Heavyweight Championship Of The Word

All week long there builds up inside of you a competitive animosity toward that other man, that counterpart across the field. All week long he is the symbol, the epitome, of what you must defeat and then, when it is over, when you have looked up to that man for as long as I have looked up to George Halas, you cannot help but be disturbed by a score like this. You know he brought a team in here hurt by key injuries and that this was just one of those days, but you can't apologize. You can't apologize for a score. It is up there on that board and nothing can change it now.
-RUN TO DAYLIGHT!, 1963

The book went through 15 printings and was the first gospel, mythological and bronze-bound, of the legendary Lombardi. Heinz wrote an award-winning television adaptation of the Lombardi book (produced by his friend Howard Cosell), and by the end of 1963, at the top of his profession, he had the time and the money and the ease of mind, at 48, to consider carefully what he might do next.

Barbara Heinz, age 16, died on Feb. 27, 1964-It is quiet torture for him to tell this story, and he tells it carefully, as though these words were made of glass and might shatter in the telling. Might cut him.

On Feb. 25, the day of the first Clay-Liston fight, in Miami, Barbara told Betty she didn't feel well. She had a persistent fever, she couldn't eat, and she had a headache. Heinz had already left to cover the fight. Betty took Barbara to the doctor, who booked her into Stamford Hospital. On the way there, they dropped off Gayl, 13, who was going on a ski trip. A few minutes later, Barbara turned to Betty in the front seat of the car and said, "I'm going to the, Mom."

That night Cassius Clay beat Sonny Liston for the heavyweight championship. Heinz flew back to Manhattan a few hours after the fight to write a newsreel wrap-up that would play in movie theaters the next day. Betty called him early on the 27th, and told him to get to the hospital. All of Barbara's major organs were shutting down.

He arrived there at 11 a.m. At 7 p.m., Barbara died. Heinz remembers Betty standing in the hospital lobby saying, "She's gone." He remembers how tightly they held each other. Toxic shock or some virulent strep, they still don't know what it was. He can never forget "taking home Barbie's empty clothes" and being stricken for the next few days, in and out of a state like a horrible, waking sleep.

Forgoing a service, Bill and Betty took Barbara's ashes up to Vermont, where she'd been so happy the summer before at camp in Dorset Hollow, where she'd fallen in love for the first time. They spread the ashes beneath a tree, and Heinz, eyes shut tight against something he still can't stand to look at, tells me they "started on the road back, which never ends."

Bill and Betty lived apart for a time after that—they couldn't look at each other without crying. Each thought the other was thinking that they could have or should have done something more, anything, done the impossible somehow. Heinz returned to 919 Eighth Avenue, the old address where he'd spent so much time, Stillman's Gym. They'd torn it down and put up an apartment building.

He and Betty hung on, though, and in 1966 they bought the mountainside house in Dorset, reknit what they could of their hearts and started over.

It is getting dark, and snow is falling outside. Heinz is tired. He brought sportswriting across the century from Granny Rice and Ring Lardner and passed it like a gift to the writers we read today. Perhaps he'd have become as famous as Red Smith if he'd stayed in one place. He had bad luck with newspapers and magazines. The Sun and The Saturday Evening Post, True and Argosy, Collier's and Look have all gone under, and they pulled the memories down after them.