The first thing one learns from reading “All Those Mornings … At the Post,” a compendium of 75 years worth of Shirley Povich’s sports columns is, not unlike Sue (the protagonist of the old Johnny Cash ditty), Shirley was a boy.
But for those who always imagined the venerable Washington Post writer as some sort of dashing female reporter of the “His Girl Friday” mold, take heart. He was listed in the 1959 edition of “Who’s Who of American Women,” which duly noted his marriage to Ethel and three children, David, Linda and Maury (yes, that Maury).
Whether you grew old reading Povich’s work or know of him only as the father of Connie Chung’s husband, “All Those Mornings” is golden; it’s either a highlight reel of your old faves or an introduction to one of the most amazing journalists America will ever see.
To start with, Povich had one of those old-school journalistic careers that will never, ever, ever, ever be recreated. Born into a large, Orthodox family in Bar Harbor, Maine, he had the good luck of caddying for the Washington Post’s flamboyant owner, Edward B. McLean. McLean took a liking to the bright young caddy, shipped him to Washington at age 18 and gave him a job. By the time he was of legal drinking age he was sports editor, and began knocking out his daily “This Morning” column.
Thus began a tour of the 20th century’s greatest sporting events. You name it, Povich was there: the Dempsey-Tunney “Long Count,” War Admiral versus Sea Biscuit, Joe DiMaggio’s streak, Bobby Thompson’s “Shot Heard ‘Round the World,” Don Larsen’s perfect game over Brooklyn and Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa’s pursuit of Roger Maris. Oh, he was also there for Maris and Mantle’s pursuit of the Babe. Oh, he was also there for the Babe. And his “called shot,” which Povich says never really happened. And on and on and on.
While some of Povich’s early work still reeks of the hokey and hackneyed journalistic style that was en vogue in the era when a man could be jailed for venturing out of doors without a fedora, by the time he was in his late 20s, he had blossomed into a sportswriter who regularly penned beautiful, compelling, honest and hard-hitting columns, a marked departure from Hunter S. Thompson’s all-too-honest summation of sports journalists as “a rude and brainless subculture of fascist drunks whose only real function is to publicize and sell whatever the sports editor sends them to cover.”
Art Rosenbaum, the longtime San Francisco Chronicle sports columnist and editor, who rose from a similarly humble Jewish origin as Povich, once compared his long-running daily column — and not pejoratively, mind you — to a satisfying bowel movement.
The parallels between Povich’s regular output of a column of almost exactly the same length six or seven days a week for most of the 20th century and you know what is impossible to sidestep. But, even 50 or 60 years after the fact, Povich’s copy is so relevant, so readable and better than nearly anything anybody is writing today (even when he was 93 and still writing only hours before his death in 1998).
“The million-to-one shot came in. Hell froze over. A month of Sundays hit the calendar. Don Larsen today pitched a no-hit, no-run, no-man-reach-first game in a World Series,” he wrote in 1956.
“I saw strong men weep this afternoon, expressionless umpires swallow hard and emotion pump in the hearts and glaze the eyes of 61,000 baseball fans in Yankee Stadium. Yes, and hard-boiled news photographers clicked their shutters with fingers that trembled a bit,” he wrote of Lou Gehrig’s farewell in 1939.
Povich was also a thinker as well as a writer, and he was years ahead of his time in decrying racism in sports. He was also right on the money in his criticism of Olympic honcho Avery Brundage’s kow-towing to Hitler by benching American Jewish athletes, and later paying short shrift to the 11 Israelis killed in the 1972 terrorist attack.
As one reads Povich’s eight decades of mastery, it’s easy to imagine the author crouched over his manual Remington in a dimly lit press box, pounding out a deadline story with his fedora perched at a jaunty angle on his gelled hair and an ever-present cigarette dangling from his lips (Povich actually smoked himself unconscious during a tight game at Yankee Stadium in 1966, and subsequently kicked the habit).
If there’s any complaint to be made about “All Those Mornings” it’s that there isn’t enough Povich in it. Longtime Post sports editor Normon Solomon and daughter Lynn Povich selected 120 columns of his more than 17,000 and wrote oft-lengthy intros to many, and these really can drag. If they cut the intros’ length in half, perhaps 20 or 30 more columns would fit in here.
“All Those Mornings … At the Post” by Shirley Povich (464 pages, PublicAffairs, $27.50).