Rumblin’ Bumblin’ Stumblin’ — On the Evolution of Sports Journalism and the Changing Role of Sports in Modern Life

Hunter S. Thompson once reasoned that sports departments “are almost always the lowest-paid people on Newspaper staffs: They are charter members of the Too-Much Fun Club, and they like it that way.” The profession is widely derided as the “toy department” of the newsroom, in part because of its seemingly unserious hours. “After I first learned that it was possible to sleep late and go to work at two in the afternoon, and still get paid for it, I never did anything else,” Thompson wrote. 

During my college years in the early 2000s, I dreamed of getting a taste of that life. I’d walk to my dormitory entrance every morning to find a replenished stack of Boston Globe papers; on Friday, it was accompanied by the student newspaper, The Springfield Student. I’d scan The Student to check on the placement of whatever story I’d written that week before ripping through the Globe, staining my fingers black with ink as I flipped to the sports section. The Student was my present, and I hoped the Globe would be my future.

I got my first internship on a sports desk at the Daily Hampshire Gazette in Northampton, Massachusetts, and soon discovered that Thompson’s words proved prescient. I recall idling in as the daytime reporters were about to clock out, though we made up for it by working weekends; on Sundays, a projector showed NFL games on one wall in the office. In between assignments, our department spent time discussing fantasy sports teams and engaging in heated debates about the Yankees and the Red Sox or whatever school topped the college basketball team rankings. We left late, but before the bars closed, so we’d grab a beer or two after our shift. It hardly felt like work.

But as I learned during my ensuing time writing sports coverage—whether it was covering high school sports for the Village News in Fallbrook, California; stringing together stories for the Eagle-Tribune in North Andover, Massachusetts; or submitting pieces to Vice Sports—the practice is more than staying up late watching people hit, catch, or shoot a ball. Like all journalism, it’s about telling stories that reveal salient facets of contemporary culture. The people who seem like they’re just playing a game are captured in time and space, their moments of victory or loss resonating well beyond their individual experience.

Sports journalism wasn’t always this way—so immediate, so impactful. From its beginnings in the 19th century, when it was about the rote summation of events, the profession has progressed and expanded under a diversifying cohort of writers, commentators, and TV personalities, occupying new platforms and an ever greater part of our collective experience. If sports media began as a way to report the Xs and Os, it moved on to explain them. It traversed the run from print newspapers to television to the internet. Games became a lens through which to examine politics, sociology, economics, and civil rights. 

As sports journalism has welcomed new voices, its style has also changed, and for the better. In parallel, sports have advanced from a niche part of society to something more, straddling the line between sheer entertainment and shared ritual. As fans, we yearn for our stars to occupy a higher stratosphere, one of inhuman grace and strength. Then we wish for our sports writers to make them appear more like us. 

STORYTELLING AND SOLIDARITY

Aristotle may have written about the value of athleticism millennia ago, but sports writing in the United States really only began in the early 19th century, focused on the popular pursuits of the day: horse racing and boxing. Between the early 1880s and the 1920s, coverage—then consisting of play-by-plays and game recaps—slowly increased from just 0.4% of the average newspaper’s content to 20%, as Arthur Schlesinger claims in his book, “The Rise of the City 1878-1898: A History of American Life.” Interest in sports journalism grew alongside the popularization of baseball and college football. As professional football took shape in the early 20th century—and as the National Basketball Association debuted in 1946—so sports writing underwent an ascent in tandem.

It was during this time that sports journalism became “an indispensable section of the daily newspaper,” according to Robert McChesney’s 1989 book, “Media, Sports, and Society.” The beat matured, and best practices were established: Reporters attended games, took notes, and told stories of what they witnessed. Stadiums designated “press boxes” for use by newspaper writers and newspaper budgets, bolstered by advertising dollars and penny presses. Sports writers began to travel and stay with (and often imbibe alongside) their subjects.

