On Writing Well - William Zinsser 2001
17 Sports
Part III Forms
As an addict of the sports pages in my boyhood, I learned about the circuit clout before I learned about the electrical circuit. I learned that a hurler (or twirler) who faces left when he toes the slab is a southpaw or a portsider. Southpaws were always lanky, portsiders always chunky, though I’ve never heard “chunky” applied to anything else except peanut butter (to distinguish it from “creamy”), and I have no idea what a chunky person would look like. When hurlers fired the old horsehide, a batsman would try to solve their slants. If he succeeded he might rap a sharp bingle to the outfield, gamering a win for the home contingent, or at least knotting the count. If not, he might bounce into a twin killing, snuffing out a rally and dimming his team’s hopes in the flag scramble.
I could go on, mining every sport for its lingo and extracting from the mother lode a variety of words found nowhere else in the mother tongue. I could write of hoopsters and pucksters, grapplers and matmen, strapping oarsmen and gridiron greats. I could rhapsodize about the old pigskin—more passionately than any pig farmer—and describe the frenzied bleacherites caught up in the excitement of the autumn classic. I could, in short, write sports English instead of good English, as if they were two different languages. They’re not. Just as in writing about science or any other field, there’s no substitute for the best.
What, you might ask, is wrong with “southpaw”? Shouldn’t we be grateful for a word so picturesque? Why isn’t it a relief to have twirlers and circuit clouts instead of the same old pitchers and home runs? The answer is that these words have become even cheaper currency than the coins they were meant to replace. They come flooding automatically out of the typewriter of every scribe (sportswriter) in every press box.
The man who first thought of “southpaw” had a right to be pleased. I like to think he allowed himself the small smile that is the due of anyone who invents a good novelty. But how long ago was that? The color that “southpaw” added to the language has paled with decades of repetition, along with the hundreds of other idioms that form the fabric of daily sportswriting. There is a weariness about them. We read the articles to find out who won, but we don’t read them with enjoyment.
The best sportswriters know this. They avoid the exhausted synonyms and strive for freshness elsewhere in their sentences. You can search the columns of Red Smith and never find a batsman bouncing into a twin killing; Smith wasn’t afraid to let a batter hit into a double play. But you will find hundreds of unusual words—good English words—chosen with precision and fitted into situations where no other sportswriter would put them. They please us because the writer cared about using fresh imagery in a journalistic form where his competitors settled for the same old stuff. That’s why Red Smith was still king of his field after half a century of writing, and why his competitors had long since been sent—as they would be the first to say—to the showers.
I can still remember many phrases in Red Smith’s columns that took me by surprise with their humor and originality. Smith was a devout angler, and it was a pleasure to watch him bait his hook and come up with that slippery fish, a sports commissioner, gasping for air. “In most professional sports the bottom has just about dropped out of the czar business,” he wrote in 1971, noting that the cupidity of team owners has a tendency to outrun the courage of the sports monitors. “The first and toughest of the [baseball] overlords was Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who came to power in 1920 and ruled with a heavy hand until his death in 1944. But if baseball started with Little Caesar, it wound up with Ethelred the Unready.” Red Smith was the daily guardian of our perspective, a writer who kept us honest. But that was largely because he was writing good English. His style was not only graceful; it was strong enough to carry strong convictions.
What keeps most sportswriters from writing good English is the misapprehension that they shouldn’t be trying to. They have been reared on so many cliches that they assume they are the required tools of the trade. They also have a dread of repeating the word that’s easiest for the reader to visualize—batter, runner, golfer, boxer—if a synonym can be found. And usually, with exertion, it can. This excerpt from a college newspaper is typical:
Bob Hornsby extended his skein yesterday by toppling Dartmouth’s Jerry Smithers, 6-4, 6-2, to lead the netmen to victory over a surprisingly strong foe. The gangling junior put his big serve to good use in keeping the Green captain off balance. The Memphis native was in top form as he racked up the first four games, breaking the Indian’s service twice in the first four games. The Exeter graduate faltered and the Hanover mainstay rallied to cop three games. But the racquet ace was not to be denied, and the Yankee’s attempt to knot the first stanza at 4-4 failed when he was passed by a crosscourt volley on the sixth deuce point. The redhead was simply too determined, and...
