The role of sports in news

This has the potential to be a really long and rambling post, so bear with me here. It ought to make up for not writing anything original in a while.

Every local daily newspaper has more or less the same four or five sections: Local news, National/World news, Features, Opinion and Sports. Those can be shaken up or renamed from paper to paper, but the rule holds true almost without exception. National newspapers like the USA Today are broken up a little differently, taking out the local angle: News, Life, Money, Sports. Smaller weeklies, like The Jessamine Journal, usually take the national news out of the picture and are divided into News, Features, Opinion, Sports. You see where I’m going with this.

Have you ever wondered how sports worked their way into being deemed newsworthy by nearly every journalistic publication? At what point did grown men and women playing games become an integral part of our worlds?

The book “Sports: The First Five Millennia” by Allen Guttmann briefly chronicles the beginning of sports in the mass media, attributing the first sports page to The London Morning Herald in 1817. Fast forward to 1895, and William Randolph Hearst added a sports section to his New York Journal, pretty much cementing its role in modern journalism. Today, not having a sports section in the newspaper is a sin as damning as not having tomato sauce on your pizza.

But why? What is it about sports that fascinates us to the point where we consider them just as vital to the news as politics and the economy?

First, the obvious. Sports is a multi-billion dollar industry. As a whole, professional sports employ more people and bring in more money than most Fortune 500 companies. The New York Yankees have the highest payroll in professional sports, at more than $209,000,000 a year (as of 2008). Interesting note, nine of the top 10 teams in payroll are in salary cap-less Major League Baseball. The other team is the San Francisco 49ers with just over $120,000,000 a year in payroll. An industry that is seeing this much money come and go definitely deserves attention in the press. So there is an economic appeal to covering professional sports.

The same goes with college athletics, which pulls in millions of dollars in boosters, ticket sales and advertising and hands out millions more in athletic scholarships and new facilities. College sports arguably need more watchdogging than professional sports do, since the goal of athletics at colleges is to boost the image of the school, not line the pockets of the players and administrators.

So money is a factor, to be sure. However, if you notice, 95 percent of sports stories are not about money. About half (and I hope you know I’m making these numbers up) of the stories that appear in the pages of the newspaper are about the games themselves. And then if it isn’t enough to talk about the score and the stats and the flow, there are columnists whose job is to delve deeper than the box score, to bring you a picture of the team from a different angle. Now that’s just one or two days a week. The other five or six are devoted to writing about they players themselves or how practice went or who is injured or what to expect in the conference season. And people, myself included, eat this stuff up.

Sports (and from here on out, I am talking about college and professional sports) are entertainment, no doubt about that. They are designed for people to come watch — if people don’t watch, they don’t make money, people don’t get paid, they move on to something lucrative. But it’s what makes us watch that makes sports newsworthy.

It all begins with the primal sense of competition and struggle between two or more entities. Everybody tells the story of soccer and how the reason it is so popular in third-world countries is that, not only is it cheap, but it is a perfect metaphor of fighting to survive and how you have to work so hard just to get one goal. Every one of those goals is cause for massive celebration. That dream of success over an opposing force is what drives athletes to sculpt their bodies and fans to want so badly, and sometimes miserably, for their teams to win.

Since franchises are based in specific cities, there is also a pride factor that works its way in. Lexington lives and dies by its Wildcats, and Green Bay not only cheers for, but it owns its Packers. The Southsider Sox in Chicago don’t like to let those high-brow Northsider Cubs into their bars. Two people can become fast friends or instant enemies depending on whose logo is on their caps. Diehard fans care about their teams like they care about their siblings, in some cases more so. It’s the reason people continue to pull for losing teams.

So there is a demand for sports news, which is a much stronger argument than the money. But can’t we get that from the endless coverage on ESPN or from one of the many specialty magazines and Web sites that we see on a regular basis? Why do newspapers continue to cover all facets of athletics, regardless of how much other information is out there?

Here’s where we come to what, to me, is the most convincing argument for why we need sports journalism as a society. Sports offers us the perfect story. Think about this for a minute. What more do you need in a good story than a hero, a villain, a conflict and a resolution? It’s like you’re reading a new story every day but with all of your favorite characters. I’ve already written before about how I view journalism — as storytelling. Sure, we are supposed to be watchdogs and break news to the readers, but at the core, we are here to tell stories. It doesn’t matter how many sources we have — if we can’t tell a story, we don’t get read.

Between those game stories, we learn more about the characters that we follow. Athlete profiles, trade rumors, anecdotes about what goes on behind the scenes, those allow us to dig deeper into the lives of these heroes and villains. The more fans care about their teams, the more they want to know about their players, the more they care about those players, the more they care about the team, and so on until you have a pretty wild fan base. I have always had a theory that the most passionate fan bases are the ones whose local newspapers have done the best job covering those teams.

Because of that passion, some of the most beautiful stories ever written have come from the sports pages. There are few emotions as raw as the joy of winning a big game or the pain of losing one. The Daily Fix at The Wall Street Journal’s Web site looks at some of the best sports writing an a day-to-day basis, but it also chooses the best sports stories of each year since 2004. Here’s a look at the 2008 list. There are two stories on that list that I highly recommend if you get a chance. Tom Friend at ESPN looked at the Tony Gwynn Jr.’s game-tying hit off of lifetime friend Trevor Hoffman and Gary Smith, one of the best feature writers out there in any subject, wrote about a group of young war refugees from 24 different countries who play on a traveling soccer team.

These are just examples of why sports are so important to journalism and why newspapers continue to devote so much time and space to covering them. It’s why the story of the Asbury College basketball team playing at a prison continues to be my favorite story I’ve ever written.

I encourage anyone, even if you are not a big sports fan, to try out the sports pages for a while and see if ou can’t get something from the stories. Maybe you’ll even pick up a favorite team along the way.