LOS ANGELES—A broken clay-mission. A due date of less than 12 hours. A grade on the line. Many fourth graders would have cried, given up, or hoped their mothers would magically rebuild the church models the next morning. This kid, however, got curious about how he could salvage the staple fourth-grade project on California’s 21 Spanish Missions. Kevin Baxter let his mind run free, asking questions like, “What if there’s a 22nd mission? A mission that nobody knows about that was destroyed by an earthquake in 1769, where all the natives at mass died?” Baxter thought. That is how this student from La Puente, California, invented the 22nd mission, named Misión Soledad del Temblor or Mission Solitude of the Earthquake.
This audacious mind knew its storytelling skills. What it did not know was how far they would take him. Like many kids growing up, Baxter wanted to be a professional athlete; he wanted to play baseball. In high school, he discovered a natural talent for track and field and quickly excelled in the sport which would get him a scholarship to pay for college. It was then that he realized he would not be playing baseball for a living, so Baxter had to find another way to be around the sport.
At the same time, Baxter was writing for his school paper, since his passion for storytelling did not end with the missions. He had received an award for best essay in fifth grade and had become a master at crafting stories to go along with the baseball board game he liked to play. “I guess I always enjoyed writing, but the thing with the [best voted] essay is that someone else thought I could write too. That support in me led me to believe that maybe I could do this,” Baxter said. Essentially, he thought, “I liked writing. I liked sports. I thought I could marry the two.”
That is when Baxter began taking writing more seriously. He would ask his father to read his stories, but he advised him to reach out to professionals instead. “He told me, find a couple of writers that you admire, who you like, and send them these stories you keep showing me. Ask them what they think,” Baxter said.
Following that advice, Baxter sent his work to a man named Jim Rode, who worked at his local paper, the San Gabriel Valley Tribune. Rode immediately wrote back and gave him feedback. A couple weeks later, they had an opening at the newspaper. Fortunately, Rode had kept Baxter’s address and number and called him to ask him if he wanted the job to which Baxter responded, “yes.”
By doing so, at just 17, Baxter got a job among real journalists as a copy messenger. Although there was no writing position for him yet, he was determined to earn his place. “It was just all kinds of menial, clerical tasks that we had to do. But it was in journalism, and I was in the building,” Baxter said.
The following year, Baxter began college at California State Fullerton, where he was majoring in journalism. As a freshman, he joined the campus newspaper, a rare exception, and wrote about the football team and other sports. However, Baxter soon received a track scholarship to Chapman University and transferred schools. There, he took on a side job covering high school football games for a local newspaper. “If you were good at covering the high school football games, they would hire you to stay on and cover basketball and baseball and other things,” Baxter said. Eventually, he got a full-time job there and worked at the Orange County Register for five years.
After that, life moved Baxter around from Runner’s World Magazine to the local newspaper in Spokane, Washington, to the LA Times, then to Florida to work at the Miami Herald and back again at the LA Times. Here, he works as a sports writer and brings experience as features editor, assistant sports editor, page designer, and foreign desk to name a few. Baxter describes himself not solely as a writer. “The first half of my career, I worked in the office and edited copy and design pages. The second half, I’ve been a writer,” he said.
For Baxter, sports writing opens the door to conversations beyond the playing field. “Sports is the one place where you can tell all kinds of stories, human interest stories, features; you can talk about politics. I do it all the time in covering the World Cup. I can talk about visas and immigration and Trump’s policies on immigration in a way that’s not threatening,” Baxter said.
Curiosity often drives Baxter to look beyond the surface of the story. Recently, covering a story on President Trump’s pledge to move World Cup matches, he did not just report the news, he questioned them. “What motivated this decision? Why were nine of the 11 U.S. host cities, each led by Democratic mayors, suddenly labeled as dangerous?” Baxter said. That incline to dig deeper and ask the ‘why’ and ‘how’ behind the ‘who’ and ‘what’ define Baxter’s approach to storytelling. It allows him to connect sports, politics, and culture in ways that reveal an underlying truth.
Currently, Baxter is doing a series on former athletes in LA, quenching his curiosity about where they are now and what they are doing. Baxter says, “Hey, whatever happened to that guy that played for the Dodgers? Well, let’s go find out and tell people about them.”
Chasing stories across fields and stadiums, what keeps Baxter drawn to sports is their simple truth and its system of meritocracy. “At the end of the day, if you go to the starting line of the Olympic 100-meter dash, it doesn’t matter if you’re black, yellow, brown, transgender. The fastest person gets the gold medal,” Baxter says.
