 MSNBC.com |
April 21 - Nobody ever covered sports longer, or better, for a great newspaper than Shirley Povich did for The Washington Post. Undoubtedly you’ve heard of the famous Jack Dempsey-Gene Tunney “long count” heavyweight fight in 1927. Shirley covered it. He covered Sammy Baugh, college and pro. He covered Connie Mack. He covered Babe Ruth. But Shirley’s career spanned such a long time that he also covered Derek Jeter, Evander Holyfield and Tiger Woods and found qualities to admire in each of them. "All Those Mornings ... At the Post," a new book collecting 75 years of his best columns compiled by his children Lynn and Maury Povich, was released this month.
Click here for an excerpt of "All Those Mornings ... At the Post."
Lynn Povich: Good afternoon. I’m Lynn Povich, a journalist by trade, but I’m here today as an editor of a new book on my father, Shirley Povich, who was a sports columnist for The Washington Post for 75 years—yes, 75 years! The book, ALL THOSE MORNINGS…AT THE POST by Shirley Povich, is a personal collection of his columns and recollection of his life. It is published by PublicAffairs and was put together by my brothers, David and Maury Povich, and the former sports editor of The Washington Post George Solomon.
My father passed away in 1998 and we started working on this book about a year and a half ago. Little did we know then that 34 years after the last Washington Senators baseball team moved to Texas, that the Distict of Columbia would be awarded a baseball team again. It was a wish my father had fought mightily for and on Opening Night, April 14, when we all were watching the President throwing out the first ball once more, I know he was looking down from that great press-box up there smiling and clapping his hands. Now I will be happy to answer questions.
_______________________
Lincoln City, IL: What does it takes to be a really first rate newspaper columnist?
Lynn Povich: The thing that was remarkable to me was that my father had a voice in his writing from his very first piece in 19924 until his last piece in 1998. His writing got better—it got crisper and less fawning—but his voice and style were very unique.
He also had a high sense of moral values—he was outraged by injustice, discrimination, racism and greed—and he wrote passionately about it. In 1939, way before Jackie Robinson came up, he wrote that there were a lot of great baseball players out there. “Only one thing is keeping them out of the big leagues--the pigmentation of their skin. They happen to be colored. That’s their crime in the eyes of big league club owners.”
He also loved the English language and used it beautifully. Ken Burns said, “ The first thing you notice about Shirley are the words. The style so full of humor and moment, so exquisitely conscious of baseball’s nearly unbearable drama. In a seemingly simple story about a World Series game, he seems to sense and know its historical importance; its principal players, bound by the merciless facts of failure and loss; its purely abstract grace freed from time’s constraints, filled with mythic collisions of memory, home and family..”
Washington Post baseball columnist Tom Boswell said, "Shirley wanted to be “on the ground.” He wanted to feel the story and the people, not just have an opinion about it. Sometimes the scene itself, simply told and focused on details of place and speech, spoke louder than chest-beating writing. Shirley always said, “If you go, it will happen.”
_______________________
Somerville, MA: So were people like Mickey Mantle and Ali and such frequent visitors to your home when you were growing up?
Lynn Povich: In the old days, the sportswriters knew the players very well. Dad traveled out West to Chicago or St. Louis for three weeks on train trips with the baseball players. And they would sleep in the same cars, drink together and play cards. There were no PR guys to keep the writers away, and the sports writers and players were good friends.
But Dad didn’t socialize with them outside the professional world. They didn’t come to our home, unfortunately.
But we, my brothers and I, did know many of them. First of all, we went to Spring Training in Florida every Spring for several months (my parents used to take us out of school and put us in school in Orlando, Florida, where the Senators would train).
There my brothers were bat boys and would hang out with the players in the dug out and club house. Since I couldn’t go there, Dad would ask Mickey Vernon or Eddie Yost to play catch with me after practice.
I also remember when the Senators were playing the Yankees in NY, Dad went to interview Yogi Berra in the clubhouse afterwards, and when they walked out I was waiting for him there. He introduced me to Yogi, and the first thing I said to him—I must have been about 15, was “I hate the Yankees!”
_______________________
Lakewood, Ohio: Do you think your father had a favorite athlete of all time?
Lynn Povich: I would say Walter Johnson, the great pitcher of the Washington Senators, was Dad’s favorite player, although he also liked Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio and Vince Lombardi.
