One-on-One With Ira Berkow

After 25 years at The New York Times, reporter and sports columnist Ira Berkow retired in February 2007. Berkow got started in the newspaper business in 1965 at the Minneapolis Tribune. As a young writer, he solicited advice and received encouragement from Red Smith, whom he succeeded at the Times in 1981 and whose biography he produced five years later. 
Berkow is the author of 25 books, including Full Swing: Hits, Runs, and Errors in a Writer’s Life. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for National Reporting. His work has been reprinted in The Best American Sports Writing anthology. A 1983 column, “The LaMotta Nuptials,” was included in The Best American Sports Writing of the Century. I spoke with him at his apartment in the Murray Hill section of New York City. 

Q. How is the view from retirement?
Berkow:  It’s good. I left [the Times] with a handful of projects. I wrote the book for a musical called A Chicago Story — From Daley to Daley, which is supposed to open in the spring in Chicago. And I’m doing the narrative for a coffee-table book from Harry Abrams on Wrigley Field. The working title is Wrigley Field: The One and Only.

Q. You are no longer under a press deadline. Is that a good thing, or do you miss that?
Berkow: It’s good not having the daily pressures. I never really felt those pressures altogether, but an interesting thing has happened since I’ve left. About once a month I have a dream about “Will I make the deadline?” Now, in 45 years of daily journalism essentially, I never missed a deadline. I was close a lot of times (laughing), but I never missed. And so now I have these dreams of “Am I going to make the deadline?” and invariably the dream ends before I know whether I did.

Q. Haunted by a deadline that no longer exists?
Berkow: My last dream was really a crazy one. The letters on the keyboard were jumbled. In other words, the “R” was where the “S” was supposed to be and the “T” was where the “W” was supposed to be. Can you imagine trying to write a story with a jumbled keyboard!

Q. And the clock is ticking.
Berkow: And the clock is ticking! I guess it was all submerged in my subconscious. But I never had dreams like that before—I don’t know if this is helping you in any way (laughing)—and I never really worried so much about meeting the deadline.

Q. Now you wake up in a cold sweat and you don’t have a deadline. I guess you don’t miss that, but what do you miss?
Berkow:  Oh, some of the camaraderie of the newspaper. I didn’t go into the office much, but when I went in, it was nice to see guys. I like that part. It’s like ballplayers: They miss the locker room. I have to say that I looked forward to not doing daily journalism, and I hadn’t thought about going in to a lot of other writing projects. I was planning to take some courses and more vacations. When I was a boy in grammar school in Chicago, I had a scholarship to the Art Institute. I dropped drawing and painting when I was in the seventh grade to play sports. I thought I’d go back to that, but I haven’t yet.

Q. Do you get out to the ballpark much?
Berkow: I don’t. I go to a ballgame when a friend invites me. I have an honorary baseball writers’ card, so I can sit in the press box all the time without paying. I just feel that when I go to a game and am hanging around the press box, I’m like a dinosaur in some ways. And now I know very few people in the press box. It’s going on four years since I left the Times, but in that period of time there’s been a huge amount of changes. If I go, it’s sort of like I’m hanging on, No. 1. and, No. 2, if there’s a game I want to see, I like watching it on television, sitting in my easy chair and drinking cranberry juice.

Q. In your book Full Swing, you wrote, “I had to try to make myself interesting at first impression since I might not get a second.” For example, you stopped Watergate judge John Sirica (in June 1973), who would not grant interviews, and asked him, “How did it come about that Jack Dempsey was the best man at your wedding?” That got his attention. 

Berkow: It turned out that Dempsey and Sirica were in the Merchant Marine together, and that’s how they got to know each other. I don’t remember where I read that, but I filed it away. Judge Sirica told me, “Come into my office, young man.” 

Q. It helped you secure the interview. 

Berkow: [Former New York Knicks coach] Red Holzman told me, “Writers are like coaches. We’re always filing things away. You never know when you’re going to use something, or if you’re going to use it.” I filed this little fact away about judge Sirica, and I was there for two hours with him. I was getting writer’s cramp, and I was getting hungry. 

