This chapter appears in Part 2 of “Going 15 Rounds With Jerry Izenberg.”

By Ed Odeven

“He didn’t use a velvet sieve like Red Smith, but he didn’t peel a grape with an ax, either. He was somewhere in between the two.”
-John Schulian

Jerry Izenberg has produced important journalism during multiple eras, working with reporters and editors who returned to the United States as World War II military veterans and chasing deadlines alongside men and women who came of age in the post-9/11 era.

Longevity is one thing.

Sustained relevance is another.

Izenberg hasn’t remained relevant just because of his age. He has a timeless gift for storytelling.

John Schulian, a prominent observer of Jerry’s career and one of the most distinguished sports columnists of the past half century, can properly assess Izenberg’s place in the pantheon of ink-stained newspaper scribes.

Schulian has retired from the daily grind of pounding out a column, which he did with verve for The Washington Post, Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Daily News and Philadelphia Daily News before a switch to TV writing and producing. In 1986, he joined the “Miami Vice” staff as a writer and later made his mark as co-creator of “Xena: Warrior Princess.”

But Schulian has kept a close eye on sports journalism, following the work of his peers and the overall industry. In 2014, he edited “Football: Great Writing About the National Sport,” a Library of America anthology. In recent years, he also conceptualized and edited Library of America’s “The Great American Sports Page: A Century of Classic Columns from Ring Lardner to Sally Jenkins” and along with his late co-editor George Kimball assembled its “At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing” anthology.

Izenberg’s work has always impressed him.

He noted that Izenberg “wrote during the Golden Age of sportswriting and now sportswriting is whatever it’s become, which certainly isn’t what it was 20, 25, 30, 40, even 50 years ago.”

In Schulian’s opinion, “Jerry was a terrific writer and he had a social conscience and broke a lot of new ground. Whether he was writing about Eddie Robinson down at Grambling or the emergence of the National Football League or big fights, he was there at a lot of epic events.”

Now in his 70s, Schulian can recall stumbling upon Izenberg’s work in one of E.P. Dutton’s “Best Sports Stories” anthologies, a 1944-80 project spearheaded by a New York Herald Tribune assistant sports editor, Irving T. Marsh, and a high school English teacher, Edward Ehre.

“That’s where I read Jerry first,” noted Schulian, who attended high school and college in Salt Lake City, Utah.

“(And) you didn’t have a lot of great sportswriting locally,” he added. “It was pretty slim pickings, so you read Sports Illustrated, which was emerging as a powerhouse, and then you got out-of-town papers in the journalism department at the University of Utah, where I went to school, and then you were left to your own devices. And when I read the Best Sports Stories there were rows of them … and I’d see stories that caught my eye for the way they were written. I was probably more interested in how they were written than what they were written about.

“Probably the first thing I ever read by Jerry was a piece he wrote about a World Series game, maybe the Yankees and Dodgers from ’63.”

Life marched on. Schulian attended grad school at Northwestern University in Illinois and served in the U.S. Army for a few years.

In 1970, he traveled to New York for the first time.

“I had a job interview at Sports Illustrated and one at Merrill Lynch because my old journalism professor crossed over and was trying to work for the Evil Empire and wanted me to become a public relations man with him, which I was extremely unsuited for,” he admitted with a laugh.

During that trip to the Big Apple, Schulian was reintroduced to Izenberg’s work.

“I picked up a copy of Jock magazine, and here was a story by Jerry Izenberg about how they used race to promote these wrestling matches at Madison Square Garden,” Schulian recalled. “You know, you’d have the blond guy against the black guy, the Puerto Rican guy against the white guy, or the Puerto Rican guy against the black guy. It was fascinating stuff because Jerry was looking at sports or quasi-sports, I guess in the case of professional wrestling, seriously, even though the stories were colorful and lively. But he was saying, Look, somebody’s promoting or taking advantage of the racial strife, if you will, or racial conflict to make a buck in the name of sports. So it was interesting stuff.

“That showed Jerry to be a thoughtful guy, a guy who thought about a lot of stuff. And then somewhere down the line, to go back to the Best Sports Stories anthology, I read his great piece on Grambling, which had run in True magazine.”

The piece he referenced was Izenberg’s September 1967 groundbreaking feature on Robinson’s college football team. Schulian selected that story for inclusion in the aforementioned Football anthology.

The article was a landmark piece of print journalism. The story expanded its reach with the production of “Grambling: 100 Yards of Glory,” a 1968 documentary that aired on WABC TV in New York in a less-than-ideal time slot for mass exposure (Saturday, 10:30 p.m.; Howard Cosell was the executive producer).

Six months after its debut in New York, the documentary aired on prime time and was nominated for an Emmy award. Izenberg wrote and directed the documentary.

Looking back on the two projects, Schulian mentioned that Izenberg’s characteristics as a journalist shone through.

“Jerry was a hustler,” he said. “Jerry had many virtues.”

