Last Word: Sports makes for lively pages

So many sportswriters came into the profession by accident that you could be forgiven for thinking it was a necessary qualification — they wanted to do something else but became sportswriters because they happened to be in the right place at the right time.

The legendary Simon Barnes has written about how he became one by accident. I was in no-man’s land between university and real life when I was offered a job at the Deccan Herald. Right place at the right time. Robert Lipsyte, the New York Times icon, called his memoir An Accidental Sportswriter.

Sportswriters travel, they write opinion pieces confident they have a bigger readership than most, they watch the matches for free, and they hobnob with heads of state keen on hobnobbing with international sportsmen and sportswomen. There doesn’t seem to be a downside except that occasionally, where you write ‘hit the goalpost’ in a report, an ‘s’ appears mysteriously in print before the ‘h’.

“Sports helped confirm my sense of myself as an outsider, a lurker in the shadows, a spy gathering intelligence in an alien world for people who want to know the truth,” wrote Lipsyte.

Organisations that pride themselves on being newspapers of record, like the New York Times, The Hindu, The Times (London), take pride in their sports sections, getting top writers to both report and comment on their pages.

Readers develop favourites they either agree with or strongly disagree with. It makes for lively pages.

And just when we thought it would last forever, the New York Times has disbanded its sports section, calling all our old certainties into question. Sportswriters who love to invest any act on the field with a deeper meaning might see in this the beginning of the end of civilization. Others will see it as a natural progression, good or bad: television killed the radio star, the Internet killed the television star, and the data crunchers are killing the Internet star.

It’s not that the Times is giving up on sports. Last year they acquired The Athletic, a sports website, for over half a billion dollars, and to avoid duplication ( The Athletic has a staff of some 400), they are redeploying the Times sports staff of about 35. That is what the newspaper says, but many staffers see a more cynical objective.

Obviously you cannot shut down the sports section without something to take its place. The Times says, “We plan to focus even more directly on distinctive, high-impact news and enterprise journalism about how sports intersect with money, power, culture, politics and society at large.” You can’t argue with that even if some of the terms are vague (what’s enterprise journalism?).

But it goes on to say, “We will scale back the coverage of games, players, teams and leagues.” And that’s where the problem lies.

When you act as if sport is about money and power and forget that it is about players, games, and leagues, you twist and scoop out something essential, perhaps even the heart of sport.