RIP, W.C. Heinz

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/28/sports/28heinz.html?ref=sports

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-heinz28feb28,1,2552785.story

http://www.ajc.com/blogs/content/shared-blogs/ajc/sportscolumns/entries/2008/02/27/author_heinz_wa.html

 

“It’s like building a stone wall without mortar,” he said. “You place the words one at a time, fit them, take them apart and refit them until they’re balanced and solid.”

What a time it was, indeed. RIP.

 

"A good writer is like a good fighter," Heinz said. "You keep your reader in front of you, moving him around. You want to keep the reader on his toes, wondering what comes next."

Beautiful.

 

Not to interrupt all the goodness here, but I wanted to share this:

A1 centerpiece: Buckley.
C1 brite, teasing inside: Cope.
Nowhere in our paper: Heinz.

I said, not so demurely, "Please tell me that WC Heinz is somewhere in this paper and I'm just missing it. Please tell me we did not run Myron Cope TWICE and Heinz zero."

Apparently, no one at our paper knew he had died. So we made it in for final, with a lead brief. Fanfuckingtastic.

 

Your anger was righteous, and your justice swift.
Nice play, kid.

 

It's always a bummer how few people in journalism seem interested in journalism history. Heinz's passing did not appear in my paper either, and I would be very surprised if either of the top editors in my department even knew who he was or why he was important. They are not big readers, not former writers, and they are not curious about the evolution of the craft.

 

As a fan for a long, long time, I have to say that unfortunately, there's a relatively narrow band of people in our business who are truly familiar with his work. Almost nobody in this office yesterday knew who he was; "M*A*S*H" was the familiar reference. Sad, but true.

 

You made the point earlier in this thread, SF, and it's worth repeating: The Red Smith Award is a perfect example of this. Even if the industry people get it together and give it to him now, it's just disappointing that it wasn't something that could have happened while he was alive.

There are some very nice people who have received the award. No disrespect to them. Many, if not all, are extremely deserving. But does their contribution to sports journalism in any way approach Heinz's? C'mon.

http://apse.dallasnews.com/main/smithwinners.html

 

You think about the Frank Defords and Gary Smiths and they stand on Heinz's shoulders. One of the greats. There were great writers who occasionally wrote sports and great sportswriters, but Heinz was one of the first great writers who happened to write sports.

 

Yes, I want to make that absolutely crystal clear. I'm not denigrating a single one of the Red Smith winners, all of them deserving. I just think Heinz could have been fit in there before he hit 93.

 

Heinz is inside journalism.

Buckley was a national figure.

Cope was one of the most beloved regional characters of his time.

 

The first time I knew of W.C. Heinz, I was 20 years old. I bought a boxing anthology, "The Fireside Book of Boxing." He was the editor. One of his pieces was in the book, "The Fighter's Wife," with the simple explanation, "Some fighters fall in love and marry. That is why this is included." As the alphabet would have it, Heinz's piece immediately preceded one by Hemingway, "Fifty Grand." And if anyone thought Heinz was self-aggrandizing in putting himself alongside Hemingway, there was this truth: Hemingway years earlier had praised Heinz's novel, "The Professional," as one of the year's best, not only on boxing, on any subject.

A 1976 anthology, with Red Smith the editor, included Heinz on Red Grange. In Red's intro, he wrote, "Bill Heinz never saw Grange play football, except in the movies, but his portrait of the Galloping Ghost is by far the best one that anybody has ever written."

Near the end of Heinz on Grange, after they'd talked about how the hero never saved memorabilia, Heinz writes, "As we stood in line to get our hats and coats, Grange nudged me and showed me his hat check. In the middle of the yellow cardboard disk was the number 77. 'Has this ever happened to you before?' I said. 'Never,' he said, 'as far as I know.'"

Grange had saved nothing from the glory years, he told Heinz, not even an I-sweater from Illinois. The piece ends this way:

"We walked about three paces.
"'You know,' Grange said, 'I'd kind of like to have an I-sweater now.'"

In the early '90s, I received a letter with a return address somewhere in Vermont. I knew no one in Vermont. Turned out it was Bill Heinz. He read The Sporting News, the literary flophouse in which I resided happily for 15 years. He wanted to know why his yearly subscription called for 52 issues but he received only 48. For most readers, I would have answered politely, "Huh?" For this one, I did the requisite investigation and discovered that the Sporting News published four "double" issues a year, inflating the 48 to 52. By return mail, he thanked me and said he was sure I didn't need a pen pal, so I needn't bother to acknowledge his thanks. I took that to mean he needed no more letters from idolators.

Only when I truly needed him did I search him out. I did a book on Ali and Cosell. Heinz knew Cosell before Cosell was Cosell. To my everlasting delight, Heinz was extraordinarily helpful, even down to domestic details. "Our wives had meat-loaf cooking competitions, and Howard did play-by-play of the meals." He was just as helpful in talking about the mechanics of Muhammad Ali in the ring and his meaning outside the ring.

I spoke with him five or six times, the last after reading an anthology of his war correspondence when it seemed that he must have been in Belgium the same winter my father was there, the winter of the Battle of the Bulge. I wrote him a note saying as much, and telling him of my own visit to Bastogne, on a wintry day of blinding, whirling snow that, in my mind, at least, suggested that winter of '44. He called me, this man near 90 then, weak and struggling. He said something very nice. I treasure the words.

Had he even an ounce of Cosell's two tons of self-promotional ego, W.C. Heinz would be widely acknowledged today as a giant of the journalistic craft, a practitioner of the 'new' journalism before anyone thought to market it as 'new.' It's enough for me to know that Red Smith considered Bill Heinz a friend and a master.