Got off the train on 231 and Broadway one night last week and saw a guy selling books on the street. The man was barely holding it together and he didn’t look to have much of anything but then I saw this: Heinz!

Torn cover, sure, but a first edition. I gave him a couple of bucks for it. He was grateful and so was I.

Here’s what Jimmy Breslin calls the best magazine story ever written:

“Brownsville Bum”

By W.C. Heinz

It’s a funny thing about people. People will hate a guy all his life for what he is, but the minute he dies for it they make him out a hero and they go around saying that maybe he wasn’t such a bad guy after all because he sure was will- ing to go the distance for whatever he believed or whatever he was.

That’s the way it was with Bummy Davis. The night Bummy fought Fritzie Zivic in the Garden and Zivic started giving him the business and Bummy hit Zivic low maybe 30 times and kicked the referee, they wanted to hang him for it. The night those four guys came into Dudy’s bar and tried the same thing, only with rods, Bummy went nuts again. He flattened the first one and then they shot him, and when everybody read about it, and how Bummy fought guns with only his left hook and died lying in the rain in front of the place, they all said he was really something and you sure had to give him credit at that.

“So you’re AI Davis?” one of the hoods said. “Why you punch-drunk bum.”

What did they expect Bummy to do? What did they expect him to do the night Zivic gave him the thumbs and the laces and walked around the referee and belted Bummy? Bummy could hook too good ever to learn how to hold himself in, if you want the truth of it.

That was really the trouble with Bummy. Bummy blew school too early, and he didn’t know enough words. A lot of guys who fought Zivic used to take it or maybe beef to the referee, but Bummy didn’t know how to do that. A lot of guys looking at four guns would have taken the talk and been think- ing about getting the number off the car when it pulled away, but all Bummy ever had was his hook.

Bummy came out of Brownsville. In the sports pages they are always refer- ring to Brownsville as the fistic incubator of Brooklyn, because they probably mean that a lot of fighters come out of there. Murder, Inc., came out of there, too, and if you don’t believe it ask Bill O’Dwyer. If it wasn’t for Brownsville maybe Bill O’Dwyer wouldn’t have become the mayor of New York.

The peculiar thing about Brownsville is that it doesn’t look so tough. There are trees around there and some vacant lots, and the houses don’t look as bad as they do over on Second Avenue or Ninth Avenue or up in Harlem. Don’t tell Charley Beecher, though, that you don’t think it’s so tough.

“What’s the matter you sold the place?” Froike said to Charley the other day. “It ain’t the same, now you sold it.”

Charley Beecher used to run the poolroom “With the gym behind it on the comer of Georgia and Livonia where Bummy used to train. It was a good little gym with a little dressing room and a shower, and Charley was a pretty good featherweight in the twenties, and his brother Willie, who was even a better fighter, fought Abe Attell and Johnny Dundee and Jack Britton and Leach Cross and Knockout Brown.

“For 17 years I was in business,” Charley said. “Seventeen times they stuck me up.”

He looked at Froike, and then he pointed with his two hands at his mouth and his ears and his eyes.

“I had guns here and here and here,” he said. “All I ever saw was guns.”

The worst part was that Charley knew all the guys. A week after they’d heist him they’d be back for a little contribution, maybe a C note. They’d be getting up bail for one of the boys, and they just wanted Charley to know there were no hard feelings about the heist, and that as long as he kept his dues up they’d still consider him friendly to the club. That’s how tough Brownsville was.

Bummy had two brothers, and they were a big help. They were a lot older than Bummy, and the one they called Little Gangy and the other they called Duff. Right now Gangy is doing 20 to 40, just to give you an idea, and Bummy took a lot of raps for them, too, because there were some people who couldn’t get back at Gangy and Duff so they took it out on the kid.

When Bummy was about seven his father used to run a candy and cigar store and did a little speaking on the side. In other words, he always had a bottle in the place, and he had Bummy hanging around in case anybody should say cop. When the signal would go up Bummy would run behind the counter and grab the bottle, and he was so small nobody could see him over the counter and he’d go out the back.

One day Bummy was going it down the street with the bottle under his coat and some real smart guy stuck out his foot. Bummy tripped and the bottle broke, and Bummy looked at the bottle and the whiskey running on the sidewalk and at the guy and his eyes got big and he started to scream. The guy just laughed and Bummy was lying right on the sidewalk in the whiskey and broken glass, hitting his head on the sidewalk and banging his fists down and screaming. A crowd came around and they watched Bummy, with the guy laughing at him, and they shook their heads and they said this youngest Davidoff kid must be crazy at that.

Davidoff was his straight name. Abraham Davidoff. In Yiddish they made Abraham into Ahvron and then Ahvron they sometimes make Bommy. All his family called him Bommy, so you can see they didn’t mean it as a knock. The one who changed it to Bummy was Johnny Attell.

Johnny Attell used to run the fights at the Ridgewood Grove, a fight club in Brooklyn where some good fighters like Sid Terris and Ruby Goldstein and Tony Canzoneri learned to fight, and Johnny and a nice guy named Lew Burston managed Bummy. When Bummy turned pro and Johnny made up the show card for the fight with Frankie Reese he put the name on it as Al (Bummy) Davis, and when Bummy saw it he went right up to John’s office.

“What are you doing that for?” he hollered at Johnny. “I don’t want to be called Bummy.”

“Take it easy,” Johnny said. “You want to make money fighting, don’t you?”

“People like to come to fights to see guys they think are tough.”

They sure liked to come to see Bummy all right. They sure liked to come to see him get his brains knocked out.

The first time Johnny Attell ever heard of Bummy was one day when Johnny was coming out of the Grove and Froike stopped him. Froike used to run the gym at Beecher’s and handle kids in the amateurs, and he was stand- ing there talking to Johnny under the Myrtle Avenue El.

“Also I got a real good ticket seller for you,” he said to Johnny after a while.

“I could use one,” Johnny said.

“Only I have to have a special for him,” Froike said. “No eliminations.” “What’s his name?” Johnny said.

“Giovanni Pasconi,” Froike said.

“Bring him around,” Johnny said.

The next week Johnny put the kid in with a tough colored boy named Johnny Williams. The kid got the hell punched out of him, but he sold $200 worth of tickets.

“He didn’t do too bad,” Johnny said to Froike after the fight. “I’ll put him back next week.”

“Only this time get him an easier opponent,” Froike said.

“You get him your own opponent,” Johnny said. “As long as he can sell that many tickets I don’t care who he fights.”

The next week Johnny put him back and he licked the guy. After the fight Johnny was walking out and he saw the kid and Froike with about 20 people around them, all of them talking Yiddish.

“Come here, Froike,” Johnny said.

“What’s the matter?” Froike said.

“What is this guy,” Johnny said, “a Wop or aJew?”

“He’s a Jew,” Froike said. “His right name’s Davidoff. He’s only 15, so we borrowed Pasconi’s card.”

“He can sure sell tickets,” Johnny said.

Bummy could sell anything. That’s the way Bummy learned to fight, selling. He used to sell off a pushcart on Blake Avenue. He used to sell berries in the spring and tomatoes and watermelons in the summer and apples in the fall and potatoes and onions and beans in the winter, and there are a lot of pushcarts on Blake Avenue and Bummy used to have a fight to hold his spot.

“I was the best tomato salesman in the world,” Bummy was bragging once.

It was right after he knocked out Bob Montgomery in the Garden. He stiffened him in 63 seconds and he was getting $15,000, and when the sports writers came into his dressing room all he wanted to talk about was how good he could sell tomatoes.

“You go over to Jersey and get them yourself,” he was telling the sports writers. “Then you don’t have to pay the middle guy. You don’t put them in boxes, because when you put them in boxes it looks like you’re getting ready to lam. When you only got a few around it looks like you can’t get rid of them so what you gotta do is pile them all up and holler: ‘I gotta get rid of these. I’m gonna give ‘em away!”‘

The sports writers couldn’t get over that. There was a lot they couldn’t get over about Bummy.

When Johnny turned Bummy pro he wasn’t impressed by his fighting, only his following. Every time Bummy fought for Johnny in the Grove he’d bring a couple of hundred guys with him and they’d holler for Bummy. Everybody else would holler for the other guy, because now they knew Bummy was Jewish and the Grove is in a German section of Ridgewood, and this was when Hitler was starting to go good and there was even one of those German beer halls right in the place where the waiters walked around in those short leather pants and wearing fancy vests and funny hats.

The fight that started Bummy was the Friedkin fight. Bummy was just beginning to bang guys out at the Grove and Friedkin was already a hot fighter the Broadway Arena and they lived only blocks apart. Friedkin was a nice about three years older than Bummy, kind of a studious guy they called Schoolboy Friedkin, and there was nothing between him and Bummy except they were both coming up and the neighborhood made the match.

Like one day Bummy was standing in the candy store and a couple of guys told him Friedkin was saying he could stiffen Bummy in two heats. Then they went to Friedkin and said Bummy said Friedkin was afraid to fight. At first this didn’t take, but they kept it up and one day Bummy was standing with a dame on the corner of Blake and Alabama and Friedkin came along.

“So why don’t you two fight?” the dame said.

“Sure, I’ll fight,” Bummy said, spreading his feet.

“Right here?” Friedkin said. “Right now?”

“Sure,” Bummy said.

“I’ll fight whenever my manager makes the match/’ Friedkin said, and he walked away.

Bummy couldn’t understand that, because he liked to fight just to fight. He got right in the subway and went over to see Lew Burston in Lew’s office on Broadway.

“Never mind making that Friedkin match,” he said to Lew.

“Why not?” Lew said.

“Because when I leave here,” Bummy said, “I’m going right around to Friedkin’s house and I’m gonna wait for him to come out, and we’re gonna find out right away if I can lick him or he can lick me.”

