George Kimball, far right, with Mike Tyson and Marvin Hagler, mid-'80s

By John Schulian

George Kimball was blessed with the kind of voluble charm you find in an Irish bar, and, brother, let me tell you he’d been in a few. No amount of drink, however, could rein in his galloping intelligence. It was as pure a part of him as his love of the language and good company, and when he spoke, I did what I’ve always done best in the presence of gold-star raconteurs: I listened. Even when we were on the radio hustling our book of great boxing writing, I did little more than provide grace notes. At least that’s the way it worked in the beginning. And then George’s voice began to turn into a sandpapery whisper. It was the chemo, extracting its price for helping to keep him alive.

Now I was the talker, just me by myself, trying to score points with the strangers on the air at the other end of the line. Again and again, I gravitated to the idea that there is something noble about prizefighters in their willingness to accept the fact that every time they set foot in the ring, they may be carried out on their shield. But it was always George I thought of, the truest nobleman of my lifetime.

The cancer doctors gave him six months to live six years ago, and it was as if he said, with characteristic Anglo-Saxon aplomb, “Fuck you, I’m too busy to die.” He went on to write books, essays, poetry, songs, and even a play. He edited books, too, and worked on a documentary. Somehow he also found time to get out to the theater and concerts and dinners. When we were collaborating long-distance – George in New York, me in L.A. – he surprised me more than once with the news that he had just landed in France or Ireland. He wasn’t simply collecting stickers for his suitcase, either. He was savoring the world that was slipping away from him and looking up writers he had always wanted to meet, like J.P. Donleavy and Bill Barich. And he made a point of staying in touch with them, for once he wrapped his arms around someone, he never let go.

It will be that way even now that he has breathed his last, too soon, at 67. Those of us who knew him–probably even those who have only heard about him–will keep the Kimball legend alive with stories about his wild times and all the nights he dropped his glass eye in a drink someone asked him to keep an eye on. There was a look that George used to get when he was on the loose back then, a look that is probably best understood when I tell you I first saw it in the Lion’s Head as he was trying to set a friend’s sport coat on fire. His friend was wearing it.

I went a long time without seeing George, and when we reconnected, he had changed without sacrificing either his relentless view of the world or his ability to laugh at the hash that mankind has made of things. He was like the record producer in Jennifer Egan’s sublime novel “A Visit from the Goon Squad,” who tells a bewildered young man how he survived the self-destructiveness of the rock and roll business: “You grew up, Alex, just like the rest of us.” So it was that George put booze and drugs behind him and let his work take center stage. His unfiltered Lucky Strikes were the only remnant of his old life. “What are they going to do,” he said, “give me cancer?”

The transformation remained a mystery to me until Bill Nack, as treasured a friend as he is a writer, sent word a few years ago that George had esophageal cancer. I wrote George a note of support and got in return the most startling letter I expect I ever will from a sick man. There were no euphemisms, just pure, raw, unadorned honesty. George was going toe-to-toe with death, and he knew that death would win, but he was damned if he wasn’t going to take the fight the full 12 rounds. Never if my life have I seen a greater example of a fighter’s heart, and that includes Ali and Frazier.

George was fighting for the money he would leave his wife and children, and for a body of work that said he counted for something in the world of sportswriting. He wrote incisively, relentlessly, memorably, and he threw himself into the editing of our Library of America anthology, “At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing,” with the same fervor. Here was a book that would give him the spotlight he yearned for. On that March day in 2010 when the bosses at LoA told us it had passed muster, George was so happy it didn’t matter that he was too sick to swallow his soup. He was a champion.

He wasn’t finished, though. Space limitations–yes, even a 517-page book has them–had confined us to non-fiction, so he tracked down a small press and Lou DiBella, a boxing promoter with a literary bent. Voila! “The Fighter Still Remains: A Celebration of Boxing in Poetry and Song Lyrics from Ali to Zevon” was born.

And still George wasn’t done. We had an abundance of fiction we hadn’t been able to squeeze into “At the Fights,” either, unforgettable work by Hemingway, Nelson Algren and Leonard Gardner, to name but a few, and George wasn’t about to let them lie fallow. Back to work we went, each of us digging up new entries along the way, George zeroing in on Walter Mosley, me on Harry Crews. We didn’t have a publisher, of course, not even a nibble, but we had a title, “Sweet Scientists: A Treasury of American Boxing Fiction,” and that was enough to sustain us for the time being.

I mailed everything I found to George, who promised that he would overcome his Oscar Madison tendencies and send me the manuscript in good shape. I shouldn’t have doubted him, but I did. I read the e-mail he sent to the woman who watches over his web site, the one in which he gave specific instructions about what to do after he was gone, and I knew the final grains of sand were going through the hour glass. But on Wednesday, shortly before noon, Federal Express delivered a box to my door, and inside was the manuscript George had promised, looking neat, even pristine. A few hours later, on the other side of the country, he was dead.

