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| Author David Halberstam |
Pulitzer Prize-winning author
DAVID HALBERSTAM has written 20 books, including those with such topics as the war in Vietnam (“The Best and the Brightest”), American politics (”The Powers That Be”), the civil rights movement (”Freedom Riders”) and sports (“Summer of ’49”). His latest, “The Education of a Coach,” offers insight into the career of pro football’s pre-eminent strategist,
BILL BELICHICK, who last season directed the Patriots to their third Super Bowl title in four years.
Halberstam spoke with SportsBusiness Journal New York bureau chief Jerry
Kavanagh.
FAVORITES
Vacation spot: Nantucket and Paris.
Quote: There’s a great quote from JULIUS ERVING that I like a lot: “Being a professional is doing the things you love to do on the days you don’t feel like doing them.” I give one or two commencement speeches a year at colleges and I always use that. It’s about getting up and doing it even when you feel rotten.
Movie: “The Bridge on the River Kwai.” I love it. They make fun of me in this house, my wife and daughters, because they go off and they think I’m going to dig out the movie and watch it again.
Last book read: JOAN DIDION’s “The Year of Magical Thinking.” It’s a brilliant book on grief, a beautiful book.
Pet peeve: People who are enthusiastic about wars but don’t want their own children to go. If you’re going to go around with a little button in your lapel and you’re too old to go yourself, you ought to be willing to send your own kid. If you’re not willing to send your own kid, take the goddamn button out of your lapel.
Q: How do you assess the state of sports journalism today?
Halberstam: It’s in such flux because the technology has changed so much. Sports journalism was once a place where print was completely in charge and the columnist was a god, people like GRANTLAND RICE and RED SMITH and JIMMY CANNON. The only thing they competed with was the daily story in the paper and the radio broadcast. Then you moved into an age of television, when, in fact, print was no longer the prime carrier. Now you’ve moved into the age of ESPN, which is an astonishing universe of its own and where the sports fan probably goes to get his or her fix.
Q: What about the role of journalism today?
Halberstam: The role of the journalist is very different now. You probably see better writing and better craftsmanship in some ways than ever before, because you have to compete with something that’s very powerful, is quicker and has an enormous magnetic attraction to ordinary fans. And there is pressure now for a reporter. He is competing with this powerful machine, and that puts the burden on the reporter to go where the camera can’t go and find the stuff that’s not being said on the air. And I think a lot of people are doing quite a good job on it.
Q: Anyone in particular?
Halberstam: There’s a lot of good writing. [ESPN’s] BUSTER OLNEY, who was covering the Yankees for the [N.Y.] Times, seemed to me brilliant. He would have seen a game that day or that night, and there was always this wonderful stuff he had squirreled away as a beat guy. And then he would feed it into the running story and you were transfixed because you were going to learn something new.
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| Gammons Calls Halberstam His
Favorite Non-Fiction Writer |
Q: PETER GAMMONS named you as his favorite non-fiction author.
Halberstam: Peter Gammons is a guy who stands up on the landscape. His encyclopedic knowledge -- maybe he should be the commissioner. I’m enormously admiring of him. I can’t help but tip my hat to him. It’s extraordinary how hard he works. If someone could spend a week with him, you’d never have to go to journalism school, just to watch him work. There’s no self-promotion in him. In his speech at the Hall of Fame he talked with such respect about the players and the game. It was never about him, but about his good fortune in covering other people’s abilities.
Q: You wrote, “If you’re a reporter, the easiest thing in the world is to get a story. The hardest thing is to verify. The old sins were about getting something wrong. The new sin is to be boring.” Has accuracy been a casualty as a result?
Halberstam: I don’t know. We’re not talking just sports; we’re talking a whole society. There’s a race to get stuff on, not just television and CNN, but the world of dot-coms. More than ever, there’s an instantaneous world of communications that waits for nothing, least of all a fact-check. So, I think the pressure on serious journalists is greater than ever [and] the pressure to go with things is greater. If you go back ten years to the Atlanta Olympics, everybody went with that story of the poor dear guy who was alleged to be the bomber. That was a story that just screamed to slow down and have verification. Once it started slipping out, everybody just joined in, and they were all wrong. And that could happen again. There’s a ferocious, powerful machine out there that’s all primed and never wants to wait. It doesn’t like to idle with the engine on in park.
Q: Who are the best and brightest minds in sports today?
Halberstam: DAVID STERN is awfully smart. He’s the head of the NBA, and that’s like a public institution and a private enterprise at the same time. I think these jobs are half-private and half-public in the sense that a JOHN HENRY in Boston owns a private company but it’s a public institution. I think David Stern is as smart and as nimble a public figure as I’ve seen in the world of sports.
