Sports writing: Journalism’s Toy Department

Sports writing: Journalism’s Toy Department
By Don Gil K. Carreon and Jose Bimbo F. Santos

ON ANY given day, newspapers would have something like this: a banner story that says five storms are about to hit the country; a story below the fold that says petroleum companies are planning to raise oil prices; and another front-page story that says the government is finalizing a new set of tax measures.
Ten or so pages away, at the back page, a photo of a volleyball player is shown, left arm stretched as she hammers the ball against two defenders. There are stories about a popular basketball team that had won another heart-stopping ball game, a local boxer gaining attention internationally, and a billiards player who had just reached the semi-final round of a tournament that promises a lucrative prize for the champion.
The contents of the two pages are worlds apart. One is about serious news and the other is about, well, games. It is what has earned for the sports section its understandable reputation as journalism’s toy department.
But take a closer look. While dealing with supposedly unimportant topics, sports reporting is almost no different from other forms of journalism. In fact, it has just about the same problems that trouble the other types of reporting.
Pack journalism, taking of money from sources, and moonlighting in public relations are just some of the practices that one finds in covering the beats, including sports.
As the British Journalism Review reported last November, “Sports, with all its cultural, political, and economic implications, continues to occupy a very public space in contemporary culture, those whose job it is to help make sense of its narratives are overdue a reassessment of their position within modern journalism.”

Looking for scruples
Inside the press room at the Rizal Memorial Sports Complex, The Daily Tribune sports writer Julius Manicad nonchalantly observes, within earshot of the other sports writers, how common corruption has become in the sports beat.
Three years into his job as sports writer, Manicad says that the cash distributed is only “goodwill money” and not grease money. Asking for gifts is considered inappropriate but being voluntarily given one is not. In fact, the latter is not even regarded by sports journalists as a bribe.
BusinessMirror’s Ian Brion adds that gifts do not influence them to write positive reports since sports stories by their very nature are usually upbeat.
“For example, when there’s a presscon on billiards, there’s nothing negative to write about. So how will giving us gifts be an incentive for us to write positively?” Brion says.
Accepting gifts, he says, becomes a problem when a reporter begins to feel that he is supposed to attack the other party which did not give a gift.
“You can still get the side of the other party but, of course, you give more weight to the statements of the one who gave something,” Brion says.
For his part, Brion says that even if he is given a gift, he will not hesitate to write negatively about somebody who is involved in a controversy. It is understood that a gift is given only as a token of appreciation and not meant to keep him quiet.

Getting the story
Manicad reveals that he would not hesitate to do anything to get a document that contains information which he thinks the public should know.
“Kahit nga security guard diyan, padugasin mo ng dokumento,  ise-xerox na niya. Istorya ’yun eh,” he says.
Yet, the usual problem in sports journalism today is not the over-eagerness to get a story; it is in having the initiative to look for a story.
The Philippine Chronicle’s Eddie Alinea, a sports writer who started out in The Manila Times in the early 1970s, observes that today is the era of press releases.
“Stories are all alike today. What we have now is like xerox journalism,” Alinea says.
Brion says sports journalists write fewer enterprise stories today because they want to keep the peace in the beat.
“For example, if the three of us cover the same beat and the next day I get a scoop, you get scolded by your editors. Naturally, you would want to get back at me by getting your own scoop. So since we don’t want to get any trouble from our editors, we just share our stories,” Brion says, explaining the dearth of enterprise reporting in the beat.
Augusto Villanueva, editor in chief of the Journal Group of Publications, started as a sportswriter in the early 1950s. In his time, he says, scoops did not destroy friendships among reporters. On the contrary, it strengthened friendships and drove them to be more competitive.
“For example, if I out-scoop them today, tomorrow when we see each other, we will just laugh and kid about it. They will still wonder, though, how I outwitted them, and we will all again try to outdo each other for the day,” Villanueva says.
He recalls, “We really had to work our butts off. There were no press releases then. We had nothing, nothing to rely on, except ourselves.”
Villanueva echoes Alinea’s observation that because of the proliferation of press releases today, “every story now looks the same.”

Keeping a story
Brion says that competition among sports journalists is no longer as intense as it used to be. Individual competition has been replaced by competition among cartels or groups of reporters who band together for reasons of friendship or other considerations. An exception to story-sharing happens when someone stumbles on a big story and wants to keep it as an exclusive. In this case, he would ask his companions in the cartel to allow him to have the scoop.
But Brion agrees that sharing a story or even asking one’s supposed rivals for permission to keep a story exclusive is a questionable practice.
“By sharing stories with journalists from other papers, one is essentially working for other papers as well,” he says.

