The End of Sportswriting, Part II

(This is the second post of a five-part series.)

by Rick Rockwell

Many of the problems with modern sportswriting are also linked to the internet. Sports talk radio and ESPN are not the only culprits.

For instance, some may have noticed the number of sports blogs listed in the sidebar of this blog actually shrinking during the past few months. That was for a reason. Many are just offensive.

Don’t believe me? Check for yourself. The most popular sports blog, Deadspin, thinks racism is funny. From the graphics to the commentary, that blog’s coverage of the Super Bowl should have been condemned by the blogosphere and the mainstream media. Instead, it was passed off like anything else in sportswriting today: an inside joke, and if you weren’t laughing you weren’t part of the club.

The writers and editors of such blogs have acquired the attitude and language of the locker-room. Their job seems not to be casting light on where sports fits into society, but acting like punks to spark fights in their comment section as a way to gain more readers or just to echo the attitudes of sullen sports stars from Barry Bonds, the steroid king of baseball to Sean Taylor of football, a classless safety for Washington known for spitting, drunk driving and barely avoiding jail time on assault charges. If you have a different opinion or dare to point out a factual error on one of these blogs, prepare to get in a verbal spitball match with the writer.

Who wants that? Perhaps such activities were fun to watch when you were in second grade, but as an adult? Or perhaps those who read sports these days just want infantile sounds, sensations and spats rather than real analysis. Maybe that’s why less than 30 percent of the public pays any attention to coverage of sports unless it is a huge championship game. They have turned away from a place that once had the very best analysis and writing in the media because what they see today is coarse, crass, or clueless.

(To see the next part in this series, please click here.)

(Photo of Jim Thorpe of the Carlisle Indians kicking in Chicago, 1907, from The Chicago Daily News collection of the Chicago Historical Society via the Library of Congress. The photo is regarded as public domain, as long as the sources are credited.)

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