Sport: A real-life soap opera
This is a great time to be a sports fan. We’ve been up to our remote controls in footy finals, a rugby World Cup is approaching and the Athens Olympic Games are just around the bend.
It’s probably also that time of the year that sports fans dream about their ultimate job – that of the sports journalist.
As a member of that privileged breed, I can assure everyone that it is indeed great work if you can get it.
Let’s start with the obvious. We get paid to attend grand sporting events, meet sporting legends and, after all that, we get to inflict our words of wisdom on our audiences.
But wait, there’s more. While most people’s exposure to sport is restricted to a few hours at the weekend, sports journalists get to watch it, study it, discuss it, pitch it, design it, read it and write it every day. We get paid to do this as well.
We get to work in a subject area which interests us even outside our working hours. We still like to kick back and watch sports on TV after work. We call that research! You don’t see a ditch digger come home after work and turn over a few sods.
I’ll tell you where we’re particularly spoilt. While most other jobs involve slogging away for days, weeks, months, or even years before the fruits of one’s labours can be seen, we get daily gratification. Like impatient little children, we must have our rewards immediately. Our finished products appear in all their glory the next day.
Despite an ever-enlarging calendar of sporting events, it is up to the journalist to keep everyone up to date, through newspapers, television, radio, and now the web. We not only provide scores and reports as quickly as we can, but we also try to convey the colour and movement as well as the blood, sweat and the tears that are shed every day in the world of sport.
Sport is like a real-life soap opera. For less than $20 the sports fan can turn up to the “set” of his or her favourite “soapie”, witness drama, great physical feats, cheer the heroes and yell something unsavoury at the villains. Now that’s entertainment!
But unlike Days of Our Lives, the sports fan can’t just tune out for a year and step back in without missing anything. Imagine your surprise after a year-long blackout from sport: “Cathy Freeman’s going out with who?”, “That Kournikova girl still hasn’t won anything?” and “Shane Warne did what?”
So how does one enter this charmed lifestyle? Sometimes, like me, you can fall into it. Soon after completing a professional writing degree at the University of Canberra, I got a job as a copyboy at The Canberra Times newspaper. This is a kind of gopher role traditional in most newspapers and a fairly common stepping-stone to a cadetship (or to the Prime Ministership if you’re John Curtin). Duties included running errands back and forth to Parliament House and wandering Garema Place at dusk with a cardboard box collecting dinner orders for hungry sub-editors. It was not a role I wanted to get too experienced at however. And so, after 18 months, two weeks and three days, I got a cadetship.
As a graduate, my cadetship was shortened to one year during which we were rotated through various “rounds” such as general news, courts, sport, and Parliament. After that, you have a better feel for where you’d rather be within the newspaper, and the newspaper has a better feel for where it would like you to be. I ended up in sport through that process of mutual attraction.
From there you start with smaller assignments such as reporting on some of the so-called minor sports and processing horse-racing betting results. Soon you are given greater responsibilities with some of the more popular sports. I was lucky enough to be entrusted with the National Basketball League “round” which included travelling with the Canberra Cannons to interstate matches.
As a sub-editor, I also had the pleasure of designing and producing the pages for The Canberra Times coverage of the 1988 and 1992 Olympic Games. Along the way I met and/or interviewed such greats as Cathy Freeman, Keith Miller, Dawn Fraser, Shane Gould and Ron Barassi.
But it’s not all hobnobbing with the legends and enjoying spectacles from a well-appointed press box.
As an editor once said to us, “journalism is not a job, it’s a way of life”. This is code for: “the hours can be long”. And as a sports journalist, those weekends aren’t yours anymore. Sport generally happens on the weekend, so guess who’s on duty?
You may find this hard to believe, but you do occasionally miss the simple pleasure of attending a sporting event as a paying punter for your own enjoyment. It is a different experience to watching it intently as a reporter, scribbling down anything that might or might not turn out to be relevant before the pressure of filing your copy before deadline. Reporting on NBL games for example entails writing a 500-word account of the game within about 25 minutes of the final buzzer.
And there are small sacrifices. During the Sydney Olympic Games, I saw precious little of this once-in-a-lifetime event while working 24 floors above Darling Harbour, helping to produce our Games liftout.
Encounters with sportspeople aren’t always pleasant. Entering the change rooms after one local rugby league match, I headed for the losing captain-coach to ask him for some quotes to help flesh out my story. Clearly in no mood for such frivolity, he greeted me with the longest face, sneering in front of his teammates: “How come we lose every time YOU turn up?” The temptation was to politely suggest that “this is a bad time, I’ll come back later”. Duty demands, however, that you plough ahead with the interview.
Grim duty called on another occasion. One normally doesn’t like harassing people just after they have been sacked but in the case of one high-profile coach we had to have the story. Ignoring the instinct to leave the poor guy alone, I picked up the phone and stumbled through the interview as sympathetically as I could.
Overall though, we love our job. It is a privilege and one where we strive to make the sports fan feel like they were there too. In some ways we are advocates for our readers, viewers and listeners. We ask the questions we believe the fans want answered and we report what we, professionally and objectively, think needs to be reported.
It’s always a good time to be a sports journalist. Now, where’s that remote …
THIS article was commissioned by the ACT Writers Centre and published in the October 2003 issue of its newsletter ACTWrite.
