Larry has been playing in an over-70 softball tournament in Manteca (think 100 degrees in the sun). His team beat all but one rogue over-65 team. And even though he’s tired after 6 games in the heat, he’s been reading me excerpts from Jim Murray’s autobiography. Larry grew up reading Jim Murray’s sports columns in the LA Times.
My favorite line so far is how he started his speech after winning the Pulitzer; “Well this is sure going to make it easier for whoever writes my obituary.”
Murray was famous for one-liners. I especially like this description of Iowans at the Rose Bowl parade: “thousands of people in calico and John Deere caps in their Winnebagos with their pacemakers and potato salad looking around for Bob Hope.” His autobiography has many of these, along with a number of his columns. You can see a couple of his columns in this tribute.
As for today’s NY Times, the best line Larry read this morning was from Arlo Guthrie about the Postal Service putting his dad’s face on the 32-cent stamp: “For a man who fought all his life against being respectable, this comes as a stunning defeat.”