What ever became of Bob Hornsby? Or Jerry Smithers? Hornsby has been metamorphosed within one paragraph into the gangling junior, the Memphis native, the Exeter graduate, the racquet ace and the redhead, and Smithers turns up as the Green captain, the Indian, the Hanover mainstay and the Yankee. Readers don’t know them in these various disguises—or care. They only want the clearest picture of what happened. Never be afraid to repeat the players name and to keep the details simple. A set or an inning doesn’t have to be recycled into a stanza or a frame just to avoid redundancy. The cure is worse than the ailment.
Another obsession is with numbers. Every sports addict lives with a head full of statistics, cross-filed for ready access, and many a baseball fan who flunked simple arithmetic in school can perform prodigies of instant calculation in the ballpark. Still, some statistics are more important than others. If a pitcher wins his 20th game, if a golfer shoots a 61, if a runner runs the mile in 3:48, please mention it. But don’t get carried away:
Auburn, Ala., Nov. 1 (UPI)—Pat Sullivan, Auburn’s sophomore quarterback, scored two touchdowns and passed for two today to hand Florida a 38-12 defeat, the first of the season for the ninth-ranked Gators.
John Reaves of Florida broke two Southeastern Conference records and tied another. The tall sophomore from Tampa, Fla., gained 369 yards passing, pushing his six-game season total to 2,115. That broke the S.E.C. season record of 2,012 set by the 1966 Heisman trophy winner, in 10 games.
Reaves attempted 66 passes—an S.E.C. record—and tied the record of 33 completions set this fall by Mississippi’s Archie Manning.
Fortunately for Auburn, nine of Reaves’s passes were intercepted—breaking the S.E.C. record of eight interceptions suffered by Georgias Zeke Bratkowski against Georgia Tech in 1951.
Reaves’s performance left him only a few yards short of the S.E.C. season total offense record of 2,187 set by Georgia’s Frank Sinkwich in 11 games in 1942. And his two touchdown passes against Auburn left him only one touchdown pass short of the S.E.C. season record of 23 set in 1950 by Kentucky’s Babe Parilli. ...
Those are the first five paragraphs of a six-paragraph story that was prominently displayed in my New York newspaper, a long way from Auburn. It has a certain mounting hilarity—a figure freak amok at his typewriter. But can anybody read it? And does anybody care? Only Zeke Bratkowski—finally off the hook.
Sports is one of the richest fields now open to the nonfiction writer. Many authors better known for “serious” books have done some of their most solid work as observers of athletic combat. John McPhee’s Levels of the Game, George Plimptons Paper Lion and George F. Will’s Men at Work—books about tennis, pro football and baseball—take us deeply into the fives of the players. In mere detail they have enough information to keep any fan happy. But what makes them special is their humanity. Who is this strange bird, the winning athlete, and what engines keep him going? One of the classics in the literature of baseball is “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” John Updike’s account of Ted Williams’s final game, on September 28, 1960, when the 42-year-old “Kid,” coming up for his last time at bat in Fenway Park, hit one over the wall. But before that Updike has distilled the essence of “this brittle and temperamental player”:
... of all team sports, baseball, with its graceful intermittences of action, its immense and tranquil field sparsely settled with poised men in white, its dispassionate mathematics, seems to me best suited to accommodate, and be ornamented by, a loner. It is essentially a lonely game. No other player visible to my generation has concentrated within himself so much of the sports poignance, has so assiduously refined his natural skills, has so constantly brought to the plate that intensity of competence that crowds the throat with joy.
What gives the article its depth is that it’s the work of a writer, not a sportswriter. Updike knows there’s not much more to say about Williams’s matchless ability at the plate: the famous swing, the eyes that could see the stitches on a ball arriving at 90 miles an hour. But the mystery of the man is still unsolved, even on the final day of his career, and that’s where Updike steers our attention, suggesting that baseball was suited to such a reclusive star because it’s a lonely game. Baseball lonely? Our great American tribal rite? Think about it, Updike says.
Something in Updike made contact with something in Williams: two solitary craftsmen laboring in the glare of the crowd. Look for this human bond. Remember that athletes are men and women who become part of our lives during the season, acting out our dreams or filling some other need for us, and we want that bond to be honored. Hold the hype and give us heroes who are believable.
