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STOP THE PRESSES (So I Can Get Off)
Tales from Forty Years of Sportswriting
By CLYDE BOLTON
The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 2005 Clyde Bolton
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-5252-3
Chapter One
My grandmother Netta Bolton who lived in Lawrenceville, Georgia, had one of the first television sets I ever saw, and she loved to watch professional wrestling. Her sister Jewel Cooper would visit from Atlanta, and those two old ladies would get down on the carpet, on their hands and knees, in front of the TV and try to see up the legs of the wrestlers' tights.
I tell you this for two reasons. One is to let you know that I come from good, inquisitive stock. The other is because the first thing you learn in Journalism 101 is to try to capture the reader in the opening sentences or you might not capture him at all. I thought the image of my grandma and my aunt as elderly voyeurs would capture you.
Not that I ever studied Journalism 101. Or Journalism Anything. I never had a class in journalism or writing. Wait. I take that back. The Birmingham News once imported a so-called expert to lecture the staff on writing. I think he was from Florida. It must have been such seminars that birthed the cynical old saying, what is an expert? An expert is someone from out of town. I asked the managing editor, Tom Bailey, if he really expected me to attend the class, even offering this bit of logic: "If I haven't learned to write in thirty years of newspapering do you expect me to learn in two hours?" But he said I must attend.
The lecturer droned on and on until, finally, he said something that caused my friend and fellow wordsmith Jimmy Bryan to elbow me in the ribs. He said that before a reporter begins a story the writer should make an outline, just like you learned in elementary school. "Wouldn't you like to see him at a night football game in Tiger Stadium at LSU with fifteen minutes to write a story, and he's making an outline?" Bryan said.
I couldn't resist it. I raised my hand and asked: "What newspapers have you worked for?"
The teacher hesitated and then said: "Well, I haven't ever actually worked for a newspaper."
No kidding. I have. I worked for five of them, and there is nothing else like it on earth. Selling sofas is like selling shoes, and raising hogs is like raising cattle, but writing for newspapers isn't like anything else.
A reporter must be fast and accurate—and those two qualities are natural enemies, like the cobra and the mongoose. Many who begin newspaper careers find they aren't cut out to live life under the deadline gun, and they desert for slower-paced jobs, such as teaching or public relations. Haste does make waste, but a reporter who can't get the facts and still turn out a story in a hurry is headed for a seat on the copydesk where he'll read the stories of those who can.
I once heard my friend Lewis Grizzard, the humor columnist–author–speaker, address the question of newspapers getting it right: "People want truth and accuracy in newspapers," he said. "Hell, a newspaper doesn't cost but 50 cents. Truth and accuracy would be $3.95." That's funny. But that's all it is. Truth and accuracy are also supposed to be 50 cents.
The clock isn't the only obstacle. Frequently the reporter must write the story despite being knee-deep in an uncomfortable, adversarial situation. Not everyone wants to help your story along.
The University of Alabama football team opened its 1962 season by beating the University of Georgia football team 35–0 in Birmingham's Legion Field. The Crimson Tide's sophomore quarterback, Joe Namath, made his eagerly anticipated debut by throwing three touchdown passes. I was writing the dressing room story, and naturally I went straight to Namath, the star of the game. I began interviewing him at his locker. The players were singing and shouting and popping butts with towels and doing all the things players do after a satisfying victory, and it was difficult to hear Joe Willie's answers to my questions. It wasn't difficult to hear the voice that boomed across the dressing room, though. "Get away from that goddamn boy!" Coach Bear Bryant screamed. "You'll ruin him!"
The room fell silent, as suddenly as if someone had hit the mute button on a TV's remote control. Every eye of every player and of every assistant coach landed on me. Namath sheepishly turned away and continued dressing. End of interview. Bryant then barked words that would have been hilarious if the situation hadn't been so supercharged: "If you want to talk to somebody, talk to somebody who did something. Talk to Jack Hurlbut." Hurlbut was a sub quarterback who had mopped up after Namath had won the game.
I never knew why Bryant pitched such a fit. I recently checked the microfilmed copies of the News and saw that after the last Alabama game—the January 1, 1962, Sugar Bowl win over Arkansas—I had interviewed Pat Trammell, Mike Fracchia, Billy Neighbors, Tommy Booker, Tim Davis, and Jack Rutledge, and there was no problem. Maybe Bryant was afraid of what the free-spirited Namath might say. Maybe he remembered an utterance of Murray Trimble, one of his Texas A&M players.
