“We are the enemy; we are free publicity. We are valuable commodities; we are expendable.

We have the greatest jobs in the world; we have no lives. We are not real journalists; we are
the best journalism has to offer.” - Christopher Walsh, Alabama-based sports writer

A Nack For Sports Writing

Let's begin this section with a brief appreciation of one of the best sportswriters of all time:
the late William "Bill" Nack of Sports Illustrated. Bill did not write stories, they bled out
of him. He crafted each sentence like a sculptor and he cared, boy did he care. No one wrote
stories that touched or haunted readers better than Bill did. This one about Secretariat, titled
"Pure Heart", is a classic.

Bill had served in Vietnam. He understood life-and-death stakes better than just about any
sportswriter or athlete. As such, he had a voracious appetite for life and embraced the notion
of being an eccentric: he memorized the final page of The Great Gatsby and would recite it
in public, in English or Spanish. When Bill visited New York City he would, though one of
SI's most celebrated writers, crash on the couch (not mine) of a young reporter. He was
utterly without airs.

Bill, who is portrayed by Kevin Connolly in the 2010 film Secretariat, understood the
paradox of sport: Nothing could be more meaningless, and yet there is nothing that more
people attach more meaning to. Almost every store he wrote explored the Why of that
paradox.

Finally, Bill taught most important lessons a journalist can learn: Writer's block is a myth;
it only afflicts those who have not reported enough. The secret to good writing is thorough
reporting. And reporting is often hard work. Most people fall short in journalism not because
they cannot write, but rather because they do not make the commitment to being a diligent
reporter.

No Cheering In The Pressbox

The cardinal rule of sportswriters is "No cheering in the pressbox." Literally, it means
exactly that. When writers are covering a game, where they sit in an enclosed area known as a
pressbox, emoting is strictly prohibiting. Figuratively, it means that a sportswriter should
always maintain their objectivity.
As the story from the assigned reading notes, this is often easier said than done. What most
experienced writers will tell you is that privately, at least, they find themselves rooting for
individuals whom they have gotten to know instead of for teams. Writers are only human
and when you cover a team you may develop a strong bond with a player or two for whatever
reason.
An example: In 1994, a writer profiled a rookie punter from Australia, Darren Bennett
(the first in the wave of now somewhat common Aussie punters) of the San Diego Chargers,
for SI. They hit it off well, and Bennett even invited the writer back to Australia in the
offseason (and the writer went; who wouldn't?). Darren was a lovely bloke, as they say, and
the writer always found himself privately hoping he would do well. But the writer was also
fortunate that I did not have to cover the Chargers every week.

A few other thoughts about "no cheering in the press box:"

• This is just another reason why sportswriters should not wager on sports. It's difficult
to remain agnostic about the outcome of a game, or for your feelings about the game to
remain untainted, when you just lost a decent sum of money on it.
• The advent of the Twitter age has proven double-edged sword for journalists, who are
mostly active on Twitter. Their fulminations often betray their true feelings about the people
or teams they cover. Sometimes, when a sports writer tweets during a game, he or she is
giving themselves an outlet for their subjective feelings. As a reader, if you consume their
objectively written (or as objectively as possible) story after having read their prejudicial
tweets beforehand, it might come off as slightly disingenuous. Insincere.
• The blog age has given rise to plenty of sportswriters who do not pretend to be
objective. And plenty who not only wager but appear on TV advising you what bets to make
(related: you are no worse off flipping a coin). That's fine, but when you occasionally spot
these scribes in the pressbox, they play by the rules and do not cheer.
• Most pressboxes have a sign at the entrance reminding visitors not to cheer and that doing
so is grounds for dismissal.
•Finally, some of your major college football programs find themselves overloaded with well-
heeled ($$$) boosters on a Saturday and not enough space to place them in the school's
luxury box area. So occasionally they will seat some in the working press box area behind the
writers. This often makes for awkward moments when Home Team U. strikes on a 53-yard
scoring pass and there is a brief eruption from the back. Then you'll see about two dozen
heads turn in unison and give those boosters the stink eye. It's like speaking out of turn in
church.
A Brief History of Sportswriting

David vs. Goliath (Bible) may be the first recorded (and reported) sports story. It even
contained quotes.

