John Rossi: Philly sports writers, a biased opinion

Philadelphia has had an inferiority complex towards New York. The city never seemed to get over being bypassed in the early 19th century as the nation’s leader. 

But there is one area where the land of scrapple and hoagies doesn’t have to take a back seat to the “Big Apple” and that is in its sportswriters. We even had Red Smith at the Record before them.

I grew up in the years after WW II learning to read by following the comic page, “the funnies,” and sports section of the city’s three papers. The sports pages of the 1950s were pretty dull and usually consisted of game scores, league stats and a couple of columns. Most of the writers, people like Lance McCurley of the Daily News, Art Morrow of the Inky were old-school, fleshing out the details of the last game but rarely going beyond that to any analysis. Hugh Brown, who wrote for the Bulletin and specialized in football as I remember, had a grouchy quality to his writing which I enjoyed. My best friend worked for him one summer and told me that Brown scared him but also took him aside occasionally and showed him how to write an opening and develop a story.

Everything changed for Philly sports writing around 1960. The Daily News hired a young man from New York, Larry Merchan, as sports editor. Merchant recruited a team of young writers — Jack McKinney, Bill Conlin, and Stan Hochman — who quickly made the back section of the Daily News prime reading for sports fans. Around the same time the Bulletin hired a southern gentleman to put some life into the staid old lady of Filbert Street. Sandy Grady brought to the Bulletin the kind of poetic writing that Red Smith had introduced to sports journalism. All these guys, as someone said, wrote from the heart as well as the brain.

Like McKinney, Grady loved writing about the characters of sports. Some of his best writing dealt with the boxing world and the hustlers who gave “the sweet science” its particular odor. I remember article one that dealt with an insignificant game in 1960 between the Phillies and the Cincinnati Reds. Reds pitcher Raul Sanchez hit four consecutive Philly batters, the last being Gene Conley who, at 6’9”, was hard to miss. Suddenly from out of the Phillies’ dugout comes their new manager, Gene Mauch, who proceeded to hit Sanchez with a haymaker and launch one of the biggest brawls in Phillies’ history. Grady described the fight in detail, writing that the various Phillies and Reds rolling around the diamond reminded him of someone letting loose a bunch of mice on the field.

Both Grady and McKinney lost interest in sports writing and turned to politics in the mid-60s because they found the political scene too disturbing. Grady wrote that a couple of days after the assassination of JFK he found himself covering a football game and the thought disgusted him. He left Philadelphia and began writing a political column following the path of other sports writers before him like James Reston, but politics and its characters never had the same bite for him that sport did.

McKinney, who along with his columns for the Daily News also had a popular radio show, got radicalized in the 60s and in particular got involved with the situation in Northern Ireland. He became more interested in Bernadette Devlin and the IRA than he did in Joey Giradello’s left jab. Sports exchanged a colorful, even unique writer for an angry bearded radical with a photograph of Lenin on his wall.

These men laid the groundwork for the great sports writers (I should just writers) that followed, and Philadelphia came to be blessed by those like Bill Lyon, Frank Fitzpatrick, Jason Stark, Ray Didinger, Glenn Macnow. 

I had a soft spot for Bill Conlin who began writing for the Daily News in 1965.  As a writer he wasn’t the best although he could come up with some good lines: “Danny Ozark handles his troops with all the finesse of a $2 bettor at the race track.”  My attraction to Conlin was simple: he specialized in baseball and baseball was my first sports love. Grady and Hochman wrote the best columns with literary and imaginative grace, but Conlin you sensed was obsessed with baseball. His columns on players’ blunders or managerial mistakes were not newspaper pieces but angry cries of betrayal. 

He was, in my mind, most like the average Philly sports fan, always ready to be betrayed by his team. Conlin disdained “sabermetrics” and the Bill James approach to baseball even though his analysis of the sport were along the same lines — but sculpted with a tone of bitterness. I found him approachable in correspondence, but reluctant to admit he was wrong. His ending was sad.

Given the state of the newspaper business today, it is no wonder so many of the fine writers turn to television. Talent always goes where the money is. At least I had the luck to live through what was Philadelphia’s golden age of sports journalism or, I should say, sports writing. 

John P. Rossi is Professor Emeritus of History as La Salle University