By Bob Markus

Whenever I make a new acquaintance I wait until asked what I did in my previous life. I used to respond: "I was a journalist," but that sounds a little pretentious and there are those who wonder whether a sports writer is a real journalist. Many who think that way are "real" journalists who disparage sports writers as members of the toy department. In truth, however, the best writers on most newspapers can be found right there amid the Tinker Toys and electric trains. Was there a better writer on the Los Angeles Times than the late Jim Murray? Red Smith could outwrite any "real" journalist at the New York Times with one hand tied behind his typewriter. As for the Chicago Tribune, where I worked for more than 36 years, I leave that judgment to others. But in my heart I knew I could write with anyone else on the paper.



So, in later years when asked the inevitable question I would answer, "I was a sports writer," an answer which, in addition to being less pretentious, was a good deal more specific. The usual followup question was, "what sport did you cover?" The answer I usually gave was: "All of them." While that was, strictly speaking, not true--I never covered badminton or shuffleboard, although I did once write a column about a shuffleboard game--I doubt if any other writer ever covered more fulltime beats than I did for The Tribune. Oddly enough, my first fulltime assignment was as a columnist. That was almost unheard of at the time, the usual progression being from beat writer, most often the baseball beat writer, to columnist. I didn't expect it at the time, but I was destined to reverse the process. When you start out on top the only direction to go is down. I didn't start out as a sports columnist, of course. I had been on The Tribune for seven years before that happened. Like everyone else, at that time, I started out in Neighborhood News, which produced weekly zoned sections and served as the paper's training ground. I was there, reading copy, for about six months when an opening came up on the sports desk. Although I was last in seniority on the copy desk, the other copy readers were all "real" journalists and wanted no part of the toy department. For me it was the dream job. When I took it, I was told by sports editor Wilfrid Smith that I would be, as Alabama Governor George Wallace might have put it, "a copy reader today, a copy reader tomorrow, a copy reader forever." That turned out to be about as prophetic as Wallace's "segregation today, segregation tomorrow, etc."



Although the paper had a large stable of sports writers, at least enough to cover every major beat and some not so major, from time to time there would come an event that needed coverage and no staff writer was available. Then one of the rim men on the copy desk would be given the assignment. For instance, there was at the time no pro basketball team in Chicago, the Stags having folded and the American Gears, led by George Mikan, moved to Minnesota as the Lakers. Then, all of a sudden, there were two pro teams in Chicago and nobody to cover them. George Strickler, the assistant sports editor at the time and eventual successor to Smith, solved the problem by doling out home games to the copy desk slaves. Strickler, a pro football man (and the Notre Dame publicist who came up with the idea of taking a picture of the Four Horsemen mounted on horseback), hated basketball with a passion. His usual method of assigning someone to a pro basketball game would be to say: "Markus, go out to The Amphitheater and cover the short-pantsed bastards." You'd be given six or at the most seven paragraphs to tell the story.



There was a good deal of competition and even animosity among the desk men, most of whom wanted to be writers. I was gradually given more assignments, occasionally filling in for the baseball beat men and, since The Tribune covered every Big Ten team in football, I worked my way into the rotation to the point where, by my fifth year at the paper, I covered a game every Saturday. My biggest break came in the week before the 1966 Notre Dame-Michigan State "Game of the Century," the one that ended in a 10-10 tie. I was not expecting to be a part of the coverage and was sitting on the rim of the copy desk on Monday or Tuesday when Strickler came out of his office and told me: "Dave Condon's supposed to be at Michigan State, but we can't find him. Go home and pack a bag and get to East Lansing." Condon, the sports department's lone columnist, had attended a Muhammad Ali fight in Houston and hadn't been heard from since.



The only thing I can remember about that week was that Spartan Coach Duffy Daugherty, at one of his daily press conferences, sang a ditty called:"My Sister's a Mule in the Mines." My game day assignment was the Michigan State locker room, but the story was in the Notre Dame locker room where Ara Parseghian attempted to explain why he'd run out the final minute and accepted the 10-10 tie. I did not write a memorable story out of the Spartans' locker room and, in fact, I was disappointed in myself. But on Monday afternoon Strickler called me into his office and informed me that The Tribune was breaking its long standing trdition of having a lone sports columnist and that I was going to write the second column. So now you know how I got the column and maybe in a future blog I'll tell you how I lost it. Meanwhile, getting back to the main topic, my subsequent assignments included: Beat writer for the Cubs and White Sox. Backup writer for the Bears. Beat writer for DePaul basketball in Ray Meyer's last year and Joey Meyer's first. Beat writer for Notre Dame basketball. Ditto for Northwestern. Beat writer for Illinois football and basketball. National college sports--football and basketball--writer. And, finally, Black Hawks beat writer. During the entirety of my stay, except when another beat precluded it, I was the auto racing writer and also covered my share of big fights, including Ali-Frazier I and Sugar Ray Leonard vs. Roberto Duran in Montreal. About eight months after being told I was no longer a columnist, I was assigned to the Ali-Leon Spinks rematch in New Orleans. David Israel, the guy who took my place as columnist, also was assigned to the fight and on our first night in New Orleans we had dinner together and ended up at one of the Bourbon Street joints, drinking Sazeracs. It was somewhere between drinks No. 3 and 4, that Israel, who was, I believe, 26 years old at the time, confided that he didn't intend to stay long at The Tribune. "I may go to law school," he said. I could have used a good lawyer about then because I could barely restrain the urge to strangle him.

-30-

Note to readers: No blog next week in honor of daughter Trish's visit. See you in two weeks.