Southern Bookman

Farewell, Ken Venturi

Watching Ken Venturi stagger through heat exhaustion and dehydration to win the 1964 U.S. Open is one of my strongest memories of TV sports viewing. Venturi's victory at Congressional Country Club cemented my love for golf and the Open, which I have watched every year since. While I adored Arnold Palmer, Venturi and his heroic victory made him one of my favorite golfers. Venturi's death Friday at age 82 marked the passing of another childhood hero.

Wearing a white shirt, gray pants and Ben Hogan-style snap-down cap, Venturi endured 36 holes on the tournament's final day, as had every other Open champion. As Venturi battled severe dehydration, a doctor advised him not to play the Saturday afternoon final round in 100-degree heat. He pressed on, consuming candy bars and placing wet towels upon his neck, to shoot a 70 in a performance he said he couldn't even remember, although he knew on the final green that he had won the open, his childhood dream growing up in a working class home in San Francisco, handicapped by a severe stutter. His winning the championship while risking possible death remains the greatest sports performance I've seen.

Citing the threat to Venturi, the USGA changed the tournament to an 18-hole final round on Sunday, although cynics thought the shift was more to meet TV network demands than to protect golfers. Whatever, watching every shot of the open's Sunday final round has been my Father's Day tradition.

I also associate Venturi with the Masters, from his years of broadcasting the tournament for CBS, especially with the great Pat Summerall, who also died this year. While reverential about the tournament, Summerall and Venturi held back from the obsequious excesses of current CBS announcer Jim Nance. Venturi's commentary was exact, brusque, and pointed, in contrast to Nick Faldo's self-referential flights.

Before winning the Open, Venturi had fallen short of expectations after turning pro following a sensational amateur career. The Masters was one of his major disappointments. As an amateur, he'd led the tournament for 54 holes before blowing to a final round 80. After joining the PGA tour, Venturi finished second to Palmer in the 1960 Masters, when Palmer received a favorable ruling that Venturi considered unfair. Palmer was not penalized for removing an embedded ball, giving him a narrow win.

Venturi was a main figure in one of the best sports books I've read this year, Mark Frost's "The Match," which tells the story of a best ball competition that Venturi and fellow amateur Harvie Ward played against professional greats Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson in 1956 at Cypress Point in Carmel, Calif. While the book doesn't justify its subtitle, "the day the game of golf changed forever," it presents a wealth of golf lore. Venturi idolized Hogan, copying his clothing style and exacting approach to golf, and received lessons from Nelson. Nelson's instruction brought Venturi's game to a world-class level.

I remember a Sports Illustrated profile of Venturi that presented him as the stylish, savvy exemplar of post-war American manhood. His blazer and gray slacks, martini and cigarettes cool, sardonic wit and rugged good looks defined him as one of the greats of a vanished era. Ken Venturi's name and personality will always glow in my memory.

Valdosta Nights: Football Life in a Southern Town

Drew Jubera's "Must Win: A Season of Survival for a Town and Its Team" goes beyond its hyperbolic title with a rich, in-depth look at a small Southern city and its passion for high school football.

More than just a sports book, "Must Win" uses the 2010 Valdosta Wildcats season to examine education, race, religion, teen life, religion, hip hop, poverty, and urban problems. Along with that, sports fans will find a wealth of high school football lore.

Jubera, a longtime colleague of mine at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, spent a year in Valdosta to chronicle the Wildcats' 2010 season under new coach Rance Gillespie, hired to restore the Wildcats' declining football dynasty.

Once nationally known as the country's top high school football power under legendary coaches Wright Bazemore and Nick Hyder, Valdosta had declined in the 1990s after Hyder's unexpected death, of a heart attack in the school's cafeteria at lunchtime. With white flight and a falling population, the old inner-city school had watched nearby Lowndes County High rise in wealth and football power.

Jubera presents an engaging history of the town's football rise and fall, giving fascinating details of the city's and region's past and present along the way. Valdosta, on the eastern edge of U.S. 84 football crescent that swings through south Georgia, is the last stop on i-75 before tourists reach Florida. That geographical distinction has allowed the city to build a tourism industry based on interstate hotels and restaurants. Jubera delves into the area's agricultural past of turpentine production, when black workers were brutally exploited. He shows how that past echoes into the present day, when many black members of the Valdosta team are beset by poverty and violence.

The book is populated by an interesting group of characters, from longtime Valdosta boosters desperate to restore the glory days to football-addicted coaches and stressed teachers and parents. The most memorable characters are the handful of players whom Jubera highlights in heartbreaking, funny and endearing ways.

