Robert Ward is a novelist, journalist, and a screenwriter. He recently published, Renegades, a collection of his magazine work from the 1970′s and was kind enough to take time out of his busy schedule for a chat.

Hope you enjoy. Dig in.

Bronx Banter: You were a novelist before you wrote journalism. How did you transition from writing fiction to doing non-fiction?

Robert Ward: My first novel Shedding Skin was really good and won the NEA Grant as one of the top novels of 1972 because I had lived it all. I had actually hitched around and gone to Haight-Ashbury and lived there and been idealistic and seen my ideals trashed. I’d suffered a nervous breakdown living that way, and was barely able to survive mentally. All of that material got into Shedding Skin. So it was lived experience not second hand stuff from a book. In short it was wild-exaggerated-for-comic effect-reportage. But the bottom line was it was real. You can’t twist and turn stuff unless you have it to begin with.

BB: The so-called New Journalism was in full swing by then.

RW: That’s right. I had done a little journalism work. In fact, I’d help start an underground newspaper with John Waters, Jack Hicks, Elia Katz, and Jack Walsh in Baltimore. It was called the Baltimore Free Press. My first piece for it was an interview with The Loving Spoonful, when they came to town. I was a huge fan of theirs and assumed they’d be happy guys, considering the many hits they’d had.

But I found them to be depressed and bummed-out because they hadn’t had a hit for I think it was like eight months. It was the first time I realized how fleeting rock n roll fame could be. They were unhappy and John Sebastian seemed really miserable. I wish I could have found that piece and included it. It taught me a lot. That getting out in the world and seeing things for yourself was really exciting.

BB: Getting you out of your head and in the insulated world of academia.

RW: Yeah, it was a lesson I didn’t learn well enough, because after I had published Shedding Skin and gotten married again, I found myself with two young boys–my second wife’s kids from her first marriage–and no money. Teaching was at least a little security but it was killing me. I knew I didn’t belong in it. When my second novel–which was supposed to be this Great Radical Tome that would fan the fires of revolution–failed miserably, I knew I had done what so many other writers of my generation had done. That was become an academic, a guy who never saw anything but pretended to know all about the world. I got drunk on campus and played the enfant terrible with a bunch of teenaged students. I had grown to hate myself for being such a phony, so I was determined to become a journalist like Tom Wolfe or Hunter Thompson and let the chips fall where they may. When my wife left me for this rock n roller dude I knew I had to re-invent myself or really go down the tubes. I got encouragement from Tom Wolfe when he came to campus and figured out a way to get the Geneva police to let me hang with them and did my first piece on them. From that moment on my career took off.

BB: What was it about Wolfe and Thompson, as opposed to Gay Talese, for instance, that turned you on?

RW: I was influenced by Wolfe and Thompson and also Terry Southern. But pretty soon I found my own voice, which was not so absurd as either Thompson or Southern, and less erudite and right-wing than Wolfe’s. I wanted to be funny and smart but also compassionate and risk feeling things for my subjects. I didn’t want it to be all outrage and jokes. And I was still basically a Lefty.

BB: That’s great you mentioned Terry Southern. Of the three guys you mentioned he’s the one who is least remembered now. Why do you think that is? He could have been the biggest influence of all three at the time.

RW: Terry was my hero, not for his journalism, but for his book The Magic Christian, which is still the funniest and hippest satire on American greed, show biz and hype ever. I loved his sensibility and shared it in a way. As a kid in college the crowd I ran with got into speaking only in clichés to people we didn’t dig. It was cruel and very funny for a while. The people we were talking to often didn’t realize it was going on. Of course it was very immature but hey, we did it mainly to people who were the big men on campus,  jerks. It was the arty students little revenge on them. They were the fifties people and the world was fast-changing. It was around then–my junior year–that I discovered The Magic Christian on a pile of remaindered books at E.J. Korvettes. A black hardback book with a pink pig on the cover. I picked it up and read the opening lines: “Grand Guy Guy Grand was, as he put it, on the go.” After reading a couple more cliché laden lines I had the great realization that this novel was going to be one of my favorite books of all time.

BB: I love when that happens.

RW: Certain books are like that. You need only look at their covers and read one or two lines and you know your whole life will be changed by them. The only other books I’ve read that put this astounding spell on me were Catcher in The Rye when I was fifteen and A Fan’s Notes in my 20′s. Anyway, I realized that this Terry Southern chap shared my love of the put-on and had a very similar sensibility as myself and my friends. The use of clichés, the feeling that the world was mad, but also this almost academic rigor in his sentences. Parodic 19th Century stuff. Perfect. I never actually used his riffs, but he helped me see into sham and the great hustle of pop culture. Later, in New York, we became friends and he was one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever met. His bullshit detector was foolproof. That’s what I think we shared.

BB: That’s one thing about Wolfe and Thompson and Southern–their style seems loose at first almost improvisational which may explain why it appeals to younger readers but it actually takes a huge amount of discipline and rigor to pull it off. I remember the same being said about Robert Altman, that he produced casual-looking ensemble style but it took a ton of discipline to achieve it.

RW: Well, with Wolfe , Southern and Hunter Thompson their style and sense of humor is first what appealed to me. They all had the sense of how wild the world was, what an amazing parade of fools and heroes passed before us. I loved that about them. They really caught the unique quality of American life like no one else. But what people forget about Wolfe and Thompson was that they really knew their subjects inside and out. I took Tom Wolfe from Hobart College in Geneva to his plane in Rochester and he told me all about Jospeh Smith in upstate New York and the history of the Mormons. It was the same for whatever he wrote. He researched the subjects before he went out and interviewed them. I did the same thing with ex-Premier Ky of Vietnam. I spent three days in the library before I went out to California to interview him. Six hours a day. I wanted to know everything I could about him. Research made a huge difference. We were able to talk about people like Ellsworth Bunker, Johnson, Thieu and many others. When someone is relaxed and likes you they’ll tell you great stories and allow you to hang out with them. Going to a parents-teachers meeting with him was absolutely amazing. The twenty-something-year-old kids who were teaching his children were absolutely terrified of him. But he was as nice as he could be to them. I wouldn’t have gotten to go on that little every day journey with him if I hadn’t prepared. You can only get the casual, everyday stuff if you’ve really done your homework.

BB: One of my favorite pieces in the book is a memoir story about your grandfather and the strip clubs in Baltimore. It reminded me of a scene out of the movie Diner. How did Baltimore shape you?

“My Dinner with Barry”

RW: Baltimore is a tough town, a very loyal town, a town of small neighborhoods in which people know one another all their lives. At least it was that way when I grew up. It formed my consciousness. You had a rough kind of wise guy humor there, and growing up my friends and I laughed at anything that scared us. But the really tough thing about the place was that there was just about no place to go if you wanted to be a writer. That’s why I had so little confidence when I grew up. My dad used to laugh at my desires to be a writer. Mainly because he was a failed painter. He had talent and was very artistic and a sensitive guy. Very smart. But there was no outlet for a working class kid like him and there was very little for me. I used to try and write and he’d look at me and say, “Mister Hemingway. You think you’re going to be a big writer. Well, you’ll learn pal. You’ll learn like I learned. Nobody wants you. Nobody is waiting for you, Mister Hemingway!” How I hated those words.

BB: I have an uncle who grew up in South Ozone Park in Queens and they used to rag on him for wanting to be a painter. “Hey, Freddy the Artist.” Like he was a clown.

RW: Maybe my father did me a favor because I would scream back at him: “I AM GOING TO BE A WRITER AND NOTHING YOU CAN SAY WILL STOP ME!” Man, I hated him in those days, he never took up for me. I was busted by the cops once for speeding, and I called the cop a fascist. They made me come down to the Chief of Police’s office with my old man. I thought he’d speak up for me, you know say something like “He’s really a good boy, officer.” Instead he said, right in front of me, “He’s a rebellious boy officer and always has been. I don’t know what to do with him. He won’t listen to me or his mother. He’s just no good.” The Chief suggested they lock me up for a week to see if that would get me straightened out and my father didn’t say anything at all in my behalf. I just sat there totally freaked out.  I knew they couldn’t really lock me up for a traffic ticket and a wise crack. They let me go with a warning. The cop told my father “If he ever gives you anymore trouble Mister Ward call me and we’ll lock him up for a while.” Then we left. In the car going home I screamed at him. I was crying, “You sold me out to that cop. You didn’t even stand up for me, you cowardly bastard.” I jumped out of the car on the way home at a red light and just wandered around on the streets for hours until my friend Hicks got home and then stayed on his couch for a month.

BB: How long did the rift last?

RW: A while. But later in life we made up and he admitted he had been too tough on me, that he had been a lousy dad. I found out about things his dad had done to him. It was a sad story. I knew I had to get out of Baltimore or I’d drown there. But in many ways I loved the city, loved the Orioles, the Colts, my buddies and our wild, drunken car rides. But you could see very early–and I saw it in my own family–that no one who wanted to be a writer from my class of people was going to get anywhere in that town.

BB: How did you find support or the confidence to become a writer in spite of that?

RW: It took my years to find myself and my own way but I found people who helped me. Some in academia and some–most of them–in New York. Editors and other writers who told me I was talented and couldn’t do enough to help me. People call New York a heartless place but they don’t know anything about it. No place was ever better to me. If you have talent in New York and want to work you’ll succeed. Same in LA. There are rough people in both places but if you’re tough enough and want to work, you’ll make it.

BB: Did you grow up reading Mencken? And did you follow your contemporaries from Baltimore, reporters like Mark Kram, a fellow blue collar guy, or Frank Deford, who was not so blue collar?

RW: Mark Kram wrote obits for New Times. I knew him a little. Good dude. I never read Frank Deford. Never met him. He was older than me. I loved Mencken to death. And still recall his great essay “Why Baltimore Is Superior to New York.” He said that basically it was better because people in Baltimore were your friends whether you were successful or not but in New York once you lost your mojo no one would talk to you anymore. I didn’t find this to be true but it informed my life when I got to New York. I met various con artists and hustlers there. And was, for the most part, not all that surprised because of Mencken.

BB: When you started doing pieces for the New Times, and then even later when you profiled celebrities, did you have a hard word count?

RW: There was sometimes a word count. “We need about three thousand words on this one.” But if I got great stuff they would always try to fit it in. New Times was the best at that. But so was Sport, GQ, Rolling Stone. These were real writers’ magazines. When I think back on it, I can’t believe how lucky I was to work for mags that cared about the writers, and made them the stars of the magazine world.

BB: One of the most notable differences between magazine pieces then and now is that writer’s were given far more space back then.

RW: There is nothing out there now like this. Maybe Harper’s and the New Yorker. But the other mags have all become pretty much promotional organs for the stars of entertainment. That’s because the publicists control the scene now. If you’re a little mean, from their point of view, to one of their clients, say Tom Cruise, the PR firms will make sure you never get access to any of their other clients. It’s a form of censorship. And a very effective one. Of course you can say whatever the hell you want on the internet but that’s not reportage. People who blog and trash public figures rarely have any access to them. And most of them aren’t real writers either. Merely having a snarky opinion isn’t writing.

BB: Can you talk a little bit about the New Times another magazine that is not well remembered by younger generations.

RW: New Times was a new magazine in the early 70′s. It was started by Jon Larsen, whose father was a journalist with Life, and in fact the Larson School of Journalism was named after him at Harvard. Also Frank Rich, David Hollander, and it was owned by George Hirsch. It was a bi-weekly magazine with really good writing in it. Larry L. King, one of my favorite writers from Willie Morris’ Harper’s in the sixties, and Robert Sam Anson, the intrepid war reporter from Harvard, was there as well. It wasn’t as counter cultural as Rolling Stone, but very political. I’d say it was a cross pollination of The Voice, Rolling Stone and Esquire. Later when they brought on John Lombardi from Rolling Stone as an editor it attracted some wilder writers like Lucian Truscott, who did great work for them. It never quite found its true identity, however. Not quite Time, not quite Stone. Eventually, as circulation dropped Hirsch sold it and started a new magazine called Runner. He told me later that one of the problems with New Times was that the ad guys would work their asses off to get say a Xerox account and then Larsen would publish some investigative piece on them which would, of course, infuriate Xerox and make them cancel their contract. But for me it was a showcase. They gave me as much space as I wanted and I loved working with everyone there. I’m still close pals with most of the guys I worked with there.

BB: The first non-fiction story you wrote was about the police in Geneva, the college town where you taught. It also brought your first brush with consequences. What did you learn right off the bat about the impact you’re reporting might have on a subject and did that effect how you approached doing stories moving forward?

RW: ”The Yawn Patrol.” That really shook me up, the cops harassed me slightly after that, but I never let it bother me. I was determined to take the journalism life seriously and rather than scare me off, it made me excited to know that my words could have a real effect in the real world. I was sorry that I’d made the cops life uncomfortable for a while but it was the truth. That line about the girl’s legs and their walks…walks with money behind them…said it all. The class gulf between the kids they protected and their own lives. What I learned was that if a piece is really good it’s going to sting somebody and they might come after you. But if you let that stop you, you shouldn’t be in the game.

BB: I like that your go-to line with subjects was that you were there to “set the record straight.” Can you talk about why this worked as a way to relax them?

RW: The beauty of the new journalism was that they’d tell you to write a piece on say Larry Flynt but there was no word count at all. They left it to the writer’s judgment. I spent a week with Flynt and got stuff that was totally outrageous. No one had ever really hung out with him before. When he asked me if the review was going to be negative or positive I answered, “I’m here to set the record straight.” To my mind this meant whatever I find I’m writing, unless you specifically tell me it’s off the record. I don’t know what Larry made of what I said. But he did mention how he thought of his life as a Horatio Alger story. “Poor Boy From The Back-Woods Makes Good.” He never actually said he wanted me to write the story that way. But it’s probably what he expected. But I had already told him why I was there. “To set the record straight.” And what great stuff I got for the record.

BB: He was the gift that kept giving.

RW: I sent the 10,000 words into New Times and they couldn’t believe it. They ran the whole damned thing, pretty much as I wrote it. That was so exciting. I mean I had barely started in my career and here was a cover piece. Plus, we asked Flynt to pose with his Blow Up Sex Dolls on the cover of the magazine and he did it. He had no idea what the piece said inside. Of course, when the piece came out he was shocked. Which I thought was pretty funny since he spent all his time shocking the bourgeois liberals and Bible Belters with his outrageous sex and outhouse humor. Eventually, he got over it and offered me the editorship of Hustler! I turned it down but my buddy Paul Krassner took the gig. Think he lasted about a year.

BB: I can’t believe that Flynt was taken aback by your piece. Did that just show his own naiveté at having a writer follow him around for a week?

RW: What you’re forgetting is I was the very first guy to do an in-depth, hang-out piece with Flynt. He was completely naive and thought–I think–that I would have the same attitude that he had about his life and career. But I never promised him anything. Anyway, he never let anyone get close to him again. Look at any other piece on him and you’ll never see that kind of access. Later, after he had forgiven me he asked me to do a documentary on him. I said I was willing to do it but I had to have control over the final cut. He wouldn’t go for that, so it never happened. But I remember when we met to discuss it in New York. He looked at me and said, “There he is: The Truth Teller!” Said with both admiration and disgust.

BB: And yet your more frightening episode was with the country singer David Allen Coe.

RW: Yes, the confrontation with Coe’s biker friends was super scary. They moved in on me in his room and there was no appealing to him because he was passed out on the bed with a girl sort of draped over him. One of them had a knife and cut away part of my leather jacket I was wearing. I remained fairly cool headed, kept my voice even, as I said, “You guys got the wrong writer. I have never written anything about Coe before. They thought I was the writer who had written a piece saying he wasn’t a murderer, that his story about how he’d been put in prison for murder but sung to the warden and gotten a pardon was all bullshit. Actually, a woman writer whose name I can’t recall now wrote the piece for Rolling Stone. Which is what his manager said when he came walking into the room. Jesus, what a nightmare. The guy took me into the next room and told me that he was sorry for the biker’s mis-treatment of me. “Come back when we tour the East Coast next year and you’ll see that we’re not like that.” Right, yeah, see you guys then.

BB: And yet your editor wished you had gotten stabbed because it would have made a better story.

RW: My editor Jon Larsen’s response was his idea of a joke. Sort of. He actually kind of meant it. It wasn’t enough to take one for the team. He wanted me to bleed for the team! I forgave him though and we’re still pals. WASP humor. He did a lot for me, gave me all the space I wanted and was a champion of my career.

BB: Another piece I really liked was the portrait of Leroy Neiman. The guy seemed so insecure, wrapped up in his celebrity–pissed that the art world didn’t take him seriously while the masses made him rich. He seemed like a character that Warhol himself could have invented but without irony or seemingly a sense of humor about himself.

RW: Looking back I think I was a little hard on Neiman. He was a pretty good guy, though he had a ridiculous king sized ego, marching around Jets stadium and waving to his fans. He did lack a sense of humor about himself and he was insecure. But you know what–he was a hell of a sketch artist and he was really good at illustrating sports heroes and other entertainers. Maybe I should have given him more credit. But he wanted to be taken seriously as a great artist like Picasso, and that just wasn’t going to happen. Still, he might be remembered as a great illustrator. People certainly love his work. And he was right about one thing: The establishment in the art world is snobby and nasty, and to tell you the truth I’ve never been a great Andy Warhol fan.

BB: Warhol was a bullshit artist.

RW: He was hip and cool and all that but I never loved his soup cans or his paintings of celebs. How much brains did it take to do what he did? But nobody ever parodied him. Why is that? Afraid if you laughed at Andy you wouldn’t be cool?

BB: He beat them to the punch.

RW: Well, I never dug him or his scene filled with drag queens and other non-talents and would have loved to have done a piece on him with all of his affectations. Leroy said so many self aggrandizing things it was kind of like shooting fish in a barrel. But it is a funny piece…

BB: Your most famous magazine story might be the profile you did on Reggie Jackson for Sport. Did you know you had gold when you spoke to Reggie in the bar during spring training?

RW: Oh, yes. I couldn’t quite believe how poetic he was. But this goes along with my theory of bragging and poetry. For the average male in the world today the one place where they really become poetic is when they’re cursing someone out, or bragging about how great they are. Over the years I’ve heard the most creative use of language in these arenas. But Reggie went beyond the call of metaphorical duty. “I’m the straw that stirs the drink. Thurman Munson thinks he can stir it but he can only stir it bad. I’m the guy who puts the meat in the seats.” On and on and on…When he left the bar I just sat there reading my notes and saying, “Thank you, Jesus!”

BB: In the postscript to your story on Clint Eastwood you write about a reporter’s nightmare—your tape recorder not working. Did you tape record the Reggie interview?

RW: I didn’t use tape much at all because I was afraid something would happen to the machine. Just like it did with Clint. I had a perfect memory and let people talk, then scribbled down what they said when we were eating or having a drink. Obviously you can’t write as fast as someone talks, but I never missed a word.

BB: I know Reggie has denied saying the “Straw that stirs the drink” line. Why do you think, all these years later, he still disputes it so hotly?

RW: Reggie is super competitive and he hates to this day that I got him dead to rights. But he admitted it to Pete Axthelm in Newsweek right after he said it all. Axthelm asked him if he really said all that stuff and he said, “Ward caught me off guard.” Later, he changed it to the “took me out of context,” to which Munson is reported to have said, “For twelve fucking pages?” Then, even later, he decided he never said any of it. The next stance he might take is that he was never there at all and I never spoke to him. Then maybe he could go a step farther and say he doesn’t even exist. Who knows?

BB: I doubt he’d go that far. Reggie had a flair for hype. Genius may be too strong. That’s a word, “genius”, that is tossed around all too flippantly but I was drawn to how you used it, with great sincerity, in describing Pete Maravich.

RW: Pete Maravich was a true athletic genius. What he could do with a basketball was so amazing you had to see it three or four times to believe it. I mean running full-tilt down a court, bouncing a ball off of your instep cross court to a guy waiting under the basket? Unreal. Punching the ball with your forearm while looking the other way and making a totally accurate pass, heading the ball into the basket ten times in a row. He would do this stuff in practice and the other players would just stop and stare at him open mouthed. I feel privileged to have known and hung out with him. And then consider he did all this with one less arterial system in his body than we are supposed to have. His whole career was a miracle because most kids who are born with his heart problems are dead before they are sixteen.

BB: People tend to remember him as someone who was tortured and didn’t achieve as much as he could have but it was incredible what he accomplished considering his health problems.

RW: As a journalist you’re always on the lookout for a good story, but sometimes you run into someone who is just freaking miraculous. That was Pete. Even Magic Johnson said so. But again, he made it look easy because he practiced six or seven hours a day as a kid. Every day. He worked out all of these ball exercises and did them religiously day after day after day. He was sweet natured too. I said, “Pete I just can’t believe the stuff you do.” He said, in this really sincere voice, “Robert, you could do all of them too if you went home and practiced two or three hours a day. I mean really. Try it!”

Hearing that made me want to give him a hug. I mean it was like being told, by Einstein, “Honestly, Bob you could have come up with Theory of Relativity if you’d just worked a little harder at your physics lessons. Go home. Read a couple more science books and you’ll see what I mean” The guy was sincere and a great teacher. If he had lived he would have been a wonderful coach, because he wasn’t only talented, he was kind and patient as well.

BB: What are the general differences between writing about actors and athletes?

RW: Well, they have a lot on common. Both athletics and acting is about timing. You need to do things just right. If you’re running through the two hole on the line you need to wait for your block just long enough and then go. Same with delivering lines. You need to have the right timing when you start speaking, when you move your hand to pick up the cigarette, or answer the phone. It has to be done the same way over and over and over again. Amateur actors, for example, can’t sustain a performance because they don’t stay in character with their bodies. It’s not about just saying lines. You have to turn your body just so, pick up the magazine just so…on the third line of the speech. You have to move your mouth just so, your eyes have to squint or not squint just so. Comparably, as a wide receiver you have to make your break at the fifteen yard line every time, not the fifteen and a half yard line. You have to wait for the block as you run through the line, you have to make the back cut after the pulling guard has hit the linebacker not before. In basketball you have to get to your spot on the floor at the right moment, not a second later or a second earlier. In baseball you have to hit to the opposite field if the ball is outside. You have to play every batter differently in the field. You have to time your hitting, time your throw to second. Physical timing is imperative in both sports.

BB: That’s so true and yet people rarely comment on the physicality that goes into acting.

RW: Yeah, and athletes tend to become pretty good actors. Obviously there is sensitivity to acting, to saying lines that most jocks don’t have. Just as there are physical attributes actors don’t have when they want to play sports. Ever look at actors? They are small boned for the most part and short. They have thin legs and waists. Look at a baseball player on any team. Big thick thighs, big wrists…some of them, like pitchers, big waists. But almost all power hitters have big trunks. Reggie had huge legs, thighs. That’s where they get their power from.

BB: But isn’t there a difference between the mental makeup of actors and jocks?

RW: Actors are much more vulnerable and insecure than athletes. They worry a lot and feel, I think, that acting isn’t a manly profession. There’s a saying actors have: “To be an actor you have to be twice the woman, and half the man.” Only a tough woman can make it because it’s so tough. But for a man to do it…well, it’s seen by actors as being a kind of feminine profession. Pretending. Not very manly. Men should be building bridges, flying planes, shooting guns. Actors only pretend to do these things, so it makes them feel insecure and I think there’s still some shame in the profession. Brando used to say that all the time. I think writers feel the same thing. As a rule, both actors and writers would rather be John Elway than Hemingway. Because athletes risk physical damage, have to have physical courage. Actors and writers need courage too, though. It’s tough being a writer. No one knows how tough until they try it. It takes a kind of courage not many people will ever realize to face a white page of paper and know you have to fill it up with new, brilliant stuff that people may read and hate or laugh at. I’ve had scripts I’ve written for TV balled up and thrown back at me with absolute hatred. It took courage to go back into my room, knowing I was two seconds away from being fired or strangling my boss and just cool down and start over again. It takes courage to act in a movie and risk people thinking you are awful. Few people can either act or write well, and it takes a lot of courage to do either one as your life’s work.

RW: In those days before publicists did you find that your subjects were almost always cooperative? Or did that depend on the person’s personality? Can you recall profiling anyone who was reticent and difficult to draw out?

RW: I did a piece on Robert Duvall which was impossible. He wouldn’t say anything at all. He didn’t trust me and as a result I had to go back again and again to talk to him and I still got next to nothing. When the piece came out in Rolling Stone I heard from a friend who knew him. He said that Duvall thought I tried to make him look stupid. Nothing could have been farther from the truth. I thought he was quite bright but he didn’t say enough for me to get a very good piece.

BB: It sounds as if Duvall made his bed, determined to be unhappy no matter what you wrote. I know he wanted to strangle Pauline Kael for her review of Tender Mercies. He wouldn’t be alone. But I liked how Clint Eastwood was more objective about her critique of Dirty Harry–he understood the hype in her take. And it sounds as if Eastwood was the opposite of Duvall.

RW: Clint Eastwood was anxious to have the younger, hipper audience catch on to him. In fact, most of them were starting to get it, so we were only a little way ahead of the curve. He was famous for short interviews and I was told if you asked the wrong question he would get surly and toss you out. In fact he was friendly, courteous and very well spoken. He knew what he was doing on the screen and he understood that there was a comic side to his performance, but it had to be done completely straight. As he said to me, “If you winked or let the audience know you knew it was funny, it wouldn’t work.”

What really impressed me is when I asked him about critics who had assumed he didn’t know what he was doing, that he was just lucky. He said that he had chosen his hat and his old jeans and the serape he wore in the man With No Name Westerns with Leone. He brought them with him from America. He knew exactly the effect he was creating. The squint, the cigar, the clothes were all Clint’s ideas not wardrobe’s. That’s part of acting too, your look. People forget that. Think of the show I worked on, Miami Vice. Without the look of the show it’s just another cop show. These are things the average movie critic doesn’t even comment on. Clint was generous and civil and even did the interview with me over again when my tape recorder failed! I thought I would get fifteen minutes and I ended up with three hours of tape. He’s a great guy.

BB: How surprised were you that Lee Marvin turned out to be so agreeable to interview?

RW: Lee Marvin completely fooled me. I always assumed he would be some lout like the louts he played so well. But he was the exact opposite. He was dressed in a beautiful Italian suit, and was friendly and, at first, rather formal. But after a couple of drinks we became good buddies. He loved to tell stories of his drinking days, and he loved fishing, hanging out in the desert, listening to jazz. He also made a musical, “Paint Your Wagon,” as did Bob Mitchum.

BB: I dug the no-nonsense professionalism of Mitchum. Especially his comment about De Niro:

I was on the set with De Niro, The Last Tycoon, and he takes forty minutes to get ready for a scene in his trailer. Ray Milland was in the movie, and he gets all upset. He asks Gage Zazan how come we didn’t get that much time, and Kazan says, ‘Hey, look, you guys don’t need time like that. Come on, just say your lines, I got enough problems with him.’ The thing is, it’s a hell of a lot more work, and I don’t see overall where the films are any better, really. You tell me.”

How was Mitchum like Marvin if at all?

RW: In Mitchum’s case it wasn’t a musical but he did write and sing the lead song “Thunder Road,” which was a hit in the fifties. They both were tough guys who had big hearts. I didn’t know Mitchum as well, but Lee was kind and loved his old friends, especially Woody Strode, his partner in “The Professionals” and other films. He was so kind. When we went out to the Palm for dinner he was besieged by autograph seekers and he insisted they get my signature too, telling them, “This guy is a great writer. You’ll be happy you have his autograph some day.” You can’t get much nicer than that. He called me at four in the morning to tell me how much he loved my novel Red Baker. “Hello, this is your book reviewer from Tucson. One hell of a book, Bobby.” That was the kind of a guy he was.

BB: Was there anyone you wanted to profile that you never had the chance to get to?

RW: I would have loved to interview Johnny Unitas, who eventually became a friend of mine. He was my childhood hero, and when the horrible Irsays moved the Colts out of Baltimore in the middle of the night I wrote a piece in GQ on how much the old Colts meant to me and everyone else I knew growing up in Baltimore in the fifties.

Johnny and Alex Hawkins called me up to thank me for it! I was so moved I could barely talk. And when Johnny died I sat at my computer and wept like a baby. I’m not ashamed of it, as many other guys I knew in those days had the exact same reaction. We loved him like no other athlete. He was exactly what you wanted your heroes to be like, on the field and off. Ask any of the old Colts who are left and they’ll say the same thing. A wonderful, caring and also very amusing guy. Had a great sense of humor. And more guts and heart than any player I’ve ever seen. He was the very best of the old Baltimore too. A guy who was kind to everyone and never stiffed his fans. You could go to his old place The Golden Arm on the York Road and have drinks with him. Imagine doing that with any of the well known quarterbacks today. They all have bodyguards and live in gaited prisons. The fact that he once threw me a pass when I was twelve and then said, “Good hands” when I caught. It’s a memory I’ve cherished all my life.

BB: Were there any pieces that were tough not to include in Renegades?

RW: I wish I’d included a humorous take on the Orioles losing to the Pirates in the World Series. It was really funny and one of my best short pieces, but I couldn’t find it. And there was a profile I did on Rip Torn for American Film but I couldn’t find it until the damned thing was put to bed.

“Payday”

BB: I had a subscription to American Film as a kid. I remember that one.

RW: Rip is the best. One night Rip, Margot Kidder, the mad novelist James Crumley and myself went to Chez Jay’s in Santa Monica. We’d all had too much to drink and we got into a pirate contest. That is “who could do the best Arrrrgghhhh!” I did one, ok but modest. Crumley did a better one. Then Rip did one that we were sure no one could beat. It was the Arghhh to end all Arghhhh’s. And loud. Like the whole joint stopped eating to hear it.

Finally, Margot, not to be outdone by no men, stood on the freaking table, looked out across the joint and ARRRRRGHED her ass off. I’ve never heard another Argggggh to top it. The whole restaurant applauded her and they bought us free drinks. That’s Rip. That’s Margot. Thank God they never got together. There would have been a new H Bomb.

Renegades is available on Amazon. And be sure to check out Robert Ward’s website.

[Photo Credit: portrait of David Allen Coe via Berrystop100; painting of Clint Eastwood by Jim Blanchard]

Jack Curry is known to Yankee fans as one of the faces of the YES Network’s Yankees reporting team, but he wasn’t always a “TV guy.” Prior to joining YES in 2010, Jack enjoyed a decorated career as a sportswriter, most notably at the New York Times. He forged his path without having to go to smaller markets and work his way back east, a rarity for those who work in media, particularly in New York. His full bio can be found here. You can follow him on Twitter @JackCurryYES.

Jack was a staple on the Yankees beat when I covered the Yankees from 2002 through 2006 for yesnetwork.com. At that point of his career, he was one of the Times’s National Baseball Reporters and I was a punk trying to figure out how to become a better reporter and writer, assignment editor, and do all of it without getting in anyone’s way. I recall that Jack was a pillar of professionalism; someone not only I, but also every other writer respected and liked. He’s the same person on camera as he is off camera.

Over a series of conversations and e-mails, Jack and I discussed a number of topics, ranging from what inspired his career choice to the move from print to TV and Internet, and more.

Bronx Banter: At what point did you “know” that you wanted to become a sportswriter? Was there a “eureka” moment while you were at Fordham?

Jack Curry: When I was in the seventh grade, I started a newspaper at my elementary school. It was only two or four pages. But I remember the jolt I felt when everyone at the school was commenting on my articles. It was the first time I had a byline and I loved how that felt. Writers like to know what people think of their writing so I grew to love the idea of being a sportswriter. I hung on to the dream of being a major league player through high school, but that faded. I played high school baseball, but I was a much better writer. I went to one baseball practice at Fordham under coach Paul Blair. It lasted four and a half hours and I missed dinner that night. Even if I had made the team, I would’ve been a backup. So that one practice told me it was time to stop playing baseball and start covering baseball (and other sports). I funneled all of my energy into journalism and broadcasting after that.

BB: Who were the writers that you admired growing up, and how did they influence your reporting / storytelling style?

JC: I grew up in Jersey City, NJ, and the Jersey Journal was the first newspaper I remember reading. They syndicated Jim Murray’s column so it always had a prominent spot in the sports section. But, since I didn’t know anything about syndication as a kid, I just thought Jim Murray was some guy from Jersey City who had the greatest job in the world. He covered all of the biggest sporting events and, man, he could write. I wanted that job. When I finally realize who Jim Murray really was, it didn’t change my thoughts. I still wanted that job. I got the chance to meet Jim Murray at a college football game, which was an absolute thrill. My regret is I didn’t tell him my “connection” to him. I’m guessing he would’ve thought it was pretty cool.

BB: How did you get from the Jersey Journal to the New York Times?

JC: I worked for the Jersey Journal for three summers while I was in college. I’m going to bet that I covered more Little League baseball in those summers than anyone in the state of New Jersey. But I loved it. I loved going to the games and watching which kids cared and which kids were coached well and which kids were so much better or, unfortunately, so much worse than the other players on the field. Trying to get decent quotes out of 11- and 12-year-olds can be more challenging than trying to get decent quotes out of some major leaguers.

After I graduated from Fordham, I worked at the Star Ledger of Newark for about a year. I covered high school sports there, but I wanted to do more than that. I applied for a position in the New York Times’s Writing Program. Basically, the Times hired you to be a clerk for 35 hours a week and then you could use your days off or your hours off to pitch story ideas and to volunteer to cover events, etc. When I was hired as a “writing clerk,” I wrote a lot of stories that appeared without bylines. The Times had some arcane rules about not giving the clerks a byline, which I always thought was nonsensical. When you were hired as a writing clerk, you were told that there was no guarantee you’d ever be a reporter at the Times.

Anyway, once I got my foot in the door, I was on a mission to do anything and everything to stay there. I wanted to do enough so that they had to keep me. I needed to prove to them that I could be a sports reporter there. It took about three years, but I was finally hired as a reporter.

BB: So many sportswriters jump from sport to sport now. I can think of a number of current beat writers from several of the area papers who have shuttled back and forth. What drew you specifically to covering baseball and keeping yourself on that beat?

JC: I covered college basketball and football and the New Jersey Nets at the Times before I started covering baseball in 1990. I wanted to cover baseball. To me, there was no other sport to cover. I was fortunate that the Times recognized that and trusted me with covering a baseball beat. I took over the Yankees beat at the All-Star break of 1991 and have essentially only covered baseball since then. I like basketball and I’ll watch some football, but I would have never been as happy covering those sports as I was in covering baseball.

BB: When I started at YES and began setting the editorial direction of the website, we were trying to do something completely different in our coverage of the Yankees. Our goal wasn’t to compete with the papers, but to be considered legitimate. How did you view YESNetwork.com’s presence on-site in those first few years?

JC: In the early years, I viewed YESNetwork.com’s presence as another entity that was immersed in covering the Yankees. When I first started as a beat writer, you were concerned about the other beat writers and what they were doing. But, with each year, more and more outlets began to cover the team and you had to pay attention to them, too, and see what they were producing.

BB: What struck you about the way YESNetwork.com covered the team, and the games? How, if at all, has that changed since you became a YES Network employee and contributor to the dot.com?

I think YESNetwork.com has tried to be different than the traditional newspaper sports website, as it should be. The Yankees are the brand and there’s obviously an attempt provide as much Yankee content as possible. I think there’s more interaction with the fans, which is another positive. What I’ve tried to do is use the 20-plus years of experience that I have covering this team to offer analysis on players and trends, develop feature stories and, obviously, push to break news.

BB: Describe the events that led YES to call you and offer you the YES job, and what drew you to make the jump to TV on a full-time basis.

JC: After 22 years at the Times, I decided to take the buyout and pursue other opportunities. The timing was good for me. I felt confident about making a career switch in my 40s. I’m not sure if a person can do that in his 50s. I had always had a good relationship with John Filippelli of YES because I had been a guest on “Yankees Hot Stove” since 2005.

Before I even took the buyout, YES was the place where I hoped I would land. Shortly after my departure from the Times became official, I heard from YES. There was mutual interest and I was excited about the chance to transition from print to broadcast. My colleagues at YES, people like Flip, Michael Kay, Bob Lorenz, Ken Singleton, Jared Boshnack, Bill Boland, Mike Cooney, John Flaherty and so many others, all welcomed me and helped make that transition a smooth one for me. I work with a lot of very cool and very talented people.

It’s rewarding to work for and with people you admire and respect and people that you consider your friends.

BB: Peter Gammons and Jayson Stark were among the first two prominent baseball writers who became “multimedia” guys. Later, your former colleague Buster Olney, Ken Rosenthal and Tom Verducci followed. Did it just make sense for you to do the same?

JC: You forgot to mention Michael Kay. Michael had worked for the Post and the News and did clubhouse reporting for MSG. Obviously, he also was a radio announcer before moving to YES. He was the one person who implored me to give TV a try. I will admit that I was resistant. I liked being a baseball writer. There were times where I thought I would end my career as a newspaperman. But I’m very happy to have made the switch. I love what I’m doing at YES. They have given me terrific opportunities in the studio with Bob Lorenz, who is as selfless as any co-worker I’ve ever had. Flip has also trusted me with chances to do work in the booth during games, which have been great experiences.

BB: In the last 10 years — heck, the last five even — so much has changed in how sports are covered on a daily basis. Responsibilities include blogging and tweeting, in some cases web-exclusive video reporting. The beat writer/columnist’s audience is broader than ever. Has that caused you to change your journalistic approach?

JC: My journalistic approach hasn’t changed. I’m trying to find insightful and interesting stories and tell them as adeptly as I can. I’m trying to dig up timely and pertinent information and deliver it as quickly and as accurately as I can. That’s the way I did the job at the Times. That’s the way I do the job at YES. But I am moving faster in telling those stories and chasing that information. Because of Twitter and blogging, we’re all doing that. When I was a beat writer in the early 1990′s, my world revolved around deadlines: 7 PM, 11 PM, 1 AM, etc. I’m on TV now, but, when I write for the website or I tweet, it’s usually about getting it done as quickly as I can, not about getting it done by 7 PM.

BB: Speaking of journalism, you broke the story of Andy Pettitte returning to the Yankees. What was the internal reaction to your scoop?

JC: My bosses at YES were elated that we broke the Pettitte story. I first tweeted about it and wrote a news story that was up on our website five minutes later. About 25 minutes after that, we led our spring training broadcast with the news about Pettitte’s return. Since that story came out of left field, they were thrilled that we led the way.

BB: What was the reaction to the Twitter war that ensued due to ESPN claiming credit for the story?

JC: It doesn’t behoove me to revisit what happened on Twitter after the Pettitte story broke. From a journalistic perspective, that was a very good day for YES. That’s what’s most important.

BB: Is the rapport with former players you used to cover, like Paul O’Neill, John Flaherty, David Cone, and Al Leiter, any different now that you’re on TV, considered an “analyst” like them?

JC: What’s interesting about all of those guys is that I had a great relationship with all of them when they were players, so those relationships have simply carried over. I liked talking baseball with all of those guys when I was a writer. I like talking baseball with all of them now that we’re colleagues.

BB: Which part of your career was, or has been, the most challenging?

JC: The most challenging part of my career were the earliest days at the Times, but, to be honest, those were also some of the most enjoyable days. Like I said, when I first started there, I wasn’t guaranteed anything other than a future of answering phones. I had to show a lot of different editors that I could write and report.

At first, I was going to answer this by saying the most challenging time was being a new beat writer on the Yankees. But, by that point in my career, at least I had become a reporter at the Times. I knew I had made the staff. In the early days, I didn’t know if that would ever happen. I’m glad it did.

[Photo Credits: YESNetwork.com, New York Times, Twitter]

Mark Kram Jr. is one of the finest practitioners we have of long form newspaper journalism, better known as the bonus or takeout piece. He has been with the Philly Daily News since 1987 and his work has appeared in The Best American Sports Writing six times (here’s a selection:  “The World is Her Cloister” 1994; “Joe’s Gift” 2002; “I Want to Kill Him” 2003; “A Lethal Catch” 2005).

Kram has a clean, almost invisible style that doesn’t call attention to itself. It is in the fine tradition of Gay Talese’s fly-on-the-wall approach. With Kram you don’t notice his technique because you are immersed in the story. Now 56, Kram has written his first book, “Like Any Normal Day.” It is published today.

I wrote a short piece on Kram in the Scorecard section of Sports Illustrated last week and was fortunate enough to chat with him recently about his book and his father, who himself was a celebrated magazine writer.

Enjoy.

Bronx Banter: I’m a huge fan of “Forgive Some Sinner,” the uncompromising article you wrote about your father. It must not have been easy to write that story. How did it come about?

Mark Kram: Frank Deford planted the idea with me. He and Dad had been colleagues at Sports Illustrated during the 1960s and early 1970s but had drifted apart in the ensuing years, as friends occasionally do. They were both from Baltimore, yet not the same Baltimore. Frank grew up in an affluent area of the city, and Dad had come out of East Baltimore, a working class section. He had lettered in baseball, basketball and football in high school—in fact, he had played high school baseball against Al Kaline—but had been a poor student and had no interest in books until his pro baseball career in the Pirates organization came to an end.

Mark Kram, left, Tito Francona far right

I had known Frank as a boy and became reacquainted with him some 30 years later at a book event he had at The Free Library of Philadelphia in 2005, three years after Dad had died. We went out for a few drinks and I filled him in on the man he once knew. By the end of the evening, he said, “You know, you should write about him.” The thought had occurred to me, but I could not think of the circumstance that would arise where it would be possible. Were I to do it, it would have to have been for publication, and I could not think of any editor who would be remotely interested. Incredibly, Frank conspired with Rob Fleder, then a top editor at SI, to offer me an assignment.

BB: That had to come as a surprise, given how your father and SI parted ways in 1977.

MK: You can say that again. I showed my wife Anne the email Rob had sent me and her jaw dropped. SI had not even published an obit on him, and here they were asking for 6,000 words on him. I played along, but I was under no illusions that whatever I came up with would ever appear in their pages.

BB: Really?

MK: Yes. As stellar has his work had been, Dad had breached some very serious ethical standards – which I explore in some depth in “Forgive Some Sinner”–so he represented a complicated piece of SI history. It seemed unlikely to me that they would have any appetite to revisit it. And yet I was excited to have the assignment, if only because it gave me a license to pick up the phone, call people and ask questions.

BB: What happened when you submitted the story?

MK: SI paid for the piece in full and then sat on it. Rob had done a wonderful job helping me get it in shape—he is a splendid editor—but as I said, I doubted that it would ever get in. A year and half passed and Rob called. He said, “I have good news and bad news.” I said, “Give me the bad news.” As I expected, he said SI would not be running the piece. But the “good news” was that I could have the story back and sell it elsewhere, if I could find someone who would take it.

BB: At least they paid you for it and let you have it back.

MK: That was kind of them – and I appreciated it. So I shopped it around but no one wanted it. And then one day, a neighbor, Jason Wilson—who is the series editor of Best American Travel Writing—crossed into our yard and said he had just been appointed the editor of “The Smart Set,” an online cultural magazine he convinced Drexel University to underwrite. “Forgive Some Sinner” appeared as part of their launch and still gets visitors to it. So I would have to say it could not have worked out better.

BB: And there is a benefit to having it on-line because a simple Google search continues to lead readers to it.

MK: Absolutely. It’s been wonderful in that way.

BB: And it was included in The Best American Sports Writing that year. That had to be gratifying.

MK: It was. Given the circuitous journey the piece had before it found a home, it was more than that. I am deeply thankful to Glenn Stout, the series editor of the book, and Bill Nack, the guest editor who selected it. And I am thankful to Frank, Rob and Jason for teeing it up.

BB: I was drawn to the part of “Forgive Some Sinner” where your old man discouraged you from pursuing a career in writing. Can you shed some light on what his thinking was?

MK: Writing was an extraordinary struggle for him. I can still see him sitting at the typewriter, drenched with sweat and wreathed in smoke from the pipe that he always had going. Every word to him was a careful brush stroke. Frank captured it well in his new memoir, “Over Time”:

“To Mark, writing was a laboratory science more than a craft; he could not write the second word until the first word was perfect. He also believed that he was like a female holding a finite number of eggs—that he only had so many words within him.”

I could not have said it better. Frank and I part company on certain other observations he had, but I am a very fond of him and he is surely entitled to his opinion. But to answer your original question: I think Dad discouraged me from writing because it was such an ordeal for him. I remember he used to say, “I should have stayed in baseball and become a first base coach.” Maybe he would have been happier.

Father and Son at Graceland, 2002

BB: To what extent was writing that story a relief for you?

MK: More than you can know. For years I had looked upon with the eyes of a boy—and only those eyes. I loved him dearly, and was always trying to plead his case in one way or another, even when the evidence to the contrary had been inescapable. I idealized him. I remember I used to look at his work and wonder how he ever did it—and if I ever could even approach what he did in some small way. Writing “Forgive Some Sinner” demanded that I looked at him with another set of eyes—challenging, discerning and yet not judgmental. No one is spared suffering in life, but you can either be embittered by it or ennobled by it. Dad became embittered by it, I am sad to say, and yet that was not the sum of who he was. “Forgive Some Sinner” was a painful excavation, yet one that acquainted me with the gray areas that hold regency over us. I think in some sense “Forgive Some Sinner” primed the pump for “Like Any Normal Day.”

BB: That’s an excellent point particularly since this is your first book. Why this story and why now?

MK: For years, I had hoped to do a book. Certainly, it seemed to be a logical outgrowth of the narrative writing I had been doing so long for newspapers. But I did not want to do just any book. I had no interest in doing an as-told-to celebrity job. I wanted to slice off a piece of life and examine it. What I found in the Miley family was precisely what I had been searching for: Ordinary people steeped in extraordinary circumstances. But I did not choose this story as much as it chose me.

BB: Ordinary people…

MK: Yes. When I attended the University of Maryland, I had a conversation with the novelist James M. Cain at his house one evening. Remember, “The Postman Always Rings Twice” and “Double Indemnity?”

Cain was well into his 80s by then, but he told me a story that has stayed with me ever since. Carey Wilson, the producer, had once told him, “Jim, the reason I like your stories is that they are about real people. I know them.” Cain told me this story to illustrate his antipathy for Raymond Chandler, whose characters in the “The Big Sleep” included “a rich, old bald-headed guy who raises orchids and has two nymphomaniac daughters.” Cain said Wilson had told him, “Whoever heard of someone like that? You can take that son of a bitch and jump in the lake with him.” In any event, I knew Buddy Miley. We were we the same age. I had played ball with boys like him, star athletes who would only go so far before gravity pulled them to earth. I think I understood who he was.

BB: You played sports in high school, right?

MK: Some baseball and basketball. Good enough to be on the team, but more or less a bench player.

BB: How did Buddy’s story choose you?

MK: I suppose you could say Buddy whispered in my ear. He became a thread I tugged on while I worked on other stuff. I think with any creative project, you have to give yourself space to play with the loose threads you come across and see where they lead. Some of the threads you pull at snap off. Others just go on and on. Buddy became a thread that I could not let go of. Over the course of some years, I found that some intriguing themes emerged: What is our duty to one another? To what extent are we able to sacrifice of ourselves? I fooled with some of screenplay versions of the story, suffered through the usual annoyances that are attached to that, and then finally decided: This has to be a book. At that point the question became, can I sell it?

BB: Did you have a feel for how that would go?

MK: Practically speaking, it seemed to me to be a long shot that any publisher would be interested in Buddy, or his story. But I had what I think of as an epiphany. It dawned on me that the book was not about Buddy alone but the people he touched.

BB: Someone who is injured like that impacts everyone around him.

MK: Exactly. That one split second of horror that occurred one day on the football field in 1973 changed the destiny of an array of people beyond just Buddy. His parents, his siblings, especially Jimmy, his youngest brother. Friends. I even found his high school girlfriend in Alabama—Karen Kollmeyer (then Karen Shields)–whose life intersected with Buddy in an intriguing way up until the very day he died. It seemed to be the perfect book for me—not a sports book per se, or a Kevorkian book—but one that played out across a large canvas of human experience.

BB: You explain in the book that you first wrote a piece about Buddy after reading a letter his mother wrote in Sports Illustrated. What was it about her letter that drew your curiosity?

