Their Mornings Just Won’t Be the Same

Haggle all you want about the greatest basketball player--Jordan, Russell or whoever. Were the 1927 Yankees the best? Lombardi’s Packers? You take Ali. Give me Joe Louis. You’re entitled to your opinion.

But don’t try to tell me Jim Murray was not the greatest sportswriter of his generation. He wasn’t voted “America’s Best Sportswriter” 14 times because the other guys used crayons.

ROLAND WRINKLE

Newhall

*

Maybe because his columns were timeless, I assumed Jim Murray was as well.

FRANK NEWELL

Long Beach

*

There are two kinds of sportswriters: Jim Murray and others.

RUSS HILL

Huntington Beach

*

With Jack Smith in Life & Style and Jim Murray in Sports, the heaven edition of The Times is one of the best newspapers around.

BECKY FISH

Culver City

*

This guarantees that the esteemed Mr. Murray is now covering the real angels and saints.

JIM BUCKLEY

Santa Barbara

*

Upon hearing of the death of Jim Murray, I was very sad. Then, as I recalled some of his most memorable columns, I brightened up a little. I know that the first things Jim got to see with his new eyes were the faces of his wife and son.

Thanks Jim, for all the wonderful words.

ERIC MONSON

Temecula

*

Saddened by Jim Murray’s passing, late last night, for the first time in a long while, I actually prayed. I asked God to leave the light on for Jim. He had bad eyes, you know. What seemed like only a minute later, a deep, reassuring voice that sounded like it was inside my head answered, “Naw, Jim has always seen just fine.”

R.C. WILLIAMS

Los Angeles

*

My penurious side has always placed me in morning coffee shops begging fellow patrons for their sports page. It wasn’t until I moved to Los Angeles that one unsuspecting customer, an elderly woman wielding a magnifying glass, turned to me and said, “No.” She said, “Son, my morning is reserved for Mr. Murray.” I didn’t know what she meant. Nine years have passed and I now know. Sunrise and that first cup of Joe will never be the same.

HAL DION

Los Angeles

*

I cannot let Jim Murray’s death pass without recalling his generosity to a college junior 31 years ago. I was studying at UCLA and needed some guidance in doing a research paper. I wrote to Jim and almost immediately got a message asking me to call him at home. I did so and was so impressed at how easy he was to talk to and how he cut right to the issues I needed to address, helping me immeasurably in producing an “A” paper.

It now occurs to me that Jim’s life was very much devoted to producing “A” papers.

RICHARD SHERMAN

Port Hueneme

*

He could do in a couple of hours what most writers couldn’t do in a week. And that was with a deadline. Jim Murray was a master craftsman. Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Murray.

Imagine going to Leonardo in the morning and asking him to draw the helicopter by lunch. “Hey, Mich, we’ve got a group coming in for a wedding at 6, can you kind of hurry it up?”

How did he do it?

When Secretariat died, they did an autopsy and found out that he had a extra-large ticker. Everyone then realized how he had run races faster than any other horse in history. So, what did Jim Murray have? From the outpouring of responses to his passing, it’s clear that his heart was oversized as well. What about his brain? Could it have been unique in some way? Call that brain research fella in here right away. Sure, study Jordan and Montana if you like, but I want to know why he passed on Jim Murray.

You want to study guys who dominate their field? That’s Murray. Leaving him out of a study like this would be like having a party for dictators and not inviting Fidel Castro. He wasn’t just better, he was Secretariat better.

JOHN T. FISCHER

Mar Vista

*

After living and breathing sports for a lot of years, I’ve lost a lot of my passion. Between the salary/labor squabbles and crime statistics, I sometimes wonder if I’m reading a cross between the Wall Street Journal and a crime report.

Jim Murray’s columns cut though all that. He brought us the people and events that led old fogies like me to love sports to begin with. I hope The Times just runs a big blank, white space for a week or so as a tribute to Jim. I miss him already.

