Hot off the presses comes Allen Barra’s new book, on sale today.

Here’s an exclusive excerpt from Mickey and Willie: Mantle and Mays, the Parallel Lives of Baseball’s Golden Age.

Dig in.

Mickey and Willie

By Allen Barra

I don’t know that anyone’s ever calculated this, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find that Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays, in that order, are the two most written-about players in baseball history, or at least two of the top three, along with Babe Ruth. The year 2010 saw the publication of a thick and well-researched biography of Willie, Willie Mays: The Life, the Legend, by James Hirsch, and there are countless shorter lives of Willie, several autobiographies and memoirs, and a superb life-and-times account, Willie’s Time, by Charles Einstein that, in my opinion, stands as the best thing ever written about him. Also published in 2010 was Jane Leavy’s Mantle biography, The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood, the most detailed of the nine versions of his life.

There are also six volumes of autobiography, memoirs, and recollections, as well as numerous books by fans and collections of letters to and from Mickey, that have been published since his death. And yet, it seems to me that there has always been one major element missing from the many books on Mantle or Mays: each other. Though they are and always will be linked in the minds of millions, I don’t think it’s ever been noted exactly how much they had in common and how each man’s image reflected the other. The similarities in their lives were uncanny. Both were children of the Great Depression, born in 1931. They were almost the same size (about five-foot-eleven and 185 pounds, at least early in their careers); Mantle had a bit more muscle, and for most of his playing career probably outweighed Willie by five to ten pounds.

Both were heralded as phenoms when they arrived in New York in 1951 after brief but legendary minor league careers. (If integration had come along a couple of years earlier, they probably would have played against each other as minor leaguers.) Both started out playing for Hall of Fame managers, Mantle for Casey Stengel and Willie for Leo Durocher. Both played stickball in the streets of New York with kids (though only Willie was lucky enough to have TV cameras record the games). The burden of expectation caused each of them to break down in tears before his first season was over. Mickey exploded on the national scene in 1953 when he hit the first “tape measure” home run, and Willie the next year when he made the most famous catch in World Series and probably baseball history. In 1958 and 1959, they barnstormed against each other with specially selected All-Star teams.

Together they defined baseball in the 1950s and through the mid-1960s. Both made the covers of Time and Life, and they were the subjects of popular songs. In the 1960s, they were often pictured together on the covers of baseball magazines, including some devoted entirely to them. They were paired off on television on the popular show Home Run Derby, did commercials and endorsements together, and appeared together on numerous TV shows. Together they created nostalgia and the autograph and memorabilia craze. Finally, in the early 1980s, they were both banned from baseball by Commissioner Bowie Kuhn for doing public relations work for Atlantic City casinos.

They had exactly the same talents—everyone who saw them observed that no other players in the big leagues possessed their astonishing combinations of power and speed. And despite Willie’s far greater durability, they were, in terms of effectiveness on the field, remarkably similar. Both batted over .300 ten times and hit over 50 home runs in a season twice. Total Baseball: The Official Encyclopedia of Major League Baseball ranks Mays as the best player in the NL from 1954, the year he returned from the Army, through 1965, except 1959, when he ranked fourth. (For the 1956 and 1961 seasons, he shared the top spot with Henry Aaron.)

Mantle was Total Baseball’s best player in the AL every year from 1955 through 1962; he was also ranked second in 1952 and fourth in 1954. (Mantle was surely poised to top Total Baseball’s ranking in 1963, when he batted .314 but was limited to just sixty-five games by injuries.) In every season from 1954 through 1965, Mickey and Willie were selected for the All-Star teams. From 1951 through 1964, the Yankees or the Giants were in every World Series except in 1959. Their fortunes in the World Series and All-Star Games contrasted oddly. Mays was the ultimate All-Star, hitting .307 in twenty-four games, producing 29 RBIs and runs scored, while Mantle hit just .233 in sixteen All-Star Games without a single home run. But in twenty World Series games, Mays managed just .239 without a single home run; in sixty-five games, Mantle set the all-time World Series home run mark with 18.

That Mickey and Willie were the most dominant players of that period isn’t simply a myth built up by worshipful New York sportswriters—it’s a fact. The ultimate question isn’t “Were they the greatest of their time?” but “Which of them was the greatest?” (That’s a subject I explore in detail in Appendix A.)

Both were consummate all-around athletes who excelled at basketball and football in high school. Reversing the stereotype, Willie was a great passing quarterback at Fairfield Industrial High School in Westfield, Alabama; at the same time, Mickey was a dazzling running back at Commerce High in Commerce, Oklahoma. If circumstances had been different, they might have ended up playing for the two greatest college football coaches of their era: Willie for Bear Bryant, then at Kentucky—Bryant had been hugely impressed when he saw Willie play baseball for the Black Barons at Rickwood Field—and Mickey for Bud Wilkinson at Oklahoma.

They were both natural center fielders, but both played other positions when they were young. Mantle spent more time at shortstop than Willie, but neither of them ever quite got the hang of it. Willie began his rookie season in center field; Mickey began his rookie year in right field while Joe DiMaggio struggled through his final season, and in 1952 Mickey became the Yankees’ starting center fielder. Both had great throwing arms and were told during their early careers that they had a shot to make it as a pitcher. Mickey and Willie both idolized Joe DiMaggio. Both loved Westerns and, as boys, dreamed of growing up to be cowboys.

Their lives were dominated by their fathers, who saw baseball as a way for their sons to escape a life of brutal manual labor. For Cat Mays it was the steel mills, for Mutt Mantle the hellish zinc mines. By the time Mickey and Willie graduated from high school, both their mothers had almost disappeared from the narratives of their lives. It was often said of both that they were “born to play ball.” Whether or not that was true, they were certainly bred to the game. Cat began rolling a ball to his son while Willie was still an infant. Mutt began to throw to his son as soon as Mickey could hold a broom handle.

Both men were southerners. (New York sportswriters were fond of labeling Mickey a cowboy, a westerner—he did, after all, once ride a horse to school—but Mickey regarded himself as a southerner and often said so.) The Mantles and the Mayses were living, breathing Americana. The Mantles were what John Steinbeck’s Joad family might have been had they chosen to stay and scrape a living out of the harsh Oklahoma earth rather than emigrate to California. Willie’s folks were the country cousins of the Younger family in Lorraine Hansberry’s great play, A Raisin in the Sun; they resisted the lure of northern cities like Chicago and stayed near their roots.

They were both the products of two generations of ball-playing men, and both honed their skills through competition with industrial leaguers. Though neither of them was actually a member of an industrial league team, their fathers, uncles, and close friends played industrial ball, and Mickey and Willie played with and against them. Mantle and Mays were probably the last products of the great age of industrial league baseball that died out a few years after World War II. Neither man ever truly understood how to manage money. Mantle envied Willie’s salary; Willie was notoriously jealous of Mantle’s income from commercials and endorsements.

Needless to say, in spite of all these similarities, there were enormous cultural differences. Mickey grew up listening to country stars such as Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys; his favorite singer was Hank Williams. Willie and his family listened to country blues singers like Amos Millburn, the more sophisticated R&B sounds of Louis Jordan, and even jazz artists like Billie Holiday and Nat King Cole. The one singer both men enjoyed was Bing Crosby. The Mantle clan was large and closely knit; Mays came from a broken home. Mickey’s father drove him relentlessly toward baseball; Willie’s father helped him along and let him find the way to baseball on his own.

Mickey drank prodigiously and recklessly from an early age; Willie got sick on his first taste of alcohol and never touched it again. Mantle, though he remained married to his high school sweetheart for decades, led a sex life that was an unreported scandal. Mays, in contrast, was never the subject of rumors of promiscuity; his first marriage, to an older, more sophisticated woman, went badly. He had no biological children and, if the journalists who knew him are to be trusted, seldom saw his adopted son after his divorce.

One Mantle biographer, writing seven years after his death, concluded that “Mickey Mantle, like most heroes, was a construction; he was not real. He was all that America wanted itself to be, and he was also all that America feared it could never be.” Surely, it would be no stretch to say the same thing of Willie Mays. In his mammoth one-volume history of the decade, The Fifties, David Halberstam wrote that “Willie Mays seemed to be the model for the new supremely gifted black athlete. . . . He showed that the new-age black athlete had both power and speed. . . . [Mays was] a new kind of athlete being showcased, a player who, in contrast to most white superstars of the past, was both powerful and fast.” At the same time Mays was at his peak, there was a supremely gifted white athlete named Mantle who had at least as much power and speed. Bob Costas says, “There was one thing about Mantle that screamed out ‘The Natural.’ He was a God-made ballplayer.” Surely the same God made Willie Mays.

