Richard Leonard Young[2] (October 17, 1917 – August 30, 1987) was an American sportswriter best known for his direct and abrasive style, and his 45-year association with the New York Daily News.

Daily News readers knew that "KOBS" was Young's acronym for "Kindly Old Burt Shotton", and was not intended as a term of endearment.

While covering journeyman Don Larsen's perfect game in the 1956 World Series, Daily News writer Joe Trimble struggled to find appropriate words to begin his article.

In 1961, it was Young who first suggested the idea of putting an asterisk on Roger Maris' home run total, should the Yankee right fielder fail to catch or surpass Babe Ruth in the first 154 games of the season, saying "Everyone does that when there's a difference of opinion."

Young angrily denounced the 23 sportswriters who had omitted Mays from their ballots, writing, "If Jesus Christ were to show up with His old baseball glove, some guys wouldn't vote for Him.

The Sporting News described his career arc: "Though Young's best work was on the baseball beat, his most controversial and memorable writing came later, as a general columnist.

"[9] A resident of Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey, Young underwent intestinal surgery in June 1987; he died in late August at Montefiore Hospital in The Bronx.

[11] For several years after his death, The Village Voice ran a parody of a late-period Young column in its sports section, railing at all comers underneath the tag "Dateline: Hell".

Fellow sportswriter Marty Appel recalled "cringing" at Young's "boorish" habit of upbraiding workers in other cities' stadiums for not meeting his "New York standards".

Despite his own candid clubhouse reporting, Young blasted Jim Bouton as a "social leper" after the publication of the pitcher's tell-all book Ball Four.

And when an arbitrator ruled in favor of the union, thus ending baseball's reserve clause, Young's first reaction was to write: "Peter Seitz reminds me of a terrorist, a little man to whom nothing very important has happened in his lifetime, who suddenly decides to create some excitement by tossing a bomb into things.

Having no interest in the "foreign" game of soccer, Young heckled Pelé and the owners of the New York Cosmos at the press conference announcing the star's arrival in the NASL.

While covering the 1980 World Series, he wrote admiringly of the way the Philadelphia police had ringed the field with mounted officers, adding "If a few dogs on leashes and a few policemen on horses can command respect, think of what an electric chair might do.

Never comfortable with the broadcast media, Young had a long and loud mutual hostility with Howard Cosell, whom he called "Howie the Shill" in his columns when he was not using pejoratives like "fraud" or "an ass".

Young was an outspoken opponent of baseball's segregation policy, and wrote about the racial abuse faced by such players as Jackie Robinson and Don Newcombe.

Because the homer had barely cleared the 259-foot (79 m) right-field fence in the Polo Grounds, the shortest in baseball at that time, it was called a "Chinese home run", implying that it hadn't required much effort to hit.

Young began his piece: The story of the Giants' 5–2 win over Cleveland in yesterday's World Series opener should be written vertically, from top to bottom ... in Chinese hieroglyphics.

Ming Toy Rhodes, sometimes called Dusty by his Occidental friends, was honorable person who, as a pinch hitter, delivered miserable bundle of wet wash to first row in rightfield of Polo Grounds, some 2591⁄2 feet down the road from the laundry.In reaction to Young's use of so many Chinese stereotypes, Shavey Lee, a Chinatown restaurateur considered the unofficial "mayor" of the Chinese American population in the city, collected signatures from his community on a Chinese-language[16] petition to the Giants' secretary, demanding that all sportswriters stop using the term.

After free agency came to baseball, Seaver publicly complained that Mets owner M. Donald Grant made no effort to sign any of the available players.

[21] In the wake of the column, Murray adopted a general policy of not speaking to any sportswriters, a career-long stance which provoked a considerable amount of criticism from the sports media.

Young was the first sportswriter to treat the clubhouse as a central and necessary part of the sports "beat", and his success at ferreting out scoops and insights from within the previously private sanctum of the team was influential and often imitated.

"[9] In 2000, Ira Berkow chose Young as one of the seven sportswriters who'd made the greatest impact on their profession, along with Red Smith, Grantland Rice, Ring Lardner, Damon Runyon, Jimmy Cannon, and Jim Murray.

According to Jack Ziegler in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Young was a "key transitional figure" between the "gentlemanly" sports reporting of old-time writers like Grantland Rice and Arthur Daley.