WHY THE MEDIA FAIL: SPORTS COLUMNISTS ARE DYING WHEN THEY ARE ESSENTIAL

As one who followed commentators in his teens, I’m stunned at the laziness and lack of content in 2024, when sports is nearing a trillion-dollar plateau and a Dallas writer is ripped by a hockey coach

     I didn’t double-double. I didn’t triple-double. I covered so many double-digit sporting events globally — seems, George Clooney wasn’t the only person lost “Up In The Air.” I still have frequent flier mileage. A Marriott hotel in New York saw me so often, someone thought I was Mr. Marriott and put me in a penthouse for free. I’d sit at a lunch table and used Isaac Newton’s works to count the complete numbers. I’ve been to five continents and passed on Antarctica. When someone tried to get rid of me, I turned in enormous overtime documents and stayed on for 17 years.

     What did I blow off? The Iditarod, though I made an attempt. The World Rock Paper Scissor Championships in Canada didn’t work out. Neither did a Laughter Yoga event in India where participants giggled. The expense account worked. I used it.

     So excuse me for wondering why sports columnists barely leave home — and I mean the crib, with a mortgage and rat control — here in 2024. Some write once a week. Very few travel beyond the city limits. How sad to see such a vibrant portion of a published sports presentation, for decades, shrink to such nothingness that Dallas Stars coach Peter DeBoer called out a columnist in a news conference Friday night. He wasn’t upset that Tim Cowlishaw asked a question about his team, saying the Stars played “lifeless” in the second period of a 3-1 defeat. Actually, he was upset that Tim Cowlishaw was asking any question at all.

     “You can sit here and question our character if you want. You haven’t been around all year. I haven’t seen you here all year,” DeBoer told him.

     “I’m not questioning your character,” Cowlishaw said.

     “You are, that’s what you’re doing,” DeBoer said. “I’m not going to do it. You can write whatever the f— you want.”

     Why would anyone read anything Cowlishaw wrote at the Dallas Morning News? He stumbled into the NHL’s Western Conference final not as a double-double or even a single-single. As DeBoer said, “I haven’t seen you here all year.” It doesn’t matter if a coach or a player calls you out — I’ve been butchered by the miserable lot. What matters is whether you go to the events or do not. Once, I was doubted by a kooky manager who wondered why I wasn’t at a White Sox game. Hmmm. I was out covering the NBA Finals — in Dallas — and the U.S. Open golf tournament at Winged Foot. That was a two-week period on the road, the usual. I’d say Ozzie Guillen was a bigger dope for letting his kids rip his bosses online and praising Fidel Castro when he worked for the Marlins in Little Havana. I went to White Sox games even when Frank Thomas said he’d stick his bat up my ass sideways and Carl Everett stared me down like his next target. I was at Cubs games. I was at Bears games. I was at Bulls games. And I saw the damned world, unlike Cowlishaw, who needs a new navigational map for hockey at American Airlines Center.

     The format is real simple. When teams win, you cover them often.

     My drug store was replaced long ago. It’s a guitar shop, which doesn’t carry Sunday newspapers that dirtied my hands and occupied my teenaged hours. I’d walk from home and purchase five editions, from Pittsburgh and Cleveland and two in New York, followed by the Sporting News. My passion involved the sports sections.

     The columnists, mostly.

     Ten years later, I became one of them, understanding quickly why we were read and quoted, loved and hated. Before long, calls would come from radio bosses and television networks, and no one in the media was bigger than the star sports critic. I sold papers in Chicago, Denver, Cincinnati and Detroit. I sold numbers at the National Sports Daily and at AOL. I gathered viewers on the ESPN blowtorch and listeners on ESPN audio. Why did those places remain in very good business? We helped.

     What happened?

     Today, most newspapers are dying or dead. So are the sports columnists. With the exception of Trump the felon vs. Biden the soporific, nothing inspires a reader more than a timely opinionist who regularly attends events and writes four, five, six times a week. Every serious operation should appoint three men and women as general columnists. Each news cycle should involve a whirlwind about a global industry soon to be worth a trillion dollars. Instead, I see papers with little circulation offering little in perspective. The Athletic wants more readers. Columnists aren’t focal.

     Don’t tell me they lack money. Pay up to stay alive.

     The Washington Post remains one leader. My current hero is Ed Graney of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, who writes almost every day and does local radio shows weekdays. He might collapse, to the point I wrote his boss and suggested a second columnist just out of pity. I look around. I don’t see more — I see much less. I see Cowlishaw, who should know hockey is played at 2500 Victory Avenue, which, according to the arena website, “is located just north of Dallas’ Central Business District and the historic West End.”

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     Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.