“Jim Bouton, Reliever”

By Jack Mann

Washington Daily News, 1969

Jim Bouton pitched an inning of relief for the Seattle Pilots Friday night, and two innings Saturday afternoon. That’s the way it is these days for Jim Bouton, 30, who started 37 games for the Yankees in 1964.

They were three pretty good innings for a guy who throws only one pitch. Bouton got almost everybody out and he got Frank Howard, on a one-two pitch, to pop up.

The trouble with Howard is that some of his pop-ups land in places where nobody can catch them. This one landed in the bullpen when it came off the wall That wasn’t bad.

What was bad was that Bouton’s hat never fell off. It hasn’t fallen off for a long time. It probably never will again.

The hat fell off when he labored in the vineyards of Auburn and Kearney and Greensboro and Amarillo. He is not a very big man, so he had to throw very hard to throw very fast. He knew he had to make it as a fastball pitcher or not at all.

Bouton came right over the top with the ball and the maximum effort made the fingertips of his right hand touch the ground as he followed thru. He needed all of it, all the time.

And the hat fell off. lt was still falling off when he won 21 games for the Yankees in 1963, and won half enough games to win the World Series in 1964.

Then he lost the fastball. Nobody believed he had lost it in 1965, when he went 4-15. He was lousy, but so, suddenly, were the Yankees.

By opening day, 1966, at Minneapolis, the truth was evident. He threw three consecutive change ups to Jim Kaat, a pitcher, and the third one beat him.

“I couldn’t throw the curve,” Bouton said yesterday. What he meant was that he could throw it, but unaccompanied by that fastball that hummed and darted, it didn’t fool anybody. He was Jim Bouton, fastball pitcher, and he had lost his fastball.

Two years ago the Yankees tentatively gave up on him and for the rest of the year, Bouton got knocked around in Syracuse. Last year they gave up on him unqualifiedly and shipped him to Seattle, which was still minor league.

Bouton didn’t give up. “I thought about quitting,” he said. “We talked about it a lot, but my wife is great. She just said, ‘Whatever you want to do.’”

Bouton wanted to pitch. He began throwing knuckle halls. “What could I lose? I was 0-7 in a minor league. I had thrown a knuckler as a kid, and I found out I could still throw it. After a while, I was getting it over.”

After a while he was 4-7. Maybe, he feels, he can still make it for a few years as a knuckleballer. And if he can’t, he feels, it’s no great tragedy. “I guess I’d sell real estate, or something,” he said. “I know I won’t work in an office. I’ll have to combine something to make a living, with something I really want to do.”

There are other things to think about. There is Kyong Jo Cho.

“Oh, sure,” Bouton said, “we could have had more children. But with the population situation what it is, I don’t think anybody has the right to have as many children as they can, where there are already so many children in the world that nobody is taking care of.”

Michael Bouton will soon be six and Laurie is almost four. For the past year, suburban New Jersey has been getting used to the fact that they have a middle brother named Kyong. “His mother was Korean,” Bouton explained. “His father was an American soldier. It’s not an advantage to have white blood in Korea.”

The Koreans, after several centuries of being whipping boys for the Japanese—being given in Japan the menial equivalent of Negroes in the American South—have finally found somebody of their own to be prejudiced against.

“We didn’t specify a Korean kid,” Bouton said. “We just told them we wanted a boy, and the age, and one with an aggressive personality.

“We did say we didn’t want a child with a Negro background. You know I don’t have anything against Negroes, but my wife and I had doubts about what kind of America it’s going to be 10 years from now.”

He had doubts about what kind of America it is right now. When Bouton came to the Yankees in 1962, he was brainwashed like all young Yankees about what not to say to newspapermen. He decided to make up his own mind and found that he even liked some of them. He horrified the senior Yankees by socializing with reporters.

He learned from the experience of a reporter his own age that adopting a Negro orphan could lead to unforeseen heartbreak and be a failure.

Kyong Jo Cho was on the way, so Jim Bouton went to Berlitz. “I learned how to ask him if he wanted a cab to his hotel,” Bouton said, “but I didn’t learn how to ask him, ‘Where does it hurt?’ So I took a cram course, and now a lot of kids in the neighborhood know how to say, ‘Where did he go?’ in Korean.”

