Codger’s Column: The Toy Department

When Codger was 19 years old, he answered a classified ad in the New York Times for editorial assistant. He needed a summer job.

The job turned out to be copy boy in the Times sports department. He hated the job, which was sharpening pencils, filling paste pots and fetching coffee for the mostly dyspeptic bullies who ran the late shift, his shift, from 6 p.m. to 2 a.m.

But he loved the majesty of the Times, the quirky rhythms of the sports department, the throb of the news flow, and by the time he was made a reporter at 21, he felt as though he had been inducted into a cult dedicated to Truth. The summer job lasted 26 years (in two hitches). Spiritually, he has never quite left, never totally been deprogrammed.

And so last week, when the Times announced the dissolution of its sports department, he was sad and suspicious and bereft of a piece of his life.

There seems to be a lot of feelings of loss lately. The fates are piling it on.  Consider the current attempt to dismantle democracy in America and the growing sense that the Shelter Island so many came to cherish is eroding as surely as its shoreline.

For Codger, while the sports department is far less essential than country or town, its sentimental symbolism is inescapable. He thinks most people have a sports department, a place where they started, where they hope they can always return, if only in dreams.

Codger didn’t come upon Shelter Island until he was in his 30s, with children in tow. He thought it was friendly, sandy and spare, but not as embracing as the lakes and mountains with which he had grown up. He didn’t return until he was in his 50s. The Island hadn’t much changed by then, he thought, but he had, and he soon bought in.

America kept changing, but it only seemed in danger to Codger when he was ducking and covering from Soviet nukes during the Cold War. Except for some scares in the 1950’s, which he was too young to fully understand at the time, he never feared the country would collapse from the inside.  Not yet.

Meanwhile, the sports department was forever, like family or hometown or religion, even though it inhabited a low spot in the Times’ pecking order. It was often referred to as the “toy department.” Sports was the Times’ version of the comics.

Sports figures (along with felons) were not referred to with the honorifics, Mr., Mrs. and Miss. People asked sportswriters what they intended to do when they grew up. It all contributed to the department’s esprit de corps, especially since reporters in other sections were condescending but chronically unhappier.

The Times’ first important sports editor of Codger’s time, Jim Roach, declared the department “The Fair Shake Athletic Club.” That’s about as good as it can ever get.

Sometime before the pandemic, the Times began to cut the space allotted for sports, dropping stand-alone sections, concentrating on European soccer as befit a global newspaper. Codger and his old colleagues grew uneasy. More so, when the Times bought The Athletic, an online prose sweat shop, for half-a-billion dollars, thus outsourcing day to day coverage to non-union reporters and editors scraped off dying local papers.

Now what? The Times claims it will integrate the 40-odd members of its sports staff into other departments, where some will write long feature stories and investigations, while The Athletic’s 400-odd staffers will cover the nation’s pro and university teams, including the local ones. Why was it necessary to revamp sports for something they were supposedly doing all along?

Codger wonders how long he will care about all this, once he sheds his sentimentality, revived these past two weeks by incessant interviews about the dissolution of the sports department with young reporters writing for publications they are afraid will try to replace them with robots. Meanwhile, two unions to which Codger belongs are striking against the movie and television industry.

Is everything coming apart? Possibly.

But here in America and Shelter Island there are elections coming up that Codger believes can hold together what remains. In America, there is hope that people will vote for politicians who will restore and then maintain the freedoms that were taken for granted and then stolen.

On Shelter Island, there is the hope that the next administration will finally deliver on the often cynically offered promises to protect the water supply, help house the local working class, make government more open and responsive and control commercial development.

As for the sports department, most of it may have to live in memory. Although Codger wants to hang on to the dream of the Fair Shake Athletic Club.