UNDERCOOKED
and fed to the lyons.
I have long been critical of the quality -- or,
more accurately, the mediocrity -- of the sports columnists in the Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette. To someone who grew up (and matured, and married, and started
a family, and started a blog) on Bill Lyon in the Philadelphia Inquirer,
reading Ron Cook and Bob Smizik feels most days like eating at Long John
Silver's when you know you could be eating at Mitchell's Fish Market.
It's not an unpleasant experience, exactly, but neither does it give you much to
savor or to anticipate. And if you think too long about what you could be
having, well, sometimes you just want to
spit.
As I did yesterday morning when, just three sentences in to Ron Cook's Pitt-upsets-WVU column, I nearly choked on this little morsel:
You also knew it would take a supreme effort from the Pitt players, who were 28 1/2-point underdogs and given absolutely no chance by anyone to shock the world.
We’ll ignore, for a moment, the ho-hum rhythm and diction and get right down to that last clause -- the one that, were it not written by a sports columnist for one of America’s great newspapers, could just as well have been spoken by a wide receiver for one of America’s worst football teams.
Given absolutely no chance by anyone to shock the world? Is he kidding? Does he really think that’s good writing? Good thinking? Or has he -- and, apparently, his editor -- merely spent so much time in the company of overinflated, unintelligible athletes that he's now begun to think and write and sound like them too?
9/11 shocked the world. The Asian tsunami shocked the world. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki shocked the world. But Dave Wannstedt’s scrappy charges somehow overcoming their coach’s well-deserved reputation as a terrible game-day coach and pulling off an upset of the overconfident and almost surely overrated West Virginia Mountaineers in a regular season contest? That registered on the world's Richter Scale only slightly higher than did Oklahoma's upset of Missouri Saturday night. Or Appalachian State's upset of Michigan earlier this year. Or Ethan's upset of Adam in a couple of games of Goblet last week.
(To be fair: the Asian Financial Markets do seem to be taking a bit of a hit today, but I've not yet heard Maria Bartiromo blame it on the lack of burning couches in Morgantown.)
The outcome of the game certainly shocked people in West Virginia. But then so do running water, undiluted gene pools, and the fact that anyone outside the state would hire Alecia Sirk to communicate. And, yes, the shockwaves traveled all the way to western Pennsylvania, where they were felt, no doubt, by all forty-seven people outside of South Oakland who still give a damn what the Pitt-iful Panthers do on the gridiron. And I'm sure that at least a few of those tremors carried across the country and were sensed in those dark corners and even darker minds still unimaginative enough to follow a sport played by young men who rarely belong on the campuses for which they play, and whose championship is decided by a pageant staged, after a five-week wait, between two contestants chosen by computer.
(Imagine the NCAA Basketball champions decided by a PowerBall drawing and a game played in May, and you'll understand why the intellects that still follow this sport might have trouble comprehending a world any larger than Pat White's dislocated thumb. But I digress.)
Given absolutely no chance by anyone to shock the world.
There it is again, just in case you've forgotten what set me off in the first place. A sequence of ten words so dim, so dull, so knee-jerk lazy and paint-by-numbers creative that they require absolutely no effort from the writer. Those two phrases are just lying there, wallowing in the muck of cliched sports talk and simmering in the mire of undercooked sports punditry, ready to be used by a writer who can summon neither the time nor the care nor the inspiration to conjure something better. It's a clause as tired as it is silly, as prosaic as it is absurd. And the only thing it befits less than the situation it describes is the newspaper in which it appears.
Just for masochistic kicks, let's compare it to a sentence from Bill Lyon, peeking his head and his keyboard out of retirement two months ago to write a guest column for the Inquirer when the Phillies completed their improbable comeback, overcame the New York Mets, and -- notice I didn't say shocked the world -- won the National League East:
In the Season of the 10,000 Losses, for a franchise that has suffered more defeats than any professional team in any sport, ever, the Phillies have achieved Deliverance.
Instead of pedestrian rhythm and diction and syntax, instead of a creaking, wheezing phrase that even high school quarterbacks should by now be media-savvy enough to avoid -- neither your three touchdowns nor your conquest of the captain of the cheerleading squad will shock the world, Troy, though your ability to pass a math class might -- we get a lovely, lilting rhythm, a pair of telling details artfully told, and a metaphor that, whether it summons images of Jesus Christ on the cross or Ned Beatty on all fours, surely speaks to some part of our brains that Ron Cook's dull-eared jock-patter could not hope to reach.
