1989, One Line (or So) at a Time : Pulitzer: Murray’s prize-winning work offered insight, humor from Miami to Rochester, N.Y., and points in between.

Jim Murray, who won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary Thursday, has often said that his job is to make Los Angeles laugh, and for doing that, he has more than earned his pay.

But it has not been all yuks and chuckles and shouts of glee. Murray has also dispensed insight and compassion along the way, while putting the pompous in their place and the seemingly profound in perspective.

In 1989, the datelines on his columns included the Super Bowl in Miami, the Kentucky Derby in Louisville, the Indianapolis 500, the U.S. Open golf tournament in Rochester, N.Y., and the World Series in the earthquake-stricken San Francisco Bay Area.

In between, he enlightened and delighted readers with, among other offerings, an open letter to Pete Rose, baseball’s 20 greatest moments--as seen from the other dugout--and a comparison of Ram Coach John Robinson’s fake field-goal attempt against the San Francisco 49ers with other notable, ill-fated calls, such as those by the captain of the Titanic, General Custer, the Charge of the Light Brigade and Tom Lasorda when he told Tom Niedenfuer to pitch to Jack Clark.

But the best way to trace Jim Murray’s year is in his own words, some of which are contained in this random sampler extracted from his 1989 columns:

On a recently acquired Kings’ hockey player: “I always thought Wayne Gretzky came with the Stanley Cup attached. He took a bath in it in the off-season. Used it as a flower pot on the back porch. . . . You look at Gretzky’s numbers and you figure there must be two of him.”

On baseball’s designated hitter: “I think it’s time to come to a uniform decision on this indelicate matter. I mean, either a team is the home nine or it’s the home 10.”

On Sunday Silence: “A horse they thought so little of they did everything but leave him on a park bench with a note on him won the Kentucky Derby Saturday.”

On Magic Johnson: “Giving Magic the basketball is like giving Hitler an army, Jesse James a gang, or Genghis Khan a horse. Devastation. Havoc. He’s one of the more demoralizing forces in sports. Dempsey with a hook, an Unser with a car, Henry Aaron on a slow curve. . . . Magic Johnson without a basketball is an offense against nature.”

On a certain blubbery former heavyweight champion making a comeback: “George Foreman made his fight like a guy waiting for a bus. If it was outdoors, pigeons would have lit on him. Guys have moved faster in checkout lines at the market. George may be the Great Fat Hope.”

On the state of U.S. tennis: “You know tennis in this country is in scandalous condition when a couple of guys named Boris and Ivan are playing for our national open title.”

On the Rams: “Ram fans are schooled to fear the worst. They are conditioned to believe if there are two ways to do a thing, the Rams will pick the one with the least chance of succeeding.”

On former Washington Redskin Dexter Manley: “Spending 16 years in or around classrooms and coming out unable to read or write is like spending your life in a cornfield--and starving to death.”

On Orel Hershiser: “His manager likes to call him Bulldog, but if Orel were a canine, he’d probably be wearing a jeweled collar and a shaved torso. If he was any paler, he could haunt a house.”

On the America’s Cup being decided in the courts, an imaginary maritime legal parallel from the past: “SAN FRANCISCO, 1898--The Spanish-American War was awarded to the King of Spain, and Cuba was ordered returned to him, as the Appellate Court of California today upheld a lower-court ruling that Admiral Dewey illegally trapped the Spanish Fleet twice.”

On Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: “He dominated his sport in the way few have in the long history of games men play. God made him more than 7 feet tall. He took care of the rest.”

On the U.S. Open golf tournament: “Welcome to Wuthering Heights West. How do you par a swamp? What club do you use for Ooze? . . . The leader board looks as if it’s bleeding to death.”

On Oklahoma’s ex-football coach: “They said Barry Switzer had one of the most successful football programs of his day. Depends on what you’re counting. Bowl games, yeah. In the important contests of life, he had one of the worst football programs I’ve ever seen.”

On the supposed wonder horse, Houston: “Now, if I paid $2.9 million for a horse, I’d at least want him to talk.”

On Nolan Ryan’s arm: “It is an American heirloom, a work of art. Ryan should go to the Hall of Fame. The arm should go to the Louvre.”

On Pete Rozelle: “As a PR man, he’s without an equal. He could make Castro President of the U.S.”

On Oregon’s legalized football betting: “America the Beautiful is turning into the world’s biggest bookie parlor. The numbers racket used to be run by Murder, Inc. Now it’s run by the state.”

On racing’s greatest jockey: “Nobody ever rode a horse with the skill and grace of Bill Shoemaker. The worst rogues on the track turned into swans when he got on them. It wasn’t a race, it was a romance. A love affair. Shoe didn’t ride a horse, he joined him. Most riders treat horses as if they were guards in slave-labor camps. Shoe treated them as if he were asking them to dance.”

On the ex-coach of the San Diego Chargers: “You remember Don Coryell. He was the guy who used to stand on the sidelines with his hands on his knees and stare out at the line of scrimmage like a guy who just got a peek at his own coffin.”

On Pete Rose: “The count is 0-2, Pete, but you always were a good two-strike hitter. Besides, how tough can that be for a guy who beat out Ty Cobb?”

On the Indy 500 champion: “Every time you see Emerson Fittipaldi in a garage in Gasoline Alley or on a pit wall in Kokomo or Sheboygan, you want to ask him, ‘What’s the matter--butler got the day off?’ Or, ‘Get lost on your way to the palace at Monaco, did you?’ ”

On the owner of the Clippers: “You’re Donald Sterling, financier, and your basketball team is the equivalent of junk bonds. It looks good on paper but not on court.”

On athletic supremacy: “You always get great athletes from the bottom of the economic order. That goes back to the days of ancient Rome, when the gladiators were all slaves (later Christians, and we all know the early Christians were the poor).”

On the Triple Crown: “If you’re going to win just one race, make it the Derby. If you’re going to win two, you better win the third, too, or you get to be forgotten.”

On USC’s 42-3 rout of Ohio State: “Now we know what a Buckeye is. A land animal most often found on its own 20-yard line.”

On trainer Charlie Whittingham: “Charlie has been around horses so much he sleeps standing up.”

On Sugar Ray Leonard: “He looks like he just walked off a can of baby food. If you saw him in the park, you’d want to take him down to the precinct and buy him a lollipop till his parents showed up.”

On the race at Indy: “It was the greatest Indianapolis 500--at least that I have seen. . . . A crash on Lap 199 between the two leaders is not something you’re apt to see outside the pages of pulp fiction. It makes for great theater and puts the 1989 Indy 500 alongside the Babe Ruth called-shot World Series, the Dempsey-Tunney fight or the 1960 Arnold Palmer Open. . . . A vintage event. A great year. A collector’s item.”

On the earthquake at the World Series: “You might have lost your heart in San Francisco, but it hasn’t lost its. The city that the late Doc Kearns would call ‘a good game town’ is getting off the floor one more time. It is reaching for the bottom rope to pull itself up for one more go. The city by the bay is like a grizzled old club fighter who keeps getting to his feet and carrying the fight to his opponent.”

On taking time off: “Every vacation you go on, you hope for three things: To take 10 strokes off your handicap. To get a tan. To get a rest. Well, one out of three ain’t bad. The tan, I got.”