Sports as he knows it
I have heard a couple of NPR commentaries
by Frank Deford. Long time ago, I had heard that one of my classmate’s father
was a sportswriter, but never learnt how different his life was from a regular
writer.
Frank Deford has reservations
about bloggers, game score statisticians and the future of sports journalism.
He is not one to keep a secret of them. Being in his game of writing for a long
time, he chronicles how one day when his contemporary players are ready to
retire and coach, it hits him hard that he is out of place and he cant identify
with the music in the locker room.
He shows the regard or lack
of it for sportswriting in the recognition it receives in the form of awards.
He compares how sportswriting was when he started and how it is now. Then the
onslaught of TV and now the internet, obliterate the need of a sportswriter. For
a ‘not so bright boy’ he did well by reporting about ‘unusual personalities, or
athletic exotica, the Americana
of sports, out on the fringes’. He takes us to the time when sportswriters
gathered in pressboxes to give the public blow by blow accounts of the games.
He also compares how earlier he could meet the athletes in the lockerroom for
statements while now they do press meets.
This book thrives on rich
characterization of real people. Grantland Rice’s profile is written in such a way that lack of familiarity with
Rice does not take away the interest from the piece like that on exclusive
clubs at Princeton . The success of his writing
must be due to his attempt to ‘humanize commisioners’.
As you approach a paragraph regarding his
nostalgia for sports and sportswriting of the yore, you can pat your back for realising
it that for him sports was always about the people. In his words -‘Nowadays sportswriting is too much about predicting
games; then, it was more about revealing human nature’. He uses his writing
wand as a justice tool to give every athlete and coach their due. Through his
writing on women in sports, I learnt of a new game – Roller Derby. I liked the
description of ‘three match game’ that the journalists played. Another game
that I havent heard of before.
His initial writing has led
him to be a judge for beauty contests. He boasts that
‘you are never going to find
another expert writer the equal of yours truly with feet in both the tennis and
the pulchritude camps’.
He has reported on all kinds
of games. The book has many interesting anecdotes from his years of writing
from the stands. On tough subjects, he stood up. He called out ‘Commercial
racism’.
Writing about the coverage of
sports on road, he became the chronicler of Americana of sports. When he says ‘I wasn’t
just writing about Americana .
I was Americana .’
Somehow he becomes the snake with its tail in its mouth encompassing the world
of sports.
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