Abstract

Sports in America: The Boswells of Baseball

Without the benefit of serious advertising, sports regularly splash across more columns than music, art, books and theatre combined and when a baseball promoter stoops to purchase his daily five-line advertisement, he exudes the benign air usually associated with contributions to the American Red Cross. Whether a sport lends more to a newspaper's appeal than the paper's coverage does to that of the sport, is a riddle bruited about for decades. It will not be solved here. For every newspaperman who credits the press with building sports, there is a promoter waiting to point out that big-time .sports have been the papers' most durable circulation crutch since 1910. Both sides are partially correct, and with the vivid emergence of the athletic hero during the fifty-year sports boom in the U.S., has arisen the unique breed of newspapermen called sportswriters.