The tableau is a memory-fetcher: Leigh Montville, Dan Shaughnessy, Peter Gammons, and Bob Ryan – four of The Boston Globe’s Boys for All Seasons going back now near on 60 years – shouting out “Play Ball” in unison at Guv Fuller Field in Falmouth last Tuesday evening (July 22) to kick off a Cape Cod League game between the hometown Commodores and the Cotuit Kettleers.
Invited to Falmouth that night as figures on “The Mt. Rushmore of Globe Sportswriters,” they came to Boston in the late 1960s and early 1970s, one from Connecticut, one from New Jersey, and two from old-Yankee Groton in north-central Massachusetts, and over the following years played featured roles as driven editors and publishers steered The Globe overall, and its sports section in particular, into a future that, in a stunningly short time, featured local dominance and national prominence.
They came to play at a time when the Globe, seen as provincial, even sleepy, by national observers, was adding substantial journalistic muscle to its staff at the direction of a new editor-in-chief, Thomas Winship.
The sports department included familiar names on its roster in 1965, headed up by editor Jerry Nason, who joined the paper in the 1930s. Will McDonough and Bud Collins had signed on in recent years, and veteran beat reporters filled in Nason’s team. But it was a hire by Evening Globe Sports Editor Ernie Roberts that year that set the stage for the department’s move into the big leagues of sports coverage.
The newcomer was Ray Fitzgerald, out of Westfield in western Massachusetts, who until his untimely death at age 56 in 1982, was, along with long-time columnist Harold Kaese for a time, the adult in the room where eager young sportswriters gathered to talk shop and write their stories. A prose master with a light but targeted wit and a generous personality, RayFitz, as he was known, remains the patron saint of most of the Boys for All Seasons who worked alongside him in heady long-ago times for Boston’s teams.
I joined the sports staff in January 1967 after spending a few weeks in the Globe newsroom. I was a copy editor working overnight for the evening edition and in that role, I was a player in, and an observer of, the department’s move toward national status and, ultimately, the country’s best.
The first new arrival on my watch was Leigh Montville, out of UConn with a few years reporting for the long-gone New Haven Journal-Courier. From Day One in early 1968, he was strutting his stuff on his new stage, the Evening Globe. His job was to reflect on the people and events he covered, not to give the details. When the teams were at home, he would come back to the office after midnight, take a seat at the back of the room, and cigarette aglow on his lips and a Coke can on the desk, begin to type.
His form was third-person observant, a view from about the tenth row. His writing was crisply descriptive, and his bandwidth (hardly a word in vogue at that time) ranged from the epigrammatic to the universal. His words graced the pages of The Globe for 21 years and the columns of Sports Illustrated for a dozen more. Today, at 82, he is circling around ideas for another book, having already written well-received titles about Ted Williams, Babe Ruth, Muhammad Ali, Evel Knievel, Dale Earnhardt, and the ‘mysterious” John Montague.
Peter Gammons, of Groton and the University of North Carolina, and Bob Ryan, of Trenton, N.J. and Boston College, first worked at the Globe as summer interns, then joined the staff full time after their graduations in 1968, bringing with them an effervescence that was palpable: Something is happening here.
That “something” was Gammons’s and Ryan’s approach to covering athletes and the games they played, Peter with the Red Sox and Bob with the Celtics. They wrote daily, with a gusto that at first startled not only long-time readers but also the editors who placed their stories in the paper. They infused their copy with topical allusions from the pop world, from history, from politics; they cited lyrics from the likes of The Rolling Stones; and they wrapped them all in deliveries that oozed conviction on the printed page.
They also made the working space in the sports department a most lively place, to the point where one day a veteran reporter, Tom Fitzgerald, left his desk where he had been working, approached Peter and Bob, who were in a high-C discussion in the middle of the room about a suicide squeeze play or some other happening, and asked them, “Is my typing bothering you?” Or so the story goes.
Peter, now 80, left The Globe twice for Sports Illustrated, and, among other endeavors, had a long and notable career with ESPN as a celebrated baseball commentator and columnist. Bob, now 79 and a self-styled baseball man at heart who took his leave but once, to a local broadcasting channel for a few years, distinguished himself and the paper not only with the breadth of his talent in all his coverage and his appearances on ESPN and other outlets but especially with his all-encompassing and insightful coverage of the Celtics from the days of Bill Russell to a column this past Sunday on the recent signing of a one-time Celtics star and others over the years with Boston’s arch-rival teams.
These two journalistic phenoms of 57 years ago gave their mightiest to the best years of The Globe’s long life.
Dan Shaughnessy, of Groton and Holy Cross ‘75, was a summer intern and sports correspondent for The Globe covering, among other things, news about the Boston Neighborhood Basketball League before he joined papers in Baltimore and Washington D.C. for some seasoning. The Globe brought him back home in the fall of 1981 to take on the Red Sox and Celtics beats successively. While he has appeared on broadcast shows from time to time, Dan, at 72, remains a print guy who continues to relish the give-and-take of a columnist’s role of informing, and, as a side effect, often provoking, readers who relish giving him feedback with comments to his opinions online.
Leigh and Peter and Bob and Dan were not the only early players in The Globe’s resurgence 60 years ago. John Powers, Joe Concannon, photographer Frank O’Brien, Kevin Paul Dupont, and Lesley C. Visser, to name five, were also pitching in substantively by 1975. But they weren’t on the field in Falmouth last Tuesday night to trigger this surge of precious memory.
Tom Mulvoy retired as The Globe’s managing editor for news operations in December 2000.
