On the Modern Sportswriter

Warning: Disjointed rant about sportswriting ahead.
 
1. I'm not sure if I ever heard Jim Murray speak, unless you count the time I sat behind him on a media bus at the Super Bowl. For a generation, Murray was the most well-respected sportswriter in America. He earned this position based entirely on words, on phrasing, on the careful construction of an 800-word column in the Los Angeles Times. As far as I know, Murray didn't appear regularly on television. He didn't seem to care much for television. Here's how he described television in his autobiography: "...the yawning maw that chewed up talent, novelty, news, history like a mindless, grazing shark, gobbled sports whole."

Jim Murray died in 1998. Which, these days, seems like a hell of a long time ago.

2. This is not really about Jay Mariotti, or Jason Whitlock. I certainly don't have a personal issue with either of them; I met Jay a few times many years ago, before he became the scourge of the blogosphere, and I found him perfectly nice. I've never met Whitlock, but we have a few mutual friends, and I find his public schtick and his columns amusing (and occasionally brilliant). Still, last weekend was one of the weirdest I can remember in the modern history of sportswriting: One day after Whitlock held a three-hour radio-broadcast "Explanation" for his departure from The Kansas City Star, Mariotti was arrested during a domestic dispute in Los Angeles, evoking unprecedented waves of schadenfreude from coast to coast. This, of course, was because Mariotti plays the heavy on a program called Around the Horn, in which a panel of sportswriters engage in vigorous arguments for 23 minutes. Around the Horn, of course, is preceded by several programs in which sportswriters engage in vigorous argument, and it is followed by a program called Pardon the Interruption, in which two extremely talented sports columnists from Washington D.C. engage in vigorous (if good-natured) argument.

It's all kind of amazing, when you think about it. For several hours a day, the airwaves are essentially dominated by people whose original avocation is/was the written word. Some of the best sportswriters in America have given up writing altogether. Others have emphasized their television work over their writing, because the money is simply too good to ignore.

3. For the most part, I can't blame them for going this route; if I were ever in their position, I might very well do the same thing. There is less money than ever to be made in the craft of writing. There is far more money to be made in television (or sometimes even on radio). It's easier, and it's more lucrative, and that's difficult to argue against. On television/radio, the points can be made faster. Nuanced arguments take up too much time, and outrageous leaps of logic and knee-jerk contrarianism contribute to the entertainment value. It's sports, and people need villains, and Mariotti seemed to enjoy playing that role. That role was, financially, very good to him. But that role also set him up to be vilified, regardless of his innocence or guilt.

4. What's so strange about this is that sportswriters are as high-profile as they've ever been--witness the mass reaction to Mariotti's arrest--and yet sports writing, as a craft, is struggling to find its place in this modern world. That's what concerns me the most about where we are now. I don't begrudge writers making money, or arguing in high-definition. But Jim Murray's argument was that sports had to be "dramatized" in order to win mass appeal, and that writers were able to do this more effectively than practitioners in any other medium. It's an indisputable truth; the best writing lends a nuance to a storyline or an argument that television never could. That's why it's so rare to see. That's why it's so damn hard to master.* It takes a certain sublimation of ego in order to embrace the self-flagellation and audience criticism that comes along with the writing process. Our job, in the end, is not to play a direct role in the drama. Our job has always been to tell the story, or express an opinion, and then get the hell out of the way.

"Television is capable of saturating the market and cloying the viewer," Murray wrote in his autobiography, a book that was published in 1993. Two decades later, these disparate mediums--sports writing and sports television--have merged in unprecedented ways. The writers have become the story. And the yawning maw continues to chew up talent.

*And yes, there are certain bloggers who are helping to fill that gap, but so much of the blogosphere, with its emphasis on quick hits, is modeled more on television than on the traditional model of writing.

On Politics and Sportswriting

One month ago, a dude named Jay Nordlinger wrote this odd little screed on the website of the National Review, declaring that sportswriting was, in fact, far too political, and that these two elements of American existence should never co-mingle. "Politics-in-sportswriting is a pet peeve of mine," Nordlinger wrote.

Today, the National Review has spent most of the afternoon politicizing the failure of a major American city to secure what is, at heart, supposed to be the largest sporting event in the world.

Of course, I realize that the Olympics have always been subsumed by far too many political forces*--and I realize that President Obama injected himself into this debate by attempting to make a pitch for his hometown--and in general, I concur: I don't think sports ever exists in a vacuum. Sports, as with everything else, is a reflection of the culture, and as reflexively childish as it may be for the National Review to ostensibly "cheer against America" after chastising large swaths of the country for eight years of "cheering against America," this is their thing. This is what they do, and if anything, it is proof that sports and politics are often inextricable.*

I expect Mr. Nordlinger's apology is forthcoming.

