Dick Young (sportswriter) - Writing Career

Writing Career

Young joined the News as a teenaged messenger boy in 1937, and broke into the sports pages five years later. He eventually became the newspaper's signature columnist, known to readers for his insider coverage and acerbic wit. During the 1951 season, when the Brooklyn Dodgers were in the process of losing a 13½-game lead and the pennant to the crosstown rival New York Giants, one of Young's columns began, "The tree that grows in Brooklyn is an apple tree." This remark referred to the colloquialism "taking the apple", which was then used to describe an athlete choking. Previously, Young had agitated for the dismissal of Dodgers manager Burt Shotton, or "KOBS" in Youngspeak. Daily News readers knew that "KOBS" was Young's acronym for "Kindly Old Burt Shotton", and was not intended as a term of endearment.

Referring to the 30,000 attendance figure announced by New York Titans owner Harry Wismer, Young quipped, "He must have been counting the eyes." Describing a lopsided loss by the Brooklyn Dodgers, Young began his column, "This story belongs on page three with the other axe murders."

What would become Young's most famous sentence as a sportswriter did not appear under his own byline. While covering journeyman Don Larsen's perfect game in the 1956 World Series, the Daily News' writer Joe Trimble struggled to find appropriate words to begin his article. Young reached over and typed seven words into Trimble's typewriter: "The imperfect man pitched a perfect game."

A 1957 column by Young revealed to fans that Dodger teammates Jackie Robinson and Don Newcombe were no longer on the best of terms. The article contained several negative quotes from Roy Campanella (i.e. ""When it's my turn to bow out of baseball, I certainly don't want to go out like he did", and "Instead of being grateful to baseball, he's criticizing it. Everything he has he owes to baseball"), which were obtained during a conversation in Campanella's liquor store that Campanella had mistakenly assumed was off the record.

In 1959 and 1960, Young was a vigorous advocate of the Continental League, the proposed third major professional baseball league that was announced in the wake of the Dodgers and Giants leaving New York for California. The Continental League never came to fruition, but was instrumental in spurring Major League Baseball to add four new expansion franchises. This included a replacement National League team in New York: the Mets.

In 1961, it was Young who first suggested the idea of putting an asterisk on Roger Maris' home run total, should the Yankee right fielder fail to catch or surpass Babe Ruth in the first 154 games of the season, saying "Everyone does that when there's a difference of opinion." Though no asterisk was ever used, the concept stuck in the public's imagination.

Willie Mays, widely considered baseball's best-ever player at the time, was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1979, with 94% of the vote. Young angrily denounced the 23 sportswriters who had omitted Mays from their ballots, writing, "If Jesus Christ were to show up with His old baseball glove, some guys wouldn't vote for Him. He dropped the cross three times, didn't He?"

Young was a tireless worker, writing as many as seven of his "Young Ideas" columns per week, in addition to covering one of the New York baseball teams six out of seven days, for up to three daily editions of the News. He also had a regular column in The Sporting News from the late 1950s until 1985. At his peak, he was probably the highest-paid sportswriter in the United States.

The Sporting News described his career arc: "Though Young's best work was on the baseball beat, his most controversial and memorable writing came later, as a general columnist. He became the Archie Bunker of the keyboard, voicing populist rage." For several years after his 1987 death, the Village Voice ran a parody of a late-period Young column in its sports section, angrily railing at all comers underneath the tag "Dateline: Hell."