Preamble:
This series will serve to highlight the individuals who inspired me to take up sportswriting as a hobby. (and perhaps eventually a career) The following pieces are dedicated to sportswriters who have been instrumental in painting the American and international sporting landscape for posterity. We will look a bit at their lives but I do not intend these pieces to be mere biographies. Instead, I want to use this space to explore what made these people such great sportswriters and why they left behind such a powerful legacy to those of us who write and read about sports today.
Shirley Povich
The greatest journalist the Washington Post ever employed was a man once listed in the list of most influential American women by virtue of his first name. That happened in 1962. Almost sixty years earlier, in 1905, Shirley Lewis Povich was born in Eden, Maine, the son of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants fleeing persecution in the former Russian Empire. He was a Georgetown man, graduating from their faculty of law. He also landed what would prove a lifelong gig at the Washington Post during his time there. By 1925, he was editor of sports, one of the veritable legion of journalists dedicated to chronicling the on and off the field exploits of a certain Babe Ruth.
By 1933, Povich had become a columnist and would remain that for the rest of his life. His final piece would be published the day after his death in June of 1998. He nominally retired in 1973, but 500 extra columns and annual World Series coverage for the Washington Post suggest he was not exactly resting on his laurels. And why wouldn't the Post keep him around. After all, even Richard Nixon once confided to a Post publisher that he only ever bothered to read their paper so he could read Povich.
In his long, fruitful career, Povich would become the president of the Baseball Writers Association of America, win the J.G. Taylor Spink award from the National Baseball Hall of Fame, take a detour from sports journalism to serve as war correspondent during World War 2, and entertain a joke marriage proposal from Walter Cronkite. He would also spend quite a bit of time explaining why his first name was what it was. Today, the press box at Nationals Park bears his name, Shirley Povich Field hosts the Georgetown baseball team and the Shirley Povich Center for Sports Journalism exists at the University of Maryland.
Povich’s writing style is subtle in its greatness most of the time, its excellence lying more in its efficiency and clarity than its flash. Reading a Shirley Povich piece would assuredly leave you wiser and better informed on whatever subject he chose to take up on that day. There were few if any excess words and seldom anything resembling ambiguity. Ideas and facts were always communicated in a way that was straightforward and accurate. It was journalism at its finest, informing and enlightening the audience without making them work too much to understand what they were reading.
That being said, he was more than capable of using powerful, evocative imagery when the occasion called for it. Consider his written reaction to Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series: “The million-to-one shot came in. Hell froze over. A month of Sundays hit the calendar. Don Larsen today pitched a no-hit, no-run, no-man-reach-first game in a World Series.”. In a few pithy, punchy sentences, Povich illustrates both the near impossibility and historical importance of what he and everyone else at the ballpark that day had just witnessed before telling you what it was. Before he has even gone into the rest of the piece describing the game, you as a reader know the sheer importance of what he is describing in the most straightforward, clear, yet elegant way. He also had his way of using his powers of imagery to paint the emotions of others into his writing. Take a moment to appreciate how he captures for his readers the emotion of Lou Gehrig’s retirement day in 1939: (the day of the “luckiest man alive” speech) “I saw strong men weep this afternoon, expressionless umpires swallow hard, and emotion pump the hearts and glaze the eyes of 61,000 baseball fans in Yankee Stadium. Yes, and hard-boiled news photographers clicked their shutters with fingers that trembled a bit.” Again, take a moment to appreciate that Povich uses no fancy, Harvardesque language, and yet he draws you into the emotionally charged atmosphere of Yankee Stadium on that Fourth of July in 1939. Reading this, I almost feel as if I was there, at an event that took place over fifty years before my birth in a city I have only visited once. That is the power of Povich imagery.
Another important skill that a great columnist must have is that of articulating opinions in a persuasive, well-formulated but also interesting manner. Povich was a master of this. This included barbed one-liners when called for. Consider this swipe at the owner of the then Washington Redskins after Jim Brown carved them up for three touchdowns: “Jim Brown, born ineligible to play for the Redskins, integrated their end zone three times yesterday." The context here is that Brown had been rejected by Washington for being black as their owner at the time enforced segregation on his club to the detriment of their on-field performance. There was also this swipe at MLB’s color barrier after Jackie Robinson signed: "Four hundred and fifty-five years after Columbus eagerly discovered America, Major League Baseball reluctantly discovered the American Negro…". On both occasions, he needs nary a line to ridicule the neanderthal views of the NFL and MLB establishments of the time in a way that portrays their racism as ignorant and more importantly self-defeating. The moral squalor of racism did not need to be argued for. That was and is self-evident.
That last bit of Povich work I wanted to point out is this: “His name was Cy Young, deceased since 1955, and he comes to mind because of the continuing travesties in his memory. The Cy Young Award designed to honor pitching excellence in his image is being profaned every year by guys with seemingly little understanding that baseball is a nine-inning game.” This was from a 1991 column bemoaning the lack of complete games in modern baseball. Again the thesis is clear and articulated up front and also in a somewhat acerbic way. Here I disagree with his general thesis because I feel that the game evolves as managers find new ways to win what they have and pitchers need not go the distance all the time to be great. But this is not as important as highlighting the fact that setting up a good column in a way that captivates readers and hearkens to historical memory needs no more than two quick sentences.
Shirley Povich’s gift to the world was to capture much of the 20th century in American sport in a way that made important points and also did justice to the many historical events that he got to witness and report on. His material is instructive on how to craft pieces in a way that is clear, articulate and well organized. Over the better part of seven decades, Povich gave master classes in journalism to the American public and left a wealth of writing that will continue to serve as evidence of the importance of sports in the American consciousness.
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