“Are you crazy?” Lew said.

By the time Johnny Attell made the fight outdoors for Dexter Park there was really a fire under it. They had show cards advertising it on the pushcarts on Blake Avenue and Friedkin’s old man and Bummy’s old man got into an argument on the street, and everybody was talking about it and betting it big. Then it was rained out five nights and Johnny sold the fight to Mike Ja- cobs and Mike put it into Madison Square Garden.

When Bummy started working for the fight Lew Burston came over to Beecher’s to train him. When Bummy got into his ring clothes they chased everybody out of the gym, and Lew told Bummy to hit the big bag. Bummy walked up to the bag and spread his feet and pulled back his left to start his hook and Lew stopped him.

“Throw that hook away,” Lew said.

“Why?” Bummy said. “What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing’s wrong with it,” Lew said, “only for this fight you’ll have to lose that hook.”

Before that Bummy was nothing but a hooker, but for weeks Lew kept him banging the big bag with rights. Then the night of the fight after Bummy was all taped and ready, Lew took him into the shower off the dressing room and he talked to Bummy.

“Now remember one thing,” he said to Bummy. “I can tell you exacdy how that other corner is thinking. They’ve got that other guy eating and sleeping with your hook for weeks. I want you to go out there and I don’t want you to throw one right hand until I tell you. If you throw one right before I say so I’ll walk right out on you. Do you understand?”

Bummy understood all right. He was like a kid with a new toy. He was a kid with a secret that only Bummy and Lew knew, and he went out there and did like Lew told him. Friedkin came out with his right glued along the side of his head, and for three rounds Bummy just hooked and hooked and Friedkin blocked, and a lot of people thought Friedkin was winning the fight.

“All right,” Lew said, after the third round. “Now this time go right out and feint with the left, but throw the right and put everything on it.”

“Don’t worry,” Bummy said.

Bummy walked out and they moved around for almost a minute and then Bummy feinted his hook. When he did Friedkin moved over and Bummy threw the right and Friedkin’s head went back and down he went with his legs in the air in his own corner. That was all the fighting there was that night.

Now Bummy was the biggest thing in Brownsville. AI Buck and Hype Igoe and Ed Van Every and Lester Bromberg were writing about him in the New York papers, saying he was the best hooker since Charley White and could also hit with his right, and he had dough for the first time in his life.

He got $14,000 for the Friedkin fight. When he walked down the street the kids followed him, and he bought them leather jackets and baseball gloves and sodas, just to show you what money meant and how he was already looking back at his own life.

When Bummy was a kid nobody bought him anything and he belonged to a gang called the Cowboys. They used to pull small jobs, and the cops could never find them until one night. One night the cops broke into the flat where the kids used to live with some dames, and they got them all except Bummy who was with his mother that night.

Sure, Bummy was what most people call tough, but if he felt sorry for you and figured you needed him be couldn’t do enough. That was the way Bummy met Barbara and fell in love.

Bummy was 19 then and one day he and Shorty were driving around and Shorty said he wanted to go to Kings County Hospital and visit a friend of his who was sick, and there was this girl about 16 years old. They sat around for a while and Shorty did all the talking and then the next time they went to see the girl Shorty was carrying some flowers and he gave them to her.

“From him,” Shorty said, meaning Bummy.

When the girl left the hospital Shorty and Bummy drove her home, and then every day for a couple of weeks they used to take her for a ride and to stop off for sodas. One day the three of them were riding together in the front seat and Bummy wasn’t saying anything.

“Say, Bobby,” Shorty said all of a sudden, “would you like to get married?”

The girl didn’t know what to say. She just looked at Shorty.

“Not to me,” Shorty said. “To him.”

That was the way Bummy got married. That was Bummy’s big romance. After the Friedkin fight Bummy won about three fights quick, and then they made him with Mickey Farber in the St. Nick’s. Farber was out of the East Side and had a good record, and one day when Bummy finished his training at Beecher’s he was sitting in the locker room soaking his left hand in a pail of ice and talking with Charley.

That was an interesting thing about Bummy’s left hand. He used to bang so hard with it that after every fight and after every day he boxed in the gym it used to swell up.

“I think I’ll quit fighting,” Bummy said to Charley.

“You think you’ll quit?” Charley said. “You’re just starting to make dough.”

“They’re making me out a tough guy,” Bummy said. “All the newspapers make me a tough guy and I don’t like it and I think I’ll quit.”

“Forget it,” Charley said.

When Charley walked out Murder, Inc., walked in. They were all there—Happy and Buggsy and Abie and Harry and the Dasher—and they were looking at Bummy soaking his hand in the ice.

“You hurt your hand?” Buggsy said.

“No,” Bummy said. “It’s all right.”

They walked out again, and they must have gone with a bundle on Farber because the day after Bummy licked Farber he was standing under the El in front of the gym and the mob drove up. They stopped the car right in front of him and they piled out.

“What are you, some wise guy?” Buggsy said.

“What’s wrong with you?” Bummy said.

“What’s all this you gave us about you had a bad hand?” Buggsy said.

“I didn’t say I had a bad hand,” Bummy said.

“You did,” Buggsy said.

“Listen,” Bummy said, spreading his feet the way he used to do it, “if you guys want a fight let’s start it.”

Buggsy looked at the others and they looked at him. They they all got in the car and drove off, and if you could have been there and seen that you would have gone for Bummy for it.

That was the bad part about Bummy’s rap. Not enough people knew that part of Bummy until it was too late. The people who go to fights don’t just go to see some guy win, but they go to see some guy get licked, too. All they knew about Bummy was some of the things they read, and he was the guy they always went to see get licked.

Even the mob that followed Bummy when he was a big name didn’t mean anything to him, because he could see through that. He could see they were always grabbing at him for what they could get, and that was the thing he never got over about the time he was training in Billy West’s place up in Woodstock, New York.

Bummy went up there after he came out of the Army,just to take off weight, and there are a lot of artists around there. Artists are different people, because they don’t care what anybody says about a guy and they either like him or they don’t like him for what they think he is. They all liked him up there, and Billy used to say that Bummy could have been Mayor of Woodstock.

Billy had a dog that Bummy never forgot, either. Bummy used to run on the roads in the mornings and Billy’s dog used to run with him. Every morning they’d go out together and one day another dog came out of a yard and went for Bummy and Billy’s dog turned and went after the other dog and chased it off.

“Gee, this dog really likes me,” Bummy said, when he got back to the house, and he said it like he couldn’t believe it. “He’s really my friend.”

The fight that really started everybody hating Bummy, though, was the Canzoneri fight in the Garden. It was a bad match and never should have been made, but they made it and all Bummy did was fight it.

Canzoneri was over the hill, but he had been the featherweight champion and the lightweight champion and he had fought the best of his time and they loved him. When Bummy knocked him out it was the only time Tony was knocked out in 180 fights, and so they booed Bummy for it and they waited for him to get licked.

They didn’t have to wait too long. After he knocked out Tippy Larkin in five they matched him with Lou Ambers. Just after he started training for Ambers he was in the candy store one day when an argument started between. Bummy and a guy named Mersky. Nobody is going to say who started the argument but somebody called Bummy a lousy fighter and it wasn’t Bummy. Somebody flipped a piece of hard candy in Bummy’s face, too, and that wasn’t Bummy either, and after Bummy got done bouncing Mersky up and down Mersky went to the hospital and had some pictures taken and called the cops.

The first Johnny Attell heard about it was the night after it happened. He was walking down Broadway and he met a dick he knew.

“That’s too bad about your fighter,” the cop said.

“What’s the matter with him?” Johnny said.

“What’s the matter with him?” the cop said. “There’s an eight-state alarm out for him. The newspapers are full of it. He damn near killed a guy in a candy store.”

The cops couldn’t find Bummy but Johnny found him. He dug up Gangy, and Gangy drove him around awhile to shake off any cops, and finally Gangy stopped the car in front of an old wooden house and they got out and went in and there was Bummy.

Bummy was sitting in a pair of pajama pants, and that was all he had on. There were four or five other guys there, and they were playing cards.

“Are you crazy?” Johnny said.

“Why?” Bummy said, playing his cards, but looking up.

“If the cops find you here they’ll kill you,” Johnny said. “You better come with me.”

After Johnny talked awhile Bummy got dressed and he went with Johnny. Johnny took him back to New York and got him a haircut and a shave and he called Mike Jacobs. Jacobs told Johnny to take Bummy down to Police Headquarters, and when Johnny did that Sol Strauss, Mike’s lawyer, showed up and he got an adjournment in night court for Bummy until after the Ambers fight.

The night Bummy fought Ambers there was Mersky right at ringside. He had on dark glasses and the photographers were all taking his picture and when Ambers beat the hell out of Bummy the crowd loved it.

The crowd, more than Ambers, hurt Bummy that night. He didn’t like the licking Ambers gave him, but the hardest part was listening to the crowd and the way they enjoyed it and the things they shouted at him when he came down out of the ring.

“I quit,” he said to Johnny in the dressing room. “You know what you can do with fighting?”

Johnny didn’t believe him. Johnny was making matches for Jacobs in the Garden then and he matched Bummy with Tony Marteliano, but Bummy wouldn’t train.

Only Johnny and Gangy knew this, and one day Johnny came out to Bummy’s house and talked with Bummy. When that didn’t do any good Lew Burston came out and he talked for four hours, and when he finished Bummy said the same thing.

“I don’t want to be a fighter,” Bummy said. “I like to fight. I’ll fight Marteliano on the street right now, just for fun, but when I’m a fighter everybody picks on me. I want them to leave me alone. All I wanted was a home for my family and I got that and now I just want to hang around my mob on the street.”

