Everything They Had

Many readers may be surprised to discover that as an undergraduate at Harvard University, David Halberstam, who would become the most honored journalist of our time, began his journalism career in the press box. As a staff writer for the
Harvard Crimson
he covered intramural basketball and the freshman baseball team before matriculating to varsity football. For a time he even wrote a sports column for the
Crimson
inventively titled “Eggs in Your Beer.” One of the pleasures of editing this volume has been the discovery that over the ensuing five decades, through stints at newspapers in Mississippi and Tennessee and the
New York Times
, and assignments in the Congo, Vietnam, Poland, and Paris, and then after leaving daily journalism to write books, he never strayed from the sports page for long. While working for the Nashville
Tennessean
from 1956 through 1960 he once covered opening day of the baseball season and reported on a high school student who would soon win several Olympic medals named Wilma Rudolph. After he joined the
New York Times
in 1960, his first byline for the
Times
was not about any great issue of the day, but, of all things, about a ski jumping exhibition held in late November on man-made snow at Central Park's Cedar Hill.

This is, I think, telling. He once wrote of his sports titles that “[they] are my entertainments, fun to do, a pleasant world and a good deal more relaxed venue,” less pressured and more enjoyable than his heavier and more lengthy books about what he termed “society, history and culture.” Yet I do not think he viewed writing about sports as necessarily something lesser, for he also wrote that sports were “a venue from which I can learn a great deal about the changing mores of the rest of the society.” He recognized that sports are important because sports matter to people, and that sports, and how we relate to sports, say something of value about ourselves, our society, and our history and culture, one of the rare places where citizens of differing creeds, classes, and races come together.

David Halberstam was, at his core, a reporter, and even when he was writing about sports he was reporting on the worldâthey were not separate. In a story he wrote as an undergraduate for the
Harvard Alumni Bulletin
about sculling on the Charles River, the first story reprinted in this book, he also managed to capture a bit of the Cold War fear that was then wreaking havoc upon the postwar psyche. His brief report on Wilma Rudolph's track squad provided Halberstam himself with a lesson in racial progress, or the lack thereof. His editor excised his use of the term “coed” in his description of the runnersâat the time the term was reserved for white students only.

This background in sports does not make David Halberstam particularly unique. A number of great American writers were, at one time or another, sportswriters, ranging from Ernest Hemingway to Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson, James Reston, and Richard Ford. What is unique, however, is that David Halberstam, while moving beyond sports, did not, I think, move past sports. While he never elevated sports out of proportion, sports never ceased to be important to him and he never cast sports aside as insignificant, once writing that “I do not know of any other venue that showcases the changes in American life and its values and the coming of the norms of entertainment more dramatically than sports.”

One reason that he felt that way may be because he found those who wrote about sports among the best teachers of writing in all journalism. In his introduction to a collection of work by W. C. Heinz entitled
What a Time It Was
, Halberstam credits Heinz, who is best known for his sportswriting, as “one of those people who made me want to be a writer,” someone who “helped teach me what the possibilities of journalism really were.” Gay Talese's famous profile of Joe DiMaggio, “The Silent Season of the Hero,” written in 1966 for
Esquire
, had a similar impact. For Halberstam, Talese's sober, nuanced portrait of DiMaggio simultaneously exposed the limits inherent in newspaper journalism and the creative possibilities of magazine work, which promised what Halberstam called “the greatest indulgence of all for a journalist, the luxury of time.” Over the years he regularly noted the influence of other writers like Red Smith, Jimmy Cannon, Jimmy Breslin, Murray Kempton, and Tom Wolfe on his own work. Smith, of course, was a sports columnist, and while Breslin, Cannon, Kempton, and Wolfe wrote of many topics, all considered sports a valid subject upon which to exercise their unique creative talents.

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