The best sports section ever

Throw in a Dufresne and Heisler and a Bonk and a Newhan and a Harvey and you have a pretty goddamn good staff.

 

The LAT certainly had a great sports staff during that era, but I found it too annoying structurally to enjoy it much -- stories that jumped three or four times, with sometimes only a couple paragraphs of the story before the first jump. That couldn't be helped; the section was fat with advertising and there were some very small news wells on the inside pages. But it lacked the visual grace and drama of the Boston Globe or Dallas Morning News. I enjoyed reading those writers more on the LAT-WP wire than in the actual paper. You could not mistake it for a magazine on newsprint -- it was definitely a newspaper, a bit jumbled and gray on the inside, which lessens the dramatic impact. So ... great talent and it read really well, but as a physical section, not really something that made me think: "Wow!"

 

hoffman didn't get to the daily news till 1980

i believe john schulian was there, however ... and whicker and hochman

jasner ...

tremendous staff ...

 

Dallas Morning News in the 1980s had a lot of people who wrote with authority but weren't super well-known at the time. I'm thinking of Gary Meyers and Mitch Lawrence, among others.

 

Hey Don you're on the wrong thread. You should be on "The Best Pitching Rotations" discussion thread.

 

I think the Boston fanbase gave voice to the writers in Boston, too. If the writers are truly the eyes and ears of the fans, that was always a little bit taller order in Boston, a huge market that stretched throughout New England and without the divided allegiances of the New York, LA and Chicago markets. It was all about the Red Sox, Pats, Celtics and Bruins. The professional sports teams are common threads that unite New Englanders.

 

Schillilian did not come onboard until the 80's. I include Rich because he'd done some things for them while at Penn.
That Newsday crew was also very good as was the LA Times. The San Francisco Chronicle was pretty good back then too.

 

Yep. I was pretty positive about that Tose edition. In fact, I was so impressed with it, there's a 50-50 chance it's something I kept, albeit buried in a box sitting my the closet off my porch.

 

I grew up on it. It's the reason I do what I've done going on two decades...
and, I couldn't agree with you more.

 

It was a weird, fun section to be involved with.

This is strictly personal, and it goes well beyond who the writing staffs were at any newspaper at any given time, but I have to note one thing.

In the early to mid-'80s, the Orange County Edition of the Times had a sports staff that was bigger than a lot of standalone newspaper staffs. Herb Stutz was the boss. There were something like 30 sports writers and editors in the bureau alone. The did their own special sections on the Angels and Rams and later the Ducks when L.A. wasn't doing them on the Dodgers and Lakers, for example. Daily circulation of the OC edition alone topped 300,000 at one point.

A bunch of people came through there. Plaschke started at the San Diego Edition, of all places (Tom Friend was there, too). Simers, Penner, DiGiovanna, Jason Reid, Dillman, Dufresne ... I'm going to stop, because names will be omitted.

The point of this is the Saturday paper. On any given day, the OC Edition would get pages of "upspace," sometimes as little as two or four pages, with OC-only ads, but often a lot more.

But the Saturday paper: There was at least one day, perhaps more, where the upspace to handle high school Friday nights (and anything else going on in OC) was 32 pages (obviously with a lot of advertising). So you had the entire L.A. sports section, and all those great writers, PLUS 32 pages of strictly OC coverage.

I was involved, and of course partial, but to me, those sections rivaled any put out by any paper ever, including the Globe and DMN and anybody else.

And, of course, when Tribune got its hooks into everything, cutting back on Orange County (and Valley) coverage -- finally to nothing -- was their idea of progress. That was the beginning of the Times' circulation losses, before we even got into this mess.

Like many things in this business, self-inflicted.

 

SF, when you talk about Herb Stutz, you're talking about someone who had a knack for getting the best out of prima donnas. You should've seen him when he was in Philly. He was the first editor who I saw use two VDT terminals at one time. He was a beast on Saturday nights. I learned a lot from him.

 

The Trentonian