One dinner. Four journalists. And you. Whom do you choose?

Pete Dexter, Bill Conlin, Carl Hiassen and Lester Bangs.

 

Pitor: My understand is that it as the Chris Steak House, which was eventually bought out by the Ruth's people.

 

Red Smith, Joel Achenbach, George Orwell and Ernie Pyle.

I'm including Orwell under the "writer" clause, but his style easily would apply to journalism.

I've had lunch and dinner on a few occasions with Selena, well before she moved to the New York Times, and she was charming and gracious and you just knew she'd be doing big things someday.

 

Excellent names brought up so far, and it would be painfully difficult to reduce any list to 4. So instead I'll just throw out a few names I don't believe have been mentioned (yes, I'm too lazy to look it up):

Dave Kindred
Len Shapiro
Hank Steuver
John Powers
Leigh Montville
Ray Fitzgerald
Lewis Grizzard
Jimmy Cannon
Bernard Darwin
P.G. Wodehouse
Furman Bisher
Linda Robertson
Ed Hinton (although no one else would get a word in edgewise)
Chris Economaki (sp?)
Bud Collins (he's my No. 1 draft pick)
Kenny Moore
Rick Telander (him and Moore for the perspective of athletes-turned-writers)

I'd mostly like to know what the deceased think of the direction of today's sports writing (which is mostly "sports quoting" or "sports giving my opinion" rather than "writing."

 

I suppose I would like my dinner guests to be breathing...
1. Ben Bradlee
2. Dave Smith
3. Bill Dwyre
4. Andrew Cockburn

 

Hunter Thompson, Gay Talese, Jimmy Breslin and McCandlish Phillips

 

First, I've seen Whitlock eat many times before he became famous. Don't need to see him eat again.
Second, someone actually put Jemele Hill? Sorry, I could never dine with Drew Sharp in drag (she loved it when I called her that a number of years ago).
And third, let's just make it cocktails and appetizers. I don't want to eat a dinner with four sports journalists.
That said, I'd choose:

Mitch Albom, to ask him why he abandoned sports column writing for excessive radio time and airing his own, warped personal view on politics in columns instead of sports. It's really too bad he doesn't write much anymore. He was brilliant a decade or two ago.
Drew Sharp, only to ask him to produce three positive columns that he has written in his career. I don't think he can.

Hmmmm ... that's it really. I'm done. Someone can have my other two leftovers.

 

Rick Rielly
Edgar Allan Poe

I really got to think of the other two

 

See, there are two courses of dinner here, although a lot of these guys, they could handle both directions. There's the "talk about writing" group, and the "let's eat and get drunk and have a great time" way of doing it.

Since I blew my chance to meet Red Smith when sitting with him, alone, at a Super Bowl hospitality table and not introducing myself, I'm going to have to put him there.

I said hi to Royko once at the Billy Goat, but no conversation. Seated.

This is a reach, but between his experiences and everything else, I think Stanley Woodward would be a good guy to have there.

Finally, I'm trying to figure out how he'd fit with the others, but what the hell. Has to be Shelby. I don't know how the other three would feel about some of the bars Mr. Strother would take us to at about 3 a.m.

For those still with us, I couldn't cut it to four, and frankly, some on my list wouldn't get along with some of the others on my list, so I'll just skip the names.

 

Hemingway
Plimpton
Shirley Povich
Charles Pierce