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| Maraniss has his second sports
bio coming out, but he’s best known
for his biography of Bill Clinton,
“First in His Class.” |
Best known for his nuanced biography of Bill Clinton, veteran Washington Post writer and veteran author David Maraniss also has shown a keen interest in the sports world. He published a well-received Vince Lombardi biography in 1999 and, this month, Simon & Schuster will release Maraniss’ portrait of Roberto Clemente (“Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero”). For Maraniss, the Clemente book carries a personal connection beyond his other works. Like many sons and fathers, David Maraniss and his father, who died while the Clemente book was in progress, spent ample time together musing over bunts and batting averages. And even though Wisconsin native Maraniss grew up a Milwaukee Braves fan (and later adopted the Brewers), his boyhood idol was Clemente, the Pittsburgh Pirates’ star right fielder. During a recent interview with SportsBusiness Journal correspondent Erik Spanberg, Maraniss reflected on baseball, the Beltway and whether athletes make good politicians.
Favorite authors: Don DeLillo and Robert Caro
Favorite musician: Otis Redding
Favorite city: Madison, Wis.
Favorite U.S. president: Thomas Jefferson.
Best advice you’ve ever received: Probably from my father, who was also a journalist. One was to believe in myself, the other was not to follow the crowd.
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| One of Maraniss’ discoveries for the book
was how preventable Clemente’s death was. |
Why did you decide to write a book on Roberto Clemente?Maraniss: Two reasons. One, even though I grew up in Wisconsin loving the Milwaukee Braves — yes, I’m that old — Roberto Clemente was my favorite player. I just thought there was something very cool about him. I didn’t really know his whole story at that point. … Then when I realized I could write books about anybody I wanted to — I love sports but that’s not my occupation — I thought that Clemente and (Vince) Lombardi, who I’ve also written about, were bigger than just sports. There were a lot of issues I could write about. I could write about baseball, which I love, but I could also write about race and the Latinization of baseball and a lot of other issues that interested me.
One of the fascinating things about your Clemente book is the research you did that shows how unnecessary, and preventable, his death was. (Clemente died in a 1972 plane crash while on a relief mission to aid earthquake victims in Nicaragua.) You found a number of documented problems with the plane itself, the owner of the plane, the pilot and so forth. Did that information surprise you?
Maraniss: Yeah, it did. When I went into it, all I knew was that he died in a plane crash and the plane was probably overloaded. I didn’t really know any of the other material or facts that led into it. The more I got into it, the more surprised I was that this plane was ever allowed to take off. You couldn’t concoct a series of events that could make you think a plane should never fly more than this one. It adds to the tragedy. I didn’t know the fullness of the story.
You’re best known for your political writing. What spurred your interest in writing about sports with both Lombardi and now Clemente?
Maraniss: First, I love sports. My first job as a newspaperman was covering high school sports while I was in college. Secondly, you know, sports and politics aren’t all that different. And rather than say that I’m interested in politics or sports, what I’m interested in are people and the forces that shape people and sociology and good narrative stories. I think that you can find all of those things in biographies of sports figures and political figures.
You’ve now written biographies about Lombardi, Clemente and Bill Clinton. Of those three, which do you find most interesting and which do you find most admirable?
Maraniss: You couldn’t imagine three more different people and yet they have several traits in common. The most important trait being enormous willpower and the will to prevail and succeed. All of them came out of nowhere, in a sense. Clinton out of rural Arkansas, Clemente out of rural Puerto Rico and growing up in a time when there were no blacks or Puerto Ricans in baseball, Lombardi sort of struggling for (many) years as an assistant coach before he got his shot. So in all three cases you see the willingness to overcome the odds and succeed. All three of them had trouble with the press when they became successful (laughs). You see that with Clemente, Lombardi and Clinton. They think they’re being misinterpreted; they have that level of pride. And all of them are good on race. Obviously, Clemente had to deal with it most as a black Puerto Rican, but he was pretty strong in the early 1960s, not backing down to the prevailing culture. And Lombardi and Clinton were also good as white men with some power; that issue is where they were the best.
I found all three fascinating. I would say that in terms of one I can connect with, Clinton is more my contemporary, Lombardi was more like a father figure and Clemente was the one who I felt the deepest soulful connection to.
Can you even begin to hazard a guess as to how Clemente may have dealt with baseball’s steroids era?
Maraniss: I don’t know the answer. I admire Mike Schmidt for saying he didn’t take them, but he’s not sure what he would have done if he had had the opportunity. I’m agnostic on that for most people. I know that Clemente had a reverence for his body, which might have mitigated him against doing anything like that. On the other hand, he was sort of experimental and that was an era before people knew the harm steroids could do.
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Maraniss thinks biography subject Lombardi
was bigger than sports. |
Do you think being a bit removed from the sports world has helped your books, made them better in some way?
Maraniss: I admire sportswriters and I think a lot of very fabulous stories and books (are written by sportswriters). I’m not trying to present myself as anything different. I approach every story in any realm the same way and part of that is when I’m doing a book, I start by saying, “I know nothing.”
How hard is it to go into something saying “I know nothing” since the people you’ve written about are well-known and their images are constantly being reshaped?
Maraniss: I certainly have my own personal feelings about each of the people I’ve written about, but what fascinates me and what drives me as a journalist and as an author and as historian is to understand why people are the way they are. So the real focus of my Clemente book is to try to explain him from the inside out: from Puerto Rico out, not an American looking at him.
Is there another sports subject you would like to explore down the road?
Maraniss: My next book is a combination of politics and sports. It’s about the 1960 Olympics in Rome and how the whole modern world exploded right there. It has great sports characters like Cassius Clay and Wilma Rudolph and Rafer Johnson but also the issues of U.S. versus U.S.S.R. and East and West Germany and Taiwan and China and black West Africa. Television for the first time, the first doping scandal and all the sociology I love.
