Writers Do Little Digging : Sports Sections Fumble Many Off-Field Stories

Newspaper sports sections, long regarded as the toy department of journalism, have improved enormously over the last 30 years. On the better sports pages, skepticism has largely replaced sycophancy, and the issues of race and drugs have taken their place alongside accounts of game-winning home runs and last-minute touchdowns.

But most sports sections still do very little investigative reporting, and almost all are woefully inadequate in covering the business side of sports.

“The basic problem,” says Doug Allen, assistant executive director of the National Football League Players Assn., “is that sportswriters don’t get into sports journalism to write about business, economics and labor relations. They want to write about X’s and O’s . . . coaching decisions . . . game plans. . . .”

At some newspapers, this syndrome is changing. Slowly. Half a dozen or so papers even have sports reporters who work full time covering sports news that takes place off the field. The Des Moines Register, for example, transferred longtime political reporter Tom Witosky to the sports department in 1985, and he has since been writing full time about such subjects as sports gambling, the athletic programs at local universities and the finances of the local minor league baseball team.

But it’s significant that Witosky and most of the other off-the-field sports specialists come from outside the sports section. Despite recent progress, most sportswriters still lack the “acumen (and) . . . appetite” for serious reporting, says Glenn Guzzo, assistant to the vice president for news at Knight-Ridder Newspapers. Most sportswriters still don’t know how to search court records, analyze financial and proxy statements, interpret labor law or trace legal documents.

That’s why Guzzo hired an experienced business reporter to cover the business side of sports when he became executive sports editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1986. Guzzo blames top editors as well as sportswriters for forcing him and other sports editors to go outside the sports department to hire such reporters. Many editors, he says, “don’t look for the skills and the attitudes when they hire sportswriters and sports editors that are absolutely necessary to producing the quality enterprise journalism that they routinely expect of the news staffs.”

Danny Robbins, who spends most of his time on investigative reporting as the Dallas-based sports reporter for Newsday in suburban New York, says he is amazed that so many sportswriters “don’t know some of the very rudimentary things that any reporter on any metro staff knows.”

Or as Murray Chass, national baseball reporter for the New York Times, puts it: “Sportswriters have a bad reputation--and, unfortunately, much of it is deserved--for being poor reporters.”

Labor Coverage Falls Short

The problem is especially acute in the coverage of labor relations.

“Baseball writers don’t want any part of the off-field stuff like strikes,” Chass says.

James Warren, who now covers the media for the Chicago Tribune after 10 years as the paper’s labor and legal affairs reporter, wrote often on sports labor issues and said he found much coverage of that field (and sports legal issues as well) “abysmal, outrageous.”

Most sportswriters clearly did not understand the dynamics of labor negotiations, and their ignorance showed in their stories, Warren says. (Perhaps that’s not surprising. After all, most newspapers wouldn’t ask their theater critics to cover a strike on Broadway; why should they expect their baseball writers to be any more qualified in labor negotiations?)

Some newspapers have tried to improve their coverage of sports labor issues by having their labor writers contribute. Others have asked their sports business and investigative reporters to help out. But most continue to use the same reporters who cover games to cover strikes.

That, says Warren, virtually ensures “implicit . . . shilling for management.”

“The bias is . . . deep,” says Lee Lowenfish, who wrote “The Imperfect Diamond,” a book-length study of the baseball reserve system.

Because player turnover is so high, management sources tend to be the “only constant” for reporters on the sports beat, Warren says. Moreover, many sportswriters think young athletes making huge salaries should be grateful and accept whatever management offers.

Reporters’ support for management should not come as a shock, Warren says, since “they, in a sense, serve at the pleasure of management. Management lets them show up at their practice field, management lets them into the locker room, management lets them sit in their press box . . . .”

