I remember Shirley Povich, legendary WaPo sports columnist, coming into the office in his 90s when I was an intern. He'd be wearing the outfit described here: fedora, tweed jacket, rep tie. He was small but had an iron grip, grasping my shoulder and tell stories of Babe Ruth. 1/
One story that stuck with me was not about the athletes but about his fellow sportswriters. In Shirley's telling, they were covering an important college football game in maybe the 1950s when reporters still wrote on typewriters in open-air press boxes. 2/
As the game was winding down and they were busy on their stories, one of the writers was really struggling with his prose and growing more anguished as deadline approached. Finally, someone urged him to just finish up and send what he had into the newspaper. 3/
In a fit of pique, the guy ripped the piece of paper from the machine and, turning to hand it to the teletype operator to transmit the copy lost his grip just as a gust of wind blew thru the press box. 4/
The paper fluttered high in the air, so high it began sailing out of the stadium, Shirley said, and the writer became distraught. His work was gone and he'd miss deadline. Just then, the wind changed directions and the paper began to sail back the opposite direction. 5/
As luck would have it, the guy's story floated down just to where he was sitting and he reached out and grabbed it. A look of relief flashed across the writer's face, Shirley said, that is until someone yelled out: "Your lede was so bad, even God rejected it." 6/
In any case, Shirley was a terrific guy, a legendary writer, a mentor to younger journalists and he had a great sense of humor. Here's a Sports Illustrated profile of him by @saulwizz from the 1990s, which mentions me solely because I sat next to him 7/end si.com/vault/1995/09/…
