VeloCat <[email hidden]> wrote in message news:<[email hidden]>...
Quoted message said:Reporting on sporting events is not real writing. My basic premise is that anyone, including
myself, could write a sports column without any prior experience. There is ample evidence of this
in just about every newspaper. Knowledge of the event being covered is clearly not a prerequisite.
Most sports reporters are wannabes who dream of playing some the "game" but consider the walk to
the bar to be their exercise quota for the day.The fact that the Tour gets so little coverage in most newspapers just demonstrates my point.
Writing about the Tour requires some knowledge about the teams, stragegy, stages, etc. That would
require some real homework by most reporters and is therefore too much work.
To write about anything well one has to have a deep knowledge about it and it's not something you
can pick up in a week or a month.
I follow a lot of sports and could probably write a sports column as lame as some of those out
there, making simple observations and having unoriginal opinions about "hot topics" (Kobe, NCAA,
yadda yadda), but the really good columnists have a really deep knowledge of the sport itself, have
followed it for years and know it's history and important figures.
Quoted message said:It's much easier to write some stupid piece like "Cycling isn't a real sport" than it is to really
report on the event. Real reporters cover events they have no knowledge of everyday. It takes hard
work and dedication to do it well. Sports reporters don't like to be bothered by such details.
There are also (the true) sports fans who can get into any competitive activity, even if they aren't
familiar with it. Pre-Tiger Woods only golfers watched golf, in cycling largely due to the fame of
Lance Armstrong the Tour de France (as opposed to bike racing in general though) has attracted lots
of casual observers, fans who aren't cyclists.
Quoted message said:I recognize that there are several excellent sports reporters who cover cycling events very
well. I personally am a big fan of rbr's own Jeff Jones. My comments are directed to the vast
majority of sports reporters who somehow make a living writing [censored] like the story that started
this thread.
These are lame-ass, unoriginal pieces. I was really disappointed with the lameness of the ESPN page
2 piece since ESPN.com usually has pretty good columns.
-Amit