There was only one Jim Murray

Jim Murray the king of the Sports Page
I was sitting around knowing I needed to write a column, but without any thoughts in mind when my dear friend and partner David Salzman mentioned Jim Murray. To read Jim’s columns, you felt as if he was your personal friend.
I was lucky, he was mine!
Where do I start? There is so much to say. But I am limited to just 500 words.
A day for me, if I did not begin by reading his column in the Los Angeles Times, was destined to be a dull one. I have never met another man who could turn a phrase like him. I wasn’t alone!
The National Sportswriters Sportscaster Association (NSSA), his peers gave him the Sportswriter of the Year award fourteen times … twelve of which were consecutive.
He possessed a most unusual sense of humor. So good, was this talent, that many of the top TV Comedy Writers, would paraphrase and actually plagiarize much of his material.
My late friend Alan Bernard enjoyed him so much, he hired him to write Comedy for the show I was involved in, the Andy Williams Show. Never thinking he would accept, or be allowed to do it, we were surprised when he got permission from the editors of the Los Angles Examiner so he could augment his earnings. The most widely read writer in all of Los Angeles and soon to be syndicated, was in need of extra money.
A Hartford native, he graduated from Trinity College and started his career on the Hartford Currant. In no time at all, he was a featured columnist for Sports Illustrated and on to L.A.
In 1987 the Baseball Hall of Fame gave him the J. G. Taylor Spink Award…citing him as an influence to countless sports journalists. Actually, he had too many awards to be accounted for in this one column. Among them was a Pulitzer Prize in 1990. The beauty of Jim he never took himself for granted. He was always humble.
He felt he didn’t deserve the Pulitzer for writing about sports. He would often say, it should go to a writer who exposed graft, gave advise to Prime Ministers, or helped bring down a government. He called sports, his personal play room.
Through all this, Jim always had poor vision. Not being malicious since he himself said it, “ My glasses look like the bottoms of Coke Bottles’ they are so thick”, we would often tease him. Eventually, he tried an operation to better his vision and completely lost his eye.
As a result to me, he wrote one of his greatest columns. So good, David Salzman might remember I had it blown up and for years, it was on the wall behind my desk. It simply started out: Today, I lost a long-time friend. This friend was always with me at the Rose Bowl, the World Series, The Indianapolis 500 and many a championship fight. You see, I lost the sight of my left eye”.
That was the poignancy of Jim Murray who once wrote of the Indianapolis 500, “Gentlemen, start your coffins”. Another time he wrote about the all-time Base Stealing champion Ricky Anderson who constantly was getting walked… “Ricky has a strike zone the size of Hitler’s Heart”. Probably one of his funniest quotes was about Basketball’s most successful coach and his dear friend, John Wooden… “so square he was divisible by four”.
In 1989, he went totally blind, but until his death in 1991, he continued to write with the aid of his wife.
Recently in my columns I have been writing about scholarships and academia. Before he passed, Jim created the Jim Murray Memorial Foundation whose basic purpose is to raise money for journalism scholarships. At present, 28 universities participate annually in a national essay competition in which five scholarships are awarded.
Jim, in both words and action, left a marvelous wonderful legacy. To know him was an honor.