Heinz Wilfred Charles - The Top of His Game: The Best Sportswriting of W. C. Heinz: A Library of America Special Publication

A SPECIAL PUBLICATION OF

THE LIBRARY OF AMERICA

Volume compilation of The Top of His Game copyright 2015 by Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., New York, N.Y. Essays by W. C. Heinz copyright 1947, 1948, 1949, 1951, 1953, 1954, 1955, 1958, 1959, 1961, 1965, 1979, 1982, 2000, 2001 by W. C. Heinz, used by permission of Gayl Heinz.

Introduction copyright 2015 by Bill Littlefield.

All rights reserved.

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Book design by David Bullen

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014946643

ISBN 9781598533729 (Print)

ISBN 9781598534191 (ePub)

Autumn 1945

George M. Woolf, 19101946

Ahm Buyin Hats...

The Ascension of George Herman Ruth

DiMaggio and Louis Are Picture-Perfect Sportsmen

Hein Ten Hoff Says Ja to America

Ringside with William Jennings Bryan

Toughie Brasuhn, Queen of the Roller Derby

You Can Tell Hes All Right, He Wont Listen to Morgan

The Columbia Freshmen Are First on the River

The Yankees Send a Good Man Down

Mintz Crowned Heavyweight Manager of the World

Air Lift, Son of Bold Venture

Hooked on the Thrill of Almost Winning

Gardella Drops His Suit Against Baseball

Or, How Joe Louis Makes a Living

Al (Bummy) Davis, 19101945

GrazianoZale, September 27, 1946

Norma Graziano Gets Through the Night

Billy Graham, Boxings Uncrowned Champ

The Trouble with McNeece Is That He Fears Nothing

A Rising Marciano Lifts All Boats

Between Phone Calls with Paul Krichell

The Dodger They Padded the Walls For

Red Grange Could Carry the Ball

Gordie Howe of the Detroit Red Wings

What a Card This Pepper Martin Is!

Jim Tescher, Rodeo Rider

Theyre Dimming the Lights at Stillmans Gym

The Quiet Power of Floyd Patterson

Jim Tescher Revisited

John C. Hurley, 18971972

Joe Pages Good Days

Dancing with Willie Pep

Willie Davis Talks Vince Lombardi

Theres Only One Sugar Ray

Eddie Arcaro Rode to Win

The Life and Times of Rocky Graziano

True to the Way It Happens

Sixty-odd years ago, the sides of the trucks delivering the New York Sun to newsstands were decorated with a large and colorful banner. The banner read:

W. C. HEINZ

Read His

Human Interest Stories On Sports

Daily In

The Sun

Buy It Today

To the left of the copy was a picture of W. C. Heinz himself, dapper in a bow tie, smiling a little ruefully, perhaps at the celebrity he had achieved. Or perhaps he was bemused that he was still alive. Hed recently returned from duty as a war correspondent in Europe. Half a century later he would talk with quiet gratitude about the soldiers whod kept him safe during World War II while he walked with them and huddled with them in foxholes and wrote about their days for readers at home.

One morning as he was crossing a Manhattan street, one of the trucks advertising his work came hurtling around the corner. W. C. Heinz, Bill to his friends, jumped back out of the street just in time to avoid becoming a sad and ironic headline on the sports page of the newspaper for which he was writing.

I got that story from Bills daughter, Gayl Heinz. She told me Bill had enjoyed telling it. Gayl is the sort of daughter all writers should have, or at least all writers who deserve to stay in print, because she has devoted a lot of energy and time to ensuring that generations of readers will have the opportunity to appreciate the work her father did.

The work that appeared in the Sun under the byline W. C. Heinz can be categorized as human interest stories in the same sense that the work of William Faulkner, Flannery OConnor, Kurt Vonnegut, and Ernest Hemingway can be so categorized.

Like Faulkner, Bill Heinz understood the significance of place. For him the place was not an imaginary county in Mississippi but a very real boxing gym on Eighth Avenue, or a racetrack in the rain, or a tavern in the middle of a clumsy hold-up.

Like OConnor, he understood that the people at the edges of any endeavor offered, by necessity, original perspectives on a culture into which they would never fit.

Like Vonnegut, he wrapped his darkest observations in humor. Often the humor was exceptionally gentle.

Like Hemingway, he never wasted a word. Hemingway recognized that quality in Heinz. When, in 1958, he was invited to comment on Bills novel The Professional, Hemingway sent a telegram in which he called it the only good novel Ive ever read about a fighter and an excellent first novel in its own right.

They were more than passing acquaintances. Both had worked as correspondents in Europe during World War II. Apparently numbers of correspondents would regularly crash at whatever house Hemingway had secured as his headquarters. On at least one occasion, Bill was one of them. According to Gayl, her father brought a bottle of scotch as a true gift of admiration for the master, in return for which Hemingway said he wouldnt allow Bill to spend the night on the floor with the others. Hemingway was prepared to give up his bed.

I couldnt, Heinz said, I wouldnt sleep a wink, and, again according to his daughter, he slept with the rest of the journalists.

As it happened, Bills visit coincided with the breakdown of Hemingways typewriter, perhaps from overwork. That night he borrowed the 1932 Remington portable Bill had been hauling around from battlefield to battlefield, and in the morning he said, That machine has a nice mill. It writes very well.

Sure, Bill said, but it writes a hell of a lot better for you than it does for me.

Heinz was wrong. The machine didnt write better for Hemingway, only differently. But the comparison serves to highlight one of the qualities that distinguish the body of work he left behind from the work of his fellow newspaper and magazine journalists. Bill Heinz wrote from the war and from the ball field and from the racetrack, the gym, and the arena. He wrote The Professional, which is more Hemingway than Red Smith, and co-wrote another novel, M*A*S*H, which provided Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland with employment in the movies and Alan Alda with a career on TV. He also wrote about medicine and civil rights and popular culture, all of which may not be pertinent to a collection of his best sportswriting, but my point is that Heinz brought to his writing about games a wide-ranging curiosity not just about athletes but about people. They fascinated him. He took pains to capture the way they talked, the way they cheated and cherished one another, the way they did what they had to do to make it through each day without surrendering more blood or dignity than necessary.