Everything They Had

by David Halberstam

  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.

  SPORTS AS A WINDOW OF SOCIAL CHANGE

  From The Sporting News, May 23, 1994

  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.

  Some six years ago when I was at a dinner party in New York at the home of Roger Altman, a friend who is now Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, a dinner filled with top political people and media stars, wealthy and accomplished men and women, I let the others have their ego time, one after another one-upping each other on what they had done lately and which important person they had just interviewed. I waited patiently all evening, like a great poker player holding the perfect hole card, and then late at night I played my card, saying (quite casually, of course) that the next day I was flying to Islamorada, Fla., in the Keys, to interview Ted Williams. All conversation stopped, and I owned that dinner party and it struck me that at the moment if I had wanted to auction off a job as my assistant—not unlike Tom Sawyer, that is, someone to carry my notebooks and tape recorders while I spent the day with Ted Ballgame—I could easily have gone to five figures.

  As I write this I have just finished up October 1964, the fourth of my sports books, and the bookend to Summer of ’49; it is the story of the 1964 season and the seven-game Cardinals-Yankees World Series that year, and the end of the Yankee dynasty. I had a wonderful time doing it.

  I spent two days in Omaha with Bob Gibson and found him (as I suspected I would) utterly admirable, a man whose intellectual, physical, and spiritual abilities seem to be in almost perfect proportion, and the component parts not merely for a dominating athlete, but an imposing person. Bill White, then in his final days as National League President, was filled with laughter and a sense of amusement about life’s contradictions, and he had an inner richness all his own. Tim McCarver was a writer’s perfect interview, combining an exceptional love of language with an equally remarkable love of the game. Dick Groat talked the way he played, ever
the strategist, each play from that season still fresh in his mind as it was 30 years ago, each one a situation, calling for its own strategy. Lou Brock was the ultimate student of the pitchers and base stealing; what came through was his hard work and discipline as well as his passion and hunger to excel.

  Among the Yankees, Al Downing was a wonderful interview, analytical, candid, thoughtful. Steve Hamilton, now the athletic director at Morehead State, was bemused, and self-deprecating (albeit appalled when my car, which had been parked outside his office, was towed away and I was stuck with a $40 ticket—“We don’t usually treat our visitors quite this way,” he said). Mel Stottlemyre, 30 years in baseball, then pitching coach of the Mets, a sad team it seemed to me, filled with largely overpaid and quite (at least to me as the two of us were talking and the Mets players turned up their boom boxes to make the interview more difficult) surly players, became once again the cool fearless rookie who had saved the Yankees when he came up in August of 1964 and went 9–3. Pete Ramos, who was coaching at Miami-Dade Community College (Wolson campus), was delighted to summon me before his players as living proof that in that season when he had come to the Yankees late in the pennant race (too late to pitch in the World Series) and had made 13 appearances, he had an earned-run average of 1.25 and had not, despite all the pressure on him in big game after big game, walked a single batter. And Bobby Richardson, despite the considerable gulf between his personal politics and mine, treated me with great grace and generosity, had me in his home and took me with his extended family to lunch and recalled the season with singular irony.

  That I eventually gravitated to writing books on sports is not so surprising. I had always been a serious sports fan, and as a college student I had covered sports for the Boston Globe to help pay for my tuition, and as a young reporter in the South during the early days of the Civil Rights movement in the mid- and late Fifties, I had been fascinated by the coming of the first generation of black athletes in big-time American sports and my instinctive sense that a revolution was taking place in America, and that it was taking place most notably and quite possibly first in the world of sports.

  So it was that I gradually and tentatively ventured out 15 years ago to do my first sports book. I did it almost because I needed to: In 1979 I had finished a long book on the media which had taken six years; it, together with a book on the origins of the war of Vietnam, The Best and the Brightest, meant that I had spent 11 years on two books, and I was tired both physically and mentally, and I badly needed a break. I was a serious professional basketball fan, had become a friend of coach Jack Ramsay, had loved his 1977 championship Portland team, and by chance had been in Portland on a book tour the day Bill Walton announced that he wanted to be traded. Instantly I envisioned a book on a season in professional basketball, and in particular how the coming of ever-larger salaries (in those more innocent days, $300,000 for a star player was still considered an outlandish salary) and the increasingly litigious nature of the society had begun to change sports. I thought it could be a good book, and could be a welcome change of pace after almost 25 years of covering politics. So I went out and did it (The Breaks of the Game) and had a glorious, if exhausting, time.

  I liked the world of sports and I liked many of the people I met and I came to cherish the friendships I made in the doing, and the passion, intelligence and, on occasion, inner purity of the different athletes I met, basketball players, baseball players and rowers, many of whom who still remain in my life. (Just last year Bill Walton decided to expand my cultural horizons and took me and my family to a Grateful Dead concert at the Meadowlands, thereby gaining me a new level of esteem in the eyes of my then 12-year-old-daughter.)

