The Waterbury Democrat., 1938-01-29
For Henry McLemOre By CLARENCE BUDDINGTON
 IRELAND

Phoenix, Ariz., Jan. 29-(UP)-I have suddenly awakened to find that most of my waking hours are spent in the company of sports writers. Suddenly to realize this was a shock of no mean proportions SO I sat back to take inventory. wondered what this weird aSsocia- ton had done to me, and have come to the conclusion that the results are eccentric.
 I have eaten, slept, travelled, play ed, quarreled with Henry McLemore Grant Rice, Dick Vidmer, the Chi cago paragon of beauty, Warren Brown. I've covered thousands of miles with the sage of San Fran cisco, Tommy Laird. I've occupied PullmanS and press boxes with the boys from Atlanta and Nashville. I've even so demeaned myself as to be found hob-nobbing with Frank Sasinger in Detroit. Out of the past 10 years I have spent nine years and two hundred days with the lads who guess about sports, and now I've moved to Arizona where they have gila monsters.
 Now take 8 gila monster-he can only bite you and you die. Sports writers seldom bite you, and never before three in the morning. But slow lingering death is harder to bear than quick and merciful talk ing of. Even Nero never talked an enemy to death. The tough thing about sports writers is that they are all het up over sports. You would think that when a man had to see couple of hundred baseball battles, 15 or 20 football games, a lot of tennis matches, and night mare of hoss racing that they would be plenty fed up without going to fights. You would think they would yearn to talk about chipmunks or modern art or women or stock raiS- ing. But no. Sports writers talk about sports.
 At the end of a day when they have been to training camp in the morning, 8 football game in the afternoon, and box fight in the evening, they will corner me in the bathroom of first class hotel. and argue with me about whether Ty Cobb could lick Joe Louis, and if Willie Heston could have been innoculated with the forward pass, and why it was they crawled out on the end of 8 limb before the Schmeling-Louis fight. They don't sing in their bathtubs-they recite golf statistics.
 Any young man starting out in life to discover what a monomaniac is need go no further than the first two sports writers he happens to meet.
 All sports writers are humorists Some of them actually do it on pur- pose. Their knowledge of architec- ture is confined to press boxes ir football Stadia. They can give you the dimensions and describe the dis comforts of every one from the Rose Bowl to the Yale Bowl, and from the sugar Bowl to Medicine Hat They will perhaps forget the score of the Dartmouth Harvard game o1 1917 but they will remember how putrid was the coffee and sand wicheS served between halves. A I have observed them closely, I an quite certain some of them coulc be saved, turned into useful citi- zens, and even into kind and in- dulgent family men. But why bother?
 Sometime a missionary society is going to discover that they have converted all the Fiji Islands, anC will turn their attention to the next barbous class of human beings-the sports writers. But it will be toe bad. The most hardened mission ary would break tooth on sports columnist. And by the second les son the missionary would be rant ing about John L. Sullivan, while