Some hither, others yon: He wrote like a dream

Rock and roll heaven, as the Righteous Brothers called it, is bursting at the seams. David Bowie, Glenn Frey and Prince have checked in this year, and how does one leave out Merle Haggard?

Sportswriters like myself, although he preferred to call us ink-stained wretches, were saddened to learn of the death Thursday, at age 96, of a patron saint.

Blackie Sherrod, who worked on both sides of the great Dallas newspaper war, surviving with the Morning News after the demise of the Times Herald, might not have been a star in, say, New York or Chicago. But for Texas readers, he went over like biscuits with cream-eyed gravy and country ham.

Although not one to use his column as a bully pulpit, one could not read Blackie without knowing just what he felt about Jerry Jones or Tom Landry or Nolan Ryan or, when he crossed over to the news side, the current occupant of the White House. If only he were around now to give Johnny Manziel a going-over when the problem child needs one.

I caught Blackie nearer the end of his career than the beginning, subscribing first to the Times Herald a few years after taking this job and then to the Morning News. I remember bus panels advertising "Bayless and Blackie" in the Morning News back when Razorback fans transformed Reunion Arena in Dallas into "Barnhill South" during the Southwest Conference basketball tournament. Skip Bayless, long before he became a talking head on ESPN, came to Dallas from the Los Angeles Times, where he was an investigative reporter, and dueled against Blackie in the Morning News before the two joined forces.

Blackie could write about any subject, and with such skill, that it made a young scribe like myself, then in his 20s, wonder what was the use. Like a director was heard to exclaim after the 1972 world premiere of "Last Tango in Paris" (one that won't be coming to your theater soon), "How dare I make another movie?"

Unlike Bayless, who attended Vanderbilt on scholarship, Blackie did not matriculate from a world-famous journalism school, although Howard Payne University, in his native state, is, I'm sure, proud to claim him as an alumnus. I never worked with Blackie and only observed him at a distance at the Kentucky Derby, where one could imagine he and Edwin Pope of Miami, Red Smith of New York and Jim Murray (whose hand I did shake at Churchill Downs) of Los Angeles forming an Algonquin's Round Table in the first week of May.

But after reading the tributes to Blackie on Thursday from former colleagues and, like myself, devoted readers, I found myself wishing to attend the old school that Sherrod conducted at the Fort Worth Press, where the old ivory hunter polished the skills of Dan Jenkins, Bud Shrake, Gary Cartwright and others who have made the sports pages brighter, encouraging them all to know about something other than the games and people they were writing about.

"I had a 15-year journalism course under Blackie Sherrod. All he did was give me a career," tweeted Jenkins, whose coverage of golf and college football helped make Sports Illustrated required reading in the 1960s.

Blackie was one of the original "quote guys," knowing that you could dull a reader to death with detail. A vignette properly placed can enhance a piece, although the writer should not inject one where it doesn't fit. The "both teams played hard" quote, standard (if terribly redundant) on the high school or college level, had no place in a Sherrod column. Blackie would have loved Joe Reese, who before a Hot Springs football game once said, "I don't know what (the other team) will be using, because what they've been using hasn't been working."

Satire is best left in the hands of masters, of which Sherrod was one, the best on any sports pages between Los Angeles (Murray) and Dallas. Unlike Dick Young, the sage of New York's Daily News and Post for decades, Blackie did not often, if ever, wear brass knuckles to work but could get his points across with stiletto sharpness. If Red Smith's finest work evoked memories of a second martini at lunch, Sherrod appealed to people who ate chicken-fried steak and drank black coffee in roadhouse bars.

Blackie, like any great writer, knew his audience and wrote neither over their heads nor in condescending fashion. His Sunday notes column "Some hither, others yon," which followed him from the Times Herald to the Morning News, was my first read when the days-late paper came in the mail.

Scattershooting," it began, "while wondering whatever happened" to say, Ina Ray Hutton, she of the all-girl band. Included were a weekly update on "our neighbor Jones" and a limerick, plus a parting shot that started the same way and left one like myself wondering why I didn't think of that.

One of his finest: "And then there was the Texan so rich he forgot he had a daughter in college."

Sports on 04/30/2016

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