By Dale Welch
Legendary sportswriter Will Henry Grimsley was a Monterey native. The red headed, blue-eyed Grimsley was born to Tennessee Central Railroad engineer Alvis and Betty Elrod Grimsley, in the booming mountain town, on Jan. 27, 1914. When he was six-years old, the family removed to McMinnville, TN and later, to Nashville.
When he was 18, Grimsley got a job writing sports for the Evening Tennessean. By 1935, he became sports editor of the paper. At one exhibition game that included the New York Yankees, Grimsley ran upon home run king Babe Ruth, who refused to start the game until he finished being interviewed by the young reporter.
The Associated Press hired Grimsley in 1943, in Memphis. He transferred to New York, in 1947. Grimsley covered many sporting events and more that are forever etched into history.
In 1964, Grimsley was in Mississippi covering a college game, when Civil Rights workers were murdered. He switched hats and reported the story.
When Cassius Clay became a Muslim and changed his name to Mohammed Ali, Grimsley did a series of articles. He was with Ali when the champion boxer refused to join the military.
At the 1972 Munich Olympics, Grimsley was there when a group of Palestinian terrorists took a group of Israeli athletes as hostages and eventually killed them. The seasoned reporter ran S to his room and grabbed a jacket that had an Olympic badge on it and slipped into the village and the police command post.
He couldn’t speak German and still had his Tennessee accent, even after all those years, but Grimsley observed. He would call the AP offices and report what was going on in a whisper. Grimsley was only discovered when a fellow reporter yelled to get him in.
“Grimsley’s Sports World” was a column he started, in 1977. The column covered everything from golf, tennis to football and more. He authored four books on golf, tennis, football and even one on the 101 greatest athletes of the century. Grimsley garnered several awards and served as president of a few sports writing associations before he retired, in 1984. Will Henry Grimsley died Oct. 31, 2002 and is buried in New York.
Even though Grimsley covered 25 Kentucky Derbies, 35 World Series, nine Summer and six Winter Olympics and a vast amount of other events from several Super Bowls to many Indy 500s and had a career that spanned over 40 years with the AP, the world heard the first report from Will Henry Grimsley when he cried out from a little room, in a little house, in Monterey, TN.
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