At times, Jubera's attempts at hip-hop flavored effects fall short, but those are rare blemishes. "Must Win's" intensely regional focus, as with Faulkner, gives it universal appeal. The book deserves national attention and readership.

Farewell Alex Karras, with memories of George Plimpton and "Paper Lion"

I just happened to see a web page report that Detroit Lions and later TV star Alex Karras has died. I associate Karras, the Lions' all-pro defensive lineman in the1960s, with one of my best childhood reading experiences, George Plimpton's "Paper Lion."

My parents subscribed for a time to the Book of the Month Club, and one of the hardbacks that arrived in a form fitted cardboard box was Plimpton's account of trying out for quarterback with the Lions. The zany Karras, who took to playing made up comic Nazi characters to ward off training camp boredom, was a star of the book, one of the first hits in the emerging literary sports-book genre. I can still remember the book's dust jacket, with a photo of the shaggy-haired Plimpton in his Lions uniform, No. 0, as I recall. Plimpton discussed his humiliation at trying to play quarterback for the Lions, who good naturedly accepted him, finishing with an account of his actual appearance in an exhibition game. The book was one of the first "New Journalism" works I read and remains one of the best.

Karras later starred in the movie version of the book, launching him on his acting career highlighted by the TV show "Webster." In the show, he and his TV wife adopted a black kid. I have a few impressions of the show, including that I had a mini-crush on the woman who played his TV wife.

I also knew Karras from my father's subscription to Sports Illustrated; he along with the Packers' Paul Hornung was suspended for a year by NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle for gambling ties. That was one of the big sports stories of the early '60s. I also recall Karras from another memorable childhood experience, watching on Thanksgiving Day as the Lions upset the undefeated Packers, totally dominating the Pack in one of the most amazing sporting events of my youth. Back then, the NFL always delivered unexpected excitement.

 The Packers went on to finish that season with only one loss. I don't remember if they played in the first Super Bowl that year, or whether that came later, and just winning the NFL championship was the thing. While I liked the Packers, the Bears and other NFL teams, I really loved the AFL, to me the most exciting football ever played.

When I was a kid reading Plimpton's account of trying out for the Lions, little did I know that Plimpton was the Paris Review's editor, and that I would later have a lifelong adult readership of the journal. At several times in my life, beginning in my college days, I have subscribed to the PR, and have continued reading it ever since. I've read many memoirs about Plimpton's New York and Paris literary days, but my  favorite  memory of him will always be as the New York writer seeking to play quarterback for the Lions. Farewell, Alex, who came to life in Plimpton's book, a great literary character as well as a great player and a fine comic actor.

Gay Talese Enters the Bunker, and The New Yorker

Gay Talese, who's rarely if ever published in The New Yorker during his illustruous career, broke into the august magazine a couple of weeks ago with a profile of New York Yankees manager Joe Girardi. In tandem with the piece, The New Yorker web site ran a video of Talese giving a tour of his "bunker," his writing office located in the basement below the New York townhome he shares with his wife, Nan, the noted book publisher.

To enter his retreat, Talese must walk down the stairs of his townhome, traverse a few steps on the sidewalk, then go down a few more stairs to a room that once served as a wine cellar. The video shows Talese making this short jaunt. Once in his hideaway, Talese displayed a glee in his work, and clothing.

The dapper, elegantly graying man, saying his haberdashery derives from his Italian heritage, sported a beige suit, blue striped shirt, yellow tie and staw fedora. His soundproof office, which lacks a phone, is crammed with files of Talese's work for five decades. He gave a demonstration of his reporting methods, how he interviews his subjects without taking notes, then immediately writes down the conversation on pieces of cardboard specifically cut to fit his jacket pockets. Connecting to  his sylish clothes, the cardboard looked like the kind cleaners place into startched shirts. I was somewhat surprised to see Talese working on a desktop computer; I half-expected him to be of the old school that still works on a typewriter, or even writes longhand. That Talese in his 70s remains so vital and attractive is inspiring.

Much of Talese's classic work was done for Esquire magazine. It's good that the New Yorker is now accepting Talese's pieces; editor David Remnick has opened the magazine to a wider variety of writers.

The piece on Girardi displays the controlled qualities of masters like Talese, who uses simple declarative sentences and well-chosen facts such as hitting statistics to build an interesting, understated narrative. His profile reminded me of the work of another master long associated with The New Yorker, John McPhee.

