Please have sympathy for the sportswriters

Frank Deford would like you to know that being a sportswriter is not fun and enjoyable like it used to be. We actually have to work during games now and attempt to be experts in a given sport rather than be generalist raconteurs who sit back and enjoy a ballgame while drinking a Tom Collins and then, several hours later, writing up a few hundred words that no one has the means to challenge or question:

But today there are no news cycles. News is like the Earth going around the sun, cycling constantly. As a consequence, sportswriters are required to update and blog and react to everything … now it is the sports fans at home with their gargantuan HDTVs who are the privileged ones watching the games, while sportswriters are the ones not able to. Now, that’s a fine how-do-you-do, isn’t it?

And it’s especially bad this time of year:

… this is the most trying time of the year, because there is no game this week, so we have this interminable countdown to the Super Bowl, and each day is worse for sportswriters because there is nothing new to analyze. And this year everything besides the Super Bowl is also so depressing … So fans, be kind. I’ve dubbed this “be sympathetic to sportswriters week,” the black hole in our sports calendar.

I don’t know. I just try to take these trying days one at a time. Wake up each morning and steel myself against the tribulations that rain down upon me and my sports writing brethren. To hope that my personal fortitude, combined with the thoughts and prayers of non-sportswriters, help me make it through and to realize that whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.

Or, alternatively, I wake up each morning and pinch myself to make sure I’m not dreaming about having this cool-ass job, even when it’s the offseason and there’s nothing particularly interesting to write about.  Either way.