MK: I always have an eye out for pieces that play in the margins of sports. In this case, an editor at the Philadelphia Daily News passed it along to me. Since I had come to Philadelphia in 1987 from Detroit, I had no idea of who Buddy or the Mileys were. In her letter, Rosemarie said, in part:

“I am sure the majority of SI readers ‘love’ football. I ask them to spend one day with my son. They will see the terrible pain he endures. They will feel his frustrations at being totally dependant upon others.”

It went on. But the point is, I followed up on her invitation, even if it had been intended as a rhetorical one. I called her and asked if I could drop by and take her up on her invitation. Of course, I had no idea of where it would lead except for perhaps an interesting feature article.

BB: Did you stay in touch with Buddy after that first article was published?

MK: I spoke with Buddy just once after the piece appeared in the paper. Apparently, some of his old friends had read it and organized a benefit for him. Ostensibly, it was to raise funds so he could visit Buoniconti clinic in Miami in search of relief from the pain he was in on a daily basis. He did take that trip, but it was to no avail, though he did get an eyeful on a side trip to South Beach.

BB: Hey, that had to be a good feeling, that something you had written had led people to organize a fund-raiser?

MK: The hope I always have is to spark a connection. Occasionally, that has expressed itself in a level of generosity that I found inspiring. I remember I once did a story on Joe Delaney, a promising young Kansas City Chiefs running back who died trying to save some boys from drowning—a $1000.00 check showed up in the mail to forward along to his widow. In the case of Buddy, I think we see the bigheartedness of others throughout his life—and this book.

BB: He was not alone.

MK: Good people stepped forward from every walk of life to help him, from legends such as the former Colts running back Alan Ameche, his widow Yvonne, and obscure characters such as Dave Heilbrun, who volunteered his expertise to build an addition on the Miley home that allowed Buddy some space of his own. So I suppose I would say, what I have always hoped to do is move readers in a way that enables them to connect to a world outside themselves.

BB: I interrupted you there. So did you stay in touch with Buddy?

MK: We spoke just once again and he more or less faded from my radar until I received a phone call from the office one evening in March, 1997. Buddy had been found dead in a Michigan motel room. From what could be immediately ascertained, it looked like it had been a Kevorkian job. I contributed some reporting to the story that appeared the following day, but did not become more deeply involved in the story until a year later. I proposed a piece on the one-year anniversary of his death, if only because the initial reporting seemed to leave certain questions unanswered. I am also of the belief that in pursuing feature subjects—especially when there is a tragedy involved—it is usually a good idea to give people some space to grieve.

BB: That makes sense.

MK: When I revisited the Mileys in March 1998, everyone was there except for Jimmy. I was told it would just be too hard for him to be there. Although I suspected then that Jimmy had been the one who had taken Buddy to Michigan, I figured that I would be done with the Mileys when I finished that story. But I had grown fond of Rosemarie and gave her a call every now and then just to talk. Always, it seemed, we ended up laughing over one thing or another. Occasionally, I would bring up Jimmy, ask how he was and told her I would love to talk with him if he was ever up to it.

BB: And you later did a story on him as well, right?

MK: The piece I did on Jimmy appeared in the Daily News in June 2006. A year before, Rosemarie called me and told me Jimmy would like to talk with me. So I drove out to Warminster to see him, no strings attached, just a chat. If for whatever reason he did not want a story written, I promised him that that would be the end of it. We met at a diner and talked for four hours. I knew then that he had a compelling story to share, but I could also see that he was bound up in fear. He seemed to think if he went public, he would end up in jail as an accessory. Or, perhaps even worse, that he would be shunned in the community for participating in an act that the Catholic Church looked upon as a sin.

BB: He was tortured.

Jimmy Miley

MK: Yes. He was so overwhelmed by his fears that he called two weeks or so later and declined to proceed. Another year passed before he decided to move forward. Contrary to the apprehensions that had held him back, the community embraced him with compassion. I received dozens of letters from readers who opened up their hearts to him. To the extent that the book had a genesis, it could be found in those letters—this sense that what Jimmy experienced had universal overtones. In fact, I had an aunt who lived in a vegetative state for 10 years, so I had some fairly strong personal views regarding self-determination.

BB: Did you share any of the letters you received from that second article with Jimmy?

MK: I did. I dropped a pile of them off at his house one day. I think it was a revelation to him, that there were people who supported what he had done, even if they did not approve of Dr. Kevorkian or what he stood for. They understood that what he had done had been an act of compassion on behalf of his brother.

BB: When Jimmy got cold feet, how did you react to that?

MK: Disappointed, of course, yet not entirely surprised. As we spoke, I sensed that he was backing away. And yet he continued to talk, as if by doing so he was expelling a large burden he had been carrying around. Sometimes I have had story subjects who could not bring themselves to follow through. I understand it. This is deeply personal stuff, and it is not easy to expose your inner world to someone, particularly a stranger who proposes to share your story in a public forum. In this case, there was also an added obstacle that came into play. Nationally, the big story in the news in early 2005 was Terri Schiavo, the young woman who had been in a vegetative state and became the focus of a heated debate on euthanasia in America. I had a sense that that spooked Jimmy.

BB: Can you talk about the difficulties that you face as a writer when you get to know a subject and like them? And was there a difference between the connection you had with the family during the two articles you wrote and then the book?

MK: Initially, my relationship to the Mileys was cordial but not one that I had any sense would endure. They were lovely people, yet the necessities of turning around fresh ideas seemed to preclude any deeper connection. Once a story is published, there is always this sense of closure, that both the subject and I had attained what we had set out to accomplish and would part ways. A book is different matter altogether. To go to the depths one has to plumb in order to piece together a narrative non fiction of any length, it is essential to establish a level of abiding trust and transparency. What I found is that you have to give of yourself in order to have any expectation of any return. The Mileys were helpful in this regard. They assured me, “This is your book.” And I assured them that I would observe the same sensitivity in writing about them as I would my own family.

BB: In what way do you give of yourself? At one point in the book, you bring yourself in the picture by sharing some of your personal history. And you do share that you and Buddy were the same age. Is this what you are referring to?

MK: By “giving of yourself” to a subject, this quite simply means that you have to be something more than an interrogator. You have to connect with them at a human level and create an environment of safety. I remember when I interviewed Karen in Alabama, I asked her to look up “Forgive Some Sinner,” if only to give her a sense that I understood what was involved with letting go of old demons. I think by reading it she came away with a better sense of who I was and became more relaxed with me. As far as Buddy was concerned, I included some personal history only to underscore the passage of years. In the 23 ½ years Buddy had been paralyzed, longer by the way, than he had been ambulatory, time had not stopped for me as it had for him.

BB: Buddy fell in love with Karen while he was in the hospital. At what point in the process did you track her down?

Buddy Miley and Karen Sheilds on Graduation Day, 1974

MK: Karen emerged very early in my reporting. At some point while I was preparing the piece on Jimmy for the Daily News, he told me that women had always loved Buddy. Some had passed in and out of his life, but there was one in particular that Buddy had a special affection for. He told me she was living somewhere in the South, Florida or Alabama. He said he had her telephone number somewhere. Once the Daily News story appeared and I began to draft a book proposal, I asked Jimmy to give her a call. He did, and Karen and I later spoke on the phone. That was in 2006 or so. When I finally got a deal, I flew down to Alabama and spent a few days with her.

BB: That’s a huge get on your part.

MK: By the end of those interviews, it became clear to me that she would be an essential character to the book. I remember I told her, “I need you to help me tap into the heart of this story.” And so she did, beyond what I could have imagined.

BB: Was there anything new or surprising that you learned about the Mileys writing the book?

MK: Nothing “new” or “surprising,” but I did develop a deep appreciation for what lovely people they were. None of them shied away from any of the questions I had, although their memories in some cases had dimmed. I remember asking Rosemarie Miley if she would share with me the letters she exchanged with her husband Bert during World War II. I asked her a few times offhandedly, but she always said no, that they were private. It was not until my final interview with her that, out of nowhere, she asked me if I would like to see one of them. “Of course,” I told her. She excused herself from the table and came back with a hand-written love letter that Bert had sent her from the Pacific near the end of the war. Quietly, she read part of it aloud to me. It was as if I had come across a missing piece in an elaborate puzzle: beneath the stony exterior that Bert exuded beat the heart of a man with the same dreams his paralyzed son had had.

BB: The story is so sad in many ways and dramatic. How did treat that story without becoming melodramatic?

MK: From the beginning, I knew I had to find some way to lighten the emotional load. So humor had to be a critical element of the story. Jimmy provided more than enough in this area. As the youngest of the seven Miley children, he had been a fine athlete, perhaps better than Buddy, yet he had been immature and always falling over himself in one way or another. It was not until he tapped into his courage and helped Buddy that he ascended into manhood. Karen, as a character, also allowed me to step away into a love story, even if that love story would ultimately have tragic overtones.

BB: And it was an unusual, complicated love story, too.

MK: Karen weaves in and out of the book. They were supposed to go on their first date after the game in which Buddy was injured. Karen began visiting him in the hospital and they became close – indeed, they fell in love. In the book there is a wonderful picture of the two of them on the stage at graduation. In any event, Karen moved away at that point with her parents, but not before Buddy assured her that when he was able to walk again, he would find her and sweep her off her feet. It was pure fantasy – Buddy would never be able to walk again – yet Karen became a projection to Buddy of the normal life he longed for. As the years passed, Karen went on to have a life of her own, with a husband and children, yet a part of her remained connected to the boy whose heart had touched her so long ago. Buddy contacted her two years before his death with the help of a private investigator. During this period, the deep feeling between them reemerged, and continued until Buddy called her from Michigan to say goodbye.

BB: You had this story with you for a long period, yet had addressed it only in short form. What entered into your thinking as you expanded to 70,000 words instead of 5,000?

MK: Good jockeys have a clock in their head, which is to say they have a sense of pace that enables them to know precisely where they are at any given point in a race. I had that ability here. Originally, the contract called for 80,000 words. Before I signed it, I sat down with a legal pad and worked up a very loose outline, just to get a sense of how far this material could be spread out. What I came up with during that exercise was what appeared to be a 70,000-word book, so we had the contract amended. And the book I turned in came to 70,400 words. We ended up trimming perhaps 1000 words from that during the editing process.

BB: Damn, that’s nothing.

MK: With the help of my wife, Anne, who attended the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars and has a sharp eye for errant prose, I did some rewriting on certain chapters as I went along. Some of our editorial sessions were tense.

BB: Oh, I can only imagine.

MK: But when I looked at what she suggested with a cooler head I was always deeply grateful, not just for her direction but the patience and love with which she offered it.

BB: Did you show your editor any early drafts?

MK: No, I just showed George Witte, the editor in chief at St. Martin’s Press, the completed manuscript when I was finished with it. I had a good sense of where I was going. And there is no point eliciting a partial score. George got back to me within a week with a lovely acceptance note. At that point, there were only some very minor revisions.

BB: That sounds so tidy. And you would have never been in this position had you not written about your father. “Forgive Some Sinner” really gave you a leg up on writing “Like Any Normal Day,” is that fair to say?

MK: In so far as the deep diving you have to do with certain subjects, I would say yes. I came away from “Forgive Some Sinner” with a better understanding not just of Dad and myself, but of life—even under ideal circumstances, it is a muddy affair. In a certain way, I cleared the land of the underbrush with that piece, which enabled me to enter the world of Buddy and Jimmy Miley in an unobstructed way. And I had discovered that “Forgive Some Sinner” helped me develop some previously unengaged creative skills, perhaps which in the final analysis can only come with experience. I remember whenever I had self-doubts as a boy, Dad used to remind me again and again: “The race is to the steady, not to the swift.” I can still hear him say that: Hang in there.

BB: I like how Scott Raab put it when he said, “Endurance is a talent.”

MK: Well said. Along with whatever talent you can scrape together, you have to have an iron ass. Buddy sure as hell had it. For 23 ½ years, he hung in here until he could not do it one more day. The pain that would shoot through him was so severe that it would leave him gritting his teeth. And yet I think he was ennobled by his suffering, not embittered by it. That’s a remarkable thing, really. Buddy had a big heart, and he shared it with whoever walked into his room and sat down with him. It was because of that heart that he stepped away from his struggle, if only to enable his mother Rosemarie a few years of peace in her advancing years. So he and Jimmy stole away to Michigan. Buddy was the personification of endurance, which is why I will always treasure the piece of memorabilia that Jimmy gave me that had belonged to his brother: a signed Cal Ripken jersey. Somehow that seemed so perfectly fitting.

You can order “Like Any Normal Day” here and here. And check out Kram’s website, here.

[Photos provided by Mark Kram Jr. Additional images via Elevated Encouragement. Author pictures taken by Mary Olivia Kram. ]

Paul Haddad’s new book about the Dodgers–available now at Amazon–is a real treat for all baseball fans. Paul grew up listening to Vin Scully and we’re fortunate that he recorded some of those broadcasts. Head on over to Paul’s site and check out this gallery of audio clips.

Here are a few that Paul was good enough to share with us:

Mike Scioscia’s first major league home run:

Scioscia’s_First_HR_’80

This one, according to Haddad, is “classic Vin, weaving in a story between pitches, and then he gets caught off guard and does a great, unorthodox (for him) home run call.  He’s talking about Mets’ reliever Neil Allen’s desire to wear number 13, back when wearing such things was considered “bad luck.”  This Pedro Guerrero homer happened in the 8th inning on May 15, 1981.  It tied the game and the Dodgers won it in the 9th.  My 15-year-old self sets up the action, rather blandly.”

He’s_Wearing_It_’81

This was in Game 6 of the 1981 World Series. “It was still a close game when Nettles made this great play to rob Derrel Thomas in the 6th inning,” says Haddad. “But by the time the inning was over, the Yankees were down, 8-1. Anyway, this play is what I’ll always remember of Nettles in the World Series, just always leaving you flabbergasted. This also is an example of Vin sharing the booth for a postseason game – in this case, Sparky Anderson.”

Great_play_by_Nettles_Gm_6_’81

“OK, this last one is sort of a wild card,” Haddad said.  ”It’s Vin admonishing home fans in left field who were pelting left fielder Jose Cruz as it became apparent the Astros were going to cruise into the playoffs by clobbering the Dodgers in the one-game tiebreaker in 1980. During this clip, Vin makes reference to the Yankees and the “zoo… the animals” that the Dodgers thought inhabited the place! This goes with my notion that Yankee Stadium was scary to me, even from afar.”

Vin_reprimands_fans_for_pelting_Jose_Cruz,_Gm_163,_’80

Meanwhile, I had the chance to chat with Paul about his book. Enjoy.

BB: We don’t have anything like Vin Scully in New York. Can you talk about what he meant to you as a kid in the context of life in L.A.?

Paul Haddad: Vin Scully is the main reason I got into the Dodgers. My Dodger obsession was just as equally a Vin obsession – they were intertwined and you couldn’t imagine one without the other. Fans in 1976 already knew this, naming Vinny the “most memorable personality” in Dodger history, and this from a team that’s had no shortage of iconic players or big personalities. My parents were not baseball fans, but growing up in Los Angeles, Vin’s voice was ubiquitous, like the smell of night jasmine, or smog. You would hear his warm baritone emanating out of storefronts, car windows, gas stations, parking lot booths, even people walking down the street clutching a transistor radio. So really, all those years of hearing this magnificent voice around town lured me into becoming a Dodger fan.

Beyond the spell of his voice and impeccable delivery, I think Vin’s continuity – he’s entering his 63rd year as the Dodgers’ broadcaster – is a big factor in why he’s cherished by so many generations. I work in television, and last year I executive produced a cool series for Cooking Channel called “The Originals,” in which chef Emeril Lagasse visited historic restaurants around the U.S. and hobnobbed with kitchen staff who have been part of these eateries for 50 or 60 years. In New York, we visited places like Keens Steakhouse, Peter Luger, Il Vagabondo and Katz’s Deli. The stories from customers were all the same – I come here to feel a connection to the past and so my kids can experience something that’s real. Vin is a lot like these iconic restaurants – timeless, classy, comforting. He’s an original.

BB: You mention Vin being heard everywhere. I have a sense of what that means in a city like New York. You can walk down the street and see a playoff game on the TV in the bars and know people are following it. But L.A. is so vast and spread out, you never seem to be falling over each other out there, if anything, I always get the sense that people want to be left alone. Can you explain Vin’s connective power in place that seems so disconnected?

PH: Yes, well put, Alex. Because Los Angeles is so spread out and is such a car culture, it lends itself to isolation, and it can be a very lonely place if you don’t have a good social network in place. I think people here do want to connect with other people, it’s just harder to do. And that’s what Vin brings to the table. You don’t hear his voice wafting throughout the city nearly as much now, as it’s become more diverse and baseball’s – especially the Dodgers’ – hold on the city wanes (this is a Laker town now). But as a kid, his radio broadcasts cut through all socio-economic boundaries and it got people talking to each other. A guy in a business suit could walk into a hardware store after work, and he’d bond with the cashier, who had the radio on. Dodger broadcasts allowed for meaningful exchanges between Angelinos who might not otherwise connect with each other.

BB: Did Chick Hearn have the same kind of impact that Vin has had?

PH: He did, in different ways. You could say Chick’s impact on the sport of basketball is even more profound than Vin’s on baseball. Chicky Baby contributed so many phrases that we now take for granted, like slam-dunk, dribble-drive, air ball, finger roll, no harm/no foul, and on and on. From a personal standpoint, I got into the Lakers around the same time as I did the Dodgers, and that was largely because of Chick. Even at 11, I knew brilliance when I heard it, and Chick sucked me in with the way he described the action. He was also funny. When the Lakers got sloppy while showboating, the “mustard was off the hot dog.” If Magic duped a defender, he “put him in the popcorn machine.” And of course, when he felt a game was out of reach, it was “in the refrigerator.” It’s interesting, while I was digging up my old audio tapes and digitizing them, I came across a couple spots where I randomly recorded Laker games so I could rehear Chick during the off-seasons. But ultimately I think I gravitated more toward Vin because the nature of baseball allows for more storytelling and less flash, which was more appealing to me. He was just more comforting to listen to, especially coming out of a transistor radio under your pillow at nights. So if forced into a Sophie’s Choice of Local Broadcasters, I’d have to say I enjoyed Vin and what he brought to the table just a little bit more.

BB: I’ve always wondered, does he have a nickname or is he just known as Vin or Vinny?

PH: Vin is simply known as Vin or Vinny to fans. On air, when he slips into self-deprecating mode, he’ll say, “Nice going, red.” But only Vin seems to call himself “Red.”

BB: Vin is such an icon, do you have any sense of what he’s like as a man? Does that matter to you?

PH: Vin is famously private and modest. He has refused all calls for an autobiography. I know what most people know through the few books and articles on him. You can often glean things about him through his broadcasts. His love of Broadway tunes, his adoration of children, his Catholic schooling with the nuns putting him in his place. I know he’s ferociously patriotic. Every June 6, you can count on Vin to gently reprimand younger viewers for not remembering D-Day, and then explaining its significance. He’s like Johnny Carson was – a very public figure leading a guarded life out of the spotlight. I always admire and respect people like that.

I met Vin one time, in 1996, when I was a TV producer for E! Before the game, I got to visit him in the press booth, and up rose this redheaded man with a crooked smile and sparkly eyes, greeting me like an old friend.

BB: That must have been a thrill.

PH: Meeting him was surreal. As he said hello and shook my hand, I couldn’t believe I was pounding flesh with a living legend. My mouth went immediately dry. The analogy I use with friends is, imagine the animatronic Lincoln coming to life in the “Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln” exhibit at Disneyland (I’m not sure they even have that exhibit at Disney World).

What I took away from it was Vin’s famed work ethic. Here’s how I describe it in my book:

As we were leaving to head over and interview organist Nancy Bea Hefley, I asked my contact, “So was that a radio ad he was voicing?”

He rubbed his chin. “Mmmmm . . . I think he was practicing.”

“For the ad?”

“For the game.”

The game wasn’t going to start for at least an hour and a half.

But even after almost fifty years, there was Vin, getting his game on, still living by the credo passed down to him by mentor Red Barber from their Brooklyn days: be there early, and be prepared.

BB: Has Vin always worked alone calling Dodgers games?

PH:Since moving to Los Angeles, at least, Vin has always worked alone on Dodger broadcasts. As he explains, it’s not an ego thing… it’s merely so he can connect directly with listeners. Putting another man in the booth changes that dynamic. All you have to do is listen to the radio duo of Rick Monday and Charley Steiner giggling at each other’s jokes to realize that. I wish more announcers worked alone, but the trend these days seems to be to pair people up, which is a shame. There’s a constant yammering. One of the great things about Vin on radio was how he clammed up after a Dodger hit a home run, to let the listener soak in the home crowd’s cheers. In my book, I actually time out how long those silences were after certain home runs.

Now, of course, Vin did pair up with people like Sparky Anderson or Brent Musburger for CBS Radio’s national baseball broadcasts, and everyone remembers him and Joe Garagiola doing the Games of the Week and three World Series in the ‘80s for NBC. But these were exceptions to the rule to accommodate a national audience. Vin ably acquitted himself, and the other announcers gave him room to maneuver, so it never bothered me.

BB: Do you still listen to old Vin broadcasts? 

PH: Every once in a while, I’ll break out the old Vin broadcasts. They instantly teleport me back to that time, which usually leads to other imagery from my childhood that has nothing to do with games. They’re like a portal to my memory bank. So I’ll often start listening to them to revisit a call, but they end up having a residual effect beyond the call.

BB: Do you have a favorite story or call that he made?

PH: Three calls from 1981 come to mind, all featuring Fernando Valenzuela. Fernando was Vin’s muse, and inspired the artist to new heights. That April 27, 1981 game that caught Fernandomania at its peak (mentioned earlier) remains a high point because he was truly a master at the top of his game. I also love his call on May 14 when Pedro Guerrero hit a home run in the bottom of the ninth inning to help Fernando go 8-0. This is the homer that he dedicated to Fernando, saying, “It’s gone, Fernando, it’s gone!”

It’s_Gone,_Fernando,_it’s_gone

And finally, after El Toro sweated and bluffed his way through that 147 pitch complete-game outing in Game 3 of the World Series, 5-4, Vin was summed it all up with a succinct, “Somehow, this was not the best Fernando game. It was his finest.”

BB: Obviously, he’s gotten older but what, if anything, has changed about Scully’s broadcasting over the course of your life?

PH: That question requires a measured response, because to suggest Vin may not be at the top of his game in Los Angeles brands you a heretic! But I think even Vin himself would say he’s slowed down a bit, much like Chick Hearn did. There’s a snap, a verve to his voice when I listen to those late ‘70s, early ‘80s games, whereas now it’s more grandfatherly and in some ways, more soothing. When the Dodgers hit a clutch home run nowadays, he doesn’t register the same excitement in his voice at 84 that he did at 54. But his insights and storytelling remain sharp, and he still seamlessly weaves narratives between pitches without missing a beat. Vin is like baseball itself – just when you think you’ve seen or heard it all, he surprises you every game with a turn of phrase, a story, an observation that makes you think or smile. I wish he did exclusively radio for a few innings, where I feel his genius is really allowed to flourish. Since Fox regional started broadcasting the games, Vin does a simulcast for the first three innings, with the final six on television. This means Vin is always calling a game for a television audience, which is a different experience than listening to a game on the radio. Time that could’ve been spent working in another anecdote is spent, say, commenting on a slow-motion replay. But the impact of That Voice… that still cuts through any medium.

BB: I know that the ’77 and ’78 loses to the Yanks were brutal for you. Which was worse?

PH: Well, 1977 was bad because, at 11 years old and new to baseball, I was ill-prepared for the emotional onslaught that overcame me when Reggie hit his 3 home runs to knock the Dodgers out of the World Series. His casual “Hi, Moms” in the dugout and the seeming effortlessness with which he hit the homers before swaggering around the bases were like kicks in the gut. It reminded me of my older brother and his show-off friends humiliating me, and to know that baseball too had that sort of destructive power on my psyche was a rude awakening. But 1978 was even worse. This was supposed to be the Series in which the Dodgers exacted their revenge. Going up 2 games to none only heightened the expectations. Once the Series switched to the Bronx for the middle three games, it was like living through a nightmare. For one thing, even 3,000 miles away, Yankee Stadium scared me. I was a SoCal kid raised in the sunshiny ‘burbs. My impressions of New York were formed by dark and dangerous movies like “Serpico” and “Taxi Driver,” which I caught many times on Z Channel (a movie subscription channel only in L.A.), and the willy-nilly mob that flooded the playing field at the end of the ’77 Series. Even the “Utz” potato chip sign prominently displayed in right field inexplicably disturbed me. We didn’t have those in Los Angeles, and it spoke of a foreign thing whose pronunciation I couldn’t quite figure out.

My memories of Game 3 are defined by third baseman Graig Nettles and play like a video loop of him making great play after great play after great play. I remember screaming “It’s not fair!” at the TV. He saved at least four runs that game. Game 4 of course was the infamous “hip and run” play by Reggie Jackson. It was one thing for Reggie to beat us fair and square the year before – I couldn’t begrudge him that. But that little hip-jut of his on the basepaths to deflect Bill Russell’s throw… that was downright cheating.

This is what made this Series so painful. Reggie’s ploy told me that if someone could cheat that openly and get away with it in a sport with clearly defined rules, then there was no justice in this world. (Of course, I didn’t realize at the time that rules are open to interpretation, and no one ever promised there was justice in this world!) I have almost no memories of Games 5 and 6. Everyone knew the momentum had shifted the day before and the Dodgers would lose the Series. The Dodgers seemed to know it too, getting outscored 19-4 in those last two games.

BB: What is your worst memory? Reggie’s three homers, Reggie interfering with the ball or Reggie’s revenge homer against Bob Welch?

PH: Definitely the non-interference call on Reggie Jackson. To my earlier point, it differed from the others in that it involved a player being duplicitous and getting away with it. And I hate to draw another negative analogy to my older brother – these things shade our perceptions of things as kids, so it’s hard not to – but it reminded me of something my brother would do. Michael was notorious for cheating at board games. During Monopoly, I would often catch him slipping an extra $200 for himself whenever he passed “Go!” while playing the “banker” – a role we all eventually banished him from taking. But just as my brother and I are now close, years later I grew to really respect Reggie Jackson and what he brought to the game. When he signed with the Angels in 1982, I remember being excited that someone who went to any lengths to win a game was now on a local team.

BB: Can you describe the ’81 season, the impact of Fernandomania, Rick Monday’s homer, and the Series win against the Yanks–especially in light of how they trailed 2-0?

PH: Relief. Like those Rolaids commercials. That was the biggest emotion I felt when the Dodgers finally beat the Yankees after the debacles of ’77 and ’78. And especially once the Dodgers went down 2 games to none in ’81. It was hard to shake that unmistakable “here we go again” feeling. I was also happy that a magical season – despite the players’ strike that shut the season down for 50 days in the middle of summer – did not go to waste. That magic, of course, was led by Fernando Valenzuela. You simply cannot describe the kind of excitement he brought to Dodger Stadium. One of my favorites is the last out of an April 27 game at home that sounds like it’s the last game of the World Series. You had 50,000 rabid fans clamoring for Fernando to strike out the last Giants batter so that he could capture his third shutout in only his fourth big-league start. Vin puts on a clinic – it’s the best I’ve ever heard him and it still gives me goose bumps. In my book, I devote four full pages to this 3 ½ minute at-bat alone. You can hear how much Vin is also swept up in Fernandomania – he even starts trotting out phrases he’s learned in Spanish!

Rick Monday was an enigmatic player for the Dodgers in that he was sort of a bust since coming over from the Cubs in 1977, streaky and often injured. But then in 1981 at age 35 (he looked 45), he finished really strong. As a part-timer that year, he averaged one homer every 11.8 at-bats, which was just a hair behind home run leader Mike Schmidt’s one for every 11.4. So the notion that Rick Monday came out of nowhere to hit that home run that put the Dodgers in the World Series is a bit misleading – he was their hottest player in the second half. As for hearing the actual homer, I was stuck in math class with an unsympathetic teacher named Mr. Bland who would not let us listen to the game (it was played on a Monday afternoon since the day before was rained out). My friend Andrew and I tried to listen to the game on radios that we smuggled into our backpacks and laid on our desks, passing notes back and forth when the teacher turned his back. But Bland busted us. Shortly after we were instructed to turn our radios off, all the other classrooms erupted in deafening cheers, whoops and hollers. They were all listening to the game, courtesy of their teachers! I was seething with resentment – I knew it had to be some kind of momentous home run. Luckily, I had set up a timer to record the game off the radio at home, but hearing it later obviously wasn’t the same thing as hearing it live. Just talking about this now still makes me angry!

I was 15 ½ years old when the 1981 season ended. I knew instantly after they won the World Series that I would not continue recording their games. Really, after finally beating the Yankees, the team had nowhere to go but down! Turns out I was right – they’ve appeared in (and won) only one World Series in the 30 years since 1981. In the five years I documented them, they got in three times! Who knew after experiencing such heartbreak, we would all look back at those times as the glory years.

[Photographs of Vin Scully via Sports Illustrated; pictures of Paul Haddad provided by the author]

“Damn Yankees” is a winning new collection of essays about the Bronx Bombers. Edited by Rob Fleder, it features an All-Star lineup and is a must not just for Yankee fans or baseball fans but anyone who appreciates good writing. I recently talked to Fleder about the project. Here’s our chat. Enjoy.

Rob Fleder at Yankee Stadium

RF: We’ve been catching up the TV series “Friday Night Lights.” I don’t really watch much TV but it’s great, just so well done. If you summarized the plot line, it would sound like cliché after cliché, but that never occurs to you because it’s great story telling, it’s so well executed. It makes me think of Colum McCann’s piece in the book. We’ve all read some version of that story. If you’re a Sports Illustrated editor you’ve seen it a hundred times—and almost none of them have worked. It’s very rare that someone can pull it off, and he did spectacularly. I think it’s a fantastic piece.

BB: It’s the father-and-son piece, the outsider-coming-to-baseball story.

RF: Right, but you don’t even think about reducing it to those terms because it’s so beautifully done.

BB: I think it’s one of the best pieces in the book. Now, when you approached Colum, did you know that was the piece he was going to write?

RF: Yeah. Even before I got in touch with him, I knew from Dan Barry that Colum had a son and that he’d come to baseball through his son. He has lived here for many years but he’s still an Irishman too. His kids have grown up here. I’d read “Let The Great World Spin” and some other things by him and loved his work. I thought if anybody could do this kind of story, it’s him. What’s cool is that because he didn’t grow up in a baseball culture, I think he was more or less oblivious to the fact that he was doing something that many other people have tried, usually without much success.

BB: There is no guile or irony in his story.

RF: That’s right, and it’s an enduring theme in baseball, fathers and sons—except that he does turn the whole thing on its head, in a way. He’s coming to the game through his son, and that process takes him back to his father and grandfather. It’s great when someone is artistic enough to take material is familiar and seems predictable in some ways and does something truly original with it. That’s the magic—to take something that’s right in front of the readers eyes and to dazzle him by revealing something he never saw. That’s what good writing is about to me.

BB: The other piece in the book that I think took a familiar theme and did a nice job making it work is Will Leitch’s essay, which is really a Babe-in-the-Woods story. It’s funny, and I think he really got the tone right.

RF: Very much so. I hadn’t met Will, but he’s a friend of my friend Dave Hirshey, who’d edited him at Harper Collins. So Dave said, let’s go get a drink with Will Leitch. And when I started this whole project, my son, Nick, a deeply knowledgeable sports kid, said, “Oh, you’ve got to get Will Leitch, he’s really funny and a really good writer.” We sat down at a bar and we connected immediately. He had an idea for the book, and I was like, “Yeah, Huckleberry Finn comes to New York, that’s it.” And he ran with it. Again, a hard one to pull off, but he did a great job with it. His piece is laugh-out-loud funny but it’s also sincere. The irony in it doesn’t create distance, it does just the opposite.

BB: Going back for a minute, how did this book begin?

RF: Roy Blount was in some ways the genesis of the whole book. Dave Hirshey reminded me of this, because I’d forgotten. There is a charity dinner I go to every year where Roy is a featured guest, and he’s always hugely entertaining. So I mentioned to Hirshey that I’d been to this dinner and Roy was telling all these great old Yankee war stories from his days writing sports. I don’t know how the subject came up but Roy had all these great stories. I mentioned this to Hirshey in passing and he called me the next day and said, “Do think there’s a book in this? The best writers you can think of, writing about the Yankees?” At the very least, I thought, it’d be a lot of fun to think about, and that’s how the whole thing started.

BB: Did you know what you wanted each writer to do before you approached them or did they have an idea in mind when you first talked to them? Or did you say, I want Leigh Montville, I want Richard Hoffer, and they’ll figure it out?

RF: Some had specific idea, and some didn’t. I tried to have several possible ideas for each writer I called, things I thought might appeal to them and they might be especially good at, but I always wanted to hear the writers’ ideas first—if they had anything specific—before I suggested possible topics for them. But I did want them to be aware of the range of possibilities, so I would tell them the sorts of things other writers were doing.

BB: You do have such a wide range in the book, not only of writers but of takes on the Yankees. I mean, you’ve got Dan Okrent and Frank Deford who are classic Yankee haters.

RF: Plus, there is a little cluster from Boston, Charlie Pierce and Leigh Montville. Montville, of course, had written a big biography of the Babe as well as one of Ted Williams, and Jane Leavy had written about Mickey Mantle. And these are big books—-not just “big” as in best-sellers, but deeply researched, substantial volumes that cover a lot of ground. So I asked, “What’s the best thing that didn’t make the book?” It took Leigh a while and of course he drew on material that he’d used in the book, but his take was new, and I think what bubbled up for him with passage of time was a new perspective, a fresh insight about Ruth. And Jane just went out and did a whole lot of new reporting. She had a situation with Frank Sullivan, the old Red Sox pitcher, where she mistakenly pronounced him dead in her Mantle book. Sullivan contacted her and wondered when she planned to announce his rebirth—or something like that. It was very funny. She was mortified by her mistake, but he had a great sense of humor about it. So she dug into it and—typical of her—she did more reporting and came up with a terrific piece. So sometimes I went to people who’d already written about subjects involving the Yankees and other times I went to people who were just writers I admired who I knew had some feeling for baseball, though I didn’t know what their feelings were about this team.

BB: Who were some of those guys?

RF: I knew our friend Dexter watched every Yankee game. And as much as I’ve talked to him about the Yankees over the years—even gone to Yankee games with him—it’s never clear what Pete’s going to come up with, how he’s going to land on a subject. That’s true with anything that he’s going to write.

BB: Yeah, like that book review he did last year for the Times on the Jim Harrison novel.

RF: The book report, he called it. Exactly. You’ve read his columns and magazine pieces. That’s part of Dexter’s genius—-you never know where he’s going to be coming from on a particular subject, or where he’s going to land.

BB: Were you amused then when in typical Dexter fashion he chose Chuck Knoblauch, of all people, to write about?

RF: Well, Pete had been very sick a few years ago, very nearly died, as he writes about in the piece. Then it took him a long time to come back and there was a stretch where he felt seriously damaged by his illness, where he couldn’t write. And it was awful. And it was during that period when he landed on the idea of Chuck Knoblauch, a guy who had done something as well as anyone in the world, had done it every day of his life, and then woke up one day and suddenly couldn’t do it at all. Pete had a personal connection to that story, something you couldn’t have predicted. I mean, I knew about Pete’s illness and its aftermath, but I never could have predicted that he would connect it to that Yankees by way of Chuck Knoblauch. And you look at it and it’s a brilliant, funny piece about the awful things that went wrong for him and for Knoblauch. Nobody else could have written that piece.

BB: You’ve known and worked with Pete for a long time. You edited “Paper Trails,” his collection of newspaper columns and magazine pieces. How much editing did you do with him on his piece, and with the other writers too, for that matter? Did Pete give you a final draft and that was it or did you actually work on the piece with him? 

RF: It varied with each writer how much editing it took to get from the first draft to the final. In Pete’s case, it’s hard for him to let go of what he’s writing. He’s a perfectionist. He will rewrite everything until you badger him to give you a peek at it. He sent a draft and it was late in the process of the book’s production—meaning I was feeling the crushing weight of a deadline. The piece was brilliant, it was fall-out-of-your-chair funny but he kept working on it. He was just getting back up to speed for himself. A week or so later he sent a draft that was completely different. He tried to come at the same subject from a totally different direction. It was written like a mock children’s book, and it might have been one direction too many. He sent me about half or two-thirds of it. He’d written the whole thing and then lost the original version on his computer— he was having technical difficulties as he sometimes does. It was like “Paris Trout”—

BB: Jesus. That’s when he lost more than 100 manuscript pages somewhere in his computer back in the mid-‘80s and then took a baseball bat to the machine and had to start over from the beginning.

RF: Right. The second version of his Yankee piece was still funny but I liked the earlier way he did it better. So he did a third version, which was recreating the first version, different and better. That was classic Dexter.

BB: You talked about Pete not wanting to let things go and being a perfectionist, does there ever come a point where a writer can cross a line and keep hold of something too long?

RF: I think it happens to writers all the time, and usually they know it and can see that they’ve pushed it too far or changed directions once too often, and will go back to the sweet spot that was working before. For instance, Pete bounced the second version of his piece off me, and by the time I got it and read it—we don’t work electronically with Pete, it still comes the old fashioned way, on paper, by Fed Ex—he’d already gone back to his first version, or what he could remember of it, and finished it that way.

BB: Is he the only writer in the collection who works like that?

RF: In technological terms, Frank [Deford] was like that for a long time—he was the last guy I worked with who used a typewriter—but he moved decisively into the electronic mode a long time ago. But there were other writers who were as meticulous as Pete, who worked on things until the last minute and wanted to see every draft, every galley, every version. It’s a matter of style, I think—some writers work one way, some work another. It doesn’t mean that someone like Frank or Jim Surowiecki or Roy Blount, who file pieces that are virtually finished the first time you lay eyes on them, are any less meticulous or aren’t perfectionists. Their process is different—at least, that’s the way it looks from the vantage point of an editor—but I think they’re all trying to make their words as good as they can possibly be, one way or another.

BB: I’m sure for some writers it’s never going to be good enough, even when the book is published they’ll still look at their piece and want to tinker with it.

RF: Yeah, Bruce McCall is a very meticulous writer who found things he wanted to fix in his piece until the very end. And when the book was about to close we shot this little video, and Dan Okrent left the shoot with a copy of the galleys, which were outdated by that point, and by the time I got home from the video shoot I had a message from Dan saying that there were two mistakes in Bruce’s piece. And Bruce is a careful writer. We were able to correct the things Dan found at the last minute, even though the book was already at the printer. I know there will be other things that we missed—it’s inevitable—but you do the best you can in the time that’s allotted.

BB: That’s agonizing but at some point—

RF: You have to let go. And the writers do the same thing. Some writers sent me drafts that were virtually perfect.

BB: Was Richard Hoffer one of those guys?

RF: Actually Rick and I worked on it because he was worried in his first draft of the piece about making it baseball-y enough. I always think of Hoffer as a great essayist. He’s always been one of my favorite SI writers.

BB: So understated and yet he’s not humorless. There’s a strong sense of wit in his writing. It’s just dry.

RF: Very much so. He’s extremely skillful and has a distinctive voice. And he has truly original thoughts in a world that I think is filthy with group-think. A Hoffer piece is never just the same old thing.

BB: And you don’t think of him as a baseball guy especially.

RF: No, but Hoffer’s one of those guys that I want to read on anything. I had an idea that I thought would make a perfect Hoffer essay, but at first he did much more of a narrative history piece without much of the essay component. He said to me as we were working, “I have two gears: this one and the other one.” I told him that I was envisioning a piece that included more of the other one, so he wrote a draft that was almost pure essay and left out much of the great historical narrative, all these great details. So we took both versions and put them together and I think it worked out beautifully. I love the piece. And I think it’s quintessential Hoffer.

BB: You were at Playboy and Esquire and SI as an editor and have worked with many of the writers featured in this collection. How many of the writers had you not worked with before?

RF: I can count them. I didn’t know J.R. Moehringer or Nathanial Rich or Jim Surowiecki. Pretty much everybody else I was at least acquainted with or had worked with directly. I met Will Leitch in the very early stages of the book. I’d been introduced to Colum McCann at Dan Barry’s book party, but that was the extent of it at that point. I’d admired Mike Paterniti’s work for a long time and tried to get him to write for me at one magazine or another, but can’t say I really knew him.

BB: What about Bill James?

RF: Bill James I’ve known since he was sending out his Abstract on mimeograph. I met him when I was a fact checker or a baby editor at Esquire. Okrent introduced Bill to us at Esquire, and in some sense, Esquire introduced him to a wider audience. It was great. Okrent wrote the first big piece about Bill that I remember and I worked on a little piece Bill wrote for an Esquire baseball package one year, and he was obviously an original thinker and, I thought, a terrific writer. I touched base with him every so often over the years and followed his ascension. I’d write to him from SI and say, “I don’t know if you remember who I am but would you be on a panel to pick the greatest all-time team…” or whatever. And he always remembered our connection from way back and was always generous with his time. So I called him for this book. He works with the Red Sox but is still as clear-headed about baseball as anyone I’ve ever read, and he’s a funny, quirky writer. I had no idea what he’d write about and neither did he, as it turns out. One day, late in the process, I got an e-mail from him in which he said, “I’ve been thinking about Yankee catchers….” And he was off and running.

BB: And it’s really a perfect kind of Bill James piece. It’s smart and irreverent.

RF: Analytical and full of all his digressions and humorous asides and deep baseball knowledge.

BB: That’s one of the things I noticed about the book, you’ve gotten kind of a quintessential piece from so many of the contributors.

RF: That’s the ideal—what you dream about as an editor. You pick writers of this quality and then you hope they get into it and just do what they do.

BB: I also like the variety. There are humorous pieces, memoir pieces—Sally Jenkins’s piece that is so evocative of New York City, historical stories, analytical pieces.

RF: I’m glad it hit you that way. My big picture idea was to have a bunch of voices that I really like to hear on the subject of the Yankees, more or less directly. In some cases I had specific topics in mind, like Jane Leavy on Mantle or Tom Verducci on Jeter. I told every writer who some of the other contributors were, so they knew who else was playing, and I just hoped all the writers would bring their game. As it turned out, they did.

BB: I’m forever grateful for Charlie Pierce’s piece if only because he punctured that horseshit Seinfeld routine, which has somehow become celebrated, that rooting for a sports team is like rooting for laundry.

RF: Charlie is another one you can count on to come up with something unpredictable.

BB: Right, because he starts there and shifts gears in the middle of the piece about growing up and what the Yankees meant growing up in Boston.

RF: He does lay waste that whole Seinfeld bit about laundry. But in a much larger context he also writes about what baseball’s tribal experience means to people who come to this country from somewhere else, and he does it in a way that is immediate and on a human scale. Charlie’s piece has a lot of common ground with Column McCann’s, but they are totally different essays.

BB: Taken as a whole were there any surprises in the collection, a theme, or a player who jumped out as somebody that appeared in more than a few of the pieces?

RF: There are some threads that run through the book, yeah. And I was aware of them when I was figuring out the order of the pieces and was conscious of spacing them out so that they didn’t come together too quickly. Catfish Hunter comes up more often than I would’ve anticipated. And he’s the focus for Mike Paterniti, who wrote just a beautiful piece.

BB: The book ends with Steve Rushin talking about Catfish, too.

RF: And I was aware that. I’d really admired Mike’s classic Thurman Munson piece in Esquire. When I spoke to him, he mentioned that he’d seen Catfish Hunter near the end of his life and had written a quick remembrance of him in the early days of Esquire.com. He sent me the little post he’d done and he went back to that and really dug in. So I knew that Mike and Steve were going to touch on some of the same ground, and Rushin wrote a gem of a piece in which he gets the last word in the book, which is fitting. And Catfish also comes up again in Bill Nack’s amazing story about the Bronx Zoo Era Yankees. There’s a different focus and context in each of the three pieces in which Catfish appears.

BB: Also, what a beautiful guy to come up. A guy with a sense of himself and a sense of humor about the Yankees and how crazy George was even though he was the first big free agent. Yankee fans love him but also probably saw himself as being apart from that too.

RF: And there was another surprise in the book. Steinbrenner comes up, obviously, over and over again. But Jim Surowiecki, the financial writer for the New Yorker, who is another really original thinker, did a revisionist analysis of what Steinbrenner did with the team economically—a totally fresh take on Steinbrenner’s ownership .

BB: I also like that there are a few essays on the modern Yankees. Verducci on Jeter but also Steve Wulf on Robinson Cano, which is important I think—to talk about a Latin star.

RF: As the book was taking shape I knew Tom was going to do Jeter but I thought it’d be good to have a piece on a player who represented the future. I think of Steve as the guy who first wrote about Dominican baseball, about Dominican shortstops. I remembered his piece from the ‘80s, and I thought Cano was the guy for this book. He is a monstrously good player and will be the center of gravity when Mariano and Jeter are gone. Steve took it and ran. He’s been an editor at ESPN for a while now, but he was a great baseball writer at SI for a really long time and knows the game as well as anyone. It was a perfect match of writer and subject.

BB: And it’s an important piece because for so many years the Yankees didn’t have Dominican players, certainly not stars, despite playing a stones throw from Washington Heights.

RF: That’s right. Another surprising piece came from Dan Barry.

BB: Which is great because the Mike Burke, CBS years were covered.

RF: The last thing you think of is the Yankees as underdogs.

BB: Celerino Sanchez.

RF: “Poor Celerino Sanchez,” is a little refrain from Dan’s piece, which is both poignant and very funny. And he had a deeper connection to that team than I expected before I talked to him. Then there’s Roy Blount, who I knew had Yankee stories to tell, but the nature of a Blount piece—the beauty of a Blount piece—is that you have no idea how he’s going to get at his subject and can’t possibly predict where he’s going to go with it.

BB: Then you see writers like Moehringer, McCann and Dexter and you think, I wonder what those guys have to say about them?

RF: J.R. Moehringer had an intimate connection with the team through his grandfather, who was a key figure in his life. “The Tender Bar” is J.R.’s great memoir about growing up with an absent father, and his grandfather is in that book. But what J.R. has done here is an element of the story that wasn’t in his book.

BB: And Moehringer is a Mets fan.

RF: I contacted him and he said that he wanted to write about the Yankees from a Mets fan’s point of view. And I already had Nathaniel Rich doing that. In fact, I had Nathaniel’s story already, and it was terrific, extremely amusing. So I told J.R. that I had that piece but that I really wanted him to write for this book. At that point I suggested a couple of topics, but he had something else he wanted to try. And after a while he sent me what he said was a really rough draft of something that was well on its way to being this piece. He’s another one who goes back to his copy over it over and over again, making it better and then going back to it again. It’s a wonderful piece about how he connected with baseball. It’s amazing.

BB: Plus, watching the games on TV and listening to the Scooter. You needed to get the Scooter in there.

RF: Had to. And he’s another thread. He’s also gets a prominent mention in Rushin’s piece.

BB: Yankee fans will obviously be interested in the book but there are enough of the writers in the book who are Yankee-haters that I suspect you want to draw readers that aren’t Yankee fans, too.

RF: Yeah, I think anybody who is interested in reading good writers is the potential audience for the book. The natural audience is Yankee fans, baseball fans. They are a team that people have strong feelings about: people love them and people really love to hate them.

BB: This is the book you want to read.

RF: That was the hope. The plan, insofar as I had one, was to get the writers I want to read on a subject I want to read about. Beyond that I didn’t really know where it would go. I wanted to be surprised and delighted, and by that measure I think the book is a real success.

“Damn Yankees” is available for pre-order at Amazon. It will be published on April 3rd.

[Photographs via N.Y. Daily News, N.Y. Times, ESPN, Corbis, Marisa Kestel, Peter Adams, SI, Illustration by Bruce McCall, photo of Pete Dexter by Stuart Isett]

“The Whore of Akron” is a funny, personal, and moving story, a must-read. Scott and I chatted recently about writing, the book, and LeBron James.

Dig in.

BB: You’ve been writing for decades yet “The Whore of Akron” is your first book. Before we get to that, I’d like to talk about your career. Loved the piece you wrote on your blog a few months ago where you talked about what it takes to be a writer. About endurance being a talent.