As for the players, they got chummy with the writers because players needed writers: They were the intermediaries to the fans who picked up the daily paper the next morning. Reporters did more than just catalog wins, losses, and statistics; their recaps brought games back to life for those who couldn’t watch or listen to their favorite teams play live.

Nowhere was this more evident in early sports writing than in Grantland Rice’s almost mythological coverage of the University of Notre Dame football team. “Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again,” began the prose that appeared in the New York Herald Tribune in 1924, and which helped catapult the Fighting Irish to the national stage. These players—backfield members Harry Stuhldreher, Don Miller, Jim Crowley, and Elmer Layden—were described in larger-than-life terms. In what the New York Times later called “The Sports Story that Changed America,” Rice wrote:

“A cyclone can’t be snared. It may be surrounded, but somewhere it breaks through to keep on going. When the cyclone starts from South Bend, where the candle lights still gleam through the Indiana sycamores, those in the way must take to storm cellars at top speed. Yesterday the cyclone struck again as Notre Dame beat the Army, 13 to 7, with a set of backfield stars that ripped and crashed through a strong Army defense with more speed and power than the warring cadets could meet.”

Whereas modern-day coverage—on television, the internet, and on social media—makes players more accessible, more human-sized, this era sold newspaper copies based on reporters’ rare access to these supposed super-humans, access which wasn’t yet available to average fans. The idea that the late Frank Deford, a longtime sports writer, and his contemporaries could ride a train with Mickey Mantle and the New York Yankees may seem foreign to anyone sitting in an Intro to Journalism class now, where keeping a distinct separation between reporter and subject feels essential to maintaining objectivity. It was on those trips that Deford was witness to not-so-wholesome extracurriculars, like the infamous 1957 Copacabana brawl that injured a New York deli owner and which may (or may not) have included some Yankees players. Then there were the alleged affairs. 

That proximity came in other forms. Take the relationship between Howard Cosell and Muhammad Ali: The broadcaster and the boxer struck up a kinship during the prime of Ali’s career in the 1960s, despite their numerous differences. Cosell was a Jewish kid from Brooklyn born in 1918, and Ali a Black boxer from Louisville born in 1942, but their connection was forged nonetheless. Cosell was among the first to recognize Ali by his chosen name, rather than his given name of Cassius Clay. He was also a great supporter of Ali’s refusal to enter military service, and of the protest posed by Tommie Smith and John Carlos after they raised their fists in the Black Power salute at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics.

Even if these kinds of athlete-journalist relationships feel less common today, that need for solidarity hasn’t changed. As every cry of “stick to sports” in response to athletes and reporters commenting on social issues shows, sports arenas remain arenas for the ongoing struggle for social progress.

RUNNING TO THE MAILBOX

These days, a trip to the mailbox consists mostly of collecting bills and circulars for deals on oil changes. But in my pre-teens and through my 20s, a trek every Thursday meant one thing: The new issue of Sports Illustrated had arrived. Born in 1954 as the brainchild of Time Magazine’s founder Henry Luce, Sports Illustrated remains unparalleled in the history of sports journalism. 

The magazine’s success followed the mid 20th century’s boom of spectator sports, according to the 1998 book “The Franchise: A History of Sports Illustrated Magazine” by Michael MacCambridge. Its use of full-color photographs, lengthy “bonus” features, and the 1964 introduction of the annual Swimsuit Issue ensured its enduring success. So did its editorial desk, which was stacked with talent including Deford, Rick Reilly, Gary Smith, and Leigh Montville. Sports Illustrated became the first sports publication to win National Magazine Awards in General Excellence twice. It was, according to former managing editor Bill Colson, “the best-written magazine in America that’s not the New Yorker.” 

I received my first subscription to the magazine for my 10th birthday. Muhammad Ali, who shared my birthday, was on the cover with a cake, celebrating turning 50 years old. Over the years, I tucked away special or historic issues in my desk drawer: The O.J. Simpson verdict; Mickey Mantle’s death; the New England Patriots’ first Super Bowl title.

