Josh Barr arrived at the Washington Post sports section in October of 1995, just shy of his 23rd birthday. Surrounded by veteran journalists who would show him the ropes, he recalled this week, “I learned how to show up”—how to cover football practices, as explained by reporters who understood it as second nature. Barr likened the paper’s sports columnists to Brazilian soccer stars, known only by mononyms: Boz, as in the longtime baseball columnist Thomas Boswell, or Sally, as in the Pulitzer Prize finalist Sally Jenkins. Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon, the stalwart hosts of the ESPN sports debate show Pardon the Interruption, who each did long stints on the Post’s sports desk, didn’t know at the time that they were previewing their future careers for Barr.
“What they did on TV,” Barr said, “they did in the office.”
Such memories flowed freely this week on social media and in mournful first-person essays. Most of the ire around the mass layoffs at the Post centered on its publisher and its owner, Will Lewis and Jeff Bezos, but it was cut in particular with a celebration of the paper’s sports department, which was shuttered amid the changes. Alums of the section, in their recollections in recent days, often pointed to the local flavor of the institution: the term All-Met, the paper’s measure of high school sports greatness, which Barr described as familiar to “anybody who’s been an athlete in the Washington area or has consumed Washington-area news and sports.”
The robust high school sports coverage, former sports reporter Jon Solomon said, contributed to the sense that a given game could constitute an event—“just that The Washington Post was covering [it]” was “a big deal.”
Others remembered the sheer wattage. “There was a time when I’d walk out of my office,” longtime editor George Solomon said, “and Kornheiser and Wilbon would be arguing, and then they took that argument to ESPN, and then I’d look over and there was Sally Jenkins sitting next to John Ed Bradley, who was sitting next to David Remnick, who was sitting next to Jane Leavy.”
Most of all, former Post staffers tended to point to a sense of idiosyncrasy—a bespoke strain of sports coverage that they could trace through several generations of mentors and predecessors. It amounted to a shared sensibility, revolving in no small part around a notion of sports coverage as broader than the boundaries of a given game. “When I got there,” college-sports reporter Jesse Dougherty said, “someone told me, ‘You can come to the sports section and people think that they’re getting french fries, but you actually are serving them potatoes.’”
Reached by email, a longtime writer during Solomon’s tenure, Richard Justice, responded true to form, with what could be viewed as a short piece about his time at the paper. Between covering the Baltimore Orioles, the football team then known as the Washington Redskins, and the Washington Wizards, he came to think of the Post as having “a collegial atmosphere and collaborative approach that I promise you was unique in American journalism.”