Boxing

Late in January, while the Washington Post was gearing up for the Olympics, staffers got an email from managing editor Kimi Yoshino. “As we assess our priorities for 2026,” she wrote, “we have decided not to send a contingent to the Winter Olympics.” A few days later the Post announced that it would send four journalists to Italy after all – down from more than a dozen. That’s four people to cover a two-week event with more than 116 medal competitions. Then at the start of this month, all 45 members of the sports team were told the section was being shut down. “We will be closing the Sports department in its current form,” the Post’s executive editor, Matt Murray, said in a statement afterwards.

It was July 2, 1961. Ernest Hemingway was three weeks shy of his sixty-second birthday. He had been living comfortably in a cabin in Ketchum, Idaho, with his fourth wife, Mary. He liked it there. He liked the hunting and fishing and the clean air. Still he had a plan. That morning he padded to the basement in his pajamas and bathrobe. He unlocked the gun closet. He selected a favorite shotgun, a double-barreled twelve-gauge. He put a shell in each barrel. He put the muzzle of the gun in his mouth. Why pull the trigger now, after so many years of defying death? Eight months earlier he had checked into the Mayo Clinic as “George Saviers,” the name of his elderly doctor in Ketchum.