(The relationship between baseball management and USA Today is especially cozy; the newspaper is the official sponsor of balloting for the annual All-Star Game. That creates at least a potential conflict of interest. Indeed, the tone of much of USA Today’s baseball coverage, especially its labor relations coverage, makes the paper seem “somewhat of a mouthpiece for the commissioner’s office,” says baseball columnist Dan Shaughnessy of the Boston Globe.

(Henry Freeman, managing editor for sports at USA Today, denies that charge. “The editorial department has nothing to do with All-Star balloting,” he says. “That’s a marketing effort.”)

Van McKenzie, sports editor of the Atlanta Constitution, resents editors who think their sports staffs can’t cover difficult, off-the-field stories.

“I think that’s totally criminal and asinine,” he says, and any editor who feels that way should get rid of his sports editor and sportswriters.

But even McKenzie concedes that many sportswriters aren’t yet capable of such reporting. The field is too new, their experience too limited.

Many sportswriters today “seem to not know a story when it jumps up and hits them in the face,” he says.

This is especially true in investigative reporting.

Thus, when the Lexington Herald Leader won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting for its 1986 stories exposing cash payoffs to basketball players at the University of Kentucky, the reporters were not sportswriters but a business writer and a member of the paper’s Washington bureau.

Similarly, when the Arizona Daily Star won a Pulitzer in 1981 for its investigation of the University of Arizona athletic department, “the perseverance, the skepticism, the hard work” came from reporters on the Star’s state and metropolitan staffs, Managing Editor John Peck says.

Sports reporters on the Star, as elsewhere, would be better able to cover such a story now, Peck says, but “I still don’t see much hard-edged, real critical thinking going into sports investigation.”

Two arbitrators found, for example, that major league baseball owners were guilty of collusion in refusing to offer contracts to free agents after the 1985 and 1986 seasons, but despite some good analysis, no newspaper published a serious investigative story during the lengthy controversy.

Investigative reporting remains the biggest weakness in today’s sports pages, in part because sportswriters who cover teams as a regular beat seldom have the time (or inclination) to do such stories. Many worry they’ll offend the people they cover and lose access to them. Others just find daily game stories much easier and more enjoyable to do.

Most sports editors say they would like to do more investigative and business stories, but they insist they don’t have the staff or space to do so. Investigative stories often take several weeks, sometimes several months, and there is always the possibility that after spending all that time, a reporter won’t have the documentation necessary for a publishable story. Editors may be willing to risk such an investment of time to investigate the mayor or the President, but only a rare few are willing to do so for an investigation of the local college or professional sports franchise.

Most major newspapers do have the resources to do such sports reporting if they really want to, though; most papers devote far more resources to sports than to any other area they cover.

Large Sports Staffs

The Los Angeles Times has 33 reporters and editors in its Washington bureau--and 98 reporters and editors covering sports (45 of them in suburban sections and editions not under the jurisdiction of the sports editor). The New York Times has 30 foreign correspondents--and 50 reporters and editors in its sports department. Lesser newspapers, with little if any staff in Washington or abroad, routinely have 30 or 40 or more people assigned to sports; almost 20% of the nation’s newspaper reporters are assigned to sports, according to a survey by the School of Communication at the University of Miami.

The Los Angeles Times, Philadelphia Inquirer and Washington Post all devote 15% to 20% of their total non-advertising space to sports. The Boston Globe and Chicago Tribune give sports even more coverage--20% to 25% of non-advertising space.

The New York Times probably budgets proportionately less news space to sports than does any other major paper--about 11%--but that still amounts to an average of 30 columns (the equivalent of five full pages) of sports news and pictures a day. The Boston Globe and Chicago Tribune each average 50, the Los Angeles Times 48 and the Washington Post 43.

Being a sportswriter at the New York Times is “like being Raquel Welch’s elbow,” one of the paper’s sportswriters once said, but given its sophisticated readership, the newspaper should be a leader in covering the serious side of sports. Yet no one on its 50-person sports staff is assigned to that area full time.

“We have to cover 10 teams first,” says sports editor Joe Vecchione. “That takes a lot of manpower. I think the primary job here is we cover games.”

