Former New York Times sports editor

NEW YORK — Joseph J. Vecchione, whose decade tenure as sports editor of The New York Times included columnist Dave Anderson’s Pulitzer Prize and the hiring of William C. Rhoden to become among the earliest Black columnists at a U.S. major metropolitan newspaper, died Friday. He was 85.

Mr. Vecchione died at his home in Manhattan. He had suffered from Lewy body disease since 2017, his wife, Elizabeth, said.

Joseph John Vecchione was born on Jan. 9, 1937, grew up in Union City, New Jersey, and was a 1959 graduate of Saint Peter’s. He joined the Times as a copy boy in 1960.

About six months after he started work, Mr. Vecchione prevented a misprint of the text of the second presidential debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon. Listening to the debate and then noticing a section omitted by a transcriber, he got it corrected for the next edition. That earned him a Times’ Publisher’s Award, internal monthly citations for distinguished work.

He worked as a makeup editor and deputy picture editor, overseeing coverage of Operation Sail in 1976.

Mr. Vecchione edited the SportsMonday section from 1978 until May 1980, when he became deputy editor of the newly launched national edition. He succeeded Le Anne Schreiber as sports editor that September. Mr. Vecchione increased the number of women, Black and Latino reporters, and among the writers he hired were Rhoden and Ira Berkow, who became columnists.

Early in Mr. Vecchione’s tenure, Anderson won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. Just before Mr. Vecchione left the sports department, he hired Claire Smith, a pioneering Black and woman sports reporter who became a columnist and in 2017 won what is now known as the Hall of Fame’s Baseball Writers’ Association of America Career Excellence Award.

Mr. Vecchione became a senior editor in 1990 and stayed at the paper until retiring in 2001.