Araton and Berkow, Together Again

10/27/2020

Not too long ago, Harvey Araton and Ira Berkow were gracing the sports pages of The New York Times with their wise columns.
Now they are both issuing books with their very personal views of the world.
Harvey’s book is “Our Last Season: A Writer, a Fan, a Friendship,” about the bond between him and Michelle Musler, who for decades was a fixture in the stands just behind the Knicks bench in Madison Square Garden.
Ira’s book is “How Life Imitates Sports: A Sportswriter Recounts, Relives and Reckons With 50 Years on the Sports Beat,” which just about tells it all.
(In alphabetical order)
Araton praises the wise businesswoman who was always there – for the Knicks and for him. He describes himself as the child of a project in Staten Island, who earns his entry into sports journalism while battling his own insecurities.

As he works his way from the Staten Island Advance to the Post to the Daily News, his talent and earnestness impress not only editors and readers but also a fan literally looking over his shoulder in the Garden.
Musler saw all – could read the body language, maybe even read lips, of the Knicks and the opponents and the refs. She had put her people skills to great advantage in the corporate world, undoubtedly by being wiser than the average (male) executive.
The Knicks were her outlet, she freely told friends, her social life. Everybody knew her – the players, nearby fans, reporters, ushers, even the team PR man, who left a packet of media stats and releases for her before every game. How cool was that?

Musler more or less adopted Harvey, counseled him, shaped him up, told him to aim big. She became friendly with Harvey’s wife, Beth Albert, and sometimes met Harvey after a game to debrief him on what she had seen from her perch.
When he fretted whether he was worthy of the Times job being offered, she figuratively slammed him up against a steel locker and gave him what a high-school coach I knew called “a posture exercise.” And when his career took a sour detour, she shaped him up, to the point that in retirement he remains an extremely valuable contributor to the Times sports section. Harvey is still what somebody once called him: “The Rebbe of Roundball.”

In return, Harvey came to know Michelle Musler – her strange childhood, her husband leaving her with five children, her career, her need to make money, her love of the Knicks. Her decades of working with male executives prepared her for a searing analysis of James Dolan, the miserable owner of the Knicks.
As Michelle’s health deteriorated, Harvey would sometimes drive from New Jersey to Connecticut to the Garden to get her to a game.
And when Michelle Musler passed in 2018, Harvey wrote a beautiful obit for the Times:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/obituaries/michelle-musler-courtside-perennial-in-the-garden-dies-at-81.html

Ira Berkow’s book is also personal – about a talented, ambitious kid from Chicago who made his way to New York and became a fixture in the Times and also in books, not all about sports.
Ira has touched on most stars of the past half century – Muhammad Ali! Michael Jordan! He sized up O.J. Simpson, before and after! He had lunch with Katarina Witt! He shot baskets with Martina Navratilova! He also shot baskets with a retired Oscar Robertson! He schmoozed with Abel Kiviat, then America’s oldest living medalist! And he scrutinized a brash real-estate hustler named Donald Trump!
One of my favorite segments is about Jackie Robinson – who broke baseball’s disgraceful color barrier in 1947. Ira recalls being 15, a high-school athlete himself, watching the Dodgers take on the Yankees in the 1955 World Series.

In 2018, with JR42 long gone, Ira was being interviewed on TV about Robinson and came up with a description of how Jackie Robinson had faked the Yankees’ Elston Howard -- a catcher playing left field -- into throwing the ball to second base while Robinson steamed into third.
Later, he remembered interviewing Robinson in 1968 about his thought processes in testing Howard, who was out of position because Yogi Berra was the catcher. Robinson seemed to deflect Ira’s analysis, but the audacious move remained in Ira’s fertile brain.
A few years ago, Ira looked it up in the official play-by-play for the 1955 Series: it confirmed that Robinson, by whatever logic, had victimized Howard into throwing behind Robinson.
This section confirms the instinctive genius of Jackie Robinson and also the enlightened journalistic observation powers of Ira Berkow.
* * *
Most of sports have been thrown off balance by the pandemic, but these very different books by Harvey Araton and Ira Berkow remind us how great sportswriters have enriched us by writing about the world, on and off the court.

Alan Rubin link

10/27/2020 03:32:59 pm

A wonderful tribute to two great writers.

Harvey Araton’s sense of individual relationship is wonderfully evident in “Driving Mr. Yogi”. I can visualize his relationship with Michelle Musler, a women who showed that men should always listen to them..

I’m not as familiar with Ira Berkow’s books other than his stories of Red Barber. Barrington Stage Theater Company in Pittsfield, MA did an excellent one-man Red Barber show a few years back.

George

10/27/2020 05:22:44 pm

Alan: you both would have enjoyed meeting Michele.
I think you mean Red Smith — Ira became close to him, and wrote a nice bio of him.
GV

bruce

10/28/2020 12:03:57 am

george,

i remember reading araton's nyt obit on ms musler.

nice tribute.

always thought he had a bit of an edge to him.

always liked berkow's stuff as well.

remember reading him a long time ago, but not where.

did he used to write for sport magazine or am i mixing him up with somebody else....arnold hano, perhaps?

bruce

10/28/2020 03:24:12 pm

Bruce: You're right...Harvey often had an edge -- in the direction of social justice or just rational management of the Knicks. He came out of the city school, knew NY basketball, and its coaches and characters. The NYT had more of a NY edge, and he was fun to read for that.
Ira did a lot of free-lancing and book-writing before joining the NYT and he continued it. You indeed might be thinking of Arnold Hano as a signature Sport magazine writer. I grew up reading Hano's psychological profiles of sports types. His book, "A Day in the Bleachers," was a result of impulse buying a ticket to the bleachers for a 1954 World Series game at the Polo Grounds, and watching Willie Mays track down Vic Wertz' long drive. Hano started jotting down notes on a scorecard, I think. When he turned 93 in 2015, I wrote about him. It is one of the jewels of sports books:

https://www.georgevecsey.com/home/arnold-hano-wrote-about-mays-catch-honored-at-93

bruce

10/28/2020 05:01:56 pm

george,

i remember your hano piece.

i read sport magazine for several years starting when i was 10 or so.

i was in grade 4 or 5 when we were asked if we were interested in getting people subscribe to different magazines. it'd be around 1959-61.

sounded good, but the only person i could convince was my mother so i could get sport magazine.

don't remember anything specific. just that i enjoyed his stuff..

hano is the only guy i remember. obviously because he was good and different from the daily paper i read.

bruce

ED MARTIN

11/1/2020 11:10:37 am

Thanks GV. Once, again, an example of what makes you “one off.”

