Everything They Had (5 page)

When I think of the early influences on me and many of my contemporaries, I think of men like Smith, Cannon, and Heinz. They were the writers who we as young boys turned to every day, and they were the ones experimenting with form. They were all very different, they were all very good, and what made reading them exciting for a generation of young men and women wanting to go into reporting was that they were changing the rules, not accepting the bland, rigid, constricting form of journalism. They gave the reader a sense of what really had happened, what an important sports event had felt like to those most deeply involved, what the jocks had really said. In truth, they were all in different ways the children of Hemingway, profoundly influenced by him, trying to apply the lessons learned from him—the modernization of the language and the use of realistic dialogue—to the small piece of territory given to them each day on the sports page. Hemingway, in turn, so admired Cannon, who was, of course, the purest of the Hemingway disciples, that he had Cannon's paper, the
New York Post
, flown in every day to his home in Cuba. Since Cannon was very close to DiMaggio, and since Hemingway was a major DiMaggio fan, and since DiMaggio was the Hemingway hero incarnate, reading Cannon allowed Hemingway to keep up with his favorite baseball player.

If writers like that were my first heroes, for a time I did not emulate them. Instead, I went straight, finished college, went off to the South and busied myself reporting on the beginnings of the Civil Rights revolution. I covered very little in the way of sports, although at least once I covered opening day of the Nashville Volunteers, in the Southern Association. The Nashville Vols played at a wondrous old ballpark called Sulphur Dell. There where right field should have been were the old L&N railroad tracks, in effect decapitating right field and making it, as I recall, about 250 feet at the foul pole. In order to give the right fielder a chance, the architects of the park had
landscaped
right field so that it rose ever higher, and the fielder, not unlike a Swiss mountain climber, had to play on an incline. It was a disaster for some young left-handed Nashville hitters who, because of the temptation posed by the wall, developed what became known as the Sulphur Dell chop, a quick, controlled upswing at an unusually sharp angle, which, if the hitter connected, almost guaranteed a home run, but which finished the hitter forever with line drives.

So my life in my early twenties had very little to do with sports. Perhaps, my family hoped, I had finally grown up. A few years later I arrived in New York as a newly minted
New York Times
reporter (first to be a Washington bureau reporter and soon afterward a foreign correspondent) and I met Jimmy Cannon, then in his early sixties, and spent a pleasant evening with him. He after all had been a hero of mine and had covered my other heroes: the great DiMaggio, the sturdy Henrich, the powerful Keller. I was stunned by the almost unbearable quality of his loneliness. If there is such a thing as the beginning of the end of innocence for a young man, then it comes at moments like that of seeing someone who had been a hero, indeed perhaps a role model, and knowing instantly that there is something dreadfully wrong with the way he has lived, that the price was too great.

In the unofficial pecking order of the
Times
, foreign correspondents ranked above national correspondents, who ranked above city-side reporters, who ranked above sportswriters. In those days, the
Times
did not pay much attention to its sports page. It was mostly an afterthought, and the predecessors of today's fine columnists—Dave Anderson, Ira Berkow, and George Vecsey, and now once again Bob Lipsyte—were not, to be as generous as I can, very good. The transcendent skills of Red Smith in the rival
Trib
were a source of constant embarrassment, if not to the editors of the paper, then at least to most of the reporters who worked there. That being said, there was nonetheless at the
Times
a magnetic attraction that pulled some of the best-known journalists of our age back to the sports department to talk to the sportswriters. I can remember Homer Bigart, the great reporter of two generations in American journalism, a Pulitzer Prize winner as a war correspondent in World War II, a Pulitzer Prize winner as a war correspondent in Korea, almost a Pulitzer Prize winner in Vietnam, a Ruthian figure, sidling back to the sports desk to talk to the beat men who covered the Yankees and the National League teams, and I could sense in him and others, and indeed in myself, a certain envy. We did what we did, and were duly honored for it, we were the paper's stars, but there was an undeclared and gnawing sense that the sportswriters had more fun, and also that they were allowed to earn a living and remain—as most people in the city room, for all of their fame, could not—little boys.

At that time, sportswriters, the good ones on the good newspapers anyway, seemed to have had more freedom to
write
, and generally the best writing in most metropolitan papers during the fifties and sixties was done on the sports pages. That freedom reflected in part the curious double standard of American journalism: because the editors of most important papers did not take their sports departments or the lives of athletes very seriously, and because the sports page therefore was not deemed a serious place, writers who worked there could experiment, they could be irreverent, they could tell stories about athletes they could never tell about, say, a mayor or a congressman. Sportswriters could write more realistically and with more candor than their colleagues in the city room or on the national desk. After all, the sports department was still known on major papers as the toy department.

There was a reason only sportswriters enjoyed this freedom: the more highly regarded the paper, the more reverential its tone toward important political, social, and cultural figures of the day. A good example are stories about Yogi Berra that appeared in the
New York Times
. Certainly there were, in New York politics in the fifties, politicians as colorful as Yogi who used the language with almost equal skill, but the
Times
did not write about them as it wrote about Yogi. As the paper became more influential in the sixties and seventies, it became even more reverential. The problem, of course, is that good writing demands irreverence, skepticism, a certain
edge
. It was all right for a reporter to be irreverent about what he had discovered at a baseball park or a football field on a given day, because he wasn't writing about serious people (athletes were perceived as entertainers), but it was not acceptable for him to be equally skeptical about politicians. The world of politics clearly was not viewed as entertainment, though that strikes me as increasingly debatable.