Q. Well, you made a good first impression. 

Berkow: I did something similar for a story I wrote in November, the last one for the Times, on Louis Farrakhan’s grandson, Mustapha, a 17-year-old basketball player out of Thornton High School right outside Chicago. His father was there and his coach was there. We were talking about basketball. The kid recently got a scholarship to the University of Virginia, so he can play. Of course, the reason I’m there is because of his grandfather. It’s an unusual element to his story.  

At one point I asked him about some of the controversial elements to his grandfather’s life. And his father leans forward in his chair toward me and in kind of a hostile manner begins to raise his voice about “All that is wrong; it’s fiction” and refuting these things that have been in the paper and the accusations about his father. It became a tense moment.

Q. What happened? 
Berkow: I turned to his son and asked, “Do you play the violin too?” I had read years ago that Louis Farrakhan was a serious violinist since he was 5 years old. There was a stillness in the room, and the kid started to laugh. It broke the ice. He said, “We lived with my grandfather for a year when our house burned down. He woke us up every morning at 5 o’clock playing the violin.” And he said, “I’d like to be as dedicated to basketball as my grandfather is to the violin.” So, here was a moment when I got this insight.  

Q. There were advantages in working for the New York Times. 

Berkow: There are. I’ll give you a perfect example. I was sitting in the Yankee locker room years ago with Dave Righetti. We were friendly because I had done a story on him when he was in the minor leagues. When you do a story on a guy in the minor leagues and he comes to the majors, there’s a kind of bond. I asked him a question, and he said, “Ira, if I tell you, the guys in the locker room will get pissed off at me. It’ll be trouble.” Then he looked around and said, “You know, these guys don’t read the New York Times. I’m going to tell you.” So, that was an advantage in working for the Times. 

Q. The research into the subject’s background can sometimes elicit interesting or thoughtful responses.  

Berkow: Oh, yeah. I covered Ted Williams when he was the manager of the Washington Senators and the Texas Rangers, and I liked him a lot. I had read some place about very creative people. It mentioned Henry Ford, John Kennedy, and Ted Williams. And so I asked him about this aspect of creativity. He said, “You always ask unusual questions.” 

And I said, “Well, you always give unusual answers.” 

Q. Your writing has brought you into contact with athletes, presidents, performers, composers, writers and other artists. That’s access to a lot of original and creative personalities. 

Berkow: I was always interested in different perspectives and how other people see the various sports. Churchill wrote a long essay, which came out in a small book called Painting As a Pastime. He wrote that before he began to paint, at around 50 years old, he had never noticed the shadows on buildings. That heightened my perception. I had never noticed the shadows on buildings either. I thought, “I better take notice of that and of other shadows.”  

Q. One characteristic that strikes me about your writing is your curiosity. 

Berkow: I remember talking with Seiji Ozawa, the former conductor of the Boston Symphony. He liked basketball. He compared the synchronization of a Boston Celtics fast break to movements in a symphony. I had never heard it quite that way. So, yeah, these are the kinds of things that interested me as a writer to bring it out of the ordinary and to try to make it special. 

Q. In the foreword to your book Beyond the Dream, Red Smith wrote, “Ira Berkow knows that what is important about a game is not the score but the people who play it.”  

Berkow: The only kind of sportswriter that I wanted to be was a writer. Sports was just a vehicle for me, and has been. I’ve done a number of other books that are not sports books. Red Smith was a writer first, a sportswriter second. Growing up in Chicago, I admired him for the quality of his work. When I eventually became interested in being a writer, I thought I would like to be able to have a quality of work. Not to write the way Red Smith wrote, but with that kind of professionalism and quality.  

Q. You also had a longstanding relationship with another writer: Nobel prize-winning novelist Saul Bellow. 

Berkow: We had a correspondence over a number of years. We identified with each other in some way in coming from the same neighborhood in Chicago and trying to make something of ourselves. I don’t know if you ever read the poems and stories about Archy and Mehitabel by Don Marquis [1878-1937], a columnist for the New York Sun and New York Tribune. Archy was a cockroach and Mehitabel was a cat. Archy wrote a love note to the cat on the typewriter, but he didn’t have the energy to hit the shift key, so everything was in lowercase. But he wrote with all his might and gave everything he had to the writing. Coming from the west side of Chicago, I sometimes identified with Archy the roach, giving all the energy you have to writing. 

