Exactly How Fun Is It To Be a Sports Journalist?

It's almost the best job in the world for seeing naked men.

 

This. At my last gig (literally since I left the biz in December), the football team I covered won a total of three games in the first two seasons I was on the beat — and most of their losses were by at least 20. I think I spent about as much time writing about if/when the coach would be fired as I did covering the day-to-day of the team. That got old rather quickly.

 

I'll give it to you straight. It beats digging a ditch for a living.

 

There is little worse than watching basketball played badly, especially at a high level.

 

Girls high school basketball might be the most violent sport I ever covered.

 

Listening to someone talk meaningfully about girls high school basketball:

 

If you don't like high school sports now, they will be a blast to watch in your 40s and 50s.

 

I got a long way to go if I want to be conversant in high school sports and talk show television by that time.

 

When I was in my 20s, I would say "I don't want to be 35 and still sitting under the basket with a camera and notebook at a bad girls game."

Having moved out of sports and doing almost every other newsroom job, and now in my 50s, I tell people my ideal job would be going to a game, writing my article and going home.

I realize the job has changed a lot, with Twitter and blogging, etc., but a bad soccer game is still better than 90 percent of the city council meetings I cover now.

On the other hand, hours are a lot better in news, with few late nights or weekends.

 

This stuff isn't gettin' to me. The knifings, the beatings, old ladies being bashed in the head for their Social Security checks, teachers being thrown out of a fourth-floor window because they don't give As, that doesn't bother me a bit. Or this job, either. Having to wade through the scum of this city, being swept away by bigger and bigger waves of corruption, apathy and red tape. Nah, that doesn't bother me. But you know what does bother me?
You know what makes me really sick to my stomach?
Is watching people stuff their faces with hot dogs. Nobody, I mean NOBODY should put ketchup on a hot dog.

 

I've been doing this for 14 years and I still love the start of football season, I'm covering high school sports and every time I walk into a game I look at all the people paying to be there and am glad to know I'm getting paid to do it, as little as it is.
It beats hard labor or sitting behind a desk doing a menial task that would make me blow my head off

 

I am reminded of a possibly apocryphal quote from Orson Wells, talking about the movies: "This is the biggest electric train set a boy ever had!"

But then there's this from Rust Cohle in True Detective: "Life's barely long enough to get good at one thing. So be careful what you get good at."

My attitude about my work is in there someplace.