Dig the beauty that is all things Eephus. Bethany Heck’s got it going on. Thank you, Lady, for making our day brighter.

Painting by Kevin Vanhooser.

Charlie Pierce lowers the boom:

One thing is certain. Paige Sultzbach and her teammates deserved a chance to play for the championship. They were the only undefeated team in their league, and they’d already beaten Our Lady of Sorrows twice this season. They’d worked hard enough, and played well enough, to be allowed to win their championship on the field, and not have it handed to them because somebody hiding in a chapel somewhere decided not to give them the satisfaction. For all the theological dust they’ve thrown up to cover their cowardly retreat, Our Lady of Sorrows plainly and simply didn’t want to lose to a girl.

This is an embarrassment to sport and to religion, the functional equivalent of bleeding statues and the face of Jesus on the side of the barn. This is the kind of thing of which Blessed John XXIII was trying to rid the Catholic Church when he called on the council to “throw open the windows” and release the stifling air of repression that had built up over the centuries. Our Lady of Sorrows doesn’t want to play baseball against Paige Sultzbach because it’s run by an organization that harbors an attitude toward women that differs very little from that of Bishop Williamson, its crackpot avatar. And, no, I don’t have to “respect” the stand they took, or the beliefs that prompted it, unless I’m also prepared to “respect” the anti-Semitism and conspiracy-mongering that are at the heart of the beliefs in question. I’m not required to be as classy as Paige Sultzbach, state champion.

[Photo Credit: Carlos Chavez/Arizona Republic]

Head on over to Grantland for a long appreciation of the Chipmunks by Bryan Curtis. Nice to see Shecter, Merchant, Isaacs, Vecsey and company celebrated.

The only problem I have with the piece is how Jimmy Cannon is portrayed. It’s not that Curtis is inaccurate in saying that Cannon was tired and bitter by the mid-’60s, or that he was the foil that the Chipmunks needed (too bad there is no mention of Dick Young). Curtis lampoons Cannon’s writing style but I wish it was balanced with a sense of how good Cannon was in his prime. Cannon is seen here as he’s most often remembered these days–an out-of-touch old timer who had become a parody of himself. That’s a shame because while Cannon was sentimental to a fault when he was bad, he was terrific, one of the very best, when he was good.

[Picture by Bags]

“Reggie Jackson in No-Man’s Land” is Robert Ward’s celebrated bonus piece on Mr. October. You may have heard of it. Caused a stir when it appeared in the June 1977 issue of Sport. The story is featured in Ward’s entertaining new collection Renegades and is reprinted here for the first time on-line.

Dig in.

By Robert Ward

Reprinted with permission from the author.

Check out this considered and well-reported piece by Noam Cohen about Joe Posnanski’s forthcoming biography on the late Joe Paterno in the New York Times:

Mark Kriegel, a sports columnist who has written biographies of Joe Namath and Pete Maravich, was more expansive. “I believe to do a biography, you need to love your subject, but you have to balance that passion,” he said. “On some level you have to love your subject, you have to have the devotion to your subject’s flaws and virtues. You have to care enough to become obsessed with your subject’s flaws.”

Creating distance is important, too. “In some ways that was easier for me with Namath, who didn’t cooperate,” Kriegel said.

…David Garrow, a longtime history professor whose biography of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “Bearing the Cross,” touched on King’s personal failings, said it was important to challenge your subject, even one as celebrated as King. “We are not in the business of being uplifting — that could be myth, but it ain’t history,” he said. “The lives of saints is not history, it’s myth. I think it is a far more powerfully inspiring story for readers to appreciate the inescapability of human imperfection than to spin myths.”

According to the article, Joe Pos received $750,000 from Simon & Schuster to write the book, scheduled to be published this fall. It is a short turnaround from the events of last year at Penn State. Is that enough time to do the subject justice? We know that Joe Pos is nothing if not prolific. I’m eager to see if he can pull it off.

[Photo Credit: Samuels]

Mark Kram Jr. is one of the finest practitioners we have of long form newspaper journalism, better known as the bonus or takeout piece. He has been with the Philly Daily News since 1987 and his work has appeared in The Best American Sports Writing six times (here’s a selection:  “The World is Her Cloister” 1994; “Joe’s Gift” 2002; “I Want to Kill Him” 2003; “A Lethal Catch” 2005).

Kram has a clean, almost invisible style that doesn’t call attention to itself. It is in the fine tradition of Gay Talese’s fly-on-the-wall approach. With Kram you don’t notice his technique because you are immersed in the story. Now 56, Kram has written his first book, “Like Any Normal Day.” It is published today.

I wrote a short piece on Kram in the Scorecard section of Sports Illustrated last week and was fortunate enough to chat with him recently about his book and his father, who himself was a celebrated magazine writer.

Enjoy.

Bronx Banter: I’m a huge fan of “Forgive Some Sinner,” the uncompromising article you wrote about your father. It must not have been easy to write that story. How did it come about?

Mark Kram: Frank Deford planted the idea with me. He and Dad had been colleagues at Sports Illustrated during the 1960s and early 1970s but had drifted apart in the ensuing years, as friends occasionally do. They were both from Baltimore, yet not the same Baltimore. Frank grew up in an affluent area of the city, and Dad had come out of East Baltimore, a working class section. He had lettered in baseball, basketball and football in high school—in fact, he had played high school baseball against Al Kaline—but had been a poor student and had no interest in books until his pro baseball career in the Pirates organization came to an end.

Mark Kram, left, Tito Francona far right

I had known Frank as a boy and became reacquainted with him some 30 years later at a book event he had at The Free Library of Philadelphia in 2005, three years after Dad had died. We went out for a few drinks and I filled him in on the man he once knew. By the end of the evening, he said, “You know, you should write about him.” The thought had occurred to me, but I could not think of the circumstance that would arise where it would be possible. Were I to do it, it would have to have been for publication, and I could not think of any editor who would be remotely interested. Incredibly, Frank conspired with Rob Fleder, then a top editor at SI, to offer me an assignment.

BB: That had to come as a surprise, given how your father and SI parted ways in 1977.

MK: You can say that again. I showed my wife Anne the email Rob had sent me and her jaw dropped. SI had not even published an obit on him, and here they were asking for 6,000 words on him. I played along, but I was under no illusions that whatever I came up with would ever appear in their pages.

BB: Really?

MK: Yes. As stellar has his work had been, Dad had breached some very serious ethical standards – which I explore in some depth in “Forgive Some Sinner”–so he represented a complicated piece of SI history. It seemed unlikely to me that they would have any appetite to revisit it. And yet I was excited to have the assignment, if only because it gave me a license to pick up the phone, call people and ask questions.

BB: What happened when you submitted the story?

MK: SI paid for the piece in full and then sat on it. Rob had done a wonderful job helping me get it in shape—he is a splendid editor—but as I said, I doubted that it would ever get in. A year and half passed and Rob called. He said, “I have good news and bad news.” I said, “Give me the bad news.” As I expected, he said SI would not be running the piece. But the “good news” was that I could have the story back and sell it elsewhere, if I could find someone who would take it.

BB: At least they paid you for it and let you have it back.

MK: That was kind of them – and I appreciated it. So I shopped it around but no one wanted it. And then one day, a neighbor, Jason Wilson—who is the series editor of Best American Travel Writing—crossed into our yard and said he had just been appointed the editor of “The Smart Set,” an online cultural magazine he convinced Drexel University to underwrite. “Forgive Some Sinner” appeared as part of their launch and still gets visitors to it. So I would have to say it could not have worked out better.

BB: And there is a benefit to having it on-line because a simple Google search continues to lead readers to it.

MK: Absolutely. It’s been wonderful in that way.

BB: And it was included in The Best American Sports Writing that year. That had to be gratifying.

MK: It was. Given the circuitous journey the piece had before it found a home, it was more than that. I am deeply thankful to Glenn Stout, the series editor of the book, and Bill Nack, the guest editor who selected it. And I am thankful to Frank, Rob and Jason for teeing it up.

BB: I was drawn to the part of “Forgive Some Sinner” where your old man discouraged you from pursuing a career in writing. Can you shed some light on what his thinking was?

MK: Writing was an extraordinary struggle for him. I can still see him sitting at the typewriter, drenched with sweat and wreathed in smoke from the pipe that he always had going. Every word to him was a careful brush stroke. Frank captured it well in his new memoir, “Over Time”:

“To Mark, writing was a laboratory science more than a craft; he could not write the second word until the first word was perfect. He also believed that he was like a female holding a finite number of eggs—that he only had so many words within him.”

I could not have said it better. Frank and I part company on certain other observations he had, but I am a very fond of him and he is surely entitled to his opinion. But to answer your original question: I think Dad discouraged me from writing because it was such an ordeal for him. I remember he used to say, “I should have stayed in baseball and become a first base coach.” Maybe he would have been happier.

Father and Son at Graceland, 2002

BB: To what extent was writing that story a relief for you?

MK: More than you can know. For years I had looked upon with the eyes of a boy—and only those eyes. I loved him dearly, and was always trying to plead his case in one way or another, even when the evidence to the contrary had been inescapable. I idealized him. I remember I used to look at his work and wonder how he ever did it—and if I ever could even approach what he did in some small way. Writing “Forgive Some Sinner” demanded that I looked at him with another set of eyes—challenging, discerning and yet not judgmental. No one is spared suffering in life, but you can either be embittered by it or ennobled by it. Dad became embittered by it, I am sad to say, and yet that was not the sum of who he was. “Forgive Some Sinner” was a painful excavation, yet one that acquainted me with the gray areas that hold regency over us. I think in some sense “Forgive Some Sinner” primed the pump for “Like Any Normal Day.”

BB: That’s an excellent point particularly since this is your first book. Why this story and why now?

MK: For years, I had hoped to do a book. Certainly, it seemed to be a logical outgrowth of the narrative writing I had been doing so long for newspapers. But I did not want to do just any book. I had no interest in doing an as-told-to celebrity job. I wanted to slice off a piece of life and examine it. What I found in the Miley family was precisely what I had been searching for: Ordinary people steeped in extraordinary circumstances. But I did not choose this story as much as it chose me.

BB: Ordinary people…

MK: Yes. When I attended the University of Maryland, I had a conversation with the novelist James M. Cain at his house one evening. Remember, “The Postman Always Rings Twice” and “Double Indemnity?”

Cain was well into his 80s by then, but he told me a story that has stayed with me ever since. Carey Wilson, the producer, had once told him, “Jim, the reason I like your stories is that they are about real people. I know them.” Cain told me this story to illustrate his antipathy for Raymond Chandler, whose characters in the “The Big Sleep” included “a rich, old bald-headed guy who raises orchids and has two nymphomaniac daughters.” Cain said Wilson had told him, “Whoever heard of someone like that? You can take that son of a bitch and jump in the lake with him.” In any event, I knew Buddy Miley. We were we the same age. I had played ball with boys like him, star athletes who would only go so far before gravity pulled them to earth. I think I understood who he was.

BB: You played sports in high school, right?

MK: Some baseball and basketball. Good enough to be on the team, but more or less a bench player.

BB: How did Buddy’s story choose you?

MK: I suppose you could say Buddy whispered in my ear. He became a thread I tugged on while I worked on other stuff. I think with any creative project, you have to give yourself space to play with the loose threads you come across and see where they lead. Some of the threads you pull at snap off. Others just go on and on. Buddy became a thread that I could not let go of. Over the course of some years, I found that some intriguing themes emerged: What is our duty to one another? To what extent are we able to sacrifice of ourselves? I fooled with some of screenplay versions of the story, suffered through the usual annoyances that are attached to that, and then finally decided: This has to be a book. At that point the question became, can I sell it?

BB: Did you have a feel for how that would go?

MK: Practically speaking, it seemed to me to be a long shot that any publisher would be interested in Buddy, or his story. But I had what I think of as an epiphany. It dawned on me that the book was not about Buddy alone but the people he touched.

BB: Someone who is injured like that impacts everyone around him.

MK: Exactly. That one split second of horror that occurred one day on the football field in 1973 changed the destiny of an array of people beyond just Buddy. His parents, his siblings, especially Jimmy, his youngest brother. Friends. I even found his high school girlfriend in Alabama—Karen Kollmeyer (then Karen Shields)–whose life intersected with Buddy in an intriguing way up until the very day he died. It seemed to be the perfect book for me—not a sports book per se, or a Kevorkian book—but one that played out across a large canvas of human experience.

BB: You explain in the book that you first wrote a piece about Buddy after reading a letter his mother wrote in Sports Illustrated. What was it about her letter that drew your curiosity?

MK: I always have an eye out for pieces that play in the margins of sports. In this case, an editor at the Philadelphia Daily News passed it along to me. Since I had come to Philadelphia in 1987 from Detroit, I had no idea of who Buddy or the Mileys were. In her letter, Rosemarie said, in part:

“I am sure the majority of SI readers ‘love’ football. I ask them to spend one day with my son. They will see the terrible pain he endures. They will feel his frustrations at being totally dependant upon others.”

It went on. But the point is, I followed up on her invitation, even if it had been intended as a rhetorical one. I called her and asked if I could drop by and take her up on her invitation. Of course, I had no idea of where it would lead except for perhaps an interesting feature article.

BB: Did you stay in touch with Buddy after that first article was published?

MK: I spoke with Buddy just once after the piece appeared in the paper. Apparently, some of his old friends had read it and organized a benefit for him. Ostensibly, it was to raise funds so he could visit Buoniconti clinic in Miami in search of relief from the pain he was in on a daily basis. He did take that trip, but it was to no avail, though he did get an eyeful on a side trip to South Beach.

BB: Hey, that had to be a good feeling, that something you had written had led people to organize a fund-raiser?

MK: The hope I always have is to spark a connection. Occasionally, that has expressed itself in a level of generosity that I found inspiring. I remember I once did a story on Joe Delaney, a promising young Kansas City Chiefs running back who died trying to save some boys from drowning—a $1000.00 check showed up in the mail to forward along to his widow. In the case of Buddy, I think we see the bigheartedness of others throughout his life—and this book.

BB: He was not alone.

MK: Good people stepped forward from every walk of life to help him, from legends such as the former Colts running back Alan Ameche, his widow Yvonne, and obscure characters such as Dave Heilbrun, who volunteered his expertise to build an addition on the Miley home that allowed Buddy some space of his own. So I suppose I would say, what I have always hoped to do is move readers in a way that enables them to connect to a world outside themselves.

BB: I interrupted you there. So did you stay in touch with Buddy?

MK: We spoke just once again and he more or less faded from my radar until I received a phone call from the office one evening in March, 1997. Buddy had been found dead in a Michigan motel room. From what could be immediately ascertained, it looked like it had been a Kevorkian job. I contributed some reporting to the story that appeared the following day, but did not become more deeply involved in the story until a year later. I proposed a piece on the one-year anniversary of his death, if only because the initial reporting seemed to leave certain questions unanswered. I am also of the belief that in pursuing feature subjects—especially when there is a tragedy involved—it is usually a good idea to give people some space to grieve.

BB: That makes sense.

MK: When I revisited the Mileys in March 1998, everyone was there except for Jimmy. I was told it would just be too hard for him to be there. Although I suspected then that Jimmy had been the one who had taken Buddy to Michigan, I figured that I would be done with the Mileys when I finished that story. But I had grown fond of Rosemarie and gave her a call every now and then just to talk. Always, it seemed, we ended up laughing over one thing or another. Occasionally, I would bring up Jimmy, ask how he was and told her I would love to talk with him if he was ever up to it.

BB: And you later did a story on him as well, right?

