Sports Biblio Digest 11.18.18: William Goldman’s Sports Storytelling
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
Also In This Issue: Women and Sportswriting; Baseball History in Photos; CASEY Award Finalists; Baseball Prospectus Goes Indie; Babe Ruth and the Medal of Freedom; Lindsay Whalen
* * * * * * * *
The death of Oscar-winning screenwriter William Goldman this week prompted a flood of tributes and remembrances that spanned across a wide representation of the arts and entertainment worlds.
The novelistic and script genius behind “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “Marathon Man” and “The Princess Bride” and who also adapted “All the President’s Men” to the big screen was a master of multiple genres.
His famous phrases, those he wrote in his works and others he expressed in memoirs, are easily understandable and resonate today, especially about the film industry which at times he regarded with some skepticism:
“Nobody knows anything.”
In addition to his fiction, Goldman, who was 87, also delved into print non-fiction in “Wait Till Next Year,” the book he wrote with Mike Lupica about the 1987 sports season in New York City.
As noted when the book was first published, Goldman leads off with Dwight Gooden’s cocaine addiction, which served as the co-author’s vehicle for:
“A reverie about sports greatness—from an informed brief on 30's Chicago Bears wonder Bruno Nagurski to a stirring replay of Sandy Koufax's 1963 World Series feat of striking out 15 Yankees. Such tangents, mostly from Goldman, skid in and fade out with manic, sometimes dizzying, rapidity; among the highlights are pungent commentary on assorted sportscasters and a humorous meditation on fans' endemic worship of statistics.”
Lupica, the author of quite a few books, said this week that the collaboration with Goldman “was as much fun, and as much of an honor, as I had ever experienced in my career.”
Goldman admitted his lone sports title "was a total flop—it didn't work commercially—but it was a wonderful time for me."
Bill Simmons, a noted fan of Boston sports, called it one of the best sports books he’s read:
“As much as I like Lupica's contributions, Goldman is the one that takes the book to another level. The ultimate fan, he twists things around and looks at things from a non-traditional way. . . .Goldman's chapters made me think, "Why don't more people write about sports from a fan's perspective?"”
The duo met at Wimbledon, a decade before earlier, with Goldman attending matches with New York Knicks great Dave DeBusschere. Lupica said he wanted to talk about Goldman’s novels, but Goldman instead wanted to talk sports. They both thought the other had the best job in the world.
Given the vast range of work they’ve both produced, I’d call it a glorious and envious toss-up.
Goldman’s exacting standards, and the commercial demands of Hollywood, may have rendered his judgment about “Wait Till Next Year” understandable.
For a writer who got into film work after writing for television, the theatre and books, Goldman worked during an era when those platforms were blending with growing frequency.
His adaptation of Stephen King’s “Misery” for the screen and the stage is a typical example, and Goldman was asked often how he managed it:
“You cross your fingers and never stop. Praying is also good.”
Being averse to Hollywood’s insular culture also distinguished Goldman, who lived in New York City for most of his adult life. In his memoir “Adventures in the Screen Trade,” He understood the singular quality that was required to realize such creative ambitions, which he made look much easier than he knew was true:
“Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it. Putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before. And although you are physically by yourself, the haunting Demon never leaves you, that Demon being the knowledge of your own terrible limitations, your hopeless inadequacy, the impossibility of ever getting it right. No matter how diamond-bright your ideas are dancing in your brain, on paper they are earthbound.
“You tell yourself lies and you force them into belief: Hey, you suckers, I’m going to do it this one time. I’m going to tell you things you never knew. I’ve—got—secrets!”
That’s because he was animated, over the course of a glittering career that lasted many decades, by a singular desire:
“All I ever wanted to do was tell my stories.”
Gender and Sportswriting
At Ozy, Michelle Bruton makes the case for more female contributions for “The Best American Sports Writing” anthology. Jane Leavy has been the only female guest editor in its 27-year history and female bylines are not that common, though they’ve been spiking up in recent years. Bruton acknowledges these are the functions of few women in the industry, and I suspect the numbers are down from when I left the newspaper world a decade ago.
While I appreciate the sentiment, media navel-gazing over “diversity” has always chastened me. I’ve benefited from efforts to hire more women in sports departments but have never thought of the work I’ve done, or the perspectives I have about sports, as reflecting my gender alone. I’ve been someone who has written about sports who also happens to be female.