•The birth of modern sports writing, at least in the sense that someone wrote about sports and
it affected the greater populace, might have come in 1618 with King James I's "Declaration
of SportsLinks to an external site.."
James I, the king of England and the son of Mary, Queen of Scots (herself an avid
sportswoman who was famously beheaded), is more renowned for overseeing the English
translation of the Bible, the best-selling book of all time. But in 1618, noting discord among
his subjects as to whether the lone day of the week when no work was done, Sunday, should
be spent entirely in prayer (the Puritan view) or rather recreation should be allowed to follow
worship (as the Catholics and Protestants felt), James issued a Book of Sports (a.k.a.
"Declaration of Sports") that found for the latter. Twenty-five years after James I issued the
Book of Sports, Puritans publicly burned a copy in London. To say the Puritans (group that
arose with the Church of England in the 16th Century) were upset is an understatement. One
might even proffer that when a few Puritans boarded a ship two years later known as the
Mayflower, sports may have hastened their exodus. Was the Book of Sports a factor in the
birth of the U.S.A? Who's to say it was not?
Fast forward 200-plus years once sports found their purchase on American soil. The
newspaper industry was blossoming thanks to the invention of the Penny pressLinks to an
external site. (another 1830 marvel), which made newspapers much, much cheaper and put
them into the hands of the working class. The publishers of these first tabloids noted the hoi
polloi's appetite for sports.
In 1883 Joseph Pulitzer (the Pulitzer Prize dude), who owned the New York World, was the
first to create a dedicated sports department. In 1895 William Randolph Hearst, who
owned the New York Journal, created the first dedicated sports section in a newspaper (it
was Hearst upon whom Orson Welles based the title character in Citizen Kane). And the first
American sportswriter of any repute was English-born Henry Chadwick, who recognized
the potential of baseball as early as the 1850s and would introduce some of the language
(such as "K" for strikeout) that the game employs today.
The 1920s introduced the era of what is known as "Gee Whiz" sportswriting. Scribes such as
Paul Gallico, Damon Runyon and most famously Grantland Rice mythologized athletes.
They were, as the late Chicago sports columnist Jerome Holtzman described them, "starry-
eyed scribes, innocents, [who] believe the ballplayers are among their best friends."
Gallico, for a story, once stood in the ring with legendary heavyweight Jack Dempsey
because he wanted to know what it felt like to be punched by the best. He lasted 1:37
seconds.
Naturally, and in the wake of the Great Depression, a rebuke to the "Gee Whiz" era came in
the form of more cynical journalists. This was known as the "Aw, Nuts" era of Jimmy
Cannon and Red Smith. Writers, reflecting the sensitivities of a sobered populace, ceased
mythologizing athletes. For the most part.
By the mid-20th century sports writing was installed as a glamorous profession. Spencer
Tracy played one in Woman Of The Year (1942) in which Katharine Hepburn pursues him.
Likewise, Gregory Peck played a sportswriter in Designing Woman, in which his love
interest is played by the lovely Lauren Bacall. Sportswriters, as portrayed in Hollywood, were
well-dressed men (and only men) about town with gorgeous dames on their arms. Even Oscar
Madison, the slovenly sportswriter from The Odd Couple (1968), owned his own apartment
on Park Avenue (highly unlikely in the 21st century).
With the advent of Sports Illustrated (1954) and a world that was confronting the atomic
bomb, the Cold War and the turbulent Sixties, sports writing matured. In short, to borrow a
contemporary phrase, it refused to "stick to sports." In the summer of 1968 SI published a
five-part series titled "The Black Athlete: A Shameful Story" that posited that "the idea of
racial harmony in sports is a myth."
Sports was no longer pure escapism; it also reflected the social issues of the day and
sportswriting chronicled that. Still, for the latter half of the 20th century, the "Sports"
section was a staple of every newspaper in America. The USA Today, a national
newspaper with a fast-food literary style, launched in 1982 with four dedicated sections:
"News," "Money," "Sports" and "Life". You could tell a lot about a person by the
order in which he or she devoured a USA Today.
Even The New York Times had a dedicated sports section (and still does). Even the editors of
The Gray Lady, as that paper is known, understood that a sports section lures adult male
readers in droves, which lures advertisers.

Print Is Dead (Is Print Dead?)

