Sports Writers Becoming Food Writers

[Jinmyo]

I so often read that food writer or critic or reviewer was previously a sports writer. I know food but know nothing of sports. Is there a connection?

[Jeanne McManus]

It’s funny: I hear that all the time. But the only person I’ve met so far who has the same two elements in his/her background is my friend Russ Parsons at the LA Times. Maybe we were both encoded by all the bad food in the press box, so we automatically turned to food editing/writing. (Mussels Marinara once at RFK almost killed us. Exception to the press box food: The NFL, every year at Super Bowl, threw a fabulous party: shrimp as big as a baby’s bottom!)

But I’ve heard your comment about the sports/food connection  from others, so if anybody out there wants to let me know the others, please do. We can form a support group. Oh wait: of course, there’s another one I forgot. Little known fact: Steve Klc pitched middle relief for the Bowie Baysox for 2 years. Steve, I hope I’m not letting the cat out of the bag here. Maybe egullet folks didn’t know? But of course, Steve had vowels in his last name back then.

I will say this about working in Sports, or at least about working in the sports section of The Post. Once you have survived there, with its huge volume, huger personalities and hectic pace,  you get the feeling you can survive anything. When things fall apart in Food some weeks, I say to my staff: Hey we’re not living in the Comfort Inn in downtown Atlanta during the 1996 Olympics and bomb didn’t just go off outside our window.

And a sportswriter can write anything: they are amazingly versatile and creative. Nothing made me more happy or proud than to have a reporter from Sports land a big A1 story, or to be on the scene of a sporting event where other news broke out, most notably, the earthquake in California during the SF-Oakland World Series in 1988.  I feel the same way about the Food staff writers.