ALL THOSE MORNINGS . . . AT THE POST
The Twentieth Century in Sports from Famed Washington Post Columnist Shirley Povich
Edited by Lynn, Maury, and David Povich and George Solomon
Shirley Povich at ringside
(The Washington Post)
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PublicAffairs. 404 pp. $27.50
Shirley Povich wrote his first sports column for this newspaper in 1924 and his last in 1998, and in the intervening years he watched Gene Tunney defeat Jack Dempsey for the heavyweight championship in 1927; Seabiscuit beat War Admiral in their 1938 match race; Don Larsen pitch his perfect game in the 1956 World Series; the Green Bay Packers win the first Super Bowl in 1967; Joe Frazier defeat Muhammad Ali for the heavyweight championship in 1971; and Cal Ripken play his 2,131st consecutive game in 1995, breaking the record held for 56 years by Lou Gehrig, whom Povich knew and liked very much.
It would be an injustice, however, to think of Povich's career primarily for its longevity. By any measure, he ranks with the heavyweights of his trade. Sports columnists develop -- some might say, cultivate -- a persona, be it the relentless champion of nobility on the playing field (Grantland Rice, a Povich mentor) or the guy on the adjoining barstool with a story to tell and a spleen to vent (New York's Dick Young, most famously). Povich, like his good friend Red Smith, drew on a keen eye, a storyteller's gift for narrative and, when he felt it necessary, a sense of moral outrage to create a voice that was urbane and engaging. It is impossible to envision him sitting in the press box without a coat and tie.
Now, his children and former Post sports editor George Solomon have assembled a volume of his best columns, All Those Mornings . . . at The Post. It contains just over 400 pages, a reasonable figure considering that little of consequence in the world of sports occurred over the last century without Povich in attendance.
Shirley Povich -- yes, his given name; he was inadvertently included in the 1959 Who's Who of American Women -- came to The Washington Post in 1922, after attending Georgetown University, by virtue of the good impression he made as a caddy for the paper's long-ago owner, Edward B. McClean. He started as a $12-a-week copy-boy and within two years was covering the Washington Senators. He wrote his first column about baseball's first commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis. The prose was clear and muscular and, over the decades, would change little stylistically. The man came to his work knowing how to say what he wanted to say.
Povich did not write for lines, a curse of cleverness suffered by too many sports columnists, whose works suggests an experience akin to fording a stream by skipping from rock to rock. He saw the piece whole, or rather built his columns around the essential narrative of the event he was covering. He also resisted the temptation to favor style over substance, an affliction that leaves too many otherwise talented columnists saying the same thing repeatedly, each time reaching desperately for another flourish. As a result, Povich's work holds up remarkably well; the great joy in reading this collection is the feeling of freshness and intimacy that comes with being at so many familiar events. Consider this view of the Dempsey-Tunney fight: "Getting up, Tunney ran. The champion ran, but it was no disgrace to run. It was the sensible thing to do under the circumstances, and in running Tunney acted the part of the champion who knew what to do when there was no logical alternative."
Povich had his causes. He was, for instance, an early and outspoken champion of integrating baseball -- a belief that set him apart from many of his contemporaries, who assumed that they were being reasonable when arguing that the safest place for a black man to play baseball was in the Jim Crow world of the Negro Leagues. Povich took the fight to football, as well, hammering at one-time Redskins owner George Marshall's resistance to signing a black man. He had his favorite athletes (Walter Johnson, especially) and games (baseball, above all). In this regard he was a product of a time when sports meant baseball, horse-racing and boxing. He liked football; he cared little for basketball.
Povich was at his best, however, when he played the role of his readers' surrogate, helping them see what he was seeing. He did this at games and, in wartime, at Iwo Jima and, perhaps most poignantly, at a sports event that became something else entirely: the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics. He was at his best in Munich, a reporter so enterprising that he slipped into the Olympic Village by changing into a Puerto Rican Olympic team sweatsuit so he could get closer to the action than anyone else. He was 66 years old and not content to wait out the crisis in the press center.
One cannot read this collection, then, without wishing that those who loved him best might have let the columns speak for themselves. Their interstitial material clogs the collection, leaving the reader to wonder where the introductions end and Povich begins.
But that is a small matter. What emerges in these pages is a portrait of a man who, even in his last years, retained his grace, his voice, his excitement at being able to spend a lifetime chronicling so many marvelous games. •
Michael Shapiro is the author of "The Last Good Season: Brooklyn, the Dodgers and Their Final Pennant Race Together."