“Today,” Arnold Hano, one of Willie’s first biographers, wrote in 1965, “players are as skilled as most stars of the past, but something is lacking. Call it color, call it magic, but you call for it in vain. Except for Willie Mays. Oh, there are a few others. Mickey Mantle has always brought his own sense of excitement to the game.” He most certainly did, and who, at their peak, could have denied that Mantle’s “own sense of excitement” was a brand quite similar to Willie’s?

Though their names are melded in the minds of three generations of American sports fans and their careers ran along uncannily parallel lines, they are still, oddly, segregated. Indeed, for most of their playing careers the realities of American life dictated that they be segregated. It wasn’t until the early 1960s that they could meet together at restaurants and nightclubs in most parts of the country, and even then not in the Deep South. And it wasn’t until the 1970s that they began to appear together regularly at card shows, in commercials, and on television shows. Mantle and Mays were friends, probably as close as it was possible for a white man and a black man to be at that time.

In any event, their work schedules didn’t allow them to see each other more than a couple of times a year. Always, the newspapers kept one apprised of what the other was doing. “We kept an eye on each other, Willie and me. I was always aware of him,” Mantle remarked. “I’d go long periods without seeing him,” Mays said after Mantle died, “but I couldn’t go for two days without hearing about him. It was like we were never far apart.” Mickey and Willie—they were given boys’ names that they never grew out of. The private lives of both men revealed that they were ill equipped for life after baseball, a fact that those of us who loved them found almost impossible to understand. How, though, could we have understood? From our perspective, what could have been better than being Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays? Even after baseball, what better life could a fan imagine than being Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays?

“In some ways,” Roger Kahn told me, “I believe they knew each other better than anyone else knew them. They were the only two men in America who understood the experience they had both been through.”

Reprinted from Mickey and Willie by Allen Barra. Copyright © May 2013. Published by Crown Archetype, a division of Random House, Inc.

From the Library of America’s site, check out this Red Smith column from the forthcoming American Pastimes: The Very Best of Red Smith.

After reading Kent Babb’s profile of Allen Iverson I thought of this passage in Mike Bryan’s book, Baseball Lives.

Here’s Dennis Eckesley:

People say baseball players should go out and have fun. No way. To me, baseball is pressure. I always feel it. This is work. The fun is afterwards, when you shake hands.

When I was a rookie I’d tear stuff up. Now I keep it in. What good is smashing a light on the way up the tunnel? But I still can’t sleep at night if I stink. I’ve always tried to change that and act like a normal guy when I got home. “Hi, honey, what’s happening?” I can’t. It’s there. It doesn’t go away. But maybe that’s why I’ve been successful in my career, because I care. I don’t have fun. I pitch scared. That’s what makes me go. Nothing wrong with being scared if you can channel it.

I used to hide behind my cockiness. Don’t let the other team know you’re scared. I got crazy on the mound. Strike a guy out, throw my fist around—”Yeah!” Not real classy, but I was a raw kid. I didn’t care. It wasn’t fake. It was me. This wasn’t taken very kindly by a lot of people. They couldn’t wait to light me up. That’s the price you pay.

I wish I was a little happier in this game. What is so great about this shit? You get the money, and then you’re used to the money. You start making half a million a year, next thing you know you need half a million a year. And the heat is on!

Used to be neat to just be a big-league ballplayer, but that wore off. I’m still proud, but I don’t want people to bother me about it. I wish my personality with people was better. I find myself becoming short with people. Going to the store. Getting gas.

If you’re not happy with when you’re doing lousy, then not happy when you’re doing well, when the hell are you going to be happy? This game will humble you in a heartbeat. Soon as you starting getting happy Boom! For the fans—and this is just a guess—they think the money takes out the feeling. I may be wrong but I think they think, “What the hell is he worrying about? He’s still getting’ paid.” There may be a few players who don’t give 100 percent, but I always thought if you were good enough to make that kind of money, you’d have enough pride to play like that, wouldn’t you think? You don’t just turn it on-or off.

If you are a certain age and grew up in New York the name Pete Fornatale means Rock n Roll on FM radio. Fornatale passed away last year but he wasn’t just a legendary DJ, he was a writer, too. His final book is on the Stones, an entertaining oral history, combining original interviews with previously published material.

Here’s an excerpt, concerning a pivotal moment in the group’s evolution.

Check it out, enjoy, and then go pick up the book.

From 50 Licks

By Pete Fornatale

At the start of 1968, the Stones were a group in turmoil, coming off what was mostly a lost year. The rift between Brian and the rest of the band was deepening. Brian had been abusive to his girlfriend of two years, Anita Pallenberg, and she ended up leaving him for Keith. Did Keith feel guilty about this?

KEITH RICHARDS: Brian, in many ways, was a right cunt. He was a bastard. Up to a point, you could put up with it. In the last year or so, when Brian was almost totally incapacitated all of the time, he became a joke to the band. It was the only way we could deal with it without getting mad at him. So then it became that very cruel, piss-taking thing behind his back all the time . . .

Things only got worse after Jones’s second bust for marijuana possession in May. Now, not only was Brian in danger of no-showing gigs in the UK, but his legal problems might prevent him from joining the band if and when they decided to return to America.

Keith Richards: There was no immediate necessity to go through the drama of replacing Brian because no gigs were lined up. We first had to recognize the fact that we needed to make a really good album. After Satanic Majesties we wanted to make a STONES album.

And that’s where Jimmy Miller came in.

GLYN JOHNS: Jagger came to me after Satanic Majesties and said, “We’re going to get a new producer, an American.” I thought, “Oh my God, that’s all I need. I don’t think my ego can stand having some bloody Yankee coming in here and start telling me what sort of sound to get with the Rolling Stones.” So I said, “I know somebody! I know there’s one in England already and he’s fantastic,” and he’d just done the Traffic album: Jimmy Miller. And it was a remarkably good record he made, the first record he made with Traffic. I said, “He’s a really nice guy.” I’d met him, he’d been in the next studio room and I said, “I’m sure he’d be fantastic.” Anything but some strange lunatic drug addict from Los Angeles. So . . . Jagger actually took the bait and off he went, met Jimmy Miller and gave him the job. And the first thing Jimmy Miller did (laughs) was fire ME. ’Cause he’d been using Eddie Kramer as an engineer. And so, naturally, quite obviously, he wanted to use his own engineer, the guy he knew.

Miller was exactly what they needed at that time. His roots-based approach allowed the Stones to do what they did best.

ANDY JOHNS: Jimmy Miller made the Stones into the band they should have always been, and tried to be in the beginning.

BILLY ALTMAN: He was a tremendous producer. Mick especially was very impressed with the last Spencer Davis album and that first Traffic album that he had done. He was able to get them a very big sound that they had never really managed to have prior to that. I don’t know how much of that was attributable to Andy Oldham nominally being their producer up until then, but I think on a sonic basis, Miller really got to the heart of what they sounded like as a band, really honing in on Keith’s guitar and Charlie Watts’s drumming.

EDDIE KRAMER: I think they’d had enough at that point. Thank God they found Jimmy Miller. Certainly Mick and Keith and the boys had heard what we’d done with Traffic. And it was amazing. When you put Dear Mr. Fantasy up against Satanic Majesties it completely blows that away. So the Stones probably think, “Who is this guy Jimmy Miller?”

If not for him, I don’t think the Stones would be in the place they are today. Because what he did is that he went to the heart and soul of where they came from. And he was so adept at milking the inner psyche of the band. And he was so clever at production. And he’s the guy I’ve always modeled myself after in terms of how to get a session going, how to make the artists really get excited about what they’re playing. Even to the point where Charlie couldn’t play the drum part the way he was hearing it, he would go and sit in on the drums.

ANDY JOHNS: Jimmy was an extremely talented man. His main gift I think was his ability to get grooves. Which for a band like the Stones is very important. Look at the difference between Beggars Banquet and Satanic Majesties. He put them right back on the rail. So he was quite influential then and came up with all sorts of lovely ideas for them. In fact that’s him playing the cowbell at the beginning of “Honky Tonk Women.” He sets it up.

