A gentleman asks us to give some advice to young men intending to enter
journalism. Well, we would say, get a job as a sporting writer. That is
where the real fun lies. Being a sporting writer is hot stuff; it keeps
you out in the open air, you are respected and even admired by the
least easily impressionable classes, such as policemen, car conductors,
and office boys; you have immense fun inventing new ways of saying
things (which is the groundwork of good literature), get a great many
free meals, have your expenses paid, meet people who have high-powered
cars and put them at your disposal, and your lightest word is deemed
important enough to be put on a telegraph wire and flashed to the
office for an EXTRA. If you write about such minor matters as war and
peace, poetry, books, or the beauty of this, that, and the other,
you will be hidden demurely away on an inside page and there is no
particular hurry about it.
The other day at the Polo Grounds we noticed a hard-boiled fan
leaving the stand after the game. As he passed out onto the field he
suddenly saw the gang of reporters finishing up their stories and the
instruments clattering beside them. “Gee,” he cried, “look at all the
writers!” And with a real awe he turned to his companion and said:
“Their stuff goes all over the world.”
We contend that Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, James Branch Cabell, Joe
Hergesheimer, Bernard Shaw, Rudyard Kipling, and Lord Dunsany, sitting
side by side on a bench writing short stories for a wager, would not
have elicited such a gust of reverent admiration from our friend.
We are not joking. You can have more fun, and get better paid for it,
as a sporting reporter than in any other newspaper job. And there is in
it a bigger opportunity for men of real originality.
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