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Out of Left Field |
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Was Old George Phair |
 Buzz Arlett weighs half a ton He cannot field, he cannot run But when he wields his trusty wood The pellet leaves the neighborhood |
Now's the time for all to know it:
Sports once had a master poet
of TheColumnists.com
In my early days as a sports reporter, I made it a point to go back into the files and read the sports guys of yore. Among others I read Grantland Rice (overrated), Heywood Broun (inspirational even if a rah-rah guy), Paul Gallico (I would never have guessed he’d go on to write popular fiction), and Charles Dryden (a pre-World War I delight).
And I came across little-known George Phair. A treat.
Phair traveled with the champion Chicago Cubs of the Tinker to Evers to Chance days. He wrote about the White Sox who came to be the Black Sox. He came to New York and covered the Giants in the 1920s and the Giants and Dodgers for the New York American into the late 1930s.
Phair wrote morning-paper reports of games, what the trade called “game stories.” And he started most of his stories with a piece of light verse pertinent to the report. He was unique. He deserves to be remembered.
Among Phair’s memorable bits was this couplet, written when heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey arrived for a weigh-in, trailed by a motley retinue of associates and hangers-on:
Here the conquering
hero comes
Surrounded by a bunch of bums
Ken Smith, a Daily Mirror baseball writer who went on to become the curator at the Baseball Hall of Fame, traveled the baseball beat with Phair in the 1930s. He was a Phair fan. He sent me some of Phair’s bits and pieces.
Smith wrote, “Writing his column one day in his room, Phair was a little short. I suggested he put one of his delightful little verses at the bottom as well as at the top. Instantly, he tapped out:
‘A husky guy is
Dizzy Dean
Strong of arm but weak of bean
At Washington on a cold
day Phair wrote:
The players breathed
on frozen hands
The temperature was freezing
The crowd was huddled in the stands
And both of them were sneezing
Phair was erudite. Other verse writers were awed by his ability to turn out his precious bits almost off the top of his head. He did not, however, do as well with John Barleycorn, and took care of emergencies by carrying around a few ambiguous verses in his pocket. They could be used by any friend who might be called upon to write his story for him.
Once, when he had no spares, a friend roused him and told him that he would have to write the poetry for a Giants victory over Pittsburgh which came on an extra-inning hit by pitcher Pete Donahue. Phair awoke and wrote:
Up stepped old Pete
Donahue
A weakling when a hit is due
But what the hell you cannot tell
These days what any guy will do
Verse got more of a play in newspapers in pre-World War II days. Phair even inspired some of his colleagues. One evening, after a card game on the road had been cleaned up by Chicago reporter Irving Vaughan, a telegram came on the special train for Phair to write a farewell ode to Irving’s brother, Manning, Phair’s old friend who had just died. Phair was asleep so John Drebinger of the New York Times sat down and wrote:
Manning Vaughan, dead
and gone
Left us here to carry on
To his ideals he was unswerving
Too gosh darned bad it wasn’t Irving
The Drebinger masterpiece wasn’t sent. Phair awoke and wrote what Smith remembered as a touching tribute.
One of Phair’s verses at the time of the Phutile Phillies read:
If the Cubs win three
of four
And Pittsburgh six of ten
The Phillies as in days of yore
Will finish last again
A big clumsy slugger named Buzz Arlett who put in a year with the Phutile Phillies in 1931 inspired this oft-quoted bit by Phair:
Buzz Arlett weighs half
a ton
He cannot field, he cannot run
But when he wields his trusty wood
The pellet leaves the neighborhood
George Phair died in 1965. I was sorry I got to know about him
only after he died.
© 2002 by Stan Isaacs.
The Stan Isaacs caricature is © 2001 by Jim Hummel. The
other illustration is from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895
Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA.
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