Heavyweight Championship Of The Word

In 1951 the Heinzes had a second daughter, Gayl. Heinz was piecing together the kind of freelance income that most writers only dream of. Over the next few years he did some of his best work, including Brownsville Bum for True magazine. Most recently collected in The Best American Sports Writing of the Century (with two other Heinz pieces), it is the profile of Al (Bummy) Davis, a gifted, dirty fighter and chronic screwup who dies a hero. Its effect on other writers is legendary; the story is told and retold about the night in Manhattan when Jimmy Breslin shouted over a bar to his wife, Rosemary, "What's the best sports magazine piece of all time?" and she bellowed back immediately, " Bummy Davis by Bill Heinz."

It's a funny thing about people. People will hate a guy all his life for what he is, but the minute he dies for it they make him out a hero and they go around saying that maybe he wasn't such a bad guy after all because he sure was willing to go the distance for whatever he believed or whatever he was.

That's the way it was with Bummy Davis. The night Bummy fought Fritzie Zivic in the Garden and Zivic started giving him the business and Bummy hit Zivic low maybe thirty times and kicked the referee, they wanted to hang him for it. The night those four guys came into Dudy's bar and tried the same thing, only with rods, Bummy went nuts again. He flattened the first one and then they shot him, and when everybody read about it, and how Bummy fought guns with only his left hook and died lying in the rain in front of the place, they all said that was really something and you sure had to give him credit for it.
—BROWNSVILLE BUM, 1951

Throughout the '50s Heinz wrote for Collier's and Cosmopolitan, The Saturday Evening Post and Sport, for Argosy and True and Esquire and Look. He kept an office out in the converted garage after they moved to Stamford from Old Greenwich and wrote each day when he wasn't on the road reporting or doing research. He profiled every boxer from Carmen Basilio to Hurricane Jackson to Roy Harris, the Backwoods Battler from the Big Thicket. He wrote about Rocky Marciano and Ingemar Johansson, about Joe Louis and Archie Moore and Beau Jack and Floyd Patterson, Sugar Ray Robinson and Ezzard Charles.

In boxing he found the purest form of competition. He often compared it to painting or composing, an application of scientific principle to produce a work of art, and has said that when he watched Willie Pep fight—the best boxer he ever saw—he could almost hear the music. Prizefighting has always attracted a colorful crowd, too, which gives a writer great raw material. A sport full of gutter-poor kids bootstrapping their way up off the street, it appealed to Heinz as the pro to-American success story.

Nineteen fifty-eight was probably the best year Heinz had as a writer. He published a much-anthologized article about Pete Reiser, the hard-luck Brooklyn Dodgers phenom who played with such exuberant abandon that he spent most of his injury-shortened career hobbled after running hell-bent into too many outfield walls.

In 1946, the Dodgers played an exhibition game in Springfield, Missouri. When the players got off the train there was a young radio announcer there, and he was grabbing them one at a time and asking them where they thought they'd finish that year.

"In first place," Reese and Casey and Dixie Walker and the rest were saying. "On top." "We'll win it."

"And here comes Pistol Pete Reiser!" the announcer said. "Where do you think you'll finish this season, Pete?"

"In Peck Memorial Hospital," Pete said.
—THE ROCKY ROAD OF PISTOL PETE, 1958