Sports Journalism

A Multimedia Primer

Rob Steen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415742139
• eBook ISBN: 9781317805793
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Sports Journalism is a comprehensive guide to the purpose, principles and practice of this unique profession. Now in a fully revised and updated second edition, including important new material on social media and the rise of on-line journalism, this is still the only book to explore the fundamentals of sports reporting across every media platform.

Combining an introduction to practical skills, contextual discussion of the changing media environment, and important case studies, including the ground-breaking story of Lance Armstrong, the book covers key topics such as:

• 
  
  

• essential relationships in sports journalism - networking and the Sports Desk

• 
  
  

• print journalism for magazines, tabloids, broadsheets and the internet

• 
  
  

• live action – news, radio and television sports journalism

• 
  
  

• effective research – managing and accessing sources, information, statistics

• 
  
  

• practical skills for managing schedules and meeting deadlines

• 
  
  

• working with sports agents and PR professionals

• 
  
  

• getting the best from press conferences and interviews.

Laced with revealing anecdotes from the author's own thirty years' experience of domestic and international sport journalism, and including questions in each chapter to encourage critical reflection and notes on further reading, Sports Journalism is the ultimate insider's guide and an invaluable student companion.

Chapter 1

The hardest job ever craved

An almost shameless confession

People view sports like they do organised religion. Some see nothing but a history of oppression, hypocrisy and mind control of the wilfully stupid in the service of a corrupt and dangerous institution. Some see nothing but glory, beauty and the opportunity to worship something greater than themselves. Some merely go on watching sports because their forebears did, as did their forebears before them. I recognise there’s a lot about sports that’s distasteful. But sports itself is not the problem. Sports doesn’t create assholes, assholes do.

I love sports. I love the action. I love the drama. I love the artistry displayed in even the most barbaric of physical activities (I’m thinking boxing, not cockfighting). I love the emotion invested by players and fans – the true fans, not the college dopes who light cars on fire when the bars close on championship game night. I love the sense of community sports can build.

To preserve my love for sports, I gave up sportswriting for a living. Being a professional sportswriter can suck the joy out of sports. The grind of beat reporting, of hearing the same clichés spouted day after day (of course you take it one game at a time!), of having to put yourself on red alert the moment your Spidey Sense picks up the sound of a tailback’s hamstring twinging, of having parents calling you around the clock to demand why you’re not covering their ‘All-State candidate’ – at the start of your career, you’re told no cheering in the press box. It doesn’t take long, unless you’re a college football reporter at a mid-sized daily in the South, to not have to be reminded. Sportswriting is a lot like doing a movie nude scene. There’s something that sounds appealing about it, and it looks like fun, but you’re so worried about your lines and all the stuff around you that it can become just as passionate a task as cleaning grout.

Thus, a few years ago, did Bob Cooke introduce his first column on the American website flakmag.com. I begin with it partly because, despite the occasional unBritishism (and I trust I’ve saved my University of Brighton students the bother of writing witheringly sarcastic emails by changing all the -izes and -izeds and -ors in this book to -ises and -iseds and -ours), it underlines the universality of sport, and sporting language; partly because it is written with such infectious verve and conviction; but mostly because it echoes so many of my own thoughts and thus enables me to wriggle free of most if not all allegations of overt bias. And if there’s one trick you soon learn as a sports journalist, it is to use the views of others as a vehicle for your own.

After more than 30 years earning varying amounts of my corn as a sports journalist, I still regard it as a privilege. With its daily dose of breathtaking winners and gallant losers, trailblazers and exemplars, cheats and leeches, what more could a writer possibly wish for in a subject? Martyn Lewis, a BBC newsreader, once insisted that bulletins should place greater stress on ‘good news’. He was pooh-poohed at the time, and rightly so, but is it really any coincidence that sport now commands increasing amounts of coverage on The Ten O’Clock News?

This is a world that never stops still for two consecutive seconds, where what was hip one week can be ‘so last year’ the next. Creative activities such as art, music and dance have evolved in ways unimaginable to their exponents 50 years ago. With its familiar landscapes, ancient customs, slowly evolving rules and nigh-on total imperviousness to fashion, sport, by comparison, has been an oasis of stability, a Tower of London with a fraction of the brutality. With its readily accessible fund of shared memories – thanks to record books and TV channels such as ESPN Classic – even those too young to have experienced games and feats first-hand can join in. Nothing unites generations quite so effortlessly.

