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sports journalism
The Fan: 'Sports journalism is about myths and transcendent moments'
by Michael Shapiro
Michael Shapiro, who has written about sports for The
New York Times, The New Yorker, and Sports Illustrated, teaches
at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism (ms106@columbia.edu).
His most recent book is Solomon's Sword: Two Families and the Children the
State Took Away.
Yes,
this is about Jim Gray and Pete Rose, but really it is about all the reporters
and all the athletes who came before them. Because it is impossible to write
about sports and journalism without revisiting the image of Gray thrusting a
microphone at Rose and doing what many people wished he had not done, which
was be a reporter.
Rose, disgraced and gone from the game for ten years, comes to the 1999 World Series as part of the All-Century team and hears a hero's ovation, louder than those for Mays, Aaron, and Williams, louder than those for the immortals. Gray asks, Are you ready to admit to gambling on games, Pete? Rose looks like a man holding a bloody knife and saying, me? Gray does not back off. Rose is saying, c'mon fella, forget it. I cop to nothing.
NBC gets so many angry calls: What is your man doing? Has he forgotten that he stands on hallowed ground, that he has sullied the moment?
The network says, he is doing his job, which means he is asking questions. He is finding things out for you. Don't you want him to do this?
And people say, as they always have when it comes to stories about games and heroes and the wonderful diversion from real life that sports can be, No, not like this, not now. Later, maybe.
Rose and Gray are a metaphor for the inescapable and enduring tension between what we want sports to be, and what we want sports stories to tell us. It is a tension heightened by the conundrum at the heart of sports journalism: that sports, strictly speaking, do not matter, that they are entertainment whose significance pales in comparison to that of, say, education, politics, health care, science, even planning commission deliberations; but that sports, on a less quantifiable level, matter very much, that they reflect a good deal about the societies that embrace them, the rich people who back them and, most especially, about the often remarkable men and women who play them.
No aspect of journalism offers what sports can offer, which is an endless series of real-time contests whose outcome tells so much about life.
To write about sports, then, is to write, at once, about events of no consequence, and about moments that no other story can rival for drama, humanity, and insight.
The problem comes when the insight, when the drama of the moment, when the glimpse of humanity we see displayed runs smack into our myth of what sports should be.
A baseball fan, I admit without shame that I have at times begged for a moment's silence from my wife and children until I hear what Peter Gammons of ESPN has to say about the Mets's middle relief pitching. (So who steps up, oh wise man?) The important things can, momentarily, wait. And while we're at it, what does Kenny Smith of TNT think of the Knicks backcourt? (That bad? Pity.) Life has been suspended. Sports — and here we talk not of the game, but of the journalistic component — has tossed a quilt over genuine concerns and allowed me to consider issues that have absolutely no bearing on my life. And that is why I love it. My morning opens with the sports section, just to get the brain going before the tasks of the day begin. Thank you Harvey Araton, for the insight of the day. Thank you, too, Selena Roberts of the Times for this morning's story on a basketball game I watched last night but whose theme you've identified and elucidated so elegantly. "Now," as Philip Roth wrote at the close of Portnoy's Complaint, "ve may perhaps to begin. Yes?"
Sports are always with us. There are the games, which never go away, season spilling into season so seamlessly that it is the rare night when we are stuck, say, with Aussie Rules football. The journalism is just as ubiquitous. There is so much commentary, and so many highlight-reel shows that it is impossible to miss the homer or slam-dunk or "ooh-that's-gotta-hurt" big hit of the night.
T his needing to know, this voracious appetite for fact and insight and what the Pulitzer jurors call "explanatory journalism," is insatiable. And if that sounds hyperbolic, tune in to sports-talk radio and listen to the national conversation on sports. It combines the gossip's plea ("tell me, tell me . . .") with the desire for guidance and illumination ("I think the Dodgers pull the trigger on that trade, right?"). It is hard to imagine the callers — let alone the mercifully silent listeners — being satisfied with the sort of sportswriting of the era before 1950, before Dick Young of the New York Daily News made his way from the comfort of the press box down to the clubhouse, shoved his mug in a ballplayer's face and inquired, "What were you doing trying to steal third with two men out?"
There is a straight line between such encounters and what A.J. Liebling might have called the Gray-Rose "donnybrook." Before Young, sportswriting was, to put it charitably, a more celebratory endeavor. We know of Babe Ruth's whoring and of Ty Cobb's utter vileness. Virtually no one knew all this then, not in the pre-World War II world where writers made men into heroes and seldom, if ever, tried to undo their creations. Small wonder that the most famous athletic trophy bearing a sportswriter's name commemorates Grantland Rice, who in 1924 did not think it fulsome to dub Notre Dame's backfield, "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse."
This is not to suggest that before Young and others like him all sportswriters were patsies, although many saw their role more in literary terms than in the dirt-under-the-nails work of digging — that is if they saw a role other than joining in a game of whist with players on the train from Philadelphia to St. Louis. This was an era of three big games — baseball, boxing, and horse racing — and several lesser ones, among them college football, golf, tennis and, thank you Red Smith, fishing.
If baseball writing was the poetry — ah, for such verse as "beneath a Flatbush sky as dull and heavy as a Milwaukee rooter's heart . . ." by Tommy Holmes, the one-armed laureate of the New York Herald Tribune — then boxing was the prose, but of the school of Tolstoy, Hawthorne, and, forgive the stretch, Homer. Consider Heywood Broun of The New York World on Jack Dempsey's thrashing of Georges Carpentier in their 1921 heavyweight championship fight: "None of the crowds in Greece who went to somewhat more beautiful stadia in search of Euripides ever saw the spirit of tragedy more truly presented."
