The great vacancy

 So Sonny Jurgensen is dead now, and who is left, I ask? Who is left to throw the deep out, the flag and the post, the home run ball to Charley Taylor or Carroll Dale, to Jack Snow or Raymond Berry or Gene Washngton?

All these arms of my youth, gone from this earth now. Sonny, and John Brodie, and Roman Gabriel, and Bart Starr, and Dandy Don, and the greatest of them all, John Unitas. Gone.

Sonny went yesterday, at the full-to-the-top age of 91, and here's the real tragedy: The great vacancy it represents is not my childhood slipping away full life by full life, but that there are so few left to craft a proper chronicle. Who is left, in other words, to tell the tale?

Sonny Jurgensen, you see, spent most of his Hall of Fame career in Washington, D.C., which lends his passing a special poignancy. In the same week he died, after all, billionaire vandal Jeff Bezos eviscerated the proud Washington Post, eliminating 300 jobs. Among them was the entire sports desk, once the home of Shirley Povich and John Feinstein and Dave Kindred and Christine Brennan; of Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon and Tom Boswell and Sally Jenkins.

Institutional memory has rarely experienced such a gory reckoning. And without institutional memory, journalism is nothing but a Wikipedia entry, bloodless and devoid of soul or context. It can tell you that Sonny Jurgensen led the NFL in passing three times and still holds Washington's single-season record for touchdown passes, but it can't tell you what it looked or felt like.

It can't tell you how the city felt about him. It can't describe the way the stadium drew in its breath every time Sonny launched one of his gorgeous parabolas downfield to Taylor or Bobby Mitchell or Jerry Smith. It can't tell you how it felt to actually cover those gorgeous parabolas, or to listen to one of the old-timers describe what it was like.

The suits will toss out suit words like "synergy" and "re-purposing" and "branding," but what they're really talking about giving readers less and selling it as more. They'll farm out their sports coverage to websites like The Athletic (as the New York Times did) and tell the paying customers they're getting MORE STORIES THAN EVER.

Except.

Except the stories will be written by people (or, in the age of AI, perhaps not) who have no connection to the community. Who have no institutional memory. Who'll provide only the context they can find on the web, because it's not about context anymore. It's about "content."

I can't say this any better than a longtime sports journo named Buddy Martin did the other day, when he penned a screed I shared with my Facebook bros. And so I will turn the wheel over to Buddy, who wrote the following:

I spent a lifetime in these trenches -- five sports editorships, five mastheads, five sets of presses humming through the night -- and I'll tell you this: A real sports section is a living, breathing organism. It's the guys and women at 11:45 p.m. arguing over a headline, the copy desk catching a stat on deadline, thde beat writer changing ledes because a kid hit a three-run homer in the bottom of the ninth ...

Sports sections were never just about scores and standings. They were the back fence of the city. You learned who you were as a fan, as a town, by the way your paper told the story of your teams ... It was a covenant. We show up, every day, on deadline, to tell you what happened and why it mattered.

Damn skippy.