Even if you have little or no interest in sports, please play along with me.
Some sports stories that will lead you to write better
Red Smith and Gay Talese are among the authors you should read.
By Gary Gilson
May 6, 2023 at 1:00PM
I just read the obituary of Dick Groat who died April 27 at the age of 92. He was an All-America basketball player at Duke and an All-Star shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates.
His name appeared as an imprint on the first baseball glove I ever owned; his obit loosed a flood of sports memories for me.
On a shelf across from my desk sit 31 books on sports. I believe you would find the writing in many of them superb.
Some recommendations:
- Three of those books contain columns by Red Smith, the Pulitzer Prize winner who graced the pages of the New York Herald Tribune before he moved to the New York Times when the Herald Tribune died.
Smith didn't focus on hits and runs. He revealed character. This column ends with my favorite quote from his work.
- Gay Talese's "The Silent Season of a Hero," a profile of Joe DiMaggio, the New York Yankees' center fielder, whose record of hitting safely in 56 straight games has never been threatened.
Talese tells about a time when the retired DiMaggio was married to Marilyn Monroe; she joined him in Tokyo, after having entertained troops in Korea, and said, "Joe, you've never heard such cheering." He replied — softly: "Yes ... I have."
- Roger Angell, in "The Web of the Game," describes sitting at a 1981 college baseball game with Joe Wood, who pitched the Red Sox to the World Series championship in 1912. After receiving a master class from Wood, Angell pumped nuances of inside baseball into a reader's bloodstream.
Now, please indulge my enthusiasm as I once again quote a Red Smith column from the 1932 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, N.Y., where he and other reporters slogged through snow to cover events. He described the intrepid journalism of the dean of sportswriters:
"The late, great W.O. McGeehan, not one to wallow in drifts up to his navel merely to watch a case of arrested development leap off a mountain, covered the 1932 Winter Olympics from the hotel bar."
Gilson conducts writing workshops online. He can be reached through www.writebetterwithgary.com.
about the writer
Gary Gilson
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