Jim Murray Memorial Foundation – Page 11

Monday’s with Murray: The Big Con of Spring

THURSDAY, MARCH 1, 1973, SPORTS

JIM MURRAY

The Big Con of Spring

It’s that time of year again. Every squeaky contralto in the country is boning up on “Oh, say can you see?” Organists are blowing the dust off their medley of 1910’s Top 10 song hits. Venders are practicing spilling mustard. Announcers are practising saying, “And that mondaysmurray2 reminds me of the Iron Horse!” so they can get into an anecdote about Lou Gehrig that will be a whole lot more interesting than what is going on down in the field.

It’s a time when every team is the 1927 Yankees, every rookie is on his way to Cooperstown, and every manager is a certified genius. Without their mighty celebrating, the team might finish fifth — which it will anyway. But knowing the nuances of baseball like telling the pitcher, “Don’t give him anything to hit, but don’t walk him neither.” Or telling a hitter, “Be sure to hit your pitch” knowing that HIS pitch will never show up in a big league game till they allow girls in it, is the stuff of pennants.

***********

The manager, you see, also has to sell tickets. He knows he can’t show up at spring training and tell the press, “If you took the best skills of all 40 men I got on the big club roster and put them all together they wouldn’t make 1-1/2 major league ball players.” He’s got to deal in the big con.

Every year at this time we offer you Murray’s Instant Decoder and flash on the screen for you, “What They Say” and “What It Means.” Just remember, the manager’s pitch looks big and fat, but you can trust me it will curve into the dirt as soon as you go for it. First, what he says. And then, the curve.

“We think the trade will help both clubs” . . . “We got two guys they don’t want for two guys we don’t want and, pretty soon, we’re all going to find out why the other fellow didn’t want them.”

“He’s got an arm like Koufax” . . . “It’s got five fingers, an elbow, bicep, and it can cut steak. Unfortunately, it’s attached to a guy who in no way resembles Koufax.”

“ We’re going for youth” . . . “The infield looks like a slow leak in Boys Town and, believe me, ‘leak’ is the word. That fellow in Montreal, John Robertson, said they made the routine ground ball extinct. Around the league, they’re known as ‘The Big E.’ They’re going to make the infield fly rule extinct, too. They throw more ground balls than they field.”

***********

“We got the best bench in the league” . . . “It’s the players sitting on it that aren’t much good.”

“I saw Ruth in his prime, and our cleanup hitter is just like him” . . . “He drinks, chases girls, stays out late, and eats too much. At the plate, he looks more like his first name is Ruth.”

“He has all the tools to make it” . . . “As a plumber.”

“They’ve got us to beat” . . . “That’s just the trouble.”

“This club will steal on you” . . . “Lock your lockers.”

“You’re going to find we got the best bunch of utility men in the game” . . . “and to prove it, they’ll all be climbing light poles this time next year.”

“I figure a year in Double A could help our outfield” . . . “I don’t have to tell you that I mean ‘Alcoholics Anonymous.'”

“You’d have to say our starting five are all finished pitchers by now” . . . “Also by the fifth inning.”

“This club is well-balanced” . . . “Everybody is mediocre.”

“If we can improve in a few areas, we’ll take it all” . . . “The areas are pitching, fielding, and hitting.”

“We figure the Big Guy will be healthy this year” . . . “He was in the whirlpool so much last year the guys started to throw him sardines.”

Reprinted with the permission of the Los Angeles Times

Jim Murray Memorial Foundation, P.O. Box 60753, Pasadena, CA 91116

———

What is the Jim Murray Memorial Foundation?

The Jim Murray Memorial Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, established in 1999 to perpetuate the Jim Murray legacy, and his love for and dedication to his extraordinary career in journalism. Since 1999, JMMF has granted 104 $5,000 scholarships to outstanding journalism students. Success of the Jim Murray Memorial Foundation’s efforts depends heavily on the contributions from generous individuals, organizations, corporations, and volunteers who align themselves with the mission and values of the JMMF.

