Following the plane home

As the Washington Post retreats from its sports pages, who will tell the story after the final whistle?

(In a recent phone call, sports writer Rohit Brijnath and I discussed the shuttering of the Washington Post’s sports desk and, more broadly, what it means to lose the sports page. Rohit’s piece, which you should read, is here. What follows are out-takes from our chat, expanded into essay-length.)

(Left: Liu Ying, in jersey #13, and right, Brandi Chastian’s iconic celebration)

On the long flight home from Los Angeles in July 1999, Liu Ying would have sought in vain for distraction, for something that could replace the voice in her head telling her she had screwed up in full public view.

Ninety thousand people had packed the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California. Two hundred million more watched on television as the Women’s World Cup final between China and the United States stretched, goalless, beyond regulation time, beyond two tranches of extra time of 15 minutes each, and into the compressed theatre of a penalty shoot-out.

1–1. Then 2–2.

Liu Ying, a 25-year-old native of Beijing with close-cropped hair and a squat body in a number 13 jersey, stepped forward for China’s third penalty.

One-time basketball star Briana Scurry -- the lone Black player in an otherwise all-White starting lineup -- guarded the American goal.

Liu kicked. Scurry dived to her left and, while airborne, got her fingertips to the ball and deflected it past the upright.

Liu’s US counterpart nailed her kick.

3-2. Then 4-3.

Minutes later, Brandi Chastain scored. The US had won 5-4.

Chastain’s shirt came off. Her arms rose in triumph. That image travelled around the world.

No camera sought out Liu, no one gave her a thought. Except one man.

The moment inside the moment

In early May that year, an American warplane had bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade — an error, Washington said, born of outdated maps. Tensions between the two countries ran high. The Chinese team had been given permission to travel only weeks before the tournament began. Now, haunted by the memory of that missed kick, Liu was on a flight back to Beijing.

Sportswriter Gay Talese was an accidental spectator who, finding himself at a loose end, surfed television and stumbled on the game. In its wake, he found himself thinking about Liu. About the long, lonely hours in the air. About the reception awaiting her at home. About family, and the shame they could be feeling. About that attitude of sports officials in a country that uses sport to whitewash its global image, a country where defeat was unacceptable. About what it meant to be Liu -- the athlete whose failed kick would echo through sports history even as her name faded into oblivion.

That instinct, to follow the losing player beyond the stadium, is as good a definition as any of what the sports page at its best has always done. It has resisted being seduced by celebrations, eschewed hype and hyperbole in favor of the human moment.

Sport is often reduced to spectacle: the goal, the knockout, the lifted trophy, the storm of confetti. But the writing that endures treats these not as the story, but merely as the hinge.

Back in 1962, after losing his heavyweight title to Sonny Liston in a fight that lasted a little less than one round (video), Floyd Patterson told Talese that as he lay on the canvas, he wished a hole would open up and swallow him whole. But no hole opened up; there was no place to hide. The world, with its cameras and its judgments, remained to be faced.

Without the writer, Patterson’s defeat would be a statistic. With Talese mediating it, in an Esquire profile titled The Loser, it became a meditation on public shame and on the peculiar cruelty of performing under lights and being found wanting.

The same was true of Liu Ying. The missed penalty was visible to millions. The plane ride home was not. It required imagination, restraint, and an appetite for interiority. It required a sportswriter who believed the human being mattered as much as the result. And good sportswriters require a home -- a sports page that allows them the space, the opportunity, to explore the human condition through the lens of sport.

I learned writing by reading not political reportage but the greats of sports reporting -- particularly boxing (a function of the era I grew up in, when boxing attracted talents from outside the traditional “sports writer” fraternity. I wrote about finding the magic in sports writing here.)

Sports pages are not, I learned over my time as a journalist, an indulgence. Rather, they are the building blocks of reportage: they teach writers how to write using voice, scene, character, and they teach readers how to read. A good sports story is not a box score in print but a frame within which to explore rivalry, history, consequence.

The sports page is where writers and readers learn empathy. A crucial loss, an unexpected comeback, an athlete fighting an aging body, a career ending, all of these are testing grounds for high-stakes human reporting. A match report filed at midnight had to do more than record the score. It had to choose the decisive moment, locate significance, capture voice. It had to make the ephemeral feel anchored.

Deadline discipline. Clarity, without condescension. A sense of proportion. These were not abstract virtues but daily requirements that had to be met against crippling deadlines, and it was on the sports pages that we learned how to do this.

Left, Muhammed Ali refuses to be drafted for the Vietnam War and right, Tommy Smith and John Carlos raise the Black Power salute

I was going through my folder of saved sports stories and thinking of the many ways in which sport taught writing beyond the frame. Take sport as political and moral theatre: the best coverage of Muhammed Ali refusing the draft went beyond the boxing ring and into the realms of race, conscience, and the nature and limits of dissent.

