Gary Cartwright
Game Over
The decline of sportswriting in Texas can be blamed on many things—the collapsing newspaper business, for one—but the real problem is that nobody’s having fun anymore.
Mike Rothstein says: Who is Gary Cartwright? (June 15th, 2009 at 2:48pm)
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Here is Ole Buster (as Sherrod referred to himself) at the Yale-Harvard game in November 1960, describing the “Hahvud” band: “These lads were a bit unbelievable. They were clad in dusty black loafers, wrinkled white ducks, red flannel blazers and red ties that were wonderfully askew. One wore a beret. Another, an eye patch. Most had unfortunate complexions and thick glasses and difficulty determining which was the right foot and which was the left foot for the purpose of marching.” A born storyteller, he had an ear for the vernacular and an antenna for bullshit, good or bad. Writing about Texas Christian University coach Abe Martin, Sherrod captured perfectly Martin’s cracker-barrel philosophy and ability to pop off such terms as “peckerwood,” “shistlepott,” and “yew bet.” Sherrod recalled that after watching a game film in which one of his Frogs made a particularly good play, Martin issued this statement of high praise: “Ah’m gonna have to buy that peckerwood a cream cone!”
Can we even compare Sherrod with the jokers turning out pap nowadays, scribblers like Golden or his Statesman compadre Kirk Bohls? I’d thought Bohls was the most boring columnist I’d ever read until Golden came aboard. Golden is one of those hapless press boxers who think lists of bests and worsts is material that engages the intellect. Bohls’ solution for every problem is to fire the coach. What both of them really like to do—because it’s easy and gives the paper a chance to blow its own horn—is make predictions. Sports predictions are the last refuge of dimwits. At the Times Herald we used to try and predict the margins in college football games in a weekly feature called the Pick-It Line, but it was strictly fun and games. To paraphrase John Kenneth Galbraith, the only purpose for predicting the outcome of sports events is to make astrology look good. I don’t mean to pick on these guys: They’re no worse than most of the others. They’re just trying to make a living in a profession that is dying a slow and pathetic death.
The best of today’s sorry lot are Randy Galloway, at the Star-Telegram, and Tim Cowlishaw and Kevin Sherrington, at the Morning News. Houston hasn’t produced a warm body since Herskowitz retired. San Antonio? Forget about it. Though our big-city dailies are top-heavy with sports columnists, there are hardly any worth spending a cup of coffee on.
Galloway is old-school. He was a young sports reporter in Dallas in the sixties, at roughly the time that Sherrod was presiding over the Times Herald. Maybe that’s why he’s so intoxicated with attitude. Cowlishaw is a good reporter and a good enough writer. Sherrington’s offerings are, as they used to say, an inch deep and a mile wide, but his short, punchy style can be pretty funny. In a column this spring about claims that the Chinese were cutting a few years off the reported ages of their gymnasts, Sherrington noted that fourteen-year-olds supposedly have an advantage over sixteen-year-olds because they’re more flexible. “Sounds sketchy to me,” he wrote, “but then I’ve never tried to bend one of my teenagers, either.” He went on to speculate that historians will discover that China isn’t nearly as old as previously believed and that “the Ming Dynasty was just an unpleasant interlude between courses of deer lip and camel hump.” At his best Sherrington might qualify as Sherrod Lite.
None of them, I’m afraid to say, stack up very well against their predecessors. Consider the lede of Jenkins’s 1970 British Open story for Sports Illustrated, where he’d gone after stints at the Times Herald and the Fort Worth Press: “Amid the gloomy and yet intoxicating old ruins of the town called St. Andrews and on the golf course that held the first cleat, history and tradition were caned and flogged all last week in a musty thing called the British Open by a cast of modern hustlers and legends.” As a pure sportswriter, Jenkins was without equal. He could be laugh-out-loud funny. Here’s the opening line of a story about “a special kind of brute,” Dick Butkus, who was an All-American linebacker at Illinois at the time: “If every college football team had a linebacker like Dick Butkus, all fullbacks would soon be three feet tall and sing soprano.”
Shrake was the most literary of the old bunch. Like Jenkins, he hit his stride at Sports Illustrated, but a series of columns he wrote for the Morning News on the boxing match between Sonny Liston and Cassius Clay in the winter of 1964 are classics of the genre. “Cassius Clay drove into town,” he wrote several weeks before the fight, “in a black Cadillac so long that by the time the rear of it could get through an intersection he had almost run the light.” Most boxing aficionados thought Clay was a joke and continued to think that way right up until the moment just before the start of the seventh round of the championship fight in Miami Beach, when he suddenly leaped from his stool and started jumping around like a crazy man. What nobody knew at the time—and nobody can explain even today—was that Liston had surrendered the championship without bothering to answer the bell. Maybe his shoulder was hurt, as he claimed later. Or maybe the fight was fixed. From ringside, Shrake wrote a wonderfully Runyonesque critique, explaining: “It was one of the worst fights of the century. Some of the incidents are all but impossible to explain other than in terms of there having been business done.”
In the backwash of today’s mediocrity, I’d hate to think that people have forgotten the great ones. But it could happen, as Jenkins reminded me recently. He and Sherrod belong to a group of truly ancient sportswriters who call themselves the Geezers. They gather each year to drink, tell the same old stories, and bitch about what’s happening to journalism. The group numbers eight or ten and includes Furman Bisher, of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution; Edwin Pope, of the Miami Herald; and, until he died, Jim Murray, who wrote so brilliantly for the Los Angeles Times.
A few years ago, as the Geezers were holding court at a bar in Dallas, the late Jim Brock, who used to be Abe Martin’s publicity director at TCU, was seated with some local wise-guy day drinkers at a nearby table. Brock pointed to the Geezers. “Right over there are a bunch of the best damn sportswriters in America, and I personally know every one of ’em,” he said.
To which one of the wise guys said, “Oh? Which one is Kevin Sherrington?”
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