Richard Ben Cramer: Play All The Big Chords

Richard Ben Cramer was a journalist who wrote great, shambling, unafraid sentences that weren't so much lively—though they were that—as they were lived-in.


I love that. Those are big, perfect chords being strummed very loudly, like the best kind of pop music. That paragraph is from Cramer's 1986 profile of Ted Williams, one of the greatest, most humane pieces of sportswriting you'll ever come across. He always wrote like that. Read Cramer on Cal Ripken. Or Jerry Lee Lewis. Or Bobby Sands. Or read What It Takes, Cramer's brilliant book about the 1988 presidential election, a prodigy of empathic journalism and still very much worth a look, even if it does bear, in its campaigning-as-the-one-true-crucible thesis and its policy-free approach to politics, a certain ancestral resemblance to the likes of Politico.










They were worried about their gums.

They were experts on soy formula.




And they certainly, God knows, did not mess around!



Or drugs.

Or ill health.

Or fouling their air with noxious smoke.

Or music so loud they couldn't hear their cellular phones!



The ⃠ Generation.




Here was Hart (reform marriage, indeed!)—whoeverybody knew was (still!) getting laid ...

Well, the sonofabitch was prima facie crazy!

I thought of the above passage when I heard a few years ago that Cramer was working on a biography of Alex Rodriguez. He was at his best when writing about public figures either too readily embraced or too summarily dismissed, which is why he was one of the only writers to get both Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams dead to rights (and which is why it was a shame Jesse Jackson never cooperated with his 1988 book). Here was the perfect guy to write the A-Rod story, I thought—someone who could take the full and proper measure of baseball's most talented phony.

He never did, alas. Cramer was a notoriously slow writer, and the book fell apart, its bones now getting picked over by lawyers.

Cramer died on Monday night of complications from lung cancer. He was 62. No one went for the big chords the way he did. What was it he wrote about Ted Williams? "Few men try for best ever, and Ted Williams is one of those."