Q. Sports is the great American topic. 

Berkow: Yeah. Everybody talks sports. My barber talks sports. My doorman talks sports. When I was doing the column, I’d come down in the morning and the doorman would ask what I thought of something that happened the night before. And I hadn’t been aware of it, but I knew this was something I’d be writing about it because if he was interested in it, the odds were quite good that the rest of the city, and maybe the rest of the country, was interested in it as well. The doormen turn out to be almost infallible barometers.  

Q. In Full Swing, you wrote about “the great difficulties of getting the facts right, a problem that plagues all writers.” Mark Twain wrote, “Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.” 

Berkow (laughing): Right. We try to get our facts right and we try to get the facts to fit the situation. It’s hard. I try to get the quotes right, and I’ve made mistakes. We have a corrections page in the New York Times now, and almost every day you’ll see a correction. Everybody is working like dogs to stay out of that corrections section. I read in the obituary of Molly Ivins, who was a great reporter and a marvelous journalist, that she had made so many mistakes that she hired a fact-checker. Well, I think we all could use a personal fact-checker.  

Q. Has the line between reporting and commentary become blurred? 

Berkow: It’s becoming more and more blurred. We do have to be careful about that. Opinions for newspapers become more interesting than they have been, especially with blogs and the Internet. There’s so much opinion going around that I think newspapers are forced to have more opinions because straight news just seems to be dull to a growing number of readers. This is unfortunate. We should never be without straight news. On the other hand, what is straight news? There has to be some leaning one way or the other. You can’t be totally 100 percent robotic straight. It’s impossible. 

Q. Does the media coverage affect the perception of sports and today's athletes? 
Berkow: From TV’s standpoint, there’s more showboating. So television coverage certainly does. From what I understand, [the athletes] all want to be on SportsCenter. When I was growing up, very few people could dunk, and it wasn’t done for show. It was the easiest way possible to score two points. And then all the gyrations and the “celebrations,” which are so asinine. And it gets so tiresome. Terrell Owens is the single most boring athlete in America. What he does is so stupid and so antagonistic to his teammates. 

Q. In 1970 you wrote, “To be 30 in this day and age, and to be a sportswriter is different from any time in history. There is the McLuhanesque threat that the printed word itself is passé, or rapidly getting that way…” What’s the biggest change you have seen in sports journalism since you started? 

Berkow: Television made us write more descriptively because we had to get behind the scenes and write about things that you don’t see on television. So, you have to go into the locker rooms or you have to really work hard to get information from people that television doesn’t show.  

Q. Anything else? 

Berkow: Another thing that has really influenced a lot of sports journalism is talk radio, in which the level of voices has been raised. If Mike & the Mad Dog have a discussion going about something, the sports editor of the Times may say, “These guy are saying this. We’ve got to follow up on this. Even if it seems irrelevant or juvenile, we’ve got to follow up on it because people are talking about it and now it’s in the news. And this has been a change, in my view, probably for the worse. 

Q. How do you assess the state of journalism? 

Berkow: It seems that the major papers are going out. I grew up in Chicago. We used to have four newspapers; now there are two. New York had, what, 11 or 12 papers at about that same time. It seems to be a dying business. I can’t imagine reading newspapers on the Internet, but it looks like that might be the future. I always wonder how you’ll do the crossword puzzle on the Internet. I guess you’ll have to print it out.    

Q. Al McGuire said, “Superintelligent people can’t be good athletes. They’re too aware.” 

Berkow: I hate to disagree with Al McGuire, but there’s all kinds of intelligence. I have witnessed some athletes who are geniuses at what they do. Willie Mays was a genius at baseball. I’d seen him do brilliant, cognitive things on the baseball field. I’ve seen Larry Bird and Magic Johnson do brilliant things. There has never been a greater basketball genius than Steve Nash today.  

