Full Swing
by Ira Berkow
Summary
For someone who suffered through poor grades in high school and flunked out of his first crack at college in his first semester, it was a revelation [for Ira Berkow] to discover as a junior in college that he had a passion for writing. He pursued it with determination and became one of America’s most thoughtful writers on sports, a man interested as much in the people who play the games as in the scores and statistics…[T]he great sports columnist Red Smith was a mentor who took the time to critique a young writer’s efforts….Add E. B. White, Muhammad Ali, Saul Bellow, Mike Royko, Ted Williams, P. G. Wodehouse, Michael Jordan….This is a writer’s memoir with the warts as well as the wows, and with all the intelligence and charm that readers of Mr. Berkow have grown accustomed to.
Excerpt
1
Who Wrote the Poem?
IN THE LATE 1940S AND ’50S I attended William Cullen Bryant Grammar School on the West Side of Chicago. Bryant was a red-brick, six-entranced school with inkwells in desks and streams of kids. Now it exists only in the mists of memory since it has been leveled to make way for something called urban renewal. At Bryant I was a good student and an avid reader. My juvenile tastes, however, did not tend toward William Cullen Bryant himself, the nineteenth-century New England poet, who wrote, as I ran across it several decades later: “The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year, / Of wailing winds, and naked woods, / and meadows brown and sere”—which, more or less, describes the fate of his eponymous public school in Chicago, if you change “woods” and “meadows” for “city block” and “sere” for “gravel.”
No, I read mostly biographies aimed at young audiences—books about Abraham Lincoln, Clara Barton, and a particular favorite, Kit Carson: Boy of the Old West—along with John R. Tunis’s sports novels, especially The Kid from Tomkinsville and Highpockets, which thrilled me with their galloping pace. I even skipped a grade at Bryant, going from fourth to fifth. (When, after morning recess on the day of the promotion, Miss Mele told me to report to the principal’s office and didn’t say why, I protested. “I didn’t do anything this time,” I said, for I occasionally had made a trek to that dreaded office for some infraction.) In high school, though, my grades were poor, since I concentrated primarily on playing sports, and success in the classroom was marked by the ability to manage, just barely, to stay eligible for the school teams. I read three books in my four years of high school. I have played arduous catch-up on reading ever since.
In an English class in my junior year at Sullivan High, however—it was October 1955, when I was fifteen—I did write something that drew the teacher’s attention. It was in Miss Moody’s English class. Miss Moody was a small woman with dyed red hair who wore circles of rouge marks on her cheeks. Every St. Patrick’s Day she and Ralph Margolis, the football coach, used to dance the Irish jig on stage in the school auditorium. Coach Margolis was as hefty as Miss Moody was petite. It was quite a sight, and one wondered, given the weight of Coach Margolis, whether the wooden floor of the stage would hold. But every Friday a rotating group of students was instructed to memorize a poem in Miss Moody’s class, and to stand and read the poem aloud. The poem was supposed to be no shorter than twelve lines. One fellow in the class stood, rolled up his shirtsleeves, and recited, glancing at his forearm with every line since the poem was inked on his arm. Somehow Miss Moody never noticed, though the rest of the class was falling into the aisles with muted laughter….
Reprinted with permission of Ivan R. Dee Publisher http://www.ivanrdee.com
Reviews
"Like a great ballpark conversation, where everything and anything is fair game"—Allen St. John, New York Times Book Review
"Such a treasure....Berkow raises sports writing to a new level"—David Rothenberg, WBAI 99.5 FM
"Full Swing is like a great ballpark conversation, where everything and anything is fair game"—Allen St. John, New York Times
Author's Biography
Ira Berkow has been a sports columnist and feature writer for the New York Times for more than twenty years. In 2001 he shared the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting with his article on “The Minority Quarterback,” later published by Ivan R. Dee in a book of the same name. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including the best-sellers Red: A Biography of Red Smith and Maxwell Street: Survival in a Bazaar. He lives in New York City.