Here’s an excerpt from Colum McCann’s “Damn Yankees” essay:

I have been in New York for 18 years. Every time I have gone to Yankee Stadium with my two sons and my daughter, I am somehow brought back to my boyhood. Perhaps it is because baseball is so very different from anything I grew up with.

The subway journey out. The hustlers, the bustlers, the bored cops. The jostle at the turnstiles. Up the ramps. Through the shadows. The huge swell of diamond green. The crackle. The billboards. The slight air of the unreal. The guilt when standing for another nation’s national anthem. The hot dogs. The bad beer. The catcalls. Siddown. Shaddup. Fuhgeddaboudit.

Learning baseball is learning to love what is left behind also. The world drifts away for a few hours. We can rediscover what it means to be lost. The world is full, once again, of surprise. We go back to who we were.

I slipped into America via baseball. The language intrigued me. The squeeze plays, the fungoes, the bean balls, the curveballs, the steals. The showboating. The pageantry. The lyrical cursing that unfolded across the bleachers.

[Photo Credit: N.Y. Daily News]

Here’s Mike Downey’s review of Paul Dickson’s new Bill Veeck biography:

My first reaction when a copy of Paul Dickson’s new biography, “Bill Veeck: Baseball’s Greatest Maverick,” lands in my lap is to be curious if justice has been done to him, before turning a single page. I touch base with Mike Veeck, the great man’s son http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-ca-bill-veeck-20120401,0,4034572.story(a man of a few radical and wonderfully ridiculous notions of his own), to inquire if the descendants approve. “We’ve read it and enjoyed the easy flow and the research,” Mike replies. “Mr. Dickson has won me over with his gentle prose.”

Nice first pitch. So into the bio I go, wondering if there’s a chance in heck that this can be a proper bookend to one of the best of all sports books, “Veeck as in Wreck,” the long-ago collaboration of Ed Linn with his subject that established Veeck as a man who held nothing back, denigrating his own contemporaries in such a way that owners such as Gene Autry and Charles O. Finley were appalled by him.

The proof of goodness is usually in the details, so it becomes clear right off the bat that Dickson has written an authoritative work. It does take on a bit of a term-paper feel in part, since Dickson did need to rely heavily on anecdotes of old, Veeck being deceased for 26 years and therefore unavailable for beery, cheery late-night chats. But the stories are well documented and well told, so Veeck, like his kin, likely would approve.

I’m down.

[Photographs by Scott Mlyn]

Copyright @ 2011 Scott Mlyn All Rights Reserved.

George Kimball

Also reviewed in the Times yesterday was “At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing.” I’ve been touting the book all spring. It was edited by two veteran writers I’m fortunate to call friends: George Kimball and John Schulian. I was thrilled that it received nothing short of a rave from Gordon Marino:

More than any other sport, even baseball or golf, boxing calls forth the muse in writers. It’s no surprise. Where there is risk there is drama, and boxers put more at risk than other athletes. In a single evening, they roll the dice with their health, marketability and sense of identity. When you have a bad night in the ring, you can’t make it up in a double header on Sunday, or on another football field in a week’s time. And after the very last bell, there is seldom a diploma to fall back on, and there sure won’t be any pension checks coming in the mail.

It’s a very hard game — maybe even crazy — but as the affection-filled writers who have attached themselves to these warriors know, the masters of the ring possess a unique nobility. That nobility is perfectly framed in this remarkable volume from the Library of America. The essays here capture every angle of this world, both solemn and comic.

…I would bemoan only one omission, namely, the wise, lustrous pages of F. X. Toole’s introduction to his short-story collection, “Rope Burns.” Though “At the Fights” weighs in at 500-plus pages, it doesn’t contain a single flabby contribution. Over and over again, writers and readers have sought to get behind the eyes of a fighter, to fathom the fighter’s heart. This is as close as you can get without catching a hook to the head.

It’s my favorite book that’s come out this year. Perfect for Father’s Day or any other day you want to be graced by a collection of great writing.

[Cartoon by George Price]

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.)

George Kimball and Thomas Hauser headline this week’s Varsity Letters speaking series, brought to you by the good people at Gelf Magazine. If you are around on Thursday night, do yourself a favor and fall through, you are sure to be entertained and learn a thing or three. I’ll be there for sure.

Here is a recent interview with Kimball discussing “At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing”:

Arts Fuse: A. J. Liebling is generally considered by critics to be the best American writer on boxing. If he is at the top, who are the runners-up and why?

Kimball: Not Mailer and not Hemingway, although they’d probably think they were. Just off the top of my head, the worthy contenders would include Budd Schulberg and W.C. Heinz for certain, but also Mark Kram and Pat Putnam from SI, Ralph Wiley, all of whom really understood the sport in addition to being wonderful writers.

AF: There are some really rare finds here — for example, pieces by Richard Wright and Sherwood Anderson on Joe Louis. How difficult was the research for the anthology? What are some of your favorite pieces?

Kimball: I wouldn’t describe the research as “difficult,” because it was such a pleasure. We probably read a half-dozen really good pieces for every one that wound up in the anthology. We read some pretty awful ones, too, mostly when we’d been touted by someone who should have known better.

…I’ve been asked that question by several people over the past couple of months and usually manage to duck it by saying “Which of your children is your favorite?” But I will say that John Lardner’s masterpiece on Stanley Ketchel, “Down Great Purple Valleys,” is sort of the cornerstone of the whole book. With all the other changes we went through in compiling At the Fights, that was the one, indispensable story if only because it so exemplified what we wanted to do with the rest of the book –- and that was setting the bar pretty high.

Man, Ralph Wiley is overlooked these days, isn’t he? And since George mentioned “Down Great Purple Valleys,” here again, is one of the greatest openings in the history of American journalism:

“Stanley Ketchel was twenty-four years old when he was fatally shot in the back by the common-law husband of the lady who was cooking his breakfast.”

Eliot Asinof is most famous for writing “Eight Men Out.” (He is less famous for once being married to Marlon Brando’s sister.) Asinof played minor league ball in the Phillies system for three years before World War II. His first book, a novel about a minor league lifer, “Man on Spikes” was published in 1955 and to my mind is one of the best baseball novels. It is a hard, gripping portrait of baseball under the reserve system (none other than Marvin Miller wrote the foreword for the most recent edition of the book). The prose is plain and clear, the details are vivid and Asinof displayed considerable skill as a dramatist.

If you’ve never read it, pick up a copy when you can. It’s well worth it. Here is an excerpt, from a chapter about an old ballplayer named Herman Cruller:

And now, before the umpire hollered “Play ball!” for the last time that season, Herman felt deflated. He could not look forward to the tension and excitement of the game. The crowd was there, sweltering even in the shade of the stands behind him, pressing the players with their boisterous presence. Even the bleachers, where the Negroes sat blistering under the naked sun, were full and demanding. They were all there, defying the heat, for this was “the big one,” the game that decided and ended a season of games.

Herman looked up into the stands and watched people fanning themselves with their programs, their throats already parched from rasping calls but soon to be lubricated by long draughts of cold beer. For years he had listened to their routine, opinionated braying during the practice hours, the little pieces of stupidity from the big blaring voices. Sullenly, he watched them hollering their pre-game nonsense: “Lefty Moss stinks. He couldn’t even strike out my Aunt Mabel, and she’s ninety-one!” “I’ll bet ya a ten-spot he goes the route, horseface; I’ll bet ya another ten-spot he wins it too!” “Aah, hell. Gowann.” Thinking with their brains in their asses like a bunch of children betting their hard-earned money as if they knew what they were talking about. For all the years he had played professional baseball, for as far back as he could remember, he hated the loud ones in the crowds who had watched him those thousands of innings. He hated them for their fickleness, their blaring derision, their hooting and squawking, the sadistic way they kicked at the guy who was down. He hated the phony effort at what they called sportsmanship, the brief moment of applause that supposedly justified the hours of razzing they had really come to revel in. It was as if the ballplayers were not playing a game they could watch and enjoy, but were caricatures representing objects of love and hate, were either heroes or villains. And if they had love for a player, still they were quick to jeer at him when he booted one or fanned with a crucial run on base. They seldom considered the player a human being, capable of error as well as competence. Their money was their admission to the arena, and it gave them rights unlimited. For half a buck they could scream and jeer and sound off with their cruddy opinions as if they were speaking gospel. When they felt like it, they unleashed their venom against a ballplayer who displeased them until their scorn itself was part of their picture of him. He was a bum in their eyes, and he had to battle against them with as great a power as he did against the legitimate opposition on the field. When the crowd was down on a kid, the odds were you could count him out, for he was hitting with a pair of strikes against him and the rattling of catcalls in his ears.