Q. Why Nash? 

Berkow: Oh, what he can do! He has such control of the game and the basketball, and such court vision. I have never seen anybody dribble into the paint and have three options. Usually there are two options: You either shoot or you pass out. He doesn’t have a shot? No one is clear? He dribbles out of the paint. Without anybody stealing the ball. This is phenomenal! There’s something in his brain that’s going on.  

Q. Who are some other geniuses? 

Berkow: Ted Williams wrote a book called The Science of Hitting. He saw it as a science. He also saw it as an art. I think Arthur Ashe had a genius maybe even beyond tennis. When Ashe figured out how to beat Connors at Wimbledon in 1975, it was like a chess match. There is a brilliance in what some of these athletes do.

Q. Still... 

Berkow: I’m surprised at McGuire. I think he was talking about poets maybe, or writers, not being great athletes because they thought too much or saw too many other elements. Julia Child was a genius in cooking. Are you going to tell me that Groucho Marx wasn’t a genius? 

Q. You told Groucho Marx that you thought the exchange in Horsefeathers (a college could not support both the college and the football team and therefore it would tear down the college) said a lot about higher education in the U.S. Do you still feel that way? 

Berkow: Absolutely. Guys come out of college and they can barely read and write. 

Q. You wrote, “I read three books in my four years of high school. I have played arduous catch-up on reading ever since.” Has it really been laborious?  

Berkow: Some of it was. I was working toward trying to educate myself. I remember reading The Sound and the Fury when I was about 19 and having a hard time trying to figure out what was going on. It was arduous. And Ulysses. But I would tackle these books because I knew that if I was going to educate myself, I was going to have to rise to certain levels. Some of it was labor, but some of it was just delicious: Dylan Thomas, Virginia Woolf, E.B. White. And it was worthwhile work because it enhanced my perceptions. And I hope that it made me a little more intelligent and a little more aware. 

Q. You came full circle with Red Smith, having solicited and received advice and encouragement from him when you were starting out and replacing him at the Times in 1981.  

Berkow: Yeah, and then writing the obituary. But the thing I took away from Red … he was a great writer, but he was really a great man. He was good to people and he had a sensitivity. There were three people who had this subtle sensitivity in my life: Red Smith, Red Holzman and my father.  

Q. Red Holzman said, “The best feeling in the world is to wake up early in the morning when you don’t have to go anywhere.” What do you consider the best feeling in the world? 

Berkow: I would say that it’s when you truly feel comfortable with yourself. You’ve done and said the right thing, the thing in which you’re not embarrassed when you look yourself in the mirror. 

Q. You wrote touchingly about playing golf with your father: “I took pleasure in my father’s pleasure.” 

Berkow: My father gave me one of the great sports quotes of all time. In talking about the joy of sports, he said, “I never take a gimme because I like to hear the ball click into the hole.”  

Q. Al Kaline told you, “Sometimes I wonder what I’m doing, if I’ve wasted my time all these years in baseball. I would like to have done more to contribute to society.” Did you ever consider the road not taken? 

Berkow: I would like to have been someone defending people the way Clarence Darrow did. That was a dream of mine. And then I got into writing and I thought, “O.K. I’d like to be Red Smith.” For years I entertained the idea of going back to law school, but I never did. I really wanted to be an attorney for the defense. And in my sports column I could do that to some degree. 

Q. In a sense, you defended Tonya Harding in print. 

Berkow: (laughing) One of my great legal moments was when I defended her right to establish her innocence—or not—and be allowed to go to the Olympics. I was almost the only sportswriter in this country who felt that way. Everyone was certain that she was guilty. I was not uncertain that she was guilty, but this is America. I try to look at things without being emotional. The great Jerry Holtzman wrote the book No Cheering in the Pressbox. A lot of sportswriters are emotional. They’re more fans, rather than stepping back and having perspective. There are a lot of outstanding sportswriters who do have this perspective, but there are some who don’t, and I didn’t want to be one of those.  

Q. There’s something of a contrarian about you. 

Berkow: It’s funny, you listen to people discussing something and my first impulse is to say, “Yes, but…here’s another side of it.” I was happy that the Times’ review of Full Swing said that I was a contrarian. That characterization does not displease me. 

