Everything They Had (2 page)

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.

And so we also meet David Halberstam, not merely as a figure on a book jacket, but as a kind and decent person who wasn't much of an athlete while growing up, but enjoyed fishing for bass on small Connecticut ponds with his father and brother and going to the occasional baseball game at Yankee Stadium and Fenway Park. A person who called his friends “pal,” liked the camaraderie of men, marveled at and appreciated those who gave their task everything they had, and was sometimes frustrated by those who did not. A man who enjoyed the process of his work as much as the product, and found peace and comfort on the water and with his family both in New York and on Nantucket, and about whom his wife, Jean, said, “[he] would like to be remembered as a historian and particularly remembered for his generosity to his peers and young people choosing the field of journalism.”

That he will certainly be. I did not know David Halberstam well, but over the past twenty years was fortunate enough to give him some small assistance with several of his projects and then had occasion to collaborate with him on several others. Our encounters, I think, are revealing, and I am grateful that now I have the opportunity, in some small way, to repay him for that generosity.

We first met when I was working at the Boston Public Library and David Halberstam was researching the book that would become
The Summer of '49
. I was one of those young people, a fledgling writer who a few years earlier had started mining the newspaper microfilm and special collections of the BPL for help in writing stories on local sports history, primarily baseball. Soon after I began publishing these stories in
Boston Magazine
I started to hear from sports writers, most of whom wanted me to look something up on their behalf either in old newspapers or in the library's archives. One of them must have tipped David off to the fact that I had become the de facto sports archivist at the library. One day I returned to my desk, and a note telling me to call David Halberstam was taped to my phone.

No “while you were out” message has ever done more for a person's self-esteem. I remember that I left it on the phone and then went to lunch, just so it would stay there a bit longer. I spoke to him later that day, and he made an appointment to visit the library a few days later.

Most other sports writers who had contacted me before wanted me to look up material for them, and frankly, many treated me as if I were some kind of chambermaid. Not Halberstam. Not only was he extremely considerate, but after I set him up in a back room he wanted only minimal assistance and pored through the archival boxes himself. He was politely curious about me, and when I told him I had written an article about the Red Sox 1948 playoff game with the Cleveland Indians, and had been the first writer to interview Boston pitcher Denny Galehouse since he gave up the winning run more than forty years before, not only did he want to see the story, he wanted to talk. Thereafter he spoke to me as an equal, as a colleague, and as he continued his research over the next few days, we held several lengthy discussions about Boston, the Boston press, and the history of the Red Sox and Yankees. In the wake of our conversations I felt like the rookie hitter who discovered he could hit big league pitching; David Halberstam made me feel like I belonged.

A few years later I was offered the opportunity to serve as series editor for the inaugural edition of the annual collection
The Best American Sports Writing
, the first book project of any kind I had ever been asked to be involved in. My editor at Houghton Mifflin asked me who I thought should serve as guest editor. I knew from the start that the collection should not be confined simply to the compound word “sportswriting” but should also include “sports writing,” the best writing on sports, a somewhat different thing. Halberstam's work was already the best example of this. With
The Summer of '49
still on the bestseller list, and the earlier successes of
The Breaks of the Game
and
The Amateurs
still fresh, he fit the criteria perfectly. I immediately suggested that we ask Halberstam to serve as the first guest editor.

My suggestion was, I recall, greeted with some skepticism. Not that my editor didn't think Halberstam would be perfect for the job, but I do not think he believed that a writer of Halberstam's stature would have any interest in serving on such a project, particularly one not yet out of the box. Naively perhaps, I thought otherwise. I boldly told my editor that I knew Halberstam from the library, and that when he contacted him, he should mention my name.