He had seen the whims of a crowd make a goat out of more than one good ballplayer and then ride him right out of the league.

But it was the crowd who paid him for his stinking forty bucks a week, fair weather and foul. If he forgot, the management was right there to remind him. Baseball was a big game, and all kinds of people came to watch it for all kinds of reasons. He was paid to play for them all.

But the afternoon was hot and he was tired, and the game was a chore. It wasn’t in him to please this crowd.

You’re bitter, Herm, he told himself finally. You’re bitter and beat by the heat. You’re old and tired and near the end of the stinking line in this game, and you’re taking it out on a bunch of people no different from yourself. Give yourself another year or two and you’ll be paying your dough to sit up there and guzzle beer with the rest of them.

[Photo Credit: Old Film]

I’m not going to be able to make it but I have the book and am about 50 pages in and recommend it highly. Cook is an engaging and lively writer and this trim book makes for a great holiday gift, no doubt.

Peep, don’t sleep.

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]

“John grew up in the shadow of a father who was a great writer,” said A. J. Liebling. “This is a handicap shared by only an infinitesimal portion of any given generation, but it did not intimidate him.”

When John Lardner was ten-years old, he wrote a short verse that appeared in a F.P.A column:

Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey,
Both sultans of the swat.
One hits where other people are,
The other where they’re not.

John Lardner was born in Chicago but raised mostly on the east coast. He went to the Phillips Academy in Andover (his three brothers would follow), spent a year at Harvard and another at the Sorbonne, before he returned to New York and got a job at the New York Herald Tribune in 1931. He was nineteen-years-old. His father, Ring, who was already ill with the tuberculosis and heart diesee that would kill him a few years later, sent a note to Stanley Walker, a Texan who’d made the Tribune into the best writer’s paper in New York.

“You will find him a little reticent at times, but personally I never felt this was a handicap.” Walker later said that John “came close to being the perfect all-around journalist.”

John worked at the Tribune until 1933, the year his father died. The two men were close in Ring’s final years and the old man was proud of his son’s early achievements. “We are all swollen up like my ankles,” Ring wrote in a letter to his nephew, Richard Tobin. John was offered a syndicated sports column when he was twenty-one for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Carried locally by the N.Y. Post, Lardner wrote about sports, and then the war, for NANA until 1948.

A week after John got married in 1938, his brother Jim was killed in Spain, the last American volunteer to die in the Spanish Civil War. The following year, John published his first freelance magazine piece, an essay on the 1919 World Series, for the Saturday Evening Post. He also started a weekly sports column in Newsweek where he would remain for more than twenty years.

At one point, Stanley Woodward, the legendary sports editor, tried to lure Lardner back to the Tribune—alongside Red Smith, he would have had the greatest one-two-punch in history—but could not come up with the money to pay him.

Beginning in 1942 and for the next three years, Lardner spent most of his time covering the war from Australia, Italy, North Africa and the Pacific for the NANA, Newsweek and the New Yorker. “John was naturally brave,” wrote Libeling, “when he saw blinding bomb flashes by night, he used to was TOWARD them to see better.” Lardner’s accounts of Iwo Jima and Okinawa for the New Yorker were, in Liebling’s opinion, “were as good as J.W. De Forest’s reporting of combat in the Civil War, which in our opinion is almost perfect.”

But tragedy continued to haunt the talented Lardner boys. The youngest Lardner brother, David was killed by a land mine in Germany, in October 1944. John’s final year covering the war in the South Pacific was under the shadow of the death of his brothers. Ring Jr. won an Oscar for his screenplay for Women of the Year when he was twenty-seven. But he a member of the Hollywood Ten, a group of writers and directors who refused to cooperate with the HUAC witchhunts. As a result, Ring Jr was blacklisted for close to twenty years though he did make money writing for tv under a suedonym. And he had the last laugh when he came back to Hollywood and wrote The Cincinnati Kid and then won his second Oscar for M*A*S*H. Ring Jr was the only Lardner brother to live a long life—he died just before his eighty-fifth birthday in 2000.

Yet in spite of his poor health, John Lardner was productive. He gave up his syndicated newspaper column after the War and concentrated exclusively on magazine work. He published in three volumes: Strong Cigars and Lovely Women, White Hopes and Other Tigers, and It Beats Working. Before he died,  Lardner was working on a social history of Drinking in America (seven chapters of which are featured in the posthumous collection, The World of John Lardner).

John and his wife Hazel did not have a close marriage, though they had three children, including a daughter, Susan, who went on to write for The New Yorker. Susan remembers her father typing in a room all day and then maybe coming out to eat or to go to Bleeck’s, pronounced “Blake’s,” a famous hangout for the Herald Tribune staff. John O’Hara drank there and so did James Thurber. Walt Kelly, the creator of the famous Pogo comic strip, was there and he happened to be Lardner’s best friend.

“As a man and as a writer,” wrote A.J. Libeling, “Lardner was reserved. His humor was direct without being blunt, his use of understatement graceful without being soft. He was as easy to like as he was hard to know.”

“The quiet of the man’s presence was like the silence of a forest,” Kelly said later, “where the lack of noise does not indicate a lack of life.”

“Though all the years we knew him,” wrote Liebling, “John remained outwardly the same; handsome, grave, and equable, only the corners of his mouth, and of the eyes behind the thick lenses, betraying occasionally his private amusement with what he though about.”

Dig the new John Lardner collection.

[Drawing by Walt Kelly]

The New Yorker’s recent compilation, The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from the New Yorker, is a fine and handsome collection but it is does not contain a single piece by John Lardner, which begs the question: Is Lardner the most neglected great sports writer of all-time?

Sure, Jimmy Cannon is  overlooked these days and he was a legend during his time; Joe H. Palmer was on his way to a PHD in English Literature when he became a full-time chronicler of horse racing–which he did as well as anyone ever has–but he died young and his name is lost; and Lenny Shecter was a funny, irascible talent, the patron saint of cynicism and snarki, and he’s sadly known as just the “co-writer” of “Ball Four.” Shecter also died young.

Over at SI.com, I’ve got an appreciation of a new collection of Lardner’s best sportswriting:

John Lardner was painting a prose portrait of a legendary con man when he wrote: “On a small scale, Titanic Thompson is an American legend. I say on a small scale, because an overpowering majority of the public has never heard of him. That is the way Titanic likes it. He is a professional gambler. He has sometimes been called the gambler’s gambler.”

Lardner might well have been writing about himself, although calling him a writer’s writer is too limiting, not to mention entirely inadequate. In a career that spanned three decades, the ’30s through the ’50s, he wrote for The New Yorker about everything from movies and TV, to the invasions of Normandy and Iwo Jima. But it was as a sports columnist for Newsweek that Lardner left his deepest footprint, and he underscored it with long, brilliant pieces for magazines like True and Sport. His trademark, as Stan Isaacs, the former Newsday sports columnist recently pointed out, was a “droll touch — precise, detached.”

“Time has a way of dimming the memory and achievements of writers who wrote, essentially, for the moment, as writers writing for journals must do,” Ira Berkow, the longtime columnist of the New York Times, told me recently. “But the best shouldn’t be lost in the haze of history and John Lardner was a brilliant writer — which means, in my view, that he was insightful, irreverent, wry and a master of English prose.”

