Return of "The Coach"

In the 1930s and 1940s, Rufus Stanley ("The Coach") Woodward of the New York Herald Tribune, one of the burliest (230 Lbs.) sports writers and editors in the business, won a reputation as one of the best. When not engaged in playful mayhem--one favorite game of his was to sit across the table from some Spartan friend, trading shin kicks and guzzling highballs to numb the pain--he was busy beefing up the Trib's sports section, with a canny eye for talent. It was Coach Woodward who hired Sports Columnist Red Smith away from the Philadelphia Record in 1945. "I was also an awful popoff," said Woodward.

After Owner-Editor Ogden Reid died in 1947, popping off went out of style at the Trib. Classmates of Whitelaw Reid (Yale '36), Ogden's son, began showing up on the payroll--even on Woodward's staff. In 1948, during an economy wave, the management suggested that Woodward trim off a few sports hands, asked him for names. Barked the Coach: "Red Smith and me." Not long after that, Whitelaw Reid found a name for the trim list: Rufus Stanley Woodward. The new sports editor was Robert Cooke (Yale '36).

Last year, when John Hay Whitney, U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James's, took control of the Trib, the management began to take a different approach to hiring, firing and promotion. Fortnight ago, with enthusiastic staff approval, Day City Editor Richard West (Harvard '29), a veteran Trib hand who had been passed over for promotion three times, was moved up to the city editor's slot. Last week Executive Editor George Cornish--the same man who fired Woodward for "Whitey" Reid in 1948--fired Sports Editor Cooke. His successor: Rufus Stanley Woodward (Amherst '17). After leaving the Trib in '48, Woodward had drifted through a series of jobs, freelanced a bit, wound up as sports editor of the Newark Star-Ledger. Aging (63), quieting (he hasn't kicked a shin in years), the Coach found the sudden vindication almost too much to take--and maybe a little late. "I just feel sort of sunk," he said, getting ready to go back. "It's been a long, long eleven years, and I'm wrung out like an old sock."

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