It’s the end of May, which means the period of time sports editors dread most, especially sports editors who don’t work in major cities. High school spring sports have ended. Newspapers that have colleges nearby are seeing those sports draw to close as well.

In a few weeks even those sports will have ended their seasons, leaving sports editors scrounging around for local sports to fill their sports sections.

I began my newspaper career in January 1982, when Dispatch sports editor David Putnam hired me to join his three-person staff. In that sense, all that I have achieved in the profession is David Putnam’s fault.

From that point on, and for the next 23 years, I worked exclusively as a sports writer and sports editor, a journey that took me from Columbus to Biloxi to Sonoma County to San Francisco to Phoenix.

It was in Phoenix that I transitioned from sports editor to news columnist in 2005, mainly because I got tired of interviewing naked people who always gave 110%, gave God the credit, played it one game at time and insisted that there is no “i” in “team.”

Newspaper sports editors in major cities never run out of local sports to cover because they have major-league baseball to bridge the end of basketball in the spring and the beginning of football in the late summer. Running out of things to cover never happens in San Francisco and Phoenix, both of which not only have all four major sports, but college sports, professional basketball, horse racing, soccer, arena football, etc.

That was not the case in Biloxi, where I took over as sports editor at The Sun Herald in 1989. When high school sports ended in the spring, it meant two to three months of looking for something, anything to put in the paper. Sooner or later you run out of ideas, so if somebody, anybody, is out there doing something that looks suspiciously like sports, a small-town sports editor is interested.

In Biloxi, there were a few fishing tournaments that we could report on. We treated them like they were the Super Bowl. Beyond that, though, we were pretty much confined to whatever city youth sports were going on, primarily baseball. This was the era before travel team baseball, softball or soccer.

At any given 6-and-under baseball game, the audience consisted of parents and grandparents and, to be honest, I think even some of them weren’t particularly interested in the game itself. It’s not hard to understand, either.

Six-and-Under baseball is something that only faintly resembles actual baseball. The players can’t catch, throw or hit, nor do they have a grasp of even the most basic rules. Almost every inning, a position player is missing because he had to go to the bathroom. Outfielders, being so far removed from the action, quickly deteriorate into a catatonic state, so that when a ball actually made it out of the infield, it went largely unnoticed by the outfielders.

The best offensive strategy is for the batter to begin running when the ball is in play and continue around the bases, in the proper order, until he is back at home plate, thus scoring a run. The prospects of the fielders’ actually making a play to retire a runner generally favored the batter who kept running. Because once a ball is stopped, there is simply no way to predict where it will then be thrown or whether it will actually be caught in the event it is accidentally thrown to another fielder.

This accounts for scores like those you see in football games — 21-17 or 17-10. A full inning of eight-year-old baseball could go an hour or more.

None of that matters to the sports editor. It’s a photo and a few paragraphs. Four of five games could fill up a sports section.

Personally, there was no sports-like activity of dubious quality I would turn down. We covered co-ed kickball, country club golf tournaments, dart tournaments and devoted space even to the Saturday night wrestling matches, with the results conveniently provided to us on Friday.

What I found was that the more obscure the sport, the more passionate were its participants.

They not only had the gall to request coverage, but to complain about it. Ingrates.

The primary ambition of any small-town newspaper sportswriter is to move on to work for a big city newspaper, not so much for more money or prestige, but because you can reasonably be assured your days of covering kickball and 8–year-old baseball were over.

That’s a powerful incentive.

So if you know a small-town sports editor, be kind to them in June and July. It’s a grim time of the year.

Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].

Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].

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