MK: The piece I did on Jimmy appeared in the Daily News in June 2006. A year before, Rosemarie called me and told me Jimmy would like to talk with me. So I drove out to Warminster to see him, no strings attached, just a chat. If for whatever reason he did not want a story written, I promised him that that would be the end of it. We met at a diner and talked for four hours. I knew then that he had a compelling story to share, but I could also see that he was bound up in fear. He seemed to think if he went public, he would end up in jail as an accessory. Or, perhaps even worse, that he would be shunned in the community for participating in an act that the Catholic Church looked upon as a sin.

BB: He was tortured.

Jimmy Miley

MK: Yes. He was so overwhelmed by his fears that he called two weeks or so later and declined to proceed. Another year passed before he decided to move forward. Contrary to the apprehensions that had held him back, the community embraced him with compassion. I received dozens of letters from readers who opened up their hearts to him. To the extent that the book had a genesis, it could be found in those letters—this sense that what Jimmy experienced had universal overtones. In fact, I had an aunt who lived in a vegetative state for 10 years, so I had some fairly strong personal views regarding self-determination.

BB: Did you share any of the letters you received from that second article with Jimmy?

MK: I did. I dropped a pile of them off at his house one day. I think it was a revelation to him, that there were people who supported what he had done, even if they did not approve of Dr. Kevorkian or what he stood for. They understood that what he had done had been an act of compassion on behalf of his brother.

BB: When Jimmy got cold feet, how did you react to that?

MK: Disappointed, of course, yet not entirely surprised. As we spoke, I sensed that he was backing away. And yet he continued to talk, as if by doing so he was expelling a large burden he had been carrying around. Sometimes I have had story subjects who could not bring themselves to follow through. I understand it. This is deeply personal stuff, and it is not easy to expose your inner world to someone, particularly a stranger who proposes to share your story in a public forum. In this case, there was also an added obstacle that came into play. Nationally, the big story in the news in early 2005 was Terri Schiavo, the young woman who had been in a vegetative state and became the focus of a heated debate on euthanasia in America. I had a sense that that spooked Jimmy.

BB: Can you talk about the difficulties that you face as a writer when you get to know a subject and like them? And was there a difference between the connection you had with the family during the two articles you wrote and then the book?

MK: Initially, my relationship to the Mileys was cordial but not one that I had any sense would endure. They were lovely people, yet the necessities of turning around fresh ideas seemed to preclude any deeper connection. Once a story is published, there is always this sense of closure, that both the subject and I had attained what we had set out to accomplish and would part ways. A book is different matter altogether. To go to the depths one has to plumb in order to piece together a narrative non fiction of any length, it is essential to establish a level of abiding trust and transparency. What I found is that you have to give of yourself in order to have any expectation of any return. The Mileys were helpful in this regard. They assured me, “This is your book.” And I assured them that I would observe the same sensitivity in writing about them as I would my own family.

BB: In what way do you give of yourself? At one point in the book, you bring yourself in the picture by sharing some of your personal history. And you do share that you and Buddy were the same age. Is this what you are referring to?

MK: By “giving of yourself” to a subject, this quite simply means that you have to be something more than an interrogator. You have to connect with them at a human level and create an environment of safety. I remember when I interviewed Karen in Alabama, I asked her to look up “Forgive Some Sinner,” if only to give her a sense that I understood what was involved with letting go of old demons. I think by reading it she came away with a better sense of who I was and became more relaxed with me. As far as Buddy was concerned, I included some personal history only to underscore the passage of years. In the 23 ½ years Buddy had been paralyzed, longer by the way, than he had been ambulatory, time had not stopped for me as it had for him.

BB: Buddy fell in love with Karen while he was in the hospital. At what point in the process did you track her down?

Buddy Miley and Karen Sheilds on Graduation Day, 1974

MK: Karen emerged very early in my reporting. At some point while I was preparing the piece on Jimmy for the Daily News, he told me that women had always loved Buddy. Some had passed in and out of his life, but there was one in particular that Buddy had a special affection for. He told me she was living somewhere in the South, Florida or Alabama. He said he had her telephone number somewhere. Once the Daily News story appeared and I began to draft a book proposal, I asked Jimmy to give her a call. He did, and Karen and I later spoke on the phone. That was in 2006 or so. When I finally got a deal, I flew down to Alabama and spent a few days with her.

BB: That’s a huge get on your part.

MK: By the end of those interviews, it became clear to me that she would be an essential character to the book. I remember I told her, “I need you to help me tap into the heart of this story.” And so she did, beyond what I could have imagined.

BB: Was there anything new or surprising that you learned about the Mileys writing the book?

MK: Nothing “new” or “surprising,” but I did develop a deep appreciation for what lovely people they were. None of them shied away from any of the questions I had, although their memories in some cases had dimmed. I remember asking Rosemarie Miley if she would share with me the letters she exchanged with her husband Bert during World War II. I asked her a few times offhandedly, but she always said no, that they were private. It was not until my final interview with her that, out of nowhere, she asked me if I would like to see one of them. “Of course,” I told her. She excused herself from the table and came back with a hand-written love letter that Bert had sent her from the Pacific near the end of the war. Quietly, she read part of it aloud to me. It was as if I had come across a missing piece in an elaborate puzzle: beneath the stony exterior that Bert exuded beat the heart of a man with the same dreams his paralyzed son had had.

BB: The story is so sad in many ways and dramatic. How did treat that story without becoming melodramatic?

MK: From the beginning, I knew I had to find some way to lighten the emotional load. So humor had to be a critical element of the story. Jimmy provided more than enough in this area. As the youngest of the seven Miley children, he had been a fine athlete, perhaps better than Buddy, yet he had been immature and always falling over himself in one way or another. It was not until he tapped into his courage and helped Buddy that he ascended into manhood. Karen, as a character, also allowed me to step away into a love story, even if that love story would ultimately have tragic overtones.

BB: And it was an unusual, complicated love story, too.

MK: Karen weaves in and out of the book. They were supposed to go on their first date after the game in which Buddy was injured. Karen began visiting him in the hospital and they became close – indeed, they fell in love. In the book there is a wonderful picture of the two of them on the stage at graduation. In any event, Karen moved away at that point with her parents, but not before Buddy assured her that when he was able to walk again, he would find her and sweep her off her feet. It was pure fantasy – Buddy would never be able to walk again – yet Karen became a projection to Buddy of the normal life he longed for. As the years passed, Karen went on to have a life of her own, with a husband and children, yet a part of her remained connected to the boy whose heart had touched her so long ago. Buddy contacted her two years before his death with the help of a private investigator. During this period, the deep feeling between them reemerged, and continued until Buddy called her from Michigan to say goodbye.

BB: You had this story with you for a long period, yet had addressed it only in short form. What entered into your thinking as you expanded to 70,000 words instead of 5,000?

MK: Good jockeys have a clock in their head, which is to say they have a sense of pace that enables them to know precisely where they are at any given point in a race. I had that ability here. Originally, the contract called for 80,000 words. Before I signed it, I sat down with a legal pad and worked up a very loose outline, just to get a sense of how far this material could be spread out. What I came up with during that exercise was what appeared to be a 70,000-word book, so we had the contract amended. And the book I turned in came to 70,400 words. We ended up trimming perhaps 1000 words from that during the editing process.

BB: Damn, that’s nothing.

MK: With the help of my wife, Anne, who attended the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars and has a sharp eye for errant prose, I did some rewriting on certain chapters as I went along. Some of our editorial sessions were tense.

BB: Oh, I can only imagine.

MK: But when I looked at what she suggested with a cooler head I was always deeply grateful, not just for her direction but the patience and love with which she offered it.

BB: Did you show your editor any early drafts?

MK: No, I just showed George Witte, the editor in chief at St. Martin’s Press, the completed manuscript when I was finished with it. I had a good sense of where I was going. And there is no point eliciting a partial score. George got back to me within a week with a lovely acceptance note. At that point, there were only some very minor revisions.

BB: That sounds so tidy. And you would have never been in this position had you not written about your father. “Forgive Some Sinner” really gave you a leg up on writing “Like Any Normal Day,” is that fair to say?

MK: In so far as the deep diving you have to do with certain subjects, I would say yes. I came away from “Forgive Some Sinner” with a better understanding not just of Dad and myself, but of life—even under ideal circumstances, it is a muddy affair. In a certain way, I cleared the land of the underbrush with that piece, which enabled me to enter the world of Buddy and Jimmy Miley in an unobstructed way. And I had discovered that “Forgive Some Sinner” helped me develop some previously unengaged creative skills, perhaps which in the final analysis can only come with experience. I remember whenever I had self-doubts as a boy, Dad used to remind me again and again: “The race is to the steady, not to the swift.” I can still hear him say that: Hang in there.

BB: I like how Scott Raab put it when he said, “Endurance is a talent.”

MK: Well said. Along with whatever talent you can scrape together, you have to have an iron ass. Buddy sure as hell had it. For 23 ½ years, he hung in here until he could not do it one more day. The pain that would shoot through him was so severe that it would leave him gritting his teeth. And yet I think he was ennobled by his suffering, not embittered by it. That’s a remarkable thing, really. Buddy had a big heart, and he shared it with whoever walked into his room and sat down with him. It was because of that heart that he stepped away from his struggle, if only to enable his mother Rosemarie a few years of peace in her advancing years. So he and Jimmy stole away to Michigan. Buddy was the personification of endurance, which is why I will always treasure the piece of memorabilia that Jimmy gave me that had belonged to his brother: a signed Cal Ripken jersey. Somehow that seemed so perfectly fitting.

You can order “Like Any Normal Day” here and here. And check out Kram’s website, here.

[Photos provided by Mark Kram Jr. Additional images via Elevated Encouragement. Author pictures taken by Mary Olivia Kram. ]

Check out this moving story by Josh Wilker.

[Featured Image: David Goldman]

Pat Jordan plays golf with Justin Verlander:

Verlander stops the cart, and we go into the woods to look for his ball. Two egrets, each standing on one leg, point it out. He drives it out of the woods and into a sand trap. We get back into the cart. Frankie ambles by and says, “There’s some pretty flowers in the woods, huh?” I say, “Yeah, Justin’s showing me the whole course — woods, rough, water hazards.” Verlander replies, “I’m just trying to be a good host, show you all aspects of the course.” I say, “Then why don’t ya show me one of the greens?” I pause, and then say, “With your ball near the pin.” Verlander glares at me, and then laughs. “People in real life don’t get ballplayers’ humor, the way we talk in the clubhouse,” he says. In “real life,” people say things they don’t mean. Ballplayers do the opposite. Verlander says, “I’m always hurting someone’s feelings.”

He sprays sand out of the trap, his ball barely reaching the green. Three shots later, we head off toward the next hole. His fastball topped out at 86 mph his senior year of high school, and scouts weren’t interested. So he went to Old Dominion University in Virginia and spent the winter lifting weights. He gained 20 pounds, and by the end of his freshman year, his fastball had been clocked at 96 mph. “All 20 pounds of muscle went to my legs,” he says, which helped him drive toward the batter with his fastball. “Blessed, I guess,” he says. “I was born to be a pitcher.”

[Photo Credit: Ben Walkter/AP]

Here’s a wonderful piece by our old pal, the late George Kimball. It’s about Opening Day at Fenway Park, 1971.

It appears in the fine collection, “Baseball I Gave You All The Best Years of My Life.”

Enjoy.

Opening Day at Fenway Park

By George Kimball

Years ago—only a few years ago, actually, but still years before the miracle year of 1967 and years before it became chic to root for the Red Sox—the centerfield bleachers at Fenway were traditionally the habitat of the most diehard of Sox aficionados. If the bleacherites weren’t the most knowledgeable fans, they were close to it, and they were certainly the most faithful. I suspect I was exposed to more genuine baseball lore, more understandings of the subtleties and stratagems of the game, and perhaps most importantly, more sheer love for the sport by sitting exclusively in the bleachers from boyhood through my early twenties than I’ve encountered in any reserved seat press box since.

This, of course, was back in the days when the Red Sox were drawing so poorly that they had to schedule night games around the Hatch Shell concerts in the summer and when a gate of 20,000 on Opening Day was considered spectacular. But from April through September the coterie in center field retained fidelity unmatched anywhere else in the American League. And while the businessmen who bought season tickets might sit next to someone in an adjacent box all season long and never exchange six words, there were people out there who’d been friends for twenty-five years yet never seen each other outside Fenway Park.

There were the beaten old men who looked like they’d just panhandled the 50 cent admission price, the retired gentlemen with their transistor radios and the truck drivers who took their shirts off on hot summer days. There were two old ladies from Dorchester, both named Mary, who attended the afternoon games as faithfully as they attended Mass. They left home early in the morning, bringing their Official Big League Scorebook along to Church, and after lunch in Kenmore Square, showed up at the park before batting practice started. They never went to night games, but the Boys from Chelsea did.

The Boys from Chelsea—three of them, Felix, Vinny, and Joe, all cab drivers, I believe, invariably turned up at night, and two or three of their friends often made it—were inveterate gamblers. They came to games weighted down with 50 cent rolls of pennies, and would wager with each other and anyone else on every conceivable facet of the game, from whether the next batter would get a hit (3 to 1 for Mantle or Willams; 6 to 1 for most pitchers) to an error on the next play (usually about 25 to 1, but you could always haggle) to the possibility of Casey Stengel being ejected during the course of the game. (If you got a bet down at the prevailing 7½ to 1 odds on Jackie Jensen hitting into a double play at every available opportunity, you usually made out over the course of a season.)

And there was Fat Howie. Fat Howie was on speaking terms with every centerfielder in the league. He’d sit right next to the rope (the section in straightaway center, directly in the batter’s line of vision, ALWAYS used to be roped off; since the space is needed now, the seats are painted green and the customers are allowed to sit there, provided they wear dark clothing) and carry on a running dialogue. Howie would lean over the wall between innings and yell out to Bob Allison: “Hey, Bob, what’s happening in Cleveland?” (The scoreboard on the left field wall can’t be seen from the bleachers in center.) And Allison would check the score and holler back: “4 to 2 Indians, Howie.” Howie was always there, day or night. I don’t know what he did for a living; maybe he took his summers off.

And, of course, there was the gang I hung out with in college. We’d usually catch about 20 or 30 games a year, always going in a group of four or five and always with a case of beer. Back then there was no hassle about bringing your own beer in to the bleachers; everyone did it, and probably would still be able to except for one particularly raucous occasion in the spring of 1964 when the bleachers were invaded by a few hundred Friday night beer drinkers posing as baseball fans.

Along about the sixth inning they were very drunk and very angry. The Red Sox were being humiliated by the lowly Kansas City Athletics (commonly referred to at the time as the “Kansas City Faggots,” since they wore bright gold suits with green trim, long before mod uniforms became fashionable), and someone heaved an empty beer can in the direction of Jose Tartabull, the A’s centerfielder. An umpire ran out to retrieve it, and was greeted by a fusillade of beer cans. This brought the park police out on the field, and the shelling exploded for real. One cop was cold-cocked by a beer can—a full one—and the barrage continued for about ten minutes, abating not because the park announcer warned that the umpires were threatening to forfeit the game, but only because the assholes ran out of ammunition. After that they started checking you out for beer when you came through the gate, and—at 55 cents a cup—the price of drinking went up considerably in center field.

Besides me, there were 34,516 other paying customers there last week. I hadn’t been to an opener at Fenway for seven years, though I caught a couple at Shea Stadium and K.C. Municipal. I looked around for Howie and the two Mary’s, but I didn’t see them. I suspect they’d be pretty uncomfortable out there these days anyway; the bleachers last Tuesday were packed with a crowd that would’ve been indistinguishable from the occupants of the cheap seats at the Fillmore East: freaks sporting Mao buttons, long-haired college kids, high school hippies, and even teenyboppers, with bells, beads, and blemishes.

