Tuesday, May 08, 2007
Thank You, Jimmy Cannon!
OP-ED
Jimmy Cannon, one of the greats of American sports writing, was a self-taught high school dropout. His colorful, almost poetic style is a reminder that some of the best reportage in American newspapers can be found in their sport pages. He would occasionally put together a column of opinions, laconic observations and pet peeves he titled "Nobody Asked Me, But . . ."
Born in 1909 in what he described as "the unfreaky part of Greenwich Village," Jimmy Cannon was the streetwise son of a minor Tammany politician. A dropout from Regis High School, he got his start in journalism at 16 as a copy boy on the New York Daily News. Within ten years the ambitious copy boy had risen to become a general interest reporter. Next he jumped from the Daily News to William Randolph Hearst's New York American, which hired him as a sportswriter. His beat eventually included not only baseball stadiums and boxing rings but Broadway and the world of "delicatessen nobility"--bookmakers, touts, horse players and talent agents who hung out at such watering holes as Toots Shor's, Lindy's, the Stork Club and El Morocco.
Jimmy Cannon's writing career spanned 37 years. Almost entirely self-educated by keen observation and voracious reading, Canon was an obsessive writer, a former drinker who "drank more coffee than Balzac." One of his colleagues, W. C. Heinz of the old New York Sun wrote, ""His column was his whole life. He has no family, no games he plays, no other activities. When he writes, it's the concentration of his whole being. He goes through the emotional wringer. I have no idea what Jimmy would do if he weren't writing that column, he'd be so lonesome."
In an era when sports writers only wrote about what they saw happening from the press box, he revolutionized sports coverage by going into the locker room to get to know athletes and to learn their view of what happened. In 1959, his salary was $1,000 a week, making him the highest-paid sportswriter in America at a time when a buck was a buck. Ernest Hemingway was a fan of his writing. "I don't know anybody who takes his job more seriously or with more confidence," he noted.
"If you saw him play, you'll never forget him," Jimmy Canon wrote about Joe DiMaggio. "No one ran with such unhurried grace. His gifts as an athlete were marvelous, because they were so subdued. Here was an outfielder who followed the flight of the ball with a deft serenity as though its progress had been plotted by a chronograph, concerned only with the defeat of awkwardness." The day, a fabled black pitcher was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame after years of discrimination, he wrote, "the ceremony was mean and sour. Baseball was apologizing to Satchel Page for what it had done to him."
Of all sports, Jimmy liked boxing most, although he admitted that it was "the red light district of sports." Jimmy Cannon called Joe Louis "the greatest heavyweight I ever covered. The hands were quick, and a left hook or a right hand, would stun the other guy, and then he would put the combinations together with a rapid accuracy." Of Louis, always correct, stolid, and unfailingly polite, Jimmy said, "He is a credit to his race--the human race." Of Rocky Marciano, who "bled for his fame," he wrote, "He stood out like a rose in a garbage dump in a sport that is too often tainted by corruption and greed."
Lifelong bachelor Jimmy Cannon lived in the Hotel Edison on West 46th Street and ate regularly at the Stork Club and Toots Shor's. Later he moved to an apartment at 440 East 56th Street, and frequented P.J. Clarke's on Third Avenue at 55th Street. I would run into him there. My favorite beat-up Irish gin mill was the less-crowded and scruffier Glennon's across the avenue to which the overflow from an overcrowded Clarke's would retreat. At Glennon's, the publican behind the bar wore a vest, and his politic loyalties were no secret. Over the cash register, a framed photo of a regal Queen Elizabeth sported a black eye.
Jimmy had given up drinking about the time of the Second World War. Drafted early, he served in the Army for five years, three of them as a combat correspondent for the newspaper Stars and Stripes. "That was a long time ago," was how he would sum up an incident recounted from the past. He once mused, "Combat soldiers are the loneliest people in the world. What a man does in a period of war, he carries around inside him forever."
Returning to sportswriting in 1946, his glory days came on the old New York Post, where he would remain for thirteen years. This was long before Rudolph Murdoch got his grubby mitts on the paper and made it a travesty of the phrase "fair and balanced reporting." The Post's liberal politics made a better match for Jimmy's working-class view of the system. After 1959, his final stint was on the New York Journal-American, a merger of Hearst's afternoon and morning papers. It folded in 1966; thereafter Hearst's King Features Syndicate handled his column.
I was one of Jimmy's many fans. Another was Frank Sinatra. So enamored was the singer and actor of Jimmy's writing that he had his New York Post columns and those of Murray Kempton, another writer he admired, airmailed to him regularly in California. A projected Cannon collaboration with Sinatra on his autobiography never materialized. "I told Frank up front," he said later, "that if I was going to write it for him, he had to tell me everything. He didn't want to do it that way, and that ended the project."
