People always ask me what the best part about writing a sports column in New York City is. If they have enough time, I may even give them the full, unabridged answer, or if they're in a rush I tell them the Reader's Digest version, which is this:
Everything.
That's not being flip. That's not being glib. Honestly, the column I've written for the Post for the past 4 1/2 years -- and the column I wrote for the Star-Ledger for the four years priot to that -- have been precisely what I always dreamed the job would be back when I first started dreaming about it ... which would have been around age 10 or so.
I've seen the Yankees win four World Series. I watched the Devils win a Stanley Cup. I saw the Nets on the brink of two NBA titles, and the Knicks on the brink of one. I've covered seven World Series, six Super Bowls, four Final Fours, three Masters, three U.S. Opens. I watched the Red Sox end an 86-year drought, and the White Sox end an 86-year drought. I saw Larry Johnson's four-point play from the front row, and Derek Jeter's flip from the press box.
And those are just the highest of the highlights. In New York City, if you work for a newspaper, you've always had, to quote the man who used to occupy my space at the Post, Larry Merchant, "a ringside seat at the circus." It's not that it's hard not to be busy; it's that it's impossible to understand why you wouldn't want to be so busy.
Here's the thing, though: if you had the same job in 1941, especially at this point of the calendar, it would make the schedule of a columnist in 2007 seem positively mundane by comparison. That's one of the things I kept coming back to as I did my research for "1941: The Greatest Year in Sports."
One of the fellows whose daily work I digested in its entirety was a man by the name of Stanley Frank. Frank had a long and distinguished career in newspapers and later as an author, and in the weeks following June 6, 1944, he was actually sent home by the state department because he wanted to write about the French invasion in the way he was trained to do it, rather than regurgitating the PR pap fed him by the rear-echelon generals.
Frank had covered the Yankees for the Post for many years, and in 1941 he was promoted to their lead sports columnist -- the exact job I have now. The papers are significantly different of course -- there was no Sunday Post in 1941; it was an afternoon paper then, a morning paper now; it leaned way left then, and tilts to the right now -- but the job was exactly the same.
And this is what Stanley Frank got to do, every day of his life, as May gave way to June in 1941:
* He covered Whirlaway at the Belmont Stakes, as the beloved "Mr. Longtail" completed the final leg of the Triple Crown. He got to spend some quality time with Eddie Arcaro, Whirlaway's rider, some of it while sitting around Toots Shor's famos circular bar.
* He covered Lou Gehrig's funeral, and eulogized Gehrig in the newspaper, a sobering assigment no doubt that nevertheless produced some of the most elegan copy of his career.
* He covered Joe DiMaggio every day he played a home game that month, which meant he saw the Yankees play 12 games against the Indians, White Sox, Tigers and Brown (the "western teams," as they were known in 1941), and every time he went to Yankee Stadium he saw Joe DiMaggio collect at least one base hit.
* On June 18, he was ringside for the Joe Louis-Billy Conn fight, and for the two weeks preceding he spent a good portion of time at both fighters' camps. He picked Louis to win the fight easily -- who didn't? -- but was delighted to be able to describe just how wrong he was in his account for the June 19 newspaper.
* And every day, as he went to the Post's offices and read his mail and filled out his expense forms he heard the ratta-tatta-tatta of the news wires as they kept feeding the newsroom updates about some of the unspeakable things plaguing the world. "Sometimes," he wrote, "I wonder what business we have caring about sports in a world gone mad. And then I realize, we need sports more now than ever before."
That could have been the sub-title of the book, now that I think of it. Spoken -- and written -- like a true Posty.
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Why 1941?
For my debut entry on this blog, I just wanted to say a quick thank-you to everyone who's expressed an interest in reading "1941," and all of you who've already pre-ordered. I'd like this to be a regular conversation between me and you, talking about anything that needs to be talked about, whether it's about 1941 or 2007.
People have asked me all the time why I was drawn to this subject, and at first glance it may seem as if 1941 was selected randomly from a hat (or so says Publisher's Weekly, which also throws the word "macabre" around as if this were an homage to Stephen King. That, I can assure you, it is not).
