What Would Dick Young Think of This?

“I was brought up in the greatest country in the world. Patriotism isn’t a matter of flag-waving but of work ethic and respect for authority.” That line came from an interview with Dick Young who covered sports—mostly baseball and boxing—in a 50-year career with the New York Daily News and New York Daily Post.

Although his name does not exactly shout “Jewish,” he was. A native of New York, he never earned a college degree and began working as a copy boy at the Daily News in 1937. Within five years, he had become a regular contributor on the sports beat. Young was prolific, writing an estimated 4,000 words per week. He is said to have been a transitional figure in American sports writing, taking us from the Grantland Rice adulatory school to the grittier truth-telling style that supposedly obtains today. When he was starting out, guys watched games and wrote their stories while sitting in the press box. Young did not hesitate to enter a clubhouse, baseball’s holy of holies, which enabled him to get far more valid information than did his competitors. They soon followed suit.

He had his own style, no doubt. There were bombastic and vitriolic tirades accompanied by wit, eloquence and even poetry. An establishment man, he almost always supported owners over players in salary disputes. Young feuded with players such as Tom Seaver and Eddie Murray, and other media figures; he and Howard Cosell did not exactly exchange Happy Hanukkah cards. Cosell once called him “a right-wing cultural illiterate.” He swaggered not just in his newspaper columns but in his life, fighting those with whom he disagreed or who offended him in whatever way. Boorish and mercurial, he sometimes came across as a reactionary. Nevertheless, he advocated for integration of major league baseball when many other White writers did not. A few decades later, he sided with female writers who needed access to MLB clubhouses.

In a New York Times column dated January 2, 2000, Ira Berkow, a fine sports writer himself, made a list of what he thought were the seven most important men in that field. Young was on it, along with Rice, Red Smith, Ring Lardner, Damon Runyon, Jimmy Cannon and Jim Murray. It’s old-timey and New York−centric but thought-provoking. If Young was just the Archie Bunker of the keyboard, he would not have merited inclusion.

What impressed me most about Young is that he dared stand up to Muhammad Ali and his Black Muslim handlers. As soon as Ali won the heavyweight title in 1964 and announced his allegiance to that strange faith (the universe was created by something called a “Mother Wheel,” all Whites were “blue-eyed devils,” and so on), they took delight in intimidating White sports writers. Many grumbled quietly, but Young refused to go along. He challenged their neo-racist claims and what he viewed as their puzzling lack of pride in being American. Young much preferred Joe Frazier in his three titanic fights with Ali, two at Madison Square Garden and one in Manila. He also favored George Foreman in his memorable contest with Ali in Kinshasa, Zaire. Eventually, however, he made his peace with Ali and even wrote flatteringly of him.

Young died 34 years ago and thus cannot apply his street-smart journalism to some of the outré stuff that has taken over the sports world. I would dearly love to read one of his columns about Gavin “Laurel” Hubbard, the transgender person who took part in the recently concluded Tokyo Olympics as a female weightlifter (“she” finished last in “her” group). Or the US women’s soccer team in the same Olympiad, which seemed more focused on making political and social statements than on competing (they won a bronze medal). I don’t think he would have liked how the International Olympics Committee loosened its rules and thus let athletes jump from one country to another. He would have said, in his caustic way, that a runner who is too slow to make the Jamaican team cannot just join the Czechs or the Taiwanese or the Uruguayans. One more Olympic example: Young surely would have disapproved of opening up the Games to professionals. NBA stars taking an easy gold medal (as Kevin Durant, Bam Adebayo et al. did last month) would have drawn his scorn. It was, by the way, an all-black team, utterly lacking in diversity.

He surely would have made his views known regarding the only-black-lives-matter movement and its deleterious effect on American sports over the last 18 months. I refer to athletes kneeling before the start of baseball, football and basketball games to protest perceived racial injustice, claiming victimhood, abjuring the flag and related in-your-face actions. (It all began with the San Francisco 49ers’ Colin Kaepernick in 2016.) Young would have been at his vituperative best in bringing to heel these one-dimensional jocks. LeBron James should be thankful that Young is no longer around because if he were, he would have pointed out the shameless hypocrisy of King James and other NBA players. (In October 2019, James opined that Houston Rockets GM Daryl Morey, who had tweeted in support of Hong Kong protesters, “wasn’t educated” and thereby jeopardized relations between China and the NBA. As if freedom of speech was less important than keeping the money flowing to James and his buds! James, whose career earnings are now close to $1 billion, is fond of talking about what a hard life he has lived.)

I am quite certain Young would disapprove of the NFL playing the black national anthem along with the Star Spangled Banner before games as commissioner Roger Goodell recently said would happen this season—and presumably will continue in perpetuity. He would have pointed to declining attendance and TV ratings in the major pro sports and how alumni of many universities are aghast at the demands made by black student-athletes—“change this policy, get rid of that tradition, tear down those statues and erect some we find more palatable,” and so forth. He would have informed them, none too gently, that alienating their fans is a risky matter. It can have repercussions. Fans who leave tend not to come back.

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