KEVIN JENNINGS

Spartanburg, S.C.

*

Jim Murray was a master of the three Cs--clever, concise and comparative. He was at his best when providing his readers with a litany of analogies on a golfer’s swing, a ballplayer’s stroke or a horse’s stride. His words floated and danced off the page much the same way Ali did in the ring. He grabbed you from the start, kept you entertained throughout and always left you wanting more.

TOM COMPAS

Fontana

*

I was born in Los Angeles in 1957. I discovered sports and Jim Murray in 1970. I would watch the Rams or the Bruins play, and read Murray’s column to see what I missed, even though I had seen or had been at the game. He cleared the shadows from the corners, and showed the entire field. You never had a bad seat with Murray’s column.

ELLIS STARKS

Los Angeles

*

In the late 1960s I was going to school in a Midwest town well known for its college football. Jim Murray wrote a memorable column that characterized that town, not in a paragraph, or a sentence, but in two words, “Klumbus, Ahaya.”

He has been my favorite sportswriter ever since. He will be sorely missed.

DAVID MARSH

La Jolla

*

Who else would ever think of describing former Dolphin running back Larry Csonka as a guy who “has a name that sounds like a watermelon falling off a truck?” Who else but Jim Murray.

DEAN F. ENGERT

Norwalk

*

Having known Jim Murray way back when he was still on the staff of Time magazine, and having had the good fortune of having clients who became the subject of a Murray column, most who knew the man had his or her most enjoyable Murrayism.

My all-time favorite was Jim’s description of the NBA as being “one massive pituitary gland.”

JERRY ROSS

Sherman Oaks

*

Being an avid sports fan, I have read and delighted in Jim’s prose, both pointed and poignant, for 40-plus years. I have many of his pieces on file.

Being a Trojan, one of my favorite lines was the opening of his report in the ‘50s on a USC upset of Notre Dame: “The crowd at the Coliseum could not have been more surprised if the Christians had begun eating the lions!”

DEV LEAHY

Ventura

*

Having grown up in L.A., I say there are only a handful of true SoCal icons: Vin Scully, John Wooden, Jim Murray at the top of the list. As a Trojan, I salute Murray for immortalizing USC football. With all due respect to Grantland Rice, Murray’s description of the 1974 USC-Notre Dame game may be the greatest sportswriting of all time. I particularly loved Murray’s hyperbole, such as when he would write something like: “The Thundering Herd wasn’t a football team, they were the Wehrmacht rolling through the Low Countries.”

When my friend Brad Cole moved to Paris in the 1980s, I sent him Murray’s column every day for a year, and to this day Brad tells me nothing could have made him feel more at home.

STEVEN R. TRAVERS

Hermosa Beach

*

In Jim Murray, we’ve lost more than a sportswriter. We’ve lost a poet laureate.

With brilliant figures of speech, he praised the heroes. “If Tom Harmon had given the Grim Reaper the straight arm, he could have kept on going.”

Of Ali, he wrote: “He choreographed his fights.”

Let’s think of him as still around, on assignment.

MORRIS SCHULATSKY

Los Angeles

*

When a person touches those around them in a positive way, that is a life well-lived.

I appreciated the heart Jim Murray displayed through the story of one of my early mentors: As a high school junior, his class project was to interview his hero: Jim Murray. An impromptu phone call from a 17-year-old to Jim Murray became a magical 45-minute chat that influenced this young man’s life. Fifteen years later, as my boss relayed this story to me, he still got choked up recalling his special experience.

I have enjoyed three decades of Jim Murray’s columns. I have listened to my dad read and appreciate many, many of Jim Murray’s columns. We have laughed together at his marvelous wit, and cried together through his columns about losses, especially the loss of his first wife.

I thank you, Jim Murray, for your influence on our father-son relationship. Heaven is lucky to have you.

