Jamie Jobb's Backstage Pass: October 2018

Putnam and Pope

A Tale of Two

Sports Writers

by Jamie Jobb

Miami 'round midnight: no moon, no rain, no breeze, no street lights. Out here on the west edge of town, Flagler Street is one very long flat dark road as everything fades into The Glades ... Suddenly out of nowhere, a cop pulls me over for speeding.

He’d followed me four miles in the dark with his lights off. It was only after I pulled off Flagler that he ignited his red flasher, headlights and siren simultaneously. It was more than obvious he wanted to shock the living hoodlum out of me.

I had just graduated high school and the police officer couldn’t have been much older himself. But I was well aware of this kind of young Miami machismo bullcrap from my short experience in a “fraternity” at Southwest High School. Like our college counterparts, we were party-boy “brothers” who hazed new initiates – our “pledges” – while we took a lot of verbal grief from guys who’d graduated – our “alumni”-- who were still too young to leave town and get on with their adult lives.

This was during the Vietnam War – a tough time for boys turning into young men. Many of our classmates had been drafted into the military and quickly disappeared overseas. A few had recently returned from basic training at Parris Island South Carolina, now Young Marines. They wanted to exhibit their new-found military discipline and hard-ass chain-of-command tomfoolery on us. The cop was also full of that bully-boy bravado.

But he had clocked me at 90 mph in a 45 mph zone, so I was in no position to argue. Plus I was very tired and needed sleep. I’d been at school all day and at work all night. My decade-old 1955 Chevrolet, which my dad found for a hundred bucks, was my trusty steed to a commuter junior college known as Miami-Dade. After school, the Chevy was my chariot to work down on Biscayne Bay at The Miami Herald.

An official “commuter” now, I also needed that car to get around town to ball games, track meets, tennis tournaments and interviews. Miami always was a hyperactive athletic scene for budding sports writers like me, always on the go.

“Where’s the fire?” asked the cop who exploded out-of-nowhere in the dark.

“I didn’t see you.” It’s true, and I thought: Don’t you guys have safety rules about driving with all your lights out like that? It would not have been polite for me to have said that. The facts were all on the cop’s side. And nobody else was on the road to dispute or verify them.

“You were going 90 miles-an-hour!” he said as he started writing the ticket.

“I just got off work … at The Herald.”

He said: “Tell that to the Judge.”

* * *

At the hearing for my speeding ticket in open court, the Judge asked me a question I assumed he asked everybody my age who appeared before his bench – the very same question I’d already answered for the cop who didn’t ask: “Where do you work?”

I told His Honor “The Herald”. I assumed he was wise enough to know the morning newspaper gets put together very late at night.

The Judge said: “Where at The Herald?”

I said “Sports Desk”.

His Honor was intrigued. “Oh, you work for Ed Pope?”

Fabled Miami Herald sports editor Edwin Pope (1928-2017)

There were many other names His Honor could have dropped at that moment.

Jimmy Burns was The Herald’s sports editor at that time, not Pope. Luther Evans probably was more famous as our radio sports talk show guy. So was his brother Dick. Ken Small and Neil Amdur were known throughout Florida for their comprehensive high school athletics coverage. Bill Braucher had come to town to cover the new Miami Dolphin franchise. Lots of sharp pencils boxed there on that storied staff!

I was certainly lucky to sit among all the talent on that Sports Desk. But the Judge had narrowed everything all down to just one writer.

“Yes, I know Edwin Pope.” I felt much too young to call the man “Ed” in open court.

“I read Pope every day.” the Judge said. “I’m converting your ticket to traffic school.”

So, I dropped a name in court and escaped a horrendous hundred-dollar fine – the equivalent of the Blue Book value of my car – which would have knocked me out of school and work. Instead, the Judge ordered me to attend only four nights of traffic school at the college where I already had classes. I didn’t need to go anywhere for punishment! That experience alone helped me know that Edwin Pope was much more than "the sportswriter’s sportswriter,” as Georgia Trend Magazine called him.

* * *

Pope certainly was an inspiration for me. We both began writing for publication before we were twelve. We both were sports editors of our school newspapers. His dad gave him a typewriter as a gift – just like my dad had done. We both also wore thick glasses. But that’s where the comparisons end.

