A news item I read this past week caused me to take a moment to reflect. The item stated that the New York Times was terminating its sports department. No sports personnel would have a seat in the Times’ newsroom in the future.

There was a day when my ambition was to be a sportswriter on the New York Times. Actually, it wasn’t just the Times I wanted to work for. My goal from the time I was in junior high was to write sports for a large circulation newspaper.

The reality was that I earned a journalism degree in college and immediately secured a job on a newspaper, but I wasn’t hired to write sports--just straight news. And it wasn’t a large city paper. My first job in journalism was in small-town Russell, Kan. From there I went on to write straight news in Decatur, Ill., a city of about 95,000 in those days. I left Decatur to enter the ministry, and many years later landed my first sports writing gig, here in Ponca City.

While reflecting, I took time to mourn the loss of an era. The Times has just joined many other journalistic endeavors in moving to the digital age. Much journalistic work is now being done by blog and other means over the internet. I participate in reading some of the stuff that is out there, but I miss the old days.

In the old days, there were some outstanding sportswriters working for newspapers. I chose to take some time to think about some of them.

One of the greatest sportswriters to sit at a typewriter (or a keyboard) was Jim Murray of the Los Angeles Times. Murray won dozens of awards during his career, but after winning the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary (his columns), he said that he thought that those who won Pulitzers should have had “to bring down a government or expose major graft or give advice to prime ministers. Correctly quoting Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda shouldn’t merit a Pulitzer Prize.”

I never read Murray’s work in the LA Times, but he wrote for other publications as well. A lot of his stuff appeared in Sports Illustrated, where I was a reader. His work was syndicated and small-town newspapers had access, enabling many to enjoy his writing.

Steve Bilko was an extralarge player for the Los Angeles Angels in the early 1960s. Murray wrote in his first column for the Times, “I hope Steve Bilko has lost weight. The last time I saw him, the front of him got to the batter’s box full seconds before the rest of him.”

In 1963, he wrote a column bemoaning how dull baseball was becoming. He wrote “The home run, the stroke that saved baseball after the Black Sox scandal is becoming as rare as the great plains bison. Like all things that made America strong, it is being replaced by obsolescence’s like drag bunts. The game is full of gray eminence like the Cleveland Indians who pass through town like fog and are about as exciting as warts. The game needs Babe Ruth and it gets relief pitchers. Atomic physics is no more abstruse than the Baltimore roster. Hardly a man is alive who can tell you right off who their right fielder is. Not even a bubblegum collector can recall the name of the Boston catcher. The Yankees lead the rest of the league around so docilely that they should have rings in their noses.”

“So, I say bring in the fences Walter O’Malley (Dodger owner). Nothing is duller that the last half of the ninth inning in a 6-1 game with the home heroes trailing and you know nothing less than a court order is going to let them get five runs. Bring a look of fear and a feel of sweat (even on a cold night) back to the pitcher. The home run is the fun of baseball, not the bunt. Let’s bring it back before the game gets as dull as dancing school.”

He once wrote about boxer Jack Dempsey. “Dempsey was the only champion who practiced the same way the early Christians did -- as if his opponent had a mane and clawsandwouldnotonlyfight him, but eat him. Dempsey even fought a punching bag as if it might open fire at any time. Sparring partners line out of town on every bus. A newspaper man climbed into the ring once as a gag, and a colleague had to write the fellow’s story for a few days afterwards while he took nourishment through a straw. ‘Dempsey fought you’ a battered spar mate once confided, ‘as if the two of you were on a ledge 20 stories up and it was either him or you.’” His philosophy in writing was to use sarcasm and gallows humor to engage his readers. “I find most people hate to be informed,” he once said. “People need to be amused, shocked...or angered.”

Murray has been described as the best of the best. But there are many, many other notable sportswriters, some current and some from ages past.

One of those had the memorable name of Shirley Povich. Povich wrote for the Washington Post a distinction he held until his death in 1998 at the age of 92. I remember reading some of his stuff as a youngster. He toiled in a city that had miserable baseball teams, but was the world’s leading expert on the history of the Washington Senators. At the time of his death he was the only living baseball writer who had covered Babe Ruth. His name caused me to pause when I first heard it. “Who would name a boy Shirley?” was my thought. Povich did have the honor of being included in the “Who’s Who of American Women” because many who read his work thought he was a woman. Povich maintained that Shirley was a common name for boys where he came from (Maine). But in jest, broadcaster Walter Cronkite, even proposed marriage to “her.” By the way, Maury Povich of the television show “Maury” is Shirley’s son.

Another writer who I admired as a youngster was Bob Broeg of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Broeg covered the St. Louis Cardinals for many years and wrote articles for The Sporting News. He started out as one who covered the St. Louis Browns, which made him special in my way of thinking. I called the Browns my favorite team in the brief period between 1951 and 1954 when they moved to Baltimore. Broeg was responsible for giving Stan Musial the nickname “Stan the Man”. Today there a plenty of pictures of midget Eddie Gaedel batting for the Browns in a 1951 game in St. Louis. We can thank Broeg for that. Newspaper photographers usually went to a game for a few shots at the beginning of a game and then left to develop their photos. Broeg tipped the photographer on this day to wait around until Gaedel batted. He also was responsible for seeing that pitcher Bob Gibson was properly nourished on the day he was to pitch in the 1967 World Series against Boston. Gibson was having trouble getting breakfast in his hotel in Boston, so Broeg delivered a ham and egg sandwich. Gibson pitched nine innings and won the game that decided the series.

As I said, there have been many, many great sportswriters over the years. Red Smith was an outstanding writer for the New York Herald-Tribune and later the New York Times. Others of note included Joe McGuff of the Kansas City Star, Bob Hurt of the Topeka Capital-Journal and The Oklahoman; Grantland Rice of the Nashville Tennessean, Ring Lardner of the Chicago Tribune. Bob Ryan of the Boston Globe, Dan Daniel of the New York Times, Rick Reilly of Sports Illustrated and I could go on and on.

I embrace change. But I still enjoy thinking about the past.