The Smell of Cabbage in the Hallway
Stanley Woodward, Jack Mann, and the creation of modern sports journalism
Red Smith, then a new columnist at the New York Herald-Tribune, was part of the sports department’s coverage of the 1945 World Series.
At the pre-series meeting, Smith asked sports editor Stanley Woodward what he should write about.
“Write about the smell of cabbage in the hallway,” Woodward said.
According to his biographer, Ira Berkow, that assignment became one of Smith’s lodestones throughout a career in which he was widely considered one of the country’s greatest sports columnists.1
It’s wistful, it’s delightful, it’s a bit contrarian. It’s what a great columnist can and should deliver readers.
The 1940s-1960s were a pivotal moment in sports journalism. It was not far removed from the “GeeWhiz” era, from a time when the profession existed for the express purposes of promoting sport as a viable pasttime and celebrating home team successes.
How did we get from there to our current, more professional era of sports media? I’m fascinated and kind of obsessed with that question. The sociologist in me knows that norms, practices and roles don’t just come out of nowhere. So where did these changes come from?
The history of sports journalism is often told as a story of writers. But it was editors who made the decisions and directed writers and columnists. Sports journalism evolved because editors began changing their expectations of sports coverage, empowering reporters and columnists to apply traditional journalistic principles to sports coverage.
The two editors I’m focusing on here are Stanley Woodward and Jack Mann.
Woodward was the sports editor of the New York Herald-Tribune from 1938-1948 and from 1959-1962 and is widely viewed as one of the most influential sports editors in history.2 Mann worked and wrote at a number of sports, but for our purposes here, he was the sports editor at Newsday from 1960-1962.3 Mann’s department was kind of like the Velvet Underground of sports journalism — a small number of people worked there, but everyone who worked there became a star.4
Through reading contemporary accounts and memories, there are three overarching ways Woodward and Mann helped lead changes in sports journalism: no more “godding up” of athletes; insisting on modern writing and reporting; and a certain ‘wink and a nod’ irreverence.
No “Godding Up” Athletes
“When a sports writer stops making heroes out of athletes, it’s time to get out of the business.”
To start with, we have to address The Grantland Rice Effect.
Rice was the most famous and influential American sports writer up to that point, even if he was a bit problematic.5 Rice, who wrote that quote above, was the leader of the “Gee Whiz” school of sports journalism that unabashedly celebrates the heroics of athletes. As Lee Congdon wrote, Rice had “A conviction that great athletes were actors in a drama as heroic and meaningful as that of the ancient Greeks … He preferred to uphold their (and by extension our) nobler rather than our base selves.”
So you the “Gee Whiz” school (Gee Whiz, aren’t these ballplayers neato!) and on the other side you had the “Aww Nuts” school led by Ring Lardner and Damon Runyon, which in Congdon’s words viewed athletes as deeply flawed individuals. (Aww Nuts, these fellows are all corrupt!”)
Woodward and Mann changed that by insisting that their writers cover athletes (and sports) as they really were.
After Red Smith wrote a particular love poem of a column about Joe DiMaggio, Woodward chewed him out:
“You’re not writing about deities. Stop godding up the athletes.”
George Vecsey, a reporter on Mann’s staff at Newsday, wrote about his editor’s influence on his staff in his 1989 memoir, A Year in the Sun:
Was Joe DiMaggio the perfect warrior, so often fawned upon by city columnists, or was there something empty and aloof at the core? Seek him out, ask him some questions. Was Mickey Mantle a courageous hero, or was he also a gruff rustic who cursed at fans and reporters and sometimes showed up for work hungover? Hang out by his locker and find out.
How did the editors encourage this?
As Mann told Dick Schapp of Newsweek, “By reporting.”
Modern Writing and Reporting
Let’s start with the writing, because it takes us back to Grantland Rice. You’re probably familiar with this:
Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore their names are Death, Destruction, Pestilence, and Famine. But those are aliases. Their real names are: Stuhldreher, Crowley, Miller and Layden. They formed the crest of the South Bend cyclone before which another fighting Army team was swept over the precipice at the Polo Grounds this afternoon as 55,000 spectators peered down upon the bewildering panorama spread out upon the green plain below.
Which, OK. Unquestionably great writing, right?
But, like, if you picked up the paper hoping to find out who won the Notre Dame-Army game, Rice is making you work for it.
“Even such colossi of our craft as Grantland Rice … did not tell me plainly,” Woodward wrote in his book, Sports Page.
Of course the problem wass less Rice and more the legions of sports writers who tried to write like him without his talent.
Woodward pushed his own writers to be clear in their writing.
“The writers of the period which some have called the “Golden Era of Sport” wallowed in jargon, florid phraseology and mixed figures. … It was an era of make-believe in which everything was super-colossal and the sports writers waived exact description in favor of the Homeric.”