“We were conditioned [at Sports Illustrated] to look for a funky T-shirt. We looked for a scar, a tattoo, a sign in the locker, a Biblical quote, a hip-hop quote. All those little things that tell a story better than him leading the league in RBI [runs batted in] or HR [home runs]. It’s the same whether it is politics or music. [For me] sports was just the medium.”

Ours was just one among the millions of households that Sports Illustrated reached. In the mid-aughts, the media property’s multiple verticals—Sports Illustrated Kids, Sports Illustrated Women, and Sports Illustrated Almanac—had a circulation of 3.2 million readers. But with the decline of print media, the magazine experienced a slow slide. By the time Sports Illustrated was acquired by Meredith Corp. in 2018, alongside numerous other titles, those numbers had shrunk to 2.75 million. As of 2020, the most recent year with information available, Sports Illustated’s circulation numbers were down to 1.6 million—but according to some commenters, the brand is “on fire” once more.

Jeff Pearlman wrote for Sports Illustrated from 1996-2003, and says the magazine succeeded because storytelling around sports can pull from all kinds of people with all kinds of life experiences. “Sports is such a diverse landscape,” he says, noting his belief that, because a locker room could be full of players from the Dominican Republic, rural Iowa, Japan, or inner-city Baltimore, it’s the most diverse work environment of any profession. “Sports throws everyone into one room.”

Pearlman, who’s published 10 New York Times Best Sellers about sports, also opines that athletics—and coverage of people, teams, and leagues—stands out as a unique space of distraction. Plopping down with a game or a long magazine feature can whisk a person away from their daily duties, however temporarily. “The thing about sports that is cool is that it serves as a release,” he says. “If your day sucked, you’re worried about finances or politics, you can turn on a ball game. That is the beautiful thing of it all.”   

The magazine’s most significant impact may well have been legitimizing sports as a vehicle for serious journalism. Poet Robert Frost and author William Faulker were among the literary giants whose bylines appeared in the pages of Sports Illustrated: In 1955, Faulker reported on a hockey game between the Montreal Canadiens and New York Rangers at Madison Square Garden, while Frost covered the 1956 Major League Baseball All-Star Game. Sports was a niche industry newly lionized.

This transformation often manifested in long-form profiles. Sports fans, both hardcore and casual, didn’t need Sports Illustrated to tell them the stats and scores. “The whole beauty of SI was you were looking for what made someone tick,” says Pearlman, reflecting on how storytelling at the magazine differed from newspapers and other specialist publications. “We were conditioned [at Sports Illustrated] to look for a funky T-shirt. We looked for a scar, a tattoo, a sign in the locker, a Biblical quote, a hip-hop quote. All those little things that tell a story better than him leading the league in RBI [runs batted in] or HR [home runs]. It’s the same whether it is politics or music. [For me] sports was just the medium.”

Sports Illustrated helped highlight sports writing as a viable career path. Aspiring writers took note, as did higher education. Both understood the discipline as a way to tell impactful stories that mattered as much as any other form of journalism. And it started for many upstart journalists—myself once included—with those formative trips to the mailbox.

‘THERE’S NOT MANY PEOPLE WHO LOOK LIKE ME’

As Pearlman notes, professional sports can be truly diverse. In 2020, OnLabor reported that 83% of the members of the Women’s National Basketball Players Association were people of color. In 2021, 73.2% of NBA players were Black. Many other sports—including baseball, football, and soccer—have similar demographic breakdowns.

But for all that the athletes themselves may represent a broader swath of society, that diversity typically does not extend to coaches or to industry leadership. Similarly, sports writing has historically been dominated by white men—to its detriment.

For Kris Rhim, currently in the midst of a one-year reporting fellowship at the New York Times, that change isn’t just important for reasons of equity and inclusion—it means better storytelling. “Certain coverage of sports is shaped by shared, lived experiences,” he says. “[The Black experience] shapes how you perceive [sports] and how you cover them. [Being a Black journalist] gives you a leg up in your comfortability with players. Covering the WNBA Finals, there were definitely instances of, ‘He knows what I’m talking about.’ I was able to build a bond with some players quickly because of who I am.”

