RIP, W.C. Heinz

To be clear, I'm nowhere near that region.

 

Dave, thanks for that wonderful post.

 

One of the sections I've always liked about "Rocky Road of Pistol Pete" is the first scene where Heinz meets Reiser. I love the choices of which details Heinz decided to include. There is nothing overdone, just the perfect brush strokes to set the scene.

So at 5 o'clock I took a cab from the hotel in Kokomo to the ball park on the edge of town. It seats about 2,200, 1,500 of them in the white-painted fairgrounds grandstand along the first base line, and the rest in chairs behind the screen and in bleechers along the other line.

I watched them take batting practice; trim, strong young kids with their dreams, I knew, of someday getting up there where Pete once was, and I listened to their kidding. I watched the groundskeeper open the concession booth and clean out the electric popcorn machine. I read the signs on the outfield walls, advertising the Mid-West Towel and Linen Service, Basil's Nite Club, the Hoosier Iron Works, UAW Local 292 and the Around the Clock Pizza Cafe'. I watched the Dubuque kids climbing out of their bus, carrying their uniforms on wire coat hangers.

"Here comes Pete now," I heard the old guy setting up the ticket box at the gate say.

When Pete came through the gate he was walking like an old man. In 1941 the Dodgers trained in Havana, and one day they clocked him, in his baseball uniform and regular spikes, at 9.8 for 100 yards. Five years later the Cleveland Indians were bragging about George Case and the Washington Senators had Gil Coan. The Dodgers offered to bet $1,000 that Reiser was the fastest man in baseball, and now it was taking him forever to walk to me, his shoulders stooped, his whole body heavier now, and Pete just slowly moving one foot ahead of the other.

"Hello," he said, shaking hands but his face solemn. "How are you?"

"Fine," I said, "but what's the matter with you?"

"I guess it's my heart," he said.

 

For some reason I just remembered Heinz's short story, "One Throw," about the scout Eddie Brown and a prospect. I read it when I was just a kid, 10, 11, and it always stuck with me - for those who don't know the story it's a very clever, adept and understated story with a big moving lesson in it.

Years later, after I knew who Heinz was, and then read the story and then put two and two together, I was amazed. The story was as good at 25 as it was at 10, and it was just as good when I read it today.

So you not only write across six or seven generations, but across the entire scope of another person's life, and all with a story nearly fifty years old today.

 

During middle school, during the first years when I would have preferred to remain planted at my desk with the Sports section and a pile of magazines than to copy notes about French or algebra or some chemistry that has already faded from my mind, I started to read old sports anthology. Nothing in particular, just whatever I was able to find at the library. I read book after book, anything that could keep me from homework for a little longer. At some point during the fourth or fifth anthology, I read a story by W.C. Heinz. It might have "The Brownsville Bum" or "The Rocky Road of Pistol Pete." I don't remember. Before I returned it to the library, I read that story probably 10 times, and the only reason I did return the book was because I wanted others to read it.

A year or two later, I found the same anthology at a bargain books table for a dollar or two. I picked it up without opening it. It's in my bookcase now. I need to go read it.

 

I haven't read posts for a couple of days so did not know about the passing of W.C. Heinz until about 30 minutes ago when I read it on another list. Immediately came here to read what people who knew him would post. His book, Once They Heard The Cheers, is without question, my favourite book of sports journalism although most of his best-known pieces are collected in What a Time It Was. RIP.

 

(One of the best, John Schulian, did an appreciation for the LA Times. Only perfect.)
********

"W.C. Heinz put a human face on every subject"

By John Schulian, Special to The Times
March 1, 2008

I was 12 the first time I read W.C. Heinz. I've never forgotten the story: "The Rocky Road of Pistol Pete." It was a bittersweet look at Pete Reiser, undone by his own fearlessness when he was the Brooklyn Dodgers' golden child and marooned years later as a bush league manager with a bad heart and a rattletrap Chevy.

You wouldn't think a kid plowing through True magazine's 1957 Baseball Annual would care, but I did. And even today what Bill Heinz wrote still gets me in the heart and the gut.
He was a master of the crystalline sentence, an understated craftsman who put a human face on every subject from busted-luck ballplayers and boxers to surgeons and dogface soldiers. More than that, he was part of history. In the middle of the 20th century, he stood shoulder to shoulder with Red Smith, Jimmy Cannon and the too-often-forgotten John Lardner as they turned sportswriting into something approaching literature, like water into wine.

