'Racing men are not writers'
How sports journalism has talked about gambling, and how it does now
A major theme of any research is examining change over time.
Things are this way now. How do they compare to how they were in the past? What has changed, and what societal and economic forces led to those changes?
In looking at the intersection of sports journalism and legal and accessible sports gambling, that has proven to be a challenge.
Because the change in this area has been from nothing to everything. Gambling has gone from something whispered about or spoken in double entendres to a primary focus of sports coverage.
Witness this headline from ESPN.com last week:
That headline — “Lakers’ early playoff exit a blow to betting public” — was posted on Thursday morning, hours after the Timberwolves beat the Lakers in the first round. And it was jarring. I found out that the Timberwolves beat the Lakers because of that headline about gambling.
It’s not just that the story was written. It’s not just that editors and writers viewed this as newsworthy. It’s not just that it was a headline on the home page of the self-proclaimed Worldwide Leader in Sports. It’s not just that it was one of the lead headlines. It’s that it was THE lead headline. Which, in the visual shortcut of journalism, means it is the top story.
What’s jarring is that there’s no real precedent for this in our sports coverage.
Looking historically, outside of scandals like the Black Sox or Pete Rose, the only time gambling ever came up in sports journalism was in coverage of horse racing. Which makes sense, since that’s the only sport in which gambling was legal and relatively accessible.
A pair of examples from sports journalism memoirs can give us a bit of understanding of how sports journalism and sports gambling historically intersected in around horse racing.
The first set comes from Stanely Woodward’s book “Sports Page,” which is a kind of owner’s manual/memoir/manifesto on running a newspaper sports section in the 1940s.
Woodward has chapters dedicated to each beat that a sports section would have and what he looks for in each sport’s beat writer, and this coming from 1940s New York City, he has a chapter titled Racing Writer. At the time, Woodward writes, horse racing was legal gambling in 25 states.
Woodward notes differences between papers where horse racing coverage is a daily thing and others where it is more event driven. Of the places where it is a daily item, like New York, he writes:
Racing coverage in a hot area is largely tabular. Followers of the sport are principally devoted to its gambling phases so what you need mostly to cover racing is an able guesser and a bundle of agate type.
He also delineates between sports writers who covered major horse racing events like the Triple Crown races and those who cover the local daily tracks. The former, he describes as typical newspaper reporters and describes the work they do within that context.
The latter, the daily horse racing writers, he describes like this:
Most racing men are statisticians, with a slight touch of seer. Their interest is in seeing their selections come home. Not one in fifty pays much attention to the color and life of the racetrack. Only in the broadest sense are such devotees of the horse ovals newspaper writers. They are capable of writing routine stories telling who won and that’s about as far as they can go.
Basically, the racing men are not writers. They regard the Kentucky Derby merely as the sixth race at Churchill Downs and practically all of them are delighted when someone else moves in to cover the attendant hoop-la. They themselves regard it as extraneous, painful and unnecessary. They are specialized people, these racing men. They do a job which is beyond if not above the capabilities of a sports writer who hasn’t spent twenty years with stable swipes and ledgers. Their manipulations are painstaking and specialized. They have a grip on their own field that cannot be shaken and some of them are among the most valuable employees of the newspapers and press services. They write for the paper briefly and occasionally. They are handicappers rather than reporters.
Implicit in Woodward’s description is the importance that horse results and, by extension, gambling, were to the sports section. Even though daily horse racing reporters were not writers and newspaper men only by the broadest sense of the word, they still had an important job to do. As anybody who ever worked a newspaper desk knows, the race results are one thing that can never ever ever be missing from the print edition.1
The second comes from George Vecsey’s “A Year in the Sun,” the diary-style memoir he wrote about 1986 that has been one of the most influential books I’ve ever read in my life.
In one section, Vecsey writes honestly and unflinchingly about his late father’s gambling addiction and how Gambler’s Anonymous helped his father recover.
Vecsey writes:
Sometimes I would see him talking with people I instinctively did not like, seedy men with furtive eyes who huddled together in secret conversations, who met in the back rooms and played cards on lunch hours, who hunched over the sports wire looking for scores and race results.
I included this passage because I think it’s illustrative of what sports gambling — and sports gamblers — looked like in the pre-legalization era. This was not guys hitting up Vegas sports books on a dudes’ weekend, it was not college kids playing on their phones, it was not Bill Simmons writing on the internet. Because it was illegal, these were the people you dealt with if you wanted to bet on sports. .
Broadening it out to gambling at large, Vecsey writes:
I cannot believe that television executives who call themselves journalists hire people like Jimmy the Greek, who talk about odds rather than news developments. I find it grubby that newspapers run columns that focus on gambling odds rather than the events themselves.
When I cover racing, I am bemused at seeing racing writers betting on races they cover, some of them sweating and shouting as the horses approach the finish line, some of them cursing jockeys and trainers for costing them money. I understand much of racing is about betting, but I’m not comfortable seeing journalists handling thick wads of money on company time. I don’t think drama critics are allowed to invest in the plays they cover, and there are increasingly tight regulations for journalists who cover the stock market. What’s different about racing?
This last section gets at the idea of insider trading, which is the fuel behind one of the main fears involving sports journalism and legal and accessible sports gambling. But it’s worth pointing out that the big scandal hasn’t happened yet, and people inside the industry think that it’s unlikely.
Three other things were the latest line (and that’s a post for another day), the comics, and the TV listings.
Stanley Woodward would know the differences of course because he had the celebrated Joe Palmer on his Herald Tribune staff. Perhaps the only PHD candidate then writing a regular sports column
on horse racing for an American newspaper, Palmer was so esteemed that Red Smith once wrote "that Joe Palmer could write better than anyone else in the world whose work appeared in newspapers."
I once moved Dear Abby from its usual location to get in a few jumps from the sports pages. I stopped counting the complaint calls after my mom!!! called to bitch about it.