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Ny daily news lupica9/16/2023 ![]() What I had were sports segments on the six o’clock news (I was partial to CBS’s Warner Wolf, whose exclamations of “swish!” during basketball recaps passed for genuine excitement) and sportstalk radio, a still-nascent medium with a decidedly blue-collar feel. The Internet, with its microblogs and highlight gifs, was still a full decade away. My parents weren’t cable subscribers, so there was no ESPN, no groaning Chris Berman puns. That, and treating people well is always a good thing.As a sports-crazed child of 1980s New Jersey, I had relatively few options to extend my mania beyond the games themselves. It's another sign that an era in sports journalism is ending. That's not to say columnists aren't important or don't play a huge role, only that their status within the field seems to be diminishing a bit.Īnd that's the overarching lesson to take from Lupica being laid off. Everyone has an opinion, but not everyone has access to information. They trade in scoops and information and tidbits and nuggets. You may not be fans of their work, but they are the big names. Think of who the stars are in sports journalism now. So when a columnist isn't at a game reporting but instead writing an opinion-based hot take off TV - something Lupica often did - it stands out as being lazy and less valuable than it once was. Now, opinions are less valuable to newspapers because of blogs and social media. They were the superstars.ĭigital media is changing that. Lupica represents the era when columnists were kings, the stars of the paper, the ones in ads on the sides of busses. It's one of my pet theories that digital and social media is changing the hierarchy of sports journalists. In a way, too, Lupica being laid off is symbolic of the evolution of newspaper sports journalism. overshadowed what should be a legacy as one of the all-time greats. Who he was as a person - the legendary snit fits over his press-row seat, etc. That's the sad thing about the end of Lupica's career. But it came accompanied by a, “Look, I know he’s a dick, but …” conditional. I’ve been doing this a long time, and I think-off the top of my head-I’ve met one colleague who sorta kinda liked Lupica. Blowing off young writers seeking help, wiping out co-workers who merely tiptoe on his turf, ignoring a friendly “Hello” from the neighboring scribe in the press box. Lupica has treated so many so terribly for so long. He has spent a v-e-r-y long time acting as one of the biggest assholes in sports media. Jeff Pearlman addressed this on his blog: Lupica is legendary as one of the worst people in sports journalism. There is how you are as a person, how you treat people. Lupica, in his prime, was a first-ballot hall of fame columnist.īut there's more to life than a collection of columns. It’s my opinion that no one who ever lived wrote a sports column better than Lupica did from, say, 1979-89. Read the stuff he did in his prime at the Daily News in the ’80s it absolutely redefined the form. Read the stuff he was writing as a 23-year-old kid at the Post it’s staggering. And I’ll tell you something: if you get a rainy day, you should go to the library, pick up a few rolls of microfilm, and read the stuff he was doing in the ’70s and the ’80s. You better believe I was one of those acolytes. That’s how the job is supposed to be done. Let’s be very clear about something: there is an entire generation of sports columnists working in the United States, dozens and dozens of them, between the ages of 30 and 50 who grew up reading Lupica and realizing: that’s what I want to do. Mike Vaccaro, my friend and mentor and competitor with Lupica in New York, said as much in an interview with The Big Lead many years ago: Lupica's been a punching bag in sports blog culture for so long it's hard to remember how good he was, how revolutionary he was. On Wednesday, news broke that he's among the employees of the New York Daily News to be laid-off in the latest round of cost-cutting measures newspapers have employed over the past decade. Over the years, Lupica became kind of a punchline, a symbol of the outdated practice and ego of a certain kind of sports columnist. For a kid who dreamed of nothing other than working in New York City sports media when I grew up, Lupica was the guy. He seemed to personify New York City sports media. He was quick-talking, quick-witted, acerbic before I knew what that word meant. Lupica was one of the regular guests on The Sports Reporters on ESPN on Sunday mornings. For many years growing up, I wanted to be Mike Lupica. ![]()
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