Al Silverman, who ran Sport magazine in the Sixties, edited Lardner’s once-a-month sports column in True for a year-and-a-half in the early ’50s. “We never did meet but talked over the phone about his piece every month,” said Silverman. “I don’t remember ever saying, ‘You made a little grammatical error here, John.’ Always it was me saying, ‘Another great one, John.’ And they all were wonderful.”

In the epilogue to a posthumous collection “The World of John Lardner” (1961), his friend Roger Kahn wrote, “Although most perceptive sports writers accepted him as matchless, sports writing was not the craft of John Lardner. Nor was it profile writing, nor column writing. After the painstaking business of reportage, his craft was purely writing: writing the English sentence, fusing sound and meaning, matching the precision of the word with the rhythm of the phrase. It is a pursuit which is unfailing demanding, and Lardner met it with unfailing mastery.”

Do yourself a favor and pick up the new Lardner collection. You won’t be sorry.

[Drawings by Walt Kelly]

Three cheers to Jim Bouton, whose classic book, Ball Four, turns 40 (Jay Jaffe had a great post to mark the event over at the Pinstriped Bible last week).

Last weekend, Bouton was honored by the  Baseball Reliquary in California. According to Tom Hoffarth:

When asked how the title “Ball Four” came into being, Bouton explained Saturday how he and editor Leonard Shecter were at the Lion’s Head Tavern in New York, the famous literary bar near Columbia University, having just turned in the finished product into the publisher:

“We went to have a drink to celebrate this piece of cardboard we had just turned in, and we’re thinking, ‘Now what are we going to call the damn thing?’

“We were talking about the need to have a downbeat title. This isn’t a story about how somebody just won the World Series. It’s about struggling, about difficulty. What’s the toughest thing for a pitcher — a knuckleball pitcher in particular — it’s to get the damn ball over the plate. It’s walking guys ….

“So we’re talking about all this, and there was a lady sitting at the bar. She was very drunk. And she was listening to our conversation. And at some point, she leans over and says, ‘Whyyyyy don’t you caaaaall it Baaaaallllll Foooouuuuurrrrrrr?’

“And we said, ‘nawwwww.’

“Finally we couldn’t come up with anything. And I was walking Shecter back to his hotel before I went home to New Jersey, and then Shecter says, ‘You know, Ball Four isn’t a bad title.’ So we owe it all to this woman at the bar.”

The Best American Sports Writing turns 20 this year. Peter Gammons is the guest editor and the book will be available in a few weeks. As always, it’s a must-read for anyone who cares about good writing.

To celebrate, here’s an excerpt from the forward by series editor Glenn Stout (I’ll have a Q&A with Glenn up shortly).

Dig:

Twenty years ago, in the foreword to the inaugural edition of this book, I repeated an anecdote I heard Tim Horgan, long time sports columnist for The Boston Herald, tell at his retirement dinner. He said that when he was approached by aspiring students of sportswriting he always asked why he or she wanted to write about sports for a living. Invariably the students would respond to Horgan by saying, “Because I love sports.”

“Wrong,” Horgan would admonish. “You have to love the writing.”

I have never forgotten those words. They are the reason, as I explained in that first edition, why this book is called The Best American Sports Writing, two words, and not The Best American Sportswriting, the compound word, which would be a different collection entirely. First and foremost this is and has always been a book for those who love writing. That the writing is about sports is, of course, not insignificant, but my goal has always been to seek out stories that are so well written that the subject matter hardly matters, stories readers will enjoy, not simply because of the topic, but, just as a non-athlete can enjoy the artistry of an athlete, because of the artistry displayed by the writer,

A great deal has changed since I began the work of this book twenty years ago, both for me personally and in the field of sports writing. When I began serving this book as series editor, I had just turned thirty years old and lived in an apartment in Boston’s South End and freelanced while working as a librarian at the Boston Public Library. Over the ensuing twenty years BASW world headquarters have moved, first to a house in the suburbs and now to Vermont, hidden in the fields and woods alongside Lake Champlain near the Canadian border. I have married, buried both my parents and watched my daughter grow up amid the clutter of this book for each of her fourteen years. Eighteen years ago I quit my job and have been a full time writer ever since. I rehabbed an old rotator cuff tear, started playing baseball again, pitched in over-30 baseball leagues for ten years, and retired once more. I have coached girls softball and Little League, learned to ski and snorkel and kayak and skate, make my own beer, maple syrup and applesauce, given dozens of talks, visited scores of schools, written hundreds of columns and features, over forty juvenile books, a full dozen adult titles and edited several other anthologies. I’ve made some friends I’ll have for the rest of my life, and lost track of some because, quite frankly, the curse that every writer lives with is that every hour and minute we spend doing what we love are also hours and minutes we spend away from those who we care about. I easily spend six or eight hours almost every day writing (I usually have to ask my daughter, to her amusement, what day of the week it is), and hours more each day reading, usually for this book, sometimes while sitting on an exercise bike, or on the porch, or at the kitchen table eating, or in my chair watching a ballgame. The work of this book never ends, but has surrounded me for so long I sometimes barely notice.

In an earlier edition of the book I told the story about how I came to be selected to serve as Series Editor, something for which I am forever grateful and still a bit mystified, because, to be honest, I did not know how to do this when I started. I cannot imagine that anyone would know how to do this, really. Like the act of writing, this is a “learn by doing” experience.

My first editor, undoubtedly trying to impress me with the magnitude of my task, told me that the series editor for another Best American title kept file cards of publications and dutifully checked them off each time they arrived, notated the cards in regard to their contents, and that I should do the same. I bought a big box of file cards and dutifully began creating a similar card file system.

Then I looked at the pile of material waiting to be read and decided that anything that got in the way of reading should probably be ignored, and tossed the cards. I have kept things simple and never used any kind of grading or ranking system for the stories I read over beyond this: stories I want to read again go in one pile. Stories I don’t go into another, and when that much larger pile topples over, those stories either get recycled or go into my woodstove. As the deadline approaches I keep going over the “read again” pile until it gets small enough to send to the guest editor.

Of course, any changes in my life pale when compared with the changes that have taken place in writing and journalism. Twenty years ago – before anyone had ever called me “sir” – I had just made the transition from writing features and other freelance assignments in long-hand and then going into work early to type them out on an electric typewriter. I was beginning to work on a Magnavox Videowriter, a first generation word processor that, to a non-typist like myself (I use my thumb and two fingers on each hand and type at the speed of my mind, which is not very fast) seemed absolutely magical. When I was selected to edit this annual collection it came with the caveat that I had to buy a computer. It cost most of my advance and now my wristwatch probably contains more computing power.

Writers for newspapers and magazines were making – or had just made – a similar transition to computers, and there was, of course, no such thing as the online world which has changed almost everything everywhere, but few places more so than the commercial worlds of newspaper, magazine and book publishing. There is no point to hash over the obvious here, but anyone involved in any of these businesses knows that everything has changed, and in the last few years of economic recession, not for the better. There are, unquestionably, fewer print outlets for writing than there were twenty years ago, and space in those that remain has become more precious. The online universe, which did not even exist, now offers outlets to everyone, ranging from purely commercial platforms, to the virtually non commercial world of the blog. This is both a bad thing, because the best writing is generally done by professionals, and a good thing, because the best writing is not always done by professionals. Quality, not bylines, matter.

It has never been easy to earn a living as a writer, and it is particularly difficult now, but it probably never been easier to write. Resources are instantly accessible. In an hour I can research what used to take me weeks to do. But those same resources are now also at the fingertips of the reader, who does not always want or even appreciate the care and talent it takes to turn raw facts into fine writing.

In these pages we argue otherwise, because the only thing that has not changed over the last twenty years is the most important thing of all – the quality of the writing. I am amused that every three or four years some magazine (or, now, website) sees fit to run a story that bemoans the “death of sportswriting,” or some similar, “get off of my lawn” nonsense, and then sends it to me for consideration in next years’ edition.

