It's been a bit of a tough go for newspaper readers in the San Francisco Bay Area this past week, not that it necessarily matters to the outside world. Two longtime staples of the sporting palaver industry, Dave Newhouse, most notably of the Oakland Tribune, and Carl Steward of the Bay Area News Group (everything in the East Bay that isn't Oakland, essentially) both passed within a few days of each other. They were regulars on people's porches and laptops and in press boxes across the various area codes for many years, as well as admired colleagues and worthwhile companions. They were worth every drink and meal your author ever had with either of them, even if all we were doing was repenting for envying their work behind their backs. But death being non-negotiable and all, we can only be saddened by their transition to Level Two, because that's the way this game ends for all of us, holding tight to our aces and tens while the reaper sits with quad nines.
There is, however, the other matter of the retirement of longtime Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle columnist Scott Ostler, the announcement of which is being greeted with entirely the wrong sentiment by his colleagues and readers. In other words, none of his admirers get it. At all.
Now Ostler has been at this dodge for most of his adult life, which, given that he just passed his double natural birthday is more than half a century. He has been much lauded in that time, winning the California Sportswriter of the Year award 13 times, or once every four years, give or take; being only 13 behind him in that category, we can only assume this is a good thing, provided there was also cash involved. In short, the guy started out with game, has had game the whole time along, and has game now.
And we completely get his decision to call it a day. You can only care about typing the words "Brock" and "Purdy" so many times. You can only explain that Stephen Curry is actually quite decent at his craft in so many ways before your eyeballs start leaking out your nostrils. Eventually you just run out of ways to compare John Fisher to a malfunctioning septic tank, despite John Fisher doing his level best to help out with that task. At some point, you simply have to transition to ass duty, where you sit on your couch morning to night, if only make sure the couch doesn't make a break for the garage, steal the car, and drive off to Cabo to sit on the beach chainsmoking rum. Few of us get to go out so well, and so it seems ungracious to begrudge Ostler for beating the system before the system beat him.
But that's not the problem here. There's a difference between not begrudging this man his reclining years, and congratulating Ostler for screwing the rest of us. The reaction to his retirement has been irksome in the extreme. His colleagues have fulsomely feted him, praised his skill and wit and achievements to the point of inducing early-onset diabetes, and done everything but credit him with donating his heart to six needy recipients simultaneously. Not once have they considered the notion that this retirement means that he is not going to entertain us any more with that skill or wit. Our porches and screens are now that much less interesting because he can no longer be bothered with the burden of our entertainment and enlightenment, and yet he's being thanked for that very development. This, children, is some mighty bullshit.
Sure, it's easy to say, "But he's earned this, and we should be happy for him." Well, you may not have been paying attention, but we are in the deepest throes of the "Yeah, but what's in it for me?" era, and Ostler's retirement means we have one fewer option to forestall the cavalcade of doomscrolling that is our lives. Happy for him? Screw him. What about us?
Look, it's hard enough to find stuff that's worth reading. There's always Your Favorite Website, of course, where you can get everything you need from bigfoot families coming to grips with the meteor threat and hilarious attempts at jurisprudence in Ohio to heroic tales of escape-artist beetles. There are other writers, bloggers, and podcasters out there who can bring the goods, and there always will be.
But there are also fewer avenues for them to trot out those goods for our bankrupted attention spans, and it is progressively harder to find them than it was before Jeff Bezos turned the Washington Post into a shopper. You find something you like, you want to be able to find it again. The industry may be dying, but it's dying from the top down, not the bottom up. There will always be talent; there are new places starting up to replace all the old ones currently steering themselves into the mountain, and the trick comes in finding the ways to properly support them all at a time when the traditional support mechanisms are opting out.
Still, Ostler bailing on the gig before we're ready to stop reading him is not helpful to us at all, and applauding him for bailing is at best counterintuitive. Why would a sensible person be happy that something enjoyable is no longer available just because the provider of that happiness is trying to master the art of Irish coffee for breakfast? The answer to that is, a sensible person wouldn't. And no, reading old Ostler columns isn't the same, for the same reason that watching a game three days later isn't the same as watching it live. Nothing has murdered more good times than the cautionary words "Spoiler alert." Tasty leftovers are still leftovers.
In other words, we're getting rogered on this retirement deal, and yet we're acting like we just won a lottery that we didn't enter. Wise up, sheeple. This is not good news for the only people who truly matter: Us.
But rather than lament our lousy fortune, let's try to be better about this. So congratulations to Scott Ostler and his soon-to-be long-suffering wife Kathy. May your retirement bring all the joy and rewards you deserve for your years of service to the rest of us. There. You done now? Got it off your chest, you selfish bastard? Good. Now, get your bony ass back to work, and don't pull this I'm-totally-fulfilled crap again. We'll tell you when you're done, not the other way around.
