LEGENDARY AMPLIFIER AND TOWN CRIER BILL DWYRE ISSUES A CEASE FIRE
By Bill Simons
He was as gruff as Graf was grand.
His origins were in the northern plains – a Wisconsin man – but for decades he was the authoritative voice of sports in glitzy Hollywood-land.
Bill Dwyre – the longtime L.A. Times sports writer and editor who recently retired from day-to-day writing – wasn’t a fan of corporate budget cuts, Twitter or shout-as-loud-as you-can cable news. He was the very definition of old school. It always seemed as if he had ink under his fingernails.
I relished my two weeks of sitting next to him in the Wimbledon press room. Here was a torrent of banter: gonzo gossip, punishing puns, whiplash connections – from San Diego’s Ted Williams to LA’s Serena Williams. It was two weeks of jolly repartee.
Dwyre played golf with the mighty in our sport – like Pete Sampras and Charlie Pasarell – but he wrote with an unpretentious salt-of-the-earth sensibility. The man had gobs of gravitas. He engendered trust. Player development super-coach Jose Higueras opened up to him, admitting American tennis was not in good shape. “I’m losing a lot of sleep. We are lacking competitiveness in our players,” said Higueras. “They’ve got good backhands…but they lack an understanding of how the game needs to be played…The culture of our players needs to improve…If our players were European…being No. 80…wouldn’t be enough. When a high percentage of the coaches want it more than the players, we have a problem.”
Dwyre had few problems covering all aspects of sports: horsemen (like jockey Gary Stevens), Hunters (like retiring baseball player Torii Hunter), heroes and hunks.
He would sit patiently in the back of the interview room and elicit great nuggets from some 18-year-old Slovakian teen new on the tour. When the beloved American veteran Andre Agassi retired in 2006, Dwyre noted, “The response, from a group [of reporters] that is paid to be adversarial, probing, sarcastic, disbelieving, jaded, confrontational and objective…was a standing ovation and many moist eyes.”
But when Serena Williams was testy after a bad U.S. Open loss, Dwyre pulled no punches: “She met with the media like a rattlesnake meets a ground squirrel. Her answers were more like hisses.”
Dwyre could hiss, too. At the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, a riot nearly broke out when a Agassi doubles match was abruptly moved out of the stadium court at Stone Mountain. Dwyre noted, “The question that quickly popped to mind: Had any of those people ever seen Agassi play doubles? Do they know it is not a pretty sight, not worth rioting over?” Eventually riot police were called, and Agassi was put back in the stadium. Dwyre wryly concluded, “The hooligans, in designer Filas and Rolex watches, got their way.”
Not exactly a fan of rampant nationalism, whether here or abroad, he noted during the 2012 Olympics: “We got so much nationalism shoved down our throats by NBC that occasionally rooting for somebody from Ethiopia to hit a winning backhand felt kind of nice.” At Wimbledon this year, he contended the emotional Brits “are so provincial in their slobbering adoration of their sports stars that it sometimes defies description.”
Dwyre could criticize the game, too. He felt that “there are only so many big, looping swings from the baseline that the average tennis fan can watch before brains turn to mush.”
But under his crusty surface, deadline Dwyre was a lover. A lover of words, a lover of journalism and a lover of games. After the late-night Agassi vs. Blake 2005 U.S. Open classic, Dwyre wrote, “It will be 120 years before we see another match like that.”
Well, it could be another 120 years before we see an observer and storyteller quite like my friend, the singular town crier Bill Dwyre.