In theory, merely telling heroic stories, or ones that expose wrongdoing, or light the way ahead, can never be as satisfying or enjoyable as actually being the hero, capturing the corporate criminal or inspiring the masses by your own deeds. However, as Alan Felix’s departed wife informs him in Woody Allen’s Play It Again, Sam, this planet of ours is divided into watchers and doers, and neither mud nor blood is on my list of favourite things. Witnessing, forecasting and striving to comprehend greatness, on the other hand, ranks right up there with lockshen pudding, Peking duck, London parks, Paris cafés, Barcelona cinemas, New York record shops, African smiles, Australian sunsets, Caribbean dancehalls, fresh bedsheets and newly mown grass. Or, as Simon Barnes, chief sportswriter of The Times until 2014, put it:

As I seek constantly a good tale to tell, so I seek – almost for private reasons, for personal rather than public gratification – greatness. I seek a definition of greatness, I seek an understanding of greatness. I seek, perhaps, the highest thing of all, to write greatness: and write it true. But, above all, I seek to be where greatness is. That is the greatest thing in the life of a sportswriter.¹

Mr Cooke and I differ on two counts, one minor, one major. Once, in my formative years as an aspiring wimp, I persuaded myself that boxing constituted safe, acceptable and palatable violence leavened with a dash of art and a bucketful of drama. The professional project with which I have been least dissatisfied, furthermore, was a biography of the fearsome hombre Muhammad Ali stunned to win the world heavyweight boxing title, Sonny Liston. Nevertheless, I have long recoiled from the ignoble art much as I do from video nasties, happy slappings and Big Brother: none present humanity in an especially complimentary light. As a boy, I fell head over heels not just for the artistry, arrogance, rebelliousness and political drive of Ali, but also for his 1920s predecessor Gene Tunney, the ex-Marine smitten by a high society gal who swore to make the million dollars he felt he needed to make her his, did so in the ring, then quit.

The knowledge I began acquiring around that time, and the vague interest I reluctantly kept up, meant that I covered the odd world title fight – Terry Marsh in a tent in Basildon, Prince Naseem Hamed at the Royal Albert Hall – and even the trial for tax evasion of Don King (I was in New York researching the Liston book, a good example of that essential journalistic skill: being in the right place at the right time). Published in the Sunday Times, it was probably the most sheerly vindictive article I have ever written – bar one for the Guardian during the hate phase of my love–hate relationship with Brian Lara. I may be riddled with Jewish guilt complexes, but this was one instance where being sarcastic and disrespectful and downright rude carried no downside whatsoever. Best known, deceptively, for that electrified shock of mad professorial hair, King, the manager, promoter, wheeler-dealer and murderer once accused by another ex-champ and client, Tim Witherspoon, of specialising in ‘black-on-black crime’, was one of the prime causes of my disillusionment with boxing. Ditto all those WBCs and WBAs and WBOs and IBFs, denying us as they do the answer to the question sports aficionados ask before all others: who’s the best? Not to mention the one all human beings feel they have a right to know: who can we trust? At bottom, though, what ruined it was the blood and gore, the intended, unapologetic, unnecessary violence of it all. Sport should compensate us for civilisation’s failings, not endorse them.

Mr Cooke and I also differ in that I did not have to give up sportswriting to preserve my love of sport. I did, however, give up writing about football – twice, in fact. Over-exposure and close proximity to its inner workings had hardened a journalist’s innate scepticism into grumpy old manism. I quit to preserve what little affection I still felt and to rid myself of the rising guilt of an ex-disciple; when it comes to sanctimonious claptrap, not even a reformed smoker can match someone who has renounced all faith in something that once gave them a reason to wake up. On the first occasion, I was persuaded to recant by the Sunday Times and actually began to enjoy myself again. This was because I was assigned to cover a lowly club every week and encouraged to turn what was ostensibly a lengthy match report into something more akin to a profile of a community. Then my wife and I decided we needed an adventure, left London and downshifted to deepest Cornwall; at the height of an advertising recession that 9/11 would only accentuate, and with freelance budgets shrinking, my patch dwindled to Plymouth. Besides, as a father of three young children to whom weekends had long been a Daddy-free zone, I wanted to realign my work–family balance. Indeed, the reason I am writing this book is that that balance has changed in a way I would never have suspected: I now spend more time attempting to teach others how to be sports journalists than I do plying my trade, as Hugh McIlvanney once modestly inscribed in my copy of McIlvanney on Football, as ‘a fellow toiler in a scruffy vineyard’. Writing about what you love, for a living, can be a curse full of blessings. More often than not, it can be a blessing full of curses.

