Dick Young (sportswriter)

Richard Leonard Young (October 17, 1917 – August 30, 1987) was an American sportswriter best known for his direct and abrasive style, and his 45-year association with the New York ''Daily News''. He was elected to the writers' wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1978, and was a former president of the Baseball Writers' Association of America.

Young was the first sportswriter to treat the clubhouse as a central and necessary part of the sports "beat", and his success at ferreting out scoops and insights from within the previously private sanctum of the team was influential and often imitated. ''The Boston Globe''s Bob Ryan said of Young, "He's the guy that broke ground, the guy who went into the locker room, and that changed everything." A self-professed Republican, Young sided frequently with owners of professional sports teams engaging in public contractual debates with players, most notoriously in 1977 when he described Mets ace pitcher Tom Seaver, a three-time Cy Young Award winner, as "a pouting, griping, morale-breaking clubhouse lawyer."

In 2000, Ira Berkow chose Young as one of the seven sportswriters who'd made the greatest impact on their profession, along with Red Smith, Grantland Rice, Ring Lardner, Damon Runyon, Jimmy Cannon, and Jim Murray. According to Jack Ziegler in the ''Dictionary of Literary Biography'', Young was a "key transitional figure" between the "gentlemanly" sports reporting of old-time writers like Grantland Rice and Arthur Daley.

Upon his death, ''The New York Times'' described Young's prose style: "With all the subtlety of a knee in the groin, Dick Young made people gasp... He could be vicious, ignorant, trivial and callous, but for many years he was the epitome of the brash, unyielding yet sentimental Damon Runyon sportswriter." ''Esquire'' called Young's writing "coarse and simpleminded, like a cave painting. But it is superbly crafted." Ross Wetzsteon wrote that Young had "singlehandedly replaced the pompous poetry of the press box with the cynical poetry of the streets." In his book '' The Boys of Summer'', Roger Kahn called Young "spiky, self-educated, and New York." Characteristically, Young described his approach to sportswriting simply: "Tell people what's going on, and what you think is going on. Bread-and-butter stuff, meat-and-potato stuff."

Writing career

Young joined the ''News'' as a teenaged messenger boy in 1937, and broke into the sports pages five years later. He eventually became the newspaper's signature columnist, known to readers for his insider coverage and acerbic wit. During the 1949 season, after the Brooklyn Dodgers blew a game in the bottom of the ninth inning to the Braves in Boston, Young's account of the game began, "The tree that grows in Brooklyn is an apple tree. It grows apples, large ones in the throats of Brooklyn ballplayers—ballplayers like the pitchers who choked up here today to blow a beaut...." This remark referred to the colloquialism "taking the apple", which was then used to describe an athlete choking. Previously, Young had agitated for the dismissal of Dodgers manager Burt Shotton, or "KOBS" in Youngspeak. ''Daily News'' readers knew that "KOBS" was Young's acronym for "Kindly Old Burt Shotton", and was not intended as a term of endearment.

Referring to the 30,000 attendance figure announced by New York Titans owner Harry Wismer, Young quipped, "He must have been counting the eyes." Describing a lopsided loss by the Brooklyn Dodgers, Young began his column, "This story belongs on page three with the other axe murders."

What would become Young's most famous sentence as a sportswriter did not appear under his own byline. While covering journeyman Don Larsen's perfect game in the 1956 World Series, ''Daily News'' writer Joe Trimble struggled to find appropriate words to begin his article. Young reached over and typed seven words into Trimble's typewriter: "The imperfect man pitched a perfect game."

A 1957 column by Young revealed to fans that Dodger teammates Jackie Robinson and Don Newcombe were no longer on the best of terms. The article contained several negative quotes from Roy Campanella ("When it's my turn to bow out of baseball, I certainly don't want to go out like he did", and "Instead of being grateful to baseball, he's criticizing it. Everything he has he owes to baseball"), which were obtained during a conversation in Campanella's liquor store that Campanella had mistakenly assumed was off the record.

In 1959 and 1960, Young was a vigorous advocate of the Continental League, the proposed third major professional baseball league that was announced in the wake of the Dodgers and Giants leaving New York for California. The Continental League never came to fruition, but was instrumental in spurring Major League Baseball to add four new expansion franchises. This included a replacement National League team in New York: the Mets.

In 1961, it was Young who first suggested the idea of putting an asterisk on Roger Maris' home run total, should the Yankee right fielder fail to catch or surpass Babe Ruth in the first 154 games of the season, saying "Everyone does that when there's a difference of opinion."

Willie Mays was elected to the Hall of Fame in with 94% of the vote. Young angrily denounced the 23 sportswriters who had omitted Mays from their ballots, writing, "If Jesus Christ were to show up with His old baseball glove, some guys wouldn't vote for Him. He dropped the cross three times, didn't He?"

Young was a tireless worker, writing as many as seven of his "Young Ideas" columns per week, in addition to covering one of the New York baseball teams six out of seven days, for up to three daily editions of the ''News''. He also had a regular column in ''The Sporting News'' from the late 1950s until 1985. At his peak, he was probably the highest-paid sportswriter in the United States. ''The Sporting News'' described his career arc: "Though Young's best work was on the baseball beat, his most controversial and memorable writing came later, as a general columnist. He became the Archie Bunker of the keyboard, voicing populist rage."

A resident of Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey

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