All-time favorite piece of sports journalism?

Deford on Bob Knight, circa 1979 or 80.

 

My all-time favorite graph in sports journalism history. It is from the Boxer and the Blonde. And you could probably never get away with this now, Deford writes:


Insults were automatic. People routinely referred to one another, face-to-face, with the racial epithets we find so offensive today. For fighting, it was the dagos and the Polacks, the micks and the jigs, and so forth. Sticks and stones. Before a fight with Gus Dorazio, when Dorazio was carrying on at the weigh-in about what color trunks he would wear, Conn cut the argument short by snapping, “Listen, dago, all you’re going to need is a catcher’s mitt and a chest protector.” It was late in Conn’s career before he took to using a mouthpiece, because, like his hero Greb, he got a kick out of insulting the people he fought.

 

This is by no means a criticism of the actual writing, but how did none of SI's fact checkers catch that it was Nicklaus' 18th major and not his 20th?

 

Another vote for Nack. I, too, go back and read that every few months.

 

Technically not a sports story, but Lewis Grizzard's column about his dog, Catfish dying is still a jerker.

My dog Catfish, the black Lab, died Thanksgiving night.

The vet said his heart gave out.

Down in the country, they would have said, "Lewis's dog up and died." He would have been 12 had he lived until January.

Catfish had a good life. He slept indoors. Mostly he ate what I ate. We shared our last meal Tuesday evening in our living room in front of the television.

We had a Wendy's double cheeseburger and some chili.

Catfish was a gift from my friends Barbara and Vince Dooley. Vince, of course, is the athletic director at the University of Georgia. Barbara is a noted speaker and author.

I named him driving back to Atlanta from Athens where I had picked him up at the Dooleys' home. I don't know why I named him what I named him. He was all curled up in a blanket on my back seat. And I looked at him and it just came out. I called him: "Catfish."

I swear he raised up from the blanket and acknowledged. Then he severely fouled the blanket and my back seat.

A powerful set of jaws

He was a most destructive animal the first three years of his life.

He chewed things. He chewed books. He chewed shoes.

"I said to Catfish, 'Heel,' " I used to offer from behind the dais, "and he went to my closet and chewed up my best pair of Guccis."

Catfish chewed television remote control devices. Batteries and all.

He chewed my glasses. Five pairs of them.

One day, when he was still a puppy, he got out of the house without my knowledge. The doorbell rang. It was a young man who said, "I hit your dog with my car, but I think he's OK."

He was. He had a small cut on his head and he was frightened, but he was otherwise unhurt.

"I came around the corner," the young man explained, "and he was in the road chewing on something. I hit my brakes the second I saw him."

"Could you tell what he was chewing on?" I asked.

"I know this sounds crazy," the young man answered, "but I think it was a beer bottle."

Catfish stopped chewing while I still had a house. Barely.

Known far and wide

He was a celebrity, Catfish. I spoke recently in Michigan.

Afterwards a lady came up to me and said, "I was real disappointed with your speech. You didn't mention Catfish."

Catfish used to get his own mail. Just the other day the manufacturer of a new brand of dog food called "Country Gold," with none other than George Jones's picture on the package, sent Catfish a sample of its new product. For the record, he stil preferred cheeseburgers and chili.

Catfish was once grand marshal of the Scottsboro, Ala., annual Catfish Festival. He was on television and got to ride in the front seat of a police car with its siren on.

He was a patient, good-natured dog, too. Jordan, who is 5, has been pulling his ears since she was 2. She even tried to ride him at times. He abided with nary a growl.

Oh, that face and those eyes. What he could do to me with that face and those eyes. He would perch himself next to me on the sofa in the living room and look at me.

And love and loyalty would pour out with that look, and as long as I had that, there was very little the human race could do to harm my self- esteem.

Good dogs don't love bad people.

He was smart. He was fun. And he loved to ride in cars. There were times he was all that I had.

And now he has up and died. My own heart, or what is left of it, is breaking.

 

Back at the dawn of time, before the earth cooled and the continents formed - in other words in 1986, when this piece was written - the US Amateur was still correctly referred to as a major when tallying Mr. Nicklaus's total. As it had been back in Bobby Jones's time. Mr. Nicklaus won the US Amateur twice. Hence the reference to 20.

