Mitch Albom's 'One More Day'

Mitch Albom fans will recognize many of the elements of “For One More Day,” a television movie he adapted from his 2006 novel, which airs Sunday on ABC. In “For One More Day,” looming death forces a defeated former ballplayer (Michael Imperioli of “The Sopranos”) to reckon with what he really wants out of life, helped by his mother, played by Ellen Burstyn, who herself has gone to her reward years earlier. But in this drama about a man finding redemption in the revelation of family secrets there are more than a few surprises, including some that surprised Albom himself.

You were a sportswriter when you wrote "Tuesdays with Morrie. But “For One More Day” is the first time you’ve depicted the sports world in your fiction. Why didn’t you ever use your sports experience before?

It’s interesting. I have always deliberately avoided writing about sports. It’s hard for Americans to accept you as more than one thing. When I wrote "Tuesdays with Morrie," it was just to pay Morrie’s medical bills, and I thought people wouldn’t take me seriously of this image of sportswriters as Oscar Madison.

So why now?

Fortunately people know me better now for "Tuesdays with Morrie" or "Five People," and I think they’ll read my books for what they are. And for “For One More Day,” I wanted to create this divide for the main character between being a daddy’s boy and a momma’s boy. I had known so many people whose only connection with their father had been sports.

I also wanted to talk about someone in middle age, someone who is already living a life of regret and memory, and I knew that story from knowing former pro athletes. It’s such a fleeting thing, sports, you know. A retired athlete’s best years are behind him. They don’t even know that that’s gonna happen until boom it’s gone. And then, all of a sudden at age 35, they have to start growing up, working a real job, like he does in the movie. And he hates it. I knew that life so well. So I said, “Well, I’ll dabble into sports.” They always say, write what you know. And I could write sports with my eyes closed.

It seems typical of you that when it came time to write sports, you didn’t write about a hero.

I was always interested in the guy who came in last. Everybody else wrote about the guy who came in first. If I went to an Olympics, I’d find someone who was eliminated in the second heat, when there wasn’t six people in the stands.
If I were a college kid who had an essay to write about the role of death in Mitch Albom’s books, what would be the right answer?

Just that I learned in writing "Tuesdays with Morrie" that people took the lessons much more seriously than if I’d written a textbook about forgiveness and money and marriage. If you have an old man who knows his days are numbered, who’s literally counting his breaths, all of a sudden, everybody’s willing to pay attention. People are willing to go with you there because they think, “I better think about that because I am gonna die one day.” And so it enables you to deal with some themes that people might otherwise not want to read about.

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