"Let Me Know When the Days of Great Sports Writing Return"

I can barely read a sports human interest story these days, largely because most of these guys aren't very interesting.

I like the X and O stuff, the analytical stuff, the front-office workings stuff, and the scouting stuff.

From 10th grade through four years of college and finally probably my first six years in the business, I had it pounded into my head that readers don't want "between the lines" sports reporting. What we all somehow missed is that this is actually ALL that sports readers want. And a lot of bloggers became really successful realizing that while we were all still smelling our own farts.

 

Grantland would have us believe sports readers want first-person essays about decaying stadiums or scalpers outside a new one.

 

Didn't you hear? Andre Igoudala is the new Pippen!

 

What we need more of is long-form pieces with Shyamalan-like "trick" endings.
Like when a guy goes up to a door of an athlete and decides, hey, it's not worth it.

 

I see on the ESPN the Magazine twitter account that Thompson's Jordan story was the most read story of any story on ESPN.com this year, with 2.7 million views.

Cue the flute, etc.

 

You would be surprised a few of the stories I've seen respond best to traffic.
I can tell you it has nothing to do with literary conceit, kind sir.
LaToya Jackson has sold tens of millions of albums.
Melville's opus sold 200 (2-0-0) on publication.

 

What boggles my mind lately?
Seeing bylines on two-, three-, five-paragraph "features" that have more photos and twitter posts than actual type ... but I guess this is what this business has become.

 

Also Michael Jordan is kind of an important athletic figure, and he doesn't open much (at all?) to the media nowadays.

 

There are certainly great long-form sports pieces that contain both outstanding reporting and storytelling, and also generate tremendous reader interest. Sometimes they don't generate a ton of reader interest, but still deserve the light of day. S.L. Price's book on the life and death of Scott Coolbaugh probably sold 200 copies. I'd be curious to know who the other 199 were. Every word of it is golden.

But I do credit the Internet sports writing insurgency with showing that, contrary to received wisdom, there was a huge untapped audience for intelligent, cogent explanatory writing about how and why franchises win and lose games, at a time (generalizing here) where I think a lot of us had started to see ourselves as psychoanalysts instead of SPORTS writers.

 

I've been reading sports for more years than I want to remember
and feel that now there is more great sports writing than ever.

I think that the perception that there is no longer great sports writing
is a result of the writing being spread out to too many forums and the
writers jumping from one institution to another. It's impossible to keep
up. Most of the great stories I come across now are a result of someone
linking them here on SJ.

If you think back to the pre internet years stories were funneled into a few
forums - your local paper, SI, Sport Magazine, The Sporting News,and yes
Playboy. Now there is just not enough time in the day to keep up.

 

But I thought the analytics were going to show no one reads these stories? And we'd be shocked.

Then it's, okay, sure people do read them, and readers, real readers, not just idiot sports writers, enjoy them, but that's meaningless because of...Melville? Whose style I'm sure you would have been praising and not ridiculing if he'd had the misfortune of toiling away at a website.

 

Good point. Very true.

Readers now want context, analysis, humor, authority, a little flare...because TV is giving them the event itself.