Writers are strange people, you know?
The late media maven Bob Briner knew that and loved many of us, anyway.
I don’t know if you have heard this or not, but writers are often rather strange people.
I believe, from personal experience, that our quirks only get stronger as we age. This is especially true when it comes to the environment in which we work. We like familiar surroundings, our perfect chair, the computer monitor that’s the right size (growing larger as we age) and the correct sources of caffeine nearby.
Personally, I think that if someone took away my beat-up mouse and ancient ergonomic keyboard I would need trauma counseling.
This leads to another observation. I have great admiration for scribes who can — day after day, week after week — pound out fine work on the road. I’m talking about sportswriters, political-campaign pros and laptop legends (super-typist Rod Dreher comes to mind) who sound like themselves and can accurately quote dozens of sources when borrowing WiFi in an airport somewhere during a short layover in between red-eye flights.
That’s not me.
At the moment, I am on the road after a trip to Wichita, Kansas, that mixed family fun with a lecture at the 10th annual Octoberfest Inklings Conference at the wonderful Eighth Day Institute. This required doing Rational Sheep work on the road, as well as writing last week’s “On Religion” column — “When A Doritos Meme Turns Into A Clash About Holy Communion” — on a laptop with which I have a complex relationship (see the earlier remarks about desktop mouse, keyboard and monitor).
What I wasn’t expecting, in the midst of that, was an encounter with what I consider my personal, ongoing “thorn in the flesh” the night before the lecture, requiring a quick emergency room trip. As for the details, I’ll just point to this famous Far Side cartoon (click here).
Now I am headed home to our flood-zone house in the Triangle-Cities of Northeast Tennessee, where I am told some crucial repairs (winter is coming) have been completed. Hurrah. I am also working on this week’s syndicated column.
By the way, if you would like to access a column list serve and archive of my Internet-era work (I’ve been at this for about 36 years), go to Tmatt.net and sign up.
Anyway, this will be the rare column that includes first-person material from me, since I am writing about the late Bob Briner, a trailblazer in mass-media sports businesses — including working with his friend Arthur Ashe to help ramp-up professional tennis around the world. Here is the New York Times obituary than ran when he died, at age 63, in 1999.
Thus, I am working through my old Briner notes and preparing to write about him once again, since his best-known book — “Roaring Lambs” — is about to be released once again, in a new edition produced by the Briner Institute.
Here is a word about that 1993 book, by the well-known Nashville producer Charlie Peacock: “To those of us who were questioning, Bob Briner gave a freedom to pursue those questions. He gave us a context and a language to really consider what it would mean to move outside the closed community of contemporary Christian music and into the whole wide world of music. He helped us to reclaim again the scriptural understanding of what it means to be salt and light, and what it means to be caretakers of all of God's creation including music, both inside and outside of the church. He helped us to see how narrow our vision and our understanding of God's kingdom had become.”
Anyway, to offer a window into what I am awkwardly working on during the final days of this long, complex road trip, here is a 1999 column based on my last encounter with Briner. The headline: “Beyond 'Becky Goes to Bible Camp'.”
GREENVILLE, Ill. — After 35 years of work in television and sports, Bob Briner is a pro at spotting doors of opportunity in the numbers churned out by media-research firms.
So he wasn't surprised that the new Internet-based Digital Entertainment Network is poised to cybercast a show called "Redemption High." This post-MTV drama will, according to USA Today, center on "several Christian teens, a group almost completely ignored by broadcast television. ... The teens grapple with problems by asking themselves what Jesus would do in their situation."
The twist isn't who is producing "Redemption High," but who is not.
"It's stunning that the people at a hip outfit like DEN would see this opening right there in the demographics," said Briner, co-founder and president of ProServ Television in Dallas and a global pioneer in pro tennis and other sports media. "But of course they saw it! It should be obvious this audience is waiting out there. ... What's so amazing and so sad is that Christian people still can't see it."
The former basketball player and football coach laughed and waved his giant hand, like he was backhanding a pesky gnat. "Let's face it. Most Christians still won't get behind a project in the entertainment business unless you're gonna make 'Becky Goes to Bible Camp,' " he said.
Briner is a conservative churchman and he doesn't enjoy making this kind of wisecrack. Nevertheless, the 63-year-old entrepreneur has — beginning with a 1993 book called "Roaring Lambs" — grown increasingly candid in his critiques of the religious establishment. His work has had an especially strong impact in Nashville, the Bible Belt's entertainment capital.
Now, after writing or co-writing seven books in six years, Briner is working with even greater urgency. The early title for his next book is "Christians Have Failed America: And Some of Us are Sorry" and he is writing it while fighting cancer.
Most Christians, he argues in the first chapter, are sinfully content to write for other Christians, sing to other Christians, produce television programs for other Christians, educate other Christians, debate other Christians and to only do business with other Christians.
"Shameful," he writes. "We have failed and are failing America. I am sorry. In failing to show up ... in the places that really count, where the moral, ethical and spiritual health of our country is concerned, we have left our country exposed and vulnerable to all the ills we now see besetting it. We have not provided a way of escape, even though we profess to know the way."
It's a sobering message. But the key is that Briner is a both successful — an Emmy winner who has worked with Arthur Ashe, Dave Dravecky, Michael Jordan and many others — and the kind of generous mentor who has voluntarily helped scores of rookies. A few years ago he sold his homes in Dallas and Paris and moved here to central Illinois to work in a one-stoplight town with students at his alma mater, Greenville College.
"Bob is a gadfly — but one with tremendous grace — who prods the Church along and asks that we take risks, practice excellence and humbly direct praise to God," said Dave Palmer, an executive at Squint Entertainment in Nashville. Briner, he said, keeps stressing that work must be "recognized on its artistic merits first and not ghetto-ized by any confining terms."
Still, most believers find it easier to blame the secular media for all of society's ills, rather than doing the hard work of funding and creating quality alternatives.
"Basically, we continue to take the easy way out," said Briner. "You can't offer the gospel to people if you aren't there in the marketplace and if you have never earned the right to even talk to them. We have failed to give people the chance to choose good things instead of bad things. We have not offered them the best that we have. ...
"Producing a 'Chariots of Fire' every 25 years or so won't get it done. We have to produce a 'Chariots of Fire' every week or every day if we are serious about giving people an alternative worldview to what Hollywood is selling them."