writermag.com • The Writer | 11want to do, but you’ve got to think
globally. You’re always talking about
how you wanted to write this book
about your father.” The reason I never
wrote the book about my father was: I
was getting paid too much money to
write something for nothing. And
now, I wasn’t getting paid any money.
So I could write something for noth-
ing. Which I did. My father’s book
took me about four years; the Seaver
book took me two years. They over-
lapped a little bit. And now, I realize
that that’s what I always wanted to do.
The best thing that happened to me
was the magazines dried up, because
I’m having more fun writing books
than I ever did writing a magazine
story. A magazine story is always a
pain in the ass because you’ve always
got stipulations. Word length. Yo u
gotta put this in. You can’t put this in
because our readers won’t like that.
Magazines falling away gave you the
books, but how did you recuperate
financially?
My wife [Susan] and I were living in
Fort Lauderdale, living on about
$120,000 a year. Which is good. Fort
Lauderdale is not New York. We had
a $100,000 house, a little Cape Cod-
like house, about a mile from the
beach. And we didn’t spend. We had
two cars – a Taurus SHO we had for
20 years. And I’ve got a little blue
Subaru I bought in 2002, a WRX, it’s
got 80,000 miles on it. So we didn’t
live high. I knew the money was
going to be gone. That’s when we
moved. I said, “We’ve gotta go some-
where that’s cheap.” We found Abbev-
ille, South Carolina, which is very
inexpensive to live. About $40,000 a
year, $45,000 a year. I intuited ahead
of time what was going to happen ̧
and what I intuited happened six
years later.
Part of being a writer is being a busi-
nessman: “This is happening, so let’s
respond this way.” I think that gets lost
sometimes.
It’s like you’re an executive at Disney
and you’re making 10 billion a year,
and you know it’s passing you by
because nobody wants to make those
small, meaningful movies anymore,
and it’s got to be Marvel No. 2, 3, 4, 5,
6, which is not your bag, and you know
you’re on your way out, so what do you
do? Do you just retire and go play golf?
No. Maybe you go teach a course at a
college at your home. And they give
you maybe 60,000 a year, and you
teach a film course. So basically, that’s
what I did, but at a smaller level, and I
love what I’m doing. More fun than I
ever did writing news stories, I’ll tell
you that.Did you ever lose that love of writing?
Never. If I don’t write, I’d die. I under-
stood Hemingway completely when he
blew his brains out because he couldn’t
write anymore. I’m not gonna do that;
I’m a good Catholic boy, so I don’t
believe in suicide. But once I can’t
write, that’s when I’ll get old.After going freelance, did you ever think
about joining a magazine or newspaper
full time?
Turning down Sports Illustrated, the
biggest financial loss in my life, was the
smartest thing I ever did in my life. My
father told me to never work for any-
body. He said they’d own you. Sports
Illustrated, after the first year I wrote for
them in ’70, they offered me a contract.
They were going to give me a column, I
was going to make three times what I
was making as a freelance writer. I was
going to have an expense account,
which I could essentially live off of,
because it was a fixed amount. What-
ever you didn’t spend at the end of the
year, you kept. Plus, I had stock options.
They did health care. The whole thing,
right? I told them no. I said, “I will
never work for anybody.” And I never
have. If you work for somebody, you’vegot to kiss ass, you’ve got to do what
they tell you, you can’t say no.This is going to sound very touchy-feely,
but if I had taken a full-time job at a
newspaper or magazine, I wouldn’t be
the best version of myself.
Absolutely, and you need to be the best
version of yourself. Here’s the thing: If
you’re not smart, you need somebody
to turn [you] into the best version of
yourself. You need a consigliere. You
need a guru. But if you’re smart, like I
am, like my father was, you determine
who you are.
The one reason I wrote was I didn’t
like who I was, and I wanted to find
out why and be better. It always
annoyed me, the kind of kid I was –
an arrogant kid. With baseball, I
could have skated on that arrogance,
and everybody would have kissed my
ass. And without baseball, I had to
decide who I was and who I wanted to
be. The only way I could do it was
writing it. Once I wrote it, I couldn’t
be it anymore. So that’s why I became
a writer: I wanted to change the kind
of guy I was.Ithaca-based Pete Croatto is a veteran free-
lance writer who has written for The New York
Times, The Christian Science Monitor, Publishers
Weekly, Columbia Journalism Review, and many
other publications. He is also working on his
first book. Twitter: @PeteCroatto.