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FYI..... For those interested in great sports writing :
‘You Find the Best Stories in the Loser’s Dressing Room’
By NATHAN WARD
Feb. 6, 2015
‘I can tell you’ve been at the gym,” Betty Heinz used to tell her sportswriter husband when he came home from a day with the New York fight crowd at Stillman’s Gym. He spoke differently after a few hours absorbing their stories and cadences for his writing. Bill Heinz, who died in 2008, was a master of precise talk and low-key poignancy. He once said, “You find the best stories in the loser’s dressing room.”
Source: Weekend Wall Street Journal
This year marks the centenary of Heinz’s birth (Jan. 11), and the Library of America is marking the occasion by publishing “The Top of His Game: The Best Sportswriting of W.C. Heinz, ” edited by Bill Littlefield. Read straight through, the collection shows how, as Gay Talese has noted elsewhere, “Bill Heinz set literary standards in the world of games.”
Born into a German-American family in Mount Vernon, N.Y., Wilfred Charles Heinz was bullied as a young boy for speaking German “at the wrong time,” as he later said of the World War I era. That experience, along with being a “failed athlete” in school, helped him acquire what he called his lifelong “affinity for the loser.” Heinz saw that the sportswriters he enjoyed, while not athletes themselves, at least got to hang around them, in the fight camps with Jack Dempsey or on the trains with Babe Ruth.
Jobs were scarce when Heinz graduated from Middlebury College in 1937, but he lucked into a copyboy position at the New York Sun. He was called “boy” for four years until his first published piece, an appreciation of cleaning women he saw riding the subway to their nighttime jobs. The article prompted a visit from the Sun’s executive editor, Keats Speed, who called the young man “Mr. Heinz” and said: “Don’t let anyone ever try to tell you how to write.”
Heinz’s compressed, empathic style, influenced by his reading of Ernest Hemingway, was there early on. As a city reporter, he covered fires, traffic accidents and zoo births. Then, as a war correspondent in 1944, he followed the First Army from Paris to Berlin after going ashore at Normandy on D-Day. Returning from Europe, he turned down a chance to cover Washington for the Sun, insisting that he just wanted to write about sports. Reluctantly, Keats Speed let him do it.
For several years, the sports beat was all he had hoped—the Library of America collection presents 15 early Sun columns. He wrote with the same appealing precision about Joe Louis and Joe DiMaggio, rowing on the obstacle-strewn Harlem River, Babe Ruth’s final visit to his Yankee locker, and the haunting death of a racehorse: “There was a short, sharp sound and the colt toppled onto his left side, his eyes staring, his legs straight out, the free legs quivering.”
“Death of a Race Horse” has often been called one of the greatest sports columns ever published. But the column form hemmed him in. He got a chance to show what else he could do in a 6,000-word piece for the old Cosmopolitan magazine, “Day of the Fight,” a masterly evocation of the tense hours leading up to Rocky Graziano ’s appointment in 1946 with Tony Zale under the lights at Yankee Stadium.
It begins cinematically, “The window was open from the bottom and in the bed by the window the prizefighter lay under a sheet and a candlewick spread,” and ends dramatically with Graziano emerging into the stadium under “a ceiling of sound, between the two long walls of faces, turned toward him and yellow in the artificial light and shouting.” The brutal fight itself—Graziano lost in six vicious rounds—is over in one incomparable paragraph. The long but remarkably taut magazine story contained all the ingredients for his later journalism.
When the Sun shut down in 1950, his real career began as a full-time magazine freelancer, writing about football legend Red Grange in retirement, hockey great Gordie Howe at the height of his powers, an aging rodeo rider or a baseball scout. But he always returned to the gritty world of prizefighting. In 1951 True magazine ran his hardboiled little masterpiece “Brownsville Bum,” tracing the short, contentious life of Al “Bummy” Davis.