It was, in a sense, a waste of time. Kyong has steadfastly refused to speak a word of Korean. He came to Bouton a few weeks ago and complained that all the kids were calling him Kyong.

“He said he wanted an American name,” Bouton said. “I asked what he thought about David. My wife and I had thought about that and we were hoping he would ask. He said that would be fine.”

David Bouton is a lucky kid.

Head on over to Grantland for a long appreciation of the Chipmunks by Bryan Curtis. Nice to see Shecter, Merchant, Isaacs, Vecsey and company celebrated.

The only problem I have with the piece is how Jimmy Cannon is portrayed. It’s not that Curtis is inaccurate in saying that Cannon was tired and bitter by the mid-’60s, or that he was the foil that the Chipmunks needed (too bad there is no mention of Dick Young). Curtis lampoons Cannon’s writing style but I wish it was balanced with a sense of how good Cannon was in his prime. Cannon is seen here as he’s most often remembered these days–an out-of-touch old timer who had become a parody of himself. That’s a shame because while Cannon was sentimental to a fault when he was bad, he was terrific, one of the very best, when he was good.

[Picture by Bags]

“Just a Guy at Oxford” (Bill Bradley)

“The Great Wall of Boston” (The Green Monster)

“Sam, You Make the Ball too Small” (Sam McDowell)

“The King of the Jungle” (Walter O’Malley)

George Vecsey, right, with his arm around the wonderful Ray Robinson

I recently exchanged e-mails with George Vecsey, the veteran columnist for the New York Times, who started his career at Newsday under Mann.

Here’s our chat. Enjoy:

Bronx Banter: When Jack Mann took over the Newsday sports department was he influenced by any sports editors that came before him? I’m thinking of someone like Stanley Woodward.

George Vecsey: I don’t know. He came up through the news department at Newsday, had some college, was well read, surely knew about sports editors, but was so much an outsider that I doubt he would consider himself an acolyte of anybody.

BB: How would you describe to young readers what the climate of the press box was like in 1960? And how did Mann and “his Chipmunks” differ from the older writers?

GV: Well, the dichotomy was not as clear as I guess we would like to have thought. It may have been a function of age. But Isaacs and Len Shecter of the Post and Larry Merchant of the Philly Daily News were not children, and were capable of thinking for themselves, with Jack only part of it. The Chipmunks were young and energetic and brash. The split was probably on the same generational lines of the Kennedy-Nixon election – new vs. old (politics excluded). Even in 1960, some of us (me at least) were anticipating the forces of the mid-60’s in style and music and attitude. But we all were pretty traditional, except in comparison to the older writers, who were often hooked into the free drinks of the press room and the party line of the clubs they covered, or so we thought. Sounds pretty simplistic, looking back.

BB: Who else writing for the New York papers in the early 60s were like-minded? I’m thinking specifically of Shecter at the Post. Who else was part of the new breed?

GV: Len Shecter, Isaacs, Merchant, of course. And Stan Hochman A lot of the younger guys were Chipmunks just because we chattered a lot, and hung out together. Looking back, it would be hard to put one label on me, Steve, Maury Allen, Vic Ziegel, Phil Pepe, Paul Zimmerman, Joe Donnelly, Joe Gergen. We (or at least I did) admired Dick Young, who was no Chipmunk, but I knew him through my dad when I was a little kid, and Dick was very gracious to me when I came along as a young writer. I was friendly with older guys like Harold Rosenthal (more acerbic than any of us) and Barney Kremenko (a kind man, a friend), and I learned a lot from Leonard Koppett, one of the great people of the business, and I adored Jimmy Cannon. I don’t know that Bob Lipsyte considered himself a Chipmunk, but he and I hung out a lot in those days, and his excellent early work as a sports columnist (in his first tour of duty, I emphasize) re-defined the genre. So it’s hard to define Chipmunk, at this late date. Every generation has its new look. When I came back to Sports in 1980, there was Jane Gross, Allen Abel, Michael Farber, Jane Leavy, Phil Hersh, all good pals of mine. New faces.

BB: And now, the climate is different from then.