ROBERT GREENFIELD: Jimmy Miller was a lovely guy. He had this great disposition. And if you want to talk about his greatness as a producer, look at his Traffic albums. What Jimmy brought to the Stones was groove. Jimmy gave them a soul groove, a rhythm groove that they never had before.

JIMMY MILLER: Musically they were just coming out of their psychedelic period, which hadn’t been too successful for them, and I think that was lucky for me, because I didn’t insist that they change direction but they were ready to do so, as was evident from the new songs that they played me. What they had written was rock ’n’ roll, yet I subsequently received a lot of credit for getting them back on course, so I benefited a lot from being in the right place at the right time. There again, I think it’s fair to say that being American also helped, because—as was the case with many successful British bands during that era—they had been raised on American records. As things turned out, it was not always easy—they could take a long time over certain things—but it was always a pleasure, especially when they’d eventually hit those magic moments as they inevitably seemed to do. The first of those just happened to be on the very first track that I produced for them, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.”

KEITH TALKS “JUMPIN JACK FLASH”

“Jumpin’ Jack Flash” was released as a single in 1968 and remains one of the Stones’ most identifiable songs. It’s also significant in that it essentially kicks off the next period in the band’s existence, Rolling Stones “Mach Two,” as Keith has called it. In Life, Keith tells the story of how the tune got its name:

KEITH RICHARDS: Mick and I had been up all night, it was raining outside and there was the sound of these heavy stomping rubber boots near the window, belonging to my gardener, Jack Dyer, a real country man from Sussex. It woke Mick up. He said, “What’s that?” I said, “Oh, that’s Jack. That’s jumping Jack.” I started to work around the phrase on the guitar, which was in open tuning, singing the phrase “Jumping Jack.” Mick said, “Flash,” and suddenly we had this phrase with a great rhythm and ring to it. So we got to work on it and wrote it.

Keith gives himself some of the credit for the reinvention of the Stones’ sound as well.

KEITH RICHARDS: “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “Street Fighting Man” came about because I had become fascinated by the possibilities of playing an acoustic guitar through a cassette recorder, using it as a pick up, really, so that I could still get the crispness of an acoustic—which you can never get off an electric guitar—but overloading this tiny little machine so the effect was that it sounded both acoustic and electric. Technology was starting to increase in sophistication, but I just wanted to reduce it back to basics. I bought one of the first cassette machines—a must for a budding songwriter—and then day in, day out recorded on it. Then I began to get interested in the actual sound of the machine, how close you could put the microphone to the guitar and what effect you could get out of it . . . When we were in the studio I would bring in that little Philips cassette recorder, get a wooden extension speaker, plug that into the back of the recorder, shove a microphone in front of the speaker in the middle of the studio and record it. We would all sit back and watch this little microphone record the cassette machine in the middle of the studio at Olympic, which was the size of Sadler’s Wells. Then we’d go back, listen to it, play over it, mash it up, and there was the track.

EDDIE KRAMER: We used Jimmy Miller’s Wollensak—a cassette machine with a microphone in it. We put it on the floor of the studio and we recorded Keith’s guitar, and I believe Charlie was just using a brush or a stick on the snare for the backbeat. After we cut the track on the cassette machine, we played it back on a little speaker, then rerecorded that on one track of a four-track machine. That was the guide track, then everybody overdubbed to that. When you hear the beginning of the song, you can hear the amount of wow—on a cassette machine when you play the straight chord you hear “bo-wow wowwow” because the movement of the tape against the pinch wheel was never very steady. It wasn’t a professional machine . . . You hear the movement of the pitch, which is the reason that it has this funky sound which everyone dug at that time.

The resulting album would go on to be one of the Stones’ collective favorites. Its back-to-basics approach was natural for them.

BILL WYMAN: It’s probably because we listened to and played so much early blues material. Musically, it was very simple, so you had to put a lot of feeling into it to make it work. Whenever we rehearse and learn new numbers, every other thing we play is a jam on an old Elmore James or Muddy Waters or Chuck Berry thing. I know a lot of people say, “What are you playing that old stuff for?” But we’re not doing it for sentimental reasons, we’re doing it to retain the feeling of those blues and R&B things.

You can’t have everybody flying off everywhere and showing off your chops. Besides, our chops aren’t always that good! I think the great thing about the Stones is the simplicity of it—that slightly ragged rhythm that sounds like it might fall apart by the next bar but never does. We always have scrappy endings; we play with kind of a pulse that fluctuates between being slightly behind and slightly in front of the beat but it swings like that. And it works for us. I hate bands that play on eighths or sixteenths, there’s no feel there, nothing seems to be coming from inside them.

On the contrary, the bluesy feel of Beggars Banquet still resonates. One album track that stands out is “No Expectations.”

BILLY ALTMAN: “No Expectations” to me is one of the great Stones songs in their entire body of work. And it really stands out to me because it’s one of the last things of substance that Brian Jones was able to contribute to the band, his slide playing on there. It’s Robert Johnson, it’s Delta blues, it’s everything about their connection to the American blues. For me, that remains one of the high points of the album.

MICK JAGGER: That’s Brian playing [slide guitar]. We were sitting around in a circle on the floor, singing and playing, recording with open mics. That was the last time I remember Brian really being totally involved in something that was really worth doing. He was there with everyone else. It’s funny how you remember—but that was the last moment I remember him doing that, because he had just lost interest in everything.

BILLY ALTMAN: Even though Brian was already out the door, there’s more of him on there than he’s usually given credit for. His spots are few, but they are significant. In addition to his work on “No Expectations,” his sitar on “Street Fighting Man” and his harmonica on “Prodigal Son” give him a real presence.

With Brian fading toward the background, other musicians stepped up as well.

BILLY ALTMAN: Nicky Hopkins added a tremendous amount to Beggars Banquet. I’m not sure how much of this was Jimmy Miller, but it seems like someone realized that they need some other voice instrumentally besides Keith’s guitar, and Nicky Hopkins is the secret weapon of Beggars Banquet and then again on Let It Bleed. He is really one of the great unsung heroes of British rock during that period. And the combination of Nicky Hopkins and Ian Stewart during that period works wonderfully and adds dimension because Stewart is such a good boogie-woogie blues pianist.

ANDY JOHNS: Nicky is on everything. He was the best and the greatest. God bless Nicky Hopkins. He added so much to that band. Sometimes you wouldn’t really notice it. But if you take the piano out then the house of cards collapses a bit. He was always coming up with gorgeous little melodies. Earlier, “She’s a Rainbow.” That’s Nicky. Of course he was doing a lot of things like that. Plus he was extremely rhythmic. People don’t remember him for being rhythmic. But he was.

When people think of Nicky Hopkins they think of his right hand. But he would make the groove happen sometimes. If you took him out, it’s “Oh, what happened here?” Which is normal. If they are listening to him they are gonna play around him. Or with him. And if you take one of those elements out: “What happened here?” It’s music. See. That’s how it works.

The album’s focal point became one of the Stones’ most famous songs, “Sympathy for the Devil.”

CHARLIE WATTS: “Sympathy for the Devil” was tried six different ways. I don’t mean at once. It was all night doing it one way, then another full night trying it another way, and we just could not get it right. It would never fit a regular rhythm. I first heard Mick play that one on the steps of my house on an acoustic guitar. The first time I heard it, it was really light and had a kind of Brazilian sound. Then when we got in the studio we poured things on it, and it was something different. I could never get a rhythm for it, except one, which is like a samba on the snare drum. It was always a bit like a dance band until we got Rocky Dijon in, playing the congas. By messing about with that, we got the thing done.

COUNTRY HONK

Beggars Banquet also featured another new, rootsy element for the Stones: country music.

KEITH RICHARDS: It is the other side of rock ’n’ roll. Rock ’n’ roll, basically, is blues, and then put in a little bit of white hillbilly melody. It’s that lovely coming together of one culture hitting another which is what music’s always about. What I’ve always loved about rock ’n’ roll is that it’s a beautiful synthesis of white music and black music. It’s a beautiful cauldron to mix things up in.

Keith’s budding friendship with Gram Parsons was the inspiration.

KEITH RICHARDS: I first met Gram in 1968, when the Byrds were appearing in London . . . I knew the Byrds from Mr. Tambourine Man on . . . But when I saw them with Gram, I could see this was a radical turn. I went backstage, and we hooked up. Then the Byrds came through London again, on their way to South Africa. I was like, “Man, we don’t go there.” The sanctions and the embargo were on. So he quit the Byrds, right there and then. Of course, he’s got nowhere to stay, so he moved in with me.

