He was already pretty busy covering the Phillies, Eagles, Sixers and Flyers for the Calkins newspaper chain in suburban Philadelphia, but now columnist Mike Sielski has written a book that’s just been released nationwide: “Fading Echoes: A True Story of Rivalry and Brotherhood from the Football Field to the Fields of Honor.”
Sielski tells the tale of two football players on rival high school teams in the Norman Rockwellesque burg of Doylestown: Central Bucks West senior captain Bryan Buckley and Central Bucks East senior Colby Umbrell. Both were star athletes who after graduation chased dreams of playing college ball.
But in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the two heard the call to serve their country. Buckley joined the Marines and Umbrell signed up with the Army Rangers. Both were sent to the Middle East in 2006, but only one came home, and the loss left the locals shaken.
In the book Sielski uses interviews, letters and e-mail correspondence to recreate everything from the young men's football games to boot camp and combat. Publishers Weekly calls "Fading Echoes" a “Friday-night-lights tale” that “unfolds into a moving study of war's transforming effect on individuals, families and communities.”
The Book’s Beginnings
In an e-mail interview, Sielski said he had originally covered the two players as a novice sportswriter.
“I had covered Umbrell and Buckley in 1998, when they were high school football players and I was just starting out in sportswriting,” he said. “I knew them a little bit, but only in the sense that I would interview them after games or over the phone.”
Nine years later, Sielski learned that Umbrell had been killed in Iraq. He wrote a four-part series for the Bucks County Courier Times and the Doylestown Intelligencer about Umbrell's journey from the football field to the battlefield.
“I knew there was more to his story and the stories of Doylestown's connections with football and the war, but the narrative needed another dimension,” Sielski said. “Put simply, you can't write about high school football and Doylestown and not write about CB West because West was once the premier program in Pennsylvania.”
When Sielski discovered that Buckley had served in Fallujah with the Marines, “I thought that his life and journey were the dimension I needed. When he agreed to be part of the book, I knew I had a ‘go project.’”
Sielski said he was “captivated by how these guys went from being the boys I once sort of knew to the honorable fighting men they became.” Beyond that, he sought to examine the relationship between football and the military. “The jargon of the sport is so laden with military language that I wanted to examine the relationship through the lives and eyes of two men who had experienced football and warfare,” he said.
Writing a Column vs. Authoring a Book
Even though Sielski had written a previous book (“How to Be Like Jackie Robinson: Life Lessons from Baseball's Greatest Hero”), the adjustment from daily sportswriter to book author was tricky.
“The thing about daily journalism, generally speaking, is that once you finish a story or a column, that’s it. You wipe it away from your writing mind and start fresh the next day,” Sielski said.
“Book writing, obviously, is a process that continues over months, sometimes years,” he added. “That made writing the book, in some respects, more challenging; I had to be mindful not to repeat certain turns-of-phrase or stylistic devices too often over the course of a 106,000-word manuscript.”
Sielski said when he’s writing a column on deadline, “I accept that sometimes it’s ‘better to be done than good,’ as a couple of my colleagues like to say. In writing the book, I found myself bleeding over the words early in the writing process more often than I thought I would, probably because I was subconsciously saying to myself, ‘Well, my deadline’s still six months away…’”
A World Series Presents Problems
Finding the time to write was also a challenge, one not made any easier when the Philadelphia Phillies made it to the World Series in 2008.
“I got the book contract in July ’08, and my deadline was Feb. 27, 2009, which gave me seven months to write the manuscript,” Sielski said. In the fall he tried to take three months of part-time leave from his columnist job to write the book, “but the Phillies’ run to the World Series made it impossible to work part-time in October. Needless to say, I didn’t see my wife much or have much of a social life for the final third of 2008.”
Sielski worked on the book whenever he could, and traveled to Jacksonville, N.C., Washington, D.C., and around the Delaware Valley to do reporting and research. He tracked down soldiers who served with Colby and Marines who served with Bryan, and their friends and family members and football teammates and coaches for interviews.
“Finally, I woke up at 7:30 on the morning of Thursday, Feb. 26, with one chapter left to write,” he recalled. “I finished it at 5 a.m. on Friday, took a three-hour nap, re-read and edited it, had my wife read it and edit it, and e-mailed the entire manuscript to my editors at 9 a.m. I don’t remember what I did after that.”
And what message would Sielski hope readers take from the book?
"I guess I want readers to know that there are still people around who choose to do brave things, who are willing to put a comfortable life on the line for a greater purpose. Colby and Bryan, to me, exemplified that notion."
