Shawn's blogging. www.shawnfury.blogspot.com. Check out the new FAQ page. NFL.com writer Gregg Easterbrook labels Keeping the Faith a "must read" sports book. Read more Booklist gives positive review to Keeping the Faith. Read more Publishers Weekly calls Keeping the Faith a "heartfelt tale." Read review Keeping the Faith is now available on Kindle. Read more. Shawn's story on Mike and Matt Fasnacht appears in the February issue of Minnesota Monthly, which can be read here. Shawn's essay on home-state memories appears in the current Sports Scoop. Read More Shawn's story on high school basketball is in the current issue of Minnesota Basketball News. Read More The Daily News of Iron Mountain, Michigan, reviews book. Read review New Ulm Journal story features Trinity football team, discusses impact of book on school, team. Read more

Published in the Worthington Daily Globe on September 24, 2005

Expanding the Story: Former Daily Globe writer pens first book

By Beth Rickers

WORTHINGTON — Shawn Fury looks the same: shaggy brown hair shielding his eyes, a couple day’s worth of stubble on his chin and an easygoing swagger on his tall frame, which is encased in well-worn T-shirt and jeans.

He also sounds the same — a hint of sarcasm tinged with humor continually cropping up in his conversation.

But Shawn undoubtedly is not the same guy who used to write sports at the Daily Globe. The man who now walks through the door into the newsroom is not just a writer, he’s an author.

The Lyons Press, a publisher based in Guilford, Conn., recently released Shawn’s hardcover book, “Keeping the Faith: In the Trenches with College Football’s Worst Team.” The nonfiction work is the expansion of a newspaper feature that Shawn wrote for The Forum in 2003, about Trinity Bible College in Ellendale, N.D., which lost a football game by what is believed to be a record score — 105-0.

Many Daily Globe readers might recall Shawn’s byline from as far back as 1993, when the teen from Janesville came to Worthington to study at Minnesota West Community and Technical College. With a natural talent for writing and an interest in sports, he was quickly recruited as one of the Globe’s part-time sports employees. After he graduated from St. John’s University, Shawn was working a job totally unrelated to his communications major at the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport when he was summoned back to the Daily Globe.

“I was pushing wheelchairs at the airport, with my St. John’s degree,” he said with a bit of disgust. “… People in wheelchairs never tip.”

So Shawn eagerly headed back to Worthington and spent three years at the Daily Globe sports desk before accepting a position in Fargo, N.D., as a sports copy editor at the The Forum.

But Shawn’s strong suit was writing, and his new job didn’t entail much of that. He did another short stint at the Globe, filling in as sports editor and night news editor, before the bright lights of the big city beckoned. Shawn moved briefly to New York City, returning within a few weeks to Fargo in mid-2002.

“They welcomed me back,” he said. “I was again a sports copy editor, but they let me do a feature story every couple of weeks.”

That’s when Shawn stumbled across the little-known Trinity football team. On a hunch, he went to Ellendale for a weekend game.

“I just went there and hung out,” he said. “I found some very interesting people and a really, really bad football team.”

The ensuing feature story was lengthy, and even with two sidebars to the main article, Shawn felt he wasn’t relating the complete tale.

“I knew when I was writing it that I had a lot more material than I could fit in it,” he recalled. “There was a lot more there. It was too bad I couldn’t tell more of their stories.”

The Forum feature did, however, garner Shawn some acclaim. It earned first place for best sports feature article in a daily paper in 2003 from the Minnesota Newspaper Association, and another first-place prize for sports writing from the North Dakota/South Dakota Associated Press Managing Editors Association.

Meanwhile, Shawn once again felt beckoned to New York City, this time due to a friendship that had blossomed into a romance.

“I met Louise the first time I went to New York, through a friend of hers, and at first we had this phone-friend kind of thing going,” Shawn related. “In 2003, we visited each other. I went out to New York; she made several trips to Fargo.”

Louise, a nanny originally from South Africa, offered to move to Fargo, but they decided there would be more opportunities for both of them in New York. Shawn arrived in Manhattan in April 2004, and the two were married in June 2004 in Central Park.

“My parents and my sister were there, and two of my friends from Janesville made the trip, but it was a small wedding,” Shawn said. “Her mom came from South Africa. It was the first time she’d seen her in five years.”

Shawn loved his new life with Louise, but the job prospects were nonexistent.

“I applied for a ton of jobs and got absolutely no response,” he said. “I tried everything — newspapers, magazines, online publications, library publications. It was cool being in New York and living there, but it was getting frustrating that I couldn’t even get an interview. I knew that if I could just get my foot in the door, I could do just as good a job as anyone else.

“I was really thinking about doing freelance writing and was starting that process,” he continued. “True story: We were up in the Hamptons, where Louise was working for the summer, and in the middle of the night, I thought about doing a story about the Trinity coach, that it might work as a freelance article for a magazine, or maybe even a book — the underdog that never won. So I got up in the middle of the night and wrote the idea down.”

