Taking Sports Seriously : It’s Over the Fence, Onto Page 1

April was a special month, even for sports-crazy Chicago. The basketball Bulls were in the playoffs. So were the hockey Black Hawks. And the Cubs and White Sox were just starting the major league baseball season, both filled with the perennial optimism that is as much a part of springtime in America as blossoming flowers, adolescent love and daylight savings.

But the sports story that stretched across the top of Page 1 of the Chicago Tribune on April 13 wasn’t about balls and strikes or pucks and rebounds. It was about financial problems in the athletic program at the University of Illinois.

The next day, another sports story appeared atop Page 1 of the Tribune, this one reporting the conviction of two agents for racketeering and mail fraud; the agents had offered college football players thousands of dollars to sign illegal contracts before they graduated, then threatened those who tried to break the contracts.

A day later, yet another sports story appeared on Page 1, this one disclosing that contractors’ bids to build a new stadium for the White Sox were $30 million higher than earlier estimates.

What’s happening in Chicago? Pretty much what’s happening elsewhere these days. Strikes. Lawsuits. Drugs. Gambling. Racketeering. Recruiting scandals. Sex scandals. Soviet defections. Run-ins with the police, the FBI and the IRS. Multimillion-dollar player contracts. Billion-dollar television deals. Almost every day, it seems, there’s a new and important sports story outside the white lines of the playing field.

Expanded Dimensions

Clearly, big-time sports is increasingly moving from the sports page to the front page--and to the business, entertainment and life style pages as well. Sports has become a big business in a skeptical, celebrity-conscious age, and many newspaper editors, long accustomed to thinking of sports as the toy department of journalism--a veritable sandbox of scores and statistics--are struggling to figure out how best to cover this change.

Not surprisingly, different editors have different solutions. The Washington Post hired a longtime sportswriter, experienced in sports investigations, to be its investigative sports reporter. The Philadelphia Inquirer hired a veteran news reporter and made him its sports business reporter. Newsday in New York has two reporters covering the off-the-field side of sports--one, a longtime police and courts reporter, the other a Dallas sportswriter who had won several awards for investigative reporting.

The Chicago Tribune has probably done more than any other major paper to break down the established barriers between sports reporters and news reporters. The paper’s religion writer covered sports for six months; its political columnist became a sports columnist; its education writer started covering the White Sox; its legal affairs writer has started covering Notre Dame sports. Four Tribune sportswriters have also transferred to various news assignments, and major sports analyses occasionally appear in the paper’s Sunday Perspective section.

The Tribune has used its labor reporter and other general news reporters to help cover some sports stories, and editors have also encouraged two or three of the paper’s sportswriters to cover off-the-field news.

“We may well, by the end of this year, decide that someone ought to do nothing but this full time,” says Managing Editor Dick Ciccone. “The economy of sport, the entertainment value of sport has made it far more significant in our total society than just 4-3 and 7-6. . . . We’ve had more sports stories that did not deal with a game on Page 1 in the last three months than we’ve had in the past three years.”

Editors elsewhere report a similar syndrome.

- The Washington Post, its pages filled with news of the new Bush Administration and controversies over Mayor Marion S. Barry and then-House Speaker Jim Wright, has published 15 non-game sports stories on Page 1 already this year, including one on unsafe conditions in local high school sports facilities, equipment and medical procedures.

- The Louisville Courier Journal’s lead Page 1 story twice in three days in April involved an investigation of alleged irregularities in the basketball program at the University of Kentucky.

- The Atlanta Constitution, that same month, devoted virtually the entire top half of its front page to stories and photographs reporting charges that basketball star Dominique Wilkins and his mother had received almost $30,000 in secret payments from a sports agent when Wilkins had played for the University of Georgia.

Personal Problems

This brief list, all from a single month, doesn’t include stories on the personal travails of four big-name baseball stars that dominated the sports pages and, sometimes, the front pages of the nation’s newspapers throughout the spring--stories on Pete Rose and his gambling, Steve Garvey and his paternity suits, Wade Boggs and his mistress, Jose Canseco and his driving and firearms problems.

Some critics--especially those in sports--blame the press for changes in the sports world, just as many blamed the press for Vietnam and civil rights protests. But while the press--now as then--has certainly made some mistakes, the press essentially covers change; it seldom instigates it.

Many athletes and sports entrepreneurs are bitterly critical of the school of sports reporting that has developed over the last generation, though. The athletes--many of them young, unsophisticated and already spoiled by years of adulation and special treatment that began even before their first bout with acne--become infuriated with sportswriters who ask tough questions and write critical stories.

Last year, Guillermo Hernandez of the Detroit Tigers dumped a bucket of ice water on a sportswriter whose stories didn’t meet his literary standards. Two years earlier, Dave Kingman of the Oakland A’s sent a live rat in a pink box to a Sacramento sportswriter. For years, Steve Carlton of the Philadelphia Phillies just refused to talk to local sportswriters.

