Newspaperman for the Ages

Aileen Izenberg makes decisions her husband doesn't want to, including where they will be buried when the time comes. The Izenbergs have been married for 46 years. She chose a quiet spot under a tree.

What does Jerry Izenberg want inscribed on his flat marble grave marker? "Well, the usual: a loving husband, a loving father," he said. "And at the bottom, I have one sentence: 'A newspaperman.' That's what I was. That's what I still am, in my heart. And that's what I want to be remembered as."

Newspaperman.

The word evokes another era, when big city newsrooms were filled with reporters — almost always gruff men — pounding the keys of manual typewriters. The air was thick with cigar and cigarette smoke and four-letter words that reporters and editors flung at each other before they adjourned to a local watering hole to rehash the day.

For newspapermen who covered sports, reporting meant dictating stories by telephone and tucking heavy typewriters under one arm while climbing stairs to the press box.

Newspapermen rolled up their sleeves as they sifted through the detritus of winners and losers, fearless about who and what they wrote about. As heavyweight champion George Foreman has put it, a newspaperman like Izenberg could write about you and then look you in the eye the next day.

"And I'll tell you," Izenberg said, "I'll go to hell and I'll write what I want to write."

Izenberg, who can't say hello in under five paragraphs, is 93, the oldest working sports columnist in the country. A Google search brings up hundreds of links to interviews with him. "I don't want to take any stories with me to the grave, untold," he explained.

Izenberg was born in Neptune City, New Jersey, in 1930, the same year Scotch tape was invented, kids played marbles and hopscotch in the streets, the Great Depression was in its second year and people still referred to World War I as the Great War because World War II was nearly a decade in the future.

His 14th book, "Baseball, Nazis & Nedick's Hot Dogs: Growing Up Jewish in the 1930s in Newark," focuses on his childhood and his relationship with his father, Harry, a Lithuanian immigrant who learned to play baseball before he learned to speak English.

"He had given me a lifetime gift — a simple game and a simple shared love for it,"
Izenberg wrote in his memoir, published in 2023. "It remains there,
bright and shining in memory 83 years later. In the soul of my memory,
I see our kind of shared love of baseball again. It never fades."

Izenberg's journalism career began at the Newark Star-Ledger, where he was a copy boy while a student at Rutgers University. He enlisted in the Army during the Korean War; after he was discharged and did a short stint at the Paterson (New Jersey) Evening News, the now-defunct New York Herald Tribune hired him in 1958. He returned to the Star-Ledger in 1962 as a columnist.

Izenberg has covered 53 Super Bowls, over 58 Kentucky Derbys, at least 30 World Series and countless professional and college basketball championships, golf tournaments, tennis matches and boxing bouts. At last count, Izenberg has been enshrined in 18 halls of fame.

He's written over 10,000 columns, sometimes more than one a day when newspapers had morning and evening editions. At the Herald Tribune, Izenberg, then 37, shared a noisy newsroom with sports writing legend Red Smith.

Sports editor Stanley Woodward not only hired Izenberg but became a surrogate father. Izenberg remembers a conversation with Woodward that set him on his path in the sports world. (In fact, there isn't much that Izenberg doesn't remember: Woodward died in 1964.)

"I learned humility" from Woodward, he said. The editor sat Izenberg down in his office to inform him: "I will not — not — permit you to 'god' around these athletes." He also wanted unadorned prose. "I don't care about the sunset in the Painted Desert," Woodward said. "Who's going to play second base?"

Woodward once benched Izenberg from covering the New York Giants in baseball spring training for some perceived infraction or other. "I learned journalistic ethics from Stanley," Izenberg said.

"In this building, all we have is newspapermen," Izenberg recalled his editor saying, drawing a distinction between newspapermen and journalists. Every morning, Woodward threw open his office window and yelled at his rivals in the New York Times building two blocks away. "Are you listening to me, Old Gray Lady?!" he barked. "We will continue to outwrite you every single day!"

One day, after completing his ritual and slamming shut the window, Woodward turned to Izenberg. "I'll tell you what," he began. "If you want to be a journalist, go over to the New York Times. First, buy a three-piece suit, get a Phi Beta Kappa key — you can get it at a pawn shop — and then present yourself there and say, 'I want to be a journalist.' They'll send you to Switzerland to cover the future of cantaloupe on the market, and then you'll be a journalist. But if I do hire you, understand this. Don't make a mistake. Because if you think you're a journalist," he warned. "I'll fire you."

Izenberg connects his writing most to the work of Jimmy Cannon, a New York Post and Journal-American sports columnist who wrote as many as 300 sharp and tight opinion columns a year and coined the phrase: Boxing is the red light district of sports. Cannon was perhaps the first to realize the social consciousness and impact of the athlete.

Izenberg's prose follows a similar lineage, particularly relating to racial injustices on and off of the playing field. Izenberg fiercely defended Muhammad Ali when the boxing champion converted to Islam and refused to be drafted during the Vietnam War.

