PUTNEY — “Sports is the toy department of life.”
That quote, often attributed to the late sports columnist Walter Wellesley “Red” Smith, refers to the tag, the Toy Department, that got stuck onto sports staffs at newspapers and other media outlets for decades afterward.
For the past two decades, author Bill Littlefield, host of National Public Radio's “Only A Game,” has been working to prove Red Smith wrong. His weekly program shows the truth of an oft-repeated aphorism of recent years in sports departments - that virtually every major issue that ends up on the front page first passes through the sports department.
On Saturday, June 15, at 7:30 p.m., Littlefield will be at NextStage to give a talk entitled “Only A Game, Except When It Isn't,” followed by a question and answer session with the audience.
Reached by phone last Friday at WBUR Radio in Boston, where “Only A Game” originates, Littlefield said the breadth of the title of his talk is deliberate, “[as] I never know what I'm going to be talking about.”
However, the topic of the sports-crazed nature of Boston, and New England in general, and the region's eternal devotion to the Red Sox, likely will come up.
The aftermath of the bomb attack at this year's Boston Marathon, where Boston's professional sports teams played such a prominent role in the healing process, is but one example of what Littlefield calls “the power of sports to draw people together as a community. People have the power to heal - whether it's in a church, a stadium, or a demonstration - and make themselves stronger despite whatever horrors they've just experienced.”
In a city as tribal as Boston, Littlefield says that sports is one of the few things that can unite people. But as rabid as the fan bases are for the Patriots, Bruins, and Celtics, they all pale before “Red Sox Nation.”
“Everybody else lines up behind [the Red Sox],” he said. “Enthusiasm waxes and wanes for the other teams depending on well they're doing, but with the Red Sox, the big interest is always there.”
He acknowledges the relationship has changed. It used to be, he said, that being a Red Sox fan meant “taking great joy in talking about how awful they are and how impossible it seems that they'd ever win a championship.”
Then came 2004, and the end of an 86-year-old championship drought, followed by another World Series win in 2007.
The 21st century has seen each of Boston's four major professional sports teams win at least one championship. The stories of decades of futility and disappointment have begun to fade, giving way to a different vibe.
“Somebody said to me back in the 1990s, 'You guys better hope that the Red Sox never do win the World Series, because if they do, they'll just be the Phillies.' People always talked about how sad and hapless the Phillies were, and then they won, and then nobody had anything to talk about. The Red Sox winning the World Series [in 2004] really was extraordinary, because so few people who could say that the Red Sox had won in their lifetime.”
The image of fans across New England visiting cemeteries for days afterwards to tell their dead relatives that the Sox had finally won is but one example of how extraordinary that victory was.
But those are the kind of stories that are the stock and trade of Littlefield and his program.
“The case we were able to make [to NPR to carry “Only A Game”] was that sports was the source of all kinds of good stories, and that it was a bad idea to leave the telling of those stories exclusive to call-in radio or television sports shows,” he said. “We could tell good stories well, in the NPR tradition, but those stories happen to be in sports.”
Boston, he said, was ideal as a home base for the program due to its sports scene. “Everybody comes through here,” he said.
Although Littlefield's program occupies a unique niche, he said he believes that there are plenty of other good storytellers working in the sports field.
“Some of the Deadspin (www.deadspin.com) stuff is pretty good, and then you have SB Nation Longform (www.sbnation.com/longform), where you can find all those long narrative pieces that used to be in magazines like Sport and Sports Illustrated. People are still doing it, and there's lots of good work out there. There's enthusiasm for good work. It may be harder to find a home for it than it used to be, but the great virtue of cyber-journalism is that there's so many places to look for it now.”
And, in the end, good writing and good storytelling is the only thing that matters, said Littlefield.
“I don't think there'll ever be a lack of enthusiasm [for it]. People need stories. They want them. They look for them. And folks keep producing them.”