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Guessing the thread title will ring a bell for some of you. This article in the Times fills in the rest.
Zander Hollander sat silently on his couch. Rows of books — a large portion of them ones he created, edited and nurtured — hovered above him, dominating a wall in his Manhattan apartment.
From 1971 to 1997, Hollander edited sports yearbooks, brick-like tomes known as Complete Handbooks, which in the pre-Internet era were almost holy objects to a certain type of sports-crazed youngster. Here, in one glorious place, was information — statistics, team rosters, records, schedules, predictions for the coming season and more — freed from the restrictions of newspaper column inches and far beyond what a still embryonic cable system was providing.
In black and white were photos and detailed profiles of players from every team, players that even the most devoted fans might only glimpse in a rare nationally televised network game of the week or an All-Star contest, if at all. The work was Hollander’s driving force. Then he had a stroke, with Alzheimer’s following shortly after. Now 90, he no longer remembers the books that he struggled to produce, that brought him professional fulfillment, friendships and minor fame. So Phyllis, his wife of 60 years, now does the talking.
“You interrupt if you have anything to say,” Phyllis Hollander, 85, sweetly instructed her husband as she showed a visitor their apartment. It was a sweltering May afternoon, and the dining area’s air-conditioning unit whirred.
“I’ll interrupt,” Hollander, bright-faced and white-haired, said from the couch.
He never did.
It is perhaps fitting that others now tell Hollander’s story. As the president and founder of Associated Features, Hollander operated like a Hollywood producer: curating writers and photographers, coming up with an idea and selling it to a publisher or a corporate client. All told, he edited or wrote some 300 books over 45 years.
The Complete Handbooks were not the only influential title Hollander, whom Sports Illustrated once called “the unofficial king of sports paperbacks,” had a hand in. Mark Simon, who helps oversee ESPN’s Stats & Info blog, gravitated toward Hollander’s The Book of Sports Lists and The Home Run Book.
The Complete Handbooks, however, spanned decades. Generations of sports fans shared the awakening Brian Costello had in the mid-1970s.
“When I was 8, 9, 10,” Costello, now senior editor for The Hockey News, said, “I was reading the Hardy Boys. When I came across Zander’s books, I didn’t read the Hardy Boys anymore.”
Growing up in Mahopac, N.Y., Jeff Pearlman, a former Sports Illustrated reporter and the author of, among other books, “Sweetness: The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton,” would call his local bookstore incessantly to see if the handbooks for baseball, football and basketball had arrived. In “The Book of Basketball,” ESPN’s Bill Simmons recalled sneaking the N.B.A. handbook into his high school math class. There, he would show the unforgettable headshot of a forgettable journeyman guard named Brook Steppe to elicit a laugh from an unsuspecting friend.
“They had these really good one-liners,” said Pearlman, 41, who saw the handbooks’ influence in his early attempts at humor as a high school and college newspaper writer. One year, the handbook said of the former N.B.A. player Kevin Duckworth, “In the real world, he would be indicted for fraud.”
And the books were used as reference materials for reporters at major publications, including The Hockey News.
“It was great reading come fall,” Costello said. “You got a chance to see how all these players did in previous years, because there was no other way to get this information.” Costello always wondered how Hollander did it.
In its heyday, the headquarters of Associated Features was a two-room office on 41st Street and Lexington Avenue crammed with file cabinets and books. Roger Director, whose desk faced Hollander’s, said he always thought it looked like a detective’s office.
The staff consisted of Hollander and an editor. At one time it was Director. For years, it was Eric Compton, who collected the Complete Handbooks before joining the company part time in the late 1970s. Phyllis Hollander handled administrative duties and sometimes helped with editorial issues. For a while, a copy editor fleshed out the skeleton crew.
Each one of the Complete Handbooks took two months to complete, Compton said, with as many as seven or eight coming out in a year.
“Zander would get the copy in, I would edit it usually, and then he would set it to be typeset,” said Compton, who went on to be an editor and sports reporter at The Daily News. “He’d get the proofs back, and he would actually lay out the pages on boards.”
Lee Stowbridge, a copy editor in the sports department of The Daily News, compiled the statistics.
