Routledge Handbook of Sports Journalism

Rob Steen, Jed Novick, Huw Richards, Rob Steen, Jed Novick, Huw Richards

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781317205746
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Industria dei media e delle comunicazioni
• Index: Business

The Routledge Handbook of Sports Journalism is a comprehensive and in-depth survey of the fast-moving and multifaceted world of sports journalism. Encompassing historical and contemporary analysis, and case studies exploring best practice as well as cutting edge themes and issues, the book also represents an impassioned defence of the skill and art of the trained journalist in an era of unmediated digital commentary.

With contributions from leading sports-media scholars and practising journalists, the book examines journalism across print, broadcast and digital media, exploring the everyday reality of working as a contemporary reporter, editor or sub-editor. It considers the organisations that shape output, from PR departments to press agencies, as well as the socio-political themes that influence both content and process, such as identity, race and gender. The book also includes interviews with, and biographies of, well-known journalists, as well as case studies looking at the way that some of the biggest names in world sport, from Lance Armstrong to Caster Semenya, have been reported.

This is essential reading for all students, researchers and professionals working in sports journalism, sports broadcasting, sports marketing and management, or the sociology or history of sport.

1

Why sports journalism matters

Rob Steen

Why does sports journalism matter? The short, incontrovertibly correct answer requires just three words: because sport matters. The full, strictly personal answer runs to rather more (rest assured: the other editors have approved it for taste and factual accuracy, been mightily indulgent on the word count, and send profuse apologies for the innumerable references to my favourite sporting fix, cricket, a game whose lexicon might prove occasionally challenging for some).

Once upon a very recent time there was a place called Great Britain, a small but exceedingly wealthy island that had recently ruled a third of the planet and thoroughly justified more than half its name (albeit only because empire-building was once regarded as an unavoidable and acceptable fact of life). Its name concealed multiple identities – English, Scottish, Welsh and two kinds of Irishes – not to mention confusing alternatives such as the United Kingdom, Britain and the British Isles, the last “a term”, as Matthew Engel would point out in 2014, “now increasingly considered politically incorrect, some pedants preferring ‘North-west European Archipalego’ or ‘Islands of the North Atlantic’”.¹ Fear, loathing, stupidity and nostalgia reigned. Enmeshed in the near-pitiable chaos of exit from the European Union, aka Brexit, with xenophobia, inequality, zero-hours contracts, online teenage suicide notes, homelessness and food banks soaring, here was a small patch of land mired in the past and growing ever more divided by the day. A patch renowned for its sense of humour where, in its northern climes, the surrealist Swedish comedian Olaf Falafel (in a show entitled It's One Leek for Mankind) had just won the award for the funniest joke of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe for a look-how-daring-I-am slice of wordplay mocking victims of Tourette's Syndrome. For those grateful for any reason to be cheerful, the dizzying weekend of 24–25 August 2019 offered relief, however brief.

For one thing, it was blissfully and ceaselessly sunny, though even the most ardent Extinction Rebellion activists would not have relished the latest hottest Bank Holiday in the annals of an island where fair weather had historically been as commonplace as equitable income distribution. Meanwhile, at Headingley, home to Yorkshire County Cricket Club, the England men's team, drawn from a multi-ethnic pool of talent encompassing players of Asian origin as well as the sons of Ireland, Barbados, Zimbabwe, South Africa and New Zealand, won a match they had no earthly – or even “solar systemy” – right to win.

An historic, hypnotic, magical, mystical and occasionally hysterical passage of bat-and-balling at Headingley began at 11am on the Saturday and ended more than twelve playing hours later (29 in real time, pausing only for two ritual lunches, drinks breaks and a tea-break, breakfast, dinner and a few thin hours of sleep). For the final hour, the clock, perversely for a sporting contest, was utterly and gloriously irrelevant: there was still another full day scheduled. In the Age of Instant Gratification, slow eating was one of the latest, hippest health fads in Notting Hill and Hampstead; could slow sport yet catch on?