Johnson started playing in 1907 and Dad wrote his first sports piece in 1923, so Johnson was already pretty old when he started. But Johnson didn’t retire until 1927, so Dad did see him pitch for a few years and then hung out with him when he managed the Senators and down at spring training. When Johnson died in 1946, Dad wrote “Walter Johnson, more than any other ball player, probably more than any other athlete, professional or amateur, became the symbol of gentlemanly conduct in the battle heat. Here was the man who never argued with an umpire, never cast a frowning look at an error-making teammate, never seemed to presume that it was his right to win, was as unperturbed in defeat.
“ Such was the fame and legend of Johnson, whose fast ball shattered pitching records wholesale, that it became a mark of distinction for the fan who could say "I was there when Walter Johnson pitched his first big league game in 1907.”
_______________________
Los Angeles, CA: Which column do you think he was most proud of?
Lynn Povich: It’s hard to say which one column was his favorite. He won the prestigious National Headliners Award for a 13-part series in 1953 called “No More Shutouts,” which was about the integration of baseball. And his column on Don Larsen’s perfect game has been included in many college writing textbooks as an example of great deadline writing. Here he was in the pressbox trying to figure out how to describe this incredible feat. This is how he described his task:
When it was over, my frightening task began: How to handle this aurora borealis? I sat, among four hundred other writers transfixed, my eyes staring at the Yankee Stadium turf, my mind trying to absorb and ponder the magnitude of the achievement, all the while knowing the clock is moving and the deadline is mocking.
I shifted my stare to the empty white sheet of paper in my typewriter until snow-blindness threatened to set in. Then my fingers began moving across the keyboard of my portable and I was writing scared as the words began to come out: The million-to-one shot came in. Hell froze over. A month of Sundays hit the calendar. Don Larsen today pitched a no-hit, no-run, no-man-reach-first game in a World Series.
But my personal favorite—and one of his too—is his column on Lou Gehrig when he retired from the Yankees in 1939. His lede still brings a lump in my throat.
New York, July 4 - I saw strong men weep this afternoon, expressionless umpires swallow hard, and emotion pump the hearts and glaze the eyes of 61,000 baseball fans in Yankee Stadium. Yes, and hard-boiled news photographers clicked their shutters with fingers that trembled a bit.
It was Lou Gehrig Day at the stadium, and the first 100 years of baseball saw nothing quite like it. It was Lou Gehrig, tributes, honors, gifts heaped upon him, getting an overabundance of the thing he wanted least - sympathy. But it wasn't maudlin. His friends were just letting their hair down in their earnestness to pay him honor. And they stopped just short of a good, mass cry.
_______________________
Washington, DC: I hope for her sake that your mother was a sports nut.
Lynn Povich: My mother loved the sports scene--the beautiful ballfields, the crowds, spring training and the players and sportswriters and their wives. She loved a good game and went to many of them, but I don't think she knew as much about the strategy of the sport or the statistics as my brothers. But it was very exciting to see all of the great sports moments of the century and she appreciated it. She was also very tolerant of his being away for a long time and the sports life. She spent her honeymoon with Dad in spring training in Biloxi, Mississipi, with all the ballplayers!
_______________________
Red Oak, Iowa: Did your father like NASCAR?
Lynn Povich: No. He also didn't like basketball, although he came to appreciate the athleticism of the players. But he wrote a famous piece in Sports Illustrated in 1958 called BASKETBALL IS FOR THE BIRDS. This is how it went:
Basketball is for the birds-the gooney birds. The game lost this particular patron years back when it went vertical and put the accent on carnival freaks who achieved upper space by growing into it. They don't shoot baskets any more, they stuff them, like taxidermists.
In a single generation, there has been a revved-up degeneration of basketball from a game to a mess. It now offers a mad confection of absurdities, with ladder-size groundlings stretching their gristle in aerial dogfights amid the whistle screeches of apoplectic referees trying to enforce ridiculous rules that empty the game of interest.
_______________________
Washington, DC: To your knowledge was being Jewish ever a hindrance to Povich during the early years of his career?
