In my research for a recent article about my favorite journalists of the 20^th century, I encountered a pattern I didn’t expect to find: a good number of them were accomplished athletes. Jack Kerouac. Ken Kesey, Norman Mailer. David Foster Wallace. William F. Buckley. Tom Wolfe (yes, even dapper Tom). Since that discovery I have become increasingly convinced that one of the reasons journalism—on both the left and the right—is now so awful and dull is because today’s journalists are no longer former athletes. Indeed, most of them seem to have been the losers that got picked last for the team or who squirrel away at Ivy League schools to study social justice.

In the great 1952 anti-communist movie My Son John, a mother, played by Helen Hayes, wonders why one of her three sons is turning into a communist. Watching her other two sons toss a ball back and forth on the front lawn, she muses, “I think maybe John [the communist] turned out this way because he never played football.”

Today that’s a laugh line for liberal audiences who like to mock America’s mid-20^th century for being simplistic, but like a lot of other things from the 1950s, there is real wisdom there.

In her book The Right Call: What Sports Teach Us About Work and Life, sportswriter Sally Jenkins notes that “essential elements of athletic success include conditioning, practice, discipline, candor, culture, and learning from failure.” It’s probably not a coincidence that these are also the traits that make a great journalist. Playing a sport makes you more interesting, open-minded, versatile, and creative. The requisite thinking on your feet during a game translates to the habit of thinking both with focus and outside the box when working on stories. Who today has that kind of moxie? Dana Milbank? Chris Hayes?

Like a lot of conservatives—and really any American who professes good taste—one of my favorite old-school journalists was Tom Wolfe. One book that completely mesmerized me in college was Wolfe’s classic The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. It’s an account about the 1960s counterculture author, Ken Kesey. Kesey had written a book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Wolfe described Kesey as having “thick wrists and big forearms,” as well as a “big neck with a pair of sternocleidomastoid muscles,” and whose “jaw and chin are massive.” Growing up in Oregon, Kesey had been football player and wrestler as an Oregonian schoolboy, leading him to the University of Oregon where he earned the Fred Lowe Scholarship, awarded to the Northwest’s most outstanding wrestler.

Wolfe himself was a jock. He pitched at Richmond’s St. Christopher’s School, then at Washington and Lee University. Wolfe played semi-professional baseball until 1952, when he tried out for the New York Giants. Wolfe said he had a “great screwball” but no fastball, so he opted for a Ph.D. in American Studies at Yale.

Jack Kerouac excelled at football in his hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts. Boston College and Notre Dame expressed interest in Kerouac; he finally accepted a scholarship from Columbia University. An injury ended his football career. And another of my favorites, David Foster Wallace, was a ranked tennis player.  

One thing all these writers have in common is that they were capacious and expansive. They wrote about a lot of different topics. Tom Wolfe covered hippies, racing cars, New York politics, modern art, and astronauts. David Foster’s massive masterpiece Infinite Jest is about, well, everything. Kerouac famously hit the road to find stories about whatever he found. Ken Kesey wrote books about the 1960s counterculture, a mental hospital, and a logging clan in Oregon.

I can’t help but surmise there must be some correlation between the physical toughness and daring it takes to excel in sports and an active curiosity and intolerance of boredom that comes from repeating the same old stories. In his book Getting About: Travel Writings of William F. Buckley, Buckley, the founder of National Review, writes about his love of skiing and sailing. Buckley started sailing at age 13. He endured crashes, fires, and life-threatening storms. He sailed from Florida to Spain. Reading Buckley’s essays, it becomes clear that the lessons he learned as a skier in Utah and sailor around the world were formative in shaping his career as a journalist. He learned to deal with danger and conflict with equipoise and calm—and he also knew when to metaphorically punch an opponent in the nose.

I ought to have happened upon this bit of wisdom earlier because it perfectly describes my father’s colleagues at National Geographic, where a Buckley 1992 essay about Christopher Columbus, which is featured in Getting About, first appeared. Dad was an editor at National Geographic from the early 1960s to 1990. Like Buckley, he had sailed the original Columbus route to the New World. Photographers, scholars, and eccentric explorers would come to dinner at our house in Maryland.

There was Howard LaFay, a large, athletic, and hilarious man with black wavy hair who wrote articles for the magazine about Leningrad, Trinidad, and Easter Island. LaFay also wrote about Sir Winston Churchill’s funeral, and a book about the Vikings. In World War II, LaFay served for three years with the Marine Corps in the Pacific and was wounded on Okinawa, receiving the Purple Heart. There was Thomas Abercrombie, a kind man of incredible stamina. In 1957 Abercrombie was the first civilian correspondent to reach the South Pole. In 1965 he discovered the 6,000-pound (2,700-kilogram) Wabar meteorite in the Arabian Desert. A few years earlier, in Cambodia, he outwitted an angry mob, eager to tear any American it encountered limb-from-limb, by convincing them that he was French. Abercrombie’s 2006 obit concluded, “With his full beard, compact build and thirst for adventure, Mr. Abercrombie was often likened to Ernest Hemingway. But from the mid-1950s to the early 1990s, his exploits in any given week made Hemingway’s look like child’s play.”

Even as sports accustom athletes turned journalists to a low threshold for boredom and drive them to cover an array of topics, sports also teach one an all-important and healthy humility that more journalists should adopt. As a journalist, I never really had the stomach to cover sports because my experience playing baseball and for a legendary football coach in high school made it almost impossible for me to feel good about sticking a microphone in a player’s face right after left the field to ask him how he felt about fumbling on the last play.

In 1990 my grandfather, who had been a professional baseball player for the Washington Senators, was inducted into the Hall of Fame at RFK Stadium in D.C. During the ceremony I met a former Washington Redskin, and I explained to him the reason why I wasn’t a sportswriter. In baseball, I know, you can score a game-winning hit one day and strike out the next. I had been cheered, and booed, on the field. Politicians, celebrities, dishonorable journalists—I’m happy to go after any of them. I just couldn’t find it in me to interrogate an athlete about his screwups. “That means you have character,” the former Redskin told me.

Who are the great journalist-athletes today? Jake Tapper? Ezra Klein? While writing this piece I got a notice that Dana Milbank of The Washington Post is coming-out with a new book—Fools on the Hill: The Hooligans, Saboteurs, Conspiracy Theorists, and Dunces Who Burned Down the House. This is the fourth book Milbank has written about “those evil conservatives.” And honestly, conservatives aren’t much better—writing the same book about the left repeatedly. It makes it rather difficult to imagine a serious National Review softball team, or Ben Shapiro surfing. The last photograph I saw of a journalist doing something mildly athletic was months ago. It was Rachel Maddow splitting wood. So at least there’s one real man left.