I heard some news that shocked me this morning. David Halberstam, long renowed author, had passed away due to a car crash. He was 73 years old, and was on his way to interview New York Giants quarterback Y.A. Tittle about the 1958 NFL Championship between Tittle’s Giants and the Baltimore Colts. He had just completed a 10-year project of the Korean War in 1950 and 1951. He had long been an avid author of sports, politics and war.
For more on Halberstam’s life, please read either the Boston Globe story or the ESPN.com story. They do a better job than I ever could, and I’m not here to recap his life, but to tell you how important Halberstam was to me, a budding writer and avid reader.
I never met him, but two of his baseball books meant a lot to me.
The very last book of his I read (although I’ve always wanted to read his 2006 piece on Bill Belichick) is The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship. It’s about Ted Williams, Bobby Doerr, Johnny Pesky, and Dom DiMaggio all being teammates during their Red Sox years and the bond between them.
His Summer of ’49 was also an excellent book, depicting the pennant race between the Red Sox and New York Yankees.
Those two books are on my bookshelf, and I hold them in high regard, as I do for the author, David Halberstam. Rest in peace, and prayers to his family and friends.
