In defense of the brotherhood

Well, now. I guess Dan Carpenter won't be the guest speaker at a sportswriters convention anytime soon.

This after the former Indianapolis Star columnist went all numbskull on Facebook recently, proclaiming "No sadder spectacle than a sportswriter weighing in on politics and history" in apparent response to Gregg Doyel's very personal piece about removing a Confederate memorial from Garfield Park in Indianapolis.

I've read it. And I don't know what Carpenter's problem with it is, other than the fact Doyel is a damn fine writer and professional jealousy tends to flourish like thistles in a fencerow among writers.

 

Perhaps that's unfair to Carpenter. I don't know. I don't know him except as a columnist for the Star, and he's a fine writer himself who now plies his trade for a number of other folks. So I won't accuse him of having a lazy intellect, even if stereotyping is one of its hallmarks.

 

And essentially telling a sportswriter to "stick to sports" when he or she strays beyond the world of games is the worst kind of stereotyping.

 

Look. I am biased here. I am also defensive. I was a sportswriter for 38 years in Indiana, and occasionally I strayed beyond the world of games myself. And so I've heard the "stick to sports" refrain more than I care to count.

 

What's dismaying is what Carpenter reveals with his unthinking observation: That it's not just the public that is chauvinistic in regard to sportswriters. It's almost as prevalent within newsrooms, too -- where the sports department has often been dubbed the Toy Department, with all the inherent lack of respect that implies.

 

I can't speak for the rest of my sportswriting brethren. But I got damn sick and tired of that "Toy Department" crap. We were reporters hired to report, same as any reporter. We were writers, same as any writer. We were educated at the same schools. A lot of times, some of the best and most perceptive writing in the newspaper came out of the sports department.

 

And, yes, also some of the worst and least perceptive writing. Always been a good-with-the-bad proposition, sportswriting.

 

The point is, the good ones were terrific writers not because of what they wrote about. They were terrific writers because they were in a lot of cases learned men (and women) with the perspective necessary for any writer of note. That what they wrote was often about what Coach was thinking on third-and-forever did not mean they didn't have the intellect or educational background to write about something else.

 

Like, I don't know, history. Or politics.

 

I wrote sports columns for 25 years at the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. I also wrote a weekly op-ed column for a spell. I like to think I did a serviceable job at both, because my interests have always extended beyond the court or the pitch or the playing field.

 

And so when someone who should know better makes a snide remark about what a sad spectacle it is when sportswriters stray from their sandbox, it gets my back up. Because in our den here at home, an entire wall is taken up with a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf. Some of my part is devoted to books about sports; most is devoted to Bruce Catton and William Manchester and S.C. Gwynne and Jay Winik, and other writers of Civil War, political and military history.

 

So when I write about politics or history, I like to think it's not the sad spectacle Carpenter assumes it is. I like to think I at least halfway know what I'm talking about.

 

Which is halfway more than Carpenter knows about sportswriters, apparently.