Although I agree that a great deal has died over the last two decades, and perhaps a small portion of that compound word “sportswriting” has reached an end, I am something of a historian of both genres and believe that rumors of the demise of either are highly exaggerated. While I have yet to meet the writer who has become better at his or her craft by going on television or the radio, there always have been and continue to be great writers who value the written word above all others. But the notion of some kind of “Golden Age” of either sportswriting or sports writing is simply the kind of selective nostalgia that still prefers Mom’s meatloaf to any other.
From my chair sports writing seems to be doing quite well. The reason, of course, is the writer. Despite the conveyor belt of change, both in technology and the marketplace, that has been rocketing past, the writers who have appeared in this book and who I read each year have neither cowered in fear before the word and nor been frozen into silence.

Quite the opposite. Many of us who retain faith in the page probably write more and better than before. It’s in the blood, and despite all the logical arguments that can be made against pursuing writing of any kind as an avocation, at the end of each year I end up with a box of about two hundred stories that I want to read again, stories that I worry over as the pile gets smaller and the decisions more difficult, just as I did twenty years ago. At the end of the process, I still seem to find seventy stories or so that I feel are worthy of being sent to the guest editor. Unless they have collectively chosen to lie, each has had a difficult time selecting the twenty to twenty five stories that eventually appear in this book, not because they can’t find enough stories, but because they have a hard time paring the number of stories down to a manageable size.

Now I am the one who regularly gets phone calls or letters or emails from aspiring writers who call me “sir” and approach me in much the same way they approached Tim Horgan. I tell them the same thing he did; you have to love the writing. That, among all else, has not changed and I do not think it ever will.

Foreword” by Glenn Stout from THE BEST AMERICAN SPORTS WRITING 2010. Copyright © 2010 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

For more on BASW, peep Glenn’s website.

Riding the Harper’s Magazine bandwagon today. They’ve earned it. Just published a terrific collection called Rules of the Game: The Best Sports Writing from Harper’s Magazine. Lots of good stuff in there including Pete Axthelm’s memorable essay The City Game (which became an excellent book), Pat Jordan on the shady baseball prospect Toe Nash, another good baseball essay by Rich Cohen, and a spot-on piece on sports writing by the critic Wilfrid Sheed, a guy who is real hit or miss for me.. Also work from Mark Twain, John R. Tunis, Shirley Jackson, Tom Wolfe, and George Plimpton. It’s the goods.

Harper’s has also made Gary Cartwright’s memorable recollection of his days at the Fort-Worth Press (included in the book), Confessions of a Washed-Up Sportswriter, available for us all on the Internet. Whoopee!

Here we have a first-hand account of Shrake and Jenkins, Blackie Sherrod and the Forth-Worth Press in the Fifties:

I did not know it at the time, but The Press sports staff was ten years ahead of the game. In 1955 The Press was perfecting what most, but not yet all, sports staffs believe they have just created: a competitive art form. Significant television competition was years away, but already The Press was rebelling against the stiff, bleak who/what/when/where architecture of its predecessors, exposing myths, demanding to know why, and treating why as the only question. It was funny about 1961 when Newsweek devoted its press section to the wry progressive sports editor of Newsday, Jack Mann. Newsday hired good, creative writers. They worked as a unit, pruning cliches from wire copy, pepping up hard news by tracing angles all over the country, barreling over dogma where they confronted it. Was Yogi Berra a lovable gnome, like it said in Sporting News? Did he sit around reading comic books and eating bananas? Or was he a noncommunicative boor whose funniest line was, “How the hell would I know?” Newsday, the magazine pointed out, demanded an answer.

There was no way for Newsweek to know it, but sports editor Blackie Sherrod had been preaching a better anarchy at The Press in 1950. Sherrod surrounded himself with such men as Dan Jenkins and Bud Shrake, now well-known and excellent writers at Sports Illustrated, not to mention the irresponsible Crew Slammer. He let them write from the gut.

Cartwright recalls the early days with great fondness but he doesn’t romanticize the sports writing profession:

…Let me make one thing plain: most sportswriters have no business in journalism. They are misfits looking for a soft life. The worst sportswriters are frustrated athletes, or compulsive sports fans, or both. The best are frustrated writers trapped by circumstances. Westbrook Pegler called sportswriters “historians of trivia,” but Pegler learned his craft by writing sport. Scotty Reston, Heywood Broun, Damon Runyon, Ring Lardner, and Paul Gallico wrote about sport. Winston Churchill covered cricket during the Boer War. TheNew York Times‘ John Kieran was a sportswriter, but he was much more. When students at Yale protested that a sportswriter had been invited to address them, Kieran delivered his speech in Latin.

Sportswriting should be a young man’s profession, No one improves after eight or ten years, but the assignments get juicier and the way out less attractive. After eight or ten years there is nothing else to say. Every word in every style has been set in print, every variation from discovery to death explored. The ritual goes on, and the mind bends under it. Ask a baseball writer what’s new and he’ll quote you the record book. Baseball writers are old men, regardless of age.

…There is no spectacle in sport more delightful than witnessing members of the Baseball Writers Association, who invented the box score, trampling each other at the buffet table. The first time I actually saw Dick Young, the New York Daily News‘ very good baseball writer, he was smearing deviled egg on the sleeve of Arthur Daley’s sport coat and discussing Casey Stengel’s grammar. Ben Hogan was rude and gruff but he impressed me when I learned that the caviar at his annual press party cost $45 a jar. Tony Lema had a genius for public relations at least as great as his genius for golf. Champagne Tony! I covered his funeral. It was an assignment that I did not want, but I was there, thinking that it may be years before I taste champagne again. They served some on the flight home. Bear Bryant used to insist that the way to handle a sportswriter was with a fifth of Scotch. Sportswriters deplored this attitude, but no one ever thought to sue Bear Bryant.

This was the title piece of Cartwright’s collection of his best work, Confessions of a Washed-Up Sportswriter (including Various Digressions about Sex, Crime, and Other Hobbies). If you can ever find a copy of that on the cheap, get it, it also features a wonderful piece on Candy Barr, the famous Texas stripper, and a vicious story about dog fighting that would make the dudes at Deadspin moist. Cartwright regarded it as the best piece he ever wrote even though it was rejected by Playboy, Sports Illustrated and Esquire. It was his favorite, anyway. Probably worth signing up for Texas Monthly (it’s free) for the Cartwright archive alone.

Kudos to Harper’s here. They are doing a real mitzvah and other publications like Rolling Stone, Esquire, GQ, and The New Yorker could take notice and make some of the gems from their vaults available to us on occasion. Share the wealth, just a little taste, good Internet karma and all that. A little love goes a long way.

[Life picture of Jimmy Cannon via A Continuous Lean]

So long as I was authentic and wrote with dedication and sincerity, I knew I’d be okay. Angell came to mind recently when I read a blog post by the veteran sports writer, David Kindred:

Bill Simmons is America’s hottest sportswriter. Fortunately, at the same time I came up with an explanation that enabled me to continue calling myself a sportswriter. Bill Simmons has succeeded because he is not, has never been, and will never be a sportswriter. He’s a fan.

Lord knows, there’s nothing wrong with being a fan. I love sports fans. Without the painted-face people, I’d be writing ad copy for weedeaters. But I have I ever been a sports fan. A fan of reporting, yes. Of journalism. Of newspapers. A fan of reading and writing, you bet. I am a fan of sports, which is different from being a sports fan of the Simmons stripe.
The art and craft of competition fascinates me. Sports gives us, on a daily basis, ordinary people doing extraordinary things and extraordinary people doing unimagined things. I love it.

But I have never cared who wins. I am a disciple of the Pulitzer Prize-winning sportswriter Dave Anderson, whose gospel is: “I root for the column.” We don’t care what happens as long as there’s a story.

