RIP Vic Ziegel

Good-bye to one of my favorites from my formative sports-reading and sportswriting years, Vic Ziegel of the Daily News.

“The Long Island Press no longer exists. (So what else is new?) When I was still in college, I showed up at the Press several nights a week – eight splendid bucks a night – to take high school basketball results over the phone and write a few paragraphs of roundup, nothing too fancy.

“There were about a half-dozen of us living in this fast lane. One night, much like all the other nights, the scores starting running together. And to keep awake, and because I’m a cunning, vicious SOB, I urged my fellow eight-buckers to repeat the same phrase in the lead of our basketball roundups. The next day, on the high school page of the Long Island Press, in a half-dozen league stories, and another on non-conference games, it was reported that Chuck Lastname or Danny Lastname or Gerry Lastname led his team to victory by ‘performing yeoman work under the boards.’

“Seven times, yeoman work under the boards. And I was back the next night, accepting congratulations, another eight bucks heading my way. What did I learn? That you can get away with a few things in this world. That nobody cares what kind of work you do if you work cheap. That if I ever fell off a roof and landed on my head I could still edit stories about high school sports for the Long Island Press. That people would laugh when I repeated the story.

“Very seductive, the sound of laughter. And so I discovered, in my yeoman period, that if I wanted to continue hearing the pleasing sound of laughter, I could keep writing sports. At least until I discovered what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. Nothing seems to have changed. I can still be found in the sports section, still trying to earn a smile. Makes me think, nights in Pittsburgh, Louisville, the Iona-Siena game, that maybe I did fall off that roof.”

—Introduction to Ziegel’s Sunday Punch: Strawberries, Raspberries, Steinbrenners and Tysons – A Famed Sports Columnist Takes His Best Shot at Sports’ Big Shots, 1991

(h/t to evesmag.com; I have this book buried somewhere in my attic, and damned it I can’t find it, though I can recall the “yeoman work under the boards” line as if I read it yesterday. I never had the gumption to try that prank when I was writing high school wrap-ups. Thanks to evesmag for saving the story online.

More, from the Daily News:

“‘I loved Vic Ziegel. I really loved him. He’d tell you a lot of good stories,’ horse trainer Nick Zito said Friday at Saratoga. ‘I remember him telling of the time he interviewed Mike Tyson at the Indiana prison. He was a New York guy.’”

The Long Island Press no longer exists. (So what else is new?) When I was still in college, I showed up at the Press several nights a week – eight splendid bucks a night – to take high school basketball results over the phone and write a few paragraphs of roundup, nothing too fancy.

Local-washing food and sportswriting

McDonald’s recently launched a local TV commercial around these parts (h/t All Over Albany). Yep, multi-national Mickey D’s name-dropped a bunch of Albany-isms (some of which The Locals don’t actually or frequently use) into a spot in a bid to put a local face on the Golden Arches.

I suppose it should be a compliment that parochial Small-bany rated a commercial geared directly toward its decidedly Single-A market. But a comment about “local-washing” in the All Over Albany blog got me thinking about the phenomenon.

The “Buy Local” movement has had some positive impacts, even beyond the obvious growth of the excellent farmer’s markets we have in upstate New York. I like that regional chain supermarket Hannaford sells some local produce from farms in a few-county radius here, even if the offerings are limited to one cart in a several-thousand-square-foot store. But they position the offering as you come into the produce section and label it with the farm it came from. Bully for them. It’s a good idea, and a smart idea. It appeals to my 100-Mile Food sensibilities, even if I don’t come close to fully practicing that.

But what about Starbucks re-naming one of its Seattle stores as “15th Avenue Coffee and Tea” to whitewash some corporate stain? What about the execrable Gannett Corporation’s deceptively named ShopLocal™ Web site? (h/t Forbes). Frito-Lay ads in Florida? Local-washing efforts by Barnes & Noble, Wal-Mart, Citgo and Hellmann’s? Does at least some of what Wal-mart and other supermarkets do (in selling local produce) redeem themselves in the same way that Hannaford does in my mind (though Hannaford’s superior-for-a-chain organic section, including its own house-brand, gives it a bump in my book, and no, I’m no flack for them, I just like their store; but am I biased because I’m a fan?). And, as Elisabeth Eaves writes in Forbes, did the “Localvores” bring this onto themselves?

I have mixed feelings about this. Not about the McDonald’s commercial, but about the full ethos of buying local. I support that philosophy wholeheartedly, but I worry about the dogma of supporting that ethos to the exclusion of all other approaches.

It’s hard to ignore the fact that the chains do actually hire local people, which Eaves notes — yes, I agree that they do create jobs. On the flip side, those jobs often pay poorly, come with limited or no health insurance, send most (if not all) of the local franchise’s profits out of the area and back to the corporate headquarters, are situated in a building that often has no architectural relationship to long-standing neighboring structures (except to other chain places in a sea of urban sprawl, and this in the face of typically weak zoning laws), and quite possibly replaced jobs in locally owned businesses (not franchises) to begin with.

