Computerized technology’s effect on the industrial world is well recognized. Less realized, perhaps, is what it has done for the creative side.
This matter arose due to someone’s question about how sportswriters, in the frenzy of a contest’s end, get stories back to their newspaper.
Thus, this is a tale of the technical progression encountered each fall with the onset of football, considered a religious revival in the southeastern states.
I answered it’s far easier now than when I started in the business in 1970. Today when I write anything, it’s always on my cell phone, a far cry from burdensome devices of yesteryear.
American sports writing began to flourish in the 1920s. Reporters and columnists would write stories on the first wave of typewriters and send them to their office via telegraph, a system that served for more than 100 years as the principal means of transmitting printed information by wire or radio wave.
Then came manual and portable typewriters, which had to be hauled up long flights of stadium steps by the sportswriters.
The hallowed press boxes would be staffed by the Western Union Telegraph Co. in that golden age of sports writing, led by such national personalities as Grantland Rice, Damon Runyon, Ring Lardner, Red Smith, Jim Murray and Milton Richman. Later, Mississippians like Carl Walters, Lee Baker, Jimmie McDowell, Bill Ross, Dick Lightsey, Robert “Steamboat” Fulton and Rick Cleveland worked in these sacred spaces. It’s also how I entered the reporting trade.
That system held forth until lightweight, portable, yet rudimentary computers started to appear in the American press box in the 1970s. Most were almost too technical for non-geeky sportswriters to operate.
Sometimes the new-fangled machines would work properly and when they were good, they were really good. They surely beat the Herculean task of toting around burdensome typewriters.
I’m sure old-timer football fans recall seeing cadres of often middle aged-and-beyond men, and sometimes women, gasping for air, stopping to rest, cursing under their breath, as they trekked upstairs to the box with a typewriter case or another device underneath their arms on which to do their writing. Poor weather exacerbated an already difficult task.
I suspect many among the sports writing fraternity in this new age will eventually abandon laptops and go all-cell phone due to their versatility.
The cells would’ve been handy years ago while covering high school sports, when, due to a looming post-game deadline, I’d phone in and dictate an article to the copy desk, composing from notes.
Few jobs on the clever side of human existence require more creativity quicker than a sportswriter’s toil at the moment of an expired game clock. It’s rare to have more than 30 minutes to collect one’s thoughts and write a readable, informative and imaginative account that will hopefully delight the next morning’s readers — or to relate a sad tale of woe.
While on the subject, the aforementioned veteran sportswriter Rick Cleveland’s recent induction into the Mississippi Press Association’s Hall of Fame is a well-deserved first for the field. The Hattiesburg native has covered it all — youth baseball, the Masters, Super Bowls, countless prep championships, Final Fours and myriad events in-between.
The MPA shrine’s membership includes at least four men who handled sports coverage as well as reporting on “hard news” at their respective daily operations in the 1940-50-60s — Leonard Lowery of the Hattiesburg American, Charles B. Gordon of the McComb Enterprise-Journal, Purser Hewitt of the Jackson Clarion-Ledger and, later, Ron Harrist of the Associated Press.
It’s likely that future MPAHOF membership lists will also include sportswriters due to the popularity of the state’s athletic scene and the readers it attracts.
— Mac Gordon, a native of McComb, is a retired newspaperman. He can be reached at macmarygordon@gmail.com.