W. C. Heinz

Wilfred Charles Heinz (January 11, 1915 – February 27, 2008) also known as Bill Heinz, was an American journalist, sportswriter, war correspondent, and novelist. Known for his concise, closely observed prose, he became one of the leading American sportswriters of the mid-twentieth century. His work included newspaper columns, magazine profiles, boxing journalism, the boxing novel The Professional, and the novel MASH, which he co-wrote with H. Richard Hornberger.

Newspaper and magazine career

Early life and war correspondence Heinz was born in Mount Vernon, New York. Following his graduation from Middlebury College in 1937, he joined the staff of the New York Sun. In 1943, Heinz became a Sun'''s war correspondent for which he spent seven weeks aboard a United States Navy aircraft carrier covering anti-submarine operations in the Atlantic. In 1944, he reported on the Normandy invasion from aboard the battleship USS Nevada. After The Sun’s senior war correspondent was captured by German forces, Heinz replaced him with the United States First Army and reported on its advance across Europe into Germany during the final months of the war.

Sportswriting and magazine career After serving as one of the newspaper's war correspondents in Europe during the Second World War, Heinz returned to the United States and was awarded his own sports column called "The Sport Scene," which primarily covered boxing, baseball, football and horse racing.

One of his pieces from around this time – Death of a Racehorse, written July 29, 1949 – is famous for its brevity (fewer than 1,000 words) and its quality, having been compared to the Gettysburg Address and the works of Ernest Hemingway. Written on a manual typewriter as the events unfolded, the story describes Air Lift, a promising two-year-old horse who was racing for the first time, and concludes less than two hours later: Air Lift broke a leg during that first race, and had to be euthanized.

Heinz became a freelance writer after The Sun ceased publishing in 1950. He was a regular contributor to magazines such as SPORT, Life, The Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, True, Collier's, and Look. The best of his magazine and newspaper pieces are published in his books American Mirror, What A Time It Was: The Best of W.C. Heinz on Sports and The Top of His Game: The Best Sportswriting of W. C. Heinz. One of his most regarded pieces is the magazine article, "The Rocky Road of Pistol Pete" about a baseball player, Pete Reiser, who fought through countless injuries to play the game that he loved.

Books Heinz was particularly associated with boxing writing. His first published book, the 1958 novel The Professional, follows Eddie Brown, a young middleweight boxer pursuing the middleweight boxing title and is often cited as one of the major American boxing novels. Ernest Hemingway praised it as "the only good novel I've ever read about a fighter, and an excellent novel in its own right."

Heinz also edited boxing anthologies, including the 1961 The Fireside Book of Boxing and The Book of Boxing (with Nathan Ward) and later received the A. J. Liebling Award for boxing writing.

Heinz's additional books include Run to Daylight with football coach Vince Lombardi, The Surgeon, following a physician through a typical working day; Emergency and Once They Heard the Cheers, in which the author travels the country revisiting sports heroes of his past.

In the late 1960s, Heinz collaborated with H. Richard Hornberger to write the novel MASH, published under Hornberger's pen name Richard Hooker. The book was the precursor to the film MASH, which won the award for best film of the 1970 Cannes Film Festival and an Academy Award for best screenplay based on another medium in 1971. The book also served as the prototype for the long-running, Emmy Award-winning television series. In 2015, the Library of America published a collection of his best sportswriting, The Top of His Game''.

Style and legacy Heinz’s sportswriting was noted for its economy, close observation, and extensive use of dialogue, an approach made popular some years later by the new journalism. Rather than concentrating solely on results, he used scenes and characterization to explore the lives and personalities of athletes. His subjects included celebrated champions, unsuccessful competitors, and aging fighters, whose decline he treated as an integral part of professional sport. Heinz has been described as a pioneer of literary sports journalism. David Halberstam identified him as a predecessor of writers including Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, and Frank Deford, while Elmore Leonard said that he studied Heinz’s magazine profiles and learned from his use of dialogue.

Recognition W. C. Heinz was a five-time winner of the E. P. Dutton Award for best magazine story of the year.

Heinz died on February 27, 2008, in Bennington, Vermont, at age 93.