Jeannette Cooperman at The Common Reader:
Sports writing can be brilliant; it is one of the most exciting forms, full of suspense and rich with lore. Yet most sports reporting winds up formulaic and pedestrian. This is an arena of high drama and individual challenge, but for the performer, the interest is in the training and the doing, not the words the rest of us try to surround it with. Reporters lean hard on interviews with athletes, yet they only turn chatty when they retire from their sport. While competing, they are intense and focused, utterly uninterested in coming up with quotable sound bites. They are not running for public office. They are running for speed, or swimming, or doing floor routines.
“The reporters talk to them right afterward, and sometimes all my son wants to do is go vomit into a trashcan!” exclaims the mother of a star collegiate athlete. So much adrenaline has pumped through his system, and right after a race, he is reeling with either triumph or disappointment.
More here.
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