Johnny still didn’t believe it. They put out the show cards, advertising the fight, and one day Bummy saw one of the cards in the window of a bar and he phoned Johnny in Jacobs’ office.

“What are you advertising the fight for?” he said, and he was mad. “I told you I’m not gonna fight.”

Before Johnny could say anything Jacobs took the phone. Johnny hadn’t told him Bummy didn’t want to fight.

“How are you, kid?” Jacobs said. “This is Mike.”

“Listen, you toothless—,” Bummy said. “What are you advertising me for? I’m not gonna fight.”

He hung up. Mike put the phone back and turned around and when he did Bummy was suspended and Johnny was out of the Garden and back in the Ridgewood Grove.

When Bummy heard what had happened to Johnny he went over to the Grove to see him. All the time Johnny was in the Garden Bummy was a little suspicious of him, like he was a capitalist, but now he was different.

“I came over to tell you something,” he said to Johnny. “I’m gonna fight.”

“Forget it,” Johnny said. “You can’t fight.”

“Who says I can’t fight?” Bummy said.

“The New York Boxing Commission,” Johnny said. “You’re suspended.”

“Let’s fight out of town,” Bumrny said. “We’ll fight where I’m not suspended.”

Johnny did it better. He took Bummy back to Mike and Bummy apologized and Bummy fought Marteliano. For nine rounds they were even, and with ten seconds to go in the last round Bummy landed the hook. Marteliano went down and the referee counted nine and the bell rang and it was another big one for Bummy and he was going again.

It was Johnny’s idea to get Marteliano back, but Bummy saw Fritzie Zivic Henry Armstrong for the welterweight title and he wanted Zivic. If you the two guys you knew this was a bad match for Bummy, because he didn’t know how to fight like Zivic.

There were a lot of people, you see, who called Bununy a dirty fighter, but Zivic fight made them wrong. The Zivic fight proved that Bummy didn’t know how to do it.

When he came out of the first clinch Bummy’s eyes were red and he was rubbing them and the crowd started to boo Zivic. In the second clinch it was same thing, and at the end of the round Bummy was roaring.

“He’s trying to blind me,” he kept saying in the comer. “He’s trying to blind me.”

When it started again in the second round Bummy blew. He pushed Zivic off and he dropped his hands and that crazy look came on that wide face of his and they could hear him in the crowd.

“All right, yo—-,” he said, “if you want to fight dirty, okay.”

He walked right into Zivic and he started belting low. There was no trying to hide anything, and the crowd started to roar and before it was over people were on their chairs throwing things and the cops were in the ring and Bummy was fined $2,500 and suspended for life.

They meant it to be for life—which wouldn’t have been very long at that, when you figure Bummy lived to be all of 26—but it didn’t work out that way. About three weeks after the fight Bummy walked into Johnny’s office with Shorty and Mousie, and they sat around for a time and Johnny could see Bummy was lost.

“You know what you ought to do?” Johnny said. “You ought to join the Army for a while until this blows over.”

This was in December of 1940, before we got into the war. For a while Bummy sat there thinking, not saying anything.

“Could my buddies go with me?” he said.

“Sure,” Johnny said.

So Johnny called up the recruiting officer and Bummy and Shorty and Mousie showed up and there were photographers there and it was a big show. Everybody was for it, and Ed Van Every wrote a story in The Sun in which he said this was a great move because the Army would teach Bummy discipline and get him in good physical shape.

That was a laugh. The first thing the Army did was split Bummy and Shorty and Mousie up and send them to different camps.

They sent Bummy to Camp Hulen, Texas, and their idea of discipline was to have Bummy cleaning latrines with a toothbrush.

You got me into this,” Bummy used to write Johnny. “I’m going crazy, so before I slug one of these officers you better get me out.”

Johnny didn’t get him out, but he got Mike Jacobs to get Bummy a leave to fight Zivic in the Polo Grounds for Army Emergency Relief. Bummy used to fight best at about 147 pounds, and when he came back from Texas he weighed close to 200.

“You look sharp in that uniform, AI,” Zivic said to him when they signed for the bout.

“I’m glad you like it,” Bummy said. “You put me in it.”

You can imagine how Bummy was looking to get back at Zivic, but he couldn’t do it. He hadn’t fought for eight months, and Zivic was a real good fighter and he put lumps all over Bummy and in the tenth round the referee stopped it. They had to find Bummy to take him back to camp. They found him with his wife and they shipped him back, but then the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor and the Army decided it had enough trouble without Bummy and they turned him loose.

Bummy fought some of his best fights after that. He couldn’t get his license back in New York but he fought in places like Holyoke and Bridgeport and Washington and Philadelphia and Elizabeth, New Jersey, and Boston. He didn’t like it in those places, but he had to live, and so no matter where he fought he would always drive back to Brownsville after the fight and sometimes it would be four o’clock in the morning before he and Johnny would get in.

It’s something when you think about Bummy and Brownsville, when you think of the money he made, almost a quarter of a million dollars, and the things he had thrown at him and the elegant places he could have gone. It was like what Lew Burston said, though, when he said the Supreme was Bummy’s Opera, and the Supreme is a movie house on Livonia Avenue.

You have to remember, too, that Brownsville is only a subway ride from Broadway, but Bummy had never seen a real Broadway show until Chicky Bogad sent Bummy and Barbara to see Hellzapoppin the night before the second Farber fight.

“How long has this been going on?” Bummy said when they came out.

“How long has what been going on?” Chicky said.

“People like that on a stage,” Bummy said.

“People on a stage?” Chicky said. “For years and years. For long before they had movies.”

“Is that right? I’ll have to see more of that,” Bummy said, but he never did.

All of those fights Bummy had out of town were murders, too, because Bummy wasn’t hard to hit, but the people liked to see him get hit and when the Republicans got back in power in New York, Fritzie Zivic put in a word for Bummy, saying he guessed he had egged the kid on, and Bummy got his license back. That’s when they matched him with Montgomery.

“What you have to do in this one,” they kept telling Bummy, “is walk right out, throw your right, and miss with it. Montgomery will grab your right arm, and that will turn you around southpaw and then you hit him with the hook.”

They knew that was the only chance Bummy had, because if Montgomery got by the first round he figured to move around Bummy and cut him up. They drilled Bummy on it over and over, and they kept talking about it in the dressing room that night.

“Now what are you going to do?” Johnny Attell said to Bummy.

“I’m gonna walk right out and miss with my right,” Bummy said. “He’ll grab my arm and that’ll turn me around southpaw and I’ll throw my hook.”

“Okay,” Johnny said. “I guess you know it.”

Bummy sat down then on one of the benches. He had his gloves on and his robe over him and he was ready to go when there was a knock on the door.

“Don’t come out yet, Davis,” one of the commission guys said through the door. “They’re selling some War Bonds first.”

When Bummy heard that he looked up from where he was sitting and you could see he was sweating, and then he keeled right over on the floor on his face. Johnny and Freddie Brown rushed over and picked him up and they stretched him on the rubbing table and Freddie brought him to, and now they weren’t worried about whether Bummy would do what they told him. All they were worried about was whether they could get him in the ring.

They got him in the ring and Burston had him repeat what he was supposed to do. When the bell rang he walked right out and threw his right and missed around the head. Montgomery grabbed the arm and turned Bummy around, and when he did Bummy threw the hook and Montgomery went down. When he got up Bummy hit him again and that’s all there was to it.

Montgomery was 10 to 1 over Bummy that night and they couldn’t believe it. Bummy got $15,000 for that fight and he borrowed $1,500 from Jacobs and the next day when Mike paid him off he told Bummy to forget the grand and a half.

“Take it out,” Bummy said, throwing the dough on the desk. “You know damn well if he kayoed me like you thought he would you were gonna take it out.”

Bummy thought he’d never be broke again. He got $34,000 the night Beau Jack beat him and $15,000 when Armstrong stopped him. Then somebody sold him the idea of buying that bar and grill and somebody else sold him a couple of race horses and even after Dudy bought the bar and grill from him he was broke.

He should have been in training for Morris Reif the night he was shot. Johnny wanted him to fight Reif, just for the dough and to go as far as he could, but Bummy said that a lot of his friends would bet him and he didn’t think he could beat Reif, so instead he was sitting in the back of Dudy’s drinking beer and singing.

Bummy used to think he could sing like a Jewish cantor. He couldn’t sing, but he was trying that night, sitting with some other guys and a cop who was off duty, when he looked through that lattice work at the bar and he saw the four guys with the guns.

“What the hell is this?” he said.

He got up and walked out and you know what happened. When Bummy stiffened the first guy one of the others fired and the bullet went into Bummy’s neck. Then the three picked up the guy Bummy hit and they ran for the car. One of the guys with Bummy stuffed his handkerchief in the collar of Bummy’s shirt to stop the blood, and Bummy got up and ran for the car. When he did they opened up from the car, and Bummy went flat on his face in the mud.

When the car started to pull away the cop who had been in the back ran out and fired. He hit one guy in d1e spine, and that guy died in Texas, and he hit another in the shoulder. The guy with the slug in his shoulder walked around with it for weeks, afraid to go to a doctor, and then one night a cop in plain clothes heard a couple of guys talking in a bar.

“You know that jerk is still walking around with the bullet in his shoulder?” the one said. “What bullet?” the second one said.

“The Bummy Davis bullet,” the first said.

The cop followed them out, and when they split up he followed the first guy and got it out of him. Then the cops picked up the guy with the bullet and he sang. They picked up the other two in Kansas City and they’re doing 20 to life. They were just punks, and they called themselves the Cowboys, the same as Bununy’s old gang did.

It was a big funeral Bummy had. Johnny and Lew Burston paid for it. The papers had made Bummy a hero, and the newsreels took pictures outside the funeral parlor and at the cemetery. It looked like everybody in Brownsville was there.