Sports teams receive so much uncritical coverage in the daily press that many athletes, coaches, general managers and other front-office executives come to think of the media as an extension of their public relations apparatus. The concept of an independent, skeptical press is utterly foreign to most of them. A rare critical or investigative story is regarded as betrayal, heresy--and cause for angry protest and, at times, for banning a reporter or a publication from locker rooms and practice fields.

In some ways, it’s more difficult to cover a sports team aggressively than it is to cover government or some other beats aggressively. Politicians are generally more accustomed to such coverage, and even when one gets mad and refuses to talk to a reporter, there are almost invariably others around who know just as much and are eager to talk. Sports teams tend to be much more close-knit and close-mouthed.

But the intrusions of the real world into the sports world--and the accompanying problems for sportswriters--are not an altogether new phenomenon. Indeed, it’s the latest step in a revolution that began more than 30 years ago when television, Sports Illustrated and a man named Larry Merchant began to transform traditional sportswriting in this country.

Some of the most stylish and provocative prose in American journalism has long been found on the nation’s sports pages. But such excellence was not (and is not) an industry standard. With a few exceptions--most notably, the New York Herald Tribune of the 1930s--sports pages were long filled with prose that Leonard Schecter, in his book “The Jocks,” called “consistently bland and hero worshipful . . . pedestrian, cliche-ridden.” Many sportswriters were “so droolingly grateful for the opportunity to make their living as non-paying fans at sporting events that they devoted much of their energy to stepping on no toes,” Schecter wrote.

Merchant, a longtime sportswriter and now a sports commentator on television for Home Box Office, says sports sections tend to attract “a certain kind of personality, and I don’t think their first inclination is to look under the rocks they stand on--or even to at first believe it when . . . (something) starts to crawl out from under the rocks.”

A New Standard

But in 1954, Time Inc. began publishing Sports Illustrated, a weekly journal of good reporting, good writing and good editing that went far beyond mere scores and statistics. Newspaper sports sections had to change accordingly to retain their readers.

Three years later, Merchant became sports editor of the Philadelphia Daily News and immediately began recruiting sophisticated, skeptical journalists determined to provide an iconoclastic look at the sports world. Soon, the two other Philadelphia newspapers followed suit. Ultimately, several Philadelphia sportswriters--Merchant among them--moved to New York and took their revolution with them. In time, the new-breed sportswriters were dubbed “chipmunks,” a quirky tribute to their badgering questions and their irreverent treatment of the icons and traditions of the sports world.

The growth of television and the sociopolitical upheavals of the 1960s also contributed significantly to the transformation of sports journalism. By bringing the playing field into the living room for an ever-increasing array of major events, television deprived newspapers of their traditional role of simply providing results. At the same time, society was changing, and sports changed right along with it. Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali. Joe Namath bragged about having sex the night before a big game. Protests, boycotts and demonstrations hit the Olympic Games. As the years wore on, sports became a truly big business, with all the problems of other big businesses--and all the problems of the society it seeks to entertain.

Slowly--and in many cases, grudgingly--sports sections began to cover these changes as the 1960s gave way to the 1970s and then the ‘80s. In a few cases, chipmunks became ferrets. These “sports reporters”--as they prefer to be characterized--now work in courtrooms, not at court-side; they cover picket lines instead of pennant races; they’re as interested in lockouts as shutouts; they look on sports as profit-making enterprise, not pristine pastime.

Doing a Job

Contrary to what their critics sometimes say, these sportswriters are not, however, congenital sourpusses or sports-hating eggheads out to spoil everyone’s fun by turning the joy and glory of sports into something dirty and ugly. Several, in fact, are lifelong sports fans, and some began as traditional sportswriters. They’re just trying to apply to sports the same journalistic standards their reportorial colleagues have long applied to business, politics, education and other fields.

Bill Brubaker is one of the new breed. Now 38, Brubaker started covering high school sports for the Miami News in the early 1970s and, since late 1985, has written for the Washington Post on steroid use, the business side of boxing and the personal problems of heavyweight champion Mike Tyson, football star Lawrence Taylor and basketball stars Len Bias and Lloyd Daniels.

Fans pay a great deal of money to go to sports events these days, and sports reporters like Brubaker think they’re entitled to know more about what they’re paying for.

Sports is a $50-billion-a-year business in the United States, one of the 25 largest industries in the country; newspapers should “make sports companies, universities and pro franchises more accountable,” says Tom Witosky, who covers the off-the-field sports news for the Des Moines Register.

For several years now, the Wall Street Journal has covered sports as big business, but very few other papers have followed suit.

One major exception is the Philadelphia Inquirer.