Throughout the summer, Louise prodded Shawn to pursue the concept, but he doubted its validity. Finally though, in late August, he followed through, typed up a one-page pitch and sent it out to 10 publishers whose names he found in a writer’s market book.

“Three days after I sent it, I came home and there was a message from this editor at Lyons Press,” he said. “I listened to it and called Louise and said, ‘What do I do?’”

Louise advised him to take a few minutes to calm down and then call the editor back. The editor liked the idea as a book, envisioning it released in hardcover, 70,000 words, priced at $22.95.

By late September last year, after the details of the book and its exact focus were hammered out, Shawn signed a contract.

“Then I was off to Ellendale a couple of days later for six weeks of research,” Shawn said, relating that the story that he now found there wasn’t exactly what he’d outlined in his book proposal. “Initially, it was all about the 2003 season, but that didn’t have any flow. … After I’d been there a week or so, I decided it should primarily be about the 2004 season, because it had potential for a conflict. Before it had been about this team that gets its butt kicked but they all still have happy faces. That wasn’t the story anymore. Now there was a lot of struggle. I’d basically sold a different book to the publisher.”

With the help and approval of his editor, Shawn shifted focus and found four or five characters on which to base his story. Since Ellendale’s sole motel was booked up for the hunting season, he was connected with a local pastor and his family and lived in their basement for the next six weeks.

Although everything was falling into place, Shawn suffered doubts.

“It all happened so fast. ‘Do I know what I’m doing?’ And four months after getting married, I left my wife for a month and a half,” he related. “But I knew it was a tremendous opportunity, and I thought it was a good story. Once I got to know the people, I wasn’t a stranger anymore just parachuting in on these people. I wanted to show their struggles, their frustrations.”

On Dec. 1, 2004, Shawn returned to New York. He had until April 15 to write a book.

“I had 60 little audiotapes to transcribe and three books full of notes,” he remembered. “It took a month just to get the notes organized. I started writing in early January. But how do you start? My editor said, ‘Don’t worry about the beginning, the middle or the end. Just start writing.’ The longest thing I’d ever written was the Trinity story for the Forum. I had to figure out how not to give the story away right away, the pacing. That first month of writing was really a struggle. … About February, I started to get into a groove, figured out how to do it.”

As he finished sections of the book, Shawn would send them to his editor, Tom McCarthy, who would relay back corrections and suggestions added in red. McCarthy also formerly worked for a newspaper, and Shawn credits him with easing the transition to book format.

“When I sent the first three chapters and he sent them back, it was weird opening the file up and it would just be all red,” Shawn recalled. “That was tough at first, but a lot of it was just suggestions, really good ideas to get me going. There are 14 chapters, and by the time I sent him the last half of them, he hardly sent back anything. …

“I wish I’d had six more months to write it,” Shawn lamented briefly, “but I’m a horrible procrastinator, so I’d probably have waited until the last minute anyway.”

Photos for the book were taken by another Daily Globe newsroom alumnus, John Brewer, who now works for the Pioneer Press in the Twin Cities. By May, Shawn had the bound galleys of “Keeping the Faith” in hand. He read and re-read the book countless times in the editing and publishing process.

Shawn received word that his book would be reviewed in July by Publisher’s Weekly, a trade publication, and registered online for a free-month’s subscription. He checked the site nightly after midnight to see if the review had been posted.

“It finally showed up, and I went and woke up Louise, and said, ‘You have to read it. I’m too nervous.’ So she started reading, and as she’s reading, she’s getting more and more excited, until she gets to the last line: ‘Fury delivers a heartfelt tale.’ Up to that point, the only people who had read it were my mom —who really liked it — my editor and my wife. It was nice to get that affirmation from an outside source.”

Thus far, Shawn has done one book-signing event — at St. John’s University— and another one is planned for 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Wednesday in the bookstore at his other alma mater, Minnesota West in Worthington. With his publicist at Lyons Press, there’s been talk about appearances at Barnes & Nobles stores in New York, perhaps a radio talk show in the Twin Cities and reviews in major newspapers around the country.

“I’m definitely not comfortable with selling myself,” he admitted about the promotional aspects of being an author. “Selling the book — I’m more comfortable with that. Louise is a social butterfly, and she has a marketing degree, so she’s been doing a lot.”

Shawn and Louise are currently spending a few days visiting Shawn’s family in Janesville and this weekend are headed for Ellendale to cheer for the Trinity Lions during a home football game.

“Trinity did win a game last Saturday,” Shawn reported about the team. “They only have seven players back from last year, so I’m happy for those guys that they got to experience a win. They broke a 31-game losing streak.”

Eventually, Shawn and Louise might move back to the Midwest, because Louise wants to pursue a nursing degree and Shawn would like to be closer to his family. As far as Shawn’s writing career, he doesn’t have any plans for a second book, at least not right now.

“Obviously, I’d like to (write another book) but it’s a matter of finding the right story,” he said. “I liked not being constrained by (newspaper) space. Loved the whole process, would love to do it again. But no, I don’t have any great ideas, yet.”