Even Babe Ruth was ushered down from the sanitized slopes of Olympus and converted into a real person, with appetites as big as his girth, in Robert Creamer’s fine biography Babe. The same qualities would go into Creamer’s later book, Stengel. Until then readers willingly settled for the standard version of Casey Stengel as an aging pantaloon who mangled the language and somehow managed to win 10 pennants. Creamer’s Stengel is far more interesting: a complex man who was nobody’s fool and whose story is very much the story of baseball itself, stretching back to 19th-century rural America.
Honest portraiture is only one of many new realities in what used to be a fairy-tale world. Sport is now a major frontier of social change, and some of the nation’s most vexing issues—drug abuse, violence, womens rights, minorities in management, television contracts—are being played out in our stadiums, grandstands and locker rooms. If you want to write about America, this is one place to pitch your tent. Take a hard look at such stories as the financial seduction of school and college athletes. It’s far more than a sports story. It’s the story of our values and our priorities in the education of our children. King Football and King Basketball sit secure on their throne. How many coaches get paid more than the college president, the school principal and the teachers?
Money is the looming monster in American sport, its dark shadow everywhere. Salaries of obscene magnitude swim through the sports section, which now seems to contain as much financial news as the financial section. How much money a player earned for winning a golf or tennis tournament is mentioned in the lead of the story, ahead of the score. Big money has also brought big emotional trouble. Much of todays sports reporting has nothing to do with sport. First we have to be told whose feelings are hurt because he’s being booed by fans who think a $6 million player ought to bat higher than .225 and run after fly balls hit in his direction. In tennis the pot of gold is huge and the players are strung as tightly as their high-tech racquets—millionaires quick to whine and to swear at the referee and the linesmen. In football and basketball the pay is sky-high, and so are the sulks.
The ego of the modem athlete has in turn rubbed off on the modem sportswriter. I’m struck by how many sportswriters now think they are the story, their thoughts more interesting than the game they were sent to cover. I miss the days when reporters had the modesty to come right out and say who won. Today that news can be a long time in arriving. Half the sportswriters think they are Guy de Maupassant, masters of the exquisitely delayed lead. The rest think they are Sigmund Freud, privy to the athlete’s psychic needs and wounded sensibilities. Some also practice orthopedics and arthroscopic surgery on the side, quicker than the team physician to assess what the magnetic resonance imaging scan revealed or didn’t reveal about the pitcher’s tom or perhaps not tom rotator cuff. “His condition is day-to-day,” they conclude. Whose condition isn’t?
The would-be Maupassants specialize in episodes that took place earlier, which they gleaned by hanging around the clubhouse in search of “color.” No nugget is too trivial or too boring if it can be cemented into that baroque edifice, the lead. The following example is one that I’ll invent, but every fan will recognize the genre:
Two weeks ago Bernie Williams’ grandmother had a dream. She told him she dreamed he and some of his Yankee teammates went to a Chinese restaurant for dinner. When it came time for dessert, Bernie asked the waiter to bring him a fortune cookie. “Sometimes those things can really tell it to you straight,” his grandmother said he told Derek Jeter. Unwrapping the paper message, Bernie saw the words: “You will soon do something powerful to confound your enemies.”
Maybe Bernie was thinking of his grandmother’s dream last night at Yankee Stadium when he stepped to the plate to face the Orioles’ Mike Mussina. He was 0-for-12 against Mussina in 1997 and was mired in his longest slump of the season. Nobody had to tell him the fans were on his case; he had heard the boos. This would be the perfect moment to confound his enemies. It was the bottom of the eighth, two men were on, and the Orioles were leading, 3-1. Time was running out. Could that fortune cookie be trying to tell him something?
Working the count full, Williams got a waist-high slider from Mussina and crunched it. The ball rose in a high arc, and you knew just by watching Bernie that he thought the
ball might carry to the left-field seats. A strong wind was swirling into the Stadium, but Bernie’s “something powerful” was not to be denied, and when Mariano Rivera shut down the O’s in the top of the ninth, the scoreboard said Yankees 4, Baltimore 3. Thanks, Granny.
The would-be Freuds are no less eager to swagger before settling down. “Somebody should have told Jimmy Connors he was into mortality denial before he took the court yesterday against a foe 20 years his junior,” they write, experts in human motivation, using words like “predictably futile”—no proper part of a reporters vocabulary—to show their superiority over an athlete having an inferior day. “Last night the Mets took the field determined to find another ridiculous way to lose,” the reporter covering that team for my local paper kept telling me, typically, during a recent lean season, using sarcasm instead of fact. The Mets did no such thing; no athlete sets out to lose. If you want to write about sports, remember that the men and women you’re writing about are doing something immensely difficult, and they have their pride. You, too, are doing a job that has its codes of honor. One of them is that you are not the story.
