The Sporting Life
1.
Sports writers by their very nature live in a world of unreality: Unreal
human specimens, unreal dollars, unreal performances and unreal
adulation. Yet none of it do they actually experience on their own. They
are mere conduits for such endeavor. They witness it and they feed off
it until they grow fat and jaded beyond compare.
Anthony Miguel Arroyo III always wanted to be a sports writer,
especially in those lean years, the short-story years spent chasing
cops and robbers, politicians and prosecutors, lawyers and
defendants until he could almost write no more. Three-dot stories
strung together to chain him in gainful employment as a news and
court reporter for the Seattle Globe had slowly begun to strangle him.
Daily doses of dull reality magnified by the endless multi-media frenzy
had begun to pull apart his consciousness until he could write about
nothing else, even at home in his own time. He had pursued serial
killers, investigated nuclear polluters, interviewed one-too-many
grieving families, recording endless sentences full of empty promises,
recounting one suicide and one death by fire at his very feet. Anthony
yearned to have fun again with his writing, finding only disgust and
contempt for the piles of news clippings that haphazardly stacked up
in his vacant fireplace day after day.
Through the years, he had simply filed his published work away
without ever looking at it again, hundreds of papers and sentences
and bylines stuffed below the hearth so he had the option of putting
his entire career to ashes should it grow wearisome and trite, too
much to take with him to his grave. But with the advent of computer
storage and retrieval, the Internet and the Globe’s own vast network
library, he never really could put an end to what had reluctantly
become his true calling in life, even if he should want to rub out his
footprints and any other trace from his mind’s eye.
While accepting his fate, Anthony started thinking of himself as an
aging athlete of a newspaper writer, someone who could endure
through pain and glory. So sports writing seemed an absolutely
appropriate medium by which to exercise the one thing he could do
well enough to keep food, family and a few vices on his training table.
Anyone could write about sports, and he certainly fit that bill.
It started with a spark in the far southwest corner of the newsroom,
where the coffeepots constantly coagulate and percolate, and where
the windows look directly into the ubiquitous shell of the Seattle Space
Needle. This hot spot, shaded by a pillar from the elevated editors of
the city desk, was where Anthony had retreated through seniority and
sheer bull-headed will after a decade of battles with the Globe’s middle-
management gatekeepers. He had learned to write first and ask
questions later; that was the paper’s overriding philosophy when he
first was hired to be the night assistant city editor, a glorified title for
news flunky willing to do anything to get the last word in print without
blowing deadline.
There were times he regretted his fateful decision to leave editing after
four years in the trenches trying to endure the passing nights of
Seattle news and the nefarious creatures that haunted him into the
dawn. But he always believed he was meant to be a reporter, to dig
and to write, to create a name for himself, even if it cost him a $150
weekly cut in salary to step down from the news-management gravy
train.
As a reporter, there were the moments of true glory, like sneaking into
a burning Queen Anne Hill nursing home and wheeling out a disabled
woman for a first-hand interview and life-saving experience. He would
end up as a news photograph of the year in the Globe’s rival, the
Seattle Times, and on the nightly newscasts as the visual media
caught the moment in the cameras and video-cams, with the flames
licking up behind him. Anthony became the story within the story.
There was the cigarette-cure clinic chief and the city engineer who
would both go to prison for stories he would write. There were the
stories of nuclear waste and congressional environmental
investigations that led to hearings in Washington, D.C. Then there was
the double-murder import/export drug ring he uncovered out of Port
Angeles that had landed him on “Hard Copy,” where he became
infamous in the newsroom for calling the deed a “web of deceit,” a
catch phrase that was repeated over and over on the national
broadcast.
He seemed destined for media stardom, but unfortunately, or
inevitably as he saw it, Anthony landed in hot water time and again in
battles with the editors who succeeded him -- editors he came to view
as adversaries to his personal agenda for expanded creativity.
Anthony saw the news as his vehicle of expression and believed at the
time that working for a newspaper in a major West Coast city was the
best job on earth. He couldn’t for the life of his writing understand why
editors would secretly, covertly, and covetously question his motives.
One of his editors removed him from his Seattle City Hall beat for
“being too close to his sources.” Another suspended him for an error
that the news editor inserted in his story and for being too one-sided in
a story about critics of government waste and spending at the Port of
Bellingham.
