In an interview several years ago, Jimmy Breslin told me that "Brownsville Bum" was "the greatest magazine sports story I've ever read, bar none. It should be required reading in all journalism classes."
Bill Heinz Was a Writer to Relish
By ALLEN BARRA
In 1946, Damon Runyon was dying of throat cancer and could scarcely speak. A magazine editor asked him who, in his opinion, was the best young writer in New York. Runyon scrawled the name W.C. Heinz on a cocktail napkin and passed it to him. He had underlined Heinz's name three times.
Wilfrid Charles Heinz
.Or so the legend goes. Wilfrid Charles Heinz (he preferred "Bill"), who died last Thursday at age 93, was the kind of person around whom great stories collected. I once asked him if all the things said about him were true. "Not all," he told me, "but what's interesting is that they all could be true."
Mr. Heinz was a novelist, war correspondent, and, in the judgment of most of his contemporaries, the best sportswriter of his era. And you can add Bill Heinz's name to the list of people who thought Bill Heinz was the best. "Red [Smith] was the best columnist," he related to me, "and A.J. Liebling was the best essayist. I suppose there's a lot of guys about whom you could say 'he was the best sportswriter,' and I'm one of them. But I think I probably was better more often than any of the others."
In his biography of Vince Lombardi, "When Pride Still Mattered," David Maraniss said that Mr. Heinz "was a perfectionist with a clean and unencumbered style, always seeking the precise word, phrase, metaphor that would convey his meaning perfectly." Gay Talese wrote that "W.C. Heinz put literary standards in the world of games." Ernest Hemingway, who sent him a fan letter after reading his 1958 boxing novel, "The Professional," thought he had put the world of games into literature.
If the world didn't know Mr. Heinz's name better, it's possibly because he shared the bylines of his best-known books. In 1962 he went to Green Bay, Wis., to collaborate on a book with football coach Lombardi, who was on the verge of becoming a legend. After weeks of prying information out of the reserved coach (and, when Mr. Lombardi was out of the house, from his more voluble wife, Marie), Mr. Heinz wrote "Run to Daylight!" -- one of the first best sellers about professional football and the one that, in the opinion of many, established the sport as a viable literary subject. Published in 1963, today a first edition of "Run to Daylight!" can fetch as much as $15,000 from collectors.
Mr. Heinz's biggest seller, though, grew out of his successful 1963 novel, "The Surgeon," written with the assistance of a noted physician named J. Maxwell Chamberlain. A former pupil of Chamberlain's wrote Mr. Heinz a letter that read, in part, "That clown . . . might be interested that I have a book I put together from my experiences in Korea." The doctor, H. Richard Hornberger, sent Mr. Heinz his manuscript, and after a year of collaboration and rewriting, the result was "M*A*S*H," the genesis of Robert Altman's groundbreaking 1970 film and, later, the hugely successful TV series. "M*A*S*H" was published under the joint pseudonym Richard Hooker (but Mr. Heinz had no connection with the subsequent M*A*S*H novels).
Mr. Heinz paid his dues as the old New York Sun's war correspondent in Europe during World War II, during which he witnessed D-Day, an execution of German spies, the Allied liberation of Paris, and the horrendous slaughter in the Huertgen Forest (where, he wrote, "In a place that had once known a cathedral's quiet...they were dying between the trees and among the ferns").
When the Sun closed in 1950, Mr. Heinz turned to profiling athletes and sports figures for magazines, a practice at which he excelled. David Halberstam, who picked three Heinz pieces for his 1999 anthology, "The Best American Sportswriting of the Century," wrote that Mr. Heinz was "one of the pioneers who helped break down the form." His breakthrough was a 1951 piece for True magazine called "Brownsville Bum," about Bummy Davis, a former middleweight boxer turned thug who redeemed himself in the public's eye when he died taking on two hoodlums with his bare hands. In an interview several years ago, Jimmy Breslin told me that "Brownsville Bum" was "the greatest magazine sports story I've ever read, bar none. It should be required reading in all journalism classes."
Perhaps the lasting legacy of Bill Heinz is something he told me in a phone interview 15 years ago. What, I asked him, was the greatest lesson he had learned in nearly half a century of sportswriting? His answer was surprising. "In the end, all of us -- fans, writers, coaches, athletes -- have something in common: We're all losers. Everybody is a loser, let's face it. None of us wins all the time, in games or in life, not Joe DiMaggio, not Muhammad Ali. And none of us is going to live forever." But the work of one sportswriter just might.
Mr. Barra writes about sports for the Journal. Write to Allen Barra at
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