In 1976 I casually started in on a Sports Illustrated piece about the University of Pittsburgh football team (Tony Dorsett, et al) which ended up that year’s mythical national champion. Not far in, there was that moment when you recheck the byline because it dawns on your you’re reading great writing.
That was the first time I saw the name Myron Cope.
A year later I was in college in Western Pennsylvania, where Cope was a regional icon who did local TV sports and, famously, the Steelers on radio. He was a squirrely little guy with a cartoonish voice that was somehow both whiny and raspy. Took me a long time to realize that the writer and the broadcaster were the same person because, you know, how could they be?
His broadcasting was at least silly and at most incoherent cheerleading (”Get those Broncos! They’re just yonkos!”), but Pittsburgh evidently has a taste for that sort of thing. Consider Bob Prince, the militantly homerish Pirates’ play-by-play guy of the 60s and 70s.
Cope, who passed away Wednesday at 79, invented the Terrible Towel and became as much of a celebrity as the Steelers themselves. You have to have lived in that part of the world to know how remarkable a statement that is.
Didn’t know Cope, but knew several people who did including, in college, a guy who mowed Cope’s lawn in the summer. He was by all accounts an exceptionally kind, gracious and generous man. It goes without saying he’ll be missed.
The legacy of William F. Buckley, who also died Wednesday, at 82, is of course bigger and more complicated. Buckley, like Cope, was known universally (OK, except for Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer) for his warmth and grace. He contributed to both the substance and the tone of the national discourse.
Buckley conceived conservatism as Catholic but not catholic, fiercely anti-Communism, just-as-fiercely pro-Capitalism, unquestionably patrician and undeniably intellectual.
He sent that message - indeed spent his life broadcasting it - through 55 books, an estimated 60-70 speeches a year for 40 years, National Review magazine (which he founded), the interview/debate TV show Firing Line, endless interviews and articles. It’s an exaggeration, but a useful one, to say he begat Goldwater who begat Reagan.
And when all that begat Dubya, Buckley found something of a late-life second wind by breaking ranks, acknowledging that Iraq has been a failure and then a mistake based on a lie and then agreeing that if the lie could be thoroughly parsed, impeachment would be defensible.
Flexibility should not be read as doubt. Buckley seemed almost sickeningly comfortable in his own skin. It sometimes seemed amazingly difficult for him to understand that loving being yourself and American was harder if you didn’t grow up rich and privileged.
Buckley was probably too smart to have been an actual racist or elitist, but how could he not have been smart enough to know when he came off like one?
He once wrote this in NR:
The central question that emerges—and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by merely consulting a catalog of the rights of American citizens, born Equal—is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. …
National Review believes that the South’s premises are correct. If the majority wills what is socially atavistic, then to thwart the majority may be, though undemocratic, enlightened. It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority. Sometimes it becomes impossible to assert the will of a minority, in which case it must give way; and the society will regress; sometimes the numerical minority cannot prevail except by violence: then it must determine whether the prevalence of its will is worth the terrible price of violence.
That was in 1957, but still. Has Ku Klux Klan rhetoric ever been so eloquent?