Even though he reversed the suspension through arbitration with the
Newspaper Guild behind him, it was the final blow to his productive
and sometimes provocative hard news career. Anthony could not
imagine any editor worthy of the job ever taking action against a
reporter who was just reporting what was said at an open public
meeting, all on tape, all on the record. That was what he thought
newspapers were supposed to do, that’s why they existed in the first
place.
So when newly hired sports editor Jackson Arness posted an internal
memo announcing a sports-reporter vacancy on the bulletin board
next to the coffee pots, Anthony was the first and only writer in the
building to jump at the chance. He told Arness he wanted to find a new
direction for his career, with new editors who might better appreciate
his work ethic and dedicated form of expression.
“Welcome to the world of sports, Tony my man. We like to think we
make the world go round, even though I know the folks downstairs
just think of us as a jock factory,” Arness gushed after the cursory
interview, Anthony being the only candidate to apply within the
building.
“Thank you very much, but I go by Anthony. Same as my byline. Just
Anthony Arrryo. I could go by initials, but not Tony. I just don’t like the
word and what it connotes.”
“We’ll just call you the Big A,” Arness joked. “That’s what they called
me at my last paper in Beaumont, Texas. Or maybe it was Jack Ass?
Whatever you like is fine with me, but I think I’ve got those two names
staked out for myself. That’s why I want you on board. Because I know
as a reporter you can kick some ass. And I want to show these others
around here what that’s like.”
This certainly was a new planet for Anthony, who had to be slowly
brought along by some of the old veterans in the sports denizen. His
first flaw, he was soon told, was that his writing contained too much
attribution, a sin that was a necessary evil with city desk editors who
demanded that nearly every thought, certainly every opinionated
utterance, have a source with a name that could be double-checked.
The rule in sports appeared to be never let too many facts spoil the
story. The readers of the sports pages assume you know what you’re
talking about, and they couldn’t care less about where it came from or
who said it; not knowing, in fact, can become a story in itself. Or so his
new boss told him.
Other than being semi-notorious as rising-star sports editor, Arness’
main claim to fame was being somehow related to the Western actor
James Arness of the long-running “Gunsmoke” television series,
hence Jackson’s penchant for editing like he was in some Wild West
docu-drama. Unlike the rest of the staff, Jackson dressed with obvious
attention to detail, and went to the barber every other week to keep his
hair perfectly shaped so it would be sculpted into a brushed suede
Australian Outback cowboy hat that accompanied him in his Jeep
Cherokee rain or shine. He wore overcoats over tailored double-
breasted suits and color-coordinated suspenders. Shoes that had
been shined in the recent past, not the past decade like the rest of the
staff.
“Do you chuckleheads even own a tie among you?” he bemoaned in
the midst of the staff meeting to introduce Anthony (who on this rare
occasion to impress his editor had at least the good fashion sense to
be the only other person in the room with a Windsor knot around his
neck).
“Why don’t you get us a clothing allowance and maybe we’ll start
dressing better,” smirked columnist J. Thomas Scott. “Besides, we’d
only get our ties smudged with ketchup and mustard stains if we had
to wear them every day.”
“Sure, I’ll get you a tie allowance. It’s called your paycheck. In the
meantime, we’ll have a new rule around here: No more free food for
columnists and sports writers unless they’re properly attired,”
Jackson retorted, smacking his hand on the conference table like it
was J. Thomas’ backside. “Wear a tie, and you can eat your heart out.”
J. Thomas rose up to his full 6-foot-6 towering presence, purposefully
checked his watch and saluted everyone on the staff. “I guess I’ll start
my diet as of right now. Gentlemen, I have a game awaiting my
services. I hate to be berated and just run off to another game, but,
hey, that’s why I’m a sports columnist. It’s what we do best.”
Everything in Anthony’s life suddenly had a game attached to it, never-
never land of endless, mindless competition, even in the very process
of editing and writing. The only real requisites appeared to be that you
had to have a fairly thick skin and defensive wit just to play on par with
the rest of the staff. The athletes were easy compared to the writers
and others in the field of sports journalism, if there really is such a fairy
tale.
The first few weeks went smoothly as Anthony moved his desk
belongings, the pictures of his wife and kids, his framed photo of the
year from the Queen Anne fire and other mementos of news wars, in U.