Now. I know what you’re thinking. That you really didn’t need that Ned Beatty image. Well, neither did I, but it got your attention and made the point, and, well, it was a formidable moment from my formative film-watching years. But I know what else you’re thinking: is it really fair to hold Mr. Cook, or Mr. Smizik, or any other perfectly competent writer at the Post-Gazette to a standard set by a six-time Pulitzer Prize nominee and nine-time Pennsylvania Sportswriter of the Year winner who’s unquestionably one of the all-time giants of his profession?
Well, let me ask you, Pittsburgh -- did you think it was fair to hold Kordell Stewart and Neil O’Donnell and poor Cliff Stoudt to the standard set by Terry Bradshaw? Do you think it’s fair to hold Marc-Andre Fleury to the same standard as Tom Barrasso or Patrick Roy or Martin Brodeur? Of course you did. And do. And should. Because when they’re playing the same game, you have a right to expect -- and, hell, to demand -- excellence in return for your energies and efforts, much less for your subscription fees.
A few months ago, I had an interesting email exchange with friend, future in-law, and Post-Gazette editor extraordinaire John Allison about how newspapers in general and the PG in particular can compete with blogs and YouTube and every other option all a-Twitter in this post-literate media age. And I told him, very simply, that I think newspapers can -- and, perhaps more importantly, should -- compete by the sheer force and quality of their content. By the vetted, collected power of their collective talents. Which is to say: by the quality of their writing.
(Yes, yes. By the quality of their reporting too. But, with local talent like Dennis Roddy and Rich Lord and Bill Toland -- and Jeremy Boren at the Trib -- just to name a few, I'm going to take that as a given. And, anyway, that's another subject for another post on another day...
...As is, I'm afraid, the lack of a truly gifted all-purpose columnist here in Pittsburgh, now that Dennis Roddy has been confined to his news desk; the PG has been conspicuous by his absence, and poorer for it. But I digress. Again.)
It seems to me that one natural and obvious place for truly great writing in a Pittsburgh newspaper would be in the sports section. I'd love to see and read and revel in a regular sports columnist who writes with something resembling passion, much less an ear for the poetic, and then channels it through some agile, engaging prose. (No, Gene Collier doesn't count; he's too busy trying to be arch and clever, and his shtick, at least to my ear, has worn wafer thin.) I'm a bit of a snob, I suppose, and I'm also admittedly spoiled; when you're weaned on the crackling, cracker-jack commentary of someone like Bill Lyon, who could turn a phrase as well as anyone in The New Yorker, and who could cut right to the passionate bone of the sport or the game or the season with one sentence and a couple of stirring metaphors, you're conditioned to expect great things from your baseball and football and hockey columns. Even if you don't always get it.
We could get it, I think, from Dejan Kovacevic -- who, for my mind and money, is the best sports writer at the Post-Gazette, and whose old Sunday hockey columns used to be one of the highlights of the PG's literary week. His passion for the sport and facility for the language made his prose always lively and engaging, and he never failed to thrill me with at least some small turn of a phrase. I still weep for the day he got the Pirates beat, and I imagine he does too. It's a wonder he's not moved out of town or at least slit his wrists.
I know that I rarely speak for the masses, and I doubt that I'm doing so here. But I know that when I open a newspaper, I want to read great writing. Delicate rhythms. Nimble phrasings. Artful, energetic diction. Fluid and fluent syntax. Those rare and wonderful sentences and paragraphs that make you want to stop and read them again and maybe even write them down. I don't think there's enough of that at the PG. And I know there’s nowhere near enough of it in the Sports section.
To be fair, there’s not a lot of it anywhere these days, though -- at the risk of homering for southeastern Pennsylvania just a little bit more -- there are at least a couple of great columns in the Philly sports sections this morning, recapping the game but also capturing the mood of a city after yet another disheartening, rip-your-guts-out-through-your-toes Eagles loss. Consider this lovely, lilting passage from the Daily News’ Rich Hoffman:
The grass isn’t always greener, even when it is newly arrived from a sod farm. This, the people of Philadelphia have learned - if not by A.J. Feeley's third interception, then certainly by his fourth.
Hours later, in the dark of the autumn night, a cold and miserable rain was still falling over Lincoln Financial Field, the precipitation playing in the lights. It was more dripping than dropping, if that makes any sense. Everybody was gone.
