Wilbon: "There's not as much good [sportswriting] as there used to be."

Define this "business."
Newspapers and magazines? Ok, yes.
Writing? Sports writing? Story telling? Hell. No.

 

Clemens/Twain was also an aggressive self-promoter.

 

Exactly. A lot of argument here based on lack of reading comprehension, a skill I do believe is at an all time low. My reaction to the Wilbon quote was, yeah, but did he say whether bears shat in the woods.

 

As a whole, the writing, especially sports writing and story telling, is not better than its ever been. I agree with and understand Wilbon's assessment.

 

Word for word...

 

It's a safe bet that it's more than there is today.

 

Sure, but websites (of all stripes and quality levels) didn't exist then.

Only one newspaper made the Best American Sports Writing 1991, the series' first edition.

 

That's a very good point in this context. BASW has never been about the daily newspaper. Maybe some newspaper writers would get in there, but from their papers' magazines or freelance to other magazines.

Most memorable story I've ever read in BASW was "The Power and the Gory" about the bodybuilding scene and steroids. Talked about a guy who was so hopped up and hormone-wacky that he fucked a Coke machine in a hotel hallway. Village Voice IIRC. No way does a story like that find space in a daily newspaper.

 

Let's stipulate that newspapers do not have as much great sports writing in them as the once did. I don't think anyone can credibly argue otherwise. When I joined a metro out of college, our newsroom had 450 people. When I left 10 years later, the same place had about 125, and you needed a goddamn waiver signed by three people if you wanted to run anything more than 1,000 words.

But overall, if you look at the landscape that exists now, I disagree a great deal. In the era that Mr. Wilbon laments has passed us by, people like Bill Simmons and Will Leitch and Spencer Hall and Dan Wetzel and Michael Weinreb and countless others I could name did not have the opportunities they do now. I really don't believe Wilbon is reading pieces like this one that Hall wrote prior to the start of last year's college football season. It's mystical and daring and challenging as anything I've read in years (many of you, if reading it for the first time, will hate it). But as far as I'm concerned, it's way, way, WAY better than so many of the tired takes people romanticize from eras gone by.

http://www.everydayshouldbesaturday.com/2011/9/1/2377214/gods-away-on-business

I think it's almost impossible to consume the amount of great sports writing that's current out there. For all the lamenting about how people don't read longform anymore, I can literally find something great to read every single day. Sometimes, frankly, I feel a little overwhelmed in trying to keep up with it. 21, I understand your point about When Columnists Were Like Gods... but I don't think that makes the quality the work that goes on today (much of it on-line) any worse.

Who is our Frank Deford? It's hard to make straight-up comparisons, frankly, because it only makes people angry. (How dare you say [insert name here] is anything close to the greatness of my vague memories about a story I can't quite name at the moment?) But I can name a lot of people who I'd feel comfortable grouping with those people Wilbon named. Find me two essayists or stylists better than Charles Pierce and Tommy Craggs from the days of yore.Dan Wetzel works harder and writes as well, if not better, than Tony Kornheiser ever did when he was a columnist. Jeff Passan and Jonah Keri and several others understand the game of baseball in way that people like Gammons did not. There are entire swaths of sports culture that the previous kings of sports writing felt completely comfortable completely ignoring. ESPN has an entire section of its website, in fact, devoted to the coverage of women's sports, and they pay large sums of money to many talented women to write about those sports. How is that not offering us more great writing about subjects that previously found their way to the agate columns?

In fact, dooley, I quite disagree about the notion that sabermetric writing isn't good writing. Great writing isn't always flowery sentences or vivid imagery. Sometimes it's the beauty of logic and reason in the face of hyperbole. Silver isn't great at what he does just because he "gets" numbers. He's great at what he does because he can covey complicated mathematical concepts in a compelling way. That's absolutely great writing.

Every generation feels compelled to defend its turf. I'm defending my own generation, in fact, in a way that's not all that different than Wilbon is defending his own. The newspaper industry has suffered some tremendous wounds, ones that might ultimately be fatal, and I will absolutely concede that has made it harder to get paid (or at least get paid well) to write about sports. But there is still so much out there that fills me with wonder and awe on a weekly (and sometimes daily) basis. Do we have Norman Mailer writing about Ali or Updike writing about Ted Williams? No, but then neither did Wilbon's generation. We did, however, have David Foster Wallace writing about Roger Federer, and Jeff MacGregor writing about Don King, and Chris Jones and Charlie Pierce writing about Tiger Woods, and Tom Lake writing about The Boy Who Died of Football, and Wright Thompson on Urban Meyer, and Scott Price on Mike Coolbaugh, and on and on and on.

It's a hard time to be a sports writer. There is definitely less job security, emotional security (no one was attacking your story on SportsJournalists.com or Twitter 10 mins after it came out 20 years ago) and, in print at least, less space. But the pressure of that environment that Mr. Wilbon is lamenting has also produced a ton of wonderful, creative journalism. Style and taste changes as well. That's why I find Grantland's running annotated works of great journalism fascinating. You show me Dan Jenkins' SI bonus piece on Texas football fandom or Kornheiser's piece from SPORT about Nolan Ryan and I think "Ok, I get why this is very good, and an important part of history, but frankly, the writing is not as good as J.R. Mohringer on Pete Carroll."

 

Exactly.

 

Double Down's post and Drip's post back-to-back are like Clint Eastwood and Bill Clinton at the conventions this year.

Two snapshots that kind of tell you, when lined up side-by-side, everything you need to know about the debate going on.

 

The only thing Drip posted was saying he agreed with the opinions and 21 and myself.