For starters: Crafting ledes no easy task
Writing on deadline, with an epic story to tell, Joe Trimble of New York’s Daily News could not find the words on this day. Writer’s block, like low wages and long hours, goes with the job. But what a time to be stricken, after a World Series game like none ever played.
Dick Young, writing the main story for the Daily News, became aware of his colleague’s plight. Pulling up a typewriter, Young simply wrote, “The imperfect man pitched a perfect game yesterday,” which appeared in the next day’s newspaper under Trimble’s byline.
Shirley Povich, covering for the Washington Post, came up with, “The million-to-one shot came in. A month of Sundays hit the calendar. Hell froze over. Don Larsen pitched the first perfect game in World Series history.”
As usual, Povich, the writer with a woman’s first name, was riding a good horse. At the same site, Yankee Stadium, Povich wrote after Lou Gehrig’s farewell address in July 1939, “I saw grown men cry today.” On this day, Joe Trimble, with an assist from Dick Young, best summed up Game 5 of the 1956 World Series.
Anyone who ever scrolled a piece of paper through a typewriter or booted up a computer has striven for words to match the moment. Once or twice in
40 years with a daily newspaper, I might have written an opening line or two of inspired prose. Really good writers, what Dallas scribe Blackie Sherrod (one himself) called learned composers, did it all the time, it seemed.
The late Orville Henry, whom it was said wrote more about University of Arkansas athletics than Carl Sandburg about Abraham Lincoln, came up with this gem of a lead, one with six commas, before a
1981 football game: “The week of the Rice game last year, at which time, in spite of everything, Arkansas’ Razorbacks had lost only twice, in high-scoring bouts with Texas and Houston, and still showed a 4-2 record, Tom Jones went down in practice.”
Henry, whose Razorback football follow-ups tended to be of Michener-like length, knew his way around a basketball arena. After a slumping Southwest Conference team floundered in Fayetteville one night, Henry led his game story in the next day’s Arkansas Gazette: “The Texas Aggies showed Saturday night why they’re in the fix they’re in.”
Orville alluded to son Clay, a fellow sportswriter, early in his Monday follow-up, with a two-paragraph lead that left me roaring: “The man from the Tulsa World used words like ‘dull and boring’ to begin with. Indeed, when they gathered Saturday night at Barnhill Arena for their Southwest Conference ‘showdown,’ neither team bothered to remove the gloves, much less don painter’s smocks and take up easels.”
Orville and I became friends after he moved to Malvern. I attended his memorial service in
2002 at Central High School in Little Rock (Nolan Richardson, recently fired at UA, delivered the eulogy while Frank Broyles, with whom Henry was on the outs late in life, sat in the audience).
Orville encouraged tyros like myself to “write about what you know.” Once I asked if it violated clubhouse rules for a sportswriter to go on talk radio. No, he said. “Us old dogs must learn new tricks.”
Clay Henry had this tip one night in Little Rock when I searched in vain for a 50-cent word: Write simpler, he said. “Remember who you’re writing for.”
Clay and Orville were in my thoughts when I covered the Arkansas-Texas football game of 1981, my second year in Hot Springs.
Texas was ranked No. 1, not for the first time when it played Arkansas. After a long game that, as I remembered, started under a tornado warning, I went with this: “When four Arkansas captains met four Texas cap
tains before Saturday’s game in Fayetteville, one thought it might be the last time the teams would be equal on this day. In a way, that’s how it turned out — Arkansas 42, Texas 11.”
The following spring, I covered my first Razorback basketball game when Houston, with Phi Slama Jama in its infancy, visited Barnhill Arena. Arkansas won a tingling game when a future NBA player sank a wing jumper in the closing seconds. Unfortunately, most people watching on TV didn’t see it live because of technical problems. Hence my lede: “Bless Scott Hastings and blame Ma Bell.”
One I particularly envied came from the late Jim Bailey, another future friend. After a Razorback exhibition basketball game at Little Rock in 1983, Bailey wrote in the next day’s Arkansas Gazette: “If Czechoslovakia joins the Southwest
Conference, don’t worry about it.”
I call that a Glengarry lead, borrowing a line from a David Mamet play (“Glengarry Glen Ross”) turned into a 1992 film that, largely because of its language, cannot be considered a date movie. It’s about real estate and a bunch of struggling salesmen who get a pep talk from the home office downtown. “I’m here from Mitch and Murray,” says a character named Blake, played by Alec Baldwin, “and I’m here on a mission of mercy.” To a group including Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon and Ed Harris, Blake famously lays down rewards for an upcoming sales contest. First prize is a Cadillac El Dorado. Second prize? A set of steak knives. “Third prize,” says Blake, “and you’re fired.”
Glengarry leads get the reader’s (or, like Blake on screen, viewer’s) attention. Dick Young wrote such a lead for the Daily
News one day after a particularly bad loss by the Brooklyn Dodgers: “This one belongs on page three with the other axe murders.” (In such case, the writer need not give the score until the second paragraph.)
One’s canvas need not be broad to find words that will draw readers into a story. I like to think I succeeded one night after an especially quirky girls’ basketball game: “A game-winning shot can come at any time, even at the end of the third quarter.”
Horse racing, without a final score to report, can be more challenging. Starting in Hot Springs, I made almost every mistake possible as a young turfwriter. Fortunately, I kept my job although I confess peering over an empty computer screen many times at the track. All I can say now is remember who you’re writing for and the first relevant thought that comes to your head.
Two superb leads from Oaklawn Park appeared in what is now the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Randy Moss extended faint praise, I thought, to the 1986 Southwest Stakes winner, “Rare Brick can go a mile.” (Actually, the colt could go a mile and sixteenth, as proven in the Rebel Stakes next time out, although by then trainer Tony Foyt had written off some members of the press.) Robert Yates came along years later with this gem after a filly went awfully fast in a prep race for an upcoming Grade 1 event: “It’s almost Apple Blossom (Handicap) time. It was an Apple Blossom time.”
Before I became a close friend of the track president, I led a column: “Most of Charles J. Cella’s favorite sportswriters are dead” (I was alluding to such as Joe Palmer and Grantland Rice, though Cella kept a framed copy of an Orville Henry racing column in his private suite at Oaklawn and, late in life, The Boss championed by turf writing).
Finally, on my eighth trip to the Kentucky Derby, I came up with something I liked after Grindstone outran Unbridled’s Song, the previous year’s Breeders’ Cup Juvenile winner, both from the first crop of the 1990 Derby winner:
“Unbridled no doubt will be happy to learn that he has sired a Kentucky Derby winner, though he may be surprised to know which horse.”
Orville Henry, however, is responsible for the Glengarry lead of Arkansas sports journalism in my time. After a 1959 Arkansas football loss (13-12) to Texas in Little Rock that the Razorbacks did almost everything right, Henry concluded: “The operation was successful but the patient died.”