Filed by Bil at 10:46 pm under Fightin' Words, Stuff to Read

Returning to the sentiment that journalism in the iPhone age is a constant battle between quality and quantity, I would like to point out sports journalism hasn’t suffered any, because it’s pretty much always sucked, and there has always been too much of it.

Florida HS football team defends 83-0 rout

Sports journalism is to the rest of journalism what actual sports are to the rest of our lives: great for entertainment without too much thought, but easy to get too wrapped up in if you’re not careful. I don’t really expect an article from a news source devoted to high school football to read much better than a high school newspaper – and I know I’m just a blogger like anyone else, and I can’t really claim to be a better journalist than anyone else – but personally, if my title was “Managing Editor” and if I got paid for it, I would have left out the following paragraphs:

Pompano Beach coach Greg McGirt, reached by phone this week, did not want to discuss the game.

“I don’t really want to talk about it,” he said. “You might want to talk to my athletic director.”

Athletic director Vince Stevenson didn’t return phone calls.

This is fluff, even for an article about high school football.

What bothers me most, though, is that there’s so much potential within the article for some extremely interesting human condition study. The article, if you haven’t read it, chronicles one particular football game between two Florida high schools. One of the high schools’ football teams defeats the other team 83 to nothing. There is mention of the team, the crowd, and the parents of the victorious team being embarrassed of being SO victorious. It’s like there’s a duality in this town of being so incredibly bloodthirsty, then being ashamed of being so bloodthirsty, but it’s scarcely even glanced at by the author of the article. (Understandably so – there are a lot of high school football teams in the nation for this guy to write about.)

In America, we all like to pretend we’re peaceful unless provoked, but it’s more accurate to say we’re peaceful unless bored. What catches my attention in this article is the sense of going too far.

I want to know about the townspeople from this Florida burg after the fact. I want to know about the parents and their weird, twisted relationships with their aspiring pro-athelete sons. I want to know about the competitive spirit among adult neighbors whose only outlet for rage and frustration is through high school football. I want to know about the old ladies at grocery stores who don’t even care about high school football, but are suddenly interested because the score was SO one-sided that it must be a sign of the end of the world. I want to know what effect this event had on the town, how it changed the people, how the mighty felt humbled without actually being humbled, how the destitute losers carry on with life here, where everybody knows how the game went down. That’s what I’m interested in. I don’t really care about the football game itself.

Man, this article about a high school football game really could have been great. It could have been like the Chaminade-Madonna High School of journalism, but it just fell somewhere between wanting to make a statement about the local society and dryly relaying statistical information.

I guess sports journalism is just like any other kind of journalism: more interesting when presented as fiction. (Prime example: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers.)