I Wear My Wartime Coat in the Wind and Sleet

Still he is always an impressive figure at banquets such as this--an "immortal" sports writers called him, and that is how they have written about him and others like him, rarely suggesting that such heroes might ever be prone to the ills of mortal men, carousing, drinking, scheming; to suggest this would destroy the myth, would disillusion small boys, would infuriate rich me who own ball clubs and to whom baseball is a business dedicated to profit and in pursuit of which they trade mediocre players' flesh as casually as boys trade players' pictures on bubble-gum cards. And so the baseball hero must always act the part, must preserve the myth, and none does it better than DiMaggio, none is more patient when drunken old me grab an arm and ask, "Who's gonna take it this year, Joe?"

"The Silent Season of a Hero" by Gay Talese in Esquire (1966)

Current Reading
The Best American Sports Writing of the Century--Edited by David Halberstam and Glenn Stout

Meet Me in the Middle, The Middle of the Town

Why Major Dick Winters, ahem, Damian Lewis might just be the GREATEST actor of our time...

He married actress Helen McCrory on 4 July 2007 and has a daughter, Manon (born September 2006), and a son, Gulliver (born November 2007). They currently reside in Los Angeles. A well-known Liverpool fan; he was spotted performing the "Torres Bounce" in The Albert Pub, shortly before the Liverpool vs Chelsea Champions League Semi-Final First Leg of 22/04/2008.

Thanks, Wikipedia.

Current Reading

Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made by David Halberstam

P.S. Many thanks to Mr. Andrew Tuegel for bringing the Lewis-Liverpool connection to my attention.

I'll Bring Home the Turkey If You'll Bring Home the Bacon

Future Reading

1. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay: A Novel by Michael Chabon
2. Soldier: The Life of Colin Powell by Karen DeYoung
3. Ted Williams: The Biography of an American Hero by Leigh Montville
4. War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals by David Halberstam
5. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
6. A Man in Full by Tom Wolfe

When We Rise It's Like Strawberry Fields

Congratulations to Mr. John Middleton for correctly naming "Pride (In the Name of Love)" by U2 as the Friday Song of the Day.

If you own a fire-extinguisher shop in the Bay Area, you might be doing brisk business in the next two days.

After numerous attempts yesterday by protesters in London to disrupt the Olympic Torch relay, the eternal flame did not have an easier journey today in Paris.

What was supposed to be a majestic procession for the Olympic torch through the French capital was disrupted Monday as thousands of people from around Europe, many with Tibetan flags, massed to protest the passage of the flame, forcing police officers to bring the torch onto a bus to try to protect it and causing the torch to be extinguished at least once.

Following the events of the past two days, the torch will arrive in San Francisco on Wednesday as part of the sole American stop on the worldwide tour prior to the Beijing Games in August. Given the level of political activism in the Bay Area, it seems that the question is not if the relay will be disrupted by further protests but how the law enforcement authorities will handle such actions.
During a trip to San Francisco four years ago, I passed by City Hall during a protest rally related to the Chinese occupation of Tibet. I've never been much of betting man, but I would not be surprised in the least to see some of those participants involved in the torch relay on Wednesday but perhaps not in any kind of official capacity.

Almost four months out from the Opening Ceremonies on August 8th, world leaders are already making preliminary statements regarding possible boycotts of portions of the Games, although none have gone as far as to state they will entirely withdraw their team from the Olympics. I am of the mind that the issue of protesting the actions of the Chinese government in Tibet, Darfur, and China itself, should lie with the individual athletes.

Just as the image of Tommie Smith and John Carlos bowing their heads and raising their fists during "The Star Spangled Banner" was burned into the minds of Americans in 1968, the choice of whether to convey such a message of dissent should be placed in the hands of each Olympian in Beijing rather than subsumed under the type of blanket protest action that Jimmy Carter utilized against the U.S.S.R. in 1980 in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

After reading David Halberstam's The Amateurs and developing some sort of understanding for the depth of disappointment that many American Olympians felt in 1980 after Carter's announcement, it seems as though it would be a colossal mistake for any world leader to completely withdraw their nation's athletes from Beijing with the aim of rebuking Chinese policy.

Such is the Promise, Such is the Curse

On Friday, I mentioned the enshrinement of NY Times columnist David Brooks in the Running Down a Dream author/writer/columnist Hall-of-Fame. At the point when I made that famous declaration, said Hall-of-Fame was an entirely contrived entity, and I guess it still is, but I wanted to run with the idea and commit it to the firmament of the internet. That last clause is probably an oxymoron, but I'm moving ahead regardless.

