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Photograph by William Eggleston.

Indeed.

[Photo Credit: Brett Walker via This Isn’t Happiness]

On Monday, we ran Pete Dexter’s Inside Sports piece on Larry Holmes. Here is Dexter’s short article on the Holmes-Ali fight, reprinted here with the author’s permission.

“The Impression”

By Pete Dexter

When I heard Ali had agreed to fight Holmes, the first thought I had was that Ali would be killed. The punch was five years gone, his hand speed had been mediocre over his last half dozen fights, and he’d been getting hit by people like Leon Spinks.

I didn’t see that two years in the pasture could have helped any of that. What figured to be left to him, at almost 39 years old, was the chin. Enough to keep him up a long time after he should go down.

The second thought I had was that I didn’t want to see it happen, and even if there was enough grace in that night to make me wrong once, there was nothing in it to make me wrong twice. And if the talk afterwards’ about thyroid pills and a fight with Mike Weaver is more than talk, I won’t be there. Ali might take the chance again. I won’t.

I couldn’t watch it again. Ali without his talent, growing old in one long night, people everywhere without words, growing old with him. In the casino you see Ray Robinson posing in pictures with people who remember him—you can’t imagine Ali like that.

YOU WOULD not imagine Ali like this either: standing in front of Larry Holmes all night, eyes swollen, throwing no punches and once, after catching a terrible right hand, turning away in the ring.

Holmes had come into the fight in the best shape of his life—maybe he had believed the talk of a miracle a little bit, too. He began with energy and something close to hate, but after the second round he walked back to his comer wearing a different expression. “I knew what that look was,” Richie Giachetti would say later. Giachetti is Holmes’ trainer/manager. “We’d found out he didn’t have nothin’ left, and he was too old, and Larry was askin’ himself, ‘Do I really want this?’ All this time he was talkin’ himself into fightin’ Ali and now it’s here, he knows he’s got it won and the look on his face, it was just no expression at all. Usually he’d be happy or excited or somethin’, but the second round on. it was no nothin’ there.

AFTER THE fifth round, Angelo Dundee threatened to stop the fight. It is the eighth round, though, that keeps coming back. It was like a dream that wouldn’t move. Ali lost in ringside smoke, leaning deep into the ropes, moving his hands in slow motion. The rinse washing out of his hair, going gray in front of my eyes … it seemed to last half an hour. Ali without his speed or a punch or his legs, without his mirrors, clearly without his miracle. Nobody to tell him he was pretty; nobody left to believe it could happen.

Standing because he would not let himself go down.

When Dundee finally stopped it after the tenth, Holmes came across the ring crying and hugged Ali. “I love you,” he ‘said.

An hour later he went to Ali’s suite and found him lying face down on his exercise table. “Please promise me,” Holmes said. “Promise me you won’t fight no more.”

It ‘was quiet, then Ali spoke, “Holmmm-z,” he said, “I want Holmes.”

The next morning Dundee was sitting in his room, answering the phone, drinking coffee. “I didn’t do good business last night. It was a horrible night. I seen an Ali, couldn’t do nothing. He just wasn’t there.”

He shook his head. “I hope he don’t fight again, but you know I don’t tell him what to do. Nobody does.”

In the end you have to admire that. He had an extraordinary talent. He had a talent as rare, in a way, as Robert Frost’s or Picasso’s. And a talent like that, I think, is always ahead of the man who has it. It leads him, it takes him places other people can’t go. And even when he understands what it does, he doesn’t necessarily know what it is.

But he had the courage to use it, to follow it, and when it left him standing in the ring, alone with the best heavyweight fighter in the world, he had courage for that, too. And one way or another—unless you’re Robert Frost or Picasso—that happens, because growing old is losing talent.

For a long time, Larry Holmes didn’t want the fight. Giachetti never wanted it. Don King, who would pick Joe Louis out of his wheelchair and feed him to Roberto Duran if the money were right, talked Holmes into it.

