Opting out of the 'Hot Take Olympics'

Last week, The Seattle Times published a column by Matt Calkins that caused me to curse out loud.¹

I disagree with this on several levels:

My objections do not mean this was a bad column. In fact, challenging readers, even stirring them to anger, can be an effective tactic for columnists.

But as I prepared to write a column about all the ways that Calkins was wrong, I realized that I was falling victim to one of two classic blunders in modern-day sports writing.

The first is never get photographed holding hands with a source on the roof of a cabana at an adults-only resort in Arizona.

Second, and only slightly less lethal, is spending all your time nitpicking someone else’s opinion.

This may be how television works, but it’s not what I grew up wanting to write, and it’s certainly not the kind of work I grew up reading. Before I explain, I’ll give you a chance to wallow in the absolutely awful series of games the Mariners played over the weekend.

All right, back to contemporary sports media.

The idea of televised debate is not a new element in sports journalism. I grew up watching a show called “The Sports Reporters” on ESPN. It aired on Sunday mornings, and I made sure to have my newspaper route finished in time to watch Dick Schaap moderate that week’s panel. It’s where I got my first whiff of Mike Lupica’s ego and how Ralph Wiley became one of my very favorite writers.

The panelists would frequently disagree, but always with a smile. It was more collegial, less theatrical, but it was a template for what is now a standard part of sports programming: a collection of people find a point on which they differ and spend somewhere between 2 and 5 minutes arguing about it.

Sports-talk radio frequently operates this way, too, but that’s just one type of content in what is a much more free-flowing format.

Over the years, it seems to me that sports writing has come to include elements of this approach as well.

Or maybe it’s just that my writing about sports has increasingly followed this approach, as demonstrated by this 2015 column about how silly I thought it was for Mike Freeman to say tight end Jimmy Graham was “pissed.”

Here’s an excerpt from what I wrote about Freeman, who was working for Bleacher Report at the time.

What I wrote would now be called trolling, and while I’m not going to say I was wrong about what I wrote, I’ve also begun to feel that this is becoming a default setting in the industry.

Each day is a competition to see which opinions, whose take, will stir the strongest reaction by grabbing some brass ring of truth or—in the case of people like Skip Bayless—saying something that everyone believes is utterly insane.

People like me, who write and talk about sports, are constantly sniffing around for things to react to. Often, this is done via Twitter. Occasionally, it is from reading a columnist like Calkins.

I can recall at least two occasions when I dissected something he had written on the air while working in Seattle radio, pointing out the various ways I thought his approach was misguided.

Was I wrong? No. There was a purpose and rationale to my criticism.

It was cheap, however. It’s easier to highlight the flaws in someone else’s argument than to construct one of your own.

Not only that, but pointing out the shortcomings of someone else’s opinion didn’t make me any taller.

I’m going to try to keep this in mind from now on. To write not in response to what others are saying, but what I see and feel.

This might not be the best business approach. Conflict is one of the best ways to command attention on the Internet. That doesn’t mean it’s the most meaningful, though.

So, in the spirit of becoming a better, more mature sports writer, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with Calkins saying the Thunder are a model of success the Sonics should strive to emulate if they ever do get reincarnated.

I say that without any snarkiness or sarcasm.

P.S. I still hate the Thunder.