Really just read this piece on Richard Ben Cramer by Sports Illustrated’s S.L. Price. It is ridiculously good and entertaining about one of the all-time great reporters and characters in journalism.
From the piece:
Thirteen years later, long after “What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?” had been widely acclaimed as perhaps the greatest piece of sportswriting ever, What It Takes was named, by NYU, the 58th-best work of journalism of the 20th century. “Did you see?” Cramer said of one giant listed a few places ahead. “I can write him under the table!”
Yet even with an ego and style that screamed look-at-me — ALL CAPS! Sentences hijacked by dashes and Aghhs and miles … of … ellipses — Cramer, at his best, made you forget he existed. “What you read was the essence of whoever he was capturing,” says David Rosenthal, one of his early editors. “Richard was a bit of a chameleon. He was able to listen to the way people spoke, the way people thought, and started to become one of them.”
Price’s piece on Richard Ben Cramer is excellent, but SI’s hanging it as yet another albatross around A-Rod’s neck is really a stretch. Enough already.