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| Halberstam’s Latest Book
Focuses On Belichick, Patriots |
Q: That segues into
BILL BELICHICK, whom you call “brilliant” in your book “The Education of a Coach.” You, and others, refer throughout to Belichick’s preparation and discipline and his eagerness to learn.
Halberstam: The book is all about how did he learn. He’s self-evidently right now at the head of the class with three Super Bowls. The players always get credit for the success, but in this case I think the coach very much as well [is responsible] in this very difficult time to repeat in pro football. One of the things he has, which I think is very important in any profession, is he knows how to learn. Wherever he went, he studied. “Who’s good, and why are they good? Who knows more than I do, and how can I learn from that?” Bill clearly did that.
Q: Belichick also had the imagination to deviate from the NFL formula.
Halberstam: Bill really goes to his own drummer and would have been successful at anything he did. He’s extremely smart. He sees ahead of things and around corners. No one is going to outwork him. He’s the master of small details. There are so many things in pro football, if you’re a coach, that you don’t control: the referees’ calls, a player being offsides on a critical play, injuries, the wind or the bounce of a punt. Therefore, if you don’t control X, Y, Z and A and B, you better work very hard in the middle of the alphabet, on the little things, so that the fewer mistakes you make, the better. And he’s very good at that.
Q: You refer to him as an “unadorned man” and wrote, “He wanted that to be not just his hallmark ... but the hallmark of his team ... in an age where the outside forces [were] working against it.”
Halberstam: You can tell that he’s unadorned in the way he dresses and his lack of interest in playing to the machinery of modern media. He’s not in for any sort of self-promotion or self-glorification. What he does believe is that there is a danger of an addiction for a player, with the camera on him, to do egocentric things. As one player does that, it takes away from the concept of team. Being unadorned really runs through the team and the kind of offices [the Patriots] have. There’s no celebration of what they did last year. You’d never really know you were in the offices of a three-time championship team. As someone said, it is the anti-DONALD TRUMP office. It’s very simple: It’s about what we’re going to do next. You don’t do a lot of dancing after you catch the ball.
Q: That’s contrary to a prevailing trend.
Halberstam: You see it all the time: Some team’s behind by three or four touchdowns and one of its receivers catches a pass for a first down and he does this dance as if they’ve won the Super Bowl. What is this about! Doesn’t he know the score? I always had a hard time with DEION SANDERS because of (a) the self-celebration, the self-promotion and (b) because the network announcers played into it far too much. There’d be too much talk about what Deion does. ... He was a person produced by this modern kind of addiction. Bill Belichick works very hard to fight that from his team because I think he thinks in the long run it’s cancerous.
Q: You wrote, “Pro football had never been a place for coaches who were sentimental.” Is that not true of all pro sports?
Halberstam: I think you could get away with some degree of sentimentality. But it’s always about winning, and the coach/manager loses his job if he doesn’t [win]. But I think it’s really draconian in an age of salary cap. A very good example of that would have been the salary cap and the Giants a few years ago letting PHIL SIMMS go or the 49ers letting JERRY RICE go before their careers were really finished. There was just a fear or sense that they were on the beginning of the downward side and an unwillingness to take a risk and a feeling that the salary bites they were going to take were too big. I think it’s significantly less sentimental in football now because of the salary cap. I think you have to make decisions now that you would have delayed in another era.
Q: In “Summer of ’49,” you wrote, “The commercial possibilities of televised games were immediately obvious. ... Gillette paid $175,000 for the TV rights [to the World Series].” Those numbers have certainly changed.
Halberstam: Yep. The 800-pound gorilla doesn’t weigh 800 pounds anymore. He’s up to around 2,400 pounds. You could see the power of the media [last month]. You had the Yankees and the Angels playing in New York [in the ALDS] and then flying out to L.A. and arriving at about 5 or 6 o’clock in the morning and barely getting some sleep [before] playing. And then the winning team had to get up in the middle of the night and fly to Chicago and play. Television sets the norms and the schedules, and the money is so big that you adapt. It’s a great national audience.
Q: What in sports would you not miss if it were eliminated?
Halberstam: I think noise at a sports event is terrific, but I wouldn’t miss the gratuitous noise of rock-and-roll stuff that they put on all the time. I would not miss the departure of the DH. I wouldn’t miss the celebration of self. I wouldn’t miss BARRY BONDS, if he hit a home run, pausing to admire himself before going to first base. Not just Barry Bonds, but everybody else who does it. I believe in the old idea of get down to first base and then you can break into your trot. The manifestations of ego, the sack dances. Some of those emotions are really genuine, but an awful lot of them we could do without.
