In Plural From the Last Pages In the period when things were becoming better, our friend who occasionally visited the Sports department and would, on his way take an issue of the newspaper, sort of jokingly told us: “They praise you a lot, but they also swear at you a lot”. Our honest friend would be answered: “Both groups are readers, and you are right, there are many of them”. The story of our friend is a reflection on one days work in “KOHA Ditore”. Maybe he didn’t have to think much in order to know that KOHA Ditore had been born amidst the fire. Or to know that each single day was and continues to be a small piece of history. The Sports department has in the ten years of KOHA Ditore’s existence tried to keep up the rhythm of the newspaper as a whole but also reach a level of identification with the rubric, where the reader would maybe start reading the paper from the back pages. To work as a journalist, be it as a sports journalist, in difficult times was not easy at all, maybe not easy in times when Kosovars sports was accompanied by “mud”, as not unintentionally our KTV Colleague, Andin Lokaj, has named his regular column. “Mud” was the companion of sports journalists in the times before the war, where football games that were played in fields and meadows could be a once only topic for reporting. It was no news to tell people that basketball and volleyball games were being played in primary school gyms. Then, the dilemma of the sportsmen was whether they would make it to the venue or whether they would even manage to finish the game. The dilemma of the journalist wasn’t which team won, which was anyways useless, but whether this would also be an object of intervention by those that opposed anything Albanian. Witnessing an international event until 1999 was as imagining life in “Sun City “. This was the beginning of the beginning. News such as - X team beat Y team, or that a player has been transferred here or there and similar such events was something that “was not allowed” to escape, however this was not the beginning nor 212
the end of the work at the Sports department. “KOHA Ditore” readers were offered much more than this, for sports was not only what one could see on the field or in the dome, but it is the complex world around it. Not only mentioning financial affairs, the Sports pages attractiveness was added to with stories such as the one about a Mitrovica fan who wore his socks inside-out to bestow luck on his basketball team;