The 1968 Mexico Olympics is another example. A single photograph of the Black Power salute and the reporting around it became one of the most compelling images of the 20th century, and sport merely the stage on which racial politics foregrounded itself.

Then there is sport as class, as labor, as an exploration of the human body. Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights is ostensibly about high-school football, but at a deeper level it is about small-town America, about masculinity, about racial hierarchy and even about economics and stagnation.

Or take Norman Mailer’s The Fight. Ali versus Foreman was merely the entry point; Mailer’s real subjects were ego, mortality, myth-making, and how men perform themselves under pressure.

There’s my friend Rohit Brijnath, whose best columns (the ones I clip and save and revisit) are about the interior life of the elite athlete, about memory, about loss, about wonder. Sport provides Rohit with the occasion and the frame, not the subject.

It is not accidental that many journalists who began on sports desks went on to other beats and flourished. The ability to see the moment inside the moment, to identify the hinge, was learned on the sports pages and then transferred to the front page. David Remnick is one example of many. His career began in the sports pages of the Washington Post, where he was tasked with covering the football league. Six years later, he became the paper’s Moscow correspondent, a stint that provided material for the book Lenin’s Tomb, which won him a Pulitzer. The craft he learned on the Washington Post’s sports pages transferred seamlessly into the world of politics.

When Sally Jenkins (who wrote a brilliant piece marking mourning the demise of the Washington Post sports desk) writes about an athlete, she is rarely writing about the score. She is writing, instead, about pressure, identity, endurance, collapse. Her writing, in common with that of the best of her peers, erased the false dichotomy between “sports writing” and “serious writing”.

The lawyer Nandan Kamath wrote a book called Boundary Lab, a series of essays that look at the intersection of sport and law. When he asked me to help edit it, I wanted to know what thought had prompted the book — what, as it is called in the trade, its through-line was. He said: Sport is the crucible in which society first tests its attitudes to the pressing issues -- race, gender -- of our time.

I think when a newspaper loses its sports pages, it doesn’t just lose sport, it loses a way of observing people, of reading consequence in seemingly simple acts.

In her essay linked above, Jenkins writes of the “swagger” of the sports desk. I first encountered that swagger during my days at the Mid-Day group of publications in the early 90s. Three feisty young women fresh out of college ran our sports coverage: Sharda Ugra, Hemal Asher, Prajwal Hegde. Seven days a week, they produced stories of such brilliance that the rest of us read with envy -- and the loudest laughter, the most fun, was usually centered around the nook they worked in.

Return for a moment to Patterson and Liston. That was a time when boxing attracted the best literary talents of the age. When the fight was announced they all flocked to Chicago, but there was little actual grist for their mill. Patterson was famously inarticulate; Liston, with the taint of Mafia connections emanating off him like sweat, wasn’t speaking to the press. All that the writers got was ten minutes at ringside, to observe the fighters as they trained. No extended interviews. No curated sound bytes.

And yet, from a fight that lasted barely two minutes and change emerged a dozen radically different interpretations. In a piece titled Ten Thousand Words A Minute, Norman Mailer turned the bout into a psychodrama. Talese wrote about the defeated Patterson’s private humiliation. Jimmy Breslin saw a morality play -- the “good Black” versus the “bad Black” -- staged by White America for its delectation. One event, multiple lenses.

During my stint in New York, the head of the English department at New York University made me read those stories. I want you to learn, she told me, that there is more than one way to see an event. Learn to see the obvious, then to look beyond it.

It was one of the most enduring lessons on writing I ever got, and it came to me via the sports page, which knew how to host multiplicity without demanding a single, instant verdict. A sporting event could be political, psychological, aesthetic, sometimes all at once.

That capacity feels increasingly fragile. Today, access to sport is ubiquitous. Major events stream in high definition. Leagues and sports federations distribute curated clips. Athletes speak directly to millions on social media. Highlights circulate within seconds. Sport has been reduced to opinion plus outrage plus celebrity.

We have never had more “content” and less meaning.

A missed penalty today is clipped, memed, looped. The outrage flares, the verdict is delivered, the feed moves on. What risks disappearing is the quieter act of following the plane home. Of asking what the moment means to the person living it. Of telling that story.

There is another function the sports page has quietly served.

It is perhaps the last of the great public squares: a civic space where disparate audiences gather daily in shared fellowship. It may be the last space where the newspaper speaks to the country at large across class, race, across political affiliations. The factory worker, the businessman, the corporate lawyer might disagree about politics, about ideology, but on the sports page they find common ground.

