AMERICA AT LARGE:Talented Texan novelist, playwright and sportswriter left a body of work to be proud of, writes GEORGE KIMBALL

“It was a rackety, dirty, city paper, with the teletypes clacking and a sense of urgency everywhere. A copy editor was eating tuna fish out of a can, and the bowling writer was drinking bourbon, and I thought, ‘This is the world I want to be in’.”

ALMOST 200 pages into Bill Barich’s 1994 travelogue Big Dreams: Into the Heart of California, the author found himself in the state capital of Sacramento, engaged in conversation with a legislative aide identified only as “Adam”.

Adam explained that America’s largest state is so big, and comprised so many diverse constituencies, that a politician needs “to be a personality to survive”. When Barich then asked about the political future of California, Adam laughed and said, half-jokingly “Arnold Schwarzenegger”.

When Schwarzenegger, an Austrian-born body-builder with a thick Teutonic accent, was improbably elected the state’s governor nine years later, Bill Barich suddenly looked like the Nostradamus of California politics. His phone was ringing off the hook with calls from networks and newspapers who had concluded he must be a prophet of sorts.

The commotion made for wonderful publicity, Barich, who has been living in Dublin since 2002, recalled the other day, “but unfortunately Big Dreams was out of print by then, and the attention came too belatedly to help”.

The exercise in prescience reminded me of another episode that had come to my attention since the death of Edwin (Bud) Shrake earlier this year.

Although he would move on to a distinguished career at Sports Illustrated a year later, in 1963 Shrake was covering the Cowboys for the Dallas Morning News.

In a decision he himself would second-guess years later, NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle had decreed the league would proceed with its regular schedule of games on November 25th, 1963, despite the assassination of President John F Kennedy three days earlier.

Thus it was that Shrake found himself in Cleveland that day, assigned a game he’d rather have not covered between two teams who’d rather have not been playing it. Having arrived early at Municipal Stadium, he was watching a television in the office of Browns’ owner Art Modell when Jack Ruby gunned down Kennedy’s presumptive murder, Lee Harvey Oswald.

Shrake walked outside to clear his head, and in the parking lot he spotted his Texas colleague and long-time friend Gary Cartwright.

“Hey, guess who just shot Oswald?” shouted Shrake.

“Jack Ruby,” said Cartwright.

“The thing was,” wrote Shrake later, “he was just guessing.”

Not only were Cartwright and Shrake regular patrons of Ruby’s Carousel Club, but Shrake was at the time dating Jada, the star stripper.

The Kennedy assassination would later provide the backdrop for Strange Peaches, one of the 10 novels he produced. (Nine on his own, plus Limo, the hilarious send-up of network television brass he co-authored with his boyhood friend Dan Jenkins in 1976.)

Early in my tenure at the Boston Phoenix in the early 1970s, I hired as my deputy a young Boston College student named Mike Lupica. Now in his fourth decade as the lead sports columnist for the New York Daily News, Lupica a few years ago sent me a note which he signed “from the junior half of the greatest two-man sport staff ever”.

I thanked him for the flattery, but pointed out that it was somewhat misplaced, since at Fort Worth’s Pascal High School in the late 1940s the sports department of the Pascal Pantherette consisted of Bud Shrake and Dan Jenkins.

When he died at 77 this past May, Shrake’s obituaries usually described him as the co-author of the best-selling sports book in publishing history. Harvey Penick’s Little Red Book, his collaboration with the long-time University of Texas golf coach whose long list of successful pupils included Tom Kite and Ben Crenshaw, was published in 1992, and had done quite well, but it received a huge boost three years later when Penick (after giving Crenshaw lessons from his deathbed) died on the eve of the 1995 Masters.

Crenshaw skipped his final practice round and the par three tournament and flew back to Texas to serve as a pallbearer at Penick’s funeral, then returned to Augusta, where over the next four days he became the second-oldest champion in Masters history.

Since television knows a good storyline when it sees one, the shade of Harvey Penick spent more time on the screen than even Crenshaw did, and by the time it was over they couldn’t print Little Red Books fast enough to satisfy the demand.

Shrake had taped enough material that the out-takes provided several sequels, so he and Harvey revisited the best-seller list four more times. And Bud Shrake, for the first time, was financially independent.

Although he also wrote the screenplays for several Hollywood films (including Songwriter with Willie Nelson – whose autobiography Willie, was a collaboration with Shrake), his fiction should by all rights have been his more enduring achievement.

But Not for Love (1964), for instance, chronicled nouveau riche oil-boom Dallas society as only a Texan could have, while 1987’s Night Never Falls (Shrake’s favourite, as well as mine) is told from the perspective of a syndicated journalist who finds himself trapped at the siege of Dien Bien Phu, where he must rely for protection on mostly ex-Nazi Legionnaires. (Think Graham Greene with a sense of humour.)

I’d remembered his Sports Illustrated phase primarily for his football and environmental pieces, but, on Jenkins’ advice at Turnberry this past summer, went back and looked at some of his superb boxing coverage from the 1960s. He covered several Muhammad Ali fights in the years just before events at the Houston draft board resulted in the loss of Ali’s championship, and roamed the world to chronicle title bouts in several lower weight classes as well.

He had recently written a play based one one of those experiences (assigned to cover the 1972 Monzon-Briscoe middleweight title fight in Buenos Aires, he was detained in prison), and at the time of his death The Friend of Carlos Monzon had already been scheduled for its premiere in Austin.

I hadn’t seen Shrake since he made a nostalgic pilgrimage to the British Open half a dozen years ago. At that point he hadn’t covered golf for almost 30 years, but he still had a lot of friends and admirers among his former press-tent colleagues. And, fine novelist though he was, he was a sportswriter at heart. (Jenkins has noted that, for Shrake, journalism was “a stopover. But he was awfully good at it.”)

Reminiscing on his introduction to the sportswriting business, Shrake recalled his first day at the Fort Worth Press: "It was a rackety, dirty, city paper, with the teletypes clacking and a sense of urgency everywhere. A copy editor was eating tuna fish out of a can, and the bowling writer was drinking bourbon, and I thought, 'This is the world I want to be in'."