The Sports World Unites

Arnold Palmer and his walk-around guy, Doc Giffen, were working in the shop in Latrobe, Pa., when the call came Monday, and Palmer paused, took a deep breath and then started talking.

And remembering.

And then reading:

“What Ruth did for baseball, Dempsey for prize fighting, Red Grange for football, Arnold Palmer did for golf.”

Jim Murray’s column had been reprinted in the program of the Bob Hope Classic this year.

“A friend sent it to me, and we have it bronzed here in the shop,” Palmer said. “He was a good friend, a great writer and a great guy.

“He was, I suppose, what I would like to think about every media person. A good guy.”

Palmer was an occasional foil.

“I guess he picked on me as much as anybody,” Palmer said. “But it was never malicious.”

The story goes that Palmer had hit a wild shot off the tee in a tournament at Rancho Park, and upon finding his ball under a tree, he also spotted Murray in the gallery.

Knowing Murray’s affinity for Ben Hogan, of whom he wrote perhaps thousands of references in hundreds of columns, Palmer said, “All right, what would your pal Hogan do in a situation like this?”

Answered Murray, “Hogan wouldn’t be in a situation like that.”

“That’s what happened, almost word for word,” Palmer said Monday. “Jim never forgot anything.”

*

Ask a question, get a line.

It’s how so many remembered Murray, including John McKay, something of a linesmith himself when he was successfully coaching at USC--even when he was unsuccessfully coaching the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

“I remember one year Notre Dame came out to play us and they were really favored, a couple of touchdowns I guess, and we beat them,” McKay said. “And I remember his line: ‘All right, who’s the wise guy who ate meat on Friday?’ ”

It might have happened. It might have been one of McKay’s lines, mixed up over the years.

What did happen was this:

“If any Irish eyes are smiling today, bring a shillelagh down over his ears. You can hear the Angels sing, but who’s listening? Anyone who’d smile and listen to music this day would water whiskey.”

*

Murray might have written more words about Dodger pitcher Sandy Koufax than any man who didn’t cover baseball every day.

And maybe some who did:

“Sandy’s fastball was so fast, some batters would start to swing as he was on his way to the mound. His curveball disappeared like a long putt going into a hole.”

Said Koufax after learning of Murray’s death: “He was a great writer and a great friend. He was a man who managed to see the humor in both himself and those he wrote about.”

*

One man could match Murray hyperbole for hyperbole.

Tom Lasorda never minced words in his appreciation of his friends, and he didn’t Monday.

And it had nothing to do with hyperbole.

“When Frank Sinatra passed away, I said we had lost an icon,” Lasorda said. “I think we have lost another. I think he was the Frank Sinatra of his business.

“He wrote a column on me, about what I meant to the game of baseball, that made me cry. Really. It was right after I signed my last contract, in 1995 or so.”

It was Oct. 15, 1995:

“What would baseball be without Tommy? You don’t want to know. A meal without wine, a day without sunshine, a dance with your sister. Any cliche you want. A life without song.

“Not to see that wonderful character bounding out of the dugout, belly first, fist pumping, bowlegs churning, throat yelling on his way to the umpire to straighten him out and tell it like it should be one more time? Never!”

*

Murray, a traditional baseball-football-boxing-horse racing guy, often tended to avoid basketball.

Maybe it was growing up in the cold winters of Hartford, Conn.

When the Lakers were making their annual pilgrimage to playoff frustration, he was at the Kentucky Derby. When UCLA was winning national championships, he was at spring training in Vero Beach, Fla.

But that didn’t prevent friendships struck up among those who wore shorts in winter or coached players who did.

“I was at several affairs through the years with Jim,” said former Bruin coach John Wooden. “Everybody was fond of Jim and not just his writing. He had a tremendous sense of humor. He was a joy to be around.

“I knew him better as a person than as a writer, and I just liked him as a person. I do remember one time he wrote about me that, well, it was sort of a flattering comparison he made:

“What Orville Wright was to flying, and somebody was to . . . I was to basketball.”

Actually, it was in 1975, and Murray neglected Vero Beach to be at Wooden’s last game, a championship matchup with Kentucky at San Diego.

Wrote Murray:

“Wooden is, to his sport, what . . Rockne was to football. Mack to baseball. . . . What the Wright Brothers were to flying or Napoleon to artillery.”

More remembered though, was this, says Wooden:

“I thought the piece he wrote on the death of his wife was one of the most poignant pieces I’ve ever read.”

*

Jerry West agrees.

For all of the avoiding pro basketball, there was no avoiding West, first the Laker star, then their boss.

“I’ve known Jim since 1960, when I was just a kid who first moved to Los Angeles,” West said. “He was not only the best sportswriter I’ve ever known, but one of the best men, period. One thing I have always wished I could do was to paint a great painting or write something that would live forever. Those are talents that are truly special, and Jim was blessed with that talent.”

