The Best Sportswriter in Texas
Blackie Sherrod, of course.
(Page 3 of 4)
“Blackie was a great disciplinarian,” Jenkins said. “I always thought he’d make a good football coach. He commanded respect. I was scared to death of him at first. My first story, I spent all night writing it at home on the kitchen table—cutting, polishing, making it bright. Blackie read the first paragraph and said, ‘Don’t ever write a morning lead for an afternoon newspaper, dumb ass.’ I was crushed. He was never really abusive, but . . well, he bit his words off. It was intimidating.”
Shrake said, “I remember racing to work in the dark and the cold, my hands sweating on the steering wheel, and just knowing that no matter how many red lights I ran it wouldn’t be enough for Blackie. Anything past 5:30 a.m. was considered late, and he dearly despised tardiness.”
“God,” Jenkins said, “but he could make you feel like a worthless shit. Wouldn’t speak to you if you came in late. Just freeze you out. He’d grab everything out of your hands and do it himself. One of the day’s highlights was going to breakfast with Blackie after all copy was in. But if you’d been late you didn’t get invited. You’d sit there alone, hating yourself and vowing never to screw up again.”
“When he was really pissed,” Shrake said, “he’d make you telephone Jess Neely at Rice or Dutch Meyer at TCU and ask some simple-ass question before good daylight. They had personalities somewhere between barracudas and mad bears, and they’d cuss you like they’d invented it.”
“Couldn’t fake it either,” Jenkins said. “Blackie would stand right over you.”
“Jap Cartwright was on time once in two years,” Shrake said. “If it had been us, Blackie would have built us doghouses with our names on ‘em.”
“Jap don’t have the normal human responses,” Jenkins grinned. “I think Blackie would have cracked before Jap did.”
Why do so many alumni of Blackie Sherrod’s School of Newspapering still swear by him?
“He was the best,” Jenkins said. “A great teacher. Blackie was doing things with headlines and makeup that other Texas papers didn’t begin for twenty years. He taught punch and juice. ‘Make me read this story,’ he’d say. ‘Motivate me.’ He taught you to look for the angle, and if you didn’t have a strong angle you jazzed it up with similes. He carried his own little black book of original similes around, even when he was drinking, and he’d jot ‘em down as they came to him. Things like ‘. . . as out of place as a Chinaman at the opera.’ A Forth Worth pitcher, Bob Austin, pitched a no-hitter and Blackie wrote a headline saying WHY DON’T WE NAME THE STATE CAPITOL AFTER HIM?
“He taught us that we couldn’t compete with the Star-Telegram when it came to money or numbers, that we had to out-write the opposition and out-hustle ‘em. He made you work. Every time you looked up he was standing there saying ‘What are you working on now?’ Blackie didn’t believe in an idle minute.When we weren’t working or reading to each other, he’d organize track meets. Chinning contests in the men’s room. Fifty-yard dashes on the way to breakfast. Push-ups and broad jumping and arm wrestling. I believe we’d have pole-vaulted if Blackie’d had the equipment.”
Shrake said, “He had a fit when we got careless. Because of our cheapo operation at the Press, we’d clip baseball box scores out of the Star-Telegram and reset ‘em. One time they trapped us by inserting names from our own staff: Ervin, P. and Jenkins, D. Like that. Well, we didn’t notice it and ran ‘em and it was really humiliating. When Blackie came back from a trip with the Fort Worth Cats he was furious. I said, ‘Blackie, we’ve always done that.’ And he said, ‘Yes, goddammit, we have to. But because we’re broke don’t mean shouldn’t always be alert.’”
The old grads of Sherrod University were laughing now, safe from the terrors and poverties of youth; their memories grew warmer and perhaps a shade maudlin. Blackie telling funny stories after “fifty or sixty beers.” Blackie singing “Danny Boy” or “Heart of My Heart” or “Ace in the Hole.” Marilyn Sherrod cooking great meals for Blackie’s boys and mending their broken hearts and generally picking them up when they were down. Newsroom horse play. Betting on football picks in the office pool. “We were a family,” Jenkins said. “A fraternity. It was us against the rest of the paper, us against the opposition, us against the Establishment, us against the world.” Shrake said, “Blackie’s always been an old-fashioned man. Duty. Honor. Country. When the original Dallas Texans began [in 1952], he thought so little of pro football that he assigned coverage to his most junior writer. He takes a lot of convincing before he’ll change.”