Q. You don’t see that so much anymore. There are sycophantic reporters trying to ingratiate themselves and some idiotic questions.

Berkow: You get a lot of that on television. They’re not prepared. Of course, some of these half-time interviews are pretty banal. In the newspapers, though, I still see some, as we say, hard-nosed reporting. I’m not sure I see a lot of poetry. I’m not sure we ever saw a lot of poetry. But in the best kind of sports writing there was some art to the language, not just reporting the facts. And I see less and less of that. Maybe it’s because they have to write for the web and everything has to be fast and they don’t have the time to craft their sentences. That’s one thing in particular that I miss: the beauty of language. But maybe people just don’t care that much about it, the writers or the readers—and the editors.

Q. Maybe they’re giving the public what it wants, which is not all that much.
Berkow: I don’t want to sound like a curmudgeon. I grew up with some of the great sportswriters. Red Smith and Jimmy Cannon and Bill Heinz, to name three, were deft with the language. They were spectacular writers. But there’s no reason why we can’t continue to have that kind of thing, unless the attention span of the public is just too small.

Q. Those writers brought literacy and culture, more than just sports, into their columns.  

Berkow: Well, I still think the Times does that better than all other papers. But after Twitter and Facebook and so many other things that are of concern to the daily newspaper writer, there’s not the time to be able to do that, and I don’t think they’re being asked to do that. They’re being asked to Twitter and [blog]; if there’s time for good writing, well, O.K., that’s down the line.

Q.  David Halberstam said, “There’s a race to get [information] on, not just television and CNN but the world of dot-coms.” He said, “There’s a ferocious, powerful machine out there that’s all primed and never wants to wait. It doesn’t like to idle with its engine in park.”
Berkow: Right. Look, I’m as guilty as many others. I’ll go on the web for the Times to see what the latest news is. Now, of course, that’s not a feature story where you have time to craft something. But it’s a faster-paced world than ever.

Q. With all of the cameras and replays, and all the gadgets and sideline reporters and everything else on display during a broadcast, is there a danger of the sideshows overshadowing the main event?
Berkow: Well, I know that there are people who go to a football game to watch the cheerleaders. The Celtics used to be the quintessence of purity in sports. You know, a minimum of music and none of the cheerleaders and mascots. I don’t know if that’s changed. I don’t think so, and I haven’t noticed that when I watch a Celtics game. I would just as soon do away with all the mascots and all that blaring noise that is such an irksome distraction at games.

Q. That’s got to be a new feeling. Now you can root or boo openly.
Berkow: That’s a certain out-of-the-closet pleasure for a sportswriter. You know, there was no cheering—or booing—in the press box. Now I can root openly for the Cubs. And being a Cubs fan takes you out of the realm of being a sports fan. It’s a whole different genre.

Q. Did you see the college football game at Wrigley Field? Because of the dimensions of the field, each team had to move the ball in the same direction on offense.
Berkow: I was reminded as I was watching the game that I had done a piece on a wide receiver named Dick Plasman, who played for the Bears in the 1930s and ’40s. In the early years of pro football, a number of players did not wear helmets. They were bareheaded. He was the last. He retired in 1946 or ’47. And at Wrigley Field, where the outfield wall was so close to the end zone, he caught a pass and rammed right into the wall. He was in a coma for about three weeks. He did return to football, but he wore a helmet. Watching the game last week, I kept thinking of Dick Plasman.

Q. What’s the best thing about sports?
Berkow: When I was working, I always rooted for my story. For the first edition, generally you would write about the pitcher or maybe a hot batter. But as the game goes on, you root for your story. Otherwise, you would root for a good game, a close game. But not too close that it goes into extra innings and you have to sweat your deadline. But now I root for drama.

Q. What’s the biggest challenge facing sports?
Berkow: I guess it’s pricing people out of seats. The tickets are getting higher and higher. For a family of four, with tickets and parking and hot dogs and so forth, could it cost $1,000 or so? I know there are a lot of complaints about that. It could be that essentially new generations aren’t going to grow up loving these sports. On the other hand, you look around and see that attendance is very good. Television may be somewhat down, but that could be because there are so many other distractions. Some kids won’t get off their cell phones to take time to watch a game.

