Page 81 - Sport Culture and the Media

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become recognized as rather better than your average results recorder.
I think that’s particularly true again of the broadsheet press. It’s less true
of the tabloid press. I have to say on the tabloid side . . . on reflection it
might be, given the number of pages devoted to sport in tabloids and given
the way they’re known to sell papers, that actually in the hierarchy, in the
pecking order of tabloid newspapers, sports journalists might be better
regarded.
(Sidney)

Once again the broadsheet–tabloid split is invoked here as corresponding to the
relative quality of sports journalism, although it is conceded that, in the more
popular (or populist) newspapers, journalistic status may be determined by
different values – commercial rather than aesthetic. Repeatedly in this study, a
rather heroic picture of certain sports journalists emerged, which showed them
to be capable of reaching beyond sport into the more universal and profound
sphere of individual motivation, the ‘human condition’, the state of society,
and so on. Here sports reporting becomes first sports writing and then writing
which uses the subject of sport only as a literary pretext. So, by using sport as a
vehicle for the exploration of wider subjects and themes rather than being
‘consumed’ by it, the ‘art’ of sports writing resists classification as just another
product of the toy department of the news media. As in other forms of art,
however, this quality tends to be attributed only to a few, unusually gifted
individuals:

I also think somebody like McIlvanney is not only the best writer on the
sports pages, he’s probably the best writer on the paper. He has demon-
strated that writing sports pages does not have to be inferior to writing the
general news or being a foreign correspondent. There are very few writers
who live up to those high standards but there are some. Ian Wooldridge
I would say is probably the best writer on the Daily Mail, certainly one
of the best. There’s even the Sun, for example, although it does some
deplorable things in its sports pages, you know, over-personalizing,
vendettas against the England manager, and so on. There is some very
good boxing writing in the Sun – very vivid. So I try to develop the idea
that sports writing doesn’t have to be downmarket simply because it’s
about sport, and that many a sporting experience can be as much a ser-
iously deep psychological study of a man and a player and motivation.
McIlvanney is probably the best example of that, particularly in boxing,
where he reaches a very profound level, I think, in understanding what it is
that drives sportsmen on to do what they do and why some sportsmen are
greater than others.
(Darren)