CHUCK HOLLER

La Crescenta

*

In 1993, my 13-year-old son Michael came back from shopping at Century City. He was not carrying a compact disc but a book. He had stopped in at a bookstore and had seen Mr. Murray autographing his book. Michael told Mr. Murray that his mother, who only liked baseball, was a great fan of his and read all his columns faithfully. Mr. Murray wrote the following to me:

“To Paulette, thanks for reading! Don’t stop. Here’s to sunshine and roses and the health to enjoy them.”

A friend said today: “The wrong people have weak hearts.”

PAULETTE F. KATZ

Westwood

*

It says here that Jim Murray is no longer with us. Giddoudahere! Must be a different Murray. Next thing they’ll tell me is that God didn’t make the little green apples or that Ted Williams bunts for base hits or that Marciano beats you with the jab or that Ripken is a malingerer!

An Irish toast and arrivederci to Jim Murray. The greatest of ‘em all!

VINNY DAVIRRO

Goleta

*

Say it isn’t so, Jim. Tell me this is all some cosmic mistake, some celestial clerk having a bad day at the office. Tell me that I’ll pick up the paper Sunday and see your Irish mug staring out at me. You were the best, Jim. You were Dempsey-Firpo, Man O’ War coming down the stretch at Churchill Downs, Hogan on the 17th at Riviera. Have a good trip, my friend, and say hello to Red Smith and Granny Rice, Jimmy Cannon and Shirley Povich, and all the other great scribes who have covered their last game. Have one for me, Jim. We’ll miss you.

KEN MCINTYRE

Marina del Rey

*

All of my heroes are gone: John Wayne, Roy Rogers, John Lennon, my dad, and now Jim Murray.

RANDY R. PARSON

Apple Valley

*

The juxtaposition of the “prince” and the “pauper” stories on the front page of Tuesday’s Aug. 18 Times spoke volumes.

After reading Jim Murray’s obituary at the bottom of the front page, it is clear that Murray, humble sportswriter, took the high road in life and found glory, not top story William Jefferson Clinton, twice elected president of the United States of America.

Jim Murray, I hardly knew ye, but your great writing and example speak to my aspirations, and that’s how you were a great leader of people.

BETSY BEGIAN

Santa Monica

*

When I read Tuesday’s headlines that Bill Clinton had deceived us, I felt bad.

When I read that Jim Murray had died, I cried.

TRINI MARQUEZ

Sky Forest, Calif.

*

I have fond memories of Jim Murray from my youth in St. Louis, when my dad would sit at the breakfast table on Sunday morning and read his column aloud to us. It was always the same: He’d head straight for the sports section, scan the first few lines of Murray’s column, then begin with, “Listen to this.” He’d then launch into his recitation. My mom, who doesn’t care much for sports, would act like she was listening. I’d really listen. My dad and I would laugh aloud at much of it.

My dad passed away five years ago. I hope he runs into Jim Murray in heaven. He’d like that.

JULIA COOPER

San Diego

*

When I was a rabbinical student in Israel in the fall of 1972, Palestinian terrorists massacred Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. Friends and relatives sent me Jim Murray’s powerful columns from the Olympics, which I have saved to this day. “This was supposed to be a track meet, not a war. Incredibly, they’re going on with it. It’s almost like having a dance at Dachau. How can they have a decathlon around the bloodstains, run the 1,500 over graves?” he wrote on Sept. 7.

His words and the moral outrage behind them made me feel that we Jews had a sympathetic and understanding friend in Murray. His was a voice of sanity and decency during a time of insanity and indecency.

As we say in Hebrew, may his memory be a blessing.

RABBI ALAN HENKIN

Lancaster

*

As a person only tangentially involved in sports, I was privileged to have been the subject of two articles by a man I admired so much. As chairman of Caesars World for many years, I was in contact often with Jim on and off our properties. It gave me an insight into the thought processes of this most gifted writer.

