With so much action immediately available onscreen, the written report conveys only what one has already seen, if not live, then on the late-night news wrap-ups and the highlight shows, with instant replay, clever cutting, multiple angles, slo-mo, super slo-mo-plus trash talk, hoop hanging, styled home run trots, and end-zone dirty dancing. There were also two championship boxing bouts, two NHL hockey games, skiing and figure skating championships, a soccer match, two golf tournaments, harness and thoroughbred racing, and two track meets. Today, because of television, reporting on who won and who lost is a penny short and a day late on a single Saturday in February, nineteen men’s and women’s college basketball games, and one NBA game, were televised in the New York area. San Francisco World Series and the Loma Prieta earthquake notwithstanding, the earth rarely moves. In sports, the confluence of the 1989 Oakland vs. Writing well about sports is as difficult as writing well about sex. Louis Cardinals ( October 1964), and the troubled 1978-1979 season of the NBA’s Portland Trailblazers ( The Breaks of the Game). His subject is always sports-the 1949 American League pennant race ( Summer of ’49), scullers questing for a place on the 1984 Olympic team ( The Amateurs), the 1964 World Series between the New York Yankees and the St. Like Graham Greene, who, between his weightier fictions on sin and salvation and the transgressions of Pax Americana, published the tidy thrillers he called “entertainments,” Halberstam intersperses his eight-hundred-page baggy monsters with diversions of his own. For thirty-five years, David Halberstam, an unsilent member of the Silent Generation, has contemplated America and its place in the world, casting his eye on big subjects-Vietnam, global economics, race, mass media, and the 1950s.
0 kommentar(er)
