The Jim Murray Reader

His striking images, evocative prose, and hyperbolic one-liners have made Murray one of the most quotable and most celebrated sports columnists of the twentieth century.

Jim Murray, the dean of American sportswriters, entertained readers with writing that is so good and so funny that even people who don’t like sports read him. The Jim Murray Reader gathers some of Murray’s best columns from the height of his career and showcases the wit and the style that won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1990.

His inexhaustible talent and limitless range are on full display here: from the perplexities of tennis scoring (“a game in which love counts for nothing, deuces are wild, and the scoring system was invented by Lewis Carroll”) and baseball rules (“The infield fly rule is about as simple as calligraphy. It might as well be a Japanese naval code”) to Murray’s Laws (“The way to make a line move faster is to join the other one”) and many of his colorful profiles (“Richard Petty has climbed in more windows than 50 car thieves. . . . He wasn’t born, he was assembled and modified”). 

Jim Murray (1919–98) was one of the founders of Sports Illustrated and a writer for Time magazine before his tenure as sportswriter at the Los Angeles Times from 1961 until 1998. Murray won the Red Smith Award, America’s most prestigious sportswriting honor, and the Pulitzer Prize. Vin Scully has been the voice of the Dodgers since 1950, which is the longest consecutive service of any current Major League broadcaster for one team.