“The Golden Age of Sportswriting” is how many historians and fans refer to the era following World War I, a time when sports stars were treated as heroes. But the public back then rarely got a 360-degree view of the players they worshipped.
Paul Gallico, a sportswriter with the New York Daily News during the twenties, later criticized the sportswriting of the time when he said that its daily function was to “peddle treacle about the baseball heroes and soft-pedal the sour stuff.”
But that may have been because, as legendary sportswriter Grantland Rice once advised colleague Richards Vidmer, “When athletes are no longer heroes to you…it’s time to stop writing sports.”
An examination of how Babe Ruth was treated in the newspapers reveals the extent to which journalists of the Golden Age softened the “sour stuff” on his behalf. That naturally leads to the question of how contemporary sports writers might have handled the Babe differently.
Babe Ruth: Looking back to my youth, I honestly don’t think I knew the difference between right and wrong. I spent much of my early boyhood living over my father’s saloon in Baltimore—and when I wasn’t living over it, I was in it, soaking up the atmosphere. I hardly knew my parents.
As an adult, Ruth indulged himself. He smoked (“He always had something in his mouth,” said a contemporary.) He drank heavily and ate gluttonously. He gambled until his heavy losses cured him. He got numerous speeding tickets. “We’d have been in jail more than once on that trip if Ruth didn’t know how to be polite to traffic cops,” said teammate Lou Gehrig after a barnstorming trip. He slept around while married, and is reported to have taken on an entire house of prostitution one night in St. Louis.
Courtesy The Daily Dot
However, much of this remained unknown during his career. By diluting the truth or by not telling all of it, the sportswriters avoided impairing Ruth’s image as a hero in the eyes of the people of the twenties. The writers did not feel this was dishonest reporting.
They were following an unwritten code best expressed by Abe Kemp, a San Francisco sportswriter in the twenties. who reflected on his experience with San Francisco Bulletin sports editor Hyland L. Baggerly: “When I broke in under Baggerly, the only advice he gave me was ‘Abe, I’m not telling you to do this, but if you can’t write something nice about a ball player, don’t mention his name.’ I pursued that policy for the rest of my life. I could have written some of the most scandalous stories of all time. But I didn’t.”
Most of the sports reporters subscribed at least in part to this unwritten code, which Kemp later termed his “Pollyanna” policy. Harold Parrott, another sportswriter of the period, spoke of his admiration for Frankie Graham, whom he considered the number one writer of the day: “He was so genteel. He had a code which he held to very rigidly. He never hurt anybody.”
The reporters knew the truth about the ballplayers. The sportswriters of the twenties were as close to their subjects as writers have ever been. They traveled with the ballplayers, drank with them, and slept on the same trains and in the same hotels. As a result, the writers were often very close friends with the players. That made impartiality difficult.
John R. Tunis, a sports novelist and freelance writer in the twenties, later commented on the problem: “I always thought it was just as well not to make friends with the players. When you become friendly, you inevitably tend to write something favorable about them.”
Hall of Fame baseball players Lou Gehrig and George Herman (Babe) Ruth in 1935. Ruth played his 22nd and last season with the Boston Braves. (Photo by Waite Hoty Collection / Cincinnati Museum Center/Getty Images)
Regarding Ruth, sportswriter Richards Vidmer had this to say: “I could have written a story every day on the Babe. But I never wrote about his personal life, not if it would hurt him. Babe couldn’t say no to certain things. Hot dogs were the least of ‘em. Other things were worse. Hell, sometimes I thought it was one long line, a procession.”
How does the modern sportswriter handle the revelation of personal details of an athlete’s life that may prove embarrassing?
Fast forward fifty years from the 1920s to a book that kick-started the tell-all style of sports writing in vogue today. Former major league pitcher Jim Bouton opened Pandora’s Box in 1970 when he released his book, Ball Four.
Bouton revealed many salacious and personal details about his teammates. What offended his teammates the most was that Bouton never told them he was working on a book while he was with them in the clubhouse and on the road.
It is not hard to imagine how Bouton would have written about the personal habits of Babe Ruth. Discretion in sports reporting has become the exception rather than the rule.
As Staci D. Kramer wrote in The New York Times: “The story goes like this ….
Two sportswriters are sitting in a dining car when a naked Babe Ruth streaks past, followed by a woman wielding a butcher knife. One sportswriter turns to the other and says: ‘I didn’t see anything. Did you?’ Instead of being written for the sports pages, the story passes from one sportswriter to another until it becomes folklore. Today, forget the sports section. The sordid details of Ruth’s naked sprint would be splashed all over the nation’s front pages with a full-color graphic of the railroad car in USA Today. Like it or not, sportswriting is no longer the art of writing about athletes as though they sprang from Zeus’s head and live on Mount Olympus.
Kramer concluded: “The double whammy of electronic media and tabloid journalism has rewritten the unwritten rules of the golden age of sportswriting. Instead, we have the Age of Realism or what one observer calls the age of the human side of the athlete, combined with the ‘if I don’t write it, someone else will’ school of journalism.”
Times have changed.
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This article is excerpted from the original, which appeared in Nine: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture (Volume 33, Number 1, Fall 2024).
