The Sports Column

The toughest job a sports editor must tackle is the blank page staring him in the face after two of the stories supposed to fill that space have crumped.

That, in essence, leads to train-of-thought columns like these.

If you think about it, columns are essentially 20 inches of free space given to any yahoo that walks in off the street and writes 16 articles for the sports page.

I'm not a member of the "media elite." wasn't specially selected by a blue-ribbon panel. I'm not Grade A anything. I was never inspected by Number 12. I've done this for two years and now I can say things like

BOMB CHICAGO BACK TO THE STONE AGE

and be taken somewhat seriously. Doesn't this bother anybody? It's mob rule, just like our hypothetical post-nuclear-winter Chicago. It's also a power trip for the columnist, just to write blather and occasionally slip in things like.

BILLY CLEARY '56 HAS A BIG NOSE

with no offense to the Athletic Director, who has a fine schnozz and should brook no this subject. (Besides, he's won a national championship both on the ice and behind the bench--which is much more than almost any team at this school can boast of.)

But the point is this: I can essentially write any damn thing I want. That's the point a column. That's why we make the boys in Legal nervous.

The complete and total unpredictability. I can talk about personal problems, like how I want to

ROAST THE EXECUTIVE STAFF OF THE HARVARD STUDENT TELEPHONE OFFICE ON A SPIT UNTIL THEY BEG FOR MERCY

for apparently random disconnections of my PAC code.

But columns can land their authors in trouble, as this one probably will with the folks at AT&T. Fortunately, no one at Harvard has done this to the Crimson in a while, but there are always L-I-B-E-L suits (a dirty word `round these parts), which columnists can attract a lot of.

Over the course of my years here, I've said a lot of near-libelous things. I've said some crappy things about the men's basketball team in its 1-11 days (I once called one of its members the "Human Foul"). I've called the football team boring and bad. I've bashed strange substitutions on the women's soccer team. I've criticized people individually and collectively and I've stretched the truth.

It's all in the name of entertainment, which is a large part of sports journalism. Sports are entertainment, and the media surrounding it should be accordingly entertaining. So we point fingers and name names. On television, CBS color commentator Terry Bradshaw rambles on like he's lost his medication. The Boston Globe's Bo Ryan Trashes soccer with gusto.

We'll go and we may go quietly. But the "sports-as-entertainment" mentality, I think, is disappearing with us. Gone is "the spectacle," to be replaced by "Personality." You'll hear an awful lot about Sean Wissman's Kansas upbringing in the next year and dot pictures on the editorial page, perhaps.

People don't want the razor-sharp dissections as much as general appreciation. I call the new trend the "exjock" trend, after all those former jocks showing up on television these days, jocks who refrain from biting analysis in favor of observation.

Ah well. I'll stop. Exams are hell. And frankly,

I DON'T GIVE A DAMN ANY MORE

Sports Editor's Note: This Crimson Sports Cube Classic appeared in the January 24 issue of the Crimson. It is, to this day, the consummate expression of a Sports Editor' angst.