There were payoffs for the boys, for sure—trips to spring training, NBA All-Star weekends, and a natural connection to the iconic subjects of schoolboy conversation, from Michael Jordan to Derek Jeter to Eli Manning. On long Olympic trips to Europe and beyond in the years just before video conferencing, there were AOL chat-room connections with their classrooms from their sportswriter dad. But the work demands were inevitably expressed in a variety of less-flattering personality tics. Before I knew it, I became my column, test-driving ideas with anyone willing to listen, dropping lines like a comedian prowling for a laugh backstage before facing a tough crowd. “Good one, Dad,” Alex, my elder son, would smirk when I rehearsed on family time. “Now I don’t have to read the paper tomorrow.”
It only got worse in the age of social media and the encouraged interaction with readers that was often unpleasant but also, I discovered, somewhat addictive. And as much as I bitched about those who didn’t get it, worse was awakening the morning after a column was posted online with no reactions to it at all. Inevitably, the column became a reliable measure of not only achievement but also relevance. Churning out three and sometimes four a week could be exhausting, but at the same time, I only once came close to bailing on the column, briefly mulling a move to the Metro desk after the 2002 Winter Olympics. Three weeks in a Salt Lake City Holiday Inn was enough to make anyone at least briefly consider career recalibration. Ultimately, as with most of my colleagues at the Times and elsewhere, I viewed the column as a lifetime appointment, like a seat on the Supreme Court—at least until the spring of 2009, when my editors summoned me to inform me otherwise.
I had sensed in the previous months that something was brewing at the Times in relation to the sports column. Dave Anderson had retired. Selena Roberts had left to join Sports Illustrated. Neither had been replaced. At the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, the Sports of the Times column—written by me or by George Vecsey—seemed to be routinely buried on the website. And I had seen accomplished columnists at other papers relieved of their status, and in some cases their jobs. Still, how could I not take it personally when Tom Jolly, the sports editor, sat me down and said that I didn’t seem enthusiastic about the column in the way I had been in previous years, and perhaps it was time for a change. It was also soon clear that this was no suggestion. I was stunned, bewildered, crushed. It felt like a thief had broken into my house in the middle of the night and made off with not only my laptop, but my identity. Hadn’t I devoted myself enough? Sacrificed enough time on the road? Taken on the most challenging deadlines, year after year? My instinct was survivalist—I pushed back at the assertion that I was no longer “enthusiastic” enough.
As if my wounded pride was not enough, worse was the sudden specter of dramatic change—writing for the paper’s features sections—in a spiraling economy and in a newspaper industry herding writers and editors like so many sheep to slaughter. I was fifty-six, with one son finishing his freshman year of college and another in high school. I convinced myself that I was being set up to fail.
Michelle didn’t disagree with my belief that top editors at the Times beyond Jolly—none of them the same people who had hired and promoted me—had likely come to view my work, or at least my role at the newspaper, differently. In her experience in dealing with corporate hierarchies, she recognized that no removal of an employee with a high-profile position like the one I’d had for fifteen years would fail to have the stamp of approval from the very top—in this case, the masthead. Having been left with five kids and no sustainable means of support, she was the last person to minimize my fears of being able to pay the bills. But as an expert on corporate strategy when it came to personnel maneuverings, she wasn’t quite ready to indulge me on the prospect of imminent dismissal and financial ruin. More likely, she said, the Times was testing me—how flexible could I be? Was I a team player? Would I continue working hard even after the loss of the column?
We sipped wine in her living room, where she reminded me of other work crises and self-imposed panics I’d survived. In 2001, I had written a book about Beth and her friends having taken up soccer for the first time as adults. What had begun as an upbeat women’s-empowerment project about a spirited band of Montclair moms discovering the joys and challenges of team sports had taken a dramatic narrative turn when the group’s organizer left her husband for a young English soccer trainer. By then, I had developed a pretty thick skin when the well-paid professionals I covered objected to a column I had written. But these women were not used to such detailed public scrutiny. They
