Beginner’s beats: Covering sports
Chip Scanlan / NoTrain-NoGain.org
Question: Are any of you familiar with a book that teaches the basics of sportswriting? I’ve got a publisher with two very green sportswriters and a professor about to teach a sportswriting class asking me for a recommendation. – John Hatcher, Center for Community Journalism, Oswego State University
At the risk of inviting the scorn of my Poynter colleagues who know the tragic story of my athletic career (I didn’t get a complete uniform in Little League and no I don’t want to talk about it!!) here’s the section on sports beat reporting I assembled for my textbook. I don’t know of a sports writing textbook. There is the annual Best Sports Writing anthology but I don’t know how much information about process that includes.
Play Ball!
Beginner’s beats: Covering sports From “Reporting and Writing: Basics for the 21st Century” (Oxford University Press)
By Christopher Scanlan
In 1995, when the American Society of Newspaper Editors gave one of its Distinguished Writing Awards for the year’s best sportswriting, judges described the beat as “not only a lot of fun, but illuminating of the human condition.”
The advantages of writing about sports are obvious, Frank Deford, one of the nation’s best sportswriters, once wrote. “The structure is heaven-sent. Every day, every game, every substitution, there is instant, well-formed drama: a beginning, plot development and climax.”
For the sports fan, a seat in the press box might seem like a dream come true. But sportswriters know the reality: long workdays, impossible deadlines and the haunting realization that your audience may have seen the same game you’re trying to write about. “Let’s face it. You can log on your computer anytime, day or night, and get all the scores,” says Mitch Albom of the Detroit Free Press. “And that’s a lot easier to do than walk down your driveway in seven degree-below weather and get your newspaper, which had to be printed at 10:30 at night and doesn’t even have the box score.”
But as a teacher once told Boston Globe sportswriter Larry Whiteside: “A box score can say there was a line drive, but it doesn’t say that a fan touched it or that it snaked around a wall. It doesn’t say what anybody said or what anybody felt.”
In the face of electronic competition, sportswriters have survived and thrived by relying on a combination that has always worked for reporters, whatever their beat: dogged reporting and stylish writing, fueled by hard work and passion.
“The main weapon is good reporting,” says Lawrie Mifflin, who had to battle sexism in locker rooms as well as the demands of covering professional sports for The New York Times. “It’s a matter of questioning and not taking people’s words for things, being skeptical, pursuing it further, asking other people.
“Being a good reporter is as essential in sportswriting as in any kind of writing: getting both sides of an issue, verifying whether what somebody tells you is true, checking things with many sources.”
Whatever the sport, there are three types of sports stories: 1. Game and event coverage 2. Human interest and feature stories 3. Columns
