The Purple and Gold

No CHEERING IN THE PRESS BOX recorded & edited by Jerome Holtzman Holt, Rinehart and Winston, $7.95

One can hardly imagine anything like the above verses being inscribed on a silver cup and presented as a retirement present by the teammates of Joe Namath, Tom Seaver, Bobby Orr—or, in fact, of any contemporary professional athlete. The sentiments and style of that tribute to Lou Gehrig, written by sportswriter John Kieran, then of the New York Times, are typical of what has come to be known as the “Golden Age of Sport” and was also surely the “Golden Age of Sportswriting.” On the fields and the courts and in the ring were Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb, the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame, Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney, Helen Wills and Suzanne Lenglen. Behind the typewriters to record their exploits were such giants as Ring Lardner and Damon Runyon, Grantland Rice and Westbrook Pegler, Ben Hecht and Heywood Broun, Jimmy Cannon and Red Smith.

All this sporting glory in action and on paper that has since been labeled “Golden” is acknowledged to belong to the period known nostalgically as “the years between the wars,” and younger readers should remember that the reference goes back to the days when our wars had numbers instead of names (i.e., One and Two, rather than Korea and Vietnam). A Chicago sportswriter named Jerome Holtzman (in an obvious labor of love) had the commendable idea of going around with a tape recorder and talking over the good old days of glory with eighteen of the sportswriters who have survived the Golden Age of Sport and made it into the Golden Age of Senior Citizenship. The result is this collection, one purpose of which is to counter the bludgeonings of time so eloquently described in the epigraph to the book:

There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.

That might have been the lead for a heavyweight championship match in the Golden Age of Sport in which one of the parties was knocked out, but in fact it comes from Ecclesiastes. In terms of style, if the age was Golden for Sports it was more accurately Purple for the prose of its reporting. The greats like Grantland Rice were setting a purple tone, the others were often imitating, and it turns out that some are still jealous as they sit now in their retirement homes, fuming, for instance, over the glory that Rice received from his famous lead about the Notre Dame-Army game of 1923 in which he coined the term “Four Horsemen” for the Fighting Irish backfield:

Outlined against a blue-grey October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as Famine, Pestilence, Destruction, and Death. These are only aliases. Their real names are Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden.

George Strickler, a prizewinning sportswriter of his time who recently retired as sports editor of the Chicago Tribune, is still, some fifty years later, smarting over the memory that he gave the “idea” of that lead to Rice. Strickler was a student publicist for Notre Dame at the time and was sent to the big game with Army. At half time, he recalls now, he was talking with Rice and three other sportswriters, and Rice was remarking on how superbly the Notre Dame backfield was cutting through the Army defenses. Strickler, who had just the night before in South Bend, Indiana, seen the current hit movie The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, starring Rudolph Valentino, said, “Yeh, just like the Four Horsemen.”

When Strickler saw Rice’s lead the next day in the New York Sun, he was surprised and peeved, and he says, “I don’t remember that Granny ever thanked me.” He brought it up with Rice years later and asked what would have happened if all the sportswriters present had used the same lead, and Rice (diplomatically, it seems to me) pointed out that “maybe it wouldn’t have been so good if everybody had used it.” Still unable to forget the matter, Strickler ran into one of the other sportswriters who’d been present, and put the same question to him, “also years later.” Evidently the matter had also rankled this scribe, one Davis J. Walsh, for he said if everyone had used that lead, “we’d probably all been famous like Rice.”

Marshall Hunt, a New York baseball writer during the twenties who later went home to be editor of the paper in his native Olympia, Washington. grumbled from his log-cabin retirement home on Puget Sound that

One of the things I can’t understand is why Grant Rice is considered the patron saint of sportswriters. . . . I always thought “The Four Horsemen” type of writing was just a wee bit above our readers over in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to say nothing of the Bronx. . . .

Mr. Hunt can’t understand the acclaim accorded Ring Lardner either, and describes him as a quiet fellow “who just didn’t mingle too well. He got a little bit sour toward the end when he realized his style of writing was passe. I think he came into town less and less.”

A1 Laney, a sportswriter and general reporter both here and abroad for fifty years, reminisced from his retirement cottage in Redding Ridge, Connecticut. “I don’t believe in a punchy style,” he said. “That was the thing I abhorred in Runyon. He always used the present tense and was very punchy. I’m a believer in smoothness.”

