A little piece of me died today when I heard of Jim Murray's death. For those of you who never read him you missed a legend. When you think of it, see if you can pick up one of his books at your local library. You won't be disappointed. Bob http://www.latimes.com/HOME/NEWS/SPORTS/t000075332.htmlTitle: A Man of His Words
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Tuesday, August 18, 1998
BILL DWYRE
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 ear after year, I went to the Rose Bowl not so much to watch the
game as to watch the pilgrimage.
There in the press box, hours before the game, they would edge his way. They were from Dubuque, Iowa; Madison, Wis.; Kalamazoo, Mich. They were young sportswriters on their first big assignment in Tinseltown. You could almost smell the mix of puberty and adrenaline. Soon, one would get the courage to approach. "Mr. Murray, my name is Tom Jones from the Gazette in Dubuque. I've admired you for years and I just wanted to meet you and . . ." And he would turn, smile, look them in the eye and invite them to sit down and tell him about themselves, and about how they got into this crazy sportswriting business. No paper was too small, no approach too awkward. Jim Murray, arguably the greatest sportswriter of them all, was simply being Jim Murray, a man whose greatness carried with it no accompanying swagger. He was the pope of sports journalism, and these audiences always came warmly, if not easily. Dubuque and Madison and Kalamazoo didn't know that Murray lived with some degree of trepidation in these situations; that he always feared being tapped on the wrong shoulder, making him turn the wrong way too quickly and detaching the retina in his surgically repaired eye, the right one. They were, after all, too young to know about the nearly full year of his life that he spent in almost total darkness, one eye lost to a detached retina and the other clouded almost completely by a cataract. Nor could they know of the nights he slept, head locked in place by sandbags or their equivalent, so that he would make no sudden motion and detach the other retina. If the pilgrimage became too long, I would stand on his vulnerable side, forcing them to approach the other way, so he could see them more quickly, so he wouldn't be startled at an approach. He so feared the loss of vision from his good eye, but never enough to isolate himself from his world of games and athletes and the words he wrote about both. Or from his brethren, other sportswriters. Murray is a man who walked with kings, dined with queens and never thought he was some kind of prince. He is the only man I know who could start a sentence with: "The night I was having dinner with Marilyn Monroe. . ." and be neither lying nor name-dropping. As the West Coast correspondent for Time magazine, Murray did, indeed, have dinner with Marilyn Monroe and noticed, halfway through the meal, that she was paying a great deal of attention to a man who had entered the restaurant and gone to a darkened booth near the back. During dessert, she asked Murray if he minded that she leave with a friend. To which Murray responded, "Not at all, as long as you take me back there first and introduce me to Joe DiMaggio." He was on a first-name basis with presidents and stars. He loved the songs of Bing Crosby, and Crosby thought that Murray's columns were music to his ears. Recently, during a golf game, Bing's son, Nathaniel, talked about the day the family had to do the inevitable and clean out some of Bing's things after his death. "Dad had an entire box of clippings of Jim Murray columns," Nathaniel Crosby said. Murray won a Pulitzer Prize and made fun of himself in the aftermath. "I never thought you could win a Pulitzer just for quoting Tommy Lasorda correctly," he said. He was inducted into baseball's Hall of Fame, was named national sportswriter of the year 14 times and still thought of himself as a working stiff. It is ironic that so many in his business tried to emulate him, so many fell so far short and so many still became his exact antithesis: Prima donnas. The angriest he ever got at me was shortly after the 1989 San Francisco earthquake. He had been at Candlestick Park with the rest of the sportswriting world, there for the World Series. Everybody scattered, communication was lost and, after several hours, nobody knew where Murray was. By the time he called in, his family was worried, the sports staff was worried and I was a wreck. So when I jumped on the phone and interrogated him as to where he had been