The Morning According to Us

Another press box departure brings up new questions.

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Is it necessary?

David Steele writes achingly about his recent brush with press box reality today. The Baltimore Sun veteran was canned on the job recently. He was pulled out of the press box, of all places, to be given the bad news. And while some concentrate on the setting -- a playwright with no sense of subtelty could never do better -- Steele's plight is everybody's.

But is it the plight of sports in general?

Not everybody is convinced it is. And they have reasons. For example, in the Mag this week Bill Simmons discussues (and laments) the loss of access with the argument that athletes have other mediums with which to control their image. Simmons notes, "With newspapers dying and the Internet not yet subject to the same libel scrutiny, journalism is getting nastier and more detached -- fewer stories broken, infinitely more snark. That will cause stars to weave even stronger cocoons, and the chasm between us will keep growing. Today's technology means athletes don't need a middleman anymore."

But the middleman discussion is what needs its own scrutiny.

That's because Steele -- or even the idea of what he represents -- is and was more than a middleman. While some pine for the days where there was more of a trust between athletes and journalists (which is also just to pine for less media noise around the athletes), where Ben Cramer or Gay Talese could truly profile a man, or where Dick Schaap could ride around with a skirt-chasing Cassius Clay long before the boxer had framed an image for himself by studying the likes of Gorgeous George and the former Robert Zimmerman, for those of us who've spent our time in the locker rooms or around athletes, there still is, was and always will be a filter. But there are also stories, and the foundation of the truth, and those are at the heart of the process. Those are what make the beat important.

That's because the middleman doesn't exist in the sense that he transports only information, he exists in that he transports reality.

An updated web-site isn't a proxy for transparency, and a Tweet isn't a form of access. The total control of a message just makes that message just that much more ripe for scrutiny, and the new mediums for information just makes the one person who can see the athlete daily, the moods, the performance, the swings, on the inside and out, that much more vital in disseminating the message. Same with politics. An updated web site isn't a "transparent" White House. The subject of information as the source of information is only the beginning.

There are such things as bad beat reporters. But that they exist is part of the whole of sport. And there are serious stories on the struggles of an industry, and sad attempts as well, and there are also those like Simmons who, in a smart and philosophical sense point out that maybe we were asking too much to get so close all along.

But in the end, even the athletes will know this: The joy of this industry, this realm, is that so many of the best stories they may have mapped out themselves.

But the storytellers provide the legend.

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