Shirley Povich

Shirley Lewis Povich was born in 1905 in the Bar Harbor area of Maine, the son of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants who ran a furniture shop. The name was a family one and it followed him all his life; he was listed more than once in Who's Who of American Women, and he took the joke better than the compilers did. As a boy he caddied at the Kebo Valley golf club, where one of the summer members was Edward B. McLean, publisher of The Washington Post.

McLean liked the caddie enough to bring him to Washington in 1923. Povich enrolled at Georgetown, went to work at the Post as a reporter in his second year, and never left. By 1925 he was sports editor, at twenty. By 1933 he had the column that would run, with interruptions for a war, for the next sixty-five years.

The column was called "This Morning with Shirley Povich," and for most of its life it was a daily fixture. He covered the Senators when Washington had them, and covered the empty seasons after they left twice. He was in the press box for Don Larsen's perfect game in the 1956 World Series and wrote the lead that other writers still quote when they teach the form: the million-to-one shot came in, and the hell-froze-over moment had arrived.

He took leave in 1944 to serve as a war correspondent in the Pacific, filing from Okinawa and Iwo Jima, and then came back to the games. He was president of the Baseball Writers' Association of America in 1955. His readers included people who did not much care for sport; Richard Nixon, then vice president, told Post publisher Philip Graham that Povich was the only reason he read the paper.

Povich did not confine himself to box scores. He wrote about race in a city that was slow to move on it, and he was one of the loudest print voices against the Redskins' refusal to integrate under George Preston Marshall. The Washington football team, he wrote in one much-repeated line, had colors of burgundy, gold and Caucasian. He kept at it until the roster changed in 1962.

The Redskins' colors are burgundy, gold and Caucasian.

He also had the columnist's essential gift of being readable when nothing much had happened. A Povich column on a rainout or a dull heavyweight was worth the space. The Grantland Rice Award came in 1964, the Spink Award from the baseball writers in 1975, and the A.P.S.E. added the Red Smith Award in 1983, two years after the honor was created. He went into the National Sportswriters and Sportscasters Hall of Fame the year after that.

He formally retired in 1973 and then, by the Post's own count, filed more than five hundred further pieces. He kept covering the World Series. He wrote about Cal Ripken passing Lou Gehrig and about Mark McGwire's home runs, subjects that belonged to writers a third his age.

Povich died of a heart attack in Washington on June 4, 1998, at ninety-two. His last column, on the Yankees and the question of whether that season's team was the best ever, appeared in the Post the next morning. His children include the television host Maury Povich and the journalist Lynn Povich, and the family's name is on the Shirley Povich Center for Sports Journalism at the University of Maryland.