John Underwood, Stylish Sportswriter and Author, Dies at 88

Published: April 28, 2023

John Underwood, a classy author at Sports Illustrated for practically 1 / 4 century whose rollicking account of a fishing journey in Florida with the baseball Hall of Famer Ted Williams led to their collaborations on two extremely regarded books, died on April 12 at his residence in Miami. He was 88.

His spouse, Donna Underwood, confirmed the dying, however didn’t cite a selected trigger.

Mr. Underwood joined Sports Illustrated in 1961 through the journal’s decades-long heyday, and would work alongside different star writers like Frank Deford, Mark Kram, Dan Jenkins, Roy Blount Jr., Jack Olsen and William Nack.

He specialised in overlaying faculty soccer, together with its shady aspect, however he additionally wrote about boxing, golf, baseball {and professional} soccer, in addition to the affect of playing on sports activities, gamers and followers. In 1982, he was the ghostwriter for an article concerning the former N.F.L. participant Don Reese that exposed that he and lots of different gamers had used cocaine and the way the drug “now controls and corrupts the game because so many players are on it.”

Mr. Underwood cast a reference to Mr. Williams once they fished for tarpon off the Florida Keys in 1967. Mr. Williams, considered one of baseball’s biggest gamers and the final within the main leagues to hit .400, was additionally an professional fisherman, then in his seventh yr of retirement from baseball.

“He brings to fishing the same hard-eyed intensity, the same unbounded capacity for scientific inquiry that he brought to hitting a baseball,” Mr. Underwood wrote.

Describing Mr. Williams in motion, he added, “The fish exploded into the air. Sawhack-whack-whack. The tarpon jumped seven times, swooshing spectacularly in the air as Williams played it, worked it, reeled, kept the pressure on. All the time, he was instructing us, telling us what he was doing, advising Charley when to shoot and at what lens opening he might use.”

Their camaraderie on the journey prompted Mr. Underwood, on the suggestion of a Sports Illustrated editor, to ask Mr. Williams if he would conform to let Mr. Underwood assist him write his autobiography. The mission started as a five-part sequence within the journal, which they expanded into the guide “My Turn at Bat: The Story of My Life” (1969), a New York Times finest vendor.

Mr. Underwood wrote Mr. Williams’s autobiography after the 2 went fishing collectively and have become pals.

It was adopted in 1971 by “The Science of Hitting,” an tutorial handbook that turned a Bible to many main leaguers, together with the a number of batting champions Tony Gwynn and Wade Boggs. In 2002, Sports Illustrated ranked it No. 86 on its listing of the highest 100 sports activities books of all time.

In his preface to “The Science of Hitting,” Mr. Underwood described Mr. Williams’s ardour for an illustrator to painting the strike zone as he envisioned it — “filled by equal rows of circles depicting what kind of batting average a player could expect swinging at balls in each of those areas. He said he would supply the figures himself.”

The two books with Mr. Williams have been the primary of Mr. Underwood’s collaborations with sports activities figures. He labored with Bear Bryant, the storied coach of the University of Alabama soccer crew, whom he had coated extensively, on his autobiography in 1974. He adopted up with Alvin Dark, the much-traveled baseball supervisor, in 1980, after which with the father-and-son N.F.L. quarterbacks Archie and Peyton Manning in 2000.

Reviewing “Bear: The Hard Life and Good Times of Alabama’s Coach Bryant,” Jonathan Yardley of The Miami Herald praised Mr. Underwood for cajoling Mr. Bryant “to talk freely, and in so doing, to reveal himself perhaps more than he intended.”

John Warren Underwood was born on Nov. 25, 1934, in Miami. His father, Edward, was a vacationer boat captain. His mom, Sarah Kathryn (Russell) Underwood, was a homemaker. While in highschool, John started writing commonly for The Miami News, and whereas finding out English on the University of Miami, he turned a employees author at The Herald. He graduated with a bachelor’s diploma in 1956 and stayed at The Herald till he moved to Sports Illustrated 5 years later.

While on the journal, he additionally wrote “The Death of an American Game: The Crisis in Football” (1979), which grew out of a sequence about accidents and violence in soccer, and “Spoiled Sport” (1984), about how massive cash and tv had sapped the enjoyable out {of professional} sports activities.

“I was about to say I have lost it, this taste for sport, but I haven’t,” he wrote. “It was taken from me — from all of us.”

He left Sports Illustrated in 1985 for full-time freelancing, sad that the modifying on the journal had turn into, as he wrote in his resignation letter, “the worst I have ever encountered.”

“Few were surprised by Underwood’s exit,” Michael MacCambridge wrote in “The Franchise: A History of Sports Illustrated” (1997). “Many felt he had lost his love for the games long ago.”

In addition to his spouse, Donna (Simmons) Underwood, he’s survived by their daughter, Caroline Burman, and son, Joshua; his daughters, Lori Gagne, Leslie Cahill and Kathryn Justice, who is called DeeDee, and his son, John Jr., from his marriage to Beverly Holland, which led to divorce; 12 grandchildren and 5 great-grandchildren.

Mr. Williams’s dying in 2002 prompted Mr. Underwood to write down “It’s Only Me: The Ted Williams We Hardly Knew” (2005), a memory about their friendship, which grew from their first journey in 1967 into looking and fishing holidays world wide.

“He thought of Ted as an uncle,” Ms. Underwood mentioned in a telephone interview. “And ‘It’s only me’ is what Ted would say when he called. John or I would answer the phone and he’d say, ‘It’s only me.’”

Source web site: www.nytimes.com