Death of sports journalist and author David Halberstam
Halberstam won the Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for his reporting on the Vietnam War, and later wrote books such as The Best and the Brightest (1972) about America’s involvement in southeast Asia. He wrote 20 other books, many of them dealing with US politics and current affairs.
However, he also wrote several terrific sports books, often taking on a sports project after a more ‘serious’ book. He wrote The Breaks of the Game (1981) about the NBA in the seventies, and The Amateurs (1985), which tracks the rivalries among the US rowing team in the run-up to the 1984 Olympics. His baseball books include Summer of ‘49 (1989), October 1964 (1993) and The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship (2003). He also wrote Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made (1999) and Bill Belichick: The Education of a Coach (2005).
Halberstam had an unerring eye for detail. The Amateurs mentions the story of the first gold medal won by the great Finnish rower, Perti Karpinnen in passing. Karpinnen’s family lived on an island off the Finnish coast, with no phone, and they only learned of Perti’s gold medal triumph in 1976 when his father opened the door to find the entire population of the island outside waiting to tell him.
In his book about Michael Jordan Halberstam outlines the rivalry between Jordan and teammate Scottie Pippen, which was crystallised in something Pippen could do in training which Jordan was unable to match. Pippen could stand on the end line of a basketball court and jump out and up, past the backboard, to dunk the ball. Halberstam reports that though he spent hours trying to duplicate the manoeuvre, Jordan could never do it successfully.
Halberstam summed up his approach to work by quoting a basketball player.
“There’s a great quote by Julius Erving,” he once said, “that went, ‘Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don’t feel like doing them’.”
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