The Best Sportswriter in Texas
Blackie Sherrod, of course.
(Page 4 of 4)
Sherrod agitates his Budweiser dregs and talks of way back when: “I always loved words. Read every book in the Belton library. Two books a day in summer and still had time for baseball. The librarian had a rule that kids couldn’t check out adult books but she finally made an exception. I read Twain, Zane Grey, William MacLeod Raine. History, biography novels. These old Street and Smith football magazines, hell I memorized them.
“Generally, I’ve found athletes and coaches to be purty good companions. Bobby Bragan, the old Forth Worth Cats manager, knew newspapering as well as he knew baseball. He’d give young newsmen angles: ‘Well, that San Antonio second baseman has hit in fifteen straight games’ or ‘This left-hander hasn’t gone more than three innings against us in two years.” I admired his competence. Lindy Berry, the old TCU quarterback, is still one of my best friends. Quality folk. Lot of old jocks keep in touch. I had a note this week from a kid who played only one season with the Dallas Cowboys maybe ten years ago.
“Pro jocks, lately, they bore my ass off. They’re so damned spoiled. But, hell, it’s not really their fault. Since superhumans started coming along—kids weighing three hundred pounds and standing eleven-feet-seven by sixth grade—they’ve been coddled and cheered and had their butts wiped. I don’t find ‘em very interesting people, no matter how many quarterbacks they can strangle or how hard they can throw a baseball.”
Sherrod came from poor but proud stock, the son of a barber father and a music teacher mother. Though handsome and a star athlete—he likes to remember catching the pass that beat Cameron 7-0 and won Belton a district championship in the late Thirties—he was not a swaggering hotshot. “I had a spit curl,” he said. “But no car. My old man kept at me to excel. I never played a game that wholly satisfied him.”
The kid always had some kind of sweaty job, and learned about hard-scrabble. The work ethic stuck deep in his craw. To this day he is not fond of welfare loafers and is contemptuous of people who give less than their best. Sherrod was discharged from the Navy on the last day of 1945, after winning decorations as a tail gunner in the Pacific, and returned to the Temple Daily Telegram to find that George Dolan (now a Star-Telegram columnist) “had got my job and my girlfriend.” Walter Humphrey, the late editor of the Fort Worth Press, who had been on the Temple newspaper earlier, brought Sherrod to Cowtown in 1946. After writing news for radio station KFJZ and doing a police beat stint for the Press, Blackie wrote sports under Pop Boone and then Amos Melton. Blackie became sports editor in the early Fifties. “After ten years on the short end of the stick,” he says, “I cleverly realized the Press was a dead end. I was offered jobs in Houston, San Diego, and here in Dallas. I 1958 I met the Times Herald representatives in the back booth of a Howard Johnson’s, like we were a bunch of spies, and when they offered me $185 a week I run over ‘em rushing home to pack. The Press had been paying me a figure that would embarrass my mother.”
“He’s not the world’s easiest person to live with,” Marilyn Sherrod says. She is a pleasant blonde woman who loves poodles, cooking, and the man she’s been married to for 28 years. She was a secretary at the Press when they met. “Blackie’s always been so consumed by his work that sometimes I fear he’s missed a few things. First date we had he took me to a football game. I learned early what it was like to be a press-box widow.
“At first we didn’t want any children. We had careers and needed to get established financially. And then it happened that we just never got around to having any. I guess that’s our big regret. One night some friends remarked on all the honors Blackie’s won—(she laughs, “I always say we’re in the used plaque and scroll business”)—and Blackie said, ‘What are we gonna do with ‘em? There’s nobody to leave ‘em to. What good are they?
“But I don’t think he’d trade lives with anybody. He’s proud, you know. He’s an achiever. He goes all out at what he does and he’s not happy unless he’s making something happen. ‘Old Buster,’ as he calls himself, has never bored me. Ever.”
Bob Galt, long Sherrod’s right hand at the Times Herald, claims his boss is a pussycat. “He tries to come on hard and tough, but he’s got this compassion for people and animals. I could tell you yarns for hours. Yeah, he bitches and complains some. It’s his job and his nature. But he’s the greatest journalism teacher in the world.”
