Sport: A Saviour in the Credit Crunch?

February 10, 2009

jim-corbett.jpg

An initiative by six of the world’s leading sports newspapers is timely and welcome, says Alex Wade.

This Saturday is a red letter day for armchair sports haters. To their delight, amid their varying poses of idleness (for how else does a sports hater pose?), the Financial Times will henceforth abandon its sports coverage. No doubt the credit crunch has played a significant part in this decision, with the FT opting to concentrate on its core brand value as the financial paper of record instead of who might win the Premier League or which racing driver is likely to set the pace in the looming Formula 1 season.

But has the FT missed a trick? Rumours of sport’s demise at the pink ‘un are evidently well founded, but elsewhere, sports coverage is flourishing, from the humble back pages to The Times’ much respected supplement, The Game, not to mention The Observer’s excellent Sport Monthly. Moreover, on the continent six of the world’s leading sports newspapers have, in rather Web 2.0 fashion, formed an alliance to “defend and promote the interests and freedom of the sports press.” Their new organisation is called, not all that imaginatively, the International Association of Sports Newspapers (IASN).

The founding members of the IASN are the Italian sports daily La Gazzetta dello Sport, El Mundo Deportivo and Marca in Spain, L’Equipe in France, Olé in Argentina, and Lance in Brazil. The IASN’s motto is “Sports press for sports in society”, its secretariat is based in Paris and its first President is Santi Nolla, editor of El Mundo Deportivo.

What, though, will the IASN actually do? Well, according to a report from the World Association of Newspapers, its aims are to “promote the role of sports newspapers as a marketing tool for the brands associated with sport; promote sports and reading among children; encourage volunteerism in the sporting world; fight against racism and xenophobia in sport; promote the use of sport as a tool in development policies; and safeguard the ethical and economic interests of sports newspapers.”

All of which is laudable per se, but yet more so, perhaps, as the recession now billed as “the worst for 100 years” bites with ever greater ferocity. It may sound counter-intuitive, but far from being a mere diversion the values of sport are precisely those that will enable people and businesses to survive.

Sport is a microcosm of the competitive world in which we live and work. Sporting success is only achieved by hard work, training, commitment and playing by the rules. Talent is undoubtedly required, but so, too, among true sportsmen, the ability to bring out the best in colleagues with lesser gifts. Moreover, sport has no regard for barriers of race and class; it is  democratic to its core.

Excesses exist. No one can condone the absurd salaries paid to Premier League footballers, and in a world threatened by global warming, the Formula 1 circus seems increasingly antediluvian. An unchecked market, in sport, may yet prove as disastrous as a pyramid scheme created by Bernie Madoff. But for all that it has its problems, sport remains an environment in which talent will out, where dedication pays off, and where no one likes a cheat.

The formation of IASN is, therefore, a welcome development in a contracting newspaper industry. Its founder members, and, perhaps, any other newspaper contemplating shedding its sports coverage, might like to recall the words of ‘Gentleman’ Jim Corbett, the great heavyweight boxer of the late 1800s:

Fight one more round, when your arms are so tired that you can hardly lift your hands to come on guard, fight one more round, when your nose is bleeding and your eyes are black and you are so tired that you wish your opponent would crack you one on the jaw and put you to sleep, fight one more round – remembering that the man who always fights one more round is never whipped.

Image courtesy of Corbis. 

 

Comments

Please submit comments to Swordplay below.

When a lawyer’s son is before the law

September 8, 2010

A lawyer of Swordplay’s acquaintance finds himself in a fix.

“My teenage son is to be interviewed by the local constable,” he tells us. “He is alleged to have committed an offence.”

We gasp, for such seems the appropriate response, and then ask: is it serious?

“No, it is not,” our troubled legal friend tells us. “In the great scheme of things, my son’s alleged transgression is about as de minimis as they get.”

For a split second, we wonder if said teenage son is cognisant of lawyerly terms of art such as de minimis, but rapidly conclude that the answer to this question is not a sine qua non of further discourse. And so we press on. That sounds good, we say, relatively speaking, at least.

“Yes,” says the lawyer, “but I am at a loss as to what to do with him. Do I come down hard and ground him, or do I play the liberal card, or do I find a compromise?”

That depends, we aver.

“On what?” asks our man.

On whether you would prefer to deal with your son’s alleged offence as a lawyer, or as a father, or as a father who is a lawyer, or maybe even as a lawyer who is a father.

“I see your point,” says the lawyer. And then, as if to prove that there is no cure for recidivism, he says: “The offence is, after all, de minimis.”

Without prejudice, we add.

Pictured: something out of Kafka. Now there was a man who knew about the law. And had a tough old father, too.

Max Mosley and Wayne Rooney: bedfellows?

September 6, 2010

We rarely enjoy pondering Max Mosley – the man, the sins, the legal action, what he stands for – but confess to a degree of grudging admiration for his tenacity in trying to change the law of privacy. As this story from the Independent has it, Mosley has lodged a request with the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg asking that, by law, journalists must inform the subject of a story of the private details they intend to print, prior to publication.

We suspect the motor racing man would never have thought it, but he would appear to have an unlikely bedfellow in a certain England footballer. Step forward, Wayne Rooney, who would presumably put his name to Mosley’s petition.

Pictured courtesy of NashvilleScene: some bedfellows are stranger than fiction.


Memo to Freelance Writers: return that editor’s call quickly

September 3, 2010

Woe betide those who freelance and fail to return a call.

We say this upon hearing of a normally prolific freelance journalist who picked up a voicemail from an editor at one of the nationals on Tuesday afternoon. Please call us, was the message, and it could mean just one thing – a commission.

Our hero’s habitual practice is to return such calls as soon as is reasonably practicable, as m’learned friends might put it. In practice, that would habitually mean within a couple of hours. Most atypically, and for reasons we have yet to fathom, our man failed to call back for a full 24 hours.

By then, said editor had looked elsewhere. One of our man’s competitors had the gig, an interesting piece about cricket and the law, one which might just be in The Times today and which, we assume, asks whether the Pakistan cricket team have been caught out (in the legal sense, you understand).

We make no judgement on the no ball scandal, save to say that it is a scandal, but in another sense the moral is clear: in the fast-paced world of modern media, he who hesitates is lost.

Pictured courtesy of PrintedClothing.com: a fast-selling shirt.