Finally found my classic QA with Jim Murray...

I met Mr. Murray at a World Series in the 80s. I was in line to get my credentials and he was immediately behind me. I was too nervous to talk to him but kept turning around every couple of minutes just to see what a legend looked like in person.

My grandfather used to vacation in LA and bring back Murray's columns from the Times. It was one of the reasons I became a sportswriter.

Always wish I had said something to him.

I did meet his widow about a year ago and didn't make the same mistake. Told her how much he meant to me and thousands of other aspiring sports journalists. I got the impression I was about the 10,000th person to tell her that, but she was gracious while I was probably boring her to tears.

 

I worked with Murray a couple of times on a special assignment, so got lucky there. He was as described.

I was once at a Super Bowl sitting alone at a table with Red Smith, and I didn't say a word to him. Really dumb, one I wish I had back.

 

Scoop: Capitalize the "Mirror" when he's talking about his Dan Parker memories. Said he ran to get the mirror to read him, which is weird.

 

Any reason is good reason to talk about Jim Murray...here's part of a column I wrote on his death....
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Every sportswriter in the last 30 years has gone to the typing machine to do what we called "a Murray column." We all failed. An editor gently explained these failures to Mike Littwin, then new to the Los Angeles Times and in thrall to the newspaper's star. "I had Jim Murray disease bad," Littwin says. "So one day an editor put his hand on my shoulder and said, `Son, you should try to be somebody else. Only Jim Murray can be Jim Murray.'"

Anybody can write a one-liner. Only Jim Murray, soft, quiet and brilliant, could write 50 laugh lines and make them sing harmony. "If there were a Bartlett's quotations of sportswriting," Littwin says, "three-quarters of the book would be Murray lines."

Only Murray could say of Cincinnati, "Nothing to do there m the summer but listen to the tar bubble." Walter Alston came from a farm town so small "the trains stopped only if they hit a cow." Mike Tyson had a way back: "Become a vegetarian." Only Murray could imagine himself, Walter Mitty-like, at the helm of an America's Cup yacht, racing against an Australian challenger and shouting...

"All right, lads, all hands before the mast! Not for nothing did Boats and Yachting magazine call me the greatest skipper on a point, a reach or a run since Lord Nelson. Now, hearken and we'll send these wallabies back to racing Snipes. Let me see the cut of that jib! Where's the apparent wind? I'll tack her 86 times on the windward leg, so anybody who has doughnuts for breakfast, carry a bucket. Get a light up in those telltales--if there's light air, don't worry. I won the Bermuda race one year catching a bird's breath in the ship's laundry. ... Those scalawags from Sydney will think they're sailing a bathtub or Cleopatra's barge before I'm through with them."

E.B. White said humor cannot be dissected; like a frog, it dies in the process. So let's leave Murray's humor at this: It rose from a foundation of knowledge, decency and common sense. What Neil Simon did on stage, Murray did in newspapers. He showed us people's lives in shades of laughter. Most of those shades were bright as dawn, but not all, as in 1968 after an assassin shot presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the brother of the assassinated JFK, a friend of the assassinated Martin Luther King Jr. ...

"Democracy is in the cross-hairs. The Assassination Party wins elections without going in a primary. The President of the United States is chosen in a hardware store, a mail-order catalogue. We blame Dallas, but it's no good. It happens everywhere. Memphis, Los Angeles. The United States."

And on Kennedy's death, this: "One passenger for Arlington. On the noon train. Departing Track 17 ... Bobby Kennedy is on his last commuter to the capital. Loose the mournful dirge of the crossing whistle. Line the tracks, America. The 5:02 out of New York is running late. There's trouble on the track. Tears."

Murray also said, "I will be severely criticized, even ridiculed for crying out. `Lousy sportswriter, what does he know?' Still others will sneer, `This is the 20th century, not Disneyland.' Well, it's getting to look more like the Cave Man Era every day from this seat. Americans who have a podium should use it today."
****

 

I have read relatively little of sports columns over the last 15 years, and remember even less. But I vividly remember reading this column while in the passenger seat of my father's car. "Tears" has stuck with me ever since. One word. So powerful. And the funny guy wrote it. Brilliant stuff. I only wish I was 25 years older so I could have appreciated work like that live.

 

Y(etc.)...
I was a kid when I read the Kennedy columns live, in the library of the Louisville Courier-Journal, six months before I became a columnist. The line about anyone having a podium should use it shaped the way I've done columns for 42 years.

 

Jim Murray = Legend everyone respects and appreciates.

"SCOOP!!!!!" Malinowski = Dude who joined this site solely to spam it with his special brand of athlete ass-kissing journalism media production.

BioFile = Still utterly useless pieces of tripe.

 

Sorry bout that, the typos are fixed.

Piotr I wouldn't agree about being called a kiss ass, nor would Mike Tyson, Roy Jones, Marcelo Rios and Floyd Mayweather.

Biofile useless? Been published all over the world my friend, opened doors, offered opportunities/experiences and sparked friendships I never could have imagined.

 

I agree. He adverstises a "scoop" in every interview and I haven't seen one yet. Stuff most of us already know and a waste of time compared with all the useful stuff we could be reading here. Another self-promoter using us like The Big League did, and about as parasitically.

 

To paraphrase someone I know on here, this is where the sanctimonious part of the thread comes.

 

I don't know, man. Dude just wants to hang out and talk journalism, breaking news, whatever -- fine. Wants us to read his stuff that has had no newsworthiness in years, no, not interested.

 

If I had anything of mine for others to read, I'd probably post it here myself. If they don't like it, hey ... that's what's great about 32 flavors of ice cream.

But that's just me.