W.C. Heinz and the value of under-writing
David Halberstam sorted through decades’ worth of magazine features in the process of compiling The Best American Sports Writing of the Century, and when it came time for publication in the summer of 1999, three pieces by W.C. Heinz made the cut — more features than any other writer included in the book.
It was a worthy honor for a man universally considered one of the great sportswriters of the mid-20th century, a time when boxing and horse racing still ruled the nation’s sports pages alongside baseball and football. In fact, the piece many revere as Heinz’s best work — 1949’s stunning New York Sun deadline column “Death of a Racehorse” — didn’t even make Halberstam’s final cut.
But that piece, checking in at fewer than 1,000 words, perfectly encapsulated what Heinz did best. As Halberstam wrote in the foreword to What a Time it Was, a compilation of Heinz’s sports writing: “He wrote simply and well — if anything he under-wrote — but he gave his readers a feel and a sense of what was happening at a game or at the fights, and a rare glimpse into the personalities of the signature athletes of the age.”
Heinz, who was born Jan. 11, 1915 and went by “Bill” aside from his byline, established himself alongside Red Smith as one of the country’s great newspaper sports columnists in the late 1940s before moving on to magazine work when the Sun closed in 1950. But all of the characteristics we now recognize as the strongest facets of his sports writing were evident in the stories he filed to the Sun from Europe as a war correspondent in 1944 and 1945.
Heinz wasn’t nearly as well-known as Ernie Pyle back then, nor is he now, but his work stands side by side with that of the renowned Scripps Howard columnist in terms of emotional impact. In story after story, Heinz found an angle away from the main thrust of the action that occupied other correspondents and delivered it without the overwriting common at the time.
In a story datelined April 29, 1944, Heinz described a ceremony being held on the fairway of an English golf course — “a funeral service for an American sailor who gave his life in the invasion of Europe.” The sailor is never named in the piece, but as with much of Pyle’s work, Heinz sets him up as an avatar of the countless Americans all over the world caught up in war.
This was a young American. He laughed at American jokes and American songs ran through his head. On the nights when he had liberty, he went into town and drank English ale, but he really didn’t like it. He had brown eyes and he knew there was no better smoke than an American cigaret. He thought the St. Louis Cardinals were the best ball club in the world. He was 19.
As indicated by the lead, Heinz’s point in the story is that this anonymous sailor’s life is just as worthy of tribute as any man who would fall whenever Americans finally stormed the beaches of Europe.
The chaplain spoke of many things relating to this American sailor, but he did not speak of the giving of this life in the invasion of Europe. Yet this is an American naval supply depot. It is the largest advanced supply depot in this theater.
There are 75,000 different items here. These items of invasion were brought in here by American sailors over American roads built of 150,000 tons of crushed English stone. And so, when of an English afternoon an American truck overturned and crushed the life of an American sailor there was none here to point out that this was not the continent of Europe or to say that the West Fall of Festung Europa and the green of an English fairway were not now one. …
He was an American sailor and there was no one here to say that this, after all, was not really the invasion coast or that the invasion had not yet begun.
Five weeks later, Heinz was aboard the USS Nevada, Pearl Harbor survivor, off Utah Beach on D-Day. He would go on to chronicle the rest of the war on the continent, from Cherbourg to Paris to the Hurtgen Forest and the Battle of the Bulge and eventually deep into Germany in the spring of 1945.
He even wrote about his voyage home that June, sharing the tale of three soldiers who had been captured in North Africa in February 1943 and mocked by their German POW camp guard, who said they would never see the Statue of Liberty again. Now, as their ship entered New York Harbor, the trio jockeyed for position among the 7,000 men aboard.
All around the three kids other kids were bobbing their heads. Some were saying they saw it. Many were pointing. Some kept asking ‘where?’ and saying they couldn’t see a thing. Nobody cheered. …
“I don’t think half these guys on board can see it,” Zimney said.
“We can see it,” Quillen said, “just enough to make a liar out of that Kraut.”
“We had a pretty good idea he was a liar the day he said that,” Schultz said.
“I’ll bet that Kraut is dead now,” Quillen said.
“Sure he is,” Zimney said, still bobbing his head and looking out. “He must be.”
Shortly after returning to New York, Heinz found his niche in the Sun sports pages, covering football and the fights.
He would become especially well-known for his boxing stories, and would be inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 2004.
Heinz did make one more notable foray outside sports during his career, collaborating with Dr. H. Richard Hornberger under the pseudonym Richard Hooker to write the 1968 novel MASH, which spawned the movie and long-running television series of the same name.
Later in life, he would trace his style back to his days as a war correspondent.
“I learned to write during the war,” he said. “The material was so rich you had great opportunity. The trick was to under-write.”
Heinz died in February 2008 at age 93.
Read more of his World War II work in the 2003 anthology When We Were One.