[Editor’s Note: George is remembered by his friends Charlie Pierce and Michael Gee. Here is a lovely piece by Glenn Stout.]

The Seeds of Discontent

By John Schulian 

George Solomon made sure I hit the ground running. I covered a couple of Redskins practices- it couldn’t have been much different than covering the Kremlin. Then I took off for Detroit to cover a three-game series with the Orioles, who were very much in the pennant race. And to write two features on them, too, even though I’d never covered a big league game before and they had never laid eyes on me. And I had to cover the Howard University-Wayne State football game, too. My football story was a stinker, but the baseball stuff I could do, partly because I had always followed the game and partly because the Orioles were so easy to get along with. All I remember from that weekend is typing, checking my watch, grabbing cabs, and drinking Vernor’s ginger ale when it was still strictly a Detroit delicacy. It was a trial by fire, and I knew I’d passed when George apologized for not being able to play my Monday feature on Jim Palmer on the front of the section.

It didn’t take George long to figure out that I wasn’t meant to be a beat reporter. It was like I had SHORT ATTENTION SPAN written in neon lights on my forehead. Besides, we had Len Shapiro as the first-string Redskins reporter, and he was terrific-–intrepid, fearless, tireless, all in the face of the paranoid monster that was George Allen. Lenny will tell you today that covering the Redskins, the prize beat in the Post sports department, took years off his life.

Shirley Povich

I filled in wherever George wanted me, the Redskins, a big NFL game, the NBA. But mostly I wrote features and series. One series was about black dominance in the NBA (to show you how long ago this was) and another was about the NFL psyche. I remember Shirley Povich, a lovely, classy gent whose sports column was an institution at the Post for half a century, coming up to me after part one of the NFL series ran and saying, “This is too good for a newspaper.” I was deeply gratified by the praise, but at the same time I was surprised that Shirley, who had been the Post’s sports editor when he was barely out of his teens, would say something like that. I’d read somewhere that Jimmy Cannon had said nothing was too good for a newspaper. He wasn’t in the same league with Shirley when it came to being gracious, but I think Cannon was right on the money about that one.

I had freedom at the Post and yet I didn’t. Nobody told me what to write, so I could continue trying to figure out what my voice was. That was one of the great things about the sports page in those days: it was a laboratory for writing. As time went on, there would be stylish writing throughout all of the country’s best newspapers, much of it inspired by the Post’s Style section, where there was great work done on society dames, movies, TV, books, and rock and roll. But the Post’s sports section was my new playground, and I was happy to be there.

I would have been even happier if George Solomon had let me turn one of my ideas into a story once in a while. But George didn’t do business that way. He bubbled over with his own ideas, many of them good ones but some clinkers too, and he had the energy level of a hyperactive two-year-old. As a result he didn’t expect you to ever be tired. I remember coming off one of his hellish road trips-–Columbus, Ohio to St. Louis to Milwaukee to Toronto to Cleveland in five hectic, work-filled winter days-–and the first thing he said to me was, “Come on in the office. We’ll talk about what you’re going to do next.” I told him that what I was going to do next was pick up my paycheck and go home and go to bed. And that’s what I did.

It wasn’t long before I realized that I was probably the only writer on the staff who questioned authority. Everybody else was too damned nice. I mean, the place was crawling with good guys -– Tom Boswell, Dave Brady, Ken Denlinger, Paul Attner, Angus Phillips, David DuPree, Gerry Strine, Mark Asher. But I never heard any of them raise their voices. And they had reason to, particularly after the copy desk got through making a hash of their prose. All they’d do, however, was whisper among themselves while they licked their wounds. I couldn’t make myself do that. I marched into George Solomon’s office one day and said, “I’ve had more stories fucked up here in five weeks than I had fucked up in five years in Baltimore.” And that was the God’s truth.

THE DEEP END OF THE POOL

By John Schulian

Like every other job candidate at the Post in those days, I had to get the approval of Ben Bradlee, the executive editor who had covered himself in glory with the paper’s Watergate coverage. One of the first things he said to me was that he liked my Jimmy Breslin style. As soon as I heard that, I knew I’d better develop my own style, and do it fast. If I was going to prosper at the Post, I couldn’t be a cheap imitation.

I realized I was in the deep end of the pool the instant I walked into the place. It was crawling with heavy hitters and on-the-make newcomers, intrepid reporters and positively wonderful wordsmiths, all of whom seemed to buy into Bradlee’s theory of creative tension. I’d hate to think of all the intramural treachery that went on there — and that was in addition to going out and bumping heads with the New York Times and L.A. Times and Boston Globe and Wall Street Journal. On top of that, the people at the Post seemed exceedingly full of themselves-–no surprise, I suppose, since I showed up in the wake of Woodward and Bernstein bringing down Nixon and his cronies. In fact, the paper was building its Batman and Robin an office back by the sports department. Nobody thought it was funny when I asked if they were going to take high school football scores on Friday nights. What did I know? I’d just come from Baltimore, where people took their work seriously, but not themselves.

