It's not even close to accurate to describe David Halberstam as a sportswriter, although he wrote about sports as well as any writer I've ever read. And it's not enough to call him a historian because he was an on-the-scene journalist worthy of a Pulitzer Prize. Nor is it doing him justice to call him a war correspondent, civil rights authority or chronicler of the powerful although he was all of those things and was good at being all of those things. I think it's probably most apt to call Halberstam an oracle of 20th century America in all of it's many forms. The great things and the travesties; the bright moments and those occluded by shadows; the larger than life and the barely remembered; all of those things made their way into his books and our knowledge of our country and our history is all the richer for them.
Halberstam died yesterday in a car accident in California where he was speaking to students at Berkeley before heading off to interview Y.A. Tittle for a book about the 1958 NFL Championship Game. That was a fitting topic for Halberstam, who had already written The Fifties and touched on the game that launched the NFL on it's trajectory toward what it is today. That was just one of the books I read by Halberstam and like all the others it made a great impact on me. His two baseball books, Summer of '49 and October 1964, painted a picture of a time when baseball was America and the Yankees were its princes. The vivid descriptions of battles with the Red Sox and Cardinals helped this Yankee fan understand the history and impact his team made on the sport and the country while introducing me to names like Ellis Kinder, Tommy Henrich and Curt Simmons. All three are part of why I love baseball and I have Halberstam to thank for bringing them into my orbit.
But it was The Breaks of the Game, a book I've talked about on these pages before, that made me swoon at the temple of Halberstam. A diary of the 1979-80 Portland Trail Blazers season that went far beyond the court, Breaks is simply as good a book as I've ever read. When I read it sometime in the early 90's it was impossible to believe that it was written in the past, so prescient was it about the path that basketball, and all sports, would take over the intervening years. Some of the stories, especially that of Billy Ray Bates, the sharecropper turned shooting guard, are too fantastic to be fiction. Television, race, drugs, exploding salaries and petulent superstars are all there in spades and Halberstam weaves them altogether to tell the story of a championship team coming apart at the seams. If you haven't read it, I can't recommend it highly enough, and if you haven't read any Halberstam you should go out and get one of his books. I'm pretty sure it won't be the last one you read.
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