TAMPA, Fla. | Tuesday was media day at the Super Bowl, that annual day when 4,000 journalists, photographers and various miscellaneous types run around a football stadium and ask probing and important questions of famous football players who are wearing jerseys so we know who they are.</p><p>So: We ask Pittsburgh&#8217;s Hines Ward about his knee (&#8220;It&#8217;s fine&#8221;). We ask Arizona&#8217;s Anquan Boldin about his feud with offensive coordinator Todd Haley (&#8220;It&#8217;s a non-issue&#8221;). Larry Fitzgerald Sr., reporter, asks his son, Larry Fitzgerald Jr., Cardinals receiver, a question on the record. A little kid asks questions for some little kid television station. Someone from &#8220;The Tonight Show&#8221; tries to stir up a few laughs. Someone from a movie channel asks Arizona cornerback Eric Green about his favorite movies. Steelers players dance in some sort of competition. This is media day. And it happens every year.</p><p>It was while all this madness was going on that I first heard that the author John Updike died. He was 76. Now, this is not really sports news. Updike was a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, he won the National Book Award, he wrote beautifully and he wrote more than any other writer of his time &#8212; he wrote novels, short stories, reviews, poems, essays, columns and everything else. He wrote about the suburbs, he wrote about sex, he wrote about the fear of dying, he wrote about sex, he wrote about faith, and he wrote about sex.</p><p>He used to say that when he wrote he was aiming for &#8220;a vague little spot a little to the east of Kansas.&#8221; He became famous for his breathtaking descriptions, which could make anything &#8212; toilets, mudholes, worn carpet &#8212; seem oddly beautiful. In one of his short stories, he found God in a pigeon feather. There&#8217;s no telling what he could have done with Super Bowl media day.</p><p>But Updike has a different meaning for me. Some 48 years ago &#8212; when he was a relatively unknown 28-year-old writer &#8212; he wrote one of my favorite sports stories. It was called &#8220;Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,&#8221; and it first appeared in <em>The New Yorker</em>. I read it for the first time when I was in college &#8212; a professor pointed it out. By the time I was out of college, I must have read it another hundred times, at least. And every year since, at least twice every year, I read it still.</p><p>The essay is about Ted Williams&#8217; last game in the major leagues. And it is written from the seats on the third base side of Fenway Park. Updike did not have a press pass that day. He did not interview Ted Williams after the game; as far as I know, Updike never spoke with Ted Williams. He did not quote any of Williams&#8217; teammates. He did not talk to any of the pitchers who faced Williams. He simply wrote what he saw and what he felt, both as a baseball fan and a Ted Williams fan.</p><p>And on the most hyped day of the year &#8212; on Super Bowl media day &#8212; I couldn&#8217;t help but think of one sentence that Updike wrote.</p><p>&#8220;For me,&#8221; Updike wrote, &#8220;Williams is the classic ballplayer of the game on a hot August weekday, before a small crowd, when the only thing at stake is the tissue-thin difference between a thing done well and a thing done ill.&#8221;</p><p>That&#8217;s what it&#8217;s all about, isn&#8217;t it? Sports, I mean. All of it. The tissue-thin difference between a thing done well and a thing done ill. We all try to turn our sports into absolutes &#8212; this coach is a genius, this coach is an idiot, this general manager is brilliant, this general manager doesn&#8217;t care about winning, this player plays hard, this player is going through the motions, on and on, and it&#8217;s almost never like that. The difference between a home run and a pop-up might be an eighth-of-an-inch or a gust of wind. The difference between a touchdown and a punt might be a fullback brushing the blitzing linebacker or a decoy receiver running full speed on his route. This isn&#8217;t something you will hear on Super Bowl media day &#8212; when every player to a man talks about how his team is a <em>family</em>, and the key is they all played <em>together</em>, and they believed in each other when no one believed in them. But the difference between a winning team and a losing team is not one big thing, it&#8217;s a hundred tiny things.