A Man of His Words

On a morning when the president of the United States is in hot water and struggling to cling to his power and reputation, a telephone call comes with worse news: Jim Murray is dead. From the mountains to the prairie to the ocean, a day that begins without Jim is less blessed than most of America’s new dawns. A face has fallen off Mount Rushmore.

He was a grand old Irishman with one working eye and a patched-up pump. A staircase, to Jim, looked as treacherous as a steep cliff, and a highway after dusk was no more navigable to him than a sewer is to a sailboat. Yet on and on Jim Murray went, resolutely, indestructibly, until one day, Sunday, having written once more for that morning’s paper, he gave to the world his last words.

Grantland Rice wrote:

“When my time has come and all farewells are said

“To what few friends may still survive the fight,

“I shall not shrink to hear the ghostly tread

“That signals Death is stalking through the night.”

Friends and mourners quoted this at Toots Shor’s establishment in New York, where they gathered after Rice’s funeral. On a sultry summer’s day 44 years ago, Granny handed in a piece on horse racing to his editor, then keeled over with a stroke. His honorary pallbearers included the prizefighters he challenged and championed, Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney, plus all of the Four Horsemen from Notre Dame he had immortalized in ink.

A church or a gin mill jammed with Jim Murray’s admirers would have to be the size of the Coliseum, perhaps one the combined size of the original in Rome and its namesake in Los Angeles. The number of his sports-page subjects alone would spill out onto the street, a street that if not known as Jim Murray Boulevard now should be named that someday.

He wrote them all, from Aaron to some guy whose surname probably began with Zz. He wrote ‘em everywhere, from Anaheim to Zaire. He wrote one-liners about a million of them and a million lines about any one of them.

And he died doing it.

Doing what he loved, doing what we loved.

Red Smith, a sportswriter’s sportswriter, the sturdiest bridge between the pre-TV years and the Murray era, once said if he didn’t write, he would die. He often confided, “I want to go like Granny Rice did. I just want to fall into my typewriter.” A last column ran only four days before Smith’s death in 1982, a feat one-upped by Shirley Povich of the Washington Post, who died this year at 95 with a fresh column still warm off the presses.

Jim Murray was a writer. He wrote. It’s what he did.

“I suppose I never grew up,” was his attitude to the end, when he looked back on his life in a book. “That’s all right with me. That’s the nice thing about sports. You can be Peter Pan.”

In a Rose Bowl press box a few months ago, a guy at Murray’s side confirmed that he was leaving sportswriting to go to news.

A twinkle flashed behind Coke-bottle glasses.

“Why?” he asked.

Jim always did ask good questions.

“You know,” he then said, “I went the other direction.”

Many a day he had entertained a younger punk--a Murray wannabe lucky to be permitted in the same room, let alone on the same page--with tales of the old Hollywood, the beat he covered for Time magazine back in the Bogie-Marilyn-Martin and Lewis ‘50s, when a reporter rubbed elbows with a star over chili at Chasen’s or a sidecar at the Brown Derby, not inside a locker room rank with Right Guard and Vaseline.

Years later, at a black-tie affair in Beverly Hills, the punk put on a tux and sat way in the back, where he could be suitably mesmerized by Murray’s influence about town. It was a testimonial to a Pulitzer Prize that had arrived long overdue but better late than never. In one corner sat an equally popular James--Garner--smiling and clapping, while at the guest of honor’s side sat a third James--Caan--slapping the table so hard in laughter that he sent the salt and pepper rattling. And up on stage stood Merv Griffin, oohing and aahing over Sammy Cahn’s revised lyrics to an old song, turned into “I’m Just Wild About Murray.”

And in closing, Merv said there was one last guest who wanted to say a few words about Jim, and, lo and behold, on came two last guests, Nancy and Ronald Reagan.

“So, just a typical day in a typical sportswriter’s life?” the punk colleague cornered Mr. Murray afterward to ask.

“Michael, it’s a snap,” he explained. “All you have to do is outlast everybody else.”

On a broadsheet of pulp where Jim Murray’s sentences danced, he outlived the giants of his business and the gnats who flitted about but could never grow enough to become his equal. In that 1993 autobiography he concluded, “I covered the circus. I felt privileged to have done so. Sure, I helped keep the hype going, the calliope playing. I can live with that. It’s what I am.

“I would have made a lousy president.”

Even Jim Murray could be wrong.

He wouldn’t have made a lousy anything.