Sports reporters: the laziest journalists in the business
Published 26 June 2000
Media - Bill Hagerty
There are journalists who are unable, or sometimes unwilling, to recognise a story even when it all but walks up, introduces itself and helps sharpen a pencil. These journalists are called sports reporters and, along with other specialist reporters, such as those lurking within the confines of the City of London, they are the laziest in the business.
When the scholar Benjamin Jowett observed that "men get lazy and substitute quantity of work for quality", he probably wasn't directing his remarks at sports reporters. Neither was Michel Rocard, the former prime minister of France, who, in his recent Reuters lecture at the University of Kent, listed "progressively substituting information with mere spectacle" as one of five ways in which the media fail society. But the ears of sports reporters should be burning.
During England's Euro 2000 campaign, sports reporters had little to do other than describe at interminable length, and with mind-numbing repetition, how Becks did this and Michael Owen did that and what Kevin Keegan said about them. The broken bones, flying chairs and blood-soaked shirts were left to the sports news reporters, the street-toughened foot soldiers of the business. Sports reporters tend only to "cover" the sport, feeding a seemingly insatiable public appetite for being told about action they have already watched on television.
I am not criticising newspapers in general, nor a number of brave sports columnists. Apart from the Sunday People's front-page celebration of England's victory over Germany - "Hun Nil", presumably written by an ignoramus unaware that the word is offensive (Hun, that is, chaps) - the days of mindless xenophobia are long gone. Even hysteria has calmed to no more than mild apoplexy, although the Mail on Sunday's claim, on its front page, that "England's ecstatic footballers swept to Euro 2000 glory" on the basis of them winning one match, against Germany, could be considered hyperbole of Everest proportions.
No, in the battle for supremacy on the almost level playing field of newspaper competition, it is those reporters huddled at the back of the papers, like shirkers waiting in dread for the call for volunteers, who are constantly found wanting.
It took an Indian newspaper to uncover the corruption that appears to have penetrated international cricket like worms in a cheese. The King Commission, investigating the scandal in South Africa, heard how talk of bookies and bribes had been echoing around the South African team's dressing rooms for five years and that England's victory over South Africa at Headingley two years ago may have been about as kosher as a bacon sandwich. Yet not one British sports reporter's nose sniffed the frying fat.
It has ever been so, and the huge growth of sporting interest and the skeletons rattling around in the closets of many major sports, have done nothing to focus the eyes of the sports journalists. John Jackson, one of the first hard-news reporters to be assigned to a major sporting event - the 1966 World Cup - has the insularity of sports writers to thank for a long and successful career.
There were no newsmen on the aeroplane transporting the England football team from Bogota, where they had played a friendly against Colombia, to Mexico City for the 1970 World Cup. Had Jackson been on board, he would, unlike every football reporter travelling with the England party, probably have realised that there was a notable absentee. "Either they didn't notice or did nothing when they saw the most recognisable footballer in the world, the blond-haired captain of the then world champions, had missed the plane," says Jackson. Nor did any of them attempt to leave the aircraft and reach a telephone when the plane made a stop at Panama City. By the time it reached Mexico City, the news that Bobby Moore had been arrested back in Bogota on suspicion of stealing a bracelet had reached London. "There were some fearful bollockings," says Jackson.
But it is the way of sports reporters. If it hasn't been kicked, hit, bowled, passed or volleyed, it isn't their business. "But he had stepped orf the field of play," exclaimed a cricket correspondent when chastised for not reporting the racial abuse suffered by Viv Richards as he climbed the pavilion steps at a county match.
It was Jackson who dared to ask John McEnroe about the sudden return to the US of his girlfriend during a Wimbledon championship. McEnroe walked out, fighting broke out among the press corps, and the Lawn Tennis Association instructed that, in future, only questions relating to tennis were to be asked. "Sports writers are always horrified when we ask such questions," says Jackson, "but always lead their copy with the answers."
Worse than the unwillingness to upset their contacts - the facile complaint that renders any contact useless - is the sports writer's occasional intervention on the wrong side of a story. When I was at the Daily Mirror and a news investigation revealed that the footballing eminence Don Revie had attempted to fix matches, somebody in the sports department sang loudly enough for news of impending publication to reach Revie. He fled abroad. More recently, sports reporters have co-operated with agents to break stories of a player's unhappiness so that the player's club comes under pressure to renegotiate his contract.
Things may be changing. At the Telegraph, Mihir Bose has established a reputation as a sports reporter willing to fearlessly expose sport's foibles. May his influence spread. Other sports reporters should realise journalism isn't only a game.
The writer is a former editor of the People
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