No Box, No Coverage
Last November, when the Boston Globe made the disappointing announcement that racing entries and results would no longer be published in the paper’s sports section, sports editor Joe Sullivan tried to soothe readers who protested that “a Sunday box on feature races” would appear throughout the year. Two months later, there’s a small problem with that promise: There are no Sunday boxes on feature races. True, there wasn’t much to report through December. It was a quiet season. Yet, today’s Sunday paper has nothing on yesterday’s San Rafael, in which likely 2005 Juvenile champion and early Kentucky Derby favorite Stevie Wonderboy returned to the scene in what was basically a match race that just happened to be a graded stakes, finishing second. You would think that that race would warrant one of those little boxes Sullivan was talking about, or at least two inches pulled from a wire service story and tucked away in a side column sports news roundup. It didn’t even get that treatment, which begs the question: What races are big enough to earn Globe coverage? Let’s hope the answer proves to be more than the Kentucky Derby.
Related: MSNBC contributor Travis Stone urges fans to act to keep racing in the news: “The fall-out of our unwillingness to act could be devastating. Imagine the Kentucky Derby, going from front cover, to inside page, and then to a minor statistic before being taken off the press completely. The potential exists and it is time to step up. We may have broken slow, but it is too soon to ease ourselves out of this race.”