Initially, anyway, that was relieving. For several years now I’ve found myself trembling whenever the National Anthem is played at sporting events, not out of patriotic sentiment but of fear that some flag-crazed lunatic sitting in back of me will be overcome by his emotions and seize the opportunity to bludgeon me from behind with his souvenir Louisville Slugger. Since the first ball on Opening Day was thrown out by a Vietnam veteran, a former POW, the new crowd did thus provide at least a reassuring measure of collective security during the pre-game ceremonies, helping to compensate for the nostalgic loss of old ambience.

On the very first play of the game, Yastrzemski made an incredible driving, sliding catch by the left field line off Horace Clarke’s bat, roller over and held the glove aloft. Now in the old days Jimmy Doyle from East Boston would’ve been yelling “Atta boy, Carl, Baby” in his booming foghorn voice, a voice so loud that even in the middle of 35.000 fans Yaz would’ve heard him. But the ovation from the bleachers was only polite applause by comparison. “That was a pretty nice, catch,” commented one of the kids behind me.

Ray Culp retired the Yankees 1-2-3 in the first, but despite two hits the Sox’ half of the first was scarcely more auspicious. Luis Aparicio led off with a smash over third base, which Jerry Kenney backhanded with a superb stab observed by everyone in Fenway Park except Aparicio and first base coach Dan Lenhardt, who waved Luis around toward second—directly into a rundown. Reggie Smith followed with another single but, after Yaz flied out, Reggie, the team’s top base thief, was thrown out trying to steal second.

The Yankees went down in order in each of the next two innings. As the Sox trotted off the field after the third, one of the kids behind me turned to his companion and breathlessly uttered: “He’s pitching a no-hitter!”

Now, according to every sacred tradition of the game’s etiquette, this is something which is never mentioned aloud—particularly after only three innings have been played. I was on the verge of turning around and instructing him on the point when his friend smugly added: “He’s pitching a perfect game.”

Fat Howie would have thrown them both over the wall.

I sat seething as the Red Sox went down 1-2-3 again, and then decided that it was time to make a beer run. “My turn,” I said, and after entrusting my scorecard to the guy sitting next to me, began making my way down the aisle. I paused at the top of the runway just in time to see Thurman Munson chop a slow-roller to the third-base side of the mound.

A pitcher fleeter afoot would have handled it with ease; Sox pitching coach Harvey Haddix, about 50 now, could still have eaten it alive. Culp himself could probably have made the play three times out of four, but as he lumbered off the mound he not only overran the ball but momentarily blocked out Petrocelli racing in from third. Rico barehanded the ball and whipped it to first in one motion, but too late to catch Munson. An infield single; the Yankees had their first hit, and I knew exactly where the blame lay. “Smart-ass punks!” I shook my fist at them as I descended the stairs.

I returned with the beer to find Reggie Smith on second with a double and Yastrzemski coming to bat. Taking my scorecard back, I matter-of-factly threw out “Here comes the first run of the season!”, which would’ve immediately been covered at 7 to 2 by Felix or Vinny. There was no response to the challenge here, though, and naturally Yaz responded with a run-scoring double.

Between innings the guy who’d been keeping my scorecard wanted to know what the funny little illegibly-scrawled notes in the margin were all about. I briefly considered a number of spectacular fabrications, but finally admitted that I wrote for the Phoenix and planned to do a story of some sort about Opening Day.

“Oh yeah?” He eyed me strangely. “If you’re a sportswriter why the fuck are you sittin’ here,” he gestured toward the press box. “Instead of up there?” The fact of the matter was that the Rex Sox had declined to provide the paper with press tickets, but for some reason I mumbled that I liked it better in the bleachers. At one time that would’ve been true; today it made me twice a liar.

The middle innings were largely uneventful, except for Duane Josephson knocking Kenney squarely on his ass while breaking up a double play, and the fact that somebody nearby produced a hash pipe. Since the hash was still being circulated when the time came, the people next to me remained sitting through the seventh inning stretch, yet another tradition shot to hell. We did come up with another run in the seventh anyway. Following two singles, a sacrifice, and an intentional walk to pinchhitter Joe Lahoud, Culp hit a sure double-play ball to short, but John Kennedy, running for Lahoud, bowled over Clarke at second, knocking the ball away and allowing the run to score.

New York led off the eighth with their second and third hits. After an error and two putouts, the bases were loaded, two out, when Clarke stroked a base hit to right apparently certain to score two runs, but Josephson perfectly blocked the plate long enough to get Smith’s throw to home and somehow the tying run was out at the plate. “Perfect throw,” approved one of the morons behind me. Of course it was not a perfect throw; it bounced three times and Scott almost cut it off and the runner had it beaten by at least ten feet had Josephson not had his body in the way.

The Sox scored their third run the way they are supposed to be scored: Yaz singled, went to third on a single by Rico, and came home on Scott’s sacrifice fly. Unspectacular, but it is the sort of thing that games are won by. Just as I’d called Josephson a “mediocre catcher” in print that morning—he came through with three hits and that key play at the plate that afternoon—I also picked the Sox to finish second behind Baltimore. One game does not a season make, but I’m looking forward to having reason to revise both assessments. I’m also looking for a new place to sit.

[This story appears with permission from the late George Kimball; it originally appeared in the Boston Phoenix. The photograph of George was taken by Hal Whalen.]

Tomorrow night in the Village, Glenn Stout, Jay Jaffe, Steven Goldman and Dan Barry are the featured speakers at Gelf’s Varsity Letters reading series.

I’m so there.

If you’ve never read “The Boxer and the Blonde” by Frank Deford, well, here’s a reminder. It’s a good one:

The boxer and the blonde are together, downstairs in the club cellar. At some point, club cellars went out, and they became family rooms instead. This is, however, very definitely a club cellar. Why, the grandchildren of the boxer and the blonde could sleep soundly upstairs, clear through the big Christmas party they gave, when everybody came and stayed late and loud down here. The boxer and the blonde are sitting next to each other, laughing about the old times, about when they fell hopelessly in love almost half a century ago in New Jersey, at the beach. Down the Jersey shore is the way everyone in Pennsylvania says it. This club cellar is in Pittsburgh.

The boxer is going on 67, except in The Ring record book, where he is going on 68. But he has all his marbles; and he has his looks (except for the fighter’s mashed nose); and he has the blonde; and they have the same house, the one with the club cellar, that they bought in the summer of 1941. A great deal of this is about that bright ripe summer, the last one before the forlorn simplicity of a Depression was buried in the thick-braided rubble of blood and Spam. What a fight the boxer had that June! It might have been the best in the history of the ring. Certainly, it was the most dramatic, alltime, any way you look at it. The boxer lost, though. Probably he would have won, except for the blonde—whom he loved so much, and wanted so much to make proud of him. And later, it was the blonde’s old man, the boxer’s father-in-law (if you can believe this), who cost him a rematch for the heavyweight championship of the world. Those were some kind of times.

The boxer and the blonde laugh again, together, remembering how they fell in love. “Actually, you sort of forced me into it,” she says.

“I did you a favor,” he snaps back, smirking at his comeback. After a couple of belts, he has been known to confess that although he fought 21 times against world champions, he has never yet won a decision over the blonde—never yet, as they say in boxing, outpointed her. But you can sure see why he keeps on trying. He still has his looks? Hey, you should see her. The blonde is past 60 now, and she’s still cute as a button. Not merely beautiful, you understand, but schoolgirl cute, just like she was when the boxer first flirted with her down the Jersey shore. There is a picture of them on the wall. Pictures cover the walls of the club cellar. This particular picture was featured in a magazine, the boxer and the blonde running, hand in hand, out of the surf. Never in your life did you see two better-looking kids. She was Miss Ocean City, and Alfred Lunt called him “a Celtic god,” and Hollywood had a part for him that Errol Flynn himself wound up with after the boxer said no thanks and went back to Pittsburgh.

Here’s an excerpt from Colum McCann’s “Damn Yankees” essay:

I have been in New York for 18 years. Every time I have gone to Yankee Stadium with my two sons and my daughter, I am somehow brought back to my boyhood. Perhaps it is because baseball is so very different from anything I grew up with.

The subway journey out. The hustlers, the bustlers, the bored cops. The jostle at the turnstiles. Up the ramps. Through the shadows. The huge swell of diamond green. The crackle. The billboards. The slight air of the unreal. The guilt when standing for another nation’s national anthem. The hot dogs. The bad beer. The catcalls. Siddown. Shaddup. Fuhgeddaboudit.

Learning baseball is learning to love what is left behind also. The world drifts away for a few hours. We can rediscover what it means to be lost. The world is full, once again, of surprise. We go back to who we were.

I slipped into America via baseball. The language intrigued me. The squeeze plays, the fungoes, the bean balls, the curveballs, the steals. The showboating. The pageantry. The lyrical cursing that unfolded across the bleachers.

[Photo Credit: N.Y. Daily News]

Here’s another excerpt from “Damn Yankees.” Over at Deadspin, check out Dan Okrent’s piece on the famous Peterson Kekich wife swap:

In the late 1970s, on my very first assignment as a baseball writer, I found myself in the press box at the Yankees’ spring training home in Fort Lauderdale. On one side of me sat Murray Chass of the New York Times, fairly early in his own career as the most prolific and most boring baseball writer in the paper’s (maybe any paper’s) history. On the other side my seatmate was Maury Allen of the New York Post.

It was only an exhibition game, but I had never been paid to watch baseball before, and even the cramped little press box in Lauderdale seemed like some sort of heaven to me. I gurgled something about this being my first professional gig as a sportswriter, and Chass looked at me briefly, emitted a noise composed entirely of consonants, and went back to his crossword puzzle. Allen was friendlier. He introduced himself, shook my hand, wished me luck, and spent the first couple innings chatting amiably about his life as a sportswriter. Around the top of the third, he paused in mid-anecdote, looked at the field briefly, and tapped a pencil on the arm of his chair. “I love everything about the job,” he said, “except the fucking games.” Then he got up and left.

It would be cheap to contradict the defenseless Allen, who died in 2010, and point out that his role in what was almost precisely a fucking game may have been the most exciting moment in his career. In the summer of 1972, the biggest trade in Yankees history originated at a party at Allen’s house in Westchester County, when pitcher Mike Kekich drove home with the wife of pitcher Fritz Peterson, and Peterson drove home with Mrs. Kekich.

Kudos to the Grantland’s “Director’s Cut” series for reprinting this gem by the late Paul Hemphill (may he not be soon forgotten).

Here is “How Jacksonville Earned its Credit Card” (from Sport, June 1970):

It must have been the fall of 1962 when I first met Joe Williams. Most newspapermen, at one point or another, succumb to the illusion of public relations — thinking it is the rainbow leading to money and class and peace of mind — and I had just quit writing sports to become the sports publicist at Florida State University. It was football season all of a sudden and I was buried in brochures and 8-by-10 glossies and travel arrangements when Bud Kennedy, the FSU basketball coach, walked in one day and introduced Joe Williams as the new freshman basketball coach. Even then Williams was not the kind to make dazzling impressions. He was quiet and pleasant, tall and hunched over, a man in his late twenties, who grinned out of the side of his mouth and looked up at you, in spite of being 6-foot-4, through bushy black eyebrows. He was, it seems, sort of a part-time coach while doing graduate study or something.7 Florida State was just beginning to flex its muscles in football then, and so Bud Kennedy (who died recently) and assistant coach Hugh Durham (now the head basketball coach at FSU) and, by all means, Joe Williams sort of hovered about like extra men at a picnic softball game.

Joe did have a beautiful young bride named Dale, whom he had met while he was coaching high-school basketball in Jacksonville.8 But she was the only outwardly outstanding thing about Joe Williams, and they lived in what sounded like a fishing-camp cabin in the swamps outside Tallahassee, and I suppose I had his picture taken for the basketball brochure and I suppose the freshman team played out its season. I just don’t know. I went back to newspapering very shortly, and Joe took an assistant coaching job at Furman University, both of us roughly the same age, both of us just looking for a home, and we went separate ways without looking back.9

Jacksonville’s basketball program was, in those days during the early sixties, almost nonexistent. I had seen them play, against teams like Tampa and Valdosta State and Mercer, and it was a twilight zone of dark and airy gyms, small crowds, travel-by-car and intramural offenses. There was a line in the papers about Joe Williams leaving Furman in 1964 to become head basketball coach at Jacksonville University,10 not the most exciting announcement but at least news about an acquaintance. Jacksonville, you could find out if you bought a Jacksonville paper, got progressively worse — from 15-11 to 8-17 in Joe’s first three seasons — and people like me who had known him however vaguely were wondering whatever in the world possessed him to take a job like that.

Here’s Pat Jordan’s piece on Geno Auriemma for Deadspin:

“I don’t coach women,” the coach says. “I coach basketball players.” He tells a story. He was practicing with his team before a game when the opposing team’s female coach came out on the floor. “I’m telling my players how to play man-to-man defense. The other coach says: ‘You can’t say that. It’s person-to-person defense.’ I said, ‘You’re shittin’ me.’ She says, ‘But it’s women playing it.’ I say: ‘Yeah, but it’s man-to-man. They’re just pawns, without gender. I’m a gender-neutral coach.’”

…Geno became a women’s coach by accident. He was 21, without a job. A friend asked him to help out coaching a girls’ high school team. Geno said, “Girls! No way.” Then he thought about it. “I realized it could be pretty cool,” he tells me. “So I gave it a shot. The girls listened to me. They appreciated what I taught them.” His high school job led to an assistant coaching job on the University of Virginia’s women’s team, which led, in 1985, to an interview for the head job at UConn. By then, Geno had decided that he “liked coaching women. But I didn’t view it as coaching women. I was just coaching the game the way it should be played.

When I ask him why UConn hired him, he says: “I have no fucking idea. They wanted a woman. But nobody wanted the job. UConn had had only one winning season in its history. The facilities were lousy, there was no money, the pay was $29,000 a year, but I didn’t give a shit. I wanted to coach. So I lied to them. I told them I’m gonna do this, and this, and this, and they believed me. So I took the job. I figured I’d win a few games then after four years I’d go someplace good, men or women, as long as I could coach on a high level.” Those plans never materialized. His teams became very good, very quickly, and then, as he puts it, “a funny thing happened. After those first winning seasons, nobody called. Nobody gave a shit because I was a guy. The women’s teams didn’t want a guy, and the men’s teams figured if I was coaching women, how good could I be?”

He smiles, the big smile of a guy who’s got the last laugh. “Now nobody wants me because I’m making too much fucking money.”

Will Leitch on Bryce Harper in the new issue of GQ:

What makes Harper far more anticipated than your typical phenom is a sense that he not only recognizes the vastness of his potential but also feels plenty comfortable telling you about it. One minute he informs me that “baseball needs more superstars.” The next, while discussing Albert Pujols signing with the Angels, he offers thoughtlessly, “Albert and I know each other and respect each other.” In a sport in which “paying your dues” is practically in the job description—an institution that once made Michael Jordan ride around in a bus for five months—Harper seems to have emerged fully formed to piss off the baseball establishment.

On his way up, he didn’t shrink from his sometime moniker, the LeBron of baseball. He poured vats of eye black on his face to make himself look like a professional wrestler. In a minor league game last year, after hitting a home run, he blew a kiss to the opposing pitcher. (Harper tells me, “It was an ‘eff you’ from the mouth.”) That’s the sort of business that will get a major leaguer a fastball in his ear. As Hall of Fame third baseman Mike Schmidt put it: “I would think at some point the game itself, the competition on the field, is going to have to figure out a way to police this young man.”

