RIP, Robert Creamer

I don't see this anywhere else. He was an original Sports Illustrated staffer, and wrote a great and influential biography of Babe Ruth. Robert Creamer died Wednesday at age 90. I interviewed him once about 10 years ago for a historical baseball article, and he was quite gracious. He had a terrific career.

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2012/baseball/mlb/07/19/robert-creamer-walter-bingham/index.html

 

"Babe: The Legend Comes to Life" is such a great book. Pretty much set the standard for sports biographies.

And Creamer was great on Ken Burns' "Baseball" miniseries.

RIP.

 

RIP

 

Go into the SI archives and read his baseball work from the 50s and 60s. He was really good.

 

RIP to one of the best writers from the early days of Sports Illustrated.

 

A fine writer, and a gentleman.

 

As noted, he was fantastic on Ken Burns' "Baseball." RIP.

 

This thread needs more than six fucking posts.

http://baseballpastandpresent.com/2012/01/17/interview-robert-creamer/

 

I don't know that I would say Creamer set a standard for sports biographies, because there were excellent sports biographies before then. Jim Bronsan's book -his diary of the 1959 season - is a great but forgotten book.

Creamer's book on Babe Ruth is outstanding and is extremely well researched.

 

No, I'd definitely go so far as to say Creamer set the standard. There really wasn't anything like "Babe" before that.

Brosnan's isn't a biography (or even an autobiography); it's a diary.

Otherwise, what decent biographies can we even name before Creamer's?

"Veeck as in Wreck", IMO, is the only one that holds up. (And it really does hold up well.) But that's mostly Bill Veeck being his charming self.

What else?

Al Stump's "Ty Cobb"? Laughably fabricated.
Arthur Mann's "The Jackie Robinson Story"? Just a film tie-in.
Taylor Spink's "Judge Landis and Twenty-Five Years of Baseball"? Verbal blow job.
Bob Considine's "The Babe Ruth Story"? Sugarcoated hero worship.
Fred Lieb's "Connie Mack: Grand Old Man of Baseball"? More hero worship.
Any of the mass-produced bios by Milton Shapiro or Albert Hirshberg? Trash.

There just ain't much left after that.

 

I thought Richard Ben Cramer book on DiMaggio was pretty good and would be in a top 5 discussion.

I haven't read Montville's book on Ted Williams or Howard Bryant on Hank Aaron but I'd imagine they'd up there.

 

What Buck and I are getting at is that Creamer's Babe book was the first of its kind. There have been many great ones (maybe even better ones) since then, but there weren't many (if any) of its ilk before 1974.