EVERYTHING THEY HAD: Sports Writing from David Halberstam
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?id=3414048
from the Introduction by Glenn Stout:
…David Halberstam wrote about sports with the same veracity with which he wrote about everything else, once summing up his approach to all his work by quoting none other than basketball legend Julius Erving, who said “Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don’t feel like doing them.” Here, in Everything They Had, I believe we gain a sense that David Halberstam himself was perhaps the best example for many of the qualities he admired most in others…
…I have been given the privilege of doing what David Halberstam would have described as, the “heavy lifting,” again selecting the best of the very best from among the essays, features, columns and other sports writing that David Halberstam produced over the course of his distinguished and inimitable career. Although, given the circumstances, part of that task was done with a measure of sadness, the burden, of course, was not really heavy at all. Like the writing that graces these pages, it was joyful and real, enriching, uplifting and true.
http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/excerpts/2008-05-12-Everything-They-Had_N.htm
http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/books/la-bk-davis4-2008may04,0,7670214.story
From the Los Angeles Times
BOOK REVIEW
‘Everything They Had’ by David Halberstam
Collected sportswritings from the legendary journalist
By David Davis
May 4, 2008
Everything They Had Sports Writing From David Halberstam David Halberstam Hyperion: 402 pp., $24.95
When David Halberstam was killed in a car crash near San Francisco last spring, he’d just finished what turned out to be his final book, “The Coldest Winter,” a history of the Korean War. The indefatigable 73-year-old author was on his way to Palo Alto to speak with Hall of Fame quarterback Y.A. Tittle. The interview was to be the first for his 22nd book, on the Baltimore Colts’ victory over the New York Giants in 1958, an overtime championship thriller that he believed marked the ascendancy of professional football in American sports.
Halberstam was one of a handful of writers who could tackle, in succession, the Korean War and the so-called Greatest Game Ever Played. He shared a Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for groundbreaking coverage of the Vietnam War for the New York Times and went on to pen the signature 1972 book on the origins of that conflict, “The Best and the Brightest.” His 1993 book, “The Fifties,” was a sprawling account of that crucible decade in U.S. history. But all along, he’d had an affection for sports. Beginning in 1981, he wrote a series of sports-themed books, which were “a pleasant respite from my other seemingly more serious work,” he said, as if to apologize for the lighter material. They were anything but lightweight. Whether writing about the NFL, Olympic rowing or Michael Jordan, Halberstam examined essential themes: race and class, media and entertainment, heroism and myth, money and power, youth and old age.
Now, a year after his untimely death, comes “Everything They Had: Sports Writing From David Halberstam.” This collection is culled from his magazine, newspaper and website articles, from 1955 (when he was an undergrad at Harvard) to 2006 (when he contributed to ESPN.com). Author-historian Glenn Stout, who edits the annual “Best American Sports Writing” collection from Houghton Mifflin, selected the 44 pieces. (Full disclosure: An article I wrote more than a decade ago was published in that series.)
Halberstam was a lifelong sports fan. He relished meeting and interviewing athletes and coaches whom he respected, including Ted Williams, Bob Gibson, Bobby Knight and Bill Belichick. He regarded sports writing as a craft and often cited the influence of Red Smith, Jimmy Cannon and W.C. Heinz on his own work; they were the true “forerunners of what became known as New Journalism” in the 1960s, he once said. (His repeated praise of Heinz, who also recently passed away, helped to resurrect an overlooked star.)
A bestselling author with enviable freedom to choose his topics, Halberstam preferred to write about his passions — the Red Sox, fishing, male bonding. The most satisfying pieces in this collection highlight his reporting chops and observational prowess. In a 1984 profile about Reggie Smith for Playboy, he neatly chronicled the arc of the veteran outfielder’s career. In Smith’s early years with the Red Sox, “the Boston sports press . . . was not entirely ready for a brash young black player who seemed to lack what some sportswriters felt was the requisite gratitude of a black player to a white newspaperman,” he wrote. With Tommy Lasorda and his “Bleed Dodger Blue” clubs of the late 1970s and early 1980s, Smith played for an organization defined by “the idea that they were not only cleaner but somehow spiritually superior to other baseball players.” Winding down his career in Japan, with the Yomiuri Giants, Smith encountered a philosophy of baseball that “was not so much assertive strategy and tactics as it was an attempt to avoid making mistakes or taking responsibility.”
In a 1998 article about Olympic ice hockey player Allison “A.J.” Mleczko, for the now-defunct Condé Nast Sports for Women magazine, Halberstam discovered “something of a sanctuary” far removed from the commercial interests that so dominate professional sports. Elite female athletes, he noted admiringly, competed in “a place where there was a sense of excellence and dedication but none of the countervailing egotism, born of the intense new materialism of sport that is so destructive to the concept of team. No one was spoiled. No one had an attitude problem.”
