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

Yeah, but he seems so adamant about this, I feel like he needs to bring it a little stronger than that.

 

That was a strong summation, DD.

 

When people say "storytelling and writing is not as good as it's ever been" but fail to cite a single example, it really feels to me like they the old ballplayer lamenting that "no one plays hard anymore." Frankly, I think it's bogus.

You show me examples of great storytelling or great writing from the era that Mr. Wilbon is talking about, and I will bet you I can show you plenty of examples from this era that are just as good. Am I going to find you a story that's equal to Frank Deford on Bobby Knight? Probably not. But that's one example. I'll bet you can't find something as great the closing paragraphs from "Rodger Federer as Religious Experience" or "Let Us Now Raze Famous Men" either.

If your argument is "Well, I don't have the time to do that, it's just the way I feel..." then I think we've reached an impasse and there is really no point in debating it further. But I'm happy to stand on the other side of the net and volley back examples.

 

The cover story in The New York Times Magazine this week was about an undrafted free agent football player trying to make it. We've read that story. Thousands of iterations. Every newspaper ever has written that story. But maybe it's the best example of what makes sports writing better today, or what could make sports writing better today, or what sports writing should be in the future.

The writer, Charles Siebert, is the player's uncle. And though he spent too long dealing in the traditional images of training camp hardship, the gripping part came in his interactions with his nephew. Siebert brings a personal tie to a well-trodden story, makes that story unique and relevant again, despite how many times it's been told.

That's where we're going, and that's where the best have already gone. You can revel over the good old days, but those days were blessed with a loyal readership. In 1985, your readers in Indianapolis hadn't seen that Chicago Tribune feature about cocaine use in football. So you could go and write something similar. The story about the injured college linebacker who played hurt and led the team in tackles, it didn't matter that story could have been written with different proper nouns at any of 20 other newspapers in the country. The competition came from your own ranks, newspapermen and maybe radio and TV reporters. The national sports media was a few magazines and ESPN's highlight clips.

But the industry has grown. Every story we write competes with everything else posted to the Internet that day, hell, everything else posted to the Internet ever. There's a lot of complaining about writers, particularly younger writers, infusing themselves into their writing. But we need to be unique, particularly for long features. We need to be able to justify why our version of this story is more worthwhile than someone else's. We need to give people a reason to share our stories on social media, which is the real goal of Twitter and Facebook. The goal is to get people to tell other people that the story is worth reading. No more crib notes.

And they will read, when you provide them with something to read. Something unique. Something that can be boiled down to 200 words in a blog rehash. You have to grab a reader, make them want to sit down and read your story. In the 1990s, I read Sports Illustrated cover-to-cover because it was Sports Illustrated. Now, I have so many more choices that, if nothing grabs me quickly, I don't read anything in Sports Illustrated. I go to ESPN The Magazine Grantland or The Classical or Sports on Earth or SB Nation Longform or The Post Game. Or I go to longreads.com or longform.org, sites aggregating the best there is on the Web, telling me a story is worth reading, pointing me toward unique, good writing.

There's a value in writing that straightforward feature about the banged-up linebacker who makes all the tackles. You're writing it for the fans of that team. You're writing it for the readers of your newspaper. But if you take it a new direction, if you dare yourself for a new approach, you could draw some attention. Your story could gain traction.

There was a time when boxing writing was the best out there. There was a time when newspapers across the country would send reporters and columnists to the big fight. No one does that anymore, and no one should. The money required isn't justified by the content produced. But that means the big-shot columnist doesn't get to cover the big fight. So that means there's less good sports writing on your daily broadsheet. That's irrelevant to this conversation.

The sports columnist was not a rock star as much as a local hero. That does not mean he (and it was always a he) was a great or even good sports writer. Blackie Sherrod and Jim Murray and Shirley Povich and Red Smith would go to cover the big fight, and head to the typewriters and write their columns. And on their own merits, those columns were all very good. But what made them stand out? The Best American Sports Writing of the Century represented Don Larsen's perfect game with Murray Kempton's take on Sal Magile. It's a brilliant column. But it's a unique piece of writing. It would have stood up well to the Internet age. People would have been talking about it. But have you read Povich and Smith on Larsen's perfect game? They were writing the same things 99% of their colleagues were, albeit arguably better.

There's no value in that any more. We've adapted, at least the best of us have. So we've got a game. And we've got essayists like Jay Caspian Kang discussing it in the context of personal identity. And we've got statisticians like Rob Neyer explaining what just happened and why it happened. And we've got the fan bloggers like Jeff Sullivan inciting or defusing panic in the context of what the fan experience means. And we've got the pundits like Charles P. Pierce examining what the game says about society as a whole.

And we've got the beat writers churning out game stories and the columnists taking strong angles. We've got them still. Maybe not as many. But we don't need many. The Internet demands variety. The readers demand variety.

It's not all good. Most of it is bad. Some is awful. But there's good out there. There's good out there from the same people who were writing good things 20 years ago, even. Leigh Montville and Dave Kindred can be found at Sports on Earth, if Michael Wilbon ever bothered to look. But what can't be questioned is the diversity. There are big, popular sites for women sports fans and black sports fans and gay sports fans and Asian sports fans. There are hundreds of takes on the biggest games, dozens on the regular-season snoozers. And every one of those writers should understand, though not all do, that their work is being compared to every other thing written, that their work needs to be unique to stand out.

There are too many choices for anyone to waste time on writing that's bad or boring or bullshit. And many of those choices are excellent.

 

You fuckers write too much. I ain't got time for all that!!

 

What more do you want me to say? I don't feel the need "to bring it a little stronger."

 

QED.

 

I agree with this post.

 

I have all the BASWs sitting on my bookshelf, 10 feet away. I bet I could flip through them, starting in 1991, and you would see maybe five or six newspaper stories in them each year. That's out of about 20 to 25 selections.

A lot of newspaper features have died. Have a lot of great newspaper features died? Or were they 40-inch takeouts on a guy's courageous struggle to over come an ACL tear? (Believe me, I wrote my share of them too.)

 

Actual newspaper stories? Like, in the sports or news section? Or were they magazine stories by newspaper writers, like the one Vers just discussed from last weekend? Important distinction IMO.

Always seemed to me that BASW had (officially or unofficially) a minimum word count, and newspaper space didn't allow for BASW-style writing.

 

I recall seven or eight years ago, they ran this pedestrian Albom column from the Free Press about some forgettable Michigan State basketball player who tried really hard. I read it three or four times and couldn't figure out how in the hell it qualified.

Another newspaper piece I remember was Greg Couch's work for the Chicago Sun-Times on the Cubs scalping their own tickets.

And Juliet Macur on eating disorders, maybe, from NYT proper (not the Sunday mag).

But, yeah, few and far between for honest-to-goodness newspaper work.

 

All the BASW stories.

http://indiepro.com/glenn/best-american-sports-writing-index-1991-2010/