I was drawn irresistibly to sport. With hindsight, the psychological catalyst, I suppose, was that it offered a way of ordering a terrifying world that otherwise defied comprehension: a tributary of certainty winding gently off a river of doubt. Whether one team thrashed another or a sprinter edged home by the thickness of a vest, you couldn’t argue with the result, or at least not with any expectation of changing it. Slowly, the associated virtues dawned: the physical artistry; the knowledge that I couldn’t hit or pass or bowl a zillionth as well even if my life depended on it; the miraculous variety of games devised around the possibilities generated by balls of differing sizes; the indescribable buzz of a close contest or a victory against the odds; the dignity sport alone lent to patriotism; the operatic nature of its plotlines; what it taught me about politics and geography and history; how it brought together mutually mistrustful races and buried, however fleetingly, their social and economic differences. Oh yes, and the possibly self-deluding belief that knowing vast amounts about who won what and when, and why, afforded me precious insights into Life Itself.

In the interests of full, frank and fearless contextualisation, I should relate that I lost my sporting virginity at the age of eight and two-thirds, in 1966, which for a romantically inclined Londoner was incredibly fortunate. England won the World Cup. Everton became the first side to win the FA Cup final after going 2–0 down, a feat not repeated until Arsenal mugged Hull City in 2014 (that not one of the four reporters sent by the Observer to Wembley for the latter mentioned this precedent, nor even the office reporter who supplied the ‘Fact of the Day’, is one of the more shameful lapses by a supposedly competent sports desk in recent memory). Between May and November, Muhammad Ali, Garry Sobers and Pelé, the era’s most important black sporting figures, all graced the capital with their otherworldly presence. Ali cracked Henry Cooper’s eggshell eyebrows at Highbury, furnishing the Sunday papers with their goriest front-page snaps in years; Sobers beat England’s cricketers singlehanded – nobody else has ever scored 600 runs and taken 15 wickets in the same Test series, much less the 700 runs and 20 wickets he chalked up; only Pelé, injured knee targeted mercilessly by Bulgarian, Hungarian and Portuguese studs, disappointed. For the first time since the 1880s, England felt like the centre of the sporting universe, a backdrop that enhanced my fanciful teenage dreams: becoming the next E.W. Swanton or Brian Glanville. Unlike so many aspiring sportswriters, I was lucky enough to live in a country whose wealth makes the fulfilment of such dreams feasible. Nor did it hurt that it accommodated more influential newspapers per square mile than anywhere else.

Back then, I loved to distraction virtually any contest between individuals or teams where the key element was a spherical object; even snooker. I even quite liked most of the various racing genres (motor, horse and foot, if not sailing), but it was the skill involved in hitting, kicking and handling balls that really tickled my fancy – mostly because I knew from bitter and shameful first-hand experience how tricky those skills were to acquire and hone. What roused me more than anything, however, was:

The possibility that small could embarrass big, and right beat might (that Glasgow Rangers were tossed out of the Scottish FA Cup by Berwick Rangers in my first season as a football fanatic scarcely hurt).

The sheer justice – in most cases – of the scoreline, which explains, in good part, my quiet lust for cricket: by dint of the longevity of its contests, albeit not exclusively so, it all but precludes flukish or freakish reversals of form or ability.

The fact that nobody wins all the time. Not Tiger Woods. Not Roger Federer. Not even the treasurers.

And now? As I write these words shortly before the start of the 2014 FIFA World Cup finals, having covered most of the entries in The Oxford Companion to Sports and Games for most of the titles that once resided in Fleet Street, in addition to sundry magazines and publications in Australia, South Africa and India, I am still smitten, irreversibly I suspect. While I can trace my youth and teenagehood via the pop charts, my life is mapped out by Test matches and World Cups. I began my preparations for the 2006–07 Ashes series by watching the DVD of England’s triumph in the 2005 encounter for the umpteenth-and-first time. Small wonder my wife tired of me.

