"When David is occupied with a big, bone-crushing masterwork, he gets in up to his armpits and needs to take a break," Harrison Salisbury observed in
People magazine (4 November 1985), "he writes something for pure enjoyment. And that means sports, since he's the ultimate sports fan."
Salisbury's observation of Halberstam as the "ultimate sports fan" is obviously an exaggeration, but he has been an avid fan for most of his life. Although he describes himself as a nonathletic youth in the introduction to Best American Sports Writing, 1991, he competed in track and field at Roosevelt High School in Yonkers, New York. Rather than becoming an athlete himself, Halberstam became a sportswriting aficionado, and as a boy he admired sportswriters Red Smith, Jimmy Cannon, Leonard Gross, and Bill Heinz. He has observed that sports, unlike politics, provides writers the freedom to experiment with language and form and develop their own literary voice. Halberstam especially enjoyed reading Sport, one of the few nationally distributed sports magazines of the 1930s and 1940s. In Best American Sports Writing, 1991 he refers to Sport as "one of the few places where the writing seemed serious, and one could sense the beginning of a literary touch, and an attempt to break out of the routine format of magazine writing of the day."
Like most young boys growing up in America during the first half of the twentieth century, David Halberstam followed baseball with great interest.
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