Short and chunky as a fire plug, Jimmy was unathletic himself. Like most New Yorkers, he enjoyed walking the city's streets and studying people. "I like my life as a columnist," he once said, "A columnist is always permitted to get off his chest what is bothering him. I have no need for a psychiatrist." Tough and opinionated to the end, Jimmy died in 1973 of complications brought on by his bad habits--cigarettes, gambling, dames, hard living and hanging out in late-night bars (where he drank no booze, only coffee). I attended the Mass of the Resurrection for him at St. Patrick's Cathedral. I never saw so many grown men with tears in their eyes.
In 2004, almost 31 years after his death, writer Jimmy Cannon was belatedly honored with the Associated Press sports editors Red Smith Award for lifetime achievement. Years after his death, perhaps figuring that people would have forgotten Jimmy, former New York City Mayor Ed Koch shamelessly appropriated Jimmy's title of "Nobody Asked Me, But . . ." for his own New York Daily News column without so much as a nod in Jimmy's direction.
Some of Jimmy's observations were memorably pithy: "If Howard Cosell was a sport, it would be Roller Derby," is one I recall. Jimmy had the map of Ireland for a face. Thus, his complaint, "I don't like Boston because all the men look like me." He wrote, "I am always amazed when I see anyone eating a cheese sandwich without mustard." And how about his "People in bus terminals look tired even before they start the trip." Or "England produces the best fat actors." Among his other memorable observations were:
"I have more faith in brusque doctors than oily-mannered ones."
"Guys who use other people's coffee saucers as ashtrays should be banned from public places."
"It's almost impossible for a girl to be homely if she wears a gardenia in her hair."
"I've never seen a circus clown I thought was funny."
"I can't remember ever staying for the end of a movie in which the actors wore togas."
"The trouble with the big leagues is that there aren't enough big leaguers."
"Fishing, to me, has always been an excuse to drink in the daytime."
"Baseball isn't statistics. Baseball is DiMaggio rounding second."
So, with a tip of the hat to Jimmy Cannon, lonesome poet of the metropolitan night, gone from our midst now more than three decades, a newspaper writer like no other before or since, we inaugurate a new addition to Postscripts: occasional commentary in the Jimmy Cannon tradition, appropriately titled, "Nobody Asked Me, But . . ." Look for the series to start soon in these pages.
Jimmy Cannon, one of the greats of American sports writing, was a self-taught high school dropout. His colorful, almost poetic style is a reminder that some of the best reportage in American newspapers can be found in their sport pages. He would occasionally put together a column of opinions, laconic observations and pet peeves he titled "Nobody Asked Me, But . . ."
Born in 1909 in what he described as "the unfreaky part of Greenwich Village," Jimmy Cannon was the streetwise son of a minor Tammany politician. A dropout from Regis High School, he got his start in journalism at 16 as a copy boy on the New York Daily News. Within ten years the ambitious copy boy had risen to become a general interest reporter. Next he jumped from the Daily News to William Randolph Hearst's New York American, which hired him as a sportswriter. His beat eventually included not only baseball stadiums and boxing rings but Broadway and the world of "delicatessen nobility"--bookmakers, touts, horse players and talent agents who hung out at such watering holes as Toots Shor's, Lindy's, the Stork Club and El Morocco.
Jimmy Cannon's writing career spanned 37 years. Almost entirely self-educated by keen observation and voracious reading, Canon was an obsessive writer, a former drinker who "drank more coffee than Balzac." One of his colleagues, W. C. Heinz of the old New York Sun wrote, ""His column was his whole life. He has no family, no games he plays, no other activities. When he writes, it's the concentration of his whole being. He goes through the emotional wringer. I have no idea what Jimmy would do if he weren't writing that column, he'd be so lonesome."
In an era when sports writers only wrote about what they saw happening from the press box, he revolutionized sports coverage by going into the locker room to get to know athletes and to learn their view of what happened. In 1959, his salary was $1,000 a week, making him the highest-paid sportswriter in America at a time when a buck was a buck. Ernest Hemingway was a fan of his writing. "I don't know anybody who takes his job more seriously or with more confidence," he noted.
"If you saw him play, you'll never forget him," Jimmy Canon wrote about Joe DiMaggio. "No one ran with such unhurried grace. His gifts as an athlete were marvelous, because they were so subdued. Here was an outfielder who followed the flight of the ball with a deft serenity as though its progress had been plotted by a chronograph, concerned only with the defeat of awkwardness." The day, a fabled black pitcher was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame after years of discrimination, he wrote, "the ceremony was mean and sour. Baseball was apologizing to Satchel Page for what it had done to him."
