FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

 

May 30, 2006                                                                           

 

Contact: Chelsey Walden, chapter president

E-mail: cwalden@iastate.edu

Telephone:  (608) 469-1339

 

Linda McCoy-Murray speaks to SPJ

 

AMES, Iowa – "Dare to be different. Don't try to be someone else."

That is the advice Linda McCoy-Murray, wife of the late Pulitzer Prize winning sports writer Jim Murray, gave to approximately 40 Society of Professional Journalists members and Greenlee School of Journalism and Mass Communication faculty and students on May 3 in Hamilton Hall.

Murray was working for Time and Life magazines, where he did profiles of athletes including football hall of famer Bobby Layne, when the chairman, Henry Luce, decided to expand and chose a sports magazine. Murray moved to New York in 1952 where he sold ads on Madison Avenue until the first edition of Sports Illustrated debuted Aug. 16, 1954. McCoy-Murray showed the dummy copies for the first edition.

The sports writer, who aspired to be Eugene O'Neill, worked for Sports Illustrated until 1961 when he moved to Los Angeles to be sports columnist for the Los Angeles Times until the day he died.

"We had covered a horse race on Saturday and got back to Los Angeles on Sunday night," McCoy-Murray said. "He died two hours later."

Murray died of a heart attack after returning from Del Mar race track on Aug. 16, 1998; 44 years to the day after the first Sports Illustrated hit newsstands.

Murray was blind in one eye and had only 40 percent vision in the other. He wrote in a column: "So, one blue eye is missing and the other misses a lot. So my best friend (his eye) left me, at least temporarily, is in a twilight world where it's always 8 o'clock on a summer night."

Murray, despite his poor eyesight, went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for sports commentary and was inducted into baseball’s hall of fame.

In Iowa, though, Murray was portrayed negatively in the op-ed section of the Des Moines Register and even denounced by the Iowa governor for mocking the state after the Hawkeyes played UCLA in the 1986 Rose Bowl.

McCoy-Murray is the president of the Jim Murray Foundation, which helps fund collegiate journalism programs and gives seven $5,000 scholarships each year to promising journalism students. Two scholarship winners have gone on to work for Sports Illustrated.

"I know Jim would be very proud of that," she said.

McCoy-Murray also donated three books to the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication reading room, including "Jim Murray: The Last of the Best," "The Quotable Jim Murray" and "Jim Murray: The Great Ones." Librarian Dru Frykberg accepted the books for the GSJC.

 

 

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