Fortunately, fans had one person who could synthesize, inform, and visually illustrate a game and players for them – the sports cartoonist. During the first two-thirds of the Twentieth Century most daily newspapers featured a cartoonist who did sport cartoons on a regular basis. (Many times this person also did other artwork for his paper, including political cartoons.) In the days of competitive journalism, a city like New York with its dozen-plus daily newspapers had an equal number of competing sports cartoonists. It was not unusual to have “yesterday’s game” or “last night’s boxing match” portrayed with a cartoon in the morning paper.

In drawings that were the forerunners of today’s “quick read” journalism, sports cartoonists drew action-packed pieces with a brief storyline summarizing (and often commenting on) a person, team, or a sport itself. Many sport cartoonists rendered striking portraits of star athletes as part of their drawings. These originals not only capture a piece of history, but are incredible works of art.

Since the 1960s, photojournalism, television coverage of sports, and corporate needs of newspapers to cut employee costs led to the eventual extinction of full-time sports cartoonists. But their heyday during the first half of the Twentieth Century left a rich tradition that is not easily forgotten.

Like magazine illustrators and comic artists, sports cartoonists usually saw their work as something done for the next issue. Sometimes the subject of the drawing requested the original art, other times the original would be discarded by the artist after publication. At that time there was little interest in collecting (or selling) originals as works of art. The original sports cartoons that remain today are important not only for nostalgia and historic reasons, but also qualify as fine works of collectible (and displayable) art.