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Authors: David Halberstam

Everything They Had

BOOK: Everything They Had
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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
G
LENN
S
TOUT

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 felt 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.

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