Sports' Beastly Coverage

Respectable people learn at an early age not to make generalizations. One size never fits all. Still, it is possible after reading daily sports beat coverage to paint with a wide brush and cover a large swath of those reporters and broadcasters who abuse the English language and offend their readers’ and listeners’ sensibilities. To read and to listen to sports beat coverage today is to swear off reading and listening to sports beat coverage tomorrow. 

Sportswriters are not alone is using the ghastly “going forward.” Whenever I read that (and in today's journalism that phrase and worse appear all too frequently in the work of hack writers) I wish I could go in reverse and immediately unread it. The belief by jargon aficionados that the use of gibberish somehow confers upon them expert or insider status instead marks them as fools. 

The trouble with bad writers is that they never read good writers. If they did, they would understand that “impact,” “medal,” “task,” and “gift” are nouns, that “myriad” is an adjective, that “disinterested” does not mean “not interested,” “presently” does not mean “now,” “fortuitous” does not mean “fortunate,” and “enormity” is not synonymous with “enormous.” And unless a reporter is covering a hurricane, I never want to read that he or she was “blown away” by something.



You want specifics? A Yankees beat reporter, during his July 4 pre-game notes, included this pleonasm: “Enjoy the holiday...with whomever you're celebrating with.” During the July 11 Fox telecast from Fenway Park of the Boston/New York game, analyst Harold Reynolds called something “very unique.” Who knew there were degrees of uniqueness! Fellow analyst Tom Verducci, normally given to clear thinking and plain speaking, got uncharacteristically caught up in sports jargon when he declared that one pitcher's “spin rate” was “off the charts.” 

Within baseball clichés, “off the charts” has replaced “taken to another level” as the ne plus ultra of praise: so superior it cannot even be measured. In less inspirational moments sportswriters like to use “incredibly” as a synonym for “very.” As in, “He is incredibly talented,” or “It was an incredibly difficult at-bat.” As Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd wrote in their book Good Prose,  “ 'Incredible' and 'incredibly'...like Chernobyl, should be out of service for years to come.” 

More abuses? In New York alone, during one night’s YES broadcast, analyst David Cone said, “And we mentioned that, too, as well.” He did omit “also,” thereby avoiding a triple-double redundancy. Another night, Cone coined a new verb: “efforting.”  (Radio play-by-play man John Sterling used the nonsensical “intrical.” Sterling's radio partner, the inimitable Suzyn Waldman, is given to treacly pronouncements: “Nunez was greeted [in the dugout] by a gauntlet of warmth”; “He tries so hard because he cares so much.”) Cone's TV partner, Michael Kay, during the same night's broadcast, referred to one player’s “tricep.” Sideline “reporter” Meredith Marakovits frequently begins her post-game player interviews with some variation of “How big/How excited/How important was this game/win/loss/hit?” One night, she asked two players the same inane “How satisfying...?” 

“Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed; everything else is public relations,” wrote the peerless journalist George Orwell. Having spent nearly 35 years in journalism, I have been out of the profession since about 2010. One change I have noticed from reading sports coverage is that the beat reporters now seem to be an extension of their teams'  P.R. departments. How else to account for the reporters' devotion and allegiance to the teams and players they purportedly cover?

I have heard in Yankees postgame press conferences these questions to A-Rod: “How dialed in are you?” “How locked in are you feeling?” “How impressed are you with the bullpen?” “How satisfying is it?” and “How happy are you?” and this question to Joe Girardi: “Joe, does first place mean anything in April?” There have also been these questions to Yankees players: “How comfortable at the plate are you feeling?” “How nice is that?” “How concerned are you?” “Is there any part of you that's concerned?” “How frustrating is it?” Well, Bryce Harper cannot be everywhere to respond, “That's a clown question, bro.”

After American Pharoah completed his Triple Crown conquest, a sideline reporter raced onto the Belmont track and breathlessly asked the horse, “How proud are you?” No, that didn't happen, but it doesn't seem that far removed from reality. I am reminded of Longshanks in the film Braveheart whenever I hear a sideline reporter: “Who is this person who speaks to me as though I need his advice?” Right after that he threw the would-be adviser out the window.

I am embarrassed for real reporters when I hear the sycophantic idiocies—from those with media credentials, no less—during postgame press conferences. Sometimes they don’t even ask a question, lazily telling an interview subject “Talk about...” When unimaginative reporters approached the Seattle Seahawks' Marshawn Lynch with inane questions, they got the response they deserved: “Thanks for axing.” 

There is enough absurd and surreal material in sports beat coverage for Christopher Guest's next mockumentary.