Sports Writing
By the 1850s, the Spirit covered angling, baseball, cricket, foot racing, fox hunting, horse racing, rowing, and yachting; boxing followed later in the decade. Porter printed all sorts of numbers and statistics, presaging the American sports obsession with such trivia. The paper helped to standardize horse racing by publishing horse weights, suggested betting practices, and offering efficient track management techniques.
Under Wilkes, the Spirit began covering football more extensively than any previous publication. Football coverage in the Spirit quickly outstripped the same in the paper's main rivals, the New York Clipper and the National Police Gazette. The paper covered college games first; in 1882, football got its own section. This coverage expanded again in 1892.
Under Curtis, who was a devotee of speed skating, developments in local and international speed-skating were covered and Curtis compiled lists of skating records.
Read more about this topic: Spirit Of The Times
Famous quotes containing the words sports and/or writing:
“I looked so much like a guy you couldn’t tell if I was a boy or a girl. I had no hair, I wore guys’ clothes, I walked like a guy ... [ellipsis in source] I didn’t do anything right except sports. I was a social dropout, but sports was a way I could be acceptable to other kids and to my family.”
—Karen Logan (b. 1949)
“I am writing for myself and strangers. This is the only
way that I can do it. Everybody is a real one to me,
everybody is like some one else too to me. No one of
them that I know can want to know it and so I write
for myself and strangers.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)