A short life of the author
Jim Murray (29 December 1919 – 16 August 1998) was an American sportswriter whose column in the Los Angeles Times ran from 1961 until shortly before his death and was, by near-universal consensus, the best sports column in America during that entire period. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1990 — the first sportswriter to do so based on a body of work rather than a single story — and received fourteen Associated Press Sports Editor awards for best column, a record that has never been approached. He was funny, literate, sharp, and generous: a writer who treated sports as a legitimate subject for the best prose he could produce and who produced, over four decades, a body of work that stands comparison with the finest American newspaper writing of any kind.
Life and Career
Murray was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and grew up in modest circumstances. He worked his way through Trinity College in Hartford and began his journalism career at the New Haven Register. He moved to the Los Angeles Examiner, then to Time magazine, where he was a staff writer, and then to Sports Illustrated, where he was one of the founding writers when the magazine launched in 1954.
In 1961, Otis Chandler, the publisher of the Los Angeles Times, hired Murray to write a sports column. It was the beginning of a thirty-seven-year run that made Murray the most decorated sportswriter in American history and the Times sports section one of the most respected in the country.
The Column
Murray wrote four or five columns a week, covering every major sport: baseball, football, boxing, golf, tennis, auto racing, horse racing, the Olympics. His range was extraordinary — he was equally comfortable writing about Muhammad Ali and Arnold Palmer, the Kentucky Derby and the Super Bowl, Sandy Koufax and Jack Nicklaus.
His style was built on one-liners, metaphors, and comic exaggeration delivered with the timing of a stand-up comedian. He once described the city of Cincinnati as “the kind of place that goes to bed around 7:30 — if they’re up that late.” He described the Indianapolis 500 as “the only event I know of that’s improved by a crash.” He wrote of a particularly hot day at a golf tournament that “the greens were harder than a landlord’s heart.”
But Murray was not merely a funny writer. His column about his wife’s death from cancer — published in the Times in 1984 — is one of the most moving pieces of American journalism ever written. His columns about race in sports, particularly his coverage of Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali, showed a moral seriousness that complemented his wit.
In 1979, Murray lost the sight in his left eye to a detached retina, and later lost most of the vision in his right eye. He continued writing his column — dictating much of it, relying on television rather than attending events in person. The columns from this period are, if anything, more concentrated and more brilliant, because Murray was forced to rely on his memory, his sources, and his extraordinary ear for language rather than on direct observation.
Style and Influence
Murray was often compared to Ring Lardner, Damon Runyon, and Red Smith — the great American sportswriters — and he belongs in their company. His particular gift was the ability to combine high comedy with genuine feeling: he could make you laugh and then, within the same column, make you think about something serious. He wrote about sports as a part of American life, not as a separate entertainment category, and his columns frequently touched on race, mortality, ambition, failure, and the strange American obsession with athletic achievement.
His influence on subsequent sportswriters — particularly in Los Angeles, where his protégés included Bill Plaschke and T.J. Simers — was enormous. He demonstrated that a sports column could be as well written as anything in the newspaper.
Books
Murray’s columns were collected in several volumes, including The Best of Jim Murray (1965) and The Jim Murray Collection (1988). His autobiography, Jim Murray: An Autobiography (1993), covers his career from Time to the Times with the same wit and warmth that characterised his columns.
Note: The works sometimes catalogued under Jim Murray’s name — The Budget-Building Book for Nonprofits and Weight Lifting and Progressive Resistance Exercise — are by different people named Jim Murray.
Collecting Murray
The Best of Jim Murray (1965, Doubleday) in first edition brings $30–$60. Jim Murray: An Autobiography (1993, Macmillan) brings $15–$30. Collections of his columns are modestly priced. Signed copies are uncommon — Murray was a newspaper columnist, not a book-tour author — and bring $50–$150. Original newspaper clippings of landmark columns are collected by sports memorabilia enthusiasts.