Like us on Facebook, and visit the JMMF website, www.jimmurrayfoundation.org.

Monday’s With Murray: Heirloom Hockey

On Saturday, the Los Angeles Kings honoured broadcasting legend Bob Miller with the unveiling of a statue in Star Plaza, just outside Staples Center, and a banner honouring him was raised inside the arena before the Kings played the Anaheim Ducks.

Miller retired last season after 44 years as the Kings play-by-play announcer.

Hockey Hall of Famers and retired Kings players were on hand to celebrate Miller, telling their own Bob Miller stories. Jim Fox, Miller’s broadcast partner since 1990, noted: “The stories to me about Bob are about Bob telling a story. It’s hard to explain this, but Bob was able to tell a joke, and laugh at his own joke. Some people who laugh at their own jokes are trying to be the center of attention. Bob isn’t. He genuinely thinks the joke is funny.”

Miller entertained and informed hockey fans on the air, much like Jim Murray did with the written word, for more than four decades.

The following Jim Murray column, written nearly 56 years ago, shines a light on the history of professional hockey in Los Angeles before the Kings organization was founded on June 5, 1967. Jack Kent Cooke was awarded an NHL expansion franchise on Feb. 9, 1966, becoming one of the six teams that began play in the 1967-68 season. The Kings played their home games at The Forum in Inglewood, California, for 32 years, until they moved to the Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles at the start of the 1999-2000 season.

The Kings have won two Stanley Cup championships, 2012 and 2014.

THURSDAY, JANUARY 11, 1962, SPORTS

JIM MURRAY

Heirloom Hockey

Because I like to study the public papers of great men and to commune with the great minds of history, I was fascinated by the word from the summit in hockey published recently by a colleague, Morton Moss.

This was a letter from Clarence Campbell, the resident giant intellect of the highest office of ice hockey who was handed the hottest puck in the game — “When is Los mondaysmurray2 Angeles going to get major league hockey?” — and asked to stickhandle it through the crowd without making anybody mad or committing himself to do anything more than send out for a cup of coffee.

Campbell, to no one’s surprise, iced the puck. His letter in answer was as long, bland and uninteresting as an ulcer diet. The meat of it explained that “the league’s position is that it is not actively promoting or encouraging expansion of the numbers of its members at this time. It has no commitments or plans to expand but it is prepared to consider each individual application on its own merits as and when such application is received.”

English translation: We won’t sic the dogs on you when you come around, but go away quietly, will you?

The Los Angeles Blades, who are the hockey equivalent of a seventh-place team in triple-A baseball, drew 26,657 fans to two hockey games here over the weekend with the cellar team in the league. The reception of the game in an area where the only time you see ice is when you order your Martini on the rocks is one of the sports astonishments of the year.

Los Angeles is used to being kept waiting with its hat in its hands and its shoes polished in the anterooms of the reigning directors of professional sports. It stood around for years begging major league baseball to let it help save the game — at a time when the sport was about to go under the third time thanks to an annual all-New York World Series — while L.A. was functioning as the only city in the history of the game that supported TWO minor league teams. It pushed professional football into the big time after that sport had roamed around the country for years like a hat-passing minstrel show.

The ‘National’ Hockey League makes a mockery of its title by restricting its franchises to six teams, waging a kind of private little tournament of 70 games just to eliminate two teams, whereupon, like basketball, it starts all over again in the playoffs. Hockey teams play each other so often, you get dizzy, and the players get so accustomed to each other’s moves they could probably play a game by mail.

Television is not interested in hockey because the American public isn’t. Outside of the hard core of fans in the six centers where it is played, there is no one to shave in front of. To be sure, league president Clarence Campbell, who resides in Montreal, is not immediately concerned. The Montreal Forum would sell out for an intra-squad game of the Canadiens. The management holds out only a few hundred seats for day-of-game sale to accommodate fans whose grandfathers were not foresighted enough to buy season tickets back around the time of the first Roosevelt administration. When a will is contested in Montreal, chances are the litigants don’t want the money, they want the deceased’s Forum seats.