A book on sports writers, might be right up your alley. (I knew Dick Clemente a bit, Newsday Bowling writer, —I was a pinboy at Heineman’s 32 lanes in S. Hempstead.)

George Vecsey

11/2/2020 09:15:47 am

Ed: I'm off. Not so sure about "one off." Thanks.
I think I got it out of my system in my 1988 book "A Year in the Sun." Lot of stuff about sportswriters and how we work.
I worked with Clemente -- liked him a lot. Cranky. Crude. Also loyal and funny. Bark bigger than bite, as the saying goes. I still use (cranky, crude) phrases I learned from him. Funny thing is, our son worked with guys like Clemente at his first job in Peoria, Ill. I love his stories about the office grumps. The old newspaper game. GV

bruce

11/2/2020 09:45:46 am

george,

g'day.

you may or may not remember that my first job was as a copy boy at the hamilton spectator.

started in august 1968.

lots of guys still around who started in the 20s and 30s.

they were, just as often as not, a crude and cranky bunch.

many not formally well educated but learned along the way.

one guy was from windsor--across the border from detroit--and had something to do with breaking up the purple gang.

ah. the good old daze.

hope tomorrow--more or less--you 'merikans get rid of the monster you slimed the world with.

bruce

bruce

11/2/2020 01:18:08 pm

Bruce reminds me, I believe you know this. My first real job, if you dont count caddying, and setting pins and mowing lawns without power, was signing up people for 13 week subscriptions to the Nassau Daily Review Star. I was recruited on the street by Roy Hepp, circulation salesman for Newsday. As Levittown, East Meadow, Uniondale and more were being built and sold daily, I prospered, causing my Dad to lose his income tax deduction.

Meanwhile, I was a sports “ stringer” writing about such major events as high school bowling, Baldwin HS soccer and. Boys Softball, (yes, Boys softball. I was a participant-observer, not sure about journalistic ethics of that.

I worked Senior year of HS and the summer of Freshman year at Muhlenberg, (you’ve all heard of Muhlenberg, even Alan.)

Bob Zellner, Sports editor of Newsday, offered me a job at summer’s end, $37.50 a week. I appreciated the offer , but wanted to continue college at Berg. Being a dumb 17 year old, I mentioned I was making about $75 a week selling the paper. Bob qualified next, as grumpy, not without cause. I did become Sports Editor for the Muhlenberg Weekly and occasional Soccer contributor to the Allentown Morning Call.

Bob predicted, after my comment, I would never be a journalist.

bruce

11/2/2020 02:15:12 pm

ed,

not all of it, but......

a well known investigative reporter's obit was in the hamilton spectator today.

i knew him from the spec and then the globe&mail. he was 81 and, if memory serves, had a grade 8 education.

i made $50 weekly for 37 1/2 hours as a copy boy and $102 for my first full time reporting job at the oakville daily journal record.in 1972. was a full time stringer for three different papers at different times plus covered the cfl hamilton ticats home games for united press.

got into travel writing as well.

had several non newspaper jobs too.

i hung out a bit with a guy from allentown when i lived in japan.

i don't suppose you occasionally reminded bob of his error.

bruce

Comments are closed.

QUOTES
More and More, I Talk to the Dead--Margaret Renkl

NASHVILLE — After my mother died so suddenly — laughing at a rerun of “JAG” at 10 p.m., dying of a hemorrhagic stroke by dawn — I dreamed about her night after night. In every dream she was willfully, outrageously alive, unaware of the grief her death had caused. In every dream relief poured through me like a flash flood. Oh, thank God!
Then I would wake into keening grief all over again.
Years earlier, when my father learned he had advanced esophageal cancer, his doctor told him he had perhaps six months to live. He lived far longer than that, though I never thought of it as “living” once I learned how little time he really had. For six months my father was dying, and then he kept dying for two years more. I was still working and raising a family, but running beneath the thin soil of my own life was a river of death. My father’s dying governed my days.
After he died, I wept and kept weeping, but I rarely dreamed about my father the way I would dream about my mother nearly a decade later. Even in the midst of calamitous grief, I understood the difference: My father’s long illness had given me time to work death into the daily patterns of my life. My mother’s sudden death had obliterated any illusion that daily patterns are trustworthy.
Years have passed now, and it’s the ordinariness of grief itself that governs my days. The very air around me thrums with absence. I grieve the beloved high-school teacher I lost the summer after graduation and the beloved college professor who was my friend for more than two decades. I grieve the father I lost nearly 20 years ago and the father-in-law I lost during the pandemic. I grieve the great-grandmother who died my junior year of college and the grandmother who lived until I was deep into my 40s.
Some of those I grieve are people I didn’t even know. How can John Prine be gone? I hear his haunting last song, “I Remember Everything,” and I still can’t quite believe that John Prine is gone.
-----
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/30/opinion/death-grief-memory.html
Jan. 30, 2023

Araton and Berkow, Together Again

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