Bill Bryson

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It had been an odd fall, especially for my dad. My father, you see, was the best baseball writer of his generation–he really was–and in the fall of 1960, I believe he proved it. At a time when most sportswriting was leaden or read as if written by enthusiastic but minimally gifted fourteen-year-olds, he wrote prose that was thoughtful, stylish, and comparatively sophisticated. “Neat but not gaudy,” he would always say, with a certain flourish of satisfaction, as he pulled the last sheet out of the typewriter. No one could touch him at writing against a deadline, and on October 13, 1960, at the World Series in Pittsburgh, he put the matter beyond possible dispute.

The series ended with one of those dramatic moments that baseball seemed to specialize in in those days: Bill Mazeroski of Pittsburgh hit a home run in the ninth inning that snatched triumph from the Yankees and handed it miraculously and unexpectedly to the lowly Pirates. Virtually all the papers in the country reported the news in the same soberly uninspired tones. Here, for instance, is the opening paragraph of the story that ran on page one of The New York Times the next morning:

The Pirates today brought Pittsburgh its first world series baseball championship in thirty-five years when Bill Mazeroski slammed a ninth-inning home run high over the left-field wall of historic Forbes Field.

And here is what people in Iowa read:

The most hallowed piece of property in Pittsburgh baseball history left Forbes Field late Thursday afternoon under a dirty gray sports jacket and with a police escort. That, of course, was home plate, where Bill Mazeroski completed his electrifying home run while Umpire Bill Jackowski, broad back braced and arms spread, held off the mob long enough for Bill to make it legal.

Pittsburgh’s steel mills couldn’t have made more noise than the crowd in this ancient park did when Mazeroski smashed Yankee Ralph Terry’s second pitch of the ninth inning. By the time the ball sailed over the ivy-colored brick wall, the rush from the stands had begun and these sudden madmen threatened to keep Maz from touching the plate with the run that beat the lordly Yankees, 10-9, for the title.

Bear in mind that the story was written not at leisure but amid the din and distraction of a crowded press box in the immediate whooping aftermath of the game. Nor could a single thought or neat phrase (like “broad back braced and arms spread”) have been prepared in advance and casually dropped into the text. Since Mazeroski’s home run rudely upended a nation’s confident expectations of a victory by “the lordly Yankees,” every sportswriter present had to discard whatever he’d had in mind to say, even one batter earlier, and start afresh. Search as you will, you won’t find a better World Series game report on file anywhere, unless it was another of my dad’s.

Note: Of course, it’s possible I overstate things–this is my father, after all–but if so it is not entirely a private opinion. In 2000, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, Michael Gartner, a former president of NBC News who grew up in Des Moines wrote that my father, the original Bill Bryson, “may have been the best baseball writer ever, anywhere.”

From “The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid” by Bill Bryson (the younger).

This entry was posted on 26. May 2008 at 06:06 and is filed under Brain Candy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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