Everything They Had Read online

  DEDICATION

  FOR ALL HIS EDITORS

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction by Glenn Stout

  EARLY DRAFTS

  Death of a Sculler, in Three Acts

  from the Harvard Alumni Bulletin, April 23, 1955

  Horse Racing in Warsaw

  from the New York Times, June 13, 1965

  THE LONGER VIEW

  Introduction

  from The Best American Sports Writing 1991

  Sports as a Window of Social Change

  from The Sporting News, May 23, 1994

  A Dynasty in the Making

  Introduction to ESPN Sportscentury, 1999

  Sports Can Distract, but They Don’t Heal

  from ESPN.com, September 10, 2002

  BASEBALL

  Baseball and the National Mythology

  from Harper’s Magazine, September 1970

  The Education of Reggie Smith

  from Playboy, October 1984

  The Fan Divided

  from the Boston Globe, October 6, 1986

  Renewed Spirits at Fenway Opener

  from the Boston Globe, April 11, 1989

  Why Men Love Baseball

  from Parade Magazine, May 14, 1989

  The Good Old Days—for Baseball Owners

  from the New York Times, May 29, 1989

  My Dinner with Theodore

  from Ted Williams: A Portrait in Words and Pictures, 1990

  History’s Man

  from Jackie Robinson: Between the Baselines, 1995

  Maybe I Remember DiMaggio’s Kick

  from the New York Times, October 21, 2000

  The Ultimate Gamer

  from ESPN.com, August 3, 2001

  Torre Makes a Good Boss

  from ESPN.com, December 5, 2001

  The Perfectionist at the Plate

  from the New York Times, July 9, 2002

  If They Strike, I’m Going Fishin’

  from ESPN.com, July 26, 2002

  And So It Happened

  from the Boston Globe, December 19, 2004

  BASKETBALL

  The Basket-Case State

  from Esquire, June 1985

  The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of

  from Sports Illustrated, June 29, 1987

  A Hero for the Wired World

  from Sports Illustrated, December 23, 1991

  Character Study: Pat Riley

  from New York Magazine, December 21, 1992

  Say It Ain’t So, Mike

  from ESPN.com, May 2, 2001

  In Admiration of Iverson

  from ESPN.com, June 11, 2001

  FOOTBALL

  Sunday, Boring Sunday

  from New York Magazine, December 16, 1974

  The Games Harvard Plays

  from Inc., October 1990

  How I Fell in Love with the NFL

  from ESPN.com, February 21, 2001

  Introduction

  from Super Bowl XL Opus, 2006

  FISHING AND OTHER SPORTS

  The Day That the Striper—and Memories of Bob Francis—Came Back

  from the Boston Globe, August 12, 1990

  Sea of Dreams

  from GQ, January 1995

  Why I Fish

  from Town & Country, April 2000

  Homage to Patagonia

  from ESPN.com, February 7, 2001

  Anatomy of a Champion

  from Vanity Fair, May 1996

  Ice Breakers

  from Condé Nast Sports for Women, February 1998

  Ali Wins Another Fight

  from ESPN.com, March 21, 2001

  Thanks, Soccer, See You in Four Years

  from ESPN.com, August 2, 2002

  Olympiad XXVIII

  from Vanity Fair, September 2004

  PALS

  He Got a Shot in the NBA, and It Went In

  from the New York Times, February 7, 1999

  Men Without Women

  from GQ, September 2002

  Schaap Was a Pioneer … and a Good Guy

  from ESPN.com, December 24, 2004

  A Full Life of Football, Till the Very End

  from the Washington Post, November 22, 2005

  The Fitness-Goers

  from Vogue, July 1987

  Acknowledgments

  Credits

  Index

  About the Author

  Other Works

  Copyright

  Footnotes

  INTRODUCTION

  BY GLENN STOUT

  Many readers may be surprised to discover that as an undergraduate at Harvard University, David Halberstam, who would become the most honored journalist of our time, began his journalism career in the press box. As a staff writer for the Harvard Crimson he covered intramural basketball and the freshman baseball team before matriculating to varsity football. For a time he even wrote a sports column for the Crimson inventively titled “Eggs in Your Beer.” One of the pleasures of editing this volume has been the discovery that over the ensuing five decades, through stints at newspapers in Mississippi and Tennessee and the New York Times, and assignments in the Congo, Vietnam, Poland, and Paris, and then after leaving daily journalism to write books, he never strayed from the sports page for long. While working for the Nashville Tennessean from 1956 through 1960 he once covered opening day of the baseball season and reported on a high school student who would soon win several Olympic medals named Wilma Rudolph. After he joined the New York Times in 1960, his first byline for the Times was not about any great issue of the day, but, of all things, about a ski jumping exhibition held in late November on man-made snow at Central Park’s Cedar Hill.