Flush with money from his well-paid magazine work, Heinz finally had time to write a boxing novel, “The Professional” (1956), which Hemingway called “the only good novel about a fighter I’ve ever read and an excellent first novel in its own right.” In 1962, Heinz’s friend and fellow sportswriter Red Smith put him together with Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi to write a book. In Wisconsin, Heinz learned that the coach had little descriptive recall of his life outside the gridiron, but his wife did, and Heinz slyly developed a method of gleaning Lombardi ’s memories from Marie Lombardi and then presenting them for his reaction, “Yeah, that’s right!” Soon they were filling up Heinz’s notebooks with what became the 1963 football classic, “Run to Daylight!”
A doctor he had interviewed for his 1963 novel “The Surgeon” introduced Heinz to Dr. H. Richard Hornberger, who was looking for help shaping his salty novel based on his surgical experiences in the Korean War. The two collaborated enough to share a byline as “ Richard Hooker ” for the novel “MASH” (1968), a best seller and the basis for the movie and television show that followed.
In 1998 I had the good fortune to edit a boxing anthology with Heinz, sending candidate stories and videotapes to him for inclusion in an updated version of his 1961 “Fireside Guide to Boxing.” He would call me with his verdict on the articles and often send back the fight tapes with a Haiku-length summary on a Post-it Note. The friendship lasted years beyond our project, and we later recorded a lengthy interview about his writing life on consecutive Sunday nights—after he had finished watching the Patriots game.
“A professional makes every play, no exceptions,” said Heinz, who long admired professionalism as a basic code of life. A job was done well, Heinz told me, when “you can sleep because you did what you had to do.” Of his own accomplishments, he would only admit to being “proud of the work, not the man.” But the man who wrote “Death of a Race Horse,” “Brownsville Bum” and “The Rocky Road of Pistol Pete” could sleep well knowing that he did it as well as it has ever been done.
Mr. Ward is the author of “Dark Harbor: The War for the New York Waterfront” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010) and, forthcoming in September from Bloomsbury USA, “The Lost Detective: Becoming Dashiell Hammett. ”
‘You Find the Best Stories in the Loser’s Dressing Room’
By NATHAN WARD
Feb. 6, 2015
‘I can tell you’ve been at the gym,” Betty Heinz used to tell her sportswriter husband when he came home from a day with the New York fight crowd at Stillman’s Gym. He spoke differently after a few hours absorbing their stories and cadences for his writing. Bill Heinz, who died in 2008, was a master of precise talk and low-key poignancy. He once said, “You find the best stories in the loser’s dressing room.”
Source: Weekend Wall Street Journal
This year marks the centenary of Heinz’s birth (Jan. 11), and the Library of America is marking the occasion by publishing “The Top of His Game: The Best Sportswriting of W.C. Heinz, ” edited by Bill Littlefield. Read straight through, the collection shows how, as Gay Talese has noted elsewhere, “Bill Heinz set literary standards in the world of games.”
Born into a German-American family in Mount Vernon, N.Y., Wilfred Charles Heinz was bullied as a young boy for speaking German “at the wrong time,” as he later said of the World War I era. That experience, along with being a “failed athlete” in school, helped him acquire what he called his lifelong “affinity for the loser.” Heinz saw that the sportswriters he enjoyed, while not athletes themselves, at least got to hang around them, in the fight camps with Jack Dempsey or on the trains with Babe Ruth.
Jobs were scarce when Heinz graduated from Middlebury College in 1937, but he lucked into a copyboy position at the New York Sun. He was called “boy” for four years until his first published piece, an appreciation of cleaning women he saw riding the subway to their nighttime jobs. The article prompted a visit from the Sun’s executive editor, Keats Speed, who called the young man “Mr. Heinz” and said: “Don’t let anyone ever try to tell you how to write.”
Heinz’s compressed, empathic style, influenced by his reading of Ernest Hemingway, was there early on. As a city reporter, he covered fires, traffic accidents and zoo births. Then, as a war correspondent in 1944, he followed the First Army from Paris to Berlin after going ashore at Normandy on D-Day. Returning from Europe, he turned down a chance to cover Washington for the Sun, insisting that he just wanted to write about sports. Reluctantly, Keats Speed let him do it.