SR: I talk to people half your age who start whining that they don’t have time to write and I say, ‘Don’t worry about it — you’re obviously not a writer.’ They don’t like hearing that. They actually think they’re entitled to some kind of pity, self- and otherwise. It’s the weirdest thing in the world to me, not because I think I have any big answers but if you really find yourself saying, ‘I don’t have time to write,’ and you’re not feeding four mouths…It’s not like I knew Ray Carver, but from what I know about him the reason he wrote short stories is, first he wasn’t ever sober, but he also had two screaming youngsters and so he’d write in his car. Either you find a way or you find something else that seems more doable. But endurance is a talent.

BB: This blog, Bronx Banter, helped me fight a sense of entitlement. I set it up in such a way that I was forced to show up every day.

SR: And anyone who doesn’t think that’s a huge part of it is deluding themselves.

BB: Showing up every day.

SR: Yes. Putting one foot in front of the other. It took me decades to learn this. And that’s fine. If you don’t learn that, it doesn’t matter how talented you are, because without this talent, of endurance, what difference does it make? Nobody finds you at the soda fountain; it almost never happens. And the journalists it does happen to, like Stephen Glass, Ruth Shalit, Jayson Blair — these are people who, after early success, couldn’t follow through. They didn’t have the chops. They made shit up and committed career suicide.

BB: Is there a difference between talent and intelligence?

SR: Certainly intelligence is a tool, a crucial tool. You have to take in large amounts of material, including human material, and construct some sort of narrative. That requires focus and intelligence. But if you are missing endurance, again, it doesn’t matter how intelligent you might be. In the wake of the LeBron book, I’ve dealt with so-called journalists who have told me, ‘I don’t have time to transcribe a tape so I’m going to send you questions via e-mail.’ They say, “You have until Friday,” and so I say, “Then you have until Friday to transcribe a fucking tape.” I’ve also heard, “I don’t have trustworthy recording equipment.” Then you’re not a real journalist, so don’t waste my fucking time.

BB: When did you start writing pieces for magazines?

SR: I started at GQ in ’92 and got my first contract in ’93. David Granger was a GQ feature editor then. Granger was my big break because he was the one editor in New York who was willing to assign long stories to writers who hadn’t already published long pieces in magazines in New York. So Granger was exactly the right guy at exactly the right time for me. I was still selling columns for $40 to a weekly—when they wanted them—and I was almost 41 when I signed that first contract with GQ. I was never a newspaper guy, I was a creative writing guy.

BB: And you had written fiction at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, right?

SR: I’d published fiction. I had a literary agent. But I wasn’t prolific and wasn’t some young Phillip Roth or William Faulkner. I was a solid fiction writer with problems. Lifestyle problems. And it turns out I needed the structure that a relationship with an editor provides.

BB: And early on with Granger was he doing macro editing with you or micro stuff like line edits?

SR: Alex, if you need line-editing help you don’t ever get a contract. I mean, seriously. If the relationship with the editor is based on line editing—

BB: –You’re screwed.

SR: You don’t even get there. Why would a guy like Granger waste his time with that stuff? I hate to sound grandiose, but at that level it’s about relationship, and envisioning stories, about building trust that you’ll deliver the goods and you won’t fuck the editor in terms of expense account bullshit. It’s business, basically. But it’s also has a strong therapeutic connection in terms of the mentor-mentee relationship for me. Not because I was wet behind the ears but because I didn’t understand what the whole process was.

BB: If part of what you have know to be writing for a major magazine is how to maintain expense accounts and the business end of things, how were you able to do that when you were so fucked up on booze and drugs at the time?

SR: I’m trying to put this the right way…

BB: Is it a matter of being what they call a functioning alcoholic?

SR: Look at your dad. People can do enormous harm to themselves, those who depend on them, and their careers and still function at a really high level. I was a high-hopes-but-low-expectations guy. When you grew up the way I grew up, when you come out of Cleveland State, there weren’t high expectations. I got into Iowa when I was in my thirties and I knew it was really important. I didn’t into the program at Stamford and I didn’t get into the program at Irvine so when I got into Iowa I went in with a strong sense of affirmation and ambition. It never occurred to me that I’d be a magazine writer. I just wanted to compete against the kids that went to school with me. They weren’t from Cleveland State. They’d gone to Sarah Lawrence or Yale.

BB: You were older than a lot of your classmates but did you have an inferiority complex?

SR: You could say that but I don’t think I’m the most accurate judge of that. I know I was very nervous but it wasn’t skittish nervous it was more like I knew what a tremendous opportunity I had. I don’t think I ever operate out of the sense of mastery or security but I don’t know anybody else who does either. I don’t think of it as an inferiority complex. I don’t think that I ever looked at writing for Granger as anything less than a total miracle. That doesn’t imply an inferiority complex; I think it implies a firm grasp of what was going on. All of a sudden you meet a guy who wants you to write in your own voice and wants you to do the kinds of stories that don’t feel safe to most magazine editors and it was like, “Wow, this is the greatest thing in the world.” People ask me if I still write fiction. Of course not. I work really hard at trying to be good at writing what I’m writing. If fiction were that important to me I’d find time to do it. I think fiction is harder and I don’t mean that what I’m doing is easy; to me, it’s not. But writing fiction you have to supply almost everything and the payoff is not so good both in terms of numbers of readers and money. I’ve always looked at meeting Granger and what followed as being beyond my wildest dreams. So things like fudging expense accounts to make a few hundred dollars more seemed absurd to me. No matter how far gone I might have been in terms of my lifestyle, I wasn’t that stupid and greedy.

BB: So when did the idea for this book—

SR: Yeah, I thought we were going to talk about the book.

BB: I know you started working on it during LeBron’s final year with the Cavaliers.

SR: I started after they lost to Orlando in the Eastern Conference Finals. For many years at Esquire I wrote a column, didn’t even have my name on it, where I answered questions, general questions. A guy wrote in and asked, “Is it illegal to flip off a cop or just stupid?” Turned out this guy worked for the Cavs. I wasn’t thinking about doing a book when I got the e-mail; I was thinking maybe this guy could get me tickets. I reached out to him—I was going to do his question anyway because it was good for the column—but it was clear after a couple of games in the Orlando series that it wasn’t going to end well for the Cavs. And that was the Cavs team that I really thought could and would go all the way. I got really bummed out. But I figured that they’re going into the next season with Lebron in his walk year, the coach and the general manager in their walk years, with an owner who doesn’t mind paying the luxury tax — it was all or nothing and I thought it would make a fascinating book. They ended up winning 61 games that year. They’d won 66 the year before. They lost in the second round to the Celtics and then Lebron declared free agency.

BB: So you didn’t know that the book would extend into the following season?

SR: No, no, I was looking to write the happy book.

BB: And was part of that happy book your experiences as a Clevelander and Jew?

SR: Not at all. That wasn’t even part of it after Lebron’s decision to go to Miami. Honestly. I don’t know what I’m going to do when I sit down and start writing. I don’t plan things out. I don’t go in blind, of course. But with the Cavs, after the Decision, after the book deal, I thought that the book would be full of interviews, a collection of a lot of Cleveland voices, and that’d be the spine of the book. I wasn’t thinking of that in a hard and fast way but I had whole lists of people to talk to.

BB: Like the wonderful scene of you in the black barbershop.

SR: Well, I needed a black guy to talk with about LeBron and race. And I asked some prominent black guys. I didn’t know Jimmy Israel very well but we were Facebook friends. I knew I couldn’t avoid the subject of race. That didn’t feel honest to me. But the other black writers I asked didn’t know me; some of them didn’t bother to reply and the ones who did said no. I realized, from talking to the guys who did turn me down, that what I was asking of them was essentially unfair. They didn’t know me. I offered them editorial control but the title of the book was already “The Whore of Akron.” As one guy put it to me, “You’re basically asking me to participate in a witch hunt.” That was a legitimate objection. Jimmy’s a Cleveland guy, a great writer, and he taught me a lot.

BB: So in the course of Lebron’s first season in Miami, you’re down there, writing about what’s going on for Esquire, you’re tweeting about what’s going on, were you also writing the book?

SR: I started going to Miami in September of 2010 and started writing the book a few months later, in January 2011. It was not clear to me at that point where the book would be going. I had a deadline and I needed to start getting stuff down but I hadn’t figured anything out at that point.

BB: When did you figure out the structure of the book, where you go back-and-forth between what’s doing with Lebron and the memoir stuff develop?

SR: It was organic. It’s not as conscious as it might seem. In addition to working on the book I also had a big 9/11 piece for Esquire closing in the summer. So I had to de-stress about the book. I don’t often use inspirational slogans but I did use one while I was writing the book. It came from Bob Wickman, the fat closer the Indians had for a couple of years. He said, “You gotta trust your stuff.”

BB: That’s like in “Tender Mercies” the Robert Duvall character says, “Sing it like you feel it.”

SR: That’s right. By the time July rolled around I took a place in the city and moved in for a month. I would go to the HarperCollins office in the morning and revise the manuscript starting at the beginning using the notes I got from my editors, David Hirshey and Barry Harbaugh. Then I would go back to the place I was staying at and work on the ending. Part of me looks at what I do as a plumber. A tradesman with a craft. And at some point in the process an editor realizes that you know what you’re doing. Structurally. So their notes were extensive and important but there weren’t structural issues. There were tonal and practical ones. There were points where I would start pontificating, especially about racial aspects of the story, and there were whole swaths of material that just had to go. I never had a problem with that. I’m really coachable as long as I trust the editor.

BB: One of the first reactions I had when I was reading was to a couple of jokes about Art Modell. Where you had these rim-shot putdown jokes. And I wondered if that was going to be what the book was, more and more outrageous gags.

SR: That’s a legitimate concern.

BB: I didn’t know if you would end up humping one note but then it didn’t go that way. You talk about tone. Did you have sensitivity that on some level you were coming across as being outrageous and not to overdo that at the risk of maybe losing some of the readers?

SR: I’m not sure. I know I lost a few people. Mostly, it’s been well-received but there are certainly people who thought—whether it was the Modell stuff or the Lebron stuff—that it was overdone. I wasn’t hyper-conscious of it. I’m not that conscious of readers. I’m conscious of editors; I want to please them. But it’s an internal process. It’s just a subject—Cleveland sports—about which I feel the kind of passion that I don’t really feel about almost anything. I don’t mean my family. But my relationship to those teams defines me in the same way that being a Jew defines me or being a man defines me. It’s at a profound level. I remember doing a piece on David Cone in the late ‘90s, fun guy, smart guy, and he told me—not that he was the first guy to say it—that “You’ve got to learn to take a few miles an hour off the fastball.” If you try to throw harder in a pressure situation it backfires. You want to change speeds. So I’m conscious of that, not in particular relation to the book but in general.

BB: You reminded me of Mel Brooks in the book. I mean that in the best way.

SR: Even if you meant it in the worst way I’d be honored by that comparison.

BB: I was never offended by your outrage. I accepted it, like I do with Mel Brooks. This is what it is, it’s over-the-top. This is the shtick. And for all of the outrageousness there is also a sense of restraint in this book. And it made me wonder if you would have been able to do that, 15 or 20 years ago.

SR: I couldn’t have done it. It goes back to David Hirshey, my senior editor at HarperCollins. Nobody was excited about the prospect of the Happy LeBron Book unless I could deliver the impossible, which was access to Lebron. Once that season ended with the loss to the Celtics, I said to my wife, “That was a fun year at sports fantasy camp, I spent a few grand, but I had a great time. There ain’t going to be any book, and I’m okay with that.”

I was more upset that Lebron left. So I was blogging the countdown to free agency for Esquire.com and Deadspin was also running it simultaneously. Then Hirshey got in touch with my agent, David Black. I’d never met Hirshey but he was willing to give a book deal to a guy who’d never written a book, wasn’t going to get access to the subject of the book, and was writing these venomous blog posts about LeBron. How many book editors would do that? I was at the right place at the right time. Again.

BB: Well, if you’re not going to get access you’re the perfect guy to do a story because you don’t give a shit. Was there any time during the process that you were afraid that LeBron, or one of his people was going to walk up to you and punch you in the face?

SR: That was one of my mother’s concerns. But that’s really movie-script stuff. Can you imagine what the results would have been? Obviously, it could have, and still could, potentially happen, I suppose. But: please do. I truly don’t give a shit. It has nothing to do with courage. I grew up reading National Lampoon magazine and they were brutal. And Hunter Thompson was filing for Rolling Stone and he was brutal. I didn’t think of either as role models, I just thought of them as great reads. A lot of my attitude toward LeBron or the media relations at the NBA or the Heat was like, “Fuck you, I don’t give a shit.”

BB: So you didn’t feel any shame or have any reservations about calling the guy out as a scumbag?

SR: I understand that if you’re working for a newspaper and you’re on a beat and you’re tweeting something like that a guy you’re going to get fired. I get that. I had to dial it back because I wasn’t thinking about the reflection on Esquire. It’s not as I didn’t make my share of mistakes, but they didn’t involve plagiarism or putting off the record stuff on the record. Professional breaches by today’s standards, yes. Ethical breaches? No. And we’re not talking about weapons of mass destruction or climate change or the corner grocery selling tainted meat. It’s a fucking basketball player. There were some people who thought I was stalking him because their understanding of reporting is that dim. I don’t cheer in the press box. I don’t get in a beat guy’s way. Ever. I’m very aware of protocol. And also very aware that if a magazine or book writer comes off like if he’s a big shot, he’s an asshole. I consciously try to avoid those kinds of behaviors.

BB: Is there ever point where your persona as the outraged Cleveland sports fan becomes a put-on?

SR: No. Isn’t that weird? A lot of the stuff that got taken out of the book was removed because it was violent. You know, stuff like seeing LeBron at media day and wanting to fracture his skull with one of the folding chairs. I’m the guy who wrote the book; I’m not just the guy in the book. There is a difference. But it’s only germane when you’re talking to another writer; it has nothing to do with putting on that costume of the outraged Cleveland fan. I am a totally outraged Cleveland fan.

BB: And yet you do put it in perspective.

SR: When you get a certain age, you realize that when you are feeling that inflamed by something outside of you, there’s something inside you going on. The other part is I had a lot of people call me a hater. That’s a very popular word now. How could I not be a monster if I was wishing a career-ending injury on a fine young athlete? There are a lot of answers to that. But I took the question seriously and tried to figure it out in the book.

I talked to Dwayne Wade on Media Day for a fashion spread in Esquire. And afterward I saw LeBron at the podium with Wade and Chris Bosh and responded viscerally to that, and then went to a family bar mitzvah and wondered, “Why am I so furious, why does it get to this level with me?” Part of what I realized—and it didn’t crystallize until I was doing the writing—was that at a fairly young age I shut down in terms of family. I didn’t like my people, I didn’t trust my people. I was angry and I felt abandoned. Nobody was paying attention to my pain, and on and on and on. Cleveland was a great city then. I wasn’t a sinkhole of despair, it wasn’t a joke. The Browns, in particular, were very good. They weren’t quite the Yankees, but from the late ‘40s through the mid ‘60s, they were a paragon of consistency and excellence. The city and those teams replaced my family in my heart.

BB: You also tap into something that goes on with every fan. When I watch the Yanks play the Red Sox, and I’m heated, I want each hitter to line a ball of Josh Beckett’s leg and send him to the hospital, even though I know that’s completely irrational.

SR: If you want to call yourself a fan by my standards, of course you felt that, even if you never wrote it. I don’t think it’s unique to Philly, Cleveland or New York. I’ve been in stadiums elsewhere where the home fans cheer their own player getting hurt because they just don’t want to see him fucking up on the field anymore.

BB: As far as realizing that at a point if you are getting that enraged over a sporting event do you feel, well, this is just the way I am or do you say, I don’t need to be this way anymore?

SR: There is a real chasm between intellect and emotion. Thinking or realizing something isn’t the same as actuating it. But the fans I understand the least are the people who don’t have a team to get worked up about. I get it, but I don’t get it. Why do they bother? It’s the other side of the insanity of being over-committed. I’d prefer the self-destruction to not caring much about a team.

BB: I like the quote you used from Viktor Frankl. That sums up why you do root for a team. Because something can happen. And you having a hope for it happening means you are alive — not necessarily the victory.

SR: I would like the victory, Alex. It’s like at the end of “The Unforgiven” when Clint Eastwood tells Little Bill, “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.” Apparently not.

BB: Talk to me about “Dayenu” for a second because I’ve been singing the song in my head for days now.

SR: It’s one of those things where the repetition and melody of it can transport you. You sing praise to God that if he had merely freed you from Pharaoh’s bondage that would have been enough. If the Cleveland Indians of 1954 had set the record that stood until the Yankees of 1998—they won 111 out of 154 games and then lost 4 straight to the Giants in the World Series—and won the Series, it would have been awful enough. The Drive. The Shot. The Fumble. The Browns moving. Each would have been bad enough alone. Each of the Cleveland franchises have built teams that were good enough, at least in paper, to win a championship. Any of those happening would have been heartbreak enough. Which is the inversion of the Dayenu thing.

BB: The other thing that occurred to me as the book went on is that it wasn’t just a tirade against LeBron, it wasn’t flip, but a very moral book in a lot of ways.

SR: I totally agree with you, but it came as a big surprise to me. And I’m not trying to be coy. I didn’t know where it was going. I think it’s an odd book. It’s like a Swiss Army Knife kind of book.

BB: It sounded like you even had pity for LeBron.

SR: I do have pity for the guy and it’s not disingenuous. There’s a certain point between fathers and sons when things are nice. I had that with my dad before my parents split up. You think all is right with the world because you’re in the presence of this all-powerful, all-knowing guy. I was old enough to feel that with my father. LeBron had none of that. Nothing. And that’s something to really feel pity for. Because you can miss the shit out of that and it can hurt a lot, but LeBron never even got that. Everyone remembers when LeBron said they weren’t only going to win seven or eight rings but in the same clip he also talked about how easy it was going to be, so easy that Pat Riley could come back and play point guard. Dwayne Wade is sitting next to him, looking sideways at him and Wade was not smiling. Have you ever heard any athlete in any sport or anyone in any profession talk about easy it was to get to the top? It’s insane. Most of us, even poor black guys without dads, have at least had someone in our life saying, “You are going to have to work for every fucking thing you get. I don’t care how good you are. You’re going to have to be a whole lot more than just good.” Maybe James gets it now. But that piece really seems to be missing in him.

BB: Did you have an awareness of being critical of yourself if you were going to be critical of James?

SR: It’s not conscious. I’m not paragon of 12-step sobriety, but part of trying to live a more honest life is self-examination and not just throwing stones at other people.

BB: Cause then you would come across as a hater. If you were only ragging on him.

SR: Of course.

BB: Another thing I liked is that you didn’t over-examine some of the game action, which came as a relief. That stuff can be deadly to read.

SR: And to write, Alex.

BB: By the end of the book, the fact that your boy gets sick is more important so as a reader, the book shifts to you as much as it is about James.

SR: I care deeply about what I do, about putting one word after another, and I think it’s a miracle that the book turned out as well as it did, or that I had such a good time with it. With a magazine piece, I usually want to keep tinkering with it, change the lede over and over, but I didn’t have the time here. So it’s a fucking miracle. I’m not a big fan of my stuff. I rarely go back and read my stuff, because I see places where I needed to do better work. I haven’t had time to go back and read the book, but I knew that when I was writing it that it was going to be good. I was happy with it because there was no way that I could have spent six more months on it and made it better. I only would have made it worse. Despite the weirdness of dealing with interviews and publicists and trying to sell copies, the feeling is still great and I’ve never felt anything like it.

BB: Probably because you don’t hate yourself.

SR: No, I don’t. And it’s funny how it all came together. If LeBron declares free agency the way every other star declares free agency there’s no book deal. It’s a strange series of events — amazing, really.

BB: He stays in Cleveland you don’t write the book that you wrote, you don’t write a loving tribute to Cleveland sports fans or write about yourself. So in a way, LeBron is the gift that keeps giving.

SR: That’s absolutely true. Irony can be cheapened in all kinds of ways but in this way it was kind of pure.

BB: I have to ask because this interview will appear on a Yankee-related site. You wrote an Esquire story on Alex Rodriguez that is famous for causing a rift between Rodriguez and Derek Jeter. How is Lebron different from A Rod?

SR: Alex is a much more self-aware, savvy guy compared to LeBron. As brilliant as Alex was at an early age, he was not anointed the Chosen One by Sports Illustrated when he was sixteen. He didn’t have Michael Jordan flying him to camp when he was a teenager. If you look at Alex’s post-season numbers career-wise they are in line with his regular season numbers. I think it’s perfectly fair, especially as a Yankees fan, to point the finger at him. He’s fair game. But I’ve never seen an athlete of Alex or LeBron’s caliber do what LeBron did last year in the Finals. James single-handedly cost the Heat the title last year. Before the games, there was LeBron giving the pre-game speech to his team after tweeting about how he couldn’t sleep. It’s so different from anything A-Rod has ever done. And LeBron’s performance was bizarre. In an elimination game, he was throwing passes to Mario Chalmers and Juan Howard. He’s the most unstoppable force in the game, but the Mavericks were totally inside his head. Being the Clevelander I am, I kept expecting LeBron to realize that he’s playing with Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh—who played very well—and I was sure the Heat were going to wake up and smack the Mavericks down. I was amazed that even with Nowitzki shooting horribly in Game 6, the Mavericks looked nothing other than supremely confident. The Heat never looked like anything but scared rabbits.

BB: Well, as a true Clevelander, even if it didn’t happen last year don’t you think that whether it is this year or next year, eventually LeBron will get his act together and he’ll win that championship?

SR: That’s one of those head or heart questions. Eventually, sure, he’s young enough. But he’s also got a lot of miles on him. And I don’t think he truly cares and I know he doesn’t work as hard as he says he does. Kobe Bryant does. I remember sitting with Shaq once and he told me about how obsessive Kobe was about working. And Shaq admits that he himself was never that way. Kobe is willing to work relentlessly. That certainly was true of Michael, too. I think Alex Rodriguez is fanatical too. He’s driven. But I don’t think that helps him come playoff time. But LeBron is better at talking about this stuff than actually doing it.

BB: LeBron is having a great year so far. Do you think he’s turned the corner, learned something since last year? Or is that something that can only be answered come June?

SR: What corner? He’s a two-time league MVP, and he should’ve won it again last season. He’s the best pure basketball player I’ve ever seen, an other-worldly talent, and he has become a complete head case in the post-season. He always had an issue with managing pressure when he was on the Cavs, and he’s fallen apart as a crunch-time player if the other team doesn’t just fold up and surrender. And everyone in the NBA knows it now. We won’t find out until June if LeBron has found a heart.

Buy “The Whore of Akron” here.

Bronx Banter: Your father was a career military man and you grew up all over the world. Did you follow boxing at all as a kid?

George Kimball: Aha, so this is going to be one of those psychological-minded interviews. My wife Marge would like that. She’s a shrink and says I’m the least psychological-minded person she knows. Sure, I watched the fights on TV with my father (and with his father) from the mid 50s on. It was a revelation to me at the live readings we did on each coast last year for The Fighter Still Remains to learn how just many of the people involved in that book had initially come to boxing the same way, as a sort of connection to their fathers at a time when there might not have been much else that did connect them.

Beginning in late ’57, which is when we moved to Germany, I followed boxing quite avidly in the papers, or really, paper. (There was an English-language weekly called The Overseas Family that covered our high school games but not much on a global scale.) Stars and Stripes, on the other hand, was a daily that carried pretty extensive coverage of both the important professional bouts (Robinson’s and Patterson’s in particular) as well as the military ones that took place in Europe, which were considered a pretty big deal, particularly as we edged toward the ’60 Olympics, which were going to be in Rome. So I’d have certainly known who all the professional champions and most of the contenders were, as well as the top Europeans (like Laszlo Papp, for instance). I don’t recall that we attended any of the bouts on the bases where we were (my father was stationed at Bamberg and Bayreuth, and I went away to the American school in Nurnberg), none of which harbored any of the really promising service amateurs, but I monitored the progress of “our” boxers – the Army guys stationed elsewhere in Europe – as they all fell by the wayside on the road to Rome with one notable exception, Sgt. Eddie Crook, who wound up being one of three U.S. boxing gold medalists in Rome. (Cassius Clay and Skeeter McClure were the others.) I liked Clay even then, since he was from Louisville, my mother’s hometown.

I don’t know that I regarded it as crushing at the time, but the Rome Olympics actually coincided with our move back to the states. I watched a lot of the Games at the home of one grandparent or another as we spent a few weeks visiting both after having been out of the country for three years. I don’t know that I’d have been able to attend had we stayed in Europe even a few weeks longer, but I had gone to Rome the previous summer, so it wouldn’t have been out of the question.

I played football and basketball at Nurnberg, and ran track in the spring. Summers I played in an AYA baseball league made up of towns that had bases. The football away games were same-day trips, but in basketball every other weekend there’d be a road trip – like you’d play a game in Munich or Heidelberg on Friday night, stay overnight, and then play in Augsburg or Mannheim on Saturday afternoon and bus back to Nurnberg on Saturday night.

The Army also had a really top-flight league of post teams that played a regular schedule, mostly, I think, on Sunday afternoons. The teams were open to everybody stationed there, so what you wound up with at a relatively large post like Bamberg was virtually a college all-star team. Everybody used to turn out to watch the home games, and I watched a lot of those on weekends when I went home. (They even used to broadcast a game of the week on AFN.) Eddie Crook, by the way, was the quarterback for the Berlin team, which was all the more unusual because most of the guys in his huddle would have been officers. He was the first black quarterback I’d ever seen, at any level.

BB: What was it like following sports when you moved around so much?

GK: My father followed the NFL avidly, or at least he did after we came back to the states in 1960 when there was football on television every Sunday no matter where you lived. We were in San Antonio my senior year, and also got the AFL games on TV. My old man had played both football and baseball at UMass (when it was still Mass State) and followed both sports. I remember sitting up with a couple of my classmates in the dorm in Nurnberg, charting the Colts-Giants overtime game off the radio broadcast. That was pretty exciting even on the radio, believe it or not.

Even moving around, you maintained your allegiances. I was a Red Sox and Cardinals fan and religiously followed both teams, even though in some cases the news and box scores were two days old.

That year in San Antonio I was working for nights 75 cents an hour, first sacking groceries and then, once I got my license, delivering prescriptions for a pharmacy, and without telling anyone saved up enough to buy two tickets to the first AFL championship game in Houston. Once the tickets came in the mail I still had a problem, because Houston was three hours away and I needed the family car to drive there with my date. When I finally worked up the nerve to ask my father his solution was that sure, I could borrow his car – as long as he got to use the other ticket. So I ended up at Jeppesen Stadium in Houston watching that game with my father.

BB: Were you tight with your siblings?

GK: Probably less so than would have been the case with an average family, simply because of the circumstances in which I grew up. My brother Tim, who is just a year and a half younger, only spent one year at Nurnberg when I was going there, and apart from my senior year in Texas I really didn’t live year-round with my family after my freshman year in high school. I was quite a bit older – six years older than the next-closest sibling – and my youngest brother wasn’t even born until I was in my second year of college. The age gap tends to shrink with the passage of time, so I’m probably more in contact with, and closer to, most of them now than I was when we were growing up.

BB: Did you read any sports writers as a kid?

GK: I think one of the early sportswriters I read avidly must have been Earl Ruby, of the Louisville Courier Journal. I also came across a collection of Furman Bisher’s pretty early on. I was reading constantly, absolutely haunted the library, but probably didn’t read a hell of a lot of sports books per se, and wasn’t much exposed to the great ones unless they were already dead and collected, like maybe Grantland Rice or Ring Lardner. I couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven when I read a collection of Irvin S. Cobb that my mother owned. But I don’t think I even began to form an idea that great sports writing could also be great writing until I started to pay attention to Sports Illustrated, which would have been the fall of 1960. I don’t know that we ever saw SI in Germany.

BB: Sounds like sports played an important part of your childhood. What about the arts? Was their music in your house as a kid? Movies, radio? What about books?

GK: That was always pretty important to me. When we were in Bayreuth I used to go to the Wagner festival with my mother because my father hated opera. I think my parents liked musicals even as much as I did, so that was there from an early age. I played the trumpet for a while and liked a lot of jazz. My parents had some jazz records, but I was the one, at probably age 15, who brought Charlie Parker into the house, and who introduced them to Miles Davis, Gerry Mulligan, and Chet Baker. Of course I listened to early rock, as did my contemporaries. Everybody listened to that, but only a few of my contemporaries were as into jazz as I was, and the number that listened to Broadway musical scores was even smaller, so when I listened to Rogers and Hammerstein or Mario Lanza, a lot of times it was alone in my room. Didn’t listen to much radio at all, that I can remember, apart from in the car.

I pretty much lived in the library, even in Germany. I’d even take dates there. No matter what else I was doing I was probably reading at least a couple of books a week for almost as long as I can remember. Movies were important during the years I lived in Germany. The new films would eventually get there, so we didn’t feel cheated that they’d been out for a few months in the states, and I can’t remember whether they cost 15 cents or a quarter, but they were certainly affordable. We had one night a week in Nurnberg where you could sign out for an early film, and then on weekends I’d usually see one too.

BB: I know you are a fan of musicals. I think Kiss Me, Kate was the first long-playing record my dad ever bought—he was six or seven years older than you.

GK: I first saw Kiss Me, Kate performed at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, in the Alps, in 1959. Went with my mother because my father didn’t want to go. I think we had all of the early Rogers and Hammerstein cast recordings at the house when I was growing up – Carousel, Oklahoma, South Pacific and The King and I, and I eventually saw all of those done in New York, in London, in regional theatre, what have you. Even saw Kiss Me, Kate on Broadway about ten years ago. I think the Rogers and Hammerstein led me back to their earlier collaborators like Lorenz Hart and Jerome Kern and their spiritual descendants like Lerner and Loewe, or Frank Loesser. I think there was a definable Golden Age that began in the late ‘20s with Show Boat and ended probably fifty years ago which was marked by a greatness that’s never been achieved since, which is why I enjoy the revivals more than most new musicals. I saw the Lincoln Center South Pacific nine times in three years, I think (and a few weeks ago I took Danny Burstein to DiBella’s boxing card at B.B. King’s.). At their best there were others in this era like Cole Porter and Irving Berlin who could be great but I thought both inconsistent. Annie Get Your Gun, for instance, is brilliant (despite a notably dumb book), and right up there with the best of Rogers and Hammerstein, but Berlin wrote some shows I wouldn’t want to even sit through. I think the symbiosis of great lyricists and composers is what defined these. I love West Side Story, for instance, but never warmed to some of Bernstein’s film scores, and I think Sondheim did his best work on that one when he was a lyricist, period. I like some of his stuff, and hope to go see Danny and Bernadette Peters do Follies at the Kennedy Center in May, but I don’t see Sondheim as an heir to the tradition.

BB: What about Gilbert and Sullivan?

GK: Gilbert and Sullivan is an acquired taste I guess I never acquired. It’s cute, but I don’t think especially good musically, and it makes you work to get the lyrics, which isn’t the way it’s supposed to be. I don’t think I’ve ever walked around with a Gilbert and Sullivan song in my head, for instance, but with some of these other classics, especially Rogers and Hammerstein, it happens all the time. Some of the movie recordings of Rogers and Hammerstein were quite good even if the movies themselves weren’t. John Raitt was the original Billy in Carousel, around the time I was born, and I met him years later when I had dinner with him and Bonnie.

BB: You would have been a teenager when Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl and Nichols and May were hitting the scene. Did you follow any comedians?

GK: Comedy? Being in Germany from 1957-1960 was like a time warp in that respect. The PX didn’t stock Lenny Bruce or even Mort Sahl, so for my friends and me they might as well not have existed. Nichols and May I read about in Time magazine, I think, but never heard them till I came back to the states. Hell, I think it was 1962 or 63 before I ever heard Lord Buckley. If I listened to any comedy at all overseas I think it was Stan Freberg or Victor Borge, and Newhart came along about ‘60, I think. I probably read Sahl before I ever heard him, and was way late in coming to Lenny Bruce.

BB: At what time did you find yourself starting to rebel against your father, and right-wing politics in general?

GK: I’d say the first conflicts that were plainly philosophical and political (as opposed to just generational) came my freshman year in college at Kansas. Almost from the moment I got to KU I was hanging with the “beatniks,” the painters and poets and musicians and actors, even though I was a clean-cut ROTC Midshipman who had to wear my uniform to class a couple of days a week. I liked Lawrence but intensely disliked the discipline and even the curriculum. (I had a few electives but was required to take physics and calculus, both of which I absolutely hated and still don’t understand the first thing about.) So the battle lines were first probably drawn even then. Before the year was out I’d dropped out of school (and ROTC) and wound up back in Massachusetts, living on my own and working at an amusement park in Hull; my grandparents lived in the adjacent town.

What remained of getting an education was pretty much up to me from then on. My father’s thinking was that since I’d been the one who fucked up the free ride, I was on my own, and he followed pretty much the same guidelines with all my brothers and sisters if they dropped out or changed curriculums or whatever, and surprisingly, most of them did. My brother Tim quit the University of Louisville and joined the Army; my sister Jennifer had a full ride at Hollins, but after her junior year at the Sorbonne decided to stay on in Paris, and I think my two youngest brothers both wound up on academic probation at Alabama, which really takes some doing. Even my sister Becky blew up at band scholarship at the University of Kentucky when she switched from music to a journalism major. With me as with them he’d have still been willing to help out with college if I’d been willing to live at home and commute. That of course was unthinkable to me, though a few of the others did that after frittering away their scholarships; the closest I came was that one summer, when my father was in Laos, I stayed at their house and took classes at St. Mary’s while driving a taxi in Leavenworth on the night shift; in one of the high points of my academic career I wound up getting an A in a ‘Philosophy of Communism’ course taught by a Sister of Charity with whom I had verbally jousted every single day that summer.

By then there were lots of times when my father and I barely spoke, but I distinctly remember at the end of spring break 1963, the night before I was taking off again, leaving at the crack of dawn to thumb back to Boston and Massachusetts Bay Community College, which he considered a total waste of time on my part – he was probably right, but it was one of the few places where I could afford the tuition and still keep 1,500 miles between me and my parents – we watched the fatal Emile Griffith-Benny Paret fight together.

BB: Tell me about going to school at KU with Gayle Sayers and Bill James. Did you know either of them at all?

GK: The first time I saw Sayers touch a football I knew that if what he was playing was football, I’d been playing a game that should have had a different name. He was that much better than not just me, but everybody else, too. As freshmen we lived on the same floor in the same dorm, but he was pretty distant and intimidating, so there wasn’t a lot of conversation between us even when we’d find ourselves watching TV together. (Somebody once warned me that he didn’t like white people, and another guy corrected him and said, “He doesn’t like ANYBODY.”) It was years later that we talked about this and he said that his attitude at that time had really been a defense mechanism, because he was afraid he didn’t belong in college at all and was basically terrified by his circumstances.

I didn’t actually meet Bill James until much later, I think in the very early ‘80s, just after I’d started at the Herald, at Fenway Park. Glenn Stout brought Bill to Opening Day, and knew I’d be sitting in the bleachers as I always did on Opening Day back then, so it was really Glenn who introduced us. Bill told me on that occasion that he had voted for me when I ran for sheriff in 1970. Of course if everyone who’s told me that in the years since actually had voted for me, I’d have won the fucking election. It’s really too bad that Bill and Susan moved to Boston at pretty much exactly the same time I moved to New York, because I’d liked to have seen more of them. As it is, we cross paths occasionally in Lawrence now but even then only rarely.

BB: Did growing up in a military family fuel your rebellious nature? And even when you weren’t on speaking terms with your father did you seek his approval?

GK: I don’t know that it fueled any rebellious nature, though it obviously ended up that way on my part, as it did with some of the guys I’d gone to school with. But an amazing preponderance of my classmates ended up in the military themselves, or married career soldiers, and a lot of those that didn’t wound up Republicans, so I don’t think I was part of any identifiable trend. Best way I can answer that was that however strained everything else got, sports was always a common ground, and we could always get through a football game without an argument.

BB: How did you lose your eye?

GK: Short answer is that I was the runner-up in a dispute with a guy who broke a quart beer bottle over my face at a party on Beacon Hill in early ‘64. (He thought I was laughing at him; I wasn’t) He was a pretty paranoid black guy. I’d just walked back from the liquor store with a case of beer when his girlfriend introduced us, and when I then shouted across the room to a friend asking for a church key he grabbed me and said “Hey man, you going for a blade?” I thought he was kidding and kind of shook my arm free and started to walk away. He hit me full-force from behind, cut up my face but more importantly the eye just exploded.

BB: And so when did you meet Hunter S. Thompson?

GK: Met Hunter in ‘67 or ‘68 in New York. I was working for his agent at the time Hell’s Angels book was published, and subletting my apartment from Paul Blackburn, whose wife Sara had been the editor who brought Hunter to Random House.

BB: And you got a piece in the Paris Review, right?

GK: My Paris Review publication was poetry, as was most of what I published in various little magazines beginning about 1965. I was pretty much a fixture around the St. Mark’s poetry project back then, and half the poets in the country must have lived within a few blocks of me when I lived first on Avenue C and then on East 7th Street, next door to McSorley’s. I did do a book review (of Ishmael Reed’s The Freelance Pallbearers for a soft-core mag called Escapade, one of several Playboy knockoffs that were going at the time. (Ishmael claimed that I’d been the only white reviewer who understood his book.) These mags were supporting quite a few people back then – Baldwin covered the Liston-Patterson fight for Nugget, for instance.

BB: Who were you reading in those days? Was Terry Southern an influence at all?

GK: There were a lot of people besides poets hanging around the St. Mark’s scene then—folk singers, painters, etc. were also plentiful, and Terry Southern was one of them. I think when I first met him I’d read only Candy (which Girodias re-issued, along with Donleavy’s The Ginger Man, when he set up shop in New York; those books had exactly the same cover as Only Skin Deep, so I always made sure bookshops in places like Iowa City ordered all three titles. Not quite by coincidence Hamill and I are going to the Tibor de Nagy gallery today to see this poets and painters show from that era, and I imagine I’ll see a lot of collaborations between friends of mine from the ’60s.

I was still reading anything and everything, but during the decade of the ’60s read pretty much everything Kerouac, Donleavy, Baldwin, etc. had written. But I also managed to read Liebling, Budd Schulberg, et al too. I read most of Mailer but wasn’t bowled over even by his best – and I was working for his agent from late ’66 to ’68. And of course even when I was spending my nights at poetry readings and gatherings I was reading the New York sports pages religiously. By ’68 or so I’d met Larry Merchant and Vic Ziegel and Lenny Shecter at the Lions Head, and about the same time became friends with Hamill and Joe Flaherty. Only Skin Deep, which was published in September of ’68, mentions Merchant and Jim Carroll’s Basketball Diaries, which made it pretty unique in the world of international porn. The publication party was at the Lions Head the night before I left for Iowa, and when Andy Warhol showed up it was the first time he’d gone out in public since he got shot by Valerie Solanis earlier in the year.

BB: I ate dinner with Vic once before he passed away and he told me about worshipping at the altar of Lenny Shecter, who is tragically overlooked these days. I think Shecter’s hard cynicism is close to some of the Deadspin sensibility. Do you think he would have eventually quit writing about sports altogether if he had stayed alive? His collection The Jocks showed that he had much contempt for big time sports.

GK: Odd thing about Lenny was that for all the humor he evinced in his writing he really didn’t have a great sense of humor, or at least didn’t really seem to enjoy himself the way his acolytes like Vic and Larry did. Lenny was, of course, the original “chipmunk,” but while it was easy to picture Larry and Vic and Stan Isaacs as “chipmunks,” the term seemed misapplied when applied to Lenny. I think you’re right that he was really sick and tired of sports, and given the financial cushion that came with Ball Four he probably would have completely moved on. But he could be almost nasty when he thought he was right and you were wrong. I remember being in New York and at the head a week or so after I’d gone up to see Jim Bouton, who was plotting some sort of comeback, pitch a few innings, I think it was, in a minor league game out in Pittsfield, and I’d described the way some 20 year-old hitter had almost gone into contortions over a knuckler. Lenny says, “Couldn’t have happened. Jim told me he only threw smoke that day,” and I say, “Lenny, I was there. He didn’t throw a lot of them, but he threw one to that batter.” “Maybe it was just a change-up you saw,” he says. I finally said “Lenny, give me a little credit here. I know a fucking knuckleball when I see one.” Really odd because he always had to get the last word in, and this time wanted to argue something I’d seen and he hadn’t.

Another night I was in the head with Leigh Montville and this doll about 25 appears at the bar. Leigh wants to know what her story was and I told him. “She’s a sportswriter groupie.” He of course refuses to believe that there is such a thing, let alone one this good looking. He finally tries to strike up a conversation and she says, “Have you guys seen Lenny Shecter? I’m supposed to meet him here tonight.” Lenny was twice her age and didn’t exactly have movie star looks, so Montville was really impressed that he had groupies.

BB: Did you guys all admire Jimmy Breslin?

GK: Sure, everybody admired Breslin. I’d read him religiously long before I met him. He wasn’t around the bar a lot but his column was a topic of conversation almost any day it ran.

BB: Did most of the Lion’s Head guys stick to booze or did they smoke a lot of weed and take harder drugs too?

GK: Most were strictly drinkers, a few guys smoked weed but more at parties or at home. The most obvious exception was Wes Joice, the owner. Even back in the ‘60s it was a running joke that he was perpetually stoned the way some drunks never sober up. Pretty much as soon as he finished his first cup of coffee he’d go down to the office to smoke a joint. He often invited me down, but got so I rarely went because the shit he was smoking was so powerful it would leave me catatonic.

By the ‘80s Wes, along with most of the American and National Leagues, had graduated to coke. Now I usually would accept if he invited me down to the inner sanctum. One night Bob Arum was with me when he did and Bob did one of those numbers straight out of Annie Hall, not knowing what he was doing, exhaled when he should have inhaled and blew a couple hundred dollars worth of cocaine all over the office. Sometimes this would be decent stuff, more often not. There was a dealer (later immortalized as “the Weasel” in Kinky Friedman’s Greenwich Killing Time), you could have set your watch by. Six o’clock every evening, rain or shine, he’d walk down the steps, and for a couple of hours he’d conduct a lively business out of the men’s room at the Lions Head. It got so sometimes you’d walk in to take a piss and on right top of the toilet paper dispenser there’d be a couple of lines just sitting there that somebody had laid out and then been so fucked up that they forgot to snort it. His shit was quite mediocre and the standard line was that if John Belushi had only known the Weasel he’d have been alive today.

BB: How big of a deal was Harpers magazine during those years, the Willie Morris time? And were guys like David Halberstam and Gay Talese widely admired in your downtown scene?

GK: Harpers was a bigger deal in some circles that I was really more on the fringe of, like George Plimpton’s, but not so much among the people I hung out with regularly. I don’t know that it’s accurate, but my impression was always that Willie Morris seemed to think of himself as much more important and influential, or maybe just relevant, than he and it actually were, at least to most people I’d have hung out with. I don’t even mean that disparagingly; it’s just that Harpers rarely even crossed my mind and I couldn’t imagine that there were actually people who spent much time thinking about its place in the literary firmament.

I had lunch with Hamill today after we toured the poets and painters show at the Tibor de Nagy. The curator came out and introduced himself and gave us each a hardbound catalogue ($40) when we left. I was mainly trying to get some stuff for the profile for the Boxing Writers Dinner program but as usual Pete had all kinds of mots to offer. Not sure you can use this in your Cannon project but Pete recalled that Cannon said of James Baldwin’s status as a double-minority something along the lines of “the poor guy wants to ride in the front of the bus–and do it wearing a dress!”

And some great Mailer stories: Apparently Mailer and Bruce Jay Friedman came to blows at a party in Brooklyn that wound up on the sidewalk below, and Friedman kicked the shit out of Norman by the time their friends moved in to stop it. Friedman, who apparently didn’t want to be responsible for diminishing the future of American letters: “I was doing everything I could to keep from hitting him in the head!”

Pete also remembered covering the Democratic convention in ‘64 when his wife went into labor. Pete didn’t have a car and didn’t even drive then, but Mailer drove him from Atlantic City to St. Vincent’s for the birth of his first daughter. “People remember all the crazy shit Mailer did but rarely mention kindnesses like that.” When Norman was drinking said Pete you always knew that danger was right around the corner when he started talking in a faux Texas accent.

He also told me about this building Mailer purchased in upper Manhattan, maybe Inwood or someplace, as both an abode and as an investment. Over the years every time he’d get divorced he’d have to sell off two floors of the building, one to pay the divorce lawyer and another to pay the ex. Eventually he owned only the top floor. The one he lived in.

Never knew Talese back then. At Super Bowl VII I was in LA for the Phoenix and since we were really pinching pennies I was staying with Bill and Susan Cardoso in Hollywood, I think it was. Hunter Thompson was there and had a room at the press hotel but also spent a lot of time out at the house. Apparently a few months earlier Talese had been out there doing his initial research for what eventually must have become Thy Neighbor’s Wife and each evening would come back to Cardoso’s with a detailed report of how many blowjobs he’d gotten that day in the name of research.

BB: My old man was a big drinker but not much of a village guy. He knew Elaine Kaufman when she managed a place in the village and then was a regular during her early years on the Upper East Side. But then he got a job at ABC and mostly drank at Herb Evans until The Ginger Man became his favorite spot. Did you ever go uptown?

GK: I didn’t spend much time in Elaine’s and when I went there it was usually with Pete. I remember going over there after a day game at Yankee Stadium in late ‘79, with this ravishing young thing I’d imported from Newport, Pete (who was driving, the first time I’d ever known him to do that) and Jose Torres and his son. They ushered us straight to a table adjacent to Woody Allen’s. Pete has a great story about the decline of Elaine’s, which he traces to this crash diet and sentence to a fat farm Elaine undertook sometime in the early ’80s. Up until then she’d personally tasted everything the place served, but her diet guru forbade that, so when the chefs started cutting corners and getting sloppy there was nobody to notice, and eventually the food got so bad people stopped going there, or at least stopped eating there, altogether. Elaine eventually started tasting (and got fat) again but it never fully recovered.

I never hung out a lot at the O’Neal/O’Connor bars in NY, but there was one Super Bowl out in LA—maybe the Redskins-Dolphins game—where the Ginger Man in Beverly Hills was sportswriter central, and we were all in there pretty much every night. I’d run into people from Boston and New York I hadn’t seen in ages who were now fully realized Californians. I was in O’Neal’s at Lincoln Center quite a few times in its last couple of years. Including with most of the other speakers (e.g. Quincy Troupe, Ben Stiller, and Jo Loesser) after Budd Schulberg’s Memorial service, and after a South Pacific performance just a few nights before it closed for good.

BB: Was Frederick Exley a regular at the Head?

GK: The thing about Exley was that the guy I knew and drank with in bars, chiefly the Lion’s Head, was almost irreconcilable with the guy who could write something as touching as A Fan’s Notes. I’d come back to New York and Fred had taken up residence at the Head in my absence; I believe David Markson was the original conduit but especially Flaherty and Jeanine were talking him up big time. I’d drunk with him for probably several weeks before I finally got around to reading the book. I was knocked out, not just by how good it was but was stunned to realize that Fred could have written it.

You also ought to try to chase down “The Last Great Saloon,” a piece Fred wrote for GQ about the Lion’s Head in December of either ’91 or ’92.

BB: That was a good one, but how much of it was true?

GK: Fred’s description of me with great danes and bullwhips was a product of his imagination and had nothing to do with my book, Only Skin Deep. Fred was a terrific novelist but had his shortcomings as a reporter. I’m surprised that GQ didn’t have a fact-checker, or at least run some of that stuff by me.

BB: I also read Joe Flaherty’s piece on you for the Village Voice around the time you ran for sheriff. Did you really take your glass eye out and leave it people’s drinks?

GK: In my younger days I did get some mileage out of that. I did some pretty outrageous stuff, but obviously Joe embellished somewhat—though not as much as Fred, who created tales out of whole cloth.

BB: Did you really call Mayor Lindsay a tight-assed WASP and bless his forehead with ashes from an ashtray?

GK: Evidently.

BB: Do you think the tendency is to print the legend instead of the truth?