The occupants of the press box, for whom time is never a friend, especially in the claustrophobic age of tweeting and blogging, knew the feeling all too well. “The messiest corner of any sportswriter's life is their waste-paper bin,” admitted Andy Bull in The Guardian. “A lot of the time print deadlines are so tight that most of the writing is done live while the match happens, and since sport has an unfortunate way of throwing up all these late twists you end up often throwing half of it away. This is the stuff that does not even get to be the next day's fish and chip paper, intros undone by late winners, articles discarded because of last-wicket partnerships, rough first drafts of the history that almost was.”²

When the end finally came, England had beaten Australia in a manner unseen – and wholly unforeseen – since the nations first met on a cricket field in 1877 to kick off the longest-running major international sporting soap opera of them all. The Headingley contest was the third in a five-chapter series, the prize for the duellists “The Ashes”, a tiny terracotta urn first presented in 1882, its contents still unconfirmed (they've been identified, variously, as the remains of a cricket bail, a cricket stump, the cover of a ball and even a bride's veil). At three stages in a match they could not afford to lose, the home team had been bereft of realistic hope; as the crescendo beckoned, Australian nerves frayed and umpires erred, they were indebted thrice more to that most indispensable of sporting gifts, luck.

The odds against England winning, given the circumstances, are best conveyed by history and statistical probability: in 1,013 previous Test matches spanning 142 years, they had never totalled 359 runs to win in the fourth and final innings, their target that afternoon. The closest they had come had been at the dawn of the Great Depression. When the ninth wicket (of ten) fell, bringing Ben Stokes and Jack Leach together, 73 more runs were required. Only once in 2,358 Test matches – by Sri Lanka earlier in 2019, as it happened – had a side's last available partnership ever conquered such a mountain. England's entire batting order, furthermore, had been whistled out in their first innings for 67, their lowest total against Australia since 1948. In The Guardian came further context from Geoff Lemon, the estimable Australian cricket writer: “Three teams previously have been rolled for such a low score and won: all of those cases were in the 1800s, when a hard day's bowling was probably attended to by medicinal leeches or a sacrifice to the Sun God. Then there was this, the summer of 2019, which makes sense given the darkly absurd timeline that our world appears to have lurched down.”³ Perhaps the most priceless of Test cricket's virtues remains its structure: two innings per side can mean, for all 22 players, a second chance.

But still, cricket is a trivial pursuit, one of the more moth-eaten members of the newspaper toy department. Far newsier news abounded. The apparently unavoidable divorce from the EU was threatening even darker economic gloom, even the very existence of the United Kingdom. Seeking to suppress opposition to his pursuit of a no-deal Brexit, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson was about to suspend Parliament, an act that would have been unconstitutional had there been such a thing as a written, legally binding British constitution. Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland's First Minister, would declare it “the day any semblance of British democracy died”; Simon Jenkins, a former editor of The Times, compared the new prime minister to F. Scott's Fitzgerald's Jazz Age anti-hero: “There is a Gatsby quality to him, of rich people having a good time as they ‘smashed up things and creatures and let other people clean up the mess they had made’. That is the fate of all nations that put their faith in unwritten constitutions. They are vulnerable to rogues.”⁴ A letter to The Guardian from Dr Mike Addison underlined the depth of disbelief: “My mother, an Austrian refugee, used to tell her children that Hitler could never have risen to power in the UK because of the existence and power of the monarch. [Johnson] proved this argument false”. Perhaps the most plaintive view came from another Guardian reader, Fiona Black: “I am a mother of four who grew up in Northern Ireland. I live in fear of a no-deal Brexit. Not because of trade or finances but because of the return to violence which a hard border will bring with it. Every day of my childhood was spent hearing of people being killed by bombs and bullets. I lived in fear that I, my siblings or parents would be next. Is this what we want for our children?”⁵

Other reasons to be fearful and furious were queuing up: Prince Andrew's connections with the billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, the American paedophile, sex trafficker and friend to presidents who had recently committed suicide in jail under deeply suspicious circumstances, were growing ever shadier and shabbier. A crucial G7 meeting of world leaders was in progress in Biarritz, where No. 10 Downing Street's truth-allergic stand-up comic of a new president had been warning his new best buddy Donald Trump that a trade war with China would result in a global recession. Unenlightened populist despots ruled the roost in the United States, India, Brazil, Hungary, Syria, Saudi Arabia and too many other places besides. The Amazon rainforests were ablaze, the havoc ordered by Brazil's prime minister, a man who deserves only that his name should be expunged from memory with indecent speed and extreme prejudice. Riots had returned to the streets of Hong Kong. In Lancashire, after 135 years as an integral part of the local community, one of the lesser latter-day cogs in the football business, Bury, was about to go out of business, the first club to be expelled from the English Football League since Leeds City during the 1919–1920 season.

Nothing, though, could stop each and every one of Monday's nine daily national newspapers leading their front pages with a photograph of Stokes at the moment of victory, arms at ten-past-ten, roaring his delight. Even the Financial Times. And all this for a sport struggling to stay relevant in its cradle, an activity and entertainment so un-21st century that a match could still consume 30 hours without yielding a winner.

