To Promote New Play About '66 Cowboys and Sportswriters, Mike Shropshire Tells All

As I've noted a few times, Mike Shropshire's Seasons in Hell, about the "worst team in baseball history" (the '73-'75 Texas Rangers), is my favorite sports book; probably has something to do with being raised on the '73-'75 Texas Rangers. Anyway.

On a very related note, a Friend of Unfair Park sends word: On Thursday Stage West in Fort Worth will debut Dallas playwright Larry Herold's latest, The Sports Page, set during Dallas Cowboys training camp in 1966. As Herold writes, he's been workshopping the piece for two years, and it's about "a young man desperate to be a big-time sportswriter [as he] heads for a showdown with a couple of crusty scribes, an attractive female TV reporter and a player who refuses to speak to the press."

To market the piece, says our Friend, Stage West has cut a series of chitchats with Shropshire as he recounts, among other things, boozin' it up on the sports beat during The Good Ol' Days and how the modern-day scribe's too buttoned-up and not havin' any damned fun. The whole collection follows, including the fifth and latest clip, which contains a very casually dropped bombshell about the first woman ever let into the Rangers' locker room in '75. Shropshire goes on to talk about the subsequent rise of the "talking doll" (as he refers to female sports journalists) and reveals how little has changed amongst some of the old guard.