A Deadline Poet Finally Gets Due

It isn’t easy trying to be Lou Gehrig when they make you bat behind Babe Ruth.

With his one good eye, Jim Murray just keeps knocking ‘em out of the park. He sees more clearly than anybody I know. “King of the Sports Page,” is what Sports Illustrated called him, and that’s what he is, the sultan of thought.

They have finally presented my not-so-old friend a Pulitzer Prize, which is only about 20 years overdue. All those deserving pundits, editorial cartoonists, TV and movie critics who have won Pulitzers now have in their company a man who pounded out his poetry on deadline, in bad lighting, worse weather, rickety press boxes and hellish hotel rooms, from Malibu to Munich, night after night after night.

We sat around swapping Jim Murray stories at the Masters golf tournament last week, so I told some of my favorites. Privately I was having a particularly giddy time, because I had been tipped off to the probability of the Pulitzer, which made me feel like a kid whose favorite uncle had just won the Irish Sweepstakes.

I told the one about Arnold Palmer’s golf ball being buried in the bunker, and Palmer spotting Murray somewhere in the gallery, and saying: “OK, Jim, you’re always writing about how great Ben Hogan was. How would Hogan do in a situation like this?”

To which Murray replied: “Hogan wouldn’t have been in a situation like this.”

And then there’s the one Jim is always telling me, about how he tried to arrange an interview with Gary Player, and how the golfer was reluctant because somebody had informed him that Murray had a habit of misquoting people.

“Misquoting people?” Murray replied. “Go tell Gary that I don’t even quote people.”

For anyone who hasn’t noticed, he doesn’t. Not often, anyway, and certainly not at any substantive length. Jim Murray doesn’t do interviews; he does impressions. He might visit with a subject for any number of hours, then go back to his keyboard and not use a word of it. Jim Murray doesn’t quote people; people quote Jim Murray.

I have long suspected that Murray has an automatic pilot on his word processor that he can punch any time he’s on a tight deadline or feels tired. There is a button to punch marked: “One-Liners.” All Murray has to do, then, is choose the proper category, quiz-show style--as in, U.S. Cities for $100, Jim. (“There’s nothing to do in Spokane after 10 o’clock.” Pause. “In the morning.”)

I mean, the guy has to be cheating somehow. Nobody can be that good, day in and day out.

This is the guy who rewrote the opening line of the Indianapolis 500--”Gentlemen, start you coffins.”

He also drove the Indy Speedway oval in 1975, after which Parnelli Jones approached Murray with his hand extended and said: “Congratulations! You have just completed the first Speedway run in history that could be timed by a calendar.”

Here is Jim Murray’s lead from Zaire, Africa, when Muhammad Ali and George Foreman invited the eyes of the Western Hemisphere to follow them there:

“All right, my good man, hand me my jodhpurs and pith helmet and polish my monocle. Get the elephant ready. Fire up the African Queen. Phone Berlitz and see what they have in the way of Swahili. Get Tarzan and Jane on the drum and see what they’re doing Tuesday. See what you can find out about the tsetse fly. Call me Bwana. Let’s hope Grace Kelly and Ava Gardner get to fight over me in the steaming jungle night.”

And that was just the first paragraph. That’s a whole column’s worth for some people. Jim hadn’t even gotten around yet to saying that he thought Kinshasa was one of the Gabor sisters.

I enjoy the privilege of knowing Jim Murray beyond the printed page. We have sort of a routine. We sit side by side in hermetically sealed press booths and I tell him who I saw on the late movie last night on TV and he tells me what that person was like in real life.

He tells me about having drinks with DiMaggio and Monroe, or playing poker with Duke Wayne, or what a chatterbox Jack Webb could be when he wasn’t shooting “Dragnet.” I tend to shut up and nod a lot.

One day I asked Murray about his house, which happens to be in a fashionable part of town. I wondered who some of his neighbors were.

“Peggy Lee lives pretty close,” he said.

“How far apart?” I asked.

“About $900,000,” he said.

Very amusing, Mr. Murray.

Go ahead, be that way. Be funnier than the rest of us. Be wiser than the rest of us. Win more Pulitzer Prizes than the rest of us, smarty pants.

If you think we’re just going to sit here and accept the fact that we are never going to be half the sportswriter you are, well, all I have to say is, mister, you’re right. And you can quote me.