Monday mash-up: High profiles and low blows
Lamenting sports journalism's lost art, PLUS: bits and pieces from the weekend, including Sam's sign-off, Shaun's return, a sailing saga and SvG's sharp elbows.
If there is one sports journalism art that has suffered more than any other from the downsizing of sports departments and the corresponding rise of communications departments and website analytics, it is the profile.
Once a staple of sports sections, particularly on the weekend, the in-depth athlete profile is now a rare bird.
The reasons for not doing them are many. If done well they take a long time to write and time is not an abundant commodity in the modern newsroom. They don’t rate particularly well in the dreaded “unique browser” column, so they’re never going to be darlings of the section heads. They also require a subject and unless they’re puff pieces – preferably made-for-tv with cute parent-of-the-year vibes – the comms folk at the country’s big sports are mostly uncooperative. The thought of giving writers quality one-on-one time with their prized ‘possessions’ has become anathema.
Those are the cons. The pros are that good profiles are hellishly engaging, they add value for readers in ways that hot takes, angles and news-driven stories cannot.
I use this example time and again: when is the last time you read a nicely crafted profile on an All Black? I’ve read plenty of rat-shit dictaphone dumps from a stolen few minutes at the end of a media session (and have written a fair few, too), but if there has been any character-driven profiles, I must have missed them.
Profiles are easy to write and insanely difficult to write well. It’s a bit like the guitar. Anybody can put their fingers on the strings and strum a few chords, but turning that into a coherent song is tricky. Likewise, anybody can transcribe an interview, but turning that into a tale worth telling, and which holds interest from the lede to the pay-off line, is fiendishly hard.
William Finnegan wrote one of my favourite memoirs, Barbarian Days, so it’s no surprise to see him strike gold with this profile on Oahu surfing pioneer Jock Sutherland, a man I had never heard of until today, but now want to know more about. From a journo-head perspective, Finnegan takes a circuitous route to the meat of the story. It’s a slow burn, but a satisfying journey.
Jock broke his femur in the early eighties, not at Pipe[line] but at Jocko’s. “It was an eight-foot wave, and I had to go around a friend who was paddling out. Lip landed right on me,” he said. “I tried to get back on my board, but my leg just hung there, like a dead eel. My friends had to help me get in.” The accident affected his surfing. “I was afraid of the lip for about a year after that.” The lip is the most violent part of the wave, and being afraid of it is a natural reaction—a survival instinct that Jock seemed to have temporarily acquired, until he lost it again.
The real problem for Jock came on land. During his convalescence from the broken leg, he lived next door to a cocaine dealer. Cocaine was cutting a deep swath across surf world. The roster of drug-related casualties is long and includes some of the best in the sport, such as Andy Irons, a three-time world champion from Kauai, who died in 2010 while still on tour. Jock developed a habit, along with half the people he knew. “I started selling bindles,” he told me, ruefully. “I never made money. I didn’t cut my stuff, just eyed up amounts. Then I got busted muling a pound for somebody else. So stupid. That really shocked my mom.”
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I would love to see Steven O’Meagher given the full profile treatment. He was a skilled feature writer himself at North & South before turning his hand to film and television production. Yeah, I know, he’s not really a ‘sports’ subject but he ghosted Sean Fitzpatrick’s autobiography, was the executive producer of The Golden Hour and reads the sports section before anything else, so I’m using licence in pimping this piece, which you could label a semi-profile ($), about him. As it reveals, O’Meagher’s been dealt a tough hand, but his mind still sparkles with big ideas that he knows won’t get funded. Or, in his words:
O’Meagher runs through a list of recent weekly NZ on Air-funded TV shows, each of them with fewer than 100,000 linear viewers per episode, some not even half that audience size. Even taking streaming into account, he says, the numbers reflect New Zealand stories hold too little appeal.
“There’s got to be other factors at play there, and for me it’s all around quality of product. Kiwis love local – look at our best ads, songs, books. So why aren’t our latest films or TV shows connecting? The problem isn’t they’re ‘Kiwi’, or a 2024 version of cultural cringe. The problem is dull, mediocre, unimaginative storytelling.”
Preach.
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Finally, profiles can take various forms, and like the O’Meagher story, the following is not in classic profile format, but it’s hard to think of a piece on Eddie Jones that reveals character quite as much as this story by the Sunday Times Owen Slot (h/t Aiden for spotting it while the paywall was down), although it is as much about the author as well - a Gonzo-type approach that just about works in this instance.
In a quiet hotel bar in a quiet Paris suburb on an everyday Friday morning, we are 35 minutes into our interview when the peace is broken and the volume and tension start to rise. This is when Eddie Jones starts telling me what he thinks of me.
“I can’t believe how negative you are,” he says. “It really intrigues me. At some stage, I must have done something really bad to you and you can’t get it out of your system.”
And then later: “I find you very negative, a quite spiteful person.” And then: “You’re a spiteful person. Sad, very sad. I feel sad for you.”
The story, or pitched battle between author and subject, continued:
I tell him a story that came from one of his former England assistant coaches about one day in the England camp in the summer of 2022, before the squad left for their Australia tour. Jones had completely lost his temper with his entire group of coaches, informed them they were all coaching badly and told them all: “F*** off!” and “I’ll do the coaching”. They were all, at that point, exceedingly close to following instructions and literally walking out.
“Does that ring a bell?” I ask.
“Not really,” he says. “But that was a tour we won.” They did, 2-1. “So, you’ve got some really good evidence there,” he adds sarcastically. “That was only the second team ever in the history of England rugby to win in Australia. And I was the head coach of both of them. So you might want to put that in the pipe.”
Viva la profile.
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On to matters of the moment. If you’re the sort of person who can’t help but look at fresh roadkill, you could subject yourself to the latest BYC, which features correspondence lifted from the weekend’s special edition ($).
New Zealand is not the only side swimming in misery. Pakistan lost to the USA in a Super Over earlier in the week and failed to chase down archrival India’s paltry 119, admittedly on New York’s perilous surface, despite being 73-2 at the start of the 13th over.
While New Zealand just plain stunk, both of Pakistan’s losses featured late-game moments that were bizarre including, when the USA needed four off the final ball to force a Super Over, bringing mid-off inside the circle and then bowling full on off stump.