The New York Times does, however, have several reporters who are widely respected for their intelligent, non-traditional approach to sports, and they have occasionally found time to write about broader sports issues--drugs, race and the internationalization of sports, among others. The newspaper also has reporters assigned to cover baseball, football and basketball on a national basis, without responsibility for specific teams, and that enables them, too, to go beyond the playing field and locker room at times.

‘Among Our Better People’

A few other papers, including the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and USA Today, have sportswriters with similar assignments, and the Boston Globe has several sportswriters who spend much of their time on major projects but also do other, more traditional sports stories.

These reporters are “among our better people, and I like to get them in the paper more often than might be the case if they were simply working on long projects that might not come to fruition for months,” says Vincent Doria, sports editor at the Globe.

But daily assignments sometimes interfere with major projects, as Murray Chass of the New York Times knows all too well.

Chass is generally regarded as one of the best reporters on baseball economics, a reporter with excellent sources, and it was Chass who broke the first story on Pete Rose being summoned to meet with then-Baseball Commissioner Peter Ueberroth in February to discuss Rose’s gambling. (Chass also broke Thursday’s story on authorities saying they have betting slips on Cincinnati Reds games bearing Rose’s fingerprints and handwriting.)

Sports Illustrated was already looking into Rose’s gambling when Chass’ first story appeared, and an editor at the weekly magazine recalls telling his reporter, “Well, kiss that story goodby.” He assumed that Chass, working for a daily newspaper, could move far more quickly to develop the Rose story.

Chass was so busy with other assignments, though, that he didn’t really follow up on the Rose story for a month, and it was finally the impending publication of the Sports Illustrated story that prompted the commissioner’s office to publicly announce its investigation of Rose.

That sequence of events shows why sports editors who are committed to covering the off-the-field sports news say the only way to do so properly is to make it a full-time assignment for a top reporter.

Setting Priorities

“It depends on how the paper sets priorities,” says Russ Brown, assistant managing editor for sports at the Pittsburgh Press.

The Press has “only” 29 full-time sports reporters and editors, but one of them is Bill Heltzel, a full-time investigative reporter who says he’s “not really much of a sports fan.”

Heltzel joined the Press sports department last year after 13 years as an investigative, police, transportation and local government reporter in Indiana and Florida. He has spent much of the last seven months examining the horse racing industry in Pennsylvania.

The Dallas Morning News made a similar move in 1986, naming Doug Bedell its investigative sports reporter; Bedell had previously investigated such issues as police brutality, voting rights violations and corrupt charities.

The Dallas newspapers have been among the leaders in investigative sports journalism in the 1980s. The Times Herald set the pace for several years, notably with stories in 1984 and 1985 that led to severe National Collegiate Athletic Assn. sanctions against Southern Methodist University. More recently, the Dallas Morning News exposed irregularities in the athletic program at Texas A&M;, after which the school’s football coach quit.

Newsday in suburban New York has been perhaps the pioneer in investigative sports reporting. The paper assigned an experienced investigative reporter, Manny Topol, to sports full time about a decade ago and now has two full-time investigative sports reporters--Topol and Danny Robbins.

Robbins formerly worked for the Dallas Times Herald, where he won awards for investigative reporting three years in a row from the Associated Press sports editors. Last year, Robbins and Topol teamed to win another such award.

“It’s . . . not hard to win,” Robbins says. “There’s so (little) truly investigative work. . . .”

The Atlanta Constitution is trying to change that. The Constitution has formed a three-man team to do investigative sports reporting full time. These reporters are going to “turn over a whole lot of rocks and see what develops,” Sports Editor Van McKenzie says.

“We have not scratched the surface on drugs in sports . . . college athletics . . . gambling,” McKenzie says. “Basically, a sports section’s very positive, but I think . . . it would be unfair to our readers if we didn’t go on out and expose somewhat the other side of sports. . . .