See: Bias, Leonard.

On the Death of the Sports Columnist

I'm not sure how this happened, but it's been fifteen years since I graduated from college, which means it's been fifteen years since I moved to Akron, Ohio, and secured a furnished one-bedroom apartment on Arlington Road that cost approximately three hundred dollars a month. I didn't really know anyone in town, except some friends of a college friend of mine, and so I found the apartment by default, with the help of a real-estate agent who, when I inquired about the quality of the neighborhood, cupped a hand to her ear and said, "Listen to that quiet," just as an ambulance scurried past and a car backfired and a neighbor began screaming at his dog. I broke my lease and moved across town a short time later, but that's not what this story is meant to be about; this story is meant as a response to this piece from the New York Observer, about the supposed death of the general newspaper sports columnist, and as a response to the varied blog responses to the Observer piece, which can essentially be summed up as, "Good riddance."

Fifteen years ago, I was a fledgling sportswriter at a mid-sized newspaper; fifteen years ago, I sat in that dank apartment on Arlington Road, reporting on high-school football two-a-days and awaiting the inevitable theft of my car. I tried to log on to this thing called America Online, but I couldn't quite figure it out. I tried to cook a steak, but the pilot light on the stove was broken and the kitchen reeked of gas, and so, to keep myself from losing my mind, I began to read.

It wasn't like I hadn't read books before. I spent my childhood reading, but this was different. This was the first time I can remember actually studying the writing while I did it. I read novels; I read The Catcher in the Rye and Of Mice and Men and several others I'd skimmed over in high school and college, presuming, for some reason, that they did not apply to me. At work, I would spend my idle time scanning the wires, reading newspaper columns from faraway cities, printing out the ones I liked and hoarding them in a manila folder. I had no idea what I was doing, or where I was going, and then one day, I was browsing at Borders--I spent hours at Borders, browsing every inch of every section--and I purchased a collection of columns from a Detroit sportswriter named Mitch Albom. I knew of Albom, of course; I had read his columns over the wire, and I had read them in the early incarnations of The Best American Sports Writing collection, and yet this was the first time I had read a group of them, all at once. I brought it home that night, to the apartment on Arlington Road, and as I listened to my neighbor scream at the television, I read Albom's series of columns about the Iditarod.

Now, I will admit I haven't gone back and re-read these columns in many years. I'm not sure if they'd still seem as good to me as they did then, but all I know is that in the summer of 1995, these columns absolutely blew my mind; every day, Albom filed a missive from another faraway Alaska outpost. I remember the columns were so good, so well-liked, that the newspaper sent him back to Alaska for more after he'd returned home midway through the race. I remember the columns as a near-perfect synthesis of observation and reporting and storytelling, each day's missive leading directly into the next. I remember reading those columns and thinking, We can do this? In a newspaper?

Obviously, a few things have happened since then. Albom changed (he became a different kind of writer, and made a fortune in the process, for which it's hard to blame him); but newspapers also changed; the Internet changed; and in turn, the culture changed. I think you can make a strong case that certain sports columnists got far too caught up in these changes, that they became tangled up in the outside influences of talk radio and television and blogs, that there was a tendency to retreat away from reporting and storytelling and into formula, into the argument model, into sentimental treacle, into facile thought and armchair posturing. The model itself was obviously reliant upon the space available in print, and on natural daily deadlines, and all of these things are now either fluid or irrelevant. Everything is changing, and in a way, I agree with Spencer Hall and Dan Shanoff and all the others who hail this new model, in which word count is irrelevant and styles are more wide-ranging. I also agree that, in the end, the writing is the thing, but this is also what concerns me, because so much of the writing I read--online, in print--seems overly colored by these new priorities.

The beauty of Albom's columns, when I stumbled upon then fifteen years ago, was that he appeared to have crafted every word. He was especially aware of the rhythm of his prose, of the way the words sang, of the way they came together to form sentences and paragraphs, of the way they danced rather than wrestled you to the ground. They weren't "takes." They weren't overly aggressive, or overly snarky, or overly sentimental, or overly anything. They were real stories. That was, I suppose, the beauty of writing in a confined space; you had to craft your voice in order to fit. You had to work at it.

Done well, it was an art form. It still is. And that discipline translates into other forms; that discipline, I have no doubt, is what allows Dan Jenkins to craft sublime 140-character Twitter posts, and 800-word columns, and 5,000-word profiles. And that discipline, I fear, is what could be lost in the Internet age.