My readings of Simmons now suggest he is past caring only about the Red Sox, Celtics, Bruins, and Patriots winning (though if they all won championships in the same year, the book would be an Everest of Will Durant proportions). He now engages, however timidly, in actual reporting of actual events; he even has allowed that interviewing people might give him insights otherwise unavailable on his flat-screen TV. Clearly, though, he is most comfortable in his persona as just a guy talking sports with other guys between commercials – which is fine if, unlike me, you go for that guys-being-guys/beer-and-wings nonsense and have infinite patience for The Sports Guy’s bloviation, blather, and balderdash.

Even though Bill James has written almost exclusively about baseball, for traditional newspaper and magazine guys, I doubt that he’d qualify as a sports writer. Not without reporting, or going into the locker rooms. Then where does that leave guys like Joe Sheehan, Tim Marchman, Jonah Keri and Rob Neyer (to name, just a few)? They aren’t fans like Simmons, but they write soley about sports.

The definition of what it is to be a sports writer is changing.

I have done some freelance writing for SI.com, gone into the locker rooms and filed stories. I’ve also worked on longer bonus pieces too. I enjoyed both experiences because it gave me an appreciation for the rigors of journalism. I also came to realize that being a beat writer, for instance, is not a job for me–I’m too old and I don’t have that kind of hustle and I don’t care enough about where being a good beat writer would take me.

Nobody grows up dreaming of beinga  columnist anymore do they? I suspect they dream of growing up and writing, or blogging, so that they can be on TV.

Here at the Banter, I’m more like Simmons or Angell. I’m not a reporter or a columnist or an analyst, and I’m certainly no expert (I’m lucky to have a sharp mind like Cliff writing analytical pieces in this space). I think of myself as an observer. More than a strict seamhead, I write about what it is like to live in New York City and root for the Yankees. Often, I’m just as interested in writing about my subway ride home or the latest Jeff Bridges movie as I am about who the Yankees left fielder will be next year. Which makes the Banter more of a lifestyle blog than just a Yankee site, for better or worse.

So I’m no sports writer and that’s cool but I’m not sure what a sports writer is anymore.

…Oh, and along with Kindred, the inimitable Charlie Pierce has started a blog at Boston.com. Pierce is a welcome addition to the landscape. Be sure to check him out.

Leigh Montville edited this year’s edition of The Best American Sports Writing. If you’ve got the extra scratch, pick-up a copy to see Todd Drew’s terrific Yankee Stadium memory in print. It’s one of the great moments in this site’s history.

WEEI in Boston ran a short interview with Montville who has some interesting thoughts about the newspaper business, Sports Illustrated, and the nature of sports writing today (thanks to the Think Factory for the link).

Also, there’s this on the Babe:

What’s the most surprising thing you learned about Babe Ruth when you wrote that book?

“I think he was smarter than most people think he was. He grew up without much education. He came out of an orphanage. He had that reputation, and it was well-deserved of being a late-night guy, a carouser who ate a million hot dogs and all that stuff. But he was very smart in lining up his career. He had the first real business manager of any athlete. The guy took care of him and his money. Babe Ruth had money until he died and lived a good life. He made sound decisions in the people he enlisted to help him. He got a personal trainer back when nobody had personal trainers, when he was starting to fall apart. The personal trainer got him on the road and got him hitting again. He had the knowledge to straighten himself out. A lot of guys don’t have that — Antoine Walker being the latest one. He had more self control that I think most people give him credit for.”

Did you ever rent a movie and then return it without watching it?

I’ve rented John Huston’s Fat City at least twice in my life but never watched it. I can’t explain why. Chalk it up to my mood at the time. After all, Huston is one of my favorite directors and Jeff Bridges one of my favorite actors.

Fat City is based on Leonard Gardner’s novel of the same name. The book is less than 200 pages long, and the story is almost unbearably grim. It is about boxing and drinking in Stockton, California. It is about losers losing. And although the prose is lean and clear, it is also dense–you can almost feel how much effort went into making it so direct and spare.

It was a tough book for me to get through, even though it wasn’t long. I read it because I thought it would be good for me not because I enjoyed it. I admired the artistry–the writing was superb, but I found the story bleak and depressing. When I finished it, I thought, Now, there is a world I don’t need to visit again. No wonder I never watched the movie.

I felt compelled to read the book because Huston’s movie started a two-week run at the Film Forum last night. George Kimball and Pete Hamill introduced the movie and then stuck around to answer questions when it was over. Hamill said that Gardner’s novel is one of the three best boxing novels ever written, along with The Professional by W.C. Heinz, and The Harder they Fall by Budd Schulberg. Kimball who is a walking encyclopedia of boxing knowledge talked about how Huston cast boxers and non-actors in the movie, how he insisted that it be shot in Stockton to preserve the book’s authenticity, how the producer Ray Stark wanted to fire the DP, the great Conrad Hall, because the scenes inside the bars were so dark.

Kimball also tried to explain the biggest question about Gardner (one that Gardner is probably asked daily)–why was Fat City the only book he ever wrote? Gardner continued to write short stories and journalism–I remember reading a piece he did for Inside Sports on the first Leonard-Duran fight–and eventually went to Hollywood to write for television. David Milch taught Fat City when he was at Yale and got Gardner work on NYPD Blue, which proves that Milch isn’t all bad (although he famously ripped-off Pete Dexter’s novel Deadwood for his TV series).

Kimball didn’t know the exact reason why Gardner has never written another book. He said Gardner’s never offered a reason and he’s never  pressed him for one. Kimball’s guess is that Gardner wrote such a perfectly realized book in Fat City that he figured could never reach that height again. So why bother trying?  Kimball said that Fat City was 400 pages long and Gardner kept honing it, pairing it down, like a master chef making a reduction.

Whatever the reason, it is easy to see why Huston was attracted to the story.  Hamill said that Huston spent his life making one movie for the studio and then one for himself. And this was one of his personal movies. He has great affection for the characters and the place and while he captures the unhappiness of Gardner’s book, I think the movie is has far more humor. There was some funny banter in the book but it didn’t come across as amusing to me. But the moment we see Nicholas Colasanto (better known to my generation as Coach from Cheers), the sound of his voice is warming, and cuts into the despair. So does the soundtrack.

Huston’s directorial style is also an ideal fit for Gardner’s prose. I remember once reading an article about Huston in American Film when he was making his final film, The Dead (another personal project). His son Tony was surprised at how skilled his father’s camera technique was.  And the old man said, “It’s what I do best, yet no critic has ever remarked on it. That’s exactly as it should be. If they noticed it, it wouldn’t be any good.”

In Huston’s movies–The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Prizzi’s Honor–you don’t notice the style, you follow the story. Gardner, who wrote the screenplay with Huston, was blessed to have this man in his corner. The boxing scenes are strong. You feel close to the action, but nothing is forced or stylistic–it’s not like the Rocky movies or Raging Bull. In fact, you can see the ropes in the frame often, putting us just outside of the ring. The boxers sometimes look clunky but since they aren’t supposed to be great fighters, it works. And in Keach’s big fight scene you can feel the fighter’s exhaustion, their bodies getting heavy, by the second round.

Stacey Keach and Jeff Bridges are terrific (so when is Bridges not terrific?). There is a dignity to the characters, no matter how laid-out they are.  There is a tremendous shot, a long take, when Keach and his trainers and their wives leave the arena after a fight, followed by a broken-down Mexican fighter that illustrates this beautifully.

Keach wears a silver braclet in the movie that was exactly like the kind my father wore during that period, when I was a young kid. But my old man was a middle-class drunk, so the comparisons end there. However, the bar scenes, the life of drunks, rang true and reminded me of my father’s alcoholism.  There is a lot of drinking during the day, and Kimball remarked on the blinding light that greets you once you stumble out into the daylight. Like when you come out of a movie theater in the middle of the day–but more woozy and disorienting.

It is that kind of touch that makes Huston’s movie effective. Nothing much happens in the story. But it feels authentic, taking the essence of Gardner’s book and making it into a story for the screen.

