Rage on the Sports Page

Facing his first freshman football scrimmage without his pair of thick glasses, the burly Amherst guard could scarcely see. He didn't need to. Flailing arms, elbows and fists, he hurled himself at every vague shape that moved, and he made the tackle on almost every play. After 20 minutes of watching the myopic terror at work, the coach pulled him out of the scrimmage and gently reprimanded him: "It's only a game, boy."

To Stanley Woodward, football was never just a game. It was one of life's major pastimes, worthy of his undivided attention, whether he was playing it or writing about it. As a sportswriter and editor for 40 years, Woodward, who died of bronchitis last week at 71, made athletics as important to his readers as they were to him. Quoting liberally from Latin and French, Milton and Shakespeare, he ranged over the entire world of sports, from its gambling to its psychology to its Jim Crowism. When a lady reporter once told him that it was her ambition to write "fun" sports stories, he summarily fired her.

Sardonic Humor. At first, Woodward wanted to be a participant sportsman, not a spectator. But a series of operations for cataracts cost him his peripheral vision and closed athletics to him as a career. After graduating from Amherst, he went to work for local newspapers; in 1930 he moved to the New York Herald Tribune as sportswriter.

Then as now, most sportswriters took themselves so seriously that they wrote about a baserunner stealing home as earnestly as if they were covering the theft of the Mono. Lisa. Woodward kept his subject in perspective, cutting everyone down to size with his sardonic sense of humor. When Dan Ferris retired as executive secretary of the Amateur Athletic Union in 1962, Woodward expressed unabashed pleasure. "As a tour conductor of American athletes abroad, Ferris ranked with Mike Quill's newest subway guard."

After time off to cover combat in World War II, Woodward returned to the Trib as editor of the sports department. He hired writers of the caliber of Red Smith and horse racing Expert Joe Palmer. He purged his pages of what he called "unholy jargon," banishing such words as horsehide, pigskin, donnybrook, grid battles. When a reporter wrote that someone had "belted a home run," Woodward whipped off his own belt and shouted, "Here, let's see you hit a home run with this." Such was Woodward's pride in his shop that when the managing editor once suggested running a big sports story on Page One, Woodward exploded: "Why bury a good story like that?"

Rude Interruption. "Coach" Woodward, as he was known to his friends, believed there were only four sports worth writing about at any length: baseball, football, horse racing and boxing. He was openly contemptuous of skiing, auto racing, golf and goono-sphere (his word for basketball). He loathed hunting. His stubborn tastes did not suit his publisher, Mrs. Ogden Reid, who insisted that he give more space to women's golf. Woodward refused. He was, said his friend Joe Palmer, "contemptuous of superiors, barely tolerant of equals and unfailingly kind to subordinates." In 1948 he was fired. "I was given the bum's rush," he explained, "for addressing the management in tones of insufficient servility."

After that, Woodward bounced from paper to paper; but in 1959, after Jock Whitney bought the Trib, he was invited back. He was not exactly penitent. His first column began: "As I was saying when I was so rudely interrupted eleven years ago . . ." When someone asked if he had any hard feelings about being fired, he replied: "Time wounds all heels."

Soon his health began to fail. In 1962 he quit for good to retire to his home in Connecticut and write an autobiography implausibly titled Paper Tiger. "I left the Trib in disappointment and rage both times," he lamented. But honest rage was more than half the secret of Stanley Woodward's success as a sports editor.

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