This Month
A PSYCHIATRIST with a taste for cost accounting ought to make a study some day of the mysterious power which sports writers exert over newspaper publishers. It would be a rich haul. Sports writers, by and large, are not only what is the matter with the press; they are very nearly what is the matter with the United States. Yet the newspaper publisher maintains them fondly, content if he gets a World’s Series box or midfield football seats or a clubhouse pass at the dog track for his share of the arrangement.
That huge revenues are thereby eluding his usually able grasp doesn’t seem to enter the publisher’s head. He has a keen understanding of how his paper shall deal commercially with such a commercial undertaking as a department store; but his wits forsake him when it comes to dealing with equally commercial undertakings like college football, horse and dog racing, baseball, boxing and wrestling, and the sundry gambling industries residing in these sports. His sports editor has charge of these dealings. The publisher merely provides the sports editor with all facilities for endowing these other commercialists with the maximum of publicity, presumably without charge. What is this singular hold of the sports writer over the publisher? Could it be the fascination of what he writes, the intrinsic content? Well, what does he write — or rather, what can he write?
Personalities? The personality of a major league ballplayer, for instance, will yield a rather limited amount of material: in the summer he plays ball; in the fall he makes a short barnstorming tour, followed by a hunting trip; in the winter he peddles insurance, or runs a filling station, or farms, according to his presentability off the diamond, lie may prefer Horseshoe to Mechanic’s Scrap as chewing tobacco. When he gets too old to play ball, he becomes a coach or an umpire or settles down on the farm for aye.
College football players are even less complex. No one, not even the sports writer, cares what they do in the off season, when, it is believed, most of them leave college and go back to the ice route, the steel mill, or the mine.
The personal qualities of many racing people would bear no retailing whatever, and there is not a great deal that could be put through the mails about the private lives of wrestlers and fighters.
Sports personalities being what they are, the sports writer must fall back on the exhibitions themselves to fill his columns. But here again are matters which a racing chart, box score, or statistics of the game can summarize crisply. “Weather clear, track fast” manages to say the same thing that the byline writer distends into a couple of sticks about Old Sol’s victory over J. Pluvius.
It can hardly be the writing style of the sports page that hypnotizes the publisher. Any writer who avoids plain English verbs like win, lose, hit, miss, run, catch, and throw can be a sports writer on learning the handful of tired synonyms devised by the craft.
The word-of-all-work just now is “roar.” A golfer roared to victory, a horse roared to a new track record, a basketball quintet roared from behind to take the lead, a pitcher roared through seven hitless innings, ball carriers roared at will through great gaps in State’s line — roared around the ends, too.
The net of the sports section is thus an unceasingly windy overstatement of big-money “sports” events, with most of the space given over to advance publicity. The chief beneficiaries are of course the promoters.
It would be interesting to compare the space which metropolitan papers accord college wrestling, one of the few surviving sports carried on by unpaid athletes, with what the professional plug-uglies get for their pretended contests. But college wrestling excludes foul tactics, while every sports editor has educated his readers to expect something more “colorful” than sissies who obey the rules of the game. Umpirebaiters, willing to rough it up, are a box-office asset to any baseball team; if one of them is suflieiently nasty to be a minor spectacle in his own right, the sports editor will dub him ihe “spark plug” of the team.
The publisher may have a theory of “reader interest” in allowing his sports page to give away newspaper space so generously. Yet Burdock’s department store deals with more people than baseball does. The dealings involve just as much money as baseball takes in. Burdock’s upperincome executives earn just as much money as upper-income ballplayers. The tantrums of Miss Doppelgänger, director of Burdock’s Paris Shoppe, would make as sprightly copy as anything thought up by even the sulkiest left-hander. And for ferocious competition, what could exceed Burdock’s perpetual death struggle with Hayshaker’s, farther on down the street? Who actually did win the hig one-eent sale of mink capes? What was the final score?
Yet Burdock’s goes along, meanwhile, paying the publisher in hard cash for display space. By bullying the paper’s advertising department into needling the city editor, it may get a stray plug into print at long intervals; “ Burdock Floorwalker Gets 50-Year Button,” “500 Burdock Employees at Annual Outing,” or “Burdock Opens Branch in Nirvana Heights.” This is flabby fare indeed. If Burdock were bright, he’d hold one last big closing-out sale and start a dog track. If the publisher were equally bright, he would cut the paper in on a percentage of the take.