Lynn Povich: My father was raised as an Orthodox Jew in Bar Harbor, Maine. His father had come over from Lithuania in the 1870s when he was only 14. They arrived in Boston, peddled north and ended up in Bar Harbor owning a furniture store. My father was born in 1905 and there were five other Orthodox Jewish families in Bar Harbor who basically serviced the rich summer people who went there to “rusticate”—the Rockefellers, Pulitizers, Vanderbilts, etc.
He said that his family was happy to be in America, to be out of the world of the ghetto and with other landsmen who came to make a good life. He said that even though they were a small Jewish community in Maine, the WASPS always treated them with respect and they, the Jews, thought the WASPS were responsible for much of the greatness of America.
Dad said he never felt any personal anti-semitism in his profession. He also never worked on the Jewish holidays. This was critical during the baseball pennant race, which inevitably fell on Rosh Hashonah or Yom Kippur in September or October. He would miss a game, if there was one, and go to synagogue. He was a very observant Jew and very proud of his religion.
He was also proud that Hank Greenberg was Jewish, too. One year, when the World Series fell on the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur, Dad, as usual, refused to write and went to Synagogue. Greenberg refused to play, which caused a lot of controversy on his team.
As Povich recalled, “We talked, I remember, and he says, ‘Shirley, I wanted to play that World Series game, I hate to let this team down.’ And he says, ‘Remember, too, I’ve been hearing all this stuff from the dugouts about Jew-Boy this and that…You know, I think you have to pay a little more for the privilege of being a Jew.’ And that was his dedication—not only to becoming the great ballplayer that he was, but his determination not to let his Jewish people down. He saw in himself a symbol.”
_______________________
Minot , ND: Who did your dad read? Who were the sports columnists he followed? Who do you yourself read now?
Lynn Povich: Dad was a great reader of The Saturday Review. And his favorite writer there was a man named John Ciardi. He always quoted John Ciardi when someone asked him how to begin a story. Dad said Ciardi said, “It doesn’t matter what your first sentence is. And it doesn’t matter what your second sentence is. But your third sentence damn well better come out of the first two.”
In sportswriting, he read them all—Damon Runyon, Westbrook Pegler, Heywood Hale Brune. But his favorite was Grantland Rice. When he died, Dad wrote: The last rites for Granny Rice will not be conducted in fact until that day in the very distant future when they hold a wake over the last sports writer who strived for even a pale semblance of the lyrical prose Granny brought to the profession.
No writer ever brought such impact to his field as Rice brought sports writing. He was the first to prove, I think, that sport writers could write; at least one of them. Until he came along in the early years of the century to give art to the work, our profession was the despised stepchild of journalism.
Like a fumigating breeze Grantland Rice burst on the scene, circa 1905, to demonstrate that sports could be written with a talent for writing and that even in the sports pages a writer could dominate the language. If he didn't exactly introduce syntax to the sports sections he lifted it to a new extreme with compositions that bordered on the literary.
Dad also loved Red Smith. They were great pals and spent many years traveling the same roads. When Red died in 1982, way before his time, Dad wrote:
None before him had Red's wit and scope. The classical education he got at Notre Dame erupted sometimes in his spouting of Shakespeare's lines at an evening with friends. Occasionally he might quote from a classic in his work, but he shrank at wearing his erudition on his sleeve, and preferred his own turn of phrase, pungent with Smith-ism. As when he called Happy Chandler "the greatest baseball commissioner since Judge Landis," the immediate predecessor.
I mostly follow Vescey in the New York Times and the writers in The Washington Pos-- Boswell, Wilbon, Kornheiser—because I know them and love them.
_______________________
Bowling Green, KY: Did Shirley ever play any sports himself? Did he bring Lou Gehrig by to play catch with you kids?
Lynn Povich: Dad loved golf, which he played all his life. He played all the sports growing up, but his big brother Abe, two years older than he, was such a stellar athlete that I think Dad just decided that golf was going to be his game. Abe, at 5’5”, was All-Maine in baseball, basketball and football!
But Dad loved golf, which is also how he landed in his profession. During the summers in Bar Harbor he would caddy at the swanky golf club for the WASPS. One man he caddied for was Edward B. McLean, who was the owner of The Washington Post and whose wife owned the Hope Diamond. When Dad was graduating from high school, Mr. McLean offered him a job caddying for him in Washington, and working at the Post.