GK: Partly, but that would be speculation. There was a lot of that around the Lion’s Head in the late ‘60s, Fred and David Markson and others, and I’d include myself in that category, who did a lot more sitting around the bar talking about writing than actual writing (this would be the ‘69 and ‘70 interludes when I was in New York after Iowa and then in early ‘70 before I went back to Lawrence).

BB: Why did you leave New York?

GK: Combination of a lot of things. My marriage had ended, and while it was a pretty eventful and enjoyable summer, I could sense that things were winding down for me in NYC and that nothing really promising loomed on the horizon. Paul Blackburn, from whom I’d sublet the apartment on East 7th St., was returning from his Guggenheim in September, and I’d have had to find new digs anyway. Ted Berrigan, one of my friends in New York, was headed out to Iowa to teach, as was Anselm Hollo, who had come over from England and hung out with me for a time that summer, was too. After a decidedly undistinguished academic career Iowa seemed to offer a fast track to Master’s Degree, no heavy lifting, so I decided to make a clean break. Got a driveway car, a new VW an army officer returning from Germany had shipped over (big savings on duty); I was supposed pick it up in Brooklyn and take it to him in Omaha. Loaded all my stuff into a U-Haul trailer with a hitch, put the dog (and a cat, a last-minute acquisition from McSorleys, where they said they were going to drown it if nobody had taken it by last call), and lit out for Iowa City. Dropped my stuff there and then proceeded to Nebraska to face the music – the weight of the trailer hitch had ripped open a pretty conspicuous gash in the rear bumper, which the Captain didn’t much appreciate at all, but there wasn’t a lot he could do about it.

BB: Did you have any concrete notion that you wanted to be a writer yet?

GK: I was scuffling to sell some freelance work, most notably my DB, Only Skin Deep, which was one of the first Girodias bought when he fled Paris and set up here. Even though I was short a bachelor’s degree they got me conditionally accepted and even the promise of funding at the Workshop, where I was one of the few actually doing both fiction and poetry. Most people had to pick one or the other. I shared a house with Hollo, and Berrigan taught my poetry section. Bob Bolles was my fiction teacher, and I think he was almost intimidated by some of the talent in that room – not just me but Tom McHale and Asa Baber and Eddie Gubar. Robert Coover was my thesis adviser, but we didn’t really see eye to eye so I didn’t consult him a lot. I always knew I would earn my living writing something. And while I’d written sports for newspapers before I wrote anything else, the idea that I’d do it for 35 years had yet to occur to me then.

BB: You then had a memorable summer running for sheriff in Lawrence, Kansas. What inspired that?

GK: The original plan was that it would provide a format for guerrilla-type street theatre that would last through the summer (my platform included subsidies for marijuana farmers etc.). Although Hunter Thompson ran for sheriff in Aspen and Stew Albert in Oakland, none of us had discussed it with the others beforehand and none knew the others were even going to run, although I did later visit Hunter for a ‘summit’ conference in Aspen after I’d won the primary. The only ones I discussed the sheriff campaign with before returning to Lawrence from New York in the spring of 1970 were Ed Sanders and Jerry Rubin, both of whom encouraged it.

In Lawrence I had announced I was running under the Youth International Party banner, so it didn’t make a lot of waves. The incumbent Republican sheriff, who had arrested me at an antiwar demonstration in 1965, routinely ran unopposed. I waited until 30 minutes before the filing deadline and then walked into the courthouse, paid a $100 filing fee to run as a Democrat. I knew if I gave them an hour they’d have found somebody to run against me. I was consequently unopposed on the primary ballot and won the Democratic nomination, much to the chagrin of the Democratic Party. At a rally at the state house a few days before the election I wound up in conversation with the governor and someone took a picture of us together. This was after the state party leadership had publicly denounced me. We printed the picture up in hundreds of flyers with the headline “Vote Democratic on Nov. (whatever the date was) Docking for Governor/Kimball for Sheriff.”

In practice things got quite ugly that summer – cops killed two kids, one black and one white, and it turned into open warfare for a while. Because of my visibility I became the go-to guy as a spokesman, and got blamed for everything that happed, much of which I knew nothing about and still don’t. There are some more detailed accounts, as in Rusty Mulholland’s book, available, including online. The Lawrence Journal World and University Daily Kansan both ran lengthy recaps of the summer of ’70 last year, the 40th anniversary.

BB: How did you parents handle the news of your numerous arrests?

GK: My mother still dislikes any mention the arrests; I don’t think she likes having to explain that to her redneck friends. Last time it came up I seem to recall her going into complete denial about it, in fact. The one in Lawrence in ‘65 she actually came from Colorado and was involved in the negotiation with my lawyer. The judge had originally sentenced me to six months, I guess to teach me a lesson, and let me sweat it out for a couple of days before he paroled me in my father’s custody. (He was a reserve JAG colonel himself and knew my old man.) That’s how I wound up spending that winter in Colorado Springs. Ran the ski lift at the Broadmoor until the snow melted and then worked in the hotel PR department for a month or two before my tolerance (and theirs) became exhausted. Finally bolted under the cover of darkness one night in a ‘54 Ford I’d bought from Peggy Fleming’s father, drove to Lawrence and then New York.

Anyway, the point being that because that was the only one she was personally involved in, my mother has over the years persuaded herself that it must have been the only arrest. There were actually a few others, including one in Wichita in 1970 that was on the front page of the paper, since the asshole who personally arrested me, Vern Miller, was the Sedgwick County sheriff who was running for Attorney General the same year I ran for sheriff in Douglas County. The headline in the Wichita paper the next morning read “George Kimball Arrested,” over a picture of me being led away in cuffs. I’d been speaking at a rally protesting the presence of Spiro Agnew, who’d flown in to stump for the incumbent attorney general, Kent Frizell, who was running for governor in another tight race. (He lost.) When Miller busted me, I just shook my head and told him, quietly, “Vern, you’re going to start a riot here,” and he did. I sat there in jail that night thinking to myself, “You stupid bastard. You just got that motherfucker elected,” which turned out to be the case.

Besides personally leading several drug raids in Lawrence, one of Vern’s first acts in office was to board an Amtrak train traveling through Kansas with an armed posse and take the bartender in the bar car into custody for serving liquor by the drink inside the borders of Kansas. (It was still illegal at the time for bars to serve anything but 3.2 beer.) He then wanted to put undercover agents on planes and bust the stewardess’ for serving drinks in Kansas airspace, but wiser heads prevailed. A few years later I met a guy in Boston – he phoned me up and arranged a meeting – who, actually – no shit – wrote an opera about all of this. Vern and I were the leads. I don’t think it ever got performed.

BB: That’s hilarious. Wasn’t there a confrontation with a cop in there? Didn’t you throw a punch at an officer?

GK: The ‘65 arrest was for carrying a “Fuck the Draft” sign at an antiwar rally in Lawrence. I don’t know that I’d describe it as a punch; I swung but it was more of a forearm shiver. He’d thrown me up against a car while the woman he claimed wasn’t in need of medical attention was collapsing to the sidewalk behind him. I was charged with assaulting an officer, but when it came to trial not even the cop’s own partner would testify for him so it got tossed. I don’t know when or if they expunge those things; there might be a record of it but I wouldn’t want to go nosing around since I think there might still be a hot possession of marijuana charge floating around down there, though for instance when I’ve gotten stopped on a couple of motor violations nothing popped up when they phoned me in.

(The most recent of those I was driving around the block at about 15 mph during street cleaning, and got stopped for no seat belt. I thought it was really chickenshit, but then I realized the real reason for it. It was during the ‘04 playoffs, and I had a Massachusetts car with Herald on the license plate.)

BB: When Miller arrested you, you told him that he was going to incite a riot when he arrested you. What kind of riot was there, if any?

GK: I’ve been in better riots, but considering there was no trouble until he arrested me, any riot there was plainly his doing. I was only in the Wichita jail overnight. By early light I’d been bailed out and was on my way back to Lawrence.

BB: How long was it before the election?

GK: I think it was November. It was just before the election, anyway.

BB: When did you leave Kansas?

GK: We left within a matter of days, not in response to Vern’s threats, but because I’d promised my wife we were going to move back East and that I’d start writing and earning a living. It had been a fun six months or so but we were awfully poor. The grand I got from Scanlan’s monthly was the only real money I’d earned, and the only thing I’d written. If I stayed in Kansas the only way to earn a decent living would have been on some level of the dope harvest, and I was way too paranoid to make a good criminal.

BB: When you too off, did you think “Well, that was fun?” Now, time to get serious and make some money?

GK: Yes and no. I didn’t want to trivialize the experience by looking like I was cashing in on it right away, so I pretty consistently resisted entreaties to write a book about the campaign. Ed Sanders, for one, really pushed me to do that. I did write the piece for the Realist (mainly because I needed the dough, $300 I think). Paul had asked me, Hunter, and Stew Albert to do separate pieces. Stew and I did ours and Hunter never did, so he finally just ran ours.

BB: So it wasn’t just theater?

GK: I wouldn’t say that. I didn’t want the guys who had gotten killed, and the people who had worked on the campaign, to suddenly look like they’d been bit players in a scheme to get me a book contract.1970 was in that respect the tail end of the 60s. What was mine was yours and what was yours was mine, that sort of stuff. We didn’t stay very much out at the A-Frame (for one thing it would have been dangerous; somebody would have had to stay up as an armed guard against a redneck attack). From Sept onward we shared a house with another couple in Lawrence. She was a grad student, he a dope dealer, and since nobody had any discernible income they (and I think maybe we, eventually) discovered they were eligible for food stamps.

I also had sort of an arrangement at the Gaslight Tavern. If I was around and it got busy (which it did at lunchtime almost any day during the week) I’d jump behind the bar and tend bar while he cooked and the other bartender worked the tables. He might or might not throw me a few bucks but in any case I didn’t have to pay for food, and rarely even for beer, there. It worked pretty well, since he didn’t have to bring in somebody to work a whole shift, which I had no interest in doing anyway. I’d worked at the bookstore next door several years earlier and knew these guys pretty well. Also next door was a barber shop. Obviously they didn’t cut any hippies’ hair, but I used to go in and shoot the shit with the barbers, talk baseball and football, so they knew I was OK.

BB: How did your father handle all of this?

GK: Like my mother, he had firsthand knowledge only of the Lawrence one, though he had clearance and could have viewed my file. Army intelligence also had one on me. I don’t recall ever asked me about the other arrests, though we weren’t talking a lot in those days. Like my mother he was sort of delusional about a lot of this stuff. When my brother Tim returned from Vietnam, got involved with Veterans against the War and participating in protests, for instance, he convinced himself and told people that he must have been doing it as a plant by Army intelligence, which was of course absurd.

By the way, he’d never in a million years have publicly agreed with me about the war, but his enthusiasm for it dampened considerably the second time he was over there, this time as Military Attaché at the embassy in Laos (read: spy.) My uncle Bill, my father’s older brother, thinks he must have witnessed, or had to participate in, some stuff he found so morally abhorrent over there that he began to question in his own mind whether it had all been worth it. He’d never have criticized the U.S., even after he retired, but he plainly no longer wanted to talk about it.

BB: So after all of this craziness in Kansas, how did you wind up in the Boston at the Boston Phoenix?

GK: I’d lived in and gone to school in Boston earlier; my grandparents lived there. Harper Barnes, who went to KU, was editor of the Phoenix; I’d also planned several freelance gigs but once I started at the Phoenix that sort of pushed everything else out of the way as the role grew. Depends on which sport you mean. The Celtics were still rebuilding but extremely accommodating. The Patriots weren’t at first but eventually came around. The Red Sox constantly battled me over access and credentials. Their PR guy, Bill Crowley, was an asshole. Covered lots of things besides sports in those days, especially politics and music.

BB: How Mike Lupica did come to the Phoenix?

GK: Lupica I’d met through Bob Ryan in 1971, I believe, when he was still at BC. I hired him to do some freelance pieces for a special section we did in ‘72 and they were so good I wound up talking the publisher into hiring him to constitute a full-time sports staff. Then not long after he graduated I think it was the Post hired him. What I didn’t realize was that it was some kind of probationary deal. A couple of months after he went to New York I got a call from somebody in personnel at the Post saying they were considering hiring him full time and asking my opinion, and I said “You mean I can have him back?” She laughed and said that sounded like an endorsement to her.

BB: What about Charlie Pierce?

GK: I met Charlie out in Worcester. I was working on some story and somebody suggested I look him up; he was writing for Worcester magazine, I think. I was the one who introduced him to Bob Sales, who was then the editor of the Phoenix, and Bob hired him, though not to do sports since Michael Gee was already working as my backup, sort of in Lupica’s place. Then I left for the Herald in early 1980, and Charlie did some sports after that. Bob was by then at the Herald, first as managing editor and later as sports editor. He and Don Forst hired me initially, over the objections of the sports editor, who shortly quit. A few years later when he was sports editor Bob hired both Michael and Charlie at the Herald.

BB: What was it like moving from a weekly like the Phoenix to a daily tabloid like the Herald? I assume part of the reason was financial. Did you enjoy the move? What new challenges did it present? Did you write anything but sports at the Herald?

GK: It was only financial in that I took a while negotiating the terms because I didn’t want to sell myself cheap, but mainly it had come time to move on. I’d actually left the Phoenix in November of ‘79, the week Kennedy announced his candidacy, and spent several months freelancing and working with the campaign. I did a few pieces for the Herald in that time, but didn’t actually sign a contract until February.

BB: Were you ever frustrated as a columnist for the Herald? In that you weren’t their number-one columnist?

GK: For about eight years I was the number-one columnist. Once Charlie Pierce arrived he started getting some of the better assignments but I was still the guy who’d go to Super Bowls, playoffs, world series, etc., so that wasn’t frustrating. Even after guys like Callahan and Buckley arrived and pretty much knocked me off most baseball coverage I probably could have lived with it, but for the last ten years after Bob Sales was let go the new sports editor wanted to assign all columns – you had no leeway in choosing what to write about, and in some cases he wanted to dictate point of view even. It got pretty tiresome and frustrating. I had also gotten old enough that since the Post in ‘92 there weren’t any job offers coming in, so I was kind of trapped there. If someone had come along with a buyout offer remotely as good as what I got in ‘05 I’d have jumped at it, but with a wife and two kids in school I wasn’t in a position to make a move.

BB: Did you have a good relationship with your editor Bob Sales when you were at the Herald?

GK: Yes. Like most any writer-editor relationship that lasts nearly 20 years we had our moments of strain, but I enjoyed working with him more than any other sports editor there — particularly his successor.

BB: How long did you work for him at the Herald?

GK: Twice at the Herald. He was the managing editor when I got there in ‘80, then in early ‘82 I think left right after Murdoch takeover. Then came back as sports editor from ‘86-‘95 or so. He and Forst hired me initially.

BB: I just watched a screener copy of a new HBO doc on Borg-McEnroe. They show footage of Charlie Steiner getting into a fight with a Brit in the press room at the ’81 Wimbledon and who should I see in the background?

GK: Yeah, that footage is everywhere — also on a video Not Great Moments in sports. I was the peacemaker. I might have been the only one in the room who knew both guys and figured if I didn’t break them up nobody would, even though neither one wanted to fight very badly. After the third Leonard Duran fight Charlie sat down with me and Stephen Stills at the Mirage and we got to talking about it and Stills was cracking up. I said if you ever want to feel ridiculous try standing in the middle of the Wimbledon press room pleading “Stop it, Nigel!” I believe I kept them apart without ever putting my briefcase down.

BB: I talked to Bill Lee. Said you’d be proud of him, he’s finally become a logger. Said he’s wanted to be one his whole life. That, and a wino. Do you still keep in touch with him?

GK: Last time I saw Bill was in Burlington more than a year ago. My daughter was meeting me there and we were driving up to Montreal for a fight, and Bill drove over and met us at my friends’ house. I’d taken a spill on the train to Newark Airport and broke a couple of ribs, it turned out. He had a deal with the owners at Jay Peak (where Darcy and Sam teach in he ski school) to make bats out of all the hickory they were clearing in their new expansion. He’d just started, and gave me one of the earlier prototypes, basically a mistake. They’d milled it to the precise dimensions of another bat he was using, and hickory being much denser, it was so heavy King Kong would have had trouble getting around on a fastball with it. We took it up to Montreal, but of course I can’t get on a plane with a bat, so Darcy kept it in the car. Later in the summer Teddy went up and spent a week doing trail work for them, and Darcy gave him the Spaceman bat to bring back. He stopped in Boston to see some of his friends, got stoned and fell asleep under a tree in the Boston Common, and walked off and left it. He went back half an hour later but of course by then it was gone.

BB: I was listening to “Boom Boom Mancini” by Warren Zevon. You must have run into him during the course of your travels, right?

GK: During the ‘70s Bill Lee, Dennis Eckersley, and I along with our wives went to see him at the Berklee Performance Center, and Zevon later wrote his song about Bill. I didn’t know him well, though obviously Carl Hiassen did. When we had to clear the permissions for “The Fighter Still Remains” I wound up corresponding with his widow, Crystal (who lived in Vermont but since moved to Western Mass) and his kids and son (who lives in LA). I also have “Werewolves of London” as a ringtone on my phone but can’t remember for who now.

BB: Did you ever miss New York at all in those Herald years?

GK: A bit, but I traveled there a lot on assignments. In ‘92 I came down and worked for the Post for six months, right after Murdoch bought it for the second time, on kind of a lend-lease basis. They wanted me to stay and I would have but for a couple of things. One is that my family was very much against it, the other was that the labor strife was looming, and the editor, Ken Chandler, who was a friend, warned me that if I took the deal they were offering I’d be obligated to cross a picket line. That was a pretty good deal while it lasted. They put me up in hotels, the Herald paid my salary and the Post my expenses, and at the first of every month they handed me a fist full of round-trip shuttle tickets I could use to fly to and from Boston at my discretion, so I could arrange my schedule to be in New York for, say, five days, and then in Boston for five.

BB: Who are some of your favorite athletes that you covered?

GK: There were lots of them: Bill Lee, Jim Willoughby, and Dennis Eckersley remain friends. Ray Leonard, Marvin Hagler, and of course Ali was a joy to cover. Dave Cowens and Kevin McHale were lots of fun to cover, as were guys in the earlier era of the Celtics – John Havlicek, Don Nelson, Don Chaney, and Jo Jo White, whom I had known at KU. I’ve also stayed close to some KU guys. Bud Stallworth I knew (and occasionally played pickup games with) when he was a freshman at KU, and then often got together with him when he was through town in his NBA days. I still see him pretty often and will in Lawrence this week. He and I went to the KU-Va Tech Orange Bowl together a few years ago, and then to the Final Four in San Antonio that April, as did Al Lopes, who was the “other” guard with Jo Jo at KU. Jo Jo got drafted by the Celtics and Al by Uncle Sam. After Vietnam Al went back to law school on the GI Bill and now practices in Lawrence.

BB: Do you ever feel that you didn’t write as much in early years because you were drinking and getting loaded?

GK: I don’t think the drinking and drugging slowed me down when it came to writing. In some cases it probably made the writing better, though I practically never drank till I was done writing and really didn’t do much drugs beyond getting a bit of an edge. But both before and after I was drinking, writing a daily column was extremely taxing mentally, in addition to having to travel to and from events, even home games. It took so much out of me that I’d never have been able to summon the discipline or the energy to write books while I was still doing that. For most of that time I was also playing a lot of golf, which was much more relaxing and didn’t tax you in the same way work did.

BB: When did you quit drinking?

GK: November 1991. As Malachy McCourt likes to say, I’d had enough.

BB: You have such a wide variety of friends and your life seems to be connected by those friendships. For writing, which is such a solitary profession, you seem to have a real need for human relationships.

GK: It’s a real cross-section of people, and it’s kind of fun getting people from those various worlds together who otherwise might never meet. But if there’s anything unique about it, it’s that there’s almost as wide a variation in age as well: Arlen Snyder is 78, and Tom Paxton is over 70 now. Niall Toibin, an actor friend in Dublin, is in his 80s. Some of my New York friends, mostly Lions Head survivors, go back more than 40 years. Pete Hamill and I don’t see each other that often – it probably averages out to once a week – but we email or talk on the phone several times a week. There are guys in Kansas like Jim McCrary I’ve known even longer, and I’ve got younger friends, too – Benn Schulberg and I go to and watch a lot of fights and ball games together; he’s barely into his 30s but then when his father and I used to do the same things, Budd was in his 90s. Lou DiBella is 50 now, but that’s a lot younger than I am, and Anne Tangeman is 45. Mark Horgan, who went out to Kansas with me last week, is only 29, and my godson Kidd Dorn is in his 30s. I’m talking here about people you might walk into my home and see hanging out. Rosalie Sorrels (who introduced me and Marge and is now 78 herself) said when people used to ask her mother why she didn’t hang out with people her own age, she’d reply “People my own age are dead.” I find that’s increasingly true, too. In the last couple of years a bunch of people from the Lions Head started dying in profusion (Jose Torres, Frank McCourt, David Markson, Paul Schiffman).

BB: Were you disappointed or angry when you heard that Hunter S. Thompson had killed himself?

GK: Both, but if I had to choose one I’d say angry.

BB: Did you feel freed up to write more once you retired from the Herald? I read in an interview that you said you feel guilty when you don’t write.

GK: Yes, I obviously had much more time to write. I was already working on Eamonn Coghlan’s book pretty much at time of retirement, and while that experience ended somewhat unhappily I think the discipline and work habits helped in all the other projects. Even though I was writing once a week for the Irish Times and covering things for websites I had a solid block of several hours I’d devote to those each day, and yes, it got so I felt guilty if I didn’t write.

BB: Even though it is difficult now, does writing give you a sense of purpose and identity?

GK: Writers write, although what I find myself doing these days is almost more secretarial work – doing all these interviews, arranging book tour stuff on the limited energy I have doesn’t leave me a lot of time for actual writing. I know I’m not going to have time to write another book (though there will be at least one more new cover, the reissue of Only Skin Deep), but I’m hoping to cover a few more fights, and I’d like to get this play (Bloodsong) finished even though there’s not a chance I’d live long enough to ever see it produced.

BB: Do you have any sense of how you’d like to be remembered?

GK: Why do you think there have been half a dozen books in the past four years?

[Pictures of George were provided by the Kimball family.]

Michael Popek, better known around these parts as “unmoderated,” runs a used and rare bookstore in upstate New York. Several years ago he started a fascinating blog called Forgotten Bookmarks. Now, he is the author a book devoted to the forgotten bookmarks he finds along the way.

Michael has written pieces on this subject for the Times Union, the Huff Post, and the Wall Street Journal. Recently, he took a few minutes out to chat about his blog and the new book. Dig:

Bronx Banter: Are all of the images that are in the book ones that also appeared on the blog?

Michael Popek: I don’t remember the exact ratio, but I believe that 60 percent of the items in the book are exclusive and haven’t appeared online. I wanted to reward the loyal readers with lots of fresh material and at the same time give new fans a look at some of the best stuff from the site.

BB: How did you choose which ones were fit for the book?

MP: It wasn’t easy deciding what to choose; when I was working on the manuscript, there were more than 600 entries on the blog and I had a collection of more than 1,000 unpublished items. I tried to pick the strangest, the funniest, the most poignant; items that might make a reader think about the time and place, the history of the bookmark. I also wanted to offer a good variety, so I tried to keep an even number of photos, letters, postcards, notes, etc. In the end, a few items had to be dropped because of copyright issues, but I don’t think any of those items take away from the entire collection.

BB: Do you save the books, along with their bookmarks? Or do you still sell the books and save the bookmarks?

MP: I save all of the bookmarks, and many of the books. As a bookseller, however, the nicer titles need to be on the shelves so I can’t afford to keep them around forever.

BB: When my dad died I went through most of his books and found random things–a voter registration card from 1977, a dry cleaning bill from the 1960s. You can let your mind wander and try to piece together a story from these fragments even though the randomness means that it can’t really tell you about someone. Have you built stories in your mind from your found bookmarks?

MP: Absolutely, I think all of us do – it’s part of the fascination with found items. It’s easiest with the old letters I find, my mind immediately creates a voice, like I would if I was reading a novel. I can instantly picture the letter writer’s face, the way they position their hand as they write, the items on their desk, the weather outside their window – I can’t help it.

BB: There is an element of voyeurism in found items. Have you ever felt uncomfortable with something you’ve found in a book?

MP: One of the most interesting things I found was just too personal to post online. It was a suicide note from the 1930s, and although there were no names or places mentioned, the emotion was too much. Being this kind of voyeur is often a lot of fun, but that’s something I wish I hadn’t seen.

BB: Wow, that’s heavy, man. On the other hand, have  you sound something so intimate that you found it to be beautiful?

MP: I can think of one in particular. It was a break-up letter, found in “While Waiting,” a pregnancy book. It started out:

Dear Aeneas,

I cannot believe what a slime you are. What I ever saw in you in beyond me. Sarah’s mind must be warped – I love her but how she managed to spend 2 years with a manipulative sadist like you is incredible (yes she told me.)

BB: How did you arrive at the format for the book, a small, handsome hardcover, as opposed to a glossy picture book?

MP: That was up to the publishers, for the most part. I had stated in my book proposal that I wanted to produce something that was vivid and in full color.

BB: I think the design of the book is ideal. I think a big, glossy book would spoil the flavor of these hidden treasures.

MP: I think producing a big coffee-table book might have been a bit risky for a first-time author like, those volumes cost a lot of money to print. In the end, I’m very happy with the way it turned out, the pages really come to life.

BB: As a bookseller I’m sure you spend most of your time looking through collections of books. How deep has the bookmark project seeped itself into that process? Do you feel disappointed when you come across books that are “clean,” and does your heart skip a beat when you initially see a bookmark?

MP: It has completely changed the way I sort through books. I cannot let one go without checking every page for lost treasures. It has certainly reduced my sorting efficiency, but I think it’s worth it. The feeling I get when I find something good and juicy is as exciting as it was when I first started this treasure hunt.

BB: It reminds me of the feeling you got as a kid opening up a pack of baseball cards. Guess it’s more like a box of Cracker Jack, waiting for the surprise, right?

MP: Nah, I like the baseball cards metaphor better. You may get a Mattingly, you may get a Dale Berra – but in the end, at least you got some gum, or in my case, a book. All the Cracker Jack prizes were awful.

BB: I like the idea of a treasure hunt. I was talking to my cousin the other night. He grew up in L.A. and now lives in New York and when we first started hanging out in the ’80s, he’d come to town and I’d take him to used bookstores. He never goes to them anymore, not that there are many left. Nowadays, I don’t go to them as much as I used to, heck, I buy my books from you. But one of the charms of your book is that it brings back the accidental pleasures of hunting. Can you talk about that and how vital your business is these days?

MP: As long as there are books still around, there’s going to be someone like me selling them. Sure, the digital revolution in publishing is underway and showing no signs of slowing down, but that’s OK. E-readers can’t replace a signed copy. There are no first edition e-books. And most importantly, you can’t buy a used digital copy – yet. I’ve done my best to adapt to the new marketplace, and the shop has done pretty well. I always like to think about the success of the good record shops still around, and they give me hope for used book shops everywhere. They are both about the hunt, the browse, the discovery. Digging through the shelves is a lot like digging through the stacks, you may have wandered in looking for some Dionne Warwick, but you walk out with some Elvis Costello.

BB: I love Baseball-Reference.com, it’s an amazing tool, but you lose something from opening up the encyclopedia and finding names by mistake. I find the same thing with reading newspapers on-line. You don’t run across a stray article in the same way. I have a friend who runs a record shop and they don’t do very much business on line–consciously–and the store is a meeting place for a community of record heads. Do you have anything like that at your store? I assume you do a majority of your business on-line now.

MP: The local paper ran a story about it, since then there have been a lot of people in asking to see some of the stuff. Before that story, I don’t think there were a lot of local readers. I’ve had a few of fans of the blog make their way into the shop, one from as far away as California, but to be fair, in was in the area for a family wedding. Most of our sales do come from online venues, but I like to think that our success there allows keeping an open brick and mortar store. I really enjoy interacting with customers, and there is the collection of usual suspects that come in every few days. I have seen a few friendships blossom from encounters here; two older guys coming in looking for Vietnam books end up discussing their service days.

Forgotten Books can be ordered here.

And when you find yourself looking for any out-of-print books, check out Michael’s store. And tell him I sent ya.

“The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael,” edited by Sanford Schwartz is a new release from the Library of America and it’s been getting a lot of press along with Brian Kellow’s Kael biography. I’m going to blog about P. Kael, who is one of my favorite writers, all week and will include all the links fit to click.

For starters, here’s a recent conversation I had with Sanford Schwartz.

Check it out:

Bronx Banter: What was your approach in selecting the material for this book? My first impression was that it seemed thin, but then I checked and it is almost 800 pages, anything but thin. Then again, I grew up reading Kael and have all of her books. Is the ideal reader for this book someone who is unfamiliar with her work?

Sanford Schwartz: My first aim in selecting Pauline Kael pieces was to give the range of her thinking and sensibility. As a kid of shadow story, I wanted the selections to give a rough sense of movie history during the years she wrote. I wanted there to be representative pieces on the actors and directors who meant most to her. So there are a number of reviews on Altman, Godard, Scorsese, and so forth. I hoped that the anthology would engage people who already knew her—but unlike you didn’t collect all her books over the years—and also people who, in their twenties and thirties, don’t know who she is. It is always a surprise to run into people who have never heard of her, and I have found that most young people haven’t.

BB. Kael was close to fifty when she started reviewing movies for the New Yorker though she’d been writing for some time. How do you think this influenced her voice as a writer, as opposed to other critics who get their start much earlier?

SS: I’m not sure that it meant a lot. Her having waited so long and absorbed so many movies along the way obviously couldn’t have hurt when it came to writing with authority and conviction. But that certainty was evident in her letters from the late 1930s and early 1940s, when she was in her early twenties—except that her subject was still unclear to her. And it was fortuitous, her coming into the field when she did—an art form was being revitalized.

BB: What did Kael bring to movie criticism in the 1960s and ’70s that set her apart from her contemporaries?

SS: Kael made reading movie reviews a more intimate and personal experience than it had ever been before. Little criticism of any kind conveyed a comparable sense of there being such a powerful, funny, opinionated, scarily shrewd, and common sensical voice there, talking to you. You wanted to know what she thought about everything. You don’t feel this with most journalists, whether they are reviewing an art of doing a political column.

BB: One of the quirks that Kael was famous for was only watching a movie once. She’s been criticized for that over the years, that it suggests a lack of reflection or the possibility that a work of art can change for you. What is it about watching a movie only one time that informed the way she wrote about it?

SS: First off, it should be noted that there were times when she saw a movie more than once. I saw a number of movies with her when it was her second time. But then it was usually because she was checking something. I think she joked about falling asleep during Bresson’s “Diary of a Country Priest” both times she saw it. How many times she saw a movie was conditioned, actually, by her generally tight writing schedule; she usually didn’t have the time to see a movie twice. But the deeper point with this issue concerns the importance of instinct for her. She believed our truest response to a movie (or any art) was our first one, and she wanted to catch that. It was also a matter of temperament. She had on-the-spot judgments about many things. That was how she operated. Movies for her, even the great, complex ones, were about the senses in a way that books were not, and in seeing a movie once and trying to recapture its immediate impact she was, in her thinking, being true to the experience it offered.

BB. Did you re-watch any of the movies whose reviews you included in the collection?

SS: I saw some again, and initially I thought it would be good to re-see many of them. But my sense if that going back to films I loved years ago is hazardous. You re-see Truffaut, Satyajit Ray, or “The Leopard” and part of you must confront ways that the movie, and you, have changed—and altogether the event is more about time than the movie. How movies age is an interesting topic. Kael talked about it in “Movies and Television.”

BB: You’ve included her most famous reviews, ones she was chided about for over-praising like “The Last Tango in Paris,” “Nashville,” and to a lesser extent, “Casualties of War.” How do you think her takes on those movies stand up?

SS: I can’t say how her reviews of those movies hold up because I haven’t seen them recently. My hunch is that she did go overboard on them. I probably felt that then. But of course the reviews had to be in any anthology of her work. They were major pieces for her. They are statements of her belief.

BB: Kael has been ridiculed for her enthusiasm for those movies, but her take on other “classics” of that time period, particularly two “Godfather” movies or “Mean Streets” or “Shampoo” seem spot on. Are there any particular movies that she loved where you feel that her writing is especially sharp?

SS: I wasn’t that interested in whether she was, as you say about some of her reviews, “spot on.” In reviewing an art, reasoning and descriptions count for much more than opinion. As to what I think she was especially sharp on, I hope “The Age of Movies” provides an answer. Are there many more pieces that might have gone in? For sure.

BB: I like that you’ve included her major essays like “Trash, Art and the Movies,” “Why Are Movies So Bad? or The Numbers,” and the long one on Cary Grant, “The Man From Dream City.” And especially an early on, “Movies, the Desperate Art.” But you did not include her celebrated essay on “Citizen Kane.” Is that because it was just too long or because you feel it doesn’t hold up as representative of her talent?

SS: No, the Kane article, as I say in the Introduction, is too long to be included.

BB: One of Kael’s first memorable articles was “Circles and Squares,” a harsh take on fellow critic Andrew Sarris’ ideas about the auteur theory. Why did you not include that one?

SS: I didn’t include the Sarris essay because it is too long for the points it makes. It would have hogged space from livelier writing—writing that meant more to Kael. There are good words in it on what criticism meant for her. If I had excerpts in the anthology I probably would have excerpted those passages. I felt also that readers for whom “auteur” issues mater would already know Kael’s piece, whereas for the wider audience that she wrote for at The New Yorker, and for whom “The Age of Movies” is intended, her deflating this theory—it is really a set of opinions—is not a very engaging issue. And while I think she nails Sarris and the whole approach, she doesn’t do it in a way that opens up the topic to the general reader. Unless you are already familiar with the auteur line, her essay is rather confusing, especially at the beginning. It isn’t an essay that had much long-term meaning for her; she never could take that stuff seriously.

BB: Kael’s review of the documentary, “Shoah,” was famous because she panned it but it’s not here.

SS: I didn’t have a powerful reason to skip the “Shoah” review. Probably, it was a matter of space and also the sense that the reasoning and attitude on display there was already clear from other articles. It is certainly a strong one, though.

BB: During the ’70s, Kael shared her position writing “The Current Cinema” at the New Yorker with Penelope Gilliatt. As a result, there are some classics from that time that she never reviewed properly like “Annie Hall,” “Dog Day Afternoon” (though she does mention this one in a notes column), and maybe especially, “Apocalypse Now.” Were there any movies that you missed her reviewing?

SS: Even with her half-year schedule in the beginning, I believe she managed to encompass the major films of her era (but a movie historian might have another view of this). If a movie was taken seriously or touched hot issues for people—and it came out when she was off—she generally managed to find a way to her her verdict in somewhere. The long articles she periodically wrote during the time she was off let her do just that. She used a piece ostensibly about actors to acknowledge “Jaws” and she let people know where she stood on “2001” in “Trash, Art, and the Movies.”

BB: Kael had her favorites—Peckinpah and DePalma, to name just two—and those who she was famous for blasting, like Kubrick and Woody Allen. But she actually took each movie as it came, and I like that you’ve included “Lolita,” which she adored and as well as “A Clockwork Orange,” which she hated. Same goes for the early Scorsese hits, “Mean Streets,” and “Taxi Driver,” again, which she loved, and “Raging Bull,” which was the first in a long line of his movies that turned her off. Even though she was famous for her prejudices do you feel that she always gave a new movie an equal chance?

SS: Oh, yes. That is one reason I included her review of Bergman’s “Shame.” The piece shows her wrestling with the fact that a director with whom she was often at odds made a movie she had to call a masterpiece. She could always say when someone she admired—Altman, Godard, Bertolucci, Huston, even Renoir—came out flat. Her subject was the film at hand, not someone’s reputation or the credit they might have built up. She didn’t much like Robert Duvall, but after she saw “The Apostle,” which he directed and wrote as well as starred in, she said something like, “You’ve got to hand it to the bastard.”

BB: Kael once said that she never wrote a memoir because, “I think I have” in her reviews. She brought her life’s experience to her reviews, from what she knew about music and books and the theater, but also from what she knew about being a mother, having her heart broken in relationships, everything. Do you think you the story of her life can be found in her work?

SS: Yes, if the story of her life is constituted by her awareness and judgments. I don’t think she was the kind of artist whose life experience mirror or can be seen as a counterpoint to their work. For Agee and Farber, yes; their movie reviews tell us things about each man’s total contribution that we might not know otherwise. Kael, though, put most of what counted in her life in her reviews.

BB: She also once said “In movies, judgment is often not so important in a critic as responsiveness to what a movie feels like, and where it’s heading and what its vision is.” She was very tuned in to the reaction movies had on audiences, especially during her heyday in the early ’70s. Was there any other critic during that time, or any other time, that was as invested in how movies were received by popular culture and what it all meant?

SS: I believe you need a movie historian to answer this one. My feeling is that she got more of the ramifications of movies—their relation to the wider culture and society in general—than most film writers.

BB: This collection is spare toward the last 10 years of her career. Is that because the cultural moment of the movies had passed by the mid ’80s or because you were running out of room? Even though the pieces in her final two collections, “Hooked,” and particularly, “Movie Love,” are terse compared with her earlier writing, I think they had a lovely, compact quality. Were there any reviews that were hard for you not to include?

SS: Kael herself said that her strongest collections were those that covered the films of the 1970s. The movies were richer then. They brought out more of her. And she was first luxuriating in all the space The New Yorker gave her. It is possible that if she had first started reviewing in 1980 her pieces might have been longer and more nuances—even considering the quality of the movies. As it was, by the mid-1980s she had already put forth in some detail her aesthetic and social positions. I agree with you, though, about the “lovely, compact quality” of her reviews of the eighties.

BB: I recall Kael once writing with admiration for the discipline it took Altman to achieve a style that appeared casual and loose. I often think about that when I consider her writing—it is conversational but don’t you think it must have taken a lot of discipline to achieve that effect?

SS: Kael was almost always writing with a deadline, so the words had to come fast, and by nature she was suited to spilling her feelings. But she had to do a lot of work to get the reviews in shape. She could be making substantive changes right to the last minute.

“The Age of Movies” is out now and you can order it here.

As a follow-up to my conversation with Schwartz, I dipped into my library for more Kael and found this in “Afterglow: A Last Conversation with Pauline Kael,” by Francis Davis:

Well, the auteur theory originally meant something quite different from what people understand it be mean now. What it originally said was that a director conferred value upon a film—that if a director was an auteur, all of his films were great. I think the public never understood that, and neither did most of the press. It was an untenable theory, and it fell from sight. It’s now taken to mean that we should pay attention to who directed a movie, because a director is vital to a film, and of course this is true. But it’s something that everybody has always known. I mean, everybody knew that Howard Hawks was terrific. We went to see “To Have and Have Not” and “The Big Sleep” the day they opened, and there was an excitement in the theater, because we all knew that these movies were special. They were smart, and we loved the work of smart directors, because lots of movies were so dumb…But the auteurists considered all of his movies to be wonderful by definition, because he was an auteur. It reached a point where they were acclaiming the later movies of directors who had ceased doing good work years earlier. Hitchcock’s later movies were acclaimed, and they were stinkers—terrible movies. And many routine action movies were praised because they were the work of certain directors.

It’s sometimes discouraging to see of a director’s movies, because there’s so much repetition. The auteurists took this to be a sign of a director’s artistry, that you could recognize his movies. But for all of a director’s movies to be alike in some essential way can also be a sign that he’s a hack.

And this on Andrew Sarris:

We both loved movies. We had that in common, and I enjoy reading him as I enjoy reading very few critics. He has genuine reactions to movies, and many critics don’t. He picks things up and points things out…The big difference between us is that our taste in movies is so radically different. He really likes romantic, classically structured movies. He had very conservative tastes in movies; he didn’t love the farout stuff that I loved. He’s a man who likes movies like “Waterloo Bridge,” movies that drive me crazy with impatience. It’s funny that he should have been at the Voice, and the voice of an underground paper. I think I would have been much more suitable to the Voice, yet for years I got dumped on brutally by the paper. That always amazed me, because I thought, I’m praising movies you should love, so what’s going on here? He and I were at the wrong places—it’s one of those flukes of movie history.

Also this on eroticism in movies and not being able to review “Deep Throat” for the New Yorker:

It wasn’t a good movie. But I very badly wanted to write about it, because for all that was being written about it, nobody was really dealing with what was on the screen. I think half of the reason that people become interested in movies in the first place is sex and dating and everything connected with eroticism on the screen. And I felt that not to deal with all of that in its most naked form was to shirk part of what’s involved in being a movie critic.

I’d love to have written about more eroticism in the movies. I think it’s a great subject, and I dealt with it a little bit in my reviews of “Last Tango in Paris,” “Get Out Your Handkerchiefs,” and a few other movies. Bertrand Blier I loved writing about, because he dealt so much in sexual areas. But it was tough to write about it all with [New Yorker editor, William] Shawn. I had a real tough time with him when I wrote about “Tales of Ordinary Madness,” The Marco Ferreri version of Charles Bukowski, about a girl who’s virtually a mermaid, with Ben Gazzara as the Bukowski, more or less. It’s an amazing movie, with some scenes that are quite erotic. I had to put up a terrible fight to get it in. Shawn wanted to know if the critics for other magazines were covering it. I said that shouldn’t be our standard for what we covered at The New Yorker. But it was hard to convince Shawn that I wasn’t pulling some sort of swindle by sneaking material into the magazine that he felt didn’t belong there. He felt he was holding the line against barbarians, and to some degree I was a barbarian.

He made it very hard to write about certain aspects of movies. Nobody, really, has done a very good job of writing on a sustained level about the way movies affect people erotically, and about the fact that they became popular because they’re a dating game. People love movies that reason, because they excite them sexually. They go to them on dates, and they go to learn more about how to behave. I never got a real crack at writing about that.

Another terrific volume for Kael nerds is “Conversations with Pauline Kael”.

From an interview with Sam Staggs in Mandate (May 1983):

Mandate: Why do you hit so many nerves among the common readers? Why do you stir up such antagonism as well as such passionate devotion?

Kael: In my writing, I was trying to get at what I actually responded to at the movies, and I couldn’t do in formal, scholarly language. I worked to loosen my style—to get away from the term-paper pomposity that we learn at college. I wanted the sentences to breathe, to have the sound of a human voice. I began, for example, to interject remarks—interrupting a train of thought, just as we do when we talk, and then picking it up again. And when I began to feel the freedom to write as easily as I spoke, the writing itself became pleasurable.

Maybe part of the resentment I stir up among critics who suffer when they write is that they can tell I’m having a good time. My guess is that just as my slangy colloquial style appeals to some readers because it is sometimes enables me to get right at what I think the emotional substance of a movie is, it turns off other readers, who prefer more literary, distanced criticism. For example, I’m frequently disparaged as ‘opinionated’—I think what this comes down to is that often I don’t share in the consensus that builds up on certain movies. Sometimes, it builds up even before the critics have seen a picture, as it did on “Sophie’s Choice”—I suspect that a lot of readers are snowed by big themes and advance articles in the New York Times. And then, if they read me making fun of the picture, they’re outraged and think I’m irresponsible, and especially so because I don’t couch my review in the language that has come to be equated with ‘objectivity.’

photo by Chris Carroll

And from a Q&A by Marc Smirnoff in the Oxford American (Spring 1992) after Kael had retired from the New Yorker:

Q: Is a person lucky to be a movie critic?

Kael: It is really a wonderfully exciting field to write about when the movies are good. When they’re not good, it’s to despair. The really bad movies you can write about with some passion and anger. It’s the mediocre ones that wear you down. They’re disgusting to write about because you can feel yourself slipping into the same mediocrity and stupidity. And you feel you’re boring the readers and yourself. When you starting falling asleep while you’re writing a review, you know how dull the movie is. The danger for criticism is that people will want to become critics in order to become television celebrities, rather than enjoying the pleasure of writing and the excitement of trying to define and describe what you’ve seen.

Q: Do you miss writing reviews?

Kael: Yes, but I know I’ve got to adjust to it. That’s part of adapting to getting older. You’ve got to recognize that the time for certain things has passed and, I’m not an idiot, I know I would not write at my best if I went on. You know, you start repeating yourself—you write the same phrase, you write the same descriptions. I’ve already had the problem of working on a paragraph that I thought was pretty good and looking up what I said about that director’s work the last time I wrote about him and finding out it was almost exactly the same paragraph. Well, you know, it’s time to quit.

I got a chance to talk to Stout before he lit out for Boston on a book tour. Here’s our chat.

Dig in.

BB: You’ve written about the Red Sox before, many times, most notably in Red Sox Century. But that was an overview of a long period of time. What was it like to tackle a more concentrated narrative?

SG: It’s far more fun to take on a concentrated narrative, but that doesn’t mean that you just get more detailed, or use detail for detail sake. With a big survey history like Red Sox Century or Yankees Century (which, incidentally, is still in print and still selling after more a decade), I have to be very disciplined and contained. Inevitably at times I have had to race over some good stories or just tell them in shorthand, because the focus of those books is a longer sweep of history. There is very limited space to veer off the main highway and follow a story down a side road, no matter how interesting, unless it carries the larger narrative farther along. In a book about single event, or in this case, a season, there is more freedom to follow the stories that naturally occur. Truths can be revealed organically, over a much more natural span of time, rather than all at once. Take the story of Smoky Joe Wood’s 1912 season, in which he goes 34-5. In a book like Red Sox Century there was no space to do much more than cite the details of his season, touch lightly on the famous early September pitching matchup with Walter Johnson, jump into the World Series against John McGraw’s New York Giants, and then boom, the next year he hurts his arm. Wood appears as some kind of comet, suddenly great, then gone.

But the full story is more nuanced, and in this kind of book I get a chance to tell those kinds of stories. In this case I show Wood’s personality, how and why Wood was so much better in 1912 than before, and how and why he improved over the course of the season; his manager made him change his windup with runners on base and injuries to two catchers thrust rookie Hick Cady into the lineup. He was much better defensively and Wood was much more comfortable with him. And Wood’s arm was already going bad in 1912. There are many, many references to that over the course of the 1912 season, and it was no surprise when he was hurt in 1913. In a book like this, I can get to stories that otherwise go untold, or are overlooked, and use those stories to create characters. The history becomes much more layered, immediate and three-dimensional. In that way it is possible to write a book with wider appeal, one for people who love baseball, and baseball history, not just Red Sox fans. Fenway, like other classic ballparks, transcends the fan base of a particular team and I think Fenway 1912 will be a breakout book this holiday season. It’s about a place and an era, not just a team.

BB: There seems to be a cottage industry of sports books that are about a specific season. Your new book is not just about the 1912 season but about the creation of Fenway Park. Still, can you explain your approach to this kind of story? Do you any hard rules about creating the narrative from the facts and maybe stretching some things to fit a dramatic arc?

GS: I just try to follow the facts as I find them, and not create a narrative arc ahead of time and make the facts fit or enhance it. My proposal for this book was one paragraph – to tell the story of the building of Fenway Park and its first season. Beyond that, I had little idea what I would find, but I trusted in the truth – the truth tells the better story anyway. If it doesn’t, that’s because you haven’t done enough research. There’s never, ever any need to put words in anybody’s mouth to make things “more colorful.” Dry history is the fault of the writer, not the event. And by building the story from actual events, rather than trying to use the events to fit a story, you inevitably uncover new information, so that even a place as familiar as Fenway is surprisingly revealing. In this book, I just tried to track the whys and hows of Fenway Park coming into existence, then track it during its first season to see what that told me. I was quite surprised, for instance, to see how Fenway’s personality, the same personality that in many ways is still in effect in the park today, was revealed over the course of the 1912 season and World Series. Even though the game was much different, the personality of the place was already visible.

BB: As a writer how do you avoid clichés when writing about a game? How much of a challenge is it to make a game recap sound fresh?

GS: You have to be vigilant, because there are times you just have to take the reader from point A to B so you have context for something more important you really want to write about – why and how the score is 2-1 entering the ninth inning for instance – and there’s a great temptation to take the easy way out and get lazy. To avoid that I have to think backwards and ask “What does the reader really need to know entering that ninth inning?” Than I have to deliver the game description to that point economically and without distractions, and that’s the argument against clichés – they are distractions. Staying simple is best, just straightforward reporting without reaching to create any false drama or using writing that calls too much attention to itself. It’s far better to be a bit spare than too florid, because florid writing not only takes readers out of a story and restrains the imagination, More spare, restrained writing leaves room for the readers’ imagination to expand and fill in the blanks.

