Sports Writing

Sports writing used to be a straightforward and fairly respectable occupation. Sportswriters covered the games and events, wrote occasional encomia to the great players, usually  left athletes’ personal lives alone except for public scandals and sob stories about players visiting sick kids, and generally had enough sense to know that the events they were covering were games presented for the amusement and entertainment of the public and not the destruction of the Hindenburg or the discovery of penicillin. While the trade certainly had its hacks, ignoramuses, and shamelessly heavy handed homers, many sportswriters were good and entertaining reporters,  and some, such Blackie Sherrod, were among the best and most thoughtful writers in any area of journalism. 

Things changed a few decades ago with the coming of so called socially significant reporting in sports. In principle this meant that in place of crusty old sportswriters who wrote mainly about sports we would have sensitive, socially aware sports journalists who would treat athletes and sporting events in the light of and as metaphors for a wider and deeply meaningful social and political context. In practice it meant that the American sports fans were treated to some of the most grandiose, self absorbed nonsense appearing in print or over the air anywhere, offered up by poseurs who strained to explain that sports (and thus those who reported on sports) were something far more important than mere games.  The epigones of Damon Runyon were supplanted by the epigones of Howard Cosell.

The new fashion quickly developed its own characteristics, rules, forms, and  clichés.  Readers usually could expect journalists to display their depth and significance by a tendency to inject themselves and their feelings into the stories they were covering, an icky emotionalism that would have embarrassed an old fashioned sob sister,  an unwavering devotion to the politically correct  prejudices of the day, a dutiful reverence for all things hip and urban, a snarky disdain for the lifestyles of most ordinary Americans, an almost morbid fascination with race, and an uncontrolled penchant for hyperbole and sweeping social generalization. 

People looking for an exemplary embodiment of this school of sports journalism can find one in Jane Leavy’s biography of Mickey Mantle.  (The book is also a well researched and well written biography apart from all the socially significant nonsense.) The title itself – The Last Boy Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood – proclaims that this book is no mere presentation of the life history of a guy who played baseball but rather some really big time, serious and significant stuff. The rest of the book lives up to that beginning ,and touches most of the expected bases. We are told that with his blond hair and winning smile Mantle served as “an unwitting antidote to the darkness and danger embodied in that other Fifties icon, Elvis Presley”, that he was the “Last Boy in the last decade ruled by boys”, and that  Mantle’s story is everyone’s story of a nation’s transition from  innocence to cynicism.  The author repeatedly injects herself and her feelings into her story, including a narrative of a fifty year old Mantle’s drunken sexual advances to her. She gives us the obligatory moralizing over race in the form of  fretting over whether Willie Mays was denied his due of affection and respect from fans because he was black and the obligatory linking of the end of Mantle’s career in 1968 to the assassinations  of the same year. She displays  an ongoing, pervasive condescension toward both of Mantle’s rural Oklahoma background and his later home in Dallas. The tone of the book is best summarized by a remarkable quote about the 1964 World Series, a quote which could have come from a particularly wickedly clever parody of the genre of socially significant sports writing. “The Cardinals lineup, with Curt Flood and Lou Brock in the outfield, showcased the future of America – young, black, ethnic, fast.”  That’s hard to top, but the author comes close to matching it in a number of places.

So do the writers and talking heads in much of the sports media these days. It would be nice to see an end to the reign of significance, but I don’t think that is the way to bet.