Overeducated sports writers log

woops

is not like other people
Nessie is a good analogy here 'cos the only evidence we have of her existing is grainy monochrome photos in weird-smelling 70s books next to pictures of kirlian auras. Serious science pours scorn on the idea.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
David Halberstam was a serious journalist who wrote serious books about Vietnam, presidents, etc, but he also wrote great books about basketball
 
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padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
There's nothing inherently lowbrow about sports

Mens sana in corpore sano

Its only fairly recently that most adults lives (in affluent parts of the world) have become largely divorced from all but voluntary physical activity
 
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padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
I'm always going on about how much I dislike that post-college sport is a "hobby" unless you're one of the very tiny number of people talented enough to do it professionally
 

version

Well-known member
I've had an article by a bloke called John Lardner bookmarked for years and still haven't gotten round to it, but he's apparently considered of one of the great American sports writers.


Director’s Cut: ‘Down Great Purple Valleys,’ by John Lardner: A look at the bombastic and abbreviated life of Stanley Ketchel, from one of America's greatest sportswriters - https://grantland.com/features/director-cut-john-lardner-stanley-ketchel/

In the grand era of sports that spanned the middle of the 20th century, few writers were more revered by their contemporaries than John Lardner. When he died in 1960, at the age of 47, he was widely recognized as an unsurpassed observer of sports, through his long-running weekly column in Newsweek1 and a variety of freelance pieces for The New Yorker, The Saturday Evening Post, True, and Sport. The famed sportswriter W.C. Heinz succinctly put it: Lardner was “the best of us.”
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I actually really like reading about sports, despite not watching them, hence me finding these quotes in the first place.

I don't mean to demean sports or sports writing, I was just intrigued by finding a reference to Shakespeare and Keats in one piece about Ronaldo and then a reference to Tennyson in another piece about Ronaldo in quick succession.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
I don't mean to demean sports or sports writing, I was just intrigued by finding a reference to Shakespeare and Keats in one piece about Ronaldo and then a reference to Tennyson in another piece about Ronaldo in quick succession
righto, didn't mean to come across aggro or nothing. I think it's an interesting topic.

a great deal of sportswriting is beat reporting, bare bones recitation of fact, and/or investigate scoops (i.e. strategic leaking by teams/agents/players)

but once you get outside of that, to think pieces, long-form etc, it often gets quite purple and (sometimes) intellectual

that's done at extreme, varying levels of competency. a lot of it is quite florid and dull.

but when it's on it can be as truly good as anything, I think.

sports is among other things a mythological realm, with heroes, (seemingly) grand scales, etc. i.e., and this will sound dumb, but the Iliad for example is a kind of proto-sportswriting (among other things ofc)

see, for example, John Updike's justifiably celebrated essay on the final game of Ted Williams (The Kid, The Splendid Splinter, Teddy Ballgame) a literal - WWII - and mythological hero, famously aloof
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1960/10/22/hub-fans-bid-kid-adieu

"Gods do not answer letters."
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
some of the qualities of those essays are particular to their era - the birth of New Journalism, the beginning of existential discontent under the placid surface of 1950s America

just as early 1900s (or 1800s - see Pierce Egan's Boxiana) purple prose on boxing has qualities particular to its context

but they also have timeless qualities, just as sports lives in the moment in the physical realm but can live eternally in the mental, emotional, spiritual

watching sports is often quotidian, and I generally much prefer playing them

but to see a moment live, when you don't know it's going to happen - Michael Jordan going baseline on Patrick Ewing

I remember every detail of that moment in my life, when I saw that

to see the very best person in the world perform an astounding feet, to see a man take flight

I'm not and will never be a good enough writer to capture that feeling, the same way I couldn't capture great art
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
and Michael Jordan, tbc, is a terrible human being in most regards from everything I've ever read or observed about him

it's his particular tragic flaw - the very factor (beyond vast physical talent) that made him so great - an insane, obsessive, relentless focus on winning - makes him terrible in every other situation

when I say heroic I mean Iliad heroism, the heroism of feats, not the heroism of sacrifice, of course

that's what I like about watching sports - to see the best people on earth at a thing do that thing

so it's unsurprising to me that writers stray easily into the mythopoetic, albeit usually without the writing ability to pull it off
 

version

Well-known member
Barkley tells a story about how he was about to hand a homeless guy some money and Jordan slapped his hand away and said "If he can say 'you got any spare change?', he can say 'Welcome to McDonald's. How may I help you?'"
 
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padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
The stories about him are legion, and sometimes do have a Paul Bunyon (or whatever the British equivalent is) semi-folk mythology air about them


there's another one I've heard multiple versions of. it basically goes:

some dude scores talks shit to, scores a bunch of points on, or somehow embarrasses MJ in some way

MJ comes back in the next possession, half, game, whatever, and completely annihilates that dude in the most vicious, humiliating fashion possiblethat the

drops 50 on him, talks shits so devastatingly that the dude becomes perpetually spooked, etc

he's also well-known for being so hard on his own teammates that he broke them
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
when I was a kid growing up, no one outside the NBA and certain basketball journalists really knew any of that

his off-court persona was the prototypical, perfect corporate shill, and I was too young to really notice the vicious side of his on-court persona

of course looking back there's a vast, deep pool of toxic masculinity there

but then the Iliad is full of toxic masculinity of various stripes too, so
 
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IdleRich

IdleRich
that's what I like about watching sports - to see the best people on earth at a thing do that thing
But surely that's only half the story? Cos none of it would happen without all the less superhuman people turning up week in week out in the lower leagues - and there are loads of people who like watching Notts County hack out a terrible scoreless draw with some other no-hopers on a wet Wednesday evening. In fact over the last few years my main experience of sports fans is more those who (possibly perversely) proudly brag about how they support that sort of team and how they are much realer sports fans than those who watch the big games spoiled by loads of money etc etc
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Another famous bit of (kinda) sports writing is the one with Delillo at the start of Underworld (I think it is) when the first hundred pages are about that baseball game with the "Shot that was heard around the world (except in all the countries that don't give a fuck about baseball (which is most of them))"
 
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