King told Holmes that he had been living in Ali’s shadow too long. Giachetti told him the shadow was there, and as shadows go it wasn’t bad.

“Nobody who really knows Ali can say anything bad about him,” Giachetti said. “Nobody wants to see him hurt. We knock him out, they say he’s an old man. We don’t, Larry’s a bum. It’s a no-win situation.”

Holmes listened to King. And in the way you sometimes do when you’re unsure, Holmes denied the part of himself that said he cared about Ali. And as the fight got closer, he came to believe Ali had taken something from him. “I don’t care. if he gets hurt,” he said. “He been denyin’ me my just dues all this time. The man hypnotizes everybody, he don’t hypnotize me. I know him better than he knows himself. There’ll be no mercy in there for him. He either gets knocked out or he gets hurt.” And there was hate in that.

GIACHETTI FORGOT his reservations and got Holmes ready. “It’s comin’ down to a head job now,” he said. That was two weeks before the fight, and from then until the fight itself he kept Holmes away from Ali. “Nobody beats Ali at talkin’,” Giachetti said. “It’s his game. He says the same old things, but everybody still loves to hear it. It’s like ‘Moon River.'” So he brought Holmes to the weigh-in early. He refused to let his fighter pose with Ali for pictures. But Ali was always there.

After. his afternoon workouts, Holmes would take the microphone and ask the audience to believe he would beat him. “The old man has made a mistake. Porky gone crazy, fightin’ me. I could kick his ass back in 1974 when I was his sparring partner, and he never gave me my just dues….” It would go on too long, get awkward. Holmes being Ali, at the same time saying things from his heart.

“If I lose, I’ll retire. People will say I wasn’t ever nothin’ if this sucker beats me I’d have to go hide.”

On September 15, a kid named Gary Wells tried to jump over the water fountain at Caesars on his motorcycle, the same jump that almost killed Eve! Knievel.

AN HOUR before the jump, Ali was sitting in bed, watching the Holmes-Weaver fight on the Betamax. As it moved into the later rounds Ali walked into a closet. There was a tray there with 30 different kinds of pills—that and a scale. He sorted out eight or 10 to eat with breakfast. He said, “I will tell you something. I believe I am on a mission from God. I pray five times a day, it’s 60 per cent of my power. Holmes out drinkin’ wine, gamblin’, how can he beat me?”

I asked if he had liked Holmes when he was a sparring partner. Ali looked at me to see if I was serious.

“I like him now,” he said.

By the time Ali got out of the closet, Holmes had knocked Weaver out, and Truman Capote was bragging to Phil Donahue that he’d ruined Jack Kerouac’s career. Ali watched a few minutes. “This is a messed up world,” he said.

He stood up and looked out the window. The crowd was already waiting for the kid on the motorcycle. Ali had met him earlier. He had shook the kid’s hand and said, “You crazy.” The kid had liked that. A reporter asked if Ali would watch the jump.

“I don’t want to see nobody get his head ripped off,” he said. “They encourage him, but I know what people want to see when they watch somethin’ like that.”

He looked at himself in the mirror again and then laid down. On some unspoken signal, the old Cuban who rubs him down closed the curtains and the room was as dark as the night, and the reflection—the proof of the miracle—was gone with the sun. “As sure as you hear my voice,” Ali said, “you and l will both die.”

An hour later I was lying in my room when I heard the crowd and knew the kid hadn’t made it. The crowd, then the sirens. I thought of Ali, alone in his room.

Rest in Peace, Ravi Shankar.

Sarah Bernhardt cakes chez Manger.

Via Hardball Talk here’s a piece on Don Mattingly by Tim Brown over at Yahoo!

