The Best Sportswriter in Texas
Blackie Sherrod, of course.
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Sherrod aggressively covered SMU’s dismissal of players for using drugs and is now working on a similar story involving other Southwest Conference schools. Precious little had been originated, however, about the crass way pro clubs have winked at—or actually encouraged—the use of pain-killing shots, amphetamines, or other uppers for years and years.
Racism? “Sure,” Sherrod says. “I think every club in pro sports has a race problem — except maybe the Golden State Warriors, where everybody but Rick Barry is black. We’ve covered it in depth. Mel Renfro filing a law suit against a discriminating apartment house in Dallas. Calvin Hill had a great deal to say of racism. Now I don’t—and I never have—believe that ball clubs stack blacks at given positions so as to enforce a quota system. In other words, to be sure that no more than X number of blacks are on the field. Hell, there’s too much big money involved! I’m convinced owners and coaches would play a platoon of cross-eyed Chinamen if they thought it’d help ‘em win.” Maybe it’s all point of view, and perhaps mine is just naturally darker and more suspicious than Sherrod’s, but I sometimes think him myopic where more is involved than the score.
Blackie now commands a baker’s dozen writers, taps out “only” five columns per week as opposed to the six he accomplished for twenty years, travels where he wants when he wants, theoretically need not show at the word factory before 10 a.m., presides over a book-lined corner office of generous proportions, is at least semi-handsomely paid, and serves on the Times Herald board of directors. It was not ever thus.
In his decade at the scabby Fort Worth Press, a now-lapsed Scripps-Howard effort where expense accounts were non-existent and he didn’t dare dispatch a staffer beyond Waco unless he suspected the fellow of independent wealth, Blackie held it altogether with chewing gum and bailing wire and cussing. “I looked for good merchandise cheap,” he remembers. Dan Jenkins, the Sports Illustrated writer and author of the best-selling novel Semi-Tough, was discovered in the pages of his high school paper. Blackie lured him from the Paschal Pantherette for a zinging $15 per week, and Jenkins worked his way through TCU without excessive raises. Jenkins recommended a buddy, Edwin (Bud) Shrake, who was put on at “space rates”: this meant he was paid according to piece work performed, as with peapickers and women who take in ironing. After he made $32 in a single week, Shrake was promoted sideways to a full-time staff job at $20 each Friday, the better to conserve corporate funds; Shrake, too, is a Sports Illustrated biggie, a fine novelist, and has sold screenplays. Gary (Jap) Cartwright, currently a novelist and freelance writer, was brought aboard for pennies from a police beat he jazzed up for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Julian Read, long hired for princely sums by Texas politicos who wish their public images polished, once was a $12.50-per-week “go-fer” for Blackie. Jerre R. Todd, now a Fort Worth public relations man, was another of Blackie’s wild and literally hungry crew. Sherrod still considers Todd the big one that got away: “He might have been better than any of us if a living wage hadn’t been so dad-gummed important to him.”
At 55, Sherrod is ripe enough to indulge in old men’s laments. “It ain’t as much fun as it was,” he admits. “I think I give it as much — I just don’t get as much back. I’ll always have a soft spot for that bunch of raging mad paupers at the Press. You could hollar out, ‘Who was the first mate on the Bounty?’ and so many voices would beller ‘Fletcher Christian’ that you thought the Mormon Tabernacle Choir had sneaked up on you. Now, though, you ask most newsmen who Fletcher Christian was and somebody will say, ‘Didn’t he play for the White Sox?’ Nobody reads anymore.”
It does not impress Sherrod that more books are bought than ever before, or that the educational norm — even among out-at-elbows newsmen — is several degrees higher than twenty years ago. No sir, he knows what he knows, remembers what he remembers, and unless you want your nasty statistical mouth mashed you’d better shut it. “We read aloud to each other in the newsroom,” he recalls. “S. J. Perelman and H. Allen Smith and Damon Runyon. Mark Twain. Name ‘em. And even when we were out drinking, or riding on a Texas League baseball train, we talked about writing headlines or leads or makeup. Now, I dunno, the five o’clock whistle blows and everybody runs off to PTA meetings or to mow their lawns.”