Others, notably Chris Hillman of the Byrds, have doubted that apartheid had anything to do with Parsons’s decision to leave the band. Hillman went so far as to suggest that Parsons was a Rolling Stones groupie. A friend of Parsons and employee of the Stones from that time refutes this idea:

PHIL KAUFMAN: Nothing could be further from the truth. Gram was one of the only guys in the world who hung out with famous people like the Stones and who carried his own weight. If anything, Keith was the “groupie” of Gram. Gram was teaching the Rolling Stones country music. Quite often we’d just sit around the house—Gram, Mick, Keith, and I. They had been to Ace Records and bought every country album they could find: George Jones, Merle Haggard, Dave Dudley, Ernest Tubb—you name it. Gram would say, “Here is an example of this,” and he’d tell me which record he wanted and I’d play the record. They’d listen to it, tap their toes to it, listen to the chords, and then Gram had me play George Jones, . . . That was what Gram was doing. I recorded Gram and Keith singing together, but sadly those tapes are long gone.

Here’s Mick’s take on the Stones first foray into country:

MICK JAGGER: As far as country music was concerned, we used to play country songs, but we’d never record them—or we recorded them but never released them. Keith and I had been playing Johnny Cash records and listening to the Everly Brothers—who were SO country—since we were kids. I used to love country music even before I met Keith. I loved George Jones and really fast, shit-kicking country music, though I didn’t really like the maudlin songs too much . . . The country songs, like “Factory Girl” or “Dear Doctor,” on Beggars Banquet were really pastiche. There’s a sense of humor in country music anyway, a way of looking at life in a humorous kind of way— and I think we were just acknowledging that element of the music.

BILLY ALTMAN: There is a lot of humor in the country songs on Beggars Banquet. At the time, I’m not sure how much of it any of us got. Back then, with everything that was going on with the tensions of 1968, they just seemed kind of weird. But listening now, “Dear Doctor” and “Factory Girl” are a lot of fun. And I think that’s one of the nice things about the album. They provide a balance against things like “Sympathy for the Devil” and “Street Fighting Man.”

One critic correctly identified a source of inspiration for “Sympathy for the Devil —the Stones’ own blues roots.

MICK FARREN: One of the major devices used by the Stones (and a lot of blues singers—Howlin’ Wolf, Robert Johnson, Lightnin’ Hopkins) to accentuate the shock of their music is consistent use of first person involvement in their lyrics. Jagger doesn’t sing about the Devil, he sings about being the Devil.

KEITH RICHARDS: “Sympathy” is quite an uplifting song. It’s just a matter of looking [the Devil] in the face. He’s there all the time. I’ve had very close contact with Lucifer—I’ve met him several times. Evil people tend to bury it and hope it sorts itself out and doesn’t rear its ugly head. “Sympathy for the Devil” is just as appropriate now, with 9/11. There it is again, big time. When that song was written, it was a time of turmoil. It was the first sort of international chaos since World War II. And confusion is not the ally of peace and love. You want to think the world is perfect. Everybody gets sucked into that. And as America has found out to its dismay, you can’t hide. You might as well accept the fact that evil is there and deal with it any way you can. “Sympathy for the Devil” is a song that says, “Don’t forget him.” If you confront him, then he’s out of a job.

UNDERCOVER OF THE NIGHT

Both Decca in the UK and London Records in the US rejected the planned album cover for Beggars Banquet.

CHARLIE WATTS: The toilet one. The graffiti one around the toilet, which they used in an ad later. That was the first one and they refused to put it out.

MICK JAGGER: We really have tried to keep the album within the bounds of good taste. I mean we haven’t shown the whole lavatory. That would have been rude. We’ve only shown the top half! Two people at the record company have told us that the sleeve is “terribly offensive.” Apart from them we have been unable to find anyone else who it offends. I asked one person to pick out something that offended him and he quite seriously picked out “Bob Dylan.” Apparently “Bob Dylan’s Dream” on the wall offends him . . . We’ve gone as far as we can in terms of concessions over the release of this sleeve. I even suggested that they put it in a brown paper bag with “Unfit for Children” and the title of the album on the outside. But no, they wouldn’t have it. They stuck to their guns . . . It was simply an idea that had not been done before and we chose to put the writing on a lavatory wall because that’s where you see most writings on walls. There’s really nothing obscene there except in people’s own minds . . . We’ll get this album distributed somehow even if I have to go down the end of Greek Street and Carlisle Street at two o’clock on Saturday morning and sell them myself.

In the end, Mick’s guerrilla marketing strategy wasn’t necessary. After several months of delay, the record was released with an album that looked like a wedding invite, complete with the letters RSVP.

[Photo Credit: Tim Kelley Collection; Photofest; Ira Korman Collection]

The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones is Stanley Booth’s account of the Rolling Stones’ 1969 US tour. Keith Richards said, “Stanley Booth’s book is the only one I can read and say, ‘Yeah, that’s how it was.’ Stanley is a lovely guy–he’s got an eye. That book took longer to write than the Bible.”

We’ve got a Stanley Booth two-fer today, starting with this excerpt from The True Adventures. Here’s Booth on the Stones at Madison Square Garden.

I went down the hall to the Stones’ dressing room, where for a moment I was alone with the concrete block walls and hard benches. I heard voices and in came the Stones with Jimi Hendrix. They were followed by the Maysles brothers, tape and film rolling.

Jagger took off his shirt and walked around; Albert followed him, filming. Mick Taylor and I sat on a bench with Hendrix, who seemed subdued but pleasant. I told him about seeing Little Richard, and he said, smiling as if it cheered him up to think about it, that once when he was with Richard, he and the bass player bought ruffled shirts to wear onstage, and Richard made them change: “I am the beauty! Nobody spoze to wear ruffles but Richard!”

Mick Taylor handed his guitar to Hendrix and asked him to play. “Oh, I can’t,” he said. “I have to string it different.” Hendrix was left-handed, but he went ahead and played the guitar upside down, a wizard he was.

As Hendrix played I went into the bathroom, where Jagger was putting mascara on his lashes. Hendrix had tried to take Marianne Faithfull away from Mick, who wasn’t about to stand around and listen to him play, upside-down or sideways. I told him about my afternoon with Wexler. He seemed distracted, I figured because he was about to go onstage. I didn’t know that in the distance a black girl was telling him she was going to have his baby, and a blond girl (who two weeks ago had been threatening to join the tour) was telling him goodbye. Back at the Plaza in a few hours, Jo would write in her notebook, “Tried talk Mick imposs—concert fantastic—Mick better but must keep his mind on necessary things.” He listened politely, or appeared to, till I finished talking about Atlantic and the Magrittes; then, with the Stones changing into their stage drag, I went out to see the show.

In the hall I saw another of the next year’s ghosts, Janis Joplin, heading for the Stones’ dressing room. Because I’d heard that something I had written about her had made her angry, I avoided her. The next day, when I came into the Garden for the afternoon show, Bill Belmont told me that Janis, being stopped at the Stones’ door—because, as nobody got a chance to tell her, they were mostly naked—stuck her head in and gave the middle-finger salute to what must have been a surprised bunch of Rolling Stones. I think she was drunk, not an unusual state for her. Later tonight, when Jagger, onstage, sang “Don’t you want to live with me?” Janis would yell, “You don’t have the balls!”

It was cold in the Garden, under the high arches and giant mushroom spines. Terry Reid and B. B. King had already played and Tina Turner was onstage singing the Otis Redding song, “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long,” her sleek red beauty shimmering in a black dress, back arched, legs bowed, one arm thrust out, testifying as she had been for years to drunks in juke joints and cuttin’ parlors. Ike was standing back from the spotlight, small and black and nasty, eyeballs glowing under his shiny processed Beatie cut, chopping chords as if in anger. This afternoon Wexler, who often saw the Turners when they were in New York, said, “He’s really got the fear of God in her.” As you watched them, you couldn’t help wondering if Mother Nature were married to the Devil.

“Come Together”–Ike and Tina Turner

Tina sang “Respect” and “Come Together,” eyes bleached out in the spotlight, her pupils swimming white slits. When the band geared up for “Land of 1000 Dances,” Janis Joplin stepped onto the rear of the stage, stomping with delight, and Tina called her to the front.

