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it's Heywood Hale Broun!
of TheColumnists.com
I was watching a
silly, little movie on Turner Classic Movies the other night.
It
was “For Pete’s Sake,” a 1974 flic with Barbra
Streisand playing a desperate wife trying to turn tricks to help
put her husband through college.
After she botched a liaison with the first John to visit her apartment, she readied to meet her would-be second customer. In walked a Judge Hiller. Quickly, I sat up at attention. Was it? Yes it was! It was the sportswriter turned actor turned TV sports guy, Heywood Hale Broun.
I had grown up in the newspaper business admiring and learning from Broun, called Woodie by all. He was the most erudite, irreverent word-slinger the sports writing trade had ever known.
This is vintage Woodie on the Red Sox slugger, Carl Yastrzemski, in 1967: “He was not just hitting home runs but was in fact, accomplishing the ninth labor of Hercules, bringing a championship to Boston, a city whose previous baseball idol, Ted Williams, resembled that other Greek, Achilles, who fought a great fight but spent a lot of time sulking in his tent.”
Christopher Buckley has gained some attention lately by writing about being the son of estimable parents, the acid-tongued Patricia and conservative icon William Buckley. Woodie Broun had the challenge of being the son of newspaper columnist-giant, Heywood Broun and the ardent feminist before her time, Ruth Hale. They were a tough act to follow, but Woodie carved out his own admirable niche.
He joined the much-respected but circulation-weak New York City newspaper, PM, in 1940, then returned from army duty to become a sports columnist for The PM and its successor, The Star. I first met him in 1948 when I was a copy boy at The Star. Broun treated copy boys as he did everybody else, with a droll, detached, engaging wit. We became friends.
He wrote well, but without reverence about sports. When a reporter asked about athletes riding the crest of fame, he said, “A banana peel waits for everyone.” I have often quoted his line, “Sports don’t build character; they reveal character.”
For all his eminence as a press box laureate, the man thirsted to be an actor. He had an acting career that was modest at best. He never rose out of the ranks of minor character roles. I think of him playing an awful lot of Swedish janitors. He said, “I was your ideal petit bourgeois. I did five undertakers in a row.”
He was in 14 Broadway plays, the best of them “Bells Are Ringing” with Judy Holliday. He was in TV soap operas and some movies, including “It Should Happen to You”, also with Holliday. He wrote abut his theatrical career in one of his three books, “A Studied Madness.”
His bit in “For Pete’s Sake” had him and Streisand fumbling and bumbling an assignation. He hides in a closet suffering a heart attack, and has to be carried out of the apartment into a taxi. I loved it.
In 1965, after the Broadway play in which he was appearing closed within a week, Broun went on to a career as a sports reporter-essayist-interviewer with CBS. He did more than 600 pieces as he covered baseball, horse racing, and golf as well as applying his keen eye and wit to amateur and offbeat sports. He died in 2001 at 83.
Bud Lamoreaux, his TV producer and friend, said, “He was a 19th century man who liked his toothpaste from Sweden, his cologne from Britain and his whiskey from Ireland. Woodie gave every CBS broadcast its signature with his colorful coats, trademark mustache and metaphor-rich prose. The backstretch worker [at racetracks] and the railbird identified with him. So did the casual racing viewer.”
In 1970 Cliff Roberts, the haughty chairman of the Masters golf tournament, tried to bar Broun from covering the event. Woodie said, “I guess Mr. Roberts regards his golf tournament more important than the passion plays at Oberammergau and that I might come down to make fun of his dogwood.”
Broun managed to elude Roberts’ gendarmes, covering the Masters wearing a Sherlock Holmes deerstalker hat and a cape.
He wrote once about Secretariat in retirement, “To say his name is to sound a chorus of horns. And to watch him in proud stride spurning the red leaves which seem respectfully to ape his color, is to see a mixture of strength and grace which makes Nuryev look like a talent contest tap dancer.”
Broun owned horses on occasion. He had a promising filly that needed a name. She was by Blushing Groom out of Duty Free. He came up with a Woodie-ish Careless Heiress. His horses, like his acting roles, won no star billing.
He would have been ranked among the titans of sports writing if he had worked for major newspapers or hung with it longer, but he preferred the theater. He wrote in 1950 about one of his roles:
“The producers of ‘The Bird Cage’ pay me for pinching a girl six evenings and two afternoons a week. I must admit that my contribution to the play is not very large and that my name will neither be found in lights or even very large letters, but the other day two people outside the theater asked me for my autograph, which puts me two up on my sports writing days.”
©2009 by Stan Isaacs. The Stan Isaacs caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. This column first posted May 25, 2009.
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