The Last Sports Reporter

Sid Hartman is an icon, a crank, and the last of a dying breed. But if you think the legendary sports columnist is going to walk away from the job anytime soon, you don’t know Sid.

Photo by Robin Eley (Illustration)

(page 2 of 3)

On-air, Sid is mostly tame these days, but it wasn’t always that way. For most of the time he’s been doing Sports Huddle, he’s been an inveterate grump. Callers would be dismissed as “stiffs” or “geniuses.” These days, Sid might tell one, “Everybody is entitled to their opinion,” but that’s about as nasty as it gets. Partly it’s his struggle to understand the caller. His hearing has declined sharply, and his hearing aides make things louder but not clearer. He blames the headphones.

Just then, Erik Eskola walks into the studio. A well-known figure among the state’s news junkies, Eskola hosts the local news show Almanac on public television. He also appears on WCCO Radio, including the weekday-morning spots with Sid. During these short bursts of conversation, Eskola often takes friendly shots at Sid—at times making him seem a hopeless old coot.

On this day, though, Sid gets Eskola’s attention during a commercial break: “Do me a favor,” he says, pointing to the growing stack of envelopes. “Write the return address in.”

Eskola sits down and dutifully begins the task. Sid looks at me and winks.

IF THERE’S A TRICK to animating Sid Hartman, it’s not to ask him about sports. It’s to get him talking about his childhood in north Minneapolis. He’ll start by reciting house numbers: 525 Humbolt; 711 Irving; 726 Irving. But he doesn’t linger there long. He may have called the area home, but he learned everything he needed to in the downtown alley that separated the Minneapolis Journal from the Minneapolis Tribune.

Sid learned to hustle in that alley. It’s where he shot craps and got in fights. It’s where a scrappy kid who was known as Sidney at home and at Hebrew school got tagged with the nickname “Blackie” for his nest of dark hair.

A job first drew him there. He was just 9 years old in 1929 when he started biking downtown after school to stand in line for copies of the city papers. He’d buy them at a discount and sell them at a mark-up on whatever corner he could hold against the older paperboys.

Sid eventually won an exclusive Tribune route that had him dropping papers at corner stands, pubs, and office buildings—a run that allowed him to move as many as 1,400 papers a day. With tips, he was earning as much as $50 a week—far more than what his delivery-driver father was bringing home. That was if his father came home at all.

Jack Hartman was born in Russia and couldn’t read or write English. If Sid’s father wasn’t home at dinner time, his son would be dispatched to find him. Often he could be found passed out on a platform outside a nearby warehouse. “For all the grief he caused our family,” Sid writes in Sid!, “my father was a hard worker. He was an underdog all of his life. He was a fierce competitor. I think that’s something I picked up from my old man. I had nothing going for me as a kid. I felt like an underdog who had to fight for everything.”

Even back then, there was no clear path from the alley to the sports desk—but Sid found it. He had friends in the sports department. And he’d already done the work of a newspaperman in room 308 at Lincoln Junior High in north Minneapolis. He was sports editor and a columnist for the Lincoln Life student paper. The column, “Punts: Lincoln Life Pickups and Sports Bits by Sidney Hartman,” was situated among stories like “Cooking Classes Study Diets for Families on Relief” and “Minstrel Show Promises to Be Splendid Entertainment,” but Sid’s style even then would be recognizable to current readers. “If the rumor that the Physical Education Department and the swimming pools of all city schools are to be closed comes true,” Sid wrote in 1935, with the same mix of dire prophesy and wild speculation that he employs today, “it will not be with the consent of the students. This will probably mean the removal of all interscholastic competition in city high schools.”

He learned early the value of a well-placed source, the need to establish and maintain confidences. “Don’t be surprised if John Deno is promoted to a coaching position in the near future,” he wrote in one Lincoln Life column. Sid had every reason to flatter Deno. It was Deno who gave Sid the keys to the gym at lunch hour where he and his friends would shoot baskets and bet whatever money they had on the outcome. It was Deno who was one of Sid’s coaches. Most significantly, it was Deno who read Sid’s columns and told him, “This is what you should do for a living.”

