By Thomas Gerbasi
If Mark Kram was alive and in his prime today, it’s safe to say that he wouldn’t be on Twitter. The way his son sees it, he may not have even be writing about sports if he was still around.
“Oh, no,” Mark Kram Jr. said. “He never even wrote a story on a computer. He would have felt very out of place today. And I’m not sure exactly where his writing style would fit in today. I think he would have applied his artistic talents in another field of endeavor. I don’t think he would have been a sportswriter if he came around today. He would have found some other way to express himself.”
Kram passed away at 69 in 2002, days after the last fight he attended, the Lennox Lewis vs. Mike Tyson bout in Memphis. Thirteen years later, his son has compiled the best of his father’s work in the volume “Great Men Die Twice,” and it’s a stark reminder of a couple things.
One is how lucky we were to have Kram around for the years we did, as he was one of a select group of writers who elevated boxing (and sports) writing to art. You may have disagreed vehemently with what he had to say (and many did, most notably when it came to his book “Ghosts of Manila”), but at the end, you had to know that you read something that meant something and that was created by a master craftsman.
The other reminder is how the sportswriting world has changed, and not necessarily for the better. And that’s not an indictment of the talent out there, but that such talent is restrained by a world where print is dying, the internet is largely unedited, and the landscape is not there for someone to devote the time necessary to their craft and be compensated for that devotion.
“He was strictly of another era, another time,” Kram Jr. said, and a run through the 20 pieces in the book backs that notion up, but not in terms of the quality presented here. The stories Kram wrote, from his seminal fight report on Ali-Frazier III to pieces on Cool Papa Bell, Edwin Moses and Beethavean Scottland, everything still holds up today. Yet despite forays into different sports and even entertainment in the form of a piece on Marlon Brando, boxing takes up the bulk of the book and seemed to be the place where Kram felt most at home.
“Dad was a baseball player in his youth,” Kram Jr. said. “He was All-City in Baltimore in high school, he played against Al Kaline and went on to play some minor league ball. But when he became a writer, he found himself drawn to boxing because I really do think he identified with the lonely struggle that boxers face on a day-to-day basis, and inside the ring you’re there by yourself with your ability and your courage. I think that’s echoed in the writer’s solitary ordeal. You’re there by yourself with a head full of ideas and some sense of purpose and that’s about it. There’s nobody there to hold your hand.”
It doesn’t hurt that boxers are among the most honest and accessible athletes in all of pro sports.
“Boxers are great storytellers,” Kram Jr., a renowned writer in his own right, said. “They open up to you and it doesn’t take much for them to tell their tale. And in those days, he spent a lot of time around camps and with fighters, and he had unlimited time with them, probably in a way that he wouldn’t have today. And he liked a lot of the fighters, although Sonny Liston was not exactly accommodating. (Laughs) Sonny picked up dad by the lapels and threw him into a snow bank out in Denver. Sonny didn’t like people snooping around his camp and asking too many questions. Beyond that, he had a great relationship with all the fighters for the most part, with the exception of Oscar Bonavena. He had a run-in with Oscar that was pretty intense at one time.”
Many also believed that he wasn’t exactly on great terms with Muhammad Ali, given his writing on the heavyweight legend in “Ghosts of Manila,” which focused on the rivalry between Ali and Joe Frazier. Kram Jr. disagrees with such comments.
“He got along great with Ali,” he said. “The interesting thing about ‘Ghosts of Manila’ was that dad got rapped for being an Ali hater, and nothing could have been further from the truth. He thought he was a generous, kind, decent man, and he thought he was a great, great athlete. But dad didn’t get the hero stuff. Dad didn’t have heroes. So he didn’t really experience Ali the way a lot of Ali’s fans did from afar, and also up-close journalists. He experienced him as a theater critic might experience an actor, at a certain objective remove.”
Again, you didn’t have to agree with Kram to appreciate what he wrote, and when talking with his son and reading his work on his father, you realize just how seriously he took what he did for a living. In fact, when it came to critics, no one was harsher on Kram’s work than the man who wrote it. It’s why a collection like this never saw the light of day during his lifetime. So how would he have reacted to the choices made by his son for “Great Men Die Twice?”
“It’s hard to say,” Kram Jr. said. “He was highly critical of his own work. It’s likely he would have seen something amiss in all the stories in one way or another, things he would have done differently or changed if he had the chance to change them. He was a perfectionist when it came to his work. It’s an interesting thing. Away from the typewriter, he lived sort of a disorganized life. He didn’t carry a wallet. He carried around cash in his pocket jumbled in with Sweet ‘N Low packs and pipe tobacco and loose change. (Laughs) He was a bit of an eccentric, but when he got behind the typewriter, he was very together and very precise and organized.”
As for the final list of stories? Kram Jr. said, “I tried to be guided by my own sense of how I would like him to be remembered, and these were the stories I came up with. A lot of stuff hit the cutting room floor. He did a beautiful piece on Gypsy Joe Harris that I just couldn’t find a way to get in. Marcel Cerdan Jr., he did a wonderful piece when he was fighting and we couldn’t get that in. There were a number of stories that I just couldn’t squeeze in because we didn’t want the book to be a doorstop. But I’m very happy with it, and it’s one more collection than he would have done in his lifetime, that’s for sure.”
Kram Jr. laughs, and while it’s clear that he misses his father, he was also lucky enough to spend a week with him before his passing, as the two covered the Lewis vs. Tyson bout in June of 2002.
“You know how it is on fight week – all these press conferences and things - but we split away from that and sort of went our own way,” he said. “We went to the crossroads where Robert Johnson made his pact with the devil supposedly, we went to the Civil Rights Museum and Graceland, and we got a feel for Memphis. We ate at barbecue joints and found a great breakfast place we sat in in the mornings, so we had a whole week together.
“It was brutally hot, and he was really slowing down,” Kram Jr. continues. “He was showing his age, and I wasn’t really aware of how sick he was until the week wore on and he was complaining about some chest pains. Of course he still had his pipe going 24/7. But it’s kind of poignant. After the fight we sat in the courtyard of the hotel and talked until about three in the morning. Then I went up and dropped him off at his room, he gave me a hug and he said ‘you did a great job this week.’ That was the last time I saw him.”
At least we still have his work, and “Great Men Die Twice” reminds us how good it was – and is.
“There are great writers to be rediscovered through the years, and dad was certainly deserving of a second look and a long look.”