Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
Share Sports heroes meet journalism heroes
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Or
Sports heroes meet journalism heroes
Time for some reorganizing. JHeroes hasn’t had a “Sports” heading on its main menu, but there have been at least a half-dozen posts and pages over the years with baseball, football and boxing themes. Here’s a list of the date-stamped blog “posts” I’ve tagged with the “sports” category name so far: https://jheroes.com/category/sports/ …
Fictional s ports hero Frank Merriwell made it from dime novels to radio.
Those include stories of general-assignment reporters like Clark Kent and Lois Lane and their editor Perry White getting involved with crimes or scandals involving local sports teams (including copyboy Jimmy Olsen’s youth teams), and Daily Sentinel sports reporters bringing the Green Hornet into a baseball-gambling story, and another episode involving a football player.
Come to think of it, the Hornet even got involved with scalped and counterfeit Rose Bowl tickets once!
“Shorty Bell,” the young reporter played by Mickey Rooney in the short-lived series by that name, confronted a “Crooked Hero” from the boxing world. The world of college sports met college journalism in at least one episode of “The Halls of Ivy.” In that story, an Ivy College board member went after a student journalist who had inspired a campus football star to question his dedication to the sport.
Among radio’s other title-star journalist heroes, I suspect that Casey, Crime Photographer, the reporter-editor couple on Bright Star, or Randy Stone, columnist hero of Night Beat, and other fictional reporters on radio may have been involved with sports stories, but I haven’t found them yet. At least given the prominence of the sports pages in 20th century newspapers, it seems that should be the case. So far, searching RadioGoldIndex’sonline plot summaries for sports-related keywords have produced mixed results. One Casey, Crime Photographer result was intriguing, but probably not something to classify as a sports story: “A phony swami, guarded by a Senegalese boxer, claims to be able to contact the dead.”
Title and summary scans reveal a boxer and a rodeo star in the titles of “Bright Star” episodes, that Fred MacMurray’s reporter character once acted as a high school football coach, and that Irene Dunne as editor in chief once took over the sports page. There is also a development threat to a local ballpark. I’ll be listening, although my previous time spent with “Bright Star” left me exhausted by the sitcom sweetness of its 1950s’ “career-woman editor pursues oblivious employee” theme.
Columnist Randy Stone’s “Night Beat” with its late deadlines kept him away from afternoon sports events, but not from after-hours dramas involving a champion swimmer, a former football star pressured to kill someone, two brothers who compete as jockeys, and a prize fighter beaten up for refusing to take a dive.
I’ve already written about reporters as secondary characters in a couple of episodes of “The Adventures of Frank Merriwell,” a radio series based on dime novels and short stories about a (fictional) Yale sports hero. And when old-time radio went to the movies, it must have brought back more sports-journalism stories, although the Hepburn-and-Tracy classic “Woman of the Year” is the only one that comes to mind. In it, Spencer Tracy is a sportswriter and Katherine Hepburn, brilliant political columnist, needs to learn about baseball, among other things.
The one legendary real-life sportswriter on the “Real Life” menu-of-pages so far is Grantland Rice, mostly because someone turned his autobiography into a radio series. Could be others to add…
Note: This is a start… “Getting organized” is my summer 2025 theme. To be continued… and perhaps it will lead to the word “Sports” joining the main menu atop the home page. The menu is limited to one-word headings by the width of our current page template. If you haven’t noticed, some of those headings hide a lot — “Movies” and “Real-Life” in particular — both hold particularly long lists of sub-pages. Maybe I will expand the “Themes” heading and work “Sports” in there as a sub-page. Hmm. Any suggestions for other improvements in the menu, which appears as a drop-down on smart phones and across-the-top on larger screens?
About | Adventures | Comedy | Detectives | Drama | Editors | Movies | Real-Life | Soaps | Themes |
View all episodes
Time for some reorganizing. JHeroes hasn’t had a “Sports” heading on its main menu, but there have been at least a half-dozen posts and pages over the years with baseball, football and boxing themes. Here’s a list of the date-stamped blog “posts” I’ve tagged with the “sports” category name so far: https://jheroes.com/category/sports/ …
Fictional s ports hero Frank Merriwell made it from dime novels to radio.
Those include stories of general-assignment reporters like Clark Kent and Lois Lane and their editor Perry White getting involved with crimes or scandals involving local sports teams (including copyboy Jimmy Olsen’s youth teams), and Daily Sentinel sports reporters bringing the Green Hornet into a baseball-gambling story, and another episode involving a football player.
Come to think of it, the Hornet even got involved with scalped and counterfeit Rose Bowl tickets once!
“Shorty Bell,” the young reporter played by Mickey Rooney in the short-lived series by that name, confronted a “Crooked Hero” from the boxing world. The world of college sports met college journalism in at least one episode of “The Halls of Ivy.” In that story, an Ivy College board member went after a student journalist who had inspired a campus football star to question his dedication to the sport.
Among radio’s other title-star journalist heroes, I suspect that Casey, Crime Photographer, the reporter-editor couple on Bright Star, or Randy Stone, columnist hero of Night Beat, and other fictional reporters on radio may have been involved with sports stories, but I haven’t found them yet. At least given the prominence of the sports pages in 20th century newspapers, it seems that should be the case. So far, searching RadioGoldIndex’sonline plot summaries for sports-related keywords have produced mixed results. One Casey, Crime Photographer result was intriguing, but probably not something to classify as a sports story: “A phony swami, guarded by a Senegalese boxer, claims to be able to contact the dead.”
Title and summary scans reveal a boxer and a rodeo star in the titles of “Bright Star” episodes, that Fred MacMurray’s reporter character once acted as a high school football coach, and that Irene Dunne as editor in chief once took over the sports page. There is also a development threat to a local ballpark. I’ll be listening, although my previous time spent with “Bright Star” left me exhausted by the sitcom sweetness of its 1950s’ “career-woman editor pursues oblivious employee” theme.
Columnist Randy Stone’s “Night Beat” with its late deadlines kept him away from afternoon sports events, but not from after-hours dramas involving a champion swimmer, a former football star pressured to kill someone, two brothers who compete as jockeys, and a prize fighter beaten up for refusing to take a dive.
I’ve already written about reporters as secondary characters in a couple of episodes of “The Adventures of Frank Merriwell,” a radio series based on dime novels and short stories about a (fictional) Yale sports hero. And when old-time radio went to the movies, it must have brought back more sports-journalism stories, although the Hepburn-and-Tracy classic “Woman of the Year” is the only one that comes to mind. In it, Spencer Tracy is a sportswriter and Katherine Hepburn, brilliant political columnist, needs to learn about baseball, among other things.
The one legendary real-life sportswriter on the “Real Life” menu-of-pages so far is Grantland Rice, mostly because someone turned his autobiography into a radio series. Could be others to add…
Note: This is a start… “Getting organized” is my summer 2025 theme. To be continued… and perhaps it will lead to the word “Sports” joining the main menu atop the home page. The menu is limited to one-word headings by the width of our current page template. If you haven’t noticed, some of those headings hide a lot — “Movies” and “Real-Life” in particular — both hold particularly long lists of sub-pages. Maybe I will expand the “Themes” heading and work “Sports” in there as a sub-page. Hmm. Any suggestions for other improvements in the menu, which appears as a drop-down on smart phones and across-the-top on larger screens?
About | Adventures | Comedy | Detectives | Drama | Editors | Movies | Real-Life | Soaps | Themes |