By Brian Dunlap

Jim Murray was a fixture in Los Ángeles sports for 37 years. Starting in 1961, he wrote keen and stylish observations on life and sports for the Los Angeles Times sports section. He was seen at sports venues across Southern California—The Forum, Dodger Stadium, The Coliseum, Pauley Pavilion, the Rose Bowl—though in his later years he was slightly bent over.

Murray’s style was quick-witted with gentle sarcasm where he became famous for his one liners. John Wooden was “so square, he was divisible by 4.”

Murray picked the right city, at the right time, to be out reporting on UCLA basketball or USC football, the NBA and baseball. John Wooden was three years away from winning the first of his 10 National Championships, a year away from John McKay winning the first of his four National Championships as USC’s football coach. Three years prior, the Dodgers had arrived from Brooklyn and sported the hall of fame pitching duo of Sandy Kofax and Don Drysdale. And the Lakers were playing their inaugural season in Los Ángeles, having drafted future hall of famer and NBA logo, Jerry West, in the previous draft to pair with the team’s other young star, Elgin Baylor. Plus, now living in the home of Hollywood, stars even filled the stands. Murray had the words to capture it all.

Six months before Murray’s death in August of 1998, these words were on full display when he wrote about L.Á.’s newest rising star, Kobe Bryant. “Oh, they don’t claim he can heal the sick, raise the dead or make water into wine. They’re not blasphemous. But they do insist that anything that can be done with a basketball, he can do it. Michael Jordan, my foot.” It was observations such as this, that helped him to become one of only four sportswriters to win a Pulitzer Prize.

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Jim Murray was born in 1919 in Hartford, Connecticut and grew up alongside its railroad tracks.

“I was a depression child,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I was raised by my grandparents…The most terrible thing in life to me was to be out of work. I had seen what it did to people. To families.”

When it was time for college, Murray stayed home and attended Trinity College in the early 1940s. While he was at Trinity his newspaper career began as a campus correspondent for the Hartford Times. After, he briefly became a police reporter. This was before he joined Time magazine as its Hollywood correspondent in 1948 and helped found Sports Illustrated in 1953 and became its West Coast editor.

“I didn’t set out to be a sportswriter,” Murray said. “I was going to be Eugene O’Neill. Hemingway.” But, “I took away from my childhood that love of sports and never lost it.” Eventually Murray realized, “Sports is not only a universal language like music, but it’s a nice, safe topic of conversation.”

Along the way, Murray developed the ability to portray all aspects of sports, both the funny and the sad, from golf to boxing to his final column about horse racing at Del Mar. Speaking on Free House, the winner of the Pacific Classic, Murray said, “The bridesmaid finally caught the bouquet. The ‘best friend’ got the girl…the sidekick saves the fort.” Jim Murray was there, capturing all SoCal sports and beyond, his column long since syndicated. But when he couldn’t capture the action, like in 1979 when the retina in his left eye detached, when he returned, Murray wrote, “I would have rather been in a press box.”