George Solomon

Sports editors are judged by whom they hire, and by that measure George Solomon's record at The Washington Post is hard to argue with. Michael Wilbon, Tony Kornheiser, Norman Chad, Rachel Nichols and Ric Bucher all worked in his section before becoming familiar faces and voices at ESPN. A sports editor who feeds one network that many people has either good judgement or good luck, and twenty-eight years is too long a run for luck.

The Post sports section under Solomon had a particular character: it took the games seriously and the athletes less so, it let columnists argue with each other on the same page, and it hired writers who could be funny without being asked. Kornheiser and Wilbon arguing across a desk on television is a direct descendant of the section Solomon edited. He did not invent the personalities, but he was the editor who gave them room and then kept them from wandering off.

Solomon graduated from the University of Florida in 1963 and joined the Post in 1972. Three years later, in 1975, he became assistant managing editor for sports, the title under which the Post's sports editor operates, and he held it until 2003. That is nearly the entire span from the paper's Watergate years to the internet era, and the sports section he inherited and the one he handed over were different organisms.

The Post already had one great sports voice when Solomon arrived: Shirley Povich, who had been writing for the paper since the 1920s and would keep writing until his death in 1998. Solomon was Povich's editor for the last two decades of that career, which is a delicate job, and after Povich died he edited the collection All Those Mornings at the Post, a selection of his columns spanning the century. It remains the standard way to read Povich, and the editor's hand in it is light, which is the right way.

Wilbon, Kornheiser, Chad, Nichols, Bucher. One sports desk supplied them all.

The Red Smith Award came in 2003, the year he gave up the sports editorship. The A.P.S.E. is a body of sports editors, and when it honors one of its own the members are voting on something they understand from the inside: the assignments, the budgets, the talent kept and the talent lost. Solomon stayed at the paper as an assistant editor after the change and has continued to write a weekly Sunday column.

In 2005 ESPN did something few broadcasters had done and appointed an independent ombudsman to examine its own coverage in public. Solomon was the first, serving from 2005 to 2007. The job was to take viewers' complaints seriously, examine how the network had handled particular stories and broadcasts, and say in print what an old newspaper editor thought of it. Le Anne Schreiber succeeded him on April 1, 2007.

An ombudsman at a newspaper has a long tradition to lean on; at a sports network in 2005 there was none. Solomon had to decide what the role meant while doing it. The columns that resulted were the first sustained public criticism of ESPN written from inside its own building, and they set the terms for the ombudsmen who followed.

It was a curious assignment for a man whose former staff populated the network's studios, and the family connection ran further: his son Aaron Solomon produces the ESPN program Around the Horn. Solomon handled the awkwardness the way an old newspaper editor would, by writing plainly and not pretending the ties did not exist.

Since 2003 Solomon has taught sports journalism at the University of Maryland, College Park, the same year he left the sports editor's desk and received the A.P.S.E. award. Students at Maryland have therefore been learning the craft from someone who spent three decades deciding what a serious newspaper's sports section should look like, and who then spent two more years grading a television network on the same question.

The teaching is the natural third act for a sports editor, and few are as well placed for it. Solomon's students get the view from the desk rather than the press box: how stories are assigned, why some are killed, what a reporter owes a source and what an editor owes a reader. Those are the questions the Red Smith Award is, at bottom, about, and it is fitting that the man honored for answering them at the Post now spends his time putting them to twenty-year-olds.

The public record of his early life is sparse: the reference sources give a birth year of around 1940 and little else before Florida. This page reports what is documented and leaves the rest alone.