George Kiseda dies

[SF_Express]

He was a bit of a legend:

SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO, Calif. (AP) -George Kiseda, a journalist who championed civil rights issues in sports in the 1950s and 1960s, has died. He was 80.
Kiseda died early Sunday of a form of dementia at an Alzheimer's care facility in Orange County, brother Jim Kiseda said Monday from Hopewell Junction, N.Y. Kiseda had been at the San Juan Capistrano facility since November.
"He got into a lot of trouble for standing up for minorities," Jim Kiseda said. "He jeopardized his career in many ways."
George Kiseda wrote for the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, Philadelphia Daily News and Philadelphia Bulletin in the 1950s and '60s before finishing his career in 1984 as a sports copy editor at the Los Angeles Times.
In 1957, he wrote a column for the Sun-Telegraph about an upcoming football game between Army and Tulane in the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans, where seating was segregated. It was the same year President. Eisenhower sent troops to Arkansas to enforce integration of Little Rock's Central High School.
U.S. Rep. James Fulton of Pennsylvania read Kiseda's column on the floor of the House of Representatives. Army moved the game to West Point's smaller Michie Stadium.
Kiseda was nicknamed the "Silver Quill" by Philadelphia 76ers guard Wally Jones.
The Boston Globe's Bob Ryan, who received the basketball Hall of Fame's Curt Gowdy Award, once said: "The greatest NBA writer of all time was George Kiseda - the 'Silver Quill' - my favorite writer."
Another admirer is Sandy Padwe, a former Philadelphia Inquirer columnist who became a senior editor at Sports Illustrated and later acting dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.
"I teach George Kiseda," Padwe told the Los Angeles Times. "He's the model of what every sports writer should be."
A funeral is Saturday in Kiseda's hometown of Monessen, Pa., with burial to follow.

 

[Dignan11]

George Kiseda

latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-kiseda14may14,0,318636.story?coll=la-home-obituaries

Mark Heisler writes a nice ode to one of the best who wasn't afraid to ignite change. Alan Richman and Bob Ryan call him the greatest basketball beat writer of all time.

 

[MileHigh]

An absolute legend and a huge part of the L.A. Times' Olympics coverage in 1984.

 

[SoCalDude]

Re: George Kiseda

The late Mal Florence once told me that George Kiseda was the best newsman he had ever known. That's good enough for me.

 

[SF_Express]

Two threads on this now, hopefully EF or somebody can merge 'em.

 

[MileHigh]

The Mark Heisler obit did not mention him as SE before Dwyre but had this:

Moving to the Los Angeles Times in 1972, Kiseda had an immediate impact, introducing a brash style of headline writing that remains the section's signature. After Anthony Davis scored six touchdowns in the second half of USC's dramatic 1972 comeback against Notre Dame, Kiseda wrote the headline that ran across the top of the page in 42-point type: "DAVIS! DAVIS! DAVIS! DAVIS! DAVIS! DAVIS!"

 

[SF_Express]

The Mark Heisler obit did not mention him as SE before Dwyre but had this:

Yeah, I deleted that post. I'm not sure how it worked out. I know Kiseda was an important guy for Dwyre.

 

[Claws for Concern]

RIP.

 

[Ike Broflovski]

Nice obit by Mark Heisler. The youngsters here should know that Kiseda's contributions to the business were not insignificant. Merchant's staff at the Philadelphia Daily News, as Mark pointed out, changed the way we do our jobs.

It was a time of change for sports sections previously devoted to poetic myth-making. Larry Merchant, the young Daily News sports editor who helped launch a new wave by hiring Kiseda, Stan Hochman, Sandy Grady and Joe McGinnis, once said that if anyone had bothered to go downstairs and ask, Babe Ruth might have actually said if he really called his shot in the 1932 World Series.

The young writers were independent — as Kiseda said, "I root for my story" — and, as former Philadelphia 76ers General Manager Pat Williams later told Richman, "scared everyone in sports to death."

I was a little disappointed that the Daily News didn't have more about Kiseda. Maybe Conlin or Hochman will write something later. I'll post it if I see it.

