Blackie Sherrod, a sportswriter and editor who endeared himself to his Texas readers with a Southern strain of Runyonesque erudition, and to generations of younger reporters with his curmudgeonly mentoring, died on Thursday at his home in Dallas. He was 96.  His death was confirmed by his wife, Joyce, who said he had been suffering from dementia for 10 years and had declined rapidly after two recent falls.  Often compared to leading contemporaries like Red Smith and Jim Murray, Mr. Sherrod was less of a nationally known figure, but few sportswriters have left their mark on a region as Mr. Sherrod did in his home state. As the headline of his obituary in The Dallas Morning News declared, Mr. Sherrod (pronounced SHEHR-ud) was, in Texas parlance, a legend.  In a career of more than six decades, The News was his final employer, beginning in 1985 after his stints at two papers that are now defunct, The Fort Worth Press and The Dallas Times Herald. He was voted Texas sportswriter of the year 16 times.  “There have been about as many imitation Sherrods as there have been sportswriters who drink,” D, the Dallas city magazine, wrote in 1986. That was more than a decade after Texas Monthly published a profile of Mr. Sherrod titled “The Best Sportswriter in Texas,” written by Larry L. King, a Texas writer of some phrase-turning renown himself.  Mr. King recalled that at his first job, at a small paper in Midland, Tex., he routinely swiped lines from Mr. Sherrod for his own column, and that when he moved to a bigger paper in Odessa, a more senior writer “wigwagged me into a neutral corner to whisper that our newspaper wasn’t big enough for both of us to crib from Blackie Sherrod.”  A lively stylist, Mr. Sherrod was able, with a piquant phrase, to force a snort of laughter or, at times, an anguished tear; one of his best-known subjects was Freddie Joe Steinmark, a University of Texas safety on the 1969 national championship team who died of cancer less than two years later.  Not so much a direct critic of the sporting establishment, Mr. Sherrod was more likely to raise an eyebrow askance than to spit in outrage. And he wasn’t naturally inclined to delve into the economics of sports or issues like drug use by athletes.  But writing with an informed swagger and the perspective of a well-read man with wide-ranging interests, he was a shrewd analyst of the games who delicately toed a line as an appreciative nonworshiper of the people who played them. He referred to the Dallas Cowboys (and their blindly adoring fans) with a bit of snark as “Your Heroes,” and to Tom Landry, the impassive and often impenetrable longtime coach of the Cowboys, a man he liked and admired, as Mount Landry.  Once in the 1960s, when Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach rescued a last-minute victory with a deft final drive after playing poorly for most of the game, Mr. Sherrod described the feat as “like putting a cherry on a glass of buttermilk.”  In later years he was best known for a weekly column of brief observations called Scattershooting. “His face is a map of a hard path,” he wrote of Johnny Unitas, among the greatest quarterbacks, “forehead wrinkles, cascading furrows in his cheeks, small pock marks dotting his lean serious cheeks. He is a day laborer who somehow fell into fame on his way to work and it impresses him not a whit.”  William Forrest Sherrod was born on Nov. 9, 1919, on a farm in Bell County, Tex., near Belton, between Austin and Waco. His parents, Marvin Sherrod and the former Lorna Forrest, eventually gave up on farming, and his father made a living as a barber. As a boy, he said, he read every book in the Belton library.  He attended Baylor University before transferring to Howard Payne University, where he played football until he was injured. A coach, noting his black hair and dark complexion — he had Cherokee blood, his wife said — gave him the nickname Blackie, which he did not like but decided to use after an editor told him that readers would remember it. He served in the Navy in the Pacific theater in World War II.  At The Fort Worth Press, a penurious operation, he quickly rose to sports editor and held his young reporters to strict standards, castigating them regularly for tardiness, flowery writing, overseriousness and factual mistakes. Among his shrewd hires were Dan Jenkins, later a writer for Sports Illustrated and the author of the football novel “Semi-Tough,” among many other books, and Bud Shrake, another future Sports Illustrated contributor and novelist.  “I was scared to death of him at first,” Mr. Jenkins told Mr. King for the Texas Monthly profile. “My first story, I spent all night writing it at home on the kitchen table — cutting, polishing, making it bright. Blackie read the first paragraph and said, ‘Don’t ever write a morning lead for an afternoon newspaper, dumbass.’”  He moved to The Times Herald in 1958, and he was so well regarded by the paper and its readership that he was sent to Los Angeles for the 1960 Democratic National Convention, served as the rewrite man in the paper’s coverage of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963 and was dispatched to Cape Kennedy, now known as Cape Canaveral, as Americans landed on the moon in 1969.  Mr. Sherrod’s first marriage ended in divorce. He married Joyce Lowe Wilson in 1979. She is his only immediate survivor.  The legend of Blackie Sherrod was, in short, that of the hard-shelled newsman with a soft heart — or maybe it was the other way around. When Mr. King, finishing his magazine profile, told him he couldn’t find anyone to say a bad word about him, Mr. Sherrod advised him to talk to his enemies. And who are they? Mr. King asked.  “Screw you,” Mr. Sherrod said. “Get your own story.”  Reprinted from Sunday’s early editions.  A version of this article appears in print on May 2, 2016, on page D7 of the New York edition with the headline: Blackie Sherrod, 96, Sportswriter With Texan Swagger. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Mr. Sherrod, voted the state’s best 16 times, was admired for his lively style and for mentoring Dan Jenkins and other younger writers.