W. C. Heinz is one of the greatest sports writers in American history. A war correspondent before he became a sports writer and novelist, Heinz understood the connection between the conflict of war and the contest of sports. He lived to get things down on paper. I always think of him sitting at—or carrying—a typewriter, a man driven to write.
The most-repeated anecdote about Heinz involves Ernest Hemingway, another man who was fascinated by war, writing, and boxing. After he read Heinz’s boxing novel, The Professional (1958), he sent Heinz a note, saying “the only good novel about a fighter I've ever read and an excellent novel in its own right.” Heinz was a life-long fan of Hemingway. When Heinz's wife read Hemingway’s note, she said to husband, “This must be the greatest day in your life.” Hemingway admired many novelists, including Tolstoy, Twain, Stendahl, Joyce, and Mann. They are august company for Heinz, content to see himself as a dutiful war correspondent and sports writer.
Heinz’s greatest work is Once They Heard the Cheers (1979), which reports on a cross-country car trip he took with his wife in 1978 to visit some of the great athletes he had met and written about. The first essay in this collection of 20 chapters is “Transition: Autumn 1945.” It describes Heinz’s return from the German front to the New York Sun, which was one of the city’s nine daily newspapers. He recounts his reunion with his wife in their New York apartment, which, I am guessing, really was the greatest day of his life.
“I stood at the front of the stairs and I was shaking. I swung my barrack’s bag onto my back and took the typewriter in one hand and I left the old black bag and I climbed the three flights of stairs. I climbed the stairs as hard as I could to keep from crying, and my wife stood in the doorway. She looked small and frail, and I could not begin to tell her, no less write it. There was so much that had finally ended.” (p. 25)
Settled in at home and office, Heinz put his typewriter to good use. Ten years after The Professional, Heinz collaborated with the surgeon-writer H. Richard Hornberger (pen-name Richard Hooker) on MASH: A Novel about Three Army Doctors (1968; paperback cover below); the book was the chief source for the much-admired movie. Heinz wrote other novels and many essays. He died in 2008, age 93.
The link between warfare and sports was at the center of his writing. When Heinz returned to the Sun, he found that he had been promoted to the paper’s Washington office. Embarrassed, Heinz explained to his boss that he had to decline. “Covering the war, where the material was so dramatic, I think I started to learn how to write,” he told him. “I want to continue to learn, and writing sports, where men are in contest, if not in conflict, where you can come to know them, one can grow as a writer better than anywhere on the paper” (pp. 25-26).
A three-month leave was part of Heinz’s welcome home from the paper, and when he returned to the office he found that he had, despite his boss’s misgiving, been assigned to sports. This is where one expects the narrative to become triumphal, but that does not happen, for, as he interviewed athletes, Heinz kept feeling, and writing about, the tug of war.
On his first assignment, he observes a football practice at Columbia University. A player gets sick and is brought to the sidelines where Heinz is sitting with other coaches. The player describes his symptoms and the team doctor asks him what he thinks is wrong. “’Well,’ the player said, ‘I think I may have T.B.’” The doctor asks why and the player says that he drank raw milk. Astonished, the doctor asks him how he could have failed to boil milk before he drank it. “‘You see, sir,’ the player said, slowly, ‘I was in a German prison camp for fifteen months. Once all we had was raw milk.’” The doctor softens his tone. He tells the player to take the afternoon off and come back to see him the next day (p. 34). “You’ll be fine,” Heinz tells the player, and then asks about his war experience. On his way back to the office to write his story, Heinz thinks about his approach:
“I would have to show somehow without saying it that, at first, the doctor had been a bit patronizing and then even incredulous when he learned about the raw milk, before he learned that the player had been a prisoner of the Germans, because that should be the way it should come to the reader, too, if I could get that dialogue—the pauses and the emphasis—just right” (p. 35).
Those words sum up the genius of his writing. Heinz wanted to create a matter-of-fact surface that would register unspoken pain, suffering, conflict, and contest. Heinz runs into other athletes who fought. He often felt guilty that he had a safe job at the front.
