Words of wisdom from DPOSTM's old timers

There may not be an institution as revered within the hallowed halls of DPOSTM -- The Daily Pennsylvanian's Only Staff That Matters, that is -- as the senior column. The seniors -- those who still remain, anyway -- are given one last chance to make their voices heard on these pages. For some, it will be the last time anything they write appears in print. For others, like me, it may be the last time they are not paid for it. Some senior columns become part of the lore and legend that goes with being a sports writer here. Matt Kelly, who was one of my first editors and perhaps the most talented college sports writer I've ever had the privilege to work with, talked of how his days at the DP prepared him for the world of professional sports writing. He wrote of how writing minor sports honed his interviewing skills, his observational skills and his writing skills. That column hangs on the wall with the inscription 'Yo DPOSTM: Read This' scrawled upon it. But, as it turned out, Matt's career didn't go the way he wanted it to, and journalism lost a strong mind when he bailed out to go to law school. That fact notwithstanding, Matt's senior column remains a testament to why we write college sports. For in its elegance, its wry humor and in its humility, Matt's column reminds us why, way back when, we started writing for the DP in the first place, even if we've lost sight of it since then. And the key word there is writing. It is easy to forget, sometimes, that what we do here is exactly that. Sports writing all too easily becomes piecework: a prewrite here, a result there -- chopping semi-journalistic cotton. What Matt failed to point out, and what I will try to remind my younger colleagues, is that sports writing has the potential to transcend journalism and enter the literary pantheon. Read the work of Leigh Montville. See how he tells the tragic story of the Zambian national soccer team, which lost nearly every team member in a plane crash. Watch transfixed as he charts the Phoenix-like resurgance of the replacement team, cobbled together with the help of the international community, rising to within one game of qualifying for the World Cup in the United States: " 'Morocco 1, Zambia 0,' an anonymous voice answers. "You take a moment to digest the news. The most dramatic story of the World Cup is finished before it reached the American stage. You share the heartbreak, long distance." And if you don't cry upon reaching that, the end of the story, you are one cold-hearted son of a bitch. It would have been easy for Montville to write the Zambian story as a DP writer might: dry, expository, emotionless. But Montville takes his craft seriously -- and it is, above all, a craft -- and he tells a tale that would fit in just as well in a collection of short stories. Too often we, as sports writers, take the easy way out. We write the facts without trying to tell the story. And while that is important, I urge you to look for the deeper meaning, to write with effort that begets feeling and to treat your work not like drudgery, but to attempt to capture the pageantry, humanity and everlasting beauty of college sports. If you do less, if you churn out copy at prodigious rates, chock full of statistics and quotes, you may get a job someday, but you sell short the sport and the athletes you cover. And more seriously, you sell short not just yourself, but the craft of sports writing. You have a responsibility to accurately portray what happened, but more importantly, you have the rare opportunity to have your writing served up for public consumption, and with that comes a duty to write. It is a situation akin to being a novelist that everyone will read, but if you don't realize that fact, you waste a priceless opportunity. I realized that one afternoon while reading my grandfather's letters to his children. My grandfather was a sports writer in Milwaukee, and, although I've never read anything he wrote for a newspaper and he was well past the prime of life by the time I reached sentient age, something about his letters struck me. They were all exquisitely written, tinged with irony, sarcasm, humor, pathos and love. And something in my brain latched on to the fact that these letters were written the same way he wrote his articles. It came to me that my grandfather was a great sports writer not because he knew a lot about baseball or because he could churn out 15 inches on a tight deadline or because he was on a first-name basis with Hank Aaron, but because he was a great writer. And the writing is important because what we write about, in its essence, is not. If I've learned anything at Penn, it's that sometimes it is best to let someone else speak for you when they can say it better, and so I leave you with a short anecdote by Dan Jenkins, whose Sports Illustrated story "The Glory Game at Goat Hills" is the greatest piece of sports writing I have ever read, bar none. This, though, is from his introduction to The Best American Sports Writing, 1995: "Actually, a close friend of mine, who has been making his living as a deadline slave for the past three or four decades, may have said it best for all of us a few months ago. Somehow, he got dragged kicking and screaming onto one of those silly panels that universities like to arrange where huge issues are discussed. My friend found himself to be the only sports writer present, and was further alarmed to be surrounded by various professors and psychologists on the panel, where the big question to be taken up was 'Why are sports important?' "For a couple of hours, he did his best to listen to the professors and psychologists as they fell deeply in love with the sound of their own voices. Finally, the question was put to my friend, the sports writer. Why did he think sports were important? " 'I really don't know,' he said. 'Can I go home now?' "