Then, for texture and context, which is always needed, I try to make use of period sports reporting. Something can be said better by a reporter at that time that if said by the omniscient narrator would sound stupid, or hackneyed or forced. I mean, at one point during the Series Joe Wood is in shock after being shelled. But I don’t write, “After being shelled, Wood was in shock.” I use the reporting of baseball writer Paul Shannon of the Boson Post. He wrote that “A place at the right hand corner of the Red Sox bench was taken by a stopped, wilted figure [SWF]. The SWF was Joe Wood.” I loved that. Another strategy I use throughout Fenway 1912 is that I drop appropriate headlines throughout the text, simply to provide that kind of textural change and period flavor. I guess the short answer is don’t try to write like you’re wearing a fedora and chewing on a cigar. That never comes off as authentic.

BB: Is being spare in your prose something that you come by naturally from your background in poetry?  Do you arrive at that kind of clear, straightforward prose after many drafts or at this point is it something you achieve early on?

GS: To a degree I guess, because in general I’ve always been more drawn toward plain speaking and work that works when listened to rather than poetry that is more mannered and academic. In prose, I aim for transparency. In many instances I almost want my actual writing to be completely invisible, so submissive to the story that you don’t notice it. I want the readers’ first reaction to be “great story” and then realize that it was the writing that delivered that experience.

BB: Did you read a lot of the other material–not from the period but since then–on the 1912 season and the building of Fenway? Was there anything that you tried to avoid repeating?

GS: There was very little that was worthwhile. It hadn’t been written about much before and so much of that was just factually wrong or incomplete. Obviously, I tried to avoid using information I knew not to be true, even it contradicted prevailing wisdom. In places I even correct what I had written before when I had depended on a secondary source that I discovered was incorrect. Here’s an example. Years ago, when I write the official 75th anniversary story about the park for the Red Sox yearbook, I had used a secondary source that called Fenway’s architectural style “Tapestry.” In this book, I learned that was incorrect – “tapestry” is simply the commercial name for the style of brick used, and after consulting with some architectural historians I was eventually able to identify Fenway’s architectural influences. That’s why you try not to use secondary sources.

Frankly, no one had ever written anything in depth about the beginnings of Fenway Park before, so there weren’t too many misconceptions to counteract. It’s funny, but it has been around so long that I think most people, and certainly most Boston baseball writers, had simply assumed that there was nothing left to be known about the origins of the park so they had never bothered to write about it. Historians, even architectural historian, had never viewed it as an object worthy of scrutiny. In reality, the opposite was true. It was virgin territory.

BB: What is the new research that you are bringing to this book? And, as a former librarian, how much do you enjoy the hunt for new stuff?

GS: I love doing the research. There is nothing better than discovering something new about a subject that everyone thinks they already know everything about. And there’s no trick to that apart from putting in the time. Today, with so much material available online, many history writers don’t bother going beyond what is readily available, but it becomes even more important. Here’s how it can work. I discovered one key document that I don’t think anyone has ever used or even seen in nearly one hundred years. I only found it because, over time, I realized that there were many different euphemisms for ballparks, and for the Red Sox. So instead of just searching “Fenway Park” I literally spent t an entire day searching for material online under different combinations of euphemisms. I was several hundred Google search pages into it when I found one obscure reference in an index dating from 1912 that seemed like it might be about Fenway. Then I had to find out what library holds the publication, and then physically go find it.

BB: Do you have researchers that work for you or do you do the legwork yourself?

GS: I do about 99% of my research myself and use a researcher to a very, very, very limited degree, and then only when my life schedule or location makes it impossible for me to look things up myself. In this case, I spent weeks in libraries looking up things on microfilm, and untold hours doing the same with sources that were available on-line and in books. There’s no substitute for that, because what inevitably happens is that when you are locked in doing research, you find things and make connections that you never, ever would have made if you were just contracting out to someone to do it for you. I recently heard from a writer who has researchers do almost everything, including interviews, and he had questions concerning a subject he had a researcher interview, but the interviewer apparently hadn’t asked all the right questions. The subject has since passed away, so now he will never know. I can’t imagine doing that. I really question the veracity of any book where the writer doesn’t do the vast bulk of his or her own research.

Generally, I’ll only use a researcher when I’m on deadline or toward the end of a project, to fill in blanks I might discover at the last minute. I live on the Canadian border in northwest Vermont and it’s not always possible to run down to New York or Boston – I have a family, animals and responsibilities, and a real long driveway I have to plow in the winter. For instance, there was one point where I was writing about the 1912 World Series when I suddenly had more questions about a particular event took place that. I already had accounts from four or five different papers, but what took place still wasn’t exactly clear. So I asked Denise Bousquet, a young woman from my town up here in Vermont who went to college in Boston and now works at Harvard, to look up some additional accounts for me. She’s done that for my last few books, and she also does some fact-checking, mostly on numbers and stats, because it’s way too easy to trip over those, and even then, stats from various sources don’t always agree. Many people think publishers fact check – they don’t. It’s the responsibility of the author, but there are discrepancies everywhere, even in data sources like Retrosheet and baseballreference.com. A book of this size – almost 200,000 words, probably contains 30,000 different facts. You try as best as you can to get it right.

BB: The mini biographies are always some of the most compelling sections of a book like this. Can you talk a little about the architect of Fenway Park, James E. McLaughlin and the builder Charles Logue? Also, I know you had experience in construction as a young man, and that you compiled an oral history about construction workers at Ground Zero. How much of your personal experience informed how you presented the relationship between McLaughlin and Logue?

GS: Fenway is perhaps the best known sporting facility in the country, yet both the architect and the builder were essentially unknown. McLaughlin and Logue had never been written about in any detail – even architectural historians knew virtually nothing about McLaughlin. Well, I bring them back, and show how both the design and building of Fenway Park was influenced by each man’s personality and philosophy. Both were immigrants. McLaughlin was Nova Scotian and Logue was Irish. McLaughlin’s practical and understated architectural philosophy was expressed in his design of Fenway. Before this book no one had ever decoded the specific architectural influences in the design of Fenway Park, or related Fenway to McLaughlin’s other buildings or to other nearby buildings built in the same era. I do, and that is one of the reasons why Fenway still works today – it fit the city then, and still does. And because I spent a number of years working in the construction industry, specifically working with concrete and reinforcing and structural steel, I understood the challenges that building Fenway created for Charles Logue, and spoke with his great grandson to give some sense of the man behind the name. My construction background was of immeasurable help in translating what would otherwise have been arcane construction and engineering information into English, and experienced how builders and architects interact. I think I make it possible to envision Fenway Park being built, and that in the end the reader walks away with an intimate understanding of the place that simply was not available before. After reading Fenway 1912 the reader will never be able to look at Fenway Park the same way – I guarantee it.

BB: You mentioned having to get rid of details sometimes if they take the reader away from the larger story. Even in this book, where you could afford to be more in-depth than in a general history book, were there things that you liked that had to be left on the cutting room floor?

GS: Only a little. It would have been nice to use another 20,000 words to better flesh out some characters, and perhaps to give those who are unfamiliar with Boston a bit more to hold on to, but I managed to squeeze in almost everything I wanted, either in the main text or in the endnotes, which are substantial.

BB: What was the most difficult part about writing this book?

GS: The story, to a degree, told itself, but the research was daunting, particularly in trying to pin down exactly how Fenway was built, and precisely when things took place, because I had to look in multiple newspapers and other sources every day over a six month period, never knowing if there would be a story or a picture that would be useful. Sometimes I’d spend all day and only find a sentence or two of information, but that one sentence could tell me something new. That’s how I found out the groundskeeper supervised the transfer of the sod from the Huntington Avenue Grounds to Fenway Park, which is the scene that opens the book. It took place in October, just after the 1911 season ended and work was just starting at Fenway Park, but I found the reference in a story written in late January of 1912, just a sentence.

BB: I loved your book on Trudy Ederle and I remember talking to you about how you spent long hours alone on a lake in an attempt to have some small understanding of what she must have experienced swimming the English channel. How did this experience, strictly from your writer’s perspective, compare with that?

GS: Completely different. For the Ederle book I had to bring myself up to speed about an experience I knew very little about. I didn’t have to do that for this book because I am very comfortable writing about both baseball and construction work. I already have insight into those subjects – I mean I’ve poured concrete day after day after day, pitched with a torn rotator cuff and from other projects already knew a great deal about the time period and the City of Boston during that time.

BB: Can you talk about the alterations that were made to the park during the 1912 season?

GS: There were two Fenway Parks in 1912. The park that opened and the park that was altered for the 1912 World’s Series. They were radically different. The park that opened was a very Spartan facility – just a small concrete and steel grandstand that barely extended past the dugouts with a tiny, ramshackle press box stuck on the roof, a mostly wooden “pavilion” that extended down the right field line, then a standalone block of wood bleachers in center field. There were no stands in right field at all, just a plain plank fence at the back edge of the property, and no stands down the left field line. In left was the earthen embankment that became known as Duffy’s Cliff and a long plank wall that extended to center field, the precursor to the “Green Monster.” The whole place seated just 24,500 people, that was it.

With the Series approaching, the club realized that Fenway was already obsolete. Overflow crowds that had been allowed onto the field during the regular season had been problematic and the National Commission told them they wouldn‘t allow that during the World Series. So while the Sox were on a road trip in September, in only a couple weeks they built 11,000 more seats, adding wooded stands down the left field line and stands in right field connecting the bleachers to the pavilion, giving the field of play the same basic footprint it has today. Fortunately I have a wonderful drawing in the book that shows those changes. And when the park was renovated and reconstructed after the 1933 season, that same footprint basic was retained.

BB: One of the incredible things about Fenway Park is that it has changed over 100 years, and although it may seem antiquated, the current Red Sox ownership has done a lot to add modern touches without tearing the place down. Can you talk about some of the most significant alterations the place has seen and why it continues to last.

GS: Fenway Park has lasted because until quite recently they never really tried to preserve it. There was little waxy nostalgia about the place until the 1980s. If they needed to change something, they just changed it. In that way the ballpark was allowed to evolve, and, except for the original grandstand, was almost entirely rebuilt in 1933/34 anyway. Significantly, I think, is that despite all the things they’ve done recently, they’ve left the interior footprint of the field alone. That allows fans to imagine they’re in the same park where Ruth and Williams and Yaz played, and where Fisk and Bucky hit it over the wall, and to connect that history. That’s mostly a fantasy, but an effective one. So despite the fact that I find Fenway far too busy these days – there are signs EVERYWHERE, and a constant barrage of noise – in many ways the park more resembles the retro parks that were built in imitation of Fenway more than the original Fenway Park – fans can still have a unique and memorable personal experience. A significant number of fans at any given game are tourists, and tourists will even find cramped seats and posts charming.

BB: Fenway and Wrigley are the only two old timey parts left. Do you think they’ll still be around in ten years?

GS: Wrigley, certainly, and Fenway probably, although at a certain point, particularly now that the 100th anniversary is about to pass, the benefits of Fenway to the franchise may begin to play out. As long as Fenway is full for every game, the park will be retained, but economically, they need it to be full. When it isn’t is when I think you’ll start to hear whispers that it’s no longer financially viable that they can’t “compete,” in Fenway. Then the drumbeat for a new park will start. Yet in this political climate replacing Fenway isn’t real viable either, and ballclubs are loathe to pay for new parks without substantial governmental help. A new ballpark in Boston, including surrounding infrastructure, would be a billion dollar project, and I don’t see that happening any time soon.

BB: Did you visit Fenway at all during the writing of the book or did you rely on your past memories of the place?

GS: I’ve seen some, but not all the changes that have taken place over the last decade because I’ve only been back to Boston a few times since I moved up here, and as you know they’ve made substantive changes to Fenway almost every season. But what they’ve done to Fenway recently is only a very small part of this book, and I was familiar enough with the park from when I did live in Boston for what I needed. I used to attend twenty games or so a year, and for a while had a pretty regular gig on NESN as a commentator on Red Sox history and got to roam around a lot. In the late ‘80s I narrated and did a walk around for a big special they did on the park and got to go all over the place – they showed it during rainouts for about a decade. I’ve covered a few games as a reporter, both in the old and new press boxes, snuck in a few times as a fan, taken batting practice there, and been in the dugouts and clubhouses, on the roof and in the lux boxes, under the bleachers when the batting cage was there, that kind of stuff.

BB: I know if this tangential to the book but you do mention in the introduction your own relationship with Fenway and how a ballpark is more like a civic institution, it’s a landmark for generations of people. Can you share some of your experiences at the park, and also, how you used to read poetry outside of it?

GS: Well shortly after I moved to Boston I decided to do something that would combine my two major interested – poetry and writing. I had collected a fair amount of baseball inspired poetry from Casey at the Bat to contemporary stuff, borrowed a little Pignose amp and microphone from a friend, put on an old baseball uniform, sent out press releases, filled a liter soda bottle with Bloody Mary’s and set up shop about 9:00 am on Opening Day and started reading. Back then, people would line up on Lansdowne Street to but bleacher seats.

It was fun as hell. People wondered what the hell I was doing out there, but no one told me to stop or tried to punch me in the face. A few heckled, but some people would actually stop and listen and every once in a while drop a few dollars at my feet. A couple TV and radio stations covered me, and columnists wrote about me – I met George Kimball that way – he did a story on me one year, and so did Peter Gelzinis of the Herald and Bob Hohler, before he was with the Globe. I met Bill Littlefield of NPR that way as well.

Glenn Stout (in uniform), and behind him (also in uniform), Scott Bortzfield, aka The Baseball Bards

So I kept doing it, and did it for nine years. Eventually my friend Scott, who I now live across the road from in Vermont, joined me out there, and people started expecting us. My Mom even made us old style Boston uniforms, and by the end there would be six or eight of us who would all go to the game together afterwards. One poem I would always read was by Tom Clark, a great poet who also wrote the Charlie Finley bio “Champagne and Baloney, called “To Bill Lee.” Wouldn’t you know it that one year, after we stopped and took our seats in the bleachers, who sits down next to us but Lee – this was only a years or two after he had stopped playing. I told him what I did and showed him the poem, which he knew and said, “That’s a great poem!” Which it is. I’ve met Bill a few times since and he remembers it.

It sounds crazy, but if I hadn’t done that, I might never have ended up writing for a living. Reading poetry in public really empowered me, and convinced me that there was a way to combine my interests in writing and baseball.

You know, I moved to Boston because I wanted to live in a city with an old ballpark, and I write that Fenway Park is the kind of place that can change your life. And I mean that, because it changed mine.

Fenway 1912: The Birth of a Ballpark, a Championship Season, and Fenway’s Remarkable First Year is available everywhere books are sold.

“Perhaps because he decamped to Hollywood in the 1980s, while he was still in his prime, John Schulian has never quite been recognized as one of the last in the great line of newspaper sports columnists that started with Ring Lardner, ran through W.C. Heinz and Red Smith, and probably ended when Joe Posnanski left the Kansas City Star in 2009. This is a shame. On his better days, he rated with anyone you might care to name.”

Tim Marchman on John Schulian’s latest collection, “Sometimes They Even Shook Your Hand: Portraits of Champions Who Walked Among Us.” (Wall Street Journal)

John Schulian has been entertaining us this year with the story of his career in “From Ali to Xena.” He has a new collection of sports writing out and we recently caught up to talk about it. Here’s our conversation.

Enjoy.

BB: Your work has been collected twice before: “Writers’ Fighters,” a boxing compilation, and “Twilight of the Long-ball Gods,” a collection of baseball writing. What was the genesis of your new anthology, which is both broader and more specific than those two?

JS: “Sometimes They Even Shook Your Hand” was born of a mixture of ego and an urge to remind readers of the kind of sports writing they’re no longer getting in newspapers. What writer doesn’t want to have his work, at least that portion of it which isn’t embarrassingly bad, preserved in book form? I got my greatest lessons in writing by reading collections of my favorite sports writers—Red Smith, W.C. Heinz, Jimmy Cannon, John Lardner—so having a collection with my name on it became a goal early on in my career. Because “Sometimes” is my third, I may have exceeded my limit, but I hope people will forgive me when they see that it’s wider in scope than “Writers’ Fighters” and “Twilight of the Long-ball Gods.” I’m not just talking about the number of different sports it touches on, either. I’m talking about the personalities involved, and how open they were about themselves and their talents.

I realize, of course, how rare such accessibility is in today’s world, with athletes wary of any kind of media, protected by their agents, and generally paranoid about revealing anything about themselves except whether they hit a fastball or a slider. I think it was you who told me the change came about in the early ‘90s, which did a lot to shape this book. Suddenly, I knew how to make it more than a vanity project. The key was to make it stand as a tribute to the kind of sports writing that enriched newspapers when guys like Dave Kindred, Mike Lupica, David Israel, Leigh Montville, Bill Nack, Tony Kornheiser, Tom Boswell and I were turned loose with our portable typewriters. It was my great good fortune to work in an era so rich in talent, so full of talented people who were both my competition and my friends. Likewise, the athletes were there to talk to when you needed them. I know I didn’t always get the answers I wanted, but I got enough of them to give my columns and my magazine work the heartbeat they needed. It was a wonderful time to be a sports writer, and I hope “Sometimes They Even Shook Your Hand” bears that out.

BB: I was struck by your piece on John Riggins in Super Bowl XVII. Your starting and closing image is the most famous one from that game. You didn’t get any special access that your peers didn’t have and yet within those limitations the piece is just so writerly. The kind you don’t see today. How were you able to condense a guy’s career into a single column?

JS: It was pure reflex. I forget how much time I had for post-game interviews, but it wasn’t much before I had to get back to my computer. I’m guessing I had an hour or so to write the column. There were some guys who routinely finished in less time than that, but for me, that was a sprint. I still wanted the column to be as stylish as possible. Sometimes that was my undoing, because I spent too much time massaging the language and not enough just saying what I wanted to say. With the Riggins column, though, things fell into place. I’d spent a lot of time around the Redskins during the regular season and into the playoffs, so I was pretty well steeped in his story. As for working with the same post-game material everybody else had, there was something liberating about that. No scoops, no exclusive interviews, just a good old-fashioned writing contest. When you get in a situation like that, if you can get your mind right, everything just flows. And that was certainly the case when I wrote about Riggins. I knew instantly where all the pieces of the puzzle were supposed to go—imagery, post-game quotes, back-story. Then my instincts took over, and I even made my deadline. What could be better than that?

BB: The majority of the stories in the collection were written for newspapers. Can you describe the atmosphere of that business in the post-Watergate, Woodward and Bernstein days when columnists were stars?

JS: The newspaper business became truly glamorous after Watergate. Robert Redford played Woodward, Dustin Hoffman played Bernstein, and Ben Bradlee, the Washington Post’s executive editor, practically became Jason Robards, who portrayed him on the screen. It just didn’t get any cooler than that, and the people at the Post were certainly aware of it, maybe too much so. I noticed the self-importance and inflated egos when I showed up there in 1975, in the wake of Watergate. The Post was a wonderful paper—beautifully written, smartly and courageously edited—but it was still a newspaper. There were still typos and factual errors and the kind of bad prose that daily deadlines inspire. The ink still came off on your hands, too. And there were still desk men with enlarged prostates and reporters who stank of cigar smoke, and one night some son of a bitch stole my jacket. Maybe worst of all, if you looked beyond the Post, you could see the storm clouds gathering. More and more afternoon papers were dying, and there was a segment of the population that hated the Post for unhorsing Dick Nixon and the New York Times for printing the Pentagon Papers. But newspaper people, who can be so sharp about spotting trouble on the horizon for others, tend to be blind when it comes to their own house. No wonder it felt safe and good and even magical to work on newspapers after Watergate. I loved it as much as anybody. And I probably would have liked the dance band on the Titanic, too.

BB: Before we get to the players, let’s talk about the section you have on the writers—Red Smith, A.J. Liebling, W.C. Heinz, Mark Kram and F.X. Toole—because it reminds us that the era you cover wasn’t just about the athletes, it was about the writers too. Can you talk about what a remarkable stylist Mark Kram was in his prime?

JS: I don’t think any sports writer ever wrote prose as dense and muscular and literary as Mark Kram’s. He opened my eyes to the possibilities of what you could do in terms of pure writing even though the subject was fun and games. If you want to read classic Kram, you need only turn to the opening paragraphs of his Sports Illustrated story about the Thrilla in Manila. It has to be one of the most anthologized pieces in any genre of writing. I know that it was a mortal lock to be in “At the Fighters” as soon as George Kimball and I sat down to edit the book. Kram had been on my radar since I was in college. He absolutely killed me with his bittersweet love letter to Baltimore, his hometown, on the eve of the 1966 World Series. He was under the influence of Nelson Algren when he wrote it, but I wouldn’t figure that out until years later. All I knew was that he had taken a mundane idea and turned it into a tone poem about blue collar life. Baseball was only a small part of it, and even though I was under the Orioles’ spell—Frank Robinson! Brooks Robinson! Jim Palmer!—I loved Kram’s audacity. He wasn’t afraid of the dark no matter how bright the lights on what he was writing about.

No wonder he was so great when the subject was boxing. When I was in grad school, he did a piece about the fighting Quarry brothers and how their old man had ridden the rails from Dust Bowl Oklahoma to the supposedly golden promise of Southern California. He had LOVE and HATE tattooed on his knuckles, and Kram left me with a picture of him standing in a boxcar door as the train carried him toward a future filled with more sorrow than joy. I read the story standing at the newsstand where I bought SI every week, and when I got back to my apartment, I read it again. I would discover A.J. Liebling, W.C. Heinz, Red Smith, Jimmy Cannon, John Lardner, and all the other giants of fight writing later, but Mark Kram was the one who lit the way for me. And it began with that story about the Quarry brothers and the image of their old man in the boxcar door.

BB: How did you come across F.X. Toole, the least-known of the writers you profile?

JS: As soon as I found out about “Rope Burns,” Toole’s collection of short stories, I snapped it up. I knew he’d written about boxing, of course, but I had no idea how intimately attuned he was to his subject. This was real in a way that boxing fiction hadn’t approached since Gardner’s “Fat City” and Heinz’s “The Professional.” Toole had clearly lived the life, but I had no idea of what a fascinating character he was until I wrote about him for Sports Illustrated. Of course he wasn’t around to tell his story. He died in 2002, two and a half years before “Million Dollar Baby” was made into the movie that brought him into the public eye. It was based on two of his stories, and it was, I thought, a thing of beauty. If my memory is correct, it opened at just a few theaters in L.A. and New York. I saw it at a 9 a.m. showing the day after Christmas 2004. I had tears in my eyes when I saw the first scene, with Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman as two old-timers who thought they were out of chances for a champion to walk into their creaky gym. That was the fight game as I remembered it best. Never mind that the story behind it took some liberties with the way boxing works. This was a movie, not a documentary. What mattered to me was the mood that Eastwood achieved as a director. It was, in a word, perfect. I called Rob Fleder at Sports Illustrated and asked if they were doing a story on the movie. When he told me they weren’t, I volunteered. I have to admit that I flinched when the cover of the issue my story appeared implied that I called it the best boxing movie ever. For my money, John Huston’s adaptation of “Fat City” holds that honor. But I’m proud of what I wrote about Toole and forever grateful that it introduced me to his family and to the wonderful people he had worked with in boxing.

BB: In your piece on Heinz you write about how much you love his boxing novel, “The Professional.” And that you’ve revisited it many times over the years. How is the book different from “Fat City,” by Leonard Gardner, another book famous for its spare, lean prose?

JS: To talk about Bill Heinz and “The Professional,” I feel like I’ve got to talk about “Fat City” first. Why stop at the prose in it if you’re going to use the word spare? There’s not an ounce of fat anywhere in the book. I get the feeling Leonard Gardner went over it again and again as he cut away the excess. I’ve heard stories, in fact, of how hard it was to get him to turn loose of it. I wonder which was more painful to him, paring down what he’d written or handing it over to his publisher. Maybe his pain is why he never wrote another novel.

Heinz, on the other hand, approached “The Professional” like a journalist with a deadline. He knew he had only so long to finish before he had to get back to his career as a freelance journalist. But he was used to racing the clock, and it certainly didn’t hurt his novel. “The Professional” is written in a style clearly influenced by Hemingway, and yet it is fully Heinz’s, from the language to characters inspired by his sports writing life to the sense of decency that permeates it. While its sentences are lean, the book itself paints a broader picture of the fight game than “Fat City” does. “Fat City” is down and dirty, a portrait of two star-crossed dreamers trapped on boxing’s bottom rung, while “The Professional” deals with a boxer who is one fight away from a world championship. It is more generous in that it makes room for more characters and their eccentricities as well as a fascinating picture of the relationship of the fighter and his wife. Look closely and you will discover that Heinz wrote as a man who had lived life and Gardner wrote as one who was still discovering it. The literature of boxing is richer for having both of them.

BB: The stories in “Sometimes” are generous. Is there a reason you chose not to include a piece that might be overwhelmingly negative?

JS: I wanted the book to be about heroes, not schmucks, which is why there aren’t any rip jobs in it. The heroes I selected are both the king-size variety like Muhammad Ali and Reggie Jackson and the kind who exist in the margins of sports, like Steve Bilko, the old minor league slugger, and Paddy Flood, a boxing trainer with a foul mouth and a beautiful heart. What I tried to find was an honest look at each subject. So it is that you see Willie Mays grumping through his way through the early stages of retirement and Jackson as a solitary figure, disliked by his Yankee teammates and dead set on doing things his way, the rest of the world be damned. Then there’s the melancholy that hangs over Pete Maravich as he hangs up his sneakers, a basketball icon unfulfilled by his NBA career, and the utter sadness generated by the shooting death of a high school basketball star named Ben Wilson. To me, the emotions generated by those columns are more genuine than whatever anger I could work up over horse’s asses like Bob Knight, John Thompson, and Dave Kingman. And let’s not forget Billy Martin. The funny thing is, when I wrote that Martin was “a mouse studying to be a rat,” it was just a throwaway line in a column about the Yankees. That it took on a life of its own never ceases to amaze me.

There’s one piece in the book, an essay about Nolan Ryan, that deals with the rip jobs I did. I wrote it for The National Sports Daily when I remembered that I had once accused Ryan of having “a heart like a blister.” That may have been the single dumbest thing I’ve ever committed to paper, so it was nice to get a chance to apologize. I knew Ryan was a warrior. I just lost my mind for a minute. But don’t get the idea that I’m sorry for blistering anybody else in print. When you’re a columnist, you need to have the capacity to raise hell. And I had it. I just didn’t want readers to think I was a ripper and nothing more. Nobody loves a one-trick pony.

BB: Oh, man, the Pistol Pete column is a heartbreaker. One of those pieces that made me not want to read anything else about the guy it was so sad. I know you are a fan of Mark Kriegel’s work. I haven’t read his Pistol Pete biography. Is it as good as they say?

JS: Repent, young fella. Repent and read Kriegel’s book “Pistol.” It will take you places I never could have gone in a single newspaper column. I’m flattered that you think so highly of what I wrote about Maravich, but even at my most self-infatuated, I wouldn’t claim that my 1,000 words amounted to anything more than a snapshot. Obviously, I think I had a pretty good handle on Maravich at the end of his career, saddled with the kind of melancholy that was hard to believe when I thought of the joy with which I had seen him play in college and his early days in the NBA. I remember feeling good about the column when I finished writing it, and feeling even better when the cerebral Ron Rapoport, one of my fellow columnists at the Sun-Times, told me he loved it. Nothing beats a kind word from your peers. For all of that, however, I also know the limits of a column, especially in comparison to the enormous amount of work Kriegel did for “Pistol.” He is a brilliant and tireless reporter, and it shows on every page. Every beautifully written page, I should say. He can make the language stand up and skip a light fandango. He proved himself as a biographer with his Joe Namath book, but I’m here to tell you that “Pistol” is his crowning achievement so far. I’m just glad to be mentioned in the same sentence with him.

BB: Let me just go back to the beginning for a minute, here. How did you go about choosing the articles for this collection?

JS: The writing always came first. If a piece was set on a big stage–Super Bowl, World Series, championship fight–so much the better, but that certainly didn’t dictate my choices. Some of them were based on pure pride of authorship, like my columns about Maravich and Riggins and my magazine pieces about Chuck Bednarik, the NFL’s last true two-way player, and Oscar Charleston, the great forgotten Negro leagues slugger. Sports Illustrated sat on my Charleston story for three years after giving me something like three weeks to research it and write it, and it ended up running in only a fraction of the magazine’s editions. I’ve never had a first-rate piece that way, so giving it a second life in “Sometimes” is a wonderful balm.

The hardest thing to do was to find surprises for the book. Savvy readers, whether young or old, will probably get an idea of what’s inside as soon as they see the photo of Willie Mays on the cover, but I still wanted to treat them to the unexpected here and there. Charleston qualifies in that regard, I suppose. So do Steve Bilko, the minor league slugger and Paddy Flood, the fight guy. But I like to think the biggest surprise is my column on Ben Wilson, the high school basketball star who was shot to death on his lunch hour. It’s a sobering piece about a kid who would never grow up to know the same fame as Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant, and yet, by the standards of the world he couldn’t escape, he was as big a hero as either of them.

BB: The Wilson piece is devastating. On the other hand, did you include pieces on the sporting legends of the time based on their fame?

JS: I wrote dozens of columns about earth shakers like Ali and Reggie. Ali was such a great subject that he always managed to put some sparkle in my work even if I was having a bad day. There are three pieces about him in the book, and I like to think that even if I’d chosen three others, nobody would know the difference.

BB: Was Ali the best subject on them all?

JS: He was the greatest gift a sports writer ever got. Even when he took a vow of silence before his disastrous first fight with Leon Spinks, he was hilarious, taping his mouth shut and making faces and putting on a show that would have made Marcel Marceau proud. Of course he was trying to take peoples’ minds off how badly out of shape he was, but even when his ploy failed, he was still entertaining. I have only two regrets about Ali: that I didn’t start covering him until the downside of his career, after the Thrilla in Manila, and that I was there the night Larry Holmes destroyed him. But that never stopped me from writing about him, and enjoying it. He could be exasperating, even maddening, but he gave us moments of great introspection, too. There’s that opening scene in the long piece about him that ends the book, the one where he contemplates what he has lost. I can’t think of another athlete who was capable of being that open and honest about the sad end he was facing. Ali was beyond special. He was one of a kind. I couldn’t have picked a better subject to ring down the curtain.

BB: How did a guy like Reggie, who was quotable but played a team sport compare?

JS: Reggie was a different case entirely. I must have written a couple dozen pieces about him in the ‘70s and ‘80s—that’s how big a shadow he cast on baseball. And a lot of them were pretty decent, whether Reggie was being Reggie beside the batting cage in mid-season or he was striking out in his classic showdown with Bob Welch in the 1978 World Series. The column I decided to go with, however, was about the inner turmoil that dogged him throughout his days with the Yankees. He was a bright and complicated guy in an unwinnable situation, and that, to me, was the most interesting thing about him.

BB: The book is dedicated to the editors you’ve worked with over the years. I thought that was an interesting choice considering the combative relationship that writers often have with editors. What did you learn as a writer from working with editors?

JS: I had a reputation as a writer who was hard on editors, but I got along with almost all of them. I didn’t suck up to them and I didn’t play office politics; I just did my work and let it stand for itself, whether I was working on newspapers or magazines. Of course, as I climbed the food chain, I developed a very specific idea of what that work should be. But when I was in Baltimore, I was still feeling my way through my stories and I was hungry for guidance. The editors on the city desk knew I could write almost as soon as I showed up, because my first story was about what the strippers, hustlers, and bartenders on a stretch of sin called The Block were doing to get ready for the 1970 World Series. The editors’ job was to make sure I used that talent every chance I got. Consider this: In my first year in Baltimore, I covered a fire in a shanty town and came back to the office and started writing a bland second-day story: “Cecil County authorities are blaming a leaky propane tank…” I gave the top of the story to an assistant city editor named Bob Keller, and the next thing I knew, he was at my side telling me I should begin the story by setting the scene at the shanty town, the charred shacks, the smell of smoke, and the weeping grandmother calling out for her dead babies. Bob isn’t one of the editors named on the dedication page, but I’m eternally grateful for the advice he gave me that day. It made for a much more human and evocative story and I still managed to work all the official statements into the body of it. First and foremost, though, it was a piece of writing.

More to the point, it was my piece of writing. I never wanted to see anyone else’s fingerprints on my work. I had my way of constructing a sentence and a paragraph and a story, and that was what the people who were paying me were buying. Good editors weren’t threatened by that. If anything, they took it as a sign of how much I cared about my work. Just as they had to learn to trust me, I had to learn to trust them. And I wouldn’t trust them if they screwed around with my copy. They were under no obligation to like what I wrote. They just had to respect it enough to give it back to me with instructions about what they wanted changed. Then I could make the changes my way, in Schulianese. That was how I worked with Rob Fleder and Chris Hunt at Sports Illustrated, and with Eliot Kaplan and Paul Scanlon at GQ, and with John Walsh and Jay Lovinger at Inside Sports. If they said change this, that, and the other thing, I did it.

Once you reach a certain level as a writer, you develop a different kind of a relationship with an editor. There should be a running give and take between writer and editor. An editor should be able to tell you that you’re capable of doing better. And he should be able to point out the weak spots in a story. After all, sooner or later, every writer gets lost in the forest. Good editors help the writer find his way out. Better yet, good editors see that writers are matched with the right ideas for them. In my case, I had a good feel for stories that dipped into the past and dealt with bringing ballplayers who were dead or forgotten or both back to life. If the stories were tinged by melancholy, so much the better. That’s why Fleder called my number when he wanted a bonus piece about Bednarik. He was a perfect subject for me–tough and outspoken, an open book emotionally, fiercely proud, and constitutionally incapable of getting along with the three grandchildren who were living with him and his wife when I knocked on their door. There are a lot of subjects that would be served better by a different writer, but Chuck Bednarik was perfect for me.

BB: Why do you have such a feel, an affinity for doing pieces of players from the past?

JS: I don’t know if I was born with an old soul, but I’ve always been fascinated by the past. And by always, I mean from childhood on. No matter where I was living, I gravitated to talkers and storytellers, older guys usually, the kind who could weave a spell with words whether they realized it or not. I had a neighbor in Salt Lake City who was like that, a railroad machinist named Sheik Caputo who had played semipro baseball until he was in his 40s. He’d start talking about the team he ran at the Naval Depot during World War II, or how his mother used her broomto hit the feds who busted his father for bootlegging wine during Prohibition. I ate it all up. When I started writing for newspapers and magazines, I was still that same kid, forever eager to sit down with old-timers who had stories to tell, filing away everything I heard and imagining what the world I was hearing about must have been like.

BB: What’s the difference from doing a profile like Concrete Charlie, where you root the piece in direct scenes from the present, and the stories you did on Charleston and Gibson?

JS: In a way, Chuck Bednarik was a lot like Sheik Caputo–a walking, talking link to the past. Here he was telling me about living through the Depression and flying on all those bombing runs in World War II before he ever played a single down for Penn or the Eagles. They’d stopped making guys like that by the time I interviewed him in 1993. But I was forced out of the past and into the present by the circumstances of Bednarik’s life. Just as he was settling into his golden years, one of his daughters had her marriage break up, so she and her three kids, none older than 10, moved in with him and his wife. He was a combustible, emotional guy to start with, and they were driving him out of his mind — and this was as tough a guy as ever played in the NFL. It was just what my story needed to give it a feeling of immediacy and a touch of the human comedy

Writing about Oscar Charleston and Josh Gibson, on the other hand, was like trying to catch the mists of time. They were both dead, as were so many of their old friends, lovers, wives and Negro leagues teammates. I got lucky with Josh because his son, Josh Jr., was still alive when I reported the story. The same thing happened with Charleston—I found some of the players he’d managed on the Philadelphia Stars and his ex-wife’s niece, and they all had vivid memories to share. The players painted a picture of this ferocious, barrel-chested brawler while the niece remembered the delicate minister’s daughter who couldn’t have made him a more unlikely wife. And let me not forget the Negro Leagues Museum in Kansas City, which gave me access to the scrapbooks Charleston himself kept. The clippings in them were so fragile that I had to wear rubber gloves when I handled them. But that only added to the atmosphere I wanted the piece to have.

When I think about my Charleston and Gibson pieces now, I see them as the sports writing equivalent of either impressionist painting or improvised music. I took all the disparate pieces of information I had about them and tried to create a spell that would evoke their spirits. They were almost ghostly figures as they drifted through my head and onto my computer screen and, ultimately, the printed page.

BB: Some of these longer pieces—the three bonus pieces for SI and the Ali story for GQ—were written after you left the newspaper business. Did writing screenplays in Hollywood influence your writing style?

JS: I don’t think writing in Hollywood helped me become a better writer. But I think working in Hollywood did. I found myself surrounded by people who were smart and articulate and driven in a way I’d never seen in a newsroom. They weren’t necessarily the products of film schools, either. I worked with burned-out lawyers and ex-cops, an electrical engineer and a golf pro, Vietnam veterans and a guy who walked around the office in his stocking feet talking about how much he hated his mother. And I spent far more time in their company than I ever did with the people I wrote about for newspapers and magazines. This extended exposure could be a curse—just because you’re on the same team with someone doesn’t mean you have to like him, or vice versa. But it turned out to be a blessing, because I learned things from all of them. I learned things even when I was on a TV show I was embarrassed to watch. That’s one thing you quickly come to realize in Hollywood: smart people work on bad shows, too. It’s the luck of the draw.

Whatever, on good shows and bad, there were people who opened my eyes and my mind with their intelligence and their use of the language and their ability to think on their feet. I was never any good at thinking on my feet. In fact I may have been the worst ever at making a point in story meetings. But the rest of my Hollywood experience served me well. Not that I realized it right away. During the writers’ strike in 1988, a five-month doozy, I wrote an essay for GQ about how the American male gets his first lessons in style from athletes. I tapped into pop psychology, John Sayles, and Frank Sinatra to make my points, and my prose felt more measured and mature than when I was writing a newspaper column. I couldn’t figure out why at first —and then it hit me: Hollywood. I was as surprised as you probably are, but I really do believe that I’m a better writer of prose today than I was 25 years ago. The process is still a struggle, of course, but the end result is usually more satisfying.

BB: You were in Chicago during Walter Payton’s heyday. How difficult it was to write about a star like Payton who wasn’t a talker?

JS: Walter was a difficult interview subject, but it wasn’t because he was difficult personally. For a star of his magnitude, he was usually friendly and approachable. And yet I always found it easier to talk to his teammates and coaches about him, just as I tried to file away as many anecdotes as I could. There was no way I couldn’t write about him, so I wanted to have as many arrows in my quiver as I could because with Walter himself, I never knew what I was going to get. If I tried to talk to him after practice, I had to do it while he was walking to his car. Of course that didn’t guarantee great quotes or even complete sentences, because Walter was easily distracted. He was a little better after games, when he was surrounded by the media at his locker. Unfortunately, everything he said there was community property. My response was to try to be inventive and paint a picture of the scene that included dialogue that meant nothing to other writers and reporters but that I thought would give readers a glimmer of his personality. You can see what I’m talking about in the Payton column that’s in the book. Here he’s just run for a single-game rushing record and he’s acting like a kid, teasing the reporters by suggesting the kind of questions they should ask him. That, to me, was Walter: a man-child whose promised land was the NFL.

BB: Did you read the excerpt in SI of Jeff Pearlman’s new biography of Payton? Anything about Payton’s troubles away from the field come as a surprise?

JS: I wish I could tell you I looked the other way when the excerpt ran, but I was just one more gawker staring at the wreckage Pearlman described. I was sorry to read about what had become of Payton’s life but not necessarily surprised. It’s like someone once said: every athlete dies twice. They’re going to cease breathing at some point, of course, but they also die in a less obvious way when the cheering stops. And when the athlete is a star of Payton’s magnitude, the withdrawal can be crippling. It certainly was with Payton, and I’ve long suspected that it’s been the same for a lot of ex-athletes whose sad story didn’t wind up on public display. Post-fame syndrome can be as bad in its way as post-concussion syndrome. Just think of the emptiness in Payton’s life – the cheating, the painkillers, the mountains of junk food, the inability to latch onto something that would give him a reason to get out of bed in the morning. And this was a hero whose name will always be revered in Chicago. But fame couldn’t save him any more than the doctors who treated his cancer could. That should tell people how much fame is worth, but they’ll forget as soon as the next hero comes along.

BB: Can you talk about how covering a guy like Gay Fencik for several years set up the bonus piece you did on him for GQ?

JS: I made it a policy never to get too close to anybody I wrote about. There was always the possibility that I might be critical of them, and the last thing I wanted was someone accusing me of betraying a friendship. And yet there were a handful of people in Chicago I really did like more than I should have. Bill Veeck was one — an irresistible maverick. Steve Stone, a bright guy who pitched for the Cubs and the White Sox, and I connected because we were avid readers. And then there was Fencik, who from day one struck me as the kind of guy you’d want for a friend. He was smart without being overbearing, loved the ladies and a good meal, dug music and books and travel. And he turned out to be a far better football player than a free agent from Yale has a right to be. An All-Pro safety, and who’d a thunk that? I wrote about him as a football player and a globetrotter who ran with the bulls at Pamplona and the owner of an oft-broken nose that symbolized Chicago toughness. I wrote columns about him for the Chicago Sun-Times and Daily News, and I profiled him for Inside Sports, too. The Inside Sports piece wasn’t as good as I wanted it to be, though, which pained me for strictly artistic reasons because I thought I’d never get another shot at Fencik at that length. But Art Cooper, the editor of GQ, decided to do a “smart issue” in the fall of 1986, and Fencik was going to be the cover story. This time I got him right, not just as a football player, but as an aspiring businessman, Chicago celebrity, and young man in love. As soon as I wrote my first paragraph, I knew it was going to be the piece I wanted it to be.

BB: I really enjoyed the column on Dr. J. He was a giant when I was growing up but it is as if he’s been overshadowed now by the Magic-Bird-Michael Era. In the ABA and then with the Sixers, Erving was a monster. Nobody really came to close to his star power at the time, did they?

JS: If you put together a proper evolutionary chain for professional basketball, Dr. J comes after Elgin Baylor and before Michael Jordan in the men-who-could-fly category. I suppose David Thomson should be in there somewhere, too, but he never seemed to make as big an impact as the others. I forget how many years Dr. J played in the ABA’s parallel universe, but the fact that so many of us couldn’t see him in person or on TV may have added to his legend. We had to use our imaginations, like old-time radio audiences,, and our imaginations soared as high Doc did. When we finally got a look at him—in a televised summertime all-star game, I think it was—we couldn’t believe our eyes. Long strides, Afro waving in the breeze, and it seemed as if he took off from the top of the key on one dunk shot. And nobody had ever done that before.

But writers who covered the ABA said the NBA never saw the real Dr. J. He’d lost a little elevation by the time he joined the 76ers, but he was still brilliant even when he had to allow room for Moses Malone and George McGinnis to operate. Remember the shot he hit under the basket to seal the 1983 NBA championship, the one where he flummoxed the Lakers by twisting through the air like the spawn of Little Egypt? That was Dr. J as he deserved to have his public remember him.

I remember him, too, for his graciousness the night I tracked him down on Long Island as his days with ABA’s New York Nets wound to a close. I was working for the Washington Post, and I was supposed to do a long piece on him. But he was tied up with another reporter before the game, and afterward he had to talk to the beat writers about the game he’d just played. By the time he came out of the shower, the only people left in the locker room were Doc, me, and Doc’s wife, Turquoise, and Turquoise looked like she was in no mood to wait much longer. I thought I’d struck out. But Doc pulled a folding chair in front of his locker for me, sat down on one of his own, and said, “Take as much time as you need.” He knew he was the best ambassador the ABA had, and he wasn’t about to blow this chance to spread its gospel in the Post. Turquoise could not have been pleased.

BB: I dug the few stories here that contained some of you in them, chiefly the piece on Steve Bilko. The Pacific Coast is similar to the ABA in that it exists in the memories of those who were there. Did you have a particularly good time writing this one?

JS: I love writing about the old Coast League any chance I get. There’s never been anything to equal it in my life. I became a fan when I listened to the Hollywood Stars games on the radio. The first ballplayer who spoke to me was a craggy Stars right-hander named Red Munger — he saw me in the stands one night when I was 4 or 5 and said, “Hiya, Whitey.” But even though the Stars were my team, the first player who truly mesmerized me was Steve Bilko, who mashed 111 homers in two years for the Stars’ cross-town rivals, the L.A. Angels. All these years later, I can still give you the line-up for the great Angels team of 1956, and I’m proud to say I’ve shaken the hand of Paul Pettit, the bonus baby who became a Stars slugger when his arm went bad. I could go on and on, but here’s the most important conclusion I have come to: In my heart of hearts, I’ll always believe L.A. really didn’t need the Dodgers as long as it had the Stars and Angels.

BB: Were there any pieces that surprised you? Ones that turned out better than you remember them being? And did you find any that just didn’t hold up?

JS: The piece I’m surprised to find myself feeling good about is the last one in the book, my essay on Muhammad Ali as GQ‘s athlete of the 20th century. I’d never thought very highly of it, probably because it ran in tandem with a stunning profile of the contemporary Ali by Peter Richmond. I’d look at Peter’s and then I’d look at mine and think bad thoughts about it. In fact I don’t think I’d re-read it until I was putting the book together and sorting through everything I wrote about Ali. Then I realized there was no reason to beat myself up about it–it was an honest assessment of Ali as a beguiling but flawed human being. Of course it also helped that it wouldn’t be next to Peter’s story this time.

If you write a column four days a week, there are always going to be turkeys. When I stumbled upon them in my files, I heard the gobbling all over again. But at least one gave me a good laugh, because laugh is all you can do when you write something as terrible as I did about Reggie Jackson’s three-homer game in the 1977 World Series. I was so busy describing the confetti that fluttered in Yankee Stadium that night that I’m not sure I ever got around to the particulars of his feat. The only good thing about the column was the headline–”Solid, Jackson”–and I didn’t write it. Mike Downey, who went on to become a wonderful columnist in Detroit, L.A. and Chicago, did. It’s like Billy Joe Shaver, the country singer says: some days are diamonds, some days are stones.

BB: Was there anyone you would have included in the book if you’d only found a piece that did him justice?

JS: Bill Buckner is the first name that comes to mind. I saw him win a batting championship when he was basically playing on one leg for the Cubs. Bravest ballplayer I’ve ever seen. And one of the most unfairly maligned. He shouldn’t have been in the game when Mookie Wilson’s ground ball went through his wickets. But I never seemed to get Buckner quite right until I wrote a speech for this wonderfully daffy outfit in L.A. called the Baseball Reliquary. It was as if all my thoughts about him finally coalesced. Better late than never, I suppose. But still not right for the book.

Here’s another one: Morganna the Kissing Bandit. She was one of the great characters of all time, with a chest from here to Katmandu and a wacky sense of humor. I interviewed her when she was stripping at a theater in Chicago, and I tried to interest her in kissing Herman Franks, the Cubs’ resolutely grumpy manager. All she wanted to know was if he chewed tobacco. What a woman.

And there were lots of boxers and fight guys I might have included—Tex Cobb, Earnie Shavers, Angelo Dundee, Henry Armstrong—but I’d used most of them in my book “Writers’ Fighters and Other Sweet Scientists.” I thought about the Mark Aguirre profile I wrote for Inside Sports, too. He was the best scorer in college basketball when he played at DePaul, but also the kind of kid who seemed like he might never grow up. As it turned out, he did. But that happened after long after I wrote the piece.

BB: What about an athlete that you never covered but would have liked to have written about?

JS: I suppose it would have been nice to write about the big names in what I considered rich-kid sports like golf and tennis—Jack Nicklaus, Tom Watson, John McEnroe, you know who I mean. Once I read Leigh Montville and Charlie Pierce on hockey, I realized more than ever that some great characters were getting away from me. But I never lost any sleep over the fact that they were in the hands of other writers. Who knows, if I had written about them, my lack of interest in their sport of choice might have tainted my prose, and they certainly didn’t deserve that. But I wanted to write about subjects that fed my view of the world, subjects that were as real as a broken nose. I liked the idea of victories being hard won, and of losers who faced up to failure rather than pouting and hiding.