When Bill died the other day at 93, after outliving all the others and almost every newspaper and magazine he worked for, you could look around and see his influence wherever words count for something. It's there in the books of David Halberstam and Elmore Leonard, and the newspaper columns of Jimmy Breslin and the stylized journalism of a new generation with no idea that Bill blazed the trail for them by applying the tools of fiction -- scenes, character, dialogue -- to his meticulous reporting.

For all I know, the seed for my own short, mostly happy life as a full-time sportswriter was planted when I read his Pete Reiser story. On my way to the press box, I came across more of his work in the old "Best Sports Stories" anthologies, and once I got where I was going, I heard about something else he'd written, a 1958 boxing novel called "The Professional." It was a revelation: a flinty-eyed yet profoundly compassionate study of a middleweight fighter and his aging manager chasing a championship in a sport that crushes true hearts. The ending is so sad that Bill had to spend a day walking in the woods around his Vermont home to gather the courage to write it.

Ernest Hemingway, who admired "The Professional" as much as anyone, said you could read it only once. Hemingway was wrong. I've read it a half-dozen times, always with the sensation of learning something new about an old friend. I've written about it too. The first time I did, in 1992, Bill sent me a thank-you note that remains a prized possession.

But the important thing, to me at least, is what happened a few years later. I'd been working in Hollywood for nearly a decade by then, and a producer I knew got it in his head to turn "The Professional" into a movie. Walter Matthau had had the same idea and had gotten nowhere. Peter Falk fared no better. But the producer asked me to call this guy W.C. Heinz anyway, just to sound him out.

When Bill answered the phone at his home in Vermont, I introduced myself by saying he probably wouldn't remember my name.

"Sure I do," he said. "Every time I get depressed, I read that piece you wrote about 'The Professional.' "

The producer wound up taking a one-year option on the novel, but once again no movie came of it. Bill's disappointment was palpable -- God, how he loved "The Professional." And there was nothing I could do to buoy his spirits when I wrote a screenplay based on his stories about Lew Jenkins, a wild-haired Texan who drank and floozied himself out of the world lightweight championship and found redemption fighting in the Korean War. Hollywood didn't buy that, either.

But Bill and I stayed in touch by letter and telephone. Though we never laid eyes on each other, never shook hands, sat down for coffee or any of the other things friends do, I like to think that friends is what we were for the last dozen years of his life.

At first we talked about the obvious: politics, pro football, the invasion of TV by sports-page gasbags. "All that lecturing, all that talking," he said. "What the hell is that about?"

In time, Bill revealed more of his inner self, starting with his frustration over the cataracts that would rob him of the sight in one eye and leave the other touch-and-go. I heard the grief in his voice in 2002 when he told me his wife, Betty, had died. And I could sense the unease beneath his rueful chuckle as he talked about his move to a care facility three years later. "If I'm not downstairs eating," he said, "they come up to make sure I'm still alive."

Once in a while, he would mention that someone whose name I recognized had been up to visit him -- Halberstam or Ken Burns or Bob Costas. But there was never any talk about why he attracted such attention, just as there was never a word about his collaborating with Vince Lombardi on "Run to Daylight" or co-authoring the novel "MASH."

Where others might have reveled in self-promotion, Bill cared only about doing a job right, treating it with respect. The essence of the man could be found in his ethos: "Don't admire yourself. Admire your work."

How fitting that in Bill's final years, two collections of his journalism were published, his sportswriting in "What a Time It Was" and his World War II correspondence in "When We Were One." There was no hiding how he felt about the pieces they contained, pieces dating all the way back to his days at the New York Sun. "I read them," he told me, "and I said, 'Hey, this is pretty good.' "

When he sent me a copy of "What a Time It Was," it wasn't just autographed, it was personally copy edited. Failing eyesight be damned, he had tracked down every typographical error and corrected them all in blue ink and block letters as precise as his prose. That was Bill Heinz for you, a professional to the end.

 

From today's Times:

Clack-Clang-Z-z-z-i-i-i-p: Music From a Maestro

By DAVE ANDERSON
Published: March 2, 2008

Maybe you noticed the typewriter in the photo of the writer W. C. Heinz that accompanied his obituary in The New York Times on Thursday. He was holding the typewriter lovingly, with the keyboard facing out, as if he were presenting a trophy or displaying a cake before it was cut.