***

Schulian said he can’t pinpoint a precise time and place where he first crossed paths with Izenberg.

“Sportswriters are interesting. A lot of times we don’t get formal introductions because we know each other’s work before we know the guy, and you read somebody and you say, ‘I might like Jerry Izenberg or I might like Red Smith.’ And the next thing you know you are sitting in the press box next to them, and you just sort of start chatting and that’s how friendships begin,” he said.

“I don’t ever remember somebody saying, ‘John, this is Jerry Izenberg, or Jerry, this is John Schulian.’We just knew each other.”

And they met sometime in the mid-1970s, according to Schulian.

What was Jerry like in those days?

“He was lively and he was full of opinions and he was great fun to be around,” Schulian said.

Izenberg’s experiences in the business and working knowledge of New York sports media were invaluable to Schulian when he penned the introduction for a reissued journalism classic, Stanley Woodward’s “Paper Tiger: An Old Sportswriter’s Reminiscences of People, Newspapers, War, and Work.” The University of Nebraska Press published the book in April 2007.

Schulian first spoke to Izenberg when he was preparing the introduction.

“Jerry worked for Stanley Woodward. That in and of itself qualifies him as a museum piece,” Schulian said of Woodward, who died in 1964.

Woodward was “one of the great sports editors of all time, maybe the greatest sports editor of all time,” Schulian declared, “and Jerry took his lead from Stanley Woodward. He pointed him in the right direction, gave him good advice and didn’t let him be a young knucklehead, either.”

That advice influenced Izenberg a great deal, as he’s mentioned on many occasions.

***

So what are the trademarks of Izenberg’s writing style? What immediately stands out?

“With Jerry, you always get a certain ferocity,” Schulian observed. “I think he’s pugnacious, but I don’t mean it in a Dick Young way. I just mean that he’s lively. He’s full of opinions, and you get a sense that he’s been there, that he knows whereof what he writes. He got close to a lot of important people in sports — Pete Rozelle, Larry Holmes, (Muhammad) Ali. He was probably as close to a lot of his subjects as a sportswriter can be.

“It’s hard enough work doing the job properly, but to maintain friendships or alliances or just good professional relationships can be difficult because a lot of times what you write in the paper is not necessarily what ballplayers or team owners or coaches or managers want to read. And Jerry was able to be tough and have real standards and yet he didn’t turn these guys off for life.”

Schulian then delivered one of the best lines that have ever been expressed about Izenberg.

“He didn’t use a velvet sieve like Red Smith, but he didn’t peel a grape with an ax, either. He was somewhere in between the two,” Schulian offered.

Izenberg also understood how to get unique, original content. He relied on instincts and common sense.

“I think a lot of his best work was probably done away from the pack,” Schulian added.

“And I don’t think you get a lot of views if you’re always hanging in the crowd and listening to people. I think Jerry was a guy who would grab Angelo Dundee and say, ‘Ang, do you have a minute? Can we go somewhere private and talk?’ I get the feeling that that’s the way Jerry worked, because that’s what I would try to do.

“Sometimes you have very specific questions that you want to ask, and you don’t want the whole world to hear them, because you are looking for stuff that concerns you, or that interests you, and that you think will interest your readers.”

***

In any interview about Izenberg, his longevity in the newspaper biz is a worthwhile topic.

Asking about his top attributes as a writer and pundit also elicits interesting responses.

To wit: What’s the greatest compliment you can make about his career and body of work?

“There’s so much to admire about Jerry,” Schulian stated. “I mean, look at him now: He’s long past retirement age, and there’s no quit in the man. He’s always speaking of the next story, the next book, the next hurdle, the next mountain to climb.

“And that to me really says a lot about him, that he’s still vibrant, that he’s still interested in these things … interested in writing about them and sharing what he’s learned and what he’s seen, and he’s seen so much. So I really, really just think the world of him for that — that he’s intrepid.

“When I look at my life now that I’m officially a senior citizen, that’s how I want to spend my golden years. I don’t want to just watch the rest of the world go by. I mean, there are days when I don’t mind doing that, but I always like to have something cooking, some project that I’m working on, and to see a guy like Jerry doing it is inspiring to me.”

Schulian didn’t stop there. He had ample praise for Izenberg’s work ethic and progressive mindset on the job.

“When you speak of his body of work as a whole, you just have to acknowledge him as one of the real progressive sportswriters of the 20th century,” Schulian added. “That he was a guy who didn’t get as much attention for it as, say, Robert Lipsyte or Larry Merchant or people like that, and those guys were great sportswriters. But Jerry worked the same turf they did, and he was just as progressive in his way as they were in theirs — that he was breaking new ground, that he wasn’t falling back on clichés, that he was fearless. He was going after things. He was daring to be different. He didn’t mind swimming against the tide.

“There was that pugnaciousness, I think, that he possessed that really served him well in that era.”