Jim Murray ...

I might have that somewhere, the hard copy that is. I'll look for it tonight. If I find it, I'd be happy to make copies of it for you.

Edit: I do have the hard copy. It was reprinted as one of the classic SI stories when they celebrated their 40 year anniversary. Florida State helmet is on the front cover.

 

Did a story once with former NHL/AHL coach Tom McVie. I guess he liked it. The next time his team came through town and he saw me coming down the hall he said "Here comes Fredericton's Jim Murray."
The greatest compliment I have ever been paid.

 

I felt the same way when a professor called me "Runyonesque."
Speaking of which, Runyon's a name I'd throw into the mix for the best sportswriter ever. Although of the same era, his prose wasn't as purple as that of Grantland Rice (did you ever try to read the story where he gave the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame their nickname?).
Additionally, he's got news chops too...his stories covering famous trials read like they were written by a sportswriter, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

 

About four years ago I attended a Jim Murray Sports Journalism workshop at the LA Times. Which is a thread all in itself.

Anyway, one day Bill Dwyre told the 20+ students a story about the day Murray sent in the column about his wife. Dwyre and the entire office expected Murray to take the day off. So later in the night when the column came across the computer screen (I can't remember how it was sent back then...he mentioned it was some ancient way of sending stories... my apologies I am a youngin') ... Now rereading it, it almost doesn't make sense since it says "I lost my lovely Gerry the other day."

But anyway, when it come across, he said everybody huddled around a computer or two and read the copy and within a few graphs, the entire sports department was crying.

 

Heard the same story last month. Great stuff.

 

Very glad to have found this thread. Thanks to all who've posted on it. Threads like this are one of the best things about this site.

 

Actually, their careers overlapped quite a bit -- Smith was only about 10 years older, I believe. I liked Murray's stuff, an awful lot, but I never considered him Red Smith's equal as a columnist. Did Heinz even write any columns after the Sun went down in 1950?

 

I was fortunate to be a part of a Jim Murray workshop class as well. Too bad the Times canned it. Who can't afford to put up 25 student journalists for three days a year? Way to invest in the future of the industry, Tribune Company.

 

No.

 

I was in an elevator headed to the press box before a Raiders game at the LA Coliseum with Jim Murray and Vin Scully. I was hoping so much for the elevator to get stuck, but alas, it didn't.

 

This is paraphrased, but it's close. "When Jimmy Cannon is done with writing, he's going to leave writing dead on the floor.'' -- Ernest Hemingway.

That said, at the top of their game, Cannon and John Lardner could play in this league. Roger Kahn once did a piece with Robert Frost in which Frost praised Lardner, not knowing Lardner was dead.

 

King of The Sports Page;

This SI Classic from April 1986 examines the life of Jim Murray, America's top sports columnist, who, despite a series of tragedies, always keeps 'em laughing;

BYLINE: by Rick Reilly

SECTION: BONUS PIECE/SPORTS ILLUSTRATED 40TH ANNIVERSARY; Pg. 68

LENGTH: 4374 words



The thing about Jim Murray is that he lived "happily," but somebody ran off with his "ever after." It's like the guy who's ahead all night at poker and then ends up bumming cab money home. Or the champ who's untouched for 14 rounds and then gets KO'd by a pool-hall left you could see coming from Toledo.

Murray is a 750-word column, and 600 of those are laughs and toasts. How many sportswriters do you know who once tossed them back with Bogie? Wined and dined Marilyn Monroe? Got mail from Brando? How many ever got mentioned in a governor's state-of-the-state address? Flew in Air Force One?

How big is Murray? One time he couldn't make an awards dinner, so he sent a sub -- Bob Hope.

Murray may be the most famous sportswriter in history. If not, he's at least in the photo. What's your favorite Murray line? At the Indy 500: "Gentlemen, start your coffins"? Or "[Rickey Henderson] has a strike zone the size of Hitler's heart"? Or UCLA coach John Wooden was "so square, he was divisible by four"? How many lines can you remember by any other sportswriter?

