Everything They Had

by David Halberstam

  Before the war, he added, there were men with their sons. “And there were always lots of Jews, too, from the Nalewki section of Warsaw, tailors and shoemakers, and they were the ones who taught me about horses, but now there are not many of them left in Warsaw,” he said.

  The people who go to the races now are often poor, he said, and they take the races seriously and play the long shots.

  The cheapest bet is 20 zlotys (the zloty is officially valued at 24 to the dollar) and one can also bet at a 100-zloty window. This is a Communist country and though horse racing and betting on the races are not necessarily the kind of thing that Communist officials see as part of a workers’ paradise, racing continues to thrive here. One reason is that it is a major source of income. Not only does the State get a percentage of all admissions but it gets 22.5 per cent of everything bet at the track.

  The rough estimates are that between two and three million zlotys are bet every day at the track here and that on Derby days the figure may go as high as four or five million.

  The Government theoretically runs and controls all betting and the grandstand is ringed with betting windows. But there are the inevitable entrepreneurs, some working at the track, some filtering in and out of coffee bars downtown.

  One tout suggested to Tadeusz quite modestly that he had a sure thing in the fifth.

  Tadeusz listened dubiously. The tout assured him that he couldn’t go wrong. “Bet wisely and buy one ticket for me. That’s all I ask. One for you and one for me,” the tout said. But it was not Tadeusz’s kind of horse.

  Another reason that racing continues here is that it is deeply ingrained in the Polish blood. Poland has been known for fine Arabic horses for several centuries and racing has been going on here for more than 120 years. Before the war, when there were 16 race tracks in Poland, Polish cavalry regiments had their own racing stables and the breeding of horses was a specialty of Polish noblemen.

  Now the noblemen have gone but the horses remain. In many cases the breeding of horses, which is run by the State, is done by some of the same families that did it before the war.

  After some talk of the success of breeding horses here, Tadeusz took the American on a tour of the track to see the regulars: a blind man who comes all the time “and sometimes even wins”; a 20-year loser who regularly sinks deeper into debt and lives off his wife; a police captain who fought in the 1944 Warsaw uprising alongside Tadeusz; a man in a flashy sports shirt and sunglasses who was a big bettor until recently “and who now bets less but wears fancier clothes to disguise the fact that he does not have so much money.”

  Just then one of Tadeusz’s friends arrived. He introduced the new Pole proudly. “This is one of the survivors of Auschwitz.” The survivor, Zygmunt, rolled up a sleeve to show the concentration camp number on his arm. Then there were more serious things to attend to. He quickly began to argue with Tadeusz on behalf of the favorite, a horse named Arbiter.

  “Dumna looks nervous and edgy,” Zygmunt said.

  “That’s good. A little fire,” said Tadeusz.

  “Maybe you should wait a few races before you bet Dumna,” said Zygmunt.

  Then the two Poles began a furious argument. Zygmunt went away somewhat embarrassed. The American asked what had happened. “He started to tell me that this is an honest year at the track,” said Tadeusz.

  The race came and the odds dropped on Dumna from 4 to 1 to 2 to 1. Nearby, two other Poles were talking. It was clear that there was interest only in three of the five horses running. They decided to make a 50-zloty bet on the two other horses, the winner being the one that finished closer to the front.

  The trouble with the races here, said Tadeusz, “is that everyone knows all the horses. They know some of the horses better than they know their wives.”

  The race was a good one, Arbiter and Dumna fought side by side and Arbiter won in the last few yards.

  Zygmunt immediately materialized, magnanimously praising Dumna, claiming that the race showed both that the horse had a bright future and that the track was honest. Tadeusz was pleased, too. He had bet the horses one-two and in a situation like this it does not matter which is first and which is second. He had three tickets. He won 200 zlotys.

  And so it went. It was a pleasant afternoon. The winnings were small but they were at least winnings. In the last race the favorite was a horse named Brama and the betting was very heavy.

  At the start Brama was, incredibly, 20 lengths behind. The favorite finally was third. The crowd booed and jeered and threw paper. The public address system announced that the jockey had been suspended for five racing days. Tadeusz beamed, congratulated himself for having broken the habit and went off joyously to find Zygmunt.

  * * *

  THE LONGER VIEW

  I like wearing the two hats. The first hat is ostensibly the more serious one, and my larger books on politics tend to take some five or six years; the other hat as a sportswriter I wear more lightly, I think. The books are shorter and I do them more quickly. I’ve come to see these books as a form of relaxation. College professors get sabbaticals, self-employed writers do not, so I see them as a form of partial sabbatical. They are work but they are pleasure.

