Blackie Sherrod

William Forrest Sherrod was born on November 9, 1919, in Belton, Texas, the son of a barber and a music teacher. A football coach noticed his deep tan and called him Blackie; the name outlasted the coach, the tan and eventually the century. He spent a year at Baylor, transferred to Howard Payne University and took an English degree there in May 1941, a few months before the war reached the United States.

He spent that war in the South Pacific as a tail gunner on a Navy torpedo plane, a job that teaches a man to hold still and wait for his moment. When he came home he wrote for the Temple Telegram and then, in 1946, joined the Fort Worth Press, where his first assignments were radio newscasts and police news rather than anything with a scoreboard.

By the early 1950s Sherrod was sports editor of the Press, a paper that never had the circulation of its Fort Worth rival and made up for it with a staff. He hired Dan Jenkins at fifteen dollars a week and helped recruit Bud Shrake. Both went on to Sports Illustrated and to novels, and both spent the rest of their lives explaining that they had learned the trade from him. Jenkins, asked about him decades later, settled on two words: our hero.

In 1958 Felix McKnight hired him for the Dallas Times Herald, and the column moved east along the turnpike. McKnight later called him the best newspaperman he had ever known, which from an editor who had run several newsrooms is not a throwaway line.

The signature was a Sunday column called “Scattershooting,” which opened by wondering whatever happened to some forgotten name and then ran through a dozen short items of news, opinion and jokes. Dallas readers learned to read it first. The voice was dry and unhurried, closer to Ring Lardner than to the shouting columnists of the coasts, and it did not need many adjectives. It was Texas vernacular set down by a man with an English degree, and the combination was the whole trick.

The daily column was built the same way, only longer. He wrote about the Cowboys and the Southwest Conference and the Texas Rangers, but he also wrote about golfers, boxers, jockeys and the occasional politician, and the subject mattered less than the angle. A Sherrod column tended to open somewhere unexpected, a cafe or a hotel lobby or a memory from Belton, and arrive at the game only when it was ready to. Editors in other cities compared him to Damon Runyon and Ring Lardner; readers in Dallas simply assumed that was how a sports column was supposed to sound, because it was the only one they had grown up on.

The Times Herald did not confine him to the sports section. He covered the 1960 Democratic National Convention, the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas in 1963 and the Apollo 11 landing in 1969, for which the Texas Headliners Club gave him an award for science writing. A sportswriter winning a science-writing prize for the moon shot tells you what his editors thought he could do.

There was a short broadcasting career too. From 1967 to 1969 he worked Dallas Cowboys radio on KLIF as color analyst beside Bill Mercer, until a December afternoon at Pitt Stadium when ice hit his hat near the press-box elevator and he decided he had done enough of that. Verne Lundquist took the chair.

Retirement is like a steam bath. Once you get used to it, it's not so hot.

Texas sportswriters voted him the state's Sportswriter of the Year sixteen times, a record that still stands. The Associated Press Sports Editors gave him the Red Smith Award in 1985, the same year The Dallas Morning News hired him away from the Times Herald. He wrote the column there for another eighteen years and retired in 2003, having filed copy in every decade from the 1940s to the 2000s.

The award was in its fifth year in 1985, and Sherrod was its first recipient from Texas. He had never worked for a New York paper or a national magazine; the whole career was Temple, Fort Worth and Dallas. The choice was a signal from the sports editors that the standard Smith had set was being met in places the national press rarely looked, by a writer who had stayed home on purpose. Sherrod, characteristically, did not make much of it in print.

He died on April 28, 2016, at his home in Dallas, at ninety-six, after a week in hospice care. The obituaries were written by people he had trained, or by people trained by people he had trained, which is as good a summary of the award as any citation.