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You learn something every day....
Published: 9/25/2008 2:13 PM
Last Modified: 9/25/2008 2:13 PM

For instance: For all these years, I thought the topics I wrote about for the Tulsa World were perhaps most accurately classified as "arts and entertainment."

Well, it would seem that, in the world of the Internet, they aren't.

I write about sports.

I have no earthly idea how many people -- if any -- seek out stories I write specifically because I have written them. But a good portion of these stories have a tendency to be find their permanent home in cyberspace not listed under "The Arts," but under "Sports."

Neither I nor the wonderful and talented people who service the Tulsa World's place on the "interweb" have any idea why this is so.

And, all things considered, it's hardly a cause for concern or alarm or even a blog entry.

It's just one of those odd little things. And since I'm the sort of person who thinks about things perhaps a little more than they deserve, I wonder if the fact that stories I write about singers and musicians and writers don't in fact BELONG under the heading of "Sports."

There is a great deal of physical prowess and strength necessary to play a musical instrument or to sing at a professional level. Dancing is as much an athletic as an aesthetic endeavor. And the most recent author interview that has appeared as an online sports story was of a man who has spent his life working to preserve as much of the natural world as possible -- which means he's outdoors a great deal, climbing mountains, crawling through jungles, all in pursuit of a new bit of knowledge or the perfect photograph.

And the arts -- in all their forms -- are a way to exercise the brain and the emotions. And they do so in ways that are very different from how a football game or a tennis match or a track event can stir one to think and feel.

So. I write sports. Fine with me.

It does, however, make me think of a couple of passes from Richard Ford's "The Sportswriter":

"If sportswriting teaches you anything, and there is much truth to it as well as plenty of lies, it is that for your life to be worth anything you must sooner or later face the possibility of terrible, searing regret. Though you must also manage to avoid it or your life will be ruined."

"If there’s another thing sportswriting teaches you, it is that there are no transcendant themes in life. In all cases things are here and they’re over, and that has to be enough. The other was a lie of literature and the liberal arts."








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ARTS

James D. Watts Jr. has lived in Oklahoma for most his life, even though he still has people saying to him, "Don't sound like you're from around these parts." A University of Oklahoma Phi Beta Kappa graduate, Watts has received the Governor Arts Award, Harwelden Award and the National Conference of Christians and Jews Beth Macklin Award for his writing. Before coming to the Tulsa World, Watts worked for the Tulsa Tribune.

Contact him at (918) 581-8478.

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