Page 65 - Sport Culture and the Media

46 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

sports journalism have been ex-players who decide they want to do
something with their sport when they finish playing. They might have been
a great player who played a hundred times for Australia but whether
they can string two words together is another matter, but they have been
allowed to do that because of who they were. Or even, racing is a good
example, a lot of people who got into racing journalism were strappers
or kids who, you know, there was more of an opportunity if you
were involved in a sport to become a sports writer. That is not to say
that all people who have come out of an active sporting career can’t
write, it did mean in that sense that the standard of the writing was not as
high, and they were not trained as closely or as professionally as other
journalists.
(Martin)

The negative attitude of journalists (both sports and non-sports) who had
trained ‘in-house’ in the orthodox way to those who had entered the profession
on the basis of their sporting expertise is common. Suspicions of involvement
in ‘ghosting’ – the common practice in the entertainment print media of
celebrities putting their names to texts that they have not written – hang over
the heads of all sports journalists (certainly in early career) who are practising
or former elite sports performers. As one Australian print journalist, a former
international sportsman who has now published widely in the international
sports press, exclaimed:

I was highly offended in the first two articles I did [while still a player]
that, you know, I got a great reaction and people said ‘were they ghosted?’
No, they fucking were not ghosted! And nothing I’ve done has ever been
ghosted! I’ve done ghosting for friends and I don’t mind doing it, but I
think to have some resentment towards someone like me when I look at
joining the Messenger now, you know, you’ve got to start out, basically.
I don’t know, I stand to be corrected but I think you’ve got to have a degree
before you can be a first-year cadet – although I think if you have a
degree they might start you at third year or something like that, but it is
a very arduous process and circuitous route to get to a decent grading in
journalism. Now the short cut that I took to that, to circumvent all that,
was to have a field of expertise where I would have some authority to
write things . . . [It’s] by no means only sport, people make their names
in computers, and don’t come that route because people want to read
what they have to say. Now I consider myself very fortunate to have
circumvented that, I never would have had the wherewithal to have done
it the other way. I stumbled into journalism, found that I loved it, but I
never would have done it the other way. I never would have stuck it for a