But what is true in Canada is hardly true in the U.S. No one has had to beat off customers with a club at Madison Square Garden recently, and the Boston Bruins have occasionally had to put a notice in the papers explaining that a game was to be played and at what time. No team is so rich it couldn’t use the television money and the exposure.

The Blades have had to do an artful selling job here in L.A. The embarrassment of having to offer its fans Canadian tank towns as worthy opposition to the third largest city on the continent has been successfully overcome, but no one seriously supposes customers will continue to clog the freeways to watch bush league hockey in a major league city even if it is the only game in town.

The bugaboo is raised over the paucity of players. The obvious rebuttal is that a boy would have to be dull to take up a hockey stick instead of a football when he has a total of six markets in one to sell his skill and four times as many in the other. Other big money sports are expanding, but hockey likes it there in the back of the cave.

Any businessman will tell you that in a dynamic economy you either grow or perish. Baseball had to be dragged kicking and screaming out of its rut. Football groped its way on the end of a short rope held by Dan Reeves. Hockey just can’t sit there in the dark forever braiding buggy whips.

Reprinted with the permission of the Los Angeles Times

Jim Murray Memorial Foundation, P.O. Box 60753, Pasadena, CA 91116

———

What is the Jim Murray Memorial Foundation?

Like us on Facebook, and visit the JMMF website, www.jimmurrayfoundation.org.

Monday’s With Murray: Goodbye to a Friend

Fifty-six years ago, almost to the day, the Los Angeles Examiner printed its last edition. The Examiner was a place that Jim Murray once called home and it’s because of that we bring to you this week a column Jim wrote about the death of the Examiner. Given the state of newspapers today, it seems appropriate.

But first an excerpt from Jim Murray’s autobiography about his time at the Examiner:

Gawd, we had fun on the old L.A. Examiner. It was a Hearst paper and the literati looked down their noses on it, but we pulled all the stops on murders, suicides, public scandals and, particularly, on Hollywood stories. L.A. was exciting. The world was in flames. We told it all in dripping red headlines.

The city editor, Jim Richardson, was a one-eyed, iron-lunged, prototypical Hearst city editor, a tyrant of the city room. But he liked the way I wrote and for a time I was the youngest rewrite man in the whole Hearst chain.

I can tell you all you need to know about Jim Richardson with one anecdote: In the Black Dahlia murder, in which a young army camp follower, Elizabeth Short, was found slain and cut in half on an empty lot in L.A., the Examiner was able to score a scoop in identifying her by means of wirephotoing (a fairly new process at the time) her fingerprints to the FBI in Washington.

Armed with her identity, Richardson instructed a reporter, Wain Sutton, to telephone her mother in Massachusetts. “Don’t tell her what happened,” he instructed. “Tell her that her daughter’s just won a beauty contest at Camp Roberts. Then get all the information on her.”

Sutton did as instructed. The mother happily confided her daughter’s life history. Then Sutton put his hand over the mouthpiece. “Now what do I do?” he wondered. Richardson looked at him wickedly. “Now tell her.” He purred. Sutton looked at him. “You miserable S-O-B!” he said. Richardson just smiled.

One slow day, Richardson handed me a routine suicide on Skid Row (Fifth and Main streets, in downtown L.A.). A poor old wino had hanged himself in a hotel room.

I wrote it straight. “John Jefferson, 51, was found dead in his room at the Hotel Barclay yesterday. Police dubbed the death as suicide by handing.”

Richardson handed it back to me. “Try to get a little more oomph in it,” he ordered. He meant pathos. I rewrote it. He was dissatisfied. I rewrote it again. He shook his head. Finally, in desperation, I handed in a lead: “John Jefferson, 51, tired of it all, stepped off a chair into eternity.”

Richardson looked at it. He knew he had driven me too far. He dropped the story in the wastebasket. “Why don’t you just go get a cup of coffee, kid?” he asked with unaccustomed gentleness.”