This piece originally appeared in True. It is reprinted here with permission of Gayl Heinz.

More Heinz:

One Throw (Short Story)

The Happiest Hooligan of them All (Pepper Martin)

Death of a Racehorse

Speaking of Sports (Howard Cosell)

Maybe Tomorrow, Maybe the Next Day (Jeremy Vernon)

As a bonus, please check out out this terrific introduction to the Heinz collection What A Time It Was:  The Best of W.C. Heinz on Sports.

By Jeff MacGregor

W. C. Heinz is the last surviving member of a golden generation of American writers. A newspaper reporter and columnist, a war correspondent and magazine feature writer, a novelist and short story writer, he was a friend and colleague of Damon Runyon, Grantland Rice, Red Smith, A. J. Liebling, Jimmy Cannon, Frank Graham, and Paul Gallico. At mid-century he was one of the best and most admired writers in America.

Across the arc of a sixty-year career his fiction has been praised by Ernest Hemingway and his combat reportage compared to that of Ernie Pyle. He wrote the book that made Vince Lombardi a sports icon, and co-wrote the classic novel MASH. He wrote about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Selma peace march and about the Allied march into Germany to end the Second World War. He wrote about success and failure, life and death, and all the dire business of humanity in the busiest half-century of mankind’s history. Mostly, though, Bill Heinz wrote about sports.

Wilfred Charles Heinz was born on January 11, 1915, in Mount Vernon, New York. The only child of Elizabeth and Frederick Heinz, he recalls ancient afternoons spent with his friends flipping baseball cards after school—winner takes Cobb, Ruth, or Johnson, Speaker or Frisch, a fortune’s worth now—the pasteboard cards tossed into the air and then gathered up for the breathless run home. Heinz, fine-boned and slender, played hockey all the way up through high school, so he understood athletics as a physical and competitive expression of self. But he was also an avid reader, devouring sets of Tennyson, Twain, Shakespeare, Balzac, and Poe, which introduced him to a world of ideas, and to self-expression of a different sort. For Christmas in 1932 he received the Omnibus of Sport, a sports writing anthology edited by the legendary Grantland Rice. In it, Heinz discovered the intersection of two things he loved: good writing and sports.

In 1937 Heinz graduated from Middlebury College in Vermont, where he had written and edited the sports page of the school newspaper. In that autumn of ’37, he took his first real job as a messenger boy for one of the afternoon papers down in the city, the New York Sun. He was paid fifteen dollars a week to run errands. Soon promoted to copyboy, by 1939 he was working as a cub reporter, covering school board meetings and apartment fires and learning how to write on deadline. He learned to listen to people, to what they said and how they said it and what they really meant. And most importantly, he learned how to tell a story.

For the next four years, Bill Heinz worked as a general assignment reporter at the Sun. He wrote about corrupt politicians and roller coaster trackwalkers, city bond issues and streetcorner shootings. He occasionally covered basketball or wrote a piece on the new winter sensation, parallel skiing, but he felt stuck and unfulfilled and wasn’t sure where or how far his writing could take him. The Second World War changed all that. He became the Sun‘s junior war correspondent in 1943, covering carrier operations in the Atlantic. His early dispatches were crisp and informative, optimistic, and heavy on the upbeat hometown profiles of Your Boys at Sea. By 1944, though, when Heinz started following the ground war across Europe after the Normandy invasion, his work took on a new gravity, the words tempered by the horrible reality of war seen firsthand. What Heinz saw on the push east to Berlin would inform his work from then on. He stripped away the artifice, did away with any writerly “style” until he made himself transparent. This would characterize the best of his work for the rest of his life.

It is this streamlined lyricism and meticulous devotion to detail that marked Heinz’s work after he returned from Europe in the spring of 1945. He was assigned a sports beat, and quickly became one of New York’s most highly regarded writers. (When asked, in 1946, to recommend a writer for an upcoming magazine job, Damon Runyon, unable to speak because of terminal throat cancer, wrote on a cocktail napkin, “W. C. Heinz very good.” He underlined “very good” three times.)

By 1948 Heinz had his own daily sports column in the New York Sun, fittingly positioned in a double truck layout opposite that of his mentor, Grantland Rice. He wrote magazine pieces and fine short stories as well, raising a family and building a national reputation. One of his columns from that year, “Death of a Racehorse,” which is included in this collection, remains, with all due respect to Bill’s good friend Red Smith, perhaps the best piece of daily newspaper writing you’ll ever read. It is a 700-word master class in how to write. It is observant and precise in detail, lyrical and beautifully metered in its language, and, in its final paragraph, piercingly eloquent about futility, about struggle and loss, and about death.

For over two years, five times a week, Heinz wrote his column in the best sports city in the world. New York was a mecca for everything from football and baseball to hockey and track, to harness racing to the dog show to the six-day bicycle races up at the 168th Street Armory. Heinz wrote about all of it exceptionally well. But what Heinz best loved to write about was boxing. It appealed to his storyteller’s sense with its simplicity, its finality, and its colorful—to say nothing of comic—characters; its sleek and shadowy money men with their pneumatic molls, its artful managers and dogged trainers and idiot savant cornermen, its avid fans and its second-generation fighters, young men bootstrapping themselves up from the gutter and into their split-level, wall-to-wall American dream and then back again.

At places like Stillman’s Gym on Eighth Avenue, Heinz spent his afternoons with his sleeves rolled up, his tie loosened, and his elbows propped on the damp canvas, taking notes, listening to the way the boxers and their handlers spoke, watching how they moved and what punches they threw. He was an extraordinary student of the form. He saw in boxing’s regulated savagery the purest expression of man’s endless appetite for combat, which he witnessed repeatedly during the war.

Boxing, to any writer but most especially to Bill Heinz, was a tailor-made meeting of the sacred and profane. It has always exerted an irresistible pull on writers of every generation from Jack London to Ernest Hemingway to Norman Mailer to Joyce Carol Oates. Looking back over the years since 1900, though, the simplest way to catalog the relative accomplishments of writers on the subject of boxing is this: There is W. C. Heinz. There is A. J. Liebling. There is everyone else.

The New York Sun closed its doors in January 1950, an early victim of the declining circulation that would reduce the number of daily papers in New York City from ten to three over the next two decades. By the time of its demise, Bill Heinz had already become a successful freelancer for magazines like Collier’s, Sport, the Saturday Evening Post, Argosy, True, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, and Look. Most of the pieces in this collection come from Bill’s magazine work.

Between 1950 and 1958 when his novel The Professional was published to wide critical acclaim (including an effusive congratulatory telegram from one of his most ardent admirers, Ernest Hemingway, and a fan letter from an earnest young author named Elmore Leonard), W. C. Heinz perfected his signature approach to the craft of storytelling. Like a master mason, Heinz built each of his long-form stories as though he were building a wall of mortarless stone. Every word and phrase was carefully set on the words and phrases that went before them. At his best, he was the equal of a Joseph Mitchell or an E. B. White. What can top the two paragraphs which open “Brownsville Bum”?

Heinz had an ear for dialogue, for the truth of what people said and how to write it. He was a student of the great Frank Graham, another sports columnist who had helped perfect the so-called “conversation piece,” stories built around long blocks of dialogue unbroken by writerly asides or commentary. In the days before the tape recorder (and guarded, litigious athletes), it was still possible to report the spirit, if not the letter, of what your subjects said—especially if you made them sound better, or smarter, or more colorful. In this technique, Heinz was, and remains, unmatched.

Through that decade and into the next, Bill Heinz profiled, it seems, every star athlete in America. Stan Musial and Pete Reiser and Eddie Arcaro and Charlie Conerly and Joe Namath. Boxers from Joe Louis to Carmen Basilio to Floyd Patterson, Sugar Ray Robinson and Ingemar Johannson to Ezzard Charles and the original Rockys, Marciano and Graziano. In every case what characterizes the writing of Bill Heinz is its drive and its deceptive simplicity. Never strident or overwrought, never hagiographic or adulatory, Bill Heinz wrote sports with a gimlet eye.

He also wrote with the same sure voice about the practice of medicine in his novels The Surgeon, Emergency, and MASH, a book he wrote in partnership with Dr. Richard Hornberger under the pseudonym Richard Hooker. This last title offers a rare glimpse into the sly sense of humor for which Heinz is still best known among his friends. And though these books, along with The Professional, American Mirror, and Once They Heard the Cheers were well-wrought and successful, perhaps Heinz’s greatest triumph was Run to Daylight! his week-in-the-life collaboration with the legendary Vince Lombardi. It made Lombardi a household name. Other members of the press eventually chose to make him a household god.

Even Bill Heinz, who should be a role model for gifted young writers everywhere, has suffered at the inconstant hands of history. Most of the publications for which he did his best work have long since ceased to be. Collier’s, Argosy, Look, True, the Sun, and the Saturday Evening Post have all been lost to us. Heinz never had the stable, high-visibility, long-term platform his friend Red Smith did. He is, at least in part, responsible for the careers of New Journalists like Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe and Frank Deford. Pioneering a new voice and a new approach, he created new opportunities for every writer to follow. And with this collection of his best writing on sports, he will no longer be the best kept secret in American literature.

Sports on Earth debuted yesterday and featured a Q&A I did with W.K. Stratton, author of a fine new biography of Floyd Patterson. Stratton is the author of four other books including Dreaming Sam Peckinpah. He also edited Splendor in the Short Grass,  a terrific collection of Grover Lewis’ non-fiction writing.

In our chat over at Sports on Earth, Stratton–who goes by the name Kip–and I talk about Patterson’s relationship with Muhammad Ali. But there’s far more to Patterson’s career than his two fights with Ali.

So, dig in, and please enjoy the rest of our conversation.

