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Franz Lidz’s introduction to the world of archaeology came early.
His uncle, Arthur Lidz, was “a full-blown hoarder,” said Mr. Lidz, who writes archaeology and science dispatches for The New York Times.
“He had newspapers that went back to the 1920s piled up in stacks, trusses — and his favorite, shoelaces — in his apartment in the Bronx,” he said. “So I think what piqued my interest in archaeology was wading through it all.”
But Mr. Lidz, who grew up on Long Island and then in the Philadelphia suburbs, didn’t initially pursue a career in writing about archaeology.
A whirlwind path took him to Antioch College in Ohio, where he was a theater major (“It was between that and creative writing; I was trying to figure out which would look better on a résumé”); to the pages of a weekly newspaper in Maine (“my first feature was about the town drunk”), to Sports Illustrated, despite having never read the magazine or covered a single sporting event (“except one pigeon race”).
Recently, he has written about a manuscript that contains a tax evasion scheme in ancient Rome; chronicled how soccer may have originated in Scotland rather than England; and profiled an archaeologist in Sweden who spent three years traveling in Viking vessels.
“This takes the place of learning another language or taking piano lessons at this age,” said Mr. Lidz, 73, whose first byline for The Times was a Metropolitan Diary tale in 1982.
In a recent interview, Mr. Lidz shared how his sports background helps him translate dense journal articles into compelling prose, and where he finds his quirky story ideas. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
You were hired at Sports Illustrated with no sportswriting experience. How did you pull that off?
I hitchhiked to New York from Baltimore in 1980 for the job interview, which was with the magazine’s managing editor, Gilbert Rogin, who was an eccentric character. He was struggling to open a jar of orange juice, and he looked at me and said, “If you can open that, you can have the job.” And, with a twist of my wrist, I opened it and asked, “When do I start?”
After 27 years at Sports Illustrated, you started covering archaeology stories for Smithsonian Magazine in 2012. How did that transition come about?
I had already done some stories at Sports Illustrated, in a roundabout way. I wound up writing a story in the early ’80s about my Uncle Arthur’s shoelace collection for Sports Illustrated.
After I took a buyout in 2007, I wrote for the short-lived Condé Nast Portfolio for about a year and a half. One of my editors there became the editor of Smithsonian, and he asked me to come onboard there. That’s how I really became interested in archaeology as a field.
What do you like about the beat?
I read a lot of obscure journals and academic papers that are often written as if my father, who was an electronic engineer, had written them. I can almost hear his voice in some of these papers; they’re so full of jargon and so impenetrable that I sometimes have to read them three or four times to understand even faintly what they’re saying.
My father assumed this faintly befogged, professorial mien, but he sparked with edgy energy whenever he talked. And everybody in our cozy Long Island hamlet indulged him as Crazy Sid, the mildly crackpot inventor.
How does your sports background benefit your reporting?
When I was a kid, I remember reading a column by Red Smith, the former New York Times sports columnist, that said something like, Sports are just games little kids play. And that’s the way I always thought of it. I never took the games that seriously. I was able to come at a subject crabwise, obliquely, in a way that other seasoned sportswriters who were just in love with sports — I was never really — did not. That perspective helped my career.
Where do you find story ideas?
It’s really reading obscure stuff, like journals. I’m looking for something that strikes me as not just different, but something I’ve never really thought about before. And then the challenge is to express it as clearly as possible. I think clarity is so important to me just because my father was so obscure.
What’s a favorite story you’ve done recently, and how did it come about?
In 2021, I wrote about the biologist Juliane Diller, who was the sole survivor of a plane crash in the Amazon in 1971, when she was 17. She fell nearly two miles from the sky into the jungle and survived the fall because she landed in the canopies. She survived for 11 days alone. It was the 50th anniversary of the plane crash, in which her mother was killed. She had not spoken about the story for years, at least to the press. But my message to her was that I just wanted to write about the science of it, rather than focusing on the childhood trauma. And that got me in.
