Texas Monthly on the death of sportswriting

Boy, if anything called for two guys to go to neutral corners, it's that piece.
Neither side comes off very well, and it's going to be important to some people to remember that the modern baseball guys -- like, say, RJ -- didn't exactly bulldog that steroid story any better than the old guys bulldogged Darrell Royal's lovelife.

 

Even though that's not the side of the debate I want to come down on, FB makes a very salient point.

 

That's how I read it.

That was a pretty goddamn intense story. Good stuff. My kind of column. The time I met Richard Justice I was very impressed with him. Nice guy.

 

And also a racist.

Remind me to buy RJ a beer the next time I see him.

 

Hmmmm. It may well be true, but I'd be more impressed if RJ gave some specifics.

 

I went looking for a little more facts as well.
I came away with some anecdotes and innuendo about Cartwright being a racist, a plagiarist and a dumbass drunk. Or something like that.
Justice pulled no punches, but he didn't say specifics either.

 

I wonder if Justice cleared that with his employer?

 

Well, many of the new guys suck, and the old days were better. However, Mr. Cartwright didn't have to go to work every day worrying about getting laid off, having to write at Sony Stadium because his travel budget was cut to shreds, be forced to write to rail length with a strip ad across the bottom of the page and be told by an intern that his life would be better if he could Tweet.

 

Now that I've lowed through six pages, a few more thoughts about the good old days:

Wonder how many of those beloved Texas scribes came anywhere close to taking Duane Thomas' side against Tom Landry, or merely played it down the middle?

Two words about being keepers of the flame: Mickey Mantle. It took an ex-player, Jim Bouton, to tell the truth.

Wonder if any of them wrote, at a certain time, "You know, it might be nice if Darrell Royal or Bud Wilkinson had a black player on his team?"

And Justice was right. Just in my home state, old-timers have freely admitted to me they made up quotes (with deadline pressure being the excuse) and took more graft than Al Capone's favorite beat cop. It wasn't bags and shirts and hats...more like three days at golf resorts, airfare included, etc.,

 

Many of the old guys sucked and the old, old days were better than the old days.

Every generation looks down with scorn on the younger generation. Hell, I'm sure there were WWI vets who thought WWII vets had it easy.

 

And we LIKED it that way.

 

threadjack, I just read that Gary Shaw, who wrote "Meat on the Hoof" to criticize Royal and UT in the early '70s, and their allegedly sadistic ways, was homeless for more than a decade and died in the late '90s