Ledger legend captures 58 years in 200 pages

One of Jerry Izenberg’s upcoming projects is a book about the death of the newspaper industry. He’ll write that one from personal experience: Izenberg, who has been with The Star-Ledger for almost 50 years, gave up his position as a regular sports columnist in 2006 to take the self-created post of “columnist emeritus.”

So just what does a columnist emeritus do? “Whatever he wants,” said Izenberg.

At 78, he’s unbelievably active; he had just returned from Baltimore, where he wrote three pieces about the Preakness, to his home in Henderson, Nev., about 17 miles from Las Vegas. “At night when I work at my desk I see the lights and in the morning there are five mountains, and one is where the sun first appears in the morning,” he told NJ Jewish News in a telephone interview.

Izenberg recently published Through My Eyes: A Sports Writer’s 58-Year Journey (St. Johann Press), in which he recalls some of the famous and infamous characters and events he’s covered. Fifty-eight? Seems like an odd number. “Well, I don’t have a contract that says I’ll be around to write [about] 60,” he said.

Through My Eyes is more than a sports scribe’s trip down memory lane. It’s a deeply personal memoir that includes stories about his father, an immigrant from Eastern Europe who quickly adopted baseball as a means to becoming an American, and the pain of being unable to properly mourn for his sister because the World Trade Center was attacked around that time.

Being Jewish in the rough-and-tumble sports world presented a few challenges. “It became an issue at times because people are people,” Izenberg said. “There’s still a lot of people who hate Jews and there are those who will, unfortunately, give them the benefit of the doubt because they’re Jewish and I don’t approve of either end of that spectrum.” After writing in support of his friend Muhammad Ali when the fighter refused to accept Uncle Sam’s invitation to fight in the Vietnam War, Izenberg received a few thousand letters that began along the lines of “Dear Jew commie bastard….”

In addition to the newspaper book (“death by suicide,” he said), Izenberg has several other projects in the hopper, including a biography of NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle and a novella/screenplay combining a ghost story with an homage to the Negro Leagues. The idea for that one came out of a ceremony he emceed at a Newark Bears game honoring the great black players. Monte Irvin, a Hall of Famer who played with the New York Giants after a career in the Negro Leagues, told him, “You’re not allowed to die. You’re the last person who saw us play…. Who’s gonna believe it happened?”

Izenberg hinted there might even be another memoir in him. “There’ll be another book about my life in this business. There’s so much more to say.

This article appeared in the May 21 issue of New Jersey Jewish News.

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For my old man, the journey to America began when his father, his pregnant mother and his two siblings left the anti-Semitism of Eastern Europe and began the long walk toward the ocean, part of the wave of immigrants who would reshape this country before the 20th century.

My father, Harry Izenberg, was 7 years old, and although he didn’t know it, each mile of the journey would bring him closer to a game whose beauty he would love until the day he died, a game to which he committed his heart on his first day of school in a new country. Without a word of English in his vocabulary, he, like millions of new immigrants then and now, discovered baseball as the first step in a process of assimilation.

On that day in Paterson, his classmates ridiculed him for his Old World clothes, strange language and ancient religion, and if he understood what they were saying, they would have had a fight on their hands.

But now it was recess and they were one short for a baseball game. “Go ask the greenhorn if he wants to play,” one kid said, which is how my father came to hold a bat in his hands for the first time.

He often spoke of that moment, and the clarity of his memory always astonished me.

“I don’t know exactly how far the ball went,” he would say, “but it left the playground. And what I do know for certain is, at that exact moment, I became an American.”

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As flight plans go, this one was more or less routine — for an astronaut. We left New York for Paris. From there we flew to Kuwait, which was a lot of fun for a Jewish kid from Newark. We landed at 5 a.m. before a wildly cheering throng of three — the guy who directed the pilot with a flashlight, the guy who drove the press corps bus to the terminal for coffee that wasn’t there and the Bedouin with the tommy gun who was staring at us.

As we headed down the steps of the portable ramp, my old traveling companion, Jerry Lisker, said, “button your shirt.”

“You must be freakin’ nuts,” I said, “it’s like 500 freakin’ degrees here.”

“See that guy?” Lisker said, pointing to the hard case that was attached to the tommy gun. “Your cha’i [sic] is showing.”

“Oh,” I said, “it is a bit chilly here.”

From Through My Eyes: A Sports Writer’s 58-Year Journey

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Kaplan’s Korner on Jews and Sports © 2009 New Jersey Jewish News

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