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The Joys of Being a Sportswriter By Vic Ziegel |
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The
iconoclastic, combative, earthy and outrageously funny veteran sportswriter,
Vic Ziegel. |
The late Leonard Shekter,
Ziegel’s great idol and friend. |
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By Vic Ziegel The There were about a half-dozen of us living in
this fast lane. One night, much like all the other nights, the scores
starting running together. And to keep awake, and because I’m a cunning,
vicious SOB, I urged my fellow eight-buckers to repeat the same phrase in the
lead of our basketball roundups. The next day, on the high school page of the
Seven times, yeoman work under the boards. And I
was back the next night, accepting congratulations, another eight bucks heading
my way. What did I learn? That you can get away with a few things in this
world. That nobody cares what kind of work you do if you work cheap. That if
I ever fell off a roof and landed on my head I could still edit stories about
high school sports for the Very seductive, the sound of laughter. And so I
discovered, in my yeoman period, that if I wanted to continue hearing the
pleasing sound of laughter, I could keep writing sports. At least until I
discovered what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. Nothing seems to
have changed. I can still be found in
the sports section, still trying to earn a smile. Makes me think, nights in Tom Rogers, a Times sportswriter, figured me out
a long time ago. Vic doesn’t write about sports, he told a mutual friend, he
writes about sportswriting. Guilty, with the usual explanation. Sports is
thrilling, fascinating, exhilarating, and happens out of town often enough to
accomplish wonderful things with an expense account. Like the night in
Philadelphia, when the sorry Mets of the mid-60’s, scored 20 runs against the
Phils, and manager Wes Westrum explained by saying his players had their
hitting shoes on. So I toured the Mets clubhouse asking the players to tell
me about their shoes. Cleon Jones said he found his in an alley. Gene Mauch, a longtime manager, once said, “I
liked it a lot better when writers didn’t think they had to be funny.” Well,
he never won a pennant and I’ll never win a Pulitzer, but it’s a great line.
One of the great things about sportswriting was that you didn’t have to
include the victim’s home address and get a quote about what a good person he
was before climbing that tower and picking off eleven people. Sportswriting,
back then, the second Lincoln administration, was about getting the score and
explaining the why of it. Them days is over. Now we have to worry about
drugs, money, more drugs, more money, arrests, the increasing number of
players who refuse to share their most intimate thoughts with us, college
boys who don’t know how to spell college, the salary cap (and other man-made
disasters), athletes endorsing sneakers ghetto kids are being killed for,
and, to pick three names out of a Yankee cap, Alex Rodriguez, Joe Torre and
Derek Jeter. If they asked me I could write a book. Most of my columns are written in press boxes,
with the stranger in the next chair typing a lot quicker. When sportswriters
describe other sportswriters, good is high praise, and quick is the ultimate.
(Quick and good, sounds almost lewd. Me? I never got it for free and I never
will.) The deadline is the enemy. It’s there, at the
same time, every night. You relax your fingers and it comes closer. You can’t
fake it out because it doesn’t move. It grows closer and towers over you. It
doesn’t understand that you’re trying to do the yeoman thing. Or that you
need a better word than fast to describe a baserunner. Very fast is very bad.
Fleet is a bank. Swift, nimble, speedy, no, no, no. Fast is starting to look
better. There’s coffee spilled on my notes. And the stranger in the next
chair is on the phone telling somebody named Sweetie he’s on the way home. He
offers a cheery good night and I respond, “yeah, grizzledip.” The rare times I write at the Daily News, and the
ax of a deadline is hours away from dropping, when you might think I have
words enough and time, it suddenly becomes a game of playing chicken with the
ax. So I schmooze with the other guys, go downstairs for another cup of
cardboard coffee, call home, anybody’s home, until it’s finally the dreaded
moment. The sports editor is standing over me asking “Where is it?” This is
what you answer, kids. You say five minutes. Not to worry. If you miss once,
nothing much happens. If you miss too many times, they make you sports
editor. When I covered baseball for the He covered the Yankees when they won the pennant
twice a year. When their clubhouse was colder than Lenny did a lousy thing to those nights at the
Lion’s Head. He died. To this day, when I write a line I like, I tell my
friend, “I did good, Lenny.” History note: All through high school, my folks
lived two subway stops from Yankee Stadium. But since I hated the Yankees as
only a nine-year-old can, it was like growing up near Castle Dracula. And
then they moved two blocks away, grizzledip. I rooted for the My dad didn’t get it about sports. He was born in
Mom did a little better. One time, when I came
home from stickball, just in time for the announcement that we were having
meat loaf, wash your hands (we had meatloaf more days in a row than DiMaggio
had hits), I told my mother I would appreciate her asking me two vital
questions: Did you win? How many hits did you get? She stayed with the
program for about a week. She missed one day but it wasn’t a slump. You come
out of a slump. Maybe if I had said something nice about the meat loaf… It astounded my father – a man who rode with the
Cossacks; the friendlier Cossacks – that a son of his earned a living writing
24-21, 4-3, $12.60 to win. The truth? It still astounds his son. |
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