Q&A With S.L. Price

S.L. PRICE, a Senior Writer at Sports Illustrated from 1994-2019, has written five books—including his most recent work, The American Game: History and Hope in the Country of Lacrosse, a wide-ranging examination of the sport.  Mr. Price took the time to do a Q&A with us about his book.

Mr. Price will be speaking about his book at the Harlem School of the Arts February 18, Tucson Festival of Books March 14-15, and the Virginia Festival of the Book March 20-22. 

MCLA: What was the impetus for writing a book about lacrosse?

S.L. Price: Took me by surprise, slowly and then all at once. I covered the Duke lacrosse rape hoax for Sports Illustrated in 2006, where the caricature of the upper-class laxbro was deployed constantly – and often accurately. But I also was exposed to Duke’s blue-collar players, the first in their families to go to college, who would never have been able to do so without lacrosse – and their hopes of tapping into the game’s unique Wall Street network. Then, in 2010, I wrote a massive piece on the Iroquois, who invented the game and stand – spiritually, politically, economically – as living counterpoints to the caricature. Add in the sport’s singular ties to military service, the fact that women have powered the bulk of the game’s rapid growth, and issues like racism and substance abuse, and I found myself fascinated. When my book editor asked in 2017 what subject I’d like to tackle next, I said, “You might think I’m nuts, but this lacrosse thing just won’t leave me alone….”

I liken it to the many stories that I’ve heard about people recounting their first experience with the game. “I can’t explain it,” they said. “I picked up a lacrosse stick and I just couldn’t put it down. I’d walk past it and had to grab it.” Soon enough, they were sleeping with the thing. That was me, with this book.

MCLA:  What was your experience with the game before your research?

SP: I grew up in Stamford, Connecticut in the 1960’s & ‘70s, hard by lacrosse hotbeds like Darien and Greenwich, but mine was a football-hockey-basketball-baseball town. A buddy playing on our fledgling high school club team gifted me a stick that I used to fiddle and jog with, but I never saw a game until much later. When I arrived at the University of North Carolina in 1981, Willie Scroggs had just dethroned Hopkins in what I now consider one of the earliest ‘Grow-the-Game’ moments. But at the time, like everyone else on campus, I was more concerned with the rise of Michael Jordan and UNC’s first hoops title under Dean Smith. Wonderfully, being able to interview Scroggs and tease out unknown elements of his stunning story turned out to be one of this project’s great joys.

MCLA: What did your research for the book look like?

SP: I started in January of 2018, at LaxCon in Baltimore with an interview with then-USA Lacrosse CEO Steve Stenersen. I’m what’s known as a parachute guy; in my 26 years at SI, my seeming specialty was dropping into unknown situations and hustling to write a definitive story. The best quality to have in such instances is to understand your weaknesses: Know what you don’t know. I didn’t know plenty. So I enlisted the great and broad knowledge and guidance of longtime lacrosse writer Corey McLaughlin, who helped me hit the ground running. I knew I had to talk to as many people as possible. I ended up doing 370 interviews, traveled to Israel for the 2018 World Championships, then all over the U.S. – Mid-Atlantic, New York, Virginia, North Carolina, Illinois, Denver, Utah, the West Coast. It was amazing how many people in the sport were so generous, so insightful, so willing to take a deep, cold-eyed look at the game. At a time when access to journalists in other sports is narrowing, fast, I got lucky. Lacrosse wanted its story told, honestly, the bad as well as the good.

MCLA: Do you have a favorite thing you learned or anecdote from your research?

SP: The story of Miles Harrison and his son, Kyle, first and only black winner of the Tewaaraton Award. Few outside the family knew that Miles had been recruited by Hopkins coach Bob Scott in the late ‘60s, and always wondered if race had something to do with that recruitment ending. He went on, of course, to become one of the founders of the Morgan State program, whose 1975 upset of mighty Washington & Lee is the closest this sport comes to a Jackie Robinson moment. Then Kyle grew up to become a Hopkins star, wipes out the program’s longest national title drought with a 2005 national championship. And, quietly, afterward Bob Scott locked eyes with Miles, presented him with a JHU jersey with his name and Morgan State number on it, and declared Miles, part of “the Hopkins family.” Both men had tears in their eyes: Full-circle moment, with enormous meaning for the family and the game.

Many lacrosse people – Scroggs, Albany coach Scott Marr, UVa coach Lars Tiffany, Selena Lasota, Kelly Amonte Hiller, Bill Tierney, Rob Pannell, Shamel Bratton, George Barrow, Brian Holman, the Thompson family, Geoff Snider, Zed Williams, Oren and Rex Lyons, others – trusted me with insights and information that hadn’t been public before. But I feel particularly honored to be able to tell the Harrison family story.

MCLA: Have you continued to follow the game since you finished writing the book?

SP: I have, but less in the details of wins and losses and rankings and recruiting. For me, the question of whether the Haudenosaunee Nationals will be allowed to take part in the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles remains vital – not just for the sport and the Olympics, but even for our nation. No sport – certainly not baseball or football -- goes back 1,000 years in the continent’s history, actually emerges out of the dirt of North America, nor more fully reflects American culture. The IOC doesn’t seem to understand the public-relations boon it would experience by letting the game’s creators play – nor the PR disaster looming if it doesn’t. And though the IOC will bear most of the blame, such an outcome would inevitably taint the sport and the host nation, too. (Unless, of course, the sport’s powers – the U.S. and Canada – threaten to boycott in solidarity with the Haudenosaunee….)

MCLA: Without giving away too much about the book what were some of the main themes you discovered in your research and wanted to get out there in the book?

SP: The grandest theme – if I can call it that – is the intertwining of the sport’s two dominant cultures: The Native American and upper-class prep school games. With Scott Marr’s work in Albany, the careers of the Thompson brothers, and – especially -- with Lars Tiffany’s life and family connection to the Onondaga via his father’s historic buffalo herd, work leading UVa and, in 2023, as Haudenosaunee Nationals men’s head coach, I sensed the lacrosse’s two strains finally, after 40 years of testy co-existence, finding common cause. “We have to view the Iroquois Nationals as an asset,” World Lacrosse head Jim Scherr told me in 2021, “not a liability.”

Getting the sport into the Olympics was one huge motivation, with an added dash of politics and public relations. But this should be made clear: Lacrosse is one of the few – if only – cultural spaces where Indigenous America is held up today not as an object of pity, or some insoluble ghettoized pathology, or a long ago historical crime, but as an example of excellence with equal standing to its traditional conquerors from America and Canada. The sport deserves great credit for that. And if it continues to do so, it can become an example – not just a mirror of the culture, but a light -- like no other.

Thank you to Mr. Price for taking the time to speak with us.  More information about the book as well as a link to purchase the book are available here.