Most of my business life has been in the public corporate arena, so I’ve had a fair amount written about me, good and bad. Only Jim extracted enough from his interviews to penetrate my personal life.

Of the millions who visited and stayed with us every year, Jim will always be remembered for his humility. He asked for nothing and rebuffed us when we endeavored to give him the favored status he had so rightfully earned. I was privileged to have known Jim and honored that he would think any part of my life worthy of his mention.

HENRY GLUCK

Bel Air

*

I can’t get used to the thought that I will never read Jim Murray’s column again. When I came to this country, I was half Jim’s age the day he left to play golf with God and Hogan. Structurally, it was too late to change anything. After 14 years here, I still dream in Romanian and will do so until the day I go caddie for Jim. With his help, though without his knowing, I’ve tried to adjust.

Jim Murray was the reason I’ve been buying The Times for 14 years. In my first two years here, the hardest two, without my wife and daughter and mostly without a job, Jim Murray made my days start with a smile. Through him, I discovered American sports. Through him, I became familiar with the elegant clarity and richness of the English language filtered by a genial mind and unique talent. I could not have found a more fortunate way to start, at 39, my English class.

Jim Murray made this immigrant go to the dictionary to fully understand his gems. Later, he helped a sportswriter-- who had done all his work in a foreign language--hope that someday he’ll write in Murray’s language. Jim was the Everest of sportswriting. I joined the many who hoped to be Hillary. Just to smell the air up there.

VLADIMIR MORARU

Los Angeles

*

When Vijay Singh won the PGA, I thought it was a slam dunk that a Murray column would follow, and capture the hidden humor in the man from Fiji winning his first major. But I thought nothing of it come Monday morning when I glanced over the front page and didn’t see Murray. Then that afternoon I heard, and suddenly the absence of his column took on a very chilling reality. It wasn’t there because it wasn’t possible.

For so many years I liked my coffee blond and sweet, but this morning I saw no reason to leave room for cream and sugar. I drank it black.

DOUGLAS LITTLETON

Dana Point

*

I know this will get lost in a flood of memorials. Jim Murray was L.A. and The Times. The Sports section is some of the best reading in the world. Jim Murray elevated that section to where it is today. The graduates of The Times around the country got to learn and work with a truly great storyteller who was a regular guy. I went to college in the upper Midwest in the ‘70s, but I subscribed to The Times anyway. I got the Sunday paper on Thursday, but it didn’t matter that the news was old. Jim’s columns and the rest of the paper were my connection to home. I haven’t lived in Southern California for over 20 years, but I turn to the Web site often. I get The Times whenever I can get my hands on it.

Thankfully, Vin Scully is still around to remind us of those days when L.A. was a lot less full of itself. Thanks to all of Jim’s colleagues for sharing their memories of him with us.

KARL MAGNUSON

Decorah, Iowa

*

My wife never reads the sports page. Because she loves Spokane and appreciates the written word, I began reading “Best of Murray--Cities” about Spokane. We both laughed. I then began reading to her “If You’re Expecting One-Liners, Wait, a Column” written in ’79 when Mr. Murray lost his eyesight. Three-quarters of the way through the article, I began bawling like a baby. Profoundly confused--why this uncontrollable sobbing, I asked? Mr. Murray’s great prose touched the universal emotion of loss--his eye, a sports era, my youth, and now Jim Murray. We both cried.

DICK CROWELL

Woodland Hills

*

There have been a few masterpieces of writing, in the sports field or any other field of writing. Without doubt, Jim Murray wrote many memorable columns but, in my mind, the greatest column/masterpiece of writing ever by any writer at any time at any age was Jim’s column wherein he tells of his wife’s death. No other writing has ever approached this in-depth feeling, respect, love and heartbreak. That column, with due respect for his present family, should be his memorial.

GLENN C. COLE

Bakersfield

*

When Jim Murray was inducted into our local Shrine Game Hall of Fame in 1988, I was fortunate to take a tour with him to our Los Angeles unit of Shriners’ Hospitals for crippled children. A sad place, and I told him so. But Murray said, “You can’t cry, because the kids aren’t crying.”

