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1 Late in the afternoon on August 26, 1961, Jim Murray looked dejectedly out the window of his motel room, watching the rain wash through the streets of Cincinnati below. The same rainstorm had already washed out that night’s Los Angeles Dodgers versus Cincinnati Reds game, which Murray had hoped to use as the subject of his column for the next day’s edition of the Los Angeles Times. Murray was now starting his second week on the road with the Dodgers, his second week living out of motel rooms, away from his wife and four kids back in Malibu. The first week had taken the team through San Francisco and St. Louis and had included a string of eight consecutive losses that had caused the Dodgers to give back most of the team’s second-place position in the National League standings. The mood among the Dodgers coaches, players, and staff had gone steadily downhill. Tension ran high. Younger players were arguing with each other, veterans were snapping at waitresses, coaches and managers were going nights without sleep. Just the day before, Dodger first baseman Norm Larker, coming off a game in which he had struck out twice and dropped an easy foul ball, had nearly come to blows with one of the beat writers along for the trip. “Would you have given me an error on that foul fly?” Larker demanded of the beat writer. The beat writer shook his head. “Why not?” challenged Larker. “Because I felt sorry for you,” the writer answered. The response sent Larker into a rage. “I don’t want you feeling sorry for me,” he screamed at the writer. “Get that once and for all.”1 It was in this atmosphere of losing and disgust that Murray struggled to think of a way to fill the twenty-five column inches the sports desk at the Times would be expecting from him in a few hours. He had already turned in six straight columns on the dismal travails of the Dodgers (“This isn’t a road trip, 2 Last King of the Sports Page it’s a death march,” he had written two days earlier),2 covering topics from player nicknames to poker games to their sleeping habits on planes. But now the endless trip was sapping his creativity. As he struggled, he remembered some sage advice from a city editor many years before: “Son, the best stories are floating right by your front door if you’ll only look out there.”3 It was an epiphany that both gave Murray the impetus to fill those twentyfive inches and sent his column in a direction that would catapult him into the national consciousness for the first time. Murray wrote: I mean, people just don’t have any appreciation for what us truth-seekers go through on one of these road trips for the honor and glory of baseball. For instance, you come into a city like Cincinnati at 3 o’clock in the morning . Now, if you have any sense, you don’t want to be in Cincinnati at all. Even in daylight, it doesn’t look like a city. It looks like it’s in the midst of condemnation proceedings. If it was human, they’d bury it. You have to think that when Dan’l Boone was fighting the Indians for this territory he didn’t have Cincinnati in mind for it. I wouldn’t arm wrestle Frank Finch for it. To give you an idea, the guys were kidding on the bus coming in here, and they decided that if war came, the Russians would by-pass Cincinnati because they’d think it had already been bombed and taken.4 Those three paragraphs, on that rainy afternoon, achieved the short-term goal of chewing up a little chunk of the space Murray needed to fill in the next day’s sports section. What he did not know at the time was that he had also gone a long way toward finding his voice as a sports columnist, a voice that, in the next four decades, would become arguably the most recognizable in American sports journalism. The reaction was immediate. Murray later wrote that Los Angeles is a city of transplants, and most of the twenty thousand transplanted Cincinnatians living in Southern California clipped that column and sent it back to their hometown. By the time Murray and the Dodgers crawled back to Los Angeles, the column was in the...

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