——

THURSDAY, JANUARY 11, 1962, SPORTS

JIM MURRAY

Goodbye to a Friend

I don’t think I’d like to write about sports today, if you don’t mind. I don’t feel much like fun and games.

You see, an old friend of mine died over the weekend — the Los Angeles Examiner.

Startle you? It shouldn’t. The Examiner was competitive, sure. But no newspaperman rejoices in the death of another newspaper. A little of you dies with each one if you’ve mondaysmurray2 loved this business and the people in it as much as we all have.

Besides, I worked for the Examiner once. That was when I first came to town — 1944.

Los Angeles was a wildly exciting place in those days. The shipyards were humming at the harbor, there were troop movements going to every point of the compass, there were so many murders the city was running neck-and-neck with the South Pacific. Life was the only thing the OPA couldn’t keep the lid on. Life and Los Angeles.

There was seldom a dull moment. And if there were, the front page of the Examiner never admitted it. Its shrill calamitous presence was felt from Lincoln Heights jail to the hibiscus-studded mansions in Beverly Hills. As young reporters were in short supply that war year, we slept with our socks on like firefighters waiting for the next alarm in that kookie city out there that made my native Connecticut look like a monastery with a State House.

I fell in love with Los Angeles then, an affair of the heart that I doubt I will ever outgrow and it was the Examiner that brought us together. I never wrote sports in those days, but I never missed a sporting event either. I used to jeer at the old Angels and bawl out a poor hardworking catcher named Mickey Kreitner (“Kreitner, you’re a bum!”). I cheered the old Hollywood Stars where my favorite player was a first baseman named ‘Butch’ Moran because I approved of ballplayers named ‘Butch’ automatically.

But most of my fun was in the city room of the Examiner. There was no such thing as a small story to us. We lived at headlong apoplexy — from journalism school graduates to gold-bricking old-timers. Our leader, hardly beloved, was a city editor who was such a combination of literary light and Attila the Hun that his rewrite man, Hank Sutherland, once dubbed Jim Richardson “Half-Oaf, Half Elf.”

The prose justified the dripping red headlines. When Tokyo fell, there was almost nothing left but to sell a front page actually in flames. Bodies were being delivered in trucks to Union Station so regularly that we were thinking of suggesting the railroad give special rates for them. Hollywood was alive with lurid stories. Louise Peete, who had murdered one man, went to prison for half a lifetime, got out and murdered again, sent the makeup editor trumpeting through the city room, cackling “Louise Peete is in a rut!”

So, I guess were we. But we thought we were the luckiest guys on earth. New Year’s Eve 365 days a year. On a big story, the city room looked like a bust out in an insane asylum. Sob sisters turned out drivel by the ream, reporters dug up bloody angles by the edition. Murderers were on the phone every other midnight, it seemed. The torso of a young lady on an empty lot was enough to push the steel strike back in the want ads as we set about to helping the police solve the case. Neither of us ever did.

We had campaigns and sacred cows. The ‘Chief’, Mr. Hearst himself, was alive in those days and called at midnight almost as often as the murderers. Usually he would just want something like a croup kettle or an out-of-manufacture cookie from his youth, but he would periodically discover our city was in the midst of a crime wave — usually when some acquaintance of the royal family got hit over the head coming out of a night club — and we would print a daily box score of crime, everything from spitting on the sidewalk to double-parking. It scared hell out of the tourists and we quit it.

There were heartaches, too. I remember almost the first story I covered — a little girl on the north side got run over by a truck and lost a leg. The thought of her going through life that way made me shrink. It still does. She must be 21 years old now and I wonder how she has managed. I remember I had $8 left of my paycheck (which was only $38 to begin with in those days) and I bought her a whole armful of toys and brought them to the hospital and those silly nurses were embarrassed and told me I’d have to take them back, and I said, like hell I would, give them to that little girl or I’ll bring the power of the press (whatever that was) down on you.,

I don’t know what they did with those toys any more than I know what life has done to that little girl.

