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The Silent Season of a Hero: The Sports Writing of Gay Talese GAY TALESE Edited by MICHAEL ROSENWALD WALKER & COMPANY, 2010. 308 PAGES, PAPER, $16.00
Gay Talese has long been drawn to those for whom the spotlight has faded. In his recently issued collection of sports writing are portraits of Joe Louis, Floyd Patterson, Joe DiMaggio, and Muhammad Ali, each article written after its subject's glory years had come and gone. They are elegiac pieces, colored by touches of nostalgia, but more powerfully by the efforts of these men to find new meaning: DiMaggio running a restaurant and being a batting coach for the Yankees, Louis golfing and following the homey guidance of his third wife, Patterson at 29 trying to recover from being knocked out a second time by Sonny Liston, Ali traveling as a goodwill ambassador to Cuba in his Parkinson's-induced muteness.
An anthology such as this one inevitably presents the opportunity for a similar consideration of the journalist himself. Talese's sports writing began in 1948, when he was in high school, and almost all of these selections are somewhere between 15 and 50 years old-the exceptions being the introduction and a 2006 excerpt from his book A Writer's Life. Beyond that, the most recent magazine or newspaper piece is from 1996. Talese himself is nearly 80. He is, however, still writing, and still writing about sports. (According to his website, in fact, he is "under contract to write a story that will become the basis of a forthcoming Warner Brothers film about New York Jets linebacker Bart Scott.") And whatever nostalgia this broad collection might induce, the much more powerful sensation that comes from a browse through this book is one of aliveness and energy. The stories have aged well, maintained their muscle and their eyesight, their voice and their sharpness of mind.
The enduring strength of Talese's sports writing is due in large part, no doubt, to the fact that he rarely wrote for...