No Cheering in the Press Box

There are many things I learned in this book, including:

In addition to being a football coach, Knute Rockne also taught chemistry at Notre Dame. No one could motivate someone to study a molecule quite like Knute Rockne.

Maury Povich's father, Shirley Povich, was a famous sportswriter in Washington who wrote for over 60 years. Because of his first name, he was also the only man listed in the 1962 edition of Who's Who in American Women.

Not only did most teams pay for the travel of reporters, often the reporters shared hotel rooms with the ballplayers themselves. Imagine Dan Shaughnessy rooming with Curt Schilling or Manny Ramirez!

In the 1920s, when he was covering the St. Louis Cardinals and Browns, Ray Gillespie says he had a half-dozen roommates who were players:

Some of them would watch me while I was writing. Once a player said, "That's not correct. That's not what the argument was about." So I changed my story.

This is a great book, if you like sports history. Like Lawrence Ritter's "The Glory of Our Times," it is an oral history of the golden age of sports, but the people interviewed here are the reporters rather than the players. In the 1970s, Holtzman interviewed 24 sportswriters who wrote between the two world wars. It's fascinating to read about the life reporters led back then.
 

Sure, there was as much alcohol as you would expect. New York sportswriter Richards Vidmer starts his interview by saying, "Hell, I should have been dead twenty years ago," and, well, he should have been. He talks about one night when he wanted to see a guy in the hotel room next to him:

I'd been drinking. Instead of going around the corner and walking in through the door, I climbed out my window and crawled from one ledge to the other.

This was on the 12th floor! Obviously, "I'd been drinking" may be the biggest understatement in the entire book.

Reporters then were much closer to the players. Even if they weren't sharing hotel rooms with players like Gillespie did, they did take long train trips with the players, and often spent time socially with them. If a reporter wanted to rip a player -- and many still did -- they couldn't hide from the players quite like they can today. More than one of these newpapermen have stories of a ballplayer threatening to beat him up because of a story.

In some ways, it was also a more genteel life. The games were played during the day. Reporters could crank out their stories in the early evening and then have the rest of the night to themselves. A few in here even said that night baseball ruined the job of the baseball reporter.

While there are many different opinions offered in here, a few themes do emerge. There is too much of a focus on statistics today, rather than the game itself. Reporters also spend way too much time writing about the personal lives of athletes today.  (In the words of Al Abrams: "What they did on their time didn't have anything to do with their baseball careers.") And, finally, reporters rely too much on "wooden quotes" from the participants, rather than just writing about what they saw at the game. (Al Laney had a good quote about how quotes can clutter up a story, but in deference to him, I'm not going to use it.)

Interestingly, I recognized stories in here from other sports books I've read that obviously used this as source material -- most notably Leigh Montville's "The Big Bam" about Babe Ruth and Brad Snyder's "A Well Paid Slave" about Curt Flood and the fight against baseball's reserve clause.

Those are just two examples I noticed, but with all the great stories in here, I'm sure there are dozens of others that also used this as source material.