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Many years ago, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson once observed that a sportswriter requires three attributes to be successful in the trade:
1) A Roget's Thesaurus, so as to avoid repeating
adjectives like splendid,
marvelous,
thrilling,
spectacular,
exciting,
etc.
in the same paragraph.
2) A blind willingness to swill free booze while believing the promotional material willingly provided by various flaks, hustlers, promoters, promoters, agents and the like.
3) A hatpin through the frontal lobes.
Nothing seems to have changed much since that observation from a former sportswriter, and it's quite apparent during Superbowl Hype Week. Special newspaper sections focus on every conceivable angle, from the weather forecast to the team accommodations, and watching the TV news is like watching try-outs for head cheerleader.
The tenets of journalism call for objectivity, but of course this doesn't apply to sports, where you're supposed to favor the hometown in your coverage. Just try writing an objective story about the high-school team when you work for a small-town paper, and then observe the tar barrels and ropes awaiting you after the paper hits the streets.
People will tolerate the suggestion that their mayor or district attorney may be less than perfect, but every lad on the team gives 110 percent all the time and the coach is a sagacious wizard who develops character by the carload, even when the players get into the rare bit of police trouble that can't be hushed up.
At the major-league level, it appears that if the team you cover wins a championship, then you get to strut and swagger for a year -- the quality of your writing or the acuity of your observations pales in comparison to the deeds on the field.
So the result is a sports-media cycle that spins ever
bigger and faster. Hype the game in your writing, and more
people attend it. That makes it more newsworthy,
and therefore your work is more important.
Everybody is happy. The players become celebrities so they can rake in the big endorsement bucks. The team owner gets a sweetheart stadium deal because it's so vital to maintain this civic institution. The fans believe they're part of something big and important, all lined up and cheering under the unifying banner of the Nike swoosh. And you get to swill free booze and consult the thesaurus.
But there's probably more to it than this. If I ran things, I'd try an experiment -- say, banning all mention of all professional sports coverage in all media for a few years in some large city. Then we could compare attendance figures, before and after the ban, and see whether Americans really love sports, or if the whole phenomenon is some sort of dark conspiracy to take our minds off other matters.
In other words, if you're watching John Elway on the
field, you won't be watching the relationship between
campaign contributions and your congressman's voting
record. If you're calculating a line-up for your
rotisserie-league team, you won't be calculating how much
money the federal government is transferring from working
people to bondholders with the latest effort at tax
reform.
If you're exalting some shortstop as a
hero
because of a squeeze bunt with two out in the
ninth and a runner on third of a tie game, you might well
miss the heroism of a whistleblower in some Pentagon agency
who tried to warn us that our troops were needlessly
endangered on account of the greed of some defense
contractor.
But I suspect that the people in my experimental city, with their minds forcibly removed from professional sports, would be no more high-minded than people in other cities who continued their regimen of force-fed sports swill.
After all, there's a limit to how much civic-mindedness we can handle. Republicans complain that we should be massing in the streets over the campaign-finance abuses of the Clinton administration. Democrats wonder why there's no widespread indignation over the orgy of corporate greed in that Washington. Almost daily I receive calls and correspondence concerning some outrage, ranging from water projects to the loathsome toils of tobacco, and somehow fail to get as excited as the other party thinks I should get.
So if we weren't paying attention to sports, it's rather unlikely that the attention would go toward producing Thomas Jefferson's ideal republic of informed yeomen. We're just not built that way -- we need public frivolity, to profess to care deeply about things that really don't matter. If it wasn't baseball or football or basketball or hockey, it was be something just as irrelevant to the general sweep of things.
That said, I'll try to enjoy this week of inanity. All this stuff is happening, presumably for my pleasure, and I'll just have to find some way to enjoy it, I suppose.
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