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SPORTS QUOTES
Quotes on a sports forum by and about sports writer Jim Murray
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King of The Sports Page;
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This SI Classic from April 1986 examines the life of Jim Murray, America's top sports columnist, who, despite a series of tragedies, always keeps 'em laughing;
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BYLINE: by Rick Reilly
SECTION: SPORTS ILLUSTRATED 40TH ANNIVERSARY; Pg. 68
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The thing about Jim Murray is that he lived "happily," but somebody ran off with his "ever after."
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It's like the guy who's ahead all night at poker and then ends up bumming cab money home. Or the champ who's untouched for 14 rounds and then gets KO'd by a pool-hall left you could see coming from Toledo.
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Murray is a 750-word column, and 600 of those are laughs and toasts.
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How many sportswriters do you know who once tossed them back with Bogie?
Wined and dined Marilyn Monroe?
Got mail from Brando?
How many ever got mentioned in a governor's state-of-the-state address?
Flew in Air Force One?
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How big is Murray?
One time he couldn't make an awards dinner, so he sent a sub -- Bob Hope.
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Murray may be the most famous sportswriter in history. If not, he's at least in the photo.
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What's your favorite Murray line?
At the Indy 500: "Gentlemen, start your coffins"?
Or "[Rickey Henderson] has a strike zone the size of Hitler's heart"?
Or UCLA coach John Wooden was "so square, he was divisible by four"?
How many lines can you remember by any other sportswriter?
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MURRAY ON LARGE PEOPLE:
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MERLIN OLSEN: ". . . went swimming in Loch Ness -- and the monster got out."
FRANK HOWARD: ". . . so big, he wasn't born, he was founded . . . not actually a man, just an unreasonable facsimile."
BOOG POWELL: ". . . when the real Boog Powell makes . . . the Hall of Fame, they're going to make an umbrella stand out of his foot."
BILL BAIN: "Once, when an official dropped a flag and penalized the Rams for having 12 men on the field . . . two of them were Bain."
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Arnold Palmer had two of them bronzed.
Jack Nicklaus calls them "a breath of fresh air."
Groucho Marx liked them enough to write to him.
Bobby Knight once framed one, which is something like getting Billy Graham to spring for drinks.
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... a Murray column is the floor show, a setup line and a rim shot, a corner of the sports section where a fighter doesn't just get beaten up, he becomes "sort of a complicated blood clot."
Where golfers are not athletes, they're "outdoor pool sharks."
And where Indy is not just a dangerous car race, it's "the run for the lilies."
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In press boxes Murray would mumble and fuss that he had no angle, sigh heavily and then, when he had finished his column, no matter how good it was, he would always slide back in his chair and say, "Well, fooled 'em again."
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Murray must have fooled all the people all the time, because in one stretch of 16 years he won the National Sportswriter of the Year award 14 times, including 12 years in a row. Have you ever heard of anybody winning 12 anythings in a row?
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After a Laker playoff game against Seattle in 1979, Muhammad Ali ran into Murray outside the locker room and said, "Jim Murray! Jim Murray! The greatest sportswriter of all time!"
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ON GROUCHES
NORM VAN BROCKLIN: ". . . a guy with the nice, even disposition of a top sergeant whose shoes are too tight."
PAUL BROWN: ". . . treated his players as if he had bought them at auction with a ring in their noses."
CONRAD DOBLER, former guard for the St. Louis Cardinals: "To say Dobler 'plays' football is like saying the Gestapo 'played' 20 Questions."
WOODY HAYES: "Woody was consistent. Graceless in victory and graceless in defeat."
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Marilyn Monroe and Murray were having dinner at a Sunset Boulevard restaurant. This was not exactly an AP news flash. Murray was TIME magazine's Hollywood reporter from 1950 to 1953, and you could throw a bucket of birdseed in any direction at Chasen's and not hit anybody who didn't know him.
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He has played poker with John Wayne ("he was lousy"), kibitzed with Jack Benny (who gave him an inscribed, solid-gold money clip) and golfed with Bing Crosby (later, Crosby sent him clippings and column ideas).
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Not bad company for a kid who came up through the Depression in his grandfather's standing-room-only house in Hartford, where, at various times, the roster consisted of himself, his two sisters, his divorced father, his grandparents, two cousins and two uncles, including, of course, Uncle Ed, the one who cheated at dice, a man so bored by work that "he couldn't even stand to watch" people work.
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For his part, Murray liked to write, and his first critical success was a 50-word essay on his handpicked American League all-star team. For winning the contest, he received a razor. He was 10.