and why hadn't he called, he snapped back immediately. "Listen, Dwyre. The last time I looked, this was a pretty big news story. I've been out interviewing people, I had to drive halfway to San Jose to find a phone that worked and now the damn Hell's Angels are going to take over this phone booth if I don't get somebody to take some dictation pretty soon." He was forever the working stiff, no matter what the rest of the world thought. Or, as Skip Bayless of the Chicago Tribune wrote: "I never knew anybody so gifted who took himself less seriously." He once nearly started an international sports war, with his own publisher right in the middle. As Otis Chandler tells the story, he had finally succeeded in putting together, under L.A. Times sponsorship, an international dual track meet between the United States and the Soviet Union, no easy feat in the middle of the Cold War. The Soviets came to the Coliseum, competed before big crowds the first day and fell well behind a stronger U.S. team in the points total. From that first day's competition, Murray wrote, in his own saber-sharp style, that this Soviet team was lousy and that, if they continued performing like this, half the team and all their coaches would be sent to Siberia. "Next thing I know," Chandler said, "I was told the Soviets were packing up and leaving and would not compete unless they received an apology for Murray's column from both The Times, me personally and the State Department. Somehow, Chandler and Glenn Davis, Army's famous Mr. Outside, who had become The Times' director of special events, patched things up and the meet went on. Asked about it years later, Murray didn't even flinch. "The Soviets were lousy," he said. "What did they expect me to write?" Two months ago, at a sports editors' convention in Virginia, I again watched a pilgrimage. Murray was there to be honored and to speak on a panel. In the hotel hallways, they circled him, then approached slowly, awkwardly, hands outstretched to meet the man who, before that day and this in-person opportunity, had only been an image and a legend. He greeted all, talked easily, warmly. And as they left, he gave me one of those looks that said, "What's the big deal here?" There is a man in The Times sports department named Jim Rhode. He is from Southern California and wanted to become a sports journalist because he grew up reading Jim Murray. Rhode has been on The Times' staff for 20 years, is an assistant sports editor and has dealt with Murray thousands of times over the phone while working on the night desk operation. But Rhode said Monday that he had never actually met Murray, never approached him when he was in the office and shook his hand or engaged him in five minutes of face-to-face conversation. "I just could never go up to him like that," Rhode said. "I was just always too much in awe." Somewhere up there, sitting around now with Bing and Ben Hogan and Walter O'Malley, Murray will read that and feel sad. He will want to tell Jim Rhode that that was silly, that he wasn't anybody to be in awe of. He was just Jim Murray, working stiff. * MURRAY DIES Jim Murray, one of only four sportswriters to have won a Pulitzer Prize, died at his home Sunday night. He was 78. * LOSING AN ANGEL Randy Harvey says that you didn't have to grow up here to know that Jim Murray was the L.A. Times sports section. C2 * BEST OF THE BEST Murray's columns about losing his left eye in 1979 and the death of his first wife in 1984 are reprinted in their entirety. C6 * SPORTS WORLD REACTION Golf was Jim Murray's favorite sport, and Arnold Palmer had his favorite column bronzed. Others also remember. C7 * STAFF MEMORIES Times staff members describe what it was like to work with Jim Murray, to sit with him in a press box or drive him home. C8 * COLLEAGUES' TRIBUTE The nation's top sports columnists, from Dave Kindred to Scott Ostler to Blackie Sherrod, say farewell to Jim Murray. C9 * VIEWS OF MURRAY Some of Jim Murray's best lines on golf, cities, celebrities and his personal look at life are featured on C6-7, 9-10. * A MUST READ Sports of all kinds made up the theater for which Jim Murray wrote the script. Editorial page. FUNERAL ARRANGEMENTS * A funeral Mass for Jim Murray will be said Friday at 11 a.m. at St. Martin of Tours Church, 11967 Sunset Blvd., Brentwood. DONATIONS * In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Richstone Family Center, 13620 Cordary, Hawthorne, Ca. 90250.
Copyright 1998 Los Angeles Times. All Rights Reserved
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