How to write a story chronologically or nearly chronologically?

There may be cases in which the writer needs to write a story chronologically or nearly chronologically. The inverted pyramid would not be appropriate and the diamond format not necessary. The chronological structure is perfect for showing a trend in sports or for clearly showing the progress of a personality in the sports world.

David Ramsey, staff reporter for the Syracuse Herald American has used the chronological structure well. He shows the public fall and the unpublicized aftermath of Cleveland State University basketball coach Kevin Mackey. Notice how this article is structured differently from the Kansas City Star article about athlete Lisa Davies.

The article was run in the “Herald American” on January 10, 1993 under the title and subtitle: Mackey reaches again for basketball’s glory In CBA, former Cleveland State coach tries to escape past.

ALBANY-Even on the best night of his basketball life, a night he should have rejoiced, Kevin Mackey couldn’t shake his fury.

He tried to bask in his triumph. Everyone wanted to be near him, to drink Miller Lites with him in his room at Syracuse’s downtown Holiday Inn. He and his no-name Cleveland State Vikings had just defeated Bobby Knight’s Indiana Hoosiers in the 1986 NCAA sub-regional.

From his room, Mackey seethed as he watched cars whiz by on Interstate 81. He saw the Carrier Dome, site of his triumph.

He pushed himself and his players with an endless fire, but the acclaim never seemed enough. Always, he sought more. Mostly, he sought more beer. Mackey says now he was an alcoholic, had been since he was 16.

A couple of years after his triumph in Syracuse, he was offered cocaine. He said yes. Alcohol, he says, had ceased to entice him.

He believed he could master cocaine. He believed he could continue to win games. He believed he could hide his addiction the same way he had hidden his voracious thirst for alcohol.

Mackey had made a dangerous choice of destinations. He had much to lose by being there. He had signed a $175,000- per-season contract with Cleveland State two days earlier. In ‘seven seasons he had compiled a 144-67 record. He took his 1986 team to the NCAA’s Sweet 16 and came within a last- second shot by David Robinson of carrying the Vikes past Navy and into the final eight. He owned a 13-room home in

He did commercials for McDonald’s. It was perfect; Mackey talking up the Big Mac. “I was the king,” Mackey says, closing his eyes as he gazed back at the old days. “The King of Cleveland, that’s what they called me.” Mackey is now the coach of the Capital Region Pontiacs, a Continental Basketball Association team based in Albany. Nobody calls him the king.

He talks, with the thick New England accent of his native Somerville, Mass., as he eats a salsa-smothered burrito in an Albany restaurant. He wears blue coaching sweats and a CBS- Sports hat. He is 46 years old with a deeply lined face. He winces as he thinks back to the crack house on Edmonton.

Mackey stumbled out of the crack house, accompanied by Alma Massey, his mistress of several years. He climbed into his Lincoln Town Car. With the police and a television camera crew following, he drove a couple of blocks. The police pulled him over.

Out of the car stepped a rich college coach high on crack. With TV cameras rolling, he was frisked, arrested, charged with drunk driving and, later, drug abuse. He was tossed in jail.

“I had no idea,” says Shawn Hood, who played for Cleveland State’s 1986 team and worked as Mackey’s assistant coach when the arrest was made.

“The only thing I was aware of was that he was a great coach. He had two lives, basically. He was very intelligent with his madness.”

Cleveland State fired him six days later. His wife kicked him out of the house in Shaker Heights. McDonald’s no longer wanted to pay him to talk up their Big Macs.

After being sentenced to 90 days treatment in lieu of conviction, Mackey underwent drug rehabilitation in Cleveland and Houston, where he attended the John Lucas clinic. Lucas was the first pick in the 1976 NBA draft, a brilliant point guard with an appetite for cocaine. He now coaches the San Antonio Spurs.

Mackey says he has, with the aid of Lucas, shackled his thirst for alcohol and his itch for cocaine. He has not, he says, taken a drink or a hit since his Friday the 13th visit to Edmonton Avenue. He is randomly tested, as are all CBA players and coaches, for drug use.

He is beginning what he hopes is his climb back. The Pontiacs are 10-11, but on a tear. Mackey acquired Chuck Nevitt, a 7-foot-5 center and NBA journeyman, to anchor the middle of his defense. The big man’s arrival started a five- game winning streak.

