The Republican president brought down by a leftist newspaper once said the only thing worth reading in it was Shirley Povich.
Povich, born in Bar Harbor, Maine, was the legendary sports writer of The Washington Post.
Now that the paper has abolished its sports coverage as part of a large swath of layoffs, the few Republicans who once secretly scanned its pages won’t have much reason to do so.
Povich’s column established the paper’s reputation as a must-read for sports fans, even, yes, Republicans.
He spent his entire career 1923 – 1988 with The Washington Post.
Povich’s parents were Jewish immigrants to northeastern Maine from Lithuania.
Having grown up in coastal Bar Harbor, far from a major league team, the first baseball game he ever saw was a game for which he wrote the story.
Povich joined the Post as a reporter in 1923 during his second year as a Georgetown University student, and in 1925 was named sports editor.
In 1933, he became a sports columnist. He was the sports editor for the Post for forty-one years.
Then-Vice President Richard Nixon once told Post publisher Phil Graham: “Shirley Povich is the only reason I read your newspaper.”
The Post’s coverage of Nixon’s presidential “Watergate” scandal, overseen by successor-publisher Katharine Graham, resulted in his resignation from the presidency in 1974.
Axios reports that the loss of paper’s Povich-legacy sports coverage comes amid a lessening of major outlets covering athletics in the new social-media age.
Judging from its reported financial troubles, Republicans may not have the Post to kick around much longer, to use a variation of a famous Nixon line.
