The year 2009 was my 20th and final as a reporter in the sports department of the New York Times and it came with a back-channel warning from a trusted editor.
He told me the newspaper’s top brass had recently held a major meeting with a significant agenda.
One of their radical ideas, he said, was to dismantle the entire sports department immediately and spend the money instead on website producers for this growing, hungry monster called the internet.
As it turned out, they didn’t quite shut down the entire sports department right then and there. But the handwriting was on the wall, to use a cliché that would never survive the Times’ crack copy desk.
So I chose to take a generous buyout — negotiated by a good union — and never regretted it as the scope and prominence of the Times’ sports pages gradually dwindled during the last decade-plus.
And, last week, that “toy department” of the Paper of Record totally disappeared, a pivotal moment for sports journalism and an inflection point in 21st-Century American media.
Now, the Times will farm out its sports coverage to The Athletic, a money-losing, non-union website bought last year by the Times for $550 million. The two websites will merge online and some Athletic stories will emerge in the print editions of the Times.
These changes have prompted a lot of old “Timesmen” (as we once were known) to reminisce about glory days, as Bruce Springsteen might sing. At least from my perspective, those days were good.
After selling freelance pieces to the Times for several years while in Detroit, I was hired in late 1989, before the rise of the internet, as the Times expanded its sports coverage in a forceful way.
The paper then was determined to shed the elitist image of a boutique sports section which most valued the Olympics, the U.S. Open tennis tournament, and the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. Instead, we would be all things to all readers.
Along with all that high-toned stuff, we increased our dedicated coverage of the nine local major professional sports teams. We covered the headquarters of their leagues, too, all within walking distance of our fusty, old offices on West 43rd Street near Broadway. (Yes, that is why they call it “Times Square.”)
We were out to scoop the local tabloids on local team stuff while competing on national and international subjects with the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and the brand new national, printed, sports daily called The National.
And the Times put up the money. Beat writers got company cars. The travel budget was enormous. Sports got a daily, free-standing section front, with pictures in color.
The Times hired numerous Black and female journalists for prominent roles in sports. All of us were encouraged to write with voice and a point of view.
In my two decades there, I majored in hockey, but also covered baseball and the World Series; football and the Super Bowl; and several college basketball Final Fours. Sometimes, we went over the top, like when a top editor “downstairs” went on a college football kick.
Much as I enjoyed my primacy on the page, I couldn’t help but think then that things were drifting a bit out of proportion.
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My job in that era was to write a weekly series of advances called “Big Game on Campus” and to cover that game on Saturday. One was the “Red River Showdown,” a rivalry between Texas and Oklahoma, held amid the Texas State Fair in Dallas at the Cotton Bowl stadium.
Next morning at the Dallas airport, I bought both the Times and the Dallas Morning News to read on the flight home.
The display of my story on the Times’ section front was greater than that of the same game in the Morning News, the local paper. Much as I enjoyed my primacy on the page, I couldn’t help but think then that things were drifting a bit out of proportion.
In these years, after 9/11, the Times stumbled on occasion, with reporter Judith Miller being duped into pushing for the Iraq war and the reporter Jayson Blair tainting the place with his scandal of plagiarism and fabulism. The editorial command structure shuffled a couple times.
Then the sports department suffered its own mess with the “Duke Lacrosse Rape Case” in 2006, in which an exotic dancer in Durham, N.C., claimed to have been gang-raped at a house party for college lacrosse players on the Blue Devils.
The story had all the politically correct hooks of a modern morality tale: poor Black woman and rich white boys; town vs. gown; and athletes run amok, an angle the Times never shied away from.
But the story fell apart. The athletes had solid alibis. The dancer kept changing her story. There was no evidence. The alleged sexual assault never happened. After first jumping to conclusions, most news media backed off from the story and cast doubt on it.
But not the Times. Driven by reckless and ambitious editors who dismissed the skepticism of one of their own sports reporters on the scene, the Times insisted on presenting the dubious account of a desperate district attorney.
He bamboozled certain gullible Times sports editors to court the Black vote by presenting himself (a white guy) as the defender of African-American womanhood.
After that, the place never felt quite the same, at least from my point of view. The paper had moved from its ancient headquarters to a sleek, cold, modern skyscraper on Eighth Avenue. It felt sterile. My first 10 years there had been great; the next 10 were good. What would another decade be like?
In my last two years with the Times, I covered the major beat of the New York Giants of the National Football League, as “cake” as a job could be, with good hours, reasonable travel, and a thoroughly professional work environment.
But it had become clear to me that such coverage was no longer a Times priority. If I reported an injury from Giants’ practice on a weekday, one of the new sports editors would say airily: “This is an incremental story. What’s the ‘Big Thought’ here?”
In addition, two of my Black colleagues — whom I’d worked with in our Free Press days — were unceremoniously shoved off prestigious beats with little warning. At least two female reporters left with hard feelings.
That’s when I got my own big thought: to leave, thanks to my insider tip from my editor friend. Did I consider myself an “insider” at the Times?
Heck no. A sports reporter there is like a satellite orbiting a moon that orbits a planet that orbits a sun — the sun being company headquarters.
Even when a Times sports reporter was in town, he or she would often be at Madison Square Garden or Yankee Stadium or somewhere other than the office. Our remote locations caused us to miss out on office gossip and office politics. The tip from my editor friend was a rare exception.
And we rarely encountered most of our superiors in person. When people ask me what it was like to work at the Times, I tell them “chill” (as in good) and “chilly” (as in formal and impersonal).
For instance: When I started, they put me on a ritual “stations of the cross” tour to meet all the big bosses. Last but not least, I was summoned to the office of Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., who was about to become publisher of the Times.
He is not to be confused with his son, A.G. Sulzberger, the current publisher; or with his father, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the previous publisher. After only a few weeks there, I was asked by Sulzberger how I liked working for the Times.
So far, so good, I said. Good job, good editors, nice salary, generous benefits, professional atmosphere. Even the food in the cafeteria is excellent.
“Great,” I said. “I love it.”
He paused a beat.
“Is that so?” Sulzberger said. “Well, we can fix that.”
Heh-heh-heh. That was boss humor.
I didn’t see Sulzberger again for another 20 years. This was in the new building on Eighth Avenue on my way to formally turn in my resignation forms. I took the “business side” elevator to a high floor.
On the way up, the car stopped and the doors opened. In stepped Sulzberger. First time I’d seen him in two decades. He looked at me directly.
“Hi,” Sulzberger said with a quick nod. “How are you?”
But — before I could answer — he turned briskly to his right and began to speak to someone else.
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