Hi, Hy ... glad to have met you

Mike Burke

April 27, 2008 12:50 am

— Don’t know if you’ve seen the latest issue of Sports Illustrated (How would I know? I don’t live with you), but the cover story this week is about the 1958 NFL championship game between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants.
Actually, it’s a book excerpt from “The Best Game Ever,” by Mark Bowden, to be published by Atlantic Monthly Press, and on the cover of this week’s Sports Illustrated is one of the most famous photographs ever taken of John Unitas with the cover headline reading, “The Best Game Ever: Colts vs. Giants 1958 — How John Unitas and Raymond Berry Invented the Modern NFL.”
Naturally, being a Baltimore Colts fan, this cover caught my attention, so I began to leaf through the magazine and I got to thinking about how much of a coincidence it was that this book would be coming out so close to the time a book on the same topic was to come out, which was being worked on by the late Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author David Halberstam at the time of his death a little over a year ago, April 23, 2007.
Halberstam died in a traffic accident in Menlo Park, Calif., on his way to interview Pro Football Hall of Fame quarterback Y.A. Tittle for “The Glory Game: How the 1958 NFL Championship Changed Football Forever.” After Halberstam’s death the book project was taken over by Hall of Famer Frank Gifford and will be published by HarperCollins in October with an introduction dedicated to Halberstam.
Anyway, I would have loved to read Halberstam’s book about the ’58 game as he was one of my favorite writers. I will, however, be sure to buy Bowden’s upcoming book because I can’t read enough about the old Baltimore Colts.
As I was looking at the SI article on Thursday, though, something else on the cover sheet caught my eye: “Photograph by Hy Peskin.”
Hy Peskin? By golly, I thought, that has to be Mort Peskin’s cousin, whom I believed I met several years ago. How cool is this?
So I called Uncle Mort (and just a warning: he’ll be home from Florida this week ... and R.F. Gornall won’t be far behind) and told him about it, and Mort, the biggest Baltimore Colts fan I’ve ever known, said he would pick up an issue.
“Isn’t Hy Peskin your cousin?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Mort said. “He was one of the most famous photographers of his time.”
Hy Peskin was indeed one of the most famous photographers of his time. He was known for several famous photographs of American sports figures and celebrities published by Sports Illustrated and Life. In particular, he was a pioneer of sports photography with his work being ranked amongst the best sports photojournalism of the 20th century. In 1966, he changed his name to Brian Blaine Reynolds and founded the Academy of Achievement, bringing young people together with notable people such as statesmen and Nobel Prize winners.
Sports photographers then worked from the press box, limiting the pictures they could take. Peskin was the first sports photographer to cover the action from the sideline or climb up on the roof to obtain more interesting shots. In his early days, he was known for the photographs he took of the Brooklyn Dodgers from Ebbets Field and he once said, “I helped make the Dodgers famous and they helped make me.”
Peskin was the first staff photographer hired by Sports Illustrated, and his picture of Ben Hogan playing a 1-iron shot to the green at the 72nd hole of the 1950 U.S. Open was ranked by that magazine as one of the greatest sports photographs of the 20th century.
In 1953, Peskin shot a Life cover and photographic feature of Senator John F. Kennedy and his fiancé Jacqueline Bouvier. These photos helped to promote Kennedy as a national figure and were Peskin’s personal favorites.
Sports Illustrated rated another photo taken by Peskin in 1955 of boxer Carmen Basilio jumping into the arms of his cornerman after winning the welterweight world championship as another of its greatest sports photographs of the 20th century.
During his career as a sports photographer, Peskin had 40 of his photographs appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated. He died in 2005 at the age of 90.
Needless to say, once I uncovered all of this information via Wikipedia, I was pretty impressed with myself that I had met such a famous and talented man. Although it did puzzle me that I didn’t remember any of his accomplishments.
“That’s because you never met him,” Mort said. “You met my cousin Perry Peskin (a world-renown botanist and author from Cumberland and Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve University).”
“Oh,” I said.
“You know how I know you didn’t meet Hy?” Mort asked.
“I was just going to take your word for it,” I said, “but how do you know?”
“I was checking into the Grossinger Hotel years ago,” Mort said, “when the man at the desk read my name and said, ‘Are you related to Hy Peskin?’
“ ‘He’s my second or third cousin,’ I said.
“ ‘Well,’ the deskman said, ‘he’s standing behind you to your left.’
“So I walk over to him and say, ‘Hy Peskin?’ And he says, ‘Yes.’
“ ‘I’m Mort Peskin,’ I say. ‘We’re cousins.’
“And he says, ‘So?’
“With that,” Mort said laughing, “he turned around and walked away and that would be the only time in my life I met my cousin Hy Peskin.”
Bummer. Hy didn’t even give Mort a chance to say, “It’s your pleasure.”
Mike Burke is sports editor of the Cumberland Times-News. Contact Mike Burke at mburke@times-news.com.

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