Mackey has long envisioned a giant on his team. While at Cleveland State, he recklessly pursued a 7-foot-7 African named Manute Bol, a pursuit that left the Vikings with two years of NCAA sanctions.

Now, Mackey watches Nevitt during practices at Albany’s Knickerbocker Arena. He strolls the sidelines yelling, “Repetition is the mother of learning.” He tells players he is offering defensive techniques “no other coach” is teaching.

His players seem to be listening. “I don’t care a thing about his past,” says Pontiacs’ starting point guard Sean Gay, who has read and heard all about Mackey’s tumble in Cleveland.

“Everyone, you know, has a past they would like to forget. He’s a good person now. That’s what I care about.” The Capital Region CBA team has been a step to the NBA in the past. Phil Jackson, coach of the World Champion Chicago Bulls, once directed the team. So did George Karl, coach of the Seattle Sonics.

Mackey wants to follow that legacy. He lives in a small apartment in Troy. He earns $40,000 a season. He coaches in front of only a few hundred fans on most nights. He wants more. He wants what he had in Cleveland-the big house, the big crowds, the big money.

That might not be easy. The lurid facts of the past, Mackey says, are still fresh in the minds of many basketball fans. Mackey often hears the volume go down when he enters a room. Those who know the Kevin Mackey Story, those who know about the booze and the coke and the mistress, begin to whisper. They whisper and they stare.

“I see those people,” Mackey says. “I see those people looking at me everywhere I go. I figure they’re wondering if I have a crack pipe in my back pocket or a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in my gym bag. I wonder that.”

He is driven by those doubters, though he admits a continued vulnerability to alcohol and cocaine. He is quick to affirm cocaine’s lure, its power. He had been a heavy drinker for years, he says, and always managed to prosper. Drinking didn’t stop him from winning four state titles in his nine seasons as a high school coach.

When he was an assistant coach at Boston College from 1977-82, he cruised the interstates of the East Coast with a cooler full of Miller Late in the passenger’s seat. He cranked the radio up loud, drank his beers and drove, always, in the inside lane as he searched from town to town for recruits.

He found players who helped BC win Big East titles in 1981 and 1983; a feat the school hasn’t managed since Mackey’s departure. He found John Bagley, a fat kid from Bridgeport now in his 11th NBA season. He found Michael Adams, a short kid from Hartford now playing for the Washington Bullets. He found the players others missed.

Somehow, the highway patrol missed him. “Hey, the troopers don’t stop you in the inside lane,” he says of those hazy rides. “It’s a fact of life, you know.”

His driving luck ran out on Friday the 13th. Talking about cocaine with Mackey is a vivid experience. His eyes get this dreamy look. His voice grows soft. The tone is wistful as if he is recalling an intense but failed romance.

“Cocaine-it takes you to another world,” he says. “Cocaine, you get that hit and, ah”-he’s smiling now, looking out the window-“you know, it’s ‘Beam me up, Scottie.’ The thing for me, I didn’t like it. I, oh, I loved it.”

Some days, he says, he still misses it.

Last spring Mackey coached the Fayetteville (N.C.) Flyers to the best record (41-23) in the Global Basketball Association, another minor-league. After the season ended, he felt a degree of vindication.

He also felt the old hunger for acclaim, and he wanted- desperately wanted-to drink and snort.

“I told myself, ‘You done a good job. You deserve something/” Mackey remembers. “I thought about going off by myself and, you know, rewarding myself. I thought about checking into a hotel.”

His word choice in the next sentence is chilling.

“I wanted to lay in some alcohol and cocaine.”

He picked out the hotel. He pictured the entire scenario. He was all ready to jump off the sobriety wagon.

But he didn’t “lay” in alcohol and cocaine.

“I’m not sure why,” he says. “I don’t know if it was because of good reasons. I don’t really think so. But I didn’t go to the hotel.”

He won that day, but not every past scar has been mended. Mackey shakes his finger when asked about his family. He will not say a word about his wife, his children or about Alma Massey.

“Nothing about that,” he says.

Kathleen Mackey, Kevin’s wife of 27 years, works as a nursing supervisor at the Cuyahoga County Jail in Cleveland. She answers the phone minutes after returning from her lunch break.

“It was a great, great thing,” she says, her voice bright as she remembers the victory night in Syracuse. “It was a natural high, so to speak.”

