The sports section is no longer simply fun reading but increasingly mirrors the rest of the newspaper, two sports columnists and Medill alumni said Monday.

Christine Brennan (BSJ80, MSJ81) and Michael Wilbon (BSJ80) appeared at Fisk Auditorium as part of the Crain Lecture Series for a discussion with Dean Ken Bode, faculty, students and community members.

"You can't avoid sports. They're part of our culture," said Brennan, USA Today columnist and commentator for ABC News, Lifetime Television and National Public Radio. Although stories about games and teams may still predominate sports sections' content, she said, "It's also contract negotiations and arrests."

"If you can't figure out salary caps, you're in trouble," added Wilbon, columnist for The Washington Post.

Events like the Women's World Cup show the need for sports editors to broaden coverage beyond newspapers' traditional football-basketball-baseball-hockey focus, Brennan said.

"A lot of our sports editors are looking to an old-time audience," she said. "We're making a huge mistake -- sports is the gateway" to getting young people in the habit of reading a newspaper.

The Women's World Cup "may very well be the last newspaper-driven sports story ever," Brennan added. "There was no pre-game show. There was no special section. It was the minivan revolution."

"A 14-year-old girl might not read about the Bears, but she might read about Mia Hamm," Wilbon agreed. He added later: "The men who run sports sections . . . are some hard-headed, not-as-bright-as-they-think-they-are, somebodies. They don't give a damn."

To attract readers and viewers, many columnists and commentators instead turn to shrillness, Wilbon said.

"There's still a lot of attitude without journalism," he said. "There's a lot of screaming." When people ask him how to become a columnist, he answers, "Be a reporter for 10 years." That way, "There's a reason to care why you think something."

Wilbon once got an offer from The Chicago Tribune but turned it down because, he said, the tone of coverage in Chicago bothered him.

"It's never introspective. There's no discussion. It's all 'me, me, me, me, me,' all the time," he said. "There's major money to be paid for going, 'me, me, me, me, me.' It's show business. But at some point, there'd better be some underpinnings."

Brennan said too many of her colleagues shy away from asking tough questions of athletes. "I still think we have a lot of sycophants who like the free meals and the golf shirts," she said.

When Bode asked about the recent Jim Gray-Pete Rose confrontation, however, Brennan and Wilbon agreed that occasionally sports journalists go too far. "Pete Rose is a bad guy on a lot of levels. Jim Gray is a smug guy on a lot of levels. So here you have two guys who deserve one another," Wilbon said, as the audience erupted in laughter.

A student asked about how to avoid the repetitive, mindless jargon that many athletes and coaches seem to spew out in every postgame press conference.

" 'We play them one game at a time.' No sh*t," Wilbon said. "The real stuff is said when the television cameras are turned off."

Brennan said that, as columnist, she and Wilbon have the luxury of ignoring bad quotes. "But frankly, if you're writing the game story, you have to explain things," she said.

Another student asked Brennan, who was the first president of the Association for Women in Sports Media, about the barriers facing women in the field.

Although more women should be editors and columnists, "I don't think there are barriers," said Brennan, who made similar comments in the Summer 1999 issue of The Medillian. "It will probably never be 50-50," given that more men than women seem interested in sports. "But it will improve."

They started at the Post and the Miami Herald, respectively, but Wilbon and Brennan said most students interested in sports should expect to start in smaller towns, probably covering high schools.

"Find joy in what you're doing," Brennan advised them. "If it's covering preps in Jonesboro, Ark., love it. You're not going to be there forever."

Wilbon said the best way to get started in any beat is to cover it at a lower level. That way, you meet the people who make it big later and have an established relationship with them. His first beat was covering Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) college basketball, where he got to know Charles Barkley and Michael Jordan.

Brennan and Wilbon recalled their student days, when everyone else seemed so confident and they felt so out of place and inadequate.

They agreed that the Medill "F," a policy under which students receive a failing grade for misspelling a name or stating a fact incorrectly, was a great motivator.

"I don't think fear is bad. I think fear is good," Brennan said. "There's nothing more important than getting it right."

"It seemed like the cruelest thing in the world then, but I'm happy to say I haven't misspelled a name in 19 years," Wilbon said. "I sometimes bolt out of bed at 2 a.m. wanting to re-check" a name he thinks he might have misspelled.