His life was all brass rails and roses -- until this last bit, that is. The end is all wrong. The scripts got switched. They killed the laugh track, fired the gag writers and spliced in one of those teary endings you see at Cannes. In this one, the guy ends up with his old typewriter and some Kodaks and not much else except a job being funny four times a week.

They say that tragedy is easy and comedy is hard.

Know what's harder?

Both at once.

MURRAY ON LARGE PEOPLE

MERLIN OLSEN: ". . . went swimming in Loch Ness -- and the monster got out."
FRANK HOWARD: ". . . so big, he wasn't born, he was founded . . . not actually a man, just an unreasonable facsimile."
BOOG POWELL: ". . . when the real Boog Powell makes . . . the Hall of Fame, they're going to make an umbrella stand out of his foot."
BILL BAIN: "Once, when an official dropped a flag and penalized the Rams for having 12 men on the field . . . two of them were Bain."

Arnold Palmer had two of them bronzed. Jack Nicklaus calls them "a breath of fresh air." Groucho Marx liked them enough to write to him. Bobby Knight once framed one, which is something like getting Billy Graham to spring for drinks.

Since 1961, a Jim Murray column in the Los Angeles Times has been quite often a wonderful thing. (He's carried by more than 80 newspapers today and at one time was in more than 150.) Now 66, Murray has been cranking out the best-written sports column this side (some say that side) of Red Smith. But if a Smith column was like sitting around Toots Shor's and swapping stories over a few beers, a Murray column is the floor show, a setup line and a rim shot, a corner of the sports section where a fighter doesn't just get beaten up, he becomes "sort of a complicated blood clot." Where golfers are not athletes, they're "outdoor pool sharks." And where Indy is not just a dangerous car race, it's "the run for the lilies."

In press boxes Murray would mumble and fuss that he had no angle, sigh heavily and then, when he had finished his column, no matter how good it was, he would always slide back in his chair and say, "Well, fooled 'em again."

Murray must have fooled all the people all the time, because in one stretch of 16 years he won the National Sportswriter of the Year award 14 times, including 12 years in a row. Have you ever heard of anybody winning 12 anythings in a row?

After a Laker playoff game against Seattle in 1979, Muhammad Ali ran into Murray outside the locker room and said, "Jim Murray! Jim Murray! The greatest sportswriter of all time!"

Which leaves only one question.

Was it worth it?

ON GROUCHES
NORM VAN BROCKLIN: ". . . a guy with the nice, even disposition of a top sergeant whose shoes are too tight."
PAUL BROWN: ". . . treated his players as if he had bought them at auction with a ring in their noses."
CONRAD DOBLER, former guard for the St. Louis Cardinals: "To say Dobler 'plays' football is like saying the Gestapo 'played' 20 Questions."
WOODY HAYES: "Woody was consistent. Graceless in victory and graceless in defeat."

Marilyn Monroe and Murray were having dinner at a Sunset Boulevard restaurant. This was not exactly an AP news flash. Murray was TIME magazine's Hollywood reporter from 1950 to 1953, and you could throw a bucket of birdseed in any direction at Chasen's and not hit anybody who didn't know him. He has played poker with John Wayne ("he was lousy"), kibitzed with Jack Benny (who gave him an inscribed, solid-gold money clip) and golfed with Bing Crosby (later, Crosby sent him clippings and column ideas).

On this particular night, somewhere around dessert, Monroe started looking as if she'd swallowed her napkin.

"What's wrong?" Murray asked.

"Jim," she said, "would you mind if I left with someone else?"

"Not as long as you introduce me."

"O.K." She waved to a man across the room, who, sheepishly, made his way to the table.

"Jim, this is Joe DiMaggio."

Not bad company for a kid who came up through the Depression in his grandfather's standing-room-only house in Hartford, where, at various times, the roster consisted of himself, his two sisters, his divorced father, his grandparents, two cousins and two uncles, including, of course, Uncle Ed, the one who cheated at dice, a man so bored by work that "he couldn't even stand to watch" people work.