I suppose the Examiner really died when the Old Man did. Newspapers, like other institutions, are lengthened shadows of men who love them and drive them. All I know is it died in its sleep. And part of all of us did with it. I hope I haven’t bored you. But I just wanted to say goodbye to an old friend.

Reprinted with the permission of the Los Angeles Times

Jim Murray Memorial Foundation, P.O. Box 60753, Pasadena, CA 91116

———

What is the Jim Murray Memorial Foundation?

Like us on Facebook, and visit the JMMF website, www.jimmurrayfoundation.org.

Monday’s With Murray: Comes the Resolution

MONDAY JANUARY 1, 1962, SPORTS

JIM MURRAY

Comes the Resolution

First off, does anyone know where the Alka-Seltzer is? Also why that cat has to stamp his feet like that?

If you think I’m going to try to write a column with this noise in my head, you have just lost. My brain feels like a window shade somebody has just snapped up and it’s rolling around on the roller.

I know it was New Year’s Eve and all that, but if I ever drink any of that bottled liver mondaysmurray2 solvent again, they should throw a net over me.

On the other hand, I need something to drown those butterflies putting on an air show in my stomach. The swelling in my head is going down but only when I keep the ice bag on straight.

I don’t know why it is we start every New Year out like this. I guess because things have nowhere to go but up from there.

The year got off on a pretty good note. Some people from Alabama invited me down for a New Year barbecue. But they didn’t say whose. And I’m not going down till I find out whether I’m the guest-of-honor or the entrée.

One thing that makes me sore as the New Year starts is here all these years I was reading Tarzan and I never caught on. I mean, I thought maybe they had gotten married by Dr. Livingstone. I presume, or Dr. Schweitzer. Who’d ever have thought the Apeman would turn out to be a Playboy? Just goes to show you. It’s more fun going ape than you think.

I guess the classic thing to do this day is dredge up a lot of hokey resolutions you have no intention of keeping. I have vowed to be nicer to people and one of the reasons is I got a Christmas card from my friend Charlie Maher and his wife addressed “to our favorite calumnist.” Actually, I’m a base calumnist — a third-base calumnist.

But that’s going to change. And while I’m at it, I think I’ll make some resolutions for others, too.

Like, Sonny Liston should contribute to police hospitalization instead of causing it.

The Mafia should take orphans not make them.

Harry Wismer should take his foot out of his mouth long enough to close it.

Floyd Patterson should join the Kennedy Peace Corps.

Someone should enter an Edsel in next year’s Indianapolis 500.

The Rams should rebel against their trainer for rubbing them the wrong way.

The Cubs should hire nine more managers and fire the players.

Jackie Robinson should make the Hall of Fame unanimously or Baseball should blush.

The Polo Grounds should be fun again with Casey Stengel abroad in it, but he’ll have to go some to be funnier than his team.

Bob Waterfield should smile. On second thought, I can’t think why.

The Dodgers should win the pennant. Or they should call in the cops and evict THEM from Chavez Ravine.

The Alabama football team should beat some team you never heard of 66-0. They should be ashamed of themselves but won’t be.

The USC Trojans should go to the Rose Bowl.

They should match the Major and the Chief of Police and let Polly Adler referee.

Roger Maris should hit 50 home runs and the papers describe it as a “slump.” Anyone else hitting 40 will get the MVP award and a parade up Broadway.

Sandy Koufax should win 30 games.

The government should make the Washington Redskins hire a Redskin.

Charlie Dressen should be back in baseball, a one-man community sing. The cast of characters is dull enough without benching live ones like Casey and Charlie. The trouble with guys who don’t speak their minds is they don’t have any to speak of.

The Phillies should lose 23 more in a row to show the last time was no fluke.

Alejandro Lavorante should get an apology from me.

San Diego should get a professional football team. Some colleges I know should get an amateur one.

I should shut up. And you should all have the happiest and most prosperous New Year ever.

Reprinted with the permission of the Los Angeles Times

Jim Murray Memorial Foundation, P.O. Box 60753, Pasadena, CA 91116

———

What is the Jim Murray Memorial Foundation?