“Land of 1000 Dances”–Ike and Tina Turner

Janis looked for once in her life completely happy; it was plain that she would love to nose around in Tina’s crotch all night long. “Roll over on your back—y’know I like it like that,” they sang together, Ike’s guitar whipping them, and Janis pulled off her little crocheted cap and threw it into the air.

After Tina and Janis finished there was a delay during which the audience had contact flashes from what they had seen and the recording equipment was prepared for the Stones. How can they follow this, I asked myself, as I did at almost every show. After watching Tina in Oakland, Mick had said that he wasn’t cocky anymore; but he was still following her. I went backstage, and Mick was wandering among the Coke bottles and folding chairs, looking rather lost and forlorn. The others kept their distance. He was about to be consumed, and there was a reverent silence between them. With his blue-beaded moccasins and black pants with silver leg buttons (only back here you can see they’re not silver, just shiny in the spotlight), little black jersey, his scarf dragging, hair hanging limp, chin slumped over gold-medallioned choker, Uncle Sam hat in hand, Mick seemed not bored but not comfortable, making little sounds under his breath as if to say, What a dumb thing this is, waiting.

As time passed and nothing happened, I went out front again into the smoky darkness. No one seemed to mind the wait. “Ain’t nothin’ any good without it has some grease on it,” Tina (the former Annie Mae Bullock, of Brownsville, Tennessee) had said, and she and Janis had left the audience greased and pleased. There were guards, but they weren’t wearing togas, and the few police didn’t seem intent on ruining a good time. The atmosphere was, if not relaxed, at least secure-perhaps because we were on an island in a giant tin can, concrete and metal shell, and no apparent threat to anybody.

Stu, walking across the stage to check a microphone, dressed in his pale-yellow tuxedo with shiny satin lapels, caused a ripple of applause, which he answered with a V-sign—very satirical, Stu. Then the stage was deserted and out of the stillness a disembodied cockney voice mused, “Everyone seems to be ready, are you ready?”

Yesss, the crowd answered in a snow-slide’s whisper-roar, Yesss.

“For the first time in three years,” Sam Cutler said, getting louder, “the greatest rock and roll band in the world, the Rolling Stones!”

The big yellow-blue-white spot bleached out Jagger as he came onstage, twirling overhead his Uncle Sam hat, not smiling, gaze fixed on fate. In a breathless rush of silence the Stones came out, Charlie settling onto the drums, the others, quick and businesslike, plugging their guitars into the amplifiers, twisting dials, setting levels, until Keith hit the opening chords of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” Mick started to howl about being born in a crossfire hurricane, and the kids all stood up and screamed. Glyn Johns stopped me in the corridor at the Plaza the next day to say that he had been backstage in a sound truck and the truck was jumping on its springs. “So I got out to see who was shaking it—I thought there might be some kids on top of it—but there was nobody there, the truck was just picking up the vibrations from the house, the whole bloody building was shaking.”

Jumpin’ Jack Flash

As “Jack Flash” ended, Mick, buttoning his trousers, said by way of greeting, “Think I busted a button on me trousers, hope they don’t fall down. You don’t want me trousers to fall down, now do ya?”

Yesss, the crowd answered, as Keith started “Carol,” standing beside Mick in the spotlight, surrounded by a glimmering halo of rhinestones on his Nudie shirt.

Carol

“We are making our own statement,” Brian had said in one of the interviews the publicity office arranged to keep him from feeling left out. “Others are making more intellectual ones.”

What message would you get if you were fifteen years old, standing in a cloud of marijuana smoke inside a crowded, cavernous hall, face reflecting the red and blue and yellow lights, watching Charlie hit the drums as hard as he was able, Bill slide his tiny hands over the skinny neck of his erect light-blue bass causing a sound like booming thunder, little Mick stare with wide eyes as if he were hearing an earthquake’s faint premonitory quiverings, Keith bend over his guitar like a bird of prey, Jagger swoop and glide like some faggot vampire banshee, all of them elevated and illuminated and larger and louder than life? A few years later, a New Yorker writer would observe, “The Stones present a theatrical-musical performance that has no equal in our culture. Thousands and thousands of people go into a room and focus energy on one point and something happens. The group’s musicianship is of a high order, but listening to Mick Jagger is not like listening to Jascha Heifetz. Mick Jagger is coming in on more circuits than Jascha Heifetz. He is dealing in total, undefined sensual experience of the most ecstatic sort.”

By the time that was written, Mick had sung “Midnight Rambler” in pink top hat and tails; after Altamont, the Stones would for reasons of self-preservation turn toward comedy. But in 1969, few people at Madison Square Garden on Thanksgiving Day thought that what the Stones were doing was a performance.

The Stones had first come to the United States in 1964, fewer than six years before. They had done five U.S. tours in three years, then were stopped for almost three years. Since then they had become world-famous idols, outlaws, legends, relics, and one was now a corpse. They had been more than lucky to find a guitarist who was docile and played, though not as Brian once had, excellent bottleneck. One problem they’d had preparing to tour was choosing songs that Keith and Mick Taylor could play. Hence “Carol” and “Little Queenie,” Keith’s Chuck Berry specialties, and hence the difficulty Jagger had mentioned of getting the old things together. The old things had featured, as Stu said, “two guitar players that were like somebody’s right and left hand.”

The people inside Madison Square Garden on this Thanksgiving had, most of them, lived through a time of cold war, hot war, race riots, student riots, police riots, assassinations, rapes, murders, trials, waking nightmares. But Keith, Mick, Charlie, Bill, and the new guitar player were impersonating the Rolling Stones, and the audience were impersonating their audience, both of them at the moment a great success. Dancing under the circumstances (“Oh, Carol! Don’t ever steal your heart away—I’m gonna learn to dance if it takes me all night and day!”) seemed to have a transcendent value. Many people thought then that dancing and music could have a major role in changing the structure of society. They may have been naive, but they were much more interesting than the sensible people who came along later. The Stones would tour the United States every three years for a long time to come, and the value of dancing would never be less than transcendent, but at Woodstock, only a few months before and a few miles away, music had seemed to create an actual community. There was—at this time, for many members of this generation—a sense of power, of possibility, that after Altamont would not return.

Here’s a nice piece on Booth by John Scanlan (which features a link to this excellent article on Booth’s career by James Calemine).

Books by Stanley Booth:

The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (also available for the Kindle)

Keith: Standing in the Shadows (Kindle edition)

Rythm Oil: A Journey Through the Music of the American South

The author pictured with Keith Richards.

From his new book, The Good Son, here’s Mark Kriegel on Boom Boom Mancini.

Bronx Banter Excerpt

Please enjoy this essay by Carlo Rotella, featured in his new collection, Playing in Time: Essays, Profiles, And Other True Stories.

“Bedtime Story”

By Carlo Rotella

I was in a city far from home, working on a magazine story. I spent the day and evening going around asking questions, watching people do what they do, filling up a couple of pocket notebooks. Among other places, I visited the dog pound, a place of grimness even though—or because—the people who worked there seemed gentle and well-intentioned. All those pit bulls, muscled up with nowhere to go, flexing as we walked past on the other side of the bars. They were desperate and accommodating, and they knew that something was wrong. They could smell all the dogs that came before them. Where had they gone?

Around midnight I retired to the dingy motel where I’d been put by the magazine that sent me out to do the story. In an effort to cut down on expenses, its travel offi ce had found me a place where if you wanted to line up some crack or a prostitute all you had to do was hang out for a while in the parking lot. It had been a long day and evening, with drinking at the end of it. The pit bulls were on my mind. I don’t have much use for dogs but I kept coming back to the sight of the animals lined up in their cages, going all rigid and alert and eager to please when visitors came by. They had thought something was going to happen, even if they didn’t know what it might be, but it didn’t happen. Life would go on like that for a while until, I guessed, some were adopted and some were taken out and killed, and then other dogs would take their place, and soon it would be the new dogs’ turn to win the lottery or die.

One thing to do in a dingy motel is to watch dingy TV. There was lots of it—tedious sports shows and talk shows, unfunny comedies, dumbass celebrity updates, bad movies of the ’80s, a charnel house of shitty writing and stale ideas. I ran aground for a while on an offbrand show or movie about the crew of a rocket ship who go around fighting space vampires. The heroes dashed from here to there shouting fakey jargon and toting futuristic weapons that looked like the weapons we have now with nonfunctional molded-plastic appendages glued to them. The vampires glowered, hissed, and suppurated. It kind of ruins the space-opera magic to wonder what the actors’ parents think when they see them on the screen, but that’s what I usually wonder about. The talented darling who starred in school plays and expectant local fantasies back in Elk Grove Village or Mamaroneck or wherever is now wearing fangs and slathered in gory makeup and being blown unconvincingly in half by a plasmoid megablaster. I picture the parents thinking, “Well, at least he is on TV.”

