Texas Monthly on the death of sportswriting

Because it's an Event, and there was a time sending a sports columnist for a special one-off on such a thing wasn't considered a ridiculous idea. That's when newspapers were licenses to print money.

Not so much anymore.

 

Because, believe it or not, for the first half of the history of college football it was one of the biggest games of the year.

 

There was a time when college football was about more than who had the most 4.5 40s on one side.

See: Army-Navy.

 

Agree with Moddy on Jenkins, who can still bring it, and even has a piece in last year's Best American Sports Writing. If you're a sports writer, go find a copy of Jenkins' novel "You Gotta Play Hurt." It's about being the kind of sports writer we all fantasized about becoming. And it's hysterical.

 

"You Gotta Play Hurt" is one of the greatest books ever written.

 

When word of this story first surfaced a while back, I thought maybe it had possibilities. Some of Cartwright's stuff has been pretty good over the years.

Man was I wrong.

That was a piece of shit.

And picking on Kirk Bohls and Cedric Golden, as others have pointed out, was ridiculous.

 

Somebody should have told me this twenty years ago. Would have saved my eyesight.

Oh yeah, alan Richman did that. Didn't believe it then.

And don't believe it now.

 

People like Glenn Stout dropping by and weighing in with his third-ever post is why I like this site so much.

This might seem kind of odd, but while the shots at Bohls and Golden are uncalled for -- and, to me, jarringly out of place as I read this in terms of the general point he's trying to make -- I find something oddly endearing about somebody who's angrily wishing we were still back 30 or 40 years ago. Because, well, there certainly was much more fun being had in this business pre-1995 or so. In the bigger sense, that main point (I guess) is something anybody who was there would probably agree with, and anybody who wasn't would probably wish they had been a part of.

 

Have heard numerous stories of some legendary sports figures who used to hang out with Cartwright and the other writers in Dallas. Wonder how objectively critical those guys got covered?

Also, it would be interesting to see how the older generation would fare operating under the access limitations we have now to players and coaches. The rules certainly have changed.

 

I read those "death of sportswriting" things as incomplete sentences.....the completion being "...as I knew it."....and what they're really about is not the death of sportswriting but the death of the author's youth....only secondarily, but necessary as the reason for the pieces, they're about the loss of imaginative writing as a value in the sports journalism practiced by newspapers (which, of course, is dead-on).....

 

If that's what he would have written. But he didn't. He wrote about how young sports writers don't do hilarious things like get drunk and wear capes and make up a funny name for themselves.

 

That's my point. Who'd read a Cartwright lament for his lost youth? So he disguised it in a "death of sportswriting" piece.