Recalling the New York Post’s Glory Days

To this day, I don’t know how Milton Gross did it. He would find himself in a cramped room among reporters jostling for position with radio journalists and television cameramen and insinuate himself to the front of the pack. Once there, he would get to the bottom of the story.

Invariably, the pursuit led him to hunch down close to the subject, whether it was the hero of a World Series game, the center who scored the winning basket or the heavyweight champion of the world. He would whisper to the athlete on his stool and the athlete, perhaps thinking himself stranded in a library, would respond in hushed tones while rival newsmen (there were scant newswomen in those days) saw lips move and overheard nothing.

After a pantomime of a conversation, Gross would rise with a satisfied look on his face and depart, the recipient of a private interview in the most public of settings.

Gross represented the New York Post.

He wasn’t a facile writer, but in his columns he explored themes ignored elsewhere in that era. He was a champion of the black athlete forced to operate in a system run by whites and he was a master of the psychological profile. Not surprisingly, his main man was Floyd Patterson, whose self-esteem never measured up to his boxing skills.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, laughing at the pomposity of officials and training his wit on the establishment, was Larry Merchant. While others focused on the drama of the National Basketball Association Finals between the New York Knicks and the Los Angeles Lakers, he spotlighted the comic subplot of clumsy flamingos Mel Counts and Phil Jackson, who were all arms, legs and elbows. He championed the quarterback of the New York Jets who had been branded as a radical and lampooned the reaction of the old-guard New York Giants and owner Wellington Mara to changing times.

Maranoia, he called it. Naturally, he sided with the likes of Fred Dryer, the California beach boy who eventually turned in his helmet, shoulder pads and van for a more lucrative and less dangerous job as a television cop.

Merchant was a columnist for the New York Post.

It wasn’t that long ago, really. Twenty years, two decades. The newspaper decline in New York was under way, having claimed the Mirror, the Herald Tribune, the Journal-American, the World Telegram & Sun and that awful product of an ill-advised merger, the World Journal Tribune. But even as the written word began to take a back seat to television in the public consciousness, the Post held a special place in the city, thanks to its sports section.

The editors at the time recognized a fundamental truth, that as entertaining as big-time sports had become, people would just as soon read about it and argue about it as watch it. They allotted far greater space to sports than did the paper’s competitors, and the late, late lockup for one of the last major afternoon dailies assured the most comprehensive coverage of events even from the West Coast. The writers and columnists took full advantage.

This was the paper that treated the NBA as a major league long before others caught on. After Jimmy Cannon moved on to the Journal and Leonard Koppett to The New York Times, it discovered a talent on the copy desk named Leonard Shecter. An incisive questioner and caustic commentator, he brought a different dimension to baseball. In 1970, having opted for free-lance work, he brought forth with Jim Bouton “Ball Four,” a book that would infuriate some baseball executives and players while illuminating their sport.

Other Post staffers were irreverent. They also were lively and hip in a way that reflected New York. As much a humorist as a journalist, Vic Ziegel once wrote about a product that had been sent to him in the mail after he mentioned its name in a story. This gave him an idea for a column. “Chivas Regal, Chivas Regal, Chivas Regal ... “ he wrote.

Paul Zimmerman covered pro football like no one else in the city and perhaps in the country, from the perspective of a onetime offensive lineman. He became embroiled in a feud with Joe Namath, admired Weeb Ewbank and found intelligent life down in the pit while the rest of us were watching fly patterns. Dr. Z also volunteered to cover the Olympic Games, alone, even paying his own way and routinely putting in 18-hour days until the No-Doz wore off.

The man also demonstrated a penchant for making news when he broke the arm of new New York Yankees president Mike Burke during the baseball writers’ game. His colleague, Maury Allen, who was renowned for writing stories in the time it took rivals to change the ribbon in their typewriters, inadvertently created even more headlines when he threw a party at his Westchester, N.Y., home for friends, including a few ballplayers. Some months later, it was revealed, Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekich of the Yankees explored wife swapping for the first time that night.

Even the oldtimers were characters. Leonard Cohen, a former sports editor and columnist who managed to spend 50 years on the job without acquiring a driver’s license, was a regular performer at the baseball writers’ dinner each January. In one of his last appearances, he not only agreed to perform a hula in a grass skirt but, for authenticity sake, removed his undergarments. He was in his 70s.

It can safely be assumed that what united this formidable group was not a love of money. I can personally verify that the Post did not occupy the high end of the pay scale. Summoned by sports editor Ike Gellis for a job interview at the prehistoric South Street building abandoned by Hearst’s Journal, I was underwhelmed by the offer to cover baseball. It added up to about a $1,000 cut in salary at a time when the business was just coming to grips with double figures. “But you’ll be working in New York,” he insisted.

The Post did give Mike Lupica his first New York forum. And it launched Harvey Araton. It also was where Dick Young kept alive America after breaking with the Daily News. By then, of course, the paper was more interested in sensationalism than sports.

A vote of the Newspaper Guild Monday night saved the Post from extinction, at least temporarily.