Kyung Seo (Ashley) Park reports
Brett Cyrgalis, English alum from 2006, secured a job at the New York Post three months out from graduation and has been working there full-time ever since.
“I started as an agate clerk,” Cyrgalis said. “I remember my first schedule was Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday from 6:30 at night to 2:30 in the morning. I made $23,000 a year and was the happiest guy in the world.”
English wasn’t always the obvious choice for Cyrgalis, though now he says he couldn’t imagine doing anything else.
“When I was really young, I was more of a jock who thought reading and writing were for nerds,” he said. “Probably in middle school, I realized that it was cool to read.”
He discovered his niche for reporting in Jeff Silverman’s class called “Writing for Magazines” where he realized there was potential to do it for a living. He jokingly says he regrets not taking the class more seriously, but credits it for giving him the push he needed.
“He told me if I was serious about this to start trying,” Cyrgalis said, referring to Silverman. “We still stay in contact. That was a big turning point for me because it was the moment I realized, ‘You can do this for a living if you want to.’ That was really the best class and best academic time at Villanova.”
Cyrgalis now reports full-time and is currently in his seventh season covering the NHL, specifically the New York Rangers.
“I have to write two early stories before the game even starts,” he said. “Then, I cover the game and file another one immediately when the game ends, and then after, I go to the locker room and talk to the coach and write two more stories. If they have a practice day, I do that. If they go on the road, I do too and fly commercially, not with the team. I cover their practices and cover them all over the place. That’s kind of the way every day goes.”
Though his work demands many hours and lots of traveling, he loves watching the sport and talking to the people who play it. For him, one of the greatest perks of being a reporter is getting to know the people personally and professionally and writing about them and their performance.
“The drawbacks really are quite a few: one of them is that newspapers are dying, so the media industry in general is a difficult environment,” he said. “You don’t get paid a ton, and I’m away from home a lot. Even when I’m not on the road, I still work nights. My friends have normal jobs and normal families, but it’s not quite the same for me. It’s just the nature of the job. You trade the normal life for a job that you love.”
In conjunction with reporting full-time, Cyrgalis signed his first book deal in September 2012. It is titled Golf’s Holy War: The Battle for the Soul of a Game in an Age of Science, and he has been working on it for the past seven years and will now see the book come to fruition on May 5 with Simon & Schuster.
Cyrgalis laughed when asked about the book writing and publishing process, describing it as “long and arduous.”
“I’ve worked on it for years, traveling and chasing people down,” he said. “I sat and wrote for a long time. I gave my editor the first draft, which was about 200,000 words. He said, ‘Cool. You did it. You wrote a book. Now redo the whole thing’ because it wasn’t good. I did that twice. Finally, on the third full redo, I kind of just sat and wrote whatever I wanted.”
The inspiration for the non-fiction began at a golf outing and unexpectedly took him all over the country. The book focuses on the conflict in golf between art and science.
“There was a guy there who was teaching someone subconsciously how to better hit a golf ball,” he recollects. “I started asking questions out of curiosity, and it brought me to two teachers in New Jersey. They led me further along until the scope widened, and it became about how science has so drastically changed golf and society."
Though he spent several years doing research for his non-fiction, Cyrgalis said he saw similarities in daily reporting and researching for a book. “The number one rule of the reporter is being there,” he said, taking that lesson from David Halberstam, award-winning American journalist and historian.
“You get to meet and know people by being there, standing around, saying hello, being nice, and following up,” he said. “Being trustworthy is very important as well because you never want to burn somebody. If someone tells you something sensitive, you need to know when to use it and when not to.”
“Relatability is key in any story,” Cyrgalis also added.
“Stories about humanity and good people and something you can take away for yourself have value,” he said. “I think that carries from sports to anything else.”
Advice from Brett Cyrgalis
“Just enjoy your time because it goes by fast. When you graduate, it’s all work. When you are in the middle of your senior year, you go, ‘Oh boy.’ Enjoy college because it’s still about you. Have fun, and don’t lose sight of the big picture because you’re going to get there. You’re going to graduate and have a job, but nothing compares to your time in college, so enjoy it.”