He started his career as an intern in the sports department of the Minneapolis Daily Times. It was 1944, and most kids Sid’s age were fighting overseas. Sid tried to enlist three times but was rejected because of his asthma. Instead, Sid would come in at night to work on the paper for the following afternoon. He’d leave at 1 a.m. and be back at 6 a.m. Then, at noon, he’d pick up stacks of papers for his news run.

By his own admission, Sid couldn’t write. (To this day, he struggles with anything more than the most rudimentary roundup.) But nobody was going to out-hustle him, and soon enough, Dick Cullum, the notoriously sharp-tongued sports editor, was sending him over to the University of Minnesota. “Before we got all of these major league sports, Gopher football was the biggest thing there was,” Sid says. He hung around the University every day, a habit that continues to this day.

Behind the scenes, he ingratiated himself to coaches and players, and he soon became part of a covert lifeline for Gophers athletes—football especially—known as the “Touchdown Club,” which placed star players in no-show jobs. On paper, the hard-working jocks were making a living between the practices, the road games, and their studies. In reality, the Touchdown Club provided critical support for stars like Bud Grant in the days before scholarships.

Sid would often take a cash-strapped Grant out for food (just as he would do for a cash-strapped Kevin McHale years later and countless others between and since). He’d connect Grant and others with Albert Murray, owner of Murray’s steak house. In those days, players would get tickets for family or to sell for walking-around money. Murray would buy the tickets from Sid at a premium and Sid would pass the profits—seven dollars per ticket—to the student-athletes. “Unethical?” writes Sid in his autobiography, “Hey, it was the 1940s. The newspaper wanted the Gophers to win.” When they did, he explains, the paper’s press run would jump by 30,000.

In 1945, when he was all of 25 years old, Sid was promoted to columnist for the Times. His first column, “The Hartman Roundup,” appeared in the morning edition of the paper on August 11, 1945.

SID’S ROUTINE is dictated by the season—but the basic elements are unchanging: He wakes up on the radio. The first of his three morning live spots comes on at 6:40 a.m. By mid-morning, he’s usually behind the wheel of his black Cadillac, making his rounds. It might be the University’s athletic department, a Vikings practice at Winter Park, a Timberwolves practice at the Target Center—or all three.

One morning last fall, he was off to the Metrodome to see William Lester, the executive director of the facility. As is his custom, Sid exploded through the office door—there had been no phone call or e-mail requesting an interview—only to find Lester sitting at his desk, bare-chested. Lester had recently returned from attending a wedding in the Virgin Islands, where he had been badly sunburned. The only thing that helped the pain was wrapping a cold, wet towel around his bare shoulders.

From Sid’s vantage point, however, it looked like the executive was sitting there naked. Sid erupted in expletives, before finally blurting: “I thought you had a girl in here!”

Lester, accustomed to such intrusions after 20 years of working with the columnist, merely stood up, removed the towel, and began dressing. As he knotted his tie in the reflection of a window, Sid hit the button on his famous recorder. “It’s not just me,” Lester says of Sid’s ways. “He does that with the Vikings and the Gophers, too. There’s no knock, he just blasts through closed doors. He will get the story.”

After making his rounds, Sid often uses lunch as an opportunity to sit down with an athlete, coach, or team executive. If he needs to bang out a column, he’ll march into the Star Tribune newsroom around 4 p.m. His desk at the paper is part museum, part dump. “In the old days of typewriters,” remembers Jon Roe, a former colleague at the Star Tribune, “he pasted all of these sheets of paper together—like Northern Tissue on steroids. There was literally crap on it.”

A Star Tribune staffer transcribes the interviews Sid compiles on his recorder. The tapes are epic collections of interviews, often with long gaps of ambient noise because Sid forgot to shut off the machine. If he is on deadline—the only thing that will bring him to the office these days—Sid will hover around his transcriptionist as he waits to get to work.

A former sports-department intern described what it was like around the newsroom when Sid was on deadline: “There were only a small group of people that edited Sid’s column, and it was always treated like the short straw. He had these early deadlines and the night-team managers would lose their minds if he missed them…. If an editor changed anything and Sid was still in the office, he’d pop in the file, and see it, and then come out to argue. That was rarely pretty.”