A Writer's Life Read Free

long lunches at Longchamps, I somehow got the impression that the careerprospects of the sports editor were no more auspicious than those of Red Drew.
    As an ambitious young sports journalist, I nevertheless continued to read and be influenced primarily by writers of fiction, although my tastes were no longer exemplified by the lingerie literature that had heated up my hormones in high school. At Alabama I had read novels and short stories by William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, and other southern-born writers who had been urged upon me by Turner Catledge’s nephew, who himself possessed such poetic sensibilities that he swore to me in advance that he would never do what I would later do so eagerly—capitalize on his uncle’s connections in journalism.
    Each day in the
Times
building I made note of the authors whose names I saw on the covers of the books held under the arms of my elders in the elevators, and sometimes I overheard discussions about these books while lunching in the cafeteria. Since I was now reading literary supplements and subscribing to
The New Yorker
for the first time, I was becoming aware that even some renowned fiction writers occasionally dealt with sporting events and athletes in their novels and short stories. When reading examples of these, I kept reminding myself that what I was reading had been
imagined
; these efforts were, after all, labeled “fiction.” And yet after finishing a short story by John O’Hara, for example, one in which the esoteric game of court tennis was precisely and gracefully described as it presented itself within the oddly angled interior walls of the New York Racquet & Tennis Club—a locale that I had visited and was familiar with—it did not seem to matter in this case whether or not O’Hara was writing “fiction”; insofar as he had woven into his story the facts and details about the club and the game, he had met the demanding standards of accuracy as upheld daily by the desk editors in the Times sports department.
    I had moreover been impressed by O’Hara’s ability to make me feel as if I was there within the Racquet & Tennis Club, watching the game from a bench overlooking the court; and I was also
there
, on a football field, rooting for a swivel-hipped halfback who elbows his way toward a touchdown in Irwin Shaw’s story “The Eighty-Yard Run”; and
there
on a snow-covered golf course, shivering next to a lovelorn caddy in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Winter Dreams”; and
there
in the dining room of a racetrack, sitting next to a horse trainer, who, looking up from his meal, notices that he is about to be joined by a jockey friend—an aging, ill-tempered rider presently experiencing much difficulty in controlling his weight—and the trainer is overheard saying in a voice that the jockey does not hear (but is quoted in the excerpt of Carson McCullers’s “The Ballad of theSad Café” that I had read in
The New Yorker
): “If he eats a lamb chop, you can see the shape of it in his stomach an hour afterward.”
    I wanted quotes like these in my sports pieces, but I also knew I could not make them up. I was a reporter, not a fiction writer. And yet if I could get close enough to some of these athletes I was now meeting in New York and could convince them to trust me and confide in me as had many of the players I had known back in high school and college—when I used to commiserate with them and encourage them after each defeat; I was the Miss Lonelyhearts of locker rooms—I might be able to write factually accurate but very revealing personal stories about big-time athletes while using their
real
names, and then get these stories published in the straitlaced
New York Times
, which Mr. Catledge was trying to loosen up in the area where I worked. Again, without faking the facts, my reportorial approach would be fictional, with lots of intimate detail, scene-setting,