He’s got game

Fifteen years ago at a relatively fancy New York dinner party, I found myself, late in the evening, at a table filled with Wall Street tycoons, political powers, real and wannabe, and journalistic tyros, real and also self-imagined. Not a place for the faint of ego. It was already late in the evening, and the first rather tentative glances at watches were just beginning to take place when I finally made my play. I was, I told them in a very low-key way, going to fly to Florida the next morning. For an interview down in the Keys. (Not much interest). For the book, which I was just finishing, on the Yankees and the Red Sox in the 1949 pennant race. (A little more interest). The interview would be with Ted Williams. (Full attention now).

Conversation stopped, as it rarely does at a power fest like this. It was a lovely moment, with a sense that the smaller pleasures of your life are genuine, and that your job is your good fortune, and you realize that the little boy in you still exists and is matched by the little boy (or girl) in most of those around you; I had a sense at that moment that I could easily have created a one-day job as my personal assistant someone who would carry my notebooks -- and auctioned it off instantly to any of these powerful men (and a few women) for something in the low five figures, a one-shot deal, surely all the money going to a worthy charity. It was also a reminder, that for all scoffing of some of my colleagues, when I first started writing sports books on the side almost 25 years ago, that I was also the subject of some envy, and that the pull of the men and events I write about remains quite powerful, both among ordinary people and the elite as well.

The day with Williams, for example, was marvelous, one of the best professional days I’ve ever had. He picked me up at my slightly downtrodden Islamorada motel (selected by him of course), and said, loudly, for he did not talk at a natural level, “Well, you look just like your goddamn picture! Let’s go!” and so off we went for a joyous and exhausting day during which he poured out all kinds of information: Why pitchers were dumb as a breed; why most hitters don’t work hard enough at their jobs, and of course, why we should be using more airpower against our adversaries in Nicaragua.

He also worked a bit on my swing -- we were both about 6 foot 3, and both left-handed, but there the comparisons ended. He was, I thought, an American original, the real John Wayne. What Wayne had done cinematically, Williams had done in real life. If you are a writer who savors not just the book, but the doing of the book, then it was a glorious day.

My new book on the more than 60-year friendship of Williams, Bobby Doerr, Dom DiMaggio and Johnny Pesky, is my sixth on sports. When I did my first, on a season with the Portland Trail Blazers, I did it for a badly needed change of pace. I was then in my mid-40s, I had been a reporter for 25 of them, much of it in crisis situations and under considerable pressure. I had covered the early Civil Rights struggle in the South, then the Congo, Vietnam, Eastern Europe and then Vietnam again. In 1969, after I had begun to write books full-time, I ended up spending 11 years writing just two books. I was tired, and I badly needed a change of pace. Sports, for a variety of reasons, had always fascinated me. And so I started out as a rookie sportswriter at the age of 46.

It has worked out amazingly well -- an alternate venue that gives me not just considerable pleasure, but also insights into the other, allegedly more serious, world I write about. The books are fun to do, and though I work hard on them, I feel less burdened. The world of sports is -- so far, at least -- a lot less mean than the world of politics, although as the money paid for teams and paid to players ascends dramatically, it is inevitably becoming harder and meaner. This will be my third on baseball, although in truth, the new book is as much about friendship and growing old in America as it is about baseball.

One of the things critical to success in any career is good luck. In a way that I did not understand when I first began, I was very lucky. I had entered the world of sportswriting at precisely the moment when cable television became a force in America -- which, of itself, helped cause a quantum increase in the importance of sports, as we became that much more an entertainment society.

It has become a great sideline for me, and it gives me the ability to work and play at the same time. Graham Greene had his entertainments, the superb novelist, writing detective novels on the side, in what was some of his best work. I have my sports books -- a pleasant respite from my other seemingly more serious work, which is nonetheless in its own way, quite serious. Other people talk about sports as a metaphor for society; I don’t like to use the big M word. Instead I believe that sports is a valuable window on society. Because of the power of television and the big money that it inevitably brings, many of the changes which eventually take place in the rest of the society, changes in hierarchies and in levels of authority, are easier to understand first in sports. In addition, it is obviously the place where our racial contradictions play out most openly, and I’ve tried to make several of my books reflect this.