What was that about the media being experts solely in the art of packaging bad news? Here's a taste of the reaction:

Best Summer's Day Ever

Daily Express headline

Boris Johnson promises Ashes star Ben Stokes ‘Dukedom’

The Mirror headline

U Must Be Stoking

The Sun headline

Land Of Heat And Glory!

Daily Mail headline

I have no sister but if I did I'd want her to marry Ben Stokes.

Tweet by Graeme Swann, ex-England colleague of Stokes

The more considered verdicts, from Englishmen and Australians alike, seem no less worthy of reproduction (for those unfamiliar with cricketese, please forgive the terminological complexities of the first):

Upon reaching his 100, the best of his career, [Stokes] did not celebrate. That was not his goal. Next Stokes took 17 runs from a Hazlewood over, pull shots, drives and legside flicks, which magically just managed to keep finding or clearing the boundary. A half-chance flew to Marcus Harris at third man but he could not quite cling on as he dived forward. This was beyond Roy of the Rovers.⁶

Vic Marks, The Guardian

To be a young cricket addict watching the 1981 Ashes was to be struck with awe, [Ian Botham's] belligerent swagger felt thrillingly un-English. To me, aged 12, he was a superhero. Perhaps the very best thing about Stokes yesterday was to feel, even in middle-age, that same wonderment – and see it in the faces of three generations gathered together. The very best of sport, and the very best of athletes, draw the world in communal joy. You look at each other, with crazy grins, and ask “how is that even possible?”⁷

Matt Dickinson, The Times

Utterly, cruelly, wonderfully fair. Even in this age, obsessed with precision and quantity, the rational and the logical, there remains in cricket an abiding belief in the rub of the green, which Stokes had by then mightily earned.⁸

Gideon Haigh, The Times

Call off Test cricket now. In fact, call off all cricket. Not because it could never get any worse than this, but because how could it ever be better, surely? That's talking as a cricket fan and connoisseur of the incomparable drama of sports, not as an Australian partisan. Let's all die happy now, or only a little bit sad, and permanently awe-struck.⁹

Greg Baum, Sydney Morning Herald

Oh hell, just call it off now. Forget the Premier League, cancel the Rugby World Cup, bin the world athletics championship and whatever else we're supposed to get excited about in the coming weeks and months. They'll all pale after this Headingley Test, when Ben Stokes, that most unlikely saint, worked the second of the two miracles he needs for his canonisation.¹⁰

Andy Bull, The Guardian

The most surprising comeback since the first boomerang.

Mick Beeby, letter to The Guardian

If we can beat Australia despite the experts writing us off, surviving Boris Johnson will be a breeze as long as we all keep our nerve.

Frederick Cantrell, letter to The Guardian

And then there was this:

England cricket: an apology from The Times

We may have given the impression in Saturday's Times that Joe Root's England side had “No fight, no idea, no hope” after they were bowled out for a dismal 67 in their first innings.

We now recognise that they are among the finest, battling sides this country has ever produced. We are happy to make this clear.¹¹

The heroes, as befits those truly worthy of that oft-abused word, were human beings of rare drive and resilience. The first was Stokes, a towering physical specimen of Maori ancestry. Having spent the first 12 years of his life in New Zealand, he had migrated to north-east England with his steely, never-knowingly-cowed father. A professional rugby league player and coach, Ged Stokes was committed to that ubiquitous mantra about there being no “I” in “team” (as well as the lesser-known one about there almost always being an “I” in “failure”). He once sacrificed a finger to the greater cause, bidding a doctor to cut a damaged one off, thus hastening his return to action. It took a broken neck to persuade him to retire.

Lovingly nurtured, Ben's talent for those apparent polar opposites rugby and cricket was unmissable. Athleticism, power, hand-eye coordination, ferocious commitment and a lifetime membership of the “Who Dares Wins” school of philosophy; he had it all. Better yet, he far preferred team sport to individual sport because it tapped into his yearning for collective endeavour and mateship. But despite that paternal influence, cricket – where he excelled in all three departments, as batsman, bowler and fielder – snared his ambition.

The inner fire was no less in-your-face. Ginger of hair, even the most skilful understaters could not accuse him of being gingerly. On the field, he was the walking definition of a captain-in-the-making: the ideal team leader, both exemplar and enabler. Only those perennial burdens – as a three-in-one master of all the game's trades – could stop him from ascending the throne occupied by the England cricket captain, the most demanding public post in the land not to include the words “prime” and “minister” in its job description (at least the England football manager doesn't have to tackle a rival centre-back or risk a broken shin). Opponents who bested Stokes, however temporary their su...