Everything They Had Read Free Page B

their task everything they had, but that inside these pages he responded in kind, with his own best effort. For David Halberstam wrote about sports with the same veracity with which he wrote about everything else, once summing up his approach to all his work by quoting none other than basketball legend Julius Erving, who said, “Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don’t feel like doing them.” Here, in Everything They Had , I believe we gain a sense that David Halberstam himself was perhaps the best example of many of the qualities he admired most in others.
    Although I don’t believe I spoke to him at all over the last four or five years or so, that was fine. We were professional acquaintances, and I never felt comfortable contacting him unless it was absolutely necessary. Yet when I asked him once how I should respond if I was ever asked by anyone how to contact him, he told me simply, “Oh, I’m in the phone book.” On a few occasions when I encouraged trusted younger writer friends to contact him about projects or issues where I thought he might be of some help, he was, every single time.
    I was honored one last time when his editor at Hyperion, Will Schwalbe, contacted me about serving as the editor of this volume. Will described the circumstances of the project and then added that David’s wife, Jean, suggested that I serve as this book’s editor. There are no words to describe the degree of gratitude I feel toward her for allowing me to share the byline of this book.
    So once more I have been given the privilege of doing what David Halberstam would have described as the “heavy lifting,” again selecting the best of the very best from among the essays, features, columns, and other sports writing that David Halberstam produced over the course of his distinguished and inimitable career. Although, given the circumstances, part of that task was done with a measure of sadness, the burden, of course, was not really heavy at all. Like the writing that graces these pages, it was joyful and real, enriching, uplifting, and true.

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EARLY DRAFTS

    In the spring of 1953 and 1954 people would turn to me and say:
    â€œLook, if sculling’s that dangerous, if people are always throwing at you and trying to sink you, why not quit? Why do you do it?”
    â€œEscape,” I would answer.
    D EATH OF A S CULLER,
IN T HREE A CTS
    Harvard Alumni Bulletin ,
April 23, 1955
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D EATH OF A S CULLER, IN T HREE A CTS
From the Harvard Alumni Bulletin , April 23, 1955
    Harvard’s Sanitary Engineering Department recently recorded 1,000 times the normal radioactivity in Cambridge water. “When we put our Geiger counter to some Cambridge water,” Harold A. Thomas, associate professor of Sanitary Engineering, admitted, “it sounded like a bobcat caught in the bushes.”
    This discovery marks, not as some immediately imagined, something strikingly new on the local scene, but rather another step in an age-old unceasing struggle—that between man’s progress and the single sculler on the Charles River.
    To understand this conflict, one must realize that through the ages the shape and form of the single scull have changed remarkably little. True, from time to time artisans have managed to make them thinner and lighter, and this year the boathouse has added a fiberglass shell. But the basic concept of rowing has not changed.
    On the other hand, as man has progressed, the opposition to the sculler has armed itself with newer and more dangerous weapons. The cycle of the opposition’s development, historians note, falls roughly into three overlapping periods.
    The first of these is the stone age. If the stone age was at first simple, it was nonetheless irritating. Little boys stood on the bank of the Charles and threw rocks at the moving sculls. It was something of a game, with the sculler’s sanity the stake. Simple in its pure