Repent, Ye Sinners

Since it is almost impossible to weave the party line into baseball and football stories, sportwriters on Manhattan's Communist Daily Worker tend to forget about the class struggle. Last week this tendency to capitalist complacency got a pair of them into trouble. In reporting the Polo Grounds row between New York Giants' Manager Leo Durocher and a fan named Fred Boysen (see SPORT), the Daily Worker sport page played it straight at first. Wrote Columnist Bill Mardo: "One wants to see the respective merits of this case, and nothing else, brought out in the open and aired properly . . ." And Columnist Lester Rodney chimed in: "I'm making no prejudgment here . . ."

Then the Worker's editors discovered that Boysen was of Puerto Rican descent. The issue was plain as a picket's placard: the case had sinister overtones of Jim Crowism and white supremacy. In a furious editorial the Worker slapped down its sportwriters : "We regret that [they] should have tended in one case to minimize and in the other case to overlook this social aspect of the Durocher case, their comments ranging from a 'let's-hear-from-both-sides' to a 'it's-too-difficult-to-judge' attitude."

The offenders were quick to get the party's point. Columnist Rodney meekly wrote : "I was off, and am trying to correct myself ... In any case involving a white and a Negro, it is the Negro who is prejudged and presumed guilty . . . This is what I seem to have forgotten." Wrote Columnist Mardo : "This writer would like to take note of the serious criticism he has received for the errors of omission [which] resulted in a poor, politically incorrect column . . . There should have been no discussion of [Commissioner] Chandler and Durocher without linking it to the main question of white chauvinism inherent in this whole case. I deserved the alert criticism that has come my way . . ."

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