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At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.

Wallace Stevens, Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself

A Resilient Subject

Although journalists who cover subjects such as politics and finance love to deride sportswriters, as a collective we have maintained our integrity in a way they have failed to: We still discuss the actual games.

If one looks hard enough, you can come across a journalist who is discussing policy as opposed to politics, but it’s not easy. A study done by the Columbia Journalism Review concluded that only 8% of the coverage of the Health Care debate has been about the actual bills before Congress; 55% of the coverage is a discussion of the fallacious political battles that obfuscate our ability to discern what the bills intend to do.

Financial journalism is hardly much better. In the wake of the financial collapse, Wall Street has come under increased public scrutiny (although far too little government scrutiny). The financial journalists who were content to parrot the empty optimism of investment bankers and hedge-fund managers before the crisis have deflected similar criticism by momentarily posing as business skeptics. But there isn’t exactly a surplus of renewed commitment to thoughtful investigation and independent economic analysis.

In other ways, the supremacy of language over event that we have seen in political journalism is far more deeply entrenched in our financial system. In Language and Capital, Italian economist Christian Marazzi writes:

On the financial markets speculative behavior is rational because the markets are self-referential. Prices are the expression of collective opinion, the individual investor does not react to information but what he believes will be the reaction of the other investors in the face of that information. It follows that the values of securities listed on the stock exchange make reference to themselves and not to their underlying economic value.

Via this process we end up with companies like Regions Financial, which, if you marked its assets to market, would be insolvent. And yet investors value the equity of the company around $6 billion.

Despite being far less important to our daily lives than either politics or finance, the nature of sports insists that a certain percentage of the coverage remain relatively sane. Yes, absurd programs like Around the Horn et al. continue to persist. But a surprisingly large amount of sports journalism remains strongly tied to the actual games.

Few Americans read congressional bills. Few Americans read the quarterly or annual reports of the companies in which they or their pension funds invest. But most of us watch the games we read about. We directly witness what will eventually be reported and therefore force sports reporting to remain slightly more than an echo chamber of self-promotion. Sadly enough, this makes us better prepared to refute the ramblings of a Tony Kornheiser than we are prepared to refute those of a Bill O’Reilly or a Keith Olbermann.

Even in those moments when sanity seems nowhere to be found (for example, Brett Favre’s unretirement coverage), the reality of the games remains laid bare. Rampant speculation and lazy reporting can lead to a stock, or even a whole industry, being overvalued. But there is no way to spin the coverage of a terrible team that will make it actually perform better once it gets on the court.

Despite the best attempts of the sports media elite, genuine debate and a verifiable reality remain.

and his Illusory Kingdom

In this case, the problem is not journalism (or at least it is not the whole problem). We cannot discuss the media without discussing it’s well-funded, hyper-aggressive alter-ego, advertising.

Whether or not you could ever discern the difference between an athlete and the posture he or she assumes when trying to sell you something, you certainly cannot now. Given the sheer volume of commercials featuring a Lebron James or a Tiger Woods, it becomes nearly impossible to delineate between the fictitious advertising figure and the real individual whose occupation sports journalists cover.

Sometimes traces of the player leak their way into advertising. In his Wrangler’s commercials, Brett Favre throws off his back foot and, although it’s hard to tell given the angle of the shot, into triple coverage no doubt. This is a verifiable aspect of his game that has somehow snuck into the commercial. But as we have learned in excruciating detail over the last two years, the boyish charm and casually Southern attitude that pervades the rest of the ad is at best a half-truth, at worst an outright deception.

This is what has made the reaction to Michael Jordan’s Hall of Fame speech so spasmodic. We were watching not only an amazing athletic talent, but a pioneer of the one-man-brand. He constantly assured us of the tastiness of our Big Macs, the comfort of our Hanes and, most importantly, the superiority of our sneakers. Our memories hold an endless reservoir of images of a smiling Jordan, a fierce competitor on the floor and a loving advocate for consumerism off.

But the bitter, scrawny cry of the Jordan on our screens was in deep conflict with the brand of Jordan in our minds. We weren’t suddenly faced with the real Jordan, although some people have reconciled their cognitive dissonance by claiming we were. It seems more likely that there is no authentic Michael Jordan, at least not to us. Just a husk with Nikes on his feet, Wheaties in his belly and a Cohiba in his mouth.

The Point of Judgment

It is in the dialogue between the press and advertising that the veracity of sports is lost. It starts with a box score and a quietly written chronicle of the evenings events. But during timeouts and in between quarters, notions of fate and failure make their way into the discussion. By the time they returns to the hands of journalists, the games are wedded to myth. Suddenly we are no longer having a discussion about men at play, but small deities on divine missions.

And this is where the point of judgement lies: Would you rather have a conversation about an idea of the thing, or the thing itself? And, if you’d prefer the latter, what does that conversation look like?

Related posts:

1. On Johnny “Red” Kerr
2. On Michael Jordan’s Hall of Fame Speech
3. David Robinson Hall of Fame Links
4. David Robinson was a Fine Role Player