In the past 40 years, ESPN and the internet have dealt serious blows to the vitality—and
future—of sports journalism. ESPN provided fans an outlet to remain engaged in sports daily
that only newspapers and SI had provided before. Local news had a sports segment that
regularly lasted 3 to 5 minutes and concentrated on local sports. ESPN opened up the
entire sports world to fans nightly.
The internet struck a far more serious blow to traditional print journalism, as suddenly there
were exponentially more stories available and they were free. In 1980 people paid for
newspapers and magazines and would never have thought of paying for water. In 2020 the
opposite is true. Massive interest in sports, the very foundation upon which the popularity of
Sports Illustrated and sports sections were built, was in a sense their downfall. The internet
provided a pulpit for thousands of frustrated sports journos who had not made it past
the gatekeepers at SI or newspapers.
And many of these writers who started their own web logs (the parent term for "bloggers")
were more than content to write for free. Having an audience was enough compensation.
Suddenly the marketplace was diluted (an analogy I often use is to imagine if thousands of
Americans suddenly took an interest in practicing dentistry and while they might not do as
skillful a job as your own dentist, the work passed muster; and it was free. Dentists might
find themselves having to lower their prices or get out of dentistry), subscriptions were not
being renewed and advertising was disappearing.

On top of all that, create an environment of social media and smart phones that renders us the
consumer, permanently distracted and all, to more or less of a degree, Attention Deficit
Disorder - addled. Some career sportswriters cannot recall the last time they picked up a
newspaper and read it. Perhaps at the country fair when Sue Ellen and I were a' courtin'?

The Present

In the past five years The Athletic, a paywall website without ads and devoted entirely to
sports, has made an ambitious go of it (full disclosure: I was a staff writer for The Athletic
from September 2018 until June, when the outlet laid off 46 employees amid the pandemic).
Whether or not The Athletic can turn profitable and sustain its existence is yet to be seen—
and certainly the coronavirus has done a site that depends on paid subscriptions no favors.

Sports Illustrated needed eight years before it became profitable. The National, an all-sports
daily newspaper that launched in 1989 and hoped to push SI out of the game, lasted less than
two years before it folded.

Meanwhile, sports fans may be more starved for quality journalism (us old-times seethe at the
term "content") than they realize. ESPN.com is America's most popular sports site, but its
writers are somewhat hamstrung by the fact that their parent company is partners with
the leagues that they cover. There is an inherent conflict of interest at playLinks to an
external site. with every story, even if the writers and editors do their darnedest to obviate it.

A few bullet points before we move on:

•For decades upon decades, newspapers and magazines worshipped at the ideal of "the
separation of church and state." That means the publishing side (the part that sells
advertising and/or devises strategies to increase revenue) never nosed into the affairs of the
editorial side (and vice-versa). Those days are, if not over, seriously threatened. As a
web-surfer you see "Paid Content" on most sites you visit and it is often dressed up to look
like the rest of the material. In the last two decades publications have increasingly made
editorial decisions with dollar signs in their eyes. Church and state have become bedfellows,
sadly, out of desperation.
•Social media, particularly Twitter, has created an environment in sports journalism in
which breaking stories takes precedence over telling stories. Call it the "Woj
Bomb"Links to an external site. effect. What ESPN's Adrian Wojnaroski (NBA beat)
and Adam Schefter (NFL beat) do in breaking stories is incredible and each is
handsomely paid for it. Before the internet, and perhaps because that Woj Bomb would have
had to wait until the next day's paper, anyway, this unique skill set was not as prioritized.
Writing was.

•It may be a fair comparison to put sports writing alongside music. Those of us who
grew up listening to vinyl in the Seventies began purchasing cassettes and then compact
discs (CDs) because they were easier to store and you could play them in your car. Then
the iPod came along and even those modes became obsolete. Napster, Spotify, etc.
But then a funny thing happened. Vintage record stores began to pop up (near college
campuses and in hipster neighborhoods). Music aficionados remembered how much
they loved staring at album covers, the rich sound of vinyl, the fact that artists intended
their songs to be heard in a specific order. And vinyl records made a comeback. Will
vinyl ever be as popular as it was in the Sixties and Seventies? Probably not. But it is
experiencing a renaissance of sorts.

Women And Minorities (Or Minorities and Women)

Sports writing as a popular profession has been around for about a century and in about all
that time it has been as white as the paper on which stories are printed. The hiring of young
writers is often a factor of the proclivities of the editors who did the hiring. Without even
realizing it, they may have favored the words and perspectives of writers whose backgrounds
resembled theirs.

But, of course, this is a narrow worldview. And it's past time for it to expand. Good writing
is good writing. The ability to report, or to write a story that engages readers, has no
racial tint. The number of X chromosomes with which one is born should not matter.

