Anderson Dave - Run to daylight!: Vince Lombardi with W.C. Heinz ; new foreword by David Maraniss ; introduction by John Madden and Dave Anderson

OTHER SPORTS CLASSICS FROM FIRESIDE BOOKS:

FIVE SEASONS BY ROGER ANGELL

MY TURN AT BAT BY TED WILLIAMS WITH JOHN UNDERWOOD

A HANDFUL OF SUMMERS BY GORDON FORBES

A FALSE SPRING BY PAT JORDAN

A DONALD HONIG READER BY DONALD HONIG

HEAVEN IS A PLAYGROUND BY RICK TELANDER

DOCK ELLIS IN THE COUNTRY OF BASEBALL BY DONALD HALL WITH DOCK ELLIS

DOLLAR SIGN ON THE MUSCLE BY KEVIN KERRANE

VEECK AS IN WRECK BY BILL VEECK WITH ED LINN

THE HUSTLERS HANDBOOK BY BILL VEECK WITH ED LINN

Offensive Formation

BROWN RIGHT AGAINST 4-3 DEFENSE

BLUE LEFT AGAINST 4-3 DEFENSE

RED RIGHT AGAINST FRISCO

BACKS DIVIDE AGAINST A BLITZ

Key Running Plays

PACKER BLUE RIGHT 37 AGAINST 6-1 DEFENSE

PACKER 67 AGAINST FRISCO DEFENSE

PACKER 34X AGAINST FRISCO DEFENSE

OPPONENTS WEAK SIDE SWEEP AGAINST PACKER 4-3

Key Pass Plays

QB OPTION

QUICK SCREEN

FOUR-X SWITCH

SWING INSIDE DELAY

For two summers while I was researching the biography When Pride Still Mattered , I lived in New York. Day after day I would venture out to Sheepshead Bay, where Vince Lombardi was born and reared; or up to Fordham University in the Bronx, where he went to school and had his first brush with legend as one of the Seven Blocks of Granite; or across the river to Englewood, New Jersey, where he taught and coached at little St. Cecilias; or farther up the Hudson to West Point, where he learned his football philosophy as an Army assistant under Red Blaik.

But the trip that had the most lasting impact on me during that period of research was a longer ride into New England to a hilltop home in Dorset, Vermont. It was there that I met and spent a memorable day with the writer W. C. Heinz.

I came to Run to Daylight! early, but to Bill Heinz late. The book that Heinz wrote under the byline Vince Lombardi was a staple of my mid-1960s Wisconsin childhood. I read it again and again, until the cover was gone and the pages were watermarked and smudged by mustard and dirt. I knew the book the way Lombardis Packers knew their Packer sweep after practicing it over and over. And every time I read it, I was thrilled anew by the game-clinching play when Milt Plum of the Detroit Lions throws a pass and the receiver slips and Green Bays dashing young cornerback swoops in and, as Lombardi in the book describes the scene, I hear the thop-sound it makes as it hits Herb Adderlys hands, and hes got it. Hes got it, and hes racing right by me now, down our sideline.

It was three and a half decades after that October 1962 game that I found Heinz standing in the driveway of his Vermont retreat. He had been forty-six when he wrote the book, and was eighty-one by the time I met him, but he still looked much like the writer I had seen hovering near Lombardi in old photographs. He was wiry, crisp, and clean and lean, his mind as sharp as ever. Through his thick black-rimmed glasses, he saw the world with uncommon clarity.

I arrived in Vermont with simple questions: What was it like to write a book with Vince Lombardi? Step by step, how did you do it? I left with the answers, but also with a deep appreciation of Wilfred Charles Heinz and his writing craft.

Over the course of a long and enjoyable morning and afternoon, he showed me the tools of his trade. He still had the old Remington manual typewriter on which he punched out Run to Daylight! and many other books (along with untold hundreds of newspaper columns and magazine stories). Of more material value to me, he dug into his closet and brought out a set of old Penrite memo books ten cents apiece, spirals on top, neatly marked 1, 2, 3, and . Inside the notebooks, in neat handwriting (shockingly neat for a reporter, I thought), were all the notes Heinz had taken from his many interviews with Lombardi during his time in Green Bay. As a writing colleague, Heinz knew the notebooks would be as important to me as anything he said. And he was such a mensch that I didnt even have to askhe handed them over to me for my use and safekeeping.

The stories he did tell me that day were unforgettable. He talked about the legendary writers he had learned from over the course of his long career. Most of them were sportswriters, but Heinz made no distinction. He agreed with me that writers were writers, and much of the best writing happened to involve sports. He had covered sports most of his career, though during World War II he served as a war correspondent with distinction for the New York Sun. After that he wrote a sports column, then turned to books (including the book on which the movie and TV show M*A*S*H were based) and freelance magazine articles when the Sun folded. He was a favorite of Grant-land Rice and Damon Runyon (as Runyon was dying, he scribbled on a bar napkin that Heinz was his choice to replace him as columnist for Hearts Cosmopolitan ), and a close friend of Red Smith, then of the New York Herald Tribune , later of the New York Times , who was ten years his senior. He admired Smiths writing, but considered him more of a dancer and mover, with a style you couldnt imitate. The writers he most closely followed in style were Ernest Hemingway for novels and Frank Graham for everything else.

It was from Graham, Heinz said, that he learned how to construct an English sentence, and how to be a fly on the wall, to catch athletes at their most authentic moments and then use their dialogue verbatim to re-create a sceneall without a tape recorder and without taking notes until later. Frank never took notes, so... I learned how to do that too, how to look and listen, Heinz told me. The first time I tried it, Frank and I were both interviewing Rocky Graziano at Stillmans gym. He wasnt taking notes, so I wasnt either. When we came out I said, You jerk! I dont think Ill remember. He said, You will. When you get home tonight and Betty [Heinzs wife] asks you where you were and what you did, youll tell her who said what and where you were and what you did. Graham was right, and the powers of memory that Heinz developed then stayed with him thereafter, so four decades later he could remember the smell in the air and the color of a tie. Still, as a backup, he continued to take copious notes in his unhurried longhand.