Summoned to a long-rumored all-staff Zoom meeting in the early hours of the morning, reporters for The Washington Post heard words they had been dreading.
“First, we will be closing the sports department in its current form,” Will Lewis announced.
Lewis, then-chief executive of The Post who has since resigned, announced a long-rumored and dramatic restructuring of The Post at a Feb. 4 Zoom meeting. Lewis said The Post would reduce its editorial staff by 300, a third of the paper’s journalists, and completely eliminate its Sports section to focus on politics coverage.
The news sent a shockwave through the city and journalistic circles, both of whom had cherished the paper’s extraordinary sports coverage for decades.
One of the laid-off sports writers was Gene Wang (CAS ’91), a Washington, D.C. native who attended Georgetown University and covered sports for The Hoya. His 35-year tenure covering a wide array of athletics at the Post began while he was still at Georgetown in 1990. On his final beat, Wang covered college athletics with a specific focus on D.C.-area college football and basketball.
Wang said his love affair with Post Sports began in his youth.
“When I was in school, the first thing we did was run to our doorstep, back when they put The Post right there, and turn to the sports page every single morning,” Wang told The Hoya. “I know it sounds like a cliche, but I’ve heard over and over again from folks disappointed about what’s happening at the sports department — that they learned to read in large part by reading the sports section of the Washington Post.”
“I can say I was one of those people,” he added.
Wang said he was naturally drawn to sports writing by his dual love for athletics and The Post. When he got to Georgetown, Wang said, he started writing for The Hoya right away, jumping headfirst into covering press conferences with titans such as Georgetown men’s basketball coach John Thompson Jr., whose “Hoya Paranoia” spawned from his legendary hostility towards the media.
“I remember the first time I was trying to ask John Thompson a question. It was the most intimidating thing,” Wang said. “He had a reputation of not suffering foolish questions. Obviously, when you’re a student reporter, you don’t have the experience and sometimes you don’t frame the question the way it should be.”
“He would call you out on it,” Wang added. “It wasn’t rude, he would just say, ‘I understand the question. Let’s ask it in a different way.’”
Years later, when Thompson Jr. left coaching and moved to the broadcast booth and Wang was writing for The Post, Wang said the two grew close.
“After John retired and went to our side, we became really, really good friends. He would always ask about my family, and I would always tell him, ‘You know, I was so scared of you,’” Wang said. “He would always say, ‘that made you a better reporter, though, didn’t it?’”
Post Sports became legendary in part because of its coverage of D.C.-area college basketball. In the 1980s, at the height of Georgetown men’s basketball, Michael Wilbon, who now co-hosts ESPN’s “Pardon the Interruption,” covered the Hoyas as a beat reporter while the equally legendary John Feinstein was on the University of Maryland beat.
Wang said Georgetown basketball’s ascendance under Thompson Jr. was huge for D.C., and The Post played a major role covering the team through those years.
“There’s a big connection. John Thompson was a Black man, the first Black coach to win an NCAA title, and in a city that is so important to that community. The Georgetown team became so important in that community, as told through Washington Post stories,” Wang said.
“Georgetown became a national brand, and obviously that’s what John Thompson built,” Wang added. “But the story was told in many ways through the Washington Post, and so it was a very symbiotic relationship that I was glad to be a part of as a reader growing up, and then eventually, maybe in some small way, covering the team in the 90s after I started at The Post.”
When the Hoyas won the national championship in 1984, The Post ran, at the very top of its front page, the declaration of victory. The Metro section, which also saw substantial cuts recently, led off with the celebrations on M Street, declaring it was “The Hoyas’ Night to Howl,” while Sports dedicated its top spot to the Hoyas.
One of Wang’s first assignments for The Post was at the Kenner Summer League in McDonough Arena in the summer of 1994, where he said he and the Georgetown faithful watched Allen Iverson play for the first time, before his freshman season.
“It had to have been a fire code violation. There had to have been thousands of people there, more than any game that’s ever been played there,” Wang told The Hoya. “You could tell from right away that this guy was going to be just something extra special that we’ve never seen.”
When Wang was hired at The Post’s sports section, it had a reporter assigned to each major local university. Over time the section was cut down until Wang had to cover D.C. college athletics virtually alone.
Wang said that although The Post had been downsizing its sports coverage for years, the idea that the entire section could be shut down was unfathomable.
“We’d been hearing rumors for months. I thought, ‘These are just rumors from other reports, there’s no way they could dismantle an entire section that has meant so much to the city,’” Wang said. “We were incredulous that that circumstance could even exist, and then when it happens, your jaw obviously hits the table.”
Wang said he was in shock for days after being laid off.
“The first few days for me were surreal,” Wang said. “You thought it was a dream that you would wake up from, but I never woke up.”
Although Wang does not know what he will do next, he said he would support a new online platform where former Post sports writers could contribute and keep the tradition of D.C. sports coverage alive.
“I’d love to see a platform where Post writers, especially, who have some connection to DC, can write and continue digitally,” Wang told The Hoya. “There might be some investors, from what I understand, who might want to get a group of us together and see what comes of it.”
“It’s very obviously still in the very early stages. I don’t know anything concrete yet, but I know there are a lot of people who value sports journalism in D.C. and would want to continue on in some way.”
Wang said The Post’s sports coverage is often intertwined with how people celebrate and remember moments in D.C. sports history, and that without a Post front page to commemorate these moments, something is missing.
“I would ask the question, ‘If we have another championship in the city, what are you going to hold up to celebrate?”’ Wang said. “There’s no hard copy of the Post to be able to frame.”
