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Game over: the decline of sportswriting in Texas can be blamed on many things--the collapsing newspaper business, for one--but the real problem is that nobody's having fun anymore.

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The World of Perspiring Arts--to borrow from the masterful phrasemaker Blackie Sherrod-has lost its voice and maybe its soul. A mere fifty years after the golden age Of sportswriting in Texas there is not a newspaperman in sight who can write a decent three-martini sports column. These sorts of entertainments were a staple in the late fifties, when I was starting out. You read them in Fort Worth and Dallas under the bylines of chaps like Sherrod, Dan Jenkins, and Bud Shrake and in Houston from the desk of Mickey Herskowitz. The subject could be football, golf, bocce ball, snake charming, lizard racing--weirder was always better. Sherrod was particularly adept at venturing into the dark corners of the sporting world. Sometimes he wrote about other sportswriters, and once, he even wrote a column of advice to a kid from Mesquite who wanted to know the best prepare for this noble profession. Most sportswriters, Sherrod informed the lad, "got an early start by having their mamas drop them on their little heads as infants. In some instances, due to mama's inept hands, they were dribbled like a basketball. Those, almost without exception, became dally columnists." The three-martini column, I should explain, is a mix of attitudes, not alcohols; I don't know anyone who can write on booze, though many have tried, including several of the aforementioned.

In the footprints of these giants we now find ants. The greats of yesteryear have been replaced by dabblers, hacks, and homers, glorified fans with press credentials that permit them to leech onto some sports outfit, usually their hometown team, and bray or bitch about its wonders or shortcomings in the dead language of statistics to audiences who wouldn't know an original sentence if one crawled up their nose with...

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