 

[goalmouth]

In 1957, he wrote a column for the Sun-Telegraph about an upcoming football game between Army and Tulane in the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans, where seating was segregated.

Tulane Stadium.

 

[SoCalDude]

The Mark Heisler obit did not mention him as SE before Dwyre but had this:

Moving to the Los Angeles Times in 1972, Kiseda had an immediate impact, introducing a brash style of headline writing that remains the section's signature. After Anthony Davis scored six touchdowns in the second half of USC's dramatic 1972 comeback against Notre Dame, Kiseda wrote the headline that ran across the top of the page in 42-point type: "DAVIS! DAVIS! DAVIS! DAVIS! DAVIS! DAVIS!"

Kiseda never would have let this get past the desk: Anthony Davis scored six touchdowns in the 1972 game against Notre Dame, but the dramatic comeback game was the 1974 game. He had only four touchdowns in that one.

 

[MileHigh]

Former Times staffer Mike Littwin this morning:

http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/news_columnists/article/0,1299,DRMN_86_5537423,00.html

 

[SoCalDude]

MY GAWD!!! They gotta get rid of that Littwin mug. Are they trying to SELL papers??? or scare everyone away??. He looks like Charles Manson.

 

[Evil ... Thy name is Orville Redenbacher!!]

P-G's Gene Collier pays his respects:

Collier: Kiseda set high bar for all sports writers
Friday, May 18, 2007

By Gene Collier, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

He was the hero of my heroes, a beacon the best sports writers turned to reflexively, the writer the writers I wanted to write like wanted to write like, if you will, and they reminded me that we all essentially walked and wrote in his shadow.
I never met him.
Maybe five years ago, having heard enough of his singular character, having memorized enough of his leads as they passed through the oral history of sportswriting's comparative literature, and having come to understand that George Kiseda's influence had long since escaped the sports pages and burned itself into a nation's history and sociology, I figured maybe George himself was a story.
So I called him.
It went badly.
"Like to come out to L.A.," I said. "Spend a few days. Do a feature story about you."
He wasn't impolite, but it was clear he found the very notion misguided at the minimum, if not foolish. This is what happens when you're allergic to flattery. Every time someone spoke aloud the notion that George Kiseda was the best baseball writer, the best football writer, the best basketball writer, or, the flat out best sports writer in the country, Kiseda got himself booted off stage.
"I am not a story," he later told Roy McHugh, the former Pittsburgh Press sports editor and columnist, about our conversation. Kiseda, retired in California, didn't want me spending the Post-Gazette's money on something that wasn't a story.
Yeah, we never do that.
Maybe you came across his obit in the A section the other day. They'll bury him today in his native Monessen. Whatever final little fuss there is, we'll know he'd have disapproved.
"Wrote the best game stories I ever read," McHugh said yesterday, having read game stories for only about 80 years. "He wrote leads I can still remember word for word. Once on a Pirates road trip, 1957, Joe Brown fired Bobby Bragan and made Danny Murtaugh the manager. George's lead the next day was, 'Jayne Russell came to the ballpark here yesterday, but the biggest bust in Wrigley Field was still Danny Murtaugh's debut as manager of the Pirates.' "In the back room of a Mount Washington saloon, McHugh poked at a salad and some ziti as he emptied an envelope of Kiseda correspondence. McHugh, whom some people in my building still identify as the best sports writer to come through Pittsburgh, is a kind of unofficial Kiseda bureau chief, although George wrote to a lot of people habitually, some would say ambitiously.
"He wrote to the Pope saying he was 'ticked off' about priestly pedophilia," McHugh said. "He then wrote a letter to William F. Buckley asking how the translators in the Vatican would convert, 'I am ticked' into Latin.' Here's Buckley's reply:"
And there it is, neatly typed.
"Furiosus iracundusque sum."
In the mid-80s, Kiseda wrote to Donald Regan, President Reagan's Chief of Staff, wondering why he didn't have his boss tell Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin wall. Books have been written since, including one by Reagan speech writer Peter Robinson, without such a note being cited in the ramp-up to Reagan's famous speech at the Brandenburg Gate. But when Kiseda wrote to the Reagan Library, asking if his letter might be among the source material for the Brandenburg speech, the Library sent him a copy of the original letter. The now historic phrasing "tear down this wall" is exactly as Kiseda wrote it.
And that was, of course, far from his best stuff.
Writing about reliever Jack Baldschun after he'd pitched six days in a row, Kiseda went out to Connie Mack Stadium and found Baldschun in the trainer's room engaged in some isometric arm-wrestling exercise with the Phillies' trainer that was part of Baldschun's preparation. The result for the Philadelphia Bulletin:
"Jack Baldschun pitched Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, and on the seventh day he wrestled."
Kiseda landed in Philadelphia after a stint at the old Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph. In the late '50s, Pitt's football team was having itself chronicled on a daily basis by Kiseda, McHugh and the great Myron Cope. When, in discussing an opening at Newsday years later, McHugh told sports editor Jack Mann that he once competed on the beat against Kiseda and Cope, Mann said, "My God, that's like being in the ring with Jack Dempsey and Joe Louis at the same time."
McHugh said Kiseda was the first Pittsburgh sports writer to go into the locker room after a game, the first to pay any attention to a rookie named Roberto Clemente, and, as has been well documented, one of the first to put his job on the line when he felt some kind of compromise was upon him, especially one related to racial or social injustice.
"When he was sports editor at Parade Magazine, they asked him for three ideas for a cover story," McHugh said. "Wilt Chamberlain was one, and two other black athletes. They said, 'George, we can't do that. We're in newspapers in Jackson, Mississippi.' "
Bye, George said.
In some of these remembrances, Kiseda comes off as a diligent crusader, perhaps a lecturer, a flinty moralist. Not true, quothe McHugh.
"He was just great to be around," Roy said. "Witty, funny."
Blind in one eye, Kiseda had the bad one removed in 1977. He wrote to Roy:
"I'm sure I told you about my concern that they would take out the wrong eye. I considered putting an arrow under the left eye, but then it occurred to me an arrow was no guarantee. They'd be standing there debating whether the arrow meant this is the eye to remove or this is the eye to keep. I made a deal with my doctor; they wouldn't put me under until I saw the doctor in the operating room and reminded him which eye was to be removed.
"Well, naturally the lines of communication broke down. The anesthesiologist came into the pre-op room to work on me and I said, 'Wait a minute.' I explained to him my concern and the agreement I had with my doctor. In one of the great put-the-patient-at-ease conversations of all time, he said, 'That's an understandable concern. It happened in a hospital in South Jersey. When the doctor realized he had taken out the wrong eye, he jumped out the window.'
"After a wonderful anecdote like that, how could I be concerned?"
I could go on, but then, George was not a story.

(Gene Collier can be reached at [email protected] or 412-263-1283. )

 

[panacct]

The night he was fired, I called him at his home in center city. Did a story on him for my high school newspaper. He was my favorite writer in Philly at the time. We had a George Kiseda fan club at Washington High School in Philly and I was the president which is how I came to know him. I used his Silver Quill nickname to coin the "Poison Pen" awards when I became a sports editor at Penn State. His best story ever was running around the city with Muhammad Ali back in the 70s and writing about how surreal it was. I still have Kiseda clips from the '68 Eastern Conference NBA finals when Wilt took just 2 shots in the second half against Russell and the 76ers blew a 3-1 series lead to the Celtics. It was vintage Kiseda. A very young Jim Murray once told an editor that he could write like a sonofabitch, long before he became a known sportswriter in LA. Well, lotta people felt the same way about Kiseda. The guy could write like a sonofabitch. And BTW: he had an unmistakable presence on press row at NBA games. You saw that silver mane from a distance and knew it was Kiseda. Sad truth is, his sports ed. at the Bulletin didn't back him up when he got into his pissing match with Packard. I loved Gene Collier's piece in the P-G. Gene and I went to PSU together and worked at the Journal together in later years. Myron Cope, Beno Cook, George Kiseda. All 3 wrote during the same era in PGH. That's talent, baby!

- tim panaccio / philly inquirer