The lameness of it all caught me just right—in that end-of-day, far-from-home, buzzed-from-work mood—and laid me low. Deep gloom descended. I went through the channels a few more times, only growing more despondent, until I happened upon round one of the middleweight title fight between Marvin Hagler and John Mugabi—held 22 years before, almost to the day. Hagler had his hands full, but he knew what to do about it. He was settling in to cope with Mugabi’s strength and power by taking him deep into the fight, wearing him out over the long haul and fi nishing him late. Mugabi, a blowout artist, had gone ten rounds just once and six only twice in his twenty-five fights, all wins. The turning point would come in the sixth round, when Hagler, having blunted the force of Mugabi’s early-round assault, would take over the fight by giving his man a spine-jellying pounding, then settle in to finish him inside the distance, KO’ing him in the eleventh.

All of a sudden I felt a lot better. I turned down the sound and put out the light. On the screen, Goody Petronelli, Hagler’s trainer, radiated calm and ease as he talked to his fighter between rounds. Everything was going to be fine; Petronelli’s every gesture said as much.His main task was to create a recurring pocket of serenity to which Hagler could retreat between hard-fought rounds for rest and reflection. Demonstrating a for-example combination he wanted Hagler to throw, Petronelli moved his own hands as if arranging flowers. Let’s just fix a couple of little mechanical things, he was saying, and it’s your fight. Doesn’t matter how strong the other guy is. Doesn’t matter what he’s done before this or who he’s done it to. We know how to beat him. We know how to beat everybody. Hagler wasn’t exactly looking at his trainer and he didn’t exactly nod, but he heard him. I took off my glasses and put them on the cigarette-stained bedside table, put my head down on the pillow, and was dreamlessly asleep before either fighter struck a blow in the next round.

Reprinted with permission from Playing in Time: Essays, Profiles, and Other True Stories, by Carlo Rotella, published by the University of Chicago Press. © 2012 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

Carlo Rotella is the author of Good with Their Hands: Boxers, Bluesmen, and Other Characters from the Rust Belt; October Cities: The Redevelopment of Urban Literature; and Cut Time: An Education at the Fights, the last also published by the University of Chicago Press. He writes regularly for the New York Times Magazine, Washington Post Magazine, and Boston Globe, and he is a commentator for WGBH FM in Boston.

[Featured Image: Motel Room by Greg Watts]

At the Fights is now out in paperback. It’s a must-have for any self-respecting sports fan.

Over at the Library of America’s terrific Story of the Week site, check out John Schulian’s wonderful story, “Nowhere to Run.”

You can order the paperback here.

The good folks at Deadspin have this excerpt from Frank Deford’s new memoir. It concerns Granny Rice.

Have at it.

Bronx Banter Book Excerpt

From Harvey Araton’s entertaining new book,”Driving Mr. Yogi” (which can be purchased at Amazon) here’s an excerpt to make you smile:

 By Harvey Araton

The first harbinger of spring — or spring training — at the home of Ron and Bonnie Guidry was a telephone call from Yogi Berra.

“You get the frog legs yet?” Berra would ask.

“Yog,” Ron Guidry would say, “it’s freaking January.”

Too late, Berra was already in serious countdown mode for the next Guidry frog fry extravaganza. It seemed like only yesterday that Berra had looked askance at Guidry’s beloved delicacy, like it was tofu wrapped in seaweed. It had actually been years since Mel Stottlemyre had bragged one spring training day about hunting frogs in the Northwest and cooking them himself. Guidry, with all due respect, was obliged to inform him that he hadn’t really experienced frog legs until he’d had them Cajun-style, or straight from the Guidry family cookbook.

Guidry returned to his apartment that evening, fried up a fresh batch, and the next day passed them around the coaches’ room. He offered one to Berra, who immediately made a face.

“Come on,” Guidry said. “You’ll like ’em.”

Stottlemyre, munching nearby, couldn’t disagree. But still Berra demurred.

“Yogi, I’ll tell you what, if you don’t try one, we’re not going to supper tonight,” Guidry said.

Was he serious? Probably not, but if Berra knew one thing about Guidry, it was that he was proud of his Cajun culture and cuisine.

Yogi wondered if he was in some way hurting his friend’s feelings. So he finally gave in, picked one off the plate, and gave it a nibble. Lo and behold, it was delicious. He wanted another, and as the years rolled by, he would continue to fi nd a place in his diet for something no conscientious doctor would have ordered for a man in his eighties.

Following treatment in the seventies for an arrhythmia, Berra assiduously watched what he ate. He avoided cholesterol-heavy breakfasts, pushed away most desserts with a dismissive “too fattening,” and made sure that the Progresso soup prepared for him at his museum almost daily and specifically at noon by the museum’s faithful business manager Bettylou O’Dell was low in sodium.

He had even long ago disassociated himself from the Yoo-hoo soft drink that he had made famous in the fifties and sixties (by chiming in a commercial, “Me-he for Yoo-hoo!”) because he objected to the preservatives that had changed the drink’s texture and flavor. If he relaxed his calorie counting, it was usually at dinner, especially at big family dinners, where everyone down to the youngest of the Berras was taught that the heels of the long Italian bread were reserved for Grandpa. Berra’s favorite dish was tripe — the stomach tissue of cows and a peasant staple in the old country — but he enjoyed a fairly wide range of gastronomic fare that occasionally didn’t agree with him.

For instance, he liked to munch on hot peppers right out of the jar. It was another habit that Carmen wanted him to break — except it turned out that Guidry, who used peppers to spice up his Cajun cooking, was Berra’s main supplier.

“I’d have them with me in spring training, and then when he’d go back to New Jersey, he’d tell me to send him a batch when I got back to Louisiana,” Guidry said. When Guidry would comply, he would get a call from Carmen asking that he stop sending the peppers. When he didn’t send them the next time Yogi asked, he’d get a call wanting to know where the peppers were. “Either way, I had one of them fussin’ about the damn peppers,” he said with mock resignation.

After so many years of sitting across the table from him at one Tampa establishment or another, Guidry could probably expound on Berra’s culinary preferences better than anyone but Carmen. At the very least, he could discuss them like a comedian working his monologue.

“When we go to the Rusty Pelican, that’s a seafood place and they have swordfish, which he loves, so he gets that all the time there,” Guidry said. “When we go to the Bahama Breeze, he likes the black bean soup, and with that he’ll have the seafood paella or the barbecued ribs. Four times out of five, he’ll have the seafood, but let’s say we have been to the Pelican the night before, well, that means he’s already had seafood, so he’ll get the ribs.

“Now Fleming’s is the steakhouse, so that’s what he gets there, and then at the Bonefish he has to have the sea bass. Then after he moved into the Residence Inn, he went one night to eat with Carmen at Lee Roy Selmon’s, which is right next door. So he tells me the next day, ‘Hey, it’s not bad.’ The guy recognized him, sat him at a nice table, everything was fine. OK, so now we got to go to Selmon’s, and there he gets the meatloaf. But since he’s been at the Residence Inn, where they put out a spread in the evening, he also keeps a list on the door of his refrigerator that tells him what they’ll be serving. If he likes something he’s had before, he’ll say, ‘On Tuesday, I’m going to eat in the hotel.’ ‘OK, that’s good, Yog.’ ”

No Tampa meal, however, was as anticipated and as fussed over as Guidry and Berra’s “Frog Legs Night,” which by the end of Berra’s first decade back with the Yankees had taken on the ritualistic weight of Old-Timers’ Day.

Before leaving for Tampa every spring, and after being badgered by Berra, Guidry would pack about two hundred legs into the truck, having purchased them inexpensively (about $200 for a hundred pounds) in Lafayette, where they are plentiful and sold year-round.

From the same vendor, he would buy a mixture of fl our and cornmeal seasoning in a gallon jar.

“They’re so simple to fix,” Guidry said. “You got the egg batter, the fry mix, dip ’em in the batter, throw ’em in the frying pan.” From the frying pan, the frog legs would be transferred to paper towels, to soak up some of the grease. It took about ten minutes to cook up a batch of forty legs.