 

Mr macg,

Outing: Mr macg is Jimmy Castor.

YD&OHS, etc

 

Ah, jgmac, thanks for the history lesson. Weren't the full results from that Masters delivered via Pony Express? ;D

 

I've never actually read his full story (I know, shame on me), but I've always loved Shirley Povich's lede when Don Larsen pitched his perfect game:

"The million-to-one shot came in. Hell finally froze over. A month of Sundays hit the calendar. Don Larsen, yesterday, pitched a perfect game in the World Series at Yankee Stadium."

 

Holy crap.

http://apse.dallasnews.com/contest/2001/writing/over250.columns.second2.html


Silence of respect, introspection, healing

By RICK MORRISSEY
Chicago Tribune

Sept. 16, 2001

My God, this is football weather, cool and crisp and full of promise. Summer has stopped sweating, and if you close your eyes long enough, you can almost feel the white stubble of winter starting to come in on the breeze.

The star quarterback is rumored to be going out with the sorority beauty queen again or else she's breaking up with him for the fifth time. Nobody seems to be quite clear on the details. The college mothers' club is putting on a bake sale outside Gate S, and the ladies are all complimenting Edna on her apple pie, which, most of them later say could have used some more nutmeg, but that nobody's perfect, even if Edna thinks she is.

Everyone's excited because the coach told the men at the Elks Club fish fry he expects 10 victories this season, but to keep it to themselves because the players don't need their heads to get any bigger than they already are.

But word gets out anyway, because Frank tells his son, Fred, a reserve wide receiver on the team, and everyone knows Fred can't keep a secret or his hands on the football.

I'm staring down Ashland Avenue in Evanston on Saturday morning, at a college football stadium rising grandly to meet a gray sky. I'm seeing what I want to see, a world that never was and never will have the chance to be, and I don't care about anyone else's 20-20 vision. I'm seeing Northwestern the way I want to see it, sport the way I want to see it, the world the way I want to see it. You might want to try it too. Keep your finger pressed on the rewind button, right past Sept. 11, 2001, as if it never happened, and keep going right into the sweet stupor of a concocted year in the 1950s.

The problem, you'll find, is that Sept. 11, 2001, refuses to leave the premises and, worse, keeps pounding its shoe on the table. As much as we want to pretend Tuesday's terrorist attacks didn't happen, as much as we'd like to make the dust and bricks of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon rewind back to wholeness, like a genie being sucked back into the bottle, the emptiness here has its own thoughts on the matter.

Just to the west of Ryan Field, in a parking lot normally filled with cars and partiers, there are two orange traffic cones spaced about a 4-yard carry from each other. A woman is trying to teach a friend how to parallel park.

If there's a safer, more open space for this type of activity than here, on this particular Saturday, it must be on another college campus or on a Wyoming ranch. There are no people selling stuffed animals or pennants or T-shirts. There is no tailgating, no smells of a Saturday in September on a college campus.

There is, as far as the sports world is concerned, nothing. We, as a nation, aren't very big on nihilism. We have 500 channels to choose from, and all we have to do is run a net through the air, and normally we can catch a game to our liking.

But not on this day, not on this weekend. Tuesday's attacks led the NFL, Major League Baseball and big-time college football to shut down this weekend. Northwestern vs. Navy is a memory that won't exist.

We're a funny people, we Americans. We work hard, but we live a disproportionate amount of our lives for our games. We take sides, choose different teams, wear our colors proudly. It's Cubs vs. White Sox and father vs. son, a house gently divided. We're a diverse people, too, in so many more ways than skin color or religious beliefs. We're so diverse that we rarely agree on anything. We can't even agree on Pepsi or Coke.

We now find ourselves agreeing on something. We agree that somebody else has ruined things for us. We agree that 19 lunatics hijacked some airplanes, totaled the World Trade Center and wiped out part of the Pentagon. We agree they totaled thousands of lives and, by extension, the lives of family members and friends.

We agree that the games don't seem to mean so much anymore.

The consensus, almost to a man, woman and child, is that we have seen hell. You can hear that consensus in the wind Saturday as it whistles around the walls of Ryan Field and causes the ropes to clang off a flagpole. It's called silence. It's not complete silence. It's not a monastery's silence or a library's silence. It's the silence of introspection, of shared loss, of respect.

