When David Halberstam was killed in a car crash near San Francisco last spring, he’d just finished what turned out to be his final book, “The Coldest Winter,” a history of the Korean War. The indefatigable 73-year-old author was on his way to Palo Alto to speak with Hall of Fame quarterback Y.A. Tittle. The interview was to be the first for his 22nd book, on the Baltimore Colts’ victory over the New York Giants in 1958, an overtime championship thriller that he believed marked the ascendancy of professional football in American sports.
Halberstam was one of a handful of writers who could tackle, in succession, the Korean War and the so-called Greatest Game Ever Played. He shared a Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for groundbreaking coverage of the Vietnam War for the New York Times and went on to pen the signature 1972 book on the origins of that conflict, “The Best and the Brightest.” His 1993 book, “The Fifties,” was a sprawling account of that crucible decade in U.S. history. But all along, he’d had an affection for sports. Beginning in 1981, he wrote a series of sports-themed books, which were “a pleasant respite from my other seemingly more serious work,” he said, as if to apologize for the lighter material. They were anything but lightweight. Whether writing about the NFL, Olympic rowing or Michael Jordan, Halberstam examined essential themes: race and class, media and entertainment, heroism and myth, money and power, youth and old age.
more from the LA Times here.