Swipe at Musial’s reputation truly pathetic

April 5, 2011
By admin

I was in St. Louis last week trying to play a little golf in a spring that looks like it’s slated to arrive in Wisconsin around the time that the NBA Finals wrap up, which is to say in June. Late spring aside, I was startled to hear on the local news that a sportswriter had taken a big-time swipe at Stan Musial in an online piece that seemed to defy imagination. Finding something derogatory to write about the 90-year-old Musial would obviously be a Herculean task, and I was more than a little curious to see what it was, though still doubtful that it had any chance of being legitimate.

Murray Chass, a former New York Times staffer, had produced a blog that implied that the Hall of Famer wasn’t worthy of the Presidential Medal of Freedom that had been bestowed a few weeks previously. Naturally, I made my way to the hotel’s business center and went online to see what Mr. Chass was up to. (Using the courtesy title like that is a sardonic nod to his former employer, The New York Times. Mr. Hussein or Mr. Pol Pot always sounded pretty goofy to me.)

I’m not going to show the blog site here because, honestly, it’s not worth making the cyber trip, and besides, blogging something so outrageous was clearly intended to drive traffic to his site and I don’t think I will directly take part in that. The only reason I looked it up was because I figured I would likely write about it myself and I owed that much to Chass to at least have read his piece. I imagine there are now quite a few others who feel they owe something to him as well, though in this case I am not talking about anything so polite as journalistic courtesy.

But journalism is really the casualty here, since the piece itself is a pretty thin gruel designed to take a jab at one of the most beloved figures on the national sporting stage. When I first heard about the Chass flap while driving to a St. Louis area golf course, I thought it was an April Fool’s gag, though had it been such it would have been extremely ham-handed even at that modest aspiration.

Ultimately, what it seems like is the pathetic sleight-of-hand of a once highly-respected sportswriter who now seemingly has unceremoniously tossed a life’s work over the side in a squalid attempt to return to a larger stage by any means available. The Musial bashing takes the form of extrapolating a tag of racism from a well-known visit to a St. Louis restaurant by his former teammate Curt Flood a couple of years after Musial had retired. Musial had lent his name to the restaurant, and Flood was denied admittance, with the details differing in a couple of accounts. After nearly a half century, the incident was hardly news by any stretch of the imagination. The rest of Chass’s argument for Musial being something decidedly less than “The Man” off the field apparently relied on the similarly thin reed of an alleged Musial coziness to management in the earliest years of Major League Baseball players’ unionizing efforts in the 1950s and early 1960s.

Though I understood why fans were outraged in the St. Louis area, I didn’t see as much about the story in the national media as I expected, and after a few days I’ve come to the conclusion that the charges are so preposterous and on such shaky journalistic grounds that few want to take part in giving them wider dissemination.

I’m fairly confident that only one person ended up taking a hit to his public persona here, and it wasn’t Stan Musial.
T.S. O’Connell

(The ersatz 1957 Topps Stan Musial card pictured here was created by Keith Conforti.)

Homemade 1957 Topps Stan Musial

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