My Son the Sportswriter

The questions that troubled the typewriters of Washington were fraught, as they liked to say, with significance. Was Cuba a nest of Red missiles--or wasn't it? Had De Gaulle's intransigence undermined NATO? Could Pierre Salinger walk 50 miles? In their cogitation chambers, capital columnists pondered such weighty problems. All but one of the columnists, that is. He climbed into his car one day last week and headed for spring training in Fort Lauderdale. Fla. He bore the improbable name of Shirley Povich and an even more improbable distinction. He not only writes sports for the Washington Post but is also the most popular and most widely read columnist in Washington.

Povich outdraws such punditical heavyweights as Walter Lippmann, Joseph Alsop and Marquis Childs on their home grounds, and he does so against formidable odds. In the virile environment of the sport section, his first name can only be a liability. He is the only male ever listed in Who's Who of American Women, a distinction conferred upon him by accident even though his entry clearly and accurately stated that he is married to a girl named Ethyl. He is the only U.S. sportswriter who, after checking into a room with a colleague in a Tampa hotel, got flowers from the management. "For Miss Shirley Povich and Mr. Robert Considine," read the note that came with the bouquet. ("I don't know what to say about the morals of that hotel.'' says Roommate Considine.)

Level Approach. Povich has also surmounted a major hazard of sportswriting in Washington--the fact that he is fated to write so often about losses. He learned his baseball by writing about the Senators, who once spent 16 straight years in the second division. And though that team has since gone to Minnesota to be transformed into the Twins, their Washington replacement lost 101 games last season. There have been times when the capital's pro football team, the Redskins, could manhandle any of the competition. But all too often they would have been given a hard time by a touch football squad captained by Ethel Kennedy.

In such circumstances, Povich has developed a refreshingly level approach to his craft. Other sportswriters tend to search out heroes on the field and to draft purple poetry about them. Povich sees an assembly of grown and muscle-bound men earnestly grunting over a boys' pastime. The sight gives him pleasure. ''You learn to detach yourself," he says. 'After all. it's only a game. You don't have to live and die every day. If you don't take it seriously, you can have some fun."

Povich gets his fun by gibing not at the performing elephants but at the mahouts. One enduring and vulnerable Povich target is Redskins Owner George Preston Marshall. Well aware of Mar shall's reluctance to hire any Negro players,* Povich improvised tellingly and endlessly on the same theme. "There was considerable integration in the Skins' end zone yesterday," went one typical Povich column, noting which Negro on the opposing team had just crossed the Redskin goal line. When Marshall and his movie-star wife Corinne Griffith (they have since been divorced) took a trip,

Povich reported that Marshall "left town, bag and baggage." Soon after Retired Air Force General Elwood R. Quesada, former chairman of the Federal Aviation Agency, bought into the Senators in 1960, the Post's Povich, egged on by Post Publisher Philip Graham, began complaining. Povich thought that baseball was too important to be entrusted to generals. The Senators finished last in 1962, and Quesada, smarting from numerous Povich attacks, sold out his interest last month for a profit. "The team, like Quesada." exulted Povich, "is richer for his retirement."

Useful Anecdotes. Until 1922, when he was 17, Shirley Lewis Povich's chief claim to renown rested on the fact that he celebrated his bar mitzvah in Bar Harbor, Me. His parents were the only Orthodox Jewish family in the posh town. That summer Shirley caddied so well for the vacationing E. B. McLean that McLean took him back to Washington with him, paid him $20 a week to caddy and another $15 a week as a copy boy at the Washington Post, which McLean happened to own. By the age of 20, Povich was the Post's sports editor. The Post was poor then and could not afford the ghost celebrities--Babe Ruth, John McGraw, Adela Rogers St. Johns--that its competition featured. So Povich composed an ad: "Colonel Charles Lindbergh, Vice President Charles Dawes, Aimee Semple McPherson and Charles Chaplin will not cover the World Series for the Post! This baseball classic will be covered by our baseball writers!"

Devoted Presidents. In 1935 he gave up the title of sports editor to concentrate on the column "This Morning," which he had been writing for seven years. Its devoted readership has included every U.S. President since Calvin Coolidge. Dwight Eisenhower, who on occasion boasted that he never read the liberal-leaning Washington Post, admitted that he always read the Post's Povich. The brothers Kennedy cull Povich columns for anecdotes useful on the sports-conscious New Frontier.

When another Washington paper offered to double his salary, Povich did not even have to inform the Post--which, having heard of the offer, hastened to match it.

*A reluctance that Marshall, alter some stern pressure from U.S. Secretary of the, Interior Stewart Udall, eventually overcame. The Redskins signed their first Negro player in 1961.

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