I’m probably going to wind up sounding negative about my time at the Post-–it was not the greatest 17 months of my life-–but I want you to know that it was an honor to work there. I was never on a better paper, never kept company with more talented people, never had more of a sense of the glamour of the newspaper business. Bradlee was forever strutting around in his Turnbull & Asser shirts-–the kind with bold stripes and white collars-–and he loved to go slumming in the sports department so he could see what we’d dug up on the Redskins. He was big pals with the team’s owner, Edward Bennett Williams.

One day I get into the elevator to go up to the newsroom and a guy jumps in at the last minute. He’s dressed the same way I am: tan corduroy sport coat, blue button-down collar shirt, Levi’s, cowboy boots. One big difference, though: he was Robert Redford and I wasn’t. They were making “All the President’s Men” then, and Redford must have been hanging around to do research on Bob Woodward, whom he played in the movie. When we got off the elevator, it was like I was invisible.

There was a copy boy at the Post-–the head copy boy, to be specific-–who wore Gucci loafers and was said to have a degree from the University of Virginia. And there was a copy girl who was an absolute babe-–absolute babes are a rarity in the newspaper business–and was said to have a tattoo of a butterfly on her ass.

In the midst of all that whatever-it-was, there was Donnie Graham, son of Katherine, the publisher who stood so tall during the Wategate era. Donnie would be publisher one day, too, but on his way there, he spent time doing every kind of job there was at the paper, from loading trucks to reporting to taking a turn as an editor in the sports department. This in addition to having been a beat cop in D.C. for a year or two. All of which is to say he was as decent and down to earth as he could be. I forget what job he had at the paper when I was there, but he still used to swing by sports to shoot the bull. One day he comes up to me while I’m pounding away on my typewriter and asks what I’m working on. I tell him it’s a feature about a former University of Maryland quarterback who washed out of the NFL and is playing semipro football in Baltimore on Saturday nights. And I mean down-and-dirty semipro football, on a field as hard as an interstate highway. “Oh,” Donnie says. He didn’t need to say anything else. I could tell he thought this one was a loser. But I wrote the hell out of it, and when I came into the office the day after it ran, there was a note from Donnie saying that in the hands of a good writer, anything could be a wonderful story. With the note was a copy of George Orwell’s essays. Memories don’t come much better than that.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the pressmen’s strike a month or so after I started at the Post on Labor Day 1975. The paper was getting ready to change from hot type to cold type and jobs were being lost in the backshop. One night everything went sideways, blood got spilled, the paper didn’t come out, and the next thing I knew, my fellow members of the Newspaper Guild and I were voting on whether to honor the pressmen’s picket line. I thought we should. Many more people thought we should cross it. And so we did. A few people actually left the Post because of that. I wasn’t one of them, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t feel a sense of shame and betrayal every time I crossed the picket line. I did, and it has stayed with me to this day.

I’m still not sure exactly why the Post came after me, particularly when so many good young sportswriters around the country would have sold their wives/mothers/firstborn for a chance to work there. Nor am I sure whether it was Donnie Graham or George Solomon who spotted me first. Sometimes I heard that it was my SI story on the Baltimore fight promoter that stirred their interest. Other times it was a funny but barbed Evening Sun feature I’d done about students at the school where the Colts trained standing up to the team’s abrasive general manager.

A funny thing about that fight promoter. Well, not funny, because he died in the time between my departure from the Evening Sun and my arrival at the Post. His name was Eli Hanover and he was barely into his 50s, one of those guys who’s so full of piss and vinegar that you figure he’ll outlive everyone. George Solomon told me he tried to get hold of me to write something about Eli, but I was off on an assignment for Sports Illustrated and nobody knew how to reach me. (Ah, those were the days.) The Post had a new sports columnist, a guy named William Barry Furlong who had had a truly distinguished career as a magazine freelancer, and he wound up writing about Eli. But all he did was lift things from my SI story, quotes and paraphrases and anecdotes. I don’t recall his having another source for his column. I hope he did. I hope he made at least one phone call. But if he did, I don’t remember it. Uncharacteristically, I didn’t say anything about it, not to Furlong, not to Solomon, not to anyone. It was one of those things I just filed away and said, Okay, pal, it’s good to know that’s how you play the game.

Click here for the full “From Ali to Xena” archives.

“Just a Guy at Oxford” (Bill Bradley)

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s our chat. Enjoy:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Jack Mann appreciation continues with three pieces by his colleagues. Please enjoy these memories of Mann from John Schulian, Tom Callahan and Dave McKenna.

Unvarnished Mann

By John Schulian

In the world according to Jack Mann, if a ballplayer dragged his private parts over the post-game spread while reaching for the mustard, a sports writer damn well better file it away for future use. Maybe he wouldn’t be able to re-create the scene for a family newspaper, but he could certainly offer some well-crafted hints. In fact Jack insisted on it when he was a visionary sports editor at Newsday because he would have done no less were he writing the story himself. He was, after all, a slave to the truth no matter how discomfiting.

