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| Nephew Melvin Powers and Candace Mossler |
I'm reminded of Dick Schaap, another sportswriter that was worth reading who is no longer with us. His son Jeremy is in the biz, but on the air on ESPN, not really in print like his father, who was decidedly in print at the drop of a ball. Dick turned out sports books, almost before the game was over.
My first exposure to him was when he was a columnist in New York's long-defunct Herald Tribune. a venerable newspaper (my favorite) that eventually lost the battle of making money after the 1963 newspaper strike that famously went on for 114 days that left it on life support. You can fold a newspaper, and newspapers can fold themselves.
Dick and Jimmy Breslin worked side-by-side at the Herald Tribune for a while. A video of the two of them at work would be a treasure. Even just the audio.
I still remember Dick writing about the Candy Mossler trial in Florida in which the blonde bombshell wife and her nephew were acquitted of killing her rich husband, whose fortune was made from Mossler safes. 'The Postman Rings Twice' in real life.
Dick, sensing that there must still be a killer out there if the jury said no, the defendants didn't do it, echoed a line from a commercial of the day for Florida tourism by Jim Dooley, who was always on TV telling frozen New Yorkers to "come on down." Dick thought the real killer should "come on down."
It's not an expression you hear anymore, but in the '60s when Mayor Lindsay managed to piss off nearly every union group in the city and have them go out on strike, Dick Schaap caught a comment His Honor made as he emerged from a helicopter ride looking over the city as it was grid-locked from Lindsay's first strike, the Transport Workers Union (TWU) who ran the subways. The ever buoyant mayor told no one in particular that he still thought "it's a fun city."
Dick on hearing this, ran as fast as he could to his typewriter and told anyone who bought the paper his story was in that despite the grid-lock and hardship of a bus and subway strike, the mayor still thought "it's a fun city." Mayor Lindsay's "popularity" only grew after the end of his second term and Abe Beame became mayor as someone who was disliked even more as the city now faced bankruptcy. The good old days.
Johnny Carson started using the term in his opening monologues on 'The Tonight Show making serious fun of what wasn't fun about NYC. A peep show in Times Square called itself "Fun City." In fact, when I worked at 1440 Broadway after the Trade Center collapse, I could see the building that Fun City was in and its old signage. The building was slated for demolition, the peep show having long disappeared as Times Square got cleaned up.
Seeing some of then names from these out-takes I'm reminded of what's gone from the newspaper: columnists I like the read and to whom I gravitated every day.
Certainly the NYT Sports section is greatly changed, currently shrunken because of the pandemic, but also because of staff cuts that do not even allow beat report coverage of local teams. The articles are more long-form that you might have found in Sport Illustrated if you were to read that tissue paper anymore.
Certainly ESPN, the Web and other cable outlets have changed how people absorb their sports news. And with it, comes less and less print, literary writing. So, aside from collecting these nuggets, I've started a museum in a way. The way we were.
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All over Alaska, there are stories of such perseverance in extreme or unusual conditions. In the southeast, Haines did not have flat space in mountainous terrain, so it used the municipal airport runway for high school track meets. Which was suitable until an aircraft with engine trouble made an emergency landing on the eve of the 110-meter hurdles, wiping out half the school's hurdle supply. Undaunted, Haines started running meets on the state highway in front of the school. The local police halted traffic to allow the events to continue.
–Bill Pennington, NYT, "In Alaska Getting There is Half the Fun." March 1, 2004
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For Trish McLeod, a beautiful Scottish Highlander, my third and final wife, of whom Mickey Mantle said to me, “You’re over married.” If I were not already in love with her, I would have fallen for her the day she met Reggie Jackson for the sixth or seventh time, and he said to her, “What’s your name again?” and she said, “Trish. And yours?” Reggie did not laugh.
I was equally proud of her the evening we had dinner with another formidable athlete, Wilt Chamberlain, who had just written a book in which he casually mentioned, as casually as you can mention such things, that he had enjoyed twenty thousand sexual experiences. Trish reached out and touched Wilt’s elbow and said, “Does that count?” Wilt did laugh.
Darling, this one counts.
–Dick Schaap, introduction to his autobiography, Flashing Before My Eyes
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The only way you could drop more names than Dick Schaap does in Flashing Before My Eyes would be to shove a Manhattan telephone book off a desk.
–Anonymous
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I’d demand a recount.
–William F. Buckley, Jr.’s (who was running for Mayor of New York City, in 1965, on the Conservative Party ticket) well-timed, sonorously elocuted reply, when asked what would he do if he were elected.
