Ten best sports columns of all time

My old friend and colleague Tom Stinson at the AJC covered that game. He says Grizzard, writing for Monday, used the dateline, Athens, and only the single sentence followed by a column's worth of white space.

 

Simers, once told by a managing editor in Beloit, Wis., that he needed to get more local names in his column and the sports section, wrote a page from the phone book, complete with a little graphic pullout of the phonebook page. The ME was not amused.

 

Last year, I had the pleasure of teaching a course in sports reporting at NYU. During the week of the Army-Notre Dame game at Yankee Stadium, we did a unit on the history of the rivalry, specifically the games played in New York. We examined the ``Four Horsemen'' column line by line and had a wonderful discussion.

Some of it stands up quite well. The line about candlelight in the sycamores is particularly poetic; it gave me goosebumps. But one of my students (a smart kid) said it should have been edited out. And some of it reads like a running game story with so much play-by-play the desk could have trimmed to the benefit of all.

I know it's a little unfair to compare writing from one era by the standards of another. I doubt if I could have carried Rice's typewriter (remember them?) But it is instructive to study great work from our profession's past to sense its evolution.

 

I would counter with Gary Smith, but certainly Reilly gets a special place for "Point After."

 

Assuming Peter was the columnist on this game, this is my nomination as possibly the best live column ever.

http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/gammons/story?id=2118859

 

No, that was the gamer.

Ray Fitzgerald wrote the column for the Globe that night. ("Call it off. Call the seventh game off. Let the World Series stand this way, three games for the Cincinnati Reds and three for the Boston Red Sox.")

 

So what happens if you can't appreciate older writing? If it's all stilted and horrid and eye-gougingly painful to read?

What does that mean for me?

 

OK, Buck. I was thinking that Pete had the gamer, but I could not remember. I have read Fitz's piece, too.

 

The first column I thought of ... Her Blue Haven by Bill Plaschke.

http://articles.latimes.com/2001/aug/19/sports/sp-35951

 

I keep this in my computer. It's a column Leigh wrote as an early during the NBA finals. It was so good that the Globe ran two Montville columns the next day.

FRIENDS, FOES FOR LIFE BIRD'S AND MAGIC'S RELATIONSHIP ALWAYS SOMETHING SPECIAL

12 June 1987

Twenty years have passed. Thirty years have passed. Forty years have passed. Forty years and more. The sun comes through the nursing home window on a spring day.
"Checkers, Larry?" Magic Johnson asks.
"You got it," Larry Bird replies.
They set up the board -- Larry is black and Magic is red this time -- and the crowd gathers immediately. They are the best two checkers players in the home. Far and away. The series now stands at 2,993 to 2,992.
"Who's ahead, anyway?" Magic Johnson asks.
"You know damn well who's ahead," Larry Bird says. "Just get playing. This thing will be even when I'm through with you today."
Even in checkers. Even in everything. The two men somehow have moved along two sides of the same railroad track at the same pace for their entire lives. Frick and Frack. A and B. Even and Steven.
Name a game and the two men have played it against each other. There was basketball, of course, in the beginning and then there was softball in the summer and then there was celebrity tennis and then celebrity golf and celebrity superstars and celebrity bowling. One game somehow led into another.
"Remember the night we both drove the sulkies at the celebrity harness race?" Magic Johnson says. "Dead heat."
"What about the celebrity auto race?" Larry Bird says. "How much did those Porsches cost? You hit me -- or did I hit you? -- and we made headlines across America. Hilarious."
The seed of competition, once planted, somehow grew and flourished. A black guy from East Lansing, Mich. A white guy from French Lick, Ind. They looked different, perhaps, but take a chainsaw to their souls and they were fraternal, if not identical, friends.
They had the same Midwestern ideals. They had the same work habits, the same senses of humor, the same competitive fires. The same talent. That was most important of all. They had the same talent, one step above everyone else who played their game, two men linked first by the talent and then by everything else.
"Yeh, yeh, the Michigan State Spartans," Magic Johnson says. "We all know how that came out."
"Ancient history," Larry Bird says. "And if I had one other basketball player on the entire team with me, we know how the result would have been different. Michigan State. I'm sick of hearing those old Michigan State stories."
They knew each other before they knew each other. Is that the way to say it? Reputations arrived before people. Press clippings. Rumors. Magic Johnson knew about this wide-eyed scorer from Indiana State before he ever saw the real person. Larry Bird knew all about Magic Johnson. Everybody knew.
The two men -- two college kids, really, at the time -- finally met on some of those all-star teams. Sat on the bench together. Didn't talk much. Just acknowledged each other with a smile, a nod, some common-sense gesture.
Heck, even in the pros they didn't know each other for five or six years. Magic Johnson was on one coast. Larry Bird was on the other. How would they meet? They saw each other on the evening news. They read each other's stats. They knew each other as basketball players. They knew nothing about each other as men.
"Sometimes I wish I never made that trip to French Lick," Magic Johnson says. "I wish I never really met you. Wish I thought you were the same strange dude I did at the beginning."
"Hah," Larry Bird says. "That would have been your tough luck. I taught you everything you know about everything. Hah."
The meeting in French Lick was the start. Magic Johnson went there thinking he was going to be spending the longest days of his life filming a sneaker commercial. He wound up loving the time. He and Larry talked. He and Larry talked some more. He and Larry kept talking.
What was the subject of the talk? Everything. Everything except basketball. They found how alike they were. They found they shared the same ideas. They found they were trying to do exactly the same things. They found they liked each other. They became friends.
"So let's get started," Magic Johnson says across the checkers board. "Is it my move first, or what?"
"Name it and claim it," Larry Bird says in return. "Spin it and win it. Name your poison."
How many championships did each man's team win after they became friends? How many MVP awards did each man win individually? One would seem to own one year. The other would seem to own the next. Back and forth. One year after another. Even. Absolutely even.
They played all of the years together and apart at the same time. They did all those things. They came into the league together. They left together. They went on all the circuits together. They played all the games together. Every game. One after another. Retirement somehow was even more competitive than their careers. There were more games to play.
"Remember that time we were on 'Hollywood Squares'?" Magic Johnson says. "Remember how I was the secret square and you were just a regular square? You were so mad."
"Are you going to move, or what?" Larry Bird says. "The game today is checkers."
Time passes and championships are won and lost, but the friendship and the rivalry remain. Magic and Larry. The best forever.

 

Don't forget, when Rice wrote, there were few radio broadcasts of games and no TV. His story WAS how you learned about the game unless you attended it. There were also maybe eight editions a day of each paper. So essentially all stories had an element of running game story in them. They had to.