He immediately grasped what is going on at our hospital; his barbs in his columns insulting anyone that thought they had no reason to attend our Shrine Game to benefit these kids made you feel guilty for not attending.

During that tour, he pointed out that Shriners had fun. There is no denying that. But he said at the time--and The Times ran his quote from my letter to Viewpoint when he won the Pulitzer Prize two years later--”As long as there is a crippled child, we’ll never run out of Shriners.”

And that’s true. But we have now run out of sportswriters.

M.R. “ROSIE” ROSENLOF

Carson

*

Jim Murray was a regular at Richstone Family Center events, from the fancy ones in Beverly Hills to the pot lucks. Jim was at home with these kids. He would shake their hands, ask them about what sports they played and wait for their answers as though each were destined for fame and glory.

In 1992, at a gala chaired by his future wife, Linda McCoy, Jim became the first recipient of the Richstone Caritas (Love of People) Award presented to him by President and Mrs. Reagan. Jim, always reluctant to be center stage, suffered in the spotlight to help secure the final dollars needed to break ground on the Richstone Jim Murray Children’s Center.

DOROTHY COURTNEY

Executive Director,

Richstone Family Center

*

In 1972, after living in Los Angeles the first 22 years of my life, I was appointed general manager of a Class-A Pittsburgh Pirate farm club in Salem, Va. I still remember waking up that February morning, going down to the coffee shop, opening the Roanoke World News newspaper and shock set in. No Jim Murray. It was an element of life I took for granted--like breathing. I immediately called to have a subscription mailed to me.

Fast-forward to 26 years later. An overcast morning in the South Bay. I open the Los Angeles Times and depression sets in. No Jim Murray. No more.

This time I can’t call anyone to have a subscription mailed to me.

PAT MOONEY

Torrance

*

When Sandy Koufax shut out the Minnesota Twins to win the 1965 World Series, Jim Murray compared him to Vladimir Horowitz, Jonas Salk, Fred Astaire and Leonard Bernstein. This was my first introduction to these great men. Only Murray could sneak in a history and culture lesson in the middle of a baseball column.

EDWARD KAZ

West Hills

*

As Jim Murray’s oldest friend, I am compelled to add a few memories.

In 1948, Jim walked with me to Ben Hogan’s first U.S. Open win at Riviera.

Dan Tana invited us to the first U.S. pro soccer game in 1967. Jim was bored. He said Americans liked rehashing games in the off-season. He said the game would never catch on here.

I remember his wife Gerry’s St. Patrick’s Day parties.

There were sad times, including the loss of his son, Ricky.

There were more happy times. He invited a great variety of friends such as Carroll Shelby, Gene Kelly, Sandy Koufax, Dave Marr, Conrad--the Times’ cartoonist.

Jim and Linda had happy years until Sunday night when Jim Murray left us. He took with him my best friend.

BOB WILLIAM

Los Angeles

*

Isn’t it humbling that we have access to the same words that Jim Murray had?

JERILYN PRIMM

Burbank

*

I’ve saved today’s edition of The Times sports section, but it’s a little hard to read: My tears have blurred much of the print.

DANA JOHNSON

Oxnard

*

Tuesday was the first time I have ever read the sports section from cover to cover.

LAURA A. BOLING

Riverside

*

It is somehow fitting that Jim Murray died on the 50th anniversary of the death of Babe Ruth, for Jim Murray was the Babe Ruth of sportswriters. Or is it the other way around?

GERALD J. MILLER

Oak Park

*

They say that everyone can be replaced. Well, you have your work cut out for you.

JOHN H. YARACH

Azusa

*

I have only one request of the L.A. Times: Leave Jim Murray’s space in the newspaper empty and pray for reincarnation.

TRACY A. ODELL

Rossmoor