Women first gained access to locker rooms in the late 1970s, when Robin Herman, from the New York Times, and Marcelle St-Cyr, a Montreal radio reporter, covered the 1975 NHL All-Star Game in Montreal. In their wake have come new generations of reporters and writers who have continued to expand the scope and quality of the field. When I was growing up, I remember admiring journalists like Jackie MacMullen, Sally Jenkins, Stuart Scott, and John Saunders, all of whom had broken down barriers to get where they had.

“Certain coverage of sports is shaped by shared, lived experiences. [The Black experience] shapes how you perceive [sports] and how you cover them. [Being a Black journalist] gives you a leg up in your comfortability with players. Covering the WNBA Finals, there were definitely instances of, ‘He knows what I’m talking about.’ I was able to build a bond with some players quickly because of who I am.”

But despite the many journalists paving the way for more equitable coverage—and for a more representative industry—there’s still a long way to go. A Pew Research study from 2022 reported that newsroom employees were less diverse than the overall workforce, and made up predominantly of white men. For its part, the sports desk remains “overwhelmingly white and male.” Rhim says his experiences in journalism reaffirmed the expectations the Pew study set. “It is isolating,” he says. “I did a bunch of Red Sox stuff with the Boston Globe and it was a lot of white dudes covering a team. Maybe two women. No Black women.”

In fact, there’s just one Black woman working as a team’s beat reporter for all of Major League Baseball’s 30 teams. “It’s not really something you notice every day,” says Kennedi Landry, who covers the Texas Rangers for MLB.com. “But when you’re around all the national people at places like the All-Star Game, you look around and it’s like, ‘Oh wow, there’s not many people who look like me.’ It’s one thing that hits you from time to time. It’s crazy.” 

As sports editor for The Daily Reveille during her sophomore year at Louisiana State University, Landry made an effort to diversify a staff that featured just two women and two people of color. “The lack of diversity was something I noticed for sure,” she says. “I went to Catholic school, so I was used to being the only Black person in a room. I was also used to being surrounded by girls. The absence of those things I noticed immediately. Sports are so male-dominated, so I went out of my way to interview more diverse applicants.”

“When you’re a marginalized person in general, Black or a person of color, you’ll be one of few generally in media,” says Rhim. “Places like the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) and local chapters helped me. You feel like you’re doing it alone, ‘Am I going crazy,’ you can lean on these groups.

Founded in 1975, the NABJ is a nonprofit organization aimed at advocacy for Black journalists and offers resources, connections, and opportunities. According to Kanya Stewart, who is the director of communications at the NABJ, it’s difficult to track the number of members who have roles in sports media, but there is “a sports task force with hundreds of members within our org[anization], but of course that would not account for the entire listing of sports journalists that are Black or African American in the industry.”

“[The NABJ] helps build connections,” Rhim says. “Journalism, like any other profession, is about the people you know. The organization gave me the opportunity to learn from people who are in positions I wanted to be in. It’s helped get Black journalists into spaces they haven’t been in before.”  

‘THIS IS SPORTSCENTER’

After its initial launch in September 1979, ESPN became the first all-sports, all-the-time network. Its first-ever program was “SportsCenter,” a daily television show that became sports fans’ go-to cultural hub. It wasn’t just the scope of its coverage that made the show popular—it was its levity, too.

In 1998—when ESPN broadcasted the 20,000th episode of “SportsCenter”—the show earned its highest ratings ever. Commercial spots were made to promote it, featuring humorous interactions between the anchors and visiting athletes in the station’s Bristol, Connecticut headquarters. Keith Olbermann and Dan Patrick became stars, earning raves for turning “SportsCenter” into “The Big Show” and revolutionizing sports broadcasting by prioritizing the magnitude of the event rather than just showing highlights by league or giving a local slant. Anchors like Kenny Mayne, Rich Eisen, and Stuart Scott flipped the script on self-serious coverage with jokes and catchphrases that became pop cultural fixtures.

