Lyra McKee wrote an article for the Mosaic website in 2016, The Fight of Your Life. It connected boxing and American football with errant behaviour and baseline poverty in Chicago and western Canada. It was about domestic violence and personality swings that were hard to figure.
The stories may have seemed random but the author led you into the narrative. You trusted her and in time there was a reveal about disposable heroes, mass entertainment and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. Once-excellent athletes had become concussed, paranoid, punch drunk, suicidal.
Lyra built the feature around interviews in Belfast, Illinois and New England. She invited you to hear from the families that had encountered CTE. Then she would pull back the focus for a scientific overview. She added dialogue and dramatic enactments. It was the domain of locker room and ring canvas and unlaundered sweat. The writer wanted you to understand this compelling need to win, earn and transcend, regardless of poor medical supervision and premature death.
In a Boston Veteran’s Hospital, Lyra learnt about brain tissue samples and trauma patterns. This information reached back to the families, explaining the personality changes of loved ones and provided a grim solace. It was also a tough trajectory for the reader, news of a lesser-known syndrome and a literal punchline.
Lyra McKee wrote this story in her mid-twenties. She clearly understood the method behind the best periodical writing. There was extensive research, human sensitivity, imaginative use of dialogue and a tremendous curve of meaning and consequence. Lyra was sympathetic to Tom Wolfe and The New Journalism playbook. She had a kinship to Joan Didion and recent travellers like Malcolm Gladwell. She put in expenditures of time and personal resources. Lyra McKee aspired to great copy and you want to cheer when you see her reaching there.
