Boxing writer Bert Sugar died of cardiac arrest Sunday. He was 75. “One joke I heard him tell a million times was that he had been around so long that he covered Cain versus Abel,” writes Dan Rafael. “He never said whom he had picked to win that one.”
In the New York Daily News, Tim Smith collects stories about Sugar, including a gem about his trademark hat: “I think he showered in that hat,” Ed Schuyler tells Smith. “I’m not sure his wife ever saw him without it.”
Gary Mihoces collects some of Sugar’s thoughts on the art of sportswriting:
We used to sit at bars and tell stories; Toots Shor’s, for example, in New York. And we would tell—drink, yes, tell stories, yes, yes and yes. And the young kids, at which point I was one, would listen to the old timers. Now, the kids don’t go to the bars, I don’t care if they drink, have a Coke, but hear the stories. Don’t go up to your room to figure out on your laptop how many free flyer miles you have, sit and hear what it is you’re doing so you have a reference value. Sports did not start in 1979 with the beginning of ESPN.