Boxing metaphors are easy to come by when the Yanks play the Sox and I had boxing on the brain today for a couple of reasons: the writer Budd Schulberg died, and Muhammad Ali was honored before the game at Yankee Stadium.

My grandfather the head of public relations at the Anti-Defamantion League from 1946-71 (the year I was born), and helped prepare Schulberg’s statement before HUAC during the communist witch hunt after World War II–he also helped the actor John Garfield with his statement.

I remember seeing a worn copy of Schulberg’s The Disenchanted on my grandfather’s bookshelf; I think my aunt has his signed copy of Waterfront, the book that was the basis of On The Waterfront. Schulberg’s most enduring work is What Makes Sammy Run? a cynical novel about show biz.

Over at  The Sweet Science, George Kimball remembers Schulberg:

He straddled the worlds of literature and pugilism throughout his life, but unlike some of his more boastful contemporaries he was not a dilettante when it came to either. He sparred regularly with Mushy Callahan well beyond middle age. The night of the Frazier-Ali fight of the century Budd started to the arena in Muhammad Ali’s limousine, and then when the traffic got heavy, got out and walked to Madison Square Garden with Ali. A year before Jose Torres died, Budd and Betsy flew to Puerto Rico and spent several days with Jose and Ramona at their home in Ponce. Art Aragon was the best man at his wedding. And when push came to shove, he put on the gloves with both Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer and kicked both of their asses, though not, as some would now claim, on the same night.

And from an interview with Schulberg earlier this year in The Independent:

No writer has ever been closer to Muhammad Ali. Schulberg travelled in Ali’s car on the way to fights, sat in his dressing-room even after defeats, and was at the epicentre of some of the bizarre social situations the Louisville fighter liked to engineer. He was at the Hotel Concord in upstate New York when Ali was training for his third fight against Ken Norton. Schulberg was with his third wife, the actress Geraldine Brooks. “Ali,” Schulberg recalls, “asked Geraldine for an acting lesson. She improvised a scene in which he’d be provoked into anger.” After two unconvincing attempts, “She whispered in his ear, with utter conviction: ‘I hate to tell you this, but everybody here except you appears to know that your wife is having an affair with one of your sparring partners.’ I watched Ali’s eyes. Rage.”

Then, he recalls, Ali had another idea. “‘Let’s go to the middle of the hotel lobby. You turn on me and, in a loud voice, call me ‘nigger’.” Once in the foyer, crowded with Ali’s entourage, “Gerry dropped it on him. ‘You know what you are? You’re just a goddamn lying nigger.’ Schulberg recalls how Ali waited, restraining his advancing minders at the very last minute; a characteristic sense of timing that allowed his white guests, if only for a moment, to experience the emotions generated by the prospect of imminent lynching, yet live to tell the story.

The stars were out at the Stadium to see Ali and the Yanks: Bruce Willis, Paul Simon, Kate Hudson, and Hall of Famer, Eddie Murray. Ali was wearing a powder blue shirt and dark sunglasses; he slumped forward, a hulking man, surrounded by young, fit athletes and middle-aged executives. The moon was yellow and almost full. The stands were packed (49,005, the biggest crowd all year) as this was the most talked-about game to date in the new park.

Joba Chamerlain got into trouble in the first and in the second but worked his way out of it, but he got touched for two cheapie Yankee Stadium dingers in the third and fourth (Dustin Pedrioa and Casey Kochman).

In the bottom of the second, the Yanks put runners on first and second with one out when Nick Swisher singled to center. Jorge Posada, a notoriously bad base-runner, rounded third and headed for home. Elsbury’s throw wasn’t great; Dustin Pedrioa cut it off and fired to the plate. Posada cruised in standing up. He didn’t think the ball was coming home. Melky Cabrera, the on-deck hitter stood next to the plate, and waved his hand meakly for Posada to get down. Posada did not and was thrown out as he bumbed into Victor Martinez. It was an embarrassing moment, made worse still when Cabrera lined out softly to second.

The next inning, Jeter flew out deep to center to lead off. Elsbury made a nice catch and knocked into the wall. Then Damon homered, another cheap shot, and Mark Teixeira hit a bomb to the area formerly known as Death Valley in the old place, good for a double. Alex Rodriguez hacked at the first pitch he saw, a breaking ball, and skied another fly ball, this one in the park, to Kevin Youkilis in left. Hideki Matsui whiffed to end it but the crowd was rowdy, the swings were good, the ball jumping, and John Smoltz looked cooked.

Posada doubled to start the fourth and scored without a throw on Robinson Cano’s single to center. Swisher walked on four pitches and Melky Cabrea kicked in the door wavin’ the fo-fo with a three run dinger to right–this one had some life to it. The Yanks scored another run before Posada crushed a three-run bomb to straight-away center against reliever Billy Traber and the base-running gaffe was forgiven. The half-inning took more than thirty minutes (eight hits and eight runs) and the game wasn’t halfway over.

Once again, this was going to be a long night. Chamerlain and a host of Yankee relievers made sure of it. Chamberlain walked the bases loaded in the top of the fifth and then gave up an RBI single to Mike Lowell. He struck out Kochman and Nick Green, who replaced Lowrie at short, to end the inning and yelled. This time, he was undoubtedly screaming at himself. That was it for him and he left with a career-high seven walks.

The Red Sox would draw a dozen base on balls in all (the Yanks had six)–each of the five Yankee pitchers walking at least one. Mark Melancon drilled Pedrioa in the eighth and the Yankee announcers said, “Why don’t you just let sleeping dogs lie?” Why would Melancon drill him on purpose? Hard to say but he also threw one over Pedrioa’s head earlier in the at-bat.

David Ortiz got booed loudly in his first at bat; after that, the crowd went easy on him. And he floundered, looking weak going 0-5.

Three-hundred-and-seventy-five pitches, just under four hours. Final Score: Yanks 13, Red Sox 6.  

And so the Yanks got a big win against the Red Sox though the game itself was agonizing to watch. I can’t imagine how upset Red Sox fans were. For Yankee fans, it is almost hard to enjoy simply because the pitching was so brutal. (“Why does it feel like the Yankees are losing 11-4?” e-mailed a friend at one point.) Almost.

It was ugly alright, but who are we to complain? They won the game, and we’ll take it.

Glenn Stout, a longtime favorite here at Bronx Banter, is most famous around these parts for his historical writing, particularly Yankee Century and Red Sox Century. Stout also serves as the series editor for The Best American Sports Writing; his oral history Nine Months at Ground Zero is one of the most fascinating and devastating things I’ve ever read about 9.11.  

Stout has a website as well as a blog, and his latest book, Young Woman and the Seas: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World,  may be the most interesting project of his career. It is the story of Trudy Ederle, the first woman to swim the English Channel (read an excerpt here).

I had the chance to talk to Stout about the book. Here is our conversation. Enjoy.

Bronx Banter: I know you are comfortable writing about history, especially in the first part of the 20th century.  What drew you to Ederle?

Glenn Stout: Her story is seminal, as central to the story of American sports in this century as that of Red Grange, Babe Ruth, Jack Johnson or Jackie Robinson, yet to most people Trudy, aka Gertrude Ederle, is unknown.  I wanted to change that. In many ways she was both the first modern female athlete and one of America’s first celebrities.  Had she not done what she had done, which is not only to become the first woman to swim the English Channel, but in the process to beat the existing men’s record by nearly two hours, the entire history of women’s sports would be radically different.  You can, I think, break down the history of women’s sports in this country into “Before Trudy” and “After Trudy.”   Before Trudy female athletes were anomalies, and their accomplishments, with just a few exceptions, primarily took place out of the public eye.  Many early female athletes, like Eleanora Sears, and Annette Kellerman, were sometimes seen as publicity hounds who performed stunts, and not serious athletes.  The question of whether or not women were either psychologically or physically capable of being athletes was still a topic of debate – at least by the men who ran sports.  Although there would still be some who would stubbornly cling to that belief, by swimming the English Channel and shattering the existing men’s record, Trudy answered that question quite definitively. 