Another reason that the writing on the sports page tended to be livelier was the drama inherent in the world of sports: the action and flow of a contest, the obvious winners and losers. It was and remains a world in which the value system, the purpose, and the pain are all comprehensible, and comprehensible even to relatively young reporters. Most other journalistic assignments are mundane and by their nature resistant to almost any instinct to indulge in literary tendencies. The one exception is war, which is graphic and can be readily and movingly described, and to which ambitious young journalists have always been pulled. The drama of war, like the drama of sports, is self-evident. The reporter not only set out to move his readers; he was moved himself.

The drama of the rest of life is a great deal more subtle, less easily revealed, and more resistant to the quick assaults of deadline-propelled journalists. The real world is more unruly and complicated; the increments of victory and defeat in ordinary people's lives are infinitely smaller and lend themselves more to the eye and talent of a skilled novelist than a young and eager sportswriter in his or her twenties. In addition, sports reporting is easier to master, so it is easier to add authority to the writer's voice, which is also important. Good writing is first and foremost authoritative; the writer must be sure of the terrain.

It is not surprising, therefore, that so many of the writers who became part of the flowering of nonfiction letters in the sixties, called the New Journalism, had some roots in sportswriting. There, writers could experiment, find their voice, and be rewarded for breaking out of form (after all, a beat writer who covered 154 baseball games using the same form every day was not only boring his readers, he was boring himself). When I think of the pioneers of New Journalism, I think first of the trinity of my early heroes: Red Smith, Jimmy Cannon, and Bill Heinz.

If those early pioneers influenced some of the more important nonfiction writers of the sixties and seventies, then the circle was unbroken; these nonfiction writers continued to experiment with form, to write books, and as they did, they influenced younger writers still working on newspapers. It struck me, as I put this collection together with Glenn Stout, that sportswriting is alive and well in magazines and newspapers, that the coming of television has changed the role of the print reporter and made the good writers ever more nimble. After all, the day when print was the prime carrier and the fastest carrier of news is long over. The job of the skilled sportswriter is to go where the cameras can't go, to find out exactly what hungry readers who already know the outcome need to know, and to beat television at a story it thinks it has already covered.

Some people bemoan the fact that we don't have a Red Smith anymore, and believe that because he is gone, sportswriting is in decline. I do not agree. There may not be one or two writers who stand out among the pack, as Smith and Cannon did in their time, but one reason is simply that there are so many other sportswriters on so many papers who are writing well, who have learned to break out of the old-fashioned form, slip inside the locker room, and give the reader an extra dimension of what has happened in a sport just witnessed by millions, and to do it with some measure of literary grace.

I am at a New Year's Eve party in Washington to start this year. It is at the Georgetown home of Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn, he the former editor of the
Washington Post
and arguably the best American editor of his generation, she the talented former writer for the paper's Style section and now novelist. It is an A-list party. Larry King is near the door as my wife and I enter. Colin Powell, who had recently finished his tour as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is in the next room to the right and 20 yards off is Bruce Babbitt, Secretary of the Interior and quite possibly future Supreme Court member. Lloyd Cutler, veteran Washington insider (and soon to be summoned to investigate the Whitewater affair), is moving deftly through the party. Senators abound. White House aides, past and present, are commonplace.

Major figures of the media, like Bob Woodward, Sam Donaldson and Bill Safire, are plentiful. James Carville, most certifiably the season's most important power figure, spots me and comes over to talk. He is wearing a bow tie with the stars and stripes of American flags on it. Does he want to talk about the hot subject—the President and the press, and the book I wrote 15 years earlier on the subject,
The Powers That Be
? No, Carville, the hottest political spin doctor and consultant in the country, wants to talk about Matt Batts, whom I had written about and he had admired as a boy.

Matt Batts? Matt Batts was the backup catcher on the 1949 Red Sox team that went down to the final day of the season in a heroic battle with a much deeper Yankees team. He is a lovely man, and he, like Carville, is from Baton Rouge, La., where he now runs the Batts Printing Company. One of the most pleasant professional days that I have spent in years was spent sitting in his office six years ago interviewing him for a book I wrote on that season,
Summer of '49
. We had never met, but he sat me down, and gave me a Coke in a bottle from a Coke machine (which won me over from the start, Coke does taste better in a bottle).

Then he started talking. He was immediately warm, generous and wondrously funny. Out came story after story of those days, lovely anecdotes of Ted Williams and his teammates. It was a glorious morning and when I left I thanked him and told him it was one of the best days I had had in years.

“Well, it's been nice for me too,” he said, “you got my mind off other things.” I asked, what other things? Well it turned out, on that day he had been sitting around waiting to hear from his doctor if he had prostate cancer, and reminiscing with me about the old days had taken his mind off it. Two days later I called him from New York and asked what the medical report was. False alarm, he said, just a mark where he had been bruised 40 years earlier as a catcher. We became friends, and we have stayed in touch and when there was a publication party in New York for my book, Matt Batts got in his car and drove to New York to attend.

I told all this to Carville, and we cemented our new instant friendship as we might well not have been able to if the subject had been politics. Politics is always much edgier; I spent some 40 minutes with Carville and we never talked about the Clinton White House. We were in our first meeting, united in our admiration for Matt Batts, and not divided over an issue of politics. I quite preferred that beginning: He did not have to spin me and I did not have to spin him.

I wear at this moment rather late in my career two hats, one as serious journalist-historian of American politics and the other more recently as sports writer, or more accurately, writer of sports books. Rarely do my two worlds connect: Few of the people in the sports world have read my political-social books, although most of the people in the political world know of the sports figures I write about, and I can feel on occasion the palpable envy of some of my literary peers because of my association with athletes who were stars when my friends were little boys.