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Thursday, July 22, 2010
Sports reporters too set in their ways
BY TP O’MAHONY
GREAT writing about sport is a rarity in Ireland.
On the other hand, good reporting of sport is a common feature of Irish journalism.
There’s no necessary element of contradiction here: you don’t have to be an accomplished wordsmith to be a good reporter. It helps, though, to lift reporting above the level of the pedestrian.
The truth is that much of the coverage of sport found in the Irish media is as dull as dishwater. It’s dull and repetitive, yet good in the sense that it’s accurate and comprehensive.
Really good writing about sport, on the other hand, is difficult to find. In many ways Con Houlihan from Castle Island broke the mould with his column in the Evening Press. Con was, indeed still is, a journeyman philosopher who actually wrote about life.
He just happened to do it through the prism of sport. That’s what made his writing so fresh, engaging and different.
Houlihan understood how sport is embedded in our culture, and also understood that culture is much more than art or plays or opera music. It’s also about how we drink pints, how we cook drisheen, the songs we sing, and the conversations we have among ourselves in Thurles on the morning of a Munster hurling final.
When you can locate, or re-locate, sport in this context then you are much closer to understanding its rootedness in our existence as a people. This is partly what Bill Shankley, the great Liverpool manager, had in mind when he once famously said that sport wasn’t just about life and death – it was far more important.
This accounts for our passionate attachment to it, and why we are so preoccupied with it. And of course it’s also why newspapers all over the country devote so many column inches to it.
Some will complain that we have too much sport in our papers, but there’s often a slight element of snobbery in these criticisms.
Houlihan is a trailblazer, but he has few successors or would-be successors at the present time. This is one reason why a lot of the books on sport produced in Ireland are a dull read.
Sport reporters, like others, tend to be set in their ways. Too many of them seem to learn very little as they go along.
The recent soccer World Cup in South Africa was yet another reminder of how television has impacted on sport and the coverage of it.
I once heard it argued that Micheal O’Hehir – rightly referred to as the "voice of the GAA" – never really adjusted to the television age in Ireland.
Essentially was what meant by that was that his match commentaries on television continued to be in style, content and format like radio commentaries.
O’Hehir was a radio commentator par excellence; he never quite took it on board that television gave us pictures that in a sense spoke for themselves, and you didn’t always need to tell your audience what they could actually see for themselves.
This same failing is discernible today in a lot of the match reports in the print media. If your readers have watched a big game on television on a Sunday, then you can’t just give them a blow-by-blow account on the Monday.
The other very strange thing, given our literary tradition here, is how few works of fiction there are dealing with sport.
Where, for instance, is there an Irish novel to match Bernard Malamud’s The Natural, set in the world of American baseball and which starred Robert Redford and Kim Basinger in the excellent film version?
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