S. postal boxes up to the third floor. His former colleagues on the city
desk all referred to the sports department as the “toy department.” But
Anthony found the essential reporting and writing environment to be
pretty much the same, only with a better view of Elliott Bay, stunning
sunsets over the Olympics, and a clear sightline south to Mount
Rainier whenever the clouds lifted. Other than that, Anthony told the
city desk reporters, it’s all-relative; you ask questions, make phone
calls, conduct interviews and then type it all up into some sensible
pattern of fact and reaction by the end of the day. The basic job of any
professional reporter.
To his credit, Jackson Arness used Anthony’s news skills to his full
advantage by assigning him to keep track of NCAA penalties being
imposed on the University of Washington football team; having him
chase down the demise of the state boxing commission; covering the
gang rape trial involving players on the visiting Cincinnati Bengals. All
out-of-the-box stories that had begun to dominate the sports section
day after day.
As a result, it became easy for Anthony not to be a fan. There was the
baseball strike. There would be threats that the Seattle teams would
move at one time or another. There were political deals and endless
lobbying for over $1 billion in tax dollars to build new sports mega-
palaces. With his new assignment, he learned that sports really had
little to do with sport any longer. Sometimes, as he wandered through
the torn-up wads of surgical tape, the streams of brown mucus-laced
chewing tobacco juice and crushed sunflower seeds, the inflaming
fumes of lineament ointments and stinging spray of champagne,
Anthony wanted to just grab the insolent athletes he was covering and
shake them into reality. “What do you mean, no comment, you steroid-
enhanced freak of nature? That’s not part of this game!”
Six months in sports was about all Anthony needed before again
coming face-to-face in the mirror of newsprint with the same fate that
had lined every step of his journalism career to that very 38-year-old
precipice of his life. It also wasn’t long before people outside in the
sports world started noticing that Anthony was constantly the bearer
of bad news and had a way of writing stories that no one really wanted
to see in print on the pages where games of guts and glory are waged.
That’s what made Anthony such a good reporter: he was always just
around the corner from a disaster waiting to happen and it followed
him wherever he was sent.
1.
Sports writers by their very nature live in a world of unreality: Unreal
human specimens, unreal dollars, unreal performances and unreal
adulation. Yet none of it do they actually experience on their own. They
are mere conduits for such endeavor. They witness it and they feed off
it until they grow fat and jaded beyond compare.
Anthony Miguel Arroyo III always wanted to be a sports writer,
especially in those lean years, the short-story years spent chasing
cops and robbers, politicians and prosecutors, lawyers and
defendants until he could almost write no more. Three-dot stories
strung together to chain him in gainful employment as a news and
court reporter for the Seattle Globe had slowly begun to strangle him.
Daily doses of dull reality magnified by the endless multi-media frenzy
had begun to pull apart his consciousness until he could write about
nothing else, even at home in his own time. He had pursued serial
killers, investigated nuclear polluters, interviewed one-too-many
grieving families, recording endless sentences full of empty promises,
recounting one suicide and one death by fire at his very feet. Anthony
yearned to have fun again with his writing, finding only disgust and
contempt for the piles of news clippings that haphazardly stacked up
in his vacant fireplace day after day.
Through the years, he had simply filed his published work away
without ever looking at it again, hundreds of papers and sentences
and bylines stuffed below the hearth so he had the option of putting
his entire career to ashes should it grow wearisome and trite, too
much to take with him to his grave. But with the advent of computer
storage and retrieval, the Internet and the Globe’s own vast network
library, he never really could put an end to what had reluctantly
become his true calling in life, even if he should want to rub out his
footprints and any other trace from his mind’s eye.
While accepting his fate, Anthony started thinking of himself as an
aging athlete of a newspaper writer, someone who could endure
through pain and glory. So sports writing seemed an absolutely
appropriate medium by which to exercise the one thing he could do
well enough to keep food, family and a few vices on his training table.
Anyone could write about sports, and he certainly fit that bill.
