There are a lot of complaints about journalism these days, but one of the problems with the profession is also one of the less obvious: no journalists are athletes anymore.

Jack Kerouac was a high school football star. Norman Mailer a boxer. Hunter S. Thompson founded a sports club in grade school. William F. Buckley was a sailor and skier.

In her new book, The Right Call: What Sports Teach Us About Work and Life, sportswriter Sally Jenkins notes that “essential elements of athletic success include conditioning, practice, discipline, candor, culture, and learning from failure.” All of these things are also key to making a great journalist. Playing a sport makes you more interesting, open-minded, versatile, and creative, and thinking on your feet during a game or on a sailboat translates to thinking both with great focus and also outside the box when working on stories.

Sadly, the journalist-as-athlete is largely gone today.

Most modern journalists are tethered to a certain beat. It’s a subject they started writing about, usually on a blog, in college. Fossilized at an early age and incapable of writing about anything else, these kids lack the humor, expansiveness, toughness, and gravitas that come with people who have fought and bled on a playing field.

It’s a problem on both the Left and Right.

It’s hard to imagine both conservative Ben Shapiro and liberal Ezra Klein in the boxing ring, or even playing baseball or riding a skateboard . Matthew Continetti is a talented writer who authored a terrific book about conservatism. Yet it’s hard to imagine Continetti, who seamlessly went from an internship at a conservative magazine to a fellowship at the American Enterprise Institute, writing about, say, surfing. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow was once photographed splitting wood. Can she play tennis?

In the delightful new book Getting About: Travel Writings of William F. Buckley , Buckley, the father of modern conservatism and founder of National Review, writes about his love of skiing, traveling, and sailing. Buckley started sailing at 13, and endured crashes, fires, and life-threatening storms. When he decided to sail from Florida to Spain, his wife Pat said, “If he survives this, I’m going to kill him.”

Reading Buckley’s essays, it become clear that the lessons he learned as a skier in Utah and sailor around the world were formative in who he was as a journalist. He dealt with danger and conflict calmly and with equipoise — and he also knew when to metaphorically punch an opponent in the nose. He was like a great boxer.

My favorite essay in Getting About is when Buckley sails the route that Christopher Columbus took to get to the New World. Buckley emphasizes that, to the modern sailor with new technology, the journey is mostly easy: “However, if you undertake a transatlantic sail along Columbus’s route you will be tempted to say to yourself from time to time — looking out over the resolute blue-green seas, up at the playful clouds, flirtatious today, menacing tomorrow; plunging through nights so dark you could bump into a new continent without any warning, sometimes amber by the moon, like sailing over a lit-up baseball stadium — you will say to yourself, ‘So it was for Columbus and his men. Just like this.’”

Buckley’s balance through the squalls brings to mind a line from Sally Jenkins’ book: “Most people think that dealing with pressure is about actually rising to an extraordinary level, when in fact, the people who really succeed in things, what they're good at is … being themselves in the moment. They are doing what is so well-practiced and grooved in them. Their performance is not deteriorating under pressure like other people's performances.”

This distinction, says Jenkins, is “critical for the rest of us [when] we think we're supposed to do something extraordinary. No. Do what you're best practiced at and what is most natural in the moment to you. Be yourself in the moment, and that will be good enough.”

This describes my father’s colleagues at National Geographic, where Buckley’s 1992 essay about Columbus first appeared. Dad was an editor at NatGeo from the early 1960s to 1990. Like Buckley, he had sailed the original Columbus route to the New World .

Photographers, scholars, and eccentric explorers would come to dinner at our house in Maryland, so from an early age, I associated journalists with athleticism. There was Howard LaFay, a large, hilarious man with wavy back hair who wrote articles for the magazine about Leningrad, Trinidad, and Easter Island. LaFay also wrote about Sir Winston Churchill's funeral, and a book about the Vikings. In World War II, LaFay served for three years with the Marine Corps in the Pacific and was wounded on Okinawa, receiving the Purple Heart Medal.

There was also Thomas Abercrombie.

In 1957, Abercrombie was the first civilian correspondent to reach the South Pole. In 1965, he discovered the 6,000-pound (2,700-kilogram) Wabar meteorite in the Arabian Desert. A few years earlier, in Cambodia, he outwitted an angry mob, eager to tear any American limb from limb, by convincing them that he was French.

Abercrombie’s 2006 obituary concluded, “With his full beard, compact build, and thirst for adventure, Mr. Abercrombie was often likened to Ernest Hemingway. But from the mid-1950's to the early 1990's, his exploits in any given week made Hemingway's look like child's play.”

Hemingway himself was a football player and a boxer, and a hunter, which may account for why his writing is not like so many modern one-note bloggers, shrill and one-dimensional, but poised.

It’s also important to note that Hemingway had serious demons.

In his article “Ernest Hemingway: A Psychological Autopsy of a Suicide,” psychiatrist Christopher Martin argues that Hemingway, “from early childhood … held a reservoir of rage against both his parents, a father who had viciously beaten him and a mother who had provided him with disorienting messages regarding gender and self-worth.” Hemingway’s mother Grace often dressed him in girls’ clothing, leading, Martin observes, to Hemingway’s “uncertainties about his identity, difficulties with interpersonal relationships, and tendency toward anger.”

For Hemingway, sports offered the calmness found from what Sally Jenkins calls “being yourself in the moment.” His writing would not have been as brilliant had he not been an athlete.

It’s hard to imagine him being replaced by Chris Hayes.

Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of  The Devil's Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi . He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.