“Vase and Gold Watch,” By Mehdi Taheri (2012)

I was downtown on Fifth Avenue. The first bit of news I got, I thought, “He’ll make it.” You know, “It’s just a flesh wound.” And then, later on, the news really came. He wasn’t just a mate of mine, he was a mate of everybody’s, really. He was a funny guy. And you realize that you’re stunned. You really don’t believe it. And you think, “God, why can’t I do anything about it?” I got well drunk on it. And I had another one for John. Then there was the confusion, the phone calls, trying to find out if Yoko was OK. There were the Beatles, and there was John. As a band, they were a great unit. But John, he was his own man. We got along very well. We didn’t see each other very often, but he would sort of turn up at your hotel. Usually, if I was in the city, I’d stay at the Plaza. If John turned up, that meant John wanted to party. He didn’t come there to discuss, you know, philosophy – although it would end up like that. I would just get into town, and there’d be a knock at the door: “Hey, man, what is going on around here?” We would get the guitars down and sing. And, in our spare time, discuss world domination. He’s rubbed off on me as much as anybody. A bit of me rubbed off on John, too, you know. He took it with him. My father just passed away, and he winked at me just before he died. I really feel a lot better about death now. I’m getting off on that wink. I’d give the wink to John.
-Keith Richards

I was nine-and-a-half when John was murdered. Funny, but at the time I thought of him as a New Yorker–an Upper West Sider, to be precise–first and a Beatle, second.

[Quote Via; photo by Ted Barron]

Word Life, I Can’t Front… [Photo Via: Hungry Ghost Food…]

From the Paris Review Interview with Jeffrey Eugenides:

INTERVIEWER

Do you write with a sense of your audience? Or is it more like Gertrude Stein said, that you write for yourself and strangers?

EUGENIDES

I tell my students that when you write, you should pretend you’re writing the best letter you ever wrote to the smartest friend you have. That way, you’ll never dumb things down. You won’t have to explain things that don’t need explaining. You’ll assume an intimacy and a natural shorthand, which is good because readers are smart and don’t wish to be condescended to.

I think about the reader. I care about the reader. Not “audience.” Not “readership.” Just the reader. That one person, alone in a room, whose time I’m asking for. I want my books to be worth the reader’s time, and that’s why I don’t publish the books I’ve written that don’t meet this criterion, and why I don’t publish the books I do until they’re ready. The novels I love are novels I live for. They make me feel smarter, more alive, more tender toward the world. I hope, with my own books, to transmit that same experience, to pass it on as best I can.

[Photo Credit: Land-Sh]

The Greek God of Walks is really a Jew, and according to Ken Rosenthal he’s also about to become a Yankee.

Ah, memories of Paul O’Neill, our favorite red ass.

I don’t have anything against Youkilis as a former Red Sox who was easy to root against but I worried if he’s got any game left in him. Twelve million bucks seems like an awful lot for a a guy who was lousy in Boston and Chicago last season.

Got a friend, big Red Sox fan, whose dog is named Youk. I imagine this isn’t easy for him.

Over at SB Nation’s Longform site, here’s Bill Littlefield on Digit Murphy:

Digit Murphy might have been a terrific coach for the Brown University men’s ice hockey team. It’s a shame she didn’t get a shot at the job three winters ago.

Murphy’s qualifications included – and include – the kind of energy that makes everybody in the room sit up straight and listen when she begins talking, which she rarely fails to do. That’s a useful quality when you are trying to recruit a player who’s been offered a free ride at North Dakota, Wisconsin or Minnesota, or, if he prefers the east, Boston University or Boston College, both former national champions, to a school that technically doesn’t give athletic scholarships.

So, energy. Slight and bright-eyed Murphy doesn’t do sitting still. She looks as if her short, dark hair should be wind-blown, even when there’s no wind. She is the sort of person who’ll text you to see if you’re in your office. Text back “Yes,” and in a few minutes she’ll be there, a slender, youthful storm of sound and enthusiasm in space that feels too small to contain her as she hands out her business cards at random, then earnestly tries to convince your graduate-student intern that she’s wasting her time in radio and should come to work for the Boston Blades. Actually, Murphy’s not the sort of person who does that. She is the person who did that where I work, at WBUR, Boston’s NPR news station at Boston University, on a weekday in October when she came to town to talk to a class and found herself facing 15 minutes without an audience. She must have figured somebody needed to hear about the line of sports clothes and equipment she planned on designing for women, or the blog post she is writing to encourage women who want to be coaches, or the partnerships she is trying to build with various celebrities in support of various progressive adventures.

