Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Buzz Bissinger is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of four books, including the New York Times bestseller 3 Nights in August and Friday Night Lights, which has sold two million copies and inspired a film and TV franchise. He is a contributing editor for Vanity Fair and a sports columnist for The Daily Beast. He has written for the New York Times, The New Republic, Time and many other publications.

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Three Nights in August

Strategy, Heartbreak, and Joy Inside the Mind of a ManagerBy Buzz Bissinger

Mariner Books

Copyright © 2006 Buzz Bissinger
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780618710539
PREFACE

The face made me do it. It left an indelible image with its eternal glower from
the dark corner that it occupied. I had always admired intensity in others, but
the face of Tony La Russa entered a new dimension, nothing quite like it in
all of sports.
I first saw the face in the early 1980s, when La Russa came out of
nowhere at the age of thirty-four to manage the Chicago White Sox and took
them to a division championship in his third full year of managing. The face
simply smoldered; it could have been used as a welding tool or rented out to
a tanning salon. A few years later, when he managed the Oakland A"s to the
World Series three times in a row, the face was a regular fixture on network
television and raised even more questions in my mind. Did it ever crack a
smile? Did it ever relax? Did it ever loosen up and let down the guard a little
bit, even in the orgy of victory? As far I could tell, the answer was no.
I was hooked on the face. I continued to observe it as he stayed
with the Oakland A"s through 1995. I followed it when he became the
manager of the St. Louis Cardinals the following season. Along the way, I
became aware of his reputation as a manager, with a polarity of opinion over
him such that when Sports Illustrated polled players on the game"s best five
managers and its worst five managers, La Russa appeared on both lists. But
I liked seeing that because it meant to me that this was a manager who
didn"t hold back, who ran his club with a distinct style regardless of the
critics" chorus. Had he been any different, surely the face would have broken
into a smile at least once.
After La Russa came to the Cardinals, I did see moments when
the face changed. I saw fatherly pride and self-effacement spread over it when
Mark McGwire hit his record-breaking sixty-second home run in 1998. I also
saw the face overcome with grief when he and his coaches and his players
mourned the passing of the soul of the St. Louis Cardinals, broadcast
announcer Jack Buck, followed four days later by the death of beloved pitcher
Darryl Kile in his hotel room during a road trip in Chicago. Later that season
of 2002, I saw the intensity return, all the features on a collision course to the
same hard line across the lips during the National League Championship
series that the Cardinals painfully lost to the Giants four games to one.
As a lifelong baseball fan, I found myself more curious about La
Russa than about anybody else in the game. Which is why, when out of
nowhere, I received a call from La Russa"s agent at the end of November
2002 asking whether I might be interested in collaborating on a book with La
Russa, my answer was an immediate yes. I jumped at the opportunity,
although I also knew that collaborations can be a tricky business. I had been
offered them before by the likes of Rudy Giuliani and legendary television
producer Roone Arledge, and I had turned them down. But this was different,
or at least I told myself it was different, because—at the risk of sounding like
some field-of-dreams idiot—my love of baseball has been perhaps the
greatest single constant of my life. I knew the game as a fan, which is a
wonderful way to know it. But the opportunity to know it through the mind of
La Russa—to excavate deep into the game and try to capture the odd and
lonely corner of the dugout that he and all managers occupy by virtue of the
natural isolation of their craft—was simply too good to pass up.
In the beginning, this was a typical collaboration. I brought along
my little mini–cassette recorder to where La Russa lived in northern
California. I turned it on and interviewed him at length, thinking that I would
listen to the tapes and transcribe them and try to fashion what he said into
his own voice. As is common in collaborations, we also have a business
arrangement, a split of the proceeds, although the entirety of La Russa"s
share is going to the Animal Rescue Foundation, known as Tony La Russa"s
ARF, that he cofounded with his wife, Elaine, in northern California.
The more we talked about the book, the more agreement there
was about trying to do something different from the typical as-told-to. La
Russa"s interest in me as a writer had been on the basis of Friday Night
Lights, a book I had written about high school football in Texas. He was
struck by the voice and observational qualities of the book, and we wondered
whether there was a way to fashion that here. We also wondered whether
there was a way to write the book with a narrative structure different from the
usual season-in-the-life trajectory, a book that would have lasting and
universal application no matter what season it took place in.
It was during those conversations that we came up with the idea
of crafting the book around the timeless unit of baseball, the three-game
series. The one we settled on, against the eternal rival Chicago Cubs, took
place in the 2003 season. Had the goal of the book been different—to write
about a particular season—it would have made sense to switch gears and
write about the Cardinals" magnificent ride of 2004. But that wasn"t the goal.
It was also during those conversations that La Russa agreed to
give me virtually unlimited access to the Cardinals" clubhouse and the
coaches and players and personnel who populate it—not simply for the three-
game series that forms the spine of the book but also for the virtual entirety of
the 2003 season—to soak up the subculture as much as possible. La Russa
understood that in granting such access, he was ceding much of the control
of the book to me as its writer. In doing so, he was untying the usual
constraints of a collaboration, allowing me wide latitude to report and observe
and draw my own conclusions. He also knew that approaching the book in
this manner required him to be revealing of not only the strategies he has
come to use but also the wrenching personal compromises he has made in
order to be the kind of manager he has chosen to be.
La Russa did not waver from the latitude that he promised. I was
made privy to dozens of private meetings between the Cardinals coaches and
their players. I was able to roam the clubhouse freely. Because of my
access, I was also able to probe not only La Russa"s mind but also the
minds of so many others who populate a clubhouse. La Russa has read what
I have written—the place where collaborations can get odious. He has
clarified, but in no place has he asked that anything be removed, no matter
how candid.
I came into this book as an admirer of La Russa. I leave with even
more admiration not simply because of the intellectual complexity with which
he reaches his decisions but also because of the place that I believe he
occupies in the changing world of baseball.
He seems like a vanishing breed to me, in the same way that Joe
Torre of the New York Yankees and Bobby Cox of Atlanta and Lou Piniella of
Tampa Bay also seem like the last of their kind. They so clearly love the
game. They revel in the history of it....