GV: The one difference between then and now was that everybody talked in the press box. Talked about the game. Argued about politics. Bickered about where we were going to dinner. Nowadays, the kids are all hunched over their machines, with headsets on, tweeting and facebooking and blogging and goodness knows what else. Nobody talks in the press box. I miss arguments. I miss human contact. I think we had more fun than the Thumb Generation. But the output in the New York Times is really good, probably better than ever, which is what matters.

BB: What was Stan Isaacs like? He was older than you so-called Chipmunks. What kind of sensibility did he have?

GV: Stan is fully a decade older than me. He was very political, saw things through his own prism, his column “Out of Left Field” may have been the most apt title I have ever seen. Stan was/is an original, thought way out of the box, did stunts, and wrote about race and politics when most columnists were writing about “affable old managers” and the like. I learned so much from him, including not being shy about expressing a point of view, of being yourself. I was probably closer to Stan for a longer period – we are still often in touch. He was a great balance of giddiness and dead seriousness. He and his wife Bobbie have been role models for my adult life.

BB: What about Eddie Comerford?

GV: Eddie was a very smart and talented guy who was a mainstay of the earlier Newsday sports section, underachieving probably under the old management. Jack pretty much absconded with Eddie when the national side of Sports was created around 1959 or 1960. He brought out Eddie’s talent and courage. Eddie was an elegant writer and good copy editor. And I was not particularly nice to him. Not proud of it. When Jack got himself fired in 1962, they made Eddie sports editor, and I suggested we go on strike until they re-hired Jack. Needless to say, that did not happen. Eddie became a racing writer after he stopped being sports editor, and I used to see him at the track, and we were fine by then, inasmuch as I had grown up at least a little bit. What kind of editor – and writer – he was, you’d have to ask Jake and Stan. They worked with him longer.

BB: What kind of questions did Mann encourage you to ask the players and managers that weren’t generally asked?

GV: Jack’s point was, ask anything. It was a city side sensibility that did not transfer easily to the clubhouse, but he empowered us (me) by sending us off with orders to ask the right question. Why did such-and-such happen? I realized how much Jack had prepared me when I went from Sports to being an Appalachian correspondent and had to ask a guy what happened when his whole family was washed away by a flash flood in West Virginia. The man talked – because I asked the question directly, and respectfully, and it was important to know. Jack was my mentor on that stuff, in a sports setting. Once, presumably facetiously, Jack sent a guy out to cover the Knicks, a guy who normally did local sports, and knew everybody on Long Island but not New York City. Jack told him not to be afraid to ask the tough question, like when did you know you were horseshit? So our guy went into the locker room and asked Darrell Imhoff, a 6-11 bust of a white center in the age of Russell and Wilt and Embry, and the guy asked Imhoff, “When did you first know you were horseshit?” And the guy answered! As I recall, it was a longer version of, when he set foot in the NBA. But he didn’t kill our guy. We loved it, back in the office.

BB: Did he encourage you to write about race in sports or politics or even the business side of the games?

GV: Absolutely. We thought race and politics (Jackie Robinson, Robert Moses, Walter O’Malley) were major subjects, even after the Dodgers left and Robinson retired. Jack knew it was important to ask why there were not black managers and coaches, what players really thought about each other in the locker room, money and politics. I would say our reporting was probably rudimentary and kneejerk, but we were aware of stuff, and fearless.

BB: What were Mann’s best and worst qualities as an editor?

GV: He was very proud of being honest and independent. He looked at what he considered the crap in a lot of papers one could name and felt he could do better with a few good people. His worst quality was probably an instinct to proclaim his honesty and independence at the wrong times.

BB: Mann wasn’t at Newsday for long. Why was he fired?

GV: Summer of 1962 while I was on the road with the Mets, I heard he got fired. From what I understand, he challenged a managing editor – possibly about production issues rather than one freedom-of-the-press issue of what we could do or write. Couple of hard-heads. The publisher, the beloved Alicia Patterson, who was hands-on and savvy and liked Jack, happened to be away. As I understand it, Miss P felt she could not come back and countermand her managing editor. I suspect she was tempted. Her early death is the single biggest tragedy in the ongoing downfall of Newsday to something akin to a shopping circular under the Dolans.