A website such as The Undefeated, which presents sports from an African-American

perspective, is a step in the right direction. While at SI, Paul Gutierrez (who now covers
the Las Vegas Raiders for ESPN.com) once pitched a story about how Hispanic baseball
players have their own inner clique at the Major League level to help new players adjust
to life in the U.S (the editors did not jump at the idea). Just the idea of having a
bilingual writer like Paul speaking with players who did not speak English did not seem
like a particularly brilliant move to them. It was an opportunity missed.
Beat vs Column vs Provocateur

This was how the "path to greatness" used to work in sports writing. You'd start out as a
copy boy (literally delivering paper sheets with filed stories on them to an editor) or a desk
editor. At SI you started out as a fact-checker although, to spare you the humiliation, you
were referred to as a "reporter."

Eventually, if you showed promise at a newspaper, you'd be given a beat. A beat meant that
you reported on one team and followed them throughout the season. At SI having a beat
meant not that you followed a team but an entire sport (even fact-checkers had beats and
were encouraged to pitch stories related to those beats). The beat reporter is the soldier in the
trenches, the pawn on the chess board. It's a brutal gig, particularly in baseball, with
approximately 200 games per season counting spring training. But beat reporting is
tantamount to earning a PhD in journalism because of the daily training it demands. Also,
imagine writing a terribly critical story about a player or team on Monday (even if it is 100%
true) and then having to walk into that locker room on Tuesday, Wednesday, ad infinitum.
That is why this advice to a young music writer in Almost Famous (2000) is apropos for any
sports writer, too.
Some journalists remain beat reporters their entire careers, or until eventually being
reassigned as editors. Some prefer being beat reporters and as it takes time to establish both
trust and sources within your beat. A competent veteran beat reporter can be an invaluable
commodity.

Then there's the columnist. Most often he or she was a beat reporter who demonstrated a flair
for prose or possessed a trenchant voice—someone whose opinion on a range of matters
readers cared to learn—and they became a columnist. Columnists are like soloists in a
symphony, or first chairs.

Then there's the internet-age provocateur. The provocateur's job is to get clicks. Being right
doesn't matter. Being accountable doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is garnering
clicks, which directly translate into ad dollars. The provocateur is the product of blog-age
journalism, because there are no standards other than the number of page views your stories
receive. Some of the most popular sports sites now, such as Outkick the Coverage or Barstool
Sports, or provocateur sites.

Around The Horn And Through The Looking Glass

Maybe it was ESPN's "Around The Horn," or before that "The Sportswriters On TV" (also
ESPN, from the 1990s), or "Pardon The Interruption," but suddenly sports writers equated
having made it with being a guest on (or host of!) a studio TV show. That's not what good
sports writing is about. It is what augmenting your income is about or "developing your
brand."

Some TV personalities have long established their sports writing bona fides before anyone
happened to notice that they had good hair (e.g. Tom Verducci). Or they're simply too
charismatic not to become TV personalities (Screamin', er, Stephen A. Smith). Others just
happen to be on TV for various reasons. But, sports writing and what I refer to as sports
bloviating are mostly unrelated skills.

That said, if you are ever offered money to talk about sports on TV, by all means accept.

The Journalist-Athlete Relationship

•The first thing a young sports fan who ventures into sports writing learns is that he or she is
now the enemy. That athlete or team you grew up cheering for—you are now less than an
anonymous fan to them. You are an adversary.

Robert Lipsyte's SportsWorld: An American Dreamland book has been referenced

throughout this course. One the advantages Lipsyte, who ascended very swiftly up the ranks
at The New York Times in the 1960s had, is that he did not grow up a sports fan. Nor did he
aspire to be a sportswriter. Lipsyte treated sports figures the way a foreign correspondent
dropped into Egypt who'd never been to the Middle East would treat his beat—and it allowed
his perspective to be fresh and not occluded by vestigial childhood fandom.

•The next thing sportswriters begin to learn, or that they should become aware of, is that
journalists and athletes are highly dissimilar creatures. Forget the difference in skill sets
or physiques. Journalists by nature are readers. Observers. Introspective. They are researchers
who cull all of their acquired information and then put something down on paper. If there is a
pool, a journalist by nature dips his toe in to test the temperatures.

Athletes, superior athletes, dive in (and don't ask how deep). They are risk-takers. Alphas.
Information and research does not inform their actions; confidence does.

Writers ask Why? Athletes ask Why not? Writers are careful. Athletes are care-free.
The dumbest question you ever hear writers (and sideline reporters) ask athletes who've
made the game-winning catch or basket or hit the walk-off base hit is, "What were you
thinking when ____?" They weren't. They were simply doing. That's what makes them
athletes as opposed to journalists.

