5 replies to this topic

[odessasteps]

I had no idea where to post this column, and then I realized, we had the sports radio thread but i don't think we have one for sportswriting.

Anyway....

from today: Joe Posnanski on Red Klotz and the time the Generals beat the Globetrotters, 40 years ago today

http://joeposnanski....carol.html#more

[odessasteps]

another great Poz column. this one about HOME and moving away.

http://joeposnanski....al-letters.html

[Beech27]

http://www.kansascit...rylink=misearch

I'm going to continue the Kansas City theme a bit. This is a nice piece of baseball writing, on young players and expectations, by Rustin Dodd. He's a young guy, my editor at the KU paper 3 years ago, in fact, but very good.

[odessasteps]

poz had great column about leaving kc

[odessasteps]

Poz compares Lebron to the Nature Boy

http://joeposnanski....nst-lebron.html

[Fallacy!]

Good thread - as a once aspiring sports writer, this is a topic I can get behind.

Here's two classics from the late, great Jim Murray.

On John Wooden:

Quote

You picture the man who is, demonstrably, the world's greatest basketball coach, and there comes to view a guy with lots of diamonds on stubby fingers, a Rolls-Royce illegally parked outside the gym with his driver reading a comic book in the front seat. Guys leap to light his cigarettes, the president of the college is on the phone seeking an appointment, maybe so is the president of the United States. He is doing a commercial, dictating a book, getting a manicure, reserving a table at Scandia for lunch, and two 7-foot phenoms from the sidewalks of New York are cooling their heels in the outer office waiting for an audition and/or a scholarship.

Then you meet John Wooden and he is answering his own phone, he clips his nails with a drugstore clipper, his haircut has a faint bunkhouse bowl look to it, his clothes are less Savile Row than bought-with-a-coupon, and the whole thing cries out for a Grant Wood brush, not a shrill sports column.

John Wooden is American Gothic to the collar button. You meet him and you're tempted to say, "All right, what did you do with the pitchfork, John?" You can smell the hay if you close your eyes. Players might call other coaches "The Baron" or "The Bear" but they call John "The Reverend."

http://articles.lati...murray-20100613

On a 19-year-old Kobe Bryant:

Quote

Oh, they don't claim he can heal the sick, raise the dead or make water into wine. They're not blasphemous. But they do insist that anything that can be done with a basketball, he can do it. Michael Jordan, my foot.

It gets to the point where, when you meet him the first time, you want to ask him what he did with the halo. Did he fly in -- or just walk across Santa Monica Bay? You don't know whether to get his autograph or his blessing. Or just touch the hem of his warmup suit. You feel inadequate interviewing someone so perfect. It's a job for Mathew, Mark, Luke and John, not a mere sportswriter.

http://www.latimes.c...0,5182314.story