What would Jim Murray make of the who-can-shout-loudest nature of much of today's sports commentary? Whatever line he would come up with, chances are it would be funny, insightful and indelible.

Murray, the legendary sportswriter who delighted readers of the Los Angeles Times and scores of other papers with his syndicated column from 1961 until his death in 1998, at 78, made his mark before the Internet age. Yet, he enjoyed a fame and popularity no current sportswriter can hope to equal.

He came by his celebrity honestly: An enduringly humble man, despite honors that included 14 National Sportswriter of the Year awards (including 12 in a row), a spot in the Baseball Hall of Fame and a Pulitzer Prize, Murray did little to bring attention to himself. He didn't have a blog, or a radio or TV show, and didn't even like seeing his picture in the newspaper. He simply wrote great, memorable prose.

In Murray's view, Willie Mays' glove was where "triples go to die" and the Indianapolis 500 was "the run for the lilies." But his one-liners did more than make readers chuckle: some served a larger purpose. His comment, "Wouldn't it be nice to have a black American at Augusta in something other than a coverall?" was the prod that finally pushed the Masters into allowing Lee Elder to play, in 1975.

Murray has been gone 11 years now, but lucky for us, his words and influence live on. -- Kelli Anderson

Let's be honest here: It was probably never thus. As long as colleges -- whose mission is to educate -- have fielded athletic teams connected to the school only by the name on the front of the jersey, comprised of players who might never otherwise be admitted to the university, the enterprise has been hypocritical.

But we didn't really know for sure before, or we blinded ourselves to all but the entertainment and the youthful passion, back when we thought games were played by student-athletes and guard Butch Lee went to Marquette because he "really liked the campus." Now we have been informed by endless recruiting scandals, academic fraud and the buying of billion-dollar postseason events. Innocence is long dead. -- Tim Layden

When The National Sports Daily came to my hometown on June 25, 1990, it was like we were hosting the Super Bowl. I walked six blocks to pick up the first copy. It still lives in my parent's house. Tony Gwynn is on the cover, wearing brown pinstripes, standing in front of four elephants at the San Diego Zoo.

The cover story, written by Peter Richmond, made a 13-year-old want to be a sportswriter. It began: "This is a good man. No one disputes that. Not anyone. It's obvious. Look at him sitting in the corner at a celebrity-puffy cocktail reception in a Beverly Hills hotel, wedged between his wife and his mom, like a kid in a church pew, while the high profiles drift through the room in search of flashbulbs and television lights. While Garvey and Rozelle and Lasorda and Marcus Allen pump hands and exchange auras, Tony Gwynn stays riveted to the chair, amid the Gwynn clan, none of whom shows the slightest desire to mingle with all the marauders. In fact, it is absolutely certain that all he'd really like to be doing right now, instead of waiting for a benefit dinner at which he will be honored, is eating dinner with his wife and two kids back down south at the neighborhood Tony Roma's, in the safe and monotonal suburbs of safe and monotonal San Diego."

So we were safe and monotonal, but we had The National. It debuted in the winter of 1990 in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles before expanding to San Diego that summer, validation for what was then a mid-sized city. The National was a newspaper, a daily newspaper, with no politics, no business, and no classified ads for used cars. In other words, it only had the good stuff, only sports. People complained that it cost 75 cents. I would have paid 75 cents for the expanded box scores alone.

The National was run by a sportswriting legend, Frank Deford, so it was no surprise that every story sang. It was also no surprise that the paper closed after 16 months. There were problems with distribution, with circulation projections, and the economy was in the tank. But the only problem I could see with The National is that it was too good to be true.

