Sportswriter...dream job or nightmare?

Writing about sports sounds like a dream job to lots of folks. Imagine...going to sports games for free, sitting in the press box, access to the locker room, interviewing players and coaches and fans. Watching games, then writing about it. And getting paid, although not much, to tell the stories. What a life!

Except I hated it.

Transcript

Sportswriter…dream job or nightmare? 

Writing about sports sounds like a dream job to lots of folks. Imagine...going to sports games for free, sitting in the press box, access to the locker room, interviewing players and coaches and fans. Watching games, then writing about it. And getting paid, although not much, to tell the stories. What a life!

Except I hated it.

I played sports in grade school and high school. Not well, but I played. Little League, then football and track. Slow, short and poor eyesight, but when you go to a four-hundred student high school, if you try out, you make the team. 

So, I played a couple of sports, but I was never a fanatic about it. I just played because the other guys did. My real love was reading. Reading and camping. 

Although I loved reading and I read newspapers, books and magazines as a kid, I never read the sports pages. I didn’t read Sports Illustrated or The Sporting News. I just didn’t care that much about the world of organized sports. Sandlot baseball or backyard touch football, yeah, but once adults got involved it lost all interest for me. To this day I seldom watch ESPN unless wife Annette insists on watching her beloved St. Louis Cardinals.

I’d pay attention to the World Series, but nothing earlier in the baseball season. Since I was a kid in the 1950’s, the Yankees, the hated New York Yankees, were always in the series. I rooted for anybody but the Yankees. I didn’t have a favorite team as a kid. I just didn’t want to see the damn Yankees win again.

Guys and gals who are sportswriters love sports. Sports of all kinds. It’s a prerequisite for the job. Why would you write about something you don’t care about?

My short-lived sports-writing career came about, like most of my career choices, almost by accident. Graduating from journalism school from Southern Illinois University’s Edwardsville campus in the midst of a recession, I needed a job. I worked an internship at the St. Louis suburban daily, the Belleville, Illinois, News-Democrat, my last quarter of college. The BND was the largest daily newspaper in the southern third of Illinois.

It was a wonderful time to work for newspapers. Bernstein and Woodward through their investigative journalism brought down the Nixon administration with their reporting on the Watergate scandal. As a veteran, I was a bit older than most of my fellow j-school grads, but we all wanted to be the next Pulitzer prize winning investigative reporter. That is all of us except the few odd ducks who wanted to be sportswriters. 

Those folks, mostly guys, lived, breathed, ate and slept sports. For a brief time, I had a roommate who was a sportswriter. A skinny little guy with a congenital heart condition, he cared only about sports and rock and roll bands. He never had a girlfriend, at least as far as I know, and he could never make up his mind what to order to eat, even at a Steak and Shake he would change his order a half dozen times. 

When I first met roommate Joe, I was a copy editor for the university daily student paper, The Daily Alestle. Joe was a first-year J student and budding sportswriter. He would accompany the baseball team on week-long spring tours of southern schools. He wrote incomprehensible stories. They were so bad I couldn’t copy edit them. I simply corrected any misspellings and sent them to press as written.

Joe persevered. He kept writing and kept writing. Three years later, by the time he’d graduated and became my roommate, he was a terrific teller of tales. He was still skinny, still had a heart condition and still had no girlfriend, but he’d become a weaver of words who could transmit his love of the game.

Unlike Joe, I didn’t seek a job as a sportswriter. After my summer internship, the BND needed a temporary reporter to fill in vacation gaps. I grabbed the job while I looked for a permanent position. By the end of August, with my temporary position coming to an end, I’d received an offer to join the PR department of a local St. Louis university, that offer came after I’d turned down a commission-based job selling tickets for The Repertory Theater.

I wasn’t excited to write PR, but it was a job. That last Friday before Labor Day I told the editor I would be starting my new position the following Tuesday. An hour or so later the editor came to me and offered me a job in the sports department. The pay was about the same and it was at least working for a newspaper, not as a PR flack.

I called my would-be university employer and quit before I started to take the offered sportswriting position. I’d never written a sports story in my life, but hey, it’s writing, how tough can it be?

Luckily, since I’d played football in high school, I knew the game. I knew the rules and could write a plausible story. 

The BND at that time, like many newspapers, was an afternoon paper, meaning it went to press about 11 am and hit the newsstands by three pm. Because the paper was printed in sections, the sports section had to be done even earlier. Our deadline was 8 am. 

To make our deadline the sports staff started at six am. Big change for a recent college graduate! Further disturbing my sleep pattern was the fact that many sports events take place at night. A Cardinals baseball game might end at 10 pm, then you’d have to write the story, get home at midnight or 1 am, then up at five am to get to the office by 6 am.

Terrible hours but if you love sports you put up with it. I didn’t love sports. Worse yet basketball season was soon upon us. I’d never played basketball. While I knew what a wide-right sweep was or what a football pulling guard did, I didn’t have a clue as to what a pick was or where a forward’s position was.

The jovial sports editor, Don Frost, or Frostie, as he was known to all, took me to one of the very last St. Louis Spirits, of the old American Basketball Association, games at the old St. Louis Arena, to break me in to writing about basketball. With nine hundred fans in the audience even I could see it was a dying franchise. Of the nine hundred attendees, I likely had the least idea of what was going on in the game. 

I attempted to write a side bar to Frostie’s top-of-the-fold, breath-taking play by play of the game, but failed miserably. It was clear to him and to me that I could write a convincing football story, but there was no way I could fake my way through basketball season.

My newspaper career appeared to be doomed. Doomed that is until the government reporter, which is the job I wanted, asked to be moved back to the sports department. The government reporter desperately wanted to write about sports, he’d been a stringer for the sports department all through his Belleville West high school days and had written sports while attending the University of Missouri journalism school. Mizzou J-school was, and likely still is, considered the Harvard of journalism schools.

The BND editors, in their infinite wisdom, had decided that anyone who went to Mizzou J-school should be a government reporter, not a sportswriter. To do otherwise would be making a pigskin writer out of a silk purse, I guess.

At any rate, Frostie wanted a writer who could write about all sports, the government reporter wanted to write about sports and I wanted to write about government, the editors realized they’d been trying to put round pegs in square holes and allowed the swap.

The former government reporter went on to spend fifty years at the paper as an award-winning sportswriter and editor. As for me, I lasted less than a year as a government and police-beat reporter before leaving for the greener pastures of law school.

(c) William L. Enyart, 2021

www.billenyart.com
Email: bill@billenyart.com