Photos: W. C. Heinz, Ring Lardner, Red Smith join “Mount Rushmore of sportswriters” at Fenway Park

The ceremony for the PEN New England Sports Writing Hall of Fame
at Fenway Park in Boston on Monday, June 15, 2015.
© 2015 Billie Weiss/Boston Red Sox

Three Library of America authors were honored on the field at Boston’s Fenway Park on Monday night, June 15, as part of a pre-game public ceremony for the new Sports Writing Hall of Fame sponsored by PEN New England. W. C. Heinz, Ring Lardner, and Red Smith were inducted along with Grantland Rice—forming an inaugural group of honorees that Karen Wulf, executive director of PEN New England, aptly characterized as “the Mount Rushmore of sportswriters.”

W. C. Heinz’s daughter Gayl Heinz was on hand for the ceremony, representing both her late father and Red Smith, the latter at the request of members of Smith’s family. Gayl Heinz later told The Library of America, “I know how hard Dad worked to get it right, and it is so gratifying to know that his work has not only passed the test of time but has risen to the top. I am deeply honored and proud to represent him and his writings.”

The Library of America published The Top of His Game: The Best Sportswriting of W. C. Heinz earlier this spring, and released American Pastimes: The Very Best of Red Smith in 2013. Lardner is represented by the volume Stories and Other Writings, which includes “Tyrus,” about Ty Cobb, and You Know Me Al, his celebrated baseball novel from 1916. (Vintage editions of You Know Me Al are on display at the Sports Writing Hall of Fame—see photo, below.) All three writers also appear in the LOA collection Baseball: A Literary Anthology.

Now established in the Press Room at Fenway Park, the Sports Writing Hall of Fame honors writers who have made lasting contributions to sports literature. The Hall is a collaboration among PEN New England (the local chapter of PEN American Center), the Boston Red Sox, and Kurt Cerulli, the founder and chief executive of the financial services firm Cerulli Associates who is also a noted collector of sports memorabilia. With his wife Mary, Cerulli also founded PEN New England’s Cerulli Award for Excellence in Sports Writing in 2012.

Meanwhile, for those keeping score, after the Sports Writing Hall of Fame ceremony the Boston Red Sox fell to the Atlanta Braves, 4-2, for their seventh loss in a row, on a damp, chilly night at Fenway. Readers can speculate as to whether any Boston fans consoled themselves that night by imagining how Heinz, Lardner, or Smith would have captured the scene in print.

Inductees Red Smith and W. C. Heinz, shown here
on a monitor at the reception for the PEN New England
Sports Writing Hall of Fame at Fenway Park on June 15, 2015.
© PEN New England

Library of America volumes at the reception for the
PEN New England Sports Writing Hall of Fame.
© 2015 Billie Weiss/Boston Red Sox

Gayl Heinz with the Library of America collection
of her father's sportswriting.
© PEN New England

A Sports Writing Hall of Fame display case with books, photos,
and memorabilia related to the four inductees.
© PEN New England

Related Reader’s Almanac posts:

• Bill Littlefield on how sportswriter W. C. Heinz listened to and respected athletes—and knew their glory was fleeting
• Daniel Okrent on Red Smith’s “mastery of anecdote and vividness of expression”

Audio and text selections:

• Read the W. C. Heinz classic “Death of a Race Horse” at The Library of America’s Story of the Week website and listen to Bill Littlefield reading the selection in streaming audio.
• Ring Lardner’s 1915 piece “Where Do You Get That Noise?” at Story of the Week

Ian Frazier on why Ring Lardner is “a major figure in twentieth-century letters”

Photo by Sigrid Estrada

Writer and humorist Ian Frazier, a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and the author of many books (including the best-selling Travels in Siberia) spoke with us recently about the newly published Ring Lardner: Stories & Other Writings, which he edited for The Library of America.

Why should people read this book? Why should they care about Ring Lardner?

Ring Lardner wrote like nobody else, caught the feel of his era like nobody else, and knew how to make people laugh with a voice or a plot change-up or a small misspelling. He was a major figure in twentieth-century American letters.

Contemporaries called the language of Lardner’s stories “Lardnerese.” What is Lardnerese? What were his special gifts or contributions as a stylist?

As this anthology shows, Lardner heard his own voice with perfect clarity from the time he was a teenager. Just as clearly, he registered the way people around him talked in the Midwestern places where he lived and where he worked as a young man. He had a genius’s ear for living speech, and he went beyond the range of ordinary orthography to capture that speech in writing. His typewriter was like a John Cage prepared piano—it made sounds, and produced corresponding narratives, that were all its own.

How did your sense of Lardner as person or writer change while working on this book?

He was an amazing man—passionate and ice-cold simultaneously. As I learned more about him I saw him as an enigmatic, cold American—like a Clint Eastwood character in a Western, or like D. H. Lawrence’s definition of an American: “isolate, and a killer.” Those qualities come out especially, I think, in Lardner’s brilliant, often hilarious, and always merciless stories. But Lardner was a good friend and a gentle family man, too. That is apparent in his letters and in his biography. He had outstanding, remarkable children.

If Lardner were around today, what do you think he’d be doing for a living?

He would be writing—no one with a gift as great as his would be able to ignore it. But I’m not sure what. If he were around today, or if Fitzgerald or Hemingway or Harold Ross were around today, today would be something other than it is.

Do you detect his influence on other writers?

Definitely. On Thurber, for one. He laid out a Midwestern scene for Thurber to populate with Thurber characters. Lardner’s middle-class settings and small-town plots presage O’Hara, Updike, and Cheever. And Lardner’s view of the psychic obtuseness and frailty and in-spite-of-themselves lovability of baseball players has influenced the way generations of writers have portrayed athletes.

Best discovery while working on book?

I loved rereading pieces, well-known and not, that I hadn’t looked at for a long time. I had never seen his World War I writings, and I really enjoyed those. I hadn’t known how much the war had been a part of his early career and life. I admired Ellis Abbott, whom he courted in Lardnerian prose and who married him—luckily for him. She was a Midwestern aristocrat of the first rank, and a really cool person.

What do you think readers will find most surprising?

Maybe the extreme, ahead-of-its-time modernism of his short plays.

Favorite piece in collection?

The Young Immigrunts! This is a magic piece of humor writing. “ ‘Shut up,’ he explained,” is as funny as it is possible to be in only four words. But every line in this story is a magic trick. The only difference between this story and what actual magicians do is that their tricks can be explained. I’ve looked at The Young Immigrunts dozens of times, always with the same mystified delight, and I still couldn’t tell you how it was done.

Read The Young Immigrunts—in its entirety, with original illustrations by Gaar Williams—at The Library of America’s Story of the Week!