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WAY WITH WORDS |
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New Berkow book glows
with nostalgic stories
of TheColumnists.com
“Don’t cry for me…Argentina,” whispered Harold Berkow, shortly before his death at age 87, to his son, the writer Ira Berkow, with as much irony as Evita Peron mustered when she said it.
Harold and Ira Berkow had one of those rare father-son
relationships with unspoken love, clear mutual respect and combined admiration
for the life path each had taken.
In his memoir, “Full Swing: Hits, Runs
and Errors in a Writer’s Life” (Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, $26), Ira Berkow, New
York Times sports columnists, author and shared Pulitzer Prize winner for
National Reporting, tells the tales of his youth, his family eelationships and
his prancing through the sports scene for some four decades.
Berkow’s book
is insightful, witty, extremely well written and brutally revealing about his
youth and early awkwardness.
He doesn’t brush off two failed marriages until he gets to
the perfect one on his third try. He reveals the torturous path many of us
take to find a career when none seem in the offering. He accepts the blue
collar background his family presented him with and he revels in the dignity
of garbage men, city politicians like his own father and the street kids of
Windy City Chicago.
Berkow seems to have a knack for getting the famous
athletes to reveal more to him in interviews than they ever would in the
boring reportage of regular sportswriting grunts
One such example concerned Joe DiMaggio. I labored for a
couple of years on a biography of DiMaggio with warnings from all concerned
that the limited access I had to the introverted Yankee Clipper would
disappear immediately if the legend of Marilyn Monroe was mentioned in his
presence. I circled associates for months about their 272 day marriage in
1954. I never uttered the name of the actress in front of DiMaggio.
“It
was widely believed that DiMaggio could turn off even the best of his friends
forever,” Berkow writes, “if that subject was posed to him.” (DiMaggio didn’t
talk to restaurant pal Toots Shor for 20 years after Shor spoke of Marilyn in
a derogatory way.)
Berkow got to know DiMaggio and once presented him
with some old photos of himself and Marilyn taken by an Army sergeant in
Tokyo, now a Baltimore judge.
“Marilyn sure looked great in those
pictures,” Berkow said to DiMaggio.
“She was a beautiful woman,” said
DiMaggio, as though enlightening me on the subject of his former wife’s
attractiveness.
It was more than almost anyone else ever got out of
DiMaggio on his flawed relationship with the Hollywood queen.
Berkow
has endless stories in his book about his meetings with Michael Jordan and
Mike Tyson, Rod Carew and Richard Nixon, basketball’s Red Holzman and
sportswriter hall of Famer Jerome Holtzman, sportswriter Murray Olderman and
legendary Red Smith.
He admits that his relationship with Smith,
started with a fan letter as a kid in school, triggered his career and
ironically led the Times to hire him to succeed the aging Smith.
Berkow
is one of those rare sportswriters, as comfortable in a discussion of capital
punishment as the infield fly rule, as versed in the peculiarities of language
as in the squeeze play, as stimulated by the will of grammar as by the record
breaking Barry Bonds home run.
Berkow once worked for the Minneapolis
Tribune under the direction of sports editor Sid Hartman, who envisioned
himself in the 1960s and 1970s as the print equal of Howard Cosell. Hartman
told Berkow, a future Pulitzer Prize winner and distinguished Times columnist,
that he ought to look for another line of work. Berkow merely reports in his
book that Hartman also once wrote his own autobiography, created by a ghost
writer.
The book is warm, touching and clearly emotional when Berkow
gets into the connection between father and son, a lesson for all.
His
father ran a dry cleaning business and later graduated into rugged Chicago
city politics in the era of down and dirty Mayor Richard Daley. Berkow tells
the tale of a voter who had promised to support the Democratic ticket in
exchange for favors, cheating on his vote. He asked his father how he knew
what the guy did in a closed voting booth. His father explained that a
straight ticket can be voted in a booth with the sweep of the hand. “His feet
moved,” his father said.
It helped Berkow learn the minute fundamentals
of good reporting: Just see and hear everything.
Berkow breaks down the
needed tools of good reporting and good writing in this book with the
exactitude he has shown always in his own moving Times columns and strong
books, especially his brilliant biographies of slugger Hank Greenberg and
WRITER Red Smith.
We all can’t be Pulitzer Prize winning
writers.
We all can be devoted children to loving parents. Berkow shows
us how he did it.
©2006 by Maury Allen. The Maury Allen caricature is ©2001
by Jim Hummel. The book cover illustration is courtesy of the publisher. This
column first posted April 22, 2006.
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