Not everybody appreciated it. To this day, there are those who recoil at the sound of his name before recovering to rail profanely about his parentage, fondness for the grape, and well-worn mean streak. Jack was, in his time, the most complicated and divisive figure in sportswriting this side of Mark Kram and Dick Young. You either loved him or hated him, and if you loved him, there were still going to be times when you wondered why the hell he did some of the things he did.

Of course the legend occasionally got in the way of the facts. Jack may have thrown a tray of type out a window at the Washington Daily News, for instance, or it may have been his boss, Dave Burgin, who did the honors. God knows they were both capable of it in the days when they were making the sports section in that abysmal tabloid the liveliest reading in town. Or maybe the incident never happened at all.

What I can guarantee did happen was Jack’s constant and very public humiliation of Shirley Povich, the icon who anchored the Washington Post’s sports page for 70 years. Shirley was every bit as gracious and gentlemanly as Red Smith, and a fine writer, too, but by the early 1970s, his reportorial legs were gone and his column showed it. He covered more and more games by watching them on TV. Even the Redskins, who become more important than the White House during the NFL season, couldn’t get him off his couch. Jack smelled blood and went for the kill, parodying Shirley’s style (“The way it came across on Channel 9”) and sneeringly referring to the Post by its advertising slogan (“Over at ‘Quoted, Honored and Consulted’”).

It was not for nothing then that the Post never hired Jack full-time after the Daily News and his subsequent employer, the Washington Star, went belly up. To tell the truth, I was surprised he got so much as a freelance assignment at the Post, but when Casey Stengel died, there was that byline – Jack Mann – on the front of the next day’s sports page. I doubt the old Professor got a better sendoff. And there would be more pieces by Jack, not a lot of them but enough to keep his name alive. I still wonder how hard George Solomon, who was then settling into his job as the Post’s sports editor, had to fight for Jack. But they had worked together at the Daily News, and George understood just how good Jack was.

To read his prose was to get a sense of the man at the typewriter. It was blunt, no-nonsense, and it could, on certain occasions, feel like a punch in the mouth. And yet, while lyricism wasn’t his game, he wove enough literary allusions into his work to let readers in on the fact that he knew Hester Prynne wasn’t a baseball Annie from Boston.

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Over at Grantland, there is a long, entertaining oral history piece compiled by Alex French and Howie Kahn on “The National,” Frank Deford’s influential, short-lived sports newspaper:

Peter Richmond (Main Event Writer): I had a Nieman fellowship at Harvard when I heard about The National. You’re obliged, if you get a Nieman, to go back to the newspaper you were working at. I worked at the Miami Herald as the national sports correspondent. I’d go to the Super Bowl, the World Series, the NBA Finals. I’d go to prize fights. I had a column. Then I got a free ride at Harvard for a year. In the middle of it, I had heard in the New York Daily News that Frank Deford was rounding up this all-star team for The National. I thought, “Oh my god. I’ve got to get there.”

Charles P. Pierce (Main Event Writer): As soon as I heard about it, I basically hurled myself out a window.

Frank Deford: What was my sales pitch like? It wasn’t a reach, and I wasn’t blowing smoke. I’d say, “This paper is going to be the first of its kind. We’ve got this extraordinary staff and we’ve got a lot of money behind it. Go look up anything you want about Emilio Azcárraga. He’s into this, and these sorts of things have worked all over the world, so why can’t they work in the United States? Then I’d pause and say, “I understand it’s risky. We all know this is new territory. But you’re a sports guy. Don’t you want to be part of this?”

Rob Fleder (Main Event Editor): Here was this great adventure and chance to invent something new. It was clear even before it started, and certainly long before it failed, that you were going to get one chance to try this in your life. This was as close to a frontier as we had.

Pierce: Rob Fleder, who was one of the original founding members of Rotisserie baseball, literally in the Rotisserie restaurant, had seen some of my stuff in New England Monthly. He called and said, “Would you like to come down and talk about this thing we have?” So I went down to New York. They didn’t even have real offices yet. They were in some space with pieces of paper hanging on the door.

For all their fine work, somebody at Grantland should have known how to spell Glenn Stout’s name. Otherwise, this is a terrific read.

And while you are at it, dig Charles Pierce’s memories of “The National”:

Oh, money. Yeah, wait. I should tell this story about money, first. In the spring of 1991, the last spring of our newspaper’s life, I got a call from New York. Mike Lupica was leaving the paper to return to the New York Daily News, a development that surprised approximately nobody. He was taking with him his “Shooting From The Lip” column, the three-dot bullet template invented by the great Jimmy Cannon and subsequently appropriated by almost everyone else in the history of newspapers, including, most notably, in USA Today by Larry — “If it’s Wheatena, I’m all in!” — King. The column had been running in The National every Friday, and it had developed an audience. They wanted to keep the idea under a different name, and someone had mentioned that I’d done a similar kind of thing when I was writing a column at the Boston Herald. So they asked me if I’d do it.

