The Lovable Professor

Fresh out of Swarthmore, where he was a Phi Beta Kappa and a terror on the badminton court, Heywood Hale Broun had visions of being "the lovable English professor, the fascinating don, the teacher whose lectures are better than a show."

Instead, setting a life pattern, he drifted between such random diversions as studying Serbo-Croatian and founding a record company to preserve the music of early New Orleans jazzmen. Inevitably, as the son of the late syndicated columnist Heywood Broun, he became a sportswriter "with a crust of adjectives as thick as barnacles on a pearling lugger."* Then, at 30, bored with the "non-Aristotelian inevitability of August doubleheaders," he decided to take a fling at acting. "I brought to the stage," he recalls, "a keen sense of Thackeray, Dickens and Trollope--and none of Stanislavski."

Galloping Elegance. Now, at 50, "Woody" Broun has settled into a comfortable niche that takes advantage of his talents as actor, writer and learned wit. He is the "sports essayist" on CBS's Saturday Evening News, and compared with the breathless, cliche-riddled attack of the athletes-turned-commentators, his relaxed, reflective reports are easily the best sportscasting on TV. Sprinkled with quotes from Shelley and Browning, his stories are aimed at the average viewer rather than the batting-average viewer who dotes on statistics.

In fact, with his tweedy jackets and rust-tinted handlebar mustache, Broun is very much the lovable professor. As such, his lectures demand an attentive ear. While the copy of most sportscasters rarely rises above the conversational, his prose is styled after "the measured, galloping elegance of the 19th century sportswriters." As one fan told him: "I just like to close my eyes and listen."

King Vinnie. What he hears is that Carl Yastrzemski didn't just hit home runs, but "accomplished the ninth labor of Hercules, bringing a championship to Boston, a city whose previous baseball idol, Ted Williams, resembled that other great Greek, Achilles, who fought a great fight, but spent a lot of the time sulking in his tent." On another show, Broun likened the coach of the Green Bay Packers to "Canute--king, coach and general manager of the Britons, who commanded the waves to stop, but they broke through the lines. Vinnie Lombardi hasn't tried stopping the tide, but it's safe to say that if he told his Packers to do it, they'd drown in the attempt."

During spring training, while other baseball announcers were playing the usual guessing game about the outcome of the season, Broun was ruminating about one of the finer points of the game. "Legend placed the fountain of youth in Florida," he reported, "and coaches like Tony Cuccinello here, hitting his billionth fungo, suggest that the legend is true. With the fungo bat, an instrument as thin as a diplomat's umbrella, Cuccinello and other artists can place a ball just where a perspiring fatty can't quite grasp it. It's as precise and complicated an art as needlepoint and gets about as much attention." Investigating other byways of sport, Broun reported on the Copacabana waiter who felt that "presiding over the organized frenzy" of the club complemented his training as an umpire, the little-known pro golfer who, without an army of following fans, is "as lonely as a mountain climber," and the football game between two highbrow Eastern colleges that "left the field strewn with contact lenses."

Company Clerk. Viewers as well as everyone else at CBS are delighted with Broun's essays. Still, Broun has a few reservations. Covering sports is interesting enough, he says, but sometimes he "feels like company clerk to the Musketeers or veterinarian to the Light Brigade." He would like on occasion to participate actively in something, he explains, and if the right role in the right show comes along, well, he's ready to chuck everything. It figures. As Broun says, "I'm either a Little League Renaissance man or simply a person who can't make up his mind."

* A small boat used by pearl divers.

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