Best Sportswriters

During the glory days of 90 Minutes, there were some great ones around. Gavin Newsham springs to mind, as does Eleanor Levi.

Hmmm... can't think of any more at the moment. I'll come back later.

When Mitch Albom actually sticks to sports without writing at a first- grade level, he can be pretty great.

Geez, there must have been several that I idolized in my youth, but I can't think of any right now.

The only reporter that I noticed back in The Day was Michael Arace, a Hartford Courant writer assigned to the Hartford Whalers (and the occasional UConn basketball game). He left eons ago for some bigger market. I have no idea where he's at nowadays. Arace was the best WRITER I ever read in the Courant sports section, that's for damn sure.

Currently, I get my sports jones from folks like Chri s Kahrl and Dere k Zumsteg, among others. Rob Neyer is solid. And the little I've read from Bill James is excellent. If there are other sports journalists & writers cover besides baseball, I wouldn't know.

Oh, and the Boston Sports Guy is good for a few laughs (when he's talking about basketball or Boston sports lore or gabbing about things tangentially related to the actual sport) (and he avoids his schtick).

The wrestling guy? Does he do anything else? I like Bill Simmons and Leonard Koppet and Bill James and Ralph Wiley. Most sportswriting is about as bad as it gets though.

Two other great ones (though more regional) -- Jerry Izenberg (Newark Star Ledger) and Bill Conlin (Philadelphia Daily News).

Runners-up: Graeme Jones (LA Times), Paul Gardener (Soccer America), Frank della Apa (Boston Globe).

Total drips: the two smug morons at Salon, Kaufman and Barra, and the revered idiot Deford, whose daily paper went belly-up when he refused to cover anything but baseball. All three are of the "we don't understand it, therefore it sucks" school of soccer-bashing, and all three are "general" sports columnists, a job title given only to the biggest assholes around.

Does Jim Rome deserve a thread?

In a dramatic twist of fate, The Pulveriser took the World Ludicrous Weight Title off Kurt 'You're gonna hurt' Schlesnickerz.

Federation owner Charles Schmarmy said 'Focus group feedback said the Pulveriser is our biggest brand, and we need to up his on-screen time. We've also got a great feud lined up with the Destructo Brothers next month on PPV.'

The bout - screened next week - will most likely see the Pulveriser out for the count, but the win will be failed to be registered as the referee will be knocked out in a collision with the Pulveriser. However, he will take all the power from the little Pulverisors in the crowd and use a not very well hidden chair to knock out Schlesnickerz with a cheap chot from behind. A writers conference will finalise the details next Monday.

I think that the overlap between PR and reporting in sports writing is not a more honest version of what others do, but a venal stitch-up by people who are a disgrace to their profession. The cosy relationship between most UK Football writers and the clubs, managers and agents prevents any serious analysis by all but the few. The clubs ban reporters who they dislike, so the pressure is on the reporter to stay on the right side of the club, which is a recipe for bad reporting.

David Conn in The Independent is a credit to the job - he is a genuine investigative reporter who doesn't cover the sound and fury of the on-the-pitch events, but the backroom stuff, about power in sport and sports politics. He covers stories no-one else is bothered with, apart from the supporters who care about the issues.

David Lacey's heart is in the right place, and Richard Williams does OK for a guy with a background in Formula One, possibly the pointless exercise known to man. As for match reports and the like, Daniel Taylor writes some great stuff, IMO.

Hugh McIlveney likes his booze (he nicked a bottle of wine of me once, the git) and Brian Glanville looks like a tramp and needs to shave more. Though he is right about getting rid of continental based qualification for the World Cup.

There was a nice piece in Slate regarding the thinning of talent due to ESPN corralling sportswriters into radio and TV gigs. ihttp://slate.com/id/2112657/

p terrific profile of Dick Schaap, whose writing and TV work i was a fan of from the '70s til his death in 2001. I saw him at a production of Hamlet at the Public Theatre in the '80s -- he was also a drama critic.

At the Herald-Tribune, Schaap was a city editor and later a columnist. During his time as editor, young writers Tom Wolfe and Terry Smith, son of legendary sportswriter Red Smith, were on his staff. Schaap oversaw a series entitled City in Crisis. As detailed in The Paper, Richard Kluger’s massive history on the rise and fall of the Herald-Tribune, Schaap wrote the first sentence in the feature: “New York is the greatest city in the world—and everything is wrong with it.”

At the paper, Schaap was at the forefront of civil rights coverage. In the summer of 1964, he traveled to Philadelphia, Mississippi to report on two law enforcement officers, Sheriff Lawrence Rainey and Deputy Cecil Price, who were suspected of murdering civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman. Schaap went to the only restaurant in town, saw the officers dining, joined their table, and watched a “stream of good ol’ boys” approach them with jokes about the deaths. “In Mississippi,” Schaap wrote in his piece. “Murder is a laughing matter.”

The next year, Schaap was out in Los Angeles following the Mets on a road trip, “for a change of pace and a few laughs.” He would not accompany the team to their next stop in Houston, because while he was in LA the Watts Riots erupted. He stayed there and covered them for a week. “It did not strike me as at all strange that one day I was asking people about fastballs and curves and the next about looting and shooting,” he wrote in his autobiography.

http://thebiglead.com/2017/05/03/dick-schaap-did-so-much-work/