What A Time It Was: The Best of W. C. Heinz on Sports
"It's a funny thing about people," begins the first piece, about the death of boxer Bummy Davis, in What a Time It Was: The Best of W.C. Heinz on Sports, exemplifying the well-bred wiseguy tone of New Journalism's forerunner. In the 1950s, writes David Halberstam in his foreword, "[m]ost daily sportswriting was pedestrian, some of it too hyped up, some of it more like words served up as oatmeal." Heinz, also a fiction writer, changed all that and set the stage for the 1960s journalism revolution undertaken by Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin and others. Whether in a profile of Vince Lombardi, a eulogy for a dead racehorse or an article about the shy and kindly former heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson, Heinz's writing is full of heart and gusto.Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.