  SPORTS AS A WINDOW

  OF SOCIAL CHANGE

  The Sporting News,

  May 23, 1994

  * * *

  INTRODUCTION

  From The Best American Sports Writing 1991

  I grew up as a semi-red-blooded all-American boy. That is, I loved sports, and like most true-blue American boys I followed almost all sports faithfully. This meant following baseball in the summer, football in the fall, and basketball in the winter; my only exemption was professional hockey, a sport I simply did not get then and do not get now. Following all sports was not as time-consuming an avocation in the forties, for those were the arid years of American sports, before the arrival of television and before the coming of the contemporary sports glut. As I write today in the spring of 1991, I can watch some eight professional basketball playoff games on the weekend, an equal number, it seems to me, of professional baseball games, as well as college baseball championships, a summer football league with teams from Europe, golf championships, and for those who feel that a summer football league is an inadequate substitute for professional football, some six hours of live coverage of the first round of the professional football draft. Less generous people might speak of this as an addiction.

  As a worthy and rather typical member of my tribal species, North American, male, middle twentieth century (roots in radio sports rather than television sports), I did then, and still do, duly open the paper each day and turn first to the sports page; in the instance of tabloids, the first love of the tribe, this of course means reading from back to front. Cultural anthropologists may make of this what they wish. As an all-American boy, therefore, so far so good. Where I failed in my youth as a prototype of the species was in a number of things: I was not big and strong, at least not then; I wore glasses, which in the forties and fifties was a sign of nonathleticism; and worst of all, I displayed a premature and clearly unhealthy interest in that day’s sportswriters, as well as the athletes. Even at the age of ten and eleven I checked out bylines, and I came to know and recognize certain ones. I loved the early, feisty work of Dick Young, whose reporting semed to burn with a toughness and candor unmatched elsewhere (as he turned meaner and more bitter in his later years as a columnist, I came to detest his work), and I was fascinated by Red Smith and Jimmy Cannon and Leonard Gross: Smith because he wrote so beautifully, indeed so delicately; Cannon because he provided a rare sense of immediacy in an age before television when cameras did not do that—a Cannon story always seemed to take the reader right into the clubhouse; and Gross because of his unusual sensitivity to the athletes themselves, and because he instinctively understood that sports was the first showcase of a broader Civil Rights revolution which was just beginning in this country.

  When I was young there was no Sports Illustra
ted, which eventually became the most serious bastion of sportswriting as literature, but like a lot of my colleagues who later made our reputations in the great breakthrough in nonfiction letters of the sixties, I read the old Sport magazine carefully and I loved it. There was some very good writing in it, it was one of the first places where the writing seemed more serious, and one could sense the beginning of a literary touch, and an attempt to break out of the routine format of magazine writing of the day. (I was hardly the only young teenager affected by it; Dick Schaap, who went on to become one of the preeminent print and television journalists of this generation, likes to recall that there was a letter to the editor of Sport published years ago from a teenage boy named Gay Talese, singling out a piece he enjoyed and asking for more articles like it.)

  If Sport was the monthly bonus, then I devoured every day if I could Smith, Cannon, and Gross. Smith, of course, was the great sportswriter of the time, the acknowledged champion, because of the fresh, graceful way he wrote, because it simply was not in him to offer up anything clichéd. I can remember, as a freshman in college, taking one of Red Smith’s early collections, Out of the Red, from Harvard’s Lamont Library and keeping it so long that I had to pay $13 in library fees, no small sum in 1951 dollars (the equivalent of four or five meals in Boston’s Chinatown with my fellow editors of the Harvard Crimson). I can also remember a piece by W. C. Heinz, who was one of my favorite writers and who never quite got the acclaim I thought he deserved (it was his misfortune to work for a paper that was in faster decline than the tabloids I favored); it was about Pete Reiser, the great Dodger player known equally well for his extraordinary talent and for his penchant for crashing into outfield walls and thereby prematurely ending otherwise promising seasons. The piece was done, I believe, for the old True magazine, and it contained a memorable scene: it was spring training and a few Dodger players were sitting around talking about the season ahead. “Where you think you’ll end up?” they were asked. Most said first place, a few said second. Finally it was Reiser’s turn. “Brooklyn Memorial Hospital,” he answered. In retrospect, told some forty years later in a time of endless breakthroughs in nonfiction writing, it does not seem so world shattering a bit of writing, but the important thing is that four decades later I still remember it, remember that it was Heinz’s way of saying that he was there, that he was going to quote these men as they actually spoke, not as writers thought they should speak, and I also remember that I wanted to be able to write like that.

  I was not the only one who loved the work of Bill Heinz. Al Silverman, who edited Sport in the sixties and later became the editor of the Book-of-the-Month Club (and is one of the nicest men in this business), tells the story of being at a bar in New York in the sixties when Jimmy Breslin, by then a star columnist with the Daily News, was proclaiming that a piece by Heinz in Sport, on a fighter named Bummy Davis, was the best sports story of all time. Breslin was making this point with considerable enthusiasm and decided he needed some final bit of proof. “Hey, Rosemary,” he yelled to his wife, who was at the other end of the bar, “what’s the best sports magazine piece of all time?” “Bummy Davis by Bill Heinz,” she immediately answered back. Wonderful, thought Silverman, but too bad it was True, not Sport, that published it.

  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 pa
ges. 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.