Remembering W.C. Heinz '37, one of the best there ever was.
Bill Heinz ’37 passed away. He was 93 years old.
I’m embarrassed to admit that I had never heard of Wilfred C. Heinz until the fall of 2000, more than half a century after he began filing stories—stories about war and peace and sports and life and death and a combination of all of those—under the byline of W.C. Heinz.
Sadly, I wasn’t alone. As recounted in a moving obituary written by Bill’s friend and classmate Marshall Sewell ’37 on page 89 of this magazine, Jeff MacGregor’s Sports Illustrated profile of Heinz “resulted in many people reading Heinz’s words for the first time, then rushing out to buy or borrow his books.” Living in Washington, D.C., at the time, I was one of those “many,” and I instantly fell in love with Heinz’s prose. (My editorial predecessor, Rachel Morton, subsequently received the rights to reprint the story in the winter 2001 issue. She chose to put Heinz on the cover, selecting a black-and-white image of Heinz in close-up, his face partially obscured by his spindly fingers, fingers that tapped out so many words on his 1932 Remington portable typewriter; it’s one of my favorite covers this magazine has ever published.)
In that profile, MacGregor wrote: “W.C. Heinz is a writer, and he tells his stories the way Heifitz fiddled or Hopper painted, or the way Willie Pep boxed—with a kind of lyrical understatement, with an insistent and inspired economy.” Take this Heinz passage from The Day of the Fight, for example:
There were 39,827 people there and they had paid $342,497 to be there, and when Graziano’s head came up out of the dugout, they rose and made their sound. The place was filled with it, and it came from far off, and then he was moving quickly down beneath this ceiling of sound, between the two long walls of faces, turned toward him and yellow in the artificial light and shouting things, mouths open, eyes wide. Into the ring where, in one of the most brutal fights ever seen in New York, Zale dropped him once, and he dropped Zale once before, in the sixth round, Zale suddenly, with a right to the body and left to the head, knocked him out.
Heinz, MacGregor wrote, was the literary godfather to men like Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, and Frank Deford; the late David Halberstam, a Pulitzer winner, called him a pioneer. And Mike Lupica, the noted sportswriter and novelist called Heinz “the greatest living war correspondent and the greatest living sportswriter.”
Through it all, Bill Heinz remained exceedingly humble. Humble to a fault, some may say. This spring, I had the good fortune and pleasure to meet one of my journalistic heroes, the aforementioned Frank Deford. We exchanged pleasantries and were chatting about Middlebury and Vermont when talk turned to Heinz, who had died the month prior. He was a giant, one of the greats, Deford told me, echoing the sentiments expressed not only by Lupica and Halberstam, but more recently by Andy Rooney on 60 Minutes and on the pages of Sports Illustrated, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. We lamented the fact that he wasn’t more widely read, but as we spoke, I noticed the ears of people around us perking up. And I told anyone who would listen, “If you love good writing, exquisite storytelling, seek out the work of W.C. Heinz.”
—MJ