|
<advertisement>
|
 |
 
|
|
media search: |
 |
sports journalism
The Ex-Sportswriter: 'I was looking for heroes in all the wrong places'
by Gene Collier
Gene Collier covered sports for twenty-two years for The
Philadelphia Journal, The Pittsburgh Press, and The Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette, and was a sports columnist for the latter two papers. For the
last two years he has been a features columnist for the Post-Gazette.
It
was in the Steelers locker room, a Wednesday as I recall, and I was doing my
famous milling act. Milling about, shuffling wordlessly along rows of lockers
at the approximate pace of a drunk at a wedding, pulling my notepad out of my
pocket, uncapping my pen, putting my notepad back in my pocket, capping my pen,
waiting for some twenty-something from the top one percent for gross motor skills
to answer some questions for me.
Some tragically measurable part of my life had been spent in exactly this pantomime, waiting for athletes to get showered, get dressed, get treatment, get ice, get heat, get taped, get whirlpooled, get out of a meeting, or just get familiar with the common courtesy of making themselves available to someone who needed to talk to them.
It is an undignified situation for a writer at any age, but with midlife busting in on you like an unblocked linebacker, the notion nailed me that day that this was, indeed, enough. It was quarterback Kordell Stewart I was waiting for, a fine young man and a willing if dull interview when he got around to it, but that wasn't what I was thinking. I was thinking: "How stupid is this? I don't want to wait for this guy. This guy doesn't want me to wait for him. I know what he's going to say. He knows what I'm going to ask. The readers know what I'm going to write. And I know what they're going to say if they read it."
I left without talking to him and walked out of Three Rivers Stadium feeling as bad as Hal Bodley looked that day in San Francisco seventeen years ago. I was sitting next to him in the press box of Candlestick Park. We were baseball writers together then, covering the Philadelphia Phillies. Bodley, now the senior baseball writer at USA Hooray, had finished maybe his 140th game story of the season a couple of minutes before me, and I looked at his computer screen as he attached some notes to the end of his copy. He had called his notes "Extra Points."
I said, "Hal, that's football."
"I know," he said. "I'm tired of baseball."
B ut this was worse, definitely. I was tired of baseball, tired of football, real tired of basketball, excruciatingly tired of hockey, contemptuous of boxing, downright hateful of golf and tennis, and immensely uninterested in auto racing, horse racing, dog racing, cat chasing, and anything else they might have on ESPN. I hated sports, and I hated writing about them, and as I was aware from reading the professional journals, those were not the two main things people are looking for in a forty-four-year-old sports columnist.
That was two years ago, and though the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has graciously seen to it that I can play at something else, I can still see sports journalism in the cracked rear-view, looking pretty much the same as the day I left. Sports journalism in America, whether in its traditional forms or as it warps through cyberspace in mutated fractals of itself, remains the culture's virtually omnipotent Depart ment of Hero Maintenance and Disposal, hourly separating the worthy from the flawed, polishing and immortalizing the best, degrading for entertainment's sake the worst.
Sports journalism biblicizes Michael Jordan, imprints his perfectly crafted image onto timeless collector's edition videos or leather-bound books, while simultaneously building databases on the anecdotal idiocies of Dennis Rodman or the pathologies of Pete Rose and Lawrence Taylor, then sells it all to a sports-addled public eager for violence or competitive validation or some definitive moral scorecard.
Not to be critical.
The joke (I'd have used "irony" but it's more a joke) is this: an actual living hero is ten times as likely to walk down your street, sit next to you on a bus, or hold the door for you at the library, than to appear on your television between the never varying pre-game yammer and the post-game lament about who "stepped up" and who just "didn't want it bad enough."
I've been prodded to think hard about these kinds of things in the last couple of years, my first back on earth after twenty-two in the galaxy of sports stars. I'm asked about it all the time, sometimes by people who can't believe I could walk away from the sports columnist's gig. For me, the main factor was a sense of outrage at the impenetrable sense of entitlement among the athletes. This is not often their fault. Indeed, most of them are unaware of it. But a culture that rewards athletic prowess from the time boys and girls are able to walk has, by the time an athlete comes to a station that attracts media coverage, produced a creature that expects its strengths will be celebrated and even embellished while its weaknesses will be tolerated, and that the culture exists merely to extend privileges and ignore flaring evidence of arrested development.
In the early '80s, a colleague of mine took a job in the front office of a major league baseball team. Before very long, he'd advanced to a position in which he helped prepare arbitration cases against players who were not eligible to become free agents, but were upset with the team's salary offer.
My colleague loved baseball, as did I. We'd have long talks about the players we idolized as kids and we marveled at their skill and at the skills of modern players as well. But he came to tell me, after a few years of sitting in on arbitration hearings, "If you could be there and hear what they want, and see what they think of themselves, you would never, ever, go to another game."
With America's blessing, athletes raised their expectations in terms of remuneration and respect. They have somehow been put in a position to demand respect without giving any. But a larger issue to me is the way the media have simultaneously lowered the standards for hero status. When Jordan re-retired, the sports media became a hurricane of idolatry that devastated all established perspective. Jordan was the plain and simple best basketball player ever, but journalism's attempt to solidify that notion for history was so overwrought it was embarrassing, even sickening.
We heard how Jordan was a "singular athlete" who "transcended the game" and had taken his place in the American sports pantheon with the likes of Muhammad Ali, Jackie Robinson, and Babe Ruth. Get a grip.
Ali cast himself as lightning rod for an overheated '60s culture poised to torture him for it, and gave up his title rather than his religious beliefs. Robinson's courage is perhaps unprecedented in sports, and he inspired and corresponded with repressed blacks from California to Capetown. Ruth, for all his misbehavior, embodied a bigger-better-farther spirit in an America coming to terms with its own roiling greatness in the '20s.
A nd Jordan, he what? Went strong to the rack? With perhaps more worldwide recognition and influence than the other three had among them, Jordan talked to Tweety Bird on the phone. For money.
It's no wonder that I find myself telling people that I've met more interesting people in the past two years than in all my years on Planet Sports.
I met a blind man who does nothing but talk to troubled and terminally ill children on the telephone. I met a Holocaust survivor who'd been hidden by a nun in a Lithuanian basement. I met some women who spend their days gathering surplus medical supplies to send to countries where people simply die for want of things that we throw away. I saw a father stand on the pulpit of a Pittsburgh church in front of 200 crying high school students and give the eulogy for their classmate, his son, who'd crashed during a flying lesson two days before.
He quoted his son: "Live for your dreams; reach for the sky, and I'll see you there." And he did that without even a quaver in his voice and without an ounce of self-consciousness or self-pity. Now that's heroic. I saw the ball go through Buckner's legs in New York. I saw that piece of Holyfield's ear hit the canvas in Las Vegas. I saw Rose break Cobb's record in Cincinnati. I saw Montana win a Super Bowl in Miami with two minutes of gifted, nonchalant, high-wire brilliance that you could almost weep over. But all that while, there was an immutable sense that it was all highly inconsequential, that I was looking for heroes in all the wrong places. Turned out that was true.
