Quotes about the biz....

'At's one of my all-time favorites. It was in the Mick's obituary (today would have been his birthday), and you have no idea how many times I've used that since.

 

agreed

 

I have always liked a quote of Steven Brunt's from the Globe and Mail:

"When a baseball player starts chewing tobacco, it's time to get worried." (he said this in reference to reporters, athletes and ethics)

another serious one he said:

"Sportswriters should be grounded in the real world. You can't deal with it like it's fantasy, or another planet."

I know none funny, but good ones.

 

"They all lie, pal. I'm just here to write it down."

Not sportswriting, but it fits. It's from True Crime with Clint Eastwood.

 

It's not about sports writing in particular, but my fave has always come from Thomas Jefferson:
"...were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."

 

Also from S.L. Price:

Sportswriters take the ephemera of a few lost hours and, juiced by coffee, adrenaline, and alarmingly deep neuroses, somehow infuse the seemingly unimportant act of hitting a puck, a ball, or a face with a romantic sense of urgency.

Sportswriters are asked how they can waste so much energy on mere games and overgrown boys in short pants, but more often they’re told by those who know no better that theirs is a dream profession. But then, this is only because people care so much about games and boys in short pants. We all know that too much money and time is spent on pro football and soccer, but only popularity separates it from more “dignified” pursuits. Ballet aficionados are just sports fans in formal wear. They, too, are obsessed with a physical act, honed by a manic devotion and years of repetition, transformed by the force of one moment, one crowd, and one serendipitous confluence of circumstances into something beautiful.

If you’re any good as a writer, you’ll be able to grasp and then channel just a bit of that; if you’re really good, you can do it night after night. But now and then you get it all: the dramatic home run, the perfect quote, the most perceptive take on what everyone saw, and then, if you’re even luckier, you see the story clear in your head and get time enough to hammer it into your keyboard. The crowd’s fever, the joy and misery of winners and losers, the running down the musty arena hall to the press room alchemizes into a rhythm in your head and you’re lining it all up, paragraphs gliding off your fingers like freight cars on greasy rails, and when you’re done your stomach is rattling and you’re as high as any drink will get you. You captured time. You bottled passion. It will be gone the next morning, but you saw it, you got it, you wrote it in a way that sounds close to true. Most likely, no one will know. Not the readers just looking for the score. Not the editors consumed by press runs. Maybe not even your competition, obsessed with getting beaten. It’s a secret glory, and you must cherish it because it never lasts. You go to breakfast the next morning, buy four newspapers, order eggs and bacon and hot coffee. You read slowly. You wake up later than the rest of the world. That’s the reward.

 

Here's the earlier quote from Hunter S. Thompson, adding a little more up front.

... Why bother with newspapers, if this is all they offer? Agnew was right. The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits - a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage.



And another HST classic:

I have spent half my life trying to get away from journalism, but I am still mired in it -- a low trade and a habit worse than heroin, a strange, seedy world full of misfits and drunkards and failures. A group photo of the top ten journalists in America on any given day would be a monument to human ugliness. It is not a trade that attracts a lot of slick people; none of the Calvin Klein crowd or international jet set types. The sun will set in a blazing red sky to the east of Casablanca before a journalist appears on the cover of People magazine.
It is always a bad business to try to explain yourself on paper -- at least not all at once -- but when you work as a journalist and sign your name in black ink on white paper above everything you write, that is the business you're in, good or bad. Buy the ticket; take the ride. I have said that before and I have found, to my horror, that it's true. It is one of those half-bright axioms that can haunt you for the rest of your life -- like the famous line Joe Louis uttered on the eve of his fight with Billy Conn: He can run, but he can't hide.
That is a thing to remember if you work in either journalism or politics -- or both, like I do -- and there is no way to duck it. You will be flogged for being right and flogged for being wrong, and it hurts both ways -- but it doesn't hurt as much when you're right.

 

Excellent addition!

 

On Wordcounts

"There are only two kinds of stories in the world: those about which I do not care to write as many as 600 words, and those about which I would like to write many more than 600 words. But there is nothing about which I would like to write exactly 600 words."

-- David Halberstam

 

The truest, saddest quote of them all:

"Tell a woman what your occupation is, and the sportswriter often gets this response: a polite nod, followed by a halfhearted 'You don't say,' followed by an awkward silence, followed by a puffing of cheeks, followed by a long whistling exhalatation, followed by a suddenly remembered appointment over by the bean dip. It is much the same response you give when you ask a person where he's from and he says, 'North Dakota.' You have reached a conversational cul-de-sac."

- Steve Rushin

 

Well, maybe when you look like Steve Rushin..............