Hollander hired freelancers around the country to write profiles and features on the players and provide photographs. It seemed as if he knew everybody. Director, who became a television producer and screenwriter, recalled attending a New York gathering of sportswriters with Hollander. They walked in and “in the space of a minute I can’t tell you how many people he walked up to, shook their hand, introduced me to, because he knew them,” Director said, marveling at the way Hollander could work a room.
“One of the things Zander did was get beat writers or columnists who really knew the local teams to write about them and to write about the players and give you a more personal insight that you just couldn’t get if you were 1,000 miles away back then,” said Alex Sachare, formerly the editorial vice president for the N.B.A. Hollander also refrained from tinkering with a writer’s style, Compton said, making him an alluring editor to write for.
Working on the handbooks had its challenges. Players would switch teams, necessitating last-minute layout changes. And there were mistakes, the product of tight deadlines and tired eyes. Compton was criticized by baseball writers for listing the wrong American League home run leader one season.
Walt MacPeek, a longtime Rangers beat reporter for The Star-Ledger, in Newark, spent summers in the 1970s and ’80s agonizing over his work for the N.H.L. handbook. Information was hard to procure. Team offices would be closed, he said, and Hollander’s deadlines seemed, under the circumstances, unrealistic. Once, while on vacation in Long Beach Island, N.J., MacPeek spotted Keith Allen, then the Philadelphia Flyers’ general manager, in a restaurant and begged for his help.
“I redid the Flyers profiles right there,” MacPeek said.
Despite all of the moving parts, Hollander remained unflappable. In more than 20 years of working with him, Compton saw Hollander become angry “maybe once or twice.” Compton always knew when it was 5 p.m.: Hollander would pour himself a glass of scotch and open a jar of peanuts. “That’s when you knew he’d put in his full day,” Compton said.
Susan Hollander Whitman’s defining image of her father is behind a typewriter. He never got comfortable with a computer. The family’s skiing and boating trips doubled as magazine and newspaper assignments, not that she minded.
And despite the scotch and peanuts, the workday never really ended for Hollander. Associated Features, which the Brooklyn-born Hollander began in 1955, was not a lucrative enterprise. Even when immersed in various editorial projects, he would occasionally take a freelance shift on the Daily News sports desk, Compton said. Before Hollander committed full time to Associated Features in the mid-1960s, his day might consist of visiting clients and writing freelance magazine pieces, followed by phoning Western Union so he could meet The New York World-Telegram and Sun’s midnight deadline.
Phyllis said that once he turned his attention to Associated Features full time, the pressure affected him.
The end came gradually. In 1989, it became too costly to run Associated Features from an office, so the operation — including all the file cabinets and the books — moved into the Hollanders’ cozy, two-bedroom apartment on East 35th Street.
In retrospect, Phyllis said, it was not a good decision. Her husband “didn’t know how to let go.” Up at 4 a.m., spurred by an idea or a task that sleep could not postpone, Hollander would head to the huge, L-shape desk that faced the living room wall. His work and his life became inextricably entwined.
The pace, she believes, wore him down. Hollander had a stroke in 1998; his Alzheimer’s disease was diagnosed two years later. Last week, his condition and needs too much for Phyllis to handle, he was moved into a nursing home in Manhattan.
Even if his ink-stained industriousness had not been curtailed, however, it would not have made much difference. Before the Internet’s impact, cheaper annuals were eroding the Complete Handbooks’ relevance. “People saw the magazine format as a better, easier-to-read, easier-to-keep memorabilia type thing than the actual handbook,” Compton said.
They are officially relics, but Pearlman still occasionally uses the Complete Handbooks when researching his books. Like the volumes in Hollander’s apartment, Pearlman’s sit on a bookshelf in his living room, despite his wife’s desire to banish the 33 yellowing, well-thumbed items to the attic.
And like Hollander, the Complete Handbooks represent something more to Pearlman, something about his childhood and his love of sports and a time when information was available, but only if you were prepared to search for it.
“I smell the book and it reminds me of being 12 years old,” he said, “excitedly coming home, locking myself in my room, and reading that thing cover to cover.” |
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