Retiring. Daskal (Photo: PR)
Veteran sports journalist Uriel Daskal announced Thursday that he is leaving Calcalist after 15 years at the newspaper. In a lengthy farewell column for the newspaper, Daskal explained that after 25 years of sports coverage, he could no longer cover sports "mentally."
"Sometime in my career, I realized that I couldn't just write about the entertainment end of this axis," he wrote in his farewell column. "That I can't write 'just about sports.' Because such writing is exactly what game managers want: they prefer to be concerned with sports, rather than corruption and their shady moves. But if you focus only on sports coverage, on "professional" coverage, you are no longer a journalist, but an entertainer. And if you refuse to be an entertainer, you are often attacked by readers and viewers (or interested parties) with statements such as "why do you mix politics and sports", "focus on sports", "what right do you have to express a political opinion in a sports article". And that's not what I wished for when I got into sports journalism."
"For years I thought I would write about sports for the rest of my life. It's the best job in the world: you've been working at what you love most since you were 8 years old. But when the climate is collapsing around us, and humanity prefers to engage in a last-second victory basket, or the passage of a player for hundreds of millions of dollars, I can't contribute to it anymore. Maybe in the future I'll go back to doing what I've always wanted to do—giving who I was, the sports-obsessed kid, another piece of information about what he loves most. But right now, mentally, I can't be a sports reporter anymore."
- culture
- On the agenda
- media
Tags
- Calcalist