Josh Barr arrived on the Washington Post sports activities part in October of 1995, simply shy of his twenty-third birthday. Surrounded by veteran journalists who would present him the ropes, he recalled this week, “I learned how to show up”—how you can cowl soccer practices, as defined by reporters who understood it as second nature. Barr likened the paper’s sports activities columnists to Brazilian soccer stars, identified solely by mononyms: Boz, as within the longtime baseball columnist Thomas Boswell, or Sally, as within the Pulitzer Prize finalist Sally Jenkins. Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon, the stalwart hosts of the ESPN sports activities debate present Pardon the Interruption who every did lengthy stints on the Post’s sports activities desk, didn’t know on the time that they had been previewing their future careers for Barr.
“What they did on TV,” Barr stated, “they did in the office.”
Such reminiscences flowed freely this week on social media and in mournful first-person essays. Most of the ire across the mass layoffs on the Post centered round its writer and proprietor, Will Lewis and Jeff Bezos, nevertheless it was minimize particularly with a celebration of the paper’s sports activities division, which was shuttered amid the cuts. Alums of the part, of their recollections in current days, typically pointed to the native taste of the institution: the time period “All-Met,” the paper’s measure of highschool sports activities greatness, which Barr described as acquainted to “anybody who’s been an athlete in the Washington area or has consumed Washington area news and sports.”
The sturdy highschool sports activities protection, former sports activities reporter Jon Solomon stated, contributed to the sense that a given sport may represent an occasion: “just that the Washington Post was covering” it.
Others remembered the sheer wattage. “There was a time when I’d walk out of my office,” longtime editor George Solomon stated, “and Kornheiser and Wilbon would be arguing, and then they took that argument to ESPN, and then I’d look over and there was Sally Jenkins sitting next to John Ed Bradley, who was sitting next to David Remnick, who was sitting next to Jane Leavy.”
Most of all, former Post staffers tended to level to a sense of idiosyncrasy—a bespoke pressure of sports activities protection that they might hint by a number of generations of mentors and predecessors. It amounted to a shared sensibility, revolving in no small half round a notion of sports activities protection as broader than the boundaries of a given sport. “When I got there,” school sports activities reporter Jesse Dougherty stated, “someone told me, You can come to the sports section and people think that they’re getting french fries, but you actually are serving them potatoes.”
Reached by e mail, a longtime author throughout Solomon’s tenure, Richard Justice, responded true to kind, with what could possibly be seen as a quick piece about his time on the paper. Between protecting the Baltimore Orioles, the soccer staff then referred to as the Washington Redskins, and the Washington Wizards, he got here to suppose of the Post as having “a collegial atmosphere and collaborative approach that I promise you was unique in American journalism.”