Red Smith had no patience with self-important sportswriting. He said it was always helpful to remember that baseball is a game that little boys play. That also goes for football and basketball and hockey and tennis and most other games. The little boys—and girls—who once played those games grow up to be readers of the sports pages, and in their imagination they are still young, still on the field and the court and the rink, still playing those games. What they want to know when they open their newspaper is how the players played and how the game came out. Please tell us.
One new role for the sportswriter is to let us know what it feels like to actually perform a sport: to be a marathon runner or a soccer goalie, a skier or a golfer or a gymnast. The historic moment is ripe—popular interest in how far the body can be pushed has never been higher. Americans are jogging, not walking, toward the millennium, keeping fit on fitness machines, calibrating every nuance of weight gain and weight loss, pulmonary intake and cardiac stress. For a nonfiction writer these weekend warriors provide a whole new readership: sports fans who are also recreational sportsmen, eager to be put inside the head of athletes at the top of their form.
High speed, a central thrill of many sports, is typical of the sensations that ordinary mortals can only try to imagine. As the owner of cars that tend to shake at 65 miles per hour, I’ve never come close to knowing how it feels to drive a racing car. I needed a writer, Lesley Hazleton, to strap me into the seat of a Formula One vehicle. “Whenever I drive fast,” she writes, “there is an awareness that I am in transgression of the laws of nature, moving faster than my body was designed to move.” This awareness doesn’t truly begin, Hazleton says, until a driver experiences the g-force, an outside force that “works on you with such pressure that it seems as though your body is moved first and your insides follow after”:
Race drivers contend with g-forces so great that they are subject to three or four times the normal force of gravity. From a standing start, a Formula One car will reach a hundred miles an hour in just under three seconds. And in that first second the driver’s head is pushed back so violently that his face distends, giving him a ghostly smile.
Within another second he has changed gears twice, and each time he does so, the acceleration force smashes him back into the seat again. After three seconds, accelerating upward from a hundred miles an hour toward two hundred, his peripheral vision is completely blurred. He can only see straight ahead. The 800-horsepower engine is screaming at 130 decibels, and each piston completes four combustion cycles 10,000 times a minute, which means that the vibration he feels is at that rate.
His neck and shoulder muscles are under immense strain, trying to keep his eyes level as the g-force pushes his head from side to side in the comers. The strong acceleration makes blood pool in his legs so that less is delivered to the heart, which means that there’s less cardiac output, forcing the pulse rate up. Formula One drivers’ pulses are often up to 180, even 200, and they stay at 85 percent of that maximum for almost the entire length of a two-hour race.
Breathing quickens as the muscles call for more blood— speed literally takes your breath away—and the whole body goes into emergency stance. A two-hour emergency. The mouth goes dry, the eyes dilate as the car travels the length of a football field for every normal heartbeat. The brain processes information at an astonishingly rapid rate, since the higher the speed, the less the reaction time. Reactions have to be not only quick but also extraordinarily precise, no matter how great the physical strain. Split seconds may be mere slivers of time, but they are also the difference between winning and losing a race, or between entering and avoiding a crash.
In short, a Formula One driver has to be almost preternaturally alert under conditions of maximum physical pressure. Obviously, the adrenaline is pumping. ... But in addition to the physical fitness of top athletes, he needs that chess player’s mind as he assimilates telemetry data, calculates overtaking points, and executes a racing strategy. All of which is why speed is so dangerous for most of us: we simply have neither the physical nor the mental stamina to handle it.
Psychologically, what happens in a race is still more complex. The muscles, the brain chemicals, the laws of physics, the vibration, the conditions of the race—all these combine to generate a high level of excitement and tension in the body, making the driver feel absolutely clearheaded and alert. And high.
Although Hazleton keeps using “his”—his muscles, his eyes, his legs—the pronoun for her article should be “her.” Amid all the erosions in sports and sports journalism today, she represents one huge gain: the emergence of women as fine athletes, often on turf previously monopolized by men, and as reporters with equal access to male locker rooms and the other routine rights of journalism. Consider the many kinds of progress—both in performance and in attitude—embodied in the following piece by one of those writers, Janice Kaplan, which ran in 1984:
To understand how good women have become in sports, you have to understand how bad they were just a decade ago. In the early ’70s the debate wasn’t how much women could do athletically, but whether a normal woman should be athletic at all.