Well-written, serious journalism on non-serious topics like the World Series or the NBA Finals had its place. But so, too, did having fun. And maybe that was the point. Maybe sports journalism had become too serious. After all, weren’t sports one of life’s simple pleasures?

Soon, ESPN extended the playful feel of SportsCenter to Page 2, a subsection of its website launched in 2000 as a counter to traditional sports journalism. It was here where Hunter S. Thompson logged on to ramble about sports in his Gonzo fashion, using fast-paced prose and first-person accounts. The writing was informal, almost conversational.

Shortly after, ESPN brought on a young writer with a different, but similarly inimitable, style named Bill Simmons. He redefined the beat by injecting inside jokes and pop culture references in his prose, writing in a way that mimicked how so many talked about sports with their friends. Access became less important than readability. The tone became more conversational, more akin to having a couple beers at the bar and arguing over the best left-handed hitter in baseball, or which NBA player has the most trade value.

Eventually, Simmons expanded his scope. Two of his projects—Grantland, which was backed by ESPN, and The Ringer, which sold for $250 million to Spotify in 2020—covered the trivial and the serious with equal measure. Contributors included the likes of Chuck Klosterman and Shea Serrano, both of whom covered the intersection of sports and culture in a way that mingled serious reporting with the lighthearted. 

The formula was a clear winner. But just how far towards entertainment can you go before you start devaluing the reporting? 

THE BARSTOOL EFFECT

You can’t discuss the idea of an entertainment company masquerading as sports media without talking about Barstool Sports. 

The company—founded in Milton, Massachusetts in 2003, and which is now headquartered in New York City—has built an incredibly lucrative brand in blurring those lines (its 2022 valuation was for $450 million). It is a podcast giant (five of the top-50 sports podcasts belong to Barstool). It also hosts Barstool Sportsbook, and sponsors a college football bowl game, the Arizona Bowl (which featured the University of Ohio and the University of Wyoming in 2022).  

Its strategy, particularly in social media spaces, has been stoking division, jostling for eyeballs and outrage by unapologetically baiting readers with sexism, racism, politics, and other controversial social issues. The company has been able to successfully monetize the devaluation of sports media as entertainment, into something different, and often more crass. 

For its followers, Barstool is a place to get a couple cheap laughs from a writer’s despair over their team’s shortcomings, to watch fans rushing onto the field, or view videos of drunken tailgate antics. Its Pardon My Take podcast furthers that tongue-in-cheek coverage, and has featured guests like announcer Joe Buck, journalist Adam Schefter, Mark Wahlberg, and Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen.

[Editor’s note: The following paragraphs includes descriptions of racial and sexual abuse.]

But for all the ways that Barstool Sports reflects how the internet has forever altered the tenor and content of sports coverage, its more pernicious legacy has been in reinforcing sports journalism’s long-standing biases and barriers. Its founder, David Portnoy, has a history of making racist and sexist statements, including using racial slurs and comparing football player and civil rights activist Colin Kaepernick to Osama bin Laden. 

As Barstool Sports grew, it came to be considered “a bible of bro culture” by supporters and a “haven of toxicity and misogyny” by detractors—one where the negative treatment of workers, particularly women, was considered fair-game, and where workers who attempted to unionize were illegally threatened. In 2021 and 2022, Business Insider published two investigative stories quoting multiple women who alleged that Portnoy had subjected them to sexual harassment and violent sexual encounters, including filming them during sex without their consent; he is accused of breaking one woman’s rib. Portnoy’s lawsuit against the publication was dismissed in November 2022, and his follow-up appeal was dropped at the beginning of this month.

If the success of Barstool Sports is indicative of anything, it is that there is a seemingly bottomless appetite for sports entertainment, for the memeification of sports journalism. But for all the industry’s attempts to promote diversity, that success is still entwined with its oldest attitudes and bigotries.