My “Summer of ‘49” was, I thought, about another America just in the process of disappearing, the prewar, radio-driven America, about to be pushed aside by a newer America, infinitely more affluent, driven by dramatic change in technology -- television, jet planes -- and of course greater disposable income. In 1949, there were only 16 teams; Washington, D.C., was a southern one, St. Louis, a western one; there were almost no black or Latino players; baseball was played more often than not in the daytime; teams traveled by train. And perhaps most important, complete power still was vested in the owners.

“October 1964” was about a fast-changing landscape: there was jet travel, and there were teams on the West Coast, but even more, the vaunted Yankee dynasty was essentially over because of the racism of its management. In that World Series, the Yankees were muscled aside by the Cardinals with their fierce, proud, determined black players, (Bob Gibson, Bill White, Curt Flood and Lou Brock). The money was becoming bigger, and soon Flood would be traded to another team, would refuse to report, and his legal struggle would profoundly change the balance of power in sports between owners and players.

When I first started out, a number of my more serious friends (and some critics as well) thought I was slumming -- sports, they felt was not serious, and a serious man had to be serious all the time. At a dinner party in New York, William Bundy, a former assistant secretary of State, one of the people I had written about in “The Best and the Brightest,” had turned to the lady next to him, Missy Chandler, (who was then the wife of the publisher of this newspaper, and whom I had written about in “The Powers That Be”) and had said with great condescension, “Can you believe what he’s writing about now?”

Clearly in his mind I was working in a lesser world filled with lesser people. I would seriously dissent from that: the professional people I meet in the world of basketball -- for example, the coaches, assistant coaches, and scouts, the lifers, in their intelligence and sense of purpose and honor -- remind me of the lifers I used to meet in the world of politics (most of them now gone, by the way). They are men who do what they do because they love it and would not do anything else if they could, no matter what the financial reward.

As for the athletes themselves, I was probably more impressed when I started out: After all, they could do what I could not. Then watching players off the court, seeing that their strengths in their sport are rarely matched by strengths in other areas, has given me a sense of their interior emotional limits, and the frailty that on occasions belies the power of their bodies. In addition, my colleague Roger Angell helped at the start: They are, he said in answer to one of my questions about a particular player years ago, what they do.

Writing about sports is not always fun. I don’t envy most beat reporters these days, covering players who make millions of dollars a year and pay attention only to a reporter from some sports network. I am nicely removed from the problems of covering a beat, but as in any professional world, there are less than charming moments, times when there is an unfortunate collision of interests and personalities. Once I was traveling on the Chicago Bulls’ team bus and Jerry Krause, head of basketball operations for the Bulls, spotted me. At the time, I was doing a cover story for Sports Illustrated on Michael Jordan. Krause asked an assistant who I was and what I was doing. When the assistant explained, Krause shook his head, and said loud enough for several people to hear, that I was just another whore, his generic term for sportswriters. That was, I felt, terminology unacceptable at this point in my career, and unacceptable as a description of my colleagues, who were less able to defend themselves. I called him later and suggested that he apologize, which he finally and quite reluctantly did at the end of the call.

My colleague Russell Baker, the distinguished New York Times columnist, was one of the first of my friends to realize I was on to a good thing. When I told him what the latest book was about, the enduring friendship of the four Boston players, he told me, “That’s not working -- that’s stealing.”

And so it probably is. In doing each book, I’ve ended up making some very nice friends, people I never would have known without this sideline, and thus I’ve expanded my own horizons. I’ve not only had fun, but I’ve taken some of the pressure off my other self, the person who writes the ostensibly more serious books. Sometimes, as with Williams and a few others, I’ve even had the chance on occasion to be a little boy again. There was the day in Cleveland, 14 years ago, when I was promoting “Summer of ‘49” and I went on a midmorning television show. The hosts had brought on Bob Feller, the great Cleveland pitcher of my childhood, to share the time slot with me and to talk about those days -- Bob Feller of Van Meter, Iowa, as every boy of my age knew, Bullet Bob, or Rapid Robert, as he was known, depending on the cliche favored by the sportswriter. When the interview was over, and the hosts took their commercial break, Feller had come over to me, my book in hand, and asked me to sign it. There I was, David Halberstam, signing an autograph for Bob Feller. Who’d have thought?