Once They Heard The Cheers

(Doubleday & Co., 1979)

"Some time ago, when literacy was in fashion, if you wanted to be a sportswriter, you noticed two names. I don't mean Red Smith and Granny Rice. Everybody noticed them. One was John Lardner, who could make a single sentence sing; the other was W.C. Heinz. Heinz could make sentences sing, but his special gift was somehow to sound the chord of music that was the man. You had to read Bill Heinz often and carefully, then, to realize how very good he was.

Now, praise be, he is back before us, a generation later, with all the old smoke on his fast ball. I was enthralled by Once They Heard the Cheers It is peopled with Pantheon sports folk- Eddie Arcaro, Sugar Ray Robinson- but in the end the most compelling character is a self-effacing writing whizz called Heinz.

Once They Heard the Cheers should be read not only by people who like sport, but just as surely by everyone who likes writing. If I taught writing, this would be high on my required reading list. Who knows, it may yet restore literacy."- Roger Kahn author of The Boys of Summer

"Once They Heard the Cheers is a beauty of a book, a warmly nostalgic wedding of yesterday and now. It recaptures the excitement of that wonderful era when Joe Page was master of all he surveyed from the mound in Yankee Stadium and Eddie Arcaro's horse-playing idolaters regularly booed the pants off their idol. Yet it isn't a book about sports, per se. It is about people who just happened to make their living in sports. Bill Heinz, who knew them at the top of their game, shows us in lean, athletic prose what they were like behind the headlines and what they are like today, a quarter-century beyond the cheers." - Red Smith, New York Times

In two decades as a writer of sports W.C. Heinz covered and came to know intimately some of the greatest athletes of modern times, men like Rocky Graziano, Pete Reiser, Sugar Ray Robinson, and Eddie Arcaro, whose achievements are now a part of the American sports legend. There is nobody better than he at bringing to life both the drama of the contest and the glory and despair of the athlete's striving, be the sport baseball, football, boxing, thoroughbred racing, or rodeo.

Once They Heard the Cheers is the story of a trip across America in search of yesterday's heroes, in search of men whose struggles to a succeed in their sport and in life made them memorable to Heinz and made him want to see them again. From the Badlands of North Dakota to the streets of New York, Heinz has tracked down those whose names dominated the headlines of days gone by. By a skillful weaving of the present with his memories of their glory days, he achieves a remarkable blend of then and now and takes a poignant look at the consequences of fame and the treasure of talent that made these men unforgettable for so many.

Here is the glory that belonged to Floyd Patterson, Joe Page, Willie Pep, Carmen Basilio, Willie Davis, and others. This is a book full of long, lovely echoes that bring to life the language and land of America, not only as it was then but as it is now.