David Halberstam - The Teammates: A Portrait of Friendship

The Noblest Roman

The Making of a Quagmire

One Very Hot Day

The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy

Ho

The Best and the Brightest

The Powers That Be

The Breaks of the Game

The Amateurs

The Reckoning

Summer of 49

The Next Century

The Fifties

October 1964

The Children

Playing for Keeps

War in a Time of Peace

Firehouse

The Teammates

The Education of a Coach

The Coldest Winter

By Jane Leavy

I ts a fucking statue! Its fucking BRONZE!

This is Boston Globe sports columnist Dan Shaughnessy talking about the book he didnt write, The Teammates, which is now also a sculpture stationed outside Gate B at Fenway Park.

It is a monument to friendship and to the teammates in questionTed Williams, Dominic DiMaggio, Johnny Pesky, and Bobby Doerrwho formed a quartet at the heart of the Red Sox lineup in the 1940s. It is also a monument to the unseen author, David Halberstam, who did not live to see his loveliest book in cast bronze.

Among Halberstams prodigious gifts was the ability to recognize a good storywhether in the rice paddies of Vietnam, the newsrooms of Important Journalism, or the friendship of four men who grew up together and grew old together and, together, would figure out how to help the greatest of them die.

The genesis was Shaughnessys October 29, 2001, column written during the World Series between the Yankees and the Diamondbacks. Back then, Shaughnessy played Ed McMahon to columnist Mike Barnicles Johnny Carson on a Boston radio show. Dick Flavin, the poet laureate of Fenway Park, a frequent guest on the show, had just returned from a three-day road trip with eighty-four-year-old Dom DiMaggio and eighty-two-year-old Johnny Pesky to visit eighty-three-year-old Ted Williams. Doms wife, Emily, unhappy at the prospect of her husband spending so much time behind the wheel between Massachusetts and Florida, recruited Flavin, a Boston legend in broadcast and public address announcing, to ride shotgun and share the driving.

I thought, Boy, that would be a swell column, Shaughnessy said. I wrote that story as an early column. I dont even know if it stayed in the paper after the first edition.

Halberstam, whose generosity to young reporters was legendary, called Shaughnessy with praise and a suggestion. You should turn it into a magazine piece, Shaughnessy said. A while later, David called me back and asked if anything was happening with it. I said, No, I had bounced the idea off some people and didnt get much reaction.

Halberstam knew all the principals from The Summer of 49, his 1989 account of the epochal pennant race between the Yankees and the Red Sox. He had grown close to Dom, whom he considered one of the most underrated players of his era and a far more complete human being than his big brother, Joltin Joe DiMaggio. At dinner one night in February 2002, DiMaggio recounted the story of the road trip and soon thereafter Halberstam recounted it to his editor. Perfect, the editor said. Tuesdays with Morrie meets Summer of 49.

Halberstam went to work. The day after Ted died, David called me again, Shaughnessy said. We were talking about Ted, trading stories. I said, You want that idea back, dont you?

Halberstam called The Teammates a small book. Small in comparison to the weighty subject matter of The Best and the Brightest. Small in comparison to the heft of The Fifties. But, Flavin said, He told me it was the best-selling book he ever wrote and the easiest.

And big enough to cite to an audience of Nieman Fellows at Harvard hoping to glean from Halberstam the secrets of narrative journalism. Once you have the idea, it just flows out, he told them in 2007. This is perhaps the best advice I can offer. Taking an idea, a central point, and pursuing it, turning it into a story that tells something about the way we live todayor in this case, about how we used to liveis the essence of narrative journalism Writing