R.I.P, Dave Anderson

Dave Anderson, a respected voice in New York and national sports journalism for over 50 years, died today at age 89. Starting as a 16-year-old copy boy in 1945 at the Brooklyn Eagle, he became a full-time writer in 1951 covering, among other things, the Brooklyn Dodgers. He later wrote for the New York Journal-American for 11 years before joining the staff of the New York Times in 1966 as a general assignment reporter. A columnist at the Times from 1971 until 2007, Anderson earned numerous awards in virtually every sport for his work, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for distinguished commentary. Below is my interview with him for SportsBusiness Journal in 2005. Rest in peace to a classy writer and one of the great gentlemen in sports journalism.

Q. Let’s talk a little about journalism. The Miami Herald columnist Carl Hiassen gave a commencement address at the University of Miami's College of Communications. In talking about print journalism, he said, “Smart graduates know that this is a business whose future is pretty shaky.” He also said, about print journalism, that “There's no better way to learn about the world than sitting in a big city newsroom and having it laid out in front of you every single day.”

Anderson: I think he’s true on both counts. It’s shaky in the sense that more and more, people are reading less, reading newspapers less. That’s just the way the world is these days. People turn on their computer more than they open a newspaper.

Q. Ken Auletta, from The New Yorker, in a journalism leadership seminar last fall, said that humility is essential to journalism. He said that reporters are sometimes perceived as arrogant because they have a “compulsion to express an opinion,” rather than ask questions.

Anderson: That depends. A reporter, theoretically, is not supposed to express opinions. In journalism theory, a reporter reports. A columnist is allowed to express his opinion. That’s the difference.

Q. I think his point was that reporters are veering into the columnists’ territory.

Anderson: More and more, some reporters do that, depending on how much liberty they get from their editors in whatever newspapers they’re on. It’s not that simple at the [New York] Times, but it certainly is at many of the other papers around the country, especially the tabloids in New York.

Q. Former White House press secretary to George W. Bush Ari Fleischer said that there is a powerful tie between the pressure that government leaders and sports figures are under because of the way the media covers them.  Does the media coverage really create pressure?

Anderson: Well, sure, because there’s more media. Years ago, by years ago, I can go back 50 years when I started in the business in 1951 at the Brooklyn Eagle. Although in a sense I was in the business in 1945 as a copyboy at the New York Sun. But in those years, newspapers were everything. That’s all you had. That was media, except for magazines, but even in those years there weren’t that many magazines, and most of them were pictorial magazines. I’m thinking of Life and Look and some of the magazines like that. 
But today you have so much more media that newspapers are only a portion of it. And it’s a portion that most people don’t really care about anymore. Even with cable television—we didn’t have cable television really until roughly 1980, maybe the mid or late ‘70s. ESPN didn’t appear at all until 1979. But today you go to a ballgame, let’s say a midseason, Tuesday night ballgame between the Yankees and Kansas City, and where 30, 40, 50 years ago, you would have had roughly 10 writers at a game like that, today you have 50 to 60 to 70 writers, radio or television voices, and cameramen. That’s certainly true in New York. You have tremendous amount of media compared with what it used to be. 

Q. Frank Deford said that ever since sports went on TV, more and more people are familiar with it. 

Anderson: That’s true. I think television has created readers. People who watch the games will be much more inclined to read about it the next day.

Q. He also said that sportswriters are more and more handmaidens of television. “We’re really not allowed to write a whole lot about things that don’t appear on television,” he said.

Anderson: That’s not true. I don’t think so. That could be true in covering an event, but that doesn’t mean you don’t write about things that develop off or beyond television.

Q. There doesn’t seem to be anything that is not covered on television now: poker, bass fishing, billiards, and so on.

Anderson: Right. What is there that’s worth covering that isn’t on TV?

Q. You started out in 1951 at the Brooklyn Eagle? 

Anderson: I was a copy boy at the New York Sun in 1945. I was 16 years old. That was strictly a summer job. My senior year at Xavier High School in Manhattan, I worked in the sports department on Saturdays for $5. I was the richest kid on the street corner. In my junior year at Holy Cross, the Sun folded. I think it was January of 1950. I had been more or less promised a job at the Sun when I got out of college, but by the time I graduated, there was no Sun. I wound up getting a job as a clerk in the sports department of the Brooklyn Eagle in August of 1951 for $40 a week.

Q. You were an English Lit major, a literate guy coming into sports journalism. 

Anderson: Well, I passed the test. Let’s put it that way. I don’t know how literate I was.

Q. How do you assess the state of sportswriting today?

Anderson: I think it’s better than ever overall, by far. There are better writers, especially better young writers. There’s a tremendous amount of young, very capable, excellent sports writers today. And I think a lot of that is because of television. They grow up watching television, watching the games on television and then wanting to read about it, and then wanting to write about it. To me, writing goes back to reading. If you don’t like to read, what would make you want to become a writer? And if you want to be a writer, there’s no better training than reading.

Q. What’s the biggest change you have seen in sports business journalism since you started?

Anderson: One thing is that the editors —the executive editors and the managing editors—of the newspapers are giving more attention and more space and more importance to sports. Just look at the Times. For years the Times had a sports section almost hidden in a cave somewhere in the paper. I always joked that you had to call AAA every morning to find out where the sports section was. Now we have our own section; now we have color. The progress of printing and everything else and also the importance of the public’s devotion to sports has made editors realize that sports can sell their papers. The people do want to read about it.

Q. Television timeouts interrupt the flow of the games…

Anderson: The TV time-outs kill me in pro football games. I keep saying, “Play the game.”

