Word: povich
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...Could Pierre Salinger walk 50 miles? In their cogitation chambers, capital columnists pondered such weighty problems. All but one of the columnists, that is. He climbed into his car one day last week and headed for spring training in Fort Lauderdale. Fla. He bore the improbable name of Shirley Povich and an even more improbable distinction. He not only writes sports for the Washington Post but is also the most popular and most widely read columnist in Washington...
...Povich outdraws such punditical heavyweights as Walter Lippmann, Joseph Alsop and Marquis Childs on their home grounds, and he does so against formidable odds. In the virile environment of the sport section, his first name can only be a liability. He is the only male ever listed in Who's Who of American Women, a distinction conferred upon him by accident even though his entry clearly and accurately stated that he is married to a girl named Ethyl. He is the only U.S. sportswriter who, after checking into a room with a colleague in a Tampa hotel, got flowers...
Level Approach. Povich has also surmounted a major hazard of sportswriting in Washington-the fact that he is fated to write so often about losses. He learned his baseball by writing about the Senators, who once spent 16 straight years in the second division. And though that team has since gone to Minnesota to be transformed into the Twins, their Washington replacement lost 101 games last season. There have been times when the capital's pro football team, the Redskins, could manhandle any of the competition. But all too often they would have been given a hard time...
...such circumstances, Povich has developed a refreshingly level approach to his craft. Other sportswriters tend to search out heroes on the field and to draft purple poetry about them. Povich sees an assembly of grown and muscle-bound men earnestly grunting over a boys' pastime. The sight gives him pleasure. ''You learn to detach yourself," he says. 'After all. it's only a game. You don't have to live and die every day. If you don't take it seriously, you can have some...
...Povich gets his fun by gibing not at the performing elephants but at the mahouts. One enduring and vulnerable Povich target is Redskins Owner George Preston Marshall. Well aware of Mar shall's reluctance to hire any Negro players,* Povich improvised tellingly and endlessly on the same theme. "There was considerable integration in the Skins' end zone yesterday," went one typical Povich column, noting which Negro on the opposing team had just crossed the Redskin goal line. When Marshall and his movie-star wife Corinne Griffith (they have since been divorced) took a trip...