One wonders if there is a young sportswriter alive today who in 45 years might produce something as good as this, the opening of Roger Kahn's account in Memories of Summer of the first spring training he covered after the death of his father:
"Then it was spring and older now and barren in mood, I journeyed to a desert, feeling banished to a barren land. I missed my father every day, but there, in Arizona dust and grit, the vulgar, vital exuberance of Leo Durocher renewed me, and after that I was refreshed by the only magic ballplayer of my lifetime--he was better than Roy Hobbs -- young Willie Howard Mays.
But first let me tell you about Leo Durocher, the skipper, or as Leo himself would have put it, the fucking skipper. He was cheap and obscene and devious and suspicious and wholly magnificent."
Probably not; the times they have a-changed. Memories of Summer is Kahn's remembrance of how the times once were. In March 1952, the 24-year-old Kahn, newly promoted to the position of sports reporter at the New York Herald Tribune, was assigned to cover his beloved Brooklyn Dodgers. The Herald Tribune was an old-fashioned great American newspaper, home to internationally known columnists such as Walter Lippman and legendary reporters like Bert Andrews; its sports department, built around Red Smith, was among the greatest ever assembled. The 1952 Dodgers were also murderously good, if not quite good enough. In Kahn's rookie year his Dodgers won the National League pennant, as they had the year before, and lost the World Series to the New York Yankees, as they had the year before. It was the seventh time the Dodgers lost the World Series.
Baseball was still big news in those days, and still magical -- World Series coverage ran on the front page. Four of the eight starting position players on that Dodger team would be elected to the baseball Hall of Fame. Kahn's own journey to the writers wing of the Hall probably began with his masterful lead for the page-one story he wrote describing the Yankees' victory in the seventh game of that Series, a victory which gave the Bombers their 15th championship and fourth in a row: "Every year is next year for the Yankees."
There is all of that, and more, in Memories of Summer. The Dodgers went on to finally win their world championship in 1955. Kahn went on to stints at the fledgling Sports Illustrated and as the sports editor at Newsweek before settling in for a few years as editor-at-large for the Saturday Evening Post. He was Esquire's first sports columnist, and has had a long and fruitful relationship with New Yorker. Along the way he wrote more than a dozen books and became known as the most literary, and incidentally the best, of American baseball writers, although it is more accurate to say that he is an outstanding writer who often happens to write about baseball. Memories of Summer is a trip through Kahn's youth, fond and affectionate and sometimes sentimental, a marvelous and often touching book about sons and fathers, the newspaper business and the magazine life, and about baseball -- as it once was, and can never be again.
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