THE REVOLUTION WILL BE DIGITIZED

The internet has given us sprawling listicles and click-through photo galleries, but in the best cases, its unbounded space yields unbounded stories. It yields specialist publications that pursue sports stories that matter, that go long, that aren’t hemmed in by column inches. It’s a place for deep profiles, investigative reporting, stories that put the people—not the stats—at their heart. In 2015, ESPN’s Kate Fagen published more than 10,000 words (and eventually wrote a book) on University of Pennsylvania runner Madison Holleran’s death by suicide. In 2022, Tom Junod and Paula Levigne teamed up to write an excruciating, extraordinary 32,000-word story on Todd Hodne, a violent criminal who haunted State College, Pennsylvania. 

But in addition to the scope of stories it allows, digital media has also fundamentally changed the way athletes communicate with fans. Former New York Yankees and Hall of Fame shortstop Derek Jeter launched The Players Tribune, which gave athletes a direct avenue to fans without the need of a journalist. When U.S. Women’s National Team soccer star Carli Lloyd announced her retirement, she did so on The Players Tribune. When Allen Iverson went to pen an emotional tribute to his fallen friend Kobe Bryant, he didn’t go to a columnist at the Philadelphia Inquirer or Bill Plaschke at the Los Angeles Times. He went to The Players Tribune.

When I was writing a lot for the now-defunct Vice Sports, I recall a very short span of time where I went from reaching out to team media departments to ask about player availability to being transferred to their agents with that question. My sense was that athletes had grown especially cautious about cell phones documenting their every move, or journalists spinning their words in ways they might not like. Communicating via agents or via their own social media teams was a way to take back the narrative.

“The biggest change is social media,” says Pearlman. “It made [the media] much less relevant. If you’re LeBron James, why are you sitting down for two hours with Wright Thompson or Seth Wickersham when you can control your own message? You don’t know what he’s writing, no idea what’s gonna come out, or you can go on your own social media and reach more people. It’s how life works. If I were a young fan, I’d be psyched to follow Steph Curry. It sucks for [sports writers], but the average fan isn’t affected.”

Gone are the days where appearing on the cover of a national magazine is a career-making feat, or when a writer from a major newspaper spending a week with an athlete signified the pinnacle of celebrity. Complicating the medium and the messaging are the stakes. Many of the highest-profile athletes have vested interests outside of sports—take LeBron James, who owns a chain of pizzerias; a sports nutrition company; a production company; and a stake in the Fenway Group, the ownership team behind the Boston Red Sox and the Liverpool Football Club. There is a lot to lose if James misspeaks, is misquoted, or if his words are taken out of context. Instead, he can earn his own views—and control his messaging—by simply posting on Instagram.

In the face of the brandification of athletes, journalists, more than ever, are tasked with digging to find stories that wouldn’t otherwise have been told. Stories like the one of Alenka Artnik, the world’s greatest freediver, or Peter Mel’s historic surf season. Not every player is LeBron James or Tom Brady, both of whom have so much to lose. While this shift means complications for journalists, it also opens the door to deeper storytelling. 

THE STANDARD-BEARERS

Despite seismic changes in the sports journalism landscape, there’s plenty of reason for optimism—at least for this writer. We’ve watched storytelling endure and expand across different forms of media, from podcasts to TikTok. And newer publications are adding to an already-deep pool of resources for sports lovers.

The Athletic is one such outlet, a subscription-based publication that was founded by Alex Mather and Adam Hansmann, who met at the fitness technology company Strava, in 2016. Last year, it was acquired by The New York Times Company for $550 million. It has become a favorite of mine, with its balance of the traditional journalism that I enjoy with the profession’s newer focuses and forms: It publishes gambling stories; it doesn’t bleep out curse words; it has a light-heartedness that seems to suggest, “Hey, we’re covering sports. We can’t be too serious.” 

