As a lowly sub on The World in 1975 my job on the sports pages was to make sure that soccer meant “struggle”. It was the people’s game, to get under the nose of whiteman. Tattered football stories submitted by stringers in the townships were transformed into shouts of journalistic defiance. The “Bucs” (Orlando Pirates), the “Birds” (Moroka Swallows) and the “Chiefs” (Kaiser Chiefs) paraded under headlines that spelt doom to rugby, cricket, tennis or any other supposedly white sport carried by the mainstream press.
Editor Percy Qoboza, who was rarely seen in the subs’ room, once stopped me in the passage to say that he didn’t want to see “swimming pools and lagers” (did he mean laagers?) on our pages. We had to “project the message”, he said. Primed by these inspiring, if mystifying, words, I returned to the chaotic piles of copy that blew in from the streets like chaff ahead of a storm.
By the time the storm hit with the Soweto Uprising in 1976, it seemed right and proper that that the school pupils protesting against Afrikaans should choose Orlando Stadium as their destination. It was a symbol of the people, champions, victory.
Today, all the blood spilt in the past has had its payoff in liberated sport, huge gate fees, and the international syndication of reports from the pitch. The 2010 Soccer World Cup looms. We’ve done the cricket and rugby world cups as a notionally united nation. Sports journalism is big business, processed in hi-tech aircon offices. Teams are sponsored up to the eyeballs and journos enjoy the cocktail spinoffs and five-star accoms that come with coverage. But has sports journalism gone up, down, or sideways?
On the face of it, everything has become far more professional and commercially driven. Is politics out of the picture? Not by a long shot, as the record will show.
“I’m in television but sports coverage in print is seen as a leader in that it’s comprehensive – television and radio hardly have time to delve into the deepest, darkest, juiciest bits of sports stories,” says Jeff Moloi, sports editor of e.tv. “Television needs pictures, which are rarely available, while sports headlines have always been, and will continue to be, the topics of discussion for people. Print continues giving those stories before and after the big matches have been shown on television.”
Here is the traditional defence of print against electronic interlopers. Funny that praise comes from the TV corner while the sluggers on the print bench are bellyful of complaints about the quality of sports journalism today.
Says Archie Henderson, sports editor of the Cape Argus: “Sports reporting is poor. Mostly it is written by reporters who are fans first and reporters second. The relationship with the sports bodies, teams and players is often too cosy. Reporting principles are often neglected and comment is too often too free. The really irritating thing is the cliches.”
Clinton van der Berg, sports editor of the Sunday Times, agrees: “I think the standards of sport reporting are at the lowest point at the moment, and the quality of reporting is diluted, very weak.” Van der Berg adds that the internet’s “new language of reporting” has bent and smudged the traditional writing quill.
Julia Beffon, sports editor of the Mail & Guardian, thinks “sports writing is pretty poor across the board” – with “some obvious exceptions: Darrel Bristow-Bovey, before he let others do the work for him, and our own Tom Eaton, stand out.”
And Robert Houwing, editor of The Wisden Cricketer magazine, despairs. “Sadly, I genuinely believe the quality of sports reporting and writing has deteriorated fairly dramatically in South Africa – from a not-especially-revered template in the first place.”
Still, there are those who praise the quality of sports writing, proudly citing the hard graft that goes into it. Nic Wides, director of Touchline Media (which publishes a number of leading sports glossies, including SA Sports Illustrated, Golf Digest, Bicycling, Kick Off and Runner’s World) maintains that the group offers “world class content with a mix of international and local editorial”.
Touchline’s strategy of partnering with international publishers, says Wides, ensures that it is “well positioned to deliver quality depth-based content in order to attract readers”. He adds, however, that the field of sports magazine publishing is a tough market with limited profitability: “My view is that only a handful of South African sports magazines are profitable.”
But leaving Wides out of it, the consensus remains that our sports journalism is terrible. Are we missing something here? Design and layout is startlingly good in newspapers and magazines, while many stories are packaged with imagination and written – it seems to me – with partisan passion. More important, print reportage on sport in South Africa has never had a bigger market. Analysis of a group of leading upper-LSM sports magazines shows a rise of more than 20% in readership over the past five years. Though the figures slipped slightly in 2004, the growth suggests that they are doing a good job of satisfying reader tastes.
And if the sports editors quoted above really mean that sports journalism serving the popular market is dross, how about the figures on soccer magazines , which show an astonishing readership pattern.
