David Halberstam, RIP

David Halberstam, the great Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who first made his mark with extraordinary, prescient reporting on the Vietnam War, was killed yesterday in a car crash. He was 73.

When Halberstam, whose output was prolific, wasn't writing books about the history of the Vietnam War (The Best and the Brightest), the titans of the mass media (The Powers that Be), shifts in U.S. foreign policy since the Gulf War (War in a Time of Peace), and other weighty topics, he wrote books about sports. The Breaks of the Game, about the 1979 Trail Blazers, is a terrific read and a basketball classic. Personally, I most enjoyed that book and The Amateurs, about amateur rowers at the Olympic level. The Amateurs doesn't get enough props when the greatest sports books are discussed.

I was never enthralled with his baseball writing, however. Summer of '49 and October 1964 failed to hook me in the way his other works, both sports and non-sports, had. That's okay -- I know plenty of people who've enjoyed those books, and his others on baseball.

For a few years, I had the honor of occupying the same virtual space as Halberstam, on ESPN.com's Page 2. I never fooled myself into thinking it put me in his league, but I still felt good about it. He was journalism royalty, after all.

The New York Times has dug up a slew of material from its archives to give Halberstam a fitting sendoff; the ones I've linked to below are baseball-related, and most, but not all, are book reviews:

July 8, 1993: At the Ball Park With: David Halberstam; Making Legwork (and Edginess) a Virtue

May 25, 2003: The Boys of Winter (book review)

May 8, 1989: Yanks vs. Sox in 'Summer of '49' (book review)

Aug. 14, 1994: Damned Yankees (book review)

And finally, a 2002 Boston Globe article by Halberstam about a day he spent with Ted Williams: Day Spent with One of the Greats