Go to your local bookstore. Beat the familiar path past the graphic novels, travel guides and cooking manuals to the sports section. Trace your finger along the shelf’s edge until you alight at the Js. There, with a bit of luck, you’ll find BS Johnson’s The Unforgettables.
His by-line is unfamiliar now, but Johnson was once a football reporter with the Observer newspaper in England in the 1960s. But not really.
No, really he was a novelist.
At weekends he was perched in draughty press boxes watching blue-collar football with the working men of Britain after a long week. But while on Monday morning they clocked back in on the Tyne dockyard or Sheffield steelworks, Bryan Stanley Johnson wrote experimental novels.
And if he was quite different to his readers, he wasn’t too similar to his colleagues in the gantry either; he once famously rang the Observer sports desk on a busy Saturday afternoon and shouted to a bemused colleague, “I’ve just thought of an idea for a novel. Will you take the report from agency?”
Very much influenced by the likes of our own James Joyce (not a football fan, really) and Samuel Beckett (a renowned cricket enthusiast) he was also hamstrung by the cliché of an artist’s tortured soul. He ultimately took his own life at the age of 40 – but not before writing his much-loved book-in-a-box ‘The Unfortunates‘ which centred on Saturday afternoon soccer match in Nottingham, as he remembers a friend who died from cancer.
The novel comes in 27 unbound parts in a little book-shaped box, and is be read randomly apart from the first and last chapters. The inventive device of delivering the chapters arbitrarily is probably supposed to reflect the randomness of his friend’s disease but also, maybe, the nature of a sport. The game has a beginning and an end; the rest is random.
The unconventional work came to mind this week as I listened to Rupert Murdoch’s words, desperately hailing Apple’s new iPad as the saviour of newspapers. It’s clear, where once the Aussie media mogul was a visionary in his industry, now he seems completely out of touch, as he tilts at idle windmills.
But though the iPad – Apple’s latest gadget which offers users a slick way of browsing online – won’t save newspapers, it is certainly a game-changer – and with it sports writing.
When cinema screens were first blotted with technicolour, Hollywood gave us the Wizard of Oz. Phil Spector was able to produce his signature wall of sound because of changes in stereo technology. So too sports writing will be shoe-horned to fit this new newspaper-in-a-box. But how?
Alex Higgins once fell out of a window – presumably with the familiar taste of alcohol on his lips. When he came to in the hospital and a doctor asked exactly how far he had fallen, he answered: “about three snooker tables”. Like a sailor whose progress is measured in knots or a physicist who builds his work on the atom, the billiard table, amazingly, was his basic unit of measurement. Ours is still the column inch.
In the future however, (when I’m wearing the hover sneakers I’m waiting on since Back to the Future II) we’ll instruct correspondents to file “two gigs of a report from Semple Stadium and a few bites of a quotes piece.”
The demarcation lines within the media are being smudged too. Like Steve McQueen said in Bullitt, once it was a case of: “You work your side of the street, and I’ll work mine.” Not so soon, as print and broadcast walk the same beat. Where Con Houlihan wrote his famous columns in long-hand – at his relative leisure in a Dublin pub – on chip paper, soon one will expect video and audio content to complement good writing. You have to admit, Houlihan would’ve nailed a podcast too.
All-Ireland winning teams will no longer be photographed on the train journey home holding up the 68-point back-page headline that screams of their Croke Park win. A snapper might be compelled to ask Colm Cooper to “flash your Kindle there with the sports page up ‘til I get a shot, Gooch”, as the footballer peruses the blogosphere on the way through Limerick Junction.
And as they wend their way towards a homecoming, those at their breakfast tables will not spread the paper wide, one corner held down by a hot teapot while an argument rages about Niall Cahalane’s column. He’ll still spark debate no doubt, but Kerry men will hop smartphones off the wall rather than rip up a sports page.
But sport is to journalism what Flann O’Brien’s policeman was to his bicycle; they cannot be parted. And though no ink will be spilled soon in the telling of famous victories and defeats, still people will look for the few lines of analysis and comment about what happened between the white lines. Though the headline won’t be scarred by a ring of milky tea, it will be back-lit, almost instant and new. No harm.
Contact: adrian.russell@examiner.ie Twitter: @adrianrussell
This column first appeared in this morning’s Irish Examiner newspaper
