Before retiring from the Chronicle, Scott Ostler sported a SELL T-shirt at the Oakland Coliseum on Aug. 9, 2023.
Amaya Edwards/The Chronicle
I became such a fan of Scott Ostler when he joined the L.A. Times, I saved a few dozen of his columns from the early 1980s. They’re all brown and frayed now, but like the man himself, they haven’t lost a bit of magnificence.
And in case you missed it, Scott announced his retirement from the Chronicle this week. If you put aside his status as one of the two greatest humorists in the history of sportswriting, we won’t be missing a thing.
On the morning of Feb. 23, 1981, the Times ran a photo at the bottom of the sports-section front page, announcing Ostler’s promotion as a columnist. There he is at a typewriter — greatest of all inventions, can’t be stylistically replaced — sporting a thick dark moustache and a deadly serious expression.
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He looks like the most joyless man in America, and that’s always been part of his charm. He’s routinely delightful company in person, but if you bring up one of his columns, or a certain hilarious line, he doesn’t break out laughing with the rest of us, offering only a thin smile or nothing at all — as if he already has his next one in mind.
Until Scott came along, I thought sports-page humor began and ended with Jim Murray, who wrote for the Times from 1961 until his death in 1998. Like all of us who go back that far, and have spent lifetimes devouring columns from around the country, Murray ranks a hands-down No. 1. But it wasn’t always funny stuff with Jim; he knew history, politics, religion, international relations, the Hollywood scene, and when a subject struck him as particularly reprehensible, he delivered thrashings at once wicked, erudite and sarcastic.
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“Gentlemen,” he once wrote of the Indy 500, “start your coffins.”
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Scott took a different approach — and let me stress with great certainty that his gift of sustained good humor was unmatched over his 46-year career as a columnist. He injects high-class levity into every subject, and think about it: Do you know how difficult that is? Even if he’s stressing over this and that, hammering away at human frailty, he’ll give you a few laugh-out-loud moments because that’s just how he thinks.
Do his jokes ever fall flat? There must have been a few. Can’t remember any off-hand. And that really makes him a party of one.
I always found it instructive to know that Scott, like a handful of other great sportswriters, was a pretty good athlete. You get only tiny bits of information from him, but once you’ve put the pieces together, you wish you’d seen him play basketball, baseball, golf — probably several other sports. Athletes can spot a kindred soul over time, and that can be an invaluable connection when the interview topic isn’t so pleasant.
San Francisco Chronicle columnists Scott Ostler and Bruce Jenkins together at a social gathering.
Courtesy of Brad Mangin
Is this a catastrophic loss for the Chronicle? I had to check my driveway Wednesday morning to make sure the paper still existed. I’ve frantically contacted people with shovels and tractors all week, hoping we can fill in the massive cavern he has left at Fifth & Mission, but it’s hopeless. Can’t be done. So I’m left with a few lines, among the thousands, from those early L.A. Times pages:
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“All that is required for being a big-league manager is that you be breathing and not legally brain-dead, although those rules have been waived in the past. Historically, most conferences convened to select a new manager end with the pronouncement, ‘What the heck.’”
On struggling to make pure contact against a high-powered pitching machine: “I suppose the feeling is similar to hitting a golf ball just right, although I wouldn’t know. I only played golf seriously for five or six years.”
On finding solace in slow-moving Albuquerque, New Mexico: “The town does have a lot of modern touches, like the new intersection pedestrian lights that blink ‘Mosey’ and ‘Don’t Mosey.’”
Come to think of it, I could keep Ostler’s column going for another 10 years, just by calling up his best work. Instead, I join the Bay Area in mourning, because he’s still at the top of his game.
When I spoke to him by phone Friday morning, I got the sense that he’s frustrated over the radical downsizing of sports sections around the country, and that he’d welcome a change. “I’ve got a few book ideas I’m tossing around, and I might look into some sort of freelance work,” he said. “I’m for hire.”
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If that’s the case, he’ll be “for hire” for about eight minutes.
Meanwhile, the Chronicle’s Sunday print edition leaves me feeling a bit forlorn. I’ve shared these pages with Ostler since my semi-retirement four years ago, and I can only tell him this:
Not once, on any Sunday, was it anything less than an honor.
Bruce Jenkins writes the 3-Dot Lounge for the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: jenksurf@gmail.com Twitter: @Bruce_Jenkins1