Perhaps it was such smoothness that made Laney declare that the best sportswriter of all was an Englishman named Bernard Darwin: “He was the grandson of Charles Darwin, of the voyage of the Beagle.” Oh, yes— that Darwin. The travel writer.

Displaying the sportswriting Darwin’s smooth prose with obvious relish, Laney cites this dispatch to the Times of London in which Bernard describes a star cricket player in the following lines:

Cricket is his daily bread, but he spreads it with all matter of delicious jam.

A more typical taste of the American sportswriting style of the time is given us by Abe Kemp, a sportswriter for sixty-two years who, when he retired from the San Francisco Chronicle, refused the gift of a pair of tickets for his wife and himself to go on a South American vacation on the grounds that neither of them spoke Spanish. Instead he spent most of the money on daily-double tickets. Starting out as a baseball writer covering the San Francisco Seals when he was fifteen years old, Kemp says:

. . . in those days most writers resorted to slang, and I was trying to outdo ‘em as best I could in my own feeble way. I wrote the old clichés—he “rammycackled the old tomato.” He “ripped the stitches off the ball.” That’s the best I could do. Christ, all I graduated from was grammar school.

College education and worldly experience didn’t necessarily aid a writer of the purple era in avoiding clichés, though such knowledge and experience sometimes added a literary tone to the product. Such was the case with Richards Vidmer, described as “still dashingly handsome at 75,” who went to college at George Washington University, coached at St. John’s University, wrote sports for the New York Times and Tribune, and in his world travels, wooed and wed the daughter of an authentic Borneo raja in the second of his three marriages. Vidmer reveals the secrets of his own writing style:

. . . I used to start my stories with some angle—like, well, there was the day the Yankees had the bases filled with two outs in the ninth inning and they sent Mike Gazella to pinch hit. An awfully nice guy. Went to Lafayette. And he stood up there and got a base on balls to force in the winning run. So I started off, “He also serves who only stands and waits.”

In these recollections, the reader, after a while, is likely to add his own cliche to the effect that there is nothing new under the sun. A feeling of deja vu comes over us as we hear Paul Gallico telling how he got in the ring with Jack Dempsey and was knocked out for a 37 count; how he then created other stories by catching passes from Michigan’s Benny Friedman, catching baseballs from major-league pitcher Herb Pennock, playing golf with Bobby Jones and tennis with Helen Wills, and even going up on the high wire with a renowned acrobat of the time. Mr. Gallico, now living in Antibes and working on two new novels, is not resentful that his acts have been replayed and written about in present-day form:

In recent years George Plimpton has done some of these things, but George did give me credit for being the first one, and that’s one reason I’m completely at peace with George. He’s a very good writer and a square guy.

Jimmy Cannon was not so fully at peace with some of his own imitators. His reminiscence, taped shortly before he died, is the last in the book and perhaps the most eloquent. Cannon had recently been claimed as a kind of Godfather to the New Journalism, but he said:

. . . if the new journalists are my bastard children, I want to disown them. My main objection to some of them is that they make up quotes. They invent action. When I was a kid we used to call it faking and piping, smoking the pipe, opium smoking.

But Cannon’s assessments of his former elders and peers are not entirely bitter. For example, he writes:

I think Lardner has to be classified among the ten greatest serious writers produced by this country. He was ferociously accurate. He just didn’t think much of people. . . . There was a bias against Lardner because he was a sportswriter. The critics thought he was a guy who just wrote funny little stories about ballplayers.

Cannon has rightly declared that “some of the best and some of the worst writing in newspapers can be found on the sports page.” That still holds true, especially of the worst. It is part of the common wisdom, though, that the good old tearjerking stuff, the purple sentiments of sports written in the glow of the Golden Age, faded with the era of the men whose lives and work we’ve been discussing. Try to imagine, for instance, a time other than theirs when a newspaper sports column could begin with these sentences describing a once great star who had recently retired:

The carnival music of boyhood once seemed to be tinkling wherever [he] went. But now soft violins accompany him.

That was the lead of a column on Willie Mays by Dave Anderson, one of the best of our current crop of working sportswriters. It appeared this May in the New York Times.