Booklist Review
Writing on sports, the late Halberstam brought his formidable reporter's skills to his task whether on Red Sox deity Ted Williams, sharpshooter Pete Maravich, brilliant but mercurial Allen Iverson, or itinerant slugger Reggie Smith, who are among the subjects of the four dozen excellent pieces here. Unlike many sports journalists, Halberstam was never so invested in the games we play that he wouldn't call out their significant failings. His essay Sports Can Distract, but They Don't Heal makes the brutally honest point that the athletes a hometown supports are probably closer to the players those fans hate than they are to the fans themselves. Halberstam focuses on the three major sports baseball, basketball, football but there are also keen essays on sculling, fishing, boxing, and horse racing. Halberstam has a touch of the windbag, but that's more than offset by the stories he shares: for example, the time a 15-year-old Reggie Smith told Willie Mays that he, Smith, was also a ballplayer, to which Mays only replied, Do you know how to duck? --Moores, Alan Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
HE wasn't a sportswriter. No insult implied, but sportswriters tend to fall into two categories: stylists attempting to turn sport into literature in glossy magazines, and reporters serving it up as news in daily papers. By the evidence of the 44 pieces in this occasionally satisfying collection - spanning his career, from 1955 to 2006 - David Halberstam was a different animal. The typical sports article is a hot cocktail of stats, strategy, emotion and action. Halberstam has little time for all that. He doesn't work hard to take the reader inside the game or the locker room with fly-on-the-wall reportage. He doesn't cover games as they unfold. Halberstam is more like a historian. He treats his subject at some remove. The big picture is never far from his mind. This can produce fascinating and affecting results. It's hard to imagine a better essay than "The Basket-Case State," which profiles Indiana through the twin themes of basketball and loneliness. Halberstam shows how the game knitted the state together, first by giving solitary farmers a chance to see one another on Friday nights, then by providing common ground for urban blacks and rural whites and finally by creating a statewide obsession with televised college basketball. Yet, while television may have enlarged the basic unit of Indiana society from village to state, Halberstam warns, it did little to ease the isolation of Indiana's people. "The hardest thing to measure," he writes, "is the new loneliness." "The Day That the Striper - and Memories of Bob Francis - Came Back," is a wondrous miniature. In a short article, he manages to chart the relationship of three generations of Halberstams to fishing, as well as the decline of striped bass in New England waters, while offering a sensitive memorial to a famed local fisherman whose brand of obsessive angling may have contributed to the stripers' decline. These pieces and others work because the thinking in them is sharp and original. Often, however, Halberstam's observations feel pedestrian. He avails himself of ideas - like television's role in the rise of football, or fan fatigue with expanding leagues and schedules - that were already shopworn even when he first published his articles. It doesn't help that some material gets recycled. Twice, Halberstam begins with the comment that a well-dropped sports name will stop talk among the rich and famous. The glories of 1960s pro football are eulogized in three different places. In Halberstam's defense, these articles weren't meant to be read together. And they shouldn't be. This collection would have better served its author's memory if it had been pared down. Halberstam, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his Vietnam reporting, wrote 21 books. He died last year at the age of 73 in a car accident outside San Francisco. He was on his way to interview the former New York Giants quarterback Y.A. Tittle for an uncompleted book about the 1958 N.F.L. championship game. Halberstam's major works were weighty, comprehensively researched affairs on grand topics like war, politics and business. In between, he produced seven popular sports books, which would have constituted a career for a lesser writer, but which he saw as "a form of relaxation." At book length, Halberstam could use sports to trace the expansive narratives of American history that always fascinated him. This is much harder to pull off within the confines of a magazine or newspaper article. Halberstam didn't always succeed, but it's to his credit that he always tried to think big, even when he was writing small. Halberstam saw sports books as a form of 'relaxation,' a break from war and politics. Edward Lewine is a frequent contributor to The Times. His book, "Death and the Sun: A Matador's Season in the Heart of Spain," came out in paperback last year.
