There was never a question, for those who read the sports pages of the bygone Chicago Daily News or the Chicago Sun-Times, that John Schulian was a writer of immense, eloquent talent. Here he is in 1981, opening a column about Skip Dillard and Bernard Randolph, the star-crossed local schoolyard hoops legends: “Even in the loving glow of noonday sunshine, with March pretending it’s May and the thermometer skipping toward 60, K Town has trouble wiping the sorrow from its face. On the West Side streets that gave birth to the neighborhood’s name, on Kedvale and Keeler and the half-dozen others, there are too many boarded-up windows, too many burned-out houses, too many cars with flat tires or no tires at all. Stray dogs wander listlessly, ragged men kill time with bottles in brown bags, and the only sign of hope is a bouncing basketball.”
When the Daily News folded in 1978, Schulian went to the Sun-Times until 1984, worked for a while for the Philadelphia Daily News and then caught the gravy train to Hollywood.
He has had success there and remains there still. But, once a sports writer always a sports writer; he has kept his pen and soul in the game, producing a number of sports stories for magazines (print and online), co-editing books (“At the Fights” about boxing) and gathering his own work (“Sometimes They Even Shook Your Hand: Portraits of Champions Who Walked Among Us.”)
His latest, “Football: Great Writing About the National Sport,” contains 44 stories that take the full measure of the game. He is the book’s editor, and yes, the book contains many of the titans of the typewriter — among them Red Smith, Jimmy Cannon, Jim Murray, Grantland Rice and W.C. Heinz — and their work, ancient as it may be, still crackles with an immediacy. In 1940, in the wake of the most lopsided contest in NFL championship history, Shirley Povich began his game story this way: “If you’re wanting to know what happened to the Redskins yesterday, maybe this will explain it: The Bears happened to ’em.”
Schulian writes, in the book’s thoughtful introduction, that “what the roaring crowds and TV cameras see may not amount to half of what you can get from writers with an eye for detail, an ear for the vernacular, and a gift for asking the right questions.”
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He is correct, too, when he writes, “(I)f you wanted to feel the pulse of football during the last forty years of the twentieth century, you had to read newspapers.”
Indeed, but there also are stories here from magazines and books, such as chapters from H.G. Bissinger’s “Friday Night Lights,” Frederick Exley’s “A Fan’s Notes” and George Plimpton’s “Paper Lion.” Notable writers pepper the pages, people such as Jimmy Breslin, David Maraniss, Frank Deford, Ira Berkow, Michael Lewis and Roy Blount Jr. Football stars are there too, as subjects, among them Peyton Manning, Joe Namath, Vince Lombardi, Tom Landry and Y.A. Tittle.
It is a powerful package. But what distinguishes it from the usual rah-rah collections that greet every new season in almost every sport, are its surprises.
Among these are the stories that shine a light on the game’s darker side, most notably the excerpt from former player Nate Jackson’s “Slow Getting Up,” a love-hate paean to a life that brought him glory and riches but beat him to a pulp and drove his teammates to drugs.
And there is no real Chicago Bears fan alive who will be able to keep a dry eye reading Paul Solotaroff’s “The Ferocious Life and Tragic Death of a Super Bowl Star,” which begins with this chilling sentence, “Dave Duerson set the scene with a hangman’s care before climbing into bed with the revolver.”
Chicago is nicely represented here by Al Silverman on Gale Sayers, Arthur Kretchmer on Dick Butkus and, in another powerful tearjerker, the Sun-Times’ Rick Telander on Doug Atkins.
There is an honesty here too, one that shadows the celebratory frenzy that starts every hopeful season. As Schulian writes, the NFL is “facing the mother of all its problems. The violence on which the game is built — the violence the league has blissfully marketed and turned into billions upon billions of dollars — turned against it with a vengeance.”
Any real fan knows what he’s talking about and fears for the game’s future.
That will work itself out, one way or the other. In the meantime, the game goes on and the Bears start the season next Sunday against the Buffalo Bills at Soldier Field, which should give you enough time to finish this book, which in turn will give you not only much pleasure but also much pause.
Oh, yes, Schulian includes one of his own stories here, aside from the introduction. It is a profile of Chuck Bednarik, the last of the NFL’s full-time two-way players. Of course, it is quite good. Amazingly, it is not the best in this amazing book.
Rick Kogan is a Tribune senior writer and columnist.
“Football”
Edited by John Schulian, Library of America, 463 pages, $30