The sports pages themselves, however, provide a different answer. When zealous coaches, including the Leafs' Pat Quinn, decide to protect their players from the pestering press by dictating who can talk after games, the press protests-loudly. Not so much because the fans are being deprived of their right to absorb still more locker-room clich s, but because the teams are hurting their chances to promote their product. By denying the media access to their players, they're denying themselves millions of dollars of free publicity. In fact, there is almost as much marketing news in the sports pages these days as in the business section.
Writers unabashedly comment on putting a quality product on the ice or the field or the court.
More often than not, then, Lemieux's heroics were gauged not by the fans' delight but by his contribution to the private profit of professional franchise owners, including himself. What is cast in stone, though, is the obligation for reporters to write something about their beat every day. This is not negotiable-the newspaper has too much invested in its sports beats for them to sit idle. They're the rank and file, file, file of sports departments, forever under the gun to come up with any morsel of information that might be remotely interesting, while making sure the competition doesn't scoop them. Team management and the athletes themselves expect a positive spin-and if they don't get it, they're prepared to make it very difficult for writers to do their job.