Great scribes and scribbles that sing

Sporting News, The, May 24, 2004 by Dave Kindred

No time is a good time to punch a Soviet KGB agent, nor is any place a good place to do it. But to level the poor fellow in the frigid years of the Cold War is, I'd say, a bad time to do it. And a combatant could choose more propitious venues for the slugfest than the steps of the Hotel Ukraine in the heart of Moscow, hard by Lenin's tomb where minions of the Red Army goosestep in jackboots at all hours.

But then, Tom Callahan, my friend, traveling partner and co-conspirator on a book and a thousand columns, had good reason to deliver his opinion, in the form of a straight right hand, without concern to either time or place. What that good reason was now escapes memory, which is what Tom did before the KGB man hit the concrete. Escape, that is.

"First plane out," he said.

"No gulag for me," he said.

Callahan gets in here today because Jimmy Cannon's name is in the news, and that's a good thing.

For a kid who loved newspapers and sports, the first more than the second, the best part of night desk work was sneaking to the morgue, our depository of dead stories. Also in the morgue, alive, were newspapers from everywhere.

There a kid picked up the New York World Journal Tribune. An innocent unexposed to economic realities beyond his $128 monthly mortgage, he didn't know that the World Journal Tribune was a patched-up remnant of three once-great papers and would itself soon be out of business.

Not that it mattered. The kid read Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin and Dick Schaap. Red Smith's column ran down the lefthand side of the first sports page. Across from Smith, down the right side, was Jimmy Cannon. Though they wrote in different ways--Smith, the subtle stylist, quoted Hemingway on Cannon: "Jimmy writes those six paragraphs to get started, like we all do. But sometimes he forgets to throw his away"--to a kid they were 1 and 1A.

Now, almost 30 years after his death, Jimmy Cannon has won the Associated Press Sports Editors' annual Red Smith Award for lifetime achievement. In sweet coincidence, my man Callahan has published an elegant and irresistibly readable book, The Bases Were Loaded (and So Was I). In it he reprises a classic Jimmy Cannon line.

They were climbing onto a Super Bowl press bus, Cannon exhausted by the effort, soon to suffer a stroke that put the great man in a wheelchair.

Callahan writes, "A family of four--a mother, father, daughter and son--spun past the bus on bicycles. 'Isn't it sad,' said Cannon, who spoke in epigrams, 'what the energy crisis has done to the Hell's Angels?'"

Smith's stuff glittered, pieces of crystal. Cannon's columns were shadows, light playing over darkness. "You're Rocky Marciano who bled for your fame," he wrote. The day a fabled black pitcher was elected to baseball's Hall of Fame, Cannon wrote, "The ceremony was mean and sour. Baseball was apologizing to Satchel Paige for what it had done to him...."

Joe DiMaggio's wife, Marilyn Monroe, was a "Technicolor vixen shaped for mischief in CinemaScope." Muhammad Ali was "the fifth Beatle." On a day in 1947, Cannon reported an exchange between Babe Ruth and an umpire as Ruth, dying of throat cancer, walked into Yankee Stadium: "'Hi-ya, Babe,' the umpire said. 'Get back in there, you three blind mice,' said Babe, and the intent was comical, but there was no humor in the rasping sounds the sick voice made."

Like Cannon, Callahan hears people talk. In Bases, we hear Kareem Abdul-Jabbar name, hesitantly, softly, his role models: "The Empire State Building. The redwood trees." We hear Callahan ask Irish featherweight fighter Barry McGuigan whether he'd seen much of his country's troubles, to which the answer was, "You mean, besides men with plastic bags over their heads and pitchforks in their hearts?"

Bill Walsh, who created the 49ers dynasty, tells Callahan about players: "Some play football well because they are incredibly cruel people. Part of it may be steroids and their insidious effects.... But a lot of it is just simple brutishness.... I went into a hotel parking lot once where one of our players was under a car being beaten up by two drug dealers. One of our leaders. He was trying to buy cocaine for a team party."

Speaking of cars and being beaten up, I am reminded of Brussels, Belgium. I'd lost my passport. As Callahan drove to the U.S. embassy, a native honked at us, perhaps irritated by our meanderings. As the Belgian pulled alongside us, Tom said to him, "Hey, buster, we've lost our passport, and we're not in a good mood. Don't mess with us."

Naturally, at the next light, Tom drove into the guy's rear bumper. The Belgian jumped out and said, "You no like my car?" Callahan, his beard a pirate's red, disembarked and placed his chest against the doh's nose. "Look, fella," Tom said, "I need to win my next three fights to get back to .500 lifetime. Let's get it on."

The Belgian probably didn't know about Tom and the KGB. Still, he did a wise thing. He got back in his car and drove away, quickly.