Like us on Facebook, and visit the JMMF website, www.jimmurrayfoundation.org.

Monday’s With Murray: He’d Rather Get Fruitcake

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 24, 1995 SPORTS

JIM MURRAY

He’d Rather Get Fruitcake

Stop me if you’ve heard this, but are you as tired as I am of the upbeat Christmas letters, the look-at-us, hurray-for-our-side family chronicles you get this time of year?

You know what I mean. The ones that start out something like this:

“Well, it’s been a banner year for the Mulligans. Christin finally had our first grandchild, mondaysmurray2 a bouncing baby girl, 9 pounds 7 ounces, who’ll probably grow up to be our first woman President.

“John has taken over the Federal Reserve System. Paula is still working on a cancer cure at Johns Hopkins and we expect a breakthrough any day now. A Nobel Prize, perhaps?

“Dad and I are enjoying our retirement. He has produced a new hybrid rose for our garden that is hailed by horticulturists everywhere.

“I am still busy with my charity work, saving the whales, protecting the spotted butterflies, supporting a Hottentot village in the South Pacific and still have time to combat illiteracy in our universities and lobby for outlawing the death penalty but legalizing abortion. Dad thinks I take on too much but I was on Howard Stern twice last year and am taking dead aim on Oprah Winfrey.

“Phil got his PhD in optical engineering and is working on the telescope with which they hope to bring in Heaven by the end of the century. Rita is in the Peace Corps some place where they can only get a message out by bottle but finds her life fulfilling and thinks the dysentery is only temporary. Harriet is still into archeology and they have found the lost city of an Aztec sun god of the second century BC, but she can’t find her car keys.

“So, all in all, it’s been a joy and we look forward to more of the same in 1996 and hope you all are enjoying the happiness and success that has been our fortunate lot this year.”

Well, when I read those, I have this irresistible urge to pen the kind of letter I dream of receiving:

“Well, it’s been a good year on balance for the Mulligans. Clarence got out of prison in time for Christmas and the good news is, he likes his parole officer.

“Hilda got another divorce, her ninth, and she has moved back home with her 11 kids. We don’t know where her ex-husband is. Neither do the police. He’s two years behind in child support to Hilda and 10 years behind to his other five wives.

“Paul has stopped sucking his thumb. We’re proud of him. He’s only 16.

“Carl is doing better. He’s happy to say he cleared $30,000 last year begging from cars at the corner of Crescent Heights and Santa Monica Boulevard. He is buying a new Mercedes. He loves it when they yell at him, ‘Get a life!’

“Frank lost his job at the factory. They’re downsizing. Particularly with guys like Frank who they said was late 47 times last year, didn’t show up at all on 20 other days and got caught making book in the company cafeteria.

“Tom goes around burning flags. He’s not unpatriotic. He says it’s a good way to meet girls.

“Alice’s movie career is progressing nicely. She got to wear clothes in her last flick — a garter belt. She also got a speaking part — all moans. It’s not Shakespeare but it’s a start.

“Jonathan flunked out of another college. The dean explained, “Jonathan missed the question ‘What year was the War of 1812?’ but he only missed by two.” We tell him if he had a good jump shot, he could miss it by a century and still graduate cum laude.”

Face it. Wouldn’t a letter like that be a welcome relief? So, have a great New Year. Just don’t tell us about it, eh?

Reprinted with the permission of the Los Angeles Times

Jim Murray Memorial Foundation, P.O. Box 60753, Pasadena, CA 91116

—————

What is the Jim Murray Memorial Foundation?

Like us on Facebook, and visit the JMMF website, www.jimmurrayfoundation.org.

Mondays With Murray (on Thursday): Here’s What Santa Should Have in Bag

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 24, 1989 SPORTS

JIM MURRAY

Here’s What Santa Should Have in Bag

Twas the day before Christmas and all through the house not a creature was stirring — they were all on the couch watching the Rams and Raiders.

All right, St. Nicholas, you pious old fraud. Come in and drop your bag. If you’re making a list and checking it twice, how about the following for a merry little Christmas?