BB: Even though he wasn’t there for a long time, was his influence felt even after he left?

GV: Hard to say. He certainly left people like me and Jacobson and Bob Sales and Bob Waters in place, and Dick Clemente, and a few others. We had learned a lot and been prodded and pushed. I probably imitated Jack for a long time, more than I should have. He had turned the Newsday sports section into a national force. We expected to go anywhere and do a big-time job, and we were arrogant about being better than the big-city staffs, and we were. That was Jack. He taught me a lot about standards, and asking questions, and being independent.

BB: Was Mann a funny guy?

GV: Yes, he loved telling stories of stuff that happened late at night with players and writers and other night people in dingy clubs and bars in Philly. And Pittsburgh etc. He loved baseball…talked the patois…the good arm, the bad hands, the red ass, etc. He loved telling stories about me. How I couldn’t hit a rubber ball with a stickball bat. How I lost my temper. How I tried to reform the office criminal. He claims to have heard me tell that guy, “You’re still a little prick, but that was a good story.” Or something like that. Jack thought it was hilarious over the years, and so did I. Most of the time he was pretty intense, to put it mildly.

BB: I know he bounced around a lot. Was he a good reporter and columnist?

GV: He did some great work at the Tribune, in Detroit, SI, I forget the sequence, but as I see it from a distance, ultimately he needed to go through a few more jobs before settling in DC. He was a bit unstable, if I am honest about it. He could be difficult. So I imagine he was a handful in the clubby world of SI back then. I wouldn’t know. He was essentially a newspaper guy, From me that is a compliment.

BB: Do you have a story that sums up the kind of guy Mann was?

GV: He didn’t let people get away with stuff. One Friday night, after a long night of high-school basketball, I was the last guy in the office, around 4 AM, just straightening up some records, etc. Jack came back from the Midway Bar and Grill in Garden City (closing time was flexible; Leo the Greek would lay out shots on the bar). Anyway, Jack came back with a colleague from news side, a very good athlete (we all played softball) who claimed to have batted against Whitey Ford in the Eastern League after WW II. Jack meticulously laid out the Spalding record guides for all those years and began thumbing through them. It was getting a little touchy in an office with a lot of spikes, scissors and gluepots lying around. Jack was not letting the guy off the hook. Finally, Jack said pointedly, “Maybe you played under an assumed name?” At that point, I did what I had to do. I told the guy to go home…and I made Jack sit there for another 10 minutes, and then I told him to go home. I was 21. He was my boss. That was Jack. Things were either right or they were wrong. We laughed about it for afterward. The Good Old Days. But they were. He was out of Dickens, more than any American writer. Or maybe he was Thomas Wolfe’s beloved older brother Ben, the sarcastic one in the beautiful final chapter of “Look Homeward Angel.” In the process, Jack saw something in me and promised to make something of me. So he is my boss for life, and he knew it. Whenever I saw him around the track, I hung out with him.

BB: You mentioned that you kept up with Mann in later years when you ran into each other at the race track. Do you know if he continued to follow your work? And did you ever lean on him for writing advice in those early days after he left Newsday?

GV: We kept it. I wouldn’t hear from him for a while…and then I’d get an envelope with that small, neat cursive script that evoked memories of the hand-crafted assignment chart at Newsday. Usually he would catch me in a grammatical or factual error, but more likely he would find me using the first person singular, which he abhorred. As a columnist, I had a hard time using it, but several editors told me that was the coming style – this was when sports columns were in vogue. Jack would circle the I and make a pungent comment in the margin. I thought I was better than the “fly on the wall” archness I associated with Red Smith and others. One time he found six or eight first person singulars in Andrew Beyers’ racing column. Circled them all, to prove his point. But he could detect some political or sporting mistake, and point it out to me. Editor for life.

You can buy Vecsey’s new book, “Stan Musial: An American Life,” here.

Jack Mann appreciation continues with three pieces by his colleagues. Please enjoy these memories of Mann from John Schulian, Tom Callahan and Dave McKenna.