Talese, McPhee and Robert Caro are among a generation of writers who gave heightened literary quality to nonfiction writing. Tom Wolfe is another illustrous member of that generation, who, however, has turned to novel writing late in his career.

With eulogies of print continuing, a new generation of writers such as Katherine Boo and Michael Lewis have continued producing vital nonfiction works, continuing in the path of Talese, McPhee, Caro and others.

The recent death of legendary New York Times publisher Punch Sulzberger made me want to go back to Talese's classic book "The Power and the Glory," about how Sulzberger revitalized the Times. Seeing the video of Talese in his work space increased my desire to revisit that book, along with Talese's other work, such as his Esquire pieces on Joe DiMaggio and Frank Sinatra. Talese is such an epitome of New York style and culture, that it's striking to remember that he is a proud graduate of the University of Alabama.

Frank Deford's sportwriting life

I listened with pleasure to Bob Edwards interviewing Frank Deford about Deford's recent memoir "Over Time: My Life as a Sportswriter." Edwards and Deford, two old pros of the media game, blended perfectly.

That I had read the book added to my enjoyment of the interview on satellite radio. Deford, despite a surprising fondness for worn-out cliches, has the gift of readibility. His stories about his early days at Sports Illustrated and about the athletes he's met went down like fine champagne. Today's ESPN generation might not remember some of the players Deford writes about -- Elgin Baylor, even Bill Bradley -- and could learn that today's hyper sports environment didn't spring up from nowhere.

Referring back to those cliches, and interjectiions such as "Heavens to Betsy," the book does show signs of careless writing and today's lower editing standards. For example, Deford makes a big point of how his name is frequently misspelled DeFord, but then it's misspelled that way throughout the book. I read the memoir in e-book form on my Nook, which made me wonder if ebooks are taken from unedited versions. I've felt with other ebooks that the editing standards for them are even lower than those for printed books. Deford's sentences can have a breathless, run-on quality, as if dictated off the top of his head.

I also wondered about his assertion that he was the first national writer to do an article on Bill Bradley when Bradley was at Princeton, Deford's alma mater. John McPhee's book "A Sense of Where You Are" is my first memory of Bradley. Perhaps Deford wrote his Sports Illustrated profile of Bradley before McPhee wrote his book, excepted in the New Yorker, as I recall. Deford might be right that he was the first one to write about Bradley, but I'd be curious to know for sure.

Deford amusingly writes about his stint as editor of the National, the great failed experiment of a national sports daily. Several of my colleagues at the AJC left to follow the National dream, including the late Van McKenzie, whom Deford warmly remembers.

Listening to Deford and Edwards chat and laugh together like a veteran vaudeville team, I realized that Deford overcomes the drawbacks with his generous, magnanimous spirit. He's a throwback to the days when sports were not taken so seriously and possessed a mythic, magical quality. Today's sports-talk yakkers, stats junkies and overpaid, entitled athletes have taken away a lot of the fun. Deford sounds, and reads, like a man whos's had fun.

Jonathan Franzen's Instant Masterpiece

The fanfare accompanying the publication of Jonathan Franzen's novel "Freedom" is heartening to upholders of traditional literary culture. After years in which novels, especially large and serious ones, were pushed to the margins of American culture, Franzen's book is receiving cloudbursts of attention, including Franzen appearing on the cover of Time magazine.

With reading of novels and other books in decline, our attention spans short-circuited by the Internet, television, mobile phones and I-pads, and cultural standards falling, the Franzen boom is like a last reflexiive spasm of a dying age. Or perhaps it marks a revived attention to literature, fueled by the popularity of e-book readers like Kindle.

No matter what, I was dismayed by Sam Tannenhaus' fawning review of "Freedom" on the front cover of the Sunday New York Times Book Review. The first sentence set me off, "Jonathan Franzen's new novel 'Freedom," like his previous one, "The Corrections," is a materpiece of American fiction."

How unseemly for Mr. Tannenhaus, the editor of the book review and the noted biographer of Whittaker Chambers, to immediately make an inflated assessment of a novel not yet available to the reading public. Such simplistic and short-sighted declarations would be questionable for a college sophomore; they are disturbing from the editor of the most prevalent literary review in Americag.  To be declared a masterpiece, a book traditionally has stood the test of readership, received longterm critical evalation and gained acceptance by generations. Tannenaus' declaraton is premature at best. It only set the stage for a long, tedious and overwrought review.