It started with a spark in the far southwest corner of the newsroom,
where the coffeepots constantly coagulate and percolate, and where
the windows look directly into the ubiquitous shell of the Seattle Space
Needle. This hot spot, shaded by a pillar from the elevated editors of
the city desk, was where Anthony had retreated through seniority and
sheer bull-headed will after a decade of battles with the Globe’s middle-
management gatekeepers. He had learned to write first and ask
questions later; that was the paper’s overriding philosophy when he
first was hired to be the night assistant city editor, a glorified title for
news flunky willing to do anything to get the last word in print without
blowing deadline.
There were times he regretted his fateful decision to leave editing after
four years in the trenches trying to endure the passing nights of
Seattle news and the nefarious creatures that haunted him into the
dawn. But he always believed he was meant to be a reporter, to dig
and to write, to create a name for himself, even if it cost him a $150
weekly cut in salary to step down from the news-management gravy
train.
As a reporter, there were the moments of true glory, like sneaking into
a burning Queen Anne Hill nursing home and wheeling out a disabled
woman for a first-hand interview and life-saving experience. He would
end up as a news photograph of the year in the Globe’s rival, the
Seattle Times, and on the nightly newscasts as the visual media
caught the moment in the cameras and video-cams, with the flames
licking up behind him. Anthony became the story within the story.
There was the cigarette-cure clinic chief and the city engineer who
would both go to prison for stories he would write. There were the
stories of nuclear waste and congressional environmental
investigations that led to hearings in Washington, D.C. Then there was
the double-murder import/export drug ring he uncovered out of Port
Angeles that had landed him on “Hard Copy,” where he became
infamous in the newsroom for calling the deed a “web of deceit,” a
catch phrase that was repeated over and over on the national
broadcast.
He seemed destined for media stardom, but unfortunately, or
inevitably as he saw it, Anthony landed in hot water time and again in
battles with the editors who succeeded him -- editors he came to view
as adversaries to his personal agenda for expanded creativity.
Anthony saw the news as his vehicle of expression and believed at the
time that working for a newspaper in a major West Coast city was the
best job on earth. He couldn’t for the life of his writing understand why
editors would secretly, covertly, and covetously question his motives.
One of his editors removed him from his Seattle City Hall beat for
“being too close to his sources.” Another suspended him for an error
that the news editor inserted in his story and for being too one-sided in
a story about critics of government waste and spending at the Port of
Bellingham.
Even though he reversed the suspension through arbitration with the
Newspaper Guild behind him, it was the final blow to his productive
and sometimes provocative hard news career. Anthony could not
imagine any editor worthy of the job ever taking action against a
reporter who was just reporting what was said at an open public
meeting, all on tape, all on the record. That was what he thought
newspapers were supposed to do, that’s why they existed in the first
place.
So when newly hired sports editor Jackson Arness posted an internal
memo announcing a sports-reporter vacancy on the bulletin board
next to the coffee pots, Anthony was the first and only writer in the
building to jump at the chance. He told Arness he wanted to find a new
direction for his career, with new editors who might better appreciate
his work ethic and dedicated form of expression.
“Welcome to the world of sports, Tony my man. We like to think we
make the world go round, even though I know the folks downstairs
just think of us as a jock factory,” Arness gushed after the cursory
interview, Anthony being the only candidate to apply within the
building.
“Thank you very much, but I go by Anthony. Same as my byline. Just
Anthony Arrryo. I could go by initials, but not Tony. I just don’t like the
word and what it connotes.”
“We’ll just call you the Big A,” Arness joked. “That’s what they called
me at my last paper in Beaumont, Texas. Or maybe it was Jack Ass?
Whatever you like is fine with me, but I think I’ve got those two names
staked out for myself. That’s why I want you on board. Because I know
as a reporter you can kick some ass. And I want to show these others
around here what that’s like.”
This certainly was a new planet for Anthony, who had to be slowly
brought along by some of the old veterans in the sports denizen. His
first flaw, he was soon told, was that his writing contained too much
attribution, a sin that was a necessary evil with city desk editors who
demanded that nearly every thought, certainly every opinionated
utterance, have a source with a name that could be double-checked.
The rule in sports appeared to be never let too many facts spoil the
story. The readers of the sports pages assume you know what you’re
talking about, and they couldn’t care less about where it came from or
who said it; not knowing, in fact, can become a story in itself. Or so his
new boss told him.