Unvarnished Mann

By John Schulian

In the world according to Jack Mann, if a ballplayer dragged his private parts over the post-game spread while reaching for the mustard, a sports writer damn well better file it away for future use. Maybe he wouldn’t be able to re-create the scene for a family newspaper, but he could certainly offer some well-crafted hints. In fact Jack insisted on it when he was a visionary sports editor at Newsday because he would have done no less were he writing the story himself. He was, after all, a slave to the truth no matter how discomfiting.

Not everybody appreciated it. To this day, there are those who recoil at the sound of his name before recovering to rail profanely about his parentage, fondness for the grape, and well-worn mean streak. Jack was, in his time, the most complicated and divisive figure in sportswriting this side of Mark Kram and Dick Young. You either loved him or hated him, and if you loved him, there were still going to be times when you wondered why the hell he did some of the things he did.

Of course the legend occasionally got in the way of the facts. Jack may have thrown a tray of type out a window at the Washington Daily News, for instance, or it may have been his boss, Dave Burgin, who did the honors. God knows they were both capable of it in the days when they were making the sports section in that abysmal tabloid the liveliest reading in town. Or maybe the incident never happened at all.

What I can guarantee did happen was Jack’s constant and very public humiliation of Shirley Povich, the icon who anchored the Washington Post’s sports page for 70 years. Shirley was every bit as gracious and gentlemanly as Red Smith, and a fine writer, too, but by the early 1970s, his reportorial legs were gone and his column showed it. He covered more and more games by watching them on TV. Even the Redskins, who become more important than the White House during the NFL season, couldn’t get him off his couch. Jack smelled blood and went for the kill, parodying Shirley’s style (“The way it came across on Channel 9”) and sneeringly referring to the Post by its advertising slogan (“Over at ‘Quoted, Honored and Consulted’”).

It was not for nothing then that the Post never hired Jack full-time after the Daily News and his subsequent employer, the Washington Star, went belly up. To tell the truth, I was surprised he got so much as a freelance assignment at the Post, but when Casey Stengel died, there was that byline – Jack Mann – on the front of the next day’s sports page. I doubt the old Professor got a better sendoff. And there would be more pieces by Jack, not a lot of them but enough to keep his name alive. I still wonder how hard George Solomon, who was then settling into his job as the Post’s sports editor, had to fight for Jack. But they had worked together at the Daily News, and George understood just how good Jack was.

To read his prose was to get a sense of the man at the typewriter. It was blunt, no-nonsense, and it could, on certain occasions, feel like a punch in the mouth. And yet, while lyricism wasn’t his game, he wove enough literary allusions into his work to let readers in on the fact that he knew Hester Prynne wasn’t a baseball Annie from Boston.

Somehow, probably out of sheer orneriness, Jack was an even better reporter than he was a writer. He proved it forevermore when he hired on at the New York Herald Tribune and found himself on the horse racing beat. Looking back, you might say he was simply part of the Trib’s grand tradition of turf writers. Joe Palmer preceded him and Pete Axthelm followed him. One problem, though: Jack didn’t know one end of a horse from the other when he got the job. But he showed up early, stayed late, and asked the right questions. By the time I saw him in the barns at Churchill Downs, drinking a 7 a.m. beer with Spectacular Bid’s trainer, he knew as much as anybody and what he didn’t know he would bust a gut trying to find out.

That same dogged intelligence was what drove Jack to become, at Newsday, one of the architects of the sports-page revolution in the 1960s, hiring bright young men and savvy old codgers and telling them to turn the clichés upside down. You don’t do something that bold, however, without stepping on toes, and Jack brought his foot down hard almost willfully, maybe even perversely.

It happened everywhere he went – New York, Detroit, Miami, Washington, Baltimore – and it cost him job after job. He didn’t even last two years at Sports Illustrated, which was where I first read him. But he made me a fan for life with his crackling good profile of Bill Bradley at Oxford, and as a fan I felt an obligation to find about more about him. Impressionable lad that I was, I thought there was a certain romance to his prickliness and the way he bounced from one paper to another.