Of course, I told them, but I’d need more money to do it.

How much, they asked.

I had no idea, so I quoted them a figure that I thought probably indicated I was on mushrooms at the time.

They didn’t even blink.

You start this week, they said.

Fun stuff.

Jack Mann was a great newspaper man: editor, reporter, and columnist.

Over at the National Sports Journalism Center, Dave Kindred has a wonderful piece on Mann:

Mann made his reputation through the tumult of the 1960s. First as Newsday’s sports editor, then writing for Sports Illustrated, he encouraged and reveled in reporting that disturbed the peace. “Chipmunks,” he wrote, appropriating the term of disdain coined by co-opted hacks, “are the New Breed … their outstanding characteristics being irreverence and curiosity.”

He made words dance. He once assigned reporters to interview track fans who carried their own stopwatches so he could write the headline: “These Are the Souls Who Time Men’s Tries.” By the end, his resume came with stops in New York, Long Island, Miami, Washington, Baltimore, and Annapolis, perhaps because in his fierce integrity he suffered fools not at all. “Most chicken newspapers,” he once wrote, “which is most newspapers….”

When he was at Newsday (1960-62) Mann sent a style sheet to his staff. It was known as “the yellow pages” because he typed his memos on legal pad paper. I recently came across a copy and so in the interest of honoring history and the elements of style, I now share it with you:

[Photo Credit: Shaefer]

Here’s Jeff MacGregor on W.C. Heinz:

Too often on American sports pages, we use the long-bomb language of war to talk about games. And too often on the editorial page, we use the slam dunk language of sports to obscure the realities of war. By doing so, we corrupt our honest understanding of both. The symbols and mythologies, the lessons and the metaphors might seem interchangeable — devotion, honor, fortitude — but one is a harmless funhouse reflection of the other. Sports are a kind of necessary human nonsense. War is the abject failure of everything that makes us human.

…Before he became a sports writer, Bill Heinz was a war correspondent. He spent months in the North Atlantic; landed at Normandy; chased Patton across France. He drank with Liebling and with Hemingway and watched American boys felled like trees in the Battle of Hürtgen Forest. That’s what I think made him great. Not just the writing or the craft or the work ethic. But in knowing exactly how much — and how very little — is at stake in sports.

Because every word Bill Heinz ever wrote about sports was informed by what he carried out of that war. By the things he could never forget.

Salute.

Over at the Village Voice, Allen Barra talks Murray Chass and the New York Times.

Compelling.

Fifty years ago, Roger Maris chased Babe Ruth’s home run record. Of course, he eventually broke it. When he did, this is what the great Leonard Shecter wrote in the New York Post:

Great events of history are over swiftly. A ball, even if it’s the first in the long and noble history of baseball to be hit for a 61st home run, takes only a few heartbeats of time to be propelled from home plate to the outfield seats.

For those who were at Yankee Stadium yestrday, some 24,000 people, it was over all too quickly. It would have been better if the ball leaped in exaltation, turned int he air and wrote a saucy message (like WHEEE!) against the blue sky, dipped nobly and shed a tear over the monument to Babe Ruth in center field.

…Maris swung his most vicious swing and the ball rose in a great arc toward right center field. In years to come millions will swear they were at the Stadium the day Maris hit the home run heard round the world but none among them will be able to say it was less than a perfect home run.

The ball was outlined sharply, whitely, against the sky as it came to the outfield. There were puffs of white clouds in the sky but it was as though they parted to let the ball fly by. It landed perhaps six rows back, about seven seats and a narrow aisle to the right of the bullpen, well to the left of the 344 foot marker. A home run in Babe Ruth’s day, too.

“I was up there wheeling,” Maris said after he had paid his homage to the commercial gods of television. He was calm, in control, the way the President is probably, when he strides into a huge room to face 800 reporters.

This wasn’t the same Maris who jiggled nervously for weeks waiting for the ax to fall on the 154th game. It wasn’t the same Maris who lost sleep, even tufts of his hair in the unbearable pressure cooker of the publicity as he made the run at the 154th game home run record.

It was a Maris who seemed a foot taller now that a terrible load had been taken off him, now that he had the 61 home runs, now that the season was over.

…The people got to their feet and clapped their hands as Maris ran. It wasn’t so much a cheer as it was applause, the kind you get from an audience which has been moved by a great performance.

…The applause and his teammates brought him back out of the dugout, cap off, his hair looking, in the bright day, blonder than it is. He waved his cap once, twice, tried to retreat, was pushed back by the players.

“I thought they wanted me to stay out there all day,” Maris said.

Perhaps they, who have had to get the base hits, understand best the magnitude of Maris’ accomplishment. Put it this way. It’s difficult to hit 61 home run the way it was difficult to run the four minute mile before anybody else had done. Others may now hit 61 but you have to put Roger Maris up there with Roger Bannister. It’s been a great century for Roger.