Guidry would ration his supply so that it would last throughout spring training. He would prepare some for the more adventurous players looking for a break from the standard clubhouse fare. Jorge Posada was a longtime fan. CC Sabathia joined the club when he came on board in 2009. Guidry would also invite two or three buddies over on one of his first nights in town and playfully have Goose Gossage dial New Jersey to let Berra know what was on the menu that night.

“Yogi, we’re over here at Gator’s, and we’re eating all the frog legs,” Gossage would say.

That was enough to set Berra off. “There’d better be some goddamn legs left when I get down there,” he’d growl.

Excerpted from DRIVING MR. YOGI: Yogi Berra, Ron Guidry, and Baseball’s Greatest Gift. Copyright © 2012 by Harvey Araton. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

[Photo Credit: Edward Linsmier for The New York Times, Saed Hindash/N.J.com]

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.

The SI baseball preview is out and it features Jane Leavy’s essay “Sully and the Mick” from Rob Fleder’s “Damn Yankees” collection:

The inquiry arrived via e-mail with a note of urgency from my publisher: You might want to take a look at this. Mrs. Frank Sullivan had just received a condolence call from a dear friend who had learned of her husband’s death on page 162 of The Last Boy, my 2010 biography of Mickey Mantle. Mrs. Frank Sullivan was upset. She was also surprised because her husband, an All-Star pitcher for the 1950s Red Sox, was sitting beside her on their porch in Kauai watching the sunset and sipping his favorite wine from a box. Mrs. Frank Sullivan wished to know how soon I might declare him undead.

I was appropriately mortified. Mickey murdered the ball, sure, but I had killed Frank. My apology was prompt and profuse. I had tried to find Frank Sullivan, honest. Two former teammates (at least!) and one heretofore unimpeachable online source had reported that Frank was putting on his pants one leg at a time in a better world.

I had grieved for him and, truth to tell, for myself because Frank wasn’t just another dead ballplayer. He was responsible for the best line ever uttered about Mantle, maybe the best line ever uttered by a major league pitcher. Asked how he pitched to the Mick, Frank answered on behalf of the 548 menaced hurlers who faced Mantle over 18 years: “With tears in my eyes.”

I had to use it. So I put Frank in the past tense.

The “late” Frank Sullivan e-mailed the next day:

Dear Jane, it would distress me big time if you were to lose a minute’s sleep over this. I know I haven’t. And besides, you’re probably not off by much.

Check it out.

Bronx Banter Book Except

The following is from Pete Dexter’s essay in “Damn Yankees.” Dig in.

“The Error of Our Ways”

By Pete Dexter

A sheltie is a medium-size breed of canine that walks around with a nest of shit in its pants. In his own circles this earthiness makes him fascinating company and kind of a celebrity at the off-leash park, although the same earthy quality is worrisome to families with toddlers who, being toddlers, hug dogs without caring much which end they are hugging. Aroma-wise, there isn’t much to choose from, one end or the other.

Shelties also bring to the playground a tradition of nipping. A sheltie is born to herd sheep, after all, a species nobody has accused of being too smart for its own good, and the herding of which amounts essentially to creating and then organizing panic, which means taking little bites of ankles and feet, and there are times, in spite of countless reminders, when old habits take over and a sheltie just has to have the feel of live flesh in his teeth. The sheltie himself is close to blameless. You are, after all, who you are. We should keep that in mind.

The sheltie who nipped the author last Christmas belongs to his daughter and answers—well, doesn’t actually answer, but some- times looks up—to the name Jonesy, and until the baby showed up no dog ever had it more his own way. In fact, until the baby showed up the dog himself had been the baby—doting parents, daily brushing, special food, a park next door, maintenance ap- pointments to keep his nails clipped and the gunk off his teeth, endless toys—the salad days.

Naturally enough, the baby’s arrival left the dog suffering from a lack of his normal attention and so, upset and confused, Jonesy went back to what works and bit the first stranger through the door. The resulting infection put the author in the hospital for ten weeks and very nearly finished him off. If the animal had sat on the author’s foot after he’d nipped it, the author would not be here to tell the story.

Which probably would have been fine with Chuck Knoblauch.

But bygones are bygones, and things were not so easy for the dog, either. Once the baby showed up, barking in the night and herding humans, which had been baby-talk scolding offenses before, were suddenly federal cases, and in the way these things sometimes go, after his mistake—and it was a mistake, you could see the surprise on the animal’s face as he sat on the floor with the author’s ankle still in his maw along with the bitter mingle of human sweat and human blood, looking up and wondering how this could have happened—after that mistake, Jonesy was driven out one Saturday afternoon to the rural setting where he now resides, with afternoon naps under the porch and chickens to herd and no toddlers to clutch him from behind, and he is free to come and go as he likes and to bark in the night (the new owners are getting on in years and take out the hearing aids after the eleven o’clock news).

Which is as close as you get to a happy ending with dogs, but not so happy when you’re talking about second basemen.

We are speaking now of Edward Charles Knoblauch who, like Jonesy, had a good thing going and then fucked the rooster. A colloquialism they use quite a bit out on the farm.

What the farmer and his missus are referring to when they say “fucked the rooster” is a class of mistakes that by their very nature are hard to forget. That happen in a moment of carelessness or bad luck and are as good as tattooed across your face for the duration of your life. That become so closely associated with your idiot self that later on when another idiot does exactly the same thing, your wife gets mad at you all over again.

The author speaks from experience here, having once made such a mistake—a miscalculation of the goodness of human nature in a not especially human precinct of Philadelphia—and the incident follows him to this day. Not just the memory of the night—which is kept in easy reach of the author’s wife (who regular readers call “poor Mrs. Dexter”), handy as her purse any time the author, like Jonesy, feels his breeding and the undeniable itch to do what an author’s got to do—but the myth of that night, which has a life of its own.

For example, about three years ago, twenty-five years after the fact, one of the weekly papers in Philadelphia heard a new version of the evening in question and flew a reporter to Seattle with the idea of going through the details with the author all over again.

The author was just finishing his seventh novel—we’re talking about writing, not reading—and for unknown reasons concluded that the request for such an early interview was a signal that he had finally written a book that was exactly right, and he vividly remembers the feeling—dead bats dropping off the walls of his stomach into a river of bile—as he realized that what the reporter wanted to talk about wasn’t the new book but a twenty-five-year- old street brawl the author had been trying to live down ever since it happened.

Which we suppose could be how the eventual subject of this essay, Chuck Knoblauch, feels when somebody comes poking around to ask about some night he, too, would prefer to forget. The difference being that Knoblauch has the good sense not to talk to any of them—or at least not talk to the author, who should have seen it coming, having gone through several hundred pages of material to write a sensitive appreciation of the psychological abnormality that affected him (known variously as Steve Blass Disease, Steve Sax Disease, and Chuck Knoblauch Syndrome, among other things)—and in all those pages found only one true- sounding, consequential remark by Knoblauch over the last dozen years: Don’t tell anybody where I live.

So the author came to this exercise suspecting he was not in friendly territory and that there was an excellent chance Chuck Knoblauch didn’t care if he appreciated his syndrome or not. That it was possible Knoblauch had had as much appreciation as he could stand.

Still, the author wanted to be part of this book and felt like he had something to contribute. Meaning that even if his insight into the game was a slim volume indeed, he did, as it happens, know quite a bit about fucking the rooster. So apologies to Mr. Knoblauch for the intrusion, but we are who we are and we do what we do. Ask Jonesy.

“The Errors of Our Ways” is from “Damn Yankees: Twenty-Four Major-League Writers on the World’s Most Loved (and Hated) Team,” edited by Rob Fleder, and published by Harper Collins/Ecco.

Adapted from his essay that appears in the forthcoming collection “Damn Yankees,” here’s Dan Barry in the New York Times:

The Yankee cards among my tired collection are like mug-shot exhibits, prepared for presentation to the Court of the Beleaguered. From Jake Gibbs, catcher without bat, to Walt Williams, outfielder without neck, they confirm my childhood status as underdog. Here is Bill Robinson, one would-be phenom, batting .196; here is Steve Whitaker, another, batting little better. Here is first baseman Joe Pepitone, sporting his game-day toupee. Here is second baseman Horace Clarke, who so disliked body contact that he often failed to make the relay to first on potential double plays.

