Category Archives: Sports

Once More with a Bunch of Bums

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Topeka Capital Journal
August 8, 1989

Harold McGraw called from Oklahoma City a couple of weeks ago and said he was inviting a few guys for a weekend at his place on Lake Eufaula, in eastern Oklahoma. He said Joe Trosper and Pat Horan would be there, and I told him to count me in.

The four of us have been friends for what seems like forever. In our last joint venture, in the years right after World War II, we were on the same softball team, and we were as hooked on the game then as we are on golf now.

This was fast pitch, long before slow pitch was invented, and we played with and against some hot shots like the late Clyde “Little Abner” Woods, Greenie Malone, and Hollywood actor-to-be Dale Robertson, who was as good as softballer as he is an actor. Maybe better.

So, last Friday I drove to Oklahoma. When I saw a sign that said “Henryetta” I laughed, remembering the time I covered a football game there when I was a fledgling. The public address announcer had blasted me out of my seat in the tiny press box that night when he screamed, “And here come the HENS, now!” Continue reading →

Kansas v Kansas State Remembered

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Topeka Capital Journal
Oct. 24, 2001

Since Kansas State and Kansas are playing football this week, it is perhaps the right time to pass along a few irrelevant remarks about both institutions of Higher Learning. I can only hope none are construed as irreverent, because many of their fans take this game seriously, and believe everyone should.

For example, it would perhaps be irreverent to sing the I-70 blues and say there isn’t a good football team between St. Louis and Denver, except for Kansas Wesleyan in Salina, which is 5-2 for the season, and ranked in the top 25 in the NAIA poll.

The Rams on the Eastern end are unbeaten, but Missouri, the Chiefs, KU, Washburn, K-State and Fort Hays all have losing records. And at the Western end, the Broncos aren’t all that hot.

* The K State KU game Saturday would be the 100th in a string that started in 1902 if, for some reason, they hadn’t skipped playing in 1910. Why they didn’t play that year is not explained in the weighty press guides published by both schools.

It would have been a good game. K State under coach Mike Ahearn played its first 11 game schedule that season, winning 10 while outscoring the opposition 476 to 20. All but three of the games were shutouts, and the lone loss was to Colorado College, 15-8. It was a Bill Snyder-like season.

KU, in 1910, under coach Bert Kennedy, was 6-1-1 losing only to Nebraska and tying Missouri.

* One of the great characters in the history of the sports rivalry between KU and K-State is Doctor Forest C. “Phog” Allen, a legend as KU’s basketball coach, but also the football coach in the 1920 season. He had a 5-2-1 record beating K-State and Washburn, and tying Nebraska. Continue reading →

Washington Loyal To Their New Senators

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Topeka Daily Capital
June 25, 1961

Washington – this city is made up of so many itinerants it has few basic loyalties. But it has at least one – the new Washington baseball club. The Senators became the New Senators when Calvin Griffith, owner of the Old Senators, moved out to start the Minnesota Twins.

The New Senators are almost a religion among baseball fans here, and they have one goal – to finish ahead of the Twins. Fans here starved for a winner for so many years they worked up an active dislike for Griffith.

When he moved out it was made clear to him nobody was sorry to see him go. Fans hated to see some of his good ballplayers go, but on the whole they liked the move.

They expected nothing of the New Senators, mostly castoffs and rookies. But right now, they’re running ahead of the Griffith’s Twins, and this is a baseball-happy town. Continue reading →

Boys of Summer: 1959

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Topeka Daily Capital
October 4, 1959

When the Dodgers were kicking the ball around in the third inning Thursday against the White Sox, it recalled the classic play Solly Hemus once engineered in the midst of similar disaster.

Hemus was at the plate with a runner on third when the catcher lost a low pitch and started looking frantically in all directions. Hemus pointed toward a distant dugout and said to the catcher, “Over there.”

As the catcher raced toward the dugout, Hemus waved home his teammate from third. The catcher discovered the trick — and the ball — too late. The runner scored while the ball lay within arm’s length of home plate.

Walter Johnson once hit Eddie Collins in the leg with one of his famed fireballs, and Collins dropped like he’d been shot. Johnson was genuinely concerned, and even helped Collins as he limped, painfully, to first.

On Johnson’s next pitch, Collins, running without a trace of a limp, stole second.