I was starting to move around a bit myself when I landed at the Washington Post in 1975. I put in my time on the Redskins and the NBA Bullets, made my mark with features, and then George Solomon dispatched me to write a column about the Touchdown Club’s annual Christmas bash. What I said about those smug, sloppy, powerful drunks was hardly in the spirit of the season. But Don Newcombe, the former Dodgers pitcher and a recovering alcoholic, wrote a letter to the editor praising my column, and Jack dropped me a note of congratulations tempered by his own experience. “I have seen the Shriners,” he said, “and they are the fucking worst.”

A few weeks later, after I had written him back to say thanks, I spied a visitor to the sports department, fiftyish, not real tall and a bit disheveled, with a wry smile and eyes that bored into you from beneath jutting brows. “Jack Mann?” I said. “I’m John Schulian.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “We write letters to each other.”

For reasons I never quite fathomed, we were friends, or at least friendly, ever after. We talked when our paths crossed, traded thoughts on writers and athletes, shared the occasional pre-game meal. I received only one invitation to go drinking with him and turned it down because I don’t believe in pro-ams that involve alcohol. The next day he showed up in the press box bruised and abraded. He said he’d gotten in a bar fight with some Marines who were less than half his age and most assuredly didn’t realize that they were putting dents in someone who had been a Marine himself in World War II. “You were a Marine, weren’t you?” he asked me. When I told him I wasn’t, I don’t think he ever looked at me the same way again. But he wouldn’t have been Jack Mann if he had.

John Schulian is the co-editor of “At the Fights.” His next collection of sports stories, “Sometimes They Even Shook Your Hand: Portraits of Champions Who Walked Among Us,” will be published this fall.

Mann in Charge

By Tom Callahan

Someday I’ll pass by the great gates of gold,
And a man will walk in, unquestioned and bold.
“A saint?” I’ll ask, and old Peter will reply:
“No, he carries a pass. He’s a newspaper guy.”

-a favorite jingle of Jack Mann, who was sentimental about absolutely nothing except newspapers

In fedora days, sportswriters wholeheartedly embraced only four games: baseball, college football, boxing and horse racing. Like most of the papers, like all of the writers, the last two are dying out now.

At dinner on the road, neither the beatmen nor the columnists said much about sports. They stuck to one topic of conversation: newspapers. It was the only thing any of them really cared about. Which starts to describe Jack Mann, who, even when he was serving magazines (even when he was serving drinks on Fire Island), was emphatically a newspaper guy.

As a matter of fact, he was a legend in the trade, probably the best writer better known as a talent scout and blue pencil editor since Stanley Woodward or at least George Kiseda.

For Newsday on Long Island, Mann gathered fresh reporters in several senses of the word fresh and showed every one of them how to squeeze a pound and a half of gee-willikers out of their stuff. A renowned headline writer, Jack regularly lent himself to the copy desk for marking special occasions such as when George/Christine Jorgensen “Returned From Abroad A Broad.”

Because Mann kept telling bosses to go fuck themselves, he was obliged to move around a lot. In 1979, Jack found himself in Washington for the afternoon Star covering the hell out of Baltimore trainer Bud Delp, minor-league jockey Ronnie Franklin and Triple Crown candidate Spectacular Bid. Mann literally rode in the van with the horse. He hated the word literally.

After winning the Kentucky Derby and Preakness in a walk, The Bid got an overwrought ride even for Franklin and finished third at Belmont Park. The alibi was that he had stepped on a safety pin in his stall. “Leave it to Delp,” Mann said, “to find the needle in the haystack.”

Secretariat’s sire was Bold Ruler, Spectacular Bid’s grandsire. So it made a kind of sense for The Bid to stand at Claiborne Farm in Kentucky. But did he have to stand right next to Secretariat? In abutting two-acre paddocks, they raced back and forth at the fence line. Though six years older, Secretariat never once let the gray colt win. Bid turned completely white except for a black mane and tail. He was gorgeous. But he was no world-beater at stud. Disappointment is hard on the heart.

His fee that had started at $150,000 per live foal dropped, and dropped again. He was moved to less and less exalted places on the property, eventually all the way to Unadilla, New York, where he died dispensing favors at $3,500 a throw.

“He wasn’t Affirmed,” Mann said, “let alone Secretariat. And I guess he could never look you in the eye around the breeding shed. But he was a hell of a sweet horse to me, the son of a bitch.”