Bronx Banter: Patterson has long been a favorite of writers like W.C. Heinz and especially, Gay Talese. Yet there haven’t been so many major biographies on his life. What drew you to writing about him?

Kip Stratton: In the mid-1970s, I took a college class with my mentor, Harry Ebeling, called Nonfiction Prose of Contemporary America. It was, in essence, a class in the New Journalism. This class introduced me to the writing of Gay Talese.  One of the pieces I studied in that class was Talese’s masterpiece from Esquire, “The Loser,” which was about Patterson.

BB: Did you following boxing at that time?

KS: Oh, yeah. I was a boxing fan since I was a kid. Boxing was in a kind of golden age, which probably started around the time of the Patterson-Johansson rivalry and lasted until, say, the Leonard-Hagler fight–which, incidentally, I believe Hagler won–a quarter of a century later. Although Muhammad Ali is the best known there were many terrific boxers were during that time, including Patterson. But I didn’t know how complicated Patterson was until I read that Talese piece. After that, I picked up more and more about Patterson here and there over the years, all of it interesting. In 1988, I met him, briefly, at a celebration marking the centennial of Jim Thorpe’s birth. Something about him in person seemed compelling and that increased my fascination with him. Eventually I read his autobiography, Victory Over Myself, which appeared at the peak of his career and I was blown away by what I read. Then, Thomas Hauser’s authorized biography of Ali appeared, which included a quote from Ali in which he listed Patterson with Liston, Foreman, and Frazier as the best he ever fought. Patterson, but not Ken Norton. Patterson, but not Larry Holmes. Patterson, but not Archie Moore. Ali said Patterson had the best boxing skills of any fighter he met in the ring. That pretty well cinched it for me. I knew I wanted to write about him someday.

BB: Can you talk about the work Talese did on Patterson, both for The New York Times and Esquire and how that influenced your thinking on the fighter. 

KS: Talese joined The Times as a sportswriter after he served a hitch in the Army; earlier, he’d had a job on the Times as a copyboy following his graduation from the University of Alabama. As I recall, he told me he intentionally targeted a job in the sports department because it would allow him to employ more stylistic freedom than other sections of the paper, which were very much locked into “Old Gray Lady” rules of writing. He said he admired what was going on in the pages of some of the other newspapers in the city at the time, in particular The New York Herald-Tribune. The sports pages of the Times would give him the same leeway writers at these other papers had. I read many articles he wrote for the Times’ sports section. They were experimental as hell for that paper. I remember one about the future light heavyweight champion, and future author, José Torres. The profile did not give Torres’ name until the last sentence! So Talese was doing this wonderful sort of creative nonfiction for the Times. To be sure, much of it was immature compared to the masterpieces he would later write. But it was interesting. So, here you have Talese, interested in taking this whole new approach to sports writing and he runs into Floyd Patterson, a whole different sort of boxing champion.

BB: It was as if they were made for each other.

KS: Gay wrote more than four dozen bylined Times pieces about Patterson that I found. I’d never met Talase prior to starting research on the book, but he was nice enough to offer me some time for an interview after I approached him via a mutual acquaintance.

BB: You went to his brownstone here in New York?

KS: I arrived at Gay’s house on the Upper East Side on a day when he suddenly had crushing deadlines of his own. But he granted me time. I think he was impressed that I had dug up all those old Times articles. He was an absolute gentleman–of  course attired in finely tailored clothes. He presented me with an inscribed copy of his newest book, which I totally did not expect. We talked and talked, not just about Patterson and D’Amato and company, but about Norman Mailer and James Baldwin and John Gregory Dunne and two of Gay’s great friends, David Halberstam and Ben Gazzara.

BB: Wow, I knew he’d been friends with Halberstam but not Gazzara.

KS: Yeah, Talese and Halberstam were friends from when they came to know each other as young reporters on the Times. Gay thought Halberstam was the greatest reporter of their generation, and I think he’s undoubtedly right about that. Gay told me that he and Gazzara followed the fights together, among other things. I also read a quote of Talese’s in which he said something like Gazzara, once he became prominent as an actor, let a whole generation know it was okay to be Italian-American. Something like that. It would have been great to have hung out with Talese and Gazzara to listen to them talk about boxing.

BB: And women. Where’s Casavetes when yo need him?

KS: Talese invited me downstairs to his basement office and showed me his archives. Like Mailer, he’s kept everything. Using large sheets of paper, he storyboards his articles as if they are three-act dramas. He showed me his actual storyboard for “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” which some of us think is the best magazine article ever written by an American. And he showed me the storyboard for “The Loser,” that piece I studied in Harry’s class all those years before. I was flabbergasted to actually see that relic from all those years ago. Talese and I also talked about his collaboration with Patterson for the Esquire article in which Floyd called for people to try to understand Muhammad Ali, not just jeer him, one of the first sympathetic Ali articles to run in a mainstream magazine. So I felt as if I had Talese looking over my shoulder the whole time I worked on this book. You know, this notion of, You better not fuck this up because there are high expectations whenever you take up the subject matter of Patterson.

BB: And he wasn’t alone, right?

KS: Talese, yes, but also Heinz, Mailer, Baldwin, Hamill, Oates, Schulberg–writers of that caliber. So I felt as if I had a standard to meet. Beyond that, Gay gave me a lot of insight into the Patterson saga through his comments in the interview, in particular about D’Amato, a character who merits a great deal of examination.

BB: Patterson had an unusual sensitivity and honesty for a fighter of his caliber, didn’t he?

KS: Let’s start with the instructions given by the referee before the opening bell. Nowadays, this is the time for the absurd exercise in posturing known as the stare-down. It wasn’t quite like it is now in Patterson’s day, but it was still expected that a fighter look the man he was going to battle in the eye. Patterson never did that. He stared at the other guy’s feet. He couldn’t look into the eyes of someone he was getting ready to hurt. If he did that, he wouldn’t be able to fight. He cradled Ingemar Johansson’s head after he knocked Ingo out. He helped an opponent recover his mouthpiece after he, Floyd, knocked it out.

BB: He was also candid, especially with Talese.

KS: Patterson was perhaps the most eloquent champion ever when it came to mining deep feelings and expressing them. He spoke honestly about fear, about cowardice — he described himself as a coward once. At the same time, he was reclusive and seemed to like to stay silent most of the time. He was not comfortable around people, an introvert, yet he did as much charitable work as any champion in history. He lived a conservative lifestyle in that he didn’t drink or do drugs or make the party scene very much, and he held conservative stances about other things, yet he was an early and outspoken liberal when it came to the civil rights movement. He lent his name and gave money to desegregation causes. He went to Alabama with Martin Luther King. He was often, to quote Kris Kristofferson, a walking contradiction.

BB: Patterson’s accomplishments in the ring tend to be overlooked these days. How much of that is due to the huge impression that Ali left?

KS: Patterson was the bridge between Rocky Marciano and Ali. The year Patterson won the heavyweight title, you had Humphrey Bogart appearing in The Harder They Fall. The year Patterson fought his last pro fight, you had Ron O’Neal appearing in Super Fly. Because of this, it’s hard to really associate Patterson with an era in the way you can a Dempsey or a Louis, and I think that’s allowed him to slip through the cracks to a certain extent.

BB: He gets lost.

KS: Absolutely, the light of Patterson gets lost in the glare of Ali. Patterson brings speed into the heavyweight ring that no one had ever seen before, revolutionizing the possibilities for a heavyweight fighter. But then Ali shows up with hand speed that matches Floyd’s and has even faster ring mobility and is taller and weighs more. Makes it easy to overlook Patterson. Floyd is good in interviews, eloquently giving well thought out answers. Ali takes control of interviews, makes them his own, makes them funny, makes them memorable for years to come. Patterson’s a good looking guy. Ali has movie-star good looks, one of the handsomest men to grace the public stage during the 20th century. Patterson has great wins over Moore and Johansson, but Ali has monumental victories over Liston, Frazier, and Foreman, and, indeed, Floyd himself. Mailer writes a significant article about Patterson but writes a significant book about Ali. On and on. The Greatest was and is The Greatest. But I think enough — or more than enough — has been written about him. I think it’s time to look at some of these other figures. Patterson. Joe Frazier. And so on. You go to a bookstore, and often the only boxing titles you see are about Ali. That’s not right. Elvis was the king of rock-and-roll, but that doesn’t mean that Buddy Holly and Little Richard aren’t damned significant figures. So be it with Floyd Patterson.

BB: What is it about stars of the 1950s and early ’60s being forgotten? 

KS: Well, again, I think Ali has something to do with it. People became so fixated with him. We’ve now had a couple of generations of American boxers come along, many of whom don’t know how to keep their hands up or are otherwise lacking in boxing fundamentals because Ali didn’t do it that way. But they’re pretty good at pulling off ring antics of some sort. This is part of the downside of the Ali legacy. Ali became sloppy about staying in shape–of course I’m talking about fighting shape here–in the second part of his career, and that became part of the negative legacy too. And one thing Ali did was that he made the fight be something more than the fight. Often it seemed that the sideshow was more important to the fans than the fight itself. That’s carried over to subsequent generations of fighters.

BB: How so?

KS: Floyd Mayweather is a brilliant boxer, but it seems that his fans are more interested in the gangsta production surrounding the fight than the fight itself. Well, Mayweather understands that expectation and delivers time after time. The fights of the pre-Ali era was something entirely different. Flourishes occurred here and there among the boxers, and fairly often when you talk about Archie Moore, who was a different sort of character for the 1950s, but the fight itself was the thing. Beau Jack headlined the Garden 21 times during the 1940s and ’50s and brought no show except his boxing skills. That was enough for the time. Fighting well. And the fans would stream in to see it. Now there has to be more. Showbiz. Glitz. Outrageous haircuts. Bling glittering off trunks. That’s the expectation. Modern fans don’t resonate with many of those older, pre-Ali fighters who did nothing more in the ring than just fight. In order to have resonance with modern fans, the older boxers have to have a hell of a back story, like Floyd Patterson.