For several years, the sports beat was all he had hoped—the Library of America collection presents 15 early Sun columns. He wrote with the same appealing precision about Joe Louis and Joe DiMaggio, rowing on the obstacle-strewn Harlem River, Babe Ruth’s final visit to his Yankee locker, and the haunting death of a racehorse: “There was a short, sharp sound and the colt toppled onto his left side, his eyes staring, his legs straight out, the free legs quivering.”
“Death of a Race Horse” has often been called one of the greatest sports columns ever published. But the column form hemmed him in. He got a chance to show what else he could do in a 6,000-word piece for the old Cosmopolitan magazine, “Day of the Fight,” a masterly evocation of the tense hours leading up to Rocky Graziano ’s appointment in 1946 with Tony Zale under the lights at Yankee Stadium.
It begins cinematically, “The window was open from the bottom and in the bed by the window the prizefighter lay under a sheet and a candlewick spread,” and ends dramatically with Graziano emerging into the stadium under “a ceiling of sound, between the two long walls of faces, turned toward him and yellow in the artificial light and shouting.” The brutal fight itself—Graziano lost in six vicious rounds—is over in one incomparable paragraph. The long but remarkably taut magazine story contained all the ingredients for his later journalism.
When the Sun shut down in 1950, his real career began as a full-time magazine freelancer, writing about football legend Red Grange in retirement, hockey great Gordie Howe at the height of his powers, an aging rodeo rider or a baseball scout. But he always returned to the gritty world of prizefighting. In 1951 True magazine ran his hardboiled little masterpiece “Brownsville Bum,” tracing the short, contentious life of Al “Bummy” Davis.
Flush with money from his well-paid magazine work, Heinz finally had time to write a boxing novel, “The Professional” (1956), which Hemingway called “the only good novel about a fighter I’ve ever read and an excellent first novel in its own right.” In 1962, Heinz’s friend and fellow sportswriter Red Smith put him together with Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi to write a book. In Wisconsin, Heinz learned that the coach had little descriptive recall of his life outside the gridiron, but his wife did, and Heinz slyly developed a method of gleaning Lombardi ’s memories from Marie Lombardi and then presenting them for his reaction, “Yeah, that’s right!” Soon they were filling up Heinz’s notebooks with what became the 1963 football classic, “Run to Daylight!”
A doctor he had interviewed for his 1963 novel “The Surgeon” introduced Heinz to Dr. H. Richard Hornberger, who was looking for help shaping his salty novel based on his surgical experiences in the Korean War. The two collaborated enough to share a byline as “ Richard Hooker ” for the novel “MASH” (1968), a best seller and the basis for the movie and television show that followed.
In 1998 I had the good fortune to edit a boxing anthology with Heinz, sending candidate stories and videotapes to him for inclusion in an updated version of his 1961 “Fireside Guide to Boxing.” He would call me with his verdict on the articles and often send back the fight tapes with a Haiku-length summary on a Post-it Note. The friendship lasted years beyond our project, and we later recorded a lengthy interview about his writing life on consecutive Sunday nights—after he had finished watching the Patriots game.
“A professional makes every play, no exceptions,” said Heinz, who long admired professionalism as a basic code of life. A job was done well, Heinz told me, when “you can sleep because you did what you had to do.” Of his own accomplishments, he would only admit to being “proud of the work, not the man.” But the man who wrote “Death of a Race Horse,” “Brownsville Bum” and “The Rocky Road of Pistol Pete” could sleep well knowing that he did it as well as it has ever been done.
Mr. Ward is the author of “Dark Harbor: The War for the New York Waterfront” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010) and, forthcoming in September from Bloomsbury USA, “The Lost Detective: Becoming Dashiell Hammett. ”