Game Over 
Game On?
A sports columnist disputes Gary Cartwright’s assertion that sportswriting is dead.
These letters are in response to Gary Cartwright’s June 2009 column on the decline of sportswriting (“Game Over”).
Well it sure is true sportswriters today don’t have as much fun as you old guys had. What can be more fun than getting liquored up, missing a game, and then writing a story that led readers to believe you were there? Now that’s real fun. Real journalism, too. How many times did you pull that one off, Gary? How many of your peers did that? Share that with us, Gary.
I’ll tell you what else is fun. Making up quotes and attributing them to football coaches. For instance, Darrell Royal. Know anyone that did that, Gary? Give us the inside on that one, you funny old sumbuck. Tell me again how my generation couldn’t carry your water bucket. That's a knee-slapper. Dad-gone-it, I wish we’d had that kind of fun.
Fun? Those boys had fun. Like allowing friendship and journalism to get all blurry. Good thing them old coaches never stopped buying you guys off with food and drink. That didn’t influence what you wrote, did it, Gary? Say it ain’t so, Gary!
Fun? No one had more fun than you fellers. How about covering the Dallas Cowboys while accepting tickets, paid vacations, and assorted other gifts from the team? Now durnit, that was fun. Only thing is, if a player—let’s say a black player—got in a contract dispute with the Cowboys, that feller never had a chance in the media, did he, Gary? I'll bet you’ve got some dang funny stories about how your generation never talked to an agent or got the other side of a story. Beneath you, right, Gary?
There’s no end to the fun you goobers had. How about taking quotes from a 20-year-old column and passing them off as new and original work? Did you do that, Gary? One of the people you praised in your article sure did. Ain’t heard much from the old boy since a real editor decided to hold him accountable for doing something that would get a reporter in any other department fired.
Isn’t it amazing, Gary, that you guys lasted so long doing things that would never have been allowed on the city hall beat, or at the state department?
I'll tell you something else that’s fun. That’s making up a story and passing it off as fact. Ever do that, Gary? Come on, Gary, be honest.
Truth is, Gary, your generation did do something better than us. You wrote better. You were more literate. You used humor instead of anger to make your point. You weren’t journalists as much as you were keepers of the flame. You created an image of famous folks and you worked like hell to protect those images. I know this because one of your peers said it exactly that way.
It was a sad day for you guys when real editors came along and made us attempt to stick to the facts, to cover the finances of the game, the fairness issues, to take people inside the boardrooms and locker rooms. We’ve gotten it wrong a lot, but we do try to be at the games we cover and to go down and ask what happened instead of turning a clever phrase.
We could argue all day which is better. Should Roger Clemens have had his personal life aired? You and I probably agree on that one, Gary.
Kirk Bohls? You got him wrong, Gary. I’ve known that guy almost forty years, and he works harder and cares more about his work than anyone I’ve ever known. OK, OK, he ain’t perfect. He will criticize a coach instead of protecting him. He tries to get both sides of every story. In fact, he probably tries too hard. He has been doing this stuff a long, long time, and he has become famous among his peers for being a bulldog of a reporter and a tenacious interviewer. I’m sure he gets it wrong sometimes, but unlike your generation, he never got it wrong on purpose, never made up funny quotes and attributed them to someone. I’ll talk to him about being more protective of Mack and Augie, of keeping the flame and creating heroes.
Would that make you happy, Gary? Is that how you done it?
Richard Justice is a sports columnist for the Houston Chronicle.
I’m in agreement that modern sportswriters provide an excess of predictions and lists, but these likely please a segment of the readers. And I can agree that Gary Cartwright’s teammates from the Times Herald were excellent journalists, especially Dan Jenkins and Bud Shrake. I, too, am a Times Herald vet from the Wonder Years, although my role had much more to do with rubber bands and getting the final product onto the porch when it rained. What I recall of reading Blackie Sherrod was a sprinkling of sports info among columns dedicated more toward phrase turning. Like novelist Tom Robbins, he seemed to work a lathe more than a Smith Corona. I remember asking my dad, a 46-year veteran of the Herald, about Sherrod and hearing that the elevator was pretty full with just him on it. Sort of like Click and Clack, sometimes you get to read about cars, sometimes they’ve been busy tying someone’s shoelaces together and they figure you want to know about it.
John Reilly
Kyle
Cartwright is, regrettably, correct to write off current San Antonio print sports journalists. Here, too, we get mostly statistics, fantasy ratings, and dumb predictions. But once upon a time we had Sherrod’s only real competitor in Texas, Dan Cook. To write about the good old days without naming Dan Cook is like writing about the history of Texas high school football without mentioning Odessa Permian.
Bill Larson
Universal City
Your article on Texas sportswriters was great and brought back a lot of good memories. However, you left one writer off the list whom I think should have been included. Morris Frank, of the Houston Post, was one of the all-time greats. He once wrote that Bobby Layne was the only quarterback he knew who took a cut in salary when he turned pro.
Bob McClure
McAllen
My Library
