W. C. Heinz

Wilfred Charles Heinz, known to everyone as Bill, never had the syndicated column or the big-paper platform that most Red Smith Award recipients enjoyed. His newspaper, the New York Sun, went out of business in 1950 when he was thirty-five. What he had instead was a reputation among other writers that grew for the next half century, until the Associated Press Sports Editors gave him the award in 2008, the year he died. Few recipients have been honored so late, and few have deserved it so plainly.

The reputation rests on a small body of work that other people keep rediscovering. David Halberstam anthologised him. Jimmy Breslin and Elmore Leonard cited him. Aspiring sportswriters are still handed a photocopy of a 1949 column and told to study what it leaves out.

The method was simple and hard to copy. Heinz reported like a war correspondent, staying with a subject long enough to get the small physical details right, and then wrote as if every extra word cost him money. He rarely told the reader what to feel. He described what the trainer did with his hands, what the fighter said in the dressing room, what the rain did to the track, and let the feeling arrive on its own.

Heinz was born in Mount Vernon, New York, on January 11, 1915, graduated from Middlebury College in 1937 and joined the Sun straight out of school. In 1943 the paper sent him to the war. He covered anti-submarine patrols, went in at Normandy aboard the battleship USS Nevada and followed the First Army across Europe. He came home convinced that the best war reporting was about individual men, not divisions, and he applied the same idea to sports.

His Sun column, The Sport Scene, covered boxing, baseball, football and the track. On July 29, 1949, he filed a short piece from Jamaica racetrack about a two-year-old colt named Air Lift that broke a leg in its first race and was destroyed on the spot. Death of a Racehorse is a few hundred words long and contains no adjectives that could be called sentimental. It is probably the most reprinted piece of deadline sportswriting in American journalism.

Death of a Racehorse runs a few hundred words. Sixty years on it is still the piece young writers are told to take apart and see how it works.

When the Sun closed in January 1950 Heinz did not look for another column. He went freelance and spent the next two decades writing long pieces for SPORT, Life, the Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, True, Collier's and Look. The Rocky Road of Pistol Pete, about the Dodgers outfielder Pete Reiser and the walls he kept running into, and Brownsville Bum, about the fighter Al Davis, are the ones most often reprinted. He won the E. P. Dutton Award for the best magazine sports story of the year five times.

In 1958 he published The Professional, a novel about a middleweight preparing for a title fight. Ernest Hemingway praised it; so, later, did Elmore Leonard. It is a boxing book in the sense that Moby-Dick is a whaling book, and it has stayed in print more or less continuously.

Two collaborations put Heinz's prose in front of readers who never opened a sports page. Run to Daylight!, written with Vince Lombardi in 1963, followed the Green Bay coach through a single game week and became the model for the inside-football book. Five years later Heinz worked with H. Richard Hornberger, a former Army surgeon, on a comic novel about a field hospital in Korea. It appeared under the joint pseudonym Richard Hooker, sold modestly, and then became a Robert Altman film and one of the longest-running series in American television. Heinz's name is on neither, which suited him.

The Lombardi book is the better guide to how he worked. Heinz moved into the coach's house and followed him through the week before a game against the Detroit Lions, from Monday's film session to Sunday's kickoff, writing it all in the second person so the reader stood where Lombardi stood. It is reporting disguised as a diary, and nearly every access-driven football book since has borrowed the structure without matching the prose.

Heinz spent his last decades in Vermont. The National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association put him in its Hall of Fame in 2001, the International Boxing Hall of Fame followed in 2004, and the A. J. Liebling Award recognised his boxing writing. He died in Bennington on February 27, 2008, aged ninety-three. The APSE gave him the Red Smith Award that same year, making it a posthumous honor by a matter of weeks.

Smith and Heinz had been contemporaries in New York in the late 1940s, both writing against the overheated style of the day. That the award named for one eventually found the other is one of the tidier outcomes in its history.