From an old post I did on HornFans long ago...
Sportswriters: How I love them
First - so I won't be accused of shitting you around and so some of you won't reply "Hey, but you said you loved sportswriters in the title - are you being ironic again?" - I will reveal my singular motive for this post: I want you to respect sports journalists as little as I do.
Why?
Primarily, because they're not very good at what they do. For some reason, that offends me. When taken collectively, I can't think of a more mediocre trade. And spare me the Frank DeFord/David Halberstam/Dan Jenkins retort already forming in your brain: for every literate, intelligent wordsmith like DeFord who refuses to participate in the daily sportswriting Cliche Bake Off Sale I'll bury you with the names of scores of pathetic hacks who could make the Thrilla in Manilla sound like Low Impact Aerobics Thursday at the Shady Acres Nursing Home.
By now you've gathered I don't hold many sports journalists in awe. You are correct. For the same reasons I don't respect waiters who scald me with soup, engineers who build bridges out of yarn and mangoes, ingrate lawyers who solicit their clientele from daytime television, or, for that matter, most people with marketing degrees.
I mean, this is supposed to be their job. They are paid to do this. They receive money to educate themselves and talk about sports in a substantive way. Yet most cannot. Doesn't that irritate you?
Prone to cliche and solipsism, they write in choppy staccato like some ungodly amalgam of Larry King in a USA Today op-ed tempered by the please-punch-me-in-the-face-repeatedly smugness of Paul Begala; they generally grasp their subject matter as well as Koko, The Gorilla Who Can Talk With Her Hands does Neils Bohr's contributions to physics though Koko, when not busy holding her pet cat to her teat like it was a gorilla baby, has the simian decency to admit as much.
They usually stand 5'7" with bird-like physiques yet are constantly calling out athlete's "manhood" and questioning their "guts"; ironic given that their first-hand experience with schoolboy athletics was usually dangling from a locker hook by the back of their collar, their nuts smeared in Icee Hot, a ripe jock pulled over their head like a triumphant shako.
By the way, let me make one distinction: I'm mostly talking about sportswriters, not chroniclers. Chroniclers are the guys and girls they send to the Spurs game and they tell you what happened. They dutifully report recruiting information or whether Applewhite's knee surgery went well. They mostly do a good job. I'm talking about the malcontents with actual opinions who are supposed to help our understanding of the game, frame its context, debate its merits.
Journalists in general - admittedly not a terrifically bright lot - generally turn a phrase the way a Japanese sumo wrestler turns a double play and sportswriters generally comprise the lowest echelon of journalism. That makes them the weakest soldiers in the French army; the most masculine girl on the field hockey team; the dumbest kid at Sam Houston State. Those aren't good things to be.
Example #1: Talent Evaluation/Football Knowledge For me, the proverbial straw that had the camel participating in the Omani Special Olympics was seeing Roger Roesler proclaimed in '99 as an All-American and 1st Team All-Big 12 performer after what could be charitably described as a challenging senior season. Nice guy, good Longhorn. Never a great player. But he was on the preseason lists so he should go on the postseason lists! We call that teleology -- something is because, umm, it just is...because we think it was before. See Jarrod Cooper, who probably cost K-State two Big 12 titles yet was a mainstay of All-Everything teams in his time there.
I've decided that most people, particularly sportswriters, rely on peer pressure, preseason lists, hype and Magic 8 Balls to determine who the conference elite are at their respective positions. Thankfully for them, statistics can serve as a useful adjunct to their mongoloid decision making processes and thus they are able to not totally defecate upon their charge when picking skill position players -- assuming they can manipulate their fat fingers in a straight line horizontally across a stat line while dumbly mouthing the words out loud to themselves and deciding that Quincy Morgan is, in fact, good cuz his numbers are, umm, good.
Example #2: Independent Thought They're as reliant as a newborn babe on the coaches they snipe at for even the most elementary analysis of game planning and strategy. If Mack Brown told them with a straight face that we won the A&M game 43-17 because of the subtle influence of Matt Trissel, 87.5% of journalists would dutifully report it under a column entitled Do Not Discount the Trissel Factor. These are people almost incapable of forming their own opinions on anything. If they do form opinions of their own, they tend to be adequately summated in pithy cliche with little bearing on what actually happened in the game: Speed Kills! You Must Run The Ball To Win! Applewhite's Gutty Leadership!
This lemming-like groupthink is complemented by a profound laziness, a lack of inquisitiveness and a commitment to accuracy as profound as the average A.I.S.D administrator.
Example #3: Shameless Frontrunning Sports Illustrated wrote an article about Ricky Williams in his senior year: a deifying and adulatory public blowjob in which he was proclaimed an even better citizen than football player: full of love for his sisters and mother, the ultimate teammate, shy, down-to-earth, endearing. He Is All That's Good About Sports.
15 months later they wrote another article in which Ricky is now a boorish, sullen ingrate, full of hatred and venom; selfish, withdrawn and the poster child For All We Hate In Sports.
A few months after that, a diagnosis of clinical depression now swings the pendulum to pity; have no doubt that a triumphant back-from-the-Abyss pre-packaged article awaits should Ricky stay healthy and gain 1,500 yards this year. Absurd.
Example #4: Smug Incompetence I am not a good ice skater. If forced to ice skate, I would acknowledge this by falling, looking embarrassed, laughing at my pathetic balance and generally apologizing for my disruptive presence in the human race. Sports journalists, unlike most of us, have little sense of their own incompetence. And strangely, they are smug about it. Kirk Bohls. Micheal Wilbon. Jason Whitlock. Peter Vecsey. Watch them. Read their stuff. They're so used to hanging out with 18 year old athletes that they actually regard themselves as wise, bright and interesting. They've granted themselves the illusion of genius with 1040 SAT scores by hanging out with Prop 48's. And they're actually self-congratulatory about it.
Why would Kirk Bohls write such a hurtful article about Chris Mihm - questioning his manhood and commitment and taking potshot after potshot - after he decided to go pro in the aftermath of a dissapointing LSU game, a game in which he showed real guts? Why? Because he can. Na na na na na na! What are you going to do about it? Like most of the new breed of smirking sportswriters, Bohls confuses provocation with being provocative.
I could go on. But I won't. If I did, I might have to go to Eckerd's Drugs and get my blood pressure taken in their nifty free screening booth and I don't want to do that because the last time I did it the cuff went too tight and I was forced to scream until various Eckerd's employees (Rod, Tammy and Ken the pharmacist) freed me.