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Murray longed to be a foreign correspondent -- "and wear a trench coat and carry a Luger" -- but when TIME called with a $7,000-a-year offer, he took it.
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Over the years he worked on a dozen cover stories on such subjects as Mario Lanza, the Duke, Betty Hutton and Marlon Brando.
"You'd go up and knock on Brando's door," Murray says, "and you'd knock and you'd knock for an hour and he'd never answer. But as soon as you walked away, he'd fling it open and cackle like a rooster."
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Humphrey Bogart became a friend too. "He was the kind of guy who'd get nasty after a couple of drinks. What's the old line? 'A couple of drinks and Bogart thinks he's Bogart.' That's how he was.
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. . . But I remember when he was dying, his wife, Lauren Bacall, would allow him only one drink a day, and if I was coming over he'd wait, because he knew I'd have it with him."
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===== END OF S.I. ARTICLE (EDITED FOR THIS POST)
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In 1969 Texas and Arkansas met in Fayetteville in a classic battle for No. 1, a football game attended by President Nixon. After the game Murray was slammed into a chain-link fence by a Secret Service man who apparently thought Murray looked suspicious. Murray found himself a foot off the ground, suspended only by his collar. Just then, Nixon walked by.
"How ya doin', Jim?" Nixon said.
"I'd be better," Murray said, "if you could get this monkey to put me down."
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ON CITIES
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LONG BEACH: "The seaport of Iowa . . . a city which, rumor has it, was settled by a slow leak in Des Moines."
CINCINNATI: "They still haven't finished the freeway outside the ballpark . . . it's Kentucky's turn to use the cement mixer."
SAN FRANCISCO: ". . . it's not a town, it's a no-host cocktail party. If it were human, it'd be W.C. Fields. It has a nice, even climate. It's always winter."
ST. LOUIS: " . . . had a bond issue recently and the local papers campaigned for it on a slogan PROGRESS OR DECAY, and decay won in a landslide."
OAKLAND: ". . . is this kind of town: You have to pay 50 cents to go from Oakland to San Francisco. Coming to Oakland from San Francisco is free."
BALTIMORE: ". . . a guy just standing on a corner with no place to go and rain dripping off his hat. Baltimore's a great place if you're a crab."
LOS ANGELES: ". . . underpoliced and oversexed."
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Murray and nuclear waste dumps have a lot in common. Everybody likes them until one shows up in the backyard.
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Take the state of Iowa. When the University of Iowa got stuck on its ear in the Rose Bowl this year, Murray felt for the losers:
"They're going home, so to speak, with a deed to the Brooklyn Bridge and a watch that loses an hour a day and turns green on their arm."
That ruffled Iowans so much that two weeks later, Governor Terry Branstad began his state-of-the-state message (as if he didn't have more pressing issues) with a comment for Murray: "Jim, we're proud to be Iowans. . . ." he said. "We're tough and we're coming back."
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Murray roasts America.
He has zinged every place from Detroit (". . . should be left on the doorstep for the Salvation Army") to Munich ("Akron with a crewcut!").
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In fact, Murray maintains Spokane once got to feeling neglected and wrote in asking for the treatment. Always helpful, Murray wrote, "The trouble with Spokane . . . is that there's nothing to do after 10 o'clock. In the morning. But it's a nice place to go for breakfast."
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Besides, if Murray had dropped dead as thousands have asked him to, sports wouldn't be the same. He has championed dozens of causes, many as stark as black and white, and they've made a difference in the nation's landscape. It was Murray's badgering of the Masters, for instance, that helped that tournament change its no-blacks stance: "It would be nice to have a black American at Augusta in something other than a coverall. . . ."
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He was incredulous that Satchel Paige was having difficulty being inducted into the Hall of Fame: "Either let him in the front of the Hall -- or move the damn thing to Mississippi."
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He championed the cause of the beleaguered, retired Joe Louis: "As an economic entity, Joe Louis disappeared into a hole years ago and pulled it in after him. He cannot tunnel out in his lifetime. He owes the United States more than some European allies."
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Crazy, isn't it? For a man half blind, Murray sure could see. I lost an old friend the other day. He was blue eyed, impish, he cried a lot with me, laughed a lot with me, saw a great many things with me. . . . He had a pretty exciting life. He saw Babe Ruth hit a home run when we were both 12 years old. He saw Willie Mays steal second base. . . . He saw Rocky Marciano get up. . . . You see, the friend I lost was my eye. . . .July 1, 1979
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