Simmons on sports writing

Correct me if I'm wrong, anyone on here who is affiliated with Grantland ... but I swear I remember either reading or hearing about it on a Simmons podcast the fact that Grantland writers were having trouble getting credentialed for pro events. I wonder if that sort of thing plays into his thinking.

 

"Ned Ryerson?"

"BING!!!!!"

 

I feel like a lot of you voicing outrage are doing so without understanding his point. He's talking about after games, not practices or the other day-to-day stuff where relationships are built. I don't know how things work in the other leagues, but I can't remember the last time I saw someone get an exclusive after an NFL game. Anyone who has covered one knows that they can skip the gang bangs and write a solid gamer off of quote sheets or the televised press conferences. Is anything lost when deadline forces someone to take that approach? Probably not.

 

I've covered lots and lots of professional sporting events. Lots.

Part of covering a beat is developing rapport with the guys you cover. They answer a question differently from a guy they know and like than from someone they've never seen - or from a PR guy.

Plus, it matters to players who comes to games and who doesn't. They notice that stuff.

 

I edited my original point before seeing this. I agree with you there. But the relationships are built during the other daily stuff that goes on. After an NFL game, where there's 100 people climbing over each other, everything is generic and there's not a whole lot of brilliant questions being asked. You can write a passable story off of quote sheets following a game if needed. You aren't going to own a beat doing that kind of work the rest of the week, but on Sunday you can get away with it.

 

Just speaking from a personal standpoint, I do a lot of my writing 'virtually,' and you can do plenty of really solid pieces that way. Obviously, it depends on the work of others, and I make sure to cite those who provide that work, even if it's as small as "XXXXX told reporters after the game."

That said, all of my best work comes from when I'm THERE, in person, doing the work and asking the questions I want to ask. I'm not on a beat. I work for a weekly, but I find that players are actually refreshed when I ask them questions the beat guys don't have time to ask. I get my best answers from players in those moments, usually, because they go into 'zone' mode, and when someone breaks that pattern, they open up. Of course, sometimes they stay in the zone and I don't get shit, but I find that's usually my fault for not knowing the player well enough to get him to open up.

 

And that's not a knock on beat guys. I've done beat writing, and it's a different animal with its own inherent challenges. Weekly writing is definitely easier for me, to each his own.

 

The other thing is that the PR department isn't going to transcribe everything or include any controversial remarks, but that's not Simmon's point. He's simply saying that a lot of the stuff that comes out after a game is useless, and he's right. The real work, at least in the NFL, is done Monday-Friday.

 

One thing that some of you and Simmons are also overlooking are the sidebar and notes stuff that doesn't end up in the gamer that everyone reads on ESPN and Sportsline. When I was on a beat, there might be one or two guys around an offensive lineman or special teams player.

 

Good point. I thought Simmons was only talking about gamers. I'm not say that there's zero value in attending pressers or gang bangs. Something is lost by not being there. You can't observe emotions by reading a transcript. I'm just saying that you can write a passable gamer from the distributed information.

The team I cover has someone in every interview session and distributes at least 25 pages of quotes after each game. Everyone has almost every word uttered delivered to their inbox.

 

I truly get where Simmons is coming from, because I've more or less done this with college baseball the past two seasons.
We're in an SEC state, one of the few places college baseball is a major sport. The two SEC schools are three hours away, though. Since the AP barely recognizes that college baseball exists until the conference tournaments and regionals, we end up writing most of our own stuff.
We could just copy and paste the SID's release as soon as it goes on the website, but the quality of those vary wildly from school to school. So, I prefer to look at the box score, a few highlights and maybe video of a postgame presser (or use a quote from the team release) and patch together a gamer of our own. A lot of schools, especially in the SEC (Mississippi State, South Carolina, LSU and Alabama are the best with this), usually have all this stuff put on their website within an hour of the game ending. If you're on deadline, there's Gametracker and the 8-inch basic story option.

You write enough of those gamers, and over time you get a feel for trends. You can get on the weekly conference calls and throw some weekend previews together. The SEC teams play a few neutral-site midweek games close to us, so we'll cover those and spin a couple features out of them.
Essentially, I've become our college baseball beat writer while attending just a couple games a year in person. There have been many days where I crank out 50-60 inches of copy, put in three or four hours of work, e-mail three or four stories to my editor and never leave the house.
If it can be done with a minor sport like that, there are certainly organizations that could employ the same tactic with an operation like the NBA, where there's a hundred times more material available. It's an approach that can save a lot of money for small or cash-strapped organizations. It's the 21st century way of watching a game on TV and stealing quotes off the radio.

Now, where the idea breaks down is like others have said -- somebody has to ask the questions in the first place. Somebody has to spend enough time around the team to work the beat, develop sources and break news away from the playing field. To dig up those germs of ideas and stories that blow up into bigger stories. To find out the scoop on injuries and pick up on nuances that become the basis for stories.
You can cover games by remote, but you can never truly work a beat. In my college baseball example, I might occasionally write a better game story than the major metro's beat writer, but I'm never going to provide the same depth of coverage on a day-to-day basis. Thinking you can is just foolish.

 

Does anybody have a doubt that if Simmons' idea came to fruition he'd be on Twitter after that hypothetical Celtics game griping about the pool reporters not asking this question or that?