During an era rife with memorable New York sports columnists, W. C. Heinz was one of the best.

Writers were like that with their typewriters, when there were typewriters. With laptop computers now, there’s never much of a bond because sooner or later, the computer either dies or there’s a new and better computer. But a sturdy typewriter simply needed a new ribbon or a cleaning every so often. And whenever Wilfred Charles Heinz, who preferred Bill, wrote seriously from the 1940s to his death at 93 last Wednesday, he wrote on that Remington portable in the photo.

And what a writer.

In a time when New York newspaper readers were blessed with Red Smith, Jimmy Cannon and Frank Graham as sports columnists, Bill Heinz was as good as, and often better than, any of them. As a sports columnist myself, I’ve never thought I could carry his typewriter, but I once handled it.

Before he wrote sports, Bill was a World War II correspondent in Europe for the old New York Sun, where, as a 16-year-old copy boy in the summer of 1945, I was in charge of the supply room for an hour a day while Harry Brown was on vacation. I gave out typewriter ribbons, stationery, whatever.

One day a mailman delivered a large package addressed to Harry Brown, The Sun, 280 Broadway, New York, N.Y.

On the brown paper wrapping were a “Handle With Care” sticker and the word “typewriter” in red ink. In the upper left-hand corner were “W. C. Heinz” and his military address. The war was over, he was coming home and he had shipped his typewriter to the office. I didn’t dare open the package. I put it on an empty shelf all by itself, and when I got home that night, I told my mother, “I handled Bill Heinz’s typewriter.”

Other teenagers would have been more thrilled to have gripped one of Joe DiMaggio’s bats or put on one of Joe Louis’s boxing gloves, but I preferred Bill Heinz’s typewriter.

When he returned, Bill wrote sports, mostly about boxers. In 1948 he became The Sun’s lead sports columnist. His words always moved you. I remember a column titled “Death of a Racehorse” in 1949, when a touted a 2-year-old colt named Air Lift broke his left ankle running in the sixth at Jamaica and had to be put down.

“There was a short sharp sound,” he wrote, “and the colt toppled onto his left side, his eyes staring, his legs straight out, the free legs quivering. ‘Aw —,’ somebody said. That was all they said. They worked quickly, the two vets removing the broken bones as evidence for the insurance company, the crowd silently watching.

“Then the heavens opened, the rain pouring down, the lightning flashing, and they rushed for the cover of the stables, leaving alone on his side near the pile of bricks, the rain running off his hide, dead an hour and a quarter after his first start, Air Lift, son of Bold Venture, full brother of Assault.”

After The Sun folded in 1950, Bill wrote for magazines, mostly The Saturday Evening Post and True. He wrote “The Professional,” which Ernest Hemingway called “the only good novel I’ve ever read about a fighter.” Bill and Dr. Richard Hornberger, under the pseudonym Richard Hooker, collaborated to write “M*A*S*H.”

He collaborated with Vince Lombardi on the classic book “Run to Daylight!” that, in Lombardi’s voice, turned the coach and his Green Bay Packers of the 1962 season into literature.

“When you are flat you’re always looking for that big play or that big man who will bring you out of it,” he had Lombardi saying. “Ray Nitschke has a lot of this on the defense for us, and on the offense, when he’s in shape, we get it from Hornung. If it isn’t Paul, Jimmy Taylor will bust through and, when two or three hit him, bull them off and pick up our whole club at the same time.”

Bill moved to Vermont to stay many years ago, but he returned to New York for Red Smith’s memorial service at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1982. That day we remembered when he, in doing a piece for Life magazine, drove the rookie quarterback Joe Namath to his first Jets training camp. Years later, Bill sent me a note about a writer who was doing a biography of Namath.

“Maybe he’s doing a series,” Bill wrote, “on great men who changed the world: Namath, Napoleon, Socrates, Caesar and Jake LaMotta.”

He had printed those words in black ink on a W. C. Heinz notecard. They weren’t serious enough to be typed on the old Remington portable that I once handled in The Sun’s supply room.

 

One column from someone under 50 -- except jmac -- would be nice.

 

I do not say this maliciously, when I note:

You'll get old, waiting.

 

I can get older?
Damn you, Ben.

UPDATE -- And Inky Wretch comes through.
http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Editorial/218576

 

For the record: I am not Kane Webb, but I am a fan of his writing.