Elmore Leonard was a Heinz fan. Heinz's creed about fiction, Leonard writes, was that "the writer should be kept out of there. He should not tell, but show" (introduction to The Professional). This is a familiar dictum (along the lines of "A poem should not mean / But be," Archibald MacLeish, "Ars Poetica" [1926]). It’s an approach that builds tension and forces the reader to make necessary connections on his own—understatement paired with and brevity of expression.
Heinz had a gift for compression as well as for compassion. Each of the 27 chapters of The Professional is a vignette. The author could pack a lot into 900-word newspaper columns. Events and people seem bigger and more imposing because the author does not inflate them or their psyches. The Hemingway-esque less is more. (Original cover below; boxers doing their roadwork.)
The Professional seems to be about the fighter, but it's really about his trainer and the sports writer/narrator. Can there be a boxing book that offers less direct insight into the man who stars in the ring? Not one that I can recall. His manager talks a lot, but rarely in sentences more than a few words long. For a boxing fan, the gold nugget is on pp. 235-37 of the 2001 edition. The narrator, a sports writer, is talking to the boxer about boxing. I see this as Heinz the writer talking to Heinz the imaginary boxer.
The scene is a training camp a few days before a big fight (chapter 19). The writer (Frank) asks the boxer (Eddie) how he feels about the men he fights. Eddie says he likes some of his opponents. Frank explains why some famous boxers like their opponents. It’s because “each guy brought out the best in the other guy and gave him the greatest fight and his greatest moment” (p. 234).
Eddie agrees and describes a very good fight that forced him to use everything he had. “I mean, for ten rounds I wanted to kill him and he fought like he wanted to kill me, and then I wanted to kiss him. First I wanted to kill him. Explain that.” When Frank says he understands Eddie’s feelings and the truth they contain, Eddie asks him why the writer likes boxing so much. “Because I find so much in it,” Frank says. He calls it “the basic law of man. The truth of life. It's a fight, man against man, and if you're going to defeat another man, defeat him completely.”
Frank elaborates: “I find man revealing himself more completely in fighting than in any other form of expressive endeavor. It’s the war all over again, and they license it and sell tickets to it and people go to see it because, without even realizing it, they see this truth in it” (pp. 235-36). This, it seems to me, is the war correspondent talking to himself as a sports writer.
“This truth” Frank sees is that fighting is an “expressive endeavor.” Fighting reveals who the fighters are. We know from fiction, if from nothing else, that war reveals who the warriors are. Think of epiphanic moments in Eric Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front or in James Jones’s The Thin Red Line. The reality of taking a life, or losing one’s own, sinks in. Men who seemed to have no philosophy about war or death or duty suddenly see themselves in an endless cycle of sacrificial violence, living to kill the enemy who lives to kill you.
Also notable is Frank's use of “expressive endeavor.” Not many people I know think of any sport as an “expressive endeavor.” In football or basketball, or in any team sport, one can see why. But in boxing, fast-paced, with tension high, and just two men involved, expression and interpretation are paramount. More than individual, boxing is personal.
One has to admire Heinz’s wish that readers would connect fighting to war “without even realizing it.” They wouldn’t realize it because Heinz would have carefully omitted syntactical signposts (e.g., such words as but, however, since) in favor of his seeming one-and-only conjunction, and. Whys and wherefores are seldom stated. Evenly-paced sentences seem to lack emphatic points and drama, but tension boils under the calm surface.
Heinz was close to athletes. When Frank describes Eddie's day, designed to lead to the championship fight at ten p.m., we can see that numerous details, down to Eddie's dinner and cups of tea, have been taken from Heinz's observation of Rocky Graziano before his fight with Tony Zale. Their 1946 fight is ranked as one of the great fights in boxing history. Many writers also include the others (1947, 1948; Graziano won the 2nd) among the greatest. Zale enlisted in the Navy in 1942 and served as a physical education instructor. Graziano was dishonorably discharged from the Army in 1941, before the U. S. entered the war, for being AWOL.
Heinz always had his eye on the game, on the coaches and players, but his backward glances in Once They Hear the Cheers are more powerful. This is his greatest book, for two reasons.
First is Heinz’s tour of his many friendships with athletes. His essay on Sugar Ray Robinson (“The Greatest, Pound for Pound”) quotes Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim: “How wavering and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun” (p. 298). Heinz writes about how prejudice and poverty made Robinson and Archie Moore “the last of the old-fashioned fighters.” Boxing was for them was a way to a better life.