In other words: Harper is awesome—exactly what baseball needs. He’s essentially a throwback: a cocky, ornery cuss who can back it all up. Ty Cobb minus the racism and chaw, Lenny Dykstra before the bankruptcy. He tells me Pete Rose, a.k.a. Charlie Hustle, is his favorite player and that “I want to play the game hard. I want to ram it down your throat, put you into left field when I’m going into second base.”

[Photo Via The Baseball Analysts]

Chris Ballard has a bonus piece on the fall of Antoine Walker in this week’s SI. Worth a read.

The following is Jordan’s original manuscript–featured in “The Best Sports Writing of Pat Jordan.” I’ve reprinted it here, with permission from the author, as an example of the kind of lengthy magazine writing that was fashionable at the time.

“Trouble in Paradise” is far from Jordan’s best work, but it captured a time and a place well and offered a candid look at the difficulties of celebrity marriage.

Enjoy.

Trouble in Paradise

This is a story about Southern California, and baseball, and sex, and fame, and wealth, and beauty, and the American Dream. It is a story about a famous athlete and his beautiful wife and the life they live in that rarefied atmosphere that few of us will ever breathe. And yet, despite its uncommon trappings, it is not an uncommon story. It is simply a love story about men and women who marry when young, when they are merely tintypes of one another and their lives together are spread out before them like some preordained feast. It is a story about husbands who go off to work, and wives who become mothers, and the ordinary lives they slip into along the way—lives that are satisfyingly simple when they are young. It is a story about people who change over the years, who grow older in different ways, who become different people from who they once were, and how this is really no one’s fault. Finally, this is a story about people who have slept together in a familiar bed for so many years that it is a profound shock to them when they wake one morning to discover they are sleeping in a strange bed alongside of someone they no longer recognize.

THE HOUSE

The house is decorated in a style common to people who have the resources for instant gratification, but who have yet to grow into a style of their own. The young wife did not have the style, or the patience, to coordinate every detail (the plaid wallpaper with the print sofa), which might have taken years, and so she merely hired the right decorator to whom she could entrust the ten-room house while she and her husband were away. When they returned, the empty house had been filled with things. There was a color television set in every room, and two in the family room. There were eleven LeRoy Neiman prints on the wall of the library. There was a pool table in the den, a few balls scattered across the felt as if to imply a game in progress. There were plants everywhere: hanging-plants in hand-painted pots, floor-plants in wicker baskets, wall plants in elephant horns, plants with spidery tendrils, plants with cactus-like trunks, and plants with rubbery-looking leaves as large as the blade of a shovel. There were three bars done in a Mediterranean style, but no liquor bottles, since neither the wife nor the husband drinks. There were four bathrooms done in Italian marble, with gold-plated fixtures, and a toilet, which, when flushed, spewed forth royal blue Sani-Flush. There was an art book or a high-end magazine in every bathroom, and on every coffee table and end table in the house (Architectural Digest, Paintings by Norman Rockwell, Paintings by Vincent van Gogh, Celebrity Houses), and there were three such books on the massive glass-and-chrome coffee table in the living room, each book arranged casually atop the other, just a bit off-center. There were oriental rugs, too, and inlaid tiles, and matching white linen sofas, and a brick fireplace with a large gold fan in front of it. The fan was so large, in fact, that it obscured the fireplace it was meant to adorn. There was a cut glass sherry decanter ringed by tulip-shaped, long-stemmed glasses on a silver tray on the bar in the library. The decanter was a third filled with an amber liquid, and it was arranged on the bar in such a way that, on sunny days, the light through the window would reflect off the cut-glass in a rainbow of colors. Soft music floated through the house from unseen speakers.

The children’s bedroom overflowed with stuffed animals of every pastel hue. Pinks and yellows and baby blues littered the beds, spilled onto the floor, rose, in a miasma of color, to the ceiling. The master bedroom was done entirely in white. There was a telephone in each of the dressing rooms off the master bath. There was a sauna. There were photographs in the bedroom hallway. Photographs of husband and wife and children. Photographs of the husband and wife. Photographs of the children, two young girls with windblown hair—one blonde, one dark. Photographs of the blonde daughter, laughing, with an upraised can of soda. There were more photographs downstairs: The husband in a baseball uniform, holding two small American flags in each hand and smiling at the camera. The wife in profile, her blonde hair as unreal in its perfection as that of a Breck girl. The wife getting out of a car. Posed getting out of a car, the car door opened, the wife smiling as she points one leg out of the car, her silky dress hiked past her thigh. The husband in uniform again, the wife beside him, holding a baby in her arms, the microphone, home plate, and, unseen, thousands of adoring fans. There were dozens of such photographs, and more. Photographs of the husband swinging a bat, throwing a ball, sliding into home plate, posing with other baseball stars, posing with actors, actresses, politicians, and presidents. All the photographs were the same. Stylized. Posed. Perfect exposures without a blemish. They were the photographs of an unseen portrait photographer, who had spent weeks following the family, taking snaps, developing them at his studio, discarding hundreds of possibilities before, finally, selecting those snaps from which he would let the wife choose.

There were mementoes, too. In glass cases. World Series rings. Golden Gloves. Bronzed spikes. Metal sculptures. Framed magazine covers. Civic awards from the Israeli government. From the Junior Chamber of Commerce. From charities. The husband contributed his time and energy to this charity and that. The husband was one of the ten outstanding young men in America in 1977. The husband was a Guardian of Freedom.

All the mementoes were the same. Recent. Expensive-looking. Freshly-minted reminders of the husband’s past, as if, for this family, there was no past worth recalling other than the husband’s, and no past more distant than that of a few years ago.

Everything in this house looked the same. Unblemished. Freshly minted. Disposable. Objects with no real past. Objects that could be replaced instantly with enough money. There were no rotting, gray, baby shoes of a revered grandmother. There were no brown-tinted photographs of some stern great uncle in a high-button collar, his slicked down hair parted in the middle. There were no off-focus photographs, poorly but lovingly taken by a young husband with his first Polaroid camera. There was none of that faintly shabby, comfortably worn feel of a house filled up in stages over the years as the family prospered and grew. This was a house in which most of its objects seemed to have been purchased at once, and, if they are replaced, it was not because they had been broken, but because someone had had a whim, to change a mood, to redecorate. This house was stuffed with such things. There was no unused space. It was as if, for this family, all these expensive-looking objects were needed to fill in the gaps in their unformed natures. Outside, the house and its surroundings are typical of a certain kind of affluent Southern California architecture and landscaping. Stucco walls. Orange Mission tile roof. Greenhouse plants and flowers. Grass the color of forest green and laid down in sod strips that could be rolled up like a carpet and replaced when the strips died in the Southern California heat. There is the obligatory swimming pool, reached through sliding glass doors in the den. There are floodlights aimed at the house. And a sprinkler system. The sprinklers are aimed at the house, too, not at the grass, because this is the San Fernando Valley, the land of brush fires, a land without trees, with only tall, dried grasses that flame up in the summer, a land once so uninhabitable that only coyotes and rabbits and rattlesnakes thrived.

The house sits at the end of a dead-end street on a bluff overlooking the valley and the community of Calabasas Park. Below in the valley lies a spotless, geometrically laid-out community of similar houses, of streets with vaguely European names (Park Capri, Park Siena, Park Vicente), of schools and shopping centers and country clubs and a man-made lake. All of it looks as if it sprang up, full-blown, only yesterday, without the benefit of a past, a real past, a past more distant than a few years ago. It is not the kind of community in which people go from birth to death without leaving. People move into Calabasas when they become suddenly affluent, and then, after a few years and an amicable divorce, they move back to Los Angeles, thirty miles to the south.

THE WIFE

The Wife is thirty-years-old. She is tall and thin. She has long blonde hair. She is pretty. Conventionally pretty. Pretty in the manner of a Miss America contestant. Undistinguished. Lacquered. She embellishes that look to give it distinction—bleached hair, heavy make-up—but her efforts only underline its lack of distinction. It is a look thought glamorous in certain regions of this country, and despite her protestations to the contrary (“I don’t try to look this way. I just always was glamorous.”), it is not a look acquired without effort. She claims her looks are a burden. “As a kid, they made me shy. People reacted to me in a negative way because of them. I always wanted my personality to overcome my looks, but it was difficult for people to get past them.” Her ambivalence is not uncommon among women who have been pretty all their lives. They have taken satisfaction from their looks for so long that, even when they wish to break the habit, it is not easy. “Men bother me on planes,” she says. “Businessmen. Sometimes, I leave first class and go back to coach to read in peace. Sometimes, though, if they’re only trying to be polite, if they say something like they like my profile, well, then I have to stay and talk to them.”

She was born in Detroit of Czechoslovakian ancestry. Her father was an Air Force colonel who dragged his family back and forth across the country. She attended more grammar schools than she can remember, and four high schools before she finally graduated from one in Washington State. She learned early how to forgo a social life in favor of academic achievement. She learned also, how to be alone. “I’m still not comfortable in group situations,” she says. She describes her parents as “harmonious opposites.” Her father was very strict with her, more strict than he was with her two brothers. “Still, I loved him,” she says. “But I identified with my mother. She kept the family together. She made a home wherever we were. And even though she taught me domestic skills, I’ve always felt she wanted me to be something. To achieve. She was not a career woman herself. She could have been, I think, if she hadn’t followed my father all over. When I was a little girl, I told my father I would never marry a man who was gone all the time.”

She met her husband at a dance at Michigan State, where she was a freshman, he a sophomore and a professional baseball player. Although he was then in the minor leagues, he was one of those golden youths for whom major league stardom had already been predicted. It was merely a matter of time.

“He was different from anyone I’d ever met,” she says. “He was a gentleman. He was not all over my body the minute I saw him. He seemed so stable. Maybe it was because of my childhood, but it was terrific to talk to someone who knew what he wanted to do. He’d already signed then. He was so directed, you know, to be a baseball star.”

They dated for two-and-one-half years, during which time he did become a major league star—he was the National League’s Most Valuable Player at the age of twenty-four—and their relationship reached a point where, as she puts it, “either we married or it died. I’d never thought of marrying a baseball player. I wasn’t even a fan, and then, suddenly, I was the wife of a major leaguer. The wife of a star.”

For the first time in her life, the wife, always a pretty woman, became visible in relation to someone else—her husband. It was exciting. She would walk down the ramp leading to her seat with the other wives at the stadium and fans would turn in admiration. Children, even grown men, begged her for her autograph. When her husband came to bat, he always paused a minute in the on-deck circle, and looked for her in the stands. The camera quickly panned to her (she was easy to spot, with her long blonde hair). She cheered her husband on. He hit a home run, or a double, or a single, and, in a way, she had shared in it.

“The high point of my day was going to the ballpark,” she says. “Soon my entire satisfaction was in my husband’s career, his day-to-day achievements. Some of the wives tear their hair out during the games. I watched one wife unravel the entire hem of her dress. Another tore her nails off. I wasn’t that bad. I wasn’t that team-oriented. Until my husband came to bat, I would read a book to pass the time. I made sure the book was in my lap so no one would notice.”

In her early twenties, she became used to living her life in the public eye, in that rarefied atmosphere of adulation and deference and instant gratification so familiar to famous athletes, politicians, actors, and rock stars, who, after awhile, see it all as their birthright. Her husband bought her a baby blue Cadillac with a vanity license plate—“Cyndy N6” (her name, his uniform number). Her husband took her with him when he was a guest on a television talk show. While she waited in the wings, he took his place beside Johnny or Dinah or Merv or Mike.

Wearing a three-piece-suit, his thumbs hooked into his vast pockets, looking for all the world like a young Southern entrepreneur, the husband could not contain himself. He waited for an opening, forced it even, and then began to tell Johnny or Dinah or Merv or Mike about his wife: how intelligent she was (3.8 grade average in sociology), how beautiful she was (a model), how talented (a dancer), what a great wife she was (she inspired him to hit home runs), what a great mother she was (for by then they had two daughters), and, finally, how much he loved her. The audience applauded. (At home, unseen, more than one ordinary housewife groaned at his effusiveness.) Then, the husband, hinting broadly, told his host that his wife was waiting for him off-stage. The host invariably took the bait. Well, let’s bring her out! She slipped through the curtain onto the stage. The audience applauded, again, applauded as resoundingly as if she had been a famous actress or singer, and not merely the wife of a baseball star. As she walked across the stage towards her husband, he beamed.

The husband took her with him everywhere, and always, it seemed, it was a public occasion recorded by the media. She went to banquets when he gave a speech or received yet another award. There were mostly men at these banquets, older men, baseball executives, Rotarians, and they were all charmed by the wife. “They always said the same thing,” says the wife. “‘Oh, isn’t she lovely!’ They said it to my husband. In front of me. ‘Lovely’ became my middle name.” She went with her husband to charity functions, too, and political fund raisers (for even then, the husband harbored distant political ambitions) in which she and her husband were as celebrated as the politicians seeking office. “When we walked in,” says the wife, “the crowd parted for us as if we were royalty.”

Their public perceived then as a handsome, loving couple. And nice. Nice in that bland, middle American conception of niceness (“If you can’t say something nice about someone, then it’s best not to say anything at all.”) It seemed almost irrelevant that, despite their image, they were nice, truly nice to those who got to know them. The media, in which, increasingly, they seemed to live their lives, began referring to them as baseball’s perfect couple. The blonde wife with the perfect smile (so what if, picture after picture, it was the same smile and her hair seemed a solid piece?). The handsome husband with the blow-dried hair (so what if he looked a bit too boyish and his hair was done at Jon Peters’ Salon in Beverly Hills).

They signed on with the William Morris Agency. Endorsements began to pour in: Pepsi (“As soon as I get to my seat at the stadium,” says the wife, “I order a Coke. . . . Oh, I mean Pepsi!”), Jack LaLanne (the husband and wife exercising, smiling, not a drop of sweat anywhere, and the wife, curiously, appearing taller than the husband), Mattel (the makers of, among other things, Ken and Barbie dolls. After they signed with Mattel, the media began to refer to the couple, not without a touch of sarcasm, as “the Ken and Barbie dolls of baseball.” The sarcasm escaped the wife, at first: “I was so flattered,” she says. “I only wish I had…” (modest pause) “…as much on top as she does.”)

Soon, their public image began to work against them. No one could be that perfect! No couple could be that much in love! No life was that simple! “But it was,” says the wife. “It was simple. We were just young and in love and we did a lot of charitable work.” Her husband began to have trouble with his teammates, who felt he was receiving a disproportionate share of publicity. Worse, they felt he courted it. (More than once, he was heard saying to a magazine writer, “Will this be a cover story?”) His image grated on them. They questioned its sincerity. How could someone, a baseball player, a star, on whose time the public had made unfair demands, be so nice to everyone? Before every home game, he went out of his way to say hello to two little old ladies in the stands. “They’ve come to every game,” he says, and then adds with all humility, “They just wouldn’t feel right unless I said, ‘Hello.’ It makes their day.”

There was a much publicized locker room fight with a teammate. Punches were thrown. They grappled on the floor. Their teammates had to pry them apart. Afterwards, there were televised apologies. The husband began to crack. In an emotional speech, he told the audience he was defending his wife’s honor. He refused to elaborate.

The bad feeling that some teammates harbored against the husband spilled over onto the wife. The other wives complained that she was too often with her husband, especially on those public occasions when the media was present. They told her she had never paid her dues in the minor leagues as they had, as if this was the wife’s fault. They complained that a woman’s magazine photo lay-out of the team wives carried a disproportionate number of photos of the wife. They threatened to withdraw their approval of the lay-out unless the imbalance was rectified. They complained, finally, that too often during a game the television camera panned the wives and focused on the wife.

