Sportswriting Quotes

If there's another thing that sportswriting teaches you, it is that there are no transcendent themes in life. In all cases things are here and they're over, and that has to be enough.

It's people stories that make good reading. I don't feel like I'm a sportswriter. I feel like I'm a guy who writes about people who happen to do sports. The best columns are the ones where you tie it somehow into the fabric of the country.

Of course newspaper sportswriting is mostly terrible - and of course it is usually the best writing in the paper.

I covered hockey for a few years in the late '90s and early 2000s for the 'Colorado Springs Gazette,' and I covered the Avalanche for some of the glory years. I've done hockey off and on as a sportswriter but never played it.

Sportswriting is fascinating - descriptions of the opponents and the details of an event in which someone is going to win and someone is going to lose. Life is much longer and more complicated, and the outcomes are less clear-cut.

I began learning the sportswriting business very early in life.

When you're a sportswriter, you learn how to use your imagination and to flex your literary muscle, because it's the same game played over and over again. There's nothing unique or marvelous. It's not an earthquake, or a weird mass murder. It's just the same old game played over and over, and you have to bring out the personalities. You have to drag them kicking and screaming out into the light of day, or you're not a good sportswriter.

I think there are more good sportswriters doing more good sportswriting than ever before. But I also believe that the one thing that's largely gone out is what made sport such fertile literary territory - the characters, the tales, the humor, the pain, what Hollywood calls 'the arc.'