National Sports Journalism Center

I’m writing early Sunday evening, a couple of hours before I’ll do the recap of today’s Mets game for Faith and Fear in Flushing, the blog I co-write with my friend Greg Prince. I went to today’s game, so the recap will look at what it was like riding the water taxi to Citi Field (an option many fans may not know about), the experience of nearly melting in the stands with my wife and friends, and the vibe in the park. There won’t be a lot about what Mets starter Jonathan Niese was throwing, or other nuances of the game – I was seated 400 feet from home plate. But that’s OK – in part because I’m making an assumption I might not have made a few years ago. I assume folks who read my blog post will also read other accounts of the game.

After all, that’s what I do as a reader. The game ended about three hours ago, and I’ve already read the basics on Metsblog, perused the comments on Amazin’ Avenue’s recap and skimmed the Associated Press game story in case there are interesting player comments and to see ESPN’s highlights video. (Player comments are usually deadly dull, but Jeff Francoeur did have an amusing story about the Mets discussing the day’s three home runs.) I’ll read the New York Times’ recap later – it doesn’t have any player quotes yet — because the Times is the closest thing I have to a local paper. I’ll check in with ESPN New York tonight for clubhouse stuff and to see what the minor-league clubs did. Tomorrow morning I’ll make the rounds on Twitter and read whatever my peers have recommended from other Mets blogs and papers. And then it will be on to the next game.

Putting together these shifting perspectives has become a basic part of what and how I read. I’m not interested in additional game stories, but I do seek out different ways of looking at a game: the facts here, video there; clubhouse reaction from Site A, a look inside the numbers from Site B; an in-the-stadium perspective from this blog, thoughts about what the team should do next from that blog.

And this is even more important to me when I put aside my habits and dig into a sports story that wouldn’t normally register with me. I pay only fitful attention to tennis, but I became intrigued by last week’s epic battle at Wimbledon between American John Isner and France’s Nicolas Mahut – the one that needed a second day to play, broke the scoreboard and went in the record books for Isner at 6-4, 3-6, 6-7 (7), 7-6 (3), 70-68.

Isner-Mahut grabbed me before they began play on their second day. So what did I do to catch up? What I always do: I went looking for different perspectives.

From my days writing the Daily Fix for WSJ.com, I knew to rely on Bruce Jenkins and Bud Collins for wise appraisals of tennis. Jenkins, writing for SI, gave me some interesting historical perspective, but what really hit home was his faintly melancholy look at two players who are at two very different points in what will likely be very different careers: Isner is young and rising into the sport’s top ranks, while Mahut is a journeyman who will probably be remembered only for being Isner’s foil. The Boston Globe’s Collins, as is his style, offered some entertaining wordplay, starting with calling the match “a soap opera in short pants,” captured the oddness of that fifth set growing to gargantuan proportions after four relatively straightforward ones, and offered up Roger Federer as a perfect commenter – Federer sounded like a fan himself, riveted by what was going on.

Another tennis expert I’ve grown to trust, SI’s Jon Wertheim, offered a Q&A on SI.com that speculated on what shape the players would be in when they resumed and looked at what it meant for tennis to have a crazy story steal the spotlight away from the World Cup. (Wertheim didn’t see the match as an unalloyed benefit for the sport, which also intrigued me.) And the Los Angeles Times’ Diane Pucin shook off the temptation to wax poetic, stating flatly that “there hasn’t been a single indelible point played. … It’s not the piece work that’s been done that will make us remember this match for a very long time. It is the entirety.”

Then there were two blogs that offered terrific ways of trying to make sense of the match. The Guardian’s Xan Brooks liveblog is a real-time chronicle of a writer descending into near-madness, in terrifically entertaining style. It opens with some marvelous scene-setting and wordplay, with no hint of what’s to come. Around 3:45 p.m., Brooks takes up the cause of Isner and Mahut, then tied at 15-15 in that epic fifth set. As quickly becomes apparent, there is no end in sight: “Soon they will sprout beards and their hair will grow down their backs, and their tennis whites will yellow and then rot off their bodies. And still they will stand out there on Court 18, belting aces and listening as the umpire calls the score. Finally, I suppose, one of them will die.” Later, Brooks notes that “under the feet of John Isner and Nicolas Mahut, the grass is growing. Before long they will be playing in a jungle and when they sit down at the change of ends, a crocodile will come to menace them.” My friend David Roth, who inherited my old Daily Fix seat, praised the Brooks blog for conveying “the sense of the process being so close to the surface, of the Thing Itself getting ahead of its description and describer over and over again.”

Brooks’ chronicle must have been great fun to see added to while watching Isner-Mahut grind on and on. But it’s so sharply written that it works as a retrospective later. But it wasn’t the only perspective that grabbed me. Reading later, I was charmed by the work of Andy Hutchins on the Sporting News’ blog. Hutchins made a wise, brave decision to cede the wordplay to Brooks, linking to the Guardian blog, but achieved the same shake-your-head level of amazement by letting the numbers tell an odd story.

I read other things during my deep-dive into Isner-Mahut, but little of it to completion: If the first two or three paragraphs indicated I was getting a straightforward recap or a salute to perseverance, I reversed field and went elsewhere. I wanted something I hadn’t already read, and that would make me think about something new.
People read differently – my reading habits may be my own. But I think it’s fair to say that the Web encourages a relatively new way of reading: one that begins with searching for information and ends with a reader diving into an event until he or she feels sated. To the extent that kind of reading is shaped by media brands, the relevant brands will be individual writers, not titles – I began by looking for Bruce Jenkins and Bud Collins, not Sports Illustrated and the Boston Globe. That kind of reading will be directed by Web searches and by recommendations from our peers. And if readers are anything like me, they won’t be searching for take after take that tell the same story. Rather, they’ll be looking for different perspectives, until they feel the tale has been satisfyingly told.

Jason Fry is a freelance writer and media consultant in Brooklyn, N.Y. He spent more than 12 years at The Wall Street Journal Online, serving as a writer, columnist, editor and projects guy. While at WSJ.com he edited and co-wrote The Daily Fix, a daily roundup of the best sportswriting online. He blogs about the Mets at Faith and Fear in Flushing, and about the newspaper industry at Reinventing the Newsroom. Write to him at  jason.fry@gmail.com, visit him on Facebook, or follow him on Twitter.