Dick Young, RIP.Dick Young, RIP DICK YOUNG had a gift rare among sportswriters and rarer among other journalists: he could put a voice on a page. It was the voice of Brooklyn, the Brooklyn of the Dodgers, the Brooklyn of immigrants' kids who remembered the Depression and the war and who coalesced co·a·lesce intr.v. co·a·lesced, co·a·lesc·ing, co·a·lesc·es 1. To grow together; fuse. 2. To come together so as to form one whole; unite: at the ballpark. Once, when the Dodgers took a mauling, Young's account in the Daily News began: "This story belongs on page three with the other axe murders.' Tony Lewis never wrote a sentence like that, and for some reason wouldn't want to. When Billy Martin punched the marshmallow marshmallow /marsh·mal·low/ (mahrsh´mel?o) (-mal?o) a perennial Eurasian herb, Althaea officinalis, salesman, Young wrote: "The problem isn't that Billy drinks a lot. It's that he fights a lot when he drinks a little.' That was the Young style: blunt sentences that dropped a payload before you knew it. Even when he wasn't cracking wise, he was always in character and yet always unpredictable. His humor and anger, kindness and moral indignation, all seemed as quick as his typewriter keys. He was born in Manhattan in 1917. His father soon abandoned the family, and Young quit high school to work in the Civilian Conservation Corps Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), established in 1933 by the U.S. Congress as a measure of the New Deal program. The CCC provided work and vocational training for unemployed single young men through conserving and developing the country's natural resources. . He joined the Daily News as a messenger boy and within a few years was its trademark sportswriter sports·writ·er n. A person who writes about sports, especially for a newspaper or magazine. sports , covering the Dodgers in the glory years of Robinson, Campanella, Hodges, Reese, Snider, Furillo, Erskine, and Newcombe. He also married and had eight children. His visceral sense visceral sense n. The perception of the presence of the internal organs. Also called splanchnesthesia, splanchnesthetic sensibility. of right and wrong gave his writing its tone. He persisted in calling Muhammad Ali "Cassius Clay' for years, accusing him of draft-dodging and racism, yet became his friend--a lapse into amity am·i·ty n. pl. am·i·ties Peaceful relations, as between nations; friendship. [Middle English amite, from Old French, from Vulgar Latin *am he atoned for by feuding with Tom Seaver, Howard Cosell, Jimmy Breslin, Larry Holmes, and heads of assorted players' unions. His hobbyhorse was drug abuse in sports: he urged fans to boo Dwight Gooden this year when Gooden was due to return from a drug rehabilitation center. He must have known he'd lose that one, but he was the sort of man who is popular because he isn't afraid to be unpopular. His style was the voice of a New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of that was as American as you can get. |
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