As many have written, The Washington Post was my newspaper. I worked at its rival, the Evening Star, in 1980 and '81, the last year of its life. And my dad worked at the Star 25 years before that. However, a lot of what the Star did consisted of "chasing" the Post, which by the time I was around was DC's dominant newspaper. Everyone in my neighborhood, including the staff of the Star, read it every day.
Also, the reason the my family was a Star family was that the Post had fired my grandfather, who'd been White House correspondent and editorial page editor. We would’ve still been working for the Post if eligible. Grand-dad was an alcoholic, I'm afraid, and maybe that's why he didn't stick. But he landed on his feet momentarily after the firing, editing a liquor trade magazine.
I've returned to the greater DC area in my retirement, but during the intervening decades I lived all about. However, I never lost touch with the Post. In the 1990s, I got the Sunday paper mailed to me in Nashville and Tuscaloosa. I was happy when newspapers went online, because then I could read the Post as it stood right at the moment from anywhere at all. I wasn’t unhappy when they introduced a pay wall; glad to support this operation, really.
I was addicted to the editorial and op-ed page even if it no longer featured my grandfather unfavorably comparing Calvin Coolidge to his friend Warren Harding. As a child, I read William Raspberry and James J. Kilpatrick (with his classic dateline "Scrabble, VA"), Mary McGrory and George Will (who's still at the Post and still writing columns). I admire their arts coverage, and they've had great book critics, for example, from Jonathan Yardley (whom I worked with at the Star) and Becca Rothfeld, the non-fiction wunderkind who was fired on Friday along with the rest of the books staff.
But what kept me coming back, what no other publication could match, was the coverage of DC-area sports, of which I never stopped being a pretty big fan. It's true, all these years I’ve wished the Washington Bullets and/or the Wizards well. I was, as my father said of me, rooting for the Washington Redskins before I could speak, and it has somehow persisted through the WTF? and Commanders eras (this will always be my quarterback). I attended both the University of Maryland and the University of Virginia, and follow their basketball teams. I grew up not far from Georgetown during the John Thompson era, and I still pay attention to them too. I sort of know a number of the local high schools. My family's baseball fanhood, involving as it does several versions of the Senators/Nats, has been less continuous. But then again, the Post used to cover the Baltimore Orioles too.
Not only that, but the Post has featured a killer line-up of sportswriters, as partly described here by Sally Jenkins. Michael Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser were insightful and even hilarious for many years. In the 1960s I read Shirley Povich, and then over the years John Feinstein, David Remnick, Dan Steinberg, Christine Brennan, Dave Kindred, Thomas Boswell, and Liz Clarke. I'm probably forgetting a favorite from 1975. And also the beat reporters: a half hour after the Maryland game was over, a full-fledged narrative of the game, often with colorful insights and jokes, would appear at washingtonpost.com. It hardly appeared possible, yet I definitely took it for granted.
Famously, you can be more “writerish” in sports than in other sections, and the Post's people were. They've been a pleasure to read, all the way up through the era of Chuck Culpepper and Nicki Jhabvala. The Post sports section was to the city what Sonny Jurgensen was to the quarterback position, and they both died the same day. This has been a lot of what kept me thinking of DC as my hometown through all these decades elsewhere. You can find some coverage of your local teams on ESPN.com, let's say. But you can't find hometown, slanted coverage that really cares or obsesses.
The Post has dismantled Sports for a while, much to my amazement, because I would’ve thought it would be the most clicked-on section. But a couple of years ago I started noticing that accounts of Maryland women's away games, for example, consisted of a couple of paragraphs from wire services. Admittedly, the Wizards got bad and stayed bad for a long time. Still the Post's coverage got thin. I was still going there to look at Sports TV and Radio listings for DC region, which is a quick place to check whether Maryland, Virginia, Georgetown, or for that matter Mount Saint Mary's, are playing today, and on what channel or app. But I was already migrating away from the Post as the content disintegrated, and I know a lot less about local teams than I did a few years ago.
But I'm sad about the destruction of the Post, like Jenkins and a lot of other people. Xers are making fun of the sadness, and admittedly not having your newspaper isn’t like not having food or shelter. On the other hand, the newspaper was central to civic or regional identity, and I'm not sure just where we are without it.
And only a fool would fire Becca Rothfeld. I hope she's not writing now for the liquor lobby.
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell