Information was sacred to Howie Schwab, the longtime researcher and producer who was laid off by ESPN on Wednesday. "Not knowledge," as the critic Lee Siegel once clarified. "Information." Siegel was writing about Stump the Schwab, the game show that made Schwab an unlikely half-celebrity, but it'll work here as an epitaph for Schwab's career at ESPN. His 26 years in Bristol were spent in service of information, dedicated to the idea of sports as discrete packets of unprocessed data, to be sorted and stored and perhaps later retrieved, or maybe jotted down on a card and hurried over to the SportsCenter desk, where an anchor always knew Schwab was coming by the jangling of coins in his pocket.
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