Stories ... just hops, skinner and a pub away

From: @MbalulaFikile (The sport minister has a chat with Kenyans after his statement about Kenyans and swimming pools) Sent: 29 Apr 2014 9.41pm “@Omukhaloba do you understand figurative speech.? Offcoarse u didn’t drown.” From: @MbalulaFikile Sent: 29 Apr 2014 10.09pm “@Wmnjeri ull b surprised I no a lot about Kenyan people” From: @MbalulaFikile (…and he isn’t going to apologise…) Sent: 29 Apr 2014 9.27pm “@ngunjiriwambugu Apologies for what ? To faceless individuals with a failed political agenda.” From: @MbalulaFikile (Minister R60 million sports awards) Sent: 28 Apr 2014 9.56pm “Presenters who don’t rehearse can mess up prestigious events ah! Shuu I see them all the time at the sport awards”

slags

off

his VERY Tuesday, at 1pm, the majority of The Star’s sports department repairs to the SAB World of Beer in Newtown for our weekly planning meeting. It is a short walk from the offices of The Star at 47 Sauer Street. A left turn from Sauer, down Pritchard Street takes you past the shiny angles of the Diagonal Street building on the left, where the Times Media Group once had offices before they joined the exodus from the city centre.

On the right is the old Johannesburg Stock Exchange, an ugly mausoleum with the stench of the 60s or 70s about it, which has been quiet since they skipped to Sandton in 2000. We turn right at the Reserve Bank, argue about whether they still keep money there, and walk across the bridge to start the process of deciding what to feed our readers for the next seven days.

It is, shall we say, a feisty meeting. The beer flows, as it should in a place called the SAB World of Beer. Cool drinks also flow, but those who imbibe cream soda and pink drinks are treated

Eequally in The Star’s sports department. We have no discrimination policy when it comes to drinking. The meeting starts with the ordering of the chicken prego, a meal that is an adventure on a plate as the heat of the sauce prepared that week is compared to the week before. It never seems to get milder, inducing a sweat from certain columnists the likes of which has the worried waiter on standby with a medicinal Hansa.

Then the planning starts, gentle at first, with the basics of the events to be covered that week, before tumbling into cursing, arguments, insults, Mickeytaking, dissecting, bitching, praising, congratulating and kinda agreeing on the week ahead. It is a passionate couple of hours.

Beer, as it should, makes it thus. It’s like a chat about sport with your mates down at the pub, except that we get paid to do it, and, hopefully, we add a little more than, “the Stormers are rubbish because they are rubbish”, although that does have a certain ring to it.

The stories of the past week are revisited, both those we wrote and those we missed, and those the people in news missed that we wrote a few weeks or months before but, now that someone at the weekend has rehashed in a slightly different way on another paper, wanted to know why we hadn’t covered it. I recall during the London Olympics being asked on a Tuesday about whether I could write something on Cameron van der Burgh’s dolphin kick. I had, I replied, although it had been cleverly disguised as my lead in the Saturday paper.

Ears burn during the Tuesday meeting. Skinner can be the start of a good story. Stories are rubbished or praised, or both, in the same breath.

Did I mention there was beer involved at this meeting? Sports journalists can be a bitchy lot. We know it all, and we’re not afraid to tell you about it. We can tell the source for another hack’s story from three six-packs away.

We talk about doing things differently, but in a way that keeps a sense of familiarity of the way the reader absorbs sports journalism.

The interweb may have changed the immediacy of journalism, but it has also created a slew of digital platforms that offer the same story written the way newspaper journalists used to write. Agency copy has its place and that place seems to be on just about every single South African sports website. Print is still king in South African sports journalism.

Very few sites have invested in sports writers and infrastructure (SuperSport.com is perhaps the only exception). They rely on the staff from their sister newspapers. Bloggers are, well, they are bloggers.

There are excellent bloggers and there are those who shout a lot, believing that making one grand statement, repeating it several times in a number of different ways in the same story, is sports journalism. It isn’t. That’s pub talk.

Every Tuesday, we speak about our jobs with care. For us, Tuesdays are a fight against cliché and the tabloid mentality that has crept into journalism.

For all the flippancy and the beer drinking, we know full well the privilege that being a South African sports journalist is and feel the sense of duty that comes with it. On any Tuesday, we balance transformation issues, quotas, the past, the future, merit with need, and political bluster with practical development.

Every Tuesday we shake our heads at how any valid discussion on transformation is turned into a shouting match by the sport minister, how he has used it on his election campaign, tailoring his message to whatever audience he has that day.

This week we’ll sigh at the man who talks like a Kenyan swims and a Malawian builds roads.

Every Tuesday, I sit around an upstairs table at the World of Beer with my colleagues and believe I have the best job in the world.

It’s a serious job not taken too seriously. Every Tuesday, I’ll wonder what my Monday column is going to be about? I never know. Perhaps I’ll write about every Tuesday.