A profile of legendary columnist Jim Murray shows and tells

If you have a few minutes and love sportswriting, sit down with ‘Still No Cheering In The Press Box’: Jim Murray, Pulitzer Prize Winner by Elia Powers at Yahoo’s the PostGame.

That oddball headline is a clumsy reference to the classic 1974 book “No Cheering in the Press Box,” in which Jerome Holtzman interviewed 18 of his fellow sportswriters. An introductory note says that students at the University of Maryland are working on a new version. “The premise is to profile great sports journalists by allowing them to tell their own stories,” the note says.

Murray died in 1998, so he’s not going to be telling his own story. But of course Murray, one of the founders of Sports Illustrated and a Los Angeles Times columnist for nearly 40 years, left millions of words behind, and Powers does a good job of both showing and telling what made him great.

How great? As Powers notes, he was named “America’s Best Sportswriter” in 14 different years—12 of them in a row—by the National Association of Sportscasters and Sportswriters. He won a Pulitzer Prize. Bill Dwyre, the former sports editor of the Los Angeles Times, says, “There was Red Smith and there was Jim Murray and there won’t be any two better.”

I grew up reading Murray. Unlike Smith, who I think slowed down a bit in the 1950s, Murray didn’t have a prime. He got old and sick and had to write less often, but whenever he could get to the keyboard, he brought his best fastball.

Two of his best and most famous columns, about losing an eye to glaucoma and the death of his first wife, were written when he was in his 60s. His obituaries all mentioned his last column, noting that it was vintage Murray. It was about jockey Chris McCarron, who was riding Free House, a horse that had finished third, second and third in the 1997 Triple Crown races but had won at Del Mar that day. “‘The bridesmaid finally caught the bouquet,” Murray wrote. “The bridesmaid finally caught the bouquet. The best friend got the girl in the Warner Brothers movie for a change. The sidekick saves the fort. … It’s nice to know getting older has its flip side.”

As great as Murray was with words and one-liners, as keen an observer as he was, Powers notes that it was when he hit on the idea of poking fun at different cities that he became a household name. He had a rainy-day column to file from Cincinnati, and he wrote about the town, “If it was a human, they’d bury it.”

“When he got the idea and started doing those columns where he wrote about cities, I think that’s where it clicked in his mind that he could do this,” [Murray biographer Ted] Geltner said. “I really thought that was an important part of his career because in the early ’60s there were so many newspapers and dozens and dozens of columnists, and he was just another one until he started doing that.”

Fifty years ago, just like today: Even if you’re clearly the best, you need to find a way to stand out.