They don’t make ’em like the old days, says Shehan

It was at Boston’s ancient boxing edifice, the Mechanic’s Building. Heading the bill was a journeyman heavyweight named Phil Brubaker. I was there representing the Bangor Evening Commercial. My seat assignment was ringside, front row. I staked out my space, and between rounds of a preliminary fight I exited for reasons I cannot explain. When I returned, the chair was occupied by a total stranger.

“You’re in my seat!”

“Who says so? I’m Tom Shehan. What’s your name?”

Since that moment, we have been friends.

Tom Shehan has passed the 82nd leg of a journey that includes 50 years as a war correspondent in North Africa, Sicily, and several other historic fronts, founding The Horseman’s Journal, becoming the first executive secretary of Harness Horsemen International, serving as general manager of six different racetracks in four states, becoming a hall of famer in the Trotter’s Writer Corner and, more recently, becoming enshrined in Maine’s Sports Hall of Fame.

Beyond those fences, the Scarborough tenant at 6 Stratton Road finds time to regularly scan the sports horizons by reading six daily newspapers and fussing about the quality of today’s crop of aspiring Red Smiths.

Thomas doesn’t dance over what he reads and passes for what is now fancily ticketed as sports journalism.

“What’s going on here?” he asks. “Last summer, I’d reached for a morning newspaper hoping to read about how the Red Sox had fared in a certain night game. I’m reading the baseball story, one in which the writer for some reason alluded to a popular song by some rock group, and finally got the game score seven paragraphs down in his story. Now you think of it, seven paragraphs below the lead paragraph.

“What has happened to telling the reader the game result, where it was played, how the game was won and giving the contest score in the lead paragraph?

“It’s not just my view that the art of sportswriting isn’t what it used to be. Several years ago, two slick magazines almost simultaneously declared that sportswriting today wasn’t the quality they thought it was. One was Gentleman’s Quarterly, an article titled `The Death of Sports Writing,’ by well-known free-lancer Alan Richman, and second in Boston Magazine that featured a headline screaming on its front cover, `Our Sports Writers: Who’s good, who stinks!’ ”

Tom Shehan asserts today’s byliners in too many instances have not paid their house dues. They have failed to do a stretch of hard time. In newspaper parlance, hard time in the old days meant keeping the coffee fresh and hot, emptying the ashtrays, and keeping the gluepots clean and filled. Once a young sports-writing candidate had acquired a passing grade in the department’s fundamentals, he was allowed to sit before a typewriter keyboard.

It’s entirely different today, Tom recently told a men’s club, a group that corraled him for a post-supper speaking stint.

“Today, a young person goes to work in a sports department and within a few weeks this upstart is telling readers how the Red Sox should be managed, what the Patriots need to do if they are to win their football games, who and what the Celtics need to do if they are to win, and how much the Bruins ought to pay Ray Bourque. What do these sportswriting Caesars of today feed upon, for God’s sake? Give me, the reader, a break, please. Get some hair on their chests before thrusting their inexperience upon the experienced.”

What about the hostility toward today’s media?

“That’s a bunch of baloney. There was hostility and has been since I broke into the writing business more than 60 years ago. When I was writing horse racing for the Boston Evening Transcript, the late Walter E. O’Hara referred to me always as `that little sonofabuckfrom The Transcript.’ I was flattered, really. And I had a right to be flattered, when I look back at it now. The Transcript at the time only had a maximum circulation of 60,000, and that was for its weekend edition, but it was the favorite newspaper of the Boston aristocracy. The money crowd. O’Hara knew that and that’s why he was hostile to me because he was so interested in what I might write about his racetrack. Hostility – we had a lot of it. Lefty Grove. You never, never lift your pencil in front of him if he pitched and the Red Sox lost the ball game. Eddie Shore. The Bruins lose or finish a game tied and you stayed clear of him. Some of those guys back then would stuff a notebook down a writer’s throat if they didn’t like what a man wrote the day before.”

Obviously, the feisty little rascal who tried unsuccessfully to con me out of my ringside seat when heavyweight fights often provided Page 1 reading material has lost but a trifle of his punching power.

How did he grade today’s sports columnists?

“Fine. There are some excellent writers. Though perhaps no group today the equal in the era of Bill Cunningham, Dave Egan, Austen Lake, Harold Kaese, among others. Boston was a seven-newspaper city. It was competition at its best. Those guys were tough on each other. I remember when Egan racked up what was hailed among sportswriters as `the hat trick of scoops.’ In a span of three days, Egan wrote in advance that the Red Sox would fire manager Bucky Harris, and they did; predicted the football Boston Redskins, now the Washington Redskins, would fire coach Lone Star Dietz, and they did; predicted Harvard University, Egan’s alma mater, would discharge coach Eddie Casey, and did the next morning. All three of Egan’s firings were hotly denied but were fait accomplis after his columns appeared in print.”

Tom Shehan has the proper credentials to reflect on today’s journalism.

“I have been at it since leaving the beautiful hills and dales surrounding my wonderful days at Higgins Classical Institute.”

“I have been round long enough to be critical, and probably, truth to tell, a bit cranky. I’ve had twice as long in the writing business to be twice as stupid as the current crop of writers. But, nevertheless, I insist it does qualify me to express my opinion that today’s writers seem to lack the appreciation of what has gone on before in their favorite sports.”

At 83, Thomas still puts his fingers to the keyboard. A year ago, he edited and put out a 12-page tabloid for a Portland company that was holding a 25th anniversary celebration.

“Just wanted to see if I still had the old desire and urge to write. I found that I still enjoyed the experience and only wish I was starting the game all over again.”

Tempus fugit, Tom.