Big Doings in Dallas

The difference between now and then is Smith's ability to fight for space and justify it to the rest of the paper. He found ways to make the numbers work. But it changed when Belo started going off on a tangent with its own network and the CueCat and increased circulation pushes in Arlington (where it had no chance) and Collin County (where it had no real competition). Then there was the circulation scandal.

Before that, no paper in Texas carried more weight than the DMN when it was really good (1984-2000).

 

Smith had amazing clout and got pretty much what he wanted. But that was because the top editors and corporate chiefs believed that sports and business were the key to knocking the Times-Herald off stride. It worked. The papers were neck and neck in 81 but every year the DMN opened the gap wider and by 87 had driven Times Mirror out. 

No question all could be factors. There's also a massive change in attitude, which I guess is something Wall Street and a series of bad decisions can do to you. When I was there, the idea of a layoff was unheard-of. Now they will have had two in two years. And the first smelled because of the number of  people gotten rid of (a majority, some say) who were 50 and older.

 

Last month, while passing through the DFW airport, I picked up a Morning News and found an eight-page sports section. Even worse, I found . . . well, they weren't eight good pages. And so I can understand how some people might be skeptical when they read here that the Morning News once had the best sports section in America. But in my view, and I've been writing about sports for 20 years, the DMN wasn't only best, but was clearly best. And the contest wasn't close. Yes, it had more space than any other section, but it wasn't only the space that made it so clearly superior. The Morning News also had many of the best writers around. Blackie Sherrod, Frank Luksa, David Castevens, Gary Meyers, Randy Galloway, Gary West, Phil Rogers, Ivan Maisel, Ed Werder, Jeff Rude -- they all wrote for the Morning News, most of them at the same time. And now the Morning News has . . . well, as I said, they weren't eight good pages.

 

My biggest question will be how the section rebounds come fall. If they go from eight pages to 12-14 on heavy days (and weekends), then we might be talking about trouble.

But God, yes. As a sports lover, Dallas was heaven to me when I was there in 2001. When I went back on a spring trip in April, I think Fort Worth had the better section.

 

No doubt, Sports Day was the premier section from around 88 through 2000. But let's be clear about why. Dave Smith hired and inherited talented people and Dave had strong realtionships with the power brokers of Dallas sports scene. The writers and people on the REM were really what made the section. Sherrod is up there with the greats of commentary, as was Luksa and is Galloway (who's now at Fort Worth). Galloway reallly put DMN in the power seat with his hard-core grilling of Jimmy Johnson back in 91ish-92ish. One particular episode saw Galloway grill Coach Johnson on his change in the offensive scheme...Johnson got so enraged he stormed out of his regular press conference. All the local television channels ran the exchange and the Cowboys and the DMN used that episode to rebuild the expectations of the Cowboys lost in the late 80s. From that moment on, readers and ticket buyers felt like they had more access and had someone pushing Jones and Johnson to explain themselves. The funny thing was, about an hour later, Galloway, Johnson and Jones were in the parking lot laughing about the whole thing. Sports Day was the only section in the country to have a full time investigative writer (Doug Bedell) on staff....and this had a huge impact on the climate, especially among the public University sports programs. Bedell was always digging through shit. He once told me that he would wake up in the middle of the night thinking the Texas A&M band was marching down his street with a lynch mob. Now that's good reporting. I also questioned him one time about why his investigations tend to uncover so much about the Aggies program. He said, "They fuck up the most." I thought that was great. A copy guy on the desk (Joe Jansen) is credited (as I remember it) for one of the best headlines I've ever seen. I forget which year, but it was the Dallas Thanksgiving day game against Miami when it snowed (and if you've ever been to Dallas, that's a little strange). Leon Lett tried to recover a blocked field goal attempt, muffed it and Miami recovered. They re-kicked the field goal as time expired and Dallas lost. Headline the next morning with a great pic of Lett's muff: Winter Blunderland. It got howls from readers. I was on the phones the next day, fielding calls. And if you know the climate at Sports Day, you know answering the phones and listening to callers bullshit is a must.

I worked there during college as a campus correspondent, preps writer and clerk from '91 to '95...and those were the healthiest years of Sports Day. I still live in Dallas, would agree that the better section is shifting toward the Star-Telegram. But the reasons why were mentioned above. The writers mentioned are gone, Gary West (fired the week before the Breeders Cup in Dallas), Ivan Maisel, great college football writer. Phil Rogers...I've never read a better baseball column. David Castevens, whom Contra-Costa's Neil Hays reminds me of. This was the guy who had the probability of covering a Super Bowl and writing about the guy selling him beer. Harless Wade, who wrote a local golf column and had more great stories about good friend Mickey Mantle then I could ever share. He once wrote a college basketball column in the late 80s that discussed teams in the South being better than teams in the North if you used the Mason-Dixon line. The copy editor correcetd him saying Georgetown U was a North team as well as a couple of others. After a heated debate Harless told the copy editor, "I'll tell you what, you check it out and if I'm right, I'm gonna kick your ass and if I'm wrong, I'm still gonna kick your ass." The column ran as written.

