Neville Cardus, Roger Angell and the art of Transatlantic sports journalism

When Robin Daniels was writing his 2009 memoir of his fellow Lancastrian Sir Neville Cardus, world-renowned music and cricket correspondent for the Manchester Guardian from the 1920s until his death in 1975, the subtitle he finally plumped for was nothing if not apt – Celebrant of Beauty. Sportswriting’s priorities have undergone enormous changes since Cardus’s heyday, not least in the premium placed on reporting the politics and business of sport, but thanks to the trail blazed by Cardus as well as the likes of American writers such as Paul Gallico and Damon Runyon, sports journalism remains the most literary branch of the profession, concerned as it still is with celebrating human endeavour, teamwork and the art and craft of competition. While many ballgames have long boasted such wordsmiths, two stand out for their traditional quality – cricket and baseball, in good part because of the sheer time each game consumes, permitting relatively leisurely reflection, but also because of the role each has historically played in helping define, respectively, English/Commonwealth and American identity. In addition to Cardus, cricket has given us John Arlott, Raymond Robertson-Glasgow, Alan Ross, David Foot, the Caribbean Marxist CLR James and the Australians Ray Robinson and Gideon Haigh; baseball reporting has been adorned by Grantland Rice, Ring Lardner, Roger Angell, Thomas Boswell, Roger Kahn and others. Intended to form part of the author’s proposed history of sports journalism, this paper will analyse and celebrate these writers while addressing what they say about their respective nations and sports.