Sports

Sports heroes (or villains, or victims) meet journalism heroes

Time for some reorganizing. This page is in progress, based on a May 2025 blog post. JHeroes hasn’t had a “Sports” heading on its main menu, but there have been at least a half-dozen posts and pages over the years with baseball, football and boxing themes. Here’s a list of the date-stamped blog “posts” I’ve tagged with the “sports” category name so far: https://jheroes.com/category/sports/ …

Those include stories of general-assignment reporters like Clark Kent and Lois Lane and their editor Perry White getting involved with crimes or scandals involving local sports teams (including racist attacks on copyboy Jimmy Olsen’s youth teams). Daily Sentinel sports reporters brought the Green Hornet into a baseball-gambling story, and another episode involving a football player, and the Hornet’s newspaper-publisher father even fell victim to scalped and counterfeit Rose Bowl tickets!

“Shorty Bell,” the young reporter played by Mickey Rooney in the short-lived series by that name, confronted a “Crooked Hero” from the boxing world. The world of college sports met college journalism in at least one episode of “The Halls of Ivy.” In that story, an Ivy College board member went after a student journalist who had inspired a campus football star to question his dedication to the sport.

Among radio’s other title-star journalist heroes, I suspect that Casey, Crime Photographer, the reporter-editor couple on Bright Star, or Randy Stone, columnist hero of Night Beat, and other fictional reporters on radio, seemed likely to get involved with sports stories, given the prominence of the sports pages in 20th century newspapers. Searching RadioGoldIndex’sonline plot summaries for sports-related keywords produces mixed results. Casey, Crime Photographer, seems to have steered clear of sports, although on episode summary mentioned a boxer: “A phony swami, guarded by a Senegalese boxer, claims to be able to contact the dead.”

Directory scans reveal another boxer — and a rodeo competitor — in the titles of “Bright Star” episodes, and that Fred MacMurray’s reporter character once acted as a high school football coach, while Irene Dunne, his editor in chief, once took over the sports page. They also faced a developer’s threat to a local ballpark. I’ll be listening to those episodes, although my previous time spent with “Bright Star” left me exhausted by the sitcom sweetness of its 1950s’ “career-woman editor pursues oblivious employee” theme.

Randy Stone’s “Night Beat” column, with its late deadlines, presumably kept him away from daytime sports events at a time (1949-1952) before the “Friday Night Lights” era in sports. But his after-hours dramas did involve a few athletes: a champion swimmer, a former football star pressured to kill someone, two brothers who competed as jockeys, and a prize fighter beaten up for refusing to take a dive.

I’ve already written about reporters as secondary characters in a couple of episodes of “The Adventures of Frank Merriwell,” a radio series based on dime novels and short stories about a (fictional) Yale sports hero. And when old-time radio went to the movies, it must have brought back more sports-journalism stories, although the Hepburn-and-Tracy classic “Woman of the Year” is the only one that comes to mind. In it, Spencer Tracy is a sportswriter and Katherine Hepburn, brilliant political columnist, needs to learn about baseball, among other things.

The one legendary real-life sportswriter on the “Real Life” menu-of-pages so far is Grantland Rice, mostly because someone turned his autobiography into a radio series. Could be others to add…

Note: This is a start… “Getting organized” is my summer 2025 theme. To be continued… and perhaps it will lead to the word “Sports” joining the main menu atop the home page. The menu is limited to one-word headings by the width of our current page template. If you haven’t noticed, some of those headings hide a lot — “Movies” and “Real-Life” in particular — both hold particularly long lists of sub-pages. Maybe I will expand the “Themes” heading and work “Sports” in there as a sub-page. Hmm. Any suggestions for other improvements in the menu, which appears as a drop-down on smart phones and across-the-top on larger screens?

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