Bryant was always talking about the importance of "good mamas and papas." After A&M beat Texas someone asked Trimble what he thought of the Longhorns. He answered: "Well, not much. They probably don't have good mamas and papas." Perhaps propelled by those words, the Longhorns upset Texas A&M the next season.
Anyway, Bryant's tantrum and the embarrassment it caused me didn't exactly make the words flow from my typewriter when I returned to the press box to write my story for Sunday's Birmingham News. I told my boss, Benny Marshall, the sports editor of the News, about Bryant's tirade, assuming Marshall would confront him and demand to know why he would jump one of his reporters who, after all, was just doing his job, but it never happened. I was surprised at the time that Benny let it slide, but I hadn't been at the News long. I later realized that Marshall idolized Bryant.
Three things come to mind when I recall Bryant's explosion. One is something Abe Lemmons, the Texas basketball coach–wit said. John Wooden used to guard his UCLA star Lew Alcindor from the press, saying a nineteen-year-old was not equipped to handle the pressure. Lemmons thought that was a hoot. He wisecracked: "Back when I was nineteen and scrooched down in a foxhole on Guadalcanal, I was sure thankful I wasn't playing college basketball." Another is that when I was Namath's age I was married and supporting a wife and child on a pittance as the sports editor of a daily newspaper. I was the press. The third is the most un-Bryant-like statement I ever heard Bear speak. On his television review a decade or so later, when Richard Todd was a sophomore quarterback, Bryant told his TV audience that Todd would make Alabama fans forget Joe Namath. In his autobiography, Bear, the coach said he had had a tooth pulled and was on pain pills that day. Well, I did think his speech was slurred.
I remain mystified as to why my interviewing Namath would ruin him while Bryant's putting such pressure on a young quarterback would be beneficial to Todd. Anyway, Namath soldiered on, despite the debilitating effect of my attention. He was named to the all-time Alabama team, led the New York Jets to a memorable Super Bowl victory, and was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Todd, too, became a fine player in college and in the National Football League, but he didn't make anyone forget Joe Namath.
But I learned to write under any conditions. I once had to get the sports information director at LSU to remove a student who was standing at the edge of the basketball court after a game, reading my story upside down as I typed it on a portable typewriter at the press table and telling me how dumb I was. I covered a World Series in Kansas City in an "auxiliary press box"—meaning a roped-off area in the grandstand—while drunk fans walked up and down the aisle, reaching over to peck at the keys of my word processor. I once wired a flashlight to my hat, like a miner's light, and typed an article in a car while photographer Tom Self drove through the night from Nashville to Birmingham.
And I have written stories that weren't really written. I mastered the knack of dictating accounts of basketball games over the telephone to a typist back in the office, just forming the stories in my mind and speaking them without actually writing a word. It was an emergency measure, but it saved ten or fifteen precious minutes. Nowadays, of course, sportswriters compose a story on a computer and transmit it instantly over a phone line to a computer system in the office. (Speaking of methods of transmission, some people I have told this to refuse to believe it. They wait for the punch line, as if it were a joke. But it is true, though it happened before my time. There used to be a pigeon coop on the roof of the Birmingham News building, and reporters would take pigeons with them to Legion Field. They would attach their stories to the pigeons' legs and the birds would fly them back to the paper.)
I not only learned to write under any conditions, I learned to interview under any conditions. Namath, by then a star for the Jets, was in Tuscaloosa during an off-season, working out in the university's weight room. I was interviewing him for my book The Crimson Tide as he lifted weights and threw footballs with his lawyer, Mike Bite. "I've got to go to the bathroom," Namath suddenly announced. He had already told me he was on a tight schedule, and I knew any minutes lost while he was perched on the throne would be irretrievable. So I followed him, and as I stood outside the stall quizzing him, Joe Willie Namath sat on the commode inside the stall, answering simultaneously the call of nature and my questions. I've interviewed football players at Sugar, Orange, Cotton, Fiesta, and Gator Bowls, but Namath is the only one I've interviewed at the toilet bowl.
A smart-aleck New York reporter once asked Namath if he studied basket weaving at Alabama. "Naw," he answered, "I studied journalism. It was easier." Good line, Joe, but I doubt if a basket weaver ever interviewed you while you took a, er, timeout from lifting weights.
Years later I read that Lyndon Johnson frequently required his female secretary to take notes from him as he sat on the commode. Well, I did it once, but I wouldn't want to make a habit of it. Still, a little humility never hurt anyone. In fact, I have found that humility can help a sportswriter get the story. If you're dumb about a subject, just admit it, and someone will feel sorry for you. Don't fake it.