BB: Are there any games that you covered stand out during your time as a newspaperman? Not so much your piece, but the event itself.

JS: I showed up too late for Ali in his prime, but I saw Reggie’s three-homer game and Affirmed win the Triple Crown and Walter Payton in his prime and the crowning of Sugar Ray Leonard and more amazing basketball players than I can count–Magic, Bird, Dr. J, Maravich, Earl the Pearl, and on and on—but the event I always come back to is the Hagler-Hearns fight in 1985. Pure electricity. It was like everybody there got hit in the ass with 4,000 volts that lifted them out of their seats and kept them on their feet for the three rounds it took Hagler to look through a veil of his own blood and dismantle Hearns. The two of them came flying out of their corners at the opening bell, and that wasn’t Hagler’s style at all. He was usually a plodder in the early rounds, trying to feel out his opponent for four or five rounds before he stepped up the pace. But not this time. He wanted Hearns’ head and he wanted it now. And when he got his brow split by an accidental butt and he knew it was only going to get worse, he stepped on the gas that much harder. Nothing short of a nuclear weapon could have stopped him.

BB: I loved the way you described the blood pouring down his face as war paint. Do you wish that you were still writing a column when Hagler fought Leonard a few years later?

JS: No, I wished that Hagler had fought Leonard the way he fought Hearns. Marvin should have gone out there and hammered away at Leonard from the opening bell. No fighting right-handed – what was that about anyway? – and none of that other cutesy stuff, just the return of the savagery he’d used to reduce Hearns to rubble. But Hagler tried to out-think a fighter who was his intellectual superior in the ring, and it didn’t work well enough to get him the decision. Of course I thought he won the fight because he was still more aggressive than Leonard, and Leonard didn’t do enough to take away his championship crown. But did I want to write about the fight? The thought never entered my mind. I was completely immersed in my move to Hollywood at that point. I wouldn’t even have watched the fight if a friend hadn’t talked me into it.

BB: It’s been more than twenty-five years since you left the newspaper business. Do you still follow sports?

JS: I’ve become the most casual of sports fans. The sport that takes up the most territory in my heart continues to be baseball. Vin Scully’s voice provides the background music for my life every summer, and as big a mess as the Dodgers’ ownership situation is, I was mesmerized by the seasons Matt Kemp and Clayton Kershaw had. Excellence in the midst of chaos—you had to admire them. As for the other sports, I don’t find much in boxing that holds my attention, and I could not care less about the NFL except for the fact that it proves socialism works. I’ve loved the NBA since I was a kid and George (the Bird) Yardley was its leading scorer, and now I’m in the same town with Kobe Bryant and Blake Griffin. But you can have college hoops and all its tyrannical coaches. I realize there are tyrants coaching college football, too, but the game doesn’t let them get in the way as much as basketball coaches do. That USC team with Reggie Bush and Matt Leinart may have been built on lies and deception, but, damn, it was a joy to watch. The University of Utah is where I went to school, though, so if you want to know my greatest moment as a fan since Billy (the Hill) McGill and the Utes upset Jerry Lucas and undefeated Ohio State in basketball, it was the night the Utes crushed Alabama in the Sugar Bowl. I howled at the moon to celebrate that one.

BB: Here’s a tougher one. Are there any sports writers that you still follow and admire?

JS: More than you might think, given how badly today’s newspaper sports sections compare with the sports sections in my era. Then again, the contemporary sports writers I like best don’t write much for newspapers. I hated to see Joe Posnanski leave the Kansas City Star because his column was part of a grand tradition that can be traced back to the glory days of Red Smith and Jimmy Cannon. But I love what he’s done so far at Sports Illustrated, where he’s mixing columns with long pieces and doing it beautifully. Charlie Pierce and Chris Jones don’t write sports as much as they used to, but when they do, they’re consistently masterful–and I admire Jones’ blog about writing for its passion and the wisdom it offers anyone smart enough to make use of it. Wright Thompson is a good one, too, unless he’s laying his good ol’ boy shtick on too thick. Thomas Lake came out of nowhere to take his place among such big hitters as S.L. Price and Gary Smith at SI. And I keep finding pleasant surprises under bylines I don’t recognize at Grantland. It makes me wonder how many good young writers are out there swimming against the tide of the talk-radio mentality that has dumbed down sports pages. I know it can’t be easy for them, and yet it can be done in newspapers and on the Internet, and there are established stars who regularly prove it. Look at Mark Kram Jr. doing magazine-quality work at the Philadelphia Daily News. And Sally Jenkins at the Washington Post. And Mark Kriegel at Fox.com. And John Ed Bradley on his breaks from writing novels. And Joe Drape at the New York Times. So there is hope out there. Now all readers and writers need is publications and websites to nurture it.

BB: I’m itching to know. If you could write about a contemporary athlete, who would it be?

JS: That’s the toughest question you’ve asked me. I suppose I’d find someone if I was still working in that world, but from where I sit, it’s hard to get a handle on a potentially worthy subject when they all speak in the clichés that make the TV smilers and nodders happy. Peyton Manning interests me for the sense of humor I see in his commercials as well as for his obvious excellence as a quarterback, and now that injury has endangered his career, he might be a better subject than ever. (I told you I don’t care about the NFL, didn’t I? Call me a liar if you must.) I think Kobe Bryant will make a fascinating subject as he heads into the twilight of his career. How does anyone who’s been that brilliant deal with declining skills, how does anyone that driven ever really turn it off? I’ll tell you, though, it’s Clayton Kershaw I’d most like to write about. The kid could turn out to be Sandy Koufax or Warren Spahn, and he and his wife spend the off-season helping the poor and starving in Africa. When I see him on TV, he looks like he has a lively intelligence and a sense of humor. You know what I like most about him, though? His walk. He carries himself like he grew up behind a plow. It’s the way old-timers like Early Wynn and Virgil Trucks walked. It makes me think Kershaw has an old soul. I like that. An old soul with a 95-mile-an-hour fastball and a curve that drops like it’s going over Niagara Falls. So, what did you have in mind, a 1,000-word newspaper column or a 5,000-word magazine piece?

“Sometimes They Even Shook Your Hand” is available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and a book store near you.

There are a ton of baseball blogs but few that are truly original. Josh Wilker’s Cardboard Gods is one, Batgirl’s old Twins blog was another. And then there is Flip Flop Fly Ball, by the British graphic artist Craig Robinson. Craig’s site has been a wonder for years but now he’s published his first book, a must-have for any baseball fan. I recently had a chance to rap with Craig about the book, his site, and baseball.

Dig:

Bronx Banter: You are from England and yet you have a great love for baseball. What are your first memories of the game?

Craig Robinson: I guess the first memories were from movies. You might not notice it in the States, but to us non-Americans, baseball is noticeable because it is referenced so often. Players will be mentioned, TV screens will be showing games, baseball terminology is used. As for an actual first memory, it was being on the subway from Midtown up to the Bronx, being surrounded by pinstripes and blue caps; the atmosphere outside of the ground along River Avenue, and once inside the ground being a bit perplexed by the national anthem being played. (In British soccer, the anthem is only ever played at international games and at the FA Cup Final.) I went with a couple of NY-based colleagues, and as soon as the game began, I was peppering them with questions. My biggest memory, though, was being amazed at how fast the pitchers were throwing.

BB: Which baseball movies did you see?

CR: My favorite is “Sugar.” Really loved that movie. “Pride of the Yankees,” “The Sandlot,” “Bang the Drum Slowly,” “Field of Dreams,” “The Rookie”. They all tend to at some point find their way onto my screen when I’m tired and hung over on a Sunday. The baseball references I remember most are from Seinfeld, actually. Keith Hernandez spitting, Joe DiMaggio dunking his donuts, and George Steinbrenner in general.

BB:  Oh, man. So what did you learn about American culture from them?

CR: I think the movie references just show how ingrained the sport is in American life. And on a personal level, the sentimental talk of fathers and sons is something I can never recapture. I missed out on that because my parents fucked without contraception on an island on the other side of the Atlantic. And, although this doesn’t really answer the question, I’ve learned a lot about American people because of baseball. Without doing any real research, I imagine there’s been a love/hate relationship with Americans since soldiers were stationed in the UK during the Second World War. All my life, Americans have often been portrayed as fat tourists in check pants mispronouncing London landmarks. And in recent years as a bully throwing its weight around in the world. And I feel there’s a level of anti-Americanism in Europe. The great thing that baseball has given me is the chance to talk to people from outside of New York. The first non-Yankee or Met game I went to was in Philadelphia, and on the subway platform, I asked a guy if I was on the right side to go to the ballpark. We got chatting, he gave me a can of beer in a brown paper bag, and we had a great conversation all the way to Citizens Bank Park. I’ve had nothing but good experiences with American people in their cities. When they wish me a good time in their city, state, country, they really sound like they mean it, and I absolutely adore that.

BB: Don’t British boys have a father-son connection through soccer or ruby, boxing or cricket?

CR: I guess some must do, yes. Nobody in my family was that interested in sport. Yes, we’d kick a football around, but it wasn’t any passing on of knowledge or anything like that.

BB: Did you follow or play cricket as a kid?

CR: I was terrible at cricket. Couldn’t do the bowling action smoothly at all. It was all soccer for me. I mean, we had to play soccer, cricket, and rugby at school, but I never cared for cricket or rugby. Since the new 20Twenty format came about, though, I’ve gotten a tiny bit more enjoyment out of watching it.

BB: Was baseball made fun of when you were growing up as the men’s version of rounders?

CR: Yes. There wasn’t even the “men’s version of” at the start, a lot of British people simply refer to it as “bloody rounders.” And I quite likely did that, too. I don’t want to generalize too much, or do my countrymen down, but when it comes to American sports, we tend to be quite snobby about it. As soon as the topic comes up, someone will mention the amount of commercial breaks. And fail to see the irony that the sports we watch feature uniforms with advertising on the front. I mainly think, though, that the time difference makes it hard for British people to get into American sports. It takes a willingness to give it a go, and then a willingness to stay up til gone midnight on a Sunday to watch a football game.

BB: What is it about baseball that you found attractive?

CR: The aesthetics plays a big part. I love the uniforms and the ballparks. I love that it’s so simple: whites at home, grays on the road. I love that the game is orderly for the most part. Pitcher throws ball, batter tries to hit ball, fielder catches or throws the ball, while the batter runs. The elegance of a good double play is pretty much my favorite thing in sports. This is also where the Yankee fan in me comes out, but I love how simple both the uniforms are. They’re beautifully elegant. I love that they look like gentlemen in their uniforms, wearing long trousers; not looking like overgrown children in shorts. I love the lack of advertising on the uniforms. The unique ballparks are such a joy, too. It amuses me to think of future civilizations who discover ancient baseball fields and texts, how they’ll be baffled that a game with such a dizzying amount of statistics, everything measured perfectly is played in parks which are of different dimensions. And the aesthetics inherent in the game’s strong ties to its past. Almost from the off, I could read as much about Gehrig or Mantle as I could about Cano or Jeter.

BB: Other than the uniforms, why the Yankees?

CR: Really, it shouldn’t have been that way. It was an accident of the schedule that they, not the Mets were at home when I was on my trip to NY in 2005. And to come to the game fresh and root for the biggest, most successful team is, I can see, kind of crass. I can try and justify it in many ways. As a European living six hours ahead of Eastern Time, it would’ve had to have been an East Coast team; it would’ve had to have been in a city where I would want to repeatedly visit. But most of all, it’s simply that I fell in love with baseball that night, and on that night, baseball was Yankee Stadium and the Yankees.

BB: Did you ever watch a game before you went to Yankee Stadium?

CR: Only on TV. That was what prompted me to go to a game. I was in NY on business, so caught a few innings here and there of Yankee and Met games on TV. It made no sense, the commentators made no sense, but I was intrigued enough to want to find out what was going on. The first game I saw live was July 27, 2005. Twins 7, Yankees 3. Johan Santana got the win, Al Leiter the loss.

BB: When you started watching games and learning the rules how did you teach yourself what was going on?

CR: I kept notes, and this is how the site started, really, made maps and charts, just to remember things like which teams were where, and where they used to be. It sounds silly, but playing MLB: The Show on the PSP helped a lot too. I had no opportunity to learn the rules by playing the game, but playing a video game version was a decent substitute. Even then, it took me about six months to realize runners had to tag up on sac flies!

BB: Do the numbers, the stats, appeal to you at all?

CR: Not particularly, it just was something that had to learn about to be able to properly appreciate players, and I enjoyed learning about statistics. I’m not really deep into it, I pick and choose what I want to read. I mean, obviously I don’t care about wins, saves, or RBIs particularly. But I’d say I only really look at 10% of what Fan Graphs does.

BB: Can you talk about your interest in the visual arts? What led to your career as a graphic designer? Did you read comics growing up, Judge Dredd and all that?

CR: This is where the father-son connection comes in. My dad was an architect. He wasn’t Frank Lloyd Wright or anything, but he did pottery and even some string art and macramé as hobbies (it was, of course, the 1970s). I always enjoyed drawing as a kid, did a lot of it at school, and then went to art school to study three-dimensional design and university to study jewelrey. I think the things I learned from education were incidental, and mostly, I learned what I didn’t want to do. It was only when, as a working man, I continued drawing, making sketchbooks, and early computer drawings that I realized the greatest talent I have is to kinda do fun stuff. I would love to be Mark Rothko or Yves Klein, but my brain doesn’t work that way. And it was doing the fun, silly stuff in the early days of flipflopflyin.com that lead to me getting a couple of freelance jobs, and then moving to Berlin to work for a web design company. When I left there, I continued freelance illustrating. And still do. I was never really that big into comics. The only ones I read regularly were The Beano when I was pre-teen, and as a teenager, Oink! and Viz.

BB: The sense of fun is integral to your work. Were you a big fan of comedy? Did your father hip you to the Pythons, Beyond the Fringe, or the Goons?

CR: Yeah, comedy is one of those things that I think the British do very well. Monty Python was on TV a lot, and more primetime stuff like The Two Ronnies, Morecambe and Wise, and Les Dawson. When the Young Ones and Blackadder came along, that kinda sealed it for me and I think a lot of my generation. I still notice it in the way people of my age talk, we’re so influenced by the way Ben Elton and Richard Curtis wrote for Blackadder. A whole generation of people who use the word “thingy” a lot.

BB: So saying you like The Goons is like saying you like Charlie Chaplin, right? Hey, did you know that Benny Hill was a very big show over here in the States in the ‘70s and early ‘80s? Used to play it on Channel 9 in NY late night. The Young Ones were on MTV.

CR: Ha ha! I do like Buster Keaton! For me the Goons was just one step removed from where humor was at. I watch it now, and totally appreciate it, but back then, with TYO and Blackadder, things had gotten a bit more, for want of a better word, punk in its attitude. Yeah, Benny Hill’s popularity in the US is one of those weird things that I don’t really understand. I was never really a fan, although I loved the Carry On… films, which were full of smut and innuendo. Proper British silliness. For example:

BB: That’s classic. So, you’ve done your site for several years. How did the book come about?

CR: I was very lucky; a literary agent Farley Chase got in touch with me about a week after the site went online. He liked the site, we had a meeting, and worked on a proposal. I’d also had contact with Pete Beatty, an editor at Bloomsbury, and while the proposal was being put together, he and I separately were having a continual email discussion about all sorts of stuff, mostly baseball, but we got on very well, so it was great that we ended up working together on the book.

BB: What was it like seeing images that you designed for a computer screen on the page?

CR: I’ve kinda gotten used to it over the years. Illustration being my day job, I’m used to seeing computer drawings printed in magazines and newspapers or in a couple of cases, on billboards. I am used to it, but the thrill never goes away. There is something nice about being able to flick through pages and see the colors. And especially for some of the more complex chart, they’d be difficult to fully appreciate on
screen.

BB: Did it change the nature of any of them? I know when I’ve done drawings or small paintings and then made bigger versions of them, the change in dimensions alters everything about the picture.

CR: Not really for the infographics, but certainly for the drawings. Especially the drawings made with the Brushes app, a fantastic painting tool for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. They definitely feel more real printed in the book. I do some pictures by hand, but not that many. Those tend to be more sketchy/doodley. Since getting that app, I’ve found that I don’t really keep a sketchbook with me as much as I used to, cos I can do everything I want to do with my iPod.

BB: Do you ever worry about running out of ideas?

CR: I don’t. Over the years I’ve gotten used to those dry spells, but that’s the joy of the creative rainy seasons: there are always ideas backed up that I’ve not had time to use.

BB: Has the book changed your approach to your work?

CR: I don’t think it changed things that much. It did free me up to do a couple of the more detailed and large charts, because of the restrictions of screen sizes. And, yes, it’d be great to do it more than once, if only because it will mean that the first one was a success!

BB: Sweet. Just a few more, back to baseball. Since you started following it have you gone deeper into the game with each passing season or has some of the appeal worn off on you yet?

CR: Every passing season reminds me of how little I knew the previous season. When friends talk about some 80s reliever or first baseman, I’m at a loss. There’s so much I don’t know, that it hasn’t had a chance to wear off. And the last two seasons have been the first seasons where I have watched a team in the ballpark regularly. I enjoyed getting to know the Blue Jays last summer, and similarly, have enjoyed the Diablos Rojos del México this summer.

BB: Is there a particular period or decade that you are especially drawn to?

CR: Watching the Ken Burns thing, I very much enjoyed the dead ball era stuff, and from an aesthetic point of view, I like the 60s and 70s.

BB: What turns you off about the game? Both historically and currently?

CR: The color barrier, obviously. I don’t enjoy the moralistic outrage about steroids. It’s not just a baseball thing, but I wish homosexuality wasn’t just something that is ignored. The Indians logo, the Tomahawk chop. Taxpayers paying for ballparks is obscene. And, maybe it’s because I’m not American, maybe it’s because I’m not a patriotic person (I don’t see why I should be any more proud of an English person doing something great in sports or life than a German, Mexican, Chinese person doing those things); but the anthem, God Bless America, and militarism makes me a like uncomfortable. And I have absolutely no interest in anything Ty Cobb ever did on the field, because he seemed like what can only be described as a despicable human being. He’s where I put an asterisk. I’m quite sure there were other hideous baseball players, but he’s the one I’ve taken a particular dislike to. I wish MLB and the Hall of Fame would stop seeing themselves as moral guardians. And, quite frankly, a posthumous Hall of Fame entry for Marvin Miller would be disgraceful. They need to sort that shit out now before it’s too late.

The book is out now. Buy it at a store. Or a place like this.

“Just a Guy at Oxford” (Bill Bradley)

“The Great Wall of Boston” (The Green Monster)

“Sam, You Make the Ball too Small” (Sam McDowell)

“The King of the Jungle” (Walter O’Malley)

George Vecsey, right, with his arm around the wonderful Ray Robinson

I recently exchanged e-mails with George Vecsey, the veteran columnist for the New York Times, who started his career at Newsday under Mann.

Here’s our chat. Enjoy:

Bronx Banter: When Jack Mann took over the Newsday sports department was he influenced by any sports editors that came before him? I’m thinking of someone like Stanley Woodward.

George Vecsey: I don’t know. He came up through the news department at Newsday, had some college, was well read, surely knew about sports editors, but was so much an outsider that I doubt he would consider himself an acolyte of anybody.

BB: How would you describe to young readers what the climate of the press box was like in 1960? And how did Mann and “his Chipmunks” differ from the older writers?

GV: Well, the dichotomy was not as clear as I guess we would like to have thought. It may have been a function of age. But Isaacs and Len Shecter of the Post and Larry Merchant of the Philly Daily News were not children, and were capable of thinking for themselves, with Jack only part of it. The Chipmunks were young and energetic and brash. The split was probably on the same generational lines of the Kennedy-Nixon election – new vs. old (politics excluded). Even in 1960, some of us (me at least) were anticipating the forces of the mid-60’s in style and music and attitude. But we all were pretty traditional, except in comparison to the older writers, who were often hooked into the free drinks of the press room and the party line of the clubs they covered, or so we thought. Sounds pretty simplistic, looking back.

BB: Who else writing for the New York papers in the early 60s were like-minded? I’m thinking specifically of Shecter at the Post. Who else was part of the new breed?

GV: Len Shecter, Isaacs, Merchant, of course. And Stan Hochman A lot of the younger guys were Chipmunks just because we chattered a lot, and hung out together. Looking back, it would be hard to put one label on me, Steve, Maury Allen, Vic Ziegel, Phil Pepe, Paul Zimmerman, Joe Donnelly, Joe Gergen. We (or at least I did) admired Dick Young, who was no Chipmunk, but I knew him through my dad when I was a little kid, and Dick was very gracious to me when I came along as a young writer. I was friendly with older guys like Harold Rosenthal (more acerbic than any of us) and Barney Kremenko (a kind man, a friend), and I learned a lot from Leonard Koppett, one of the great people of the business, and I adored Jimmy Cannon. I don’t know that Bob Lipsyte considered himself a Chipmunk, but he and I hung out a lot in those days, and his excellent early work as a sports columnist (in his first tour of duty, I emphasize) re-defined the genre. So it’s hard to define Chipmunk, at this late date. Every generation has its new look. When I came back to Sports in 1980, there was Jane Gross, Allen Abel, Michael Farber, Jane Leavy, Phil Hersh, all good pals of mine. New faces.

BB: And now, the climate is different from then.

GV: The one difference between then and now was that everybody talked in the press box. Talked about the game. Argued about politics. Bickered about where we were going to dinner. Nowadays, the kids are all hunched over their machines, with headsets on, tweeting and facebooking and blogging and goodness knows what else. Nobody talks in the press box. I miss arguments. I miss human contact. I think we had more fun than the Thumb Generation. But the output in the New York Times is really good, probably better than ever, which is what matters.

BB: What was Stan Isaacs like? He was older than you so-called Chipmunks. What kind of sensibility did he have?

GV: Stan is fully a decade older than me. He was very political, saw things through his own prism, his column “Out of Left Field” may have been the most apt title I have ever seen. Stan was/is an original, thought way out of the box, did stunts, and wrote about race and politics when most columnists were writing about “affable old managers” and the like. I learned so much from him, including not being shy about expressing a point of view, of being yourself. I was probably closer to Stan for a longer period – we are still often in touch. He was a great balance of giddiness and dead seriousness. He and his wife Bobbie have been role models for my adult life.

BB: What about Eddie Comerford?

GV: Eddie was a very smart and talented guy who was a mainstay of the earlier Newsday sports section, underachieving probably under the old management. Jack pretty much absconded with Eddie when the national side of Sports was created around 1959 or 1960. He brought out Eddie’s talent and courage. Eddie was an elegant writer and good copy editor. And I was not particularly nice to him. Not proud of it. When Jack got himself fired in 1962, they made Eddie sports editor, and I suggested we go on strike until they re-hired Jack. Needless to say, that did not happen. Eddie became a racing writer after he stopped being sports editor, and I used to see him at the track, and we were fine by then, inasmuch as I had grown up at least a little bit. What kind of editor – and writer – he was, you’d have to ask Jake and Stan. They worked with him longer.

BB: What kind of questions did Mann encourage you to ask the players and managers that weren’t generally asked?

GV: Jack’s point was, ask anything. It was a city side sensibility that did not transfer easily to the clubhouse, but he empowered us (me) by sending us off with orders to ask the right question. Why did such-and-such happen? I realized how much Jack had prepared me when I went from Sports to being an Appalachian correspondent and had to ask a guy what happened when his whole family was washed away by a flash flood in West Virginia. The man talked – because I asked the question directly, and respectfully, and it was important to know. Jack was my mentor on that stuff, in a sports setting. Once, presumably facetiously, Jack sent a guy out to cover the Knicks, a guy who normally did local sports, and knew everybody on Long Island but not New York City. Jack told him not to be afraid to ask the tough question, like when did you know you were horseshit? So our guy went into the locker room and asked Darrell Imhoff, a 6-11 bust of a white center in the age of Russell and Wilt and Embry, and the guy asked Imhoff, “When did you first know you were horseshit?” And the guy answered! As I recall, it was a longer version of, when he set foot in the NBA. But he didn’t kill our guy. We loved it, back in the office.

BB: Did he encourage you to write about race in sports or politics or even the business side of the games?

GV: Absolutely. We thought race and politics (Jackie Robinson, Robert Moses, Walter O’Malley) were major subjects, even after the Dodgers left and Robinson retired. Jack knew it was important to ask why there were not black managers and coaches, what players really thought about each other in the locker room, money and politics. I would say our reporting was probably rudimentary and kneejerk, but we were aware of stuff, and fearless.

BB: What were Mann’s best and worst qualities as an editor?

GV: He was very proud of being honest and independent. He looked at what he considered the crap in a lot of papers one could name and felt he could do better with a few good people. His worst quality was probably an instinct to proclaim his honesty and independence at the wrong times.

BB: Mann wasn’t at Newsday for long. Why was he fired?

GV: Summer of 1962 while I was on the road with the Mets, I heard he got fired. From what I understand, he challenged a managing editor – possibly about production issues rather than one freedom-of-the-press issue of what we could do or write. Couple of hard-heads. The publisher, the beloved Alicia Patterson, who was hands-on and savvy and liked Jack, happened to be away. As I understand it, Miss P felt she could not come back and countermand her managing editor. I suspect she was tempted. Her early death is the single biggest tragedy in the ongoing downfall of Newsday to something akin to a shopping circular under the Dolans.

BB: Even though he wasn’t there for a long time, was his influence felt even after he left?

GV: Hard to say. He certainly left people like me and Jacobson and Bob Sales and Bob Waters in place, and Dick Clemente, and a few others. We had learned a lot and been prodded and pushed. I probably imitated Jack for a long time, more than I should have. He had turned the Newsday sports section into a national force. We expected to go anywhere and do a big-time job, and we were arrogant about being better than the big-city staffs, and we were. That was Jack. He taught me a lot about standards, and asking questions, and being independent.

BB: Was Mann a funny guy?

GV: Yes, he loved telling stories of stuff that happened late at night with players and writers and other night people in dingy clubs and bars in Philly. And Pittsburgh etc. He loved baseball…talked the patois…the good arm, the bad hands, the red ass, etc. He loved telling stories about me. How I couldn’t hit a rubber ball with a stickball bat. How I lost my temper. How I tried to reform the office criminal. He claims to have heard me tell that guy, “You’re still a little prick, but that was a good story.” Or something like that. Jack thought it was hilarious over the years, and so did I. Most of the time he was pretty intense, to put it mildly.

BB: I know he bounced around a lot. Was he a good reporter and columnist?

GV: He did some great work at the Tribune, in Detroit, SI, I forget the sequence, but as I see it from a distance, ultimately he needed to go through a few more jobs before settling in DC. He was a bit unstable, if I am honest about it. He could be difficult. So I imagine he was a handful in the clubby world of SI back then. I wouldn’t know. He was essentially a newspaper guy, From me that is a compliment.

BB: Do you have a story that sums up the kind of guy Mann was?

GV: He didn’t let people get away with stuff. One Friday night, after a long night of high-school basketball, I was the last guy in the office, around 4 AM, just straightening up some records, etc. Jack came back from the Midway Bar and Grill in Garden City (closing time was flexible; Leo the Greek would lay out shots on the bar). Anyway, Jack came back with a colleague from news side, a very good athlete (we all played softball) who claimed to have batted against Whitey Ford in the Eastern League after WW II. Jack meticulously laid out the Spalding record guides for all those years and began thumbing through them. It was getting a little touchy in an office with a lot of spikes, scissors and gluepots lying around. Jack was not letting the guy off the hook. Finally, Jack said pointedly, “Maybe you played under an assumed name?” At that point, I did what I had to do. I told the guy to go home…and I made Jack sit there for another 10 minutes, and then I told him to go home. I was 21. He was my boss. That was Jack. Things were either right or they were wrong. We laughed about it for afterward. The Good Old Days. But they were. He was out of Dickens, more than any American writer. Or maybe he was Thomas Wolfe’s beloved older brother Ben, the sarcastic one in the beautiful final chapter of “Look Homeward Angel.” In the process, Jack saw something in me and promised to make something of me. So he is my boss for life, and he knew it. Whenever I saw him around the track, I hung out with him.

BB: You mentioned that you kept up with Mann in later years when you ran into each other at the race track. Do you know if he continued to follow your work? And did you ever lean on him for writing advice in those early days after he left Newsday?

GV: We kept it. I wouldn’t hear from him for a while…and then I’d get an envelope with that small, neat cursive script that evoked memories of the hand-crafted assignment chart at Newsday. Usually he would catch me in a grammatical or factual error, but more likely he would find me using the first person singular, which he abhorred. As a columnist, I had a hard time using it, but several editors told me that was the coming style – this was when sports columns were in vogue. Jack would circle the I and make a pungent comment in the margin. I thought I was better than the “fly on the wall” archness I associated with Red Smith and others. One time he found six or eight first person singulars in Andrew Beyers’ racing column. Circled them all, to prove his point. But he could detect some political or sporting mistake, and point it out to me. Editor for life.

You can buy Vecsey’s new book, “Stan Musial: An American Life,” here.

The Cardboard God of Hellfire, our man Josh Wilker, has a new book out. I recently had a chance to ask him a few questions about it.

Dig:

Bronx Banter: How did this project come about?

Josh Wilker: I guess the series editor, Sean Howe, is a fan of my blog. He contacted me to see if I had any interest in working on something for the series. I wrote him back an email listing several of my favorite movies, including “The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training.” Sean liked the idea of me writing about Breaking Training rather than any others on the list, and I was into it, too. (I also would have gotten excited about writing about “Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia,” but it’s probably better for my mental health that I focused for a long while on Tanner and Kelly and Ogilvie rather than Warren Oates and a severed head.)

BB: How long is the book–it’s really a long essay, right?

JW: Yeah, it’s not that long, maybe a little over a hundred pages. I just checked the Word doc I sent the editor—it’s about 30,000. It’s got chapters though, which is kind of book-like. I think the idea was for the books in the series to be similar to those in the 33 1/3 books on albums.

BB: I love that this is a pocket paperback. When I got it the first thing I did was see if it fit in my back pocket. There is something so comforting about that.

JW: Right, all books should be that way. Nothing better than heading out the door and not having to carry anything and still have something to read on the train.

BB: What was the first baseball movie you saw as a kid?

JW: “Breaking Training” was probably the first. I’d read a lot of baseball books by the time I saw that movie, but I don’t think I saw any other movies. I guess the first time I saw any sort of fictional baseball on the screen was when Bugs Bunny took on the Balboniesque sluggers on the Gashouse Gorillas.

BB: Why did you chose it over the original “Bad News Bears”?

JW: Probably because I suck. There are lots of other reasons, too, among them that the second movie had a much stronger personal connection to me, and felt more like my own flawed little love rather than a generally acknowledged classic, and also that the second movie seemed to me to have much more potential as a jumping off point to talk about a lot of facets of American culture that fascinate and/or nauseate me, such as the central American myth of the road narrative, the changing ways in which children are raised in America, the malignancy of sequels, the “man alone” myth, etc. But above all that, if I’m being truthful, I don’t see myself as worthy of tackling something canonical. I’m too flawed to be some learned authority shedding light on “Citizen Kane” or “The Godfather.” I relate to the lesser sequel, even love it, and wanted to sing its praises. Maybe it’s kind of a Charlie Brown Christmas tree kind of thing.

BB: When did you see the original?

JW: Unlike my first viewing of “The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training,” which I remember vividly, I don’t remember when or where I saw “The Bad News Bears.” In line with a life that has often felt like an aftermath, like I arrive everywhere just after the things that mattered occurred, I saw the sequel first, and it was years before I saw the original. I probably saw it in my twenties, during which I spent a lot of time catching up on all the classic movies from the 1970s. If I were a couple years older, I probably would have seen it in the theater when it came out, and I’d surely have a different relationship to the two films.

BB: What did you think of “The Bad News Bears” when you finally saw it?

JW: It’s a fantastic movie, one of the last great films of the gritty late 1960s to mid-1970s golden age. I don’t recall my first time watching it, as I’ve said, but I’ve watched it many times since then—as with Breaking Training, I own the DVD. Matthau is of course brilliant, and I also like the occasional long reaction shots some of the Bears get to have, those long wordless shots that you don’t see anymore in movies (and which were gone even by the time of the sequel two years later). Jimmy Feldman gets one of these, as does Rudi Stein, in both cases showing a heart-wrenching human kid reaction to Buttermaker getting caught up in a win at all costs mentality. Both of these characters are marginal, so the fact that they each get to have one of these moments lends a sense to the movie that everyone is worth something.

BB: Where did you see “Breaking Training?”

JW: I saw it at the Playhouse Theater in Randolph, Vermont. In piecing together my personal experience of the summer of 1977, I came to the conclusion that my brother and I would have seen the movie during our yearly two-week summer visit to see our dad in Manhattan, but we lost a couple of movie-going days due to the blackout. It was god to see it back home, because I saw it in a theater packed with all the kids I played little league with, which could not have been a more receptive audience. It’s the most alive, enthusiastic movie audience I’ve ever been a part of.

BB: Was going to the movies a special occasion for you as a kid?

JW: Yes, I didn’t get to a lot of movies because I lived out in the boonies. For this reason, movies were the focal point for my brother and me in our trips to New York to see our dad. We swarmed to the movies during those two weeks.

BB: Did you sit through it more than once?

JW: I saw “Breaking Training” for the first time at night in a small town, and I think there might not have been any showings afterward. I remember we all cheered at the end, and probably after that we all burst out of the theater all charged up. I was staying over at the house of a friend who lived in town, near the theater, and I’d like to think that as we walked back to his house with the other kids who lived near there we were all chanting “Let them play.”

BB: Which of the Bears can you identify with?

JW: I identify with Ogilvie because of his glasses and penchant for baseball stats, and I also identify to some extent with Carmen Ronzonni, not for his surface bluster but for the anxiety underneath, his belief that he needs to be a big fake because at his core he doesn’t have anything solid or valid.

BB: Which one did you fantasize about being?

JW: I think I fantasized that could just sort of slot myself in with the “chorus,” imagining that I could leap onto the van as myself as I was in 1977, another faintly Jewy curly-haired kid with glasses, somewhere on the spectrum in the midst of Jimmy Feldman, Ogilvie, and Rudi Stein. Of course I also worshipped Kelly, and I guess my eventual drift a few years later toward being a kind of premature burnt-out world-weary pothead was in a way a reach toward the untouchable cool of Kelly.

BB: And did you walk around quoting lines from it? If so, which ones?

JW: You know, I can’t say that I did. I think it must go back to the fact that I saw it just that one time in a theater and then that was it, so I wasn’t able to fetishize its particulars as I did “Star Wars.” It existed whole cloth. I certainly remembered the “Let Them Play” chant, and I also remembered and laughed at the “don’t assume or you’ll make an ass out of you and me” routine that the meathead coach goes into at the beginning of the film.

BB: Did you see it before or after “Star Wars,” came out early that summer?

JW: I do know that I saw it after seeing Star Wars twice within two weeks with my brother and father in New York. Then I saw “Star Wars” again when it finally made its way to Vermont and went on to see it again and again through the years because it was so readily available. “Breaking Training,” by contrast, just came through my life that one time early on and then disappeared for a long time, and it became a more intimate personal memory that way. As I mentioned, I now own the DVD and have watched it many times while working on the book. When I first saw it as a 9-year-old, I sincerely thought it was flawless. Now I see its many flaws, but I still love it. When Tanner makes his stand at the end, I always get a little choked up, even after all these viewings. Really, to amend an earlier answer, in some ways I most related to Tanner, even though I knew I wasn’t as tough as him. Like him, I really didn’t want the game to end.

BB: You write about the social events of the day in your book. How did the movie relate?

JW: Well, I try to drag my father into the book, which is funny, because the film is about as far removed from his sensibility as any film could ever be, a supreme example of what he would call “drek.” But I wanted to find some way to give voice to some of his thoughts on the collapsing world economy, which his studies on World Systems Theory have led him to believe began in the 1970s. There are certainly signs of that collapse in the movie, which is itself a capitalism-prompted deterioration of the aesthetically purer world of the first movie. Also, you see clues that the movie is something of a crystalline distillation of a white male American fantasy of total childish freedom on the road, women and people of color (e.g., Ahmad, who is reduced to a broad caricature in the sequel) marginalized. My dad’s feeling is that people should not just capitulate to the powers that be, however, and I try to channel that thought into an appreciation of Tanner’s stand at the end, and into some similar stands in that time of malaise and decline.

Order “The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training,” by Josh Wilker, here.

Over at SI.com I’ve got a 30-minute podcast interview George Vecsey about his new Stan Musial biography.

Dig it…(There is no direct hyperlink to the interview, just go to May, 2011 and you’ll find it there.)

Babe Ruth was clearly the best player in Yankees history, Yogi Berra earned the most World Series rings, and Joe DiMaggio was, well, Joe DiMaggio, but somehow Mickey Mantle still stands apart. He came of age along with millions of baby boomers who curled the brims of their hats to match Mantle’s, imitated his swing, and even limped like he did.

Quite simply, he was the Mick.  Jane Leavy explores the man and the legend in her recent book, The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood.  Ms. Leavy was generous enough to talk with me about her book and a few other topics.

Enjoy…

Bronx Banter: Behind every good baseball book, you can usually find an author who grew up loving the game, who grew up playing catch with his father…

Jane Leavy: Ah, ah, ah… Watch that “his,” watch that “his,” Hank!

BB: But I think that’s what I want to get at, the fact that typically most of these writers are men who were boys growing up wanting to be baseball players and then settled for being writers. I was just wondering how much of that was true of you as a child?

JL: Well, I don’t think past the age of probably five I really thought there was much prayer I was going to be a baseball player. I think the inheritance of a passion for a game, whether it’s baseball, since baseball claims a supremacy in that, though certainly I know people whose devotion to the New York Football Giants or the Jets or even, God help us, the Redskins, is handed down along with the season tickets the same way. But baseball certainly has a claim on that matter of inheritance, and yes, I inherited my love of the game from my dad. I don’t think I had any illusion that I was going to be out there on the field with the guys, and that was pretty sad. I could dream, but that’s different. And I do think that that makes a big difference in the way that women write about sports. I’ve often said, and I really do believe this, reporters are supposed to be outsiders. There’s always been a little bit of a competitive thing going on when the guys who wish they could’ve been the second baseman for the New York Yankees are trying, almost, in their question to prove to the interview subject that they know as much and they could’ve been out there with them and the whole nine yards. I don’t think any woman is going to go into a locker room with that same notion. Reporters are supposed to be outsiders, that’s what we are. When you’re a woman in a locker room, that’s what you are. You’re an outsider.

BB: It reminds me of something that I heard Suzyn Waldman once talk about. She said that when a player is traded, a male reporter will immediately think about how it impacts a team, whereas she would always realize that behind that player there’s a family that’s being uprooted, and she felt like her female perspective allowed her to see more of a situation than just what was going on on the surface. It seems like you’re kind of saying the same type of thing, I suppose.

JL:  Well, I don’t think you can make the acute generalization that every male reporter is gonna not wonder about how somebody’s nursery school age kids are gonna feel, or how every baseball wife is going to deal with yet another relocation. Not every guy is an insensitive boob, and not every woman is an empathic shoulder to cry on. As a reporter, it’s partly determined not just by personality, but by assignment. If you’re just out there to write the game, whether you’re male or female, it doesn’t matter. For a while, once in a while I would trade bylines with a male friend just to see if anybody noticed. I think I wrote this actually once. When I first started sports writing, the gig was can you write so that nobody could tell you were a girl. You had to prove that it was an okay thing to be. I do believe, and this is what I was saying, there are advantages, though it’s certainly a double-edged sword, particularly early on – but there are advantages to being a woman in a locker room. There are things that guys tell women that are different than what they tell other guys. And there are questions that women may ask that are different than what a guy may first ask. I always use this example. I’ve heard countless numbers of men say to a player, “Well, that slider didn’t do much, did it?” The question presumes that they know exactly what the pitch was. Well, maybe they don’t. Half the time the hitters don’t. But a woman, certainly this woman, would presume nothing. I would say, “What was the pitch? Do you know what that pitch was? And where was it? Where did it go? What was it supposed to do?” That’s what I meant about the competitiveness. I didn’t feel the need to show my bona fides in that way.

BB: My ten-year-old daughter recently learned how to keep score, can identify most of the Yankee players, she loves to play catch with me…

JL:  My kinda girl!

BB: Exactly. And even though that’s not typical of most girls, she certainly isn’t seen as odd. How were your feelings about baseball viewed when you were growing up?

JL:  I measure the change, which I think is profound and which you’re seeing in your daughter, with a story I’ll tell you in a second. Certainly as I approached that tender age, at least growing up in Long Island, you’re supposed to be thinking about what you’re going to wear to all the bar mitzvah and bat mitzvah parties, and not whether the first baseman is in a slump. My particular infatuation for baseball, and more particular for the Yankees, did not serve me exactly well. I’m old enough that it was the era of tom boys, and girls were supposed to like boys more than they liked baseball, and I was a girl who liked the things that little boys got to do. And that was not a popular way to go in 1950s Long Island. As a young girl I was, I’m sure, pretty unaware of whatever may have been swirling around me, but as I got older it became more uncomfortable, and for period of time I suppressed the Yankees.

BB: What a terrible thing.

JL:  Terrible! But I have a daughter who’s twenty-two, and one day when she was somewhere around eight, at the age when little girls like to wear make up and those stick-on earrings that come in little packages, so maybe seven or eight years old, something like that. I have a painting in the front hall of my house, a floor painting, that’s almost a perfect square, but it’s all painted florals. It’s almost like a mural on the floor, but Emma decided one day that it made for a perfect boxing ring. And down she comes dressed in a red sweatsuit with lots of appliqué butterflies and flowers, wearing her brother’s Michael Jordan hightops, a tutu over the sweatpants, her father’s boxing clubs from when he was a kid, forty-seven different shades of lipstick covering her face…

BB: She was covering all the bases, basically.

JL:  You got it. Seven or eight pairs of those stick-on earrings, and she comes downstairs and plops down in the funny boxing ring she imagined, and she says, “Put ‘em up!” Now, what that said to me was, this is a new generation. This is not a case of having to choose between either or. Emma felt perfectly comfortable, and still does at age twenty-two, getting rotty and sweaty and being competitive and being, in my opinion, the most gorgeous twenty-two year-old young woman on the face of the earth, who has successfully, finally, taught this tom boy mom how to put on makeup correctly. So I think that that schism that used to exist for young girls in this culture, doesn’t anymore, and I think that’s the best measurement I can give for how different it is for my daughter, your daughter, compared to how it was for me.

BB: That’s interesting to hear that perspective. All of which leads us to Mickey Mantle. What did Mickey mean to you as a fan of the game?

JL:  Ah, the Mick. Well I don’t think he meant anything particular to me as a fan of the game, it was a far more personal relationship. I think that these relationships that existed then between kid and player or grownup and player had a really proprietary quality to them. When you used that phrase, “He was my guy,” it’s possessive. It’s in the language and the structure of the sentence, a kind of possessiveness. We belonged to each other. He was my guy, I was a Mickey guy. So this didn’t have so much to do with being a fan of the game – though I was also that and remain also that – this was about a particular attachment to a public figure who touched something – obviously metaphorically – in me, just as Willie Mays did for other kids and Duke did for kids in Brooklyn or Michael Jordan or Larry Bird or Magic Johnson did for other kids. There was a part of the book that got sort of crunched down. I suppose it was the right decision, though it pained me. I went to Columbia, and there was a teacher there back in the day, Ethel Person, a very prominent psychiatrist who taught a class in human development, and I just thought she was the coolest thing ever. She wore all these swanky, black chemise dresses and smoked cigarettes through a cigarette holder. Whoa! This class was odd because it featured a lot of Columbia football players because they thought this would be an easy grade. Anyway, she wrote this book called Feeling Strong: How Power Issues Affect Our Ability to Direct Our Own Lives. Ethel knew nothing about sports, which is part of what made the whole class so funny back in the day. And in the middle of this book she suddenly does this weird digression into what the whole psychoanalytic underpinnings of the who’s better debate is all about. Her whole argument is that these fierce debates that continue into late middle age about who’s better are basically for young boys a way of trying on the vestments of adulthood and what kind of man they want to be, under the guise of it being an objective conversation with all these statistics. You’re investing this power in this person because you’re trying on different ways of being man. Am I gonna be a Mickey kind of man? Am I gonna be a Willie kind of man? The fierceness of those debates is what that is about. So I thought that was brilliant. I thought, “Oh, my god, that explains it – of course!”

BB: That’s why people are so passionate.

JL:  The only place I would disagree with Ethel – and I never disagree with Ethel – is that I don’t think it’s exclusive to boys. [Laughing] It certainly wasn’t for me. That’s a long way around to your answer, and I apologize…

BB: That’s okay.

JL:  What I’m saying is that everybody remembers the news conference, Mickey’s last news conference, when he got up and pointed that withered thumb at his caved in chest and said, “I’m not a hero. Don’t be like me.” Well, I did want to be like him, and not just ‘cause I wanted to be able to go up to the plate and pop one over the fence, but because I had – and I couldn’t have articulated this at that age – I had physical problems dating from my premature birth. I have this very inchoate sense of myself as being, for lack of a better way to put it, half-baked because I was born two months prematurely. So I was, kind of, not fully baked, and I had things that weren’t even diagnosed until later. I didn’t understand them, but I had a real sense that something wasn’t right and I had to cope with it. And Mickey did, too. I knew that, we all knew that. So my identification with him had to do with the way he carried himself. I couldn’t explain it at that age. It was a way of learning how to carry myself despite a sense that I had of being physically… I hate challenged… I don’t want to say challenged…

BB: Fragile or vulnerable…

JL:  Yeah, right. Thank you. Exactly right. So he really did help in that way. And the other thing, of course, was the proximity of my grandmother’s house and Yankee Stadium. To me, going to see her was the same as going to see him, and vice versa. In the weird elixir of childhood and imagination and a grandmother who was willing and able to give me permission to be exactly who I wanted to be, whether or not it comported with notions of fifties girliness, in my mind the two of them are inseparable. When I got to think about it more later, I realized that in some ways they were more alike than I realized and I think I wrote about it a little in the book. I said something to the effect that, how different is it really, my grandmother’s determination to fast on Yom Kippur despite her diabetes, and Mickey’s willingness to play hurt. They were both taking one for the team! And it represented the same kind of bravery to me, and the same kind of grace. To watch my grandmother shoot her thigh with the insulin that she kept in the refrigerator was to me an incredible act of heroism. I was in awe. And again, how different was it, really, than what Mickey could do? So they were just all mushed up in my mind.

BB: You talked earlier about how you felt like you were able to be objective as a reporter. How difficult was it to be objective as you were writing a biography of your guy?

JL:  Impossible. Which is why I wrote it the why I did. I’m not sure any of us is ever really objective, Hank. I think that’s a faux objectivity that we like to affect. Even if you allegedly start out objective, I’m not sure you end up there. Certainly in this particular case I could not pretend to be dispassionate. There was just no way. And so the only way, I concluded pretty fast, that I could write this book – other people could do it differently – but the only way I could write this book was the way I did, by acknowledging what he had meant to me, acknowledging the fierce disappointment that therefore ensued upon being confronted with what and who he really was.

BB: Talking about Mantle the player, one thing that I feel like we’ve lost in this internet age is that sense of mystery and excitement that comes along with a hot new prospect. I think we got a little taste of that this past summer when Stephen Strasburg made his debut with the Nationals, but even with Strasburg, we still knew an awful lot about him by the time he arrived. What was it like when Mantle made his debut in 1951? What were the expectations?

