Word: halberstam
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Past winners of the annual award include Joe Alex Merris '49, who was killed while covering the Iranian revolution, journalist and author David L. Halberstam '55, and consumer activist Ralph Nader...
...HIGHLIGHTS of Breaks, as of any Halberstam book, are the profiles--long and sensitive, almost stream-of-consciousness journeys into a character's past. In them Halberstam examines this book's dominant sub-text, race. Basketball today is a Black game played (in the pros) mostly by Blacks. Halberstam's discussion of the use of basketball as a route out of the ghetto is familiar to anyone interested in the sport, but he tells it with grace. More important are his examples of how race--not racism, exactly--still shapes the professional game: Owners who demand at least...
...many non-fans, will long recall, he punched Rudy Tomjanovich in a brawl and nearly killed him. This gentle man, this hero, had marked himself forever with the memory of his black hand destroying Rudy T.'s white face. Two years later, the punch haunts Washington and the game. Halberstam writes, "Even now, rehabilitated, accepted by teammates and fans in two different cities, he was aware that he had been part of something terrible and frightening, that he was on the edge of having committed, however involuntarily, a dark deed...
...STORY of the Washington punch is one of many in Halberstam's ledger; he is, of course, the Olympic anecdote champion. No one gets the gossip he gets--the recruiters visiting Bill Walton's mom and dad, the notorious Marvin "Bad News" Barnes taking off on another binge, the team trainer enduring the petty humiliations. Halberstam traveled the entire season with the Blazers and it shows. He knows the patterns of big league life--the hotels, the planes, the soap operas (both televised and intramural)--and the reader's appreciation of the game is richer for it. The basketball story...
Quibbles aside, The Breaks of the Game ranks with the best sports books of the recent past (unfortunately not an immense group) and solidifies its author's title as the best journalist in the nation. A Halberstam book always takes chances, makes big claims and cuts through the nervous, "objective" froth that passes for most contemporary newswriting. The man breatnes fire and, yes, occasionally burns himself, but no one brandishes as incisive and ambitious a talent. When Halberstam is on, as the ball players say, the man can play...