Blackie is sprawled in his fine home in the Lakewood section of Dallas, surrounded by so many autographed pictures from people like Bing Crosby and John Connally and Doak Walker that you wonder why he needs wallpaper; he is grinning in remembering when nobody ran off to PTA meetings after work. “There was this beer-sop Meskin food place called Shanghai Jimmy’s, and if we didn’t eat there two nights a week our faces would break out. A certain eatin’ contest was matched between Bad Hair Bentley, who could eat a boiled child if it was free, and a challenger named Pete Fisher, who claimed to eat raw frogs. Bad Hair’s manager tried a tad of strategy that backfired: he had Bad Hair eat rum balls between official courses on the theory it would cool off his gizzard and keep him fresh. When the contest ended in a tie, Bad Hair Bentley claimed he’d been done in by mismanagement. Then somebody noticed that Bud Shrake, who’d been standing around as a mere spectator, had accidentally scarfed down four double-number-elevens. I think Bud was a little embarrassed by being crowned the new official glutton, but after that we’d have him go down to Shanghai Jimmy’s occasionally and eat an exhibition.
“Jerre Todd, the good crazy bastard, he’d do anything a monkey could. You had to watch him. The best sports writing in America was wild stuff he’d write and post on the bulletin board. Back during the Fifties when Red Grange was on TV as a football color man, Red used the worst grammar in the Kingdom, ‘Ohio State they’ and ‘The Buckeyes it,’ and so on. When Grange’s old college coach died—Bob Zuppke, I think it was—I was turning through the Press after the first edition rolled and came on this suspicious dateline from Florida quoting Red Grange as saying, ‘It are a great personal loss.’ Well, shit, I howled and slapped my leg and hated like the devil to make Jerre remove his priceless little invention before the second edition. But, of course, I had to.
“Dan Jenkins was, and is, the most effortless writer I’ve ever know. And the most confident. Most writers, they’re insecure to the point of hiding under the bed. Dan always had the attitude of a competent athlete—and he was a good athlete. Golf. Basketball. Pool. I think he could’ve roped buffaloes. Nothing in the world spooked Dan except snakes. Just a picture of a reptile would crater him. We spent a lot of time finding snake pictures—in color if possible—and trimming them and then rolling them up in Dan’s typewriter. He’d come sailing in, smoking his nineteenth cigarette of the morning and drinking his twelfth Coke. When he rolled his typewriter carriage, out would jump this horrible goddamn snake. And Dan would beat and thresh and whoop awhile and fall down in wastebaskets. Then he’d sigh and sit down and once he’d quit trembling he’d write you the best eight hundred newspaper words you ever read.
“When I left the Press for the Times Herald, Jenkins replaced me as a sports editor there—which was about like being the lookout at a prairie dog colony. Anyway, Shrake made the move to Dallas with me: he and Jerre Todd flipped for it, and I guess Shrake lost. We’d been accustomed to mighty short rations at the Press. Honest, when pencils wore down to nubs you were expected to tape the two shorties together and make-do with the lead at both ends. Then you had to turn in the nubs to get a new pencil. On the second day the Times Herald Shrake said in some wonder, ‘Do you know they’ve got a supply room back there and you can get anything you want?’ He talked like they had a company whore hid back there. When he found out they actually had a copy boy, I thought he’d soil hisself. Shrake would rare back about every twenty minutes and beller ‘Copy!’ and sit and grin silly and look vastly pleased when the copy boy rushed up. Of course, more than half the time he didn’t have any copy. I had to make him quit it so they wouldn’t think we were a couple of Cowtown hicks.”
Dan Jenkins sat in his penthouse apartment on Park Avenue, looking out on the spires of Manhattan. He and some visiting Texas pals cleaned up on chicken-fried steaks which his wife, June, cooks better than they do it at Odessa’s Club Cafe. Bud Shrake, visiting from Austin, opined that the cream gravy was lighter and better than any French chef’s sauce. It was a good time, between sips of wine and puffs of fine cigars, to recall the tougher days—their root beginnings as writers.
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