This country has turned into a sports ghost town, and I can hear the emptiness howling. It's a good sound, a necessary sound. I can hear it all over town.

You want to know what quiet is? Quiet is going to Sluggers sports bar in Wrigleyville on Saturday afternoon and hearing Paul Simon singing loudly on a video on a big screen. Paul Simon is on a big screen because there are no sports to take up the space. He's a replacement player.

He is not singing a college fight song. He is singing these words:

These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long-distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all.

We're looking to each other now. Illinois-Louisville is nowhere to be seen on any of the screens, but the casket holding the body of Rev. Mychal Judge, who was killed while giving last rites to a firefighter, is being shown on one of the TVs in the bar.

The few people in the place can't take their eyes off the images of terror that are being shown on almost all the screens in the place, except for one showing a Jim McMahon retrospective and another showing paid programming for a machine that claims to strengthen abdominal muscles. It could be perfect for America's suddenly exposed soft belly.

It's two hours before the Cubs would have played the Pittsburgh Pirates, and Sluggers, down the street from Wrigley Field, is close to empty. This is unprecedented, general manager Zach Strauss says.

"This place is normally packed before a game," he says. "And afterward it's a zoo. But not today, and that's OK. I didn't think they should play the games. We'll make it up down the line."

The corner bar has been replaced as a gathering place in this country by the sports bar, where men can be boys again and boys can be carded. Those same boys might be going to war soon, as if anyone needed more sobering up.

There are two guys down from me saying we have to watch out for China, that there could be millions of casualties if the Chinese join whatever nastiness lies ahead. The men might as well have been saying, "Watch out for Tennessee. They're playing their butts off." The talk mixes easily with the smell of beer, disinfectant and cigar smoke.

"Tomorrow's going to be a long day," one of the men says, and they leave. Tomorrow would be Sunday, a day of rest, worship, no NFL and hard thoughts.

I walk outside and look up and down Clark Street. The parking-lot guys who wave the orange flags are nowhere to be seen. I miss the way their waving gets more agitated when they think they see a suburban sucker slowing down, a sucker willing to pay $30 for a spot. I picture them waving a different flag right now.

The sports world in this country will start its engine again Monday. It's the right time, but I can't tell you why that is. It just is. It's the right time for America, clothed in black, to put on a baseball cap. It doesn't mean we've stopped mourning, just that we're moving on, forcing one foot to move in front of the other. We've already gone back to work. Now we're going back to play.

I don't know if it will ever be the same again, if sports will continue to provide the same joy and retreat. I hope it will, but I suspect we have a hard, arduous journey ahead. We'll find out if sport is, indeed, the great escape.

In a little less than a week, we have watched our national obsession go into a lock-down mode, and many of us have thought it was the right and respectful thing to do. That's the adult view of life, but I don't remember any of us consulting with children on the matter. They still need to laugh and be kids.

And so I stop at a park to watch a baseball game for 9-and 10-year-old boys and girls. The weather has decided to cooperate. It's baseball weather now, sunny and warmer. I see a throwing error on a ground ball turn into what will certainly be called a home run by the time the player gets to the dugout. It's so much fun that you almost forget for a second. The important thing is that you believe with all your heart that the kids have forgotten for a few hours.

Inside my car, I turn on one of the sports radio stations, which has become all news, all the time because of the bombings. I turn it off.

I sit back in my car and I think of how well Northwestern's game went Saturday, of Navy's valiant effort, of words that I'll write to describe it. I see the sorority beauty queen put her head on the quarterback's shoulder. I see him put his arm around her and know that everything is all right. I see, too, that I was wrong. I see now that you can't rewind what has happened, can't make the airplane stop from slicing into the tower, can't hit a button and hear the shrill warble of tape going backward. You can't escape, not now.

I see people coming together, helping each other when I thought nothing could ever make this country an army of one. I see firefighters and police officers covered in ash and looking like ghosts, and I seem them rescuing people. I see people rolling up their sleeves to go to work, to get back to this business of living, and I see people rolling up their sleeves to give blood.

These are the days of miracle and wonder.

It's not so bad, this silence.

 

God. Damn.

That was fantastic.

 

Incredible.