A few months later I became a baseball writer, that luckiest of men, paid to see every day what others have to pay to see occasionally.
Living in the finest hotels, packed with steak and wine, spending the springs in Florida, Arizona, California, Havana, allowed, nay required, to talk continually with the nation’s idols, is he not the favorite of the gods?
-Heywood Hale Broun
Heywood Hale Broun, the flamboyantly talented sportswriter and announcer, was a terrific optimist. He loved his job and would never consider an alternative. I wonder what he would have thought about sports writing at Stuyvesant.
Writing about sports has always been rewarding for me. I’ve always apprecoated having the opportunity to do so. For the rest of my senior year, however, I will be working on the Web content of the Spectator.
Here, Sports is forever stuck on the back page. I can count with two fingers the number of sports articles that have made it onto the front page in recent years. Are these articles even read by someone other than their subject?.
For the most part these articles are well-researched, well-reported and well-written. If they are generic it is the fault of the teams, not the reporters. How many different ways can you describe a five and five season, a first round playoff loss, the hiring of a new coach? Things become difficult to distinguish after a season or two.
But there is a human element in every game, every practice, that just needs to be nudged into the light. The next time you read (or glance at) a sports article, don’t focus on yards gained or medley times. Focus instead on the people competing.
The human element is always there. We just need to look to find it.