...as recounted in I Never Played The Game, by Howard Cosell. I'll be posting more about Cosell's book in the future, because it doesn't paint a very pretty picture of Howard's mental state in his later years. But despite the book's paranoid tendencies, this is an interesting anecdote:
David Halberstam won the Pulitzer Prize based on his reporting from Vietnam for The New York Times. Later he achieved literary fame as the best-selling author of two books in particular, The Best and the Brightest and The Powers That Be. We first met in the early 1970s but never really had much contact. Then one day, while talking business with Roone Arledge, he said to me, "By the way, what the hell does David Halberstam have against you?
"Beats me," I said. "I hardly even know the man."
"Well, I met him at a party the other night, and he was all over me. He's got a real bug up his ass about you."
I shrugged. "What can I tell you, Roone? He's obviously got a problem. I know he has a childlike devotion to the Knicks. He's very immature about it. I've heard from Mike Burke [then the president of Madison Square Garden] that he bothers him with phone calls, telling him who should start, who should sit on the bench. The guy's a nut."
A couple of years later, in December 1982, Halberstam authored a vicious attack on me in Playboy magazine. Apparently, he couldn't contain himself any longer. In the article he called me, among other things, a bully and a monster, and went so far as to say I was merciless and violent. This from a man I had only a passing acquaintance with. It was the worst kind of cheap shot I had ever read. He ended the article with a ludicrous attempt at psychoanalysis, trying to get inside my head and figure out my various neuroses. He never even bothered to call and talk to me!
There were asides in some of the columns Halberstam wrote for ESPN that also betrayed a passionate hatred of Cosell. In the end, I don't know how meaningful any of this is for either man's legacy, but I find it interesting.
1 comment:
All these oddities having to do with Halberstam are unsettling. It sounds as if both Halberstam and his accuser were a bit unhinged when it came to certain issues relating to sports and egos. But I'm still obsessing about the poor graduate student who had the chance to drive his hero to an interview and may end up facing criminal charges for being at fault in the accident that killed the famous journalist.
Post a Comment