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Of my 44 years as a newspaper journalist, 23 of them were spent in sports departments from Columbus to Biloxi to San Francisco to Phoenix. In 2005, I made the decision to leave sports to be a news columnist and while I’ve dabbled with sports journalism off and on since then, I can’t say I have regretted moving on from the games people play.
When I first made the transition from sports to news/opinion writer, I explained it by saying I got tired of interviewing naked people (back then, sportswriters had unfettered access to locker rooms), but the real reason I left is because it began to feel like I’d seen and heard it all before.
I may have fallen out of love with sportswriting, but my love of sports has not waned. I find I enjoy sports more now because it’s no longer a job, but an unadulterated source of pleasure. As a fan, I’m not bound by the constraints of good taste, objectivity, neutrality, proportion or perspective.
I find that all those years as a sportswriter enhanced my appreciation of sports because it allowed me to get up close and personal with the athletes and the competition. There is nothing like a courtside view of an NBA game, standing on the sidelines of a NFL game or wandering along the Backside at Churchill Downs during Kentucky Derby week, close enough to touch the thoroughbreds as their grooms bring them out of the paddock.
Television, and all our advances in technology, cannot capture all of the sensations you feel when you are near the action. What TV captures least of all is the speed of the action, no matter the sport.
When you are watching a major-league baseball game, it seems not too difficult a task to hit a 97 mph fastball. In person, you can barely see it, and hitting it would be unthinkable.
If you are standing at the rail at a NASCAR race, you don’t see cars go by, just flashes of color.
On the sideline of an NFL game, you see a kickoff and watch enormous, fast men violently collide and you start looking around to see where the body bags are being kept, so certain you are of impending fatalities. You are amazed that they all pop right up and jog back to the sideline in perfect health.
When the crowd of thoroughbreds thunder past the rails in a cluster so tight you can’t spit between the horses, their hooves kicking up clods of earth as big as a dinner plate and the jockeys poised over the shoulders of these beasts – maintaining contact with their mounts only with their knees – you are certain some of them are going to be catapulted through the air and trampled.
The speed, intensity and ferocity of sports cannot be captured by the camera.
That is why the Olympics are my favorite sporting event: because they can awe you in a dozen different ways in their various combinations of speed, strength, agility and endurance.
My first exposure to world-class Olympic athletes came in the 1992 U.S. Olympic Trials in New Orleans. Until then, track-and-field had captured little of my attention, confined as it was to attending mostly high school meets. There in New Orleans, I watched Mike Powell turn in a long jump with a distance of 8.62 meters. Folks, that’s like jumping the length of two full-sized cars parked bumper to bumper. Human beings are not supposed to be able to do that.
All across the Olympic landscape, you will see spectacles of athletic prowess that seem to defy physics. There are athletes from all over the world performing feats that cannot be fully understood or appreciated unless you are in close proximity.
To approximate some of this, swing by Waverley mansion and imagine a diver descending from its apex. Stand in the end zone of Davis Wade Stadium and imagine a swimmer reaching the back of the other end zone in 42 seconds. Imagine Simone Biles jumping the height of two refrigerators during her floor exercise only to land as softly as a butterfly landing on a flower petal.
As a sportswriter, I had the good fortune to observe almost all of the big events, but the Olympics stand apart. There is no greater collection of world-class athletes than what you will find in Paris for these two weeks.
And even though TV is a poor representation, the Olympic Games are worthy of your attention.
Watch and be amazed.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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