On the other hand, in these strained economic days, if I’m not eating PB&J for lunch (again) my lunch budget is $3 — enough for two items off McDonald’s Dollar Menu and a buck coffee, provided I can scrounge up enough change in between my car seats to cover the sales tax. Plus, we took Junior to the place once and he referred to it as “Old McDonald’s.” In fact, we tried Wendy’s a few weeks later, and eager to avoid him becoming brand-brainwashed, we called Dave Thomas’ place Old McDonald’s, too.

(Aside: At once point I had attempted the Neil Pollack approach in Alternadad and tried to flip branding on its ear by telling Junior that, whenever he saw the Golden Arches, it signaled a building that sold yucky food. That didn’t last long once we had a hungry 3-year-old suddenly awake on a road trip and the only thing open on a Thruway rest stop was Mickey D’s. But I digress.)

In the end, it’s a fine line. Hannaford’s approach seems to be the right one, though of course, I’d like to see even more local offerings there. But McDonald’s approach seems more sneaky, more insidious somehow.

It’s not entirely dissimilar from what ESPN is doing with ESPNChicago.com, ESPNBoston.com, ESPNDallas.com and (God help us) ESPNNewYork.com. (Though ESPNScranton.com still seems to be available.)

Whither the box score?

As a kid, I can remember devouring box scores, with their encapsulated summaries of baseball games. Box scores became fancier in the early Nineties, with the rise of fantasy leagues spurring on extra columns for batters’ walks, Ks and up-to-date batting averages and ERAs. But they remained a staple of my newspaper reading, as much as the columnists and the crime reports.

Now, as newspapers continue to die, box scores seem to me to be dying too; at the very least, their importance to fans seems diminished.

That’s not to say that sports stats are less popular; quite the opposite. But the collection of stats inside a box score doesn’t seem to have the same pull it once did. Even on the Web, it’s easier to check a player’s most recent individual page or click on a quick game summary on MLB.com or check out a live update on any of the various sites. And that doesn’t include the overflow of stats included on the scrolling tickers on the bottom of ESPN and the MLB Network, or on the recap screen that follows each game’s highlights on Sportscenter, Baseball Tonight, and every other highlight show. It’s just not the same as an old box score.

Ironically, fantasy leagues, which fueled the boom in expanded box scores almost two decades ago, have helped contribute to their diminished stature, as much as the (largely self-inflicted) death of newspapers. Why check 15 individual box scores for 15 games when you can check CBS.com and see the stats for solely your fantasy team’s guys collected and summarized on a live scoring page?

(Disclosure: every morning since the mid-Nineties until about a year ago, I used to sit with the sports pages open, yellow highlighter in hand, and highlight the summary lines in the various box scores of the players on my Rotisserie baseball team. But I digress.)

I’ve come around to reading articles, columnists, etc. almost exclusively on the Web. I prefer reading on-screen so much that even if I buy the local papers, I still wind up reading that days’ news on their Web sites — the print version sits mostly untouched, at least until Mrs. Icepick picks it up. But despite that, I haven’t come around to reading box scores on the Web, where they do, in fact survive. I wonder if I’m alone in this, or if it is merely the way my reading habits have developed.

Will the box score form, developed by British-born journalist Henry Chadwick in (or around) the 1880s¹, survive?

Track: dark

Joe Hirsch, dean of turf writers and the last icon of a dying breed of sportswriter, died earlier this month.

Hirsch covered The Ponies for more than 50 years before retiring in 2003. It’s unlikely any racing writer will ever again achieve the stature he did. The falling amount of writers covering horse racing has outpaced even the decline of professional sportswriters (and the decline of sportswriting in general).

Hirsch had the respect of the industry, the fans, and other sportswriters, at least those from my generation and older. Sadly, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a sports fan younger than 30 who knew who knew who he was. In the world of writing and reading about sports, the DNR order is in for newspapers (and the big-city columnists who write for them) — the blogs have inherited their earth.

He was a link who could remember the days of Toots Shor’s — when sportswriters and athletes converged in a nostalgic heyday devoid of the flaccid, pedestrian sameness of today’s hangouts but by the mid-1960s had become somewhat fossilized in a rapidly changing city — through the evolving culture of free agency, superstars, and drugs of the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties, and on to the ongoing drama of the last 20 years of sports as the land of the modern sheltered, pampered, and inaccessible athlete. He might not have been the most critical writer, but his life and career bridged those eras to the dying days of print.

Hirsch quit writing before the sports blogs got big — in fact, two of the biggest, The Big Lead and Deadspin, failed to note his passing. As may well be appropriate — at least in the world of reading about sports (i.e., apart from watching sycophantic television coverage on ESPN and the networks), the blogs have largely supplanted the columnists for fans under 30 (and probably under 40).

Hirsch’s life story was also notable for having palled around and roomed in New York with Joe Namath. Mark Kriegel, in his biography of Namath, recalls the pair’s first meeting, when the young quarterback was still at Alabama:

Hirsch knew horses, not college football players. The bartender had to point out Joe. They had a drink, then Hirsch lent him a sports jacket and took him to a first-class dinner. “I suppose you’re majoring in basket-weaving,” he said.

“Nah, that class was all filled up,” the kid replied. “But I found an even easier one — journalism.”