Sid Hartman: the one and only

Sid Hartman of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune defies all descriptions.

He never met a Minneapolis team, pro or college, that he didn't love. He loves the Gophers more than current Minnesota head football coach Tim Brewster can pretend.

Sunday, 89-year-0ld Sid told his readers that the Vikings snapped up Florida wide receiver Percy Harvin in the first round just before the New England Patriots were going to grab him. To show, you know, Harvin was a stellar pick.

But I come here not to bury Sid or praise him, rather  to pass on this piece in Sunday's Los Angeles Times by Jerry Crowe on Hartman, and his role in founding the Minneapolis Lakers many decades ago.

"Conflict of interest," Hartman says from his home outside Minneapolis, "wasn't important then."

I'm burying the lede. The especially good stuff is this piece on Sid -- no one, and I mean no one, calls him "Hartman" -- by Jeff Severans Guntzel in April's Minnesota Monthly. What a great read on a Minnesota icon with fans and critics galore.

Excerpts: It is not hyperbole to say that there are only four people alive so familiar to Minnesotans that they can be referred to by a single moniker: Jesse, Prince, Dylan-and Sid.

Sid's inescapability can only explain so much about his stature. There's also the outsized personality, the comic-book persona: a wild stew of arrogance, petulance, and utter shamelessness that has made him one of the most notorious figures in the state.

Sid would often take a cash-strapped (Bud) Grant out for food (just as he would do for a cash-strapped Kevin McHale years later and countless others between and since). He'd connect Grant and others with Albert Murray, owner of Murray's steak house. In those days, players would get tickets for family or to sell for walking-around money. Murray would buy the tickets from Sid at a premium and Sid would pass the profits-seven dollars per ticket-to the student-athletes. “Unethical?” writes Sid in his autobiography, “Hey, it was the 1940s. The newspaper wanted the Gophers to win.” When they did, he explains, the paper's press run would jump by 30,000.

What do you all think of Sid? I can almost guarantee a mixed response, though people with an Iowa bent are more likely to be anti-Sid. He isn't exactly a Hawkeye fan, you know.