For his part, Murray liked to write, and his first critical success was a 50-word essay on his handpicked American League all-star team. For winning the contest, he received a razor. He was 10.

Murray devoured books on European history, and so, after graduating from Trinity College in Hartford and working a city-side stint at the New Haven Register, it is no wonder that when a real war came along and history was being made, he wanted to see it up close. But as a youth he had had rheumatic fever, and that made him 4-F. He was so disappointed he wouldn't be seeing Europe that he took the first and farthest-going train out to see distant parts of his own country. Besides, "I wanted to be as far away as I could when the casualties started coming in," he says. "I didn't want any mothers leaning out the window and saying, 'Here's my son with a sleeve where his arm used to be. What's the Murray boy doing walking around like that?' "

The train was bound for Los Angeles, where Murray talked his way into a job as a reporter and eventually became a rewrite man for the Hearst-owned L.A. Examiner. Those were gory, glory days for Murray. "There was seldom a dull moment," he wrote in The Best of Jim Murray. "And if there were, the front page of the Examiner never admitted it."

He specialized in murders. He wrote, ". . . we slept with our socks on, like firemen waiting for that next alarm." But Murray never could get used to the blood. Once he covered a story about a little girl who was run over by a truck and lost a leg. Murray took the $8 he had left from his $38 paycheck and bought her an armful of toys.

That figured. Murray always was a sucker for a pretty face. And in those days, in a town with pink stucco houses and restaurants shaped like brown derbies, every nightclub window was filled with pretty faces. One night, Murray and a cohort were entertaining two of them when Jim went to call his best friend. The friend had good news.

"You know that girl at the Five Seventy Five Club that you're always saying melts your heart? The one who plays the piano?"

"Yeah, so?" Murray said.

"If you can get over here in the next five minutes, she said she'd like to meet you."

Murray threw $2 on the table, grabbed his coat and headed for the door. Outside, his nightclub buddy caught up with him.

"I'm coming, too," he said.

"Why?" Murray asked.

"Because those two girls in there were mad enough to kill one of us, and it wasn't going to be you."

Murray married the girl at the piano, Gerry Brown, and theirs was a 38-year date. Folks say you've never seen two people carry on so. The Murrays appeared to be happiest at the piano, with Gerry playing (she was an accomplished pianist) and Jim singing maudlin Irish songs. "If the phone rang at 2 a.m., you knew who it was," says Tom McEwen of The Tampa Tribune. "It was the Murrays saying, 'All right, what do you want to hear?' And you'd say, 'Well, whatever you feel like.' And Murray would break into Galway Bay."

Murray longed to be a foreign correspondent -- "and wear a trench coat and carry a Luger" -- but when TIME called with a $7,000-a-year offer, he took it. Over the years he worked on a dozen cover stories on such subjects as Mario Lanza, the Duke, Betty Hutton and Marlon Brando.

"You'd go up and knock on Brando's door," Murray says, "and you'd knock and you'd knock for an hour and he'd never answer. But as soon as you walked away, he'd fling it open and cackle like a rooster."

Humphrey Bogart became a friend too. "He was the kind of guy who'd get nasty after a couple of drinks. What's the old line? 'A couple of drinks and Bogart thinks he's Bogart.' That's how he was. . . . But I remember when he was dying, his wife, Lauren Bacall, would allow him only one drink a day, and if I was coming over he'd wait, because he knew I'd have it with him."

When a sports assignment in Los Angeles came up at TIME, Murray got it -- by default. His proclivity for sports was so strong that in 1953, when Henry Luce decided to launch a sports magazine, Murray was asked to help start it up. He did, and a year later SPORTS ILLUSTRATED was in print. Although Murray did return to TIME for a while, he eventually became SI's West Coast correspondent. In 1961 he jumped to the L.A. Times, where he was ready to take on the daily world of sports. Unfortunately, that world was not ready to take him on.

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