• U.S.

The Press: Good Sports

5 minute read
TIME

After seven games of a losing streak that knocked the National League-leading Los Angeles Dodgers back into second place, the gloom of players, fans, and sympathetic local sportswriters was slightly thicker than the city’s smog. But in the Los Angeles Times, Sports Columnist James Murray could regard the home team’s travail with wry humor. “What was happening to the Dodgers,” wrote Murray, “could only be described as a slump if you think of what happened to General Custer as a slump. I have seen happier people on the end of a rope than the Dodgers on the bus ride home. The players even cursed in whispers.”

With such sprightly comment, Times Sports Columnist Murray has built a reputation and following that, in just six months, qualifies him as one of the best sportswriters in the U.S. The fan mail comes in from all over, even from women. “I love your column,” gushed one distaff Murray fan, “even when I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Wrote another: “For the first time in my life, I’m reading the sports page.” Murray has fielded four offers to turn radio or television sportscaster; and after a dozen serious inquiries from other papers, the Times is now facing up to the fact that Murray’s appeal may transcend the West Coast.

Without Patois. Much of Murray’s appeal lies in his iconoclastic approach to a branch of journalism that is densely populated with hero worshipers. To Murray, professional ballplayers are “skilled but one-talent guys, who should be grateful that baseball is around to pay them $80,000 a year.” When ancient Archie Moore prepared to defend his light-heavyweight boxing title, Murray took unsentimental note of Moore’s brocaded ring bathrobe and droopy trunks, which “made him look like a guy who just got out of a hotel fire in time.” When pint-sized Jerry Barber won the P.G.A. golf tournament, Murray suggested that Barber was “the only guy who ever won that trophy who could take a bath in it.”

As a sportswriter whose head is not turned by the luminaries of sport and whose typewriter does not print in purple ink, Jim Murray, 42, onetime Los Angeles Examiner, TIME and SPORTS ILLUSTRATED staffer, is a prime example of the new look in sportswriting. Since the days when Paul Gallico, Westbrook Pegler, Ring Lardner and Grantland Rice turned sportswriting into an art (and drew the best pay in newspapering for it), their imitators have filled the nation’s sports pages with some of the worst—and occasionally some of the best—overwriting in journalism. This encouraged the notion, said Stanley Walker, ex-city editor of the New York Herald Tribune, in his book City Editor, “that all sports should be written in a bizarre patois, and that to use good English was a sissy trick.”

The New Breed. Yesterday’s sports sections bristled with evasions of perfectly useful words: four-ply wallop for homerun, apple for baseball, henhouse hoist for foul ball. When athletes were injured, claret flowed, not blood. On one occasion, the Herald Tribune’s Sports Editor Stanley Woodward, outraged at receipt of a story in which some ballplayer “belted” a homerun, whipped off his own belt, waved it before the eyes of the transgressor, and bellowed: “Did you ever see anyone hit a baseball with one of these?”

Prolate spheroids (footballs), gonfalons (pennants), and sepia headsmen (Negro prizefighters) still find their way into the sports page, but there are sharp-eyed dogs at work. In Miami, a News sports editor circulated memos listing words, e.g., twin-bill, gridiron and clouts, that were barred from print. In Boston, one sports editor punished his writers by sending bad copy to office boys for rewriting. As a result of such discipline, a new breed of sportswriters has arisen over the last two decades to take their rightful place alongside the news reporters across the city room. Some of them:

¶ Furman Bisher, 42, Atlanta Journal sports editor, a deft columnist who writes with the level hand of a journalist who has learned how to resist the temptation to operate as if the home team’s morale depended solely on his daily cheer.

¶ William Barry Furlong, 34, Chicago Daily News sports columnist and feature writer, who once outraged less enterprising colleagues by listening at an air vent to get the inside story of a major-league baseball meeting.

¶ Mel Durslag, 40, Murray’s professional rival (and personal friend) on Hearst’s Los Angeles Examiner, a talented phrasemaker and diligent reporter who salts his daily column with irony.

The best, most polished, literate and readable of them all is Red Smith, 55, the New York Herald Tribune’s syndicated (82 papers) sports columnist (TIME, May 15, 1950). Red is not wide-eyed about the world of sports: “These are still games that little boys can play. The future of civilization is not at stake.” But like all good writers in any field, he takes sportswriting in dead earnest. “Writing a column is easy,” he once said. “You just sit at your typewriter until little drops of blood appear on your forehead.”

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