JL:  Well, I think it was an understated set of expectations. I think by the time he had been the MVP of the Western League as he was the year before, it was pretty clear that he could hit. What was it .353 or something like that? But still, nobody expected him to be in the major leagues the next year. Nobody. And he wanted to go back down and play for Harry Craft again. He really did. So the effect of him blowing through that thin air out there in Arizona was extraordinary. Of course, as Red Smith used to always say and Stanley Woodward would write, “Quit godding up those ballplayers!” But you don’t really realize you’re doing it when you’ve spent that much time in the sun, and there isn’t much incentive for doing it either. So the gushing of column inches had as much to do with the astonishing demonstration and breadth of his talent as the sun, the air, and the desert. Mickey would often laugh about it later about how thin the air was in Arizona. It’s not like he wasn’t doing what he was doing, but he certainly wasn’t really an outfielder, was he? One of things that puzzled me, and I still can’t figure out, is how come in 1950 Casey says, “I don’t wanna see him at shortstop ever again,” and yet he plays another whole season at shortstop for the Joplin Miners. One possible scenario, what that tells you is that they really didn’t expect him to be in the major leagues in ’51 and they thought he was gonna have another season to learn how to play outfield.

BB: I can’t quite imagine a bigger move than going from Commerce, Oklahoma, to the Yankees and New York City. How was that transition for Mantle, in terms of both baseball and culture?

JL:  Well, I’m sure he would’ve done his best to hide whatever fears were there. His father obviously knew enough to go to Red Patterson and say, “I want you to look out for this kid.” And for Red Patterson to turn around and say, “That’s not really my job, I can’t be his agent…”

BB: Yeah, I was struck by that. I can’t imagine something like that happening today.

JL:  Right. So his father clearly intuited, maybe because of his role in producing this particular phenomenon, physically and emotionally, that he was ill-prepared to negotiate this. After all, how could Mutt Mantle really know what it meant? He couldn’t. He could have a sense of it. He’d taken him to St. Louis and seen Stan Musial in an elevator, but he couldn’t have an idea of what it was like to come to New York with all of that potential. The fact is, I’m sure Mickey was terrified. Red Smith wrote that fabulous column about him going out and playing in a pair of spikes with the soles flapping like radio announcers mouth. What does that tell you about how prepared he was?

BB: One thing that really caught my interest was your description of the rivalry between Mantle and Joe DiMaggio. Can you talk about that a little bit? That tension?

JL:  Picture little Mickey Mantle in study hall looking at a Life Magazine spread about Joe DiMaggio. He’s sitting there with his pals saying, “I’m gonna be Joe DiMaggio one day.” Well, how many people around the country have done that, sitting at kitchen tables or in study halls? A zillion. Do they really think they’re gonna become Joe DiMaggio? Do they possibly, in their wildest imaginations, think that they’re gonna end up playing beside him in right field as he tries to figure out a way to retire as gracefully as he had played? I don’t think so. And then you have Casey Stengel who has his own ambitions. Jerry Coleman has said to me, “Joe coulda kept playing. He didn’t need to quit.” That’s the only person I ever heard say that, but I put a lot of credence in Jerry Coleman’s statements. Stengel clearly wanted to get the process of being in the second half of the twentieth century under way. And in his view, clearly DiMaggio was the first half of the twentieth century, and I don’t think you can underestimate how much Stengel wanted to be able to mold someone and to be known as the Ol’ Professor who really could teach and tutor and shape the career that would then reflect back on him. So with all that and DiMaggio, who may not be, after reading Richard Ben Cramer’s unbelievable book, anybody’s idea of the best human being on the planet, but the fact is it’s not easy to seize center stage than it is to let go of it. And you can certainly have compassion for anybody, any of these athletes, who having been Joe DiMaggio, having been Mickey Mantle, have to figure out a way, not just to leave it, but to go on.

BB: Right, right.

JL:  That Joe DiMaggio would have ankle spurs – an Achilles Heal – doesn’t really, metaphorically, surprise me. And here comes this young kid, who for that very brief moment in time, really can do anything. Now, could he do it for eighteen years? Look at your analogy to Stephen Strasburg, which is fabulous. My publisher was inundated after Strasburg’s fourteen K game with proposals – the greatest pitcher who ever lived! Well, wait a minute. How many games has he pitched? There’s a rush to judgment in the making of daily history. You don’t know how it’s gonna come out, and it’s really hard to remind yourself that before Mickey Mantle got hurt, before the whole process of physical deterioration set in, before Mutt died, before Mickey started carousing with grieving Billy Martin, you didn’t know what he was really gonna become. Merlyn would say later that she regretted naming their first boy Mickey Junior because of the burden it was. Well, my thought was, she didn’t know what the burden was gonna be then, because Mickey Mantle…

BB: Wasn’t Mickey Mantle.

JL:  How did you know what this little baby was gonna have to be carrying around with him? But I think that that’s what’s so amazing about that moment. Talk about what if. That was the moment, before the knee, those seven months, one of which he spent in Kansas City wearing #35 for the Blues, where you really could allow your imagination to run wild and imagine not what he could have done, but what he might do.

BB: When Mantle arrived in the early 50s it was kind of a golden age of New York City baseball, with Duke Snider and Willie Mays leading competitive teams in Brooklyn and Manhattan while Mickey did his thing in the Bronx. What was that rivalry like? Did those three men have a sense of what was going on, or is this something that’s been created in retrospect?

JL:  I said something to Duke about ’51, and he said, “No, it really started in ’54.” Mantle had been injured in the Series, then Mays left for the Army in ’52 and ’53, so ’54, he’s right, was the first time that they were really, metaphorically and literally, together on the big stage. So that’s when it really all dates back to. The “who’s better” thing didn’t really begin until ’54, because that was the first time they really all played a season on that center stage. I think it certainly gained force over the next couple of years with Duke continuing to hit his forty home runs a year and the Dodgers and the Yankees being in the two World Series. And Willie faded, of course. He didn’t have those great years. All things you read about Mantle, how he’s not fulfilling his potential, there were stories like that about Mays.

BB: It’s surprising. I recently read the Mays biography, and it’s kind of amazing to read what people were writing about him at the time.

JL:  Duke was really great on this subject. I think he certainly resented it, and Carl Erskine described this to me how O’Malley exaggerated the pressure by putting all the averages up on the scoreboard. All through ’54 you had the head-to-head things with Mays and Mueller and Snider. Duke didn’t like that at all, and he felt it was counter to the Branch Rickey way he had been schooled in: if the team wins, the individual numbers will be there. But it really was the old ethos. That’s what they cared about then. Not just because they were selfish, but because that was how they were gonna make the money, if they played in the World Series. Scott Boras wasn’t around to count the base hits and the stolen bases. It didn’t really matter. Duke said that he and Willie would kibitz behind the batting cage – Oh, I got you today, blah, blah, blah – but they weren’t close friends by any stretch of the imagination. I love the story about Willie hitting two home runs in Ebbetts Field and coming out to the parking lot to find all four of his tires slashed and having to take the subway back to Harlem. This was personal. When people say it took a lot of guts to be a Mickey fan in Brooklyn, it really did! I think Duke and Mickey overlapped a lot in the World Series, obviously, but a lot of it is retrospective. Right at the opening of the ’57 season Stan Isaacs had a piece in Newsday about who’s better, saying we’re starting to see it now, but we’ll know in fifteen years when all the statistics are dry. Well, we don’t know, because we’ve just invented more statistics to keep the debate going. The debate’s just relocated from the street corner to cyberspace.

BB: It didn’t take long, of course, for Mantle to grow into – and even exceed – the expectations that he first brought to the big leagues. But while he was winning multiple World Series and winning the hearts of America, he was also spending time off the field with people like Billy Martin and Whitey Ford. How serious was all this debauchery? How much did it affect Mantle’s performance on the field, both the next day and the long term?

JL:  I think that is impossible to answer. When people like Ralph Houk said to me, “That’s all exaggerated, he didn’t drink that much.” When Moose Skowron said, “He didn’t drink that much, he didn’t hurt nobody,” they’re talking from a very different perspective.

BB: And aren’t they in a sense kind of defending him?

JL:  Yeah, but let me see if I can explain it. We need some perspective. It was a culture in which that was the norm. So how much he was doing…There’s good evidence that with Billy Martin around, particularly with Billy being as emotionally distraught as he was in ’53 when his wife left and took the baby, and Mickey still not over his father’s death, that they hit it pretty good. But what Sam McDowell said to me is the thing that’s most persuasive. I don’t think Houk was lying when he said he didn’t drink that much, it’s just that the standards of how much was “that much” are different. I don’t think he came to the ballpark in the ’50s hung over. I don’t think he probably got drunk every night. But what Sam McDowell said, and what is true, is that the seeds of his alcoholism would’ve been invisible. You just would’ve thought he was being irresponsible, because he wasn’t doing anything that was much different from anybody else. What you couldn’t see was that the effect on his biochemistry was different from everybody else.

BB: It wasn’t just a guy going out drinking.

JL:  No. He didn’t know it, and they didn’t know it. There was just no way to know that.

BB: I wanted to also ask you about 1961. So much has been written about that and movies have been made. What kind of relationship did Mantle and Maris have?

JL:  I really think the stuff about them hating each other was untrue. It really was one of those reporter created…

BB: It made for a good story.

JL:  Yeah. Now do I think that Mickey didn’t care about not winning the home run race? No, I think he cared. To the point where he hated Roger Maris’s guts or anything? No, of course not. I think he would’ve liked to have broken that record, but I think this is one of those cases when ballplayers say, “Do you know how much time we were out there together?” And it was true. At least for part of the summer, it was true.

BB: And what about the end? There are a lot of contradictions in the Mantle story, especially when we look at his final days. He’s every woman’s dream, but he’s juggling two different…

JL:  Whoa, whoa, whoa. Why do you say that?

BB: That’s part of the contradiction, I think.

JL:  No, I think that is a male fantasy.

BB: Well, let me tell you what I think, and then you tell me why I’m wrong. The next part of the question is that he’s every man’s hero, so maybe I’m just assuming that if I love him, then every woman must love him, too.

JL:  It depends on when you’re talking about.

BB: Over the course of his career. Because what I’m thinking about is this contradiction that he’s a hero, but in the end he’s juggling two different women during his final hours, and he essentially drank himself to death. During those days I remember a lot of people being very conflicted, going through two different types of mourning: the death of the man, and the death of the legend, I suppose. But the legend survived all of that. Am I making any kind of sense? Does any of that make sense to you?

JL:  No. I think that in his youth, the Mickey Mantle whom you see on the cover of the book was an incredibly gorgeous, magnetic figure, and that men and women were infatuated with him. I think it’s an erroneous supposition to assume that he was later every woman’s dream. I don’t buy that at all. I think he became more every man’s dream: what you can get away with, how many women you can have, how you can do all this and get drunk every night. I think it became more a male fantasy than a female fantasy. But does that mean that there weren’t women ready and willing and available? No, of course it doesn’t mean that. But you know, that’s true for baseball players pretty much across the board. There are always the baseball Annies.

BB: So how did you reconcile your feelings about him as you grew older and grew more to understand what was going on?

JL:  I’m not sure what you mean.

BB: For instance, when you talk about how important he was to you as a child, and even looking back how intertwined his memory is with your memories of your grandmother. I think it’s interesting how we can still separate, how we can accept one part of a person without throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

JL:  Isn’t that just being a grown-up? That’s probably the answer to your question. Grown-ups are capable, allegedly, of holding more than one idea in their heads. That’s what the subtitle means. He can be as magnificent an athlete, compromised as he was by circumstance and disability, and he can be not somebody you would’ve wanted to have passed out in your lap. Just because things are opposite doesn’t mean they’re mutually exclusive. To me, that’s what it means to be a grown-up. It means you don’t need to see things or people as one-dimensional. You can see that it’s complex. There was good and there was bad. It literally isn’t all black and white.

BB: I think that sums up Mickey, and a lot of people.

JL:  I think the part that I care about most, Hank, I think maybe I said it better in the book, is that Mickey forced me to grow up. He forced me to see him as he was and not as I wanted to see him. I think that the thing that he has in common and the unshakeable bond with his legions of Mantleologists, the fan boys, is the refusal to grow up, the refusal to abandon their fond illusions of childhood. And Mickey, I think to his credit, was trying over and over and over in so many ways with so many ridiculous excesses to say, “Look at me!” – just like he said “Don’t look at me” at the end – he said, “Look at me! Look at me!” I think a lot of his behavior was a cry for help. And nobody could see it or could hear it over the roar of the crowd.

[Photo Credits: Bob Olen and John Dominis]

To celebrate the publication of the 20th edition of The Best American Sports Writing, I sat down with series editor Glenn Stout. Dig our chat.

Bronx Banter: How many pieces do you read each year, and how do you find all the stuff?

Glenn Stout: I can’t answer this any more specifically than to say “many thousands.”  I don’t waste time counting. But understand, a lot of what I read I only read until I say to myself “This is not going to make the book,” so I stop. Suffice to say that I read enough of every submission, and enough of every significant story in every publication I receive, that I don’t stay up nights worrying if I read enough. Almost without even thinking about it anymore, I read a couple hours a day. It’s like feeding the dogs or working out – part of the fabric of the day.

I find things by looking and by being easy to find myself and by trying to make it clear to every writer that he or she is encouraged to submit material. Several hundred magazines and newspapers are sent requests for submissions and/or complimentary subscriptions.  I subscribe to a healthy number of publications myself, a few good friends, like yourself, and even readers, recommend stories to me, and I send out a mass e-mail request to a mailing list I’ve put together over the years. I also read some blogs and check some message boards to see if there are any stories people are talking about. But most importantly, I just keep my eyes open. A story like one by Pam Belluck in the New York Times a few years ago – “How to Catch Fish in Vermont,” wasn’t a submission, and didn’t appear in the sports section of the Times. I stumbled upon Belluck’s story while looking for something else. The same thing happened this year when I found Eric Nusbaum’s story “Death of Pitcher” from his blog, pitchersandpoets.com. I was looking for something for Fenway 1912, my book on the first season of Fenway Park which will come out next year, and I stumbled on his story. There are probably eight or ten stories each year that get sent to the Guest Editor that I “find” accidentally. But they are “on purpose accidental” because I leave myself open to finding them. I’ll steal a magazine from a doctor’s office if there is a story in it that might be good for the book.

BB: Has the process changed at all over the years?

GS: The biggest change is that 20 years ago all my browsing took place in hard copy. I worked at the Boston Public Library then and had access to where the past years’ magazines and newspapers were kept. I’d go in the occasional Saturday and spend the whole day reading. Now, with the internet, coupled with the fact I no longer have direct access to what, until recently, was one of the world’s greatest public libraries, means I spend much more time online. But I don’t think the flow rate of the word river has changed all that much.

BB: Are there certain kinds of stories that are more likely to make it? Magazine profiles, newspaper columns?

GS: I don’t think so, but other people do. I’ve gone back and checked and the stories I set aside each year for further reading break down about 60% – 40% between magazines and other long form formats and newspapers (which includes weeklies and the handful of Sunday supplements still published). Although these days, of course, with so many newspapers cutting space, cutting back, and/or closing, I’ve noticed a drop in submissions from newspapers and their writers, and there are clearly fewer “take-outs” being written. Since it is impossible to browse hundreds of daily newspapers, newspaper writing is probably more dependent on submissions than work from magazines that can send me subscriptions. And I have to say, newspapers and newspaper writers are, for some reason I’ve never been able to figure out, hesitant to make submissions. There are some major, major newspapers that have never responded to a request for material. I can’t consider what I don’t see. And even when papers do make submissions, there have been times we’ve picked a story that the writer submitted and the paper did not. What they submit is often very telling. One very well thought of sports editor at a major paper never sent me material from his staff – but submitted his own very pedestrian work every year.

I’ll admit that longer form pieces probably have a bit of an edge – extra space is a gift to a writer — but that’s also part of the media of putting a book together. Longer form stories hold together better in a book. Obviously, there are some kinds of stories that I personally don’t care for, but in every batch of material I send to the Guest Editor, I always include a few stories that I might not like at all, but understand that someone else might.

BB: There aren’t very many accounts of single games or events. Is that by design? Do you find that the art–and of necessity–of game recaps has been devalued with the rise of technology?

GS: Very few games stories and column – I find – provide the information needed to stand alone a year or more later when the book comes out. Often there just isn’t enough context in the story, and they often depend on a great deal of assumed knowledge. That may be understandable when the story was first written, but can no longer be assumed a year or more later. And some are just plain dated. This isn’t a contest for the writers, but a book for the readers, and if a story doesn’t give the reader enough, or is dated by changing events, it’s not going in the book no matter how well written it might be. And stylistically, few game stories or columns today are written with much real form – there is a lot of radio banter and one-liners masquerading as writing. I’m not sure that technology is the reason for that, but when considering game stories, I think that when the computer allowed writers the freedom to do constant updates and re-writes, and writers became accustomed to doing so, many stopped writing stories that actually told a story.

BB: Are there any stories that you selected but weren’t selected by the guest editor that stand out?

GS: There are always a couple each year that I wish the Guest Editor would have picked, but that has always been the case. In BASW of the Century I really wish we would have included a story by A.J. Leibling, for instance, and there are a few other writers I wish we would have included, but you have to put a back cover on the book at some point. Some GE’s have asked for my input, and when I feel really strongly about a story I might mention it, and I think on one or two occasions it has resulted in a story making the book that otherwise might not have. But can I pick out examples? That wouldn’t be fair to the writer. After I turn the submissions over to the GE, I always make my own picks and compare them with mine. Almost without fail we overlap about 60-75% of the time. That seems about right.

BB: Other than David Halberstam, who you’ve written about before, were there any relationships you had with guest editors that stand our as enjoyable or remarkable?

GS: Well, although David was the best, most have been enjoyable and all have tried to make a good book. Although a few GE’s have preferred to do everything by mail and e-mail, I’ve had some great conversations with the GE’s – and occasionally from writers who are appearing in the book, although I won’t critique anyone’s work, since I don’t think that’s appropriate. I get nice letters too… and few crazy ones. The mail is always an adventure.

BB: Do you ever hear from writers who are mad that they aren’t in the book?

GS: Kinda sorta indirectly, but not aggressively so. Precisely what makes the book is not really my decision anyway – the guest editor chooses and can always add any story not submitted by me. I’m a gatekeeper but there are other ways around the gate. A few writers have taken snipes at the book that I suspect are because they are not in it. Some of these writers have made it clear to me, privately, that they would like to be in the book. I understand that, and don’t hold it against them. I have had family members that have gotten mad at me. You have to be careful of daughters defending their dads.

BB: How do you keep up with all the material that is on the Internet? I know there have been a few blog posts that have qualified, though Internet writers like Bill Simmons or Rob Neyer have never been selected. Is there a built in prejudice against Internet-based writers, or do you see the quality of that writing as being less than because most bloggers don’t have editors (of course Neyer and Simmons do).

GS: You can’t. No one can, not even if you do it all day, every day. It’s as impossible as reading 300 daily newspapers a day. Now obviously, there are a handful of sites that are must reads, but the volume is overwhelming. Everybody has a blog – even me ( verbplow.blogspot.com ). In this climate, anybody writing online, or writing anywhere for that matter, who assumes that I must be reading them because of their name or their publisher or their profile or their website is mistaken. I might be, and I try to, but it cannot be done. The best way to get a story in the book is to make sure I see it, and the only foolproof way to do that is to send it to me in the mail.

There isn’t any prejudice against Internet writers, but I have say they have been far less aggressive making submissions than writers from other sources, as have online publications. You’ve got to print it out, and you’ve got to put it in the mail. I don’t accept submissions by e-mail, because some people would forward everything they write to me, and it would be overwhelming. Hell, some people do that now (and some by mail, too). You do what you can to be fair to everybody, but in this case it comes down to the mechanics of the process. It’s got to get in my hands.

As far as the issue of blogs and editing, there are obviously some people who spend more time on their work than others, same as in print, but often there are not very many other eyes between the writer and the page online, and it sometimes shows. One very prominent blogger sent me a long and very well received, at the time, blog post last year that was built around an anecdote that was apocryphal and demonstrably incorrect. But when he revisited the topic in print form a year later, it was corrected.

In some online contexts I think writers find it easier to be conversational rather than work with form and pace and other strategies like they would in print.

It reminds me of something I learned when writing a lot of poetry. When something is typed rather than handwritten, a transformation takes place and a certain objective distance is created. Writing on the internet goes through a transformation when it appears in print, and work in print is transformed when it appears online. Not better, not worse, but just different. No matter the format or medium, I just try to find writing that matters, without regard to its source or subject, work that can stand by itself in a book with twenty-five other pieces or so, and not be drowned out.

Just write something so good that I want to read it again. That’s all any of us are trying to do.

You can buy The Best American Sports Writing 2010, here. Also, check out Stout’s blog and his website.

People talk about the electricity of a heavyweight title bout, the spectacle of the Super Bowl, or the madness of the NCAA basketball tournament, but for my money there is no greater championship than baseball’s World Series. In those years when we’re lucky enough to see the game’s two best teams engaged in a closely fought series, we witness a battle which stretches out over more than a week as the Series lives and breathes with context and texture unmatched by any other sport’s championship. Because of this, the greatest of these Series live etched in our memory, and even those which were merely good become the subjects of books.

We all remember the ecstasy and the agony (not to mention the Mystique and Aura) of the 2001 World Series; we know the significance of Burt Hooton, Elias Sosa, and Charlie Hough; we’ve mimicked Carlton Fisk’s frantic waving from 1975; and we’ve seen the grainy newsreel footage of Mazeroski’s clinching home run in 1960. Because we are fans of the Game, we feel like we know all there is to know – or at least all we’re supposed to know.

But what if we don’t? Enter Mike Vaccaro and his latest book, The First Fall Classic: The Red Sox, the Giants and the Cast of Players, Pugs and Politicos Who Re-Invented the World Series in 1912, an engaging look at a World Series you’ve never heard of. As he describes the Hall of Fame players and personalities on both sides, as well as politicians and gamblers lurking on the sidelines, Vaccaro argues that this was the series that gave the World Series its place in our national psyche. He was kind enough to talk with me about it for a bit recently. I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did. (Note: As I opened the book, I had no idea of how the Series eventually turned out, and I enjoyed this added suspense. In order to preserve this for any readers who might like a similar experience, the author and I did not discuss the outcome. Where indicated, some of the links will give the result.)

Bronx Banter:  Have you always been a baseball fan? Did you play as a kid?

Mike Vaccaro:  Yeah, absolutely. Baseball was always a pretty important part of my childhood, and now it’s an important part of my adulthood. I played through high school and was never terrible, but never terribly good. Always just enjoyed it. I like to stay close to the game.

BB:  So what teams and players did you follow as a kid?

MV:  I was a Mets fan growing up. Most of my childhood they were awful and then later on they kinda gave us a nice shining moment in ’86, so that was my team growing up, for sure. I was a big Tom Seaver fan, as I’m sure almost all kids of my age were.

BB:  I suppose for a lot of your life you were probably hoping for a career playing baseball. At what point did you decide on a career in journalism?

MV:  When I realized that I not only couldn’t hit the curveball, I couldn’t throw the curveball, I could barely identify a curveball. If I was gonna do anything at all in terms of professional experience, it would have to be from the sidelines in some regard. Writing was something that I enjoyed, so it was a natural marriage.

BB:  Here’s a question that I always look forward to asking journalists: are you still a fan? Can you be a fan – not just of the game, but of the Mets, for example – and a journalist at the same time?

MV:  I’m a fan of the Mets in the sense that when they play well it’s a lot more interesting story to cover, I think. I do think that the occasional train wreck is also an enjoyable story for people to read, but let’s face it – Mets fans would prefer to read stories that have to do with the Mets doing well, just as Yankees fans do also. So I do think that it’s probably fair that when you’re working the press box you root for good stories first before you root for teams or anybody, but I do think they go hand in hand. And I do try to look a little bit through the prism of a sports fan, even though that’s hard to do. You do obviously have access fans don’t have, and so therefore you have to take advantage of that telling your own stories, but I like to think I understand what sports fans bring to the game. I try and have that color my writing. I don’t believe in the complete detachment of emotion when it comes to writing. I know a lot of people like to say, “I hate the games, I don’t like the games, I don’t care about the games,” but I think if you do that, that really informs your writing and I think it really lessens it as well.

BB:  I think I’d agree with that. So with this book, what was your research process like? Where did you get your information, how long were you researching, and when did you sit down to write?

MV:  It was actually a fairly swift process. I suppose one of the good things about writing a book in which all the characters are dead, is that you’re kind of on your own schedule, not anybody else’s schedule. (Laughing.) So it was just a matter of getting my butt to the library, to the archives, to the Hall of Fame, and all these places where you could find the information that I wanted to find. It’s interesting. In a lot of ways it was easier to write a book about that era than it even would be about the 50s or certainly today, because there were so many newspapers, there were so many stories written, there were so many of these players that were first-person reporters in their own right for all these newspapers. It was almost… I won’t say there was too much information, but there was certainly enough there to be able to weave a tale out of it. From the first moment I arrived in the library with a blank notebook trying to start taking notes, to turning in the final manuscript was probably about nine months, start to finish. And the funny part about book publishing is that it actually was longer between turning in the final manuscript and publication than the actual book itself. That’s partly because instead of having a release date earlier in the year they decided on one to coincide with the playoffs, which was a smart marketing decision, I think.

BB:  Something you just mentioned I wanted to ask you about. We have this idea today that there’s media saturation with all of the TV networks and ESPN and sports radio…

MV:  I would agree with that.

BB:  But whenever I read something from this era, or maybe the first half of the last century, like you mentioned, the newspapers, there are just so many newspapers. What was that like with all the papers in that era?

MV:  It was like going to a buffet table with a bottomless appetite. There were fourteen newspapers in New York and six in Boston, and you have access nowadays to the archives of a lot of papers from around the country to get a gauge of what it was like outside of the two primary cities. It was fascinating. There were two corresponding big stories going on at that time. The World Series, and the big murder trial with Charlie Becker, the rogue cop. In New York, at least, it was essentially a split front page. You had baseball at the top, and the trial at the bottom, and the next day they would flip-flop. There’s a newfangled TV expression, “If it bleeds, it leads,” but I think that in those days newspaper sales were based in large part on the two Bs: blood and baseball. And certainly with those two stories you had a little bit of both, and it was the heart of the Pulitzer and Hearst war, so you had the World and you had the Journal American and it was as fierce a battle as today with the Post and the Daily News. We like to think we go at each other in a cutthroat manner, but really comparatively speaking, it’s relatively tame compared to the way it was back in those days. Hearst and Pulitzer were kind of playing varsity ball back in those days. As a result of that intense competition, it’s incredible what you had there. When you think of the writers who were actually filing the copy for these stories, you had Damon Runyan, you had Grantland Rice, you had Fred Lead, you had all these famous writing names. It was really kind of fascinating to think that every day, the days I was reading, I was reading Damon Runyon, you know? You kind of think of him as being something of a mythic figure and then you see him with his byline in a newspaper, so that was kind of cool. My problem is that I happen to be a guy who loves to do this kind of research, so my problem, if I had a problem at all, was that I would go there and I would get too lost in those papers. I would want to read more about what was happening in Persia at the time, what was happening on Wall Street, and I kind of had to discipline myself to stay with the matter at hand because there was so much information that I had to get to.

BB: I consider myself a huge baseball fan, a fan of baseball history. But I have to admit that before opening your book I knew nothing about the (spoiler alert) 1912 World Series. So tell me what drew you to this in the first place. What did you know about this series, going in, that made you want to start this project?

MV:  I swear, the only thing I knew about 1912 at all was the idea of the Snodgrass muff, and I didn’t even know any of the details about that. It was just one of these things. You can be a big, big, big baseball historian, but I think it’s sometimes hard to have a completely encyclopedic appreciation, understanding, or even a desire to know… I think if we consider ourselves big historians, we know a lot about the 40s and the 50s and the 60s, which in some ways is ancient history, but in some ways happened yesterday. You know, I was lucky. My editor at Doubleday, Jason Kauffman, when we were thinking about my next project he said, “Why don’t you see if you can find a World Series you think would be interesting enough to write a book about, but one that hasn’t been done to death.” Just about every World Series since the 30s, if you want to know something about it, somebody has either written about it, or there’s newsreel footage about it, so you really have to go back to the real black and white era. The first superstar team is the ’27 Yankees, so you have to use that almost as the delineation point between quasi-modern understanding of the World Series. And when I did that I boiled it down to two. One was the ’26 World Series, which was the Yankees and the Cardinals and was most famous for Grover Cleveland Alexander walking in, reportedly hung over, in the seventh inning and striking out Tony Lazzeri with the bases loaded. And on top of that, the series ended in the bottom of the ninth when Babe Ruth was thrown out trying to steal second base, which I’ve always found fascinating. I try to bring that forward and think about what the uproar would be like if that was Alex Rodríguez ending the World Series in 2010. Just imagine what that would be like! But you know what, the more I looked at that, it was more of a baseball series. People have read a million books about Babe Ruth, and a million books about Lou Gehrig, and there’s been a movie made about Grover Cleveland Alexander, so you really weren’t going to be touching new ground. The more I looked at 1912, though, the more I realized the characters involved were tremendous: John McGraw, Christy Matthewson, Tris Speaker – these are historic names. And the more I looked at the World Series itself, the more I realized this was a great World Series. Not only did it go the distance, it went beyond the distance because there was a tie game so there was an extra game. And then the last game goes extra innings, which has only happened one other time before, in ’97. So that interested me. And I had done a book previously about sports in 1941, and the reason I liked doing that book so much is because I was able to use sports as kind of a window into what was happening in the world, and I liked that. To me, if you’re gonna tell a story about history, it can’t just be about your own subject. You’ve gotta give context and tell what the world was like, what it was like to live back then, what people were doing back then, which is why I enjoyed doing that book. So I was kind of hoping to present that alongside the main story in this book, and was fortunate enough to have the trial. Probably until the O.J. trial came along, it was probably still considered the trial of the century in many ways, because it was that important. And beyond that you had a presidential race, and beyond that you had Teddy Roosevelt getting shot during the World Series. You had all these other ancillary issues which to me just made the story more potentially rich. Because it wasn’t necessarily a book that was born in my brain, I went into it thinking it was a good subject, and as I went on I realized it was a great subject, and I was lucky in that regard. Because the last thing you want to do when you’re investing as much time as you need to invest in writing a book is to fall less in love with the product as you go along. I was lucky enough to fall more in love as I went along.

BB:  What’s interesting is that my experience as a reader was really similar. My first thought was, oh, the 1912 World Series, what’s this? And as I started out, it was, okay, this is kind of interesting, and then by the end I really couldn’t put it down.

MV:  That’s great to hear, and that’s interesting. I’ve been really lucky. Word of mouth is a wonderful thing. This is by no means The DaVinci Code, but it has sold beyond expectations, because when people read it, they like it. Books are funny, even more so than movies or record albums – oh, my god, I’m aging myself, calling them record albums – you get word of mouth on a book. People who are inclined to read, want to be told, yes, this is something you want to read. It’s a real fortunate thing that’s gone on with this book.

BB:  Very often when you read about baseball during this era, the main thing you come away with is how different everything was – the fields were awful, the ball was heavy, the gloves were terrible, etc. – but it seemed like you made a conscious choice keep the game as a constant. Is that accurate, or did I make that up?

MV:  It is. It’s a very basic tenth grade history credo, but I really believe that the more things change, the more they stay the same. That’s what makes history fascinating, is finding out that things that happened in the 1500s weren’t, but for the way things were done, the modern advancement, weren’t that different than they are now. And the same thing applies with baseball. It really is the same game. And like you said, there have obviously been improvements that have helped beautify it a little bit, and certainly people hit more homeruns now than they ever did and so forth, but in terms of how the game is played, it’s interesting. People tend to think that in the good old days people played for the love of the game and getting paid was secondary. That couldn’t be further from the truth. If anything, these guys were more obsessed with money than today’s athletes are. Partly because they weren’t getting as much of it, and partly because everything was more accessible. You know from reading the book that gamblers and bookmakers were as omnipresent as peanut venders in stadiums there, so if you ever wanted to supplement your income it was fairly easy to do. Things like winner’s shares and how much that winner’s share would be were taken very seriously by these guys because nowadays a guy wins the World Series, he gets a $300,000 share and it’s equivalent to the money he finds in his couch. In those days you won $4,000 in the World Series, and a lot of times it was more than you made in the whole season. These guys really cared about money, and that really kind of made them more accessible human beings because you’re able to see them less as these demigods and more as regular people who easily could’ve played today if they’d only been born eighty years later.

BB:  That kind of leads into my next question a bit. It seems like things were so different off the field than they are today, and one of the things you mentioned was the gambling. How prevalent was gambling, and how prominent were the big gamblers and bookmakers?

MV:  They were incredibly prominent. What’s interesting is John McGraw was business partners with Arnold Rothstein, which is a little tidbit I didn’t know until I started researching this book. Arnold Rothstein, of course, is the guy who masterminded the 1919 fix. They owned pool halls together, and you gotta figure that people discussed more than 8-ball in those establishments back in the day. I’ve always been fascinated by the Black Sox also. Obviously the great Eliot Asinof book and the movie was tremendous, the subject matter was great. But in doing the work for the this book, it was obvious that it wasn’t only understandable why that happened, but it was almost inevitable that something was going to happen in that regards. When it’s that accessible, when it’s that easy, when you have so much hubris among owners… You know, Charlie Comiskey is the guy who goes down in history as the guy who kind of inspired the Black Sox scandal, but really any owner could’ve qualified. Just the hassle and the haggle over the extra game they had in this World Series with the National Commission. It was everywhere, it really was. And it wasn’t just that the bookmakers were in the stands and prominent. During batting practice, if you wanted to you could find a floating crap game in the stands, or a poker game. It really was as much a part of day to day life in most big league cities as anything else, and like I said it almost makes it inevitable that something was gonna happen, and it just so happened that it was 1919 and it happened to the White Sox. Even among these games, as you know from having read the book, as great as the games were, they weren’t always played on the level, for different and various reasons.

BB:  With all of this gambling out in the open, and players openly talking about betting on games that they were playing in and even mentioning it in the newspaper columns they were wrting, how did the public perceive this?

MV:  The public wasn’t affected by it at all because they took part as much as anybody else did. That’s the funny part of the way things progressed through history. The headline anticipating the World Series wouldn’t say “Matthewson to Face Off Against Smokey Joe Wood” it was “Sox the 8 to 5 Choice.” Christy Matthewson, who was as much a paragon of virtue as any ballplayer ever has been, in his own column would talk about who the gambling favorite was and who the underdog was, and those weren’t just terms. It was a part of the culture in the same way that gambling is at a racetrack. I suppose there is a small element of people who go the racetrack because they like to see the horses run around, but 98% of the people who go there, go there with the idea that it’s a place where money is exchanged. I get the sense it was the same way that people approached going to ballparks in those days, that it was as much a sport among the players in the stands as it was among the players on the field.

BB:  So at this point in 1912, baseball seemed to hold a powerful grip on the public, through the game itself and the gambling opportunity it provided. How did the people of Boston, New York, and the rest of the country view baseball in 1912, and how excited were they for this series?

MV:  It’s a great question, because certainly in New York and Boston baseball was king, it really was. It was unrivalled in terms of sporting passion, for sure. What’s interesting about this World Series, and the reason why I came to the title that I came to, is from ’03 to ’11, for the most part, the World Series was something that people around the country would read about in the newspaper and there would be some interest in it. In the cities where the games took place it was over the top excitement, if it was in Pittsburgh or Chicago or wherever else it was. It was a very parochial event. 1911 kind of changed it a little bit. The Giants and the A’s were both recognizable teams with recognizable names, but 1912 really kind of brought it to another level. For one thing, these were probably the two best teams ever assembled at that point, and it was pretty obvious they were gonna play each other from early September on. There were a lot of personalities people knew about, there was a lot of advance hype as a result, and really the excitement about the series was everywhere. One of the neat things that they had in those days was that outside newspaper buildings they would have these pitch-by-pitch updates with little figurines going around the basepaths.

BB:  That was one of my favorite things about the book.

MV:  Yeah, you could understand certainly how that could become exciting in New York and in Boston, and in fact it was over the top. In Harold Square there would be 40,000 people a day in New York, on newspaper row there would be 50,000 people a day, and it’s hard to even fathom that. In Boston it was the same way in the Common. Now we have PDAs and you can look at updates every fifteen seconds, and it’s staggering to think that it’s essentially what these people were doing. They didn’t have, obviously, a Blackberry to look at, but they did have that ability to get updates as quickly as they did, which is really kind of incredible. But it wasn’t just New York and Boston, though. They had the same availability in other cities starting in 1911, in 1912 it became even bigger. In fact, the story that I really like, at the very end of the book it comes, is outside the L.A. Times office there are a couple thousand people watching this. They hear about Fred Snodgrass dropping a ball, and a woman faints in the crowd and it’s Fred Snodgrass’s mother. So I think that really just kind of shows you how much of a grip the series had on the country. Before that series it was referred to the world series, lower-case w, lower-case s, and this series kind of capitalized it to where we know it now as the World Series, capital W, capital S.

BB:  The narrative in your story was obviously driven by the ebb and flow of the series, but there some pretty interesting personalities, too. The Giants, of course, were led by the largest personality of all, John McGraw. What was he like?

MV:  In the deepest chamber of my heart, I wish I could have covered John McGraw, because he would’ve been great copy. He’s undisputed as being a great baseball mind, certainly ahead of his time in a lot of ways. He was an umpire baiter, he was an opponent baiter. He was not afraid to speak his mind about anything and everything. In a lot of ways he was kind of like Billy Martin, only without the sociopathic tendencies. And a guy with a lot of layers. People think of him as being this fiery, ornery guy, and he was. And yet Snodgrass drops that ball, and the next year he gives him a thousand dollar raise, which is a huge, huge statement in those days. Players alternately loved playing for him and loathed playing for him, alternately loved him and despised him. Just an incredibly rich character who was really in the prime of his career in 1912. He was the kind of guy who’s got an awfully long lineage. One of his protégés was Casey Stengel, who begat Billy Martin, who begat Willie Randolph. In a lot of ways, the John McGraw legacy still continues to this day even though many people don’t know that that’s really where it is.

BB:  He was paired with Christy Matthewson, who had kind of transcended the game, hadn’t he?

MV:  Yeah, he was without doubt the most famous American athlete at the time, and the most beloved, held up as this paragon of virtue, and even to that point was considered one of the best pitchers who ever lived. Even though he was kind of on the downward cycle of his career, he was still pretty good, winning twenty games a year. He just wasn’t what he had been seven or eight years earlier when he was just unhittable. And the two of them were a wonderful contrast. For a while they actually lived together. But even at this point they were great friends and had an inordinate amount of respect for each other that really kind of manifested itself in the way they both wanted so badly to win another World Series. They had gone seven years at that point without winning a World Series even though they fancied themselves the flag bearers for the entire sport.

BB:  And what about the Red Sox, with Smokey Joe Wood and Tris Speaker. How good were they?

MV:  People think of one-year pitching wonders like Dwight Gooden in 1985, but there’s never been a pitcher who had a better single year than Joe Wood: 34-5, 1.90 ERA. At a time when nobody struck out, when it was considered a mortal sin to strikeout, he struck out almost 250 people. Even Walter Johnson, who was renowned as the flamethrower of his era, said there was nobody in the world who threw harder than Smokey Joe Wood, hence the name. It’s really kind of an interesting story, because the next spring he breaks his thumb in spring training, and he’s literally never the same, and he hurts his arm. And while he reinvents himself later on as an everyday player – as a hitter he’s a very good hitter – but he could well have been a historic and legendary pitcher if his arm hadn’t given out. But for that year he was untouchable. And Tris Speaker, I think Tris Speaker is probably the most underappreciated all-time player ever. I think people have heard of the name and they have a hard time placing where he played or what he did. The guy had 3,700 hits and not only played on three World Series winners but managed one in Cleveland. (And also was himself involved in a gambling scandal towards the latter end of his career.) It’s interesting too, because the Red Sox in a lot of ways could be likened to the Bronx Zoo Yankees and the ’72-’74 A’s in that they didn’t really like each other very much. It was definitely split into factions between Catholics and non-Catholics, and there two best players Wood and Speaker were non-Catholics, one from Kansas City, one from Texas, who were perceived from day one there as outsiders, not only by the team but also by the fans. But because they were so good and because they were so successful, they were obviously adopted and for the most part kept something of an uneasy peace among the people on the team, which obviously exploded briefly during the World Series and subtly other times during the year. That also makes this fascinating. We tend to think of old time guys as being one for all and all for one, but these guys were every bit as contentious as the Yankees were in the 70s.

BB:  That’s interesting, because that was going to be my next question. Now you hear about clubhouse that are divided along racial lines sometimes, and you think that these were all a bunch of white guys in 1912 so they probably got along well, but there were divisions – cultural divisions between Northern players and Southern players. Could you talk about that a bit?

MV:  Certainly in Boston, which was a hotbed, even in those days, of Irish Catholicism, of liberalism, a real Northern bastion, and had been the seat of patriotism not so long before, a hundred and forty years earlier. Tris Speaker’s uncles both fought in the Civil War. Smokey Joe Wood was literally raised in the wild west, with stagecoaches and sheriffs and stuff. That’s where these guys are coming from, and this is obviously an era where who you worshipped and how you worshipped was not a secret. People knew if you were Catholic, they knew if you were Baptist, they knew if you were Methodist, they knew if you were Episcopalian, and it mattered to people. To come to Boston, which was as I said, an Irish Catholic hotbed, you had these two Protestants. That was one of the main things that divided people in those days, especially in baseball in 1912. Unfortunately it’s not a subject that I delve into a great deal, but certainly 1912 was very much in the middle of the Gentlemen’s Agreement. It was an all-white sport, so there certainly wasn’t going to be any racial divides in any clubhouses, because everybody looked exactly the same. So I suppose if you look for things that divide you, religion is probably the next best thing to race, and certainly that was there. Probably on almost every team, because that was so prevalent in society, but on that team especially, it became a big deal.

BB:  There’s a lot of drama throughout this World Series, most of it surrounding the players, managers, and even owners. You do a great job of illuminating all the controversies and personalities, most notably through conversations between the principle characters. I read recently a suggestion that you had manufactured these conversations. I read what you wrote about this in your introduction, but I was wondering if you could explain this.

MV:  Yeah, I’d like to, because look, the fact that I was compelled to write an author’s note, that was my idea. I wanted to do that because I wanted to be completely transparent. I mean, look, we are dealing with things that happened almost a hundred years ago, so it was amazing to me what I was actually able to get in terms of verbatim conversations. But you can’t get everything. And to me, the choice was it was either going to be completely written in a narrative or it wasn’t. If it’s not, it becomes a recitation of facts, it’s a textbook, and it’s impossible to read. I would be very comfortable to say that probably ninety percent of the stuff that’s in that book, was stuff that was actually in between quotation marks elsewhere, whether it was in a newspaper story, a magazine story, an archive, someone’s diary, what have you. So that’s ninety percent. In order to complete the narrative, I felt there were certain aspects where you just didn’t have that, where you just didn’t have the actual quotes, where I kind of gave myself license since I knew these characters as well as anybody could, having spent nine months with them. Certainly I wasn’t going to invent the kind of conversation where Smokey Joe Wood, for instance, turns to Tris Speaker and says, “Yeah, I threw that game!” That certainly wasn’t going to happen. To me, it was more to augment conversation, to help move the story along in a way that just wasn’t otherwise available. And I understood that when I wrote that that people were gonna look at that, and certainly I didn’t put that I think that ninety percent of the conversations were accurately recreated because there’s no way of actually putting a number on it. So I know that opens it up to anybody who want to think, well, maybe he invented the whole thing. And they’re welcome to think that if they want. To me, it’s like when you watch a movie. A movie is always based on real life. I wasn’t there in 1912, so everything that I do about the book is necessarily going to be second-hand. So to me, I think what you have to do, is you have to make a choice when you read the book: do I trust this author or don’t I? I would hope that if you read the book, you understand that I not only know these characters, but I happen to like them, and I appreciate them, and I want to try and portray them as accurately as possible, so whatever I augmented was done in the idea of moving the story along. That’s frankly bothered some people who’ve reviewed the book, and I certainly respect that. It’s a worthy and worthwhile subject for discussion. I just chose to do it that way because I think it made for a better book. I don’t think I sacrificed any integrity. Like I said, if I invented conversations to invent new plotlines, I think that would have been unforgivable and I wouldn’t even have considered doing that. But to me it was more of a device that helped to kind of close the circle. If you look at it as a circle and if there are a couple of segments of the circle that are missing, you’re not going to be able to complete the circle. This allowed me to complete the circle. Most of the circle was already drawn based upon legitimate quotes that I drew from other places, but the small aspects that I needed to close the circle I did on my own, believing that I had the license to do that. That’s a long and very windy way of explaining that, but I do think it’s a worthwhile subject. Like I said, I brought it up myself. I wouldn’t have wanted to misrepresent how that came to be.

BB:  At any point in your process did you consider footnoting so that people could see which conversations were quoted elsewhere and which were not?

MV:  I did. In fact, I do have a set of footnotes that I wrote. It was a decision between myself and the editors at Doubleday that it was more appropriate to be specific with bibliography, which I kind of have in my acknowledgements later toward the end, and more of a blanket explanation of how you did it than it was to footnote. That was just a decision that was made. I actually do, in my personal archives, have what would have been the footnotes, but it was just an editorial decision that was made higher than me.

BB:  I think I do agree with your response to this, because nothing seemed disingenuous to me as I was reading.

MV:  I suppose if my intention with the book had been to show how the 1912 World Series was thrown, it would’ve been a little bit harder to do what I did and just dismiss it as something that was a literary device. Even when it comes to the potential shadiness of some of the games, I think I do leave it open ended and open to interpretation. I don’t say that Smokey Joe Woods threw the game, I say this is what happened, what do you think?

BB:  Right, right. I think that was interesting. You just kind of present it as here are the facts, and here’s how he felt going in, and here’s the season that he had, and here’s how he pitched on this day. I think it was even better, because I read it, my first thought was, how come I haven’t heard of this before? This is a pretty big deal, where you’ve got arguably the best pitcher in the game, who’s pissed off at his manager and his owner, and he’s throwing a World Series game.

MV:  Right. We could argue the merits of whether it was justified or not, but I’m asked all the time, do you think he threw the game? I absolutely think he threw the game. Here’s a guy who’s the best pitcher of his day in that year, he’s already stuck it up their ass two times easily in the World Series and the very next day he would come back and do the same thing basically, and here he is throwing thirteen batting practice fastballs. So if you’re asking me, as an expert witness, do I think that he did it? I say yes. Do I think he would’ve been convicted of it? No, because I think the entirety of the case against him was circumstantial.

Here’s a little something in case you can’t make it out to Brooklyn tonight to hear Larry Tye talk about his new book, Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend. Larry was good enough to spend part of his morning last week talking to me about Satchel Paige and Negro League baseball. Enjoy…

BronxBanter:  Your previous four books dealt with public relations, the Jewish diaspora, Pullman porters, and shock therapy. How did you get from there to Satchel Paige?

Larry Tye:  When I was writing the Pullman porter book, the porters told that of all the extraordinary characters that they had carried on the trains, from Joe Louis to Louie Armstrong to Paul Robeson, their favorite was Satchel Paige. And I had grown up hearing wonderful stories about Satchel as being the guy that every pitcher was compared to, and yet nobody really knew much about Satchel. So the porters really reignited my childhood interest in Satchel, and it seemed like a great time to do it.

BB:  Were you a baseball fan growing up?

LT:  I was. I was a huge Red Sox fan growing up, and every time I would go to a ballgame, my dad, any time there was a great pitcher, would always compare him to Satchel. But when I would ask, “What about Satchel Paige?” nobody really seemed to know much because he had played so much of his career in a shadow world.

BB:  Right, he seems almost like a legend as opposed to a real man with real statistics and real information behind him.

LT:  He did, and sort of every journalist or author out there sort of trying to understand how much of every legend is real, and Satchel seemed a wonderful way to do that.

BB:  I wonder if you could walk me through your process a bit. What kind of research was involved, and at one point did you sit down and start wrting?

LT:  I spent more than a year reading everything that had ever been written about Satchel, which meant looking at references to him or entire books. Probably a hundred books about Satchel or the Negro Leagues or some mention. Tens of thousands of articles from African-American and mainstream newspapers, loads of magazine pieces done over the years, and most importantly interviewing. I interviewed more than two hundred old major leagues and Negro leaguers. So it was partly trying to see what was there in terms of the written evidence, and partly trying to fill in the blanks with first-hand recollections of people who had been there with him, playing with him or against him. It was only after that work was well along, after about a year, that I started writing.

