Keith Touch 'em All

My Life and Career at Sports Illustrated

ISBN: 979-8-3509-9800-9
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 252 Seiten

Reihe: Touch 'em All

'Touch 'Em All: My Life and Career at Sports Illustrated' is the story of Larry Keith and his fascinating job chronicling legendary athletes and championship teams, as a writer and editor. Keith began his award-winning journey to SI and the North Carolina Journalism Hall of Fame when he was 14 years old, writing a game account in a spiral notebook after listening to a Tar Heels basketball game on the radio. Less than a year after graduating from UNC-Chapel Hill, he was hired by Sports Illustrated, the pinnacle of sports publications. In his prolific, 34-year career, he climbed the ladder from reporter, to writer, to editor, to the head of three Time Inc. development magazines, to editorial projects director and won three Time Inc. President's Awards. Along the way, he encountered an actor stage-named Larry Keith and a bad actor who stole that name (and wound up in prison). Join him as you experience the excitement, challenges and, yes, a few disappointments, in this entertaining behind-the-scenes memoir about sports and the publishing industry.

Larry Keith is a former Sports Illustrated writer and editor, member of the North Carolina Journalism Hall of Fame, and an ordained Presbyterian elder from Charlotte, NC. He's a journalism graduate from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who wrote 19 cover stories, authored two books, been featured in multiple anthologies and taught at Columbia University. He created the editorial concept for Sports Illustrated For Kids, edited official publications for three Olympic Games and oversaw two more Time Inc. development projects when it was the world's leading publishing company. His prolific journalism experience also includes numerous appearances on radio, network television and podcasts. Keith and his wife Carolyn, a former SI picture editor, have four adult children.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Keith, Larry

Leseproben

Chapter 2

I Grow Up

I do not remember being born, which means I do not recall the sirens, whistles, cheers and firecrackers that doubtless greeted my arrival. Or not. I was named after my father. He always regretted that we didn’t baptize any of our three sons Larry Ficquette Keith III.

My parents were married in 1945, and I made my puking, mewling debut two years later. I was the oldest of three, preceding sisters Charlotte (1/21/51) and Debbie (3/6/52), who were born in Mobile. I don’t remember their childhoods. They were “girls,” after all. Dad said that Mother was in charge of them, and he was in charge of me, a division that would not exist in these “woke” times. (What a terrible expression, though I confess I did make a sexist faux pas in my 1971 Chris Evert story when I wrote she was “only a girl.”) He would take a belt to me, but not Mother’s daughters.

We three kids shared a room in our two-bedroom apartment on Oakcrest Place, where we moved in 1954. Granddaddy George Browder lived with us for a month in 1956 before he died in a Charlotte hospital. He had been a card-carrying member of the Sons of the Confederacy, though I like to believe this was based more on regional pride than sympathy for the Lost Cause. When we moved to Cooper Drive in 1959, I was in the sixth grade and got a room of my own. In later years, Mother revealed that the relocation was due to harassing phone calls she received. My sisters shared a room; they had to divide it further when Mammaw, Dad’s mother, moved in with us, again briefly, around 1962. She had been a 15-year-old child bride in 1897, when she slid down a ladder from her bedroom window to run off with a man who was 14 years older. How’s that for my down-home Dixie bona fides?

One of my earliest recollections is wetting my pants when a policeman stopped the family car while we were on a crowded street in New Orleans just before a Sugar Bowl. The policeman asked my father, “Do you want to be arrested?” Flash forward: In 1975, the night before another Sugar Bowl, Carolyn and I actually were arrested, taken to the police station in a squad car and put in jail cells after a banquet with Mayor Moon Landrieu (below, holding arrest warrants). It was part of the overwrought crowd control procedures outside Pat O’Brien’s bar, where we were trying to join Jim Lampley, a fellow Tar Heel who then worked for ABC. Sort of like what happened to golfer Scottie Scheffler at the 2024 U.S. Open in Louisville. He was in a car; I was in over my head. I was freaking furious afterward and called our local correspondent, Peter Finney, to ask if he could “fix” our predicament. It’s not what you know, it’s who you know, you know? Turns out he was old friends with a judge, so problem solved. The arrest record was ultimately expunged, and we got an apology letter from Mayor Landrieu. Mission accomplished.

I loved sports and reading, an equation that gave me the makings of a sportswriter at an early age. Also the makings of an editor. I once took it upon myself to make unsolicited changes, in ink, to a pencil-written composition a classmate had merely invited me to read. There’s a picture of me, from a long ago Christmas, holding several Landmark books about history. I love history to this day, especially biographies of presidents and the country’s founders. Over the years, I have also read quite a few writing collections by such notable sports journalists as Red Smith, Furman Bisher, Larry Merchant and Ron Green, as well as The Grantland Rice Award Prize Sports Stories. When I was 12, I asked for and received a copy of the Baseball Encyclopedia for my birthday. My interests were obvious. My best sport to play, surprisingly, was Pop Warner football. Though small, I started at middle linebacker on an excellent team that included future North Carolina Shrine Bowler Ed Atkinson at quarterback. Our second team QB, Neb Hayden, later started some games at Alabama under Bear Bryant.

