Texas Monthly’s Gary Cartwright caught my eye recently with this op-ed in which he bemoans the decline of sports writing in Texas.
I mean really. Can anyone who regularly reads the sports pages of Texas newspapers make a good faith argument against the notion that the current slate of Texas newspaper sportswriters cannot hold a candle to Dan Jenkins and his contemporaries?
Enter the Chronicle’s lead sports columnist, Richard Justice.
Justice — whose shoddy reporting, vapid analysis and bizarre blog comment attacks have been a frequent topic here for years — essentially proves Cartwright’s point about the demise of Texas sportswriting with this snarling and petty reply to Cartwright’s op-ed.
An old saying in India is that "sarcasm is the last weapon of the defeated wit."
Justice is living proof of the truth of that adage.
Thanks for the links, Tom.
The op-ed by Cartwright was thoughtful, insightful, and spot on.
The response by Justice seemed to have the tenor of a 3rd grader responding to an insult by saying, “Oh yeah?”.
Kind of like what it would have been like to watch William Buckley, Jr debate Nancy Pelosi…..
BTW, one of my favorite quotes from W F B seems appropriate for this discussion:
“I won’t insult your intelligence by suggesting that you really believe what you just said.”
jtb
I have no dog in this fight, and would be the first to say that Mr. Justice could not write cat if you spotted him a c and a t.
However, to say “advantage Cartwright” after reading the very serious charges Mr. Justice leveled at his predecessors is hard for me to understand. He is accusing Cartwright and his ilk of making up quotes, accepting gifts from sources, and flat-out fabricating stories about sporting events they did not even witness. Wow!
It sounds to me like both sides have a point here: the new generation is boring and colorless, while the old generation was ethically challenged and prone to romanticize. I suspect both sides are right in their claims.