Playing both sides
Manicad  says the practice of sports writers doubling as public relations people has become commonplace.
While he personally does not agree with this, he accepts it as part of the culture in sports journalism. Claiming that the stakes are lower in sports, Manicad thinks that sports reporters doubling as PR persons is not as bad compared to political journalists who do this.
Brion also admits that some sports journalists do positive write-ups for athletes as a favor.
“I know that when you are a reporter, you should not serve as PR people for others but here it cannot be avoided,” he says and describes the situation as a “gray area.”

Not just a hobby beat
But for all the fun associated with reporting about sports, Brion, who has covered beats such as the military and the police for the Tokyo Shimbun, says covering sports can be more challenging
“There are more instances when we have to race against the clock because some games usually finish just when the papers are closing,” Brion says.
Manicad puts things less modestly.
“If a sports writer is placed in another beat—lifestyle, politics, or anywhere else—he will survive and even shine,” he says, adding “But put a political writer in sports and I am sure his performance will suffer—and everybody knows that.”
It would seem that politics and other beats are easier to learn and master than sports—at least according to sports writers.
The perception that sports journalism is just about covering games is also wrong, according to Manicad, because there are other stories that should also be explained to the public such as the policies and issues involving sports organizations or their leaders.
Covering games is not always easy either.  Sports journalists are also expected to familiarize themselves with different kinds of sports that have different rules and are governed by different organizations. A reporter who covers basketball is also expected to be able to report on football, baseball, volleyball, badminton, and even water polo.
Neither does covering sports mean that journalists do not tackle serious matters. In the United States, for example, sports journalists routinely report on the business dealings of the teams they cover. And in that country, sports is serious business.
According to the sports publication Street and Smith’s Sports Business Journal, the American sports business industry, estimated to be worth around $213 billion, is one of the largest and fastest growing industries in the US. It is twice the size of the US auto industry and seven times that of the movie industry.
Although the sports industry in the Philippines is not as developed as in other countries, a number of sports are growing in popularity and attracting media attention. Aside from basketball, billiards, and boxing—considered the most popular sports in the country—other games that are getting more coverage are volleyball, through the tournament sponsored by pizza chain Shakey’s, and badminton, which has the Manny V. Pangilinan Cup that invites top players from Europe and Asia to compete in the Philippines.

Covering highs and lows
While sports journalists are twitted for dealing with supposedly trivial matters, it is sometimes forgotten that they are the same people who deliver news that brings a nation together.
As former US Chief Justice Earl Warren said, he preferred the sports pages to the front page because while the first “records people’s accomplishments,” the latter contains “nothing but man’s failures.”
Sports often has a political dimension. In the 1936 Berlin Olympics, for example, African-American track athlete Jesse Owens won four gold medals. His victory repudiated his own country’s racist practices as well as  Adolf Hitler’s claims of Aryan superiority.
But the intrusion of serious issues into the sports pages is not always uplifting. In the 1972 Munich Olympics, 11 Israeli athletes and coaches were killed by Palestinian militants to show their opposition to the creation of a Jewish state in a land they believed rightfully belonged to Palestinian Arabs.
There are other issues as well. Locally, these are the chronic lack of funding for the national teams and even cheating.
In 1992, the Philippines was stripped of its championship in the Little League World Series after journalist Al Mendoza exposed the use of fake age and residency documents to field ineligible players in a story that incidentally had its share of flaws.
In the US, the American press regularly releases stories on the doping scandals in baseball and the tendency of college basketball players to discontinue their education in order to turn professional.

The challenge
All the reporters interviewed for this article said they believe that Filipino sports journalists have the skill to do their job.  But with the growing reliance on press releases and the practice of writing positive write-ups in exchange for favors, having those skills may not really matter.
“Manny Pacquiao has vanquished Erik Morales with the kind of dispatch that makes even skeptics mutter, ‘Greatest ever.’ Now, if only our sports writers could likewise rise to the challenge,” journalist Howie Severino recently wrote in his blog (http://gmapinoytv.igma.tv/sidetrip/blog/).
As far as ethics are concerned, Villanueva, who edits People’s Journal, People’s Tonight, and People’s Taliba, says he enforces strict policies to stem corruption which, he admits, is prevalent in the profession. Whenever a journalist is caught in a shady deal, he is warned. If he continues with the wrongdoing, he is suspended.  And if he persists, he is dismissed.
“In my own little way, I do what I can,” Villanueva says.  In a business where so much needs to be done, a little goes a long way.

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