Nearly 20 years later, when I run into people who worked at The National, I probably look at them like they played for the Showtime Lakers. My sportswriting buddies, after a few drinks, still daydream about reviving it. Then they realize what they'd be up against: the Internet, rising printing costs, reluctant advertisers and an audience that is veering away from the printed word. The National is not coming back. I'm just glad I held onto an issue. -- Lee Jenkins

Much like his onetime CBS colleague Walter Cronkite, Jim McKay symbolizes a no-B.S. era in TV news and sports. McKay, who made his name in the 1960s and '70s anchoring ABC's Wide World of Sports and Olympics coverage, even had a signature journalistic moment akin to Cronkite's breaking the awful news of JFK's assassination. McKay's epic (and Peabody Award-winning) story, of course, was the massacre of 11 Israeli hostages at the 1972 Munich Olympics, which he punctuated with his unforgettable phrase, "They're all gone."

What I particularly miss, though, is the way McKay's earnestness, always centered and reasoned, became the preferred standard for sportscasting in those early TV days. (Or as we might now call it: The Pre-Cosell Era.) The former newspaperman (also like Cronkite) set a lofty tone each week with his pronouncement at the top of Wide World: "Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sports ... the thrill of victory ... the agony of defeat ... the human drama of athletic competition."

OK, sometimes the significance didn't match that opening, unless you were one of those riveted to cliff diving from Acapulco. But whether he was presenting the world figure-skating championships or a lumberjack competition, McKay didn’t give you any snark.

As one who could report on goofiness one Saturday and employ gravitas the next, McKay has his heirs; Bob Costas and Bob Ley come readily to mind. But luckily for him and for us, McKay was a man of his time. He'd never have made it on SportsCenter. And heaven help him on PTI. -- Dick Friedman

The words still vibrate with excitement, from Michael Buffer's larynx to our mind's ear: "And now ... the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world ... " But it's only an echo, now, a term for an altogether extinct species.

The heavyweight division is presently one of the sport's dullest, sadly, the latest symptom of the sweet science's slide from the national marquee. "The best big, young athletes in the world used to fight," Muhammad Ali's promoter, Bob Arum, once lamented to me. Now those kids are wearing shoulder pads or dunking. And who can blame them?

Boxing lives and dies by an oddly decentralized bureaucracy that provides both its charm (no union or league regulations!) and its ultimate undoing (there are four major belts and no one knows who anyone is!). Can you name the three heavyweights who apparently all hold title claims? Two of them even have the same last name —- and I'm betting that you still can't.

A fellow like Mike Tyson, then, truly was a rare breed. More than we ever knew. -- Pablo S. Torre

The history of pro wrestling can, I think, be divided into two eras: the olden days, when it was a regional sport that played to small, but avid crowds, and the cable TV era, when the increased visibility led the sport to explode into a national phenomenon that packed arenas. But for a few glorious years, the two overlapped.

In the early 1980s, wrestling was still local, but, thanks to Ted Turner's superstation WTBS, it could be seen everywhere. Was the product fantastic? Heavens no. If it looked like it was being staged in Turner's garage, that's because it almost was. It was filmed at the WTBS studios in front of a crowd of a few hundred people.

The host was Gordon Solie, a raspy voiced man who bore a striking resemblance to game show host Bill Cullen. Solie's trademark call was to refer to a wrestler's bleeding face as a "crimson mask," and he pronounced the word suplex as if it were a hors d'oeuvres on a French menu: "su-play." For this, he was known as "The Walter Cronkite of Pro Wrestling."

The competitors were legendary: Jerry Lawler, Dusty Rhodes, Ole and Arn Anderson, Misters Wrestling I and II. They were campy and outlandish without really trying.