I was assigned to write a story about a tennis tournament in Birmingham. I introduced myself to the public relations director and said, "I don't know one thing about tennis. I don't even understand how you keep score. But if you will steer me to a feature story I can write it and tack the scores onto the bottom of the story, because I do know how to write about people." Several girls from New Zealand or somewhere were playing in the tournament. The PR director seated them at a table with me, told them I knew nothing about tennis, and they had a jolly good time educating me. It made a nice story. If I had tried to fake it, the story and the day would have been miserable flops.
Alabama's basketball team lost to Bobby Knight's Indiana club in the Mideast Regional in Baton Rouge in 1976. Several reporters came to Coach C. M. Newton's motel room the next morning to hear Newton's postmortem on the game for their follow-up stories. One writer, Mike McKenzie, launched into a monologue on the technicalities of the game. All he needed was a blackboard and some chalk and he would have been drawing up plays. Newton sighed. I avoided eye contact with the writer, trying not to laugh. When McKenzie left the room Newton chuckled and summed up the scene with one of his priceless lines: "I know that no sportswriter knows anything about basketball, because half the coaches don't know anything about basketball."
One year Newton decided to educate those of us who wrote about Alabama basketball. He had a chalk-talk clinic in a conference room before the season began, demonstrating such tactics as clearing a side and zone-trap defense. After all the Xs and Os, I still didn't get it, and I didn't mind admitting it. "I know less about basketball now than when you started," I told him. "I still can't write about the stack play, but I can write about people."
"That's what your subscribers would rather read about anyway," Newton said.
Writers should, indeed, write about people. Who cares what kind of defense the losing team was in with 2:47 to play?
Well, a fellow who used to write sports for the Birmingham News cared. Al O'Brien had played college basketball, and when he covered a game he went into the technicalities. He was not pleased that I got more of the good basketball assignments than he did, and he cited his playing experience in a complaint. "I used to write obituaries," I told him, "but I've never died. You don't have to play basketball to cover basketball any more than you have to die to write obituaries."
I can understand coaches being irked when writers pretend they're experts in the technicalities. I don't like it when a civilian intrudes on my area of expertise. I've had readers tell me, "I could write a column." No doubt they could. Maybe they could write two columns, maybe even five. The question is can they write two hundred a year for more than thirty years as I did? I've written seventeen books, and I sigh when someone tells me, "I've always wanted to write a book"—as if that makes us brothers in some authors' fraternity. I simply reply, "I've always wanted to be an alchemist."
God help the sportswriter who tried to impress Bear Bryant with his knowledge of football. God help the sportswriter who even ventured the opinion that a football was made of leather. Bryant knew everything, and a writer wasn't supposed to know anything. I watched an Alabama practice one afternoon, and you've never seen such a bloodletting. The pads and helmets were popping, and the scene was as electric as a Super Bowl. It was the kind of practices coaches dream about.
Bryant always spoke to the press for a few minutes after each day's practice. Writers just sat there and waited for him to speak while he torched an unfiltered Chesterfield and spat miniature ribbons of tobacco onto the floor. I don't know why I did it, because the years had taught me better, but before Bryant could tell us how great the practice had been I piped up and said, "Boy, they were really hitting out there today, weren't they?"
Bryant jerked his cigarette from his lips and growled, "Shhhiiittt. You call that hitting? There wasn't a decent lick passed all day. They won't even need to take a shower, because they're as fresh as they were when practice started. Hitting? Haw!" Bryant was the only person I ever knew who could stretch "shit" into an eight-syllable word.
But a writer could kid some coaches about the incredible technicalities of football. I once walked into a room in which Mike DuBose and Curley Hallman, then defensive coaches at Alabama, were sitting at a table drawing up diagrams. I don't know where they could possibly have hung another one. Because all four walls of the room were plastered with them.
"Boys, you're overengineering," I told them. "When I played in high school we had just two defenses. If we thought they were going to run we went to a six-man line; if we thought they were going to pass we went to a five-man line. We were undefeated, and y'all aren't." DuBose grinned and said, "There may be more good sense in that than you think."
One time a "coach" actually gave me credit for having some technical knowledge—but it was undeserved credit. Gary Nelson was the crew chief for stock car driver Geoff Bodine, and the team was conducting a private test at Talladega Superspeedway. I was observing the mechanics at work—without having a clue what they were doing—when Nelson said, "Clyde, I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't watch this. We're doing some experimental work on this hub."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from STOP THE PRESSES (So I Can Get Off) by CLYDE BOLTON Copyright © 2005 by Clyde Bolton. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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