Marathoning, for example, was said to be bad for children, for the elderly and for women. The formidable Boston Marathon was officially closed to women until 1972. That year Nina Kuscsik battled sexism and a mid-race bout with diarrhea to become the first winner of the women’s division. Those of us who knew about it felt a surge of pride, mixed with a tinge of embarrassment. Pride, because Kuscsik’s victory proved that women could run 26 miles after all. Embarrassment, because her time of three hours and ten minutes was more than 50 minutes slower than the best men’s times. Fifty minutes. That’s an eternity in racing lingo. The obvious explanation was that women had rarely run marathons before and lacked training and experience. An obvious explanation— but who really believed it?
Flash ahead to this year. For the first time, the women’s marathon will be an Olympic event. One of the top competitors is likely to be Joan Benoit, who holds the current womens world record—two hours and 22 minutes. In the dozen years since the first woman raced in Boston, the best womens times have improved by about 50 minutes. Another eternity.
Men’s times in the marathon have meanwhile improved by only a few minutes, so this dramatic progress should begin to answer the question of training vs. hormones: Are women slower and weaker than men because of built-in biological differences—or because of cultural bias and the fact that we haven’t been given a chance to prove what we can do?... Whether the gap between men and women will ever be totally closed seems almost beside the point. What matters is that women are doing what they never dreamed they could do—taking themselves and their bodies seriously.
A pivotal event in this revolution of altered consciousness was the mid-1970s tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs. “It was billed as the battle of the sexes,” Kaplan recalls in another article, “and it was.”
There has probably never been a sporting event that was less about sports and more about social issues. The big issue in this match was women: where we belonged and what we could do. Forget Supreme Court decisions and ERA votes; we looked to two athletes to settle the issues of equality for women in a way that really mattered. In sports, all is writ large and writ in concrete. There is a winner and a loser; there is no debate.
For many women there was a sense of personal triumph in Billie Jean’s victory. It seemed to release an energy in women all over the country. Young women demanded—and got—a greater role in college sports. Prize money for women in many professional sports soared. Little girls began playing Little League, joining boys’ teams, proving that the physiological differences between males and females aren’t as great as they were once imagined.
American sport has always been interwoven with social history, and the best writers are men and women who make the connection. “It wasn’t my idea for basketball to become tax-shelter show biz,” Bill Bradley writes in Life on the Run, a chronicle of his seasons with the New York Knicks. Ex-Senator Bradley’s book is a good example of the new sportswriting because it ponders some of the destructive forces that are altering American sport—the greed of owners, the worship of stars, the inability to accept defeat:
After Van’s departure I realized that no matter how kind, friendly and genuinely interested the owners may be, in the end most players are little more than depreciable assets to them.
Self-definition comes from external sources, not from within. While their physical skill lasts, professional athletes are celebrities—fondled and excused, praised and believed. Only toward the end of their careers do the stars realize that their sense of identity is insufficient.
The winning team, like the conquering army, claims everything in its path and seems to say that only winning is important. Yet victory has very narrow meanings and can become a destructive force. The taste of defeat has a richness of experience all its own.
Bradley’s book is also an excellent travel journal, catching the fatigue and loneliness of the professional athlete’s nomadic life—the countless night flights and bus rides, the dreary days and endless waits in motel rooms and terminals: “In the airports that have become our commuter stations we see so many dramatic personal moments that we are callused. To some, we live romantic lives. To me, every day is a struggle to stay in touch with life’s subtleties.”
Those are the values to look for when you write about sport: people and places, time and transition. Here’s an enjoyable list of the kind of people every sport comes furnished with. It’s from the obituary of G. F. T. Ryall, who covered thoroughbred racing for The New Yorker, under the pen name Audax Minor, for more than half a century, until a few months before he died at 92. The obituary said that Ryall “came to know everyone connected with racing—owners, breeders, stewards, judges, timers, mutuel clerks, Pinkertons, trainers, cooks, grooms, handicappers, hot-walkers, starters, musicians, jockeys and their agents, touts, high-rolling gamblers and tinhorns.”
Hang around the track and the stable, the stadium and the rink. Observe closely. Interview in depth. Listen to old-timers. Ponder the changes. Write well.