The Top of His Game: The Best Sportswriting of W. C. Heinz

Bill Littlefield (NPR's Only a Game) presents the second installment in the Library of America series devoted to classic American sportswriters, a defintive collectors edition of the pathbreaking writer who invented the long-form sports story. Like his friend and admirer Red Smith, W. C. Heinz (19152008) was one of the most distinctive and influential sportswriters of the last century. Though he began his career as a newspaper reporter, Heinz soon moved beyond the confines of the daily column, turning freelance and becoming the first sportwriter to make his living writing for magazines. In doing so he effectively invented the long-form sports story, perfecting a style that paved the way for the New Journalism of the 1960s. His profiles of the top athletes of his day still feel remarkably current, written with a freshness of perception, a gift for characterization, and a finely tuned ear for dialogue. Jimmy Breslin named Heinzs Brownsville Buma brief life of Al Bummy Davis, Brooklyn street tough and onetime welterweight champion of the worldthe greatest magazine sports story Ive ever read, bar none. His spare and powerful 1949 column, Death of a Race Horse, has been called a literary classic, a work of clarity and precision comparable to Hemingway at his best. Now, for this essential writers centennial, Bill Littlefield, the host of NPRs Only A Game, presents the essential Heinz: thirty-eight columns, profiles, and memoirs from the authors personal archive, including eighteen pieces never collected during his lifetime. Though Heinzs great passion was boxingthe golden era of Rocky Graziano, Floyd Patterson, and Sugar Ray Robinsonhis interests extended to the wide world of sports, with indelible profiles of baseball players (Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio), jockeys (George Woolf, Eddie Arcaro), hockey players, football coaches, scouts and trainers and rodeo riders.