Really, the germ for the idea came from a conversation I had with Phil Rizzuto in an elevator at Yankee Stadium during the 2001 World Series. As you may recall, there were a lot of heavy hearts everywhere in the city, still, during those final days of October and early days of November. There was still a smoldering ruin in lower Manhattan. People seemed ambivalent about caring too deeply about sports yet, with 9/11 still so fresh in the memory.
It was Scooter who made the parallel about 1941. He'd been a rookie that year, had received his draft notice in spring training and realized that for all anyone knew, this could be it for life as we'd always known it. "It was a terrifying time to be young," Rizzuto told me, "because if you were healthy enough to hit a baseball you were certainly healthy enough to shoot a rifle."
Then he said the thing that stuck with me most.
"You read the sports section a lot," he said, "because you were afraid of what you'd see in the other parts of the paper."
And really, in our world of 2007, there's a lot of the same to explain our national fascination with sports. It really is one of the last legal narcotics, a way to separate ourself from the real and the surreal of every day life, away from Paris Hilton and Britney Spears and also the horrors of war and suffering and the daily pulse of human tragedy. New York dived into that 2001 World Series as a healing salve, same as New Orleans turned to this year's Saints as a way to overcome Katrina, same as San Francisco and Oakland used the 1989 World Series as a balm from the shattering earthquake that interrupted that series for ten days.
What made 1941 unique, though, was the fact that every day, it seemed, someone legendary was doing something legendary. DiMaggio. Williams. Louis. Greenberg. Even Bobby Riggs, who'd later gain lasting infamy, was one of sport's genuine heroes in 1941. I can tell you, as a guy who spent a lot of time reading old newspapers, it was a heck of a time to be alive, because you could be scared stiff one minute and thrilled to goose bumps the next. I wanted to capture that in this book; I hope I did; I hope you enjoy.
Till next time. Thanks for reading.
Mike Vaccaro
People have asked me all the time why I was drawn to this subject, and at first glance it may seem as if 1941 was selected randomly from a hat (or so says Publisher's Weekly, which also throws the word "macabre" around as if this were an homage to Stephen King. That, I can assure you, it is not).
Really, the germ for the idea came from a conversation I had with Phil Rizzuto in an elevator at Yankee Stadium during the 2001 World Series. As you may recall, there were a lot of heavy hearts everywhere in the city, still, during those final days of October and early days of November. There was still a smoldering ruin in lower Manhattan. People seemed ambivalent about caring too deeply about sports yet, with 9/11 still so fresh in the memory.
It was Scooter who made the parallel about 1941. He'd been a rookie that year, had received his draft notice in spring training and realized that for all anyone knew, this could be it for life as we'd always known it. "It was a terrifying time to be young," Rizzuto told me, "because if you were healthy enough to hit a baseball you were certainly healthy enough to shoot a rifle."
Then he said the thing that stuck with me most.
"You read the sports section a lot," he said, "because you were afraid of what you'd see in the other parts of the paper."
And really, in our world of 2007, there's a lot of the same to explain our national fascination with sports. It really is one of the last legal narcotics, a way to separate ourself from the real and the surreal of every day life, away from Paris Hilton and Britney Spears and also the horrors of war and suffering and the daily pulse of human tragedy. New York dived into that 2001 World Series as a healing salve, same as New Orleans turned to this year's Saints as a way to overcome Katrina, same as San Francisco and Oakland used the 1989 World Series as a balm from the shattering earthquake that interrupted that series for ten days.
What made 1941 unique, though, was the fact that every day, it seemed, someone legendary was doing something legendary. DiMaggio. Williams. Louis. Greenberg. Even Bobby Riggs, who'd later gain lasting infamy, was one of sport's genuine heroes in 1941. I can tell you, as a guy who spent a lot of time reading old newspapers, it was a heck of a time to be alive, because you could be scared stiff one minute and thrilled to goose bumps the next. I wanted to capture that in this book; I hope I did; I hope you enjoy.
Till next time. Thanks for reading.
Mike Vaccaro
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