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If it seems odd for a sports columnist at a major city newspaper to lament the closing of another major city newspaper’s sports department, that’s because it is. But as The New York Times sports page and sports staff enter their final days as we knew them, it feels right to acknowledge what is lost to all of us. The great sports section of the American newspaper may not be dead yet. But it is unhealthy, and who knows the cure?
Sports journalism has changed because all of journalism has changed, and there are benefits for consumers and fans. Results and statistics are available in real time. Waiting for boxing scores and standings to come out the next morning is an idea best depicted in sepia. Miss the game? Why read about it? Here are the highlights, whenever you want them. There. You’re caught up.
In this environment, there is no need for an all-encompassing clearinghouse that summarizes what happened in sports the day before and what will happen in the days to come, and delves into the characters driving those narratives. Just as ESPN’s “SportsCenter” was once a necessary gathering place to process the day’s events, the newspaper’s sports section was a town square where a city’s teams and stars could be evaluated, analyzed and discussed.
The Times has never been anything like a traditional sports column, nor has it been specifically a sports column for sports fans, certainly not for bloodthirsty American sports fans concerned with who won and who lost, who was the hero and who was the goat. This is a decision, and a justifiable one.
Its stars were its authors, a past and present too vast, deep and talented to list here. (Hello, Dave Anderson, though.) The themes were more often eccentric than not, the audience global. Hardcore New York Knicks fans haven’t turned to the Times for the latest injuries or lineup changes. Nobody would say otherwise.
But everyone who read it knew what it was: a place for in-depth reporting and top-notch writing, for stories hard to find anywhere else. It had its identity, just as — pick one — the Dallas Morning News, the Los Angeles Times, the Miami Herald, the Boston Globe, or the Chicago Tribune had different identities. Your readers knew what to expect when they picked up these sections, back when you actually picked up the sections.
Forget about print vs. online for a minute, because that war is long over. The stories and the analysis, the commentary and the accountability journalism – broadly establishing the powers that be responsible for how they treated people and, more narrowly, holding teams accountable for the steps they took – were all on housed in one place.
But that doesn’t mean the Times won’t have an impact on sports journalism. The Athletic, the subscription-based site that the Times bought for $550 million to replace its sports content, has many capable and talented reporters and editors and has done a good job. It’s hard to imagine that there will be 400 of them in the future. And as reporters leave, so does their ability to analyze the movements of specific franchises for the fans who care so much about them. Pro teams have been creating their own content for more than a decade now, and some of it – especially behind-the-scenes videos – can be moving. But it’s not critical – ever. That’s a loss.
If I sound like I have a romantic, even outdated view of all this, it’s because I have a romantic, even outdated view of all this. Growing up, I both supplied and devoured the Boston Globe, which in the 1980s had a sports section unrivaled for me – and others. The Sunday newspaper weighed so much back then that I couldn’t possibly deliver 80-year-old newspapers in a bag on my bike, so my stepfather drove and we filled the trunk.
Returning from the route meant breathing in the sports section. It was a master class in how to cover athletes and coaches, how to recreate games that ended past bedtime, how to tell stories big and small, and how to get the job done. Bob Ryan, Will McDonough, Peter Gammons, Leigh Montville, Dan Shaughnessy, Jackie MacMullan, Larry Whiteside, Kevin Paul Dupont. The athletes were not my heroes. The writers who covered the athletes were my heroes.
There are still great sports writers and sports journalists. Where it and they can be found is changing. ESPN no longer has a magazine. Sports Illustrated is no longer owned by a journalism company. The New York Times is closing its sports section. The craft is currently undergoing a makeover, produced by non-traditional providers looking to appeal to a different audience.
Maybe that’s perfectly fine, a natural and necessary development. But I can’t help but feel that something is lost in all this – something has been lost. The idea that sport is a valuable and important part of culture, worth being packaged with international and national news alongside coverage of theatre, art and style. The idea that in-depth reporting and elegant writing can increase understanding of sports, that the stories a publication’s best writers produce can enhance the experience of watching a competition, not just reflect what everyone has seen.
Of course, this all has something to do with navel-gazing, because while there were probably more differences than similarities in the sports departments of The Post and Times, you survive one day and not another. That in no way means that we here at The Post have our sights set on the future of sports reporting. Far from it. We’re working on it.
But I know, for example, that in every Olympics I’ve covered here – since 2004 in Athens and all since – the standard to beat was usually the Times and its army of reporters who could write , and writers who could report. The Olympic Games will take place in Paris next summer. The post will send a strong team ready to face the games and everything that surrounds them. The Times will… well, I guess we don’t know.
Perhaps the idea of a sports newspaper providing comprehensive coverage of teams in a city – and beyond – is long outdated. Fine. The future is more important than the past. But forgive me a little sadness. A pillar of a publication with a history of telling the best stories sport has to offer – traditional and off-the-cuff – is the decision not to pursue those stories. In this sense, authors, fans and readers all lose.
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