One Summer of Sport, with Olivetti Lettera 32 Typewriter: A Pressman's Progress

When I stumbled across this New Yorker cover from November 11, 1939, by the Armenian artist Constantin Ivanovich Alajálov (left, 1898-1987), it stirred in me memories of my own one great and glorious sporting summer, the unforgettable English sporting summer of 1981. On one broadly sweeping assignment, I covered, using an Olivetti Lettera 32 portable typewriter, the Wimbledon Grand Slam tennis championships, the British Open golf championship at Royal St George's in Sandwich, the Royal Henley Regatta international rowing championships, the Royal International Horse Show at Wembley, the Admiral's Cup international yaching regatta off Cowes on the Isle of Wight, the British Grand Prix at Silverstone, the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Diamond Stakes at Royal Ascot and the Ashes Test cricket series between England and Australia. What made it so special a sporting summer were the historic triumphs and the notable manner in which they were achieved: John McEnroe winning his first Wimbledon by ending Björn Borg's reign in four sets, Bill Rogers downing the German Bernhard Langer under the Battle of Britain skies in Kent, the Husky oarsmen from the University of Washington refreshing my recollections of the Nile in the Ladies' Challenge Plate at Henley, the bogus Bond-de Savary America's Cup race on the Solent, with ballast of sacks of 40,000 Krugerrand in gold coin at stake, but most of all Shergar's last, breathtaking race on English soil and Ian Botham's cricketing heroics at Headingley in Leeds. English sporting summers are still the greatest annual two months of sport in the world, but in 1981! What a year to be there.

The wonderful New Yorker cover scene captured by Alajálov, of the bread-and-butter bourgeoisie sports writers goggling at high society blow-ins at the National Horse Show at Madison Square Garden in New York City in early November 1939 (the event was, after all, the official start of the formal social season in New York), is not quite how I remember the surroundings when I covered that irascible character Harvey Smith winning the Horse and Hound Cup on San Mar at Wembley 40½ years later. But  Press Tribunes dotted with portable typewriters beside rotary dial telephones with handsets were still our regular work benches.

No Press Tribunes while covering yachting in Cowes.

Travelling light and moving far and fast in a Renault hatchback, often on a daily basis, photographer Rod Taylor and I covered 15 major sporting events, from London to Sandwich, Stoke Mandeville to Sutton Coldfield, Sittingborne to Silverstone, Southampton to Northampton, Cowes and back by ferry on the way to Ascot, and Leeds to the New Forest. Typing stories on the move, finding places to file (while Rod found a means to develop and wire photos), I wrote 37 illustrated feature articles, many dozens of news items and filled more than 60 columns of newsprint (that's almost eight full pages) in West Australian afternoon, morning and weekend newspapers in the space of a 42 days. My Olivetti would have bashed out at least 74,000 words during that period. The only time the pace slowed was when we got caught in a downpour behind a Team Skol van carrying Emerson Fittipaldi's test racing car on a winding country lane outside Oxford. Back home, it was, I can now say quite unashamedly, difficult for me to choose one story to enter the Gilmour Prize for sports writing. The one I picked, about cricketer Ian Botham simultaneously stepping down and being sacked as England captain at Lord's on July 7, 1981, duly won the award, giving me the second of three consecutive prizes (which were to become four in all with my coverage of Ben Johnson's disqualification at the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games). The unsual Botham story was achieveable because, back then, TV networks did not dictate who spoke to the media, when and where - I had free and easy access to players and officials, from the dressing room to the Long Room. It wouldn't be possible to do that today, and sportswriting is all the poorer because of the way journalists are restricted and their raw material is regulated, dependant as it is on press conferences.

Notwithstanding all the pleasing memories that came flooding back upon viewing Alajálov's New Yorker cover, I was soon brought crashing back down to earth - and left feeling grossly inadequate - when I looked into the life of the sportswriter whose story in The New Yorker of November 11, 1939, provided Alajálov with the inspiration for his illustration. Thomas Sterling Costigan O'Reilly (left, 1905-1962) had an amazing sportswriting career, mostly in covering horse racing. He was certainly ranked up there with the finest in the business, and by no lesser judge than Red Smith. In a brilliant piece titled “Literati of the Playpen” in The New York Times in March 1975, Smith shot down in flames the claims that Sports Illustrated (1954-) injected “literacy” into sports writing and that Larry Merchant (1931-) started a national trend away from cliche‐ridden hero worship and toward “acerbic, trenchant iconoclastic reportage.” Smith was responding to an essay by David Shaw on sportswriting that “started on the front page of the Los Angeles Times and ran through the paper for 26 miles, 385 yards.” Smith said Shaw had suggested “that sports pages are better than they used to be because they pay less attention to the score than formerly and more to racism, drugs, sex, religion, gambling, psychology, cheating, dress styles and similar matters.” Smith described the marathon read as “tedious and uninformed”. Smith added that “with all due esteem and admiration for Larry Merchant, it must be pointed out that about the time he was learning to spell ‘is’, Stanley Woodward was putting together a staff on the New York Herald Tribune [that was] incomparably the most gifted company ever assembled in one playpen.” “Ruthlessly, Woodward scrubbed his sports section clean of camp and drivel and space‐wasting trash … Not that he originated excellence in sports coverage or was the first to appreciate grace and style and wit in a writer.” After mentioning the like of Paul Gallico and Westbrook Pegler, in his next breath Smith called up the memory of “Tom O'Reilly … Jimmy Cannon, Roger Kahn and the matchless John Lardner.” If Smith's word is not enough, let's add that H. Allen Smith wrote in Low Man on a Totem Pole that O'Reilly was a "superb" sportswriter.