Paintings such as that of West’s 63-footer against the New York Knicks in the 1970 NBA playoffs:

“Jerry let fly. Ordinarily, you would say it was a ‘desperation’ shot, but with Jerry West, nothing was desperation. He was deadly from any point on the floor. The ball was in all the way. Swish.”

And, always, the one-liners:

“Jerry West can spot a great player from the window of a moving train.”

But the words written about him aren’t those that most stand out in West’s mind:

“He’s written several things that will live forever, the two that most come to mind are the stories he wrote about losing his first wife, and the one about losing his eyesight. Those are two of the most touching stories that I have ever read, and I wish every person alive could read those stories.”

*

Murray came to auto racing late, brought by a guy he had better known through football.

“I took him to his first auto race, at Riverside,” said Les Richter, about whom Murray had first written when he played at California, then made repeated reference in stories about the 11-for-one player trade that made him a Ram linebacker.

“Then, the first time he went to Indy, I took him there. Just being around him, the things he asked were things that really made you feel good because there was always a keen interest in him. . . .

“Others could make a situation real bad, he could be more objective.”

That endeared him to one driver in particular:

“A.J. Foyt was as colorful a character as any sport ever saw. Irascible, cantankerous, he was, like all great athletes from Jack Nicklaus to Ted Williams, a perfectionist. I remember the first time I approached him, just as he was excoriating his pit crew over some engine malfeasance or another. ‘We’re at work here!’ he snapped at me, looking at me as if I were a pothole in Turn 3. ‘What do you think I’m doing? You think I want to be here?’ I asked him. A.J. almost smiled.”

Said Foyt on Monday: “He called a spade a spade, and what I respect about him, he didn’t care if it was A.J. Foyt or Roger Penske or who. He asked honest questions, and I respected that. I hate to hear that he’s gone.”

But there was no mitigation when it came to the carnage that piled up at Indianapolis seemingly every year.

“In a lot of ways, he was controversial about racing being dangerous,” Parnelli Jones said.

“He was tremendous, really a good friend of mine. . . . He liked racing. He certainly didn’t enjoy the dangerous part of it, but neither do any of us. He was a downright good guy. There’s just guys that you latch onto and others you don’t.”

So good, apparently, that Jones put Murray in a car at Indianapolis.

“It had to be around ’74 ‘75, something around there,” Jones said.

“Viceroy was our sponsor. We came up with a gimmick, and what we did was come up with a little Cosworth [engine] in [the car] and take the racing Offy out. It had a governor on it.”

It went this fast:

“ ‘Goggles’ Murray, the scourge of the speedway. Foyt turns pale at the sound of my engines revving up to speed. Rutherford would rather see a train bearing down on him than catch old Goggles in his rear-view mirror.

“I went through the turns at a fearsome speed of 12.5 mph. I was a blur on the straightaways at 22.5. I came near to frying the clutch in my pit stop.”

At the end of the run, he put Indianapolis in perspective:

“I braved THEIR track. I’d like to see them on mine--the dreadful stretch from the Harbor to the Santa Monica at 5 o’clock at night with your glasses sweaty, your shocks worn--and two California highway patrolmen in your rear-view mirror behind on their quotas.”

In the end, though, Richter did Murray a favor, introducing him to Indianapolis. It’s where Murray met Linda McCoy, who became his wife.

*

His last column was about horse racing, and there was a kinship between Murray and the track. More properly, Murray and the people of the track.

“He was the best,” says Marje Everett, who named the Jim Murray Handicap when she was CEO at Hollywood Park.

“He was a good friend, and he’ll really be missed.”

The track provided an opportunity to watch horses and jockeys, both athletes in Murray’s eye.

And it offered a chance to maintain contacts with Hollywood.

“I remember I had a house at Scottsdale, and Charles Boyer was there once, and he and Jim would talk about plays and movies and all of the old Hollywood times,” Everett says. “And at parties at my house, Merv Griffin and Johnny Mathis and Jo Stafford would be there. Gerry, Jim’s first wife, played piano by ear and Jim loved to sing.”

*

The song will be missed, according to Vin Scully, about whom Murray wrote:

“Vincent Edward Scully meant as much or more to the Dodgers than any .300 hitter they ever signed, any 20-game winner they ever fielded. True, he didn’t limp to home plate and hit the home run that turned a season into a miracle--but he knew what to do with it so it would echo through the ages.”

Said Scully:

“He made his readers laugh and cry, all the while peppering them with enough one-liners to land you a week at the Palace. He leveled cities with tongue-in-cheek descriptions, humanized by hyperbole and punctured the pompous with his literary lance. Every day he faced the same challenge, the same blank piece of paper tauntingly unfurled and hanging out of the typewriter like a mocking tongue, daring him to be different, fresh, funny and incisive. And every day for more than 35 years, Jim Murray not only accepted that challenge but triumphed.”