Sherrod was top sports columnist

Blackie Sherrod ,a longtime Texas sports writer revered for his dry wit, died at his Dallas home after a week in hospice care, Joyce Sherrod, his wife, told the Dallas Morning News. He was 96.

Sherrod was Texas Sportswriter of the Year a record 16 times and a Red Smith Award winner for lifetime achievement in sports writing.

Sherrod began his newspaper career as the unpaid Belton correspondent for the nearby Temple Telegram before going off to serve as a Navy torpedo plane tail gunner in the South Pacific in World War II. He returned to the Temple Telegram briefly before moving to Fort Worth in 1946, where he briefly wrote radio newscasts and police news for the now-defunct Fort Worth Press before moving to the newspaper’s small sports department. He was promoted to sports editor in the early 1950s.

Sherrod took his popular column in 1958 to the now-defunct Dallas Times Herald in 1958, where he also helped cover the 1960 Democratic National Convention, the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing, for which he won a Texas Headliners Club award for science writing. The Dallas Morning News hired away Sherrod from the Times Herald in 1985, and he continued his column until retiring in 2003 — a move he regarded with mixed emotions.

“Retirement is like a steam bath,” he said in his last “Scattershooting” column. “Once you get used to it, it’s not so hot.”