Don't want this to turn into a cheek sucking fest, but thought I'd share just a few snippets of some great years of a great sports section. It's a total shame that management has emploded it's best sell of the newspaper.

 

Gandhi, are you delusional?

What the heck are you talking about?

Let's just say I'm quite familiar with the cast of characters. And your command of the essense of what the DMN was -- and what made it great -- rivals Rich Kotite's mastery of coaching. Hope to God you're not out there reporting, because it'd undermine my faith in everything I read.

 

DMN in its heyday was NEVER about great writing, it was about great space and filling that space as The Paper Of Record. Sure, the columnists were solid, but Blackie was on the back side of his career. Dave Smith would compliment a writer about a good story and if the writer asked Dave about a specific regarding the story, nine times out of 10, Dave had not read it. Still, when it was at its height, it was a force to be reckoned with.

 

This thread is losing touch with reality. Gandhi, take your medicine.

The only thing that Dave Smith knew about good writers is that he chased away a whole boxcar full of them.
When Dave was given the Red Smith Award, David Casstevens put it perfectly when he said that Dave Smith was the "first non-journalist" to receive the award.

You could build a Pulitzer winning sports section with the people that Smith drove away.

 

Well, off the top of my head, when I was there, the columnists were Sherrod, Casstevens and Galloway. Gary Myers was on NFL, Mitch Lawrence on NBA, Tracy Ringolsby on the Rangers. Sherrington and Cathy Harasta were among the GA types. Might not be the greatest lineup ever, but you're shortchanging that section to say it was "NEVER" about great writing.

 

At the time, the DMN paid well but not spectacularly (although columnists made a mint). I imagine that had something to do with both writers and deskers leaving. And its reputation then was such that there was always another talented writer eager to jump aboard. A tactic that I imagine was less effective as time went by. ... But if Smith didn't know good writing, how'd those guys get hired in the first place?

 

Let me offer my two cents on the DMN in its "glory years," basically 1984-2003. I was a fulltime writer at one of D/FW's Big Three much of that time, and the best thing that ever happened to the DMN was the Dallas Times Herald throwing in the towel late 1991-early 1992.

What the DMN did was throw tons of money at its sports section with boatloads of writers, reams of notebooks and lots of featurey enterprise packages that were more design-driven gloss than true enterprise reporting. When their columnist lineup was Galloway-Casstevens--Sherrod (I THINK all three were there at the same time for a while), they were at the top of their game, although Skip Bayless at the DTH was must-read every day.

Yes, Bedell was a good investigative reporter, but one with a huge ego and questionable tactics who did a bangup job digging up slime on out of town programs like Texas A&M and, to beat a dead horse, Oklahoma. But for my money, the best Dallas-based investigative sports writer in those days was the DTH's Danny Robbins. He did the dirty work with the likes of SMU and SWC HQ in his backyard, and the way I see it, the closer to home your investigating writing is, the more chutzpah demonstrated. Anyone can take potshots at long-distance targets.

Robbins also covered the usual GA stuff on a regular basis and pulled off the trick of having a regular presence in the paper while also excelling at the undercover stuff. Bedell, on the other hand, would disappear for three months at a time, and then suddenly jump out with another blast at A&M or Oklahoma (both schools safely 200 miles away, where editors don't have to face the music of their reporters' muckraking jobs quite so severely). That's a personnel luxury the DMN had----if you can't win at reporting, just swamp your section with color and commentary a day later. I don't deny that Bedell was a good digger, but his stuff always had a certain "ick" factor to them, where Robbins' work seemed to be, shall I say, less questionable. It is said that when Robbins was leaving the DTH, Dave Smith tried to buy Robbins's little black book of sources from him. Don't know if true or not, but it makes good copy if true.

One thing I know: when D/FW beat reporters woke up in the morning, the one sports section they feared the most picking up in the a.m. to see if they had been scooped was the DTH, not the DMN or even the FWST, although the latter has always done consistently well over the years. What the DMN offered in return was when it came time to chase breaking stories, they would have two or three writers popping up for every one the DTH or FWST could throw at the chase. The DMN excelled at carpet bombing while the DTH and FWST had to resort to Green Beret tactics in picking their spots.

That said, I had, and still have, a number of friends working at the DMN (at least they were there on Aug. 1), folks who are good people----there is one exception among writers I won't name, but any of you who know the market know who I"m talking about, a bitterly cynical person---and I wish them well. The DMN has done a lot of grandiose things over the years and served mainstream sports fans well. I just wonder what in the heck happened to Belo----between the DMN and Channel 8, they were the hotshots of the Big D for nearly 20 years.

Sorry for the filibuster----I've just been following this thread for several weeks and finally had to get it all out.

 

Thank you for the DTH perspective. ;D