The detritus of defeat lay on the Eagles' sideline, and in their dressing room. What do you say when Feeley, The People's Choice, has just thrown away a football game? Because that is what he did.
Everybody saw it. Everybody felt it, the numbing thud when the afternoon's emotional pendulum made sickly contact on its final swing. Brian Westbrook's magical punt return set them up to steal the game at the end. Then Feeley threw another pick, his fourth.
Seahawks 28, Eagles 24. Thud.
And what was left? Crushed paper cups that didn't quite make it into the nearby trash can. The ribbons on the goal posts, barely moving. Players heading out of the locker room and into the uncertainty of the December night with a 5-7 record, admonished by their coach - as related by cornerback Sheldon Brown - "to stay together."
This was left, too: The irony that dripped along with the weather, the irony that Philadelphia would now look, unanimously, for Donovan McNabb to try to save the Eagles' season.
I’d planned to end that excerpt earlier, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. It was all too good, too sure, too richly and artfully developed in both tone and texture. I was having far too good of a time reading it, and I imagined that you would be too, even if you don’t give a damn about the Eagles or any other Philadelphia sports team. Because that’s not just great sports writing. It’s great writing. Period.
Just for the fun -- which is to say, the masochism -- of it, go ahead and compare Mr. Hoffman’s opening to, say, the first five or six paragraphs of Ron Cook’s column after last night’s Steelers’ game. It's palatable and professional enough, to be sure. But it leaves me wanting and hungry, like I'm back in a booth at Long John Silver's again, dreaming of some cedar plank salmon on a solid oak table at Mitchell's.
Am I being unfair? Maybe. Am I being selective? Sure. But if you can find some truly great or powerful or poetic passages in the works of Mr. Cook or Mr. Smizik or Mr. Collier, feel free to send them along and make a case for what I've missed or overlooked or maybe just convinced myself is not there. You'll forgive me, however, if I don't exactly brace my inbox. And that's a particular shame in a place like Pittsburgh, where fans follow their football and, to a lesser extent, their hockey with something approaching, and sometimes even surpassing, a full religious fervor. In this town, a poet laureate of balls and pucks and the powerful, emotional undertow of the three rivers that run through them, would be a most welcome voice, and a most wonderful read.
I know you can't always get a Bill Lyon. But sometimes, out here in the sports column jungle, you want more than just a clowder of padding and passable cats.
As I did yesterday morning when, just three sentences in to Ron Cook's Pitt-upsets-WVU column, I nearly choked on this little morsel:
You also knew it would take a supreme effort from the Pitt players, who were 28 1/2-point underdogs and given absolutely no chance by anyone to shock the world.
We’ll ignore, for a moment, the ho-hum rhythm and diction and get right down to that last clause -- the one that, were it not written by a sports columnist for one of America’s great newspapers, could just as well have been spoken by a wide receiver for one of America’s worst football teams.
Given absolutely no chance by anyone to shock the world? Is he kidding? Does he really think that’s good writing? Good thinking? Or has he -- and, apparently, his editor -- merely spent so much time in the company of overinflated, unintelligible athletes that he's now begun to think and write and sound like them too?
9/11 shocked the world. The Asian tsunami shocked the world. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki shocked the world. But Dave Wannstedt’s scrappy charges somehow overcoming their coach’s well-deserved reputation as a terrible game-day coach and pulling off an upset of the overconfident and almost surely overrated West Virginia Mountaineers in a regular season contest? That registered on the world's Richter Scale only slightly higher than did Oklahoma's upset of Missouri Saturday night. Or Appalachian State's upset of Michigan earlier this year. Or Ethan's upset of Adam in a couple of games of Goblet last week.
(To be fair: the Asian Financial Markets do seem to be taking a bit of a hit today, but I've not yet heard Maria Bartiromo blame it on the lack of burning couches in Morgantown.)
The outcome of the game certainly shocked people in West Virginia. But then so do running water, undiluted gene pools, and the fact that anyone outside the state would hire Alecia Sirk to communicate. And, yes, the shockwaves traveled all the way to western Pennsylvania, where they were felt, no doubt, by all forty-seven people outside of South Oakland who still give a damn what the Pitt-iful Panthers do on the gridiron. And I'm sure that at least a few of those tremors carried across the country and were sensed in those dark corners and even darker minds still unimaginative enough to follow a sport played by young men who rarely belong on the campuses for which they play, and whose championship is decided by a pageant staged, after a five-week wait, between two contestants chosen by computer.