Over at Baseball Think Factory, a heated debate has centered on Rafael Soriano’s decision to leave the clubhouse early on Tuesday night, before he could be grilled by reporters about his eighth inning blow-up at the hands of the Twins. Some posters have defended Soriano, saying that they do not want to listen to the media whine about the difficulty of doing their job. The Soriano defenders sympathize with him, saying that it’s understandable that he didn’t want to talk after such a poor performance. Others have criticized Soriano for failing to “face the music” after walking three batters, all of whom scored during Minnesota’s rally from a 4-0 deficit.

As someone who has worked in the media and has had to conduct interviews in locker rooms and clubhouses, I’ll always take the writers’ side on this issue. First off, those that think it is fun or glamorous to conduct interviews in a losing clubhouse, talking to guys who are probably not in the best of moods, are horribly mistaken. Reporters who venture into clubhouses do so because they are expected to by their bosses, whether it’s to pick up a good quote or two for the next day’s newspaper, or to come up with a sound bite that can be used on radio or TV. To me, it’s one of the least pleasant aspects of being a reporter/writer. So I figure that if I have to go into the clubhouse to do an interview, then athletes should shoulder a similar responsibility and make themselves available with a reasonable degree of civility.

Players who don’t stick around after wearing goat horns also place an unfair burden on their teammates, who are left trying to make explanations for the players who avoid the media. Do you really think that Russell Martin wants to sit there trying to explain what Soriano was doing wrong on the mound, or speculating about how he felt after blowing a four-run lead and essentially the game? A report in the New York Daily News indicated that several of the Yankee players were indeed upset with Soriano for leaving the clubhouse early and making them have to do the talking for him. We can be sure that at least one Yankee player pulled Soriano aside the next day and informed the temperamental reliever that he had made a bad choice. So it wasn’t just the Yankee front office that expressed its displeasure to Scott Boras, the agent for Soriano.

I’m not saying that it’s the law, or even a rule, that players must do this: I think it’s just the decent and ethical thing to do. Joe Sheehan and other Sabermetric Internet writers don’t care about players making themselves available because the kind of writing they do doesn’t depend on player interviews or quotes. They’re writing as analysts, and their writing is largely dependent on statistics and the evaluation of what they mean in regard to player performance. So how would Joe Sheehan and other writers react if teams and leagues didn’t make statistics available to the mass media? How would they feel if boxscores were not printed and statistics like on-base percentage or WHIP were not released to the public, but were instead treated as proprietary information? Would they be as quick to give teams a free pass for such a policy? After all, there’s no law or rule that says teams have to make this information available to the public for free. But once again, it’s the right thing to do.

As a fan, I don’t feel that I absolutely have to hear from the players after every game. A lot of what they say is clichéd and trite balderdash. If I hear “It is what it is” one more time, I may not be held responsible for my actions. But if a Yankee player screws up a game, I’d like to hear why it happened, or at least how it happened. And if a Yankee player blasts a game-winning home run, I’d like to hear him talk about it, even if it’s just for a moment.

The Yankee players seem to agree with that philosophy. For years now, their players have made a policy of always talking to reporters, even after losses and even after they themselves endured bad games. Yankee players believe in being accountable, and being willing to answer tough questions after difficult defeats. And they’re absolutely right about it. It’s called being a professional.

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Over at The American Scholar, Douglas Goetsch has a piece on Ring Lardner and the Black Sox Scandal:

At the height of his fame in the 1920s, humorist and short-story writer Ring Lardner was listed among the 10 best-known people in America. He wrote a nationally syndicated newspaper column, short stories for mass-circulation magazines, skits and songs for the Ziegfeld Follies, and the text of a daily comic strip. To the bulk of his readers, Lardner was the regular guy who had made it, the man who golfed with the president but was still friends with the train conductors. The only writer in the country who could get away with the salutation, “Well, friends,” he addressed the average American, the man he repeatedly called “Joe,” and he did this in a natural, unassuming style—a veritable idiom nicknamed “Lardner Ringlish”—removed from the formal conventions of correct prose.

…But earlier in his career, Lardner was best known as a baseball writer, and much of his enduring reputation is tied to the national pastime. He covered baseball in what’s been called the Silver Age of the game—from 1900 to 1919—an era that ended with the infamous Black Sox scandal, ushering in, as irony would have it, the Golden Age of baseball. Lardner’s infatuation and eventual disillusionment with baseball offer a number of lessons about how we should think about the scandals in today’s game, and his writing illuminates our own love-hate relationship with baseball.

George Plimpton once wrote, “The smaller the ball used in the sport, the better the book.” But this doesn’t account for boxing, a sport that word-for-word has produced more great writing than any other. For hard evidence, look no further than “At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing,” an outstanding new collection edited by George Kimball and John Schulian.