Vecsey remembered Mann typing up memos to his staff with cliche phrases they were no longer allowed to use, including “fray, tilt, donnybrook, stanza, heat, canto, chapter, merman, natatore, condermen, hurler, twirler, netmen, hardwood, circuit clout, twin lining, keggler, and so on, and on.”
Mann wrote:
“Maybe it isn’t possible to put out a sports section without this kind of drivel.
Certainly it hasn’t even been done.
But let’s try, anyway.”
Of course, the basis for all good newspaper writing is good reporting. And Woodward and Mann preached it to their staffs. Woodward insisted that all sports writers spend two years as cityside reporters covering news before coming to sports. It paid off, as his staff at the Herald-Tribune broke the story in 1948 that the St. Louis Cardinals had attempted to boycott a series with the Brooklyn Dodgers because they didn’t want to be on the same field as Jackie Robinson.6
Mann also instilled in his writers a respect for reporting, which allowed the so-called Kiddie Corps of Newsday to stand out. Vecsey remembered:
We felt ourselves part of the Red Guard of sports journalism, formulating what we thought were new approaches - asking questions, relying on quotes, writing long profiles that focused more on the psychological than the technical
Wink and a Nod Irreverence
It may not be the best headline in newspaper history.7 But it’s on the short list.
Stanley Issacs wrote a column about the timekeepers at a local track meet. Mann wrote the headline: These are the souls that time men’s tries.
The headline got its own byline, with a note: “Frankly there is an ulterior motive to this story. Sports Editor Jack Mann has waited nine years to write the headline …)
Reading about Mann’s time at Newsday, and there are real old-school Deadspin or current Defector vibes. It’s giving “we know this is sports, so we’re gonna have a little fun with this here section.”
Mann’s staff at Newsday was profiled by Dick Schapp in Newsweek in early 1961, and Schapp captured this mindset. “Mixing irony, satire, and solid reporting with liberal grains of salt,” Schapp wrote, “the (Newsday) sports section seeks to skip past the publicity handout and the pet phrase and concentrate instead on the heroic villain, the villainous hero, the dramatic incident.”
Woodward, in his book Sports Page, referred to newspaper ownership as “The Walking Dead” and mocked the so-called defenders of the Newspaper Tradition.
They revere the Holy Cows. They mistrust anything new. In short, they are the bulwarks of our profession, and coupled with the older traditionalists, they keep the craft from advancing. …
When the enterprising sports editor runs up against an official obstacle he should, for the benefit of his newspaper, walk around it. If the oak tree planted by grandpa now blocks off the front door, you can always go out through the kitchen, can’t you?
Don’t listen to the old gentleman who have rules of thumb to offer, unless it’s a question of getting fired. Do anything you think is good. Don’t get in a rut. Do something new at least once a week.
It’s worth noting that both of these editors who had a huge influence on the development of modern sports journalism came from underdog papers and sections in the New York market. They weren’t The Times.
The Herald-Tribune had a staff that was about half the size of The Times, and Woodward felt that sting a lot. Newsday was still a relatively new paper when Mann took over, and it was a suburban Long Island paper, not a Big City paper.
But that’s often where change comes from. From the margins. From the underdogs.
This post comes from my presentation at the 2024 IACS Summit on Communication and Sport.
Funny aside - Woodward wasn’t the biggest Smith fan at that time, as he was new to the paper. So there’s a world in which you can imagine this assignment not being meaningful but dismissive. “Get the smell of the cabbage in the hallway, IDK”
He’s also the second most famous Woodward in journalism history.
Mann’s hiring came just a few years after Newsday won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service Journalism. That was a real “Hey Mr. Arnstein Here I Am!” moment for the paper, and its post-Pulitzer growth included increased sports coverage.
Not really, just like Brian Eno’s famous quote about everyone who bought the Velvet Underground’s album forming a band isn’t really the case either. But Mann’s Newsday staff did feature Stanley Issacs, George Vecsey, Steve Jacobson, and a number of other future big timers.
Rice’s grandfather fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War under general Nathaniel Bedford Forrest, the first Grand Wizard of the KKK. Forrest was a hero to the young Rice throughout his life.
This feels like it could be the first true sports “scoop," in that it’s a breaking news about something a team/league did not want reported on.
“Headless Body Found in Topless Bar” forever wins.
As someone who has only recently begun spending a lot of time with these guys, I am so glad to have found this post. It puts a lot of things together for me. In the 60s and 70s at least, Newsday routinely has sports coverage that is head-and-shoulders above what else was coming out, in depth and sometimes in style. Now I know who to thank.
I also adore some of the older stuff, in the early 1900s, cresting, I think, in the 1920s. The other day I found a Reds-Giants game recap from 1920 that used the phrases "lese majeste" and "pasarangs." I have Google, so these were fun-if-weird Easter eggs for me, but how were newspaper readers in 1920 expected to understand such Hellenic-style jokes?