“It wasn’t my fault,” says the wife. “It was just that my hair made it easy for the camera man to pick me out. And I didn’t tell the magazine to use more pictures of me than the others. It was their decision. A few of the wives—and I want to emphasize this point, I’ve only had trouble with a few of them—maybe were not as pretty as I am, and maybe they didn’t have a vehicle like I did—” meaning the husband—“I began to sit off by myself at games. Why not? I’d always felt their conversation was so trivial, anyway. I mean, those few I didn’t get along with. They spent hours talking about make-up. I would go wild. They said I was a snob for not sitting with them, so I went upstairs to the Stadium Club. I watched the game from behind a glass partition.

“I phased out of baseball three years ago. I don’t see the wives much anymore. I don’t have to ask them about their kids or their husbands or anything. I only went to eight games last year. It wasn’t any one big thing, it was just that a season came along and I said, that’s it. I don’t go to banquets anymore with my husband, either. I told him I couldn’t take it. I wanted to scream! All those men talking baseball. I was just a ‘lovely’, that’s all. I promised myself I wouldn’t do that anymore. My husband says I don’t want to participate in any part of his life now. He gets invitations that say, Oh, and your wife came come, too. She can sit on the dais with you. Of course, she isn’t gonna do shit, but so what? I wouldn’t go. There would always be this empty place beside my husband with my name tag, and my name spelled wrong. I hate that. But that’s the way it was…I don’t go with my husband to talk shows either. I’ll only go if I have a vehicle of my own. I can sing, you know. I can dance. I can talk. I can chew gum.”

The wife was twenty-nine-years-old. Life was no longer simple. She took a job.

THE JOB

The chef is smoking a long cigar while plucking the feathers from a dead chicken. The lady from Adopt-a-Dog is sitting on stool with two whimpering puppies and a towel on her lap. The male model is smoothing the sides of his hair with the flat of his palms. The housewife, who lost her husband to her best friend and wrote a book about it, is talking to an actress whose career was based on her talent for marrying a succession of men, each more wealthy than the last. The actress, a plump little blonde, is telling the housewife how she has managed to retain her taut facial skin without benefit of a facelift. She throws her hair forward, over her face, and points behind her ears. “You see, Dahlink,” she says. “Not
even a scar.”

Suddenly, there is a call for quiet on the set. The director, a slim black man with a gold earring in one pierced ear, begins counting down, out loud, from ten. “Nine…eight…seven…” Behind him, a New York commercial actress is telling a bearded man about her network coffee commercial.

“You see this,” she says, pointing to her face.” This is the face that launched a thousand coffee cups.”

The director whirls around on his heels, plants his hands on his hips, and snaps, “Quiet, LOVE! If you please!” He returns to his counting. The battery of cameras begins to move forward, towards the talk show host, a dapper man in a pinstriped suit, who is sitting on a large sofa. Sitting beside him is the wife, the show’s co-host. The director points at the host and nods with great exaggeration. The host begins his monologue. The wife smiles at the camera. She is sitting up very straight, legs crossed, hands folded in her lap, leaning slightly towards the host. Every so often she interjects a comment. The host responds without looking at her. She smiles at the camera. The host goes on. From the shadows, the New York actress whispers to the bearded man. “It’s a regional look,” she says of the wife. “It would never play in New York.”

The wife is wearing a teal blue, Qiana, pajama suit with white high heeled shoes. The suit is belted at the waist with a large, cloth flower. There is a string of pearls around her long, tanned neck. Her blonde hair is pulled back into a pony tail revealing a pair of oversized bulb earrings. Her hair is pulled back so tightly from the sides of her face, stretching the skin, that her face looks gaunt. She is too thin. Her thin arms appear as sticks protruding from her sleeveless blouse. On the television screen she appears only as slim, but in person she looks emaciated. There are deep lines, parentheses, on either side of her wide mouth, as if from too much smiling, or too severe a diet, or maybe just from an inner tension that is finally beginning to show in her face.

The host is telling a funny story directly into the camera. The wife adds a word here and there, no more than a phrase. She punctuates her words with a taut smile, a laugh, a flutter of eyelids, a gesture of her hands, all of which seem a bit out-of-sync with her words. She smiles too broadly, too often, too late. The host finishes his story and she laughs, laying a hand on his arm and leaning against his shoulder. The host begins another story. The wife listens, smiles. She initiates nothing, ventures little, seems content only to react to his lead, as if all her life she has been only an appendage of men.

As the host is finishing his monologue, the wife interrupts him with a truly funny comment of her own. The camera crew breaks into laughter. The host turns his head towards her, simultaneously pulling away from her as if her touch carried contagion. “What the hell do you know?” he says, only half-kidding. “You’ve only been doing this show for a year. I’ve been doing it for five years.” She smiles at him, as a dutiful wife would a husband who has chastised her in front of guests. Unseen by the camera, she kicks him in the shins.

“Oh, Jeez,” says the New York actress to the bearded man. “No wonder she doesn’t have much confidence. He won’t give her a break. He’s a real cunt.”

Before the commercial break, the host introduces the day’s guests. The camera pans to each of them at various parts of the set. The chef at the kitchen set. The Adopt-a-Dog lady on the stool. The blonde actress and the housewife-author. The male model in a jogging suit. The model looks properly macho into the camera, a snarl on his lips, and then, when the camera leaves him, he dashes off, like the athlete he is supposed to be, towards a make-shift dressing room in the shadows. A male attendant is leaning against the dressing room wall. As the model dashes inside, the attendant disdainfully peels off after him.

During the commercial break, the wife takes a sip from a mug of coffee. When she returns it to the coffee table in front of her it is smudged with lipstick. She climbs down from the elevated sofa set and goes over to the Adopt-a-Dog lady and sits on a stool beside her. She smiles at the lady and pets the whimpering puppies with a wary hand. The black director hands her a towel. She lays it across her lap and reluctantly takes the two puppies. She is holding them stiffly in her lap when the camera returns to her. She smiles into the camera as she begins to interview the Adopt-a-Dog lady.

She gives the audience a number to call if anyone of them wishes to adopt one of the puppies. As she finishes her interview, she looks suddenly startled. She looks down at the puppies in her lap. She shakes her head and rolls her eyes heavenward. The camera crew breaks into laughter. The Adopt-a-Dog lady blushes. The wife forces a smile into the camera as it pans away from her for another commercial break. The wife, with a forced smile, dries her lap with the towel and goes back to the sofa set with the host to wait for the camera’s return. The host points at her soiled lap, and laughs. She says nothing, smiles at him, and sits stiffly waiting for the camera to return. When it does, and the host begins to introduce the next guest, the male model, who is now in a white summer suit, the wife takes the wet towel in her lap and lays it gently over the host’s shoulder.

After the segment with the model, the wife goes over to the kitchen set with the chef. She is replaced at the sofa set by the housewife-author and the blonde actress. The blonde actress stops at the foot of the elevated set, her arms held out from her sides like wings, and says, “Dahlinks, somebody please, give me a step up.”

The director holds her under her outstretched arms and helps her up. Soon the camera pans back to the sofa and the host begins interviewing the housewife-author, who is plugging her book, and the blonde actress, who is plugging a line of cheap cosmetic jewelry. Waiting at the kitchen set, unseen by the camera, the wife is laughing softly with the chef. He is a robust, barrel-chested man with a van Dyke beard and slicked back hair that curls up at the nap of his neck. He tells the wife something with a lascivious grin, flourishing his cigar for emphasis. Laughing, she brushes lint off his navy blazer and straightens the handkerchief dripping from his coat pocket. At the sofa set the housewife-author is telling the host about her experiences. “The problem with most women,” she says, “is that their self-esteem is always tied up with a man.”

Finally, the camera pans to the wife and she introduces the chef. He drops his cigar and steps on it as he greets her and the audience with a booming, good-natured voice. He resembles an 1890s circus strongman. He says he is going to teach the wife how to prepare a chicken for stew. He hands her a pot-holder glove. She looks at it, holds it up to the camera with a thumb and forefinger as if it was rancid.

“What’s this?” she says. “I haven’t been in a kitchen in three years.”

The chef roars with laughter. The wife shrugs, slips on the pot-holder. She is no longer studied, seems very much at ease now, and confident with the chef. Perhaps it is because she is freed from the tyranny of the host, or perhaps it is merely because the chef is such a good-natured, sexually robust man, and the wife is so obviously attracted to such men.

The chef holds up the plucked chicken by the neck. It is a ridiculous sight. He pinches it in various places, slaps it a few times to the delight of everyone on the set. “You know,” he says to the wife, “I used to be a geek in the circus.” The wife laughs, a truly genuine laugh, and as she does she slides her arm around his back and clings to him… At the close of the show, the camera pans back to the host who announces tomorrow’s guests. The wife stays to talk to the chef. From the shadows, the New York actress says to the bearded man, “You know, she could make it in New York. If I was a casting director, and she came to me for a job, I’d tell her to go home, wash her face, cut her hair, get some sleep, gain fifteen pounds, and then come back and read some copy…Oh, and of course, she’d have to get over whatever it is that’s making her so drawn and tense.”

THE HOTEL

The two producers have taken off their suit coats and silk shirts against the morning heat as they sit by the hotel pool playing cards and talking business into telephones. They pause in their business dealings only to acknowledge each other’s play of cards with a nod and a flourish of their long cigars. They are in their sixties, distinguished looking men, in that typically Southern California manner. Tanned. White-haired. Mustachioed. Vigorous-looking, with the faint muscle tone of older men who train daily with chromium-plated weights. They are wearing gold medallions around their necks, the medallions partially obscured by the white foliage on their chests.

The pool, like the pink stucco hotel beside it, is camouflaged from the street by palm trees and dark, tropical vegetation, as are most of the pools belonging to the mansions on this residential street of millionaires. The pool boy circles the pool, laying white towels over the arm of each deck chair. A woman is swimming laps. She swims from one end of the pool to the other and back again. She swims with a maddening precision, altering her stroke only to lift her head from the water for a breath, before plunging on. The pool boy is oblivious to the woman in the pool. He is wearing white tennis shorts, and he moves with a ponderous, thick-legged slowness. He is blonde, but no longer youthful, and his body has not aged well as it has taken on flesh. He stops to hand a towel to an actress reclining on a chaise lounge reading a script. She is wearing dark glasses, a string bikini, and satin short-shorts. She accepts the towel with a languidly raised hand without taking her eyes from her script. She resembles, faintly, Jane Fonda, only in a more conventional way, with less of Fonda’s distinct, big-jawed prettiness.

A few chairs away, a party of men in bathing suits is seated around an awninged table, finishing their breakfast. One of them is the son of the wealthiest man in the world. A few years ago the son was kidnapped and held for ransom in Italy, and after he had been released there was talk that he had engineered his own abduction to bilk his father out of millions. Every so often, one of the men at the table glances over at the actress. Finally, the youngest-looking man, red-haired and freckled, with part of an ear missing, leans forward and whispers to one of his friends. The friend gets up and goes over to the actress. He is wearing Bermuda shorts and white patent-leather loafers without socks. He hovers over the actress for a long moment, waiting for her to acknowledge him. She does so, only after she has finished a page of her script. He smiles at her, and says something. She looks at him wearily, closes her eyes behind her dark glasses as if to erase him from sight, and, without speaking, returns to her script. The man utters a curse and returns to his friends. The actress does not look up from her script again for a long while, and when she finally does, the men have gone. Only the remnants of their breakfast remain. Two hummingbirds are hovering over the plates, pecking at the morsels of food.

The maitre’d sighs, snaps up the menus he has just deposited on the table near the service bar, and leads the wife and her gentleman companion to another table in the center of the nearly-deserted hotel restaurant.

“Will this do, Madam?” he says.

“Yes. Thank you very much,” says the wife, smiling. They sit down. After the maitre’d leaves, the wife says, “Well, I just don’t care. I will not be seated near the service bar.” Her companion nods. He is a tall man, in his forties, with a salt-and-pepper beard. He unbuttons the cuffs of his silk shirt and is about to roll them back, when the wife says, “Oh, let me do it. I think it looks sooo sexy.”

She rolls back the cuffs twice, smiling at the man as she does so. It is the smile of a coquette. Of someone who thinks they are being sexy. Of someone who is trying to be sexy. Of someone who has read too many of the wrong women’s magazines. It implies nothing, is merely a dessert filled with empty calories. Falsely satisfying, yet without substance. She knows, and she assumes her companion knows, that her flirtation is meant to lead nowhere. She is the wife of a star, who can afford such a luxury. She is used to flirting without having to deliver on it. It is safe. Most men are gratified by it, by her merely laying a hand on their arm, a small blessing, for which they are grateful.

Her companion asks how she manages to put up with the talk show host. She smiles and says, “You mean, Bozo? Oh, he’s my big bad brother. He’s always teasing me, but I can put up with it because I don’t need it. The show, I mean. They told him the show would be a lot better if he’d do less. But he won’t. Actually, he’s good for me. There’s a lot of give and take, and I have to hold my own against a very strong man. Viewers like the way we bicker back and forth. It’s like a husband and wife bickering over coffee in the morning. The funny thing is, we really like each other. I mean, he was in a bad mood today because he didn’t get a commercial he auditioned for last night. That’s all. He took it out on me, but that’s the way it is. Still, I really do like him. And I love the atmosphere of the set. It’s kinda like a baseball locker room, only on a higher intellectual level, don’t you think? Oh, that’s dumb to say. I’ve never been in a locker room.”

A waiter comes to take their order, and then leaves. The room is filled now, with voices and the clatter of silverware against porcelain. The people at tables in the middle of the room are talking to one another, while those at the more prestigious booths along the walls are talking into telephones. The telephones are green, hospital green, their wires are a faded pink. Everything in this hotel-lounge, which is famous for its movie star clientele, is done in pink or green. Napkins (green). Table cloths (pink). Rubber plants (green). Carnations (pink, their stems, green). Leather booths (green). The telephones are green and pink. A woman in a turban is seated alongside of a man at a booth. The man is eating while the woman is talking into a telephone. The man says something to the woman. She puts a finger into the ear nearest the man so she can better hear the voice coming through the telephone. The man sighs, disgustedly, and pours heavy cream over strawberries in a silver dish. He sprinkles powdered sugar over the cream. At another booth, two men in dark suits are talking very loudly into telephones in order to be heard over the chatter of the three young blonde women interspersed between them. The men are leaning back in the booths, away from the women, who are leaning forward over the table, chattering gaily.

“Actually, this show is my kindergarten,” says the wife. “I’m working, learning, and some day I’ll graduate. I’ll be all right. I’m not twenty-two anymore. I’m no little nymphet. But I’m no ballsy career woman either. I’m just trying to balance a career with being a wife and mother. I have all this energy and nowhere to channel it. Now I have a voice of my own. I’m gonna do something with my life. Maybe I’ll do news, or straight acting, or a talk show. Whatever, I won’t go through life wondering what I might have been… Would I like a career in New York? You mean, if my husband was traded to New York? Oh, you mean just me.” She laughs, as if embarrassed. “I can’t answer that right now. The way things are…”

After the waiter brings their food, the wife is quiet for a long moment. She picks at her food. Finally, she looks up and says in a flat voice devoid of emotion, “When I married my husband, I had no idea it would lead to a career of my own. I never intended to be anything but a wife and mother until a few years ago. I was bored, so I took a job. I know my husband wants me to be happy and fulfilled, and if this job does it then that’s what he wants for me. In the long run, my career might even be bigger than my husband’s.”

