Flashes of Panic

I have a preview of this weekend’s Boston Indoor Games out. I am not a fan of writing previews; I spend far too much time fact-checking the credentials of the athletes, looking up rankings and performances, to really get much flow in the paragraphs. This year, I started thinking well in advance, and managed to boil things down to a pretty simple formula: Dibaba, Defar, shot putters, and Australians. Others might be interesting to me (e.g. Nick Symmonds) but it’s better to give several long paragraphs to the top stars than to try to cram in lots of names and times.

Of course, every year I miss someone I should’ve mentioned, for whatever reason. Two years ago it was Dibaba, who ran a world record and didn’t get a mention in my preview. Last year, it was the two-mile record which was, apparently, never in the cards to begin with. This year, I neglected to mention Sarah Jamieson, who is “only” a Commonwealth Games silver medalist (and fifth-ranked in the world in her event,) but would be the fourth in the “Australian invasion” I mentioned in the title. Oops.

Anyway, for the first few years I had this gig, I walked on eggshells with the editor, trying to produce the straightest, most professional reports I could. After all, I reasoned, there were plenty of others who wouldn’t mind this work, so if he didn’t like what I sent, he’d find someone else. Then I met him last spring in Fukuoka, and realized I might be able to get away with a bit more life in my stories. But my idea of “humor” sometimes just comes off as bizarre to others, so it was with some trepidation that I used this as my opening paragraph:

It should be enough to say that both Tirunesh Dibaba and Meseret Defar, Ethiopia’s “Dueling Ds,” will be racing at the Boston Indoor Games on Saturday, although not against each other. But such a brief meet preview would be a disservice to the other top-ranked athletes competing in the first major fixture of the North American indoor season, not to mention raising suspicions of laziness on the part of the reporter.

I thought about providing an “alternate opening,” but didn’t—and he ran this one unchanged.

Now Playing: It’s Good To Be King from Wildflowers by Tom Petty

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