When Glenn Guzzo became executive sports editor of the Inquirer in 1986, one of his first moves was to create a sports business beat that would provide stories telling fans “what decisions were being made in the front office that were going to affect what the fan was going to see on the field--and what the fan was going to have to pay to see it.”

Banking to Sports

Craig Stock had done “an excellent job explaining the vagaries of banking to the readers of the Inquirer business section and I felt confident he could do the same for us in dealing with the administration of sports,” Guzzo says.

Several months later, Stock was promoted to business editor of the Inquirer, and the paper hired Glen Macnow from the Detroit Free Press to replace him on the sports business beat. Macnow had been doing the same job for a few months in Detroit, but he had spent eight years before that as a news-side reporter, much of it on the paper’s investigative team, examining subjects ranging from slumlords to sex offenders.

In five years, Macnow predicts, every newspaper will have a sports business reporter “as regularly as they have somebody who covers baseball and hockey and basketball.”

But Sandy Padwe, a senior editor at Sports Illustrated, says, “Every . . . major . . . sports section in this country should have a business reporter” right now.

“Look at all the stuff that’s going on in sports,” Padwe says, “the sale of the Dallas Cowboys--what does it mean? what does it say about pro football?--the sale of the New England Patriots . . . ticket-scalping, how are the corporations involved . . . (in sponsoring sports events) . . . (unethical) agents . . . what’s going on in the golf and tennis worlds, what’s happened to U.S. soccer and why, what is the relationship between sports teams and municipal governments. . . .”

Some sportswriters--and many sports fans--resent the attention already devoted to such issues. To them, the sports page has traditionally been a source of entertainment and escape, a refuge from the problems that plague the rest of society.

According to legend, when Babe Ruth chased a naked woman through a train one day, sportswriters just looked at each other and shrugged. “I’m glad none of us saw that,” one of them said, “or we’d have to write about it.”

Today, “Babe Chases Babe” would be a tabloid headline--and a major story in virtually every other newspaper as well.

One can argue, of course, that such a story--or any story about an athlete’s off-the-field behavior--is not a legitimate news story. The same argument is made in political reporting--witness the controversy over press reports on Gary Hart and Donna Rice during last year’s presidential campaign.

Political reporters generally say that a candidate’s private life is legitimate news only if it affects how he does his public job; sports reporters make the same point. If Pete Rose’s gambling affects his decisions as manager of the Cincinnati Reds, then it’s a story. If the palimony suit that Margo Adams filed against Wade Boggs affects either his play or the performance or morale of his resentful Boston Red Sox teammates, it’s a story.

Dan Shaughnessy, baseball columnist for the Boston Globe, reluctantly agrees with this analysis, but he thinks the press pays too much attention now to the off-the-field side of sports. He says another paper once offered him a job covering those stories and he turned it down quicker than you can say Pete Rose.

“What a god-awful job that would be,” he says.

Shaughnessy reads only enough off-the-field sports news to “keep up on it” and he doesn’t enjoy it.

“I really slough off on the labor stories, the economics . . . the salaries,” he says.

Shaughnessy says he likes the game side of sports and he thinks most fans agree. They don’t read stories about labor negotiations and strikes in professional sports, he says: “All anyone wants to know is when it’s going to be over.”

But Frank Deford, who recently left Sports Illustrated after 27 years to become the editor of a planned daily sports newspaper, The National, thinks fans and readers are interested in what happens off the field. His new paper will cover that news, as well as on-the-field events, he says.

During Sports Illustrated’s coverage of the Pete Rose gambling story this year, Deford says, people ‘often asked him, “ ‘Why do you guys put that stuff in there? That’s not sports.’ “But as soon as I go to a party, everybody wants to know exactly those things. I can’t tell you how many questions I’ve had about Pete Rose . . . and how few I’ve had about the Reds’ chances (to win the pennant).”

Stories about sex and gambling are only a tiny percentage of the stories done by the new breed of investigative, interpretive and business-oriented sportswriters, though. Most such stories involve corruption, litigation, illegal or unethical behavior, wrongdoing in college athletics and analyses of labor-management problems in professional sports.

“It’s like I never left the newsroom,” says Manny Topol, who spent 15 years covering the police and the courts for Newsday in New York and has spent most of the last decade writing about the legal and business side of sports, examining drug use, sports touts, agents and an FBI investigation of a major boxing promoter.

Topol says many editors and sportswriters, even at Newsday, “don’t like the type of coverage that I do. . . . They would like to see the good old days when we just wrote about games.”

George Solomon, sports editor of the Washington Post, doesn’t feel that way at all.

When a sports editor hires a sportswriter today, Solomon says, “he’d better find reporters who are able to be as competent with issues as they are understanding games. . . . If you can’t have professional reporters capable of covering issues involving labor, involving legalities, they shouldn’t be reporters.”

Tom Lutgen of The Times editorial library assisted with the research for this story.