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:
“Short of a wholesale reform of college athletics—a complete breakdown of the whole system that is now focused on money and power—the women’s programs are just as doomed as the men’s are to move further and further away from the academic mission of their colleges.... We have to decide if that’s the kind of success for women’s sports that we want.”
—Christine H. B. Grant, U.S. university athletic director. As quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, p. A42 (May 12, 1993)
“Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.”
—Joseph Brodsky (b. 1940)