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Going by the Book |
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The Yanks! |
Wanna write a Yankee book?
Then move to New York!
By MAURY ALLEN
of TheColumnists.com
I’ve read most of them over the last 60 years
and written a bunch of them myself. I’m talking about books
by, for, with, about and concentrating on the Yankees.
It’s not the fact that the Yankees have won 38 pennants
and 26 World Series that gets the team and its players into print.
It’s that most of the guys writing sports books live in
New York.
Sure, there are writers in Intercourse, Pa.; Walla Walla, Washington
and Grand Forks, North Dakota, who have strolled inside a big
league park or can define the infield fly rule without stammering.
It’s just that publishers chuckle when a guy from there
or anywhere wants money for writing about the Yankees. The book
bosses only lean on guys from New York who have ridden the el
train, eaten a stale hot dog and have argued Willie, Mickey and
the Duke to death.
So the New York guys write about the Yankees or the out-of-the-way
guys come to New York to imitate them.
I’m a Brooklyn guy. I only wanted to write about the Brooklyn
Dodgers when I was a kid. I never got a word published professionally
about them before they skipped town on me after the 1957 season.
The first book that moved me was “Lou Gehrig: Pride of the
Yankees” by Paul Gallico in 1942. I was hooked. When the
Dodgers moved and I started writing, I turned out Yankee works
on Casey Stengel, Roger Maris, Mickey Mantle, Lou Piniella, Reggie
Jackson, Billy Martin and my hottest, “Where Have You Gone,
Joe DiMaggio?”
Write a book on the Yankees and dozens more will fill your shelves.
Publishers think a blurb by a Yankee book writer will sell more
books for their guy, a theory no one has ever proved.
I have this thing about books. I can’t dispose of them.
They pile up in my office library, in my den, on tables near
my bed, in closets in the living room, in boxes throughout our
garage, in the trunk of my car and in attaché cases I
carry around for show at business meetings.
My latest Yankee book, “All Roads Lead To October,”
about George Steinbrenner’s Yankee reign and the pennants
and players he has collected since he showed up in 1973, came
out (St. Martin’s Press) two years ago. The paperback came
out last year.
That means cartons of the books (an autographed copy is still
a big deal birthday gift for friends) fill floor space in my
den and garage. I always challenge my wife, Janet, by suggesting
my book cartons will go when her old clothes go. Neither of us
move.
The Yankees are a hundred years old in 2002 even though they
first played in New York in 1903. I’ll take everybody else’s
word for it. Now come the books about their century.
Yankee haters (that’s all of you out there west of NYC)
must have loved the Yankees from 1903-1920. They never won anything.
A dead-end kid named George Herman Ruth (how many fights did
he have over the lady’s name of Ruth for such a tough guy?)
joined the club in a money deal in 1920. Third place was the
best the Yankees could do despite 54 homers by the pinstriped
Babe.
The agony for the rest of the country and the ecstasy for New
Yorkers began with the team’s first pennant in 1921.
All of the rest is history, as captured in the latest Yankee
epistle, “Pennants & Pinstripes: The New York Yankees
1903-2002” by Ray Robinson and Christopher
Jennison (Viking Studio) published in time for opening day of
2002.
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on the bottomless market. At left, "Pennants & Pinstripes" by Robinson and Jennison. At right, Maury Allen's latest. |
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Robinson was the brilliant editor of Seventeen Magazine for many years, a journal no legitimate female teenager could be without. When I was the father of one of those about a dozen years ago, I thought this publication would push a lot of my books out the door.
A fanatic Yankee fan and Yankee writer burned inside of Robinson. It all came out when he escaped the magazine business and captured the life of Lou Gehrig in his splendid biography and recreated Christy Mathewson and Will Rogers for an unsuspecting modern generation.
This Yankee book is as spirited and attractive as they come. He has all the details down--from why the Highlanders became the Yankees to why Babe Ruth became the icon he did and Lou Gehrig never did.
He moves his book through the decades of failure and frustration (1903-1920), (1965-75), (1982-1995) into the glory years of the 1920s with Babe and then Lou, the 1930s with Lou and then Joe D. and the 1940s and 1950s with Joe D. Mickey Mantle, Casey Stengel and the rest.
It is a wonderful book for Yankee lovers and haters alike with thrilling photos of just about every Yankee figure from Clark Griffith to Derek Jeter. The new edition will be Jason Giambi, 2002, all Jason all the time and beyond to irritate the rest of the country.
Yogi Berra was once introduced to writer Ernest Hemingway in Toots Shor’s restaurant in NYC and asked Shor, “What paper does he work for?”
Hemingway put DiMaggio in "The Old Man and the Sea," but he never wrote a book on the Yankees. I always knew why. He came from Oak Park, Illinois. Nobody would publish it.
© 2002 by Maury Allen.
The Maury Allen caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel.
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