What A Time It Was: The Best of W. C. Heinz on Sports - Softcover

W. C. Heinz

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0306810433 ISBN 13: 9780306810435

Publisher: Da Capo Press, 2001

Synopsis

Many think that W. C. Heinz stands right alongside the legendary New York Times columnist Red Smith as the greatest sports writer of the 1940s and '50s. Paving the way for the New Journalism of Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, and Jimmy Breslin, Heinz was the first sports writer to make his living exclusively by writing for magazines. Whether describing mobbed-up boxers, crippled jockeys, lame horses, aspiring ballplayers, or driven football coaches, Heinz's finely etched, indelible portraits recall a sports era less influenced by money, image, and self-indulgence. He collaborated with Vince Lombardi on the book Run to Daylight, cowrote the novel M*A*S*H with Dr. H. Richard Hornberger under the pseudonym Richard Hooker, and wrote what Hemingway considered to be the "only good novel about a fighter I've ever read," The Professional. In this collection of Heinz's finest writing, we meet the immortal Red Grange; the injury-riddled, "purest baseball player" of his era, Pistol Pete Reiser; the greatest pound-for-pound fighter of all time, Sugar Ray Robinson; and the Brownsville Bum, Bummy Davis, in a story that Jimmy Breslin calls the "best magazine sports story of all time." Here is a long-overdue homage to a vastly underappreciated writer.

About this title

About the Author

W. C. Heinz is the coauthor of Run to Daylight, the best-selling autobiography of Vince Lombardi, and MASH, the novel that later became a successful movie and TV series. Da Capo recently published an omnibus collection of his best sportswriting, What a Time It Was. W. C. Heinz lives in Vermont.

From the Inside Flap

"Tells his stories the way Heifitz fiddled or Hopper painted, or the way Willie Pep boxed--with a kind of lyrical understatement." (Jeff McGregor, Sports Illustrated)

"No one will ever produce work of comparable range." (Vanity Fair, Hall of Fame inductee, July 2002)

Selected as the "It Lit Comeback" (Entertainment Weekly, June 2002)

"Every W.C. Heinz sentence is as clear and cold as an ice cube." (Elmore Leonard)

"One of the most respected sportswriters of the 20th century, a peer of Damon Runyon, A. J. Liebling, and Red Smith." (Boston Herald)

Reviews

"It's a funny thing about people," begins the first piece, about the death of boxer Bummy Davis, in What a Time It Was: The Best of W.C. Heinz on Sports, exemplifying the well-bred wiseguy tone of New Journalism's forerunner. In the 1950s, writes David Halberstam in his foreword, "[m]ost daily sportswriting was pedestrian, some of it too hyped up, some of it more like words served up as oatmeal." Heinz, also a fiction writer, changed all that and set the stage for the 1960s journalism revolution undertaken by Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin and others. Whether in a profile of Vince Lombardi, a eulogy for a dead racehorse or an article about the shy and kindly former heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson, Heinz's writing is full of heart and gusto.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

In more than 60 years of writing for newspapers and magazines, Heinz has covered baseball, boxing, football, horse racing, and even bike races. But he has also written respected novels (The Professional), coauthored Vince Lombardi's Run to Daylight, and collaborated with H. Richard Hornberger to write the comic classic MASH under the joint pseudonym Richard Hooker. Drawing on both fiction and nonfiction written throughout his long and influential career, this new collection showcases his wide-ranging sports knowledge and enlightening narrative skill, whether the subject be the talented but accident-prone outfielder Pistol Pete Reiser or the original pound-for-pound fighting genius Sugar Ray Robinson. Heinz's anthology should be attractive to most public libraries and all sports collections. [Heinz had more entries than any other writer in the recent The Best American Sports Writing of the Century. Ed.] Morey Berger, St. Joseph's Hosp. Lib., Tucson, A.
- Morey Berger, St. Joseph's Hosp. Lib., Tucson, AZ
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Da Capo Press
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0306810433
• ISBN 13: 9780306810435
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 303