I read "Corrections" when it appeared: I'd forgotten that it was publshed right before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Perhaps someone will compile an anthology of Sept. 11-eve literature; old '60s lib and reputed Barack Obama pal Bill Ayers published his self-serving memoir right before Sept. 11 as well. "Corrections" is an apt companion to Ayers' book; both are testaments to an age of self-indulgence and moral atrophy reputedly blown away with the dust of the Trade Center towers.

Looking back on "Corrections," I don't consider it "a masterpiece." I remember a swirl of impressions, a few striking characters and scenes, and the book's claustrophobic atmosphere. It had stretches of good writing, but could have benefitted from cutting and editing. I didn't think it that much different from other novels about American families; it was hardly the original, revolutionary break with the past that Tannehaus imagines.

The importance given to Time's endorsement of Franzen is also outdated, since the cultural power of the weekly newsmagazine has seriously eroded.  A few decades ago, the newsmagazines played a major role in settting the cultural/political and social agenda, but now they hardly matter, especially to the younger generation.

That Franzen is receiving such heightened attention is ironic, since he claimed to disdain such acclaim when Oprah chose "Corrections" for her book club and he rejected her imprimatur. The burst of publicity has also brought protests from women novelists who see themselves as slighted in comparison.

The publication of "Freedom," at 562 pages, marks the latest revival of the big, messy novel. That there's no shortage of such books shows that literary publishing might not be in such bad shape after all. Still, "Freedom," even if it achieves best-seller status, will still be purchased and read by a small percentage of the American public. "American Idol" and football will consume most people.

  

My Southern Heritage, Universal Outlook

I've sometimes wondered why I called this venture Southern Bookman, since that implies the regionalism and provincialism I deplore. In my literary interests, I consider myself a member of the Republic of Letters, the historical and enduring fellowship explored by Princeton historian Anthony Grafton in his recent book "Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West."

While I have an international, open-minded outlook, I instinctively and without much thought decided to use the title "Southern Bookman." I am a Southerner, irrevocably stamped by my upbringing in Southern Louisiana, in many ways different from the rest of the South because of its French and Catholic heritage. While I lack much patience for neo-Confederate Romanticism, or the Southern boosterism espoused by the Oxford American, I am in profound ways a provincial Southerner.

As an LSU graduate, I am deeply proud of the university's literary heritage, fostered by Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks in the original incarnation of the Southern Review, and nurtured today with the continued excellence of the literary journal, and the LSU Press. I love the South's literary tradition, rooted in William Faulkner, but contributed to by so many others: Eudora Welty, Kate Chopin, Flannery O'Connor, Roy Blount, Barry Hannah, Tom Franklin, Donald Barthelme, Larry McMurtry, Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon and on and on. Among my favorite writers, the quintessential Yankee, Robert Lowell, was strongly stamped by his association with Southerners and his time in the Deep South.

I consider myself as adding to the tradtion of Southern liberalism/progressism, with various branches reaching to Huey and Earl Long, William Faulkner, Ralph McGill, Eugene Patterson,  Walker and William Percy, Hodding Carter (a bitter Long foe in his Louisiana Days), Wendell Berrry and so many others. Like Berry, I respect the Agrarians, rejecting their racism, but seeing much of value in their espousal of  tradition and criticism of modern, monolithic capitalism.

While I revere Lincoln and the Union cause, I have a deeply engrained emotional bond with the soldiers of the South and military leaders like Lee and Jackson. I am an irrational and emotional partisan of LSU football and other sports, although for many years I tried to deny that tribal attachment.

For better or worse, I am a Southerner, a Louisianian, and I suppose, a Georgian, although I've resisted the latter attachement despite living in Georgia for now more than 30 years. I've had allegiances to Sewanee, Emory and the University of Florida. Along with other intellectual Southerners, I deplore the South's poverty, religious fundamentalism, suspicion of outsiders and fresh ideas, violence, self-destructive eating and drinking, and defensiveness, traces of all of which I possess like minerals in my bloodstream. I love the South's colorful language, storytelling, loyalty, sense of honor, love of nature and beauty, romanticism, family consciousness and love of eating, drinking, celebration and ceremony. As these conflicting statements indicate, the best and worst of the South are sides of the same cracked mirror, through which a clear image can be difficult to discern.

I'm not sure why I felt compelled to write this type of essay now, so many months into Southern Bookman. For some reason, I felt the need to orient myself to the site's mission, and give some insight into its purpose and outlook.

I've enjoyed doing the site's interviews with a variety of writers, and look forward to continuing this in 2010. I also look ahead to renewing my efforts to cover American and global writing and thinking. As a new year arrives, I am grateful for the many readers and supporters of this effort and happily anticipate the journey continuing.