In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

227 A month and five days later, a crowd of twenty-five hundred, made up of Jim Murray’s most loyal fans, friends, and readers, walked through the turnstiles at Dodger Stadium for one last chance to gather and memorialize the man whose words had started their morning for four decades. It was a gray day, and the clouds hung low over the baseball diamond, but Vin Scully, one of the speakers assembled to pay homage to Murray, said the weather should not cast a pall over the proceedings. To the contrary, he said, it was the ideal conditions in which to speak about an Irishman like Murray. “This is not an overcast day, nor is it a gloomy day,” Scully said. “The Irish would call it a soft day.”1 Along with Scully, Al Davis, Jerry West, Chris McCarron, Al Michaels, Chick Hearn, and Ann Meyers Drysdale took the podium to share their remembrances of Murray with the assembled crowd. Bill Dwyre opened the ceremony, and then Al Michaels took to the microphone and discussed the impact Murray had upon him personally and upon sportswriting in general. He compared Murray’s writing to ABC’s Wide World of Sports in terms of innovation: “I think of [Wide World of Sports] in concert with what took place on February 12, 1961, when Jim Murray’s first column appeared in the Los Angeles Times, and the signal moment that that was, not only for sports journalism in this area, but for the country, and what it did for the profession.” As Al Davis ascended to the podium, Raiders fans unveiled a banner with the words “we love our raiders,” referring to Davis’s team, which he had moved back up the coast to Oakland four years before. Davis acknowledged the Raider faithful and then dug into his own treasure trove of anecdotes to remember his ever-humble friend. Davis’s relationship with Murray went back to when Davis was an assistant football coach at USC and had remained strong through the decades, despite Murray’s occasional shot across the bow. Davis recalled for the crowd a reception held while the Raiders were still in Los Angeles. “I certainly refrained from speaking engagements, but one group 228 Epilogue came up with a great idea: they would give Jim Murray some kind of honor, and they would ask me to present. And both of us accepted, and I said to Jim before the presentation, ‘Is there anything you want me to say?’ And he said, ‘Well, don’t be to laudatory.’ And I said, ‘Don’t worry, Jim, I won’t be. There’s not that much there.’” Both West and Hearn discussed that long-ago trip to West Virginia with the Lakers, where Murray’s commentary had managed to enrage the local population . West told the crowd how Murray had written that people in West Virginia were fond of “sewing patches on their cars with needle and thread.” Hearn was also along on that early-1960s Lakers road trip. “I was in that wagon,” he said. “Hell, it wasn’t getting in [that was difficult], it was trying to get out of town. By that time, they’d formed a posse.” Then Hearn managed to sum up the reason that most of the assembled crowd were in attendance, spending a Saturday morning remembering a newspaper writer who had died more than a month earlier: “He could write about a cockfight, he could write about an automobile race, he could write about anything, and find the heart and soul of the subject and put it into words. . . . That’s something that is God given, but it has to be mastered by someone with unbelievable, unequaled ability. And that’s what Jim had. He could start your day with a smile.” Linda took to the podium and articulated what those closest to the man knew would have been Murray’s reaction to the proceedings. “Jim, I tell you, would be embarrassed by this fanfare. He’d probably say, ‘Enough already. Don’t you have anything else to do?’” she said. “No, Jim, we don’t.”2 Murray, of course, laughed at the idea of “his legacy.” He would say to Linda, “Hell, I won’t be out of here six months and they’ll be saying ‘Jim who?’” That particular statement remained on her mind, percolated, and eventually led her to devote her life to proving it wrong. A few months after the Dodger...

Share