  This is, I think, telling. He once wrote of his sports titles that “[they] are my entertainments, fun to do, a pleasant world and a good deal more relaxed venue,” less pressured and more enjoyable than his heavier and more lengthy books about what he termed “society, history and culture.” Yet I do not think he viewed writing about sports as necessarily something lesser, for he also wrote that sports were “a venue from which I can learn a great deal about the changing mores of the rest of the society.” He recognized that sports are important because sports matter to people, and that sports, and how we relate to sports, say something of value about ourselves, our society, and our history and culture, one of the rare places where citizens of differing creeds, classes, and races come together.

  David Halberstam was, at his core, a reporter, and even when he was writing about sports he was reporting on the world—they were not separate. In a story he wrote as an undergraduate for the Harvard Alumni Bulletin about sculling on the Charles River, the first story reprinted in this book, he also managed to capture a bit of the Cold War fear that was then wreaking havoc upon the postwar psyche. His brief report on Wilma Rudolph’s track squad provided Halberstam himself with a lesson in racial progress, or the lack thereof. His editor excised his use of the term “coed” in his description of the runners—at the time the term was reserved for white students only.

  This background in sports does not make David Halberstam particularly unique. A number of great American writers were, at one time or another, sportswriters, ranging from Ernest Hemingway to Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson, James Reston, and Richard Ford. What is unique, however, is that David Halberstam, while moving beyond sports, did not, I think, move past sports. While he never elevated sports out of proportion, sports never ceased to be important to him and he never cast sports aside as insignificant, once writing that “I do not know of any other venue that showcases the changes in American life and its values and the coming of the norms of entertainment more dramatically than sports.”

  One reason that he fe
lt that way may be because he found those who wrote about sports among the best teachers of writing in all journalism. In his introduction to a collection of work by W. C. Heinz entitled What a Time It Was, Halberstam credits Heinz, who is best known for his sportswriting, as “one of those people who made me want to be a writer,” someone who “helped teach me what the possibilities of journalism really were.” Gay Talese’s famous profile of Joe DiMaggio, “The Silent Season of the Hero,” written in 1966 for Esquire, had a similar impact. For Halberstam, Talese’s sober, nuanced portrait of DiMaggio simultaneously exposed the limits inherent in newspaper journalism and the creative possibilities of magazine work, which promised what Halberstam called “the greatest indulgence of all for a journalist, the luxury of time.” Over the years he regularly noted the influence of other writers like Red Smith, Jimmy Cannon, Jimmy Breslin, Murray Kempton, and Tom Wolfe on his own work. Smith, of course, was a sports columnist, and while Breslin, Cannon, Kempton, and Wolfe wrote of many topics, all considered sports a valid subject upon which to exercise their unique creative talents.

  It was, in fact, the influence of these talented writers that caused Halberstam to look at his own work and career and, shortly after Talese’s story about DiMaggio appeared in print, to ponder leaving daily journalism. Despite winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for his reporting on the Vietnam War, he began to find daily journalism too rigid and confining.

  His frustration with daily reportage and his desire to say more is apparent even in his earliest work and is apparent even when he wrote about sports. In March of 1961 Halberstam wrote a brief story for the Times about the Washington Redskins’ new football stadium, which was being built as part of the National Capital Parks system and therefore fell under the jurisdiction of the Interior Department. In the story, U.S. Interior Secretary Stewart Udall warned Redskins owner George Preston Marshall, a notorious bigot who at that point had yet to put an African American player on the field in a Redskins uniform, that if he continued to discriminate in his hiring practices, the new stadium might not be available to the Redskins.

  The story is unremarkable except for the ending. Halberstam interviewed both Udall and Marshall for the story, and the Redskins owner offered up his usual excuses for not employing any African Americans, telling Halberstam that Redskins fans were mainly from the south and therefore the team recruited players from southern universities, which just so happened to field all-white football teams, a transparently cowardly posture that ignored the fact that there were already African American collegiate players in black colleges as well as African American players in the NFL available by trade. Yet Marshall told Halberstam, “I don’t know where I could get a good Negro player now—the other clubs aren’t going to give up a good one.”

  Reading the story today, one can almost feel Halberstam bristling at Marshall’s unapologetic bigotry and insensitivity. As the reporter of a news story, he simply did not have the latitude to take Marshall directly to task on the topic, an experience he must have found frustrating.

  Yet still, he did find a way—through simple reporting. Immediately following Marshall’s quote, Halberstam added one single, concise fact, one small “take that” of a sentence that said everything, writing simply, “The Redskins won only one game last year and finished last in their division.”

  Several years later, when Halberstam was serving as a foreign correspondent for the Times in Warsaw, Poland, the paper sent staffers a memo requesting that they write stories exactly 600 words long. In response Halberstam wrote his now famous letter to his fellow correspondent and former staffer at the Harvard Crimson, J. Anthony Lukas, in which he stated, “There are only two kinds of stories in the world: those about which I do not care to write as many as 600 words, and those about which I would like to write many more than 600 words. But there is nothing about which I would like to write exactly 600 words.”