Eventually Georgia Championship Wrestling was sold to Vince McMahon, who shuttered it in 1984 as part of his plan to grow the sport by consolidating it. It worked. For better or worse. -- Mark Bechtel

Ray Allen had a star turn in He Got Game, Mike Tyson’s rightly received rave reviews for his brief appearance in The Hangover and Brett Favre showed some acting chops in There’s Something About Mary. Of course there was once a time when professional athletes offered wonderfully wooden performances on television, the kind of awful acting that was so bad it was great. The bellwether of awful jock cameos? Probably the 1978 Fantasy Island episode featuring George Brett, Ken Brett, Steve Garvey, Tom Lasorda, Fred Lynn and Elvis Valentine. Other memorable drop-ins? Joe Namath, Don Drysdale and Wes Parker all stopped by the Brady’s house; Reggie Jackson yukked it up with Love Boat crew members; and Kevin McHale popped into Cheers. We also recommend Nolan Ryan as Nolan Ryan on Ryan’s Hope. While glassy-eyed performances such as Ryan’s have a certain train wreck appeal, some athletes have provided memorable efforts, from Keith Hernandez (as Keith Hernandez on Seinfeld) and Billie Jean King, Deacon Jones and Bobby Riggs on The Odd Couple. Alas, these days, the jock cameo has morphed into a full-fledged reality show. That’s a shame. T.O. in small doses is tolerable. The T.O. Show is not. -–Richard Deitsch

When people get misty-eyed over the old North American Soccer League (NASL), the focus tends to be on the once-in-a-lifetime New York Cosmos, who created a phenomenon in soccer-indifferent America in the '70s by shelling out vast amounts of cash, first on the incomparable Pelé, the most popular athlete in the world, and then on a host of other superstars to surround him: brash Italian striker Giorgio Chinaglia, German mastermind Franz Beckenbauer, Pelé's Brazilian countryman Carlos Alberto.

Soon Giants Stadium was filling to the rafters, and other NASL teams began to seek their own international luminaries: World Cup winners Gordon Banks of England and Gerd Muller of Germany (Fort Lauderdale Strikers); English stalwart Rodney Marsh (Tampa Bay Rowdies); Manchester United legend George Best (Los Angeles Aztecs; Fort Lauderdale; San Jose Earthquakes); even Dutchman Johan Cruyff (Los Angeles; Washington Diplomats), the embodiment of the Total Football concept that had revolutionized the European game.

For me, though, the fondest NASL memories are reserved for a player a few rungs down the ladder of greatness from Pelé. When I arrived in Chicago as a college freshman in the fall of 1980, it was to a city starved for a sports champion. The Bears had last won the NFL title 17 years earlier; the Blackhawks' most recent Stanley Cup came two years before that. The White Sox and Cubs had gone a combined 132 years without a World Series title. The Bulls had never won much of anything. In 1981, though, Chicago finally celebrated a sporting triumph, courtesy of an unlikely hero and unlikely team.

Behind the scoring prowess and flowing mane of Karl-Heinz Granitza, a mullet-haired West German striker who'd played for six middling clubs in his native country before joining the Sting in 1978, the Windy City's soccer team, the Sting beat the mighty Cosmos 1-0 in the Soccer Bowl in Toronto. The climax to the game, which had been scoreless in regulation, was the great NASL-style shoot-out in which the attacker started 35 yards out from goal and had five seconds to shoot. In the shootout, Granitza and teammate Rudy Glenn both beat the New York keeper, Hubert Birkenmeier, and Chicago had its trophy. It was front-page news in the city.

Granitza scored 128 goals in NASL, third alltime behind Chinaglia and Alan Willey, and went on to play for the indoor version of the Sting after the NASL folded in 1984. When MLS kicked off a new American soccer league in 1996, it consciously avoided the strategy that eventually killed off the NASL -- overpaying for superstars -- and has mostly stuck to that philosophy (David Beckham being the notable exception). Instead, MLS has had its greatest success with international players bearing a slightly lower worldwide profile than Becks. The best lesson of NASL may have been: fewer Pelés, more Granitzas. -- Mark Mravic

Track and field can be the purest of athletic ventures. First across the line wins, no excuses. What a joy it was to see Bob Hayes with the Olympic gold in 1964 on a hard, dirt track in Tokyo. It should be simple, and perhaps it was until Ben Johnson ran 9.79 for 100 meters to win the Olympic gold medal in 1988. Then he tested positive for a steroid and in a sense, every performance since that day has been suspect and many have been proven dirty (including almost every performance out of the Eastern Bloc in the 1980s).

