The Boy Who Wouldn't Die... Amazing piece in SI about Rae Carruth's son

Touche. I should have said always purple or elaborate.

And to be fair, that's the sixth graf from a piece, not the lede. In the same collection, his ledes are as simple as this:

"Watching a fight on TV has always seemed to me a poor substitute for being there."

- The Big Fellows, The Sweet Science

 

I think it's hard to define eras based on styles. W.C. Heinz wrote during a pretty purple era, but his prose was minimalist even by today's standards. I lean minimalist, in part because Heinz is my patron saint, but I can also appreciate and admire and very much enjoy stylists like Pierce or MacGregor or Lake—the same way I love the Vindictives and also Explosions in the Sky, even though they're totally different kinds of music. I think young writers are better served by Gee's "get out of the way" decree, and I've often given the same advice, because there's less risk in that approach, and bad efforts at writing grander read like puke. But Lake loves Gary Smith the way I love W.C. Heinz, and so we both write the way we write, and I'm glad that we can both write our separate ways and that there will be some readers who don't like me and some who don't like him but hopefully plenty who can like us both.

 

A few sample ledes from Best American Sports Writing of the Century:

"It is the great word of the twentieth century. If there is a single word our century has added to the potentiality of language, it is ego. Everything we have done in this century, from monumental feats to nightmares of human destruction, has been a function of that extraordinary state of the psyche which gives us authority to declare we are sure of ourselves when we are not."
— Norman Mailer, "Ego," Life, 1971.

"It was not quite spring, the silent season before the search for salmon, and the old fishermen of San Francisco were either paiting their boats or repairing their nets along the pier or sitting in the sun talking quietly among themselves, watching the tourists come and go, and smiling, now, as a pretty girl paused to take their picture. She was about 25, healthy and blue-eyed and wearing a turtleneck sweater, and she had long, flowing blonde hair that she brushed back a few times before clicking her camera. The fishermen, looking at her, made admiring comments, but she did not understand because they spoke a Sicilian dialect; nor did she understand the tall gray-haired man in a dark suit who stood watching her from behind a big bay window on the second floor of DiMaggio's Restaurant that overlooks the pier."
— Gay Talese, "The Silent Season of a Hero," Esquire, 1966.

"Now it is done. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again."
— Red Smith, "Miracle of Coogan's Bluff," The New York Herald Tribune, 1951.

"It's a funny thing about people. People will hate a guy all his life for what he is, but the minute he dies for it they make him out a hero and they go around saying that maybe he wasn't such a bad guy after all because he sure was willing to go the distance for whatever he believed or whatever he was."
— W.C. Heinz, "Brownsville Bum," True, 1951.

 

I hope nobody writes longform like Tweedy writes lyrics.

 

Is this "Tweedy" character anything like Kool Keith?

 

Good post.

I think you'd agree there's just times that whatever a writer was trying to do, it missed the mark. It's hard to put a finger on this exactly - it comes down to taste or timing or some thing that doesn't fit in a reader's brain - but the more one reads and really begins to immerse themselves in the art and craft of reading - not writing, mind you, but reading - the more they can discern what's hit the mark and what's overblown. Great editors and book critics have a sense for it beyond, sometimes, the writers themselves having a sense for it.

It's hard to have the in between conversations where it's not one thing or the other, but just an examination of the text at hand. Invariably, people make connections, arguments, present worldviews, rebuttals, you name it, and it's all part of the process of discussion.

Ideally, I think - this is my ideal, mind you - one starts emotionally, naturally, full heart and all that, getting it down, strips it bare and then builds back up. What I've found in more recent long-form work is the sheer joy of creation -- of a writer loving to write and trying to make sense of the bigness of life -- smothering the story. Or the joy standing aside it but still prominent. As I've written before: I actually far prefer it to where we were in the 1990s.

 

Versatile, good example. I loved all those pieces and now I'm not sleeping till I re-read "The Silent Season of a Hero," but striving to be like Heinz, Talese, Smith and Mailer is every writer's dream. Just like with everything else in life, some people have been given the ability to do certain things better than others, and this goes for writing styles as well. Heinz is Heinz, Talese is Talese, etc. Strong prose always makes itself blatantly evident.

 

Thomas Lake is on their level when he's at his best. But to hit those home runs, you've got to open your stance up a bit and put a little hitch in the swing. This lede was a whiff.

 

Here is Kram's lede to his Thrilla in Manilla story, which is probably the best deadline story ever written for a magazine.


It was only a moment, sliding past the eyes like the sudden shifting of light and shadow, but long years from now it will remain a pure and moving glimpse of hard reality, and if Muhammad Ali could have turned his eyes upon himself, what first and final truth could he have seen? He had been led up the winding, red- carpeted staircase by Imelda Marcos, the first lady of the Philippines, as the guest of honor at the Malacaûang Palace. Soft music drifted in from the terrace as the beautiful Imelda guided the massive and still heavyweight champion of the world to the long buffet ornamented by huge candelabra. The two whispered, and then she stopped and filled his plate, and as he waited the candles threw an eerie light across the face of a man who only a few hours before had survived the ultimate inquisition of himself and his art.

The maddest of existentialists, one of the great surrealists of our time, the king of all he sees, Ali had never before appeared so vulnerable and fragile, so pitiably unmajestic, so far from the universe he claims as his along. He could barely hold his fork, and he lifted the food slowly up to his bottom lip, which had been scraped pink. The skin on his face was dull and blotched, his eyes drained of that familiar childlike wonder. His right eye was a deep purple, beginning to close, a dark blind being drawn against a harsh light. He chewed his food painfully, and then he suddenly moved away from the candles as if he had become aware of the mask he was wearing, as if an inner voice were laughing at him. He shrugged, and the moment was gone.

A couple of miles away in the bedroom of a villa, the man who has always demanded answers of Ali, has trailed the champion like a timber wolf, lay in semidarkness. Only his heavy breathing disturbed the quiet as an old friend walked to within two feet of him. "Who is it?" asked Joe Frazier, lifting himself to look around. "I can't see! I can't see! Turn the lights on!" Another light was turned on, but Frazier still could not see. The scene cannot be forgotten; this good and gallant man lying there, embodying the remains of a will never before seen in a ring, a will that had carried him so far -- and now surely too far. His eyes were only slits, his face looked as if it had been painted by Goya. "Man, I hit him with punches that'd bring down the walls of a city," said Frazier. "Lawdy, Lawdy, he's a great champion." Then he put his head back down on the pillow, and soon there was only the heavy breathing of a deep sleep slapping like big waves against the silence.

Time may well erode that long morning drama in Manila, but for anyone who was there those faces will return again and again to evoke what it was like when two of the greatest heavyweights of any era met for a third time, and left millions limp around the world. Muhammad Ali caught the way it was: "It was like death. Closest thing to dyin' that I know of."

 

Allegations of fabrication aside, perhaps.

 

I have a vague recollection of that allegation, but have completely forgotten the details.

 

I haven't read The Franchise by Michael MacCambridge, but I have read the part about Mark Kram. Basically, he was a God-maker who was fired for extreme conflicts of interest. And the details about Joe Frazier after the fight, including that now-famous quote in the third graf, can't be verified by anyone. And those details kind of make the story.