BB: I think it’s interesting that Ali mentioned Patterson over Norton who fought well against Ali, arguably better than Patterson did.

KS: Floyd had a great trainer in Dan Florio. It is doubtful that any heavyweight champion had better instruction in and subsequent competency at the rudiments of boxing than Patterson. You know, how to set up a right cross with a left jab. How to set up a right uppercut. So I think in part what Ali was saying is that Patterson was the best schooled of any boxer he faced. Beyond that, if you watch the film of the first Ali-Patterson fight, you see that Floyd’s hand speed was something Ali was unaccustomed to encountering. Ali lived and died by his jab, but Patterson had the speed to catch a lot of Ali’s jabs in that first fight. Now, don’t get me wrong: The fight was a mismatch from the get-go. Ali was bigger and younger; Floyd was injured and shouldn’t have been fighting in the first place. But in those early rounds, Floyd does a very respectable job taking Ali’s jab away from him by blocking them with his right hand. I think those are the reasons Ali had so much respect for him.

BB: Since Ali has cast such a large shadow over Patterson, and a host of other fighters, can you talk about how Patterson stands up on his own, without comparing him in any way to Ali.

KS:  First, let’s talk about Floyd the amateur. Pete Hamill has said that Patterson was one of the great amateur boxers in the history of American sports. Hamill’s right. Patterson’s record in the Golden Gloves and the AAUs is very impressive, especially when you consider he was 16 and 17 years old when he was scoring all those victories. Then he went to the Olympics. The 1952 US boxing team at the Helsinki games is a great story. The United States had never performed particularly well in Olympic boxing prior to 1952; our teams were dominated by white collegians before that. But in 1952, you had a team whose dominate fighters were inner city guys who were tough and talented. That team brought back five gold medals to America. Five! And all five of the gold medalists were African American. This was at a time when big league baseball and pro football were barely integrated. It would be twenty years before some Southwest Conference football teams integrated. This was a huge event in the history of sports in America. And Floyd Patterson was the star of that team. To the end of his life, Floyd said that winning a gold medal in the Olympics was his proudest accomplishment.

BB: And that’s all before he went pro.

KS: That’s right. He won the heavyweight title at age 21, the youngest man to do so. His record stood for around three decades before Tyson won it at an even younger age. Patterson won the title, lost it, then regained it. He was the first person in history to win the title twice. This was something that boxers the likes of Jack Dempsey and Joe Louis couldn’t do. He came damned close to winning the title a third time in his fight against Jimmy Ellis. At around the halfway point of his pro career, he, an African American fighter, fired his white manager and became his own manager. He did all these things showing a high level of fair play and honor. For instance, everything was set up for him to be able to avoid fighting Sonny Liston. Many people inside and outside the boxing world believed Liston’s extensive criminal background was justification for keeping him from competing for the crown. Floyd could have bought into that argument and every sanctioning body would have supported his decision. But Patterson believe Liston had earned a shot at the title, that he deserved it, and Patterson gave it to him, even though he knew it would spell his doom as champ. Remarkable, just remarkable.

BB: And he had a complicated relationship with the trainer Cus D’Amato.

KS:  Patterson had to paired with just the right mentor if he was ever going have any success fighting. I believe it could not have been anyone else other than Cus D’Amato. I spend a good deal of time in a boxing gym and I hear the same thing over and over: Boxing is mostly mental. Boxing is 75 percent psychological. My friend Anissa Zamarron, a two-time world champion female boxer, says that a successful boxer has to take on the mind-set of a rooster in a cockfight whenever the bell rings. Well, getting Floyd to be a rooster psychologically took some doing. I’m not sure anyone other than D’Amato could have taken Floyd that far. He was a very talented amateur psychologist, I believe, especially when dealing with young boxers, teenaged boxers. Floyd came from a large family and his father was usually absent, out working, holding down two or more jobs, and because his father worked so much, I got the feeling that Floyd didn’t receive very much fathering from him. Floyd was closer to his mother. D’Amato became this sort of surrogate father figure.

BB: Your portrait of D’Amato could be a book on its own.

KS: D’Amato was pretty messed up himself. He was regarded as a mystery figure during his prime–some writers wrote that he had no family, stuff like that. But I dug up quite a bit about him. In fact, he was the son of Italian immigrants, grew up in the Bronx, lost his mother at a very early age, had a beloved brother, a boxer and a talented artist, shot and killed by a New York cop. D’Amato went through serious depression as a kid, obsessed with funerals and all that. He also told stories about himself as being some sort of vicious street tough, which were probably exaggerated or made up entirely. He was a ne’er-do-well who couldn’t keep a job, a dabbler in city politics but not too successful in that either. But then he stumbled into the world of boxing, and though he was no athlete himself, certainly never boxed, he found himself in this world of prizefighting. Boxing was completely mobbed up in New York at the time, and D’Amato willing “did business,” in his early days when called upon to do so. But then he eventually very publicly set out to expose the mob’s reign in boxing with an attempt to dislodge; at the same time, he continued to associate himself, secretly, with some powerful organized crime figures. Complicated man. He had no interest in making money for himself, but I think he was a kind of publicity hound. He always wanted it known that he was the brains behind Patterson. He brought Floyd along brilliantly through the amateur and early pro days. No one could have done a better job. He and Dan Florio were able to pick fighters that stretched Patterson, helped him grow from a middleweight to light heavyweight and then to a heavyweight contender. Cus was great at building up Patterson’s confidence. So a father figure, a confident, an adviser, a spokesman–all  those things. But there were also problems.

BB: Was Patterson’s break from D’Amato necessary in him becoming his own man?

KS: Once Patterson won the world title, it became apparent that D’Amato was a bit in over his head in handling a champion at that level. He made mistakes on contracts that ended up costing Floyd money. That sort of thing. Just making a fight was a tortuous process for him. The business decisions were what Patterson pointed to when he eventually talked about why he fired D’Amato and took over his own career. But there was more. I think part of it was the need for a son to break away from his father, figuratively speaking, for Floyd to prove that he was his own man. D’Amato’s hesitancy to match Patterson with some of the ranking contenders of the late 1950s made it almost seem as if Floyd were afraid to fight them. Well, one thing you didn’t do to a proud black man was put him into situations in which it might seem as if he were a coward. Jesus, that harkened back to way too many old American stereotypes. I’m not sure D’Amato ever got that, however.

BB: You write about how he have made some unwelcome advances though Patterson never called him out publicly on that.

KS: I discovered in my reserach there was a lot of whispered speculation about D’Amato’s sexuality in some quarters. D’Amato had a long-time relationship with Camille Ewald, but she usually lived apart from him. In the 1950s, a man was expected to be married with children or have a very visible girlfriend or, in the world of boxing, maybe both. Cus didn’t do this, so he was suspect. For a time, he shared a one-bedroom apartment with Jim Jacobs. That too spurred whispering. I mention this because in the context of the times, this was a big deal. Then there was the event about which Patterson told Talese. D’Amato was so obsessive about “protecting” Patterson from enemies, real or imagined, that he took to sleeping the same bedroom with him. And then in the same bed with him. One night, Floyd told Gay, Patterson awoke to feel D’Amato rubbing Floyd’s leg with his foot. Floyd feigned sleep and didn’t react in any way. Nothing like this ever happened again, as far as I could find out. And who knows? D’Amato may have been sound asleep himself and it was some sort of reflexive thing. I mention all this only to portray just how closely, how intimately if you will, connected Patterson and D’Amato were at one point. It went beyond the typical manager/trainer’s relationship with a boxer, and because of the nature of the sport, that’s always a pretty intimate relationship anyway.

BB: Still, Patterson need to break from him eventually.

KS: Floyd could never become what he did had it not been for D’Amato, but he also had to break with D’Amato if he was to grow into a man fully in charge of his life. Floyd broke with Cus and drove his career where he thought it had to go, the fights with Liston and Ali, the defeats, the dethronement, the tarnished legacy. To me this is what Aristotle was getting at when he wrote about tragedy. To me, Floyd Patterson is a tragic figure in this regard. And if it was cast into the tradition five-act form, D’Amato would be a key figure in “The Tragedy of Floyd Patterson.”

BB: Before I let you go, I’ve got to ask you about your book of poetry, Dreaming Sam Peckinpah. How did you get into poetry?

KS: Poetry was the first thing I wrote in earnest. In high school, I had a teacher, Kenny Walter, who turned me on to contemporary poetry in a serious way. Now, where I came from, it wasn’t exactly okay for a guy to be interested in something like poetry, under normal circumstances. But Kenny had been something of a star athlete in my home town before he went off to college and came back a teacher, and he was still a serious weekend basketball and tennis player and a serious bird hunter. So he showed you could be into poetry and still be “manly.” Keep in mind we’re talking about a pretty remote place–rural Oklahoma—inhabited by a lot of people with backwards notions. So Kenny made poetry accessible, and I sure as hell was interested.

BB: What poets did you read early on?

KS: The big poet who fascinated us at that time was James Dickey, again, a former athlete, a guy who seemed to know a lot about the woods, a guy who seemed to know a lot about things like archery. Since then I’ve learned he was in part a fraud, a damaged person, but, again, he wrote about things I could relate to. Anyway, through that portal, I entered this whole world of verse. I was so damned naïve—I didn’t realize there were all these competing factions in that world. The portal through which I entered was one dominated by some poets who would be classified as Academic poets: Dickey, Richard Hugo, William Stafford. Stafford eventually became a friend of mine for a while, a kind, generous man. Also Robert Lowell during his confessional period—I still think “Skunk Hour” is a terrific poem. Elizabeth Bishop.

