Jim Murray

The Associated Press Sports Editors had a problem in 1982. They had named their new award for Red Smith, given it to Red Smith, and then Red Smith had died in January. Whoever came next would be compared with him directly, in the same breath, on the same plaque. The editors chose James Patrick Murray of the Los Angeles Times, and the comparison held up better than most.

Murray was sixty-two, in his third decade of column writing, and already the most widely quoted sportswriter in the western half of the country. His selection also settled a quiet question about the award: it would go where the best work was, not where the oldest papers were.

He was born in Hartford in 1919 and graduated from Trinity College there in 1943. The early jobs were ordinary ones on the New Haven Register and the Hartford Times, and then, in 1944, a reporting post at the Los Angeles Examiner. Los Angeles was still a Hearst town and Murray covered it as a general-assignment man, crime and celebrity included, which explains a good deal about the later columns. He learned to write about athletes as if they were people who might do something surprising.

Time magazine hired him in 1948. When Henry Luce's company started Sports Illustrated in 1954, Murray was on the founding staff, and he wrote for the magazine until 1961. That year the Los Angeles Times, then remaking itself into a serious newspaper, offered him a column. He kept it until the week he died.

Murray's method was the joke that turned out to be an argument. He would open with a line that read like a nightclub comic's and then, three paragraphs later, the reader would notice it had been the thesis all along. Cities got the treatment as often as athletes. Rival towns learned to dread his arrival for a big event, because whatever he wrote about them would be repeated at every bar in the place for a decade.

Gentlemen, start your coffins.

That was his verdict on the Indianapolis 500 in a period when the race was killing drivers with some regularity. It is funny, and it is also a plain statement of fact wearing a costume, which is the Murray trick in five words. The National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association named him Sportswriter of the Year fourteen times, twelve of them in a row. No one else has come close, and the association put him in its Hall of Fame in 1978 while he was still very much at work.

He worked the big events the way a beat writer works a clubhouse: the Kentucky Derby, the Masters, the Super Bowl, the Olympics, Indianapolis every May. A Murray column from a major event usually had two subjects, the event and the place it was held, and the second was often the better one. He was a general-assignment reporter in a columnist's chair, and the old Examiner habit of finding the story in the crowd rather than the box score never left him.

The humor had an edge, and he knew it. Readers who wanted their sports page to be a cheerful place sometimes found him too caustic. He did not appear to mind. The columns that survive best are the ones where the wit is at the service of something he actually cared about, which was usually a person rather than a score.

The Baseball Writers' Association gave him the J. G. Taylor Spink Award in 1987. Then in 1990, for the columns of 1989, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. Red Smith had won the same prize in 1976, so the A.P.S.E. list now had two Pulitzer commentators at the top of it, a circle the editors had drawn eight years earlier without knowing how neatly it would close.

The 1990 prize also settled an old argument inside the trade. For decades the Pulitzer board had treated sportswriting as a lesser craft, and a sports column had to be exceptional twice over to be considered. Smith in 1976 and Murray in 1990, both men who had spent entire careers on the sports page, made the case that the section could produce prose as good as any in the paper. Murray was seventy when the prize came, which tells you something about how long the case took to make.

Murray died in Los Angeles on August 16, 1998, at seventy-eight, still filing. The Jim Murray Memorial Foundation was set up the following year and funds journalism scholarships through an annual essay competition; thirty-one universities take part and each winner receives five thousand dollars. It is a fitting memorial for a writer who spent his career persuading young people that the sports section was a respectable place to learn the trade.