She laughs again, as if contemplating a fantasy. “You know, a woman in her thirties needs mobility to grow,” she continues. “When she gets into something she’s hard pressed to give it up…even for a man. I know in my own case, if I was single now, I’d be a hard person to marry…But still…my career doesn’t fill the void of not having my husband home during the baseball season. He’s gone 92 days out of the summer, and during the offseason, he’s very active in business. He’s got to take advantage of his peak earning years as a ballplayer. He’s got to capitalize on his success now. Of course, he only endorses products he uses…But God, sometimes, I wish I could cuddle with someone. I have to have someone to talk to at night. Baseball is a tough sport for a wife. A baseball wife can’t work at a conventional job, like teaching, or else she’ll never see her husband. Baseball doesn’t leave much time to be together, unless the wife goes to the park and sits in the stands and cheers her husband on. I don’t do that anymore. I’m sick of baseball. It’s fun for guys, but it’s a watching sport for girls…Jeez, when there’s no man in your house you can really go nuts…

“The wife of a baseball player must see that baseball is his main thing. I have to be a constant support for my husband. If I’m angry at him when he leaves his house for the stadium, I feel guilty maybe he won’t do well. Of course, he always does do well.” (She says this, not with pride, but with sarcasm.) “At first I channeled all my energy into him. Now he calls home, and I’m not there. A baseball wife either lives her life around her husband’s career or else she gets frustrated and this affects their marriage. A lot of us discover a need for our own identity at 30, but we’re so used to thinking in terms of a man, we think all we need to get rid of the frustration is a different man. We trade up, we think. It’s a halfway measure. If the new man’s an athlete, we’ll outgrow him, too.”

Throughout her monologue, the wife is speaking in a brusque, nasal voice that sounds almost whiny except that there is no self-pity behind it. Her voice is perfectly flat, objective, punctuated here and there by quick smiles and brittle laughter that seem rarely to correspond to the words she is speaking. In fact, her style and words contain none of the nuances of felt emotion.

“Of course, baseball leaves the wives a lot of time to develop,” she continues. “The men are gone so much of the time. It’s one of the advantages, if that’s what you want. If you don’t, you’re lonely. I’m both. And wives left alone tend to take charge. But charge of what? You think, great. I’ve got a famous husband, a big house, a career, everything, but what good is it? Go try to sleep with it. There’s always a dark moment when you want to make love to someone and there’s no one there, so you go stumbling around an empty house talking to yourself.

“The off-season’s no better when your husband is like mine, with a lot of outside business interests. You try to fulfill social obligations, go to dinners, shows, friends’ homes, and still you’re alone. You end up talking about a ghost person…You know, baseball wives are told how lucky we are, and we’re not ungrateful for the good things, but…it’s just that sometimes you crave good conversation, a laugh, and in baseball these things aren’t there for women. If a woman shows a baseball player too much in a non-sexual way, he doesn’t know what to make of her. That’s why I love older men. They can appreciate you. They’re their own men. They aren’t still growing up. I mean, I always wonder, am I gonna go through life knowing only baseball players? They’re so shy around real women. They’re nice guys, but I don’t have much to say to many of them. Is that what a hero is? Of course not. I wouldn’t want my child to look at baseball players or any athletes as heroes. It’s such a limited endeavor. You train so hard, for what?

“My feelings about baseball must sound trite to fans who see players as heroes making so much money. I mean, I don’t want to sound ungrateful. As Chico Escuela on Saturday Night Live says, ‘Baseball been berry, berry good to me.’ And it has. I’ve got security. How do you complain? The average fan is gonna read this and say, ‘What the hell does she have to be frustrated about? Hollywood must have turned her head.’ But they don’t know…Do you want to hear a baseball story? A real baseball story?

“The other day my daughter fell out of a tree and broke her wrist. My husband and I rushed her to the hospital. While she was in the operating room I had to fill out a questionnaire for a nurse. When I said my husband’s occupation was ‘baseball player’, she asked, for what team? I told her. Then she asked, what position? I got so pissed off, I shoved the paper at my husband and told him to deal with her, she was obviously more interested in him than our daughter. Now there’s another woman who’s gonna think I’m just the stuck-up wife of a star.

“Anyway, just before they set my daughter’s wrist, my husband had to leave to go to the stadium. He couldn’t wait. That’s the clearest vision of when the game comes first. Before anything. It’s so cut and dried with him. I got furious. It’s always been like that. Another time I had a baby while he was playing in the World Series. When they wheeled me back from the delivery room—I’m just coming out of the anesthesia—the nurse is putting on the TV. ‘I thought you’d like to watch your husband playing in the World Series,’ she says. I screamed at her to shut it off. Hell, he didn’t come to watch me. I could have died in childbirth and my man wouldn’t have been there. The burden is always on the wife’s shoulders. Her man is never there. You can’t even make love to your husband when you want to. You’ve got to wait for an off-day. What if you get your period? What if you don’t feel like it then? How often can you put that aside? Do you think a marriage can survive that? I need to be cuddled, tested, talked to, made love to, and if I don’t have those things I turn into a stone princess. I’m very sexual looking but I can be like ice when I’m near someone who doesn’t give off a sexual aura. I’m much more sexual than my husband. I need a man more than he needs a woman. And I want a man when I want one. That’s my ideal fantasy love. I love men. Men who are their own man. I don’t want a man who’s still growing up. My husband is the same person now that he was when I first met him. On exactly the same emotional level. He’s so goal oriented. He wants to be a senator. Ten years from now I’ll be a senator’s wife. Isn’t that funny? When he wants something he puts blinders on. That’s why he’s so successful. He’s disciplined and controlled. He’s never loose. He can’t be mussed. We play tennis, and after a few minutes, I’m a mess. He doesn’t have one hair on his head out of place. It’s not that he tries to be that way, he just is. He’s neat. Everything about him is neat. He’s the pinnacle of what everyone should be. Really, isn’t that awful? It makes life so boring. His image has been carried over on to me. We look alike so people think we are alike. But what have I ever done to make people think I’m so cherry pie? I’m not like him at all. I’m street smart. Emotional. Sensitive. I mean, he edits his thoughts. I can’t. It drives him nuts. I’m so uncontrollable he’s afraid of what I’m gonna say. I’ve been misquoted so often. I get so angry when I’m thrown into an article about him without my being talked to. He didn’t tell me you were doing a story on me, because he wasn’t sure I’d agree to it. When I found out, that old feeling clicked in me. I thought he set me up for it so I couldn’t refuse. He’s still reverberating from my wrath over the last story. Old news about the wives all hating me. A lot of Ken and Barbie shit. I told my husband, thanks a lot. Now, what are you gonna do about this? He said there would come a time. I said, when? My husband’s been in this town for twelve years and if people respected him as a man, they’d respect his wife, too…”

When the wife and her companion finally get up to leave, the maitre’d comes over to them. He apologizes to the wife for not having recognized her earlier. He is ashamed of himself, he says, Why, he watches her on television every morning. She forgives him with a smile, and then brushes his cheek with hers, her lips puckered into a kiss that caresses the air.

THE HUSBAND

The husband, dressed in a white baseball uniform with royal blue letters and red numerals, goes to the refrigerator in the clubhouse and withdraws a bottle of diet Pepsi. He does not bother to ask his guest, a bearded man in jeans, if he wants a soda, too. The husband scoops up some ice into a plastic cup and then pours the soda over the ice in such a way, the cup tilted at just the right angle, that the foam will not overflow the cup. Satisfied, he scissors his hair off his forehead and hands the cup to his guest.

In person, the husband does not look so boyishly soft as he does on television. He looks more rugged, manly, but in a Hollywood way, with a handsomely lined face. He is too handsome to be a long distance truck driver and not nearly scuffed enough to be a rodeo cowboy. Yet, his face has more character than one might expect, certainly more than that of the messianic Jim Jones, whom he closely resembles. The husband is sitting on a sofa in a small room off the clubhouse, watching a video tape of himself batting in a game. He stares at his image through narrowed eyes. Without taking his eyes off his image, he tells the man running the video tape to replay it. His image back-tracks like that in an old time comedy movie. Then it goes forward again, slower. He watches himself swing the bat. He fouls off the ball. Still without taking his eyes off his image, the husband says, “Not that far off. Yes. Not that far. Maybe move back in the box a bit.”

He speaks in a soft, droning, almost hypnotic voice, and it is not clear whether he is talking to anyone else in the room, or merely to himself. His image swings again. The husband says, “Hmmm. That’s it. That’s a training guide right there.” He nods his head and smiles. It is a small smile. Smug, almost. The smile of a man who is so obviously satisfied with himself, in a world of the dissatisfied.

The husband hops up the dugout steps onto the field and breaks into a trot towards first base while, around him, his teammates are taking pregame batting practice. He moves precisely, with a textbook stride, almost in slow motion. He is conscious of the way he runs and of the fact that he is being watched. His pumping arms are properly bent into L’s at his sides, and held away from his body a bit, like wings, as if to keep his shirt from wrinkling. He resembles a man trotting to catch a bus in a new silk shirt on a hot day.

A fan in the stands calls out his name. Without breaking stride, the husband glances back over his shoulder and bestows a blessing. He smiles. It is an odd smile, both humble and smug, and it is the same smile he shows in every newspaper and magazine photograph of himself. It is automatic, perfected, the smile of a man who is used to smiling often in public, even when the occasion does not demand it, just as a foreigner smiles too readily at things he does not understand.

Standing at first base, the husband takes ground balls during batting practice. He moves deftly around the bag, scooping up balls with studied nonchalance, and then pausing a moment to examine each ball. He looks for scuff marks or caked dirt that might cause the next ground ball to take a bad hop. If he finds a blemish he either tosses the ball into the dugout or else scrapes off the dirt with his fingernail before lobbing it back to his coach. He sets himself again in a classic first baseman’s pose, and waits for the next ball. He moves to his right, bends low and spears the ball. He moves with a certain stiffness, as if he has yet to loosen aching muscles. His are the movements of a man with a single focus of concentration, a man for whom nothing—running, picking up a ball, smiling—is natural or intuitive and everything is learned.

The husband trots over to the batting cage to take his swings. There is a crowd of people around the cage. Teammates. Opposing players in orange and black uniforms. Photographers with cameras slung around their necks. Reporters with tape recorders and steno pads. Television announcers wearing patchwork sports jackets and white patent leather loafers. The husband shakes hands with an opposing black player and makes a joke, “No socialism before a game.” It is a malapropism. He means socializing. He allows each writer a few moments for an interview; he poses for photographers; he stands for an interview with a television sportscaster. He greets everyone around the cage with good cheer and a smile. (“You should say something nice to everyone,” he has said.)

It is the same smile for each. Only his compliments vary. They are personal to each man. He asks one man what kind of gas mileage he is getting with his new car. He congratulates another on his daughter’s acceptance into a prestigious college. He compliments a third on a book he has written. (“I gave it to my wife,” he says. “She read it three times.”) Each person is slightly taken aback at his knowledge of their personal affairs; and then flattered that he, a star, has taken the time to bestow a blessing; and, finally, disturbed, although they are not sure why. It is, as if, like a good politician, he has memorized the voluminous file cards his advance men have accumulated on the personal lives of each constituent he is about to meet at a fund raiser.

Twenty minutes before the game is to begin, the husband is seated by his locker in the clubhouse. Around him, his teammates joke amongst themselves, ignoring him. (“I don’t understand how he does it,” says the wife. “His locker is between those of two players he doesn’t get along with.”) “It’s not so hard,” says the husband. “You have to learn to live with thirty players because you’ve got to play together.”

Then he tells a sportswriter it would be best to conduct the interview in the concrete runway where they can have some “privacy.” They go out to the runway and sit on uniform trunks. Before the writer can even ask a question, the husband begins the interview in his soft, droning voice. A star, he is used to being interviewed. Immediately, he steers the interview in the direction in which he wishes it to go. He talks about his children. How he sent them to a Catholic school to get a Catholic base. How difficult it is for him to function like other fathers. Still, despite the burden of his stardom, his daughters are very well-adjusted. He and his wife try to be like other parents, he says, and then, “I can be a silly daddy, too, you know.”

He looks down and flutters his eyelids as he speaks. It is meant to be a humbling gesture, The Emperor Without Clothes, but it comes off only as contrived. Self-conscious in the extreme.

“I always try to do what I feel like doing,” he continues. “I’m not acting. This is not a concentrated effort. I am the same as I was ten years ago. Everyone has their own space and they have to decide how they want to use it. It’s natural to me to say, ‘Hello,’ to everyone. To wave to those little old ladies who haven’t missed a game. I look forward to seeing them. In life, you’re either a people person or a private person. I’m a people person. I like dealing with groups of people. I think I can get along with banker’s sons and blacks from the ghettos. When I retire, I’d like to go into politics.”

He talks for a few more minutes about his political ambitions, and then he begins to talk about his wife. Her 3.95 grade point average in college. Her energy. Her deep insight. Her talent for interviewing. The speed with which she mastered her talk show format. “It amazes me,” he says, truly amazed, and he goes on. He can’t stop. About his wife, he is compulsive.

It is Band Day at the stadium. A few minutes before the game is to begin, a dozen or so colorfully-uniformed high school bands assemble in front of a small conductor’s platform at the pitcher’s mound. The public address announcer introduces the guest conductor. It is Lawrence Welk! The fans applaud. Welk, smiling, wearing a powder blue blazer, white slacks and shoes, leaps out of the home team dugout as agilely as any young player. He walks briskly towards the pitcher’s mound. His hair is slicked back into a stiff pompadour, and he looks remarkably fit for a man in his seventies. The public address announcer calls attention to this fact, to Welk’s age—seventy-seven. The fans applaud louder. Welk breaks into a trot.

“Isn’t he amazing, folks, seventy-seven years young!” says the public address announcer. Welk is running now, as fast as a seventy-seven-year-old man in patent leather loafers can run on slick grass. When he reaches the pitcher’s mound, he is exhausted, but still smiling. Two men grip him by each elbow and propel him up the platform. . . .There is something disturbing about Lawrence Welk’s vitality, about his show of vitality—at seventy-seven. It is not enough for him to be remarkably fit at that age—an age when most men are tending a lone orange tree behind their mobile home in St. Petersburg, Florida—he is compelled to show us how fit he is—at seventy-seven. He intends to remind people of what they will never be, to remind them of how dissatisfied they should be in the face of his obvious satisfaction with what he is. He is gloating in the same way many people feel that the husband is gloating over the successes of his life—his wife, his children, his talent, his image, his future. To make matters worse, the husband is satisfied with himself so soon, at thirty-one! He seems so positive he is the best he can be, that he strives only to protect the delicate balance of his perfect life without ever questioning the worth of what he’s created. It is an enviable state, and those who have not reached it resent him for implying that this is their failure. But he doesn’t. Unlike Welk, the husband does not intend to rub our noses in his perfection. He is merely a simple man who has worked very hard at being what he thinks he should be, and now he is single-mindedly compelled to maintain the standards he has set for himself.

THE PROBLEM

“My husband is a very warm, gentle, understanding, considerate…father. His controlled traits pay off with our children,” she says. The wife, dressed in a peach-colored, velour jogging suit, is sitting cross-legged on the print sofa in the den of her house. A bearded man in jeans is sitting in a chair beside her. He is leaning towards her, his elbows on his knees, his hands folded in front of him. There is a tape recorder on the coffee table in front of her, the microphone aimed at her. She does not look at the microphone as she speaks, nor does she look at the man to her left. She stares straight ahead, through unseeing eyes, as she speaks in her brusque, whiny, yet absolutely unemotional voice.