So Dad went to DC and made $20 caddying for Mr. McLean and $7 as a copyboy at the Post! Two years later he was offered $5 more to work in the sports department, and that launched his 75-year-career as the dean of sportswriters!
_______________________
Nezperce, ID: Would your dad have been into fantasy baseball, or is that strickly for geeks?
Lynn Povich: I don’t think he would have liked fantasy baseball because the emphasis on statistics is not what he thought the game was all about. He wrote a wonderful column called “Baseball is Dull for those with Dull Minds” which is really a paen to America's Pasttime and to what’s important in the game. Here’s what he wrote:
Those interludes in a ball game that are viewed by some as a bore are, in fact, full of dynamics. That pitcher isn’t merely fiddling around with the ball in his hand; chances are he is scared to throw it to that big baboon with a bat in his hand who’s ready to knock it back down his throat.
And the batter is not merely knocking the dirt out of his spikes. It’s probably imaginary dirt, anyway. He’s just a little bit reluctant to get into the batter’s box against that old pro 60 feet, six inches away. And when he does he’ll be wondering whether the bum is gonna curve him again or try to blow him down with that good fast ball. It’s High Noon on almost every pitched ball.
And that first baseman who is slapping his throwing hand against his mitt may be less eager for the next play than nervous about it. Big lefthanded hitters can decapitate a first baseman, you know. If that second baseman is playing a bit close to the bag, he may be cheating a bit. He’s another year older and has lost that step, maybe a step and a half. And the third baseman who has decided to play it deep against that righthanded hitter is only being discreet. Smart.
That center fielder isn’t just standing there. Look at him. He’s ready to break toward right where the guy usually hits.
It’s the greatest one-on-one game in the world, a naked contest between man and ball, a battle against flight and bounce and no help from any teammate. In that flash when the moment of truth is apparent, he can’t hand off or hope for a blocker.
_______________________
Washington, DC: Go Nats!;
Lynn Povich: Yes! He would have loved seeing a baseball team in Washington. He was so upset when the second Senators team left in 1972. Here's what he wrote at the last game:
To those among the crowd who had come in sorrow, the Star Spangled Banner never before sounded so much like a dirge. Francis Scott Key, if he had taken another peek by the dawn's early light, would have seen that the flag ain't still there, and lyricized accordingly. It was captured and in transit to Arlington, Tex., which, to embittered Washington fans, is some jerk town with the single boast it is equidistant from Dallas and Fort Worth.
_______________________
New York, NY: Can you talk a little about your dad being named to the Who's Who ... of women?
Lynn Povich: First I must tell you about his name. Shirley was a very common name for a boy in Maine, which was very influenced by the English culture—just as Evelyn and Claire are men’s names in England. Dad went to school with five boys named Shirley.
In 1959, the Marquis Company in Chicago, who assembled the respected Who’s Who in America, decided to publish its first edition of Who’s Who of American Women. They sent a letter to Miss Shirley Povich of The Washington Post, inviting Povich to submit a biography for the book. He flipped the letter into the waste basket.
But despite the fact that his daily column ran with a clear photo of the author, Povich was included in the new edition. There he was, listed between Louise Pound and Horstense Powdermaker, even though his entry included the fact that he was married to Ethyl Friedman and had three children.
Papers all over the country picked up the AP story on the embarrassing error. The LA Times splashed it across the page showing pictures of Mamie Eisenhower, Liz Taylor, Eleanor Roosevelt, Clare Booth Luce and Povich--with a cigar. Walter Cronkite sent a telegram asking, “Miss Povich, will you marry me?” He also went on the popular TV show “I’ve Got a Secret” and stumped the panel!
The Marquis Company quickly sent an apology to Povich, hoping he wasn’t embarrassed by the incident. Typically, Povich responded saying, “For years I have been hearing this is no longer a man’s world and I am glad to be listed officially on the winning side.”
He later was elected to the American Pen Women’s Association, but this time he actually filled out the questionnaire. When asked if his gender ever interfered with how he was treated in his profession, he answered, “No, I just try to be one of the boys.” He was a very witty man.
_______________________
Lynn Povich: Thank you all very much for your delightful questions. I hope you enjoy ALL THOSE MORNINGS...AT THE POST which is a wonderful eyewitness history of the most thrilling and tragic moments in sports in the 20th Century.
_______________________