Earl Warren and the sports pages
A deep dive into the origin of the most famous quote about sports journalism.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before …
There’s a quote attributed to Earl Warren, the former chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States: “I always turn to the sports section first. The sports page records people’s accomplishments; the front page has nothing but man’s failures.”
You’ve heard that before. I wrote that very paragraph in my dissertation, and then on the OG Sports Media Guy site.
It’s one of the most famous quotes about sports journalism. Back when the Newseum1 was open, that quote was literally carved into the wall.
One of my central articles of faith is that that quote is incredibly telling about how we think about sports journalism. It’s used to celebrate sports journalism, but it’s just as easy to read it as limiting the profession to being the cheerleading toy department critics often accuse it of being.
So yeah, that quote is important to the work I’m doing.
Which is why the following paragraph stopped me in my tracks a few weeks ago:
The sports page was an exciting place to work for several reasons. Tonto Coleman, former czar of the Southeastern Conference, has summed it up best: “I turn to the front pages of my newspaper to read about men’s failures. I turn to the sports pages to read about their triumphs.”
James Michener wrote that in 1976, in his book Sports In America.
I’m sorry, what?
The quote about turning to the sports page to read men’s triumphs, a foundational quote that frames my thinking and writing about my life’s work, came not from the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court but some guy named Tonto?
I had to do some digging.
It’s a trip that took me down rabbit holes of newspaper archives, library databases, Google Scholar, blogs, and linguist listservs, and wound up being a fun, fascinating journey into one of the most famous quotes about sports journalism
OK, first things first.
Tonto Coleman, who has one of the best names I’ve ever heard in sports, was the head football coach at Abilene Christian University for five seasons. He was also an assistant at Florida and Georgia Tech before he was hired as the SEC Commissioner in 1966. It’s kind of crazy to think that his career path went from assistant coach at Georgia Tech to major conference commissioner. The 60s were a hell of a time.
Anyway, I found no other reference to him saying the thing about the sports pages. Michener doesn’t include a citation or anything to the quote — it’s presented as almost common knowledge. You know, it’s what ol’ Tonto used to say.
Michener does have a short works cited section at the start of his book, which is a collection of essays about sports in the 1970s that’s advertised as “explosive” but isn’t really that explosive, but as far as I could find, none of the listings included Coleman’s quote.
Let’s start with the Warren quote, as presented.
I always turn to the sports section first. The sports page records people’s accomplishments; the front page has nothing but man’s failures.
That quote, as widely cited, comes from the July 22, 1968 edition of Sports Illustrated. A young Mark Spitz was on the cover of that issue, a picture of him popping out of the water mid stroke in advance of that summer’s Olympics in Mexico City where he’d win the first two of his nine lifetime gold medals.
Ironically for Warren’s quote, the cover also had a banner across the top right corner: “The Black Athlete, Part 4.” This referred to The Black Athlete: a Shameful Story, a five-part series by Jack Olsen that critically examined how black athletes were treated in American sports.
Warren’s quote appeared in “They Said It.” Those of us of a certain age remember this fondly, but it’s likely the young folks reading this don’t have the context. “They Said It” was a part of Sports Illustrated’s front of book section called “Scorecard,” which consisted of briefs, notes, and other short pieces from that week in sports. It was a notable quote from that week in sports.
Remember, this was the age of media scarcity. The only sports news fans were getting were from their local newspapers or the daily local newscast. So Sports Illustrated was the way that fans got the types of news, quotes, and fun stories that are all over digital and social media these days.
This is where Warren’s quote appeared. It was a little breakout box with the quote and the person’s name.
The thing is, as printed in the magazine, there was no context for the quote. It doesn’t say where Warren said this, if it was in a speech, a court decision, a conversation with a reporter, anything like that.
To find the source of the Warren quote, I went digging on the internet and found myself on an archived version of Linguist List, which is run by the Indiana University2 Department of Linguistics, and whose aim is “to provide a forum where academic linguists can discuss linguistic issues and exchange linguistic information.”
On that thread, Barry Popik — a well-known etymologist3 — traced the history of the quote as he could find it.
Popik’s research found that a number of people throughout history have said similar things in print. There’s even one reference to Teddy Rosevelt saying it, although that’s dubious. Honestly? I’m surprised no one claimed Mark Twain said it.
Anyway, here’s the story: There are two published versions of Warren’s quote pre-Sports Illustrated. The first came in the St. Petersburg Times on Oct. 7, 1967 in a story by Drew Pearson:
For the first time in 14 years, Washington’s No. 1 baseball fan is not able to watch the entire World Series. He is tied up on the Supreme Court. …
Most people connect Earl Warren with school desegregation or complicated legal decisions. But he has a secret sideline—sports. He reads the sport pages in the morning before he reads the front page headlines because, he says, “The front page advertises man’s failures; the sports pages report men’s achievements.”