Now -- and forever -- the sport is changed. There is what you see with your eyes, what you feel with your heart and what you suspect with your conscience. Different things all. -- T.L.

Just as Michael Jackson's Thriller changed everything we thought we knew about music videos, the Bears' Super Bowl Shuffle opened our minds to the boundlessness of athletic showmanship. Sure, every once in a while we might have seen the odd player bust a move after scoring a touchdown, or break into off-key song during a triumphant moment in the locker room. Shuffle not only fused these two ideas together, but also wrapped them in a package so quintessentially 1980s that no electric drum, neon light or local weatherman's blue screen went unused.

It also spawned a legion of imitators: A year later the New York Mets released Let's Go Mets Go, a production that was (mercifully) light on choreography and heavy on Joe Piscopo cameos. A year after that came the even cheesier Cats from Ol' Mizzou, a four-minute advertisement for the Missouri men's basketball team's Big 8 championship ambitions. What it became, thanks to Norm Stewart's stodgy rap flow, was a PSA for preventing middle-aged men from rocking the mic.

The San Francisco 49ers got in the act after winning their second straight Super Bowl in 1989. It was a rap video that featured a pre-Dancing with the Stars Jerry Rice doing the Cabbage Patch in a Cosby sweater. In the early-90s the Miami Dolphins dreamed up their own version of the MC Hammer's You Can't Touch This -- only instead of gold pants they opted for Zubaz.

Still, as cultural time capsules go, team music videos function as a kind of rearview mirror, one that lets us look back at some of the fun rides our teams have taken us on while framing us in context. So rather than do away with this meme altogether, why don't NFL teams steal a page from Mike Singletary's old rhyme book and get back to "Doin' what's right and settin' the style?" -- Andrew Lawrence

The sight of those rubber balls rolling out onto the gym floor either made you cringe or salivate at the prospect of flinging one at your classmates' heads. At its core, Dodgeball is a fundamentally violent game that has caused more childhood trauma than the Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday The 13th series combined. But it's also hard to deny that gym class was never more chock-full of valuable life lessons.

You learned to protect yourself and your own well-being, and if you happened to fail and get stung along the way, well, then you got an early taste of what it's like to rely on a handout (once a teammate caught a ball to get you back in the game -- and that stinging sensation has worn off, of course). Sure, it can be nasty, enough that some schools have outlawed it, but so is life. -- Cory McCartney

No makeup. No shtick. No Woody Paige. Before sportswriters were awarded points for rants and appeared on every regional network across America to argue the news of the day, there was a cable television show that was so old school it was new school.

The idea was simple: Four sportswriters engaged in a roundtable discussion on the sports topics of the day. The main quartet -- Bill Gleason of Chicago's Southtown Economist and the South Bend (Ind.) Tribune, Bill Jauss of the Chicago Tribune, host Ben Bentley, a career p.r. man and former ring announcer and Rick Telander, at the time a Sports Illustrated writer -- appeared weekly out of SportsChannel Chicago on the no-shtick titled Sportswriters on TV.

Thanks to the reach of the network, I watched the show as a teenager (it ran from 1985 to 2000) and found myself mesmerized by these cigar-smoking (Gleason and Bentley), pugnacious (Jauss) and thoughtful (Telander) scribes. What struck me at the time -- and still does -- was how old these guys were.

"You don't see older people on TV unless they're hawking dentures or geriatric health coverage," Telander wrote in his SI profile of the show in 1990. "But these three guys [Bentley, Gleason and Jauss] are the show, and at its best The Sportwriters is about their collected knowledge, not their gags or nostalgia or rantings."

Bentley died in 2001. He's missed. If only we could go around the horn with the crew again, even for an episode. -- R.D.