•The third thing an aspiring sportswriter should learn is that being an athlete is enough. By
that I mean that writers often seek to find the person behind the star athlete. Some
athletes have plenty to say about the world outside sports, or maybe they have a musical skill
or are bilingual. As writers we seek to find "color" on the athlete, something besides his
athleticism that makes him or her intriguing.

At SI it is sometimes referred to this as the "And He Has A Pet Boa Constrictor" syndrome.
Unless that athlete was on a record-breaking tear or the MVP of his league, pitching a
story on him or her required there to be a hook besides his or her athletic prowess. The
lowest standard you could meet to have a story pitch green-lit was to inform an editor that
said athlete had a pet boa constrictor. One could wonder if editors realized that boas A) are
not-venemous and B) do not grow anywhere near as long as pythons. It's doubtful they cared.

But the point is this: it takes an almost unfathomable amount of focus and effort to become a
big-time athlete. If the quarterback of the Los Angeles Rams did not happen to also take
French horn lessons growing up, let's not hold that against him. There's still a story to be
unearthed.

4) Finally, the sportswriter, especially in the 2020's, better be able to embrace diversity.
The profession remains predominantly white and male and yet look around. Basketball and
football are predominantly black while baseball has a sizeable Hispanic population (how
there are still baseball writers who do not speak Spanish is, well, loco). Sportswriting is a
wonderful profession for exposing oneself to different cultures and backgrounds. Those
writers uncomfortable doing so will suffer professionally.

We're All In This Together

There's a scene from SportsWorld where Yankee manager Ralph Houk gathers the beat
reporters who follow the team at the outset of the season and reminds them, "Remember,
we're all in this together."
In other words, Houk, is saying, we're all part of the same show. But it is also a veiled threat.
We may need your print coverage, but you also need our cooperation. Woe unto the beat
reporter in that era who would dare break a story that would make a Yankee hero look, well,
human (there were plenty of whispers about Mickey Mantle's drinking and plenty of people
who saw him out, um, breaking curfew, but you never read about it).

There's a dilemma journalists face: Are they working for their readers or for the approval
of the people they cover? The good ones never forget that the readers are their boss (the
newspaper just pays them). Below is beautiful moment from the 2013 NBA draft that let me
see ESPN's Bill Simmons in an entirely new light.

Now, Simmons makes no secret of the fact that he is bleeds-green Celtics fan, so perhaps his
ire here is direced at coach Doc Rivers because he feels that Rivers betrayed the Celtics.
What makes this terrific television here, and Simmons is really a print guy, is that Simmons
does not back down. Watch the three other members on set—Rece Davis, Jay Bilas and Jalen
Rose. They don't want any part of this argument because they don't work for the fans, they
work for ESPN, which partners with the NBA.

Simmons does not care. He works for ESPN, too, but he has what he believes are the facts on
his side. And just because an NBA coach tries to belittle him on national TV, that is not about
to intimidate Simmons. This is compelling television but it's also good journalism. Ask the
questions that need to be asked and be fair. Stick to the facts.

We're All In This Together, Part 2

A few years back, Fox NFL Sunday's Jay Glazer was interviewed about how he had risen up
the ranks. Glazer did not attend a flashy college and he was a backup beat reporter for the
New York Post, covering the New York Giants. So how did he separate himself?

"I reminded myself that I didn't have a terrific pedigree and I wasn't much to look at," Glazer
says. "I told myself the only way these players and coaches would respect me was if they saw
I worked as hard as they did."

To that end, Glazer made sure to always be the last reporter to leave the training facility and
to stop players and coaches for an extra chat as they were walking to their cars at day's end.
He wanted to be the last person they saw before they left the facility.
Finally, one day, a Giant rookie noticed that Glazer did not have a car of his own. That he
used public transportation to get home. The rookie, Michael Strahan, offered Glazer a ride
home. Before long they were carpool buddies. They were both young, in their early 20s, and
one of them just happened to be setting out on a Hall of Fame NFL career trajectory.

But each day Glazer, just via car pool banter, learned more about the Giants than any of his
colleagues could hope to have done. He and Strahan remained friends throughout the
defensive end's career and now they are studio cohorts on Fox NFL Sunday.

We're all in this together? Glazer used that axiom to his advantage. And he didn't get lucky.
He made his luck.