A tearless lament for the lackadaisical

By Ed Goldman

Word this past July that the New York Times was shutting down its sports reporting desk couldn’t have come at a worse time for me. I’d also just learned that Mensa was discontinuing its annual cockfighting festival, that Rolls Royce was selling off its after-market Yugo division and George Will would no longer be a commentator at Demolition Derby’s Ladies Night.

What next? 

• Will The Economist dedicate an entire issue to lemonade-stand demographics in the American southwest? 
• Will the MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” be awarded to Carrothead? 
• Will the Nobel Peace Prize be handed to Vladimir Putin (“I’d just like to thank the little people, mainly because they’re so much easier to toss out all those windows”)?

Yes, we may live in an oxymoronic world—one in which Intellectual Property cases may not involve intellectuals but more likely who owns the rerun rights to “Keeping Up With the Kardashians”—or which rap artist was the first to claim “Lil’” as his given name. (By the way, can you think of a better oxymoron than “rap artist”?) 

Be truthful. Did you know that the New York Times even had a sports desk? I can see as how it might have had a sports desk. But I have serious doubts it also had a sports chair.

Let’s face it. The Times—which used to be known as the Gray Lady because it never printed anything in color, while the visual look of its pages resembled a charcoal tablecloth—didn’t make its name covering stories on the signing of a $30 million contract by an 18-year-old pitching ace from Rendville, Ohio (population: 28), or on a senior citizen pickleball champion tearing her ACL. You know, genuine sport stories. 

To be fair, the newspaper did have decent enough Olympics coverage— especially when compared to all of those Bob Costas tape-delayed broadcasts of the Games (“That ski jump will go down in history! Actually, by the time you see this, it already has!”). It’s funny when a newspaper can beat a TV network on timely reporting.

When I think of the Times, to which I’ve been a daily subscriber since I could say the word “subscriber” without lisping, I think of its wide-ranging political coverage (and sure, subliminal bias); its brilliant array of columnists like Maureen Dowd and, uh, Maureen Dowd; its daily crossword puzzles, which are challenging Thursday, Friday and especially Saturday, but easier than people think on Sunday—when, once you get the theme, your handwriting becomes a blur as you fill in the answers at warp speed. 

I think of the fact that the Times never runs comic strips nor editorial cartoons, has no regular TV column and has a weekly supplement called “Science Times,” from which I’ve learned a lot and which has been a garden of snarky delights for me as a writer. It also has Thursday and Sunday Style sections (now in living color); and, if I haven’t mentioned her since a prior paragraph, Maureen Dowd.