JIMMY CANNON, FRANK GRAHAM, SR., PETE HAMILL AND JIMMY BRESLIN
To be able to write clearly, persuasively, compellingly and with conviction — with feeling you can touch — is manna from the heavens.
A gift from God.
Like running fast or jumping high.
It’s a natural thing I guess.
I guess because I really don’t know. The physical gifts of speed and elevation were never bestowed upon me. Wouldn’t recognize ’em if they gave me a stinging slap in the kisser.
The writing part? I can do that a little. But not the way the big boys and girls can.
The best writers punch it out like drawing breath. Like batting their eyelids. Like putting their feet on the floor each morning. Like nothing.
I don’t know about that kind of thing either.
I do know that I like to write and derive enjoyment from it. And that’s all it is for me really, at least at this point. It’s a source of pleasure and satisfaction. It makes me happy.
The great ones are stars in their own right and not unlike champion athletes or renowned concert pianists for example, they identify a skill about which they subsequently become passionate and pursue it. Hard. Relentlessly. With verve, vigor and all their heart.
Natural ability may serve as the foundation but layer upon layer of work, practice, honing and more of the same ad infinitum build the structure.
The flip side suggests that when you’re good at something and could be very good or even great, it motivates you to get better each day. To be the absolute best that you can be with no regrets.
Progress and the palpable recognition of progress has a way of feeding this hunger, of supplying and filling a vast reservoir of inspiration.
In spite of the tremendous volume of effort involved (and required) it somehow doesn’t seem like work.
If and when it does, trouble looms and begins nipping annoyingly at the heels.
Jimmy Cannon died at the age of 64 in 1973.
To many, his name belongs in the same sentence with writing luminaries such as Ring Lardner and Red Smith, gentlemen credited with re-creating the sports pages using their inimitable storytelling styles.
Cannon’s schtick incorporated a bit of his friend Hemingway, some Damon Runyon and plenty of beer and whiskey-laced Irish sentimentality along with a sharp ear, a keen and penetrating eye and the uncanny ability to cut right to the heart of the matter in question amid all of its pseudopod-fired amoebic permutations.
His hot-knife-through-butter routine and all the rest worked best when he covered boxing as he could dispense with formalities, the niceties of execution — not exactly his forte — and get right down to it.
He prowled the dressing rooms ranting, raving, preaching, weeping and singing, the polar opposite of another crony, the avuncular Smith about whom he once remarked, “Red Smith is wonderful, but he doesn’t care about anything that happens outside the foul lines.”
Cannon was all about activity ‘outside the foul lines’ as evidenced by a varied assortment of his fabled utterances and the wide swath they cut.
To wit:
“Fishing, with me, has always been an excuse to drink in the daytime.”
“England produces the best fat actors.”
“Women aren’t embarrassed when they buy men’s pajamas, but a man buying a nightgown acts as though he were dealing with a dope peddler.”
“I can’t remember ever staying for the end of a movie in which the actors wore togas.”
“[A knuckleball is] a curve ball that doesn’t give a damn.”
“Hockey would be a great game…if played in the mud.”
“I judge how much a man cares for a woman by the space he allots her under a jointly shared umbrella.”
“It is the best of all games for me. It frequently escapes from the pattern of sport and assumes the form of a virile ballet. It is purer than any dance because the actions of the players are not governed by music or crowded into a formula by a director. The movement is natural and unrehearsed and controlled only by the unexpected flight of the ball.”
— -On Baseball — -
And then there was the simple declarative statement he made which represented a more encompassing genuine and transcendent pearl of wisdom.
Journalist Cannon, inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 2002 for his coverage of the sport impactfully said of World Heavyweight Champion (1937–1949) Joe Louis, dubbed the “Brown Bomber”:
“Joe Louis is a credit to his race-the human race.”
Frank Graham, Sr. (1893–1965) was to N.Y. Giants manager and Hall-of-Famer Mel Ott “…the nicest, kindest, gentlest, finest, sweetest and most wonderful person I ever met in my life.”
That the highest praise for any human being could be heaped upon a sportswriter by a grizzled baseball lifer no less, is somewhat startling today although truth be told, the relationship between writers covering the team and players or managers remained far more amicable in the early-mid 1900s than would be the norm in years following.
Graham was an American sportswriter and accomplished biographer (politician Al Smith; baseball icons Lou Gehrig and John McGraw; and histories of the New York Yankees, the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers among other works) whose style featured the use of lengthy passages of “unrelieved [or conversational] dialogue” when attempting to create a desired image.