Trying to trick the opposition is old stuff in baseball, although it seldom works. I recall one occasion when it backfired. I’ve told this story often, but I still regard it as a classic. Continue reading →

Amy’s Friends, No Explanation Needed

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Topeka Daily Capital
Oct. 23, 1960

A friend of mine named Amy, who is three years old, has as one of her best friends a man who is an inmate in the state penitentiary in Lansing. It is a friendship built on the simplest sort of foundation. It is a friendship between a man who probably needs friends and a little girl who is overwhelmed by unexpected favors.

It’s a rather long story, and it doesn’t get any shorter the way I tell it. . . . Continue reading →

Dean Smith, A Kansan and Always a Leader

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(Editor’s Note: Some readers were surprised to learn the late Dean Smith was a Kansan and a member of the 1952 NCAA-champion Jayhawk basketball team. The North Carolina coaching legend was born and raised in Emporia and apparently was marked early as a leader by those who knew him, according to this excerpt from the Capitalizing on Sports column of December 18, 1959)

Dean Smith of Kansas is a little guy making good in a big way. He was a fine high school basketball player, but at only 5-10 he never made KU’s starting team.

Still, he impressed his coaches with his intelligence and basketball instinct, and his ability to diagnose and grasp quickly any part of the game. He was the squad’s best at running enemy patterns against the varsity, and KU coach Dick Harp says of him: “He was born to coach.” Continue reading →

An Evening With Dean Smith and Other Kansas Superstars

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Topeka Capital-Journal
Feb. 6, 2002

Saturday evening, Gerry Barker and his wife, Lois, picked up my wife and me for a trip to Lawrence to have dinner with the 1952 Kansas basketball team, celebrating the 50th anniversary of its national championship season. The 87-year-old Barker drove like there was nothing to it.

I wasn’t worried. He had plenty of advice, back seat and front, and I know he’s physically sound because in golf he has shot his age 125 times, and is still doing it. I can’t shoot my age, but I can shoot our combined age with a little to spare, and on a good day can shoot my temperature and my 1948 IQ. Continue reading →

Among those whose dreams drowned in 1951 flood – Topeka Owls

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Topeka Capital-Journal – July 11, 2001

It is not my intent to make light of the events that followed what historians call the worst chapter in Topeka’s history — 50 years ago this week — but there was some humor in that disastrous flood. One piece of it is a story that still makes me laugh, when I probably should weep.

It happened in the old Topeka Daily Capital newsroom at 8th and Jackson, when water 15 to 20 feet deep covered North Topeka, and nobody yet knew how bad it really was.

Some background: When the flood hit here, the Topeka Owls were in first place in the Class C Western Association pennant race and were drawing good crowds. Their ballpark was in North Topeka, near US-24 highway, east of where the China Inn is today.

Owls’ owner Link Norris was a happy man, because he was looking at his best season financially, which would make up for some that hadn’t gone so well. But suddenly, the flood turned his world upside down. Continue reading →

Augusta has mastered the art of making a buck on golf

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Shawnee hatTopeka Capital Jornal – 1998

LITCHFIELD, S.C. — Our route to South Carolina took us through Augusta, Ga., scene of this weeks’ Masters golf tournament and probably the greatest financial bonanza of all the country’s sports events. Signs are up all over the place directing “golf traffic,” and to say they’re needed is like saying the Masters is just another tournament.

Fans flock in and they spend great wads of money. Corporations pay up to $15,000 to rent a house for a week while the owners leave town, and there are about 2,000 such homes available. Hotel rooms that go for $70 on the average jump to $300 and more during the tournament week.

The visitors like to play golf as well as watch it, and local courses other than Augusta National, where the Masters is played, welcome them, sort of. Greens fees that normally are in the $30 to $50 range soar to as much as $500 per round, and tee times are hard to get.

Restaurants put away their regular menus and use special Masters menus that have fewer items and Paris prices. Souvenir prices are out of sight, but few leave without some of them.

The Augusta convention bureau says that during this week there will be 10,400 visitors in the city’s hotels and motels, another 8,000 in private homes, and about 25,000 driving into town each day. They will pump $109 million into the Augusta economy. Continue reading →

Keith Jackson: One of history’s best reporters

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Tuesday, January 19, 1999
Topeka Capital-Journal

This is another name-dropping column, another chapter in the story of my life among the bigshots. The big name in this one is Keith Jackson, who retired earlier this month from ABC after a 47-year career that established him firmly as the top college football announcer in the land, and one of the best reporters in sports history.

Keith also was involved, at about the mid-point in his career, with producing and directing sports shows for television, and that’s when I got to know him pretty well.

In 1970 I was running NCAA Films, and as part of the college football package on ABC we produced a Sunday morning highlight show of top games played the day before, plus an annual prime-time special to open the season. Continue reading →