Good news, bad news on W.C. Heinz

All: APSE has finally done the right thing and named W.C. Heinz the winner of the Red Smith Award.

http://apse.dallasnews.com/news/2008/052108heinzsmith.html

The bad news, of course, is that because they waited so long, he wins the award posthumously.

Long overdue, but at least it has been done.

 

Bless you, Jonesy, for fighting the good fight when you did.

 

I appreciate the sentiment, Doc, but I can't take any credit here. I believe jgmacg worked his usual magic, along with Dave Kindred. Two good men there, doing the right thing by a departed third.

 

Wasn't aware of that. Kudos to them, as well. I was just remembering your petition.

 

Sorry for the gratuitous bump, but this deserves to stay prominent through the holiday weekend.

 

Congratulations to W.C. Heinz, even now, when he is pounding out the best deadline stories and features for the major metro upstairs. (The Heaven Daily Herald? The Pearly Gates Post? Or is he collecting paychecks from one of the weekly magazines, like AfterLife?)

Yes, he received the award a year too late, and now he is bunched among all the posthumous winners, but at least he is bunched among the winners. Finally.

 

A business that makes its most deserving awards posthumously is not a business in which I'd invest, either for moral or financial reasons.

 

Agreed. This is too late.

 

Let me ask this question: Do enough newspaper editors have enough sense of history, especially prior to his death, to know why Heinz was important? I would bet that when his name first surfaced on a petition here two years ago, it was the first time many had heard of him. And when he passed away, I think a lot of them were still like "Death of a Racehorse? Huh?"

I say this more out of sadness than I do as a slam. I don't think many sports editors today are big readers, or students of history. Many of them probably feel like they can't be. Perhaps it is because they're forced to spend much more time managing people and budgets than they are with the creative side of the business. Or perhaps it's because, more and more often, they were not writers for very long (if at all) before becoming editors.

 

The shame is not in not knowing. It's in not learning and then making proper use of the knowledge; in this case, by giving Bill Heinz his due in story play.

Thurber, writing about The New Yorker's early days, re-told the famous anecdote about the magazine's editor, Harold Ross. One day Ross put his head into a researcher's office and asked, "'Was Moby Dick the man or the whale?"

 

From BASW backwards, through the old Best Sports Stories collections, the Fireside anthologies and other individual collections ranging from those of people like Red Smith, Gallico, Cannon, Deford, etc. etc. etc. (particularly in this era, where, if they are not in your local library you can easily find such books for sale online), there's no excuse.

You should know the history of your craft. Period.

 

This is what happens when APSE is too busy giving the award to sports editors to give it to one of the greatest sportswriters of his generation.