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Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and gives you a behind-the-scenes look at how our journalism works.
At the first modern Olympic Games, in Athens in 1896, The New York Times was there to describe the presence of the King of Greece and the Duke of Sparta, the hills “black with spectators” who were too poor to pay for tickets and the triumph of American athletes (“they won their victories with much apparent ease ”).
Since then, hardly a milestone in sports history has passed that a New York Times reporter hasn’t mentioned.
Sprinter Jesse Owens’ four gold medals at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. The “Miracle on ice” during the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, NY The Chicago Cubs’ victory in the 2016 World Series, ending a 108-year drought.
But this season, there will be no Times sports reporter in the Madison Square Garden press box.
Last week, The Times disbanded its sports department, although it will still cover teams and games through The Athletic, the sports website The Times bought last year.
While sports editor journalists took on other tasks in the newsroom – and in a few cases roll bee The Athletics — Times Insider looked back at the agency’s history. New York Times Sports has been home to a distinguished roster of columnists — including Arthur Daley, Red Smith, Dave Anderson and Selena Roberts — as well as reporters like Alan Schwarz, whose reporting on the deadly effects of concussions in the National Football League led to reform at all levels of the game.
Here are five occasions when Times sportswriters and columnists went out of their way for a story.
Creating a unique beat
Walter Fletcher joined the staff of The Times in 1927, shortly after graduating from the City College of New York, where he was a campus correspondent for The Times and The New York Post. At The Times, Fletcher, a lifelong dog lover, turned his interest into a beat: reporting on the world of dog shows.
In the more than 40 editions of the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show he has covered in his more than 60 years as a writer for The Times, he has demonstrated a knack for, well, getting it right: correctly predicting the Best in Show winner in each of the seven years prior to his retirement in 1995 (Take that, Paul the Octopus).
“He cared about the sport and knew about it,” Roger Caras, president of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, told The Times in 2000. “He had a sense of humor. I once called him the Walter Lippmann of the fire hydrant set, and he loved it.”
Red Smith’s Search for Sideshow Stories
Red Smith wrote for The New York Herald Tribune for 21 years and was a nationally syndicated columnist before joining The Times in 1971 at age 66. So when he took over the Sports section of The Times, he essentially had carte blanche to write about whatever he wanted.
What he actually wrote about: Muhammad Ali’s informal conversations with music legends James Brown, Billy Eckstine and Lloyd Price and with comedian Redd Foxx the day before he defended his world heavyweight title against Chuck Wepner in 1975; the legacy of Black Gold, a horse that won the 1924 Louisiana and Kentucky Derbies; and the love affair between professional baseball players and chewing tobacco.
Smith, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1976, was sought after as an editor or consultant by dictionary and thesaurus publishers for his literary writing style and command of the English language. He made it his mission to highlight overlooked people and perspectives in professional sports.
Fight for the right to be in the room
Until the 1970s, female sports reporters were excluded from locker rooms in professional men’s sports, meaning they had to wait until players were dressed after the game to conduct their interviews, while facing the same tight deadlines as their male colleagues.
Robin Herman, a hockey reporter for The Times, wouldn’t accept it.
After becoming one of the first female journalists to enter a professional men’s sports locker room at the 1975 National Hockey League All-Star Game in Montreal, she pushed NHL teams to let her into their locker rooms while they were covering Islanders away games. That didn’t happen right away, and even when it did, there were challenges, including rude comments, dropped towels and piles of hate mail (It’s hard to approach a whore disguised as a reporter,” reads one letter).
But she persevered – the last remnant, the Toronto Maple Leafs, female reporters remained banned until 1987 — and ultimately, her efforts opened doors for other women covering professional sports.
Create a new narrative form
When sports reporter John Branch began investigating the details of a deadly avalanche in Washington state in 2012, he had no idea there would be anything different about the presentation of his final story.
But after Branch, who spent months interviewing survivors, victims’ families and first responders, shared a minute-by-minute timeline of the disaster with his editors, they sent the file to the heads of The Times’ graphics, photography and video departments. And that, he a student at the University of Southern California told me in 2014was when the size and scope of the project grew dramatically.
In a collaboration that would reshape multimedia journalism for the next decade, Branch worked with a team of 11 editors and designers to combine more than 15,000 words with video interviews, interactive graphics and animated simulations. The project, “Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek,” which was viewed by more than 3.5 million people after its publication, won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing.
Five columns in eight hours
You write quickly and you write what Tyler Kepner, the national baseball reporter for The Times, did during the Chicago Cubs’ triumph in Game 7 of the 2016 World Series in Cleveland.
With the Cubs ahead, 6-3, in the eighth inning and the lead appearing secure, Kepner finished a column, “Chicago Makes History,” in time to make the next day’s paper.
But then.
Cleveland’s Rajai Davis hit a home run to tie the game and Kepner wrote another column about Davis’ unlikely heroics. This column was written in about 12 minutes, his editor Jay Schreiber said recently at a farewell party for Kepner, who earlier this month began a new role covering Major League Baseball for The Athletic.
But the Cubs weren’t done yet: in the top of the 10th inning, Ben Zobrist doubled to give Chicago the lead again. The Cubs scored another run and Kepner hit a third column.
Finally, he got a break: the Cubs held on to capture their first World Series championship in 108 years, and a column featuring Zobrist made it into the paper’s delayed final edition.
“With a curse-breaking goal, Ben Zobrist is living a dream he never expected,” said Kepner’s fourth column, submitted around 2:30 a.m. (“impeccable,” Schreiber recalled).
And then, as the sun rose, the last gasp, Column 5, sounded over Cubs baseman Anthony Rizzo, who caught the last out of the game.
Kepner’s column ran on the front page of the paper the next day. And after writing five columns in about eight hours — a feat made possible only by his preparation and encyclopedic baseball knowledge — he headed back to his hotel to get some sleep.
