Larry Herold’s new play, The Sports Page, receiving its world premiere at Stage West, takes us back to the declining days of the almighty sportswriter. It’s about football, it’s chock full of crowd-pleasing Dallas vs. Fort Worth jokes, and there are plenty of witty one-liners. The trouble is the play, like many of us writers, loves the clack of its own keys. It’s like music, the click and return, the composition of a symphony one deadline after another.

Put aside the banter, which is funny enough, and Larry Herold’s new play feels like a overlong rehash of what we already know: grizzled male sports reporters were an amusing, mostly misogynistic bunch who didn’t much like it when women came stepping into their game. Doyle Miller (Mark Fickert) and Zinc Tucker (Chuck Huber, overdoing it) are two veteran newspaper sports writers (Miller’s Fort Worth, Tucker’s Dallas— a point of competition and contention) who’ve earned the prime spot on the 50 yard line at the Dallas Cowboys training camp out in Waxahachie. It’s 1966, and television is encroaching on NFL ticket sales and on the two writers’ livelihood. When a female repeater, Jane Jordan (Sherry Hopkins) shows up to cover the Cowboys for Channel 8, it’s basically a sign of the apocalypse.

If you like the Dallas Cowboys, and pigskin in general, you’ll do just fine with this play. If you’re looking for a tough take on gender equality in the workplace, well, this isn’t it. Jordan arrives rather late in the first act, after the boy’s club bit has been firmly established, and she’s just sort of there as a harbinger of bad things to come rather than a fully realized character. She doesn’t have to fight her way in or display much in the way of journalistic talent. Rather, she just threatens to run a story about the franchise owner’s “secret family in Iowa” that is clearly not much of a secret, since all the characters know about it.

Jerry Russell directs with a light hand, allowing the characters to descend into caricature (the over-the-top ’60s outfits, by Michael Robinson and the Dallas Costume Shoppe, aren’t much help).  The stakes are the highest for Zinc, a compulsive gambler in over his head, but he’s so unsympathetically one-note that we don’t care what happens to him one way or another.

Scene changes are gratingly cheesy (girls in vintage cheerleader outfits, prancing about in a way that’s more awkward than sexy), and the script wants cutting. Herold obviously knows his sports, but 30 minutes off the running time would go a long way for tolerating the thinner threads of the plot. For now, it’s too easily written off as a weak, little laugh.