Q. If you could change one thing in sports, what would it be?
Berkow: I know that a complaint by the writers is less and less access to the players. You go into the locker room and all the players are in the trainer’s room or some other place that’s off limits to the writers. The writers stand around looking at and interviewing each other. Hardly a player comes by. When I broke in, you could take a player to lunch or breakfast, and they would be happy to do it because they weren’t making all that much money and they were happy for you to pick up the tab.
That’s something that is missing now.

Q. What would you like to change about that?
Berkow: I would change the inane interviews of the managers and the coaches or the players at half-time and between innings. No one ever says anything. I would rather have some good insight by some reporter having gone and done some digging beforehand, because the managers are not going to say anything, and they don’t. It’s just a total bore. And then after the game, the dumb questions asked by these sideline reporters. There should be better reporting.

Q. So, the reporters who need the access can’t get it, and the broadcasters who have it don’t ask anything worth listening to?
Berkow: That’s right. That’s good. You can say I said that (laughing).

Q. What in sports would you not miss if it were eliminated? 

Berkow: Every time a guy gets fouled in basketball, he argues. Every time a batter gets a close pitch, he looks like he’s going to run at the pitcher. 

Q. What’s the secret to your success? 

Berkow: One thing that’s hard is when you are interviewing someone and you disagree with their position, it’s sometimes hard to say, “Wait a minute. You’re wrong.” You have to think objectivity. If I start getting into an argument there, that could end the interview. I might play devil’s advocate and ask, “What do you think about this?” Jimmy Cannon used to say that you had to save the hard question for last [in an interview] or else you’d go back to the office with an empty notebook. There’s a certain restraint involved sometimes.  

Q. What advice would you give to aspiring journalists? 

Berkow: I’d use the line by Bette Davis from All About Eve. She said, “Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.” 

When the interview concluded, Ira said, “Let's go into my office. I want to show you something.” We went to the room next door. From the top drawer of a file cabinet Ira pulled out a hard-cover copy of Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun. “Look at this,” he said, opening the book. Inscribed on the inside cover was this: “To Ira, Because I know you will appreciate it. [Signed] George Steinbrenner.” “I don't know why George thought I would appreciate this,” said Ira.

Date & Place of Birth: 1-7-40 in Chicago, Ill. 

Education: University of Miami (Ohio), Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism  

Favorites: 

• Vacation spot: A quiet balcony overlooking a noisy ocean. And my wife likes traipsing over old stones in Europe. 

• Musician: I always aid that if I were a groupie, I would follow Little Richard to the ends of the earth. And Chopin was pretty good, too. 

• Books: Quite Early One Morning, by Dylan Thomas; One Man’s Meat, by E.B. White; and Out of the Red, by Red Smith. If I could take only one book to a desert island, it would be The Baseball Encyclopedia. 

•Movies: Stalag17, Tom Jones, and Paths of Glory

• Actresses: Judi Dench and Marilyn Monroe 

• Best sports movie: Bang the Drum Slowly 

• Worst sports movie: Field of Dreams, for glamorizing miscreants. 

• Athletes: Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. They’re a tandem in almost any sports fan’s imagination, and in their own. And Howie Carl of DePaul, whom I played against in high school. 

• Quotes: Churchill’s “Never give up” and my own “Never take no from a bureaucrat,” and there are too many people who are bureaucrats.  

• Best Coach/Manager: Red Holzman/Joe Torre 

• Smartest player: I'd put Greg Maddux at the top of the list. A brainy pitcher as well as an all-around player, with ability to advance runners at bat, fields his position beautifully and even runs the bases cerebrally. I loved Joe Torre's commennt on Maddux before he was going to pitch against the Yankees in the 1996 World Series. "Greg Maddux is an artist. When you swing at one of his pitches, it's a ball. And when you don't, it's a strike."  

From interviews published in 2007 in SportsBusiness Journal and 2010 in Athlon