Glenn Schwarz learned everything you need to know about the vagaries of being a sports editor within the first six months
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| Glenn Schwarz |
of his promotion, and he learned it with one conversation.
It was February 1988, and Schwarz, the longtime San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle sports editor who just retired (in the modern take-the-buyout sense of retirement), had gone to spring training in Arizona to give his successor on the San Francisco Giants beat a quick on-the-ground tutorial.
Oh, and to get an excuse for dinner. Glenn could dinner with the very best of them. Glenn could dinner in outer space.
Anyway, he showed up at the writer’s hotel room and knocked on the door without getting an answer. Being persistent, he kept knocking and finally convinced the writer to open it. Upon doing so, Glenn said, "Come on, we’re going to dinner." The writer demurred, claiming he had too much work to do. Glenn reiterated the plan. The writer declined again. Glenn said, "It’s the third day of spring training. There’s no work to do yet."
And the writer, measuring his weeks of experience against Glenn’s 18 years, said, "You don’t understand. The beat’s changed since you’ve been on it."
And there it was. The whole ingratitude/misplaced arrogance/breathtaking brainlessness trifecta, all with one well-crafted sentence delivered by a guy who’d just benefited from Glenn’s wisdom and willingness to leave a beat he loved for a new adventure. People. It was a lesson that serviced him well for the next 21 years.
Glenn found out that dealing with writers is often like trying to read bedtime stories to hyenas. He later found out that dealing with superiors is like trying to read those stories to hyenas on methamphetamine. Mostly he found out that the rewards of teaching the unteachable are typically found only at dinner.
But because he refused to give in to the gravitational pull of idiocy and understood that managing newspaper people only requires common sense, patience and backbone, he lasted those 21 years and as much as he gave to those in his charge, he got just as much. He repeatedly managed the neat trick of not just giving his writers the rope they needed but teaching them the best ways to tie the knots. He found and nurtured talent, both on the writing and editing side. He put out award-winning sections. He made the Examiner and Chronicle lively and useful newspapers because of his skill, sense and generosity. He easily won the respect and admiration of his colleagues in the sports editing dodge.
Oh, the hell with the platitudes. He lasted 21 years in a business that makes bomb demolition look like a sensible career choice. What else do you really need explained here?
Editing was and remains a test of four skills – subject knowledge, wisdom, teaching/nurturing and technological know-how. In that order. Whether the product be print or pixels, you fail without them, and Glenn ran the table. He could manage disparate characters, find their gifts, bring them out and plane the rough edges, all for a better section. He had all of those gifts the day he tried to pry his successor out of his room, and he has more still to give in his post-Chronicle career.
But at least he’ll know one thing in his next job. There will be one moron who tells him, "The beat’s changed since you were on it." And he will laugh, knowing that nothing’s changed as much as we think it has, and that the things he brought to the job every day are actually immutable.
