My Life in a Press Box

By Buddy Martin

The Joy of Sitting in the Sacred Presence of Dan Jenkins, Edwin Pope and Furman Bisher As If I Belonged There.

Buddy "At Home"

For those who missed this Buddy Martin column recently and asked for a reprise:

This came to me in the night, September 30, 2026

It’s 3 o’clock in the morning and I’m sitting in a chair next to my bed, which is where a man my age does his best thinking and all of his worst worrying.

For some reason, it has become urgent that I find the proper words for my life story before I die. Not that I’m planning to die. I’ve just noticed that a lot of the people I used to sit next to in press boxes didn’t plan on it either.

I’ve always been smitten with the title of Fred Russell’s book. Fred was the Nashville Banner’s great sports editor and one of the gentlemen of our trade, my friend, and he called his memoir “Bury Me in an Old Press Box.”

I’d have killed for that title. The only reason I didn’t steal it outright is that I was raised Southern Baptist, and we only plagiarize the Bible.

So I’ll borrow the spirit and call mine “My Life in a Press Box.” Or maybe even better, “Will The Last Great American Sports Writer Leaving The Press Box Please Turn Out The Lights?”

The subtitle is the honest part: I was sitting in the sacred presence of Dan Jenkins, Edwin Pope and Furman Bisher as if I belonged there. I didn’t. They just never got around to throwing me out.

Hieroglyphics on a Remington

Some people think sportswriters were just grown men who got paid to watch boys’ games, eat free hot dogs and complain about the Wi-Fi before there was any Wi-Fi. They’re partly right. The hot dogs were free.

But something bigger was happening up there.

Ever since mankind figured out how to scratch a buffalo on a cave wall, people have been looking for language strong enough to inspire, motivate and teach. A surprising amount of it came out of press boxes. It was refined hieroglyphics, sent over Western Union at deadline by men with cigarettes hanging off their lips and maybe a touch bourbon in their coffee.

Me, I was too weak to drink alcohol and string words together. So I restrained myself until much later.

We wrote about men playing boys’ games, and somewhere between the kickoff and the last paragraph, those games turned into morality plays.

Sometimes they turned into musicals.

A fourth-quarter comeback was a sermon. A fumble on the 1-yard line was Greek tragedy with a marching band. A coach getting fired was Shakespeare, only with better quotes and worse ties.

We weren’t there to describe games of men any more than Michelangelo was there to pound rocks.

Michelangelo had his marble. We had a Smith-Corona and 40 minutes to deadline.

The Concert Hall

Nobody warned me what a privilege it would be to sit among writers that gifted. You’d look down the row and see these guys working their typewriters like concert pianists: a Remington here, a Royal there, an Underwood or Smith-Corona clacking away like Van Cliburn with a hangover.

Later it was computers, which were quieter and far less romantic. Nobody ever wrote a love song to a floppy disk.

You’d watch Jenkins, and it looked like he was simply writing down what everybody else in the building was too dumb to notice. Pope had so much hustle in his prose that he’d give you the lead, the color, the quote and the kicker before you’d found a working pencil. Bisher wrote with a dignity that made the rest of us sit up straighter, or at least scrape the ketchup off our shirts.

And there I was among them, trying to look like I belonged. It was like a kid who’d snuck into Carnegie Hall and got handed a tuba.

When the Music Was Sweet

I wish I could find the words, right here at 3 a.m., for how exhilarating those press boxes were in the 1960s, the ’70s, the ‘80s and, yes, into the ’90s. The music was so sweet and so plentiful that you’d have happily died up there, as long as you’d filed first.

It was smoke and mirrors and noise and deadline panic. It was the fellowship of ink-stained wretched lunatics who argued about everything, forgave each other nothing and would have given you their last clean sheet of copy paper anyway.

It was the best seat in America, and they let us in for free. We just had to pay with our livers and our marriages.

To paraphrase Robert Redford as Roy Hobbs in “The Natural”:

God, I loved the press box.