BB: When did you break out of the “academic poets”?

KS: That came later and was a liberating experience. Here were a bunch of people writing verse that came from the truest artistic inspiration. Sometimes the verse ended up being, to my taste, not completely successful, but, damn, you could not deny the spirit and the true artistic inspiration behind it. Other times the verse exceeded what the Academics could pull off at their best. I remember well watching a black-and-white PBS documentary about Charles Bukowski at a time when Bukowski was hardly known. It was fascinating and led me to seek out some of his early verse, which was not easy to find in a place like Oklahoma City at that time. As I said, it was liberating. So I just kept writing verse, never stopped. I write poetry that’s not destined to end up in The New Yorker or Poetry. I came in through the Dickey-Hugo-Stafford portal, and their influence is still on me, but I think I wound up writing more in the Outlaw Poetry tradition.

BB: What did you write about?

KS: I wrote a series of haiku about boxing, in part as a sort of satire on the form. Seriously, boxing haiku? Sports infiltrates the verse. I write about rodeo. I wrote a poem about learning at a football game about the suicide of a girl I knew and dated some as a teenager. I wrote poems about a lot of hard slices of life, about dumping my father’s ashes in a stream in the Cascades, about my stepbrother’s death from AIDS. I wrote poems about Merle Haggard and Harry Dean Stanton and Warren Oates and Dennis Hopper. I wrote about beer joints. I wrote about a Mexican food place in Uvalde, Texas.

BB: And then…Peckinpah?

KS: I’ve long considered the director Sam Peckinpah to be a kind of poet, when he was at his best. He created his metaphors in the mixed media of film rather than by writing them down as lines on paper. I’ve thought a lot about Peckinpah’s work over the years, read a lot about him. I had a poem that included in a line the phrase “dreaming Sam Peckinpah.” I thought for a long time it would be a good title for a book. Well, I had all these poems I’d written, one or two going back more than thirty years. And one day it occurred to me that they could be arranged in a thematic way, sort of in the way a rock concept album from back in the day would be arranged. So I did that, drawing on quotes from or about Peckinpah, and, damn, if I wasn’t happy with the results. About that same time, a wonderful small press publisher had told me he’d be interested in something like what I was working on. Things clicked. And that’s how Dreaming Sam Peckinpah came to be.

Visit Stratton’s website here; you can purchase the Patterson book, here.

From Gayl Heinz comes a letter that Howard Cosell once sent to her father, Bill (better known as W.C. Heinz). It concerns a Mets game back in 1962.

The handwritten P.S. from Cosell reads: “The gist of the mail and calls was…at last we understand Stengelese.”

By John Schulian

In my show business alphabet, the scarlet letter will always be “s” for syndication. The instant I started wearing it, the network and cable people doing high-end dramas treated me like I was descended from intellectual pygmies who eat rabid bats and worship Soupy Sales. Only the young and promising receive special dispensation for working on a syndicated show to get a foot in Hollywood’s door. But I was 51 when I crawled away from “Xena” and “Hercules,” old enough to have known better. I would have had to be a miracle worker to avoid being branded as a junk peddler and cast into darkness. Alas, I was fresh out of miracles.

My new status hit me like a pie in the face on my next gig, an appallingly uninspired private eye show called “Lawless.” The title had absolutely nothing to do with Lucy, though I couldn’t help wishing she were around to give our leading man lessons in how to roll with the flow instead of turning to stone whenever the camera was on him. Brian Bosworth was a washed-up football star who realized how badly he wanted to act when Bo Jackson trampled him on national TV. The Boz got his chance in a series of cheap action movies that proved he wasn’t any better at it than he was at tackling. But that didn’t stop the brain trust at Fox TV from handing him “Lawless.” The thinking seemed to be that if enough helicopters landed in Lawlesss’s mother’s backyard simultaneously, we’d have a hit.

I found myself in the trenches with Frank Lupo, who had created or co-created something like 16 series, and Richard Christian Matheson, who had scored big in TV and was now devoting most of his time to writing novels and screenplays. While the network dithered about choppers and the proper sidekick for Bosworth, our biggest decision every day was where to eat lunch. The rest of the time, we cashed fat paychecks, complained about our offices in a converted Culver City warehouse, and listened to Lupo tell stories. My favorite was about Robert Blake, in his “Baretta” days, introducing himself to this son of a Brooklyn pizza maker by saying, “I’m crazy, you know.”

On Friday nights, gang kids would gather in the shadows of our dead-end street to drink and howl at the moon while we scampered for our respective Mercedes. That was as close to the real world as we came, unless you want to consider the fate of “Lawless” itself. Fox didn’t get its desired number of helicopters and we were left to bang out scripts in a white heat. Predictably, the show was cancelled after one episode. The only reason “Lawless” lasted that long was because the network didn’t have anything to replace it at the half-hour.

Lew Jenkins

From that point forward, I could see the last of the sand running through my hourglass. I tried to buy myself more time by writing screenplays, one of them based on W.C. Heinz’s unforgettable magazine story about Lew Jenkins, a go-to-hell prizefighter from Texas who became a war hero in Korea. The Jenkins script got me a flurry of meetings and, for a minute or two, made me the poster boy for the Creative Artists Agency’s in-house campaign to have its TV writers cross over to movies. Unfortunately my timing was dreadful. “Cinderella Man” was already in the works, and so was a Meg Ryan movie about a real-life female fight manager. I wanted to tell the people who were using those projects as a reason to say no to me that Jenkins’ story was better than either of them. But I kept my mouth shut, and when movie people asked if I had any other ideas, I always mentioned Gram Parsons, who married classic country music to a rock-and-roll sensibility and died of hard living way too young. I didn’t get anywhere with that one, either. Johnny Knoxville did. Need I say more?

Eventually I did what most every frustrated screenwriter does. I changed agents. Why not? I’d changed agents, and agencies, even when I wasn’t frustrated. I’d changed them because one agent was a creep who sexually harassed his female assistants. And because my instincts told me another was a bad fit for me. And because a woman who represented me left United Talent for CAA after she became a target for an abrasive, emotionally damaged colleague she had made the mistake of dating.

When I talked myself into believing she had lost sight of whatever it was I did best, I jumped again, to Paul Haas, at ICM. It was the worst move I ever made professionally. When I think of him now, I’m reminded of Murray Kempton’s analysis of Bill Clinton: “too smart by half.” Haas wasn’t book smart, though; he was Hollywood smart, slick and self-absorbed, almost feral in his quest to get to the top of the meat pile. Not unusual qualities in an agent, but I failed to see the warning sign that said “by half” until he told me to meet with the producers of a show about a fat cop who was a martial arts wizard. It was exactly the kind of claptrap I wanted to get away from, so I refused. Then the producers of another show about a fat cop said they didn’t want to meet with me because I’d done “Xena” and “Hercules.” They robbed me of the chance to say no to them first, the bastards.

Far worse, however, was that Haas soon lost interest in me. He had bigger fish to fry, more important clients who could make him more money, and a more prestigious place at the table to claim for his own. The only attention I got from him bordered on condescension. When I wrote pieces for GQ and Sports Illustrated to maintain my sanity, he congratulated me on “reinventing” myself, as if I’d never told him that I was a newspaper and magazine guy at heart. That wasn’t the only thing he didn’t pay attention to. There was also my Lew Jenkins screenplay, which he handed off to two of ICM’s young sharks. Their names were Todd and Danny, and on those rare occasions when I look at the trade papers now, I see they’ve prospered. But when they were supposed to be championing my cause, I never heard from them. After a year of being ignored, I complained to Haas and quickly got a call from Todd. Or Danny.

“That was a great script,” whichever one I was talking to said.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Remind me what it was about, would you?”

I hung up. If it hadn’t, I would have told Todd – or Danny – I had a new screenplay that I had written specifically for the purpose of sticking up his ass. Even now I have moments when I fantasize about seeing one of them in some fancy-schmancy restaurant and decking him. Not so much as a “Remember me?” Just lights out. But I’m too old for such nonsense and too weary to get exercised over the everyday cruelties that pass for standard business practices in Hollywood. Maybe I was gassed back then too and just wouldn’t admit it. How else to explain the fact that I never fired Haas no matter how useless he was?

It took an old friend from “Midnight Caller,” Stephen Zito, to open the door for me at “JAG.” The show was more fun than I expected it to be with one exception: its creator and executive producer, Don Bellisario. With a foul-smelling cigar smoldering in his mouth, a disdain for any idea that wasn’t his, and a tin ear for dialogue, Bellisario leeched all the joy out of writing. He was a bully and a lout and a war lover who’d never been to war. You’d have to go a long way to find anyone in TV more despised. I’m surprised I lasted 25 episodes. Not that things improved when Haas steered me to “Outer Limits” and I promptly shot myself in the foot by telling an executive producer with a lube-job haircut that a story he embraced was no story at all. That would have been my last stand if David Israel hadn’t brought me aboard as his right-hand man on “Tremors.” It had monsters, oddball humor, and weird characters in a forgotten desert town. Hits have been made of less. But we were saddled with the two amiably passive-aggressive guys who wrote the movies on which “Tremors” was based, and they refused to adapt to the realities of TV. They just made the same mistakes over and over until they looked up one day and the show was off the air.

I was as far as I could be from those heady times when Steven Bochco invited me to come out and try my hand at writing scripts. Where once the TV business had given me with hope, I now felt diminished. I found myself remembering the long-in-tooth writers who had come in to pitch their tired episode ideas on “Miami Vice” and “Midnight Caller,” and how I had promised myself I wouldn’t end up the way they had. If I insisted on squeezing the last drop of juice from the orange, that was exactly who I’d be – short on pride and dignity, just a beggar with a nice car. It felt as though there were less of me every time I turned around. I was in a bad sci-fi movie and I was slowly vanishing.

