With his distinctive column logo, Doug Mintline was a Journal Sports department icon for years. At right, Mintline in 1980.

Detailed coverage evolved from brief reports

When The Flint Journal was born, there was no such thing as a sports writer.

DAN NILSEN Journal Sports Writer

Sports pages � let alone entire sections of sports coverage � were decades in the future.

Of course, there was nothing much to cover in the mid-19th century. With the country barely 100 years old and still expanding, Americans had little time for games.

What little sports news that appeared in the paper was of a recreational nature, such as an 1887 baseball game between a team of married men and a squad of bachelors. (The bachelors prevailed, 23-22.)

�Professional sports� meant gambling-linked ventures such as boxing, wrestling, billiards and horse-racing. Considerable detail was provided on the harness races at Flint Driving Park as early as 1883, but the money involved made it more of a business issue than sports.

The National League of baseball started in the same year as The Journal � 1876 � and by the end of the century, The Journal was running daily results and standings.

Still, there were no detailed reports on games. Even the end of the first World Series, in 1903, received but nine sentences under a small headline.

Local action drew more attention, but objectivity apparently did not apply. An 1889 baseball game between Flint and Jackson rated a full box score, but the story blatantly blamed the umpire for Flint�s 13-8 loss, citing him for �rotten judgment throughout the whole game.�

The Journal of that era was just four pages, and sports reports were short and sporadic. The University of Michigan baseball team got a paragraph for being �champions of the west,� and the Flint high school (Central High today) was accorded one sentence for beating Lapeer 11-7.

There were no pictures, no bylines and, oddly, no first names given in many sports articles. Thus, it might be written that �Waite had no control of the ball� and �Sinclair replaced him after the sixth inning.�

Seasons in the sun

Winter editions were devoid of any sports coverage, ice hockey being a foreign game and basketball merely an off-season conditioning exercise.

College football coverage went from zilch in 1899 to overkill just six years later. Perhaps it was Fielding Yost�s �point-a-minute� UM football team of 1902 that sparked interest, but by 1905 The Journal saw fit to run the entire season�s gridiron schedule for every major school east of the Mississippi under the screaming headline �Football season!�

The national sports news was provided via wire � or wireless � services. One 1899 Journal article was nothing more than a list of hourly telegraph dispatches updating the progress of the America�s Cup yacht race.

As early as 1899, sports stories were being grouped under label headlines such as �The Diamond and other sports� and �Sports of all sorts,� but the space allotted was always a column or less.

That barrier finally broke in 1908 as sports spilled into two columns, swelled by the first use of photographs � mostly head-and-shoulders portraits and posed pictures.

Cartoons popped up in 1909 � single-panel, comical depictions of game action. Winter sports also broke into print that year with the appearance of local bowling scores, basketball results and �hot-stove league� baseball news.

Flint�s role in the birth of the automobile industry meant instant recognition for auto racing in The Journal. A June 19, 1909, race in Indiana led to one of the earliest �extras� in Journal history after Louis Chevrolet won the 395-mile event in a Buick that day. �Buick car wins big auto race� was one of the largest, boldest headlines of its time.

By May 1910, sports was filling a full page, and the first byline appeared. Burr Osborn might not have been strictly a sports writer, but he did have a regular sports beat: the Flint Vehics of the Southern Michigan baseball league.

Sports interest was crossing into sports fanaticism. A large crowd gathered outside The Journal one day in 1910, awaiting an extra edition the paper promised after a fight in Reno, Nev.

The next decade ushered in the sports column. Tip O�Neill (not the late U.S. House speaker) offered colorful tidbits on local sports, mostly baseball, under label heads like �Sportlets� and �Snappy curves from the Vehics press box.� He was the paper�s first sports editor in 1919 but stayed less than two years before moving on to a career in local and state politics.

Harry Dayton took over in 1921, the dawn of sports� Golden Age and a time when sports writers started expressing opinions. One of Dayton�s �Just Dope� columns criticized heavyweight boxer Jack Sharkey for not trying hard enough in the ring.

Under Dayton�s watch, newspapers broke up into sections, and sports sometimes occupied the front of one. A Sunday edition might have up to four pages of sports. Action photos from previous-day events began to liven up those pages in the �20s.

You read it here first

With public interest booming, sports reporting became competitive. M.B. Cossman succeeded Dayton and was the first to write that a distraught Hank Greenberg, sold by the Detroit Tigers to the Pittsburgh Pirates in early 1947, was considering retirement. Baseball writers in New York were calling it �that Flint story� as they tried to follow it up.

Some Journal sports writers did more than write. Willis J. �Speed� Oldfield in 1939 started the Flint Junior Golf Association, which today is the largest and oldest of its kind in the nation.

By 1950, when Tom Mercy was sports editor and writing �The Tom Tom� column, his staff consisted of a desk specialist, a clerk-reporter and two young sports writers � Len Hoyes and Doug Mintline � who would stay on for more than four decades.

Hoyes started out on high school sports, covered the rise and fall of pro hockey in Flint and was on the Detroit Red Wings beat when he retired � sort of � in 1992. He is still a steady contributor after 51 years, both on the desk and with his vast knowledge of Flint sports history.

Mintline became the most popular sports writer in Journal history. Over his 44-year career he spoke at more than 2,000 athletic banquets and events, served 20 years as sports editor and was Michigan sports writer of the year in 1966 and �69. He died in 1996.

The careers of those two coincided with the baby-boom generation, and The Journal�s local coverage expanded greatly on their watch.

A century ago, the only area schools getting ink in The Journal were Flint�s high school, Michigan School for the Deaf and occasionally Fenton.

Today The Journal reports on four area leagues totaling 31 schools spread over four counties, plus 15 other high schools not affiliated with those conferences, as well as Mott Community College.

That kind of coverage relies heavily on the assistance of area coaches and statisticians, who become reporters for the 5-10 minutes they spend phoning in the results of their games.

More stories require more space. From that single column or less in 1899, The Journal�s sports coverage now fills 30 or more columns daily � the equivalent of at least five full pages with no ads � and up to 50 or more on Sundays.

Part of the Booth Newspapers chain that includes seven other Michigan dailies, The Journal also exchanges sports stories around the state. The Ann Arbor News shares its coverage of UM sports, and a central pool of reporters covers the four major professional teams in Detroit as well as Michigan State University.

Many of the stories appearing in The Journal are also posted on the Michigan Live Web site (fl.mlive.com).

To keep it fun, The Journal sponsors contests and competitions. For more than two decades now, readers have been trying to �Outpick� current sports editor Dave Poniers on a weekly list of football games during the fall. The Publisher�s Cup soccer tournament was inaugurated last spring to accommodate the booming interest in youth soccer.

The Journal also seeks to preserve the rich sports history of the area with its role in the Greater Flint Area Sports Hall of Fame.

Sports writer Dan Nilsen started at The Journal in 1985. He can be reached at (810) 766-6394 or dnilsen@flintjournal.com.