While I went on to pursue a variety of other writing choices on the West Coast, Edwin Pope became a sportswriting legend in American press boxes where he was credited with covering forty-seven consecutive Super Bowls, starting with the first. Everyone knew he was a great writer, in that fine southern gentleman tradition. His prime achievement was his induction into the College Football Hall of Fame in 2000, although he also received the Professional Football Writers of America’s Dick McCann Memorial Award in 2002.

Florida broadcast legend Buddy Martin certainly captured the essence of the Miami sports editor in one punchy quote:

“Pope played typewriter keys like Ray Charles played piano.”

I witnessed first-hand the music Pope tapped out on his keyboard. As a college student working on The Herald Sports Desk, I covered youth sports and college games – baseball, football, basketball, track, soccer, tennis. In those days, the mid-1960s, Pope covered all the sports I did, plus the Adult Sports – horse racing and boxing.

He’d started writing professionally at age 11 and was named sports editor of The Athens Georgia Banner-Herald when he was only 15! Pope would listen intently to University of Georgia football games on the radio, taking notes and compiling stats. Then after the game, he’d rush down to the paper with his story complete with statistical and scoring details in “agate” (the small print).

By 30, Pope was The Herald’s sports editor. New York Post’s Jimmy Cannon called him “the best writer of sports in America.” Atlanta Constitution’s Jesse Outlar said: “Day in and day out, no one was better than Edwin Pope.”

Miami Dolphin Hall-of-Fame quarterback Bob Griese likewise held Pope in high esteem. "He wrote the truth. Unlike some sports writers who had their stories written before they interviewed me, Pope never did. He never fabricated. He listened to what I had to say. What he wrote was what I said, nothing more."

Pope certainly inspired me as a young writer, and helped me understand the importance of intently listening -- for accuracy and speed when getting something published on time under my byline.

Once he pointed to my name in print: “That’s your reputation right there – on the line.” His implication was clear – when it’s your name, you’ve got to get it right!

Edwin Pope never did retire but he took his last byline in The Herald on June 5, 2016. You can tell that he didn’t think it would be his last when he wrote:

“I have a lot more to say about Muhammad Ali, and I will, in time.”

* * *.

Pat Putnam (1930-2005) in his element at Fifth Street Gym Miami Beach

The first sports writer to report that Cassius Clay changed his name to Muhammad Ali was Pat Putnam, who worked on that same Herald Sports Desk and spend most of his time at the Fifth Street Gym on South Beach, just a couple miles due east of The Herald building. Both Pope and Putnam were renowned as boxing writers, and everyone knew Putnam scooped Pope on Clay’s name change. But Putnam’s reputation was trashed over a silly boast after he passed away in 2005 (more on that later).

Pat Putnam started at The Herald as a copy boy in 1954 and worked his way up to the Sports Desk where he was a fixture when I got there ten years later. Although renowned as a great sporting reporter, Putnam probably was better known for his pranks. Here's one he pulled in Nevada:

At a 1991 fight in Reno, the ring announcer was introducing celebrities to the crowd when Putnam yelled out that the announcer had better not forget New York Yankee Hall of Famer Joe DiMaggio.

The announcer obliged, encouraging the crowd to give a big Reno welcome to the Yankee Clipper. They did so, while swiveling their necks to spot the baseball legend.

The only problem was, DiMaggio wasn't there. Except in Putnam's mischievous mind.

My most vivid personal memory of Pat Putnam is sitting next to him on The Herald Sports Desk and hearing him answer the phone ... “Harold Schwartz” – a terrific pun for our newsroom that overlooked South Beach, home of more than a few folks named Schwartz.

We were constantly bombarded with questions from bars around town where sporting men wanted to settle bets, there and then. So they called us for The Truth.

Putnam’s best trick was his answer to this twice daily question we got from any bar in town: "Who won the Dempsey-Tunney fight?"

When a caller rang in with that question, Pat The Boxing Writer would answer "Dempsey" . Then, after the bar patron said “hang on” and passed the phone over to his buddy, Pat would say "Tunney" to the other guy and hang up.

Everyone in the Herald newsroom knew Putnam was personally responsible for many sudden bar fights erupting around town on any given night.

He also had a way of imitating the sports editor, Jimmy Burns, who had a very gruff voice. He'd call into The Desk from outside and disguise his voice and then "dictate" Burns' column! The first couple times he tried this with me, I was well into typing the second take before I realized Putnam had set me up.

