The Pulitzer Prizes were announced this week (congrats to all the winners), and once again, a major section of every newspaper was not represented.
There was no sports winner. Because there is no Pulitzer Prize for sports journalism.
There have only been two Pulitzer's awarded to sports reporters in the 2000s - George Dorfmann won for his expose of academic fraud at the University of Minneapolis, and John Branch won for his feature on skiers killed in an avalanche. That's it.
Writing at Poynter, Ed Sherman calls this "a snub." And he quotes Frank Deford, a long-time advocate of a sports Pulitzer:
“Hey, I love political cartoonists. But how many of them are there left? What? Two dozen? And how many newspaper sportswriters are there? Thousands. And for them, the Pulitzer people deign to give out one to a guy at the New York Times every generation or so.”
But I tend to think there's no real need for a sports pulitzer. What would be eliglble? Game stories? Columns? Features? Would we be judging a column off the Final Four vs. an investigative piece? Would, say, Sara Ganim's coverage of the Jerry Sandusky scandal be considered for a news or sports pulitzer?
I tend to agree with George Vecsey, a colleague of one of three sports columnists to win a Pulitzer (Dave Anderson). In his memoir "A Year in the Sun," Vecsey writes:
“I feel strongly that a sports Pulitzer would, in the very short run, tend to reward the regulars, the old war-horses. Pulitzers ought to be given for special efforts, the exceptional series.”