It's inhabited by non-beat writers of varying degrees of competence from the outsourced entity called The Athletic. The section has shrunk so much that it can sometimes be only two pages. It's sad, when you think of the great Pulitzer prize winning writers that brought you sport stories. The only writer The Athletic has who was part of the NYT roster prior to the outsourcing is Tyler Kepner for baseball.
The managing editors think that long-form stories with massive color photos are a decent sports section. It is sad. I call it a newspaper Sports Illustrated, which I think doesn't even print a hard copy anymore.
But, all is not lost. There is something called The Irish Sports Page. Never heard of it? Marilyn Johnson, in her seminal book on obituary writing, The Dead Beat, Lost Souls and Lucky Stiffs and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries delivers a narrative about it.
Of course, obituaries are not perverse. That's a little tongue-in-cheek, since most people don't realize how informative and well written the tribute obits are. And the best of the best can be found in the NYT on a daily basis, written by a staff of seasoned senior writers whose bylines can sometimes appear twice on the same day for two different subjects.
In her book, Ms. Johnson tells us that the former poet laureate of the United States, Billy Collins— who she unexpectantly happens to be sitting next to on train while she's headed into the city to interview the then obituary editor of the New York Times, Charles Strum—tells her his father, (and many others no doubt) used to call obituaries "the Irish sports page."
I sent the current obituary page editor, Bill McDonald, a Tweet/X a while ago suggesting that the NYT should consider giving him a separate section, or make an obit an A-Hed piece like the Wall Street Journal, on the front page, since the sports page these days is so dismal. I'm not so full of myself that I expected to hear back from Bill, ( I didn't.) but around the time of that Tweet/X I started to detect what seemed to be a few more obits making it to the front page at a more than expected rate.
I know from "Obit the Film", a documentary that made its way into some art house theaters a few years ago, that centered around the obit process of the NYT obituary desk, that the editor, Bill McDonald, attends an afternoon meeting with other editors to go over what might make it to the front page.
Well, if Bill were a baseball player, he's he batting over .400 right about now. No less than a tsunami of obits have floated over the dam and onto the front page since July 1st. I'm not going to bother going any further back, but my guess is in the time from July 1st to today (which has a front pager on astronaut James Lovell Jr.), there have been more front page obits than in all of the first 6 months of this year.
Did someone at the Paper of Record feel that since the sports page is so crappy that obits on the front page might make the Times the Irish Sports Page?
I've written about this before. The Irish are on the earth in the hopes that when whey pass away they will have a good wake. My wife, who is an Irish-American Catholic from the Bronx (a BIC), has viewed the obit page several times and learned of the passing of people she knows. These aren't the tribute obits, but the small print death notices.
So, who has the Times promoted to the front page since July 1st, and running through today, August 9th? It is an eclectic list of 7:
•Jimmy Swaggert
•Connie Francis
•Ozzy Osbourne
•Hulk Hogan (Now I know they're pulling out the stops.)
•Cécile Dionne
•Eddie Palmieri
•James Lovell Jr.
And the first two months of the second half of the year are hardly over. What's the over/under bet for the rest of the year going to be?
Bill, you did it. The front page is the Irish Sports page. I'm there.
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