Picture from: philly.com
My first encounter with journalist Richard Ben Cramer went something like this:
Few men try for best ever, and Ted Williams is one of those. There’s a story about him I think of now. This is not about basball but fishing. He meant to be the best there, too. One day he says to a Boston writer: “Ain’t no one in heaven or earth knew more about fishing.”
“Sure there is,” says the scribe.
“Oh, yeah? Who?”
“Well, God made the fish.”
“Yeah, awright,” Ted says. “But you have to go pretty far back.”
It’s a beautiful piece of writing, and it was the first time I’d ever heard of Ted Williams. (I know, I know. He’s the last .400 hitter. I’m not a baseball guy.) But more than being wowed at the descriptions of Williams’ baseball prowess, I fell in love with the voice that oozes out of the letters.
Somehow (and I know what I’m about to write sounds cliche), Cramer captured the essence of an old man who wanted to be left alone, while also capturing the enigma he was as a young sports star. Also, brilliantly, most of the quotes from Williams are all uppercase, LIKE THIS, because the man spoke bombastically.
I saw on Twitter that Cramer died at the age of 62 yesterday. My first reaction was his age — it got to me; it sounds so young (my parents are only a decade away from that age). I didn’t know, at the time, that he was the man who wrote one of the best sports stories ever, a story I had no intention of reading until the above section hooked me.
I clicked on the Twitter link and it brought me to a list of some of his best work. There was the story on Ted Williams and a few others — I started to read his work. Sure enough, that same terrific voice that corralled me into Williams’ story corralled me into his other pieces.
(Here are some of my new-found favorites of his:
Another article I was linked to from Twitter was the transcript to a 1992 (footnote: I was one years old) interview on C-SPAN about his tome, What It Takes: The Way to the White House, which is about, from what I gather, pretty much what the title says it does: politicians and campaigns.
The best thing about the interview was what he said about how he wrote the book and how he gained access into the lives of some of these politicians. At first he started interviewing “important people in Washington whom I had seen quoted in the papers or seen as talking heads on TV.” That got him nowhere. Then he started interviewing people in the politicians’ hometowns, including schoolmates and Cub Scout leaders. Cramer went on to say:
By the time I got back to the candidates on the campaign trail, I was asking them about their Aunt Lucy or their Aunt Gladys. She said they never would wake up in the morning when they spent the summer with her. Now they start their campaign days at 5:30 a.m. What got into these guys?
Gaining that access into politicians’ head through the people who would know them best is ingenious. I’ve read another interview answer like this. Gay Talese wrote a story for Esquire about Old Blue Eyes, but he could never get a face-to-face interview with the man. What did he do? He interviewed “dozens of people who were not celebrities, who were not stars, etc. — they were just people who had been on the scene, in minor roles, when Sinatra was present.”
Just one more point about Cramer: One of his best stories was a sports story, but he was not a sports writer. I love sports (OK, not baseball). For the longest time, I thought I wanted to be a sports writer, but then I realized I didn’t just want to write about games. I want to write about lots of things. And I think it’s cool Cramer was able to write about a wide range of topics, including sports but not limited to sports, or just politics, for that matter.
I just wish I had a writing voice as distinctive as his.
Behind Blue Skies 
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