(Once again Ernest Hemingway’s influence was present and part of the pattern).
Later generation highly acclaimed sportswriter and author Leonard Koppett (1923–2003) offered in a foreword to a 2002 printing of Graham’s work on the Yankees (The New York Yankees: An Informal History) “…he didn’t take a lot of notes. He just absorbed what was being said — and what it meant in the right context — and reproduced it in graceful prose and natural speech. It is this style of narration through dialogue that makes his [writing] come so alive.”
Graham’s conversational dialogue writing technique produced one of the most legendary baseball quotes of all time courtesy of Leo “The Lip” Durocher in which the aforementioned Ott ironically played a part once again.
As Giants manager Ott and his players emerged from the opposing dugout Durocher pointed a gnarled and baseball-worn finger to them and said to Graham, “…take a look at them. All nice guys. They’ll finish last. Nice guys. Finish last.”
Graham himself was widely regarded to be a ‘nice guy’ as Ott so eloquently noted, and “psychopathically polite” his friend Bob Reilly once remarked.
Cannon described his colleague as “a gentle man who seemed to walk on the tips of his toes as if he intended to pass through the world without disturbing anyone…The copy was pure and so was he. He typed it quickly on the toy machine with the dainty tapping of polite fingers. He frisked the characters of even the rogues for their good traits and cherished them for that. He was an original, this embarrassed poet, who changed sports writing, and brought it to the dignity of folk literature.”
Frank Graham, Sr. was the worthy recipient of many honors and awards celebrating his writing prowess including the Boxing Writers Association of New York’s James J. Walker Award for “long and meritorious” service to boxing (1957); The Grantland Rice Award presented annually to the outstanding sportswriter in America (1958); and The William J. Slocum Award saluting “long and meritorious service” to baseball (1961).
Posthumously Graham was selected by the Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWA) as the recipient of its highest honor, the J.G. Taylor Spink Award for distinguished baseball writing (1971) and as such was inducted into the “writers wing” of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum (1972). And in 1997–32 years after his death — he was honored by the Boxing Writers Association of America with the A.J. Liebling Award for outstanding writing about boxing.
Pete Hamill was born in 1935 and dropped out of high school at 15 to work as an apprentice sheet metal worker in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Fifty-nine years later in June of 2010 the prestigious Regis High School in Manhattan awarded its former scholarship student an honorary diploma.
A columnist and editor-in-chief for both the New York Post and The New York Daily News — he also was a contributing columnist for New York Newsday, the Village Voice, New York magazine, the New Yorker, Playboy, Rolling Stone and Esquire — Hamill, perhaps best known as “the author of columns that sought to capture the particular flavors of New York City’s politics and sports and the particular pathos of its crime,” remains so much more than that.
A widely-traveled (he has lived in Mexico, Spain, Ireland, Puerto Rico, Rome, Los Angeles and Santa Fe in addition to New York of course) novelist, essayist and educator in addition to his standing as a world-class journalist, his first passion was comic strips.
That’s right.
Hamill had a burning desire to be a comic strip artist, a cartoonist. He attended night classes at the School of Visual Arts, known at the time as the Cartoonist and Illustrators School.
Having enlisted in the U.S. Navy in the Fall of 1952, serving and being discharged he was entitled to the G.I. Bill of Rights. He rode that paperwork to Mexico City College in the autumn of ‘56 — he’d completed his high school education in the Navy — to become a painter. He later attended Pratt Institute and for a time worked as a graphic designer.
Soon after it was on to writing and a long and storied career in journalism.
As a journalist he has covered wars in Vietnam, Nicaragua, Lebanon and Northern Ireland. From his New York fulcrum he has covered murders, fires, the city’s underclass and racial divide, World Series classics and championship fights. He reported on the urban unrest and rioting of America’s 1960s.
A friend of Robert F. Kennedy, he helped persuade the senator to run for the United States Presidency and then worked on the campaign and covered it as a journalist. In fact, he was one of four men who disarmed Sirhan Sirhan of his firearm in the immediate aftermath of the RFK assassination.
He even has written about contemporary music, winning a Grammy in 1975 for Best Liner Notes to/for Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks.
A most impressive repertoire and an astonishing range for one person, multi-faceted and wildly talented to say the very least.
