Will Grimsley

Most of the names on this list belong to columnists at a single big-city paper. Will Grimsley belonged to everybody. As an Associated Press sportswriter from 1943 and, from 1969, the wire service's only special correspondent in sports, his stories ran in whatever paper you happened to pick up, which for much of the country was the only way the Olympics or the Masters arrived at all.

Fifteen Olympics, thirty-five World Series, twenty-five Kentucky Derbies.

That tally, from the AP's own obituary, leaves out the Masters, Wimbledon, the Super Bowl and the Indianapolis 500, all of which he covered as a matter of routine. He was hired at the AP's Memphis bureau in 1943, moved to New York in 1947, and stayed until he retired in 1984. A five-day-a-week column, Grimsley's Sports World, began in 1977 and gave the wire something it had rarely had: a signed opinion.

He was born on January 27, 1914, in Monterey, Tennessee, the son of a railroad engineer. At eighteen he joined the sports staff of the Evening Tennessean in Nashville, and by 1935, at twenty-one, he was its sports editor and columnist. That is a fast climb even by the standards of a Depression-era newsroom, and it was the last time he worked for a paper rather than for all of them at once.

The assignments that outlasted the games were the ones the wire sent him to because he was there. He covered Muhammad Ali through the refusal of military induction in 1967, was in Munich for the 1972 Olympic hostage crisis, and in 1964 was pulled off sports entirely to report on the murders of three civil rights workers in Mississippi. Golf and tennis were his specialties, and he wrote the reference histories of both.

Grimsley was named National Sportswriter of the Year four times, in 1978, 1980, 1981 and 1983, and served as president of the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association in 1985 and 1986. In 1987 two things happened at once: the NSSA put him in its Hall of Fame, and the Associated Press Sports Editors gave him the Red Smith Award, the seventh recipient and the first from a wire service.

He died of heart failure on October 31, 2002, in East Meadow, New York, at eighty-eight. For a writer this widely read, the public record is oddly slight. There is no Wikipedia article; what survives online is the AP's own obituary and a short reference entry. This page is built from those and claims nothing beyond them.