Sports journalism is an oxymoron. I’m not being unkind by saying so. Find a sports journalist, perhaps sleeping under a pool table on the East Rand, the widening moat of drool spreading under his unshaven cheek reflecting the pole-dancer’s neon panties.
Grab him by the lapels of his gray patched-patent-leather jacket, and haul him to his feet. Make sure his faux alligator-hide loafers with crêpe soles don’t slip out from under him. Peel the Lucky Strike from behind his ear and light it for him. Then ask him what he does for a living.
Brain surgeon, he’ll say. He’ll laugh, and shudder. Then he’ll remember where he is. What kind of a bloody ignorant thing is that to ask, he’ll say, and stumble for the door.
Of course, there are some sports writers who are proud of their profession, who look out across the tented field with a beatific half-smile, who greet their colleagues with a serene nod. Their shirts are pressed and they eat their lunch with cutlery rather than fingers. They believe that sport is about merit and competition, that one day they’ll wake up to discover that transformation and those awful uppity black politicians have all been a bad dream.
They don’t know that their wives are slowly warming to erotic asphyxiation techniques, and that purported book club get-togethers have long since devolved into squeaking, ripping, popping orgies of black latex and vacuum masks. And they don’t know that their manly colleagues, those fellows they hail so cheerily, call them things like Molly and Soggy Biscuit, and construct terribly cruel narratives about them, the kind that only bored young men with some literary ability and few scruples can concoct.
But at least this savage band of slackers who save their creativity for press-box character assassination knows that they are degenerate. They knows that when they are mentioned at family functions their mothers smile anxiously and ask if the food is still warm enough, that their fathers crumple their serviettes under the table in agonies of poker-faced shame.
Because nobody studies sports journalism: press boxes around the world are full of half-finished degrees in geology and sociology, of recently resigned schoolteachers and jaded club coaches, of former players and also-rans rapidly subsiding into sad autumnal lives of fat and knee operations and obscurity.
Perhaps editors have given sports journalism this inferiority complex, seeing the back pages as a sordid commercial necessity that helps pay for the noble front pages in which wormy cans are opened and clay feet are revealed.
Perhaps it’s the reporter’s own guilt at being paid to report in dull journalese the details of a game that his readers watched with surround-sound and action replays.
Perhaps it’s simply a function of being assimilated into the retinues of international stars en route to clubs and being asked by pretty girls for an autograph, and having to shout admissions (to be heard about the music) that render you irrelevant in their world view. There’s nothing like screaming, ”I’m not famous! I’m nobody!” at three beautifully groomed soccer-moms-to-be to put one in touch with one’s basic humanity.
Why do they go on? Free chocolate éclairs, for one thing. But maybe they go on because they don’t know how to stop. It’s simply too hard to think about picking up third-year criminology courses when you could just wait for the Tri-Nations to start. And besides, they’ve watched enough grand send-offs to harbour secret fantasies about getting on themselves.
They’ve disguised the frogs in their throats with jocular comments as retiring giants walked off the field in tears under a deluge of applause and rose petals or strode away towards the dressing-room with chin held high, their team-mates forming an honour-guard with cricket bats aloft.
They’ve lauded the greats for quitting while they were ahead, and gone home to stare at the wall and reflect on 30 more years of vicarious pleasure. Their quitting points have come and gone, and they’re in it for life.
But sometimes they do notice the quitting points. In the two years since the debut of this column I’ve been called a racist, a homophobe, a traitor, an idiot (oh, when will sports fans buy thesauruses?), and a bitch; and perhaps that last epithet is worth developing: 101 little journalistic Dalmatians — spotted, blotchy, not black but not entirely white either — have entered the world as Pitch & Mutters.
And that, I think, is enough for this bitch.
Tom Eaton’s new column will appear in the Comment & Analysis section next week