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  • The Silent Season of a Hero: The Sports Writing of Gay Talese
  • Dan Roche (bio)
The Silent Season of a Hero: The Sports Writing of Gay Talese. Gay Talese . Edited by Michael Rosenwald . Walker & Company , 2010 . 308 Pages, Paper, $16.00 .

Gay Talese has long been drawn to those for whom the spotlight has faded. In his recently issued collection of sports writing are portraits of Joe Louis, Floyd Patterson, Joe DiMaggio, and Muhammad Ali, each article written after its subject’s glory years had come and gone. They are elegiac pieces, colored by touches of nostalgia, but more powerfully by the efforts of these men to find new meaning: DiMaggio running a restaurant and being a batting coach for the Yankees, Louis golfing and following the homey guidance of his third wife, Patterson at 29 trying to recover from being knocked out a second time by Sonny Liston, Ali traveling as a goodwill ambassador to Cuba in his Parkinson’s-induced muteness.

An anthology such as this one inevitably presents the opportunity for a similar consideration of the journalist himself. Talese’s sports writing began in 1948, when he was in high school, and almost all of these selections are somewhere between 15 and 50 years old—the exceptions being the introduction and a 2006 excerpt from his book A Writer’s Life. Beyond that, the most recent magazine or newspaper piece is from 1996. Talese himself is nearly 80. He is, however, still writing, and still writing about sports. (According to his website, in fact, he is “under contract to write a story that will become the basis of a forthcoming Warner Brothers film about New York Jets linebacker Bart Scott.”) And whatever nostalgia this broad collection might induce, the much more powerful sensation that comes from a browse through this book is one of aliveness and energy. The stories have aged well, maintained their muscle and their eyesight, their voice and their sharpness of mind.

The enduring strength of Talese’s sports writing is due in large part, no [End Page 139] doubt, to the fact that he rarely wrote for just the next day’s paper. The story to be told, in his view, was never simply how a contest went, never bounded by the game clock. This seems true—judging from the selections in this collection—even when he was writing daily journalism for the New York Times in the 1950s and early 1960s. Included here from that period are brief but durable pieces about such intriguing sports figures as the roller-derby skater Gerry Murray, “a curvesome woman pushing 40 with the gentility of a waterfront bouncer”; the boxing referee Ruby Goldstein, “possibly the most lonely guy in boxing”; the golf champion Judy Frank, “who says she keeps late hours, smokes excessively and takes a drink from time to time”; and Billy Ray, a former bare-knuckle fighter who was 93 when Talese tracked him down.

Talese has always been famous for his talent at what he calls “hanging out,” and such a skill applied to the sports world serves to add a refreshingly patient voice to contrast with the highlight-driven sports talk that dominates now. He is, of course, famous as a long-listening interviewer. In most of these pieces, he simply lets his subjects talk at length, sometimes summarizing their quotes with rhythm and concision (“On the night before their first fight, he would tell them, they would get no sleep—but neither would their opponent. At the weigh-in, he would predict, their opponent would look unbeatable—but this would only be the imagination at work”), and sometimes quoting them directly. With the subjects Talese picked, their voices were usually interesting in and of themselves.

In the book’s most unusual piece, Talese somewhat awkwardly shows himself at work. It is a 1958 collaboration with an anthropologist who studied young male athletes, and it is built out of long, direct quotes from the anthropologist and regular, passive-voiced questions from Talese (“‘Does this family relationship to the athlete affect him in any other way?’ he was asked”). In a note to the article, editor Michael Rosenwald quotes Talese...

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