The ‘hot take’ route to nowhere

TMy favourite story of the week comes from the US, where the West is still wild, if woolly. As the election for the presidency of the US fumbles towards a battle of two old white men who should be more worried about zipping up and using Sippy cups than having nuclear missile codes, one Dustin Ebey has entered the fray.

“A Texas man has legally changed his name to Literally Anybody Else and announced he is running for US president in the 2024 election,” reported the Guardian on Monday.

“Formerly known as Dustin Ebey, the 35-year-old is a US army veteran and seventhgrade math teacher in the suburbs of Dallas, and now has a Texas driving licence to prove his name change.

“Three hundred million people can do better,” he said in reference to the two frontrunners for the nation’s highest office. “There really should be some outlet for people like me who are just so fed up with this constant power grab between the two parties that just has no benefit to the common person.”

“Literally Anybody Else” is to provide the option of “neither”, which is not accommodated for on the ballot. It is an option I think is in dire need in modern sports journalism, which has become a guessing game of vague questions before, during and after a match, followed by vague answers that become vaguer headlines with twisted angles. Perhaps they should just provide athletes and managers with a multiple choice: “Yes. No. None of the Above. Literally Anybody Else.”

Sports writing has become a crap shoot, not in the risky sense, but because so much of it is crap and should be taken out to the back yard and shot to put it and us out of its misery. Chance meetings with good friends, all high-ranking and respected sport writers and editors this week were kneedeep in this misery.

“Sports journalism is dead,” was the tone. It is being etched on to a tombstone, carved into tree trunks, spray-painted on walls alongside “Kilroy was Here”.

Here lies sports writing, lost in the quicksand wastelands of more instead of better. An editor of a major paper told me this week that there is still a desire for print when it is quality, but one person is now doing the job of 20, and that one person is dealing with owners and publishers who have an IQ and EQ linked to share price and profits.

Columnists are appointed to stir up instead of strive by editors and former editors who should really know better instead of satisfying their hunger for clickbait. These are columnists whose writing is nothing more than a headline repeated ad nauseam. If something is claimed to be uncut, then it usually screams out to be cut.

But there is hope. The extraordinary, Germiston-born writer Don McRae won two awards at British Sports Journalism Awards this week as “special correspondent” and “feature writer”. The judges praised him for his “unflinching and compelling’ writing on boxing, and for ‘interviewing skills, investigative rigour and writing ability [that] cut to the heart of difficult subjects”.

McRae’s writing is a world away from the “hot take”, which was noted more than a decade ago by the Pacific Standard magazine as “ruining sports writing”.

Hot takes are “published en masse after any seemingly scandalous sports story. They are usually written on tight deadlines with little research or reporting, and even less thought.

“Writing a hot take is simple. Start with an easy target — any athlete accused of doing anything ‘bad’ will do — channel the aggrieved, paternalistic wails of your least favourite news anchor drunk on paranoia and privilege, dismiss nuance and insight at every opportunity, and close with some nonsensical pap about tradition, or responsibility, or America.”

Sports writing, like good music, art and food writing should not be simple. It should be a diversion and an education, an unveiling, a revelation, an understanding and, above all, it should be a story.

There are cuts in sports departments all over the world, the New York Times no longer has one, Sports Illustrated has had mass layoffs, ESPN is shedding jobs.

In SA, there are major papers with sports staffs of just two people. Others are luckier. But none seem to care for the craft that sports writing should be. It’s all about the hot take, easy quote, lack of nuance and insight.

Sports writing around the world and in SA is headed or is already at a place where the choice “Literally Anybody Else” is becoming the preferred option. As The Atlantic prophesised in February: “You’ll Miss Sports Journalism When It’s Gone”.