New Orleans       Decades ago, I used to argue that the best writing in a newspaper was in the sports section.  It didn’t matter whether you liked sports in general or in specific, it was a mistake to forego spending time in the sports section, because that’s where the pure writers were showcased.  They had more leeway in both style and substance.  They were less burdened by fact-checkers and the false pretense of objectivity.  They could let it rip and get to all sides of the story.  That’s not to say that all of them shined, or that there weren’t some great writers and stories in the rest of the paper, but in the sports section, you could depend on some of them more regularly.

If this sounds like nostalgia, then maybe it is, but it also says something about our times, the news business, and the problem of clickbait.  Newspapers are in trouble with fewer and fewer surviving in even large cities, so when they are the only game in town and just trying to hang on, many don’t want to invest in good writers in the sports section, when a hardcore fan with a keyboard suits many.  The Times even subcontracted their sports section writers to The Athletic, one of their on-line purchases.  There might be a few left, but we’re a long way from the Red Smith days.

One of The Athletic writers, Jim Trotter, noted that the business of sports has pushed sportswriters across the line of basic civility in some of their efforts to stand out and win readers.  His two examples were from big papers in Los Angeles and Philadelphia.  In Philly, a writer went after basketball star Joel Embiid by taking a shot at his consistency by disparaging his dead brother and baby son.  A writer for the Los Angeles Times referred to the LSU’s women’s basketball team, headlined by all star Angel Reese, at the time as “dirty debutantes” versus UCLA’s team as “America’s sweethearts.”   Some of this seems not just uncivil, but racist.  Both apologized and deleted the offending passages, but the damage was done already.  Both make my point as well about the deterioration of sports writing, as too often nothing but wins and losses infected by snark and snarl.

I’m not alone in my wistfulness it seems.  A piece in The Wall Street Journal noted the cult audience of a UK sportswriter who continues to dare to be different by adding what might seem like extraneous, personal notes to his reporting.  He’s talked about his favorite spoon, the search for a “perfect pillow” – something we can all identify with fully, and the need to learn to cry in public.  Adrian Chiles writes for The Guardian.  I read their world news fairly regularly, but for me, and others like me, Chiles might should qualify as “destination reading,” even if we don’t know beans about cricket or soccer.

If sports is America and so many other countries “national pastime,” don’t we still deserve the best in reporting?