If I had to construct my version of Canton, Grauman's Chinese Theater, or Cooperstown, it would look something like this:

First-Ballot Members (since Cooperstown had 5 initial members [Mathewson, Ruth, Wagner, Johnson, and Cobb] I'm going with 5 of my own) in no particular order:

David Halberstam

As if it were not enough to have written the definitive book on the Vietnam War (1972's The Best and the Brightest), the Pulitzer Prize-winner also authored one of the best sports books in the last half-century with 1980's The Breaks of the Game.

Over the years, he developed a pattern of alternating a book with a weighty theme with one that might seem of slighter import but to which he nonetheless applied his considerable reportorial muscles. “He was a man who didn’t have a lazy bone in his body,” said the writer Gay Talese, a close family friend. Obituary in the April 24, 2007 edition of the NY Times.

David Brooks

I was introduced to the writing of Brooks through the Op-Ed page of the NY Times, but his best work, at least in my opinion, is found in his two books, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There and On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense. When viewed as two parts of a larger whole, they represent one of the most accurate pictures of modern America that I have read.

Bill Simmons

Even though his rampant homerism for the Great Satan this year has been a bit too much to handle, the Sports Guy still holds down a spot in the Pantheon (I know, I'm mixing my metaphors), due to the fact that he has introduced me to The Ewing Theory, the Manning Face, the Levels of Losing, the Tyson Zone, and "Yup, these are my readers." His first book, Now I Can Die in Peace, chronicling the 2004 World Series run by the Red Sawx, may just be required bedtime reading for my (non-existent) children or grandchildren when the Rangers, Cowboys, and Liverpool still have not won a title.

Malcolm Gladwell

Out of the Top-5, Gladwell is easily the figure that I have read the least, but his ability to present technical, jargon-laden information in an engrossing and engaging manner is a skill that I greatly admire. Whether it was 2000's The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, 2005's Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, his pieces for the New Yorker, or his blog, almost all of Gladwell's writing makes me view the world in a new way that I had never before considered.

Jon Krakauer

Krakauer rose to prominence based on his first hand-account of the 1996 Everest Disaster in Into Thin Air, but 1990's Eiger Dreams: Ventures Among Men and Mountains, 1996's Into the Wild, and 2003's Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith are just as good, if not better than Into Thin Air. Krakauer's writing is reminiscent of the settings he describes: stark and often unforgiving. If the sign of a great writer is the ability to remove himself from the story and place the characters on center stage, Krakauer is surely near the pinnacle of the modern non-fiction genre.

Honorable Mention (Maybe next time, fellas)

• Ernest Hemingway
• John Grisham
• Stephen Ambrose
• John Steinbeck
• Bob Woodward
• Chuck Klosterman
• William Manchester
• Edmund Morris
• David McCullough
  
  
  
  

I Won't Tell You to Stay but I'm Coming to Much More

Perhaps it's because I'm generally a bigger fan of nonfiction than fiction, but after the outpouring of praise for Kurt Vonnegut at his recent death (praise that was well deserved), I think I'm going to miss David Halberstam more. I'll miss him like I miss other people that I've never met, but who have somehow influenced the way that I think and look at the world. Something like that.

• When he was killed in the car accident, he was on his way to interview someone for his next book. I don't think I want to be killed in a car accident, but that's how I want to go out of this world: Moving forward, looking ahead to the next thing on the horizon, and doing what I love.
• "He was a man who didn't have a lazy bone in his body."
• "A writer should be like a playwright — putting people on stage, putting ideas on stage, making the reader become the audience."
• His truthful reporting on the less than stellar Vietnam War efforts once led JFK to place a call with NY Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger asking for Halberstam's reassignment. Halberstam stayed on the Vietnam beat.
• "Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, even on days you don't feel like doing them."
  

He Lives on a Star That's Dying in the Night

Congratulations to Mr. Cody Blair for correctly naming "Holiday in Spain" by Counting Crows as the Sunday Song of the Day.

As I was turning off the TV after eating dinner, I caught a quick statement by the anchor that Pulitzer Prize winning author and journalist David Halberstam was killed today in a car accident. I realize that Halberstam was 73, but I was really caught off-guard by the news of his death. It seemed that he possessed the rare ability to write lucidly and authoritatively on a number of diverse subjects such as the Vietnam War, professional basketball, the 50's, and a Red Sox/Yankees pennant race in 1949.

Halberstam won the Pulitzer Prize in 1964 at the age of 30 (Thirty! At 23, I need to get on and cracking) for his reporting on the early stages of the Vietnam War. I actually have his definitive basketball book, The Breaks of the Game, waiting on me at home, but reading it now is going to be a bit bittersweet.