Guest Blog

WHY BEYOND THE DREAM NOW

Many, if not most, newspaper sports columns are perishable the day after they appear. In Beyond the Dream, by Ira Berkow, published in 1975 and reissued this spring, the 74 newspaper sports columns represented were written for the feature syndicate Newspaper Enterprise Association from 33 to 40 years ago. In the original foreword to the book, Red Smith wrote: “It can be stated as a law that the sportswriter whose horizons are no wider than the outfield fences is a bad sportswriter, because he has no sense of proportion and no awareness of the real world around him. Ira Berkow knows that what is important about a game is not the score but the people who play it.”

When the book was originally published, the Chicago Sun-Times’ reviewer Rick Kogan wrote: “Wrapped together in this neat package, (these pieces) show Berkow as an astute observer of the national scene….The best of these stories are as good as any ever written.”

Many of the people, and the issues, that Berkow wrote about more than a third of a century ago are still in the news, or on “the national scene,” in one way or another. As Berkow wrote in his new introduction for the book, “The Vietnam War was in its last throes in the spring of 1975, but the Iraqi War would be a terrible echo three decades later. Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus morphed, more or less, into Tiger Woods; Peter Sellers and Inspector Clouseau eventually were eclipsed by Sacha Baron Cohen and Borat (for the moment, anyway). As the French proverb has it, the more things change, the more they inevitably, if not sometimes reluctantly, stay the same.”

He added, “I would like to think that the pieces included in this book reflect a time in our national and world history, and perhaps give a sense of who we were then, and, in some ways, how we became who we are today, going even beyond sports.” And Berkow did it in a way that has earned him acclaim as a literary stylist (George Will called him “the Sondheim of sportswriters” and Saul Bellow wrote that he read Ira Berkow “with unfailing interest”). Berkow went on to become a Pultizer Prize-winning sports columnist for the New York Times and the author of 17 other books, including best-sellers.

Beyond the Dream begins with a piece about the Roberto Clemente Little League in San Juan, Puerto Rico, with the sentence, “Except for the threat that always lurks of a brief outburst of tropical rain, it was a glorious day.” Clemente had died a year earlier, on New Years Eve, 1972, when his airplane disappeared in the ocean on the way to Nicaragua to help earthquake victims. Clemente, the Hall of Fame baseball player and humanitarian, lives on, in the hearts and memories of many, as well as in a recent best-selling biography.

Included in Beyond the Dream is the story of Charlie Nash, an Olympic boxer from Northern Ireland, who has trained despite the “Troubles” of his native land, much like Iraqi and Palestinian soccer players must certainly train today. Here is Tom Seaver in the midst of a baseball players’ strike in 1972 -- and why the fans will (and did) forgive the players, as they invariably do following inevitable strikes. And Pittsburgh Steeler linebacker Andy Russell talks about the prevalence of drugs in football and the sham involved when he thought that taking them made him “invincible.” And there is the irrepressible Muhammad Ali, the charismatic Joe Namath, the thoughtful Joe Louis, the unconquerable Jackie Robinson, the nonpareils Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio and the 1936 Nazi Olympic gold-medal discus thrower, Gisela Mauermayer.

They are there along with candid and unexpected moments featuring, among others, Henry Aaron, Casey Stengel, Pete Rose, Roger Maris Jack Dempsey, Jake LaMotta (“Raging Bull”), Pancho Gonzales, the teen-age Chris Evert, Jerry West and the rassler Bruno Sammartino as well as people who rarely are associated with sports, but who, in Beyond the Dream, provided startling and delightful insights, from Marcel Marceau to Marianne Moore to  Bobby Fischer, the United States chess champion who, a few months before his greatly anticipated world championship match against the Russian champion Boris Spassky, told Berkow, “It will be probably the greatest sports event in history. Bigger even than Ali-Frazier. It is really the free world against the lying, cheating, hypocritical Russians.” It was, indeed, to the millions watching on television around the globe, a Super Bowl, World Cup, World Series and heavyweight title fight rolled into one.

The range of humor, of drama, of tragedy, of, well, wisdom of the subjects depicted in Beyond the Dream is remarkable for the depth and breadth and historical significance that, as the title suggests, goes beyond the world of sports, and lands in the world of every day. So it did in the years from 1968 to 1975, so it does today.