The Washington Post masthead is so blinding, apparently, that people have trouble seeing the personnel clearly. Let's do a quick around the horn.
Kornheiser is gone. Who's the New Kornheiser -- or anything close? Wilbon is virtually gone. Who's the New Wilbon -- or anything close? Who's turning out baseball pieces that can touch the ones Tom Boswell was cranking out, regularly, 25 years ago (and then collecting them in books that sold well). Is there anybody outside the Post building who doesn't think Les Carpenter is a tradedown from Bill Gildea? And who among the college writers strikes you as a Young John Feinstein?
So what are we really talking about here? We're talking about a section that gives you volume. We're talking about one of the few sections around that still has the manpower to be relatively complete. But qualitatively it's been slipping for years.
Mike Wise, one of their columnists, does a four-hour radio show five days a week. He really doesn't have much time or energy to write a column, but he still does a few a week -- and they often come across as hurry-up jobs. A recent effort about Gilbert Arenas contained the telltale words, "his father said when he first told me the story three years ago."
Wilbon is being pulled in so many different directions that it's a miracle he's in the paper at all anymore. One of his recent efforts, about Sherm Lewis, included the following passage:
"In 1998, in a column for this newspaper, I wrote rather angrily about Lewis being passed over for head coaching vacancies despite having all of the, uh, necessities to do the job. One of the people I talked to about Lewis was the great Bill Walsh, author of the modern-day West Coast offense and Lewis's mentor.
"Part of what I wrote that day included, `[Lewis] has been a coordinator for the Packers the last four years. Lewis learned Bill Walsh's West Coast offense before both the head coaches in this Super Bowl, [Mike] Holmgren and Mike Shanahan. Walsh has said Lewis has had more experience teaching the West Coast offense than any of his pupils. And . . . Lewis has experience as both a defensive coordinator [at Michigan State] and an offensive coordinator in the pros.
"`There's literally nothing an assistant coach can do that Sherm Lewis hasn't already done . . . He's like a Ph.D. of football.'"
A sure sign of a writer who's juggling too many balls: He starts quoting himself.
Sally Jenkins, who's fabulous, writes once a week, basically. Tracee Hamilton, whose less fabulous, writes more often. One of Tracee's recent columns included the following passage:
"Other teams may have the football gods on speed dial, but they seem to largely ignore the Redskins, so if you're a fan you should enjoy their rare visits. It's like when your husband brings home flowers unprompted one night -- you know he bought them at the Metro stop, you know they were cheap to begin with and cheaper still because the vendor wanted to empty his buckets, you know he's never done it before and he might never do it again, and there's a good chance he just did it because he got hammered with his friends the weekend before and threw up on the bathroom rug. But still, they're flowers and they're pretty and you figure, this is as good as it gets."
Nothing like a little bathroom rug vomit with your morning coffee. In fact, maybe I could spread some on my English muffin . . .
Does no one else notice this stuff? The Post has kinda turned into the print version of ESPN. They do a great job of promoting the heck out of their people on TV and radio and on their Web site, turning them into "celebrities," but I don't want celebrity for my 75 cents. Put it this way: I got much more for my money 10 or 15 years ago, and it's not just because of cutbacks. It's because the section has gone noticeably downhill. There's a reason the Post's circulation has dropped 200,000 or more (from what I read) in the last decade or so, and it's a copout to say, "Well, those are just the times we live in." A lot of things are contributing to the situation, and one of them, in this case, is: You ain't nearly as good as you used to be.