HOT CORNER - Los Angeles Times
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HOT CORNER

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What: “Woodie’s World”

Where: Today, 4 p.m., ESPN Classic.

Heywood Hale Broun, known to his friends as “Woodie,” became famous for prose that was as colorful as his sports coats. Brown, who died last year at 83, brought a wry sense of humor and literary sensibility to the world of sports through his weekly features on the “CBS Saturday Evening News” during the 1960s and ‘70s.

Now ESPN Classic is offering viewers a chance to relive Broun’s reports -- or discover them for the first time. Today’s show is the first of a 13-part series hosted by Bud Lamoreaux, Broun’s longtime producer and colleague.

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Each weekly half-hour show will include four of Broun’s reports.

The first in tonight’s show is on Ted Williams and his return to baseball at 42 as manager of the Washington Senators in 1969.

Another is about the Manitowoc County Chiefs, the nation’s oldest minor league football team. Manitowoc is in Wisconsin.

Of the players, Broun says, “Shakespeare wrote of the uncertain glory of an April day. Equally uncertain is the glory of a minor league football player’s night. His bruises are as blue as those in the NFL, but his paychecks are a lot less green.”

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You won’t find that kind of prose in television sports reporting these days.

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