The Art of Sports Writing, Part I
It's not always glamorous, but at its best, sports writing is an art form.
NOTE: This is the first in a four-part series of essays on the beauty and importance of sports writing. I got my start covering sports, and even though I’ve moved on, I care deeply about the medium and wish sports journalism would get back to what it once was. Each installment will post on Thursday.
I’m gonna let you in on a secret when it comes to sports writing.
Not everyone realizes this. Given the state of sports journalism today, it feels like no one in the industry even knows this anymore:
Great sports writing, the true stuff of legends? The articles and stories you come back to and remember fondly, even decades later? They have less to do with the end result or the box score. Truly transcendent sports writing is less about the sport and more about the people competing in it.
Emphasis on people.
It’s easy to treat athletes as otherworldly. Real-life superheroes capable of feats us mere mortals can only dream of. That’s part of the draw, isn’t it? Watching our fellow species-mates doing things we cannot physically handle.
I suppose there is some truth to that; after all, the late broadcaster Ken Squier once said of race car drivers, “These are common men doing uncommon things.” But even in that quote, the crux of the story is in the men and not the things. The late Dale Earnhardt is worshiped not simply because of his ability to wrangle a two-ton machine at speeds pushing 200 miles an hour, inches from disaster; it’s because for a lot of his fans, he was no different than them.
Dale could’ve just as easily been a farmer, or a factory worker.
Talented? Yes. Wildly successful? Absolutely. But more than anything, Dale was just a regular guy.
Today’s sports media landscape allows precious little room for such realities. It’s always about who beat whom, which overpaid superstar shat the proverbial bed when his team needed him most, which insanely wealthy athlete truly deserved the Brinks truck that was about to be backed into their driveway?
And if one athlete was great and worthy of all the praise coming their way, who was the one to blame? Who was not nearly as good as everyone says they are, and who deserves to be ripped to shreds on ESPN all day, every day, with no thought to how it might affect them or their families?
After all, they’re millionaires, and that’s part of the game.
There’s a reason no one watches ESPN anymore (and it’s not because it “went woke”—whatever the hell that means).
I got my professional start as a sports writer. In fact, I became one while I was still in college. I joined the campus newspaper, The Mace & Crown, not long after I switched my major from visual art to English. Because I knew, even then, that newspapers cared more about bylines and articles than they did the actual degree. I was studying to be a journalist, but I knew I didn’t want to be a true news man. Not in the traditional sense. Because I wanted nothing to do with covering politics or any of that “serious stuff.”
War and natural disasters and all the worst of humanity were on full display there, and I wanted no part of documenting it all. Especially if it meant detaching myself from it all. Sports, at least, seemed safe.
It didn’t take long before I realized the true focus of my work was less about what happened between the lines and more about the lives of those who were competing. Wendy Larry’s accomplishments as a basketball player and, later, as the head women’s coach at Old Dominion University mattered far less to me in my profile on her than the story of when she was a young coach and had just adopted a dog before the team’s trip to Austin, Texas for the Final Four. She didn’t think ODU had a chance to win the championship, but they did, so when she returned home, the dog had a name:
Austin.
When I was in college, so was this stud baseball prospect named Justin Verlander. In fact, his girlfriend at the time (no, not Kate Upton) lived next door to me in the dorms. While interviewing him for a profile, I learned he nearly gave up baseball at the age of 10, because he had hit a batter in the head with a fastball.
If memory serves, that wound up being the lede of the piece.
One year, while I was serving as the paper’s sports editor, I spent a weekend at Richmond Raceway. My reason was threefold (aside from being credentialed to cover a NASCAR weekend holy freaking crap): ODU had an alum who was driving in what was then the NASCAR Busch Series (think like the AAA level in baseball). ODU also had an alum who was a crew chief for a NASCAR Winston Cup Series team. Lastly, ODU was and is a notable engineering school, and at the time, engineering was becoming a larger part of NASCAR—and motorsports as a whole.
My stories from that weekend had little to do with what happened on the track. I don’t even remember where Ashton Lewis, the driver I profiled, finished. I was there to get his story, as well as to find out why crew chief Robert Barker is nicknamed “Bootie” (he was oddly evasive on that question, as I recall), and to let engineering students back on campus know that this was a possible career path for them.
Spoiler alert: motorsports fans aren’t there for the cars. We’re there for the maniacs inside them.
Were those the most impactful stories I ever wrote for The Mace & Crown? Probably not. But that weekend was just one more example that the true beauty of covering sports, and writing about them, lies in the humanity behind the extraordinary feats. All journalists should understand that people are the foundation for everything, but sometimes, it feels like sports is the only avenue where that’s consistently the case.
And even that’s not the case anymore. Sports media today is all about the viral clip, the outrageous hot take, who can shout louder than the next person. Outlets like Sports Illustrated are shells of their former selves, and even though I’m no longer in the business, it pains me to see what it’s become.
Because I know how beautiful it can be. I know the kinds of stories we can write.
I know, because I’ve done it.