There was a time when reading the Los Angeles Times sports section was the highlight of my day, and while that is an accurate barometer of the sorry state of my life, I wasn’t the only one. There were legendary writers, namely Jim Murray (he won the fuckin’ Pulitzer Prize for chrissakes) and Scott Ostler and guys like Rick Reilly and Mike Penner and John Hall who wrote daily poetry about the magical nuances of sports and the people, places and intrigue that turn athletics contests into some of life’s most precious memories.

Those days are long past. The Times hasn’t had a sports columnist worth reading in well over a decade and, well, it’s not exactly breaking news that the great American sports section is mostly dead (the Sunday New York Times often has great sports stories that go wonderfully beyond the boxscore, but they only have a standalone sports section twice a week).

So the sportswriting is very average, just a bunch of uninspired beat writers, but the real reason you can get through the LA Times sports section in record time is because there’s nothing there … no interesting departments, no funny bits, almost every page is skippable. There used to be so much more creativity. For example, for years they had an offbeat feature called The Bottom Ten, in which they’d rank the worst teams in college football and then discuss the details about who they were gonna lose to next. Brilliant, engaging and extinct.

Here’s how most sports fans now drive through the Times sports section (using this past Sunday’s sports page as an example):

Page 1:
-Story on NFL playoffs (slow down)
-Story about boxing (skip), the general population hasn’t been interested in boxing since Cassius Clay fought in the Rome Olympics
-Story about Rams (speed up or skip), if anyone gave a fuck about the Rams they wouldn’t have been gone for a quarter century. The sports section was ten times better without an L.A. NFL team, now half the fuckin’ sports section is dedicated to NFL teams no one gives a rip about
Page 2:
-TV sports schedule (slow down), maybe the most consistently good thing in the sports
page and it’s just a list
-Clippers game story (skip), you’re kidding, right?
-NBA column (skip), the NBA doesn’t require this kind of scientific analysis … guys wear shorts, guys dunk
Page 3:
-All about the NBA, standings, etc. (skip), I understand that I’m not the target demographic for basketball anymore, but really, I don’t actually know a soul who cares about the NBA
Page 4:
-NFL playoff game review/preview (slow down)
-Soccer column (skip), it’s hard to imagine the justification for having this content in an American newspaper
Page 5 & 6:
-Rams playoff game coverage (skip), a waste of perfectly good recycled newsprint
Page 7:
-NFL playoff game review/preview (slow down); (full stop) at the mention of Tom Brady (he’s so cute); the Times NFL expert predicts the Chargers will beat the Patriots by a touchdown
Page 8:
-A little hockey (slow down), glance at the standings
-Australian Open preview (slow down), think about cute female tennis players from Russia
Page 9:
-The Day in Sports, newswire reports from around the sports world (slow down), look for names you might recognize from football, baseball and maybe Olympic sports
-5,000 college basketball scores (skip)
-Random scores and schedules from sports that are only relevant in foreign countries (skip)
-Golf scores (skip), but it is sometimes fun to review the women’s golf scores to see if you can find a name that isn’t Korean
-Horse race entries & results (skip), this used to be the best thing in the sports section but there’s no horse handicapping in the Times anymore, it’s an embarrassment
Page 10:
-Boxing stories continued (skip)
Page 11:
-College basketball roundup (skip), following college hoops in March, is madness, following college hoops in January is stupid
Page 12:
-Local college basketball game coverage (skip), you’d be better off spending your time reading the phone book

In summary, you pick up the Sunday sports page and start turning the pages … You slow down three or four times but pretty much just continually turn the pages with your foot on the gas. There’s no way you need to spend more than one minute (sixty seconds running time) … It’s sad, but you won’t miss anything lots of days if you just go straight to the comics.

Of course, the time you save not reading the sports page can be put to other practical uses, but I ask you, what can be a better use of a young boys time than soaking up stories about our great games and our great athletes and our great sports culture? It used to be as easy as picking up the Los Angeles Times … not anymore.

Photo credit: José Pestana on VisualHunt.com / CC BY-NC-SA