Here are Roger Repoz and Ruben Amaro, Andy Kosco and Charley Smith, Fred Talbot and Hal Reniff, Frank Tepedino and Gene Michael and Joe Verbanic and Thad Tillotson and Johnny Callison and Danny Cater and Curt Blefary and Jerry Kenney and Jimmy Lyttle and Celerino Sanchez, poor Celerino Sanchez, and so many others you do not remember, probably by choice.

As hollow as it might sound, though, these were my heroes. I ached and rooted for every one of them as they failed daily on baseball’s Broadway stage, Yankee Stadium, facing two opponents every time they stepped onto the field: the American League team of the moment and the Yankees teams of the past. My father’s Yankees.

“Damn Yankees” will be released in early April.

Stanley Woodward is best remembered today for a wire he almost sent to Red Smith. Woodward was the sports editor for the New York Herald Tribune and Smith was his star columnist. One spring, according to “Red: A Biography of Red Smith,” By Ira Berkow,  ”Woodward had been upset with the general sweet fare of columns” Smith had written. “Stanley was about to send a wire saying, ‘Will you stop Godding up those ball players?”

Woodward did not send the wire but Smith never forgot the sentiment. He repeated the story in Jerome Holtzman’s terrific oral history, “No Cheering in the Press Box.”

Woodward ran perhaps the finest sports section in New York after WWII. His Tribune staff included Smith, Al Laney, Jesse Abramson and Joe Palmer.

“Paper Tiger” is Woodward’s classic memoir. Fortunately for us, the good people at the University of Nebraska Press reissued the book not long ago (and it features an introduction from our man Schulian). Woodward’s gem is in print and it is essential reading. (Check out the “Paper Tiger” page at the University of Nebraska Press website.)

Please enjoy this excerpt. Woodward writes about bringing Smith, and Palmer–a writer who is also criminally overlooked these days–to the paper.

From “Paper Tiger,” by Stanley Woodward

Mrs. Helen Rogers Reid blew hot and cold on me at various times during my prewar and wartime career with the New York Herald Tribune. When I came back from the Pacific I felt I was in high favor. Not only had I written reams of copy about the nether side of the war but I worked largely by mail and so had not run up the hideous radio and cable bills the lady was used to receiving for war correspondence.

Mrs. Reid was extremely active in running the paper. She was the actual head of the Advertising Department but in the late stages of Ogden’s life she played a role of increasing importance in the Editorial Department. He started to fail in 1945, and his death occurred on January 3, 1947.

My first day in the office after getting back from the Pacific theater, Mrs. Reid invited me to her office and asked me what I would like to do for the paper. I believe I could have had any job I named at the time. But I asked merely to be returned to the Sports Department which needed reorganization. I asked to go back as sports editor on the theory, held by myself at any rate, that I would be moved out of Sports after the department had been put on its feet.

The first move I made was to install Arthur Glass as head of the copy desk. Our selection of news had been poor during the war and our choice of pictures was abysmal. Glass improved the paper the first day he worked in the slot, which was September 4, 1945.

At this time Al Laney was the columnist and didn’t like the job. He much preferred to handle assignments or to get up a feature series as he had in the case of “The Forgotten Men” before the war.

The first move I made was to attempt to get John Lardner to write our column. The first time we discussed it we renewed the old crap game argument and got nowhere. The second time I took along our publisher, Bill Robinson, and the talk was more businesslike. We met Lardner several other times but couldn’t come to terms with him. The fact was he didn’t want to write a newspaper column and kept making difficulties. So we dropped him, reluctantly.

Even before we talked to Lardner I had been scouting a little guy on the Philadelphia Record whose name was Walter Wellesley Smith. This character was a complete newspaper man. He had been through the mill and had come out with a high polish. In Philadelphia he was being hideously overworked. Not only did he write the column for the Record but he covered the ball games and took most other important assignments.

We scouted him in our usual way. For a month Verna Reamer, Sports Department secretary, bought the Record at the out-of-town newsstand in Times Square. She clipped all of Smith’s writings and pasted them in a blank book. At the end of the month she left the book on my desk and I read a month’s work by Smith at one sitting. I found I could get a better impression of a man’s general ability and style by reading a large amount of his stuff at one time.

There was no doubt in my mind that Smith was a man we must have. After I’d read half his stuff I decided he had more class than any writer in the newspaper business.

At first I didn’t think of him as a substitute for Lardner. Rather I wanted to get them both. When dealings with Lardner came to a stop I was afraid I would have to go back to writing a daily column myself, which I dreaded. I thought of myself at this time as an organizer rather than a writer, but Laney was anxious to have a leave of absence to finish the book he was writing (Paris Herald).

I telephoned Smith and asked him if he could come to New York and talk with me. We set a date and he arrived one morning with his wife Kay. She and Ricie paired off for much of the day while Smith and I discussed business.

It must be said that I was making this move without full approval of the management. George Cornish, our managing editor, knew I was looking for a man but was hard to convince when higher salaries were involved.

It is very strange to me that there was no competition in New York for Smith’s services. He was making ninety dollars a week in Philadelphia with a small extra fee for use of his material in the Camden paper, also operated by J. David Stern. Nobody in New York had approached Smith in several years. In fact, he never had had a decent offer from any New York paper. I opened the conversation with Smith as follows—

“You are the best newspaper writer in the country and I can’t understand why you are stuck in Philadelphia. I can’t pay you what you’re worth, but I’m very anxious to have you come here with us. I think that you will ultimately be our sports columnist but all I can offer you at the start is a job on the staff. Are you interested?”

“I sure am if the money is right,” said Red.

We adjourned for lunch and I told him about the paper and what I hoped to make of the Sports Department. I told him that I had lost all interest in sports during the war but now I was determined to make our department the best in the country.

“I can’t do this without you, Red,” I told him.

I left Smith parked in Bleeck’s and went upstairs to talk to George Cornish. With him it was a question of money and he blanched when I told him how much I wanted to pay Smith. I got a halfhearted go-ahead from George, but still I didn’t dare make the offer to Smith.

He owned a house in the Philadelphia suburbs and would be under great expense until he could sell it and move his family to New York. I suggested that we would perhaps be able to pay him an “equalization fee” until he moved his wife and children into Herald Tribune territory.

I went back to see Cornish and broached this subject. No one can say George wasn’t careful with the company’s money. He argued for a while but finally agreed that if we were to bring Smith to New York, it would be fair to save him from penury during his first weeks with us.

I was able to go back to Bleeck’s and make a pretty good offer to Red. I explained to him that his salary would be cut back after his family moved.

“But don’t worry,” I added. “You’ll be making five times that in three years.”

Of course, it turned out that way. As our columnist, Red was immediately syndicated. His salary was boosted within a couple of months and his income from outside papers equaled his new salary. Before anyone knew it he was making telephone numbers—and he deserved it.

I am unable to account for the fact that none of the evening papers of New York grabbed him. He could have been had, in all probability, for five dollars more a week than we gave him.

With him in hand I was able to let Laney take a few months off to finish his book while I slaved at the column, in addition to other duties. I didn’t want to put Red in too quickly. I wanted him to get the feel of the town first, and also I needed some of his writing in the paper to convince the bigwigs that he was as good as I claimed.

After Smith had been with us a month or so, I talked to Bill Robinson about making him our columnist. I wanted Bill to talk to Mrs. Reid about Smith so that Red would get away from the gate in good order. Bill had been reading him and was enthusiastic about his work. So not long after Smith had shifted his family to Malverne, Long Island, having sold his house, I told him that he was the columnist until further notice.

“I think that means forever, Red. And I’ll go right upstairs and see if I can get you more money.”

As a columnist Smith made an immediate hit and it wasn’t long before the Hearst people were showing interest in him. I told Bill Robinson it was silly not to have a contract with Smith. He agreed and it was drawn up at once. It gave him a large increase in salary and half the returns from his syndicate, which was growing fast. It now includes about one hundred papers.

I’d like to go back to the question of why Smith wasn’t hired by somebody else. My conclusion is that most writing sports editors don’t want a man around who is obviously better than they. I took the opposite view on this question. I wanted no writer on the staff who couldn’t beat me or at least compete with me. This was a question of policy.

I was trying to make a strong Sports Department and it was impossible to do this with the dreadful mediocrity I saw around me on the other New York papers.

The week the Smiths moved from the Main Line to Malverne was memorable. The kids, Kitty and Terry, were dropped off at our farm for a few days so that the parental Smiths could move in peace. I think the kids had a good time playing with our little girls.

Terry, who is now a bright young reporter and a graduate of Notre Dame and the army, was satisfied to sit on the tractor for hours at