The voice continues to hop as she talks? About the fast- talking Irish man she met at St. Anselm’s College. She is still married to Mackey.

“Kevin, he was a lot of fun,” she says. “He was very good- looking. He played ball. We had a very nice relationship. You know, I’ve known him more than half my life. I met him when I was 19.”

Her tone changes as the subject moves closer to the present.

She says she had no idea her husband had a serious drinking problem, no idea he abused cocaine, no idea he had a mistress.

No idea.

“The whole thing was quite a shock,” she says. “The depth and the breadth of it was quite a shock. I knew maybe he was drinking a little bit too much, but I wasn’t looking for anything like what happened. It was shattering.”

Kathleen still waits for her husband to say he’s sorry. He never apologized, she says.

She waits for him to say anything. She hasn’t spoken to him in months. He knows the number, she says, but he chooses not to call.

“Silence,” she says, “is not always golden.”

Mackey is quiet after declining to talk about Kathleen and his children. He gazes out the window. The sun’s rays bathe his face. The former King of Cleveland, today an unknown at a restaurant in Albany, smiles.

“I don’t feel guilty,” he says. “I take full responsibility for what happened, but I don’t feel guilty. I’ve put the guilt down.

“Yesterday is a canceled check.”

He has so much to do, so far to climb.

“I’m not satisfied,” he says. “I want it back.”

His wife is confident he will succeed-on the basketball court.

“He really is an excellent coach,” she says, her voice cracking at the Cuyahoga County Jail.

The writer could even highlight the straight-line time chronology by using a diary format, by beginning key sections or paragraphs with a time:

The use of a diary or time format article would be particularly appropriate in an article such as “24 Hours behind the Scenes at the Indianapolis 500” or other similar articles.

This type of article pulls the reader through the story because the reader is constantly wondering what will happen next.

Staff writers and editors for The Wall Street Journal have devised their own structure, which bears examination. In News Reporting and Writing (1985), the Missouri Group, Brooks, Kennedy, Moen, and Ranly, wrote: For centuries, writers have used the literary device of telling a story through the eyes of one person or by examining part of the whole.

The device makes large institutions, complex issues and seven-digit numbers meaningful. Few of us can comprehend the size of the U.S. budget, but we can understand the numbers on our own paycheck. Not many of us can explain the marketing system for wheat, but we could if we followed a bushel of wheat from the time it was planted until a consumer picked up a loaf of bread in the supermarket.

Even though Joseph Stalin was hardly talking about literary approaches, he summed the impact of focusing on a part of the whole when he said, “Ten million deaths are a statistic; one death is a tragedy.”

Individual newspaper journalists have used the technique often, but no newspaper has seized upon it like The Wall Street Journal. In its daily one-column feature examining national and international issues, The Journal routinely and expertly puts a literary magnifying glass on the individual involved in an issue or institution.

The Wall Street Journal article has four distinct parts:

1. The lead begins with a focus on an individual and his or her problems or concerns about an industry or a work environment.

2. There is a transition to a larger level-the same issue across an industry or at the national level.

3. There is a lengthy report on the larger scope-the issue at the industry or national level.

4. There is a return to end the article with the focus again at the local level-the article usually ends with an anec­dote or quotation from the same person cited in the lead, or with a similar person.

The first four paragraphs of a typical Wall Street Journal article begin with the individual, and then there is a subhead. The subhead acts as the transition to the body of the article, which examines the problem across an industry. At the end of the article body, there is another subhead, which again acts as a transition, and the end of the article is the last four paragraphs, to exactly match the lead.

A typical article in this format for The Wall Street Journal would be how one auto worker, Joe, has been replaced on a Ford assembly line by a robot welding arm.

Then the body of the article is devoted to how many workers throughout the auto industry are being replaced by robot welders and how the human workers are being retrained for other jobs. The end of the article might be a look at how auto worker Joe was successfully retrained for another position at Ford.

This is a variation of the diamond format. Sports writers might use this technique to show how one pro football player’s career was ended by a crippling injury, then show how all injured football players are rehabilitated, then return to show how the single player successfully overcame his injuries.

The article may not need to use exactly four paragraphs in the lead, then the body, and then exactly four paragraphs at the end of the article, as The Wall Street Journal does.