Legend’s final chapters to have Vegas viewpoint

By Jeff Haney

Monday, Oct. 26, 2009 | 2 a.m.

His long friendship with Muhammad Ali has given Jerry Izenberg countless cherished memories.

When Izenberg wrote a column supporting Ali upon his refusal to join the military, though, the trouble started right away.

A bomb threat was called in to Izenberg’s newspaper, the Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J. Advertisers pulled out. He received envelopes full of hate mail — and worse, though decorum prevents us from getting into details. Vandals smashed the windows of his gray Chevy outside of his home.

The situation wasn’t without its grim humor, however.

“Here’s the newspaper building and here’s the street,” Izenberg says, arranging a cell phone and salt-and-pepper shakers on the table to re-create a scene from downtown Newark in the late ’60s. “I’m going to pull up here and park next to the building, but I’ve got a red light.

“While I’m waiting, here comes another gray Chevy down Court Street. It pulls in and parks next to the paper. The driver gets out and starts to walk away. Two guys jump out of another car with sledgehammers and they smash his windshield out.”

The victim of mistaken identity didn’t have a clue as to what just happened.

“I went up to the guy and said, ‘Don’t take it personally. It’s only business,’ ” Izenberg says, suppressing an impish grin.

That’s Izenberg in precis: A compelling story, told with empathy and leavened with a street-smart sense of humor.

One of America’s preeminent sports writers, Izenberg officially retired from the Star-Ledger in 2007. He recently moved to Henderson, where he lives full time as he works on a series of book projects and files occasional stories for his old newspaper under the label of columnist emeritus — “a Latin word meaning old fart,” Izenberg jokes.

His latest book, “Through My Eyes: A Sports Writer’s 58-Year Journey,” is a memoir of his life in the business. It contains stories of greats like Ali and Secretariat, but also portraits of forgotten denizens of racetrack backstretches and memories of his childhood in Newark, where he grew up as the son of an immigrant father who came to love baseball after leaving Eastern Europe to escape anti-Semitism.

Though he personifies the image of a Northeastern metropolitan newspaperman, Izenberg says he’s adjusting well to his desert home.

“I didn’t think I was going to like moving here because I grew up in Newark, with the cracked sidewalks and the smog and all of that,” Izenberg, 79, says. He gestures toward the splendid view from his back yard patio. “Now, look at the mountains. One of them is called Sunrise Mountain. I’m getting up at 6:30 and looking at the sunrise. If you do that in Newark, it’s hard because the sun is rusty, and it’s hard to see. So I like that very much.”

Izenberg and Las Vegas go way back. In town to cover boxing in the 1960s, Izenberg recalls feeling chills down his spine upon entering a casino showroom and hearing a young Barbra Streisand singing “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf,” a track from her first album. He watched Don Rickles perform and later got to know him.

He spent time with Sid Wyman, the owner of the Dunes, who told Izenberg that casino bosses should embrace gamblers who win. There will never be enough of them to break the house, Wyman said, and when they return home they’re like walking advertisements for Las Vegas.

“And the fights out here, most of them, were only the best,” Izenberg says. “Las Vegas always represented a certain form of excellence to me.”

Izenberg, a longtime resident of Sopranos territory, harbors some nostalgia for Old Vegas.

“There was a rapport between, I guess you would have to call them the mob guys, and the sports writers,” Izenberg says. “They liked us very much, always did, because they loved fighters and that’s the sport that was going on out here.

“I have to believe it was a lot more fun in Las Vegas then than now. The way I think of the spirit of Las Vegas is that if Las Vegas were a hooker, she’s one who’s been around, but she understands that her job is not to get the thing over as quickly as possible. I think there was a lot of that in the old Las Vegas. I don’t know if anybody in town understands that today.”

Izenberg is one of four writers to have covered every Super Bowl. It’s a nice distinction, he says, but one that draws increasingly goofy questions from journalists in the Super Bowl’s host city each year.

He once received a questionnaire asking him to predict which of the small group would be the last man standing — the eventual sole survivor, as it were.

“Here’s some schmuck asking me when I think I’m going to die!” Izenberg says.

He considers it a symptom of the changing dynamics of the sports media. Izenberg sees a culture of 24-hour TV highlight shows and talk programs yielding sports coverage that’s a mile wide and an inch deep.

The literate, in-depth writing Izenberg champions has become a bit of a lost art, he says.

“When you talk about communications and where we’re going with it, you have to ask where you’re going to get the truth,” Izenberg says. “Off the Internet, where people make outrageous charges and don’t sign their names, where they argue about things they know nothing about? Not a chance.

“I would like to see people on the Internet sign their comments like ‘Jeff Haney from Las Vegas’ — not ‘BigJeffGoDevils’ or something. If you want to question somebody and you’re not sure enough of yourself to do it without the cloak of anonymity, then I don’t care what you think about anything.

“I was a fairly controversial guy at times, and I always had the conviction to put my name right out there.”

His next project, Izenberg says, will be a biography of Pete Rozelle, the influential former NFL commissioner. He plans to write the bulk of it in his home office, with its expansive view of the mountains and, in the distance, the lights of Las Vegas.

“I feel this is a great place for me to end up,” Izenberg says. “And I’m in no hurry to end up.”