To Halberstam, sports always meant something beyond the arena, beyond the balls and strikes. His experiences covering the civil rights movement had made him acutely sensitive to racial matters. The integration of major league baseball by Jackie Robinson, he wrote, “put America itself at a crossroads between two powerful competing national impulses, one impulse reflecting the special darkness of racial prejudice and historic meanness of spirit which had begun with slavery, the other the impulse of idealism and optimism, that a true democracy offered the children of all American citizens a chance to exhibit their full talents and rise to their rightful place.”
In the same 1999 essay, “A Dynasty in the Making,” Halberstam delighted in the fact that Muhammad Ali, whom he described as “the most marginally educated young man, barely able to get through high school,” had, with his refusal to be inducted into the Army, made the correct call about Vietnam. In contrast, he pointed out, “the most brilliant national security advisors who had gathered around the President . . . had turned out to be wrong.”
That big-picture perspective defined Halberstam’s sportswriting. But ultimately he saw sports as a diversion, however pleasurable. “If . . . you need sports to help you through a time of tragedy and to take your mind off a grimmer reality,” he concluded after the attacks of Sept. 11, “then you are emotionally in so much trouble . . . that the prospects for your long-term emotional health are probably not very good.”
There are minor flaws in this collection, which Stout, a longtime colleague of Halberstam’s (he got the celebrated writer to serve as guest editor for the first “Best American Sports Writing” in 1991), assembled at the request of his widow, Jean. Some anecdotes are repeated; one tale, about watching football games at a Nashville bar in the 1950s, pops up in consecutive stories. And as both a Yankee and Red Sox fan (who knew it was possible?), his musings about the national pastime revolve on the overly familiar New York-Boston axis. Some articles seem dashed off — in particular, the more recent material he wrote for ESPN.com — and some gems are missing. As a reader of the short-lived Inside Sports magazine, I’d hoped for the inclusion of his profile of “Pistol Pete” Maravich. [Editor’s Note: The Maravich story was originally included but had to be dropped due to rights issues]
Stout wisely did not include excerpts from the writer’s books. Halberstam’s storytelling has a process, a roiling momentum that requires the entirety of the experience. That said, he was at his best in that form — particularly in “The Breaks of the Game,” about the Jack Ramsay-coached Portland Trail Blazers during a time of turmoil over the injured — and angry — superstar Bill Walton. The book began as an assignment for Inside Sports, but Halberstam recognized that he had struck something close to gold. He spent 1979 and 1980 with the club — this was in the pre-David Stern era, when the NBA was in the doldrums — and “Breaks” is a masterpiece of season-in-the-life, locker-room reportage. His timing was impeccable: Those were the rookie years of Magic Johnson and Larry Bird; the league would never be the same.
He followed that book with “The Amateurs,” a mash note to rowing, and three fine baseball narratives: “Summer of ‘49,” “October 1964″ and “The Teammates.” In “Playing for Keeps,” he returned to the NBA, this time in the late 1990s, to analyze the phenomenon of Michael Jordan. Most recently, in “The Education of a Coach” (2005), he dissected the coaching machinations of Belichick with the New England Patriots. Only his book about Jordan fell flat; Halberstam never warmed to the media-wary Jordan or, for that matter, the contemporary NBA, with its hip-hop influences and global marketing emphasis.
With Halberstam’s death, sports lost a friend and sportswriting a master. No doubt his projected book about the “Greatest Game” would have been a terrific read. (Coincidentally, journalist Mark Bowden took on the same topic in his new book, “The Best Game Ever.”) But thankfully, Halberstam left behind much to treasure — including this collection, whose title Stout massaged from a book the two planned to write on female athletes, “Everything She Had,” an apt metaphor for a writer who gave it his all. *
David Davis is a contributing writer at Los Angeles magazine
CONTENTS
Introduction by Glenn Stout
Early Drafts
The 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, Oct. 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 Ted
Essay from Ted Williams: A Portrait in Words and Pictures, 1990.
History’s Man
Essay 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
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
In the Satellite Age, Michael Jordan has become the Global Star of a Global Show
from Sports Illustrated, December 23, 1991
Character Study: Pat Riley
from New York Magazine, Dec 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, 1974
The Games Harvard Plays
from Inc., Oct 1990.
How I Fell in Love with the NFL
from ESPN.com, February 21, 2001
Introduction
from SuperBowl XL The 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 and Country, April 2000
Homage to Patagonia
from ESPN.com, February 7, 2001
Anatomy of a Champion
from Vanity Fair, May 1996
Ice Breakers
from Conde Nast Sports for Women, February 1998
Ali Wins Another Fight
from ESPN.com, March 21, 2001
Thanks, Soccer
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, Dec 21, 2004
A Full Life of Football, Till the Very End
from the Washington Post, Nov 22, 2005
The Fitness-Goers
from Vogue, July 1987
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