09.09.03
On sports writing
Sports writing is, to borrow a phrase, a funny old game.
It isn’t news, and it isn’t really comment. It reports stories where the reader is often already aware of the outcome.
Perhaps this is why sports writing has a long and peculiar history of being personal, elliptical, even obscure. Hunter S. Thompson is, of course, a sports journalist. His tales of fear and loathing are a product of the fact that his exact turn of phrase would not cause, for instance, the whole machinery of government to turn on him.
Elsewhere, B.S. Johnson’s experimental novel The Unfortunates was provoked by one of Johnson’s forays into the midlands to cover a football match in a strange town, only to find it wasn’t a strange town at all.
Note that I’m not talking here about writers who are sportsmen: though there have been a fair number, from Arthur Conan Doyle (cricket, football), through Camus (football), Nabokov (tennis, football), to Tony Adams (football, drinking). Near the top of that list would be Samuel Beckett, the only Nobel laureate to have played first class cricket. Fascinating, but a subject for another day.
What I’m interested in today is the tradition of sports writers, and in particular, why the greatest of all are the cricket writers.
Anybody’s list of cricket writers would include the formidable Marxist critic CLR James and the immortal Neville Cardus (here he is on the famous bodyline series).
There are many more in the canon, but with the exception of the likes of Frank Keating, it seems ever fewer than there used to be.
In fact, as is usual with this sort of tradition, one of the indications that the tradition is still strong is, ironically, the number of complaints that all the greats have gone. Unlike football, which with small exceptions, continually pretends that the current generation are the greatest we have ever seen, cricket constantly harks to a golden past, where Cardus endlessly reported in glistening prose the sublime performances of Don Bradman, the feats of both remaining ever out of reach.
Well, of course, they’re not. The sprats of the present soon become the whoppers of the past. Dour old Michael Atherton is rehabilitating his reputation nicely, and Devon Malcolm, a frustrating scattergun of a fast bowler in his day, is perfected in the memory as the fellow who was hit on the head while batting agaist South Africa, murmured “You guys are history” to himself, and returned to take nine wickets in the next innings.
It happens to the players, and it happens to the writers. In a decade cricket writers will be harking back to Keating, in thirty years tyros like Lawrence Booth will be regarded with a sort of puzzled fondness.
Maybe it’s just the relief of England squaring the series against South Africa, and perhaps it’s a soft view of the Boy’s Own performance put in by England’s cart-pulling all-rounder Andrew Flintoff, but this appreciation by The Guardian’s David Hopps tickled me no end.
“Quick, get the beers, Freddie’s in.” A similar cry sounded for Ian Botham 25 years ago. Now it rings for Flintoff. Gary Kirsten might best be admired with your back to the television screen but not to watch Flintoff is like going to Blackpool Pleasure Park and not riding the Big One.
Like all the best sports writing, it captures something you saw, and felt, and wished to share. The art of the cricket writer is knowing not only how to share it with you, but how to fit it into the sense of cricket as a whole entity, a cultural enterprise.
Incidentally, this sense of cricket having a cultural - maybe even a political - resonance, as CLR James would have it, can help to explain many deep-seated feelings. What better metaphor for the meandering curlicues of aggression
between India and Pakistan than a Test series? What better illustration of the different mental universes of the British and the American than the fact that cricket remains a mystery to them? If the typical American could be brought to understand a game that necessarily involved whole mornings in which nothing much happens, perhaps we would be subject to less precipitous handbagging of perceived enemies.
Very well. I may not be entirely serious here, and the Old Cricketer’s writing style can boom and parp after a while, but one thing is heartfelt:
roll on the winter tours, where nobody in their right mind and gainful employment can watch the overnight coverage, and the writers will take to the centre for another long session.
Lance Knobel said,
September 9, 2003 at 3:54 pm
I’m that rarity — and American that played cricket to a passable standard.
I think you need to revise some of your theory, because just about everything you say about cricket and cricket writing could be applied to baseball.
In American sportswriting, all the best writing is baseball writing (in a long gone age, it was probably boxing, but we know what happened to that sport). Ring Lardner, Roger Angell, Tom Boswell, Nelson Algren, Roger Kahn, Red Smith, James Farrell and on and on.
I don’t think the issue is cultural, but inherent in the nature of the games. Both cricket and baseball are, on the surface, incredibly simple games. The large movements are usually unexciting — fans know that nothing much happens for most of the three hours (baseball) or five days (cricket).
The interest is entirely in the subtleties. How is he pitching to this batter? Notice the way the outfield shifted. Has the captain got his field placings right? Did you see how the bowler followed two outswingers with an inswinger?
That encourages good and sometimes great writing. And it also attracts the kinds of passions and minds that provoke a CLR James.
It’s also noticeable that George Bush’s America is much more an American football nation than a baseball nation (despite Dubya having owned a baseball team).
Jon said,
September 9, 2003 at 4:18 pm
I was going to make an exceedingly unflattering comparison between cricket and baseball in the post, then realised that it would just be sledging in the kitchen.
I think an extended cultural analysis of cricket would always lead back to the fact that Test Match Special has a large audience who aren’t even interested in cricket.
Incidentally, you say that the quality and significance of cricket/baseball writing isn’t cultural, but then suggest a link between the decline of baseball as the American national sport and the emergence of a new dominant culture in the country. Perhaps not so far apart after all?
Two questions remain:
Your greatest cricketing moment?
Do you mean that Ring Lardner is a real name?
failing journalism student said,
December 16, 2003 at 12:24 am
hey can someone help me out. i am in journalism at my school and im not sure how to write a sports article. if anyone absolutely loves writing sports articles or just has one randomly lying around somewhere could you email it to me please. if not then could you email me and give me ideas on how to write it and what to write it about. thanks.
failing jouralism student