David Lebovitz’s quick trip to NYC.

My mother’s father died in the spring of 1995. I went to Belgium for the funeral with my brother and sister, mother and step father. We stayed at my uncle’s house and for the three days we were there he played Jeff Buckley’s Grace constantly. It was a mournful soundtrack and the songs are inseparable from the mental pictures and emotions I keep with me from that trip.

I don’t imagine I would have heard the Buckley record, let alone be so moved by it, unless it had been such an indelible part of saying goodbye to my grandfather, staying in the home of his only son, a man with whom I shared little language but ardent feeling.

That trip and Buckley’s album came to mind today.

Here is Janet Maslin in the Times on The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, & The Unlikely Ascent of ‘Hallelujah’:

The album containing “Hallelujah” came out on an independent label in 1984, and then it languished. See Ms. Simmons’s account for an understanding of why, by 1991, the world was nonetheless ready for a Leonard Cohen tribute album: “I’m Your Fan,” put together by the French music magazine Les Inrockuptibles. This album prompted a major overhaul of “Hallelujah” by John Cale, once of the Velvet Underground, who re-edited the lyrics, coming up with a version that has proved more enduring than Mr. Cohen’s. Mr. Cale’s stark, exquisitely pure rendition, with an emphasis on the song’s eroticism, is by some lights (like this one) the best “Hallelujah” ever recorded.

A remarkable stroke of fate sent Jeff Buckley, then an aspiring young troubadour, to stay in a New York apartment that happened to contain a copy of “I’m Your Fan.” Buckley heard the song and, like many who have heard it, claimed he had no idea who had written it. But he included an intensely, beautifully ethereal version of it on his 1994 album, “Grace,” giving it a young man’s hypercharged sensibility rather than the Cohen-Cale seasoned one. When Buckley died young (as his doppelgänger father, the singer Tim Buckley, had), “Hallelujah” developed a cult following. “Leonard penned it, but Jeff owned it,” Mr. Light writes.

[Photo Credit: jucanlis]

From my dear friend Mike Fox in London comes this on Damon Runyon:

“Raymond Onion”

I was about ten or eleven-years-old when I read my first book by Damon Runyon. It was called Johnny One-Eye. I’ve only just learned that it was a short-story first published in Colliers Magazine in 1941. The book that I read in the late Forties, titled Johnny One-Eye, was a one-inch thick hard-cover in black rexine, and I have always thought it was complete novel. However, the facts being the facts, it must have been a compilation of Runyon’s work.

Normally, at that time of my life, I rarely read books. I blame my school for that: stuffing young kids’ heads full of Shakespeare, George Eliot, and the Brontës. Whenever I tried a book, I put it aside after a few boring chapters, thinking that I just didn’t like books (rather than comics and magazines). I was yet to realise that, simply, I hadn’t yet read anything of personal interest to me written in everyday language that I could understand.

Johnny One-Eye, I remember, had sat on my bedroom mantelpiece over the fireplace for many months. It was my mother’s book, taken out from Boots the Chemists Lending Library at probably sixpence (5c) per week. Obviously, being above such things, my mother never bothered to return it. Again, I seem to remember, I may have had a dose of the ‘flu at the time, enough to keep me in bed for a day or two, and it was then most likely that I reached for the book and read it – and thoroughly enjoyed it.

I can honestly say that it was Johnny One-Eye, and later, Tomboy, a junk paperback about New York City street gangs (then controversial but of some note as a ‘first’ today), that my older sister had just finished, which set me to reading to the extent that reading is something I’m almost addicted to today. I became a dedicated reader as a young teenager.

