Director's cut: Best American Sports Writing

On authenticity, boundary work, and the last word

A few weeks ago, I posted my presentation from the IACS 2025 Summit on Communication and Sport that used the guest editor essays from the Best American Sports Writing Series to examine my notion of the platonic ideal of sports journalism. 

I had a lot of notes that didn’t make the presentation or the post, so I wanted to do a director’s cut of BASW thoughts. 

What is authenticity?

In the 2020 edition, Jackie MacMullan made a fascinating point I had never thought of before. Talking about the stories she had picked for that year’s edition, she wrote: 

None of these stories highlight exploits of stars from the major professional teams. Increasingly, elite athletes have opted to create their own ”brand” churning out self made glossy presentations shellacked with a veneer that lacks the authenticity of a story well told.

This is a fascinating point of view for me. Because traditionally, authenticity is like THE selling point of both for social media and athletes telling their own stories. That posting to social media is more authentic than going through traditional legacy media. When you post on social media, you have total editorial control. You can tell your story exactly how you want to. 

And that’s true to some extent, when we look at it from an athlete’s point of view. 

But what about from the reader’s point of view?

A lot of us understand that an athlete’s social media presence is now carefully curated to present a certain image to the public. And anyone who’s posted vacation or family photos to Instagram that social media is often a highlight reel, not necessarily a well-rounded story. 

MacMullan brings up a really interesting point, that a story by an independent journalist may present an athlete more authentically than a curated social media post will. It casts the idea of authenticity on social media and in sports media in a whole new light. 

Wilbon and social media. 

A few weeks ago, I teased a takedown of Michael Wilbon’s anti-new media screed in the 2012 edition. 

I wrote the whole thing. Dunked on the parts that deserved to be dunked on. 

Then I deleted most of it. 

Honestly, it didn’t feel good or useful to write. It felt like taking cheap shots at a 13-year-old essay. It felt smarmy to publish, another dose of negativity that doesn’t add anything of value. We’ve got enough of that on Al Gore’s internet.

There is one point I’ll make. To quote Wilbon: 

Now anyone who can text or Tweet can be a sportswriter, in a sense, despite never having gotten any closer to ringside, to practice, the start’s locker, or the GM’s office than, say, a cashier at the corner grocery store. 

To be honest, this was a pretty common idea back in the early 2010s among sports journalism. As bloggers and social media users became more prominent and popular, there were a fair number of sports journalists who reacted negatively to that because their stature and identity was being threatened. 

This is some of the original boundary work in digital sports journalism. As always, I turn to my friend Michael Mirer to define it, with his original citations: 

Journalists have engaged in the boundary work of expulsion and protection of autonomy to define their relationships with others in the media system (Lewis, 2012; Revers, 2014; Robinson, 2011) or else define practices that distinguish journal- ists from non-journalists (Anderson, 2013; Coddington, 2013). Yet both sets of arguments, at heart, speak to how journalism fulfills its role in society, setting the profession apart from the amateurs and partisans that populate digital spaces (Singer, 2015).

The Last Word

Because I grew up in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I’m a Sports Reporters kid at heart.

Which means, Dick Schaap always gets the last word. From his delightful introduction to the 2000 edition: 

I have been a journalist for half a century. I have been a reporter, a writer, an editor, and a broadcaster, using the same basic techniques to cover the Son of Sam or the San Francisco 49ers. I have played golf with Bill Clinton, tennis with Johnny Carson, and tonk with Wilt Chamberlain. I have been to the Olympics, the Super Bowl, the World Series, the Final Four, the Masters, Wimbledon, the Kentucky Derby, the Thrilla in Manila, and the World Chess Championships. 

In other words, I have never worked a day in my life.