Read online at the
National Sports Journalism Center website
by Dave Kindred
This is about two leads, each perfect in memory, one perfect in fact.
We begin maybe 25 years ago.
My late, great friend Barry Lorge, then sports editor and columnist of the San Diego Union-Tribune, made a habit of quoting what he called the greatest lead ever written. He had not read it himself but said it was a piece of Fleet Street lore. He believed it came from a London newspaper's advance on the 1966 World Cup final matching England and Germany. With admiration for the lead's wicked wit, Lorge recited it with gusto:
"Fret not, boys, if on the morrow we should lose to the Germans at our national game, for twice this century we have defeated them at theirs."
More than a few times since, I have quoted that lead as an example of the sportswriting art, wonderful in its topicality, brevity, and sweet rhythm. The mystery was, who wrote it? Every year at Wimbledon, Lorge and I put the question to Brits.
No one knew.
When I brought up the subject a year ago, one of Lorge's successors at the U-T, the estimable Tim Sullivan, decided to do some reporting.
The best reporting is that built on persistence of the dogged, inexhaustible, obsessive-compulsive kind that causes a man to clutch at his haircut until, finally, he has the answer that allows him to lay his head on a pillow and, at last, rest in peace. Which pretty much explains Sullivan's method here.
He, too, wanted to identify the lead's writer. In March this year, he alerted me to a mention of the quote in a 2001 edition of the London Independent. There the sportswriter Ken Jones had written in lament about the snarkiness that attended Anglo-German meetings. Jones claimed the famous lead was written by Frank McGhee of London's Daily Mirror. Fabulous.
Except that Jones offered a version different from that in Lorge's memory. He said it went, "If, on the morrow, the Germans beat us at our national game, we'd do well to remember that, twice this century, we have beaten them at theirs." Well.
No self-respecting dogged inexhaustible obsessive-compulsive reporter would stand for that discrepancy in quotation. So, last month, there came an e-mail from Tim Sullivan with the subject line:
"Mother lode."
He wrote: "Dave: Our librarian's research connections have unearthed the World Cup column we've been misquoting. Proper credit goes to Vincent Mulchrone of the Daily Mail, who unfortunately neglected to use the phrase ‘on the morrow.'"
The legwork was done by a friend of Sullivan's – David Gaddis Smith – who copied the Mulchrone piece from microfilm at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
On July 30, 1966, Mulchrone's column began:
"If the Germans beat us at our national game today, we can always console ourselves with the fact that we have twice beaten them at theirs."
At every Lorge recital of the fret-not line, our imaginations suggested that the lead was only prelude to a learned, literary take on the characteristics that made England England, made Germany Germany, and made the World Cup a kinder, gentler way of settling differences between nations.
Instead, after that dreadfully flat lead, Mulchrone admitted he didn't care about either the game or a character study.
Here is his second sentence:
"And how's that for narrow, nationalistic hedging from one who has never in his life paid as much as half a dollar to watch 22 men disputing possession of the hide of a cow?"
So which do we prefer? We have the Mulchrone fact. We have the Lorge legend. I, for one, am reminded, once again, of a line from the movie, "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance." A newspaper editor says, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."
The best-case scenario is when the legend is fact – as in a John Lardner lead often quoted by sportswriters. I first heard it from Red Smith, who called it "a great American novel in one sentence." Red quoted it precisely, and I can say that because, happily for anyone who cares about writing, the lead is preserved in a new anthology, "The John Lardner Reader: A Press Box Legend's Classic Sportswriting." It's Lardner's best stuff, with John Schulian doing an introduction, Dan Jenkins the foreword.
We can forget Vincent Mulchrone.
But we should remember Lardner's lead on a star-crossed boxing champion:
"Stanley Ketchel was twenty-four years old when he was fatally shot in the back by the common-law husband of the lady who was cooking his breakfast."
Dave Kindred's latest book, "Morning Miracle," is an inside-the-newsroom account of two years in the life of The Washington Post. Now a contributing writer at Golf Digest, Kindred is a Red Smith Award winner and member of the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association Hall of Fame. He can be reached at inkstained1@aol.com. He can be followed at Twitter.com/DaveKindred and on Facebook.