Other than being semi-notorious as rising-star sports editor, Arness’
main claim to fame was being somehow related to the Western actor
James Arness of the long-running “Gunsmoke” television series,
hence Jackson’s penchant for editing like he was in some Wild West
docu-drama. Unlike the rest of the staff, Jackson dressed with obvious
attention to detail, and went to the barber every other week to keep his
hair perfectly shaped so it would be sculpted into a brushed suede
Australian Outback cowboy hat that accompanied him in his Jeep
Cherokee rain or shine. He wore overcoats over tailored double-
breasted suits and color-coordinated suspenders. Shoes that had
been shined in the recent past, not the past decade like the rest of the
staff.
“Do you chuckleheads even own a tie among you?” he bemoaned in
the midst of the staff meeting to introduce Anthony (who on this rare
occasion to impress his editor had at least the good fashion sense to
be the only other person in the room with a Windsor knot around his
neck).
“Why don’t you get us a clothing allowance and maybe we’ll start
dressing better,” smirked columnist J. Thomas Scott. “Besides, we’d
only get our ties smudged with ketchup and mustard stains if we had
to wear them every day.”
“Sure, I’ll get you a tie allowance. It’s called your paycheck. In the
meantime, we’ll have a new rule around here: No more free food for
columnists and sports writers unless they’re properly attired,”
Jackson retorted, smacking his hand on the conference table like it
was J. Thomas’ backside. “Wear a tie, and you can eat your heart out.”
J. Thomas rose up to his full 6-foot-6 towering presence, purposefully
checked his watch and saluted everyone on the staff. “I guess I’ll start
my diet as of right now. Gentlemen, I have a game awaiting my
services. I hate to be berated and just run off to another game, but,
hey, that’s why I’m a sports columnist. It’s what we do best.”
Everything in Anthony’s life suddenly had a game attached to it, never-
never land of endless, mindless competition, even in the very process
of editing and writing. The only real requisites appeared to be that you
had to have a fairly thick skin and defensive wit just to play on par with
the rest of the staff. The athletes were easy compared to the writers
and others in the field of sports journalism, if there really is such a fairy
tale.
The first few weeks went smoothly as Anthony moved his desk
belongings, the pictures of his wife and kids, his framed photo of the
year from the Queen Anne fire and other mementos of news wars, in U.
S. postal boxes up to the third floor. His former colleagues on the city
desk all referred to the sports department as the “toy department.” But
Anthony found the essential reporting and writing environment to be
pretty much the same, only with a better view of Elliott Bay, stunning
sunsets over the Olympics, and a clear sightline south to Mount
Rainier whenever the clouds lifted. Other than that, Anthony told the
city desk reporters, it’s all-relative; you ask questions, make phone
calls, conduct interviews and then type it all up into some sensible
pattern of fact and reaction by the end of the day. The basic job of any
professional reporter.
To his credit, Jackson Arness used Anthony’s news skills to his full
advantage by assigning him to keep track of NCAA penalties being
imposed on the University of Washington football team; having him
chase down the demise of the state boxing commission; covering the
gang rape trial involving players on the visiting Cincinnati Bengals. All
out-of-the-box stories that had begun to dominate the sports section
day after day.
As a result, it became easy for Anthony not to be a fan. There was the
baseball strike. There would be threats that the Seattle teams would
move at one time or another. There were political deals and endless
lobbying for over $1 billion in tax dollars to build new sports mega-
palaces. With his new assignment, he learned that sports really had
little to do with sport any longer. Sometimes, as he wandered through
the torn-up wads of surgical tape, the streams of brown mucus-laced
chewing tobacco juice and crushed sunflower seeds, the inflaming
fumes of lineament ointments and stinging spray of champagne,
Anthony wanted to just grab the insolent athletes he was covering and
shake them into reality. “What do you mean, no comment, you steroid-
enhanced freak of nature? That’s not part of this game!”
Six months in sports was about all Anthony needed before again
coming face-to-face in the mirror of newsprint with the same fate that
had lined every step of his journalism career to that very 38-year-old
precipice of his life. It also wasn’t long before people outside in the
sports world started noticing that Anthony was constantly the bearer
of bad news and had a way of writing stories that no one really wanted
to see in print on the pages where games of guts and glory are waged.
That’s what made Anthony such a good reporter: he was always just
around the corner from a disaster waiting to happen and it followed
him wherever he was sent.
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