Young did not invent the piercing column. Red Smith, in the 1934 St. Louis Star, did not shrink from writing that the great Cardinal pitcher Dizzy Dean could be "a gross clown," albeit in an otherwise celebratory piece. But Young, a man whose enemies were legion, was, more than any writer who came before him, a sports reporter.
And that changed everything. Young found news, which was an altogether different approach from that of the gentleman in the grandstand, who merely observed. Young made it possible for his progeny to practice in a different landscape. By the late 1950s a cast of new reporters began arriving in the clubhouse and behaving a little too hungrily for the likes of the great sports columnist, Jimmy Cannon. He called them "the chipmunks." Cannon, who wrote for the Post and later the World-Telegram, and who could on occasion veer into hagiography on such subjects as Joe DiMaggio — he "stirred the dreams of countless boys" — was still wise and willing enough to write with insight and compassion of his friend's (yes, friend's) loneliness and distance.
Like Young, the "chipmunks" wanted stories. They did not mind having a little fun with their prose. Athletes did not always like them. The "chipmunks" (Maury Allen, Larry Merchant, and Leonard Shecter of the New York Post, Stan Isaacs of Newsday) were a New York phenomenon, but there were others, Jim Murray and the Los Angeles Times chief among them, who did not seek to spare the feelings of their subjects.
The stories that followed — the rise of Muhammad Ali, the protest at the medal stand at the 1968 Olympics, the massacre at Munich in 1972, wife-swapping by the Yankees, the end of the reserve clause, players' unions, drugs — were covered by journalists, print and broadcast (a moment, please, for Howard Cosell) who very often wanted to report.
It is hard, now, to imagine a time when writers like the late Wells Twombley of the San Francisco Examiner would not have taken on such subjects as the demeaning spectacle that is the Harlem Globetrotters, or when Rick Telander would not have thought it appropriate to write about basketball and manhood in Heaven Is a Playground.
It is hard, too, to recall the acid response to Jim Bouton, a former athlete, for writing his baseball exposé-as-memoir, Ball Four. (How could he say those things about Mickey Mantle?) People may have hated Bouton and his book. But they bought it and talked about it, just as they have so many of the athlete-confessional books that followed.
W e now know that sports is an entertainment business pre sided over by corporate owners whose passion for the games appears to extend no further than the construction of "skyboxes" in new, downtown arenas. It is terribly corrupt. It is a meatgrinder, enticing young men into, say, the prize ring or the college football stadium with lofty promises but leaving them with addled brains or arthritic knees.
We know all this because reporters have told us, about cheating scandals and sweetheart stadium deals and obscenely overpaid college coaches who care not a whit whether their players ever earn their degrees. We know, too, about the sometimes crude and vulgar men who play the games, who treat women as if they were scraps of paper stuck to the bottom of their shoes.
We know more than we sometimes wish we did. Linda Verigan, letters manager at Sports Illustrated, says that among the magazine's 3.3 million readers there is a core who take exception to the space devoted to anyone who is less than "honorable." Positive pieces, she ex plains, generate little mail.
Not so the tougher pieces, those that reveal the uglier side of sport. While the magazine will hear praise for its investigative pieces, it also hears from its detractors who wish Sports Illustrated had just kept the bad news to itself. Last fall, she says, the magazine ran a long and thoughtful obituary on Walter Payton, the marvelous Chicago Bear running back, who died of liver cancer. The piece, however, ran over fewer pages than a story in the same issue on Keyshawn Johnson, the New York Jets's gifted but immodest wide receiver. How, some readers asked, could SI devote more space to the author of the as-told-to autobiography Just Throw Me the Damned Ball, than to a good guy like "Sweetness?"
Verigan was still seeing mail on Rose and Gray months after their encounter — and this for NBC's story, not Sports Illustrated's. The letters ran overwhelmingly against Gray, who was criticized both for his timing (not "the appropriate setting" for an interrogation) and his persistence (Rose offered his denial, and then offered it again and still Gray stayed after him.)
Never mind that Gray was reminding everyone watching that there was overwhelming evidence that the rather sad and bloated man at his side had placed bets on his own team. That was Charlie Hustle! It was a "special night."
But what if Jim Gray had not pushed Pete Rose? What if he had reduced himself, as so many of his colleagues have, to the role of the man with the mike asking nothing more probing than, "So, big fella, heckuva night, huh?"
I suspect that while many would have been pleased at Gray's permitting some unpleasantness to slip past, many others would have seen the free pass for what it was: an opportunity to know, to ask, squandered.
One can fault Gray for asking essentially the same question several times, when it was clear what the answer would be. And one can take issue with his conducting his interview in so august a setting. But reporting is neither about deference nor is it always about asking nicely. It is about finding out. And nowhere is the "if-they-only-knew-what-happens-in-the-sausage-factory" aspect of reporting more apparent than in live television, which does not have the luxury of editing enjoyed by print and the TV news magazines.
In that moment and in its aftermath, we saw what sports journalism is about. It is about myths and heroes and transcendent moments. It is also about what we talk about, about a subject that despite its frothiness matters a great deal to a great many people.
We want to sustain that conversation. To make the talk worthwhile, to make it the passionate give-and-take it is. We need, we want to know, be it profane or sacred.
