Jim Murray, May 16, 1961

May 16, 1961: A batter who has only to tell a real curve from a slider has an easy job compared to the general manager who has to straighten out the curve balls thrown at him by the other front offices. The Dodger's Buzzi Bavasi, for instance, has to hit the dirt from so many brush-back pitches thrown at him by his colleagues that he has the reputation of being a one-trade-a-year man, the front office equivalent of a Luke Appling who fouls off two-dozen pitches waiting for the right one.

Jim Murray, May 15, 1961

May 15, 1961: Norman G. Dyhrenfurth, an old friend and a perfect dynamo of human energy, is a man who not only thinks Mt. Everest is a place to be but a place for the American flag to be sometime in June 1963. He has just gained the hard-won permission of the Nepalese government to mount an expedition to Everest, the summit of the world, has fired off a check for 1,000 rupees ($640 in 1961 -- $4,611.85 USD 2010) to cinch his place in line and is now about to dervish around the country seeking the additional $150,000 ($1,080,901.75 USD 2010) it will take for an all-American team to bring not only Everest but also the surrounding ramparts of Lhotse and Nuptse to their knees.

Jim Murray, May 14, 1961

May 14, 1961: Rinold George Duren, is the victim -- or the beneficiary, if you want to look at it that way -- of the most monumental case of nearsightedness in the annals of sport, if not in the annals of optometry. The movies' Mr. Magoo, who frequently confuses the Sahara Desert with Malibu Beach or a lion with a housecat, is a hawkeye by comparison.

Jim Murray, May 12, 1961

May 12, 1961: Paul Pender is not really a prizefighter at all. He has retired from the game more times than Jackie Jensen. He is a fireman by trade and he still reaches out instinctively to slide down a pole when the alarm goes off early in the morning. He was just whiling away his days off dabbling in the prize ring when he suddenly found himself fighting for the championship of the world last year. Since his opponent was Sugar Ray Robinson, he didn't take his chances too seriously.

Jim Murray, May 11, 1961

May 11, 1961: The horse player is the hardest guy I know to please in the whole world of sports. He is grumpy, cynical, suspicious. He never smiles. No matter what happens he is not going to like it. If he wins, the price is too short. If he loses, it's somebody else's fault. The boy rode him like a camel. The starter got him stuck in the gate. The other horses came over on him just as he started to run.  Also on the jump: A golfing official says the PGA’s “Caucasian only” rule is doomed. State Atty. Gen. Stanley Mosk advised the national PGA that it could not stage its tournament in California unless the clause was eliminated.

Jim Murray, May 10, 1961

May 10, 1961: Things have gotten so desperate the Yankees have taken to trading four of their players for two Angels, a ratio, which, if it holds up, will ultimately mean the whole New York franchise here and ours there. I'm not sure I want it that way, Jim Murray says. Note: The Angels finished the 1961 season in eighth place. The Yankees won the World Series.

Jim Murray, May 8, 1961

May 8, 1961: I was rooting hard for old John  Longden on Saturday. You knew it was his last long ride around Churchill Downs. John has won races under all kinds of conditions, including three at Jamaica one day when there was a guy somewhere in the crowd who had threatened to kill him with a high-power rifle. But you knew John and Four-and-Twenty couldn't make it.

From the Stacks -- 'The Long Season'

I haven’t read a baseball book since my mother gave away my trading cards of the Philadelphia Athletics and the Boston Braves. No, I’m not quite that old. I got them from a neighbor lady who was surreptitiously cleaning out her son’s room and I imagine they are still circulating on EBay.  On Jim Murray’s recommendation, I got a copy of Jim Brosnan’s 1960 baseball diary “The Long Season” from the library, and discovered that “Season” is as unlike the heroic sports biographies of my youth (“as told to Bob Considine”)  as a glossy travel book is to a group of airline pilots critiquing the world’s worst airports.

Jim Murray, May 5, 1961

May 5, 1961: The strange story of Gene Littler illustrates the elusiveness of golf. Seven years ago, this calm, compact young man was almost everybody's best bet to corner the game of golf altogether….  The top is a tough place to begin any career. Gene's game didn't exactly come apart, but he didn't make anybody forget Bobby Jones either, Jim Murray says.

Jim Murray, May 4, 1961

May 4, 1961: Once a year, golf and Las Vegas get together -- and in the view of both, that's often enough. It costs Vegas' Desert Inn $150,000 and a swatch of headaches. It costs the golfers a sizable setback in their Vardon Trophy strokes-per-pound average.

Jim Murray, May 2, 1961

May 2, 1961: It has been said this is a so-so field coming up to the Kentucky Derby this year, but it is only in retrospect that anyone can evaluate. A derby lineup is like a high school graduating class. You can't tell till years later whether they're heading for the hall of fame or the gas chamber.

Jim Murray, May 1, 1961

May 1, 1961: Les Richter, middle-guard linebacker and mad red dog of the Rams, spends each football season as the Dracula of the line-of-scrimmage and each off-season as the William Jennings Bryan of sports.