Bill Handleman, long-time Press columnist who championed the underdog, dead at 62.
http://www.app.com/article/20100609/NEWS/100609024/Bill-Handleman-long-time-Asbury-Park-Press-columnist-dead-at-62
By Shannon Mullen • Staff Writer • June 9, 2010
Bill Handleman, an award-winning columnist at the Asbury Park Press whose hard-hitting reporting was instrumental in helping Tinton Falls resident David Goldman bring his son Sean back from Brazil last year after an drawn-out international custody battle, died early this morning. He was 62.
A stalwart at the Press for 30 years, Handleman, of Neptune, was one of the newspaper’s most prominent and popular writers and a leading authority on horse racing.
“It is a sad loss,” said Hollis R. Towns, executive editor and vice president of news at the Press. “He was a valuable part of this newspaper as well as the community.”
The son of an international correspondent for U.S. News & World Report magazine, Handleman grew up in Toyko, Paris, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., graduating with a degree in history from Occidental College in Los Angeles, Calif., the same small liberal arts college that Barack Obama attended for two years.
After stints at the Star-Democrat, in Easton, Md., and the Guardian, in Lexington Park, Md., Handleman joined the Press’ sports department in 1980.
With his international background, he quickly developed a reputation in the newsroom and the press box as something of a renaissance man. Early on, for example, he scored a rare, candid interview from the famously taciturn Andre the Giant after switching in mid-interview to fluent French, the 7-foot-4-inch wrestler’s native tongue.
“That was the Handleman touch,” recalled former Press sports editor Joseph Adelizzi, who hired Handleman. “When there was a story you wanted to get, there was no one else who could do it better.”
Handleman spent 26 years in sports, covering the tri-state’s areas professional teams and filing columns from such national events as the World Series, Super Bowl, Kentucky Derby and many of the biggest boxing matches.
His expertise, and abiding passion, was horse racing, however. A fixture at Monmouth Park, where he had a bird’s eye view from his tiny office high above the track, he had an uncanny ability to mine the backstretch and luxury parterre boxes for juicy scoops and hidden story gems. He was respected not just as a sportwriter but as a handicapper. He burnished his reputation in that regard considerably in 1995 when he walked away with the top prize in the prestigious $100,000 Penn National World Series of Handicapping.
As a columnist, Handleman relished championing the underdog, be it an overachieving claimer at the track, out-gunned homeowners fighting to save their Long Branch neighborhood from eminent domain, or a group of plucky student journalists at Ocean County College standing up to administrative intimidation.
Handleman’s connection to David Goldman
One of the more egregious injustices he encountered in his career was the plight of David Goldman, whom Handleman first met in the fall of 2008.
More than four years earlier, Goldman’s then-wife, Bruna Bianchi Goldman, had flown to Brazil with their then-4-year-old son Sean and her parents, purportedly for a brief vacation. The next day, according to Goldman, she phoned him to say she wasn’t coming back and demanded that he fly to Brazil and sign divorce papers drawn up by her attorney or he would never see Sean again. Bruna later remarried and died after giving birth, and her husband, a well-connected attorney in Brazil, kept custody of Sean in defiance of international law, and even secured a gag order to prevent Brazilian media from writing about the case.
Handleman, who was under no such constraint, wrote a series of columns and stories about Goldman’s efforts to regain custody of his son. The saga eventually culminated with their reunion and dramatic return to Tinton Falls on Christmas Eve 2009. The Press nominated Handleman’s work for a Pulitzer Prize.
U.S. Rep. Christopher H. Smith, R-N.J., who pressed Goldman’s case in Washington and accompanied him to Brazil numerous times, said Handleman’s columns galvanized support for Goldman at the highest levels of the U.S. government.
“I, along with tens of thousands of others, read each and every column, often with tears of empathy and resolve to do more,” Smith wrote in a letter to the Pulitzer Board in support of Handleman’s nomination. “David Goldman was indeed lucky that the columnist who embraced his quest turned out to be a consummate story teller dedicated to spotlighting issues of injustice. Bill Handleman’s column changed the course of the game.”
END
Bill’s complete series of Asbury Park Press articles covering the Goldman Case are located here: http://bringseanhome.org/wordpress/goldman-case/newspaper-magazine-articles/ap/
A tribute to Bill was made by Congressman Chris Smith in the U.S. House of Representatives (Text Here)
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