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As Sports reporters began other newsroom roles — and, in some cases, roles at The Athletic — Times Insider took a look back at the newsroom’s history. The New York Times Sports has hosted a host of distinguished columnists – including Arthur Daley, Red Smith, Dave Anderson and Selena Roberts – as well as reporters such as Alan Schwarz, whose reporting on the deadly effects of concussions in the National Football League led to the reforms at all levels of the game.
Here are five times Times sportswriters and columnists went the extra mile for a story.
Carve out a unique rhythm
Walter Fletcher joined the Times staff in 1927 soon after graduating from City College of New York, where he was a campus correspondent for The Times and The New York Post. At The Times, Fletcher, always passionate about dogs, turned his interest into a joke: covering the world of dog shows.
Over the course of the more than 40 editions of the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show that he has covered in his more than 60 years of writing for The Times, he has demonstrated a knack for, well, being right, correctly predicting the winner of Best in Show in each of the seven years until his retirement in 1995 (take that, Paul the Octopus).
“He cared about sports and he knew it,” Roger Caras, president of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, told the Times in 2000. “He had a sense of humor. I once called him the Walter Lippmann of the fire hydrant set, and he loved it.”
Red Smith’s search for sideshow stories
Red Smith wrote for the New York Herald Tribune for 21 years and was a national columnist before coming to the Times in 1971, at age 66. So when he took over the Sports column of The Times, he essentially had carte blanche to cover whatever he wanted.
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