Young Maraniss hops on pop in the backyard of his grandparents’ house on Regent Street.
If you’re the son of David Maraniss — part-time Madison resident, Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author of 10 books, including the definitive Vince Lombardi bio When Pride Still Mattered — you’re bound to feel pressure writing your first book. Maybe that’s why Andrew Maraniss, David’s 44-year-old son, spent eight years working on Strong Inside, a massive 468-page biography of Perry Wallace.
Who?
It’s a question Andrew Maraniss was asked more times than he cares to remember during the process of finding a major publisher willing to take a chance on a book about the first African American scholarship athlete in the Southeastern Conference.
Wallace, who played basketball for Vanderbilt University, became an icon of the civil rights movement as well as the target of fierce hostility from segregationists, and the book explores (as the subtitle says) “the collision of race and sports in the South” in the late 1960s.
“In some ways, sports is an area of American culture where there’s often been progress on race,” says Maraniss, who was born in Madison in 1970 and moved to the East Coast with his parents four years later. “But race is still a part of every aspect of American culture. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that it’s still an issue in sports.”
Strong Inside ultimately was published by Vanderbilt University Press last December and received overwhelmingly positive reviews. The book debuted on The New York Times best-seller lists in both the sports and civil rights categories, and last month it received a 2015 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award “Special Recognition” honor.
Maraniss worked on the book nights and weekends when he wasn’t at his day job as a partner at McNeely Pigott and Fox Public Relations in Nashville. Wallace, who sat for more than 15 interviews and responded to “thousands” of the author’s emails, also was the focus of a term paper Maraniss wrote for a black history class while attending Vanderbilt on a sports-writing scholarship. “I felt really prepared,” Maraniss says. “Like this was the book I was supposed to write. I did have a little bit of self-imposed pressure, though. I feared reviews that said ‘The apple fell a long way from the tree.’ I didn’t want to read any reviews like that.”
Both the tree and the apple will be at Madison’s Hotel Red on June 24 for a first-time event sponsored by Mystery to Me, in which they will discuss Strong Inside. Dad will moderate, and Andrew says he has no idea what kind of questions he’ll ask. The potential for a compelling discussion is huge, especially considering both men wrote sports books with important social themes.
“Every son wants to measure up in their dad’s eyes,” Maraniss says. “I always felt it would be really hard to measure up as a writer. How am I going to compete? Am I going to win a Pulitzer Prize or write 10 books? But my love of sports and my love of writing came from my dad, and I feel a certain amount of pride in that.”
Strong Inside: Perry Wallace and the Collision of Race and Sports in the South
By Andrew Maraniss, Vanderbilt University Press