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Politics is the most demanding trade I know. Not even prostitution demands that its practitioners surrender so many pieces of themselves.
–--Dick Schaap, Flashing Before My Eyes
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My favorite topic in my newspaper columns was John Lindsay. At the start of his administration, I introduced the nickname Fun City to describe New York. Lindsay himself inspired the phrase. The subways went on strike his first day in office, and after he toured the grid-locked city in a helicopter, someone asked him if he was still glad that he had been elected mayor. “I still think it’s a fun city,” Lindsay said.
–Dick Schaap, Flashing Before My Eyes
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Jimmy Breslin encouraged me to be different, to stand out on television. “Do something outrageous,” he recommended. On the eleven o’clock news one night, I did. I talked about Secretariat and Riva Ridge, the back-to-back Kentucky Derby winners from Meadow Stable, and referred to them, innocently, as the two most famous stablemates since Joseph and Mary.
(This utterance did not gently into the night air.)
–Dick Schaap, Flashing Before My Eyes
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Smith was trying to get out of Philadelphia and into New York, where the money and prestige were substantially greater. Look magazine was seeking a sports editor, and Smith applied. “Look represented his ticket to get to New York,” his daughter Kit Smith recalled years later.” I remember him saying, ‘I’d leave the newspapers for that dumb magazine.’” But Frank Graham got the job in September of 1943. Smith was very disappointed. Another time, he received an offer from the Brooklyn Eagle. “But I decided, “ recalled Smith, “that Brooklyn was farther from New York than Philadelphia was.”
–Ira Berkow, Red, A Biography of Red Smith.
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On January 16, 1983, one year after Red smith died, some 250 people—including friends, colleagues, and a few Red Smith family members—attended a Red smith Pipe Night at the Players Club on Gramercy Park South in Manhattan. Jack Whitaker, the sports announcer, served as master of ceremonies. Whitaker said he had a tape recording of Smith speaking less than two years before at a dinner in his honor at the National Arts Club. The lights were dimmed, the audience grew quiet, and on a screen at the front of the dining hall appeared a silhouette of Smith at his typewriter.
And then Smith’s words, slightly scratchy, a combination of the recorder and the man, were heard in the room. Smith said:
This is a peculiar business we work in. I have to tell you a little about what it’s like. There was a sportswriter in Cincinnati years ago named Bill Phelon. He was a bachelor and a lot of people considered him eccentric because he shared his apartment in Cincinnati with a five-foot alligator. And he had a pet squirrel that he carried around the National League circuit in his topcoat pocket.
Bill Phelon loved baseball and he was kind to animals, and above all he loved Havana. The city of Havana. As soon as the World Series was over, he would go to Havana, join up with his friend Pepe Conte, who was a sportswriter in Havana at the time, and spend as long a time there as his bankroll and the patience of his paper would allow.
And eventually the inevitable happened. Bill Phelon died. And in obedience to directions in his will, he was cremated and his ashes shipped to Pepe Conte. Pepe got a letter and a little package. And in the package was a small urn. The letter said, “Hello Pepe, this is Bill.” Bill asked that Pepe rent a small plane and scatter his ashes over Morro Castle.
Pepe was deeply grieved by the loss of a friend and he took the little jug under his arm and went down to El Floridita, one of the places they had frequented, and there were a few hangers-on sitting around the joint, and Pepe put the urn up on the bar and said to the guys, “Remember Bill Phelon?” Sure, they all remembered Bill Phelon. Pepe Said, “This is to bill Phelon. Have a drink on Bill Phelon.” So they all had a drink on Bill Phelon, and Pepe tucked the jug under his arm and went on to Sloppy Joe’s.
Went through the same routine. “You guys remember Bill Phelon?” “Sure.” “Drink to Bill Phelon.” He went onto the Plaza Bar, maybe the Algleterre, I don’t know. All the spots that were the favorites of Bill’s and Pepe’s. But somewhere on his appointed rounds, Pepe achieved a state of incandescence and he mislaid Bill Phelon.
Bill was undoubtedly swept out the next morning with the cigar butts and the empty bottles. And I tell the story to make it clear that sportswriters lead glamorous lives and come to unexpected ends. And I thank you.
–Red Smith, in Red, A Biography of Red Smith, by Ira Berkow
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The look on the man’s face was that of someone who had just bitten into an apple and found half a worm.
–Red Smith, as recounted by Ira Berkow, in Red, A Biography of Red
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