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Every time you write anything, at least half your readers are going to disagree with you. A big part of sports writing is how you respond to that tension.

A lot of times I watch sporting events, and there are things I want to say and things I see that don't get said or talked about.

When you're representing a sport, people are more likely to judge and comment as, unlike other fields, sport permits every viewer to participate to a certain level.

We are essentially in the business of telling stories. We would like to think that most of our stories are basically human stories with sports as a backdrop.

I think of sports writers as mediating between two worlds. Athletes probably think of sports writers as not macho enough. And people in high culture probably think of sports writers as jocks or something. They are in an interestingly complex position in which they have to mediate the world of body and the world of words.

For many of us, sport has provided the continuity in our lives, the alternative family to the one we left behind. It gives us something to talk about, to preen about, to care about.

Baseball, boxing, handball - sooner or later every game gets compared to narrative, but only in football are the plays perfectly linear, drawn up with letters, and only in football is the field itself lined like a sheet of notebook paper.

When you write about sports, you're allowed to engage in mischief. Nothing is at stake.

In sports teams, apart from talk of sporting prowess and the imparting of inspirational thought, an extraordinary amount of time is spent discussing, and flaunting, material possessions.

The sports space is so full of opinion that you aren't hearing from the athletes just speaking for themselves. We are such a Twitter-oriented society with radio talk shows, TV talk shows and social media - what you are missing is the authentic, unfiltered aspect of who these people are.