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1938-2010  |
Vic Ziegel--A Writer Who Inspired Many Tributes
of TheColumnists.com
My friend, Vic Ziegel, died July 23.
He was a rare person for being funny both in writing and spontaneously on his feet. The New York papers were full of tributes to him, and you can read many of them by Googling “Vic Ziegel tributes.”
A sampling:
He is celebrated for writing this line after a team won a game with a ninth-inning home run: “The game is never over until the final out, The New York Post learned last night.”
A New York Giants fan, he taught his pet bird to recite Russ Hodges’ immortal cry, “The Giants win the pennant, the Giants win the pennant.”
He wrote about his immigrant father, “He was born in Russia and the boat he came over on didn’t have shuffleboard.”
He carried in his wallet a photo of his childhood stickball team “to prove he once had hair.”
Once he visited the ailing Muhammad Ali and Ali said, “You look the same.” And Ziegel said, “Bald guys always look the same.”
His last assignment for The New York Daily News almost two months before he died at 72 of throat cancer (he did not smoke) was the Belmont Stakes. This concluding paragraph about the undistinguished winner, Drosselmeyer, was pure Ziegel:
“His winning time was 2:31.57. Secretariat, who won his Belmont in 2:24, would have beaten him by, oh, 40 lengths. Drosselmeyer must never be told.”
With all that, the thing I feel must be said about him was that he was misused by editors, particularly in his last stint with The Daily News. Though his deft touch allowed him to drop in Drosselmeyer-like droll lines when he could, he was a funny man operating with one hand tied behind his back on the typewriter, oops, computer. He too often was put into restrictive assignments covering the so-called important sports developments of the day, told to cover particular subjects, particular areas.
He was a columnist who should have been told to fly fancy free, go out to the ball park or the racetrack or the boxing arena and “see what you come up with.” The Post did that with Jerry Mitchell decades ago and Mitchell came up with stuff that was sometimes funny, sometimes not so amusing, but something unpredictable enough to be worth a look most of the time. Would that editors were smart enough to give Ziegel that freedom.
We are in a time, though, when sports talk radio and the blather of the hard core faithful dominate the sports dialogue. We are awash in palaver about who will be traded to whom for whom; who will sign humongous contracts; conjecture about drug users; and the biggest farce of them all, the LeBron James charade.
It almost seems quaint to recall that people talked about sports as “fun and games” or sports being “the toy department” of the newspaper. Now we have baseball specialists who patrol the beat trying to come up with scoops on impending trades. We have football and basketball draft gurus ad nauseum.
Larry Merchant, the HBO boxing analyst, a friend of Ziegel’s and mine-and a standout newspaper columnist in his day--says that you no longer look for change of pace columns on today’s sports pages. “You are getting that on the Op-ed pages of the Times with people like Maureen Dowd, David Brooks and Bob Herbert. I don’t always agree with Dowd, but she is unpredictable and has style.”
Herbert, who is immersed in the most serious
problems of the day--unemployment, poverty, a quagmire of a war--still
trots out an annual column on his beloved if inept New York Jets.
I don’t want to leave this without passing on my favorite
Ziegelism. I have long run a wacky ratings column every year
at Newsday and on this www.thecolumnists.com website in which
I rate categories that nobody ever rated before. Like “Overrated,
Underrated Athletes:” “Seventeenth Century Baroque
Composers,” and “Bridges Over the River Seine.”
I encourage guest raters, and the best guest rating I ever got
was from Ziegel.
He rated “The Numbers from One to Six.”
©2010 by Stan Isaacs.
The Stan Isaacs caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. The photo
is courtesy of The New York Daily News. This column first
posted Aug. 2, 2010.
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