"I was defending Muhammad Ali probably two years before (broadcaster) Howard Cosell knew who he was," Izenberg said. He acknowledged that his public defense of Ali was unpopular. "I was defending the American system, the Constitution," Izenberg said recently. ". . . It was very simple. Everybody had rights. And Ali had the right to appeal to the court system, and that's what I was defending."

Izenberg's 15 nonfiction books include "Once There Were Giants: The Golden Age of Heavyweight Boxing," "Through My Eyes: A Sports Writer's 58-Year Journey" (written when he was 78) and a biography of former NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle.

Izenberg's latest book, "Larry Doby In Black and White: The Story of a Baseball Pioneer," is a biography of an often forgotten player: the first Black man to play in the American League, at whom racist fans threw unopened beer cans and racial epithets as he played in the outfield.

Izenberg, who lived near Doby in Montclair, New Jersey, and was a friend for 35 years, also writes about the difficulties the Cleveland Indians player Doby had in being elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and living in the shadow of Jackie Robinson, the first Black player in Major League Baseball since the late 19th century.

I never knew the story until years later, when I sat with Larry
at my kitchen table on a dark, snowy night.

Later, the more research I did, the more I wondered
how the story of his lonely battle
was allowed to slip through the cracks for years
until it almost seemed headed toward oblivion.

"We make a tradition out of running away from the truth if the truth doesn't suit our needs," Izenberg said. "But you really can't run from it if you're honest."

Former New York Post and Newsday sports columnist Wallace Matthews, 67, grew up reading Izenberg and later, became his colleague. "Jerry was perfect because he was New Jersey through and through and he was working for a place that would allow him to be Jerry," he said.

So how does an editor work with Izenberg?

"It's a very light touch with him, because you just have to kind of get out of the way of storytelling," his longtime editor Kevin Manahan said. "It's just a really unique sort of way of constructing his stories, of forming his sentences, of telling you stories of references he makes in the story.

"Is he irascible? Yes. Is he opinionated? Is he funny? But that all goes into what he is, in his voice as a columnist."

When Ali died in 2016, everyone at the Star-Ledger knew that only one person in the newspaper building could write an obituary worth of the man. Izenberg did not disappoint.

Muhammad Ali
The people.
With Muhammad Ali, it was always the people.

It didn't matter whether they were rich or poor, black or white,
celebrity-famous, blue-collar weary or welfare poor.
It didn't matter what language they spoke,
what God they worshiped, what gender they were.
Well, in this last group I'd have to say that the ladies had a little edge. . . .

Manahan, 65, remains impressed by Izenberg's storytelling skills. "You would go to an event. It'd be a World Series," he said, citing one example. "Sportswriters would be at batting practice, and the reporters would all huddle together, and the columnists would all huddle together. Jerry went in the other direction."

Matthews was asked to find three words to describe Izenberg. "Scholarly, irascible and — I was going to say compassionate, but it's more than that. Enlightened. He was enlightened well before his time," said the former columnist. "Jerry's such a great writer. Before you become a great writer, you have to be a great thinker," he added. "And the guy's a great thinker."

Boxing champion Foreman recalls meeting Izenberg in 1973 while training for a title fight with Joe Frazier. "Sports writers would ask me questions to get answers," he said by telephone from his home in Texas. "Jerry would ask questions and listen. This sounds like not much, but that means a lot for someone to listen to you. He stuck out more than any reporter. He listened, and you long for that."

Izenberg officially "retired" in 2007 but still writes for the Star-Ledger when he wants to. Said Matthews: "I've never seen any sign of aging in his writing."

The Izenbergs now live in Henderson, Nevada. When he turned 90, he handed in his driver's license. So, Aileen, 85, drives their car, a white Lexus SUV with enough room to fit his walker and sometimes, his wheelchair. They met when she volunteered for a nonprofit he founded to help disadvantaged kids in Newark. His one novel, "After the Fire: Love and Hate in the Ashes of 1967," is loosely based on their interracial marriage. They have four children, nine grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Izenberg interviews his subjects by phone these days. "There's no one who will not take my calls," he said. "Then I watch on television and analyze."

He checks in with his editor by email or cell phone, sometimes removing his hearing aids to hear better. If anyone thinks Izenberg will ever run out of ideas or energy, consider that he has a manuscript in the drawer for his 17th book.

"I don't think Jerry's ever going to die. I just don't," Manahan said. "He's not done telling stories."

Izenberg said he has a sheet of paper on his desk with eight potential book titles on it. "That's eight more books I would hope I have enough time to write," he said. "And right now I'm wrestling with myself about what will be the next one.

"This is my 73rd year in the business," he added. "I would like to do more, but we'll see."

Izenberg is never one to miss a connection with an athlete he once knew. By chance, Aileen Izenberg selected the same Las Vegas cemetery where heavyweight champion Sonny Liston was buried after he died a mysterious death in 1970.

"So I have a little company if I need it," Izenberg said.

Arlene Schulman is a writer, photographer and filmmaker living in Manhattan. She is the author of several books, including the critically acclaimed "The Prizefighters: An Intimate Look at Champions and Contenders" and "23rd Precinct: The Job." Visit her at www.arlenesscratchpaper.com She's also on Instagram: @arlenesbodega Read More