BY GEORGE SOLOMON
When Shirley Povich assumed the sports editorship of The Washington Post in 1924 at age 21, he had a staff of seven.
Now, 102 years later, that would be four more sports journalists currently at The Post after Wednesday’s house-cleaning of one of the nation’s best sports sections.
The final score of this disaster isn’t pretty. Most of the 50 full-time staffers in the sports department were laid off, the section eliminated. If this were a game, it would be a one-sided triumph for the bad guys. Three-hundred journalists out of 800 in The Post newsroom were canned this week.
Left after the destruction were three sports writers – Adam Kilgore, Rick Maese and Ava Wallace – to cover what Post management calls the “cultural and societal phenomenon” of sports. I wish the late Dan Jenkins or John Feinstein were with us to explain that to me.
Gone is the separate sports section that’s been in place at The Post for more than 100 years. Gone are Sports Editor Jason Murray and his deputy, Matt Rennie. Gone are sportswriters such as Barry Svurluga and Les Carpenter, both axed but still working the Winter Olympics in Italy because it’s what good journalists do. Gone are the editors, photographers and layout staffers who make the pages attractive. Gone is the editor who ran the high school coverage (with part-timers) that so many readers live for.
I had the privilege of editing the sports section of The Post from 1975-2003. I was succeeded by my deputy, Emilio Garcia-Ruiz (now Editor-in-Chief of The San Francisco Chronicle), Matt Vita (retired) and Murray (terminated). All smarter than me when it came to new media options. But not good enough for the people who own (Jeff Bezos) and run The Post.
What some of my successors missed, I’m afraid, was the delight at working at a newspaper owned by the late Katharine Graham and her son, Donald Graham, who preceded me by one year (1974) as Sports Editor before moving on to run the newspaper. He sold it to Bezos in 2013.
I had the good fortune of working in a sports department that competed against the likes of The Boston Globe, The New York Times, The Washington Star, the Dallas Morning News, USA Today, the New York Post, the New York Daily News, Newsday, The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Daily News – plus other great sections in a media landscape that is much different today.
And compete we did – winning some, losing others. If my boss, the great, late Ben Bradlee, saw a story or column he liked in a competing newspaper, he’d circle the piece in red and write, “What’s this?” You didn’t want to receive too many of those clips in the interoffice mail. Bradlee’s successor, Len Downie, was more direct. If we were beaten on a story, the competing paper was rolled up under his arm, with him charging into my office saying, “Why didn’t we have this?” without the hint of a smile.
My main competitors were Dave Smith in Dallas, Bill Dwyer in Los Angeles and Vince Doria in Boston, among others.
The great Frank Deford had a brief stint running The National, looking to snatch our best talent. His paper did not succeed. But it was a heady time in the business, filled with great sports writing every day.
My team included, among others, Povich, Tony Kornheiser, Tom Boswell, Michael Wilbon, Sally Jenkins, Andrew Beyer, Dave Kindred, Christine Brennan, Angus Phillips, David Aldridge, Ken Denlinger, Norman Chad, Richard Justice, Mark Maske, John Ed Bradley, David Remnick, Gerald Strine, Gary Pomerantz, David DuPree, Dave Brady, Bob Fachet, Gene Wang, Jennifer Frey, Rachel Nichols, Steve Goff, Paul Attner and Tom Friend.
We also had a horse racing handicapper, Clem Florio, a former boxer with whom you did not want to have yearly evaluation talks.
And how lucky was I to have an editing staff that included Jeanne McManus, Len Shapiro, Tracee Hamilton, Garcia-Ruiz, Mike Hill, Tony Reid, Mike Trilling, Neil Greenberger, Sushant Sagar, George Minot and Steve King?
If that wasn’t enough, accounting let me use, by turning away, Tom Callahan, Pete Axthelm, Pat Fischer, Jean Fugett, Arthur Ashe, Joan Ryan and around 100 stringers for high school coverage when I didn’t have it in the budget. Maybe that’s the reason The Post ran out of money this week.
My bad.
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Red Smith Award winner George Solomon was Sports Editor of The Washington Post from 1975-2003, Director of the Shirley Povich Center for Sports Journalism at Maryland from 2012-20 and a Professor of the Practice at Maryland’s Merrill College from 2003 until his retirement in 2020.