If the scope of The Athletic’s coverage makes it feel like a new vanguard—it reports on all major professional sports, as well as golf, Formula 1, and collegiate sports, and it has writers staffed in almost 50 American cities as well as the United Kingdom—so does its tone, its fearlessness in covering hot-button issues. But The Athletic isn’t alone—and for the sports fan, today’s journalistic landscape is a moveable feast. There are the standbys like Sports Illustrated and ESPN; the daily newspapers like the Washington Post and the Boston Globe; the specialist sites like Golf Digest; and the general interest publications like Esquire, which understand that sports stories are human stories at heart.

“The NFL is 80% Black. Even MLB is 60% Hispanic. All these people of color are not a monolith, but there are similarities in how they’re treated. There is a difference in how we can connect, and the stories we can tell.”

Underlying this plenitude and diversity are the authors themselves. There is so much talent to turn to that it’s hard not to feel like we live in a golden age for sports journalism. There is Wright Thompson, a senior writer at ESPN whom I consider the best in the business. There is Dana O’Neil of The Athletic, the best college basketball writer in the country. There is Jemele Hill of The Atlantic; there is Jesse Washington of Andscape. All are sports writers who, to me, are drop-what-you’re-doing-and-read-this good for the way they contextualize what sports mean for people all over the world.

With the industry’s slow but steady improvements in diversity and inclusivity, more voices mean more stories, Landry says. “Especially in sports. The NFL is 80% Black. Even MLB is 60% Hispanic. All these people of color are not a monolith, but there are similarities in how they’re treated. There is a difference in how we can connect, and the stories we can tell.” 

She notes that the people playing professional sports are changing, and that diversity in the newsroom is the greatest way to celebrate that fact. “We can now understand the cultures surrounding how these games are played,” Landry adds. “Players are getting more expressive. [San Diego Padres shortstop] Fernando Tatís Jr. might not be doing bat flips if we still had a white monolith in the newsroom. It’s important to have diverse voices representing these players. It is important because you are able to make connections you can’t make with people who don’t look like you.”

Greater representation among writers has meant progress in terms of how sports are covered and athletes are understood. “They see me and think, ‘She’s not just another 40-year-old white dude,’” Landry says. “I am lucky to have a very good group of middle-aged white dudes who I work with, but we have different life experiences, different ways of approaching the coverage.” 

Rhim recalls seeing personalities like Stephen A. Smith on television, and says the experience certainly made him feel like he, too, could do that someday. More important, however, was being able to be in the presence of “people just like me.”

“[For me] it was more meeting people and talking with them,” he says. “In press conferences, we’d be looking at each other and learning that these are people just like me, who grew up in inner cities, who talk a certain way. That made me feel really comfortable. Stephen A. gave me the image, but it was really meeting others, building relationships, and figuring out, ‘Oh, I’m not alone.’”

TO COMPEL, INSPIRE, AND ENTERTAIN

I still read the Boston Globe on a daily basis. Because I’m reading it on my laptop or on my phone, I no longer get ink stains on my fingers. It seems silly to admit that, at 40, I still have the relatively banal goal of walking into a gym, laptop bag around my shoulder, pen and paper at the ready, soundtracked by the squeak of sneakers and the bouncing of balls on a hardwood floor, with a lanyard around my neck that reads “Boston Globe.” I went to school when writing for a major daily newspaper was the dream. The media landscape’s tectonic shifts have changed that dream, but it is still pretty rad to see your name there. 

We need sports journalism the way we need other pastimes, the way we need streaming services and books and walking the dogs. These practices provide solace, activity, and a fullness of being, even while they can also function as simple pleasures and distractions.

But we also need sports journalism to bridge gaps between cultures and people. We need it to understand not only what happened, but why, and to whom. Stories on our favorite athletes can compel, inspire, and entertain us. We use these stories to understand the differences between us and the rest of the world, and how, despite these differences, we can find common ground. We read and write (and root) to discover what it all means. We do these things to understand how we can get better. 

Words by Matt Osgood
Illustrations by David Alvarado