Bat Masterson, gunslinger first but then first-class sports writer

 The world today knows him as one of the Old West's most famous gunslingers, fearless associate of the famous lawman Wyatt Earp.

But in 1921, the world knew Bat Masterson as a world-class sports writer for the New York Morning Telegraph and one of the foremost experts on the second most popular sport of the day, boxing. (Baseball was the most popular sport, and professional football was hardly thought about.)

Bat Masterson was indeed a gunfighter in Dodge City and elsewhere in the west during his younger days. He was also a buffalo hunter, Indian fighter, and scout for the U.S. Army. But that phase of his life was finished by the mid-1880s when he was in his thirties. Moving to Denver, he became a "sporting man" and gambler and developed himself as a leading authority on prizefighting, which was growing in popularity with the public and with newspaper sports writers.

Masterson was a personal friend of people such as Gentleman Jim Corbett, Jack Johnson, John L. Sullivan, and Jack Dempsey, all legends of the boxing ring. He attended just about every major fight of that era, and his expertise on the sport was unsurpassed.

In 1902 he moved to New York to become a sports reporter and columnist for the Morning Telegraph and did that until his death in 1921. On the way, he became a personal friend of President Theodore Roosevelt and accepted a federal appointment as a U.S. marshal from him. He died as his sports writing desk of a massive heart attack on Oct. 25, 1921. In the late 1950s, a television series loosely based on his life and starring Gene Barry was broadcast for several seasons.

He was writing a column when he died as his desk, and his final written words were 

“There are many in this old world of ours who hold that things break about even for all of us. I have observed, for example, that we get about the same amount of ice. The rich get it in the summer – and the poor get it in the winter.”  New-York Historical Society http://sports.nyhistory.org/bat-masterson/

Masterson's friend Damon Runyan named his lead character in Guys and Dolls Sky Masterson after the old gunfighter.

See also:

DeArment, Robert K. Gunfighter in Gotham: Bat Masterson's New York City Years. Norman: University of Oklahoma, 2013.

 

A journalist needs something to write about: Richard Ben Cramer, Alex Rodriguez and the book that did not get written

 A journalist needs something to write about -- a subject worthy of the time and effort it takes to gather the information and put it into a suitable form.

Seems pretty obvious.

Sometimes, of course, stories just don't pan out. If you're working in daily journalism, a story like that is no big deal. It might mean a few hours lost and a few phone calls that go nowhere.

But, what if you've committed several months of your life and your big-time book publisher has advanced major bucks for your manuscript?

That's the story that is told several years ago in an excellent article in  Sports Illustrated, The Puzzle That Couldn't Be Solved by S.L. Price. (At this point, it takes a subscription to see it, so there's no link.) The subject is  Richard Ben Cramer, a journalist of distinctive style and stunning success (What It Takes: The Way to the White House; Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life; What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now: A Remembrance; Being Poppy: A Portrait of George Herbert Walker Bush, among others).

Cramer died in January 2013 of complications from lung cancer. He was 62 years old.

In 2006 Cramer sold both his publisher and his subject on a book about Alex Rodriguez, the star of the New York Yankees who was later banned for a year by Major League Baseball for taking banned substances. The book had the title, The Importance of Being Alex: A Life with the Yankees. He had a $550,000 advance from the Hachette Book Group. Rodriguez had agreed to cooperate fully. In fact, he welcomed Cramer into his entourage.

During the next year and a half, Cramer was all in with A-Rod and his crowd, spending hours and days traveling with him, talking with him, figuring out the relationships he had. It was a time when A-Rod was fulfilling most of the expectations that baseball fans had for him -- the expectation, in particular, of being one of the greatest baseball players ever.

But at some point, in Cramer's head, A-Rod began to evaporate.

He had hoped to give A-Rod "his size" as the apotheosis of postmodern stardom, but the deeper he dug the more he found, says one close friend, "nothing there. A completely vacuous person and a completely vacuous life." (quoted material from the Sports Illustrated article)

By 2010, after A-Rod admitted using performance enhancing drugs, not only was Cramer unable to find his larger-than-life story, but his subject had become loathsome.

It's a sad tale for all concerned. 

Cramer's story is not unique. 

Historian Edmund Morris encountered the same problem when he signed on to write the authorized biography of Ronald Reagan in 1985. At that time Morris had gained a good reputation of a biographer with his work on Theodore Roosevelt, and he had been courted by the Reaganites for some time. He was given special access to the White House and Reagan and his family. All were fully cooperative.

Reagan left office in 1989 and went into retirement. Morris continued to work with almost unlimited access to files in the Reagan Library.

The result of his efforts, finally, was Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan.

Morris included all the standard biographical material, but he also created a fictional version of himself and placed it in the book. He resorted to this "literary device" because no one, including Reagan himself, understood the man. He had no close friends. He was not in the least curious about himself. And no one that Morris talked to "could ever figure him out." That would include Morris himself.

In reviewing the book, the New York Times referred to Reagan as "the hollow man."

Morris, who lacked Cramer's journalistic integrity, fell into fiction to try to explain a subject he couldn't locate. Here's what the Times review said:

Most journalists, historians and nonfiction writers will find this unacceptable. The fictional characters are not clearly identified as such; often they are unnecessary and distracting, particularly an obnoxious made-up son of the author who becomes a radical in the 1960's. Yet a reader who surrenders to Morris's self-indulgent blend of scholarship and imagination will be led through a riveting story to a transcendent conclusion with a surprise twist. If there is a ''higher truth'' justifying the book's technique, it is that Ronald Reagan lived in a world of his own fictions, far more extensive than the fictions of Edmund Morris. Who better suited to plumb a phantom subject than a phantom narrator? (quoted material from the New York Times review)

So, the lesson for journalists here is a cautionary one. Despite receiving the accolades of the world (in these instances baseball and politics), a subject might not be worth your time and talent.