Unplugged
A woman’s no longer an oddity in the press boxes of America, but the July 14 visit by the Tribune’s sports editor was historic. Down on Comiskey’s greensward the Sox battled Cleveland for first place. Upstairs, the boys found it hard to focus on the game.
We reached Solomon last week just before he vanished in Alaska. What (in God’s name) did you have in mind? we wondered.
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By various accounts Margaret Holt is a cool and distant boss. She’s also (1) a woman (2) from out of town (3) whose last job wasn’t even in sports, and (4) who inherited a staff that had openly campaigned for someone else. Last December editor Howard Tyner brought her in from the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, where she’d run the Palm Beach bureau, to juice up the sports section. She’s doing it.
Snatching the TV set was the most unacceptable act of all. It had sat on the sports desk since time immemorial. “Its role for us was to monitor late games, especially on deadline,” says Witthoeft. “After the game it might be flipped to ESPN.”
“If I’d been her,” he told us, “I would have reacted the exact same way she reacted. With outrage, and a sense she couldn’t tolerate that kind of gesture. It was just something I felt I had to do, and maybe I was stupid for doing it.”
The first report to make its way back to Adee was that Holt had refused the gift. This proved untrue. Remarkably, the TV showed up last Friday perched on the Tribune sports desk. More remarkably, Holt ordered the night crew pizzas. (Not everyone would eat them.) And a bouquet of roses and carnations arrived at the Sun-Times. The note said thanks and was signed “Margaret and the guys.”
“There’s still a game story on the front page virtually every day. But we don’t automatically put it on the front page. And the agate [stats and box scores] has been expanded and reorganized. I’m an agate person. I love to look at agate.”
