Sun-Times Sports Shuffle
The column Hewitt now writes used to belong to Rapoport, who won all sorts of awards for the Sun-Times and then got dumped. Publisher Robert Page and executive editor Ken Towers tired of Rapoport’s voice of reason, and in 1987 they busted him down to feature writer. The Sun-Times already had one gentlemanly sports columnist in Ray Sons, and Page and Towers saw no reason for two. As Towers told us then, they wanted “somebody who’d look at things in a different way and express an opinion that maybe wouldn’t be the type of opinion people would agree with. We want somebody who’s opinionated, very opinionated . . .”
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Towers found his horse’s ass in staff sportswriter Terry Boers. As Boers stepped forward, Rapoport quit, and Brian Hewitt, who’d been a Sun-Times sportswriter since 1976, also quit. Out of solidarity with Rapoport? we asked him last week. “I think if there’s any common thread, it’s that neither of us was terribly thrilled with the leadership at the top,” he said. “Anybody who was there knew there was some sort of madness at the paper at the time. But I’ve got to say, when the Los Angeles Times calls, it’s pretty tough to say no under any circumstances.”
By now, Page and Towers were history. Sam McKeel ran the place and Dennis Britton of the LA Times was the new editor. “It’s a completely different paper from the one I left,” says Hewitt. Nobody knows that better than Terry Boers.
“I have not been anointed,” said Hewitt. He has the column on what Snyder calls an “unofficial interim” basis, which means Hewitt might turn out to be interim and he might not. “We haven’t decided what to do on this,” says Snyder. Hewitt could wind up writing the column for the next 20 years; but as he knows, the Sun-Times has approached and is now interviewing sportswriters from other papers. One possibility, says Snyder, is for the Sun-Times sports section to begin carrying three columnists.
But down it goes. Full of curiosity, we went out to the final home game Sunday, bringing along a Spanish houseguest who doesn’t know much of anything about baseball but had seen the Paul Goldberger elegy in the morning’s New York Times and understood that a great place was vanishing from the earth. We told Paco that Comiskey was just as much a classic as the bullring in Seville.
Now that instant annihilation had been guaranteed to anyone whose blood ran high, a mawkish video unspooled on the scoreboard, inviting us all to get misty and nostalgic. And the players wandered off the field, waving at the crowd. Our friend from Spain did not know baseball but he grasped this. The only manly response was to laugh.