All of the heavyweights are here–from Jack London, James Baldwin and Norman Mailer, to A.J. Liebling, W.C. Heinz, Red Smith and Jimmy Cannon. And that’s just for starters. How about Gay Talese, Pete Hamill, George Plimpton, Pete Dexter, David Remnick and Mark Kriegel, not to mention the veterans of the boxing scene like Larry Merchant, Mark Kram, Vic Ziegel, Pat Putnam and Richard Hoffer.

I’m not a huge boxing fan but I adore boxing writing and this is the finest anthology I’ve ever come across.

Check out the Library of America’s website for a fascinating and in-depth interview with Kimball and Schulian.

Here’s Kimball:

The wonder shouldn’t be that there are two Liebling pieces, but that there are only two. (He and Schulberg have the only double-barreled entries in the anthology.) If I’d been compiling that list, The Sweet Science would be No.1, and A Neutral Corner, Liebling’s other collection of (mostly) New Yorker pieces No. 2.

Putting At the Fights together was a painstaking, year-long process that was often like a jigsaw puzzle, because sometimes the decision to include a par- ticular piece would, due to subject matter or tone or approach, displace others. John and I made a conscious decision early on to hold Liebling in reserve. We knew whichever of his pieces we wound up using, they were going to work. Our initial inclination, for instance, had been to include Liebling’s terrific account of his visit to Sonny Liston’s training camp, but if we’d used that we probably wouldn’t have been able to include Joe Flaherty’s wonderful “Amen to Sonny,” and if we hadn’t used Liebling’s “Kearns by a Knockout” we’d probably have had to find two more pieces to adequately address Doc Kearns and Sugar Ray Robinson. It was sometimes like playing Whack-A-Mole, because every time you’d hammer one down, three more would pop up somewhere else. But in that respect Liebling was a constant security blanket, our wild-card, because of our unshaken confidence that whatever we wound up using was going to be great.

Anyone who has written about boxing for the last fifty years owes a great debt of gratitude to Joe Liebling, so yes, his influence has been both pervasive and profound, but woe be unto the conscious imitator. Any writer who sets out trying to write his own “Liebling piece”—and there have been a few—is inex- orably doomed to fall flat on his face.

And Schulian:

It’s too much to say that the best boxing stories are about losers. That argument is contradicted time and again throughout the book. But losers and eccentrics and guys who never quite made it to the mountaintop have inspired some classic writing. You want to weep for Primo Carnera after read- ing what Paul Gallico had to say about the way he was used as a patsy and a stooge and a pretend heavyweight champion. And then you have Stanley Ketchel and Bummy Davis, two crazy-tough fighters who would have been swallowed by the mists of time if it weren’t for the stories written about them. Was John Lardner’s piece on Ketchel better than the fighter himself? Absolutely. And Bill Heinz’s on Davis? Without a doubt. And the amazing thing is that Lardner and Heinz never met their subjects, both of whom were prematurely dispatched from this life by gunshot. But Lardner and Heinz were intrepid reporters as well as stunning writers, and they proved it with their renderings of the two fighters’ hearts and souls.

Click here for an excerpt.

Don’t sleep, pound-for-pound, this will be the most rewarding book–never mind sports book–you’ll buy this spring.

Say what you will about Peter Gammons, but I love him. There was a time, when Gammons was a regular on ESPN’s Baseball Tonight, when I encouraged my children to refer to him as Uncle Peter. (My wife, incidentally, was not a fan of this.) Sure, his Boston Globe columns could be long-winded–perhaps even elitist, if a baseball writer can aspire to elitism–and there were the nagging questions about the accuracy of some of his reporting, but it never really mattered that much to me. I’m not a journalist, after all, I’m just a baseball fan, and Gammons always gave me exactly what I wanted. Heck, I even liked his guitar-nerd habit of dropping in bits about the Moody Blues or Third Eye Blind.

Anyway, like him or not, he’s got an interesting column about the Yankees over at MLB.com. In a nutshell, Jeter’s working hard, Ruben Rivera was a bust, Jesus Montero is the real deal, and Joba (gasp!) looks like the old Joba. Enjoy.

[Photo Credit: Justine Hunt/Boston Globe]

Here’s George Kimball on Sly Stallone and “Rocky”:

If Ali remains the most recognizable boxing figure of the 20th century, Rocky Balboa, at least in the public consciousness, probably ranks a close second.

Stallone had drawn his inspiration for Rocky, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture that year (the defeated competition included All The President’s Men, Network, and Taxi Driver) from a real-life title fight in Cleveland a year earlier, when a journeyman heavyweight named Chuck Wepner lasted until the 15th round against the great Ali. Wepner, who was known for reasons devoid of irony as “The Bayonne Bleeder,” was even credited with a ninth-round knockdown.

On the evening of that bout, The Bayonne Bleeder presented his wife with a filmy blue negligee and instructed her to wear it later that night when, he promised, “you’re gonna be sleeping with the heavyweight champion of the world.”

Much later that night, having been taken first to a hospital to have his face stitched back together, Wepner stumbled back to his hotel room, to find his wife sitting up in bed wearing the filmy blue negligee.