The beautiful June Jenkins had been listening with a growing smile. Now she said, “Do you guys remember how you used to hate him?”
They looked at her as if she’d announced her intention to dispense her special favors to the next man who might come up in the elevator, or maybe wanted to surrender all Semi-Tough profits to Russian War Relief. Shock. Disbelief. Bugged eyes and slack jaws.
“Hate Blackie?” Jenkins managed. “Shit, we never hated Blackie! Impossible!”
“You don’t remember throwing your hats down and jumping on them and
“Well . . .”
“Because,” she smiled, “you were overworked and underpaid?”
“Oh, well, shit,” Shrake said. “Everybody did that. It was just blowing off steam.”
June Jenkins laughed and said, “Look, I love Blackie Sherrod, too. I just wanted you to remember it straight.”
Shrake looked a little sheepish and said, “I do remember resenting covering a football game in Waco on Christmas Day.”
“Well,” Jenkins said, “maybe sometimes I hated him about fifteen cents worth my ownself. But when you were good he let you know it, and it made you want to be good again real soon. He taught us to write our way of Fort Worth, didn’t he?”
“Why, I was never mean to those precious children!” Blackie Sherrod says.
We are at the house he enjoys calling “Harlow’s Haven” because of its resemblance to Hollywood homes in the Thirties and Forties: random curved walls of thick glass brick, skylights, air and space, unexpected staircases. It is late. We weave like twin buoys in choppy waters, near Sherrod’s placid swimming pool, having earlier eaten chili “guaranteed to make your head sweat” and then mangling a few fundamentalist hymns with Blackie the perpetrator of much marginal guitar.
“With people like Shrake and Jenkins I didn’t need to be mean. They were hard-working buggers. They cared and they hustled and they’d make you wake up singing. Things we had to guard against was showing scorn toward anybody who couldn’t write good. For a bunch of nobodies working on a Mickey Mouse newspaper we were terrible talent snobs.
“I always taught young folks to write not in competition with others but against the highest standards. Jap Cartwright, when he went to work for the Dallas News writing a column like mine in the Times Herald, he said, ‘Blackie, I’m gonna wear you out. Gonna work so hard and good you’ll never beat me.’ I really didn’t understand that. If I did my best work, then I knew I wouldn’t have to worry about Cartwright or Red Smith or the ghost of Granny Rice. If I didn’t . . .”
He sucked on a Budweiser bottle and said, “I do plead guilty to being a damned meddler. Can’t keep my hands off things. When I leave town and come back and go through the papers, I yell and fuss no matter what’s been done.”
Did his subordinates resent it?
“Shit, I imagine. Wouldn’t you? I know I would. I just can’t seem to help it: didn’t learn to delegate nothing until my ninety-eighth birthday. It pisses me off when something’s not done right! Awhile back I returned from a trip and Lee Trevino had just won a big golf tournament. And I asked, ‘Has anybody called him?’ They mumbled awhile and somebody said, ‘Well, we didn’t know how to reach him.’ Now, come on, the man lives in El Paso not in Afghanistan.” He broods and sighs and shakes his head over mortal man’s capacity to err. “Bob Galt’s good, and steady as a rock. Got a kid named Randy Harvey with all the earmarks if he’ll stick with it.”
Where do sports fit in the grand scheme?
“It ain’t war or pestilence or famine. I guess you could say it’s all running and jumping. I like sports, always have. Played ‘em all at Belton High School. Tried a little football at Baylor and Howard Payne. I try to keep sports in perspective. I’ve written other things and feel comfortable doing it. But long ago I made a decision to stay with what I’m doing. It sure does beat a sharp stick in the eye.” He says this as one who has pissanted heavy objects for small profits and began on the Temple Daily Telegram as the Belton correspondent. Without pay.
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