Former Yankee catcher/coach/manager Ralph Houk passed away yesterday at 90. A fateful train ride involving Houk forever changed the face of the modern sports page.
From September 2008:
There once was a time when sportswriter and athlete sat shoulder to shoulder on trains and in bars. The athlete spoke his mind, and the sportswriter sent the jock talk through a pretty stringent filter, hiding the athlete’s rougher edges–usually pertaining to booze, broads or both–from the reader.
That all changed 50 years ago on a Yankee train trip from Kansas City to Detroit, reports the NY Times. A donnybrook broke out on board between the Bombers’ hard-throwing, hard-drinking hurler, Ryne Duren, and coach Ralph Houk. Houk threw a jab and his World Series ring (remember those, Yankee fans?) ripped the skin above Duren’s eye.
As was protocol back then, even for the New York Post, beat writer Leonard Schecter turned a blind eye to the row. But Schecter was hammered by his editor at the Post when a Journal-American reporter came up with a scoop saying the Yankees were hiring private eyes to monitor players; how did you miss that, the editor asked. Schecter, under pressure, offered up the Houk-Duren bout to get the editor off his back and save his job.
The page one story read:
“Yankee relief star Ryne Duren and Coach Ralph Houk engaged in a bloody and bitter fight during the ball club’s pennant victory party Sunday, it was learned today.
“Houk won the fistfight, and Duren today wears its scars, including a gash over his right eye. The Yankee ball club is extremely agitated, and has put a platoon of private detectives to watching the players since.
The rapport between jock and scribe was permanently altered on that train, never to return to its old form. Think of Leonard Schecter every time you hear Jeter mutter a mindless nothing about “taking one day at a time.”