Robinson assured Heinz that he had never liked to fight. Heinz replied that, in his view, “fighting has given you the most satisfying experiences you have ever known.” Robinson admitted that he enjoyed outthinking and outmaneuvering others in the ring, but he did not admit to enjoying it (p. 299). He also said that the boxer himself was the first to know when he was losing his edge—it was when he had to start thinking the punches that he used to throw instinctively. Heinz said that this happened to all of us when we saw that “what was once the product of inspiration is now merely the result of reason” (pp. 300-1).
Heinz visited the famous and those who are now almost unknown. He remembered something significant about each one. (Cover, above: Rocky Graziano, Jackie Robinson; Eddie Arcaro (center); Willie Davis, lower left; Floyd Patterson; Davis is my best guess.)
The second reason why Once They Heard the Cheers is the best of Heinz’s books is that, nearly fifty years later, it takes us on a historical tour of the country. As he reconnects with the athletes, Heinz animates an America that has since disappeared—small towns, local diners, pay telephones, newspapers, and gas station attendants.
Heinz reminds us of horse racing before split-second camera recorded everything; of boxers who fought in barns or anywhere they could get a fight; and of other sports before they became what they turned into in the 1980s and after. Heinz remembers details of fights from the 1940s, when he was just back from the war and seeing contest and conflict with older eyes. He remembers the facts of some fighters’ lives better than they do themselves, as we see when he visits Willie Pep (pp. 242-55).
Can Heinz have remembered all the dialogue he reports, many pages of it? Did he record it? Or does he reconstruct some of it, mixing his memories with his experiences? It doesn’t matter, in the end. It all reads beautifully and every page feels authentic. It was a world that people looked on with kindness because, however spare, it was a big improvement over the world they knew in the Great Depression.
At the end of “Transition,” Heinz recalls two brothers getting ready for fights at Madison Square Garden. They are the two surviving Rogers brothers. The four brothers enlisted together and were all on the Juneau, a light cruiser that sunk off Guadalcanal in 1942. The four Rogers brothers are not famous, like the five Sullivan brothers. The two who died, Pat and Louie, were the better fighters, Heinz says, and the two survivors boxed because it helped them think about something else. Both Joe and Jimmy lost their fights at the Garden, unfortunately. Heinz walked them to their dressing room, shook hands with them, and, he writes, “walked out of the dressing room and out of the war again.” What he walked into, he says, “is what follows in the rest of this book” (pp. 40-41).
My copy of Once They Heard the Cheers is the one Heinz gave to Nat Loubet in 1979, the year the book came out: “To Nat Loubet, who has preserved the grand N. F. tradition, with my best wishes, Bill Heinz 6/19/79.”
N.F. is Nat Fleischer, founder of The Ring, a magazine that refers to itself (and is referred to by others) as “The Bible of Boxing.” Fleischer died In 1972, and Loubet, his son-in-law and the managing editor, then took over as publisher.
I am pleased to have a copy written in by Heinz, blue ink in his neat hand. To write about Heinz is to write about nostalgia. For nostalgia, nothing could be better than the following notice, carried in every issue of The Ring under Fleischer.
“The Ring is a magazine which a man may take home with him. He may leave it on his library table safe in the knowledge that it does not contain one line of matter either in the text or the advertisements which would be offensive. The publisher of The Ring guards this reputation of his magazine jealously. It is entertaining and it is clean.”
“what was once the product of inspiration is now merely the result of reason” - I found this quotation interesting because I get what he's after, but then I wonder, isn't this the purpose of martial arts? at least to some extent, to have the time while fighting to think? I mean to reach a level where one is no longer caught up in the fight, but outside it instead and capable of strategy?
Also wanted to remark as a fellow writer on the subject of "Show! Don't tell!" which is a writer's workshop cliche. Notice how MacLeish's poem actually tells, and how much we focus on the telling part. Even in this article, Allen, you are drawn to Heinz's telling. What I mean to convey is that good writing doesn't abide by the show/don't tell dictum. Instead, there's an awareness of establishing a balance between show and tell, and one has to have some awareness of subtext and implication. I think the telling parts have to be earned, and that's the hard part.