I loved seeing Marv Throneberry on the Miller Lite commercials.
I loved seeing Marv Throneberry on the Miller Lite commercials.After he left baseball, Throneberry became first a Memphis beer distributor and later worked in the trucking industry. He was said to have had a unique business card: a fold-over card in which the top flap had an oval cutout through which you could see, on the inside of the card, a head shot of Throneberry in his Mets cap. At the bottom of the fold-over, in gold embossed lettering, the caption: Eight million New Yorkers called him Marvelous Marv.
The nickname, by the way, came by way of Leonard Shecter, then a sportswriter for the New York Post, and later to become the man who hammered Jim Bouton's running diary of his 1969 season in Seattle and Houston into Ball Four.
And Shecter's original notoriety came not from Bouton, not from Marvelous Marv, but from the 1958 Yankees---Shecter was aboard the team plane when, during the Yankees' pennant clinch celebration in-flight, relief ace Ryne Duren playfully poked a cigar into the mouth of Ralph Houk, then a coach, and Houk decked him in reply. (Duren never quite understood why Houk reacted so violently to a gentle joke.) When Shecter's editor asked him how he could miss the story of GM George Weiss siccing private detectives on some Yankees' tails, Shecter told his editor he had something better---the Duren/Houk dustup.
Shecter didn't write the actual story; he gave the details to his editor, who gave them in turn to then-managing editor Paul Sann, and Sann and assorted other editors wrote the final version. The New York sports press credited that revelation with the beginning of the end of hagiographic sports reporting, even if the final version proved to be a tabloid-style exaggeration (the paper made it sound like a hearty brawl instead of a one-punch idiocy on Ralph Houk's part) of what actually happened.