“We don’t talk baseball or my show, anymore,” she says. “Just the children. We’re not good in certain areas. I’m not as affectionate as I used to be and he, he’s so jumbled up in his career and his outside interests…When I say, ‘Let’s talk about it,’ he says, ‘Whoa! Is this gonna be the same old stuff? How unhappy you are?’ I say, ‘Oh, forget it, then!’ Maybe relationships are just bound to deteriorate gradually, I don’t know? Don’t get me wrong, we’re not serving papers, or anything. It’s just…I wonder, are marriages ideal anymore? I mean, I’m out here in the land of fantasy and I see relationships come and go and I don’t know whether or not it’s worth it to cash in on something stable in order to find something more fulfilling. That’s why I want to try everything to make this thing work. During the off-season we’re going to Europe. I really hope in the next year my husband can develop to keep my interest. I want to see if what I feel in love with is still there…

“Sometimes, though, I feel I’m banging my head against the wall. I’m trying to get him to see other possibilities, that the way he sees things is not the only way. But he’s so satisfied with the way he is. He’s stayed the same all these years. He does everything the way people wish they could do them. He can’t break that mold. It’s really him. He’s a nice guy. He gives and all, but…ah, I want electricity, a spark, some idiosyncrasy…Now catch this act. It was so stupid. A few days ago we had three hours to ourselves. We’re driving in the car. He says to me, ‘Where do you want to go to eat?’ I mean, I’d love my man to say, ‘I’m taking you here and then back home to make love.’ Now, I could have said that, but it wouldn’t be the same. I want him to be smart enough to arrange his meetings around me. I don’t want him to have to be told. I don’t want to teach him anymore. Oh, he tries, but he can’t be something he’s not. He has no interests other than baseball. He doesn’t understand music, or art. Those LeRoy Neiman prints? They all look alike to me. And he’s not a sexual guy. Sometimes he teases me. He walks around the house with this great body, and when I try to focus love and attention on it, it’s not there. I’m a girl who needs a regular sex life…I’ve reached the point where I don’t care anymore. Then again, maybe it’s me? Maybe it’s not his problem, but mine? Maybe I haven’t told him exactly what I want? Maybe this will pass and I’m just going through a cycle? Sometimes I think I’m distorted, that what I want can never be. I told my husband he should have married another girl. I don’t want to sell him short. I don’t want to downgrade him; he has no choice because of the structures of this sport. When we have our little fights, I say, ‘How do you fight with a sport?’ How do you do that?

“I’m open now, because I’m angry. I’m tired of that Ken and Barbie shit. I never questioned before. I was always busy with the children. The suburbs drove me nuts. I had to get out. That’s why I went back to work. Maybe my job will be a way out. I don’t want to give up what I’ve got unless I can go to something else. I don’t want to drag my kids around during my indecision. If I can tolerate it, if I can live within the confines of this marriage, I’ll stay. I’m not wanting for anything. It’s convenient. No, it’s not even that. That’s not enough. Maybe some miracle happens to help you make up your mind? Sometimes I wonder if I met someone would a relationship develop. I haven’t had any affairs yet, but I wonder what it would be like. Someone who is his own man. I’m untapped. No one touches me. There’s no mentor in my life. Someone to tell me to shut up. I get so depressed. I have too much time to think. What am I doing here? Life is going on around me and I’m not participating. My security is to go out and then come back. I can’t keep doing this. Everyone tells me how lucky I am. If I divorced my husband I’d have to get out of town. He’s a god here. Where would I go without my husband? Do you know what a price it is to be told that? A real kick. I mean, just because he doesn’t beat me or anything, it doesn’t mean. . . .”

She falls silent for a moment. She is still staring straight ahead. Throughout her monologue, the tone in her voice has remained constant. Brusque. Unemotional. Confusing to her listener. How can she reveal such intimacies without the nuances of felt emotion? Does she feel nothing? Or is it simply that there is some strange lack in her, some inability to communicate her deepest emotions in conventional ways? She does not cry. Her voice does not falter. Her expression never varies. In fact, at times, she flashes her brittle smile precisely at that moment one expects her to cry. She reveals everything—trivialities and intimacies—on the same note. It is the single note of a Public Persona, of one who is used to smiling in front of a camera, or the public, no matter what the mood of the moment may be. It is, as if her nature had been formed in some Charm School where she was taught always to smile, to be nice, to express herself in a pleasant way. Now, at thirty, when she is feeling unpleasant emotions, she knows of no other way to express them. It is her curse. She will always be misread. She will always appear to be cool, aloof, unfeeling, no matter how deeply she feels. She is like her husband. Their style will always be misconstrued as a lack of substance.

She begins again. “Sometimes, half-kiddingly, I say to my husband, ‘If I ever left you, would you always be my good friend?’ He says, ‘No,’ and then a little later, ‘O.K.’ He’s like a brother to me. What I’m hoping—if I don’t get involved with a lover somewhere—is that…I’m going to have to…” She falls silent again. She is still staring straight ahead. Her face still has that perfectly composed look, only now; she is trying very hard not to cry. She forces back her tears with a weak laugh and a brittle smile before she can continue, “…we’ll have to be good friends for awhile…maybe we can…I mean, sometimes, I’ll catch a vignette, it’s like I’m wearing 3D glasses, and suddenly I’ll see something we’re doing together, and it’s all right again. Maybe we’re at a show, or playing tennis, and I’ll say to myself, ‘Oh, that’s it! That’s fine!’ But then it goes away and a few nights later I’m sitting home alone, crying, thinking, is this the future for me? To gut it out…”

THE COUPLE

It is dusk in Calabasas Park. The bearded man walks up to the front door of the house on the bluff at the end of Park Vicente, and rings the door bell. The husband appears, smiling, and welcomes him inside. The husband is wearing a V-neck sweater and gray slacks. He leads the bearded man to the family room where he has been watching television. They sit down on a sofa, and, after a few words of small talk, the husband returns his attention to the television. He is now watching a program, whose premise, in imitation of the Superstars competition, is to find the best bar bouncer and the best belly flop diver in the country.

A huge black man (Mr. T), who claims he was Leon Spinks’ former bodyguard, is the last contestant in the bouncer competition. Mr. T has a shaved head, a goatee, and a ring through his nose, and he looks like someone who should be hanging by one hand from the Empire State Building. A bell rings and Mr. T dives over a fake bar, picks up a dummy and heaves it, head first, through a plate glass window. Then Mr. T crashes through a door, splintering it, and rings a bell. His time is recorded and he is judged the winner. He is interviewed by Bruce Jenner.

After a commercial, during which the husband is still silent, the belly flop championships begin. A man in a straw boater and a tuxedo climbs up onto a diving board and leaps off into a pool. He lands with a splat on his stomach. The audience around the pool cheers wildly. The next contestant, a man in a red t-shirt, dives off the board and as he is suspended in mid-air, his arms outstretched like wings, he bursts into flames. The flames are doused when he hits the water. The bearded man can’t keep from laughing at this. The husband looks at him for a moment, and only then does he smile.

The wife appears, holding the daughter with the broken wrist. The daughter, a beautiful blonde child with pouting lips, is sobbing with pain. The husband says to the bearded man, “Well, let’s get the interview over. We can do it in my office.”

But before he can raise, his wife snaps at him.

“Oh, Garvey, you make me sick,” she says. “Stay right there!” She goes over to the television set and turns it off. “Did you offer him a drink, at least?”

The husband jumps up and asks the bearded man if he would like a Pepsi. He goes to the kitchen to get one. While he is gone, the wife says, “Sometimes, he just…I mean, he leaves the dumb TV on when you’re here. I hate that. And then he pulls that interview shit…” She shakes her head.

When the husband returns with the Pepsi, the wife hands him their daughter for a few moments. The husband is very careful in the way he holds his daughter. While his wife and the bearded man talk, he sooths his daughter with his voice. Soon, her eyes fill with sleep. He gently presses her head to his chest. Finally, the wife tells the bearded man she had best put her daughter to bed, and then get to bed herself in order to get up in time for tomorrow morning’s show. The husband hands her the child, and the wife and child go upstairs. The husband looks down at his sweater. His sweater is wrinkled from the warmth of his daughter’s body. With the palms of both hands, he smoothes away the wrinkles, and then sits back on the sofa.

“This is the first year, she’s been out working,” says the husband. “She’s sacrificed a lot for my career. I’d like her to have a job of more importance than mine, not so much for her to be a success, but so she’ll be happy. I love the woman very deeply. I have this sense of injustice because of what I do. It’s been draining to her. You see her now in a period of frustration. The things she’s told you, she’s told you out of emotion. Deep down she knows there’s nothing I can do about my job. She used to do a lot of things with me but now she doesn’t have time because of her job. I do things alone or else I try to fit my schedule into hers…

“We’re not so different from most people, really. People would see that if they just didn’t take into account our appearance. We’re just two people who love each other and who have gone through a lot…I hope…maybe…it’s just a cycle she’s going through…what do you think?”

When the bearded man tells the husband what he wants to hear, the husband smiles. It is unlike his other smile. It is a smile of absolute vulnerability. The husband is genuinely infatuated with his wife, in the same way a porcelain collector is infatuated with an exquisite piece—a ballerina poised on one toe as she is about to pirouette. He has loved her in the same way for ten years, and now that that is no longer enough for her, he is confused.

Finally, the bearded man gets up to leave. The husband shakes his hand at the door and tells him he is sure he and his wife will resolve their difficulties. The bearded man says he is sure they will, too. The husband opens the front door and the bearded man steps outside into the darkness. It is night, now, and strangely quiet. There is not even the sound of crickets in the hot stillness of this arid land that was not meant for human habitation. The bearded man gets into his car, and as he pulls out of the driveway, he sees the husband, a silhouette, framed in the doorway by the light at his back. The silhouette waves once, and then turns its back and closes the door.

Rorion Gracie is willing to fight to the death to prove he’s the toughest man in the west.

The toughest man in the United States holds no official titles and has had only one fight in years. He lives with his pregnant wife and four children, three small sons and a baby daughter, in a modest ranch house on a tidy little street of similar homes in Torrance, California. He is 37, tall and skinny at 6’2″, 165 pounds, and he does not look very tough. He looks mor like Tom Selleck than like Mr. T. He is dark and handsome like Selleck, with wavy black hair, a trim mustache and a charming, self-deprecating smile. He spends more time in the kitchen than his wife does and wears a woman’s apron. He has an idiosyncratic high-pitched laugh. He picks up a yellowed newspaper with an account of one of his father’s fights, adjusts his bifocals and reads. “‘The most savage, stupid bloody desires of the audience were satisfied,’” he says. Then he laughs. “Heh-heh!”

“I never spank my sons,” Rorion says, “because my father never spanked me.” He spends as much time as possible with his sons. He drives them to their soccer practice in his station wagon. He spends the day with them at the beach.

Rorion once fought a kick-boxing champion and made him beg for mercy in less then three minutes. Before the fight, the kick boxer had stood in his corner of the ring and flexed his muscular arms. He cut the air with savage kicks. The crowd oohed and aahed. Rorion, skinny and stoop-shouldered, stood in his corner and waited. Two minutes and 15 seconds after the bell sounded, he was straddling the kick boxer on the mat in such a way that, if the kick boxer had not surrendered, Rorion would have “choked him out.”

Rorion has made a standing offer to fight anyone in the United States, winner take all, for $100,000. So far he has had no takers – for one simple reason. Rorion’s fights are fights to the finish with no rules. His fights are merely street brawls in a ring bounded by ropes. Kicking, punching, head butting, elbow and knee hits are all fair play in a Gracie fight. Only the accouterments of a street brawl – broken bottles, ash cans, bricks – are missing. The only purpose of referee serves in a Gracie fight is to acknowledge his opponent’s surrender when he taps the mat with his hand or passes out from a choke hold.

Rorion (pronounced Horion, in the Portuguese way) is a master of a kind of no-holds-barred jujitsu practiced by his family in Brazil for 60 years. Gracie jujitsu is a bouillabaisse of the other martial arts: judo (throws), karate (kicks, punches), aikido (twists), boxing (punches) and wrestling (grappling, holds). Its primary purpose is defensive; i.e., to render attackers immobile. Rorion believes that since most real fights end up on the ground 90 percent of the time, Gracie jujitsu is the most devastating of all martial arts, because it relies on a series of intricate wrestling-like moves that are most effective when the combatants are on the ground. All a jujitsu master must do is avoid his attacker’s kicks, punches and stabs until he can throw him to the ground and then apply either a choke hold to render him unconscious or a hold in which he can break his attacker’s arm, leg, back or neck. A jujitsu fight is like a chess match, in that the winner is usually the one who can think the most moves ahead of his opponent.

Jujitsu originated in India 2000 years ago, travelled to Japan (via China) three centuries ago and was introduced to Brazil through Rorion’s family 60 years ago, when a touring Japanese master taught Rorion’s uncle some basic moves. His uncle taught Rorion’s father and the two men grew enamoured of it, as only two small men with monstrous egos could. They took Japanese jujitsu a step further than their teachers by introducing techniques that required less strength than Japanese style and would make their family the most feared and famous in all of Brazil. Rorion’s father, Helio, once fought an opponent in the ring before 20,000 screaming spectators for three hours and 40 minutes, nonstop, before the police finally separated the bloodied combatants. In another ring fight, he so savaged his opponent with kicks to his kidney that many attributed his subsequent death to the fight. When a rival martial-arts teacher once accused the Gracie family of fixing its fights, Helio, surrounded by a taunting crowd, confronted him on the street. He had broken the man’s arms and ribs before the police arrested him. He was sentenced to two and a half years in jail for that beating, but the president of Brazil, a fan of the Gracie family, pardoned him within a week.

Rorion laughs and says, “Heh-heh! My dad kicked his butt.” He is sitting in the den of his tidy little house, sifting through the many newspaper and magazine articles written about his family, while his sons wrestle, jujitsu style, on the floor.

Rorion holds up a photograph of his father in a kimono taken when Helio was 34. He is small, slim man at 5’8″, 135 pounds, with slicked-back hair, an aquiline nose and a pencil-thin mustache. He is hip-tossing his older brother, Carlos, in an open filed. “That was the year my dad read a Reader’s Digest article that said a boxer beat a jujitsu guy,” Rorion says. “Heh-heh! My father offered to fight five boxers in one night. At various times, he offered to fight Primo Carnera, Ezzard Charles and Joe Louis. He put up sixteen thousand dollars and told Louis he’d fight with Louis having no gloves, just taped hands. No one took up his challenge.” Rorion shrugs. “Louis was on vacation and here was this little bee buzzing in his ear and giving him no peace. Heh-heh!”

Helio reigned as the self-proclaimed toughest man in the occidental world for 25 years. He fought 14 fights in the ring and lost only two of them, one to Japanese master Kimura and the other to a much younger man – in fact, his protege – when Helio, at 42, was out of shape. Helio is 75 now, the patriarch of a family of nine children, including seven sons, and 18 grandchildren. Rorion has a photograph of his father at 73, still fit, gaunt-faced, with his aquiline nose and menacing pale-blue eyes. He is posing in his kimono with three of his sons, Rorion, Relson and Rickson, in their kimonos. Father and sons are standing identically – legs spread, arms crossed at their chests, eyes glaring at the camera – underneath a seal of the Gracie Jujitsu Academy, which Carlos and Helio founded in Rio in the Twenties. Helio’s sons have all taught at the academy at one time or another. They are black belts. They are bigger than their father, darker, but the look in their eyes is only a parody of their father’s truly menacing look. Except for Rickson. He has his own look. Not menacing but devoid of emotion. The blankness of the supremely confident. Rickson is 29, as muscular as a bodybuilder, with a Marine’s crewcut, the high cheekbones of an Inca Indian and a square jaw. If Rorion is amiably handsome, Rickson is devastatingly handsome. Noted photographer Bruce Weber devoted 36 pages of his book on Rio (O Rio De Janeiro) to the Gracies and Rickson. Rickson as a baby being tossed high into the air by his father. Rorion and Relson as small boys on the beach, Rorion hooking his leg behind his brother’s before throwing him to the sand. Rickson, in bikini shorts, on his back on a mat in a ring, his legs wrapped around the hips of a muscular black man, also in bikini shorts, who is trying to strangle him.