I told Sherrod that nobody had said anything bad of him. (The nearest thing to a knock came from the person who said Sherrod may be an old-fashioned, if unconscious, bigot: he was among the last to abandon calling Muhammad Ali by his old name of Cassius Clay and sometimes he’ll still say “colored boy.”) “Well, yeah,” Sherrod said. “You sure ought to talk to my enemies.”
Well, who are they?
“Screw you,” he said. “Get your own story.”
Blackie is Beautiful
“Sportswriting is like driving a taxi.”
Good editors such as Blackie Sherrod instruct writers to show, not merely tell. Very well. Here are random samples of Sherrod’s talent, culled from his new book Scattershooting.
On the Dallas Cowboys beating the Miami Dolphins in the 1972 Super Bowl:
“The ghosts are now buried and quiet, the closets have been swept clean of skeletons. The Cowboy complexion is now clear of pimples, and they may walk down the street on the day after their biggest challenge without yard dogs barking and small boys pelting them with stones. The old brands of Choke City, U.S.A., and the El Foldo Kids and the Next Year’s Champions must now fall on other brows. The Cowboys have met the big one and he is finally theirs. . . . The clock told the story. Dallas controlled the ball 40 minutes and 58 seconds of the game. This left 19 minutes and two seconds for the young Dolphins, and this was like trying to vault the Eiffel Tower with a broomstick. . . . Some Shadetree Experts called it a dull game because of Dallas’ grinding movements, but it is like putting the bad rap on a no-hitter because there were no home runs…”
On recalling that marvelous season when undefeated Belton whacked Cameron for the district championship:
“The Belton team was a slight underdog because word leaked out the Cameron team had married guys on it. No one knew exactly what advantage this was, but it was impressive news. . . . Merchants in both towns closed their doors. The drug store sold out of cigars, and several of the sportier chaps made a run down to Williamson County for pints of Mint Springs. There was a report that the owner of the all-night cafe had bet $50. . . . Cameron had run a special train for the game, a distance of at least 30 miles or so. People stood a half-dozen deep around the field and some perched in trees . . . at one end of the arena. Talk about pressure, Don [Meredith] baby, you never had it like this.”
Describing Johnny Unitas:
“His face is a map of a hard path, forehead wrinkles, cascading furrows in his cheeks, small pock marks dotting his lean, serious cheeks. He is a day laborer who somehow fell into fame on his way to work and it impresses him not one whit.”
And:
“Sportswriting is just like driving a taxi. It ain’t the work you enjoy. It’s the people you run into.”
Or:
“Something less than two weeks ago, Mr. LBJ thru his laig crost the saddle horn and made oratorical history. He spoke a line that zinged in the national ear. Zinged, baby, zinged. Our leader surveyed reports from [Watts] and released this ponderous thought: “‘Killing, rioting, and looting are contrary to the best traditions of this country.’ Not only was this of informative value but it showed a vast amount of diligent research.
Finally, on writing of a dying Primo Carnera, the mob-managed innocent giant heavyweight who in the thirties was fed setups until he became a bogus champion, then—once the mob had its bets placed—was sent out to take fearful beatings from Max Baer and Joe Louis:
“He had zero ability but he was heavy on bravery and pride. And when he left the New York airport, his frame wracked by cirrhosis of the liver, heading home [to Italy] to die, the photographers clustered about him. A couple of his old sparring mates came to see him off and they were openly crying. Primo begged the photographers to wait a minute. Then he handed his cane to a friend and told the guys to shoot away. He still wanted no sign of weakness. May somebody forgive all of us everywhere for what we did to this human being.”
I reckon you can see, now, why those of us who peddle words talk about Blackie Sherrod on our barstools and find him so easy to steal from. In the second paragraph of this opus I wrote that A.C. Greene “was not born fast friends with money.” My earlier efforts said things like, “He was born scratch poor” or “He came into this world naked and broke,” and so on, none of it working. Then, thumbing through the galley proofs of Scattershooting, I found the line “Unitas is fast friends with money,” and I simply couldn’t resist the slight twist. I’m like the Texas legislator who said in response to the little old lady constituent who’d charge that she’d heard he was stealing, “Yessum, but I been trying to quit.” Me too, Blackie. But you sure do make it hard. L.L.K.
My Library