Being a woman is a big part of my identity, but it’s only one part of who I am. While it has informed my sportswriting to a certain extent (I championed more coverage of women’s sports at the Atlanta J-C when more established female writers elsewhere couldn’t run fast enough from being pigeonholed in such a way), my status as a typical sports fan growing up in baby boom America has driven my work much more.
I’m no different than the boys I grew up with, who listened to games on transistor radios, traded baseball cards, read Sports Illustrated and memorized stats and trivia. Yet during the 1970s, I was an oddity as a girl in that respect, a “tomboy” at the dawn of the Title IX era, an epithet meant to hurt me but that I turned into a term of defiance and pride.
It provided some comfortable armor as I progressed from being a softball-playing suburban kid to a full-fledged adult stepping inside smelly, sordid football locker rooms and navigating press boxes teeming with chain-smoking men from Asia, Latin America and Europe at the Olympics and World Cup.
Today, in too many corners of the American media (all of them, in fact), cultural identity is all the rage, full of fury and hand-wringing, but without much in the way of solutions other than hire more ________ (race, gender, identity marking of your choice) and then hire some more.
I don’t like the obsession with bean-counting numbers and percentages of hires, and above all, the notion that if you belong to a certain group you must think like everyone else in that group, or want the same things they do. To think that you know someone because of their skin pigmentation, biology, religion or ethnicity is not to know them as people, but as abstractions.
Today’s diversity proponents have reduced individual talent, ambition and life circumstances into a reductionist game to fit their grim idea of “representation.” Hiring more women, or minorities, won’t necessarily make sportswriting, or any other endeavor, “better” in and of itself.
The obstacles for women writing sports today are related primarily to the upheavals in the media industry, and that in truth that are wiping out middle-aged and older white men in devastating numbers. The barriers that I, and especially women before me, had to traverse are unknowable to today’s younger generation of women. Bruton’s piece reflects a glaring lack of historical perspective.
While I’ve long admired the work of Leavy, Sally Jenkins, Claire Smith, Lesley Visser, Robin Herman and other trailblazers, the real diversity that all good writers should strive for, regardless of identity, is within the capacity of their individual intellect, curiosity and ability to find, and tell, great stories.
In that respect, “Best American Sports Writing” has never been more diverse, or richly illustrative of the emerging stories and voices that are increasingly finding their ideal transmitters.
A Few Good Reads
Just off the presses: An excerpt from the newly-published “The Story of Baseball in 100 Photographs,” from the editors of Sports Illustrated (Time, Inc. Books);
At the White House this week, President Trump handed out Medal of Freedom Awards that included Roger Staubach, Alan Page, Elvis Presley and Babe Ruth, whose exclusion until now, as the 14th baseball honoree, is absolutely confounding;
At the New York Post, Ken Davidoff ruminates on the Cy Young Awards and says that “baseball’s dumbest stat” has got to go;
The senior staff of Baseball Prospectus is going indie, after purchasing the 20-year-old analytics-based site from corporate ownership and promising its subscriber base it wants to make the service “feel like the old Baseball Prospectus with a new cutter;”
The finalists for the 2018 CASEY Award have been released by Spitball magazine, and this year’s collection of baseball books (including a biography of Tom Yawkey) figures to be a tough selection for the judges who will announce the winner in March;
Ken Willard played for the San Francisco 49ers from 1965-73 and remains fourth on the franchise’s all-time rushing list with 5,960 yards. He’s right behind Roger Craig, who helped surprise Willard when he was recently named an honorary captain by paying for Willard’s granddaughters to be flown in from South Carolina for that moment;
One of my favorite basketball players ever is no longer playing, and it makes me sad. Lindsay Whalen, who won four Olympic gold medals and four WNBA titles with the Minnesota Lynx, has just started her first season as the head coach of the Minnesota Golden Gophers, whom she led to a Women’s Final Four in 2004. I’ve often said I wish she could play forever, but she’ll probably never be far from the courts that made her one of the women’s games true legends. I hope Springfield awaits her someday.
* * * * * * * *
The Sports Biblio Digest is an e-mail newsletter delivered each Sunday. You can subscribe here and search the archives.
This is Digest issue No. 143, published Nov. 18, 2018.
I’d love to hear what you think about the Digest, and Sports Biblio. Send feedback, suggestions, book recommendations, review copies, newsletter items and interview requests to Wendy Parker at sportsbiblio@gmail.com.
You can also follow Sports Biblio on Twitter and hit the “like” button on Facebook.