September 1994
Our vote for the Hall of Fame:
David Halberstam
Interview by James Buckley Jr.
If someone created a Hall of Fame for writers of sports books, an unlikely prospect, I admit, David Halberstam would be one of the first choices for induction. With Summer of '49, The Amateurs, The Breaks of the Game and his new book, October 1964, he has long since established his credentials.
More impressive, however, is that he'd probably be a member of the Halls of Fame for reporters, business writers and social historians as well. He brings to his work on sports topics the tenacity, the depth of research, the thoughtful eye and the writing skill that helped him win two Pulitzer Prizes in the 1960s and write 11 non-fiction books, including the recent bestseller The Fifties.
But even though he's written popular and influential books about everything from White House politics to big business, and covered several wars, it's baseball that brings out the most emotion in his writing. "I hope what comes out of this book, and out of Summer of '49 [about the Red Sox-Yankees pennant race, among other things], is a real love of the game," he says. "A sense of what's beautiful about it. At its best, baseball is really quite beautiful."
While the game on the field may be filled with crisp double plays and the intrigue of the pitcher-batter confrontation, the game off the field in Halberstam's year of focus, 1964, was anything but beautiful. Even though it had been 17 years since Jackie Robinson had broken baseball's "color" line, race relations throughout the game were just as strained as they were in the rest of America at the time. One of Halberstam's major themes in October 1964 is that those who do not change with the times are condemned to die with the times.
Reading October 1964 is like watching a couple of guys play catch in the backyard. The book focuses on two teams, the New York Yankees and the St. Louis Cardinals, who would meet in the World Series in the titular month. You follow their stories back and forth, back and forth. He takes us into the locker rooms, hotel suites and corporate offices of first the Yankees then the Cardinals then the Yankees and so on. Gradually, while the two guys in the yard move closer and closer together, the two teams race toward their shared destiny at the World Series. There all the author's themes tie together and all the other shoes drop. The players he introduces and the stories that they tell all become tied together as neatly as a 1-2-3 inning by the time the seventh game of the World Series ends.
In this tale of two teams, the Yankees, writes Halberstam, were a staid, racist organization mired in the unwavering belief that they were great simply because they wore the pinstripes. They saw no need to scout young black players; in fact went out of their way to avoid them. They manipulated their stars' stats to keep salaries down. And they were that season saddled with aging stars like Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford and Roger Maris.
On the other hand, the Cardinals were eager to sign and use top-flight young black players like Bob Gibson, Lou Brock and Curt Flood. They were a team that played with speed and defense and pitching, while the Yankees relied on power and mystique. The harmonious, multi-racial Cardinal clubhouse was a symbol of progress in America; the lily-white (with but two black players) Yankees a part of the quickly-disappearing past.
I asked Halberstam if he thought that black players like Gibson, Brock and future National League president Bill White thought themselves part of the civil rights movement then sweeping America. "I don't think they thought they were part of the sit-ins or that sort of thing," says Halberstam. "But they did see themselves out to prove something. I think they were very aware they were getting a chance; and that they were playing for all those who had never gotten that chance. They were aware they were part of something larger than they were."
Using a part of something to shed light on the whole is a key Halberstam tool in both of his baseball books. They are as much about life in the United States as they are about baseball. "Sports is really a great way of looking at society and the way it changes. It's a very effective window. Both books are concerned with setting time and place. I'd like to think that if a historian came along 100 years from now and wanted to get a sense of what Americans were thinking and doing in these different ages, they could calibrate it somewhat by these books."
Halberstam, now 60, can calibrate his own ages by the two books. "In Summer of '49, the players were mythic figures to me. I was writing through the memory of a 15-year-old boy," he recalls on a break from summer vacation on Nantucket. "In October 1964, it was a 30-year-old person who perceived the season. It's more of a journalistís book."
He sees the two volumes as bookends. "It's amazing how much America had changed in only 15 years," he says. He thinks a third volume might be done about a season from the mid-'80s, as enormous money and free agency took over the game, but, given the necessary perspective of time, "I'll be too old to write that one," he adds.
It was no ordinary 30-year-old who watched those games that summer of '64, but one who had just returned from three years of Pulitzer-Prize winning combat reporting for the New York Times in the Congo and Vietnam. "When I had left to go overseas, the Yankees were invincible and indomitable. Then I came back and they were in the Series against the Cardinals. I thought, who are these guys? It was an epiphany."
In choosing 1964 as his season of focus, Halberstam knew something had happened that was worth writing about. But as he did more than 75 interviews with players, coaches, writers and executives that are the basis of much of the book, he found that "the things I knew to be true about the season turned out to be true in far more interesting ways and with far more irony and inner truth." We meet these men, player by scout by manager by executive, as if Halberstam is building a house and they are the bricks. Each brick is of itself interesting, but the house they create is even more meaningful and impressive.
Creating such literary houses, of course, is what Halberstam has done so skillfully for so many years, making him one of the generation's finest non-fiction writers. It's to his credit, and to the game's, that he has once again chosen baseball on which to focus his eye.
James Buckley Jr. is a freelance sportswriter in Santa Barbara, California.
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