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

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

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

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

Enjoy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BB: Was Ali the best subject on them all?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

W.C. Heinz was one of the great magazine writers of the 20th century. Thanks to his daughter Gayl, we are going to run a series featuring some of Heinz’s work. First up, the original manuscript for a Pepper Martin profile that appeared in True. The story ran in the October issue, 1959.

Now, dig Heinz’s original:

[Photo Credit: Gaspar Tringale]

All thanks to Heinz’s daughter, Gayl, for making it happen. In a recent e-mail, Gayl wrote:

“One Throw” was first printed in a July 15, 1950 issue of Collier’s magazine. In 1959 Summer Time Scholastic magazine picked it up. I don’t know if it was printed anywhere in between, but it has been reprinted many times since in English textbooks as an instructional piece on how to build a plot, use dialogue, and so on. The most recent contract for a textbook reprint was this past summer. “One Throw” also appears in “The Third Fireside Book of Baseball,” 1968, edited by Charles Einstein….and who knows where else?! I know Dad was always pleased with its timelessness and longevity.

Here it is. Hope you enjoy.

“One Throw”

By W.C. Heinz

I checked into a hotel called the Olympia, which is right on the main street and the only hotel in the town. After lunch I was hanging around the lobby, and I got to talking to the guy at the desk. I asked him if this wasn’t the town where that kid named Maneri played ball.

“That’s right,” the guy said. “He’s a pretty good ballplayer.”

“He should be,” I said. “I read that he was the new Phil Rizzuto.”

“That’s what they said,” the guy said.

“What’s the matter with him?” I said. “I mean if he’s such a good ballplayer what’s he doing in this league?”

“I don’t know,” the guy said. “I guess the Yankees know what they’re doing.”

“What kind of kid is he?”

“He’s a nice kid,” the guy said. “He plays good ball, but I feel sorry for him. He thought he’d be playing for the Yankees soon, and here he is in this town. You can see it’s got him down.”

“He lives here in this hotel?”

“That’s right,” the guy said. “Most of the older ballplayers stay in rooming houses, but Pete and a couple other kids live here.”

He was leaning on the desk, talking to me and looking across the hotel lobby. He nodded his head. “This is a funny thing,” he said. “Here he comes now.”

The kid had come through the door from across the street. He had on a light gray sport shirt and a pair of grey flannel slacks.

I could see why, when he showed up with the Yankees in spring training, he made them all think of Rizzuto. He isn’t any bigger than Rizzuto, and he looks just like him.

“Hello, Nick,” he said to the guy at the desk.

“Hello, Pete,” the guy at the desk said. “How goes it today?”

“All right,” the kid said but you could see he was exaggerating.

“I’m sorry, Pete,” the guy at the desk said, “but no mail today.”

“That’s all right, Nick,” the kid said. “I’m used to it.”

“Excuse me,” I said, “but you’re Pate Maneri?”

“That’s right,” the kid said, turning and looking at me.

“Excuse me,” the guy at the desk said, introducing us. “Pete, this is Mr. Franklin.”

“Harry Franklin,” I said.

“I’m glad to know you,” the kid said, shaking my hand.

“I recognize you from your pictures,” I said.

“Pete’s a good ballplayer,” the guy at the desk said.

“Not very,” the kid said.

“Don’t take his word for it, Mr. Franklin,” the guy said.

“I’m a great ball fan,” I said to the kid. “Do you people play tonight?”

“We play two games,” the kid said.

“That first game’s at six o’clock,” the guy at the desk said. “They play pretty good ball.”

“I’ll be there,” I said. “I used to play a little ball myself.”

“You did?” the kid said.

“With Columbus,” I said. “That’s twenty years ago.”

“Is that right?” the kid said…

That’s the way I got to talking with the kid. They had one of those pine-paneled taprooms in the basement of the hotel, and we went down there. I had a couple and the kid had a Coke, and I told him a few stories and he turned out to be a real good listener.

“But what do you do now, Mr. Franklin?” he said after a while.

“I sell hardware,” I said. “I can think of some things I’d like better, but I was going to ask you how you like playing in this league.”

“Well,” the kid said, “I don’t get along very well here. I mean there’s nothing wrong with my playing. I’m hitting .365 right now. I lead the league in stolen bases. There’s nobody can field with me, but who cares?”

“Who manages this ball club?”

“Al Dall,” the kid said. “You remember, he played in the outfield for the Yankees for about four years.”

“I remember.”

“Maybe he is all right,” the kid said, “but I don’t get along with him. He’s on my neck all the time.”

“Well,” I said, “that’s the way they are in the minors sometimes. You have to remember the guy is looking out for himself and his ball club first. He’s not worried about you.”

“I know that,” the kid said. “If I get the big hit or make the play he never says anything. The other night I tried to take second on a loose ball and I got caught in the run-down. He bawls me out in front of everybody. There’s nothing I can do.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “This is probably a guy who knows he’s got a good thing in you, and he’s looking to keep you around. You people lead the league, and that makes him look good. He doesn’t want to lose you to Kansas City or the Yankees.”

“That’s what I mean,” the kid said. “When the Yankees sent me down here they said, ‘Don’t worry. We’ll keep an eye on you.’ So Dall never sends a good report on me. Nobody ever comes down to look me over. What chance is there for a guy like Eddie Brown or somebody like that coming down to see me in this town?”

“You have to remember that Eddie Brown’s the big shot,” I said, “the great Yankee scout.”

“Sure,” the kid said. “I never even saw him, and I’ll never see him in this place. I have an idea that if they ever ask Dall about me he keeps knocking me down.”

“Why don’t you go after Dall?” I said. “I had trouble like that once myself, but I figured out a way to get attention.”

“You did?” the kid said.

“I threw a couple of balls over the first baseman’s head,” I said. “I threw a couple of games away, and that really got the manager sore. I was lousing up his ball club and his record. So what does he do? He blows the whistle on me, and what happens? That gets the brass curious, and they send me down to see what’s wrong.”

“Is that so?” the kid said. “What happened?”

“Two weeks later,” I said, “I was up with Columbus.”

“Is that right?” the kid said.

“Sure,” I said, egging him on. “What have you got to lose?”

“Nothing,” the kid said. “I haven’t got anything to lose.”

“I’d try it,” I said.

“I might try it,” the kid said. “I might try it tonight if the spot comes up.”

I could see from the way he said it that he was madder than he’d said. Maybe you think this is mean to steam a kid up like this, but I do some strange things.

“Take over,” I said. “Don’t let this guy ruin your career.”

“I’ll try it,” the kid said. “Are you coming out to the park tonight?”

“I wouldn’t miss it,” I said. “This will be better than making out route sheets and sales orders.”

It’s not much of a ball park in this town—old wooden bleachers and an old wooden fence and about four hundred people in the stands. The first game wasn’t much either, with the home club winning something like 8 to 1.

The kid didn’t have any hard chances, but I could see he was a ballplayer, with a double and a couple of walks and a lot of speed.

The second game was different, though. The other club got a couple of runs and then the home club picked up three runs in one, and they were in the top of the ninth with a 3-2 lead and two outs when the pitching began to fall apart and they loaded the bases.

I was trying to wish the ball down to the kid, just to see what he’d do with it, when the batter drives one on one big bounce to the kid’s right.

The kid was off for it when the ball started. He made it a backhanded stab and grabbed it. He was deep now, and he turned in the air and fired. If it goes over the first baseman’s head, it’s two runs in and a panic—but it’s the prettiest throw you’d want to see. It’s right on a line, and the runner is out by a step, and it’s the ball game.

I walked back to the hotel, thinking about the kid. I sat around the lobby until I saw him come in, and then I walked toward the elevator like I was going to my room, but so I’d meet him. And I could see he didn’t want to talk.

“How about a Coke?” I said.

“No,” he said. “Thanks, but I’m going to bed.”

“Look,” I said. “Forget it. You did the right thing. Have a Coke.”

We were sitting in the taproom again. The kid wasn’t saying anything.

“Why didn’t you throw that ball away?” I said.

“I don’t know,” the kid said. “I had it in my mind before he hit it, but I couldn’t.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know why.”

“I know why,” I said.

The kid didn’t say anything. He just sat looking down.

“Do you know why you couldn’t throw that ball away?” I said.

“No,” the kid said.

“You couldn’t throw that ball away,” I said, “because you’re going to be a major-league ballplayer someday.”

The kid just looked at me. He had that same sore expression.

“Do you know why you’re going to be a major-league ballplayer?” I said.

The kid was just looking down again, shaking his head. I never got more of a kick out of anything in my life.

“You’re going to be a major-league ballplayer,” I said, “because you couldn’t throw that ball away, and because I’m not a hardware salesman and my name’s not Harry Franklin.”

“What do you mean?” the kid said.

“I mean,” I explained to him, “that I tried to needle you into throwing that ball away because I’m Eddie Brown.”

(Pictures of W.C. Heinz taken in 2001 on grounds of his Dorset, Vt home by photographer for Vanity Fair, Gaspar Tringale. The bat was Heinz’s personalized Louisville Slugger given to him by the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Assoc. Hall of Fame upon his induction in 2001.)

The W.C. Heinz Reader:

The Professional

Run to Daylight! (with Vince Lombardi)

M*A*S*H (“Richard Hooker,” penname shared with Dr. H. Richard Hornberger).

What a Time it Was: The Best of W.C. Heinz on Sports

Once They Heard the Cheers

American Mirror

Emergency

The Surgeon

When We Were One: Stories of World War II

The Fireside Book of Boxing

The Book of Boxing (with Nathan Ward)