Dil Porter on BS Johnson and Sports Journalism

Sport in History Podcast

Arthur Hopcraft’s much-celebrated The Football Man (1968) comprised chapters based on interviews with representative ‘football men’ of the 1960s – ‘The Player’, ‘The Manager’, ‘The Referee’ etc. But though there is a brief chapter on ‘Football and the Press’, the ever-present match reporter receives little attention. Bryan Stanley Johnson (1933-73) is best remembered for his experimental writing, especially The Unfortunates (1969), an essentially autobiographical novel comprising a collection of unbound chapters in a box, which reflects on a day in the life of a football reporter and the random memories and thoughts that it prompts. Johnson’s football journalism for the Observer in the mid-1960s supplies the main focus here. As a writer preoccupied with writing ‘truthfully’, he could not always resolve the tensions relating to this often highly-stylised form of journalism. Yet there was a sense in which a football match – a series of unpredictable events occurring within a time-regulated framework, provided him with a unique opportunity. For most people, most of the time, sport is a mediated experience. The text of The Unfortunates alongside Johnson’s reports, as drafted and as they appeared in print a few hours later, allows access to this process of mediation. Johnson helps us to understand how a match report, a primary source that historians of sport often take for granted, was created. Dilwyn Porter is Emeritus Professor of Sports History and Culture at De Montfort University and also Visiting Professor in Modern British History at Newman University, Birmingham.