(Imagine the NCAA Basketball champions decided by a PowerBall drawing and a game played in May, and you'll understand why the intellects that still follow this sport might have trouble comprehending a world any larger than Pat White's dislocated thumb. But I digress.)
Given absolutely no chance by anyone to shock the world.
There it is again, just in case you've forgotten what set me off in the first place. A sequence of ten words so dim, so dull, so knee-jerk lazy and paint-by-numbers creative that they require absolutely no effort from the writer. Those two phrases are just lying there, wallowing in the muck of cliched sports talk and simmering in the mire of undercooked sports punditry, ready to be used by a writer who can summon neither the time nor the care nor the inspiration to conjure something better. It's a clause as tired as it is silly, as prosaic as it is absurd. And the only thing it befits less than the situation it describes is the newspaper in which it appears.
Just for masochistic kicks, let's compare it to a sentence from Bill Lyon, peeking his head and his keyboard out of retirement two months ago to write a guest column for the Inquirer when the Phillies completed their improbable comeback, overcame the New York Mets, and -- notice I didn't say shocked the world -- won the National League East:
In the Season of the 10,000 Losses, for a franchise that has suffered more defeats than any professional team in any sport, ever, the Phillies have achieved Deliverance.
Instead of pedestrian rhythm and diction and syntax, instead of a creaking, wheezing phrase that even high school quarterbacks should by now be media-savvy enough to avoid -- neither your three touchdowns nor your conquest of the captain of the cheerleading squad will shock the world, Troy, though your ability to pass a math class might -- we get a lovely, lilting rhythm, a pair of telling details artfully told, and a metaphor that, whether it summons images of Jesus Christ on the cross or Ned Beatty on all fours, surely speaks to some part of our brains that Ron Cook's dull-eared jock-patter could not hope to reach.
Now. I know what you’re thinking. That you really didn’t need that Ned Beatty image. Well, neither did I, but it got your attention and made the point, and, well, it was a formidable moment from my formative film-watching years. But I know what else you’re thinking: is it really fair to hold Mr. Cook, or Mr. Smizik, or any other perfectly competent writer at the Post-Gazette to a standard set by a six-time Pulitzer Prize nominee and nine-time Pennsylvania Sportswriter of the Year winner who’s unquestionably one of the all-time giants of his profession?
Well, let me ask you, Pittsburgh -- did you think it was fair to hold Kordell Stewart and Neil O’Donnell and poor Cliff Stoudt to the standard set by Terry Bradshaw? Do you think it’s fair to hold Marc-Andre Fleury to the same standard as Tom Barrasso or Patrick Roy or Martin Brodeur? Of course you did. And do. And should. Because when they’re playing the same game, you have a right to expect -- and, hell, to demand -- excellence in return for your energies and efforts, much less for your subscription fees.
A few months ago, I had an interesting email exchange with friend, future in-law, and Post-Gazette editor extraordinaire John Allison about how newspapers in general and the PG in particular can compete with blogs and YouTube and every other option all a-Twitter in this post-literate media age. And I told him, very simply, that I think newspapers can -- and, perhaps more importantly, should -- compete by the sheer force and quality of their content. By the vetted, collected power of their collective talents. Which is to say: by the quality of their writing.
(Yes, yes. By the quality of their reporting too. But, with local talent like Dennis Roddy and Rich Lord and Bill Toland -- and Jeremy Boren at the Trib -- just to name a few, I'm going to take that as a given. And, anyway, that's another subject for another post on another day...
...As is, I'm afraid, the lack of a truly gifted all-purpose columnist here in Pittsburgh, now that Dennis Roddy has been confined to his news desk; the PG has been conspicuous by his absence, and poorer for it. But I digress. Again.)
It seems to me that one natural and obvious place for truly great writing in a Pittsburgh newspaper would be in the sports section. I'd love to see and read and revel in a regular sports columnist who writes with something resembling passion, much less an ear for the poetic, and then channels it through some agile, engaging prose. (No, Gene Collier doesn't count; he's too busy trying to be arch and clever, and his shtick, at least to my ear, has worn wafer thin.) I'm a bit of a snob, I suppose, and I'm also admittedly spoiled; when you're weaned on the crackling, cracker-jack commentary of someone like Bill Lyon, who could turn a phrase as well as anyone in The New Yorker, and who could cut right to the passionate bone of the sport or the game or the season with one sentence and a couple of stirring metaphors, you're conditioned to expect great things from your baseball and football and hockey columns. Even if you don't always get it.