Last week, on researching Johnny One-Eye, I found that more than a few of its present day book reviewers are disseminating an error in describing its plot. They state that Johnny One-Eye was a dog, when in fact it (he) was a kitten. They have mistakenly taken as their source the eponymous 1950 Pat O’Brien film, whose producers made the change from cat to dog for reasons known only to them and Damon Runyon, who was duly screen-credited for Story.

For me, the remarkable thing about Runyon was that his all-American characters pretty much described my father, his friends, and cohorts from the large community of Jewish spielers in the East End of London, where my father was born. A course bookmaker, my dad would take me along to visit his friends on the other side of town on occasional Sundays, to watch him and them all sitting round a blanket-covered table, drinking whisky and smoking havanas, playing rummy for money with a double-deck of cards. Better than that, my dad would take me for lunch at any one of a dozen fine kosher delis and restaurants where I wolfed down dishes of lockshen soup, plates of salt-beef and latkes, chrane, pickled cucumbers and rye bread – and we’d carry home cholas and hot beigels and the greatest cheese-cake I’ve ever tasted in my life. (Note: British Jews say ‘byegul’ unlike the American ‘baygul’. Why? I couldn’t tell you. Similarly: shmairil and schlemiel; shmock and schmuk; salt-beef and corned beef; smoked salmon and lox.)

So, I actually knew Harry the Horse, Benny the Blond Jew, Nicely-Nicely Johnson, the Lemon Drop Kid, et al, long before I introduced myself to Runyon.

Why I loved Runyon on my first reading was much more about his language, his scrupulous use of the present tense, and his characters rather than his plots. In fact I didn’t care for his ‘normally’ written work about non-Broadway subjects much at all. But I’m sure that if I read them now, as an adult, I’d like them; probably very much. Sadly, I learned not too long ago that Runyon was a noted anti-Semite. I’m sure that was a hard thing to be in a Jewish town like New York peopled by characters he wrote about that were almost certainly and mainly Jewish. How could they not be? Never mind all that, I love Runyon and his Broadway, and like The Pat Hobby Stories, I go back to them again and again when I feel enough time has passed for me to enjoy them anew.

So, to answer your question: with Runyon (and Pat Hobby) I have no favourites. The whole of them, taken together, is my favourite, just like my kids.

From your ever-lovin’

Oink!

PS: A poignant little story about my pre-teen reading.

When I was about nine-years-old I somehow came into possession of a Bugs Bunny comic. This was rare because in the immediate post-war period Britain was pretty much bankrupt and anything imported was severely restricted to the necessities. Every dollar was needed to pay our huge war-debt to the United States. I loved Warner Bros. cartoons because they were the very best, and because they had Mel Blanc. At the end of the Bugs Bunny comic was a little ad offering a year’s subscription for a dollar (if I remember right). Now, it happens I actually had a US dollar coin that a very kind Canadian serviceman lodging in one of our flats had given me. So I cut out the ad, filled in my address, dropped in the dollar coin and posted it off to an address in Poughkeepsie (I’ve never forgotten the name). Sure enough, weeks later, a copy of Bugs Bunny dropped through our letter-box and continued doing so for one year. Only as an adult did I realise what a very kind gesture this was. The air mail costs must have eaten up any profit to the publishers after just a couple of weeks. I find that very, very touching, and now you know why I love America.

It was raining when I left my apartment building this morning but the sun was out by the time I reached the subway platform.

No word on Ichiro yet. The Mets have reportedly upped their offer to R.A. Dickey, though it still might not be enough.

And the Yanks, Angels, and Cubs will no longer play nice with StubHub.

Dig this hand drawn map of NYC by Jenni Sparks.

Today, let’s spend some time with Jimmy, shall we?

[Photo Via]

“Flower at Thousand Island Lake” By Brian Ernst 

Via Test Pressing, here’s Norman Mailer’s 1974 Esquire article on graffiti.