So, unlike Mr Cooke, being a sports journalist has not eroded my passion for sport, at least not fatally. If it had, I would not have had the gall to write this book; the very last thing you should be reading is a how-to guide by a practitioner who has forgotten the why.

THE LURE OF SPORTS JOURNALISM

The way this scruffy vineyard is perceived has evolved radically during my time as a member of the National Union of Journalists, the Sports Journalists’ Association and the proudly unreconstructed Cricket Writers’ Club; Chapters 2 and 3 examine this in detail. Suffice it to say that sports desks, once derided, slimly-populated and barely tolerated, are now dignified – all right, grudgingly valued. This may seem extraordinarily naive, not least given that journalists, by and large, command a level of public esteem matched only by dentists, insurance salesmen, estate agents and car-towers. I would argue otherwise – but then I would, wouldn’t I?

My tastes and loyalties, meanwhile, have shifted and realigned. I like to feel that that enduring childlike interest has been aided by neutrality. Unless, of course, one of the protagonists is poorer, unluckier, more deserving, more inclined to cheat or play with neither wit nor imagination – or the England cricket team. Intriguingly, to me and my therapist if nobody else, my passion for cricket, the sport I have covered with comfortably the greatest regularity, has actually grown. It is a moot point, mind, whether this says more about cricket than it does about my refusal to age gracefully, if at all.

I also adore baseball (my favourite sporting event is the World Series, a best-of-seven affair and hence the fairest and most democratic test of athleticism and nerve there is), occasionally thrill to a goal or try or smash or putt and take a passing interest in about half the remnants. The exceptions, besides boxing, are motor racing, horse racing and sailing (too reliant on non-humans and hence immeasurably less interesting), athletics and cycling (neither of which appears to be possible to perform in a spectacular or even captivating way without the whiff of drugs), and darts, which shares much the same affinity for athleticism and variety as a kebab shop. To be ashamed of such prejudices is to be ashamed of the contents of your iPod.

But why – beyond their common worship of such boyish delights as hits, throws, runs, outs, catches and averages – cricket and baseball? I love the sense both give, in this noisy, nosy, non-stop age, of defying the tyranny of time (baseball, indeed, has no clock, literally or even figuratively). I love that each game combines the best of all cultural worlds: like novels and biographies, they are long enough and languid enough to suck you in; like movies, plays and television dramas, they twist and turn, and with even greater disregard for probability. I love the utterly fortuitous fact that my introduction to baseball – game 6 of the 1986 World Series between New York’s Mets and Boston’s Red Sox, courtesy of Channel 4 – happened to conclude with the most dramatic climax to a sporting event it has ever been my fingernails’ displeasure to witness, a climax that could never have been scripted for a cinema or plasma TV because it was too far-fetched. I love the way that, 31 years after Steve Pinder gave me my first chance to write about sport for City Limits magazine, I still feel a sense of deflation, and renewed longing, whenever a Test match in England ends, no matter what the result. Above all, I love that you can read about cricket and baseball with as much delight as you can watch them, often more so.

I have unquestionably been fortunate. Even though my knowledge of the subject had been gleaned solely from the safe side of the white line – terraces, grandstands, libraries, bookshops, newsagents, radio a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary
• 1 The hardest job ever craved: An almost shameless confession
• 2 Batting and balling: A short history of sportswriting
• 3 Whose agenda is it anyway? Sports journalism in the digital age
• 4 The knowledge
• 5 Then, in the final minute …: The match report
• 6 Breaking the news: The news story
• 7 ‘Hi,’ said Muhammad, amiably: The interview
• 8 Beneath the mud: The feature
• 9 Me, the jury: Expressing yourself (responsibly)
• 10 The advantage of distance: Periodical journalism
• 11 Live and exclusive: Broadcasting
• 12 The safety net: Editing and sub-editing
• 13 Views from the top
• 14 St Francis of Hereford: Frank Keating, heart and soul of sportswriting
• Further reading
• Index