Competitive Sports
So here’s some good news. The sports sections of the Sun-Times and Tribune are now entering a still more perfervid era of competition, driven by a force that over time might be more lethal than hatred: friendship.
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These are two guys who’ve always been there for each other. When Sherwa felt edgy about leaving LA, where he was the Times’s deputy sports editor, Jaffe told him Chicago was a great sports town; LA didn’t compare. Now they can romp around together like Romulus and Remus. Bill Adee, who runs Sun-Times sports day-to-day under Jaffe, told me, “We had a staff meeting last week to explain to everybody how intense this rivalry is going to get. Because it’s personal. Rick will be a maniac for the foreseeable future. The rivalry is already intense, and it will get ten notches higher.”
What does he expect from Sherwa? “I think he’s going to bring a different philosophy than the Tribune sports pages are used to. He might give it a harder edge than they’re used to. One of the things the Sun-Times sports section has done really well is that we’re real aggressive. In general they’ve done softer feature-type stuff.”
Investigations? He said he had a three-person team back in Los Angeles, and unfortunately “I had to leave right in the middle of a lot of controversy with the USC football team and sports agents.
I don’t know where the city gets off telling an organization they must hire an individual because he has a particular sexual orientation,” Arnie Metanky told me. I was startled by this rare lapse in Metanky’s normally deep and subtle powers of reasoning, but I said nothing. He’d arrived at his convictions, and he could have them.
Knowing how predictably some people react when confronted with raving homophobia, I guessed that Matanky’s forthright declaration had not gone unnoticed. For sure, he said. “There’s always a reaction when you criticize homosexuals. There’s a very well organized phone bank that makes nuisance calls.” A lot of the callers demanded that their subscriptions be canceled, Matanky said. This was strictly harassment, he deduced, because (1) they wouldn’t give their names, and (2) he didn’t have any homosexual subscribers to begin with. He’d lost any he had a couple of years ago when the Near North News questioned the need to place quite so much stress on AIDS research.
