He kept the calliope playing

Sporting News, The, August 31, 1998 by Dave Kindred

Every sportswriter in the last 30 years has gone to the typing machine to do what we called "a Murray column." We all failed. An editor gently explained these failures to Mike Littwin, then new to the Los Angeles Times and in thrall to the newspaper's star. "I had Jim Murray disease bad," Littwin says. "So one day an editor put his hand on my shoulder and said, `Son, you should try to be somebody else. Only Jim Murray can be Jim Murray.'"

Anybody can write a one-liner Only Jim Murray, soft, quiet and brilliant, could write 50 laugh lines and make them sing harmony. "If there were a Bartlett's quotations of sportswriting," Littwin says, "three-quarters of the book would be Murray lines."

Only Murray could say of Cincinnati, "Nothing to do there m the summer but listen to the tar bubble." Walter Alston came from a farm town so small "the trains stopped only if they hit a cow." Mike Tyson had a way back: "Become a vegetarian." Only Murray could imagine himself, Walter Mitty-like, at the helm of an America's Cup yacht, racing against an Australian challenger and shouting...

"All right, lads, all hands before the mast! Not for nothing did Boats and Yachting magazine call me the greatest skipper on a point, a reach or a run since Lord Nelson. Now, hearken and we'll send these wallabies back to racing Snipes. Let me see the cut of that jib! Where's the apparent wind? I'll tack her 86 times on the windward leg, so anybody who has doughnuts for breakfast, carry a bucket. Get a light up in those telltales--if there's light air, don't worry. I won the Bermuda race one year catching a bird's breath in the ship's laundry. ... Those scalawags from Sydney will think they're sailing a bathtub or Cleopatra's barge before I'm through with them."

E.B. White said humor cannot be dissected; like a frog, it dies in the process. So let's leave Murray's humor at this: It rose from a foundation of knowledge, decency and common sense. What Neil Simon did on stage, Murray did in newspapers. He showed us people's lives in shades of laughter. Most of those shades were bright as dawn, but not all, as in 1968 after an assassin shot presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the brother of the assassinated JFK, a friend of the assassinated Martin Luther King Jr. ...

"Democracy is in the cross-hairs. The Assassination Party wins elections without going in a primary. The President of the United States is chosen in a hardware store, a mail-order catalogue. We blame Dallas, but it's no good. It happens everywhere. Memphis, Los Angeles. The United States."

And on Kennedy's death, this: "One passenger for Arlington. On the noon train. Departing Track 17 ... Bobby Kennedy is on his last commuter to the capital. Loose the mournful dirge of the crossing whistle. Line the tracks, America. The 5:02 out of New York is running late. There's trouble on the track. Tears."

Murray also said, "I will be severely criticized, even ridiculed for crying out. `Lousy sportswriter, what does he know?' Still others will sneer, `This is the 20th century, not Disneyland.' Well, it's getting to look more like the Cave Man Era every day from this seat. Americans who have a podium should use it today."

What he didn't tell us that day was the subtext of his pain and anger. We learned it only in his autobiography. His youngest son had fallen from reach, a teenager seduced by drugs, finally dead of an overdose.

Tragedy stalked the comic. Murray's wife died soon after her baby. In the 20 years before his death last week at 78, Murray had detached retinas in both eyes, only one working at the end. In 1994, he had heart surgery so complex the doctors needed 12 hours to do it. Through it all, he wrote laugh lines because, he said, "That's who I am." He called sports a circus. "I helped keep the calliope playing."

That's too modest by half. Jim Murray worked from the highest trapeze, there with Red Smith, Jimmy Cannon, Grantland Rice and Shirley Povich. "Jim was more Cannon and less Red," says Golf Digest columnist Tom Callahan. "He had Cannon's one-liners, but you couldn't smell the cabbage in his stuff the way you could in Red's. Jim was a home run hitter. Which means he's entitled to strike out because when he connects, you go, `Whoa, whoa, wow.' He was that good."

Steve Allen once wrote Callahan a note. The man who invented late-night comedy with The Tonight Show said, "The connection between humor and sports has long intrigued me. One of my favorite American humorists is Jim Murray of the L.A. Times. God, what a gift he has for the fanny line. And yet, simply because his field is sports, the so-called experts in humor literally never bring up his name when the subject of comic writing is under discussion."

I had something to do with The National, a sports newspaper which lived and died in 1990 and '91. Our managing editor, Van McKenzie, wanted to hire Murray.

"We'll never get Jim away from the Times," I said.

"What if we offer him $1 million a year?" McKenzie said.

"Can we do that?"

"He's worth it. Let's see."