The next came in the July 9, 1968 edition of the Omaha World-Herald, although it was written by Jerome Holtzman, the legendary Chicago Sun-Times sports columnist4.
Earl Warren, the retiring Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, revealed that he is an inveterate sports page reader.
“I suppose I’m like everyone else—I always turn to the sports section first,” he said.
Chief Justice Warren then added: “You know what they say. They say the sports page records people’s accomplishments and the front page has nothing but man’s failures.”
Given the timing, and the language, I think it’s fair to say that this is where the quote that SI made famous comes from. You take out the “you know what they say,” and you’ve got it.
The plot thickens.
OK, maybe not that dramatically.
But a month later, SI published a letter from a reader named William Clines from Los Angeles.
Again, from Popik’s post/blog5:
I am a charter subscriber, and this is my first letter to one of my favorite and more enjoyable magazines. In “They Said It” (SCORECARD, July 22) you attribute to Chief Justice Earl Warren: “I always turn to the sports section first. The sports page records man’s accomplishments; the front page has nothing but man’s failures.” I read the quote many years ago—and at that time it belonged to the late William Lyon Phelps, professor of English literature at Yale.
There was an editor’s note attached to the letter:
Professor Phelps, a sports enthusiast, tennis player, golfer, baseball fan and a distance runner in his college days, phrased the same thought somewhat less succinctly in his Autobiography with Letters: “The love of most men for sport and their absorbing interest in it cannot perhaps be defended rationally; it is an instinct going deeper than reason.... The fact that the majority of men turn first of all to the sporting page of the newspaper can be accounted for on the ground that the first page is usually a record of failures—failures in business, failures in the art of living together, failures in citizenship, in character, and many other things; whereas the sporting page is a record of victories. It contains some good news, a commodity so rarely found on the first Page.”
If you’ve never heard of Phelps, I hadn’t either. But he was an enormous figure in the public intellectual sphere in the early 20th century. Dude taught at Yale for 41 years, was one of the first university professors to teach a class on the modern novel (which angered his colleagues to the point he had to stop doing so to avoid media attention), and spoke to crowds as big as 1,000 on a summer lecture circuit. His Wikipedia page is a ride you don’t expect from a Yale English professor.
And while Warren had no connection to Yale, you can certainly see a world in which he read Phelps, and was familiar with the latter’s thoughts on the sports page, in which Phelps was the “they” Warren was referring to in the column by Jerome Holtzman.
Other instances of this quote that Popoik found:
“But I believe that most people who turn to the sports page first do so because there is so little fun anywhere else in the paper.” by Fred Russell in Good Times and Life of a Sports Writer in 1957..
“We hear criticism of the emphasis given sports by the newspapers. We hear slighting criticism of the man who buys and reads the newspaper for its sports section alone. We hear criticism of the “over-emphasis” placed on football. This criticism never disturbs me, for I believe that if there are enough men, in the welter and turmoil of the modern world, who find time to interest themselves in clean, virile sport, we can point to these men as unfailing signs of an ultimate salvation for us all. I would far rather have America be called a nation of sportsenthusiasts than a nation of money-grabbers. I would far rather have my boy study the sports section than the stock-market pages, or, for that matter, the lurid first-page stories of the world’s woes and sordid scandals.” - Fielding Yost, University of Michiagn Athletic Director in 1932.
It’s interesting that two of the early versions of this quote come from the 1930s. Along with everything else going on in the world at the time, this was still the era in which sports journalism and newspaper sports sections existed primarily to promote sport as a worthwhile endeavor.
At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if Warren said it first because Warren said it most famously. Honestly, he said better than anyone else, and he was the most famous person to say it. Tonto Coleman wasn’t about to have his name carved into the wall of the Newseum.
The fact that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court — the man whose court ended school segregation in the United States — liked reading the sports pages is a natural boost to sports journalists. It’s a reminder that our work can matter and is important.
Even if the quote also demonstrates the essential paradox at the profession’s core.
It’s easy to mock the idea of a museum dedicated solely to journalism — especially one funded by Gannett — but it was actually a really cool place.
Of course it’s from Indiana. I cannot escape IU people.
This is a phrase I’ll admit to not using a lot but one that I should use more often.
Among other things, Holtzman is credited with inventing the save as a baseball stat.
I’m citing Popik’s work to give him credit for digging this up. But also because the investment bank zombies that bought and sold Sports Illustrated’s brand over the years have decimated the SI Vault, which was one of the 10 best things about the old internet.
This is great and you're insane.