Editor’s note: This op-ed is by Kevin Ellis, a partner in the Montpelier lobbying firm KSE Partners, LLP, and a former award-winning newspaper reporter.
So now we learn that the Boston Red Sox of 2011 were a dysfunctional bunch that drank in the clubhouse during games, skipped workouts, ignored their manager and complained about having to play doubleheaders. When do we learn this? AFTER the season!
Boston Globe sportswriter Bob Hohler brings us a great 2,500 word piece about the inner workings of the Red Sox and gives great insight into why they swooned in September and missed the playoffs. NOW YOU TELL US.
My biggest beef with modern sports journalism – and journalism in general – is that readers don’t really know what’s going on because reporters don’t tell you. It’s the same with reporters covering the White House or a senator. If you write the truth about Senator Jones, he won’t speak to you any more and then you have nothing to put in the paper. Heard it a million times.
Here is how sports journalism works.
A reporter or two spends an entire season with the Red Sox, or the Patriots or the Bruins – from training camp through the end of the season. They get to know the players, coaches and staff REALLY well. They see lots of stuff that players would rather they not see – girlfriends, dirty or racist jokes, bad habits – in short, behaving as very human beings.
My issue with sports writers is that they don’t write what they know. Same with the White House press corps. They know a lot. The job is to put it in the paper or up on the Web. Instead, too many times, they keep what they know to themselves, content to know it and talk about it at parties but not share it with readers.
If you are Boston sports fan, you have no idea what’s going on in the New England Patriot locker room. I think it’s because they are scared of Bill Belichick. (I’m a huge Belichick fan) They are scared that the famed coach will shut them out and never speak to them. Well – he doesn’t speak to them anyway! What do you have to lose? When you watch a Belichick press conference, you can hear a pin drop there is so much fear in the room.
Readers need to know what’s going on in the locker room because it bears on why the team is winning or losing. If Terry Francona gets angry and throws a chair at a player, readers need to know that. If Josh Beckett is overweight and drinking beer in the clubhouse during games, readers need to know that –when the reporter knows it, not when the reporter chooses to write it.
Instead, we get treated like readers back in the Babe Ruth days, when sportswriters traveled and partied with the players and kept their secrets. Yes – things have changed with multi-million dollar contracts. Players are now off limits to the press for the most part. But reporters still see and know lots of interesting stuff that they could report – but don’t.
Bob Hohler’s excellent Red Sox piece should have been written Sept. 1, not after the season.
If journalism is going to survive and prosper in the digital era, reporters need to write and broadcast what they know and stop self-censoring.
“If you know it, write it.” If you do that, readers will flock.
