Page 148 - Sport Culture and the Media

TAKING US THROUGH IT || 129

immediate audiovisual form (which, nonetheless, is also moulded by producers,
commentators, camera operators, and so on), is reliant above all else on conno-
tation, evocation, elaboration, embellishment and interpretation. As was also
noted in Chapter 2, the electronic media have had a very serious influence on
the status of the print sports text. Once the reader had to take the word of the
writer concerning the veracity and accuracy of what was written or, at least, the
journalist could be challenged only by the relatively small number of people
present. Now it is expected that the report will be produced at high speed and
then must be reconciled with the perceptions of a potentially huge audience
that has been exposed to the event in sparkling sound and vision. McGuane
(1992), in the introduction to a collection of The Best American Sports Writing
1992 (a work chosen more or less at random from that part of my personal
library devoted to remaindered books picked up in sales – which may or not be
significant for my argument), makes clear just how exacting can be the demand
of the reader of the print sports text, especially when access has already been
gained to the moving media sports text:
The reader of sports writing is a strict, occasionally cruel individual. There
has never been a modernist period in sports writing, much less a post-
modernist spell. Anything beyond telling the sports fan what actually
happened requires the heart of a lion, a jeweler’s eye. Otherwise, one
risks being tossed out by the reader himself [sic]. The sports page of any
newspaper is truly an impact zone where writers and readers compare
impressions of something they often have both seen. No one is taking
anyone’s word for anything. Opinions are truly earned. Fancy sports
writing is some of the worst writing of any kind.
(McGuane 1992: xv)
McGuane is reflecting a very traditional view of sports writing which, it seems,
is being superseded in the television (and even the post-television) age. The
contributions to The Best American Sports Writing 1992 are by no means
confined to the objective style of ‘realist’ sports reporting, despite his claim
that ‘what is shared, foremost, is the event’ (McGuane 1992: xv). Among the
twenty-five contributions (only three of which are by women, which indicates
the existence of traditionalism of a different kind) drawn from a pool of ‘more
than 350 national, regional, and specialty publications’ (according to the back
cover) including the Washington Post, Sports Illustrated, Los Angeles Times and
Yale Review, there are not only elaborate reports of sports events. The collec-
tion also contains biographical profiles of sportspeople like boxers Mohammed
Ali (Gildea 1992) and Sonny Liston (Nack 1992), and more provocative essays
like Barry’s (1992) ‘Why the NBA isn’t as offensive as you think’. Some of this
writing is, indeed, ‘fancy’, seeming to aspire, like the ‘name’ sports journalists