Special pair helped change sportswriting game
It’s hard to imagine, now, in the era of ESPN and sports websites galore, when we know pretty much everything about athletes and the social issues surrounding sports, sometimes more than we’d like to.
But there was a time when sports coverage was pretty tame, characterized by rampant clichés, straight game stories and little controversy — or enlightenment.
Then, in the mid-1950s, that all began to change. In the middle of the revolution was the sports section at an always-underdog tabloid called the Philadelphia Daily
News. Presiding over the transformation was Larry Merchant, age 26 when he started.
Suddenly, things had a different flavor. Gone was the florid prose and the athlete worship.
Daily News stories humanized the players. There was no cheering in the press box. The Daily
News would take on management and write about those formerly off-limit social topics. And good writing was the coin of the realm.
Merchant, best known for his many years as a mainstay on HBO Boxing, attracted formidable talent to that sports section. And in the past week, two of the very best of those innovative sportswriters died. Their careers would take very different trajectories.
Stan Hochman would go on to write for the Daily News for 55 years, most of them as a sports columnist, and a great one.
Sandy Grady, who moved on after several years to join the now-defunct Philadelphia Bulle
tin, changed directions in midcourse and became a fine political columnist, returning to the Daily
News after the Bulletin folded. In 1996, Grady became a charter member of USA TODAY’s board of contributors. They were both special. In his Grady obituary in the
Daily News, John F. Morrison, who worked with Grady at the
Daily News and the Bulletin, wrote, “Many a youngster with the sounds of newspaper presses thundering in their dreams had one great wish: They wanted to be a Sandy Grady when they grew up. ”
Here’s how good Grady was: Back in the dark, primitive time before the Internet, when they didn’t have links, I actually saved hard copies of some of his pieces, notably one on the old Phillie Wes Covington. Still have it, still love it.
On CSNetphilly.com, Ray Didinger, once a pretty formidable Philly sportswriter in his own right, wrote, “Stan Hochman was the ideal sports columnist. He was smart, he was tenacious, he was funny and, oh, how he could write. On the day after a big event, every Philadelphia fan knew Stan’s column was a must read.”
Merchant discovered how great Grady was when Merchant was an editor (and one-man sports staff ) in North Carolina and Grady was writing for The
Charlotte News. If I’m ever in a place where I can hire, Merchant thought, Grady gets the first call. When Merchant took over in Philly, that’s what happened.
Grady, who covered baseball’s Phillies, “was an instant star,” Merchant remembers. “He wrote so beautifully, so gracefully. He was like a Southern novelist.”
When the Southern novelist was lured away by the much-bigger Bulletin a few years later, Merchant remembered a couple of very impressive columns that a friend had sent him written by a guy in San Bernardino, Calif. That would be Hochman, who succeeded Grady on the baseball beat.
“Stan was as good as it gets as a reporter and writer,” Merchant says. “He was fair and very fast. He would just sit down and write, and it was gold-plated. You never had to move a word.”
Merchant sees Grady and Hochman as part of the New Journalism movement popularized by such giants as Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese, which relied heavily on a narrative approach.
I asked Merchant, who wrote a must-read column himself, how he would distinguish between the two great ones. “Sandy was a lyrical writer,” he replied. Hochman, he added, would simply tell the story, always in a seamless way.
So how did a 26-year-old editor come up with such a radically different approach to sports journalism? He read a lot of sports sections, and he began to see traces of something new and exciting in a variety of places, Long Island’s Newsday prime among them. And the advent of Sports Il
lustrated and its talented magazine writers altered the equation. “The idea crystallized for me,” Merchant says, adding, “You had to tell more than the score.”
One of Merchant’s best moves was enlisting the paper’s classical music critic, Jack McKinney, to cover boxing (Philly had a very hot boxing scene at the time) and the NFL’s Eagles. McKinney turned out to be excellent. And he took his job seriously: He actually had a professional fight and knocked out one Alvin Green in the first round in Painesville, Ohio, in 1963.
I asked Kathy Kiely, Grady’s longtime companion and a stellar journalist herself, what she thought made him stand out. “To me, it was because he approached journalism with the craft of a novelist,” said Kiely, a former USA TODAY congressional correspondent who is Washington news director of Bloomberg Politics. “He wasn’t a fact spewer but a storyteller. He loved characters. He had a healthy suspicion of easy sentiment.”
And he was a man of principle. “When he found out the Phillies’ black baseball players were staying in family homes during spring training because the ballclub’s hotel wouldn’t let them stay there, he called it out — which didn’t make him popular on his beat,” Kiely added.
As for Merchant, 84, he ended his 35-year run as an HBO boxing commentator in 2013. But the man known for his astute boxing analysis and fearlessness — he once told Floyd Mayweather Jr. that if he were 35 years younger he would “kick your ass” — is still on the boxing scene. Merchant and Sylvester Stallone are doing a series of digital commentaries for Tecate beer in the run-up to the Mayweather-Manny Pacquiao championship bout May 2.
And those Philly days? “I thought I’d never do anything as good as this,” he says, adding with a laugh, “I may have changed my mind.”
“Stan was as good as it gets as a reporter and writer. ... He would just sit down and write, and it was gold-plated.” Larry Merchant, on late sportswriter Stan Hochman