To This Team of L.A. All-Stars, a Writer Was Most Valuable

The cloud cover hung heavy and gray over Dodger Stadium late Saturday morning, preventing the sun from making a clean run to daylight, but Vin Scully looked up and declared the conditions ideal for a tribute to an old Irish wordsmith named James Patrick Murray.

“This is not an overcast day,” Scully told an audience of about 2,500 fans and friends of the late Times sports columnist. “Nor is it a gloomy day. The Irish would call it a soft day.

“And considering the man whose memory we honor today in this hard-hearted world, it’s a perfect day. A soft day.”

It was also a sad day, and a funny day, a day when a veritable Who’s Who In Los Angeles Sports turned up in front of the first-base dugout at Dodger Stadium to take turns at the microphone telling Jim Murray stories.

A team photo of the featured speakers brought together for the 80-minute memorial service was one for the time capsule.

Scully and Chick Hearn, the Hall of Fame voices of the Dodgers and the Lakers.

Jerry West, the great Laker guard, of whom Murray once wrote, “could score from the locker room, who could fake his man back into his street clothes.”

Ann Meyers Drysdale, wife of the late Dodger pitcher whose on-the-mound pugnacity Murray so admired.

Chris McCarron, the champion jockey whom Murray interviewed for his final column, which appeared in the Times on the day he passed away, Aug. 16.

And Al Davis and Al Michaels, bitter combatants over such trivialities as the Raiders’ place in the NFL cosmos, sharing the same dais--if not happy conversation--because of their mutual affection for a member of the sporting press.

Davis’ appearance was greeted with long, loud applause from a section of Raider loyalists brandishing a “WE LOVE OUR RAIDERS” banner recently resurrected from mothballs.

“Don’t stop,” Davis grinningly goaded as he stepped to the podium, from where he launched into the sincerest form of flattery he could conceive.

“Jim Murray did not play for the Los Angeles Raiders,” Davis began. “Nor did he play for the Oakland Raiders. Nor did he ever, in any way, wear the famed silver and black.

“But if he did, he would have worn it with pride, with poise, with class. Because he was a star among stars.”

Davis described Murray, with admiration, as “an organization man--he played for the Los Angeles Times. His devotion, dedication, loyalty, his towering courage were the things that make great organizations great. He won for 40 years--40 years as a columnist.”

Echoing the phrase he coined for you-know-know, Davis added, “When you talk about the team of the decades, and we’re talking about the ‘60s and the ‘70s and the ‘80s and the ‘90s, certainly Jim Murray was the sports columnist of the decades.”

Michaels described Murray’s debut column in the Times on Feb. 16, 1961 as “a signal moment of the 1960s. . . . He was an original. He really transcended the business of sportswriting. He did it in a different way. And from that very first column on, when we picked it up that morning and thought, ‘We haven’t seen anything like this,’ he was able to do that for 37 more years.”

Murray, to Michaels, was a well-read, quick-witted tour guide who, luckily enough, started on the job smack in the middle of a golden era in Los Angeles sports.

“When Jim began, this stadium was still under construction,” Michaels noted. “The Angels had just been born and would start play that year. The Rose Bowl was still the bowl game. John McKay was beginning that incredible run with USC football.

“We were on the verge of watching John Wooden begin the most unbelievable run in terms of dynasties in college sports at UCLA. The Lakers had just come to town with a couple of guys named Baylor and West.

“Santa Anita and Hollywood Park were drawing 50,000 on a Saturday afternoon. The Rams were drawing 80,000, 90,000 and some times even 100,000. Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus would come to town for tournaments and they were transcending their sport.

“And Jim was here to chronicle all of it, to guide us through what was a very golden time. And we had a golden man who did it.”

West remembered the reaction in his home state of West Virginia to a column in which Murray called the television satellite dish “the state flower of West Virginia” and talked about the locals repairing their cars by “sewing patches with needle and thread.”

“I have never seen a man talk so badly about a state,” West said. “All of a sudden, Jim Murray became public enemy No. 1.”

West called Murray “the Michael Jordan of writers. . . . Jim Murray never had a bad day as a writer. When every one of us as athletes fail and fail in front of the whole world, it’s not a very good feeling. This man did not fail.”

Hearn said he thought of Murray on Friday night as “I watched the home run derby. First Sammy hits one, puts him ahead of Big Mac. And, what, less than an hour later, Mac hits one out in St. Louis.

“I thought to myself, golly, would Murray have had a great column tomorrow? About this race? About the twists and turns it has taken?

“We are deprived.”

Linda McCoy-Murray, Murray’s widow, thought the setting was perfect for Saturday’s tribute, because, she said, “I’ve always thought of Dodger Stadium as the House That Murray Built.

“Jim, I tell you, would be embarrassed by this fanfare. He’d probably say, ‘Enough already. Don’t you have anything else to do?’

“No, Jim, we don’t.”