Dave Anderson, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the New York Times, dead at 89

Dave Anderson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning sportswriter whose career touched some of the biggest events — and biggest personalities — of the second half of the 20th Century, died on Thursday at age 89 in Cresskill, New Jersey, The New York Times reported.

It was at the Times that Anderson won his Pulitzer, in 1981, becoming at the time only the second sportswriter to win one for commentary, joining Red Smith. But he worked at other newspapers before moving there in 1966, and wrote nearly two dozen books and several hundred magazine articles.

As was evident in an outpouring of affection on social media, he also made a lasting contribution by mentoring and befriending younger journalists, no matter how small their outlet. He was known unanimously as a big-time guy who never big-timed anyone.

Many of the most prominent sportswriters of the generation that followed Anderson, especially those with New York connections, weighed in. By late afternoon, his name was trending on Twitter, something he likely would have found amusing.

Anderson spent his early childhood in upstate Troy, but he moved to Brooklyn at age 9 and was a New Yorker through and through — despite a college detour to Holy Cross in Massachusetts in the late 1940s.

He first made his mark covering the Dodgers for the Brooklyn Eagle.

That era spawned a quintessential Anderson story. As far as he could tell, he was the last sportswriter to leave Ebbets Field after the last Dodgers game there in 1957. But it did not dawn on him until long after the fact.

It happened because he held the door for another writer, Bill Roeder, to walk ahead of him. He was being nice.

Anderson left Brooklyn for the New York Journal-American in 1955 before joining the Times a decade later, where he was given a column in 1971. He retired from fulltime work in 2007 but continued to write occasionally.

Among his many honors were the Dick McCann Memorial Award from the Pro Football Hall of Fame, as well as awards related to his coverage of boxing and golf. He was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 2016.

He was from an era of sportswriting when it was possible to be famous and influential without moonlighting on TV, but he always took a workingman’s approach to the job.

Among many traits that endeared him to fellow writers: No one loved pregame press box buffets more — not only for the food, but for the company in the dining room.

Sportswriters who paid their respects mostly recalled stories and advice from Anderson, who had a vast trove of connections to prominent athletes and coaches of his era.

A Times colleague, Bill Pennington, offered one from the locker room after the 1958 NFL Championship Game, when Anderson asked Colts quarterback Johnny Unitas whether he was nervous in overtime during the win over the Giants.

“Unitas glared and said, ‘When you know what you’re doing, you don’t get nervous,’” Pennington wrote.

Paul Schwartz of the New York Post recalled one of Anderson’s favorite bits of advice, about the value of writing about stars, early and often: “When in doubt, write Namath.”

Many writers still repeat a favorite Anderson line, used when an editor bugged him too soon in the day about what he was writing. “It hasn’t happened yet,” he’d say.

He loved telling the story of tossing writers’ Rangers game stories from a moving train near the U.S.-Canada border to a Western Union telegrapher in the 1950s so they could be transmitted to New York. That was followed by the thrill of seeing his story in the paper that morning at Grand Central Terminal.

One of Anderson’s most well-remembered columns, a November 1980, piece headlined, “The Food On a Table at the Execution,” still is slyly referenced by sportswriters at catered news conferences, even if they do not know its origin.

The Times said Anderson is survived by his sons, Stephen and Mark, daughters, Jo and Jean-Marie, three grandchildren and one great-grandson. His wife of 60 years, Maureen, died in 2014.

By Neil Best

neil.best@newsday.com@sportswatch

Neil Best first worked at Newsday in 1982, returned in 1985 after a detour to Alaska and has been here since, specializing in high schools, college basketball, the NFL and most recently sports media and business.