* * *

Pat was one great reporter who didn't shy away from offering tips to young writers. One of Putnam’s best reporting tips to me was to avoid taking interview notes in front of anybody who stutters. He said just turn on your memory, let the subject relax and after you’ve left the interview, immediately run around the corner and write everything down.

Putnam knew I was getting set that fall to cover a local football hero who happened to stutter. We were both headed off upstate to the same college, him to play football and me to write for The Paper. It turns out that Putnam’s old reporter’s clue was a better tip than anything I’d ever learn in journalism school.

Given Putnam’s urging, I hung out in that stuttering player’s room in the athletic dorm. It turned out everybody on the team wanted to be his pal, since he was the top athlete in the state! And he seemed to have trouble speaking for himself in public, so his teammates gathered there for moral support.

And all significant team news filtered through that player’s room.

By the time I’d finished college, Putnam had moved on from The Herald to what was then The Prime Job for any sports writer – on the staff Sports Illustrated. And that’s where he remained until he retired.

* * *

We know what happens when things that go around tend to come back around … In Putnam's case, that boomerang was quite cruel. After he died in 2005, a dust-up developed over a boxing award that he’d received in 1982, the Nat Fleisher Award for Excellence in Boxing Journalism. The award was stripped away after the Boxing Writers Association of America learned that Putnam had falsely represented himself as a Marine Corps prisoner of the Korean War – a yarn he often told in bars, but not under oath. The story also sometimes seemed to involve a tattoo … and when the fake POW story ended up in Putnam’s obituary, many fellow boxing writers considered it a “disgrace” for Pat’s name to remain on the award. So he was stripped of the honor.

As noted below, Putnam didn't deserve this cruel irony. Here’s George Kimball writing on “Boxing Talk” three years after Pat passed away:

There is no doubt that Pat made the claims he stands accused of making. He recounted them in my presence at the Galleria Bar at Caesars and the lounge at the Flame in Las Vegas, and like many others who were taken in, I had little reason to doubt them, but there is an important distinction to be made here.

Pat’s wartime adventures might have been tall tales, but he never attempted to make them part of his official resume. They were never a consideration in helping get him a job. They weren’t included in his official biographies at The Miami Herald, at Sports Illustrated, or at TheSweetScience.com, for which he wrote following his retirement from SI.

He never publicly represented himself as either a veteran or a POW. He never attempted to join groups representing either. He never applied for veterans’ benefits, he didn’t ask to be buried with military honors, and he certainly didn’t ask the BWAA to label him a war hero or to name an award after him. He didn’t even attempt to tell these tall tales to his children.

“Never, ever, ever,” said his daughter Collen Putnam, who was herself surprised by the accounts of his Korean experience that emerged at the time of her father’s death.

In short, if Putnam is going to be posthumously convicted of anything, it should be of slinging bullshit in a bar. If that were a hanging offense, we’d all be in trouble.

* * *

A budding young writer in the South in the mid Twentieth Century had many sporting scribes to read for inspiration: A.J. Liebling, Grantland Rice and Ring Lardner, of course, set an early tone for sports writing style. Southern sports editors Furman Bisher of The Atlanta Journal and Benny Marshall of The Birmingham News developed large readerships with their dramatic detailed tales of local teams and athletes. I was among their loyal readers.

But both Pope and Putnam were inspired writers I knew personally. Two men whose words in print and in person helped mold me into the man I am today. I was blessed to know each of them and to count them among my many writing mentors. But, it’s a cryin’ shame, that even after they quit The Herald and left “This Daily Planet”, they did not land back “on the same page”.

Pope made his presence widely known particularly among the press box set. Although rather short, he was extremely focused through those thick dark tinted-glasses. Pope was so good at interrogation, he could have been a dang judge himself! If he’d wanted to. The “sportswriter’s sportswriter” indeed! Pope never left The Herald, once he got there. Even when the paper began to crumble around him. He lived to be 88.

Putnam was a fly-on-the-wall, a where’d-he-go kinda guy. He loved to hang out in bars, and was probably the closest things Miami had at the time to measure up to Jimmy Breslin in that writers heyday of New Journalism. He lived to be 75.

Both Pope and Putnam insisted on going to the source’s mouth, persisting on phone and on foot. They also practiced the advice they preached … “Get good quotes.”

Even if you have to keep your notebook in your back pocket and run around the corner to scribble them down.

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