Jim Murray, June 9, 1961

June 9, 1961: Wrestling isn't even a sport at all. It's a drama in three acts in which a lot of nice old ladies get rid of all their hostilities and aggressions occasioned usually by the fact their daughters-in-law don't make pies the way they used to or won't let them give fudge to the grandchildren. Wrestling today still has the simple basic plot of a medieval morality play. There's a good guy and a bad guy. The good guy loses all the way up to the end when the bad guy goes too far. Thereupon, the good guy tears him apart like a cat looking for a mouse in a sofa.

Jim Murray, June 8, 1961

June 8, 1961: Danny Murtaugh is like the Pirates. Tough, blue-bearded, underslung jaw, he looks like a sulfurous-tempered truck driver. Actually, he is shy and modest and the kind of worrier whose biggest fear when he took the manager's job was that other managers around the league might not want to take him on as a coach if he failed.

Jim Murray, June 7, 1961

June 7, 1961: Gene Tunney's chief claim to fame is he licked an over-aged Jack Dempsey twice. It won him respect but not affection. A peculiar thing about the public is it resents a man who topples a popular champion and Gene was no exception. Just ask Ezzard Charles. He overturned Joe Louis and could hardly get anybody to go to lunch with him. Sandy Saddler beat Willie Pep and people stopped speaking to him on the street. And so on.   Notice: Women’s weightlifting in the 1960s. The caption notes that Judy Miller lifts weights, but she’s still “pretty.”

Jim Murray, June 6, 1961

June 6, 1961: Track and field is still a wholesome LIVING sport, not bound down to tradition like, say, baseball. A trophy for everything and everything for a trophy. I don't know whether you know it or not, but Olympic events are the least standardized of any in the whole fabric of sports. Today it can be high-jumping or hop-step-and-jumping. Tomorrow, it could just as well be pushing a peanut on your nose around a circular course over two jumps and a water hole.

Jim Murray, June 5, 1961

June 5, 1961: It is always a source of wonder to me that a sport as savage and cruel as prizefighting doesn't brutalize its practitioners. Yet, it doesn't. A ballplayer after losing a game is a snarling, cursing, tantrum-throwing terror. Football players smash fists into lockers. But a fighter weeps.

Jim Murray, June 4, 1961

June 4, 1961: Jim Murray puts in a call to Casey Stengel and says: "I realized I was listening to the Voice of Baseball again. And what it is doing in a bank vault in Glendale instead of a locker room in baseball is something for Dan Topping or Del Webb to answer, not me."   Notice the LAPD badge says “Policeman” instead of the current “Police Officer.”

Jim Murray, June 2, 1961

June 2, 1961: Parry O'Brien at the age of 29 will be a chief drawing card at the Compton Invitational tonight. He is one of the most durable and remarkable athletes of our time. In the record books of track and field -- which mean more on the veldts of Africa and the steppes of Russian than Spalding's Baseball Guide ever could -- he rates a page all to himself.

Jim Murray, June 1, 1961

June 1, 1961: Among those celebrating the convictions of Blinky Palermo and Frankie Carbo is a Boyle Heights prizefight manager named Harry Shall. Harry gave the government a chance to throw the book at Blinky Palermo a long time ago, nearly 10 years, when he haled him into Federal Court for stealing a fighter from him but Harry made the mistake of lumping CBS, Pabst beer, the IBC and others in his suit and Harry was lucky to escape in his underwear when their battery of lawyers got through with him. Notice the ad for a program on skydiving. Fibber, this is for you!

Jim Murray, 'Gentlemen, Start Your Coffins!'

June 29, 1966: "Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the  50th annual Memorial Day Safety Contest, the world's fastest traffic jam. This year, in order to more nearly approximate road conditions on our nation's highways and test performance under authentic hazards, we have brought about several changes in the field."   By special request! This one’s for you, Art!

Jim Murray, May 31, 1961

May 31, 1961: Emile Griffith is a slashing boxer from the Virgin Islands whose waist is so narrow and shoulders so wide that he would have to go to a tailor for his suits even if it weren't the only way he could get a belt in the back that buttons in the middle -- and colors to match the silver and gold buckles on his shoes.

Jim Murray, May 28, 1961

May 28, 1961: On the battlefields of baseball this year it has become quite evident that the Los Angeles Angels are the Serbs of the American League. They do not have the firepower to win the war or even any major battles.

Jim Murray, May 26, 1961

May 26, 1961: There was in our midst this week a young man whom the pressures of baseball exploded like a too-tightly wound clock. Jim Piersall has lived out his baseball career on the narrow edge of hysteria -- and once in 1952 he toppled over when the Boston Red Sox (reluctantly, because he's a gifted player) had to throw a straitjacket over him and put him in a mental institution.