A Guide to America’s Best Pickup Basketball,” his first book, and a launchpad into sports journalism.
Now, three decades later, Ballard has spent more than 20 years writing features for Sports Illustrated. He has published several other books, most recently “The Plunge,” which examines the history of cold-water swimming. Ballard’s storied career started at Pomona, where he first developed his skills.
As a features writer, sports editor, columnist and cartoonist for the Claremont Collage, a now defunct 5C newspaper, Ballard honed his craft. A member of the basketball team, Ballard used his access to athletics and position in journalism to establish his portfolio.
“I started essentially giving myself assignments that I hoped would help me down the road in a potential journalism career,” Ballard said. “Bill Cover [PO ’94], who was the star player at that point … I wrote a feature about him. He was also a teammate, so that was a little weird, sort of a conflict of interest level there, but it was also great exercise to cover it from the inside out.”
Cover was not the only fellow Sagehen who Ballard has featured in his writing. Following graduate school at Columbia’s School of Journalism, Ballard landed a job at Sports Illustrated. After several years spent fact-checking for older sports writers, his first NBA feature took him to San Antonio to profile the Spurs and guard Derek Anderson. Waiting there were two men with Claremont ties: Budenholzer, his former teammate who was, by then, a Spurs assistant coach, and head coach Greg Popovich, who had coached at Pomona-Pitzer (P-P) before Ballard’s time.
“I went down to San Antonio and I had lunch with Budenholzer and I sat down with Pop, so there was a direct Pomona connection there,” Ballard said. He recalled that Popovich immediately made the connection, remarking “Oh, you’re the Pomona guy.”
Ballard spent weeks at a time on the road for pieces like these on the Sports Illustrated NBA beat. After years covering the NBA during the season, and writing features in the offseason, Ballard had long wanted to fully transition to the longer-form narrative.
“Right around 2005, 2006, I was able to break out a bit,” Ballard said. “They had me write the back page column for a while. But my goal had always been the long-form narrative features. And so by about 2009 or so, I think I was mainly doing those kinds of features.”
With the shift to longer-form narrative writing, Ballard had room to use sports as a lens into more complex issues. From the grief of losing a loved one to the story of a high school baseball team and their devoted coach, some stories gave Ballard the chance to dive deeper into the people that shape the world of professional sports.
In February 2016, Ingrid Williams, the wife of NBA coach Monty Williams, died in a car accident. Ballard spent the next year reporting on the family. The result, “You Can’t Give In,” published in 2017, traced the couple’s life before, during and after the crash, and Monty Williams’ path through the grief and struggle. Ballard reflected on the importance of empathizing with Williams throughout the process.
“That story was a good example of the importance of supplanting the ego,” Ballard said. “Forgetting what you are wearing, forgetting if you are hungry, and focusing totally on the other person, trying to put yourself in their shoes and how they are feeling. With Monty, it was about spending time with him.”
That ability to listen has earned Ballard recognition for his storied career, with his profile on Williams winning the 2018 Dan Jenkins Medal for the best sportswriting piece. His long-form stories continue to capture people’s journeys beyond sports, from the loss of a child to basketball as a lens into life in Afghanistan.
Thirty years after that phone call, Ballard is still chasing the same stories that get at the personal narrative beyond the game. From pickup courts to ice-swimming competitions in the Boston Harbor, the path has rarely been as expected. When asked if he had anything to say to his college-aged self, Ballard reflected on the importance of capturing the deeper story behind sports.
“All stories are human stories,” Ballard said. “The sooner you realize that the better.”
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