  One of those stories that he found that he wanted to write more than 600 words about was at the racetrack in Poland, in the company of two Poles, Tadeusz and Zygmunt, whom he trailed for a day as they watched the races and placed their bets. It is a simple, understated story, one that easily could have been nothing more than a pleasant little diversion, yet Halberstam, by actually reporting what took place, manages to reveal a thing or two or three about daily life in Poland, making deft note of the underground economy, entrenched corruption, the continued existence of class in a supposedly classless society, and the genuine affection between his two subjects. But the opportunities to write such stories were few, and two years later, following an unsatisfactory assignment in Paris, he left the newspaper business altogether, joining Harper’s Magazine in 1967 and, in 1969, pursuing a career primarily as an author of books.

  This collection does not include excerpts from his many sports titles. All are still widely available and deserve to be read in full, rather than in any abbreviated fashion. Instead, this collection is built from his lesser-known writing on sports: the essays, articles, and columns that he wrote over a lifetime, most of which will be new to even the most dedicated reader. I have chosen to start this volume with two early pieces—his column on rowing on the Charles and his day at the racetrack in Poland—not only because of their historicity, but because each of these early stories demonstrates something that differentiates David Halberstam, the sports writer, from so many other writers better known in other genres who sometimes write about sports.

  He was no dilettante. He never dipped his pen into the world of sports and then simply walked away, treating it as, in the parlance of the newsroom, simply the “toy department.” Sports was a lifelong subject of interest to him, a place he valued and considered worthy of his attention, and where over time I think he discovered that some of his larger concerns—the checkered history of race relations in this country, for example, or the value of friendship and camaraderie—were sometimes played out in a more concentrated, more accessible form. No matter the subject, his approach never varied. He never wrote just to fill up a page or spoke to fill a screen at a time when other writers preferred to talk than write. His commitment to the craft of writing was always apparent.

  It should have come as no great surprise that after the towering success of The Best and the Brightest in 1972 and The Powers That Be in 1979, his next book would be his chronicle of the 1979–80 season of the NBA’s Portland Trailblazers, The Breaks of the Game, published in 1981. For throughout the 1970s, even as he earned a reputation as the preeminent journalist of our day, he continued to write about sports in publications like Harper’s and New York Magazine and in newspapers. The real surprise is not that he chose to write a book about sports, but that he took so long to do so. Sports had always been part of his own personal beat. It was only natural that he would one day write one or more books in that genre.

  The success of that book, a bestseller and still, I think, the single best chronicle of a season in sports, spawned many imitators. In short order a host of writers successful in other genres, ranging from political columnists, newspaper journalists, novelists, and pundits, tried to duplicate his success and chose to turn their attention to sports, rashly deciding, after a lifetime of writing about something else, that what they really wanted to do was write about baseball or some other sport. Many such books, even those that have sold well, have not been very satisfying, for very few of the authors brought the same skills of reporting and level of respect to their task as David Halberstam did to his. In the hands of these less skilled craftsmen, their sporting subjects were often made to seem small and insignificant, even disposable. In Halberstam’s hands, that was never the case.

  This may be, in fact, precisely what differentiates his work from that of those sports writers who followed in his wake. “Big games, and late innings and fourth quarters … that’s when the test is real,” he once wrote, and in his own work he sought to find those moments in a subject that similarly revealed when the test was real, when it mattered. He was not awed or overwhelmed by big themes
and big subjects. And when he found a worthy subject, he often probed it repeatedly, returning time and time again, ferreting out more and more each time, as he did with Michael Jordan, for example, first in a number of articles and finally in a book, or with Ted Williams, or with fishing. His vast knowledge of American history and culture allowed him to place sports both within a larger landscape and in perspective, helping us see what we had not seen before, and by articulating what he saw in a subject, teaching us.

  There is a wonderful logical progression in much of his work that contains lessons for any writer. He reports first, slowly adding layers of fact and observation, before reaching conclusions that simultaneously seem both revelatory and completely evident and obvious. I suppose that is the rough guideline I have used in selecting the articles and essays that grace this volume. Each, in some way, brings us to a place of knowledge and a level of understanding we likely would not have reached without his guidance—wisdom we would not have otherwise gained. Even better, he manages to teach without preaching, and like any truly good teacher, makes each lesson somehow feel like ours alone.

  That appears to be something of a family tradition. His mother was a teacher, and so too is his daughter, Julia, and that is one of the small pleasures of this book—while reading about sports we also learn quite a bit about David Halberstam himself. In his sports writing he was often much more personal and revealing than he was when writing about other subjects. There are probably many reasons for this, but most important, I think, is that he recognized that sports is one of the ways in which we come together, both as a nation and as individuals. The reader will notice that in these selections we meet many of his subjects not as remote figures whose deeds are far removed from our lives, but as friends, and to show us them, Halberstam sometimes had to show us himself.