We could get it, I think, from Dejan Kovacevic -- who, for my mind and money, is the best sports writer at the Post-Gazette, and whose old Sunday hockey columns used to be one of the highlights of the PG's literary week. His passion for the sport and facility for the language made his prose always lively and engaging, and he never failed to thrill me with at least some small turn of a phrase. I still weep for the day he got the Pirates beat, and I imagine he does too. It's a wonder he's not moved out of town or at least slit his wrists.
I know that I rarely speak for the masses, and I doubt that I'm doing so here. But I know that when I open a newspaper, I want to read great writing. Delicate rhythms. Nimble phrasings. Artful, energetic diction. Fluid and fluent syntax. Those rare and wonderful sentences and paragraphs that make you want to stop and read them again and maybe even write them down. I don't think there's enough of that at the PG. And I know there’s nowhere near enough of it in the Sports section.
To be fair, there’s not a lot of it anywhere these days, though -- at the risk of homering for southeastern Pennsylvania just a little bit more -- there are at least a couple of great columns in the Philly sports sections this morning, recapping the game but also capturing the mood of a city after yet another disheartening, rip-your-guts-out-through-your-toes Eagles loss. Consider this lovely, lilting passage from the Daily News’ Rich Hoffman:
The grass isn’t always greener, even when it is newly arrived from a sod farm. This, the people of Philadelphia have learned - if not by A.J. Feeley's third interception, then certainly by his fourth.
Hours later, in the dark of the autumn night, a cold and miserable rain was still falling over Lincoln Financial Field, the precipitation playing in the lights. It was more dripping than dropping, if that makes any sense. Everybody was gone.
The detritus of defeat lay on the Eagles' sideline, and in their dressing room. What do you say when Feeley, The People's Choice, has just thrown away a football game? Because that is what he did.
Everybody saw it. Everybody felt it, the numbing thud when the afternoon's emotional pendulum made sickly contact on its final swing. Brian Westbrook's magical punt return set them up to steal the game at the end. Then Feeley threw another pick, his fourth.
Seahawks 28, Eagles 24. Thud.
And what was left? Crushed paper cups that didn't quite make it into the nearby trash can. The ribbons on the goal posts, barely moving. Players heading out of the locker room and into the uncertainty of the December night with a 5-7 record, admonished by their coach - as related by cornerback Sheldon Brown - "to stay together."
This was left, too: The irony that dripped along with the weather, the irony that Philadelphia would now look, unanimously, for Donovan McNabb to try to save the Eagles' season.
I’d planned to end that excerpt earlier, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. It was all too good, too sure, too richly and artfully developed in both tone and texture. I was having far too good of a time reading it, and I imagined that you would be too, even if you don’t give a damn about the Eagles or any other Philadelphia sports team. Because that’s not just great sports writing. It’s great writing. Period.
Just for the fun -- which is to say, the masochism -- of it, go ahead and compare Mr. Hoffman’s opening to, say, the first five or six paragraphs of Ron Cook’s column after last night’s Steelers’ game. It's palatable and professional enough, to be sure. But it leaves me wanting and hungry, like I'm back in a booth at Long John Silver's again, dreaming of some cedar plank salmon on a solid oak table at Mitchell's.
Am I being unfair? Maybe. Am I being selective? Sure. But if you can find some truly great or powerful or poetic passages in the works of Mr. Cook or Mr. Smizik or Mr. Collier, feel free to send them along and make a case for what I've missed or overlooked or maybe just convinced myself is not there. You'll forgive me, however, if I don't exactly brace my inbox. And that's a particular shame in a place like Pittsburgh, where fans follow their football and, to a lesser extent, their hockey with something approaching, and sometimes even surpassing, a full religious fervor. In this town, a poet laureate of balls and pucks and the powerful, emotional undertow of the three rivers that run through them, would be a most welcome voice, and a most wonderful read.
I know you can't always get a Bill Lyon. But sometimes, out here in the sports column jungle, you want more than just a clowder of padding and passable cats.
Posted: Mon - December 3, 2007 at 04:49 PM
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Published On: Jan 16, 2009 04:50 PM
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Published On: Jan 16, 2009 04:50 PM