By Mike Conklin
In between firing Dale Tallon and getting booed at the recent Blackhawks convention, John McDonough found welcome relief at the Union League Club. The occasion was the Ring Lardner Awards, where McDonough gave a speech to toast Harry Caray. The awards are held to celebrate sports journalism in Chicago and raise money for charity, which this year was the Boys & Girls Clubs of America. McDonough, who knows a lot about all of the above, was excellent.
It had been several years since the Lardner Awards were held, owing as much to the closing of the Chicago Athletic Association club, where the dinner was enthusiastically embraced, as the state of the industry. The event always has been fun, a chance for the city’s sports insiders to reminisce in a public setting and outsiders to listen and be entertained. This is exactly how the old Sportswriters radio show, granddaddy of sports talk in Chicago, got started back in the 1970s, when customers at the Billy Goat eavesdropped on Tribune and Sun-Times scribes swapping stories.
Over the years, notables such as Ray Sons, Bill Gleason, Brent Musburger, Bob Costas, David Halberstam, Jerome Holtzman, and Bill Jauss have been on hand at the Lardner event to give speeches. Honored posthumously – typically with eloquent, stand-in speakers – have been local media legends such as Tim Weigel, David Condon, John Carmichael, Wendell Smith, and now Caray.
On this night of revival, Pat Foley won a well-deserved Broadcaster of the Year award, though it could just as easily been called the Comeback of the Year, considering his career of late. Don Pierson, former Tribune sportswriter who retired several years ago, was the honoree for print journalism and the only real journalist on the dance card.
Caray and Foley have high profiles, but few sportswriters commanded more respect from peers, management, coaches, agents, and athletes in his four-decade reporting career than Pierson. He is a former president of the Pro Football Writers Association, championing the rights of locker room access at some key points in league history. He also has been influential as a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame selection committee.
Chicago fans were as well informed of developments as those in any NFL city when Pierson had the beat. His Sunday notes column was must-read Gospel. To many in the sports business, his quiet departure from the Tribune three years ago remains the biggest hole in the paper’s coverage.
Former Chicago Bear and Northwestern football star Mike Adamle, now at WMAQ-Ch 5, jumped at the chance to be his presenter. As someone whose own career was covered by the former Tribune sportswriter, Adamle noted admiringly: “Don is a person who wrote thousands of stories and never used the word ‘I.'”
Ring Lardner was one of Chicago’s most famous sports columnists, having worked for the old Inter-Ocean, Examiner, Tribune, and Sporting News in the Roaring 20s and the years leading to them. Lardner’s name, to those who know it, never fails to evoke images of journalism the way it used to be, when writers wrote and editors simply “hooked the ‘graphs,” sent the copy to the typesetter, and tried to come up with a snappy headline.
In truth, the journalism era of Lardner, Grantland Rice, and Damon Runyon was long on storytelling, short on actual probing, and done with a very selective use of facts. Figure it this way: The White Sox tossed the 1919 World Series, but it was not until almost a year later that the details were aggressively pursued by newspapers, which were a monopoly when it came to forming public opinion. It is no coincidence some of the best reporters of that era went on to become Hollywood screenwriters and novelists.
Now, the slumping economy and rampant technological changes have altered radically Chicago’s sports landscape – just as radio and then TV did decades ago. Not even Lardner was creative enough to blow these changes by readers and, despite an entertaining program featuring McDonough, Foley, and Pierson, some in the Union League crowd that night wondered whether this was really last rites as much as a celebration of great careers.
But despite being gutted by layoffs, retirements, and buyouts, there do remain excellent writers and reporters working full-time on Chicago newspapers – whenever they’re allowed to practice the craft by editors, who now hold the upper hand. In fact, the Tribune, in a touch of class, mustered a full table at this event to applaud their former colleague.
There is no reason to believe there won’t be new waves of Chicago sports reporters. The Lardner Awards could continue to honor them, but serve as a reminder of what should be valuable in journalism.
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Mike Conklin, who spent 35 years at the Tribune, teaches journalism at DePaul University. He welcomes your comments.
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Previously by Mike Conklin:
* Webio Warnings Wasted
* Missing The Soccer Beat
Posted on July 30, 2009