“Well,” Mrs. Wepner asked her husband, “is he coming up here, or do I have to go to his room?”

From the New York Magazine archives, here’s the late, great Vic Ziegel on Ali-Spinks II:

he copy of Money magazine offered to Leon Spinks during his flight to New Orleans was full of splendid suggestions for a new career. Soccer coach, that was something the heavyweight champion might want to think about. Nowhere is it written that soccer coaches have to run through strange cities at five in the morning. Or spend great hunks of each day inside expensive hotel rooms that offer baskets of apples and Gouda instead of X-rated film selections. And there aren’t small armies of people telling the cover-boy soccer coach to kick this, do that, no this, no, no, no . . . armies that depend on the heavyweight champion to provide their per diem expenses.

The magazine went unread, of course. Leon Spinks was in Louisiana to defend his title against Muhammad Ali, a 36-year-old body with the staying power of Tutankhamen. Ali was the favorite. Ali was the attraction—the once, twice, and future champion. Leon Spinks? Come on. Just another name on an expired driver’s license.

“Did you hear what Spinks did when he came off the plane?” The lawyer is talking to a sportswriter after the fight. The party is at the Windsor Suite of the New Orleans Hilton. Sportswriters are badly outnumbered by designer suits. Worse yet, the lawyers had heard all the best available fiction.

“Spinks gets off the plane and he does an interview. Everything’s cool. No problems. And then they hustle him into the sheriff’s private car to drive him to the hotel. The first thing he does—this is in the sheriff’s car, right?—the first thing he does is take out a joint and light up.”

Ali won the rematch.

[Art by Neil Adams]

Good lineup at Gelf’s Varsity Letters Speaking Serious tomorrow night in BK: Howard Byrant, Tommy Craggs and Dave Jamieson.

There is a new collection of love letters from famed Chicago columnist Mike Royko to his wife.

Steve Lopez reviews the book for the L.A. Times:

The job of writing newspaper columns doesn’t come with instructions, just deadlines that fly at you in your sleep. I used to read Royko and Jimmy Breslin and try to break down how they did what they did, but I couldn’t crack the code. How could they make a word stand up on the page, or a thought linger? How could they say so much with lines so spare?

They knew the places they wrote about, and that was part of it. But only years later would I learn their real secret: They knew who they were, and they knew why they wrote.

Royko was a man’s man, as they say, a guy who loved baseball and bars, believed in his city, backhanded its fools and celebrated its anonymous heroes, always with wit and tough-minded certainty.

…It’s an interesting thing, the way a famous city columnist — whose very public job was to make readers feel like they knew him — kept his family life private. Maybe Royko understood the better story was out there in the neighborhoods and in the hopes and fears of others. When you fall back on family for material, you sacrifice them to your selfish needs and cut off your own escape from the public glare.

Or maybe there’s a darker explanation as to why Royko did not write about the woman who had so consumed him as a young man. David Royko suggests his dad got caught up in the superstardom that came with decades of writing five columns a week in a city he owned, and his marriage to Carol Duckman was not “a rosy extension” of his heartfelt letters to her.

It could be that Royko discovered he adored nothing more than the pressure of filling empty space, on deadline, to the cheers of a city that adored him. Those were love letters, too, all those thousands of columns, the brilliant ones and the forgotten ones too.

The job is a thrill, but a wise man once advised me not to overdo it.

One of the first grown-up books I ever read as a kid was “Mr. October,” by Maury Allen. I was ten-years-old when it was published in 1981. I already had “The Reggie Jackson Scrapbook” but this was a biography, all words and no pictures (although each chapter featured a picture of Reggie at the plate ). I wasn’t a big reader but I liked having my own books and often received baseball books for my birthday. I knew about the two Rogers–Angell and Kahn–from my dad’s book collection. But when I picked up “The Boys of Summer” and tried to read it I got bored quickly, same for “The Summer Game” and “Five Innings” which had impossibly long paragraphs that seemed to go on forever.

Maury Allen I could read. He told a story. The words didn’t scare me away. So I read “Mr. October” over and again. And I got more of Allen’s books, notably “Baseball’s 100,” and always made the distinction between Maury Allen and Murray Chass–who covered the Yankees for the New York Times. Maury Allen was my first favorite sports writer. And although I knew that he wasn’t in the best of health, I was deeply sadened to hear that he died yesterday morning.

Here is the obit from the New York Times.

Allen had been around New York covering sports since the Toots Shor days. He wrote for the Post from 1961-88. In the Sixties, Allen was at the Post with Leonard Shecter, Milton Gross, Leonard Koppett, Larry Merchant and Vic Ziegel, to name just a few. He covered the Yanks and looked as if he’d be right at home sitting at Oscar Madison’s poker table.

Allen moved to the Gannett chain after leaving the Post and most recently contributed to The Columnists (check out his archive). He also wrote close to 40 books. I was thrilled that he was a part of the Lasting Yankee Stadium Memories book.

Maury Allen will be missed but not forgotten.

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.”