http://collegepark.patch.com/articles/fear-and-loathing-in-the-sports-pages
The best sportswriting isn't necessarily about sports
By Lauren Evans
October 8, 2010
Hunter S. Thompson didn't care for sportswriters, and I can
understand why. With a few exceptions, he said, sportswriters are "a
kind of rude and brainless subculture of fascist drunks whose only
real function is to publicize and sell whatever the sports editor
sends them out to cover."
In other, less vibrant words, sportswriters have a knack for sucking
the humanity out of sports, in particular, football. They mute the
collective heart-thud of the crowd, whose every happiness, at that
moment, is tied to the fate of one lemon shaped ball. They rarely
mention the unique timbre produced by crunching skin and bone and
plastic, or the smell of a thousand hot dogs on the breath of a
thousand raving fans. They omit the elation of winning and the
heartbreak of losing, whittling away at it until nothing remains but
a box score. It is an empirical fact that a box score possesses all
the whimsy of an unsalted tortilla chip.
Perhaps it's these anesthetized accounts that make even the games
themselves seem dull. But real sportswriting, at least to me,
admitted football neophyte that I am, doesn't drain the game of its
intrigue. Good sportswriting, like good writing about rock formations
or good writing about sealant, tells a story.
Thompson could, in both the strictest and loosest of terms, be called
a sportswriter himself. His final days were spent penning a column
called "Hey Rube" for ESPN.com, but to identify him with that is akin
to identifying Bob Dylan with his bizarre and somewhat alarming
rendition of "Must Be Santa." Oh, had you not see that? Sorry to ruin
your week.
Rather, Thompson is better known for his earlier work, like Fear and
Loathing at the Superbowl. Thompson doesn't talk a whole lot about
the intricacies of football, but he does deliver a raving sermon on
the atrocities wrought by Al Davis from his hotel room balcony while
slapping at a giant leech he claims is creeping up his spinal cord.
He also used the phrase "Mother of Sweating Jesus." The original
purpose of the article, which was published in Rolling Stone in
February of '73, was to use football as an allegory for politics,
specifically, the Nixon administration.
It's tough to say whether this particular goal actually came to
fruition. It's a solid 19 pages into my weathered copy of the "The
Great Shark Hunt" before he seems to remember he why he was sent to
the Super Bowl at all. Even then, he regards his deadline only as "a
quick and nasty regression to professionalism" before meandering away
again, getting lost in a tangle of insights on the dismal pre-party
and the pre-game betting on the press-bus. Is this sportswriting?
Yes. Maybe. It uses the word "football" at least 33 times, which
makes it sportswriting for my purposes. Whatever you call it, it's
one of the most thoughtful and entertaining things I have ever read.
On the less severe side of the tracks we have Gay Talese, who
recently published a book called "The Silent Season of the Hero," a
compilation of his sportswriting ranging from the time he was in high
school in the late '40s, all the way through the '60s, where his
byline was a fixture on the pages of the New York Times.
I got my hands on the book earlier this week. I'm only about halfway
through, but the pull-quote on the back cover sums its contents up
best (as it should, I suppose): "Sports is about people who lose and
lose and lose. They lose games; they lose their jobs. It can be very
intriguing."
And it is, especially the way Talese tells it. When he was in college
at the University of Alabama, he wrote a short piece about the
deafening quiet that hung in the football team's locker room after a
particularly poignant loss to Georgia Tech. "We just have to GET
Maryland next week," one player said by way of consolation. Another
piece was on the anguish of practicing in the sub-30 degree
temperatures of Alabama winter, and the scene as "80 huge hunks of
Alabama football scholarships began to smash and lash at one another."
The point is, a person doesn't need to be a connoisseur on the
subject to enjoy prose about football. Sometimes, as both Thompson,
Talese and I'm sure many others prove, the most thrilling thing about
the sport isn't what happens on game day.
--
About this column:
Saturday Night Lights is a poorly named column about one woman's
attempt to care about football
.
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