A generalist as opposed to a specialist, Hamill often said that he has learned a great deal from photographers and has written reams about their work, specifically how a picture and a word can be so inextricably linked and mutually serving.
No surprise coming from one whose love of comics and their boundless wonder from an early age, informed his writing and his imagination.
With a collection of framed comic strip originals above his desk he has authored — among other pieces — an introduction to “Terry and the Pirates Vol.II” by Milton Caniff; an introductory text for a version of Al Hirschfeld’s, “The Speakeasies of 1932”; and an introduction to “Jerry Robinson: Ambassador of Comics” lauding the man who helped conceive the modern comic book, including the creation of one of its legendary villains, The Joker.
The laundry list of awards received by Pete Hamill spans five decades (1962–2014 and counting) and is far too long to detail here but with Honorary Doctorate Degrees from Pratt Institute (1980) and St. John’s University (2010) along with a host of Lifetime Achievement Awards (the Society of Silurians-1989; Columbia Journalism-2000; Ernie Pyle-2005; and Eugene O’Neill-2014) to go with “The New York City 400” list of the Most Influential New Yorkers in Past 400 Years inclusion, what more need be said?
Hamill will be 82 in June.
To many, Jimmy Breslin’s name is perhaps the most recognizable of the four and understandably.
Breslin became an institution, a global icon, the rags-to-riches writer in terms of the neighborhood guy, a regular guy making good.
There were many before him, many after, many presently and many whose skills are beginning to percolate surely. But Breslin was brash, acetic and relentless in his pursuit to embolden the powerless while bludgeoning the powerful.
He came by this hard-boiled sentiment and Robin Hood mentality honestly, courtesy of a difficult upbringing in Queens.
Breslin started as a copy boy in the late 1940s for The Long Island Press and then took a job as a sportswriter for The New York Journal-American.
His humorous take on the first season of the New York Mets in 1962 (40–120 .250; last in the NL, 60 ½ games out of first place) in a book entitled, “Can’t Anyone Here Play This Game?” got him a gig at the Herald-Tribune as a news columnist in 1963.
This position, that which it entailed and his unique knack and flair vaulted Breslin into the rarified air of a select group of writers credited with inventing “New Journalism,” in which novelistic techniques are used to infuse an urgent and tension-laden narrative discourse into the reporting of the daily news.
He was changing the craft of column writing — wittingly or not — and to Hamill, a former colleague, this was no small potatoes.
Hardly.
Said he, “It seemed so new and original…It was a very, very important moment in New York journalism, and in national journalism.”
Seminal is what it was.
Speaking to his affinity for the papers, Breslin explained that, “rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns for newspapers…[and] once you get back in the newspapers, it’s like heroin. You’re there. That’s all.”
He was always “there.”
One of the first staff writers at New York magazine; covering the JFK assassination and his famous column about Clifton Pollard in 1963; covering the RFK assassination in 1968; a run for City Council president with Norman Mailer as his mayoral ticketmate in 1969; his controversial published exchanges with Son of Sam in 1977; his 1986 skewering of Queens borough president Donald R. Manes regarding his involvement in a payoff swindle with city officials which precipitated Manes’ suicide two months later; and on and on.
Telling the stories of others was therapy for Breslin, allowing him to replace his feelings with those of his subjects. He became comfortable subjugating and suppressing his feelings about himself and the rippling effect for instance that his father’s abandonment of him and his family had on all of their lives.
“I replaced my feelings with what I felt were the feelings of others, and that changed with each thing I went to, so I was about 67 people in my life,” he mused.
Breslin won nearly every newspaper award known to man.
He was the 1986 Pulitzer Prize winner for commentary and he was a critically acclaimed author who wrote novels (“World Without End, Amen”-1973; “Table Money”-1986; “The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez”-2002; and “The Good Rat”-2008 among several others) as well as biographies (Damon Runyon and Branch Rickey).
He died on March 19, 2017 at 88 years of age.
The four gentlemen critiqued represent shining examples of what it means to be talented, courtesy of God’s gift and hard work.
I seem to remember my mother telling me that everyone is good at something.
What she didn’t say was that there’s good and then there’s good.
These guys were (and are) far better than good. Intergalactically great may be a more apt description.
The rest of us?
As Larry Bird once extolled, “keep tryin’ kid; you’ll git it.”
[Editor’s Note: This piece was written by Mr. Kaplan in April 2017.]