“Maybe sports departments have stuck their heads in the sand too long.”

The Atlanta team is headed by Chris Mortensen, who has spent most of the last two years writing about two sports agents who were convicted in Chicago earlier this year of racketeering and mail fraud. Mortensen, who previously covered baseball and football games, wrote the first substantive stories on the two agents in 1987, then produced more than 250 additional stories on them before their trial began in March.

Mortensen went to Atlanta from Southern California, where he had been the baseball writer for the South Bay Daily Breeze. Covering games and writing about labor and drug and alcohol problems in the sport, Mortensen developed an interest in investigative sports reporting. He applied for a job at the Los Angeles Times. Bill Dwyre, sports editor at The Times, turned him down because he didn’t think Mortensen was a particularly good writer.

Mortensen then applied for a job in Atlanta and asked Dwyre to give him a recommendation. Dwyre agreed. The Constitution hired Mortensen.

“In retrospect, I wish I’d taken a chance on him myself,” Dwyre now says.

But The Times has not been a leader in investigative journalism, not in its news pages and especially not in its sports pages. With a few notable exceptions, it has not been hard-edged reporting but stylish writing--graceful essays, humorous columns, well-crafted feature stories on personalities, problems and trends in sports--that have given The Times’ sports section its distinctive tone.

Times sports columnists “don’t go after owners, prick the bubbles of the pompous” the way columnists in other cities do, says Larry Merchant, longtime sportswriter and editor and now a commentator for HBO. “Maybe the L.A. Times is too white collar, not enough blue collar.”

Many sports journalists interviewed for this story praised The Times for the quality of its prose and the breadth of its coverage, and the Associated Press sports editors have voted The Times’ sports section one of the 10 best in the country seven years in a row. But critics say the section is too soft.

Several years ago, Dwyre proposed the establishment of a four-person investigative team in sports, but top editors turned him down. Dwyre says he ran into similar resistance several times when he wanted to have a single investigative sports reporter.

Dwyre felt especially unhappy over those decisions last year, when a Los Angeles high school student became the focal point of a University of Kentucky basketball recruiting scandal and the Los Angeles Daily News broke the story.

Several other papers did a “very thorough job” too, Dwyre says. “One of the poorest jobs of reporting in America on a story that had some local interest was done by the Los Angeles Times. I just couldn’t get any of my guys to do anything. I made some bad assignments. I have some of the world’s shyest reporters.”

More recently, in covering the Pete Rose gambling story, The Times has several times had to quote other publications--Sports Illustrated, the Dayton Daily News, the New York Post--on major developments in the case. Just Thursday, The Times’ lead sports story--on betting slips on Cincinnati Reds games allegedly bearing Rose’s fingerprints and handwriting--was based on disclosures made by the New York Times and the Associated Press.

Closer to home, even when it became obvious that the Dodgers were severely overworking pitcher Fernando Valenzuela and risking permanent damage to his arm in recent years, The Times neither wrote tough, probing stories about this shortsighted strategy nor bothered to compare the Dodgers’ abuse of Valenzuela with, say, the Mets’ far more careful use of their young pitching superstar, Dwight Gooden.

Similarly, in 1986 and 1987, when the Dodgers stumbled to consecutive second-division finishes, and again this year, when they have languished in fourth place, The Times’ sports section hasn’t published the kind of aggressive, challenging stories about Dodger management that similar failures routinely elicit from sports sections in Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, New York and other cities.

Kenneth Reich, a veteran Times political writer, did aggressively cover the politics of the 1984 Olympic Games for several years, and he also spent six months covering other political and economic aspects of sports after the Olympics. Reich still covers an occasional sports story--the Raiders’ proposed move to Irwindale, for example--but having lost interest in sports as a full-time job, he now does those stories in the news pages of The Times.

“I’d kill to have him back (in sports),” Dwyre says.

Tom Lutgen of The Times’ editorial library assisted with the research for this story.