Daley was in the same category with Red, Murray and Anderson

By Scott Benjamin

“Ty Cobb had the reputation of being one of the snarlingest, fightiest ball players that the game has ever produced. He denies it all in his present-day mild-mannered fashion. In fact, if you listen to him long enough you leave with the inescapable conclusion that butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth and that the swashbuckling Tyrus Raymond Cobb was the original Casper Milquetoast.”

Arthur Daley, 1955

Jim Murray of The Los Angeles Times demonstrated that a sports column could be as much Regis Philbin as Peter Jennings.

He was named National Sports Writer of The Year 14 times, including 12 years in a row.

In 1990 he won a Pulitzer Prize.

Dave Anderson of The New York Times not only captured a Pulitzer Prize in 1981 but wrote four books with John Madden.

Anderson said his New York Times colleague Red Smith “was the Ernest Hemmingway of sports writers.” Dictionary and thesaurus publishers sought Smith as an advisor

Smith was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1976.

There have been a handful of other sports writers who have received Pulitzer’s through the years in such categories as investigative reporting and national reporting.

However, there are only four sports columnists that have been honored.

The other recipient was the first sports columnist to garner a Pulitzer, which he received in 1956 in Local Reporting. He was recognized for six of his columns from 1955.

Arthur Daley is the least heralded of the quartet.

Sports Illustrated’s Frank Deford, who lived in Westport, wrote in a column shortly after Smith won his Pulitzer that Daley was “a nice enough man of modest ability.”

In 1992, Dick Schapp of ABC News said he wasn’t sure if any sportswriter deserved to win a Pulitzer but if “Arthur Daley was able to win one then Jim Murray clearly deserved the award.”

It’s like taking the Heisman Trophy list and comparing Gino Toretta to Tony Dorsett, Barry Sanders and Roger Staubach.

Deford stated in his 1976 column that Jimmy Cannon, the former New York Post and New York Journal American sports columnist who had died three years earlier, had been a worthy candidate for a Pulitzer. He added that at that time, Dick Young, then with the New York Daily News, deserved the prize.

“In a somewhat improbably setting, a somewhat improbably challenger for the world heavyweight championship goes through the motions of training for a goal that is virtually unattainable. Brian London, a journeyman fighter of such little distinction that he isn’t even ranked among the top 10 by Ring Magazine, will attempt on Saturday to dislodge the crown from its secure perch on [Muhammad Ali’s] noggin.”

Arthur Daley, 1966

Interestingly, three of the four Pulitzer-winning sports columnists had Connecticut connections: Murray grew up in Hartford and West Hartford and graduated from Trinity College in Hartford, Smith lived in New Canaan and Daley resided in Greenwich.

MLB.com columnist Mike Lupica said in a 1987 interview that he was pleased to be living in New Canaan because that is where Smith had lived. He admired Smith and noted that he treated him well as they got to know each other in the twi-light of Smith’s career after Lupica had ascended to become a New York Daily News columnist at age 24.

Armen Keteyian, the CBS and HBO correspondent and co-author of the recent unauthorized biography of Tiger Woods, said in 1990 when he was living in New Canaan that he had driven by Smith’s house and former New York Times sports writer Ira Berkow, who wrote a biography on Smith, had encouraged him to take the step of calling Smith’s wife and inviting himself over since she would love to talk to him about Red’s career.

Apparently people don’t move to Greenwich because of Arthur Daley – the sportswriter who used a clipboard.

If they do move there, it must be because it is where George H.W. Bush grew up, where Ned Lamont made cable television affordable for college students or where the richest hedge fund manager in the world, Ray Dalio, has a mansion larger than Buckingham Palace.

“Charles Dillon Stengal, the distinguished nonstop conversationalist, wandered into press headquarters on a night during the World Series and promptly began a filibuster. There usually is neither a beginning or end to Stengal’s discourses. Sometimes there isn’t any middle either. He just rambles away, tossing people off the sled at every turn.”

Arthur Daley, 1951

Multiple volumes of Murray’s and Smith’s best work have been published.

There is only one collection of Daly’s work, which was published in 1975, a year after his death, by Quadrangle, a New York Times company, and edited by then-Times sports editor James Tuite.

In the introduction, Tuite stated that, “There were those who did not admire Arthur as a columnist. Too much baseball, they would say. Or that he was always writing in the past. Or that he would write about the good things that people would say or do, and ignore the bad.”

But Tuite wrote that as he was reviewing which of Daley’s columns to include in the book, “I found myself sticking all of his columns in the ‘good’ pile. I realized that Arthur had never written any bad columns, it’s just that some were better than others.”

Daley wrote incisive columns on athletes ranging from Babe Ruth to Hank Aaron.

Deford said in a 1986 interview that too many sports columnists wrote too often that sports is a business.

“Well of course it’s a business,” he said. “But you don’t need to remind us about it every day. There is a fantasy element of sports that needs to be written about more.”

Daley’s columns capture that dream-like quality.

Also, the collection of his columns includes photographs of him standing next to Muhammad Ali and Willie Mays. The jacket of the book has tributes from Joe DiMaggio, Jesse Owens and Ted Williams.

It takes us back to a time when athletes and journalists were friendlier.

True, we apparently haven’t reached the point of no return. ESPN.com’s Rich Coutinho has noted that Jose Reyes wrote an endorsement for his 2017 book, “Press Box Revolution.”

However, as far back as 1993, John Harper and Bob Klapisch wrote about the tensions between the reporters and players in their book, “The Worst Team Money Can Buy” on the New York Mets 1992 season.

In 1992 Murray was honored at a dinner and Ronald Reagan did 10 minutes of stand-up.

However, in the early 1960s former newspaper reporter, book author and fellow Pulitzer winner John Kennedy asked to meet Daley and then sent him a photograph inscribed “from an avid reader.”

Regarding his father being the first sports columnist to annex a Pulitzer, Daley’s oldest son, Robert Daley, a novelist and former New York Times foreign correspondent, stated in an afterward to the collection, that his father “had always imagined that Red Smith might get it, if any sportswriter did, or one of the others. My brother Kevin told him, ‘They didn’t give it to the cleverest guy on the sports page, but to the man who day after day wrote the best sports column.”

“The game was over. The once proud New York Giants heads bowed and spirits crushed by the 27-0 rout at the hands of the Green Bay Packers, walked slowly off the field. All around them delirious fans danced in glee.”

Arthur Daley, 1939