IF you've been a sportswriter very long, you keep waiting for someone to tap you on the shoulder and tell you the doctor will see you now. Fortunately, madness
rules in our worldYou often have this disquieting feeling of waking up and rolling over into the real world where you're making the news, instead of reporting it.
You live in constant denial that Peter Pan is really your first cousin and that sitting in an office all day with a bunch of other losers like you discussing the pros and cons of the designated hitter is a perfectly reasonable way to make a living. It probably isn't.
Lawyers don't spend their evenings settling bar bets about long forgotten sports legends, and brokers aren't asked the halftime score of the Harvard-Yale game, six weeks after it happened.
The trade-off is they aren't afforded the opportunity to write a story about how many games they think the University of Hawaii football team will win this season or spend an afternoon with Cal Lee wondering if St. Louis School will ever lose another Prep Bowl.
While accountants are crunching endless streams of numbers and teachers are grading stacks and stacks of papers, you're afforded the luxury of basking in the sun watching football practice, learning the difference between "cover one" and "cover two."
For some reason they pay you for this ridiculous job. Nobody's sure why. But even your fellow newsroom employees hold it against you; the cynical souls who spend their days and nights at the county lock-up, district court, city council, governor's house, legislative sessions, school board meetings and any other disagreeable place imaginable.
They stare at you in disbelief when they point out that a coach makes $100,000 a year, while driving around in some luxury car with the top down, all in the name of a game, and your response is:
"Yeah, so?"
After they wander off to write about world peace, you sit in front of the television set like the chattering monkeys gathering around the black monolith in "2001: A Space Odyssey."
You shake your fist at these pretty boys on network TV and SportsCenter for their transparent attempts of wanting to be liked by Mike. Ahmad Rashad is the worst offender for beginning each sound bite of the NBA Finals with the phrase, "I just spoke to Michael Jordan and he told me ..."
NOW everybody's doing it from Portland, Ore., to Portland, Maine. It's as if inserting the word me into the sentence gives it instant credibility. Local broadcasters are equally troubling when throwing around the we word in the same breath as the home team, as in "I hope we win." Oui, oui.
This makes it difficult for us print boys, who take pride in giving the reader objective coverage. That's something athletic directors don't always want to read or even hear, just ask Bob Hogue.
They try to control what you say and when you say it, which is insulting to those of you in the studio audience, who know there is no positive side to the home team losing 66-0.
Sometimes lost in all this madness is that nobody charged admission to the dodge ball game on the playground. Nobody opened their notebooks and started scribbling down the results or pretended that a stick was a microphone.
There was a time when sports were played for fun, not money or fame. And people didn't even know, much less care, what a designated hitter was. It was just a game, not world peace.
Fortunately for the writers, madness rules. People pay top dollar to see overpaid athletes. They love to watch it on TV and read the analysis in the newspaper.
And while balancing the budget are numbers for the real world, statistical data for those fantasy league goof balls is what really counts. It's not rocket science, but it sure beats someone telling you the doctor will see you now.
Paul Arnett has been covering sports
for the Star-Bulletin since 1990.
Text Site Directory:
[News] [Business] [Features] [Sports] [Editorial] [Community]
[Info] [Letter to Editor] [Stylebook] [Feedback]
© 1997 Honolulu Star-Bulletin
http://starbulletin.com