Well, Kutler and your esteemed editor are taking a short road trip tonight to D.C. to see Will Leitch at Borders in Georgetown. He's peddling his book, God Save the Fan, which we finished reading this past week. If you haven't seen it or heard of it, just go buy it. It explains why people blog, why we love sports, and offers quite a few humorous moments.
But the book hit home for me in a different way, right from the get go. In the introduction, Leitch talks about why if you are in sports journalism you start hating sports because it's your job instead of something you love as an escape. The picture he paints is very similar to the one I experienced in the later years of college while I was working for an unnamed Baltimore daily print publication. I saw the people around me, like Will did, who had been in the business for twenty years and were run down by it. They didn't have any reaction to it anymore, it was just something from keeping them from going home.
When I arrived in the pressbox for the first professional game I covered, the man who I was next to reminded me of the sportswriters' cardinal rule: no cheering in the press box. Later that night, I keep thinking about that phrase, and wondering: if you can't cheer, then what's the point?
So we'll be heading down to the District now to see Leitch. Full report on Friday.
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