Hardboiled Sports Pages

Lessons from old school sports writers, thoughts on women's basketball, and more

OK, I know sports and what I usually write about don’t always gel, but even if you’re reaching for your Void record to blast “Organized Sports” at me, stick around.

Those of you who know me may or may not know of my love of women’s sports in general and women’s basketball and soccer in particular (NY Libery, Gotham FC, Racing Louisville). It’s been a while this has been the case, but it kicked into high gear a few years ago, largely because television broadcasts slowly started making it possible to kick it into a higher gear by finally trickling games onto TV. Barely a drip for a while, but this past season? Forget it. The floodwaters were unleashed and will be carrying us into the new WNBA season and, hopefully, far beyond. Of course, anyone who thinks what happened in the past few months with Caitlin Clark mania guarantees the future hasn’t been paying attention to America, but it’s a hell of a good step in the right direction. It’s almost incomprehensible how much talent went to the WNBA this past draft. Hopefully the league is prepared to capitalize on the interest Caitlin, Angel Reese, Kamilla Cardoso, Cameron Brink, Nika Mühl, Aaliyah Edwards, and the rest of the Class of 2024 are bringing with them from the college game. The season’s going to be insane. Kamilla vs. Brittney Griner? Caitlin vs. Sabrina Ionescu? Mühl vs Plum? And next year? With Paige Bueckers and Te-Hina Paopao entering the fray? Come on!

The drawback to this is that my days of sauntering up to the Barclays Center a couple of hours before a Liberty game and buying sixth row center court seats for peanuts look to be over. But that’s a small price to pay for these players finally getting some of the respect they’ve deserved for decades, and I’ll always have that season home opener where I sat next to Didi Richards’ mom. And hey, at least I can watch the games at home without having to seek out some app and viewing everything on a phone.

Concurrent with riding the high of seeing an underdog sport finally clawing its way into the limelight, I’ve been reading The Great American Sports Page, edited by John Schulian. If you’re a writer in any genre you should give it a read, even if sports is the farthest thing outside your sphere of interests. The lessons contained in the articles—columns, mostly, rather than long-form pieces—are essential, I think, to studying the art, craft, and evolution of writing. Much of what we think of as hardboiled fiction (the real thing, not the parodies and pastiches that are copying previous parodies and pastiches) was formulated in the limited space of the American newspaper, and in particular, the sports page: clipped, no nonsense, staccato, raw, occasionally purple, often darkly humorous, and at times stunningly poetic and beautiful.

My old newspaper editor would fly into a rage if he saw how many adjectives I just used in a single sentence. But then, that was back when your skill was measured in column inches and how much you could accomplish with the fewest number of them.

There are great sports writers out there, and there are a number of potentially great writers (or content creators—I have the Gen Xer’s hatred of that term, but I also understand it’s a hell of a lot easier than listing every format you have to produce for to make it these days) coming up through the social media ranks like some zinester working their way to a staff job at the New Yorker. It’s not a hustle I can keep pace with, but it has opened the doors just a crack for writers who aren’t straight white guys. That’s been wonderful to watch and support. But the state of sports journalism as a professional industry is pretty sorry, illustrated best by the scandal that broke when Sports Illustrated (a hollowed-out shell of its former self) was caught cranking out AI-generated “content” of little coherence and no value. Witness also the need, real or self-inflicted, to fill the digital air 24/7, meaning that most of what’s created possibly shouldn’t have been. This is nowhere more apaprent to me than the world of covering Formula 1, where several major outlets exist purely by making up wild “what if’s” with no facts behind them, then reporting them as rumors (see also: who will be the next James Bond?).

This isn’t unique to sports. Have you tried searching for information about a film? If you can bushwhack your way through 100 AI-generated “content” pages that are scraping info from IMDB and re-displaying on a page full of ads, then maybe you’ll find something insightful. But good luck. Finding quality writers and content creators is difficult, but it’s not impossible, and a lot of them can’t find purchase in the established professional racket (which, far from being a guarantee of quality, has become a collection of near-useless publications looking to maximize profits at the cost of creators). When you do find that person doing good work, hold onto them and support them. They are the rarest of rarities.

I’m cranky about social media. I ditched Twitter. I’m not on Facebook. I enjoy Instagram but mostly use it to look at pretty outfits and vacation destinations. I’m not a TikTok user, and my engagement with Bluesky and Threads is spotty at best. I’m not even that into watching stuff on Youtube. I am Norma Desmond raging against the talkies, but maybe slightly more aware that my preferences have become things of the past.

This isn’t to dismiss creators on any of those platforms. I’ve seen you working, the good ones, and it’s fucking hard. You are busting your asses. You often have very little support, no pay, questionable access, and have to be online constantly to find any sort of footing. It’s exhausting to behold. But I’m proud of the people who do it and do it well. I’ve been lucky to find a few really great film people, working mostly these days in podcasting rather than writing articles for a website, and some phenomenal sports creators, largely via doing a bit of legwork on Threads and following the trail of people I trust. F1Threads is a lot mroe useful than any professional F1 publications. It can even squeeze value out of those junk rumors but turning them into a good joke. Most of the creators I follow now do it for love of the subject. recognizing that there was no path toward a professional gig, they forged their own. Watching some of them create a professional job out of thin air by sheer force of passion has been amazing.

Getting back to The Great American Sports Page, when newspaper columns ruled the day, there wasn’t time to fuck around. Newspaper cost money to make, every centimeter was valuable, and you have to hit hard with no room to spare. The collected columns span decades, and the book explores the racism and misogyny not just faced by some of the athletes, but also by writers who dared to be a different color or gender. Similarly, not every article is praising sports. The intro discusses two approaches to sports journalism: “gee whiz” and “aw nuts.” The former is what we often think of when we think of stereotypical old-school sports journalism. Battered gladiators on a field of honor triumphing against impossible odds and all that. The latter is best captured by one of the earliest entries in the book, in which the profile of a former boxing champion ends with the champ in a mental hospital suffering from extreme brain damage, a blistering indictment of the men who were willing to sacrifice him in the ring for their own gain. Every sports fan with a conscience has to deal with the horror of their favorite sport sooner or later, whether it’s the toll it takes on athletes, the corruption of governing bodies like FIFA and the International Olympic Committee, or the racism/sexism/homophobia still rampant even in leagues in which, to quote Megan Rapinoe, “you can’t win championships without gays.”

There’s a lot to learn about how to accomplish that by reading people who are doing it really well. Without these writers forging a new style out of necessity, would we have gotten Dashiell Hammett? Raymond Chandler? Maybe, but the sports page has still played a major and often uncelebrated role in the history of American journalism and literature.

And get ready for a wild WNBA season.