“Zulu,” says Rorion. “A street fighter. He was thirty pounds heavier than Rickson. He threw Rickson out of the ring four times in their fight.” Rorion gets up to put on a video tape of Rickson’s fight with Zulu for the title of the toughest man in the occidental world. A grainy image flickers on the screen. Zulu is sitting astride Rickson, on his back. He trying to gouge out Rickson’s eyes. Rickson keeps twisting his head left and right to avoid Zulu’s stabbing fingers while, at the same time, he is kicking his heels in the sides of Zulu’s back where his kidneys are. Rorion laughs and says, “Heh-heh! After the fight, Zulu was pissing blood for weeks.”

The two men, locked in combat, roll toward the edge of the ring. The crowd surges forward. Hands reach out and slap at the combatants. The referee kicks at the hands, trying to drive the crowd back, while he grabs the combatants’ legs and pulls them back to the center of the ring. A rain of crushed paper cups descends on the ring. The referee kicks the cups out of the ring like a soccer player.

“Wild people, huh?” says Rorion. “Brazil is a violent country. Watch here.” Rickson stops kicking Zulu’s kidneys, locks his legs around his hips and rolls him over so that now he is on top. He unleashes a barrage of bare-fisted punches to Zulu’s face. Zulu tries to block the blows with his hands.

Zulu manages to roll Rickson over now so that his is on top of him, close to the edge of the ring again. Before Zulu can set himself, Rickson twists Zulu’s body so that Zulu is lying on top of him, both men facing the overhead lights. Rickson gets Zulu in a choke hold and squeezes. Zulu’s eyes begin to roll back in his head.

Rorion, smiling, turns off the video and says, “I used to change Rickson’s diapers. Now he’s the best in the world. Heh-heh!” It amuses him that he is the toughest man in the United States and yet he is not even the toughest man in his own family. “Rickson has never been beaten,” he says. “No on will challenge him after Zulu. It’s been three years. The Gracie family is the only family in history that will fight anyone with no rules. The Gracies don’t believe in Mike Tyson. Rickson issued a public challenge to Mike Tyson, but he has not responded.”

All the while Rorion has been talking. His three sons have been grappling on the floor, like monkeys, in a silent parody of their father and uncle Rickson. Their names are Ryron, Rener and Ralek. Nearby is his daughter Segina. Rorion has two daughters by a previous marriage in Brazil, Riane, 12, and Rose. Rorion believes that the letter R has mystical powers. He also shuns common names, like Robert, because they carry their own associations. “An original name has only the aura you give to it,” he says. It is a belief, one of many, that Rorion inherited from his father, whom he worships almost as a god. (Rorion’s other siblings besides his brothers Relson, 36, and Rickson are brothers Rolker, 24, Royler, 23, Royce, 22, Robin, 15, and sisters Rherica, 20, and Ricci, 12.)

Rorion’s beliefs were fashioned out of Helio and Carlo’ devotion to jujitsu, not merely as a martial art but as the cornerstone for a way of living that encompasses every aspect of a man’s life, from morality and sex to diet. Rorion, for instance, eats only raw fruits and, occasionally, vegetables, and only in certain combinations as prescribed by his uncle Carlos, a nutritionist. His back yard is a greengrocer’s market of boxes of apples, watermelons, bananas, mangoes and papayas he has bought in bulk. A typical Gracie meal might include watermelon juice, sliced persimmons and a side of bananas, and the talk around the Gracie dinner table between Rorion and his wife invariably concerns such questions as whether apricots should be combined with mangoes at a meal. His sons have only a passing acquaintance with foods other than fruits. They have had chicken maybe three times in their lives, and once, at a friend’s birthday party, they were given lollipops, which they began smacking against the side of their heads because they didn’t know what they were.

If the Gracie family’s belief in the efficacy of fruits and the letter R seems nutty, if harmless, then their devotion to warrior values such as courage, honour and chivalry borders on the fanatical. Gracie men do fight at the drop of an insult, with predictably savage results. When Carlos and Helio returned home one night and found a robber in their house, they offered him the choice of fighting or going to jail. He chose to fight. In minutes, his screams woke the neighbourhood: “Jail! Jail! Jail!” When Uncle Carlos fought, he was not content merely to beat an opponent, he also wanted to teach him a lesson, or, as Uncle Carlos likes to say, “He’s gonna get to dreamland all right, but first he must walk through the garden of punishment.”

Rorion laughs and shakes his head. “Uncle Carlos was a bratty little kid. WHen he saw a Japanese guy carrying heavy loads of laundry, he liked to trip him. Heh-heh! He was very aggressive.” When Carlos found opponents scarce for his ring fights, he advertised for them in the newspaper under the headline that read, “IF YOU WANT A BROKEN ARM OR RIB, CONTACT CARLOS GRACIE AT THIS NUMBER.”

Rorion Gracie first visited the United States in 1969, when he was 17. He bummed around New York, L.A. and Hawaii for a year. He worked in a restaurant and on a construction site, where he slept. “I was always the first one on the job in the morning,” he says. When his finances got precarious, he panhandled on the street. After years of being protected in the Gracie bosom in Rio, he learned to live on his own. “I grew a lot,” he says. “Trouble only comes to test our reactions.”

When Rorion returned to Brazil at the end of 1970, he went to college, got a law degree, though he has never practiced law, got married, had two children and then got divorced. In 1979, he decided it was time to cut the Gracie umbilical cord and return to the States for good to establish Gracie Jujitsu in the States.

“I felt there were more opportunities in America to spread the work of the Gracie myth,” he says. “I felt that in Brazil, the Gracie family had reached the top and I didn’t want to stay there and live off of my father’s fame.”

The Gracie myth in Brazil began with George Gracie, a blue-eyed Scottish sailor who settled in Brazil in the early 1800′s. His descendants were bankers, diplomats, rubber-plantation barons and confidants of Brazilian emperors. A different kind of fame commenced with Carlos and Helio, whose fights were the stuff of legends. Helio was the first jujitsu master in the occidental world to defeat a Japanese master, Namiki, in 1932. He challenged any and all comers to fight in the ring with him, without rules, to the death. He fought a man to the death, only to have him surrender after four minutes. A newspaper story the following day said that the man had chosen not to die and dubbed him “The Dead Chicken.” Helio fought Fred Ebert for 14 rounds of ten minutes each, until the police climbed into the ring to separate the two combatants, who had broken noses, lost teeth, welts over their eyes and blood streaming down their faces. The fan rioted at the halting of the fight. When Helio challenged a famous Brazilian boxer known as The Drop of Fire to a fight to the death, more than 20,000 fans showed up at the stadium. Only The Drop of Fire never showed, and overnight, the press dubbed him The Drop of Fear. Once, Helio dived into the turbulent, shark-infested Atlantic Ocean to save a man from drowning and was given his nation’s Medal of Honour for his heroism.

Finally, in early 1951, Helio choked to unconsciousness Japan’s number-two master, Kato, in a fight in Brazil that earned him a shot at Japan’s premiere jujitsu master, the toughest man in all the world, Kimura. The fight took place in October of 1951 before thousands of Brazilian fans. kimura, 80 pounds heavier than Helio, agreed to the fight only if Helio, who had a reputation for never surrendering, would promise to tap the mat in surrender if his position seemed hopeless. “kimura was a gentleman,” say Rorion, “and he didn’t like to go to sleep at night dreaming of the sound of broken arms.” The fight lasted 13 minutes. Kimura got Helio in a choke hold and noticed blood coming out of Helio’s ear. “You all right?” Kimura said. “Yes,” Helio said. “Good,” Kimura said, and grabbed Helio’s head and began to crush it like an overripe melon. Carlos threw in the towel.

The next day, Kimura appeared at the Gracie academy to invite Helio to teach at the Imperial Academy of Japan. Even though Helio wasn’t scheduled to fight, Kimura could not guarantee his safety in Japan, where the fans often threaten to kill non-Japanese masters to maintain their monopoly of that martial art. Helio refused the offer. None of the current Japanese masters have dared venture to Rickson’s home turf of Rio.

“The Brazilian youth had no idols before my father,” says Rorion. “They felt there was nothing important known about Brazil. My father gave them hope. Something to believe in.”

Rorion was 27 when he decided to come to the States to spread the word of the Gracie myth. He felt that the seed of Gracie jujitsu would flourish in the fertile soil of America, where men are bigger and stronger than in Brazil. He felt that American men could become a kind of master race of jujitsu warriors. Furthermore, he felt that men, and their women, too, were tired of their world image as the wimps of feminism. As proof, he could point to the popularity of such American movie actors as Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Chuck Norris, who personified in their movies the kind of macho warrior that bore the striking resemblance to the roles assumed by Gracie men in real life in Brazil. Only the Gracie men did not need bazookas and machine guns.

Rorion moved to Southern California in 1979 and began to spread the word of Gracie jujitsu while trying to support himself in a strange country. He took a job cleaning houses. He met a woman whose husband was a movie producer. “You should be in movies,” she told Rorion. Her husband took him to Central Casting and soon he was appearing as an extra in such TV series as Hart to Hart, Starsky and Hutch and Hotel. Rorion left the housecleaning business and set up a jujitsu mat in his garage, where he began to teach students. The youngest was the four-year-old son of a movie producer and the oldest, a 75-year-old retired Marine general. When a movie producer saw his fight against Ralph Alegria, the kick boxer, he hired him as a consultant for Lethal Weapon. Rorion choreographed the final fight scene between Mel Gibson and Gary Busey in that movie. Then he met Chuck Norris and began to teach him jujitsu for his movie Hero and the Terror.

While he waited for Gracie jujitsu to catch on in the States, Rorion busied himself with his movies, his students, demonstrations for law-enforcement agencies and colleges and an occasional challenge from a beach bully. He issued a $100,000 challenge, winner take all, to a fight to the death. Finally, a few months ago, a producer called to tell him about a documentary movie he was filming on the martial arts. A kick boxer in that movie, who claimed he was “the baddest dude in the world,” had put up $100,000, winner take all, to fight anyone. Rorion accepted the challenge immediately and then told the producer, “First you better tell him who he’s going to fight.”

Rorion laughs and says, “I sparred a few times with him before. I was very gentle with him. I took him to the mat a few times, showed him some nice choke holds and he tapped the mat. Heh-heh.”

The next day, the producer called back and said that the kick boxer would fight Rorion only under the following rules: Rorion had to put up the entire $100,000, the fight would consist of ten rounds of five minutes each and the two combatants could not stay on the mat for more than a minute at a time. Rorion laughed. “But that is not a street fight,” he said. The producer never called him back.

In the den, Rorion passes his time browsing through the many books, newspapers and magazines with stories about the Gracie family. He holds up pictures of his father fighting Kimura and studies them. “See here,” he says, “the choke.” He memorizes that choke hold and the many facts of Gracie history: the names of long-dead ancestors; the dates of famous fights; the nicknames of vanquished opponents; Dudu, The Elephant, The Drop of Fire, The Dead Chicken, Zulu. He glances at his young sons in kimonos, wrestling on the rug. They grapple, silently, trip one another, tap the mat, stand, begin again. He looks outside to the garage, where two men in kimonos stand in front of the closed door. One man opens it to reveal a spotless, empty room with a grey mat on the floor. There is a photograph of a gaunt, mean-eyed old man, his arms folded across his chest, underneath a seal that reads ACADEMIA GRACIE. The two men step inside onto the mat. They are barefooted. They face each other, plant their legs wide, like crabs, and begin to circle each other like ancient warriors. They circle and circle, looking for an opening on this peaceful day on this quiet street in Torrance.

This article appears with permission from the author.

Paul Solotaroff has a terrific piece on the original Gold’s Gym and the rise of bodybuilding in the latest issue of Men’s Journal:

Muscle, in all its meanings, is such a deeply American trope that it feels like part of our national narrative. We’ve made strength the flag of our exceptionalism and believe, however vainly, that our might will prevail in any test of wills against our foes. We’ve even found a way to monetize muscle, building an industrial complex of health clubs and home gyms and their hugely lucrative sideline: nutritional supplements. Thirty years ago, men stopped at a bar for a cold one after work; now those bars are Ballys and Crunches, and the person sweating beside you is as likely to be a woman as the guy who used to buy the second round. Most of them aren’t there to build contest-quality mass or prepare for strongman shows; they go in pursuit of fitness, which is strength by another name — muscle fit for stock traders and internet geeks.

But if you were born anytime after the release of Conan the Barbarian in 1982, it may shock you to learn that as late as the 1970s, Americans were repelled by the sight of brawn. “I’d go to the beach, and they’d give me the wolf whistle, guys on a blanket wanting to fight,” says Eddie Giuliani, the 1974 Mr. America (short division) and one of the early legends at Gold’s. “Nobody liked guys with the lumps back then. They thought we were all morons and fairies.” George Butler, codirector of Pumping Iron — the landmark documentary that made a rock star of Schwarzenegger and almost single-handedly changed America’s view of well-built men — says, “I always liked to walk behind Arnold in the street so I could check out people’s reactions as we passed. They’d point at him and sneer: ‘God, look at that fucking freak. What a clown.’”

Gold’s Gym didn’t blow that bias away the day it opened for business in 1965. But in less than a decade, it became the Athens of muscle, the cradle of a full-blown body culture and the place where the gods of iron inspired millions. Everything we have now, from moonshot-hitting shortstops to film stars busting out of their bandoliers, began in that no-frills bunker by the beach. Joe Gold, the ornery seaman who built the place and has since been largely forgotten, had a lot of timely help from other people, not least of them Butler, whose charismatic film spread the Gospel of Huge to a scrawny nation. None of that would have happened, though, without Gold’s vision. He made a space where titans congregated.

Solotaroff also wrote a book about this subculture, “The Body Shop: Parties, Pills, and Pumping Iron–Or, My Life in the Age of Muscle.”

You can read an excerpt over at Deadspin.

Here’s another, from Men’s Journal:

It was the fall of 1975, and I was having such a rough go of it that even my hair was depressed. Styled on David Bowie of Aladdin Sane vintage, it was long in back and purportedly spiked on top, but drooped like Three Dog Night in a two-day downpour. I stood 6-foot-1, weighed 150 pounds, and hadn’t been laid since Nixon’s reelection, making me, like George McGovern, a landslide loser. At the ripe age of 20, I had a mad crush on Ginger from Gilligan’s Island and organized my day around the 4 pm reruns. I had plenty of time to watch, having dropped out of college and been fired from a series of flathead jobs, including two at which I actually volunteered.

And so that January, I did what middle-class kids do when life gets bored of beating them senseless — ran, hat in hand, back to college. Though the State University at Stony Brook billed itself as the “Berkeley of the East,” it was fairer, I think, to call it the “McNeese State of the North,” a school whose students were mostly interested in cars and picking up overtime at Sears. To walk the length of my residence hall was to know both the joys of a fierce contact high and the canon of Gregg and Duane Allman.

With the exception of mine, the one door on the hall kept closed belonged to a tall blond kid with big muscles. Actually, big doesn’t begin to give a sense of the guy. The first time I saw Mark, he was leaving the john, wearing a towel so small it gaped at the hip and thigh. He had cannonball shoulders that looked carved from brass — burnished arcs at the top of his arms that flowed into half-moon biceps. His chest was a slab of T-squared boxes, beneath which knelt columns of raised abdominals that bunched and torqued as he moved. I turned around, slack-jawed, and watched him go; it took all my self-control not to applaud.

[Photograph of Paul Solotaroff by Jim Herrington]