The figure of readers per copy (rpc) suggests that the weekly Soccer Laduma changes hands frequently – like many black dailies and weeklies, which range around 8 to 15 rpc. Soccer Laduma reaches more than 2.02 million readers, putting it in the same league as City Press (2.06 million) and nearly double the readership of Sunday World (1.06 million), according to Amps 2004. Considering that all weekly newspapers already push mass sport, Soccer Laduma’s specialised soccer coverage has created an entirely new sector of readership.
But the truly amazing figure is KickOff’s 26.09 rpcs, which, if really true, puts it at the top of the rankings of much-thumbed monthly magazines in this country. This figure is both good and bad news for advertisers: good because it shows huge pulling power, bad because readers are either too poor, or too unmotivated, to buy their own copies – a reflection on both their disposable income and consumption habits.
As for SoccerLife, there has been no Amps readership survey so we do not know the pattern. The SA Advertising Research Foundation, Saarf, says magazines with a circulation of less than 20,000 do not automatically qualify for surveys. This magazine, launched with a flourish only a year ago to tell the glitzy stories behind the goal-scoring, seems not to have caught the imagination of middle to upper echelon readers and has no mass following. Who knows if the lifestyle/soccer formula will carry it through to a second birthday?
Commenting on SoccerLife‘s prospects, deputy business manager Mark Murphy says the group is “really excited” about the future of the magazine and that the ABC figure should range between 18,000 and 30,000 over the next two years (ABCs for July to December 2004 are 17,163). SoccerLife, he says, is a “niche product with a selective audience” and research has shown that readers are appreciative of its quality and positioning. He adds that there are some “rather ambitious plans to develop this brand well beyond this kind of market penetration”. So it seems a change is mooted, but no-one is yet saying how.
Caveats aside, what both charts show is that sports journalism, as a product for sale, has never been healthier overall. The journalism may be well below the standard needed for international World Cup coverage. Yet from the perspective of three decades ago, the atrocious copy of the 1970s was surely no better – and probably a lot worse – than what is being served up today. Now, as then, the subs are holding the line.
What’s the solution to bad sports journalism? “Getting younger aspiring writers into sports is the challenge for the industry as the perception is that there are not many positions available and the current opportunities are filled by established writers,” says Craig Ross, associate publisher of Golf Digest. “The truth is there is a great opportunity for young writers to make an impact in South Africa.”
He’s right. If the journalistic play is as bad as they say, there is plenty of opportunity to score writing goals. Yet there is a dark side to it all, and this goes back generations.
Archie Henderson again: “The soccer writers are often vague and too frightened to probe too deeply into a game where suspicions of corruption are rife. Another story missed.”
Let’s not single out the soccer writers alone: what happened to the investigative flair of our journalists when Hansie Cronjé was busy selling his soul as cricket captain to the bookmakers? Or why is it that golf writers seem oblivious to the growing debate over the environmental and social impacts of golf estates? The commons is being sold off to millionaires with small white balls.
In a neat reversal of the anti-apartheid slogan – “No normal sport in an abnormal society” – we now have a conspiracy to keep controversies within the confines of the game. There can be no abnormal reporting on “normal” sport. That would spoil the fun. Beckham and sex are news, but bent soccer referees in our own backyard don’t make news until someone outside the corps of soccer writers blows the whistle.
Sport is still sport –which means it is rife with corruption and still full of politics.
A recent book entitled Laduma! by Peter Alegi, assistant professor of History and director of African/African-American Studies at Eastern Kentucky University, makes the point. Laduma! chronicles the impact of indigenous sporting traditions such as stick fighting, the rise of Orlando Pirates, the emergence of their rivals Moroka Swallows, and the power struggles between different football associations and white authorities.
Alegi shows that soccer became the mainstay of black sporting experience because it has been possible to Africanise the game – for example, by introducing rituals and magic, and developing distinctive African playing styles. This makes for great copy, though run-of-the mill soccer writers seldom tap into these themes. Instead we have boot-by-boot match reports and so-called “analysis” not worthy of the name. Believe me, I know: I judge some of the soccer writing competitions.
What does that say about the sports-reading public? Are they happy with mediocrity because they have never been exposed to better models of sports journalism? No, my guess is that readers do know the difference between good and bad but are prepared to accept the worst (and enjoy the best) because they love sport so much.
You can love sport so much that nothing else matters.