Justice B. Hill

To an aspiring sportswriter who enjoys covering games, I can’t think of any advice that is any more profound – or more worth heeding — than what I’m about to tell you.

The landscape of sports journalism is cluttered, of course, with advice on what to do and what not to do that, actually, doesn’t help one bit. So it can become difficult, if not impossible, for a sportswriter to mine this terrain for what is helpful.

But I can promise that, if followed, this advice I’m about to give you will make your “gamers” fresher, more vibrant and more appealing to a reader.

Now, in all frankness, the advice isn’t mine; I heard it, oh, 25 or so years ago from the late Joe Falls, a popular sports columnist with The Detroit News.

Here’s what Falls told me:

Get out of the press box.

Now, that sounds odd, right? For isn’t the press box the best vantage point for watching the game? Isn’t that where all the action is, where all the resources are?

Well, maybe that’s part of the problem. It is that vantage point that has dulled game stories and made them so predictable. Each writer in the press box is seeing the same thing, from the same angle and, too often, coming to the same conclusion.

As a group, the men (and women) there are talking about the action, about what that action means and about how things unfold. They are planting the seeds for a consensus, and rarely should a game be judged from a single perspective.

For a father and his 10-year-old daughter in the seats atop the Green Monster in Fenway see a vastly different game than the one a father and his 9-year-old son see from the box seats behind home plate. Ask the martini crowd inside a luxury box at storied Fenway what it sees, and I can promise you’ll get a decidedly different perspective as well.

Think of a sports event like a 10-car pileup on Interstate 90. Depending on where people viewed the wreck, the highway patrolman on the scene will hear different versions of things.

Is anybody’s version less accurate than anyone else’s? No, not in a real sense – all the views have merit; they all are honest representations of what did occur — at least from the people who are voicing them.

From the press box (or along press row), you can see a dimension of the game that differs from anyplace else in the ballpark, and when you sit in the same press-box seat night after night, you find plays seeming to look too much alike.

That slick-fielding shortstop for the home team … well, he might not cover as much ground as you imagined after watching him from a field-level seat along the third-base line. The umpire’s strike zone might not be as loose as you first thought when you switch to a seat directly behind home plate.

I know this isn’t the traditional thinking about covering a sports event. But traditional is as outmoded as an Underwood typewriter or a Tandy 100. With TV cameras showing the game from various angles, a writer needs to explore new angles as well. He can only find those angles in places other than the press box and press row.

So leave your seat in the press box, sit in the bleachers or in the grandstands once in a while. Try watching a game from a corridor. Just do whatever you can to provide a perspective on the game that less predictable.