Boston Globe's Clif Keane was a sportswriter in a class by himself

John George Taylor Spink died on Dec. 7, 1962, at age 74. He had been the publisher of the Sporting News in St. Louis from 1914 until his death.

The Baseball Writers Association of America and the Hall of Fame decided to honor his legacy with the J.G. Taylor Spink Award to a sportswriter with a strong résumé of baseball coverage. The first winner was Spink, and he was recognized at the 1963 induction event.

The Spink Award and Ford Frick Award for broadcasters (started in 1978) are honored in an area at the National Baseball Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y., although they are not official members of the Hall of Fame.

Dan Shaughnessy of the Boston Globe had his moment Saturday as the 67th winner of the Spink Award. There had been four previous ­winners from the Boston chapter of the BBWAA:

Peter Gammons, Larry Whiteside, Harold Kaese and Tim Murnane, a prominent baseball writer at the start of the 20th century.

There is one Boston baseball writer missing: the late magnificently acerbic Clif Keane, who covered the Red Sox for the Globe from 1939 to 1975.

Globe staffers who edited Clif's work as a reporter would tell you the copy was a bit rough, and certainly the words of a Keane game story didn't flow like those you could find in a Shaughnessy gamer (and now his columns).

Yet, I think at our soul, sportswriters are required to be cynics and smart alecks, and Clif was in a class by ­himself. Legend has it, he would address Ted Williams in the same manner as everyone else:

"Hey, bush" … as in bush league.

The first time I met Clif was before a game at Fenway Park in 1974. I walked into the press box dining room with the Minneapolis Star's Bob Fowler. Clif glanced at my stout figure and said:

"Hey, Foul-aa, where'd you get the bear? You should put a muzzle on that guy.''

The Bear became my nickname among ball-writing friends of that era, and it's a lasting honor … to have been so christened by Clif Keane.

Read Patrick Reusse's blog at startribune.com/patrick. E-mail him at preusse@startribune.com.