Rieder: Remembering two special Philadelphia sportswriters

It's hard to imagine, now, in the era of ESPN and sports websites galore, when we know pretty much everything about athletes and the social issues surrounding sports, sometimes more than we'd like to.

But there was a time when sports coverage was pretty tame, characterized by rampant cliches, straight game stories and little controversy – or enlightenment.

Then, in the mid-1950s, that all began to change. In the middle of the revolution was the sports section at an always-underdog tabloid called the Philadelphia Daily News. Presiding over the transformation was one Larry Merchant, age 26 when he started.

Suddenly things had a different flavor. Gone was the florid prose and the athlete worship. The Daily News stories humanized the players. There was no cheering in the press box. The Daily News would take on management and write about those formerly off-limits social topics. And good writing was the coin of the realm.

Merchant, best known for his many years as a mainstay on HBO Boxing, attracted some formidable talent to that sports section. And in the past week, two of the very best of those innovative sportswriters died. Their careers would take very different trajectories.

Stan Hochman would go on to write for the Daily News for 55 years, most of them as a sports columnist, and a great one.

Sandy Grady, who moved on after several years to join the now-defunct Philadelphia Bulletin, changed directions in mid-course and became a fine political columnist, returning to the Daily News after the Bulletin folded. In 1996, Grady became a charter member of Paste BN's Board of Contributors.

They were both special.

In his Grady obit in the Daily News, John F. Morrison, who worked with Grady at both the Daily News and the Bulletin, wrote, "Many a youngster with the sounds of newspaper presses thundering n their dreams had one great wish: They wanted to be a Sandy Grady when they grew up."

Here's how good Grady was: Back in the dark, primitive time before the Internet, when they didn't have links, I actually saved hard copies of some of his pieces, notably the one on the old Phillie Wes Covington. Still have it, still love it.

On csnetphilly.com, Ray Didinger, once a pretty formidable Philly sportswriter in his own right, wrote, "Stan Hochman was the ideal sports columnist. He was smart, he was tenacious, he was funny and, oh, how he could write. On the day after a big event, every Philadelphia fan knew Stan's column was a must read."

Merchant discovered how great Grady was when Merchant was an editor (and one-man sports staff) in North Carolina and Grady was writing for the Charlotte News. If I'm ever in a place where I can hire, Merchant thought, Grady gets the first call. When Merchant took over in Philly, that's what happened.

Grady, who covered the Phillies, "was an instant star," Merchant remembers. "He wrote so beautifully, so gracefully. He was like a Southern novelist."

When the Southern novelist was lured away by the much-bigger Bulletin a few years later, Merchant remembered a couple of very impressive columns that a friend had sent him written by a guy in San Bernardino, Calif. That would be Hochman, who succeeded Grady on the baseball beat.

"Stan was as good as it gets as a reporter and writer," Merchant says. "He was fair and very fast. He would just sit down and write, and it was gold-plated. You never had to move a word."

Merchant sees both Grady and Hochman as part of the New Journalism movement popularized by such giants as Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese, which relied heavily on a narrative approach.

I asked Merchant, who wrote a must-read column himself, how he would distinguish between the two great ones. "Sandy was a lyrical writer," he replied. Hochman, he added, would simply tell the story, always in a seamless way.

So how did a 26-year-old editor come up with such a radically different approach to sports journalism? He read a lot of sports sections, and he began to see traces of something new and exciting in a variety of places, Long Island's Newsday prime among them. And the advent of Sports Illustrated and its team of talented magazine writers altered the equation. "The idea crystallized for me," he says, adding, "You had to tell more than the score."

One of Merchant's better moves was enlisting the paper's classical music critic, Jack McKinney, to cover boxing (Philly had a very hot boxing scene at the time) and the Eagles. McKinney turned out to be excellent. And he took his job seriously: He actually had a professional fight and knocked out one Alvin Green in the first round in Painesville, Ohio, in 1963.

I asked Kathy Kiely, Grady's longtime companion and a stellar journalist herself, what she felt made him stand out. "To me, it was because he approached journalism with the craft of a novelist," said Kiely, a former Paste BN congressional correspondent who is Washington news director of Bloomberg Politics, "He wasn't a fact spewer but a story teller. He loved characters. He had a healthy suspicion of easy sentiment."

And he was a man of principle. "When he found out the Phillies' black baseball players were staying in family homes during spring training because the ball club's hotel wouldn't let them stay there, he called it out – which didn't make him popular on his beat," Kiely added.

As for Merchant, now 84, he ended his 35-year run as HBO boxing commentator in 2013. But the man known both for his astute boxing analysis and his fearlessness – he once told Floyd Mayweather Jr. that if he were 35 years younger he would "kick your ass" – is still on the boxing scene. Merchant and Sylvester Stallone are doing a series of digital commentaries for Tecate beer in the run-up to the Mayweather-Manny Pacquiao championship bout on May 2.

And those Philly days? "I thought I'd never do anything as good as this," he says, adding with a laugh, "I may have changed my mind."