FORTY or more years ago, two men were standing silently in a Manhattan bar, drinking whisky and watching daytime television. A celebrated French chef who had a reputation for making the finest omelettes to be found in New York was being interviewed. How long, he was asked, had be been cooking? Who had taught him? The questions kept coming, the chef spoke freely. When it was over, the older man at the bar shook his head. “Bad interview,” he said. “All that and they never asked him the most important thing: Where do you get your eggs?” The man at the bar was Andre Laguerre, editor of Sports Illustrated when the magazine practically invented modern sports journalism. He came to mind during a conference last Tuesday in Cork, during which the sportswriting business had its pulse taken.

The Irish Examiner’s idea was a good one: invite some of the best practitioners to talk about their trade before an audience made up mostly of young people on the outside trying to get in. Never before in Ireland had there been such a gathering.

Young people such as Ronan Bagnall. He comes from Newry but he calls Cork home these days. Next week it all begins for him: his first newspaper job. He will report for work in Mitchelstown for The Avondhu. You may not have heard of it. But perhaps one day you will hear again of Ronan Bagnall, for he is made of the right stuff. He has what all good reporters need, what Laguerre always looked for: the desire to ask questions and the ability to ask the right ones.

But for him, and the other aspirants, the day was a reality check. Those who have had the good sense to read Tom Humphries’ devastatingly funny book Laptop Dancing And The Nanny Goat Mambo will have been under no illusions: sportswriters are increasingly viewed with — at best — supreme indifference by many of those they seek to interview, and at worst with undisguised contempt. Soccer writers in particular feed off scraps, only occasionally meeting somebody who reminds them of why they do the job in the first place.

After it was over you worried that many of those in the room would abandon the idea of scuffling for a living, but it was best that they learnt the truth about how today’s sports pages are written. Hell will freeze over before a sportswriter gets any sympathy from those whose hobbies are not their careers but the point here is that ultimately the reader is the one being short-changed.

If the day produced a surprise, it was in the vivid testimony of another Sports Illustrated man, the magazine’s senior golf writer, John Garrity. We imagine that things are different for Sports Illustrated guys. The magazine sells millions and sporting careers are often measured by the number of appearances on its cover.

But no: Garrity revealed that the world’s elite golfers — Tiger Woods, Vijay Singh, Phil Mickelson — are no more available to him than they will be to the new recruit at The Avondhu. Once upon a time, when Palmer and Nicklaus ruled golf, great writers who were allowed to get close to them produced pieces of genuine insight, stories that will live on. For Woods and Co we get what Garrity calls the “write around”: entertaining but devoid of real substance — “like eating empty calories”.

But for anybody expecting speaker after speaker to endorse the view that writing on sport is a dream job, the rudest awakening was still to come. David Walsh, chief sports writer of The Sunday Times, was invited to talk about the state of investigative journalism on the sports pages. The billing presumed more than he was willing to allow. Walsh believes too much of what appears is inconsequential, that there is no appetite to confront serious issues.

“Where is investigative journalism?” he asked. “It’s nowhere, it’s dead. Instead of writing what we should be, we are actual writing — in a slow but gradual way — our own death warrants.”

Ronan Bagnall asked if Walsh was as disillusioned with his job as he sounded. It was a good question and it produced a good answer. If he was disillusioned, Walsh said, it was because so few share his belief that sportswriters are not engaging in real battles. Later, Bagnall said he knew of others in the room who had been put off the idea of writing about sport for a living. But not him. He had found Walsh’s words “inspirational”. At the end of a sometimes disquieting day, some hope for the future.