Q. Does the business of sport threaten to overwhelm the sport itself?

Anderson: It certainly rivals it because there’s so much money in sports today: the television money, the sponsorship money, the salaries of the athletes. Everything is bigger and bigger in the form of dollars and cents every year. It just keeps going up. That’s the way it is. It wasn’t that way a long time ago, but in those years not that many people went to the ball games. Now people say will television keep people away from the ballgames? But it’s proven for the Yankees at least that television has drawn people to the ballgames.  

Q. Who is the shrewdest or most creative businessman in sports you’ve ever seen? 

Anderson: Over the last 30-40 years, I would say Mark McCormack, the golf impresario, who died recently. He did more to build one sport, golf, than any other. He branched out, but golf was his basic sport. He built it into the huge sport that it is today. 

Walter O’Malley, as much as everybody in Brooklyn still despises him for moving the Dodgers, was an incredibly prescient sports businessman in going to Los Angeles. And that was in the 1950s. What people do today is really a spinoff of what O’Malley and McCormack did a long time ago.

Q. You have interviewed and written about some of the great performers in sports. Who is the most memorable?

Anderson: Muhammad Ali. We’ve never had anybody like Muhammad Ali and we’ll never have anybody like him ever again. The interesting word there is “interview” because most of the time, you didn’t have to interview Muhammad, nor would he let you interview him. Usually you would find him wherever he was, maybe at a press conference after he had sparred a few rounds. Somebody would ask him a mundane question and he would go into a monologue for the next 20 minutes. You very rarely had a sit-down question-and-answer session with him. But you didn’t need it. He made news just by whatever he happened to be talking about that day. He knew what you wanted to hear, and he could do it. It was like turning on a faucet.

Q. What’s the best thing about sports?

Anderson: You have a winner and a loser virtually every day. I say that as a writer. When people ask me, “Would you have rather gone into writing a general column or writing about politics?” In politics, you seldom know who the winner is and who the loser is for 10 or 15 — maybe 100 — years. In sports, you know every day who won. 

Q. Is showtime an inextricable part of sports? 

Anderson: Sure. The reason is the television camera. That’s why they do these things, because they know the camera is on them.

Q. Rick Reilly of Sports Illustrated said one reason he enjoys covering golf is because there are no guaranteed contracts. 

Anderson: Exactly. I’ve written that for 30 years

Q. In a letter to Bud Selig criticizing the advertising patches on the players’ uniforms during the Yankees/Devil Rays series in Japan, Ralph Nader said that “overcommercialization is sapping the fun out of being a fan of Major League Baseball.” Where would sports be without advertising?

Anderson: It’s one thing to have an advertisement on the outfield wall; it’s another to have it on the player’s sleeve, especially in a team situation like that. The NFL doesn’t do that; the NBA doesn’t do that. None of the team-oriented leagues do that. The racing drivers started it, I’m sure. Tennis players and golfers do it. There’s also a limit. You can’t have 10 logos on you. I don’t know if technically there’s a limit in their contracts with the PGA Tour, but nobody seems to have 10 logos on them.

Q. Pat Williams of the Orlando Magic said that after 9/11 he was so proud to be working in sports because he said it’s the heartbeat of the country, what gives America its juice. 

Anderson: I think that is true to a great extent, because there’s so much media interest in sports, because there’s so much sports on television, the television rules out lives, whether we like it or not, and people grow up watching sports. Not everybody —thank heaven, please, not everybody — but so many people do. The Red Sox reminded us of how deeply embedded that team was in the psyches of everybody in New England and any Red Sox fan who lived outside New England. This has been almost a 100-year war for those people to finally win a World Series. And that’s true all over the country in various depths.

Q. What do you think of the new MLB steroid policy? 

Anderson: It’s better than the previous one, certainly. The previous one had no teeth at all to it. Players could circumvent it without any fear of being caught. This one at least has a little more juice to it — pardon the take-off on the word juice. I’d still like to see it boiled down … I don’t know if you want the Olympic situation where you can get a lifetime ban very quickly, but I’d like to see them make the punishment more severe. 
Too many of the players don’t seem to care that steroids may be harming their health if not eventually killing them at an early age. But if they know that they can’t play baseball if they get caught, that their career would be over, certainly that would be more of a deterrent.

Q. Will there be a west side stadium in New York? Do we need a west side stadium?

Anderson: I hope not. New York has many more things to do with its money than help the Jets build a west side stadium. New York doesn’t need the Olympics either. New York has too many monetary problems to worry about a stadium for the Olympics.

Personal:

Date and Place of Birth: May 6, 1929 in Troy, N.Y.

Education: College of the Holy Cross, 1951

Favorites:

Vacation spot: The Hamptons, to relax and play golf.

Music: Sinatra 

Author and book: Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

Sporting event: 1980 U.S. Olympic Hockey Gold Medal team

Movie: “The Bridge on the River Kwai”

Actress: Hmm. I have several. All men have several, right? Just say all of them.

Quote: The quote I remember, and I used it when Red Smith died. Red had used it at another eulogy: “Dying is no big deal; the least of us will manage that. Living is the trick."

Smartest player: Jack Nicklaus

Greatest competitor: Joe Frazier

Toughest player: Lawrence Taylor

Best coach: Vince Lombardi. I was lucky enough to get to know him when he was an assistant year ago with the New York Giants, so I as around him a lot.

Something about you that nobody knows:

I was the year behind [Bob] Cousy and the first guy to spell it C-O-O-Z—in the school paper. The Boston papers were spelling it C-O-U-S. I spelled it C-O-O-Z. That’s the way everybody’s spelled it since.