Quote of the Day | September 5, 2008: Sportswriting Being What It Is. . . .

From Roy Blount Jr.'s 1974 chronicle of the Pittsburgh Steelers, About Three Bricks Shy . . .

Of course, as in the children's hand game, paper covers rock. What remained for the aforementioned Herb, after B.B. had either squelched him or declined to respond meaningfully at all, was to go to is typewriter and deal high-handedly in prose with B.B.'s output or attitudes. And B.B. may well have deserved it. But that prose, sportswriting being what it is, would probably not be so sound or compelling, in any primal sense, as the way B.B. moved on the field of play, or even the way B.B. sat on his stool with sweat running down his neck and gauze unraveling down his legs.

Among themselves, our course, Herb and his colleagues would have their own bonds and hardihood, highlighted by talk in some ways more rounded and venturesome than the players'. But the stories told would be about the players, mostly. Check out the sportswriter character in pro football novels. "Chumps" would be a player's word for them. "Somebody you slap in the face and he don't do anything. That's the definition of a chump," Dwight White told me. And Joe Greene once referred to $50 as "chump change." A player makes more money than a scribe, and yet has stayed truer to his fiercest childhood dreams; he pushes the equivalent of a dozen people down the equivalent of a flight of stairs on a normal working day. He lives firsthand, and doesn't like to admit, by and large, that he is in the same boat with a man who asks questions and describes.

Tags: About Three Bricks Shy, Roy Blount Jr.