The Washington Post can close its sports desk, but not even Jeff Bezos can kill it

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I suppose there were other reporters in the newspaper we got delivered when I was a kid, but I can only remember the ones who wrote in the sports section.

Sportswriters are so professionally long-lived and so immune to change, that I would eventually end up working with a few of them.

When I got that first sportswriting gig 20 years ago, well into my professional life, I was taken aside and told two things.

First, never expense less than $100 a day on the road. To charge less was to put everyone else’s hustle in jeopardy.

Second, whenever anyone outside the section has any big ideas about what sports should be doing or was actually about, ignore them. I remember my mentor putting air quotes around “big ideas.”

I bear this history and foundational wisdom in mind during another bad week for the newspaper sports section as it used to be.

The Washington Post lays off one-third of its staff

The New York Times torching their sports desk was insulting enough, but at least they (kind of) replaced it with something.

Now, the Washington Post intends to limit its sports coverage to whenever a pro athlete wanders onto a red carpet, or has a (terrible) late-night thought about democracy. No more dedicated sports reporters. No full-time editors for the section.

In my imagined world, they have done a controlled burn in that corner of the newsroom – probably the only one without windows – so that all future victims of rationalization can see and shudder.

In the wake of those cuts, a lot of people with a kennel’s worth of dogs in this fight are writing laments for the sports section as a cultural object. I get that. In times of war, I doubt many people are picking up the local rag and saying, “Now that the bombing’s paused, I wonder what’s happening in hockey?”

The sports section represents the highest privilege we are afforded as a society – freedom from worry about things that actually matter. The depressing business of real life appears in other sections of the paper.

Whether you care about the goings-on at the trade deadline or not, to see that removed is chilling in a way that’s hard to put a name on. It means that things are getting meaner, as well as leaner. There is less opportunity to be frivolous. That effect will be felt everywhere in the news.

Aside from the usual gong about colleagues losing a living, I have a hard time getting worked up about this.

The sports section isn’t a line item. It is the spirit of oddness within the already weird news subculture that is any newspaper. That peculiarity, not the job itself, is the reason they make movies about journalists. In them, the reporters are all a bit cracked. That is exactly right, and sportswriters are the most unhinged among them.

Sometimes, I look around a press room at a big event and think: “None of you could ever do a real job. You’re too strange. But not me. I’m the normal one.”

It’s not the sports that does it. It’s the long leash that sportswriters are given. They’re not at their desks. They’re tucked up in a corridor somewhere, huddled in groups, talking about Marriott points, making sure their knives have a good edge.

There was one sports reporter on the Toronto scene who, upon finishing his deadline story in the press box every night, would lean back and announce that if they put this piece of garbage in the newspaper, he had a job for life. And he did.

Sportswriters don’t think they are describing just football. They think they’re doing the Lord’s own work. How many ancient martyrs were dissuaded by a memo from corporate? Exactly – none.

There was another guy I knew who wrote a bit, and did some play-by-play calling as well. If you had the misfortune of sitting next to him, he would spend the entire game announcing it to no one in particular: “Jones to Smith. Smith to Jones. Ooh, he took a real wallop at that one.”

You could ask him to stop, but then he’d be sad. So you type harder and hope that bugs him. It does not.

Neither Jeff Bezos nor anyone else can kill that kind of stupidity. No one has such power.

Accountants have been trying to bury sports since the first guy came back from the hunt with a mostly non-fictional description of who got a mammoth hat trick. Papers in this country have tried it, too.

It never takes. You know why? Accountants read sports.

Not because they need the game explained to them. Anyone with a fist-sized cluster of brain cells can find the score.

What they need is for someone to explain it in a way that excites, delights and/or angers them.

I tend toward option three. I sometimes think about the fact that I have a job that upsets people. I’d like to say that’s “telling uncomfortable truths,” but it’s more along the lines of “getting it wrong.”

You can do that in sports. You cannot do it in the Report on Business.

So, yes, the Washington Post can close its sports section, but I guarantee that doing so will only spread the sports infection around the newsroom. All you’ve done is turn the employees you haven’t fired into cadres. The Washington Post hasn’t been streamlined. Rather, it has just entered a phase of asymmetric warfare.

Eventually, whether it’s a year or a decade, the sports section will return. Mark it down. As sure as a big snow that follows the day you pack away your winter coats, some big management brain of the future will say, “You know what we’re missing in this mix? Sports.”

When that happens, it will be the exception that proves the rule that all executive big ideas about sports and what it’s really about should be dismissed out of hand.