* Give the Dodgers a center fielder, they already got enough second basemen and right fielders to start a league.

* Give boxing another Joe Louis.

* Give Charlie Whittingham another Sunday Silence. Give Laz Barrera another Affirmed.

* Give Laffit Pincay the mount on either one of them. Give Chris McCarron the other one.

* Give the USC Trojans another Mike Garrett or O.J. Simpson or Marcus Allen. Give us back Student Body Right.

* Give the Raiders a quarterback, Al Davis will take it from there.

* Give L.A. the Olympics again. Or, rather, give the Olympics L.A.

Twice in 50 years the city saved it.

* Give Magic Johnson a man in the pivot to play off. It doesn’t have to be another Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. A Bill Laimbeer would do. Magic can’t take on the league’s skyscrapers, the Patrick Ewings, David Robinsons, Akeem Olajuwons by himself.

* Give Mike Ditka a rubber room.

* Give Buddy Ryan a copy of ‘How to Win Friends And Influence People.’

* Give Oklahoma a football team it can be proud of.

* Give Bill Walsh one more team to build up. The San Diego Chargers come to mind.

* Give the Cowboys back to America.

* Give Joe Montana the ball.

* Give Steffi Graf some competition.

* Give Flipper Anderson a pass that stays up and a zone he can beat.

* Give the Cubs a pennant.

* Give Mark Langston another pitch or a fast outfield so the press

can’t crow that he’s getting a million dollars an inning on his bad nights.

* Give Larry Bird the outside shot with the playoff on the line and the

defender sagging, just one more time.

* Give Mike Tyson a Gene Tunney so he can become a lovable figure in sports instead of a scary one.

* Give Cito Gaston or Frank Robinson a pennant so we can get on with it.

* Give Wayne Lukas another pretty little filly who doesn’t know she’s not supposed to beat the boys in the spring of the year.

* Give San Diego an America’s Cup challenge. Let the New Zealanders win it in the waters, not the courts, with a boat, not a writ. Can you imagine Sir Thomas Lipton letting some landlubber in a wig and a robe award him the cup?

Give Michael Jordan the ball.

* Give Wayne Gretzky the puck.

* Give Noriega 50-to-life.

* Give the Rams a pass rush.

* Give Bo Jackson a bat, give Marcus Allen the football.

* Give Gene Autry a pennant.

* Give Mario Andretti a car that will hold together for 200 laps and

Roger Penske to set it up for him so it will.

* Give Al Davis the keys to the city.

* Give Pete Rose back baseball. He’s sick, not crooked. The Black Sox’s addiction was greed, not gambling.

* Give the states the word to stop trying to solve fiscal problems by

legalizing gambling. They’ll create more problems than they’ll solve.

They’ll achieve a human deficit.

* Give golf another Jack Nicklaus.

* Give Rickey Henderson an MVP or discontinue the award.

* Give Wade Boggs a cold shower.

* Give Steve Garvey a hobby. Come to think of it, he has one.

* Give Don Zimmer a lineup he can juggle. Better yet, give him one he can’t juggle.

* Give us an overtime Super Bowl. But, first, pass a rule it can’t be decided by a field goal.

* Give instant replay to the Indians.

* Give the designated hitter to the birds. That’s what it’s for.

* Give the Jets, Atlanta and Tampa Bay a coach. Look what a difference one made to Green Bay, Kansas City and Detroit. To say nothing of San Francisco 10 years ago and Green Bay 30 years ago. There are no bad teams in the NFL, only bad schemes.

* Give me the day off. On second thought, I just took it.

* Give each and every one of our sports fans out there the merriest of holidays and winners on the cards. Just remember, everything turns to sugar anyway. So, enjoy.

Reprinted with the permission of the Los Angeles Times

Jim Murray Memorial Foundation, P.O. Box 60753, Pasadena, CA 91116

—————

What is the Jim Murray Memorial Foundation?

Like us on Facebook, and visit the JMMF website, www.jimmurrayfoundation.org.

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