The Roger Kahn Reader by Roger Kahn

Author:Roger Kahn [Kahn, Roger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SPO012000 Sports & Recreation / Essays, LAN008000 Language Arts & Disciplines / Journalism
ISBN: 978-1-4962-0716-6
Publisher: UNP - Nebraska
Published: 2018-04-04T16:00:00+00:00

Part 4

Getting Closer

26

Writing Sports

Esquire, August 1970

A look at the craft as the press gives way to the media.

During the mauve years of Richard Nixon’s vice presidency, I served the hierarchy of a major magazine as sports editor. This was preferable to evisceration, although the distinction was not always clear.

My immediate superior had written sports in Bridgeport. There he learned to mistrust dialogue. “It makes for short sentences,” he complained, “and wastes space.” His superior had published a sports magazine that failed. He knew a number of anecdotes that he habitually excised as stale, and did not know a number of others that he excised as obscure. The executive editor was big, square, Yale, and doggedly elitist. Finally, the editor himself indulged certain prejudices.

“Writing about niggers again, Kahn?” he said once.

“Look,” I said. “It’s my sports section.”

“Yes,” the editor said, “and it’s my magazine.”

As with cigarettes, the deleterious effects proceeded subtly, but when I left the magazine after four years, I found myself in agreement with an old New York Times sportswriter who liked to say, “Very little matters, and nothing matters much.”

I contracted to rewrite a doctor’s diet book; the chore consumed three weeks and produced a bestseller. For no reason beyond vague curiosity about Hollywood, I ghosted Mickey Rooney’s autobiography. We reaped large sums from editors who burned to know how the first Mrs. Rooney, Ava Gardner, behaved in bed.

Through these affluent, obscene, dissolute days, sports shone, a beacon to my conscience, and when Ingemar Johannson, the Goteborg Juggernaut, agreed to face Floyd Patterson for the third time, I got word to Stanley Woodward of the Herald Tribune that I would like to cover the fight and could work cheap. Woodward, an earth force disguised as a sports editor, said, “If you file a thousand words of notes and cover a dressing room, I’ll pay you ten dollars.”

In Miami Beach before the fight, Max Schmeling strolled Collins Avenue to modest applause. Since Schmeling had represented Adolf Hitler as a paratrooper, the scene was troubling. “Of course Schmeling was not a Nazi,” I explained. “As I get the picture, there were never more than six or seven Nazis in Germany. But they worked very hard.” Then the sour memory of the mangling magazine editors charged to mind. Lufthansa, Volkswagen, and the Argentine Tourist Bureau were advertisers. I placed the comment near the end of the notes.

After printing the entire story, Woodward sent a message saying that he had liked the stuff enough to pay five times the agreed-upon price. With his $50 came an invitation for another drink.

I strutted into the Artist and Writers Restaurant. “Hello, Coach. Glad you liked the piece.”

“Why did you bury the lead note?” Woodward growled.

“The Schmeling thing? I thought if you saw it you might kill it.”

“You are a stupid son of a bitch,” Woodward said, turning and showing a back that was broad as Asia. He would not speak to me for twenty minutes, and I had to pay for my own Scotch. It struck me then that I had been found out, and through sports.

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