She was the answer.  One can argue that had it not been for her women would not have been allowed to compete in track and field and many other sports as early as they did – women competed in track events for the first time at the Olympics in 1928.  It may have been another generation – until after World War II – before there was any acceptance of female athletes.  I am old enough to remember when women could not play little league, or run marathons, and when school sports were pretty much limited to gymnastics and basketball.  Now of course, women can and do play everything.  Without Trudy that happens much later than it did.

Trudy also has a compelling personal story that I think resonates with any reader.  She grew up in New York, the daughter of German immigrants and overcame anti-German prejudice in the wake of World War I to become arguably the most famous woman in the world.  At the same time, she was partially deaf, and was able to overcome that challenge.  Swimming the English Channel, while perceived to be somewhat commonplace today, is still extremely difficult – it was the first “extreme” sport.  More people have climbed Mount Everest than have swum the Channel, and most of those who try to swim the Channel fail.  In most years more people will succeed in climbing Everest than in swimming the Channel.   When I first began to research the book, that really, really surprised me, and made Trudy’s story even more compelling.

BB: Why isn’t Ederle remembered like Grange, Thorpe, Ruth and the other greats of the first great era of sports? For someone who had such a profound impact, why has her legacy faded?

GS:  Hopefully, my book will help rectify that, but there are several reasons.  Trudy herself soon discovered she just wasn’t cut out for the spotlight.  Within 48 hours of her return to the United States, where New York gave her an enormous ticker tape parade, she was in the fetal position in her bedroom, completely overwhelmed.  She was both slow and reluctant to “cash in” on her achievement.  Her attorney mis-managed her career, turning down easy money for a grueling vaudeville tour.  By the time that got going a male swimmer had broken her record, and a second female swam the Channel, which stole some of her thunder – the public began to think that swimming the Channel was far easier than it is, something that holds true today.  She also had increasing trouble with her hearing – she was partially deaf since a bout with the measles as a child, and that made her less comfortable in the public eye.  And few years after the swim she fell and was virtually bed-ridden for a time. And let’s face it, swimming simply isn’t a big spectator sport like football or baseball.

BB:  What is Ederle’s reputation in the world of women’s swimming? Is she properly recognized?

GS: Swimming historians certainly recognize her as one of the all-time greats, but in a sport like swimming, records have been broken so many times that it is difficult for any swimmer from her era to remain in the public eye.  Her only contemporary recognized b y the public today is Johnny Weissmuller, and that’s because of the Tarzan films.  But in the world of swimming, she has to rank as one of the top seven or eight swimmers of all-time.  No one else combined her success at shorter distances with open water success, and in the world of open water swimming, I think she’s right at the top.  Anyone who has ever swum the Channel, or thought about it, knows about her.

BB:  How did Ederle manage to beat the existing time of swimming the channel by such a great margin? That seems almost inconceivable.

GS:  There are a couple of reasons.  For one, she used a stroke known then as the “American Crawl” essentially what most people recognize as the “freestyle” today.  Her coach with the Women’s Swimming Association was one of the strokes pioneers and its greatest advocate. And although it had been used for about two decades, no one believed it could be used for long distance swimming – it was thought to be too demanding, physically.  Long distance swimmers usually used the breast stroke at the time, with occasional use of the side-stroke and trudgeon.  The crawl was much faster, and Handley recognized that women in general, and Trudy in particular, although not as strong as a man, had just as much stamina.  She was the first swimmer to use the stroke in the Channel, and proved the superiority of the stroke.  Secondly, her trainer for the Channel swim, William Burgess, was a real student of the Channel currents and tides, and he found a somewhat new route across that was something of a breakthrough.  Also, before Trudy most of the people who tried to swim the Channel simply were not great swimmers.  They had great stamina, and desire, but as swimmers were rather pedestrian.  Trudy was world class at every distance from fifty yards on up.  She was simply a far, far, far better swimmer than anyone else who had swam the Channel before.  For a swimmer of her ability to take on the Channel would be the equivalent of Michael Phelps to do so today – if he had her stamina.  And lastly, while Trudy was growing up she spent summers in Highlands, New Jersey, where she spent hours and hours swimming in the ocean.  She developed a very special relationship with the water, once saying “To me, the sea is like a person – like a child that I’ve known a long time. It sounds crazy, I know, but when I swim in the sea I talk to it. I never feel alone when I’m out there.”  When she was swimming, she was in her place, right where she wanted to be, and where others found only torture, she found joy, and when you love what you do, well, there are no limits.

BB:  Can you share the story about the tragic boat fire that helped lead to changes in the way Americans thought of woman and swimming?

GS:  In the summer of 1904 nearly 1500 German immigrants, mostly women and children, were aboard the steamship “General Slocum” going from lower Manhattan to Long Island for a picnic.  It caught fire and the boat captain ran the boat aground on North Brother Island in the East River.  But despite the fact that the boat was only a few yards off shore, in relatively shallow water, over 1,000 passengers died – most by drowning.  A terrific book called “Ship Ablaze” tells the whole story.  As I write in Young Woman and the Sea, it was “murder by repression.”  Women were not allowed to learn to swim and that is what killed them.  Had they been able to swim most would have survived.  Not until 9/11 did more New Yorkers die in a single incident.  But in the wake of the tragedy some women’s groups began advocating for the rights a necessity for women to learn how to swim.  That provided the impetus that led to Trudy’s accomplishment twenty years later. 

BB: Describe the Victorian attitudes towards women and swimming.

GS:  In short, you weren’t supposed to swim if you were a woman.  It was considered risqué and sexually provocative.  Moreover most medical and athletic experts – all men – felt that women simply were not physically able to compete in any sport, including swimming.  It was considered too taxing, and women were not supposed to be strong enough to swim.  The few that tried had to be covered from head to toe – wear woolen leggings and a long skirt and a swimming shirt that left only your head, face and hands uncovered.  Even when standards relaxed somewhat and the Women’s Swimming Association, of which Trudy was a member and which pioneered women’s sports, started holding meets in the late teens and early 1920s, women were still getting arrested on beaches around New York if they exposed their calves.

BB:  Having written a biography, I have a great deal of admiration and respect for historians who can bring their subjects to life, especially when none of the participants is living. What are the narrative challenges that you face in trying to achieve this?

GS: That was the challenge of the book -  how do you animate a subject and her accomplishment, particularly one that took place more than eight decades ago, and one that most people have probably never heard of, in a sport that – let’s face it – does not easily lend itself to narrative?   How do you make those fourteen and half hours she spent in the water into a compelling story? To do so I felt I had to give her story the proper context and tell several stories at once – the geology and history of the English Channel itself, the history of swimming, the history of Channel swimming and the history of women’s athletics as well as Trudy’s own personal story.  Of all the books I have done this clearly provided the most difficult structural challenge. What I ended up doing was to begin the book using sort of an “alternate chapter” structure.  In one chapter I tell part of Trudy’s story – her background and upbringing for instance, or how she learned to swim, and then in the next chapter I’ll tell a piece of one of those other stories, like how the English Channel was formed, and why that makes it so difficult to swim, or the story of Matthew Webb, the first person to ever swim the Channel.  My goal was slowly to bring those stories together so they intersect when Trudy enters the English Channel, at which point the reader has all the information he or she needs to appreciate it and accompany Trudy on her journey.  It has been incredibly gratifying to learn from readers and reviewers that I managed to pull that off. 

