Here was an athlete he was able to interview for more than a half-hour, and without the intrusion of a meddlesome PR man. He was a source of wonder for Halberstam in other ways. Wood was coming off a year (1983) in which he had won a bronze medal in the world championships. Halberstam describes Wood as a “very intelligent, extraordinarily sensitive, fair-minded person.” Wood talks of such discipline as a step-by-step process, the rewards of which are nothing but an inner peace that is hard to define. His is a sport no one will televise, almost no one will write about, and few will even watch. Halberstam writes about Wood’s routine of getting up in the darkness of a Boston morning, the wind chill dropping below zero, to pursue in solitude a series of strokes on the Charles River. One of the main characters is Christopher (Tiff) Wood, a 32-year-old Harvard graduate who made the 1984 Olympic team as an alternate but did not compete in the Games. Their most compelling attribute was a passion for their sport. The world Halberstam found was populated by attractive people, in looks, temperament and ideology. If I had done the book 50 years ago, I would have found almost the same world.” The world of the rower, he was pleased to find, was a happy alternative to the big-bucks emphasis of professional sport. Whether it’s the impact of television on society, or the impact of the new materialism, sport says a lot about our change of focus, our change of purpose.”

Sport is an excellent mirror to the condition of America, of how our values have changed. “I have sort of a little side store of mom-and-pop sportswriting. “I like to do sportswriting on the side,” he said recently.

The Amateurs by David Halberstam