An excerpt from Tom O'Reilly New Yorker story on the 1939 National Horse Show. 

In a tribute to O’Reilly in April 1962, syndicated sports columnist Joe Williams wrote of a conversation he had had with O’Reilly just before O’Reilly died. “I’m writing a book and much of it is going to be about our old sports department," O'Reilly had said. “How’s ‘Bedlam to Bellevue’ for a title? … It’ll either discourage all youngsters from ever wanting to be a sportswriter, or it’ll start the damnest stampede this side of Cecil B. De Mille.”  The book was never completed, but happily, by 1962, my mind had already been made up. I was going to join the stampede.

How illustrator Leo Hershfield saw Tom O'Reilly, when O'Reilly

was in the US Merchant Marine in the early years of World War II.

O’Reilly, born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on December 13, 1905, died of throat cancer at St Vincent’s Hospital, New York, on my 14th birthday, April 5, 1962. He was aged just 56. Less than three months earlier he had been filing beautiful copy from Caracas, immediately before going into hospital. He was still writing from his death bed, datelining his copy “Pillsville, NY”. By then he'd spent more than 30 years being recognised as, in the words of an obituary, “one of the wittiest and most popular sports writers” in the US. Williams wrote that “Tom O’Reilly brought competence, style and humor to any assignment. Since he had the Irishman’s traditional admiration for the beauty of the show horse and the competitive ardor of the thoroughbred runner, no one could have been surprised that this was the field in which his talent would gleam brightest. Tom professed to be puzzled by his increasing prestige and earnings. ‘This is the same kind of stuff I’ve always written about humans. Yet until I switched to horses, nobody gave me a tumble.’” Another tribute, from Kent Hollingsworth in Lexington, Kentucky, said O’Reilly was a “merry man” who “had a knack of arranging words on paper so others could share his lively interest in people and his amusement in their foibles.” Al Abrams, sports editor in Pittsburgh, said O’Reilly was a “big, gregarious, witty Irishman with red hair and a full-blown mustache of the same color [which he grew to cover an upper lip injury suffered in his youth]. O’Reilly wrote about thoroughbreds like a thoroughbred.”

From the 1939 National Horse Show that O’Reilly covered for The New Yorker, O’Reilly began by describing the “customary quota of opening-night mishaps and high spirits. Captain Robert L. Taylor’s Grey Horse Battery upset a caisson in the middle of the ring; Lieutenant David Wagstaff Jr, of Tuxedo Park, slid slowly down the long nose of his chesnut, Enterprise, when the animal changed its mind at the stone-wall jump in the Bowman Cup class; and I saw three gentlemen in top hats get into the Garden on grooms’ tickets.”

Tom O'Reilly was educated at Franklin & Marshall College, a private liberal arts college in Lancaster. After trying to sell soap to grocery stores, wheeling wet concrete from a highway mixer and shaving coconuts in a candy factory, O’Reilly joined his hometown newspaper, the Lancaster Inquirer, under editor Austin McCullough. He also worked for other Lancaster publications, the Sunday News and New Era. In 1931 he moved to New York, at age 25, and joined the then newly merged New York World-Telegram, where he worked alongside such outstanding mentors as Heywood Broun and Westbrook Pegler, while the newspaper remained liberal. When Roger Ingersoll set up the liberal-leaning daily PM in 1940, O’Reilly moved to that camp. He was also writing regularly for The New Yorker. PM closed in 1948 and O’Reilly became racing editor of the Morning Telegraph, a paper devoted mostly to theatrical and horse racing news. Just a year before his death, O’Reilly became a racing columnist for the Herald Tribune, working under John Denson. The Herald Tribune’s ad campaign at that time was “Who says a good newspaper has to be dull?” Certainly, O’Reilly’s writing was anything but dull. When the US joined World War II in 1941, O’Reilly volunteered for the Merchant Marine on the American South African Line, sailing from New York to the Suez around  Cape Horn and back under skipper James Hanley Kerr. This experience, with portable typewriter, on what O’Reilly called the Mulligan Stew, led to a delightful book, The Purser’s Pilgrim - The Adventures of a Seagoing Office Boy (1944), illustrated by the incomparable Leo Hershfield. By chance, it includes a character called Featherstonehaugh, and when I worked for The Irish Press in Dublin in the 1970s, we had a very fine racing writer called Brian Featherstonehaugh (it's pronounced “Fanshaw”, by the way). I'd developed an appreciation for the "literarcy" of racing writers years before meeting Brian, but I have to say it was somewhat heightened in Dublin. As it is now, knowing about Tom O'Reilly.