While interning at The News I acquired a nickname: Beaver. The guys in the sports department started calling me that when I began working there on weekends my junior year of high school. I had won the state high school sports writing contest as a sophomore, you may recall, and that inspired my father to talk the sports editor, Ron Green, into hiring me. It turned out Ron, a wonderful man and writer, whom I kept in touch with until his death in 2024, had also begun his career in The News sports department as a high school junior. He was North Carolina sportswriter of the year five times. I always assumed (or hoped) that the name Beaver expressed an appreciation for my zeal to work. But I realize that in that male sports department environment of six decades ago, it could have been a sly reference to something else. Boys will be boys, you know. Another nickname came many years later when I was leading SI’s editorial projects department. I created so many major revenue programs, with such apparent ease, the salespeople started referring to me as “Just Add Water.”

Max Muhleman, another former News colleague, called me Beaver or Beav until his passing, like Ron’s, in 2024. Max moved to California in the mid-’60s to begin a successful public relations career, initially representing Dan Gurney and Carroll Shelby for the Ford Motor Company. I called him in March 1968 when I was in L.A. for the NCAA tournament. Carolina lost to UCLA, but I won an enduring friendship. Muhleman remained a dear friend, with loads of experience in pro football, including the marketing chores for Gary Davidson’s World Football League in 1974-75, the Carolina Panthers’ entry to the NFL in 1993, and the same duties for Charlotte’s NBA team in 1987. Without a doubt, he was instrumental in making the Queen City the major metropolis it is today. I miss you, Mully. You too, Ron.

In 1974, I proved what a sophisticated bon vivant I was when I mentioned to Max my surprise that Chris Hemmeter, the owner of the Hawaiians’ WFL team, hadn’t thanked me for picking up a big dinner tab. A few days later, Carolyn received a beautiful box of orchids, purportedly from Hemmeter, but more likely from Max. In 1975, Max learned that teenager Martina Navratilova of Czechoslovakia planned to defect during an exhibition match he was promoting in Newport Beach, CA. He gave me the inside scoop for the inevitable major story that would develop. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen until later in the season at the U.S. Open, so Max’s info was a little premature. But we always stayed in touch. He took on Rob one summer as an intern in his Charlotte marketing office. In 2005, he even “hired” me to try to sell personal seat license programs to the New York Giants and Jets. I didn’t receive any compensation (I’m easy), but I did get a set of impressive business cards, identifying me as Senior Vice President of Private Sports Consulting. All hat and no cattle.

Returning to my childhood, my dad was a huge baseball fan and often took me with him to watch the Class A Sally League Charlotte Hornets play. I bet we saw 25 games in the 1961 season, the year of the great home run chase between Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris. Maris finished the year with a then-record 61, and it was always exciting to hear the PA guy, usually Ron Green, announce their homers. Some good ol’ boy sitting on the first base line used to encourage the locals by yelling in his foghorn voice: “You’re better than he are!” I could sometimes hear my father’s amplified voice when he filled in for Ron, as our apartment and Clark Griffith Park were about a mile apart. In 1961, Dad put together a baseball team of neighborhood boys to bus down to Alabama to play a few games. I wowed the crowd and amazed myself as a second baseman, by going back, back, way back to catch a pop fly in right field. I never could judge a fly ball, and I was inconsistent on grounders. Plus, I couldn’t hit. And, oh yes, my father accurately called me “Scatter Arm.” It’s not like I didn’t throw the ball over the backstop on a play at home in Little League. But in that one game, I was a momentary star.

In late 1955 or early ’56, Observer columnist Kays Gary reported a humorous anecdote involving my dad and uncle: “PEOPLE YOU KNOW OR OUGHTA: Larry Keith has an evening radio show on WIST. The WAYS competition with a similar night-time show is Carroll Keith—his brother. Carroll insists he’ll build up a bigger audience than Larry. ‘Nobody,’ says he, ‘who is invited to a free steak dinner and orders a ham sandwich instead deserves an audience. That’s Larry.’”

My father for a while had a drinking problem, though not as severe as his brother’s. Dad’s was so bad that Mother once considered leaving him. Their relationship obviously healed, as a letter he wrote to us in 1980 or ’81 demonstrates: “Mary is just a GRAND wife, mother and person--is about the best way to describe it. The Lord surely blessed me when He sent her my way and I’m thankful.” As for me, I was careful not to overindulge, though it took a frightening lesson to teach me. I rarely drank while I was at Carolina. And then I learned how to drink, which is to say not imbibe so much as to suffer hangovers: headaches, nausea and throwing up. Here’s what cured me: While living in Charlotte one night, shortly after getting out of college, I steered my gold Camaro with BIG WAYS News written on the sides in purple letters from one location to another and didn’t. . .remember. . . being. . . behind. . . the. . . wheel. That did it for me. I wasn’t...