Of all sports, Jimmy liked boxing most, although he admitted that it was "the red light district of sports." Jimmy Cannon called Joe Louis "the greatest heavyweight I ever covered. The hands were quick, and a left hook or a right hand, would stun the other guy, and then he would put the combinations together with a rapid accuracy." Of Louis, always correct, stolid, and unfailingly polite, Jimmy said, "He is a credit to his race--the human race." Of Rocky Marciano, who "bled for his fame," he wrote, "He stood out like a rose in a garbage dump in a sport that is too often tainted by corruption and greed."
Lifelong bachelor Jimmy Cannon lived in the Hotel Edison on West 46th Street and ate regularly at the Stork Club and Toots Shor's. Later he moved to an apartment at 440 East 56th Street, and frequented P.J. Clarke's on Third Avenue at 55th Street. I would run into him there. My favorite beat-up Irish gin mill was the less-crowded and scruffier Glennon's across the avenue to which the overflow from an overcrowded Clarke's would retreat. At Glennon's, the publican behind the bar wore a vest, and his politic loyalties were no secret. Over the cash register, a framed photo of a regal Queen Elizabeth sported a black eye.
Jimmy had given up drinking about the time of the Second World War. Drafted early, he served in the Army for five years, three of them as a combat correspondent for the newspaper Stars and Stripes. "That was a long time ago," was how he would sum up an incident recounted from the past. He once mused, "Combat soldiers are the loneliest people in the world. What a man does in a period of war, he carries around inside him forever."
Returning to sportswriting in 1946, his glory days came on the old New York Post, where he would remain for thirteen years. This was long before Rudolph Murdoch got his grubby mitts on the paper and made it a travesty of the phrase "fair and balanced reporting." The Post's liberal politics made a better match for Jimmy's working-class view of the system. After 1959, his final stint was on the New York Journal-American, a merger of Hearst's afternoon and morning papers. It folded in 1966; thereafter Hearst's King Features Syndicate handled his column.
I was one of Jimmy's many fans. Another was Frank Sinatra. So enamored was the singer and actor of Jimmy's writing that he had his New York Post columns and those of Murray Kempton, another writer he admired, airmailed to him regularly in California. A projected Cannon collaboration with Sinatra on his autobiography never materialized. "I told Frank up front," he said later, "that if I was going to write it for him, he had to tell me everything. He didn't want to do it that way, and that ended the project."
Short and chunky as a fire plug, Jimmy was unathletic himself. Like most New Yorkers, he enjoyed walking the city's streets and studying people. "I like my life as a columnist," he once said, "A columnist is always permitted to get off his chest what is bothering him. I have no need for a psychiatrist." Tough and opinionated to the end, Jimmy died in 1973 of complications brought on by his bad habits--cigarettes, gambling, dames, hard living and hanging out in late-night bars (where he drank no booze, only coffee). I attended the Mass of the Resurrection for him at St. Patrick's Cathedral. I never saw so many grown men with tears in their eyes.
In 2004, almost 31 years after his death, writer Jimmy Cannon was belatedly honored with the Associated Press sports editors Red Smith Award for lifetime achievement. Years after his death, perhaps figuring that people would have forgotten Jimmy, former New York City Mayor Ed Koch shamelessly appropriated Jimmy's title of "Nobody Asked Me, But . . ." for his own New York Daily News column without so much as a nod in Jimmy's direction.
Some of Jimmy's observations were memorably pithy: "If Howard Cosell was a sport, it would be Roller Derby," is one I recall. Jimmy had the map of Ireland for a face. Thus, his complaint, "I don't like Boston because all the men look like me." He wrote, "I am always amazed when I see anyone eating a cheese sandwich without mustard." And how about his "People in bus terminals look tired even before they start the trip." Or "England produces the best fat actors." Among his other memorable observations were:
"I have more faith in brusque doctors than oily-mannered ones."
"Guys who use other people's coffee saucers as ashtrays should be banned from public places."
"It's almost impossible for a girl to be homely if she wears a gardenia in her hair."
"I've never seen a circus clown I thought was funny."
"I can't remember ever staying for the end of a movie in which the actors wore togas."
"The trouble with the big leagues is that there aren't enough big leaguers."
"Fishing, to me, has always been an excuse to drink in the daytime."
"Baseball isn't statistics. Baseball is DiMaggio rounding second."
So, with a tip of the hat to Jimmy Cannon, lonesome poet of the metropolitan night, gone from our midst now more than three decades, a newspaper writer like no other before or since, we inaugurate a new addition to Postscripts: occasional commentary in the Jimmy Cannon tradition, appropriately titled, "Nobody Asked Me, But . . ." Look for the series to start soon in these pages.
Labels: Jimmy Cannon, New York Post, Op Ed
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