Best Ledes?

That's fantastic.

I'll go with:

"Clifton Pollard was pretty sure he was going to be working on Sunday, so when he woke up at 9 a.m., in his three-room apartment on Corcoran Street, he put on khaki overalls before going into the kitchen for breakfast."

That's Jimmy Breslin, beating the world.

 

I believe John Lardner holds the lifetime achievement award in this category:

"Stanley Ketchel was shot in the back by the common-law husband of the woman who was cooking his breakfast."

 

Great line, but it wasn't a lede.

http://espn.go.com/classic/s/2001/0521/1202226.html

 

Wow, I'm full of fail on that one. I sentence myself to read 50 Murray columns.

 

Classics:

Gammons

''And all of a sudden the ball was there, like the Mystic River Bridge, suspended out in the black of morning.

" When it finally crashed off the mesh attached to the left-field foul pole, one step after another the reaction unfurled: from Carlton Fisk's convulsive leap to John Kiley's booming of the "Hallelujah Chorus'' to the wearing off of numbness to the outcry that echoed across the cold New England morning."


Rice

Outlined against a blue-gray October sky the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as famine, pestilence, destruction and death. These are only aliases. Their real names are: Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden. They formed the crest of the South Bend cyclone before which another fighting Army team was swept over the precipice at the Polo Grounds this afternoon as 55,000 spectators peered down upon the bewildering panorama spread out upon the green plain below.

Sorry, I could not resist.

Oh . . . Not a lead, but it could have been:

"The cathedral that is Yankee Stadium belongs to a Chapel."

 

g

Granny Rice was also a poet.

He was a great writer but at poetry he was equally dominate..... at being bad.

 

Not a sports lede, but nonetheless powerful after a Kansas town was struck by a deadly tornado in, I believe, the late 1950s:

(UPI) -- The town of Udall died in its sleep last night.

 

I remember John Hersey's lede to "Hiroshima" being lights out. Or maybe that was the entire article.

I'll post it when I can find my copy on my bookshelf somewhere.

 

No way. I never read Shirley Povich's lede on Jim Brown before tonight, but you'd have to go a long, long way to beat that one:

"Jim Brown, born ineligible to play for the Redskins, integrated their end zone three times yesterday."

Oh, man, how great is that?

 

Red Smith:

"At the risk of shattering this gazette's reputation for probity, readers are asked to believe these things happened in Ebbets Field:
After 136 pitches, Floyd Bevens, of the Yankees, had the only no-hit ball game ever played in a World Series. But he threw 137 and lost, 3 to 2.
With two out in the ninth inning, a preposterously untidy box score showed one run for the Dodgers, no hits, ten bases on balls, seven men left on base, and two more aboard to be left. There are still two out in the ninth....
In the ninth, Lindell pressed his stern against the left-field fence and caught a smash by Bruce Edwards. Jake Pitler, coaching for the Dodgers at first base, flung his hands aloft and his cap to the ground.
And finally, Bucky Harris, who has managed major-league teams in Washington, Detroit, Boston, Philadelphia and New York, violated all ten commandments of the dugout by ordering Bevens to walk Peter Reiser and put the winning run on base.
Lavagetto, who is slightly less experienced than Harris, then demonstrated why this maneuver is forbidden in the managers' guild.
Cookie hit the fence. A character named Al Gionfriddo ran home. Running, he turned and beckoned frantically to a character named Eddie Miksis. Eddie Miksis ran home.
Dodgers pummeled Lavagetto. Gionfriddo and Miksis pummeled each other. Cops pummeled Lavagetto. Ushers pummeled Lavagetto. Ushers pummeled one another. Three soda butchers in white caps ran onto the field and threw forward passes with their white caps. In the tangle Bevens could not be seen.
The unhappiest man in Brooklyn is sitting up here in the far end of the press box. The 'V' on his typewriter is broken. He can't write either Lavagetto or Bevens."


Note: edited to add some additional text from the story...

 

My favorite ever, from Jerry Tipton of the Lexington Herald Leader after the Crispin brothers, Joe and John, scored about 50 points combined to lead Penn State to an upset victory at Rupp Arena:


Kentucky got fried last night. Extra Crispin.

 

Shirley Povich:

"New York, July 4 -- I saw strong men weep this afternoon, expressionless umpires swallow hard, and emotion pump the hearts and glaze the eyes of 61,000 baseball fans in Yankee Stadium. Yes, and hard-boiled news photographers clicked their shutters with fingers the trembled a bit."