  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: It is a world that is, for me at least, as witness my meeting with Carville, generally more pleasant and less adversarial than that of politics.

  Graham Greene, the great British novelist, would alternate his serious novels with detective novels, which he came to call his “entertainments,” and in some way these sports books are my entertainments, fun to do, a pleasant world and a good deal more relaxed venue, and yet a venue from which I can learn a great deal about the changing mores of the rest of the society. (I should admit that in baseball I have the luxury of interviewing athletes who played 30 or 40 years ago rather than those who play today, something I am not sure I would enjoy nearly as much.) If I did these books at first because they were fun and in some ways less demanding, then I have been surprised by their increasing commercial success—and the expanded constituency they have brought me, that is, readers who have come to my other books because they first read one of my sports books.

  In addition, sports has been an excellent window through which to monitor changes in the rest of the society as we become more and more of an entertainment society. 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. We can learn as much about race from sports as almost any subject and we can learn what the coming of big money does to players and to lines of authority more from sports than anything else. When I wrote Summer I did it because I wanted a book on the last moment of the old era in baseball, when the game was played on grass, in the daytime, when the teams traveled by train, and when the games were broadcast by radio, when owners held dictatorial power, and when above all else, both teams, the Yankees and the Red Sox, were still lily white.

  October 1964 catches baseball midway through the dramatic changes that have taken place since World War II: By 1964 baseball is a television sport, expansions have come, because of television ever bigger money is moving into the game (the Astrodome is just being completed at $30 million) and although the new money has not yet reached the players it is already affecting the nature of the game and its ownership.

  Above all, by 1964, baseball reflected a larger slice of America: In the critical last game of the 1949 pennant race, four of the starting nine players on the Yankees—Raschi, Rizzuto, DiMaggio and Berra—were of Italian-American descent, whereas in the critical seventh game of the 1964 World Series, four of the nine Cardinals—Gibson, Brock, White and Flood—were black. The Yankees, of course, could have extended their dynasty, they could have signed Ernie Banks and other great black stars, but George Weiss, their general manager, did not think blacks were as talented or as mentally tough as whites and he gave for far too long orders to his best scouts not to sign them. All of that came to a head by 1964 as Mantle and Ford and others wore out; the Cardinals that fall, it seemed to me (and I was a Yankees fan), represented not just a larger slice of America, but a more just America. That, I suppose, was the answer I had been looking for when I started the book.

  A DYNASTY IN THE MAKING

  Introduction to ESPN Sportscentury, 1999

  America entered the new century on the very threshold of becoming a great power. Barely more than a century old, it was already moving at an astonishing rate from agrarian to industrial society, and from rural to urban society. With a population of roughly 70 million, the nation was becoming urbanized at an accelerating rate; indeed tensions between the new immigrants who lived in the cities and were often Catholic, and people who were nativists, that is the older stock Americans who lived in more rural areas, would dominate the country’s politics for the first third of a century.

  More than a third of the population made their living from farming. The pace of life was slow; for every 1,000 Americans, there were only 18 telephones, most of these in businesses. No one spoke of disposable income or the entertainment share of the take-home dollar—ta
ke-home dollars were too scarce. Sports, both amateur and professional, had a limited importance; ordinary people lacked the time to play them, and more important, the time and money to watch them.

  But the country would become the most dynamic society in the world. In a century of stunning advances in technology, no country was so systematically on the cutting edge like America, not only in inventing new and critical scientific breakthroughs, but in bringing them to market as devices to be enjoyed by simple working citizens. If there was one great American revolution, created by hundreds of smaller inventions, it was a revolution which created the good life for ordinary working men and women. It was a revolution which in sum made the worst kind of physical labor less harsh, paid workers a fairer share for their labor, gave them a decent wage, and allowed them not only great personal dignity and economic independence with an increased amount of disposable income, but more leisure time. How America spent both that leisure time and disposable income—the rise of an entertainment society and its effect upon the world of sports—would be one of the most dramatic by-products of what was often called the American Century.

  By the end of the century, it had become America the affluent, a place where ordinary families owned two and sometimes three cars, one and sometimes two houses, took long, expensive vacations, and spent a vast amount of the GNP on the search for pleasure. In the process—in part because of its wealth, in part because of the direction the new technology took it—America had morphed itself from a grim, often joyless, rather Calvinist society to a modern mass-production industrial society. By the Sixties, it changed again, into a communications society, to finally, by the end of the century, an entertainment society in which images replaced print as a principal means of communication.