|
By Homer Hirt
Back in my eighth decade, give or take, I was recruited to write an Opinions column for The Jackson County Times, a weekly newspaper published in Marianna, the county seat of Jackson County. I soon dubbed the town as the “Center of the Universe”, abbreviated as “COTU”.
The subjects were to be of my choice, but the recommendation from Sid Riley, then Managing Editor, was that I concentrate on stories of the rivers of our area. I did well until I ran out of rivers, so the gates were thrown open and I continued onward if not upward.
About midway through my voyage through journalism Riley made a hole in one at the local golf course. He got a plaque…this is one time that the oft misspelled word “plague” was appropriate… made up, probably at his own expense, and took off to show it throughout the southeastern states. He asked me to fill in as editor pro tem, and I agreed.
Early on my first day I took over Sid’s front desk…..the one that overlooks Madison Avenue and the second ugliest county courthouse in the country.
I handled news stories brought in by our reporters and I critiqued the advertisements. Along with our staff I selected front page above- the- fold stories. I talked with drop-ins and interviewed VIPs and candidates for political offices. I learned quickly the importance of the “drop dead” press time. I sweated the distribution of news box and mail-out editions and, in between I placated irate readers.
Early on I had informed Sid that I knew next to nothing about sports, organized or disorganized. My then-thirteen regular readers learned of this when I told of my excitement in winning medals at two 5k races in the “seventy and above” range at the age of seventy eight. Until then I had never taken part in any athletics, even in my younger years when our sandlot teams played and was never chosen for a team, not even when I owned the only bat. The games were learning experiences for me, though. I became very adept at carrying water to the benches, and I learned that on a hot summer’s day I could charge a couple of pennies for a cupful. This pleased my car salesman father, who finally saw some potential in me.
But I have long admired some sportswriters.
I am not speaking of those that use trite and worn phrases. I grimace when I see headlines that read “Seminoles Scalp Foe” or “Gators take a Bite out of Opposition”. This is something like the old “it’s not news until a man bites a dog”. When the Seminoles chomps down on the opposition and the Gators begin to lift the hair of their foes we have the makings of headlines to be reckoned with. As editor I would lose my cool when the sports coverage during roundball season was accompanied by picture after picture of hairy armpits.
But I do have some idols (the old word that is now replaced by “icon”) in the sports writing field. I really have no explanation for all three being from the Deep South. Here they are:
Given my druthers, I would like to write like Ring Lardner.
That man began with a real handicap.
His full name was Ringgold Wilmer Lardner, and he was lucky to escape with only “Ring”. The “Ringgold” part came from a family friend: Rear Admiral Cadwalader Ringgold. He did an admirable job of reporting and later penning books about the players of his day. His nadir came with the downfall of his beloved White Sox, who became known as the “Black Sox” after Shoeless Joe Jackson admitted that he and the rest of the team sold out to gamblers. One biographer said that Lardner thereafter “wrote about sports as if there were some kink to the outcome”.
|
|
|
Grantland Rice was a contemporary of Lardner’s, and also a favorite of mine.
He was a Southerner, and he had the courtesy that is built into the scribes of Dixie’s Land. After beginning in Tennessee Rice went Nawth, and it was there that he became famous. He dubbed the great backfield of the Notre Dame team of 1924 the “Four Horsemen”, a reference to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Saint John, the author of the New Testament book of Revelation, named the riders “Pestilence, Famine, Death and Destruction”. Grantland Rice said that “These are only aliases. Their real names are: Miller, Crowley Stuhldreher, and Layden”. He went on to describe how these four laid waste to a strong Army team. That, my dear readers, is real sports writing!
And then along came another Southerner.
Born in Columbus, Mississippi and a distant relative of the poet Sidney Lanier, Walter Lanier Barber, better known as “Red”, attended the University of Florida. There he majored in education and sought part time employment, ending up as janitor of the university radio station.
One day an agriculture professor was scheduled to read a scholarly paper over the air and did not show. As you might expect, the Gators picked the janitor to read the paper. Red Barber began his broadcasting career by reading “Certain Aspects of Bovine Obstetrics”. Baseball sportscasting probably seemed easy after that.
On Opening Day in 1934 Barber attended his first major league game, called it for the Cincinnati Reds, called for them for next five years. He moved on to the Brooklyn Dodgers and finally to the Yankees.
His catchphrases made him famous. To Southerners they were everyday, but when those folks up Nawth heard “They’re tearin’ up the pea patch” and “Sittin’ in the catbird seat”, not to mention “Slicker than boiled okra”, and “Tied up in a croker sack”, they took to him like white on rice. And he was always a gentleman, calling the players “Mister” and “Big Fella”.
When he retired to Tallahassee he was interviewed weekly on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition by Bob Edwards, and I seldom missed a session. He talked sports and filled in the spaces with descriptions of the flowers that grew in his own yard here in our beautiful state.
He always referred to Edwards as “Colonel”, a title that Edwards had been awarded by the Governor of Kentucky. Red was a gentleman to the last.
If I decide to move in this new direction and write about sports figures, I hope that I will be able to have the passion of Lardner for the good teams that are still out there, the descriptive power of Rice for outstanding athletes and to be able to use my Southernness to good advantage, as Barber did.
But I suspect that I had better stick to carrying the water bucket.
Lagniappe. (A little something extra) And where will something extra for a sports column come from but the pen (and mouth) of Yogi Berra!
When you come to a fork in the road, take it!
- What time is it? You mean …NOW?
- It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity….and I have had a couple of those.
- Someone’s got to win and someone has got to lose, and that was us.
The future ain’t what it used to be.
|
|
