This week, the New York Times announced that it was disbanding its sports department after nearly a century and reassigning the section’s staff to other parts of the paper. The move wasn’t a total shock; it came a year and a half after the Times purchased online sports outlet the Athletic, which will now provide primary coverage for Times readers. Long before that deal, the Times sports section had occupied a strange place at the paper. While it provided excellent coverage of certain areas, like tennis, it was far less essential for more mainstream pursuits like football and basketball. And it came in for criticism over its sometimes esoteric story selection.
After the section’s demise became public on Monday, I spoke with distinguished former Times sportswriter and columnist Robert Lipsyte, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and novelist who became the Times’ boxing reporter in 1964. Lipsyte, known for his literary style and persistent attention to social issues, has had a long and varied career. He left the Times in 1971 to write YA fiction and nonfiction, was a sportswriter for both the New York Post and USA Today, served as a correspondent for CBS and NBC, and hosted a nightly public-affairs show on the PBS station in New York, for which he won an Emmy. In 1991, he returned to the Times for a second, decade-plus run as a sports columnist. In 2013, he began an 18-month stint as the ombudsman at ESPN.
Lipsyte offered his typically unvarnished opinion about the dissolution of Times sports and recalled a time when the department was the landing spot for all the reporters who couldn’t make it anywhere else.
When you first heard the news, what were your initial thoughts?
Fucking about time!
Really?
Yeah. I started in 1957 as a copy boy, and sports were always like the New York Times comics. They were always faintly embarrassed about having a sports section. If you remember, that was the only section where you didn’t have to call people Mr. or Mrs. International news is the Times. Sports is not the Times.
So you don’t think the Times ever valued the sports section?
Except for a brief period in the 1990s under a wonderful editor named Neil Amdur. He understood the dynamic that sports is a scheduled entertainment, but that at the same time, it reflects American life. There were deep takes and ways of looking at sports that were valuable. When I started, most people in sports were hard-core x’s and o’s guys. They had fucked up major assignments in news, so they were put into sports. That eventually began to change. There was a new wave of young sportswriters like George Vecsey and Ira Berkow — you had very sophisticated observers who not only understood sports, but understood its position in society. As a reporter, you were in a wonderful position, because you were working for a cultural institution that was invariably more important than the teams that you were covering, so they couldn’t really intimidate you or screw you over.
When the Times acquired the Athletic, did you think the sports section’s demise was inevitable? Or that it had run its natural course?
Both. The so-called business model did not seem sustainable and didn’t make sense. And obviously, buying the Athletic was really about getting rid of the sports section. I never understood why they bought it in the first place. If you remember, the Athletic was built on the business model of stripping the sports section of all the other newspapers in the country and giving you one person to cover every single team in the world.
They are going to have to strip the Athletic back to the bone because the business model of covering everything certainly doesn’t work. The Times’ sports department, which even as denuded as it is, contains some of the smartest and most sophisticated sports reporters in the country. So, what is going to happen to them? Are they going to be integrated into other departments? Maybe. The devil is in the details, because how is the Athletic going to cover things?
What they seem to be missing here is that there are no columnists. There are no thundering voices. There is no Sally Jenkins, who I personally think is the best sports columnist in America right now, or Dave Zirin, maybe the only working socialist sportswriter. They can straddle the difference between sports as a kind of fanboy entertainment and sports as an interesting window on American culture.
What are your thoughts on the paper’s sports coverage in recent years?
I think the Times has come to the end of its old relationship to sports. For some years now, it’s been covering European soccer more than the Mets. If I’m from the Bronx, Tottenham doesn’t mean anything to me. Will Messi jump to some other league? It’s vaguely interesting but has no emotional impact. It means that you are no longer interested in my kind of readership.
You know what I would really like? I’d love to be the ombudsman for the Times coverage in the next year or so and see what they actually do. Because if you believe that sports are any kind of window on American culture, then what you cover and how you cover it really becomes important. And if you are going to do investigative journalism in sports, you are going to really upset fans. The fans don’t want the heavy stuff coming in the door.
What has been your experience with the Athletic? Do you read it? Are you a fan?
Of course. I keep up with what’s going on, and one of the ways I keep up on a daily basis is to check out the Athletic. I’ve always liked it. Max Frankel, a former top editor at the paper, had this idea that the way to approach the Times is not to see it as a monolithic bowl that you must read every day but as a smorgasbord that you would pick at. So, if the Athletic is your pickled herring in the corner, that’s great.
When you heard the news, was there any sentimentalizing about your past at the Times? Did you think of your own accomplishments or the colleagues you worked with?
I’m not awash in nostalgia. l was fired because I didn’t get along with Howell Raines (Ed note: Raines was the Times editor-in-chief from 2001 to 2003). As I said, when I started the sports section was, except for one or two exceptions, white and male. A lot of people weren’t very good, and a couple of them were on the take and nobody much cared. And then, slowly, as the ’60s unveiled, people did begin to care, and the Times sports section changed.
And it changed just at the right time for me. I needed a summer job before I went out to California for a Ph.D. in Romantic English poetry. I wasn’t a sports fan. I despised the job, but I fell in love with the paper. I was the guy who went out and got coffee for Gay Talese. They didn’t care that I didn’t know anything about sports because I could write. They sent me to the first week of the 1962 Mets spring training and then to the Cassius Clay and Sonny Liston fight. That made my career.
And then you returned in the ’90s.
Yes, later, under Amdur, it really became a way to cover racism and sexism.
What do you think the Times should be focusing more on now?
The biggest story, and the one no one knows how to approach properly, is the gender story. There’s a kind of panic going on, and it’s not even about the fact that trans women are more muscular or are going to win all the medals. It’s not like everyone has cut off their penises. That’s the right-wing craziness we are also dealing with. And sports gambling is going to change everything. What does that mean for sports?
I wish that whatever changes the Times are making, they somehow take this into consideration and cover it properly. On the one hand, covering it as entertainment like they do with streaming and covering it as something that has an impact in our daily lives. With the Times prestige, power, money, and resources, they are the ones who can do it.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