Tom Callahan is the author of many books including “Johnny U: The Life and Times of Johnny Unites,” and “The Bases Were Loaded (And So Was I): Up Close and Personal With the Greatest Names in Sports.”

A Difficult Mann

By Dave McKenna

I used to write about horse racing as a freelancer at a very low level in the late 1990s, so I got to watch Jack at the Maryland tracks for his last several years of typing. Everywhere you look at the racetrack you see people you won’t see anywhere but the racetrack, but even in that glorious circus Jack stood out. He was mean as a motherfucker to me, but it never bothered me because he was mean as a motherfucker to everybody except young women. He would make a wisecrack every time he walked by me, and it always took several minutes for me to get what the hell he was insulting me for this time. Often it turned out that he’d read something I’d written and his wisecrack was destroying some lousy sentence or misused word that showed up under my byline. I don’t remember many specific walk-by barbs, but they were all along the lines of “What sort of fool would say ‘prior to’ instead of ‘before’?” then I’d remember that a week prior to him mumbling that I’d typed “prior to” in a story.

Jack surely didn’t like that I wasn’t as committed to words as he was. Hell, Webster’s took a backseat to him, maybe that’s why he was so pissed at the world. but, over time, watching how much he cared about his work, and how hard he worked,you had to love the guy. and even if you didn’t know his back story, you knew there wasn’t anybody like him. In small doses, he was totally unbearable. But you can’t ask more of a grown man than consistency, and pretty quick you could tell how straight he was. He took motherfuckerhood to a genius level; kinda like Van Morrison on stage, if you’ve ever had the painful pleasure of seeing him live.

I still think about him all the time, and I’m sure I’m not alone.

Damn, I just had a flashback of that look of disgust he always gave me. What a lucky bastard I was to be around that guy for all those years of Saturdays.

Dave McKenna writes for Washington City Paper and is getting sued by Dan Snyder for a million dollars.

Over at the National Sports Journalism Center, Dave Kindred has a wonderful piece on Mann:

Mann made his reputation through the tumult of the 1960s. First as Newsday’s sports editor, then writing for Sports Illustrated, he encouraged and reveled in reporting that disturbed the peace. “Chipmunks,” he wrote, appropriating the term of disdain coined by co-opted hacks, “are the New Breed … their outstanding characteristics being irreverence and curiosity.”

He made words dance. He once assigned reporters to interview track fans who carried their own stopwatches so he could write the headline: “These Are the Souls Who Time Men’s Tries.” By the end, his resume came with stops in New York, Long Island, Miami, Washington, Baltimore, and Annapolis, perhaps because in his fierce integrity he suffered fools not at all. “Most chicken newspapers,” he once wrote, “which is most newspapers….”

When he was at Newsday (1960-62) Mann sent a style sheet to his staff. It was known as “the yellow pages” because he typed his memos on legal pad paper. I recently came across a copy and so in the interest of honoring history and the elements of style, I now share it with you:

[Photo Credit: Shaefer]

“They blame me,” Yawkey says, ‘and I’m not even a Southerner. I’m from Detroit.” Yawkey remains on his South Carolina fief until May because Boston weather before then is too much for his sensitive sinuses. “I have no feeling against colored people,” he says. “I employ a lot of them in the South. But they are clannish, and when that story got around that we didn’t want Negroes they all decided to sign with some other club. Actually, we scouted them right along, but we didn’t want one because he was a Negro. We wanted a ballplayer.”

Stout continues:

But then comes the first of two smoking guns: “But they are clannish,” Mann quotes Yawkey as saying of African Americans, “and when that story got around that we didn’t want Negroes they all decided to sign with some other club.”

No single sentence could be more revealing – or more pathetic. First Yawkey offers that all African Americans share the same characteristics – in this case, being “clannish.” That kind of stereotyping is damning enough, but when he states that “when that story got around that we didn’t want Negroes they all decided to sign with some other club,” he fantasy land. Yawkey is making the claim that the reason the Red Sox remained white is the fault of the black ballplayers themselves. He is saying nothing less than “African Americans erroneously thought we were racist so therefore they refused to sign with us.”