Bert Randolph Sugar was fond of hats, cigars and old school sports writing. Modern sports writing and blogging? Not so much.
Sugar, boxing writer, historian, broadcaster, character, and bon vivant, died Sunday at age 75 at a medical center near his home in Chappaqua, N.Y., after a battle with lung cancer.
One of his many opinions was that it was better for young sports writers to go to a bar, even if they just had a soda, and listen to older sportswriters than it was for them to go to their hotel rooms and sit at their laptops.
Sugar said he grew up with such sportswriting heroes as Shirley Povich, Damon Runyon, Ring Lardner and Paul Gallico. Here are some excerpts from a 2010 interview Sugar did with a website, BigThink.com:
On the profession: "Sports writing is almost an extinct species, or soon to be. Point being, they're writing for blogs and they don't have a discipline. Once they state a subject, they can go on. There's no space restraint. And they're writing quickly, so there's no time for thought and cerebral thinking on an article, they're just banging away.''
Advice to youngsters: "We used to sit at bars and tell stories; Toots Shor's, for example, in New York. And we would tell—drink, yes, tell stories, yes, yes and yes. And the young kids, at which point I was one, would listen to the old timers. Now, the kids don't go to the bars, I don't care if they drink, have a Coke, but hear the stories. Don't go up to your room to figure out on your laptop how many free flyer miles you have, sit and hear what it is you're doing so you have a reference value. Sports did not start in 1979 with the beginning of ESPN."
On a story told him by another sportswriter nicknamed Drebby about the time the writers were sharing a train ride with the New York Yankees and playing cards when Babe Ruth ran down the aisle naked: "And they look up; they fan out their cards more. And the door slams again, and here comes a woman chasing him, equally as naked, with a knife in her hand. And Drebby says, one of the writers said, "Well there's another story we're not going to cover." Because that's what it was like in those days. You protected your heroes."
On an exchange he once had with Yogi Berra of the Yankees: "I said: 'Yogs, what did you mean when you said, when you come to a fork in the road, take it.' He said, 'That's easy, I live at the end of a circle. Whether you go left or right, you come to my driveway.' And I went, 'He's making sense.' And if you parse, analyze, Yogi's sayings, he does makes sense.''
On his hats: "It's a panama in the summer. It's a fedora in the winter. So I change my hats with the season, also my drinks. But it's fun. I'm now identified by my hat, which means less people are wearing them, and have been really since John Kennedy didn't wear one at his inauguration in '61."
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