The Only Sports Journalist in the World

Athletes are the penultimate symbol of national duty, veritable King's men holding steadfast to the nation's chilvaric code. They are often godly men well-versed in the conservative arts, masculine guardians of the family and the traditional structure of society. Sport, they claim, should be a refuge from the real world, an abstraction and an escape. Sports journalists, like financial journalists, act as their loyal technocrats, filling their pages with statistics, shielding their subjects from society. Yet athletes are more than symbols, particularist abstractions in their own right. They have access to a wealth that most never see and in their symbolic gestures they make very real political statements about what is proper conduct for a national citizen.

David O'Brien of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is one journalist that breathes fresh air into this suffocating climate. It is rare that such a man of music and art, a true subterranean, has found his way in this environment. For you sir who always rocks, I salute you.