America at Large:I had just turned 30 when I got a fan letter from David Halberstam. It was a short note, telling me how much he enjoyed the sports columns I was then writing for the Boston Phoenix. I was flattered, though probably not as deeply as I should have been. A decade earlier Halberstam had won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from Vietnam for the New York Times, but he had only a year or two earlier published The Best and the Brightest, the book that would catapult him to prominence.
That note was my first inkling Halberstam was interested in sports. He even mentioned he'd suggested to his publisher they contact me about doing a book. If that happened, somebody at Random House must have dropped the ball.
Over the ensuing three decades Halberstam would go on to write 20 more books, and at least half a dozen of them revolved around the world of sport: beginning with The Breaks of the Game, (of which Bob Ryan, the dean of American basketball writers, said "there has never been anything better written about the NBA, before or since"), he authored books on rowing (The Amateurs), baseball (The Summer of '49, October 1964, and The Teammates), Michael Jordan and the NBA (Playing for Keeps), and football (The Education of a Coach, a touching portrayal of the Patriots' Bill Belichick and his father, Steve.)
And when he was killed in a California car crash on Monday, Halberstam was on his way to visit Y.A. Tittle, the old New York Giants' quarterback, for a book he was writing about the 1958 NFL Championship game.
Between his Vietnam reportage for the Times and The Best and the Brightest, if Halberstam had never written about anything else his position in the pantheon of great journalists would be secure. And if he'd never published anything but his sports books, that body of work would still rank him among the best to ever write about that world. Although The Best and the Brightest is a scathing chronicle of how the US stumbled into its Vietnam disaster, when Halberstam was first dispatched to Southeast Asia by the Times he was still in his 20s and still a true believer. His subsequent cynicism developed from first-hand experience, but it wasn't long in developing.
As early as 1963 John F Kennedy demanded Halberstam be replaced at the Saigon bureau. (The Times not only refused, but cancelled a scheduled Halberstam vacation, lest anyone in Washington misinterpret his absence.) Kennedy's successor Lyndon Johnson described Halberstam as a "traitor to his country", and as White House files were unearthed in the wake of Watergate, it unsurprisingly came to light Halberstam's name occupied a prominent place in Richard Nixon's infamous "Enemies List". "I'm jealous," then Boston Globe columnist Marty Nolan told Halberstam. "But you were also on JFK's Enemies List. That one was a lot shorter."
Although he had introduced himself in that long-ago letter, nearly two decades would elapse before I met Halberstam, and since we were both in the presence of royalty that day in the press room at Fenway Park we barely had the opportunity to exchange pleasantries. Ted Williams was also there that afternoon, and was the centre of attention. Some years later David would write The Teammates, a touching account of the friendship between Williams and his fellow 1940s-era Red Sox players, Johnny Pesky and Bobby Doerr, and the dynamics of that relationship half a century later.
An esteemed financial writer once told me "You think I understand all this stuff? I make them explain it to me." That was the gift Halberstam brought to his forays into the world of sport. By assuming a posture of near-total naiveté, he would elicit patient explanations from his subjects in a manner that not only illuminated the topic at hand, but forced the principals to examine themselves in ways that might never have consciously occurred to them.
His widow, Jean Sandness, this week described Halberstam's sports books as "his entertainments - his way to take a break", but in an interview a few years ago David refused to draw distinctions between "the supposedly serious books and the supposedly not-so-serious books". He was a man for all seasons, and they were all serious to him. His obituaries described him as a "journalist, historian, and biographer", and not as a sportswriter, although he was that, too. A Renaissance man, Halberstam not only moved easily between those disparate worlds, but delighted in orchestrating mix-and-match occasions that brought them into juxtaposition.
The Teammates, for instance, was dedicated to "my teammate, Neil Sheehan," his Vietnam-era colleague who authored A Bright and Shining Lie. "He loved pulling people together," said Belichick. "He knew everything and everybody, but not in a know-it-all way."
After back-to-back sports books, Halberstam had just completed The Coldest Winter, a book about the Korean War. The night before he was killed he had delivered a lecture on "Turning Journalism Into History" at the University of California, and was en route to his interview with Tittle when the car in which he was riding was broadsided by another vehicle. He had just turned 73 a few weeks earlier.
Far be it from me to suggest another man's epitaph, but a couple of possibilities spring to mind. In Vietnam, he revealed in a "letter" to his then two-year-old daughter published 25 years ago, "I kept on my desk a small quote from Albert Camus which he had written during France's war in Algeria: 'I should like to be able to love my country and love justice'."
Another nomination might come from a recent interview at a New York TV station, in which Halberstam answered a question about his indefatigable work habits by quoting the basketball player Julius Erving: "Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don't feel like doing them."