BB: We think of Mobile, Alabama, as the birthplace of baseball greats like Hank Aaron and Willie McCovey, but they came a generation later than Paige. What was Mobile like during the beginning of the century when young Satchel was growing up?

LT:  There are two ways to look at what Mobile was like then. One, is what was it like generally in terms of society then for a young, black kid like Satchel to come into the world? And the answer was that at the very moment that he was born, the Jim Crow segregation system was coming into force in the South generally, and in Mobile specifically. Mobile had been one of the more tolerant deep South cities when it came to race, but starting in Satchel’s birth year of 1906, there were lynchings and other things that suggested tolerance was out the window, and segregation and violence were the order of the day. So it’s not an easy time for a young black kid to come into the world, it was not an easy time to come in with what became a family of twelve kids. So he was born into poverty, he was born into a racially hostile environment, and in the baseball world then, he was born into a strictly segregated world that had him prepared for the wider segregated situation in terms of the Negro Leagues and the major leagues. It was a time like in the later generation when guys like Hank Aaron came along. It was a time where baseball was as important in black America as it was in white. There were just fewer opportunities, particularly in a place like Mobile.

BB:  That kind of moves me right to my next question…

LT:  Actually, one last thing I had to say about that. The good news for him was that Mobile was an extraordinary baseball city, and it’s not accidental that all these great players came out of Mobile. Baseball was everything there.

BB:  Once he did discover his baseball skill, what kind of options were available to him at this time?

LT:  The options were to play semi-pro baseball in Mobile and make no money and have to look for another way to earn his living, or in case he was lucky and the manager of the Chattanooga White Sox, an old black team, came in and scouted him and brought him to Chattanooga to play in these lower levels of the black professional leagues. The good news is he got out of Mobile, the bad news is if he had stayed in Mobile he would have ended up probably like his brother Wilson, who may have been as good or better a baseball player but ended up having to dig graves for a living and died an early death.

BB:  What was it like, not necessarily for a star like Satchel Paige, but just in general, what was it like to play in the Negro Leagues? How different was that from major league baseball?

LT:  It was different in that players made less money, played to smaller crowds, the teams were precariously financed, and every season teams would come and go. It was a world more on the edge. It was like every black institution in the era of Jim Crow. They all shared a lot with the parallel white universe, whether it was schools or busses or whatever. They were generally not nearly as well financed. The good news in terms of black baseball, again like other Negro institutions of that era, is it was an extraordinarily exciting game. On a Sunday afternoon, the activity in black America was to go watch the local Negro League baseball team. Ministers would let churches out early, women would don their best mink stoles and high heels and hats, men would go out there and for one time in the week not have to worry about any racial insults or any hostility. They would go out there in what was an almost entirely black world, and they’d watch players play an incredibly hard-driving brand of baseball. It was a lot like what we would call “small ball” today. There was a lot of bunting, there was a lot of base stealing, there was a much more hard edged, and I think, exciting brand of baseball to watch. And one thing we can say definitively, the best Negro League ball players were as good as the best of the white majors.

BB:  It’s always tempting to compare the Negro Leagues to the major leagues for a lot of the reasons that you just mentioned. For one thing, Paige’s white contemporaries were bound to their teams, and the best players often remained with one team throughout their careers, but this was hardly true for Satchel, was it?

LT:  No. Satchel was a free agent fifty years before we knew what free agency was, which meant that he would sign a contract and honor that signature only as long as it suited him, and when he’d get a better offer he’d jump from one team to another. He said he played for two hundred and fifty teams during his career. That’s kind of high, but I’d say he probably played for more teams than any player in the history of black or white baseball. Teams would rent him out for one or two games because he was guaranteed to draw a big crowd, and contracts were only as good as he wanted to make them.

BB:  Satchel Paige is often paired with Josh Gibson in stories and memories of the Negro Leagues. What was their relationship like?

LT:  They were on the one hand as different as two ballplayers could be. Satchel loved to be in the center of attention, Josh hated the spotlight. Satchel was brilliant at squeezing every nickel he could from owners, and Josh was a laidback guy who just didn’t do that kind of thing. Josh was somebody who was adored by his teammates, and Satchel was often resented by his teammates. On the other hand, the two of them had this special interaction. They knew that they were black baseball’s two biggest starts, they knew that their facing off against one another was going to get more attention than anything else that happened in the ballgame they were playing in, and they each had enough pride that they thought that they could get the better of it. So it was this wonderful drama every time that they played

BB:  In the thirties and forties Satchel Paige was more than just a pitcher, more than just a baseball player. He was a cultural icon in Black America. How was he able to transcend baseball the way he did?

LT:  Because he was such a natural showman. He would go out there before a game and do things that nobody else would ever dare to do. He’d put a matchbook on home plate and go back sixty feet six inches to the pitchers mound and throw nine out of ten balls over home plate. What he was doing was proving to any fans who were out there early to watch him – and fans were always out there early to watch him – proving that he could do extraordinary things. He was intimidating the heck out of any opponents who were out there watching what he was doing, and he had this innate understanding of what it took to make it worth somebody’s while to come and flop down the money to watch him play a ballgame. And he gave them a show. He never made a spectacle of himself, and he understood the way that great entertainers did, the way that Louie Armstrong did, the way that Joe Louis did. Satchel understood even better just what it was like to go out and really give fans more than their money’s worth by dazzling them as well as winning the ballgame.

BB:  Satchel’s story can be seen as tragic, not just because he spent his prime in the shadows, but also because he wasn’t the player chosen to break the color line. I thought it was interesting to read about the tension between Paige and Jackie Robinson. Can you talk about that a bit?

LT:  Sure. They were from two different generations, and they reflected the generational tension. Jackie never quite understood, I think, the fact that it was Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson and all the great ballplayers of their generation upon whose shoulders he, Jackie, was standing when he broke the color barrier. He saw what he did, he saw the abuse that he, Jackie, took, and he never quite understood that people had been going through that in the Negro Leagues for fifty years before him, and he saw Satchel and many of his fellow Negro Leaguers as an embarrassment. Jackie never had much use for the Negro Leagues; he only played there for a year. And yet it was only because of Satchel that Branch Rickey knew about the Negro Leagues, and he knew about the all-black Kansas City Monarchs, and he knew about a guy who started out that season as a second-string second baseman, namely Jackie Robinson. So Satchel thought that he deserved, if not to be first, then at least be worthy of credit by the guy who was first, and Jackie never gave him that credit.

BB:  I thought that was really interesting because we know that in Jackie’s later years he often complained that modern-day black players didn’t appreciate what he and others had done for them, so I thought it was ironic to read that he had fallen into the same generational trap. I guess we never appreciate what our predecessors have done for us, do we?

LT:  It’s true, and it’s the same thing in the Civil Rights movement. If you ask kids today who study on Martin Luther King’s birthday or in Black History Month, the Civil Rights movement, you would think that the movement began and ended with Martin Luther King, Jr. They don’t acknowledge the history and the Pullman porters and guys like A. Phillip Randolph who really set the stage for King, the same way we don’t acknowledge that anything came before Jackie. We don’t also acknowledge that professional baseball at the highest levels was integrated in the 1800s. What Jackie did was not integrate baseball, he reintegrated it.

BB:  Exactly, exactly. What about when the major leagues finally came calling for Satchel? How good was he at the age of forty-two?

LT:  He was good enough that at the end of that first half-season with the Cleveland Indians he notched a 6-1 record, he had the second-lowest ERA in the American League. And my favorite is that twelve sportswriters in voting for the AP Rookie of the Year, twelve of them voted for Satchel, to which he replied, “I’m honored, but I’m not quite sure what year the gentlemen were talking about.”

BB:  I wanted to back up a little bit. It seemed like throughout his story there are incidents where various major leaguers would come to the fore and say, “These other pitchers that we’re facing every day are great, but there’s also this guy Satchel Paige who’s even better.” Who were some of those major leaguers that were kind of instrumental in spreading the word about Satchel Paige. Dizzy Dean, sure, and some of these others. Who were the main ones?

LT:  Well, Dizzy Dean and Bob Feller saw it firsthand, but I think lots of people were out there doing it. Ted Williams absolutely understood just how great they were, and he spread the word in his early years and later on ended up taking time out from his induction ceremony at the Hall of Fame to call for the induction of Satchel and others. Joe DiMaggio did it in a dramatic way. It was a face-off against Satchel in California before DiMaggio was with the Yankees that convinced the Yankee scouts who watched him that day to sign DiMaggio. DiMaggio said repeatedly that Satchel was the best pitcher he ever faced. My favorite DiMaggio expression was he said that Satchel’s curve ball gave him optical indigestion. Lots of guys were doing it. Jimmy Foxx was doing it. All the old great ballplayers who barnstormed against Satchel in California and Latin America and across this country came back raving about him, and that was from the 1920s through the 1940s. Just about every great major league saw Satchel, and they just couldn’t help but talk about it.

BB:  You mentioned barnstorming. I wanted to ask you about that real quickly. Can you explain what that environment was like, because you had black and white ballplayers on different teams, sometimes on the same team. What was the barnstorming culture like?

LT:  It was basically a case where Negro Leaguers couldn’t come close to earning a living just by playing in their official Negro League games. So in between games they would go to any town anywhere nearby that could come up with enough money to bring them to town with a team to field against them. So it was in towns with more barns than streetlights with teams that ranged from really good semi-pro teams to a bunch of farmers who knew nothing about baseball other than that they loved it. It was a way for small town America to get really good baseball, and it was a way for Negro Leaguers and major leaguers to earn critical extra money when their families were sufficiently small.

BB:  What about the legend of Satchel Paige? My favorite story was always the one where he was facing his buddy Josh Gibson and pulls his fielders off the diamond before striking him out. Did you have a favorite? Did you find a new one through this process?

LT:  First of all I’ve got to say that in checking all the legend against the facts I found that about eighty percent of the things that Satchel claimed he did, he did. And that’s pretty extraordinary considering what his claims were. And that raises the question, why embellish the other twenty percent if all that would do is potentially call into question the eighty percent? And I think it was partly that Satchel was such a good story teller that he couldn’t resist, and partly that while the white legends, the Babe Ruths and Joe DiMaggios, had reporters there fanning their legend, Satchel was playing in this shadow world of the Negro Leagues and had to be out there telling his own story. It was a great story, and at times with each new telling he’d realize reporters needed something a little new to spice it up, and he’d give ‘em something a little new. My favorite stories were when he was out there in his later years. We all know the stories of his calling in his fielders, of his going out and performing all these stunts, having his teammates stand there with lit cigarettes in their mouths and he’d throw a hardball at their face at ninety miles an hour and they had enough confidence that he would knock it out and knock them out – and he did it. My favorites are what he did in his later years. I love the notion that he set a record that will never be broken in the major leagues in 1965 by going out and pitching three shutout innings against the Boston Red Sox. He was 59 years, two months, and eight days old, and his catcher that night was thirty years younger. I talked to a bunch of the ballplayers from the Red Sox and had them actually at my opening kickoff party for the book. The guy who pitched against him that night, Bill Momboquette and a bunch of others. And I talked to Carl Yastrzemski about what it was like facing off against Satchel that night. The only guy to get a hit off him in those three innings was Yastrzemski, he got a double. And what I loved was after the game, Yastrzemski went up to him and gave him a bear hug. And Yastrzemski, anybody who knew him in Boston knows that the last guy who’s ever played in the city that you would expect to give anybody a bear hug was the relatively cold, reserved Carl Yastrzemski. And he did it because a full generation before Yaz’s dad had faced off against Satchel in a semi-pro game on Long Island. I love that story because Satchel was the only guy in the history of baseball who pitched against fathers and sons and even grandsons. He lasted so long, he was so durable, that he was out there dazzling generations of fans. And this perpetual argument, as you well know, of who was the greatest pitcher of all times. What we can say without any argument is there’s no pitcher in the history of baseball who ever pitched at a higher level for longer than Satchel Paige.

BB:  So finally, where do you rank Satchel amongst the all-time greats?

LT:  I rank him as the most durable of the greats, and I would say that he did it longer than anybody, and I’d say that at his peak he would match up against Walter Johnson, Cy Young, Sandy Koufax, or Roger Clemens in terms of speed, in terms of accuracy, and he would top all of them in terms of putting on a show when he was out there. He went out and he could get out batters as easily as anyone ever in the history of baseball, but he did it with style and grace that nobody ever showed that I’m familiar with.

Bronx Banter:  A Day in the Bleachers. I just read this book for the first time, I want to say about six months ago. I think one of my favorite things about it – obviously I knew about the game, and I knew about The Catch and the other things that come to mind – but I think one of my favorite things was your description of the atmosphere of the game. Looking back fifty years ago, what was it like seeing a game in the Polo Grounds in the ’40s or ’50s?

Arnold Hano:  Well, what it was like seeing a game in the bleachers was the camaraderie. [Showing the covers of three different editions of the book.] When the book first came out, it was a book for fans, about fans. And then the next edition, it’s Willie Mays and fans. And then the next edition it’s just The Catch. But the cover of the first one is truer. This is truly what the book is about.

BB:  Right, right, definitely. It almost seemed like the book was about the fans, and, by the way, Willie Mays made a nice catch.

AH:  That catch, which I spent a lot of time on, took up nine pages in a hundred and sixty page book. And I don’t know if you know about the $700 edition of the book…

BB:  Yes, I read something about that. There was a limited print, and you had signed them all.

AH:  Four hundred copies.

BB:  The other thing, too, about this book is that now, that device that you used, using the game kind of as a prism through which to illuminate either a season or an era or a career, that’s a fairly common device now. But then, I don’t think so, is that right?

AH:  You’re telling me about devices. I wrote a book. I wrote a book about a day, and this is the day.

BB:  What I love about this book is that you’re writing the book and you’re telling what’s happening on the field, and Vic Wertz comes up to bat, and then suddenly you have a two-page segue on Vic Wertz.

AH:  Or on home runs hit by other people for long distances.

BB:  Exactly, exactly.

AH:  Well, I had to fill some space!

BB:  I think that now that’s pretty common. A lot of people use that.

AH:  Part of what E.L. Doctorow said yesterday on television is that writers don’t really realize what it is they’ve written. Critics tell them what they’ve written, but he said, “The result is I never read critics. They tell me things about the book…”

BB:  That perhaps aren’t there, or aren’t intended to be there.

AH:  So when you ask me about a device, I don’t know from the device in this case. I wrote a book about a day, and I filled it in with background stuff. I had to establish myself as writing a book with some reason, so I established myself as somebody who’d seen all these other things. And to that degree, I was an historian of this… thing. But that’s getting beyond where I wanted to go with it. I think of this as a nice little book. Other people think it was something else, but I think it was a nice little book.

BB:  Well, like I said, I don’t know if this was your intention as you wrote it – and it doesn’t sound like you had big intentions – but what I got from it is, I know about that catch, and I knew about that before I picked up the book. But your description of the fans in the bleachers, of what it was like on the field, in the stadium, that’s what I got out of it.

AH:  When I used to go to ballgames, of course, you don’t do this anymore, I used to go very early so I could watch fielding practice. And until a few years ago, I did not know they had suspended fielding practice. I bet the players’ union has done that because they don’t want somebody to break a finger.

BB:  Sometimes you hear people complain about that. You’ll be watching a game and someone will throw to the wrong base and someone will say, “Oh, well, they don’t have fielding practice anymore, and the only time they do that is in spring training…”

AH:  Although when you see a guy like Omar Vizquel pull a backdoor double play. Do you know about that at all? Kenny Lofton was at bat when he was with the Dodgers. Men on first and second and I think there was nobody out. They sent the runners and Lofton hit a one-bouncer to second base. Well, Lofton is about as fast going down from the plate to first base as almost anybody. So when Ray Durham fed Vizquel for the force play, Vizquel had Lofton in his sights, and he knew that he was not gonna throw out Lofton. So he whirled and he threw to third. The guy who had been on second base was playing his first game in the major leagues. He rounded third and goes two or three steps and there’s Pedro Felíz with the ball. The most embarrassed baserunner in the history of baseball – who was sent back to the minors that night! A backdoor double play! It was a 4-6-5 double play. I had never seen it before, and apparently he’s done it more than once. And apparently before that play, a few days before, he had reminded Felíz that this was something he might do. Television followed Vizquel off the field at the end of the half inning, and as he reached the first baseline he broke into laughter. He was so pleased and charmed with what he had just done. It was just a great moment. Now there’s somebody who didn’t need fielding practice.

BB:  You know what, I remember when I was a kid I would always make my dad take me to the game when they opened the gates because I wanted to watch batting practice.

AH:  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

BB:  But I do remember watching a version of fielding practice with Ozzie Smith. It was towards the end of his career, and I don’t think he even ended up playing in the game that night. But I’ll never forget this. He was taking balls at short and throwing to second base, never once looking at second base.

AH:  He knows where it is!

BB:  It’s like Casey Stengel said about Joe DiMaggio, I think maybe you quoted this in your book, “Mr. DiMaggio does not look down at second base as he rounds the bag because Mr. DiMaggio knows that second base has not moved in forty years.”

AH:  I didn’t write that, I wish I had. Yeah, yeah, but there are only a handful of Vizquels and Ozzie Smiths. In fact, Vizquel and Ozzie Smith are together as the greatest shortstops I have ever seen play that game. And to do it for all those years and all those plays and to always know where second base was without even looking… They used to say that Vizquel didn’t have much of an arm, well he never needed much of an arm because he had hands like Bill Mazeroski…

BB:  In and out.

AH:  The ball was in and out and gone. But when he turned and whirled he threw a bullet. He could throw the ball, he just didn’t have to throw the ball. It’s a lovely sport. It’s still the greatest game.

BB:  Why do you think that?

AH:  Well, because it has an elegance that football doesn’t have. My wife Bonnie describes football. She says one man bends down and passes the ball between his legs to another man, and twenty-two men fall down. That’s her description of what a football play looks like. And other people have pointed out that after every football play, they have a conference. Baseball proceeds the way soccer proceeds, with a flow about it. Of course it breaks up every half inning, which soccer doesn’t do. Soccer is much underrated because of that ongoing flow that it has. Baseball has that flow, but it also great individual moments. It’s a game where pitcher-batter still is the game, so there is that. I don’t know. Ninety feet was such a glorious invention. Ninety feet. They didn’t miss by an inch one way or the other. It was exactly right. Today still, a ball hit to shortstop, the throw to first base will get the guy by only this much every time. It’s a wonderfully measured and calculated game. It’s timeless; it can last four hours. One of the greatest days in baseball history in 1933 when Hubbell went eighteen innings and shut out the Cardinals 1-0, six hits. Like having two three-hit shutouts, one on top of the other, and it was the first game of a doubleheader, and during daytime. And then Parmalee goes against Dizzy Dean in the second game, and it’s starting to get dark, and that game lasted one hour and thirty-two minutes. The umpires were in a rush. And Parmalee won his game 1-0. Pitching never had a better day than that. Pitching today is ignored. It’s not ignored, but it’s a homerun hitter’s game, and that has lowered the quality of the game for me. They’ve brought in the fences, they’ve lowered the mound. The strike zone – you played ball as a kid?

BB:  Yeah.

AH:  Shoulders to knees was the strike zone. Now it’s the size of a car.

BB:  I remember vividly as a kid when I was just starting to play baseball and starting to learn the game and watching it on TV, at that time letters to the knees was the strike zone I was taught.

AH:  Okay, ours was shoulders to the knees.

BB:  I remember watching it on TV and seeing balls come across the chest and they were called balls, and it was confusing to me.

AH:  It is confusing. I don’t know what goes at umpire school, but what goes on is something that’s arcane. It’s a strange world where the strike zone is now like this. Wow! What pressure that puts on pitchers! Okay, so where were we?

BB:  Back to A Day in the Bleachers. I read something that you wrote recently for the LA Times, you wrote that you went to the game that day and it wasn’t until a few hours later after you got home that you thought you could write a book.

AH:  Actually, I thought I could write a magazine article. I wrote a magazine article. I expanded the ballgame into ten thousand words. The only magazine that published stuff like that was the New Yorker. They would run important tennis matches, the whole match. John McPhee would cover it. So I brought it down to the New Yorker and some kid came out. I said, “Here’s an article, it’s about a baseball game that took place, and if you publish it you’ll have to publish it right away.” The kid listened, and he said, “Okay, I’ll have them read it.” He went upstairs, an hour later he comes back to me and says they liked it, but it wasn’t right. I took it home and I read it, and it wasn’t right. They were absolutely right that it wasn’t right. So I decided, what the hell, I’ll make it a book. So then I made it a book. My agent Sterling Law thought it was wonderful and knew that Hiram Hayden over at Crown Publishing would publish it in a minute because Hiram Hayden was a Giants fan. Well, Hiram Hayden turned out to be a Cleveland fan, and he turned out to be absolutely right when he said, “I don’t know how to sell this book. There’s no place to sell it. If I put in the sports section, that’s where fathers go to buy books for little boys. If I put it in the nonfiction section it’s lost, it’s swallowed up. I cannot sell this book.” Colliers did not know that. They did not know the book couldn’t be sold until they published it and they found out that Hiram Hayden was right, it couldn’t be sold. It sold, as I tell people, like coldcakes.  We were driving across the country, we’d left New York in July of ’55, Bonnie and I and our daughter and our beagle puppy. We were going across the country and we got to Sioux City, Iowa, where Bonnie’s mother lives, and there’s a telegram from a friend of ours: “Congratulations, rave reviews in Times and Tribune, blah, blah, blah…” So suddenly I was famous, to twelve people.

BB:  One thing that I was thinking about as I was talking to a friend of mine this morning. You went to this game, just to go to a game. There’s a lot of luck involved here.

AH:  I’m the luckiest fan in the history of the world. When I was a copy boy at the Daily News, I was sitting in the Ebbetts Field press box when that ball got away from Mickey Owen. I won a limerick contest and I sat in right field and watched Don Larsen pitch his perfect game. Now, I had to be smart to write the limerick, but Larsen had been bombed in the previous outing in that series, he could’ve been bombed again. It could’ve been an 11-9 ballgame. I went with a bunch of kids to a football game in ’34-’35, the Giants against the Bears for the national championship. We sat in the lower left field seats, it was four degrees above zero, and we stood. We didn’t sit because it was so cold, and we shook our feet. The sound was like thunder. The Bears pushed the Giants all over the field in the first half, and Wellington Mara ordered an underling to go to Manhattan College and steal some basketball shoes. During halftime the Giants changed into sneakers and they pushed the Bears all over the field and they won 30-13. Now that game could’ve been any kind of game, but it turned out to be the Sneaker Game. I am lucky. I go to a ballgame, it was Giants-Dodgers. It was Pee Wee Reese’s first time in the Polo Grounds. Mel Ott was on first base and they fed Reese for a force play and he went up in the air to throw to first for the double play and Ott hit him. Ott’s body was a horizontal blade, and he hit him right around the waist. Ott was not a fast man, but he was built like a small football player, and the cap went one way, the ball went one way, Reese went another way. Years later I ran into Reese and asked if he still remembered the first game he played in the Polo Grounds. “Well, yeah,” he said. When Ott leveled you. He said, “It still hurts. I wonder why he did that.” I said I think he was saying “Welcome to the rivalry, Pee Wee.” And he said, “That’s what he was saying.” I was lucky that I was there to see that. So I have lucked my way through fandom. I’m the luckiest fan that ever lived. There are more, but…

BB:  And didn’t you see Koufax’s first no-hitter as well?

AH:  Bonnie and I. It was an anniversary. I went to the Dodgers and said give me a couple freebies. They sort of owed me. They winked because it was the Mets, they said they always sold out the Mets. I said, oh, you’ll make some room. So we went there and Koufax pitched a no-hitter. Wow! And of course, Willie Mays making his catch. That ball could’ve landed beyond him, or Wertz could’ve popped up.

BB:  So what about Willie Mays? What are your memories of watching him as a player?

AH:  What are my memories of him? Watching him as a player, there was this wild exuberance in the beginning, that “Say, Hey” kind of quality, that gleeful quality that he brought to the field. And then that gradually disappeared as he got older and more mature and more serious about what was going on and he realized that he wasn’t making the kind of money that he should’ve been making. He became an embittered young man, and then an embittered old man. He remained, for the years that I saw him, the greatest player that I had ever seen for that period of time. I saw him make some catches, not the Wertz catch, which was a good catch, it was not a great catch. He outran the ball, I mean that’s what it amounted to. In fact, I write in the book that he started to look over his shoulder and then thought better of it. I think what he did, he probably had great peripheral vision. He probably looked over his shoulder just to make sure the ball was where it should be. I think that’s what happened, now that I think back on it. I saw him make two other catches, maybe I described them elsewhere, one against Bobby Tolan…

BB:  I think you did.

AH:  Anyway, he was great. He hates me.

BB:  Why is that?

AH:  In ’64 I went back to cover the Phillies down the stretch. They were gonna win the pennant by ten games, that sort of thing. Sport Magazine sent me to cover them for eight games, early in the month. Giants came in. Meanwhile I get a phone call from Doubleday, they want me to do a biography of Willie Mays, they’ll pay $250,000, which was then a lot of money. So I said to Willie, and at this time I think he wasn’t very happy with me because I had turned some of our magazine interviews into paperback books. But that’s okay, that happens. I said, Doubleday wants me to do a biography of you. Eyes glitter. I said, they want to pay $250,000, and I’m guessing that’s their first offer, therefore I think we can go higher. Glitter, glitter. And then he said to me, 90-10. I said, what? He said, “Ninety for me, ten for you.” I said, fifty-fifty, that’s the way it is. “Not with me. With me, it’s 90-10.” Charlie Einstein must have had one thing with him, maybe they did a 90-10, I don’t know. I said, “I’m sorry, Willie, it’s 50-50.” Later on, he ran into Al Silverman and he said, “Does that guy Hano still write for you?” Al said, yes. “Well, tell him to kiss my ass.” And then two or three years later he saw Al Silverman, he said, “Does that guy Hano still write for you?” And Al said, yes, he does. His repertoire was limited. He said, “Well, tell him to kiss my ass.” It seemed that his anatomy and his cursing was limited. So he doesn’t like me, but I think there’s good reason. He sees today what’s happened. He sees people in their first year of play, utility second basemen, who appear maybe thirty times in a season as baserunners, make $400,00 a year. He never made $400,000 in a year, even with throwing in all the commercials and everything else. I think that pisses him off. But he was great. He played with a wonderful freedom. The only guy who came close to playing with that same sort of talent on the field was Roberto Clemente. He had that same… lacking the exuberance, he just happened to have the natural grace and ability that Mays had. I liked all those Latin ballplayers. Felipe Alou said on the phone to me, not long ago, “You did more for the Latin American ballplayer than anybody in baseball. I wrote about them. I treated them as though they were human beings. I guess nobody else did.

BB:  I know from reading a Clemente biography a few years ago, David Maraniss’s book that came out about three or four years ago. He talked a lot about that, about how in the ‘60s, the Latino players that were coming in, the press really treated them poorly.

AH:  Terribly, terribly.

BB:  Made fun of them, made fun of their speech…

AH:  Myron Cope, who’s a very good writer and a bright guy, he did that piece for Sports Illustrated. He said to Clemente, “How are you?” And Clemente went through this litany of things, so they ran a skeleton and they labeled all his injuries…

BB:  Yeah, yeah…

AH:  Yeah, you remember that. Cope didn’t understand. Bonnie and I lived for a while in Costa Rica, we were in the peace corps. You and I pass on the street, we say, “Hi, how are you? Good, how are you? Fine.” Neither one of us means what we say, it’s a courtesy. When you say to a Latino, how are you, they think you’re interested, and you stand still for thirty minutes because they go through from top to toe with a special interest in bowel movements. Cope did not realize it. When you ask Clemente how he feels, when Pittsburgh manager Danny Murtaugh asked him how he felt when he got to the stadium and he would shrug and say, “Oh, my shoulder hurts,” he would scratch him. He’d say, well, I can’t play Clemente today, his shoulder’s hurting him. Well, everybody’s shoulder hurts in baseball.

BB:  But he didn’t know not to talk about it.

AH:  He didn’t know not to talk about it. So I guess I didn’t do that. Cepeda loved me. He would bring me around and introduce me to Pagan and Marichal and those guys. They just loved me. And Alou did. I didn’t know that Alou has been married five times and has nine children. I didn’t know that. Ah, the things you learn. Anyway, what else?

BB:  After I read A Day in the Bleachers I jumped ahead a decade or two and read a lot of your Sport Magazine profiles. I love to read about sports – I mean, I love to read in general, but I think I love to read because when I was a kid I read a lot of sports books.

AH:  Sure.

BB:  And so I’ve read a lot of sports stuff, but what I read today is so different from what you were writing then. I was just wondering whom you read that influenced you.

AH:  Well, don’t forget I began reading Bill Heinz way back when he broke in, and he was one of the original “new journalism” sports writers. Nobody even talks about that. But he would talk about it, he would find out what made a guy tick, they’d have a conversation, and then he’d repeat the conversation in print. And nobody did that. And he used the word “I”. So I read him, I read everybody. I read Tom Meany, Tom Meany did a biography of Babe Ruth, and I liked it…

BB:  You quoted him in your Ruth piece, I remember that.

AH:  And Meany would go around saying nice things about me as a result. Dick Young used to say nice things about me when he was doing stuff for the Daily News, he was a beat reporter. I didn’t really know him, I saw him around, but he would say nice things about me. Heinz and I went together to cover the last day that Musial played with the Cardinals. He was doing it for Look, and I was doing it for Sport, so his piece would be coming out first. So I fed him things I had learned. When I went to Musial’s restaurant that night after the game, there was a guy, built a bit like you, and he waited the table and we talked. He had played ball with Musial as a kid. It added an extra little thing to the story, and I gave it to Heinz. He said, “You shouldn’t do that.” But his piece was coming out first. Of course I read everybody. I read Tom Wolfe, and I read Thomas Wolfe, and I read Hemingway, and I read Tolstoy. I read everything. I’m a reader. I have wet macular degeneration and I can’t read. It is the great loss of my life. It’s very difficult for me to write. I’m trying to write a book on pitching because I want to do an antidote to home run hitting. I want to talk about it, I’ll even throw in my own bit about pitching. You know I pitched a little. Shall I tell you about my walk-on?

BB:  You tell me about anything that you want to tell me about.

AH:  I was throwing a baseball around during lunch hour at LIU. A little factory in Brooklyn was where the campus was. A guy came up to me. I knew him by sight, he played on the varsity team. He said, “I’m gonna bring a glove tomorrow, would you throw to me?” I said, sure. So he brought a glove the next day and I threw to him. And then I said to him, after about five or six pitches, “I wanna throw you a screwball.” And so I threw him a screwball and he went crazy, because it was a good one. He said, “You come out Saturday, I want to introduce you to the coach.” So I went out Saturday. The coach, his name was Al Caruso, but he was only known as “All-American Al,” because Parade magazine or someplace had listed him as an Honorable Mention. They had done the first team, they had done the second team, and then there he was down there someplace. So we called him All-American Al, or Triple-A. So he looked me over. I was five-eleven, three quarters and two dimes by that time, I was just shy of six feet. Later on in the army I got run over by a truck, etc., etc., but anyway. So he grabbed a bat and he said, “Okay, Lefty, show me your best stuff.” So I threw him this screwball, and it happened to have been the best screwball I would ever throw in my entire life. It began a little bit around the waist, a little bit outside – on the plate, but a little bit outside – but he lunged, and it broke, and he looked so… he looked terrible! He missed it by this much. And the guys behind me started to chatter. “Attababy, Lefty! You got him, he’s your meat, Lefty!” So I threw him another one. I got this one up a little bit high, and it broke and he hit a one-bouncer back to the box. I mean, a little tapper. I slapped it down with my bare hand. He came running out, he said, “Never do that! You’ll break your finger!” If he had hit it straight back to the box, I could’ve caught it with my teeth, it was so soft. Anyway, so I’m starting to throw the third ball, I’m 0 and 2 on this guy, and I’m trying to make the squad…

BB:  You have to strike him out.

AH:  No, I think if I strike him out, if I do this again, he’s gonna come up to me and say, “You know, Lefty, you already have an academic scholarship, you’re gonna take space and we won’t be able to fill it with some kid coming out of Wilkesborough, blah, blah, blah…” He’ll make a reason. I don’t wanna embarrass him. So in the middle of my third windup, I threw him a fastball, and he hit it four hundred feet. And he ran around with a good baseball smirk on his face, and I made the squad! All I did was pitch batting practice, but still, it’s a good story. All-American Al. So what else?

BB:  I had a question about Sport Magazine in general. Were you assigned to things geographically? Because sometimes it appeared that you were.

AH:  When I was back in New York I did whatever was around there. But when I was on the west coast, you know, that’s an insular attitude. I was sent from Laguna Beach to Seattle to cover a basketball scandal at Seattle University!

BB:  Because it’s the west coast, it’s all the west coast.

AH:  “Oh, Hano’s out there. He’s on the west coast, he can do that.” They would never send anybody from New York to Cleveland, but this is a greater distance, much greater distance. So yeah, you’re right. It was geographic. It was wonderful. There were very few well-known writers out here at that time.

BB:  I bet.

AH:  You had some newspaper people. You had Charlie Einstein up there, me down here, down in this area. So I covered all the Dodgers, and I covered the Angels, and I covered the Giants, and I covered the Warriors when they were playing in San Francisco. The New York Times was as bad about it as anybody. They would send me to places…

BB:  So you were writing out here in the 50s and 60s. How did things change, I guess, in the “journalism game.” I know that in the East there were the Chipmonks, these young, college-educated guys.

AH:  Al Silverman told me about that. I had never heard of these Chipmunks. You’re the second person that’s ever mentioned Chipmunks to me, but Al mentioned it. I didn’t know much about that. I thought we had some pretty good writers there. I thought that Roger Kahn was good, and Roger Angell was a wonderful writer. He didn’t do much for Sport, but he was a great writer. And Ed Lynn was a very good writer. So we had good writers back there. I don’t know. Today’s writers are like Bill Plaschke doing his one-sentence paragraph. Plaschke was invited to speak at the Festival of Books that the Times puts on with UCLA, but he had to cover a Laker game up in Denver because it was getting to be that time of year, playoff time. The LA Times book editor called me and asked me whether I could fill in. So I filled in for Plaschke, and people were delighted because it was sort of a different kind of approach to the world. And I talked about what you and I are talking about, and it was good, it worked out very well as a result. I hope they invite me back again, this time for real and not as a sub. I’m going to Tucson, SABR puts on a thing every year, and I’m the speaker this year. That’ll be fun. I guess it was different then. Sports Illustrated hasn’t changed much. They’re still flashy and splashy. They catered then to a yachting crowd.

BB:  More like a sporting life than a sports magazine.

AH:  Yeah, yeah. But they did some wonderful pieces, wonderful people.

BB:  A lot of the things that you were writing about, whether you were writing about Deacon Jones or Lew Alcindor…

AH:  He was the worst interview I ever did.

BB:  Why do say that? I mean, I would guess that, because that’s his reputation.

AH:  He was, “No comment.” He showed up forty minutes late, he wouldn’t give me any time, he refused to engage me. I did my best, and I’m pretty good at getting people to engage. Impossible. Impossible.

BB:  You interviewed him when he was in college, right?

AH:  Sophomore year. I was the first person to interview him. He was off-limits his freshman year, which was ridiculous. What are they doing? Anyway, sophomore year, I was allowed. But under all these watchful eyes. What was I going to do?

BB:  Now did you come across him later, did you ever have occasion to interview him again, or the desire?

AH:  No, I didn’t, but he’s better. He’s improved considerably. But I’ll tell you a funny story. I was speaking at some writers conference and there was a fairly good-looking, beautifully formed young woman sitting in the front row there. She’s eyeing me, and I’m going along, and she’s ogling me. And I’m thinking, oh, wow! So when it’s over, I went up to her and said, “What was that all about?” She told me exactly what it was all about. She wanted Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s phone number because she wanted to lay him. She knew I had done a piece on him and a book on him, so I must know it. I said I don’t know that, and I don’t pimp for these guys anyway. But I said to her, “If I were in your place, and I wanted to do that, I would just find out where they travel and I’d meet him for breakfast one morning.” She did, and it worked.

BB:  It seemed like these pieces that you did, they were true profiles in the sense that they were more about the men than the games that they played or the numbers they had accrued.

AH:  I hope.

BB:  So that was by design when you went in?

AH:  Well it was by design that I always want to know what you do and where you do it and what else do you do? In fact, editors were pretty good about that. If I would do a one-interview story you’ve done there, and then I’d have to go and flush it out. Today it’s really like a thirty-second interview to me. Sound bites, is all it is.

BB:  It seems like if they’re doing a profile about someone, they talk to him, but it’s mostly about things that you already know.

AH:  Or they find one thing that’s sort of hot. They’re friends with Tom Hanks and they go to the same bar. That sort of stuff. And they hit on that for the first ten minutes.

BB:  Another thing, going back to your writing style again. There was a time when journalists were taught to stay out of their own stories, but you’re clearly present in all your pieces, whether just as a witness or offering opinions about what’s going on. Why did you decide to do that? I love that.

AH:  I think I began doing it when I was doing the first pieces that I did for TV Guide. Ray Robinson, who’s a very dear friend, asked me to do a piece years and years ago on Jayne Mansfield. I don’t do that kind of stuff. So he said, how about one on Mickey Rooney. I said fine, so I did a piece on Mickey Rooney. I found myself engaged with him, and it worked well. So then I did a piece on the actor Paul Douglas. You don’t remember the actor Paul Douglas. Anyway, he was very good. He had been a sports announcer and then an actor. Anyway, we had a couple drinks together, we went to his house together, it was loose. So I treated it loose, the way Tom Wolfe would have, or Hunter Thompson or people like that. I was influenced by New Journalism. I helped create New Journalism, but I was also influenced by New Journalism. Better than who, what, where, when, and why.

BB:  We talked a little about this with Kareem and your memories of that, but what makes for a good interview subject? How did you choose? Were they always assigned to you, or did you say, hey, I wanna go talk to this guy?

AH:  Usually assigned. Somebody like Al Silverman would say, do Bill Freehan. Well, I didn’t know Bill Freehan from Bill Gates. I immerse myself in all the stuff I could find about the guy. I go to the library, I read all the clips, I talk to people so I know something going in. I write a query sheet. You have notes, I would have a whole query sheet. I don’t necessarily follow it, but I wanted to have it there as a backup. I want to know as much as I can about this guy and his life. I’ll give you an example. Did you ever hear of the magazine Pageant?

BB:  No.

AH:  Okay. Pageant was a Reader’s Digest-size magazine. Took no ads. It was the writers’ magazine, that writers loved. Ray worked there for a while, Ray Robinson. Ray asked me to do a piece on Robert Ryan, the actor. He said he’s the last liberal in Hollywood. To me, that’s about a paragraph. In two thousand words, that’s a paragraph. So I went to see him. I did all the work before and I found out everything I could about him. So we’re talking, but we’re missing. And said to him, Bob, something’s going on. I’ve got you heavyweight champion of Dartmouth College at the age of fifteen, and that doesn’t work. He stopped and said, “My agent won’t let me be fifty years old. I’m fifty-three.” So he was being forty-nine for me, but his real age was fifty-three. And having said that, I guess he felt that I knew everything about him, so he started telling me about his drinking problem, and that became the story. If you do enough homework, you often find something like that will happen. The story will change on you, and you change with it. It became a very good piece. He died a few months after the piece appeared. I was killing a lot of people for a while. Killing ‘em off. John Wayne was an excellent interview, by the way. We’re one-eighty apart on almost everything, except that he not only was a great interview he also wrote nice letters back to me after the story would appear. Nobody does that. He did. Anyway, what were we talking about?

BB:  Something that you mentioned struck me. You talked about how doing a good interview changed you. How do you think you’ve been affected by interviewing all these people? Are there certain interviews, maybe, that stand out even after all these years?

AH:  Some do. Bill Holden. He was making The Horse Soldiers with John Wayne and some woman. He said, “I’ll give you an hour between twelve and one.” At twelve I went to his dressing room and we started the kind of interview that we’ve been talking about. At five minutes to one I said, “I should tell you we have only five minutes left.” He said, “You know more about me than I do. Keep going.” So we went another two hours. People don’t do that kind of work anymore when they do an interview. It’s on the spot. I will spend four or five days getting everything ready for that interview, for the major interview. Because I don’t think of it as an interview story, I think of it as a profile. A biography boiled down to two thousand words. I did a story on Jackie Coogan, who had been the kid when he was four years old in a movie with Charlie Chaplin, and then he ended up as Uncle Fester in the Addams Family. Fifty years. His life was the history of Hollywood. And so I did this story. They wanted two thousand words. I wrote sixteen thousand words and then I started boiling it down and boiling it down and boiling it down. I got it down to twenty-four hundred words and I sent it in. I can’t cut another word of this. And they loved it. He told about how after World War II he couldn’t get any jobs anywhere. He went to the Charlie Chaplin studio, Chaplin had a studio then, and Chaplin was so delighted to see him, he replayed the movie The Kid, and he played the piano to supply the music, and they both cried. It’s things like that, if you work hard enough you can get this sort of stuff out of people, but nobody works hard enough anymore. That’s a statement about society. This is a disposable society, a lazy, laid-back society, and that’s not how I grew up. My old man was out work in 1934 for six months, and every day, seven days a week, he’d put his feet up on a wooden chair and he’d block his shoes, and he’d go out into that jungle. Every day for six months until he found a job. Today this is the bailout time. What else you got?

BB:  A lot of what I was reading was stuff that you had written in the ’60s, which was obviously a real turbulent time. You were writing about people who were kind of going against the establishment, whether it was someone like Bob Gibson or Joe Namath or whoever. How did you see the sporting world kind of reflecting what was going on in general society?

AH:  I think exactly the way you described. I think there were the establishment folks and there were the anti-establishment folks. There’s Ron Fairly – he’ll do everything to please the boss, and there’s Bob Gibson who won’t do a thing to please the boss. One makes a much better interview than the other, I discovered that. And it fits more with my attitude towards life. I don’t know which came first, but I’m a non-establishment person. As I get older I get more mellow, by the way, so I can’t even say that anymore.

BB:  There was one quote I wanted to read to you from A Day in the Bleachers. You were talking about Sal Maglie.

AH:  Yeah.

BB:  He had been removed from the game, and as he was walking off the people were cheering for him. And you were talking about how he had failed.

AH:  And the best thing in life is failure.

BB:  Let me read it to you. “All the great people and great things in life are failures. It is in doing what we cannot do but must try to do that humans rise to their exalted fulfillment. Maglie had tried to do with an old man’s arm and back what a young man might not have been able to do as well. Of such failures is greatness made.”

AH:  Yeah. I’d like to believe that. Whether I truly believe it or not, I don’t know. And I don’t think it’s fair to say that all great things in life are failures. I like to think that people should try more than they can accomplish and reach for the stars and then, if satisfied, grab a cloud and fly. I don’t think people try hard enough. That’s certainly been true in the last eight years in this country and that administration. That was a laid-back, lousy, lewd eight years that we had. I think Obama’s gonna be okay. I think he’s gonna try. I hope he stiffens his back a little bit more than he’s doing. I think he’s gonna be okay. Thank you for quoting that. It’s a nice quote.

BB:  It was something that really jumped out at me when I read the book the first time. I think that sometimes you can learn more about yourself when you fail than when you succeed. I mentioned to you before that I’m a teacher, and I coach the basketball team at our school also. I always think that I can give my players more when we lose than when we win. When we win, it’s just, “Good job.”

AH:  Do you know Murry Kempton, the writer, at all? He was a New York Post writer. He covered the Don Larsen perfect game, but he covered it by talking only about Sal Maglie. Each inning he would describe what Maglie was doing. You know, Maglie went, again, eight innings. The same way. And this time he struck out the side in his last inning, but Larsen decided to pitch a perfect game that day. But it made for a wonderful column. So here’s a guy fails in ’54, and then in ’56 he’s pitching an even better game against a better team…

BB:  On a bigger stage.

AH:  People didn’t like Maglie. A lot of people discovered he was a very nice man, besides that snarling, hard-bitten, brush-‘em-back kind of pitcher.

BB:  You know, it’s funny, because you talked about him very sympathetically, or heroically even. I always loved reading baseball biographies, and that’s a big reason why I’m a Yankee fan, because I read about Ruth and DiMaggio and Gehrig and all the rest. So Sal Maglie, in my head, was always the villain.

AH:  The bad guy.

BB:  They talked about his thick beard, and he was always the bad guy. So it was really interesting to read him cast in a different light.

AH:  And then he joins the Dodgers. Carl Furrillo probably hated him more than anybody in the world, and he had to change his whole attitude toward him.

BB:  I don’t want to take up too much of your Sunday, but a couple of other things. We talked about “A Day in the Bleachers,” for instance, as being incredibly lucky that things kind of happened the way that they did. Do you feel like there are other things that you’ve written that people don’t know about that maybe we should? Maybe things didn’t break the way they should’ve.

AH:  Well, I wrote the first western novel with a black protagonist. Don Meade, when they received the manuscript, said, “We like this, and we’re gonna run it, and we’ll pay you your advance, but you’re gonna have to change the race of your protagonist because there are no black cowboys.” And I said, well, beginning with this book there will be one. Grudgingly, and nicely, they okayed it. Then about a month before the book came out, a nonfiction work came out called The Black Cowboy. Turned out that seventy percent of all cowboys after the Civil War were black. In that case I forced my hand. I’ve written some other things that people don’t know about because I wrote under a series of pseudonyms. I wrote a short story, a suspense story set far in the future, and it deals with book burning. Radio Free Europe broadcast it. It’s appeared in at least fifteen foreign languages, it’s been anthologized maybe twenty times. And that’s a short story other people don’t know about.

BB:  Is it under your name?

AH:  It’s under the name Matthew Gant. It’s called “The Crate at Outpost 1.” When a library closed in south Laguna, they read this short story aloud because it has to do with book burning. Unbeknownst to them, the writer was present!

BB:  Did you raise your hand?

AH:  Actually, I only heard about from somebody. The writer was present in the town, but not in the building. When we went to the Alamo, I said to the librarian there, I said, “Do you have a copy of “The Raven and the Sword,” by Matthew Gant?” And she said, “Oh, yeah, we have that.” I said, “I wrote it,” and they almost died. They brought it out and had me sign it. So I’ve done some other things. And the fact that that Mineral King story was quoted in a Supreme Court decision. That’s good stuff. Very heady. A lawyer calls and says you’re part of a Supreme Court decision. Wow. So anyway, I’ve had a wonderful and lucky life.

BB:  So as you look back on that wonderful and lucky life, you said to me early on that you didn’t think of yourself as a sportswriter but as a writer. What’s your legacy?

AH:  My legacy here in town is that I worked my ass off to keep Laguna Beach, Laguna Beach.

BB:  Oh, yeah? Tell me about that.

AH:  We have a low-profile town because of me. The city council back in 1970 wanted to pass a zoning law…

BB:  You’re talking about the height of the buildings?

AH:  Right. To build a string of high-rise hotels from Broadway to Bluebird Canyon, about a mile and an eighth. A string of ten-story, hundred-foot tall hotels. I started a movement against it and we brought out an initiative to make a building height limit in the city of Laguna Beach so this could never happen again. We were the first city in America to use the initiative process to establish a city-wide building height limit, and it passed. Thirty-six feet, three stories. Nothing ever taller will be built in Laguna, because of me. So that’s how they know me here. And I write a column that appears in an environmental organization every month. I write a monthly column for them, and some of that stuff is as good as anything I’ve ever done. I don’t know. Bonnie keeps saying I have to write out our obituaries so somebody will know what to publish. I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to write my obituary. I don’t want to close the door yet. If I ever get back to writing that pitching book, then I want to do another book about my brother who was killed in WWII. A book called, “How Am I Doing, Big Brother?”

BB:  Have you ever thought about writing your personal memoirs?

AH:  I tried. At six hundred pages it was already much, much, much too meaty and much too long and not very good and I didn’t like it. It never went anywhere. I might figure out a way to do it in three hundred pages instead of six hundred pages. I’m getting old. I’m getting tired.

[Painting by Mark Ulriksen]