Sport is not lily white. It traffics in nationalism, commercialism, exclusion, abuse. It is susceptible to corruption and excess. But precisely because it is powerful, it requires scrutiny. The sports page charted not only achievement but also excess — the doping scandal, administrative malfeasance, the sexual and financial exploitation of young athletes. And it succeeded, more often than not, in holding institutions to account.

As rights holders consolidate control over images and narratives, and as economic pressures narrow newsroom resources, that capacity is thinning. The risk is not that fans will lack entertainment. It is that fewer reporters will be paid to ask uncomfortable questions, to examine structures rather than celebrate spectacle.

Sport generates myth at warp speed. The winning goal becomes replay, then icon. But myth without context becomes thin, and the great sports writers have always resisted that thinness. They have lingered. They have returned to ask what it meant, not merely what had occurred.

The great Gary Smith (whose stellar storytelling I wrote about here) in the preface to a collection of his best work, spoke of why he did the kind of stories he was known for:

“Sport comes to us in boxes – the perimeters of our TV screens or the boundary lines of fields and courts. As much as I enjoy what goes on inside those boxes, I’ve always had the urge to bust out of them. I’ve always had the feeling that the most compelling and significant story was the one occurring beyond the game – before it, after it, above it or under it, deep in the furnace of the psyche. Conventional journalism couldn’t always carry me up to those rafters or down to those boiler rooms, so I had to break out of a few of my own little boxes as well.”

It is within the “furnace of the psyche” that Talese sought the story of Liu Ying’s missed penalty. That act of looking beyond the victor and peering deep into the shadows to seek out the pain that lurks there requires time, space, and editorial will. And it requires a page, an organization, that believes such attention is worthwhile.

In its halcyon days, the Washington Post treated sport as not something confined to the playground but as a sort of front porch of culture, of society. It gave permission to its writers to be essayists, critics, witnesses, even interpreters of the human condition. I would argue that readers trusted the Post sportswriters more than its political reporters -- I know I did. And “trust” is what media houses are increasingly losing.

It is ironic, really: we tend to think of sportswriting as escapism, but in the great papers, sport was often the most serious writing across the entire paper.

The Plane Home

Somewhere over the Pacific in July 1999, cabin lights would have dimmed. Passengers would have slept. But not Liu Ying, who had long hours ahead of her before she reached Beijing, where she had long years of obscurity ahead of her.

That image — the athlete alone with consequence — lingers because a writer chose to imagine it, because someone believed the missed kick was not the end of the story.

There is a soccer World Cup coming up in July. There will be penalty shoot outs and stunning field goals; established stars will stumble, unknowns will emerge from obscurity to light up the stage. And the highlights will circulate at ever greater speed.

The question is whether we still have room for the quieter story: the one that follows the plane home, that treats collapse not as spectacle but as human experience.

Sport does not require newspapers to survive. But the newspaper may yet require sport to anchor its humanity.

Without that prism, without the ability to look at the moment within the moment, without the space to see beyond the celebration of the champion and the roar of the crowd, we risk seeing less not only of the game, but of ourselves.

PostScript: Talese pitched the story of Liu Ying to an editor who oversaw the sports coverage in Sports Illustrated, Time and People (all Time Warner publications). He wrote:

“I believe that last week’s single blocked kick of the Chinese World Cup soccer player, Liu Ying, might provide us with a story angle by which we may measure China and the United States well beyond the realm of sports competition.

“There is a photo in today’s New York Times showing President Clinton greeting the triumphant American women in the White House. How did China’s officials greet the Chinese women after their return to their homeland? Who was at the airport?...the story should be told through this young woman, Liu Ying, a step-by step account of how her life has gone since her foot failed her in the Rose Bowl.”

Would you want to read that story? Well, you can’t. It never got written.

Talese got a formulaic response to his pitch. The editor is traveling, the response read. But thanks for sending us the idea, it is interesting. We won’t be using it, but do feel free to keep sending in ideas.

(This anecdote, and the earlier sections about Liu Ying, is paraphrased from Talese’s memoir, A Writer’s Life).

PPS: Recent events prompted me to dust off and delve into an old favorite: The Great American Sports Page, a book I dip into every once in a while to remind myself what great sports writing can be. It is a compilation of a century’s worth of U.S. newspaper columns: written on deadline, at a time when the sports section still had swagger and space. From Ring Lardner and Red Smith to Thomas Boswell, Michael Wilbon and Sally Jenkins, the book reminds me yet again that the daily sports page was once a repository of voice, argument, and literary craft. These writers chronicled Babe Ruth and Muhammed Ali, but they also chronicled the quiet heartbreaks and moral dilemmas that are so central to sport. Re-reading this now, the anthology feels less like a victory lap than an elegy, a record of what newspapers could do when they believed sport was part of the civic conversation.

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