But the central story of the book is the actual swim itself, which I tell over two chapters.  From the outside one might expect that just entails putting one arm out in front of the other for hours and hours and hours.  But it is not.  Although swimming the Channel isn’t like telling the story of a baseball game – there are no innings when swimming the Channel – there is a similar unfolding of an event over time.  I was able to plot the story quite specifically by using the “bulletins” the press sent out by wireless from the press boat that followed her across.  In that way, in effect, I was able to put “innings” in the story of her swim and find moments of drama, clarity and insight.  I think I was able to deliver the dramatic tension in the event through both the changing weather conditions in the Channel, the changing mood on her escort boat, and in her own mood and physical condition.  Once again, readers have really responded to this in a very positive way.  Several people who have swum the Channel themselves have read the book and told me that I captured the experience.

All of that, of course, is built from research.  I read everything I could possibly find about her, the Channel, the history of swimming, and women’s sports at the time.  I watched films, looked at photos, read blogs and diaries and stories about other swimmers.  I immersed myself in 1920s fashions and music and slang.  Writing a book like this is like building a brick wall.  Each fact is a brick – and you have to have enough bricks – so each snippet of information you find becomes extremely, extremely important.  If you say it’s raining, you better have looked at the weather report.  For the weather on the day she swam the Channel, I got the official report from the National Meteorological Archive of the British Weather Office.  Let me put it this way – I think did more intensive research in this book that I did in any of my big baseball books, like Yankees Century, or Red Sox Century, even though those books are twice as along and cover much longer time spans. 

BB:  In the back of the book you mention that you spent a good chunk of time in the water yourself. How did that experience help inform you about Ederle? 

GS:  It was absolutely necessary, because I needed to be able to translate accurately that experience – to “get it right.”  I’ll admit that I am not much of a swimmer, but I do live on Lake Champlain near the Canadian border in northern Vermont and from April thru November have the opportunity to either be in or on the water.  Now Lake Champlain isn’t the English Channel, but it is a sizable body of water, and for much of the year it is cold.  So I made sure I got in the water and spent some time in it when the water temperature was about sixty degrees, the same temperature it was for Trudy.  Obviously, I can’t swim for nearly as long as she – and it wouldn’t be safe for me to try to do so – but I did spend an hour once in the shallows, dog paddling til I got tired then running place with only my head sticking out.  I also spent hours and hours and hours kayaking on the lake in all sorts of weather conditions, including some that I probably shouldn’t have, to gain some understanding of what it is like to negotiate the water in three or four foot waves, both against and with a twenty mph gale, with an air temperature of about sixty degrees, for five or six hours, while it is raining.  Kayaking isn’t swimming, obviously, but it does put you on the water and when you are several miles off shore you become keenly aware of the fact that you alone are responsible for getting back to shore – people die on boats out here every year, so it’s no joke.  I often took trips of ten or fifteen miles – five or six hours – just to experience these conditions.  Even on a good day, you have to stay mindful of where you are, what the weather is doing and how you are feeling.  There just isn’t any room for other thoughts, and at a certain point the battle to continue becomes more mental than physical, an experience Channel swimmers know very well.

I think it helped that much of my other athletic experience includes solo sports.  I’ve been a runner for thirty years so I have some insight into the mental experience of doing physical activity while by yourself, and I’ll even include the time I spent pitching in adult baseball leagues or pouring concrete as a construction worker as a part of that.  It’s just you out there, and that’s the way it was for Trudy.  Again, several Channel swimmers have told me straight up that I “got” the experience.  That means a great deal.

BB: You mentioned that you put yourself at potential risk on the lake doing research. Did that have a beneficial effect on the writing or at least your understanding of the perils of the water?

GS:  Absolutely.  Trudy’s swim took place during a storm, and I had to understand what that meant.  I don’t want to overstate things, but I tried not to put myself at peril.  In really bad weather, I’d stay close to shore when I could, I always wore life vests and carried safety equipment, and I never intentionally went out in lightening or anything like that.  I also used a very stable, “sit on top” kayak, which is very difficult to flip.  But that being said, anytime you are out on the water alone, you get an immediate understanding of the risks that entails – I’ve had boaters tell me they would rather be on the open ocean than in Lake Champlain during a big storm.   I think it was important for me to gain some understanding both of that and of what it is like to perform the same physical activity for hours and hours.  My longest kayak trip, in terms of time, was about eight or nine hours, and while that is clearly not the same as swimming, I think paddling that length of time without stopping provided me with some insight into the psychology that allowed Trudy to swim for fourteen hours, and helped in the recreation of that experience in the book, both on the sensory level and descriptively.

BB:   Did you pattern the narrative on anything that you’d read before? In doing this kind of book, did you read anything to “put you in the mood”?

GS:   read a great deal of non-fiction in my work as series editor of The Best American Sports Writing, and I’ve always been a big reader of non-fiction.  Most helpful to me, structurally, was probably Eric Larson’s “Thunderstruck,” which simultaneously told the story of a murder and Marconi’s invention of the wireless, which was used in the capture of the murderer.  He told multiple stories that came to together over the course of the book.  So do I, so it was helpful to see how another author did that.   Specifically however, I didn’t really model the book after anything or read anything specific to “get in the mood.”  In a book like this, the reading you do in your research, primarily contemporary newspaper accounts, tends to get you there  – you are already immersed in a time.  But it also helped that in so many of my other books, in particular the four big baseball histories, I’ve already had to write about the 1920s, and more specifically, the 1920s in New York, so there was some familiarity already there.

BB: What is the trickiest part about re-creating scenes and situations? What is line, both aesthetically and ethically, for a writer?

GS:  You owe it to the reader to, as much as possible, re-create the experience, to make it live.  That is the aesthetic challenge.  You can’t expect people to spend six or seven hours of their time reading a book and be bored.  But regardless, the short answer remains the same – you don’t make anything up, you don’t create dialogue, and you don’t put a thought in anyone’s head that is not informed by the facts.  Too many books and too many writers have recently gotten in trouble for that, and it is just not worth it.  Besides, it is cheating, and taking a short cut, and if you have done the research and the work, you shouldn’t even have to fight the impulse to make anything up – you should have enough information already.  The truth always makes the best story.

Where you can and have to be creative is in the way you combine that information, how you layer it upon your subject and take something that is one or two dimensional and make it three dimensional.  I’ll give you an example.  In my proposal for the book I described the color of the water as Trudy viewed it while she swam – she was wearing amber-tinted goggles, and I knew from my own time in the water, when I put the lens from an old pair of sunglasses in a face mask, that this would make the water appear not green or gray, but as I described it, a “golden ochre.”  But as I worked on the book I could not find a specific statement from her about this, so even though I was certain I was right, I took it out.  Then, when I was working on my final draft about the swim, I was double-checking my research one last time and there it was, one line in an interview in which she did mention the color of the water.  I had been right, so I put it back in.  In another instance, I was struggling to write about how it looked for her as she approached Kingsdown Beach – she landed in England after dark and I knew there were bonfires on shore and flares in the sky and searchlights scanning the water, but I didn’t know if she noticed them – was she too exhausted to care? Did it make an impression?  Again, she herself provided the best description, telling one interviewer that when she first lifted off her goggles, it looked like a child’s fairy story, a fairy tale.  Now, when I use those impressions in the book I don’t stop the narrative to reference it directly in the text to those interviews like an academic book would, but those impressions are factual.  That’s how it should work.

But you are only as good as your information, and there are places where you have to use your own best judgment.  Multiple accounts about the same event rarely line up in all areas – even the quotes will sometimes be different.  In those instances you try to create a composite.  Or if you have one account that differs radically from others, you have to use your own intellectual judgment to weigh the veracity of the evidence.  For example, at one point in her swim someone on the boat yells for her to “Come out girl, come out of the water!”  But no two stories phrase it exactly the same way, so I created a composite.  But no story identified the speaker, either.  It was very tempting for me to do so, but even though I have my own thoughts on the matter, I didn’t have enough evidence to make me feel comfortable doing so, so I leave it as is, simply as “someone.”  Besides, she probably could not hear well enough at the time to know exactly who called out herself, which is probably why she never identified the speaker. But she knew how to respond.  She asked “What for?”  And that’s the crux of the book, right there.

You can order Young Woman & the Sea here.