Sports Journalism at its worst

Written on 17/06/07

On a cool pleasant Sunday morning, I picked up the Sunday Times to proceed with my routine activity of newspaper reading while sipping some nice filter coffee. To my utter disappointment I ended up reading one of the worst articles penned.

The write-up was intended to hype the tantalizingly poised final round of La Liga matches but the writer turned it into an exhibition of his linguistic prowess.

This led me to wonder what exactly is good writing. Is it the use of florid vocabulary or is it the expression of one’s clear ideas using felicitous but simple words? As I comprehend it, it is the later.

Being an avid sports lover I have been religiously reading the last 4 pages of the Times for quite a few years now. Most of what I find there, is plain reporting picked up predominantly from PTI or Reuters. But with the growing accessibility of the electronic media, my interest in this has waned with time. What I look for in the morning daily is articles with some interesting and insightful views. And sadly there is glaring dearth of such journalism, Harsha Bhogle’s and Ayaz Menon’s weekly columns in Indian Express and DNA respectively being the few exceptions.

A premier league fan to the core I am not one of the biggest admirers of the Spanish game. But such has been the dramatic nature of this La Liga season that it has had me transfixed to the television set for each of the screenings in the past 2-3 months. The football has not resembled the sleek passing game, which has been a characteristic feature of Spanish football but fortunately it has been a fairytale script, one which could only be written by the Almighty Himself. Such has been the exciting nature of Real Madrid's miraculous comebacks in the past 10-12 weeks that a mere listing of events using the most hackneyed of phrases and jargon would have made the article worth a read. But our author, armed with his wide gamut of adjectives and descriptives, managed to fill half a page of The Times of India, with a piece which resembled an account of the pros and cons of globalization and international inter-dependence rather than the thrill of watching the beautiful game.

The problem can be solved if sports-lovers with a good command over the English language, rather than language-lovers with some interest in sports, start playing an active role in sports journalism.

Don’t be vexed if you find this write-up foisted with unnecessary uncommon words here and there. After all I have grown up reading articles like the aforementioned one and bad habits do rub on.