When Your Beat Moves Out of Town   

Amid the snow, sleet and darkness of March 28, 1984, Vito Stellino, a reporter for Baltimore's Sun, watched as a fleet of Mayflower moving vans trucked away his beat, right down to the last piece of training equipment. It was bad enough that the Baltimore Colts were skipping out to play NFL football in Indianapolis and that the locals were losing their beloved Sunday afternoon heroes, but Stellino remembers that day most as the day he lost a locker room full of sources.

It is the unique burden of the sports journalist. The police reporter will always have cops to badger for quotes and the political reporter will always have City Hall, but in these days of high stakes wheeling and dealing in professional sports, the sports reporter may not necessarily always have a local team to cover.

"It's musical chairs, and nobody knows where the music stops," says Bud Shaw, sports columnist for Cleveland's Plain Dealer, a newspaper that stands to lose the mainstay of its pro football coverage when the Browns move to Baltimore next fall.

Owners of professional sports franchises--always in search of the next sweet stadium deal--have been filling out change of address forms for about a century now, so it is hardly uncommon for a sports reporter to find himself beatless. But recent months give pause to even those sports reporters who readily accept the fact that a pro sports team is a transient luxury.

The NFL's Raiders and Rams fled Los Angeles. The Cleveland Browns have signed a deal to play in a new city, and the Houston Oilers have tentatively signed a deal to do the same. At least five others (the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Arizona Cardinals, Seattle Seahawks, Cincinnati Bengals and Chicago Bears) have made noises about looking for greener turf.

Aside from the obvious disappointment of disillusioned fans, team flight leaves behind charged-up sports editors and writers scrambling to cover the loss--often while they're still trying to come to grips with it themselves.

The Houston Oilers' probable move to Nashville next season will rip the heart out of the Houston Chronicle's fall coverage, but Deputy Sports Editor Reid Laymance says the paper is rising to the challenge of refocusing its sports section. "Hopefully, we're going to be able to take the pulse of what people are interested in and be doing the games they want to see," he says, adding that the loss nevertheless will be difficult. "As much as we try to be objective about covering things, it hurts a little bit not to have an NFL team."

Cleveland's Shaw says the most difficult part of adjusting to post-home team coverage is getting excited about sports stories that might never have seen print during the home team's reign. "If you're in a city with major league teams and those major league teams are successful, I think it sort of uplifts the spirits of the people that are following the team," he says, "and also the people who are covering them."

Jack Gibbons, assistant managing editor for sports at Baltimore's Sun, now on the other side of Shaw's dilemma, says that the promise of an NFL franchise returning to Baltimore undeniably has provided a boost. But Gibbons says that being on the receiving end of a team's relocation has its own set of problems. The Sun has been careful not to gloat about the Browns' relocation, he says, and the tempered coverage that has resulted has irked many readers unwilling to feel guilty over Browns owner Art Modell's abandonment of Cleveland.

Meanwhile in Cleveland, where the loss of the Browns has driven the most hardcore mutts of the infamous "Dawg Pound" to tears, Plain Dealer Sports Editor Roy Hewitt says his staff hasn't even had time to experience the story from an emotional standpoint. "Emotions haven't played into it," Hewitt says. "It's just been a race to cover all the aspects of the story."

Try as they might, sportswriters can't always immunize themselves from the rage, sorrow and betrayal experienced by spurned fans. Shaw admits to feeling angry on behalf of Cleveland Browns supporters, and Houston Chronicle reporter John McClain, who covered the Oilers for 17 years, described what will probably be the Oilers' final home game at the Astrodome last December as funereal. Stellino, who still vividly remembers the night pro football escaped Baltimore, says that at the time the soon-to-be broken hearts of local fans weighed most heavily on his mind. "Being a part of the community," he says, "you could sense what this team meant to them."

In what should be heartening news to staffers at papers soon to be faced with fleeing franchises, Los Angeles Times Sports Editor Bill Dwyre says a season without home teams isn't necessarily such a bad thing. Though newspaper-wide cutbacks at the Times in 1995 led to six layoffs in the sports department, Dwyre says none came as a result of the Raiders' and Rams' departures, which left the city NFL-free.

Dwyre says that in his estimation NFL coverage in the sports section actually improved last season. "In some ways you have a little more freedom to do good stories," Dwyre says, "because you're not tied to stories on the Rams' right guard having a sore knee."

In the end, though, fans are fans, and journalists are journalists--journalists with jobs to do. As Hewitt sees it, the fate of the Browns won't make or break his sports pages. "There's either going to be a team to cover here next year, or there's going to be the ongoing story of the pursuit of a team to cover," he says. "There'll be a news story to cover."