Texas Monthly on the death of sportswriting

The picture of the Sportswriting Six that was included with the original post is a classic photo that includes the recently deceased Bud Shrake. I had hoped to post that pic in the Shrake threat but that skill is above my pay scale.

Thanks for the links to the Sportswriting is Dead stories; I'm collecting.

 

I'm not defending Cartwright lamenting about the good ol' days and I agree it's cheap and easy to pick out one column by Golden to support his critical view point.

However, this story was written for Texas Monthly and Cartwright is remembering/lamenting the glory days he lived. The story is from a Texas point of view. That is all.

 

I don't really understand your point.

 

“Amid the gloomy and yet intoxicating old ruins of the town called St. Andrews and on the golf course that held the first cleat, history and tradition were caned and flogged all last week in a musty thing called the British Open by a cast of modern hustlers and legends"

I'm not a big golf guy but this isn't exactly a timeless lede. Sorry, but does anybody have the attention span to know what this means in today's world.

 

To me the piece says more about the writer (ie. crusty, embittered douchenozzle) than it does about the things he's attempted to address (I don't know much about TX). Ironically, yes, it reads like a satire of a guy who might actually think this way... except he's not being satirical. He's stone serious -- Les Punzars, barf-worthy passages of legend, et all. I laughed.

Reminds me of a similar moment of recognition deep into the New Yorker piece recently about this trustafarian non-sailor attempting to sail across the Pacific or something in a boat he's (paying to have) made from recycled bottles. It's like the more you learn about the profile subject, the more you begin to dislike him and his motives--then, bam, it finally dawns that that's the point of the profile in the first place (ie. he's douchenozzle).

My takeaway: Perhaps editors of Texas Monthly gamely provided this apparently once-stately chap ample rope for his own hanging. And this: don't take yourself too seriously in this profession, on paper or otherwise. Lest we all be wearing capes...

 

: :

 

I'm not going to knock the old-timers. They're legends. But it's like comparing Sid Luckman to Tom Brady. It's a different game these days.
Print guys had a lot more leeway back then because television was new and you didn't have sports fans with the ability to seek out 20 different opinions on a sporting event, the ability to see a game with their own eyes in a lot of cases, and print was starting point and ending point of a news cycle.

 

Sirs, Madames,

I have long been an admirer of Cartwright ... but this is hugely disappointing.

It doesn't compare favorably with the other stories in this (tired, maybe exhausted) vein, Richman et al.

I like to measure a writer by his best rather than his worst. I'd recommend Cartwright's best. I'd ignore his worst ... and I'd hope that those who will judge me in my dotage (i.e. tomorrow) will do me that kindness.

If it had just been a ribald look at glory days, it could have been great.

o-<

 

I never really got the whole Blackie worship either, but then I'm not a Texan. I did read The Dallas Morning News a lot in the 1980s, though. I never saw the point in some of his affectations, like writing "Superbowl." He'd sometimes throw in a short poem. Sometimes the verses made sense and were funny. Even if you loved him and even if he had a better fastball in 1955 than he did in 1985, who's to say he wouldn't have diluted his talent with a talk-radio gig and a blog, or chased after a TV career, if that stuff had been more available in his prime.

There was a series of sports-columnist collections put out in the 1980s in book form. I have The Blackie Sherrord Collection (1988), and I have the Edwin Pope and Jerry Izenberg ones, picked up haphazardly in used book stores over the years. They also did Jim Murray, Bob Verdi, Art Spander, Mickey Herskowitz and Furman Bisher, but I never stumbled on those. I wouldn't call the 1980s Sherrod collection high literature. He probably wouldn't have, either, at least not in print for public consumption.

There's this in the preface: the sports writer, although having pride in his work, "scoffs at his product, never losing the premise that it will wrap tomorrow's carp. And that, on journalistic scales, he may rank somewhere above the obit writer but far below Dear Abby." Sherrod went on to say that some like Red Smith and John Lardner and Jim Murray were more literary, but "None charges the Pillars of Injustice with a machete. None presents himself as The One And Only Truth. None takes his subject nor himself seriously, only his craft. ... However, theirs is but one approach. It just happens to be a favorite of mine but that does not make it gospel. There are blunter and more authoritative styles and techniques, hipshooting as it were, that readers may find more -- a favorite journalistic word of the day -- provocative (italics his) and modern. We live, I suppose, in an angrier world."

I think that's what Cartwright is missing, that it's an entirely different world. I don't think it's necessarily an improved world, but it's the world we have. Blackie had his cutesy shit, and today we see a lot of forced pop-culture references and forced moral outrage and forced loudness. Better or worse, it's just different. Can't compare one era with another. It's like trying to figure out what a young Bob Gibson's stats would be if he were pitching for the Cards today. Pointless.

 

Semi-related to life and death of sportswriting: The hiring of Tommy Craggs at Deadpsin (that's his post that is linked) is a very, very positive thing. Great writer.

 

I think "friend of the friendless" makes a key point here. Go and dig out the BEST of Blackie Sherrod and Dan Jenkins and Jim Murray and Frank Deford and Bud Shrake and Sandy Grady (a personal favorite of mine) from 30 - 50 years ago and compare it to the BEST of whoever you think is a "great writer" today.

There are a few "great writers" today to be sure; but I don't think anyone today is so clearly superior to that lineup from the past that you can say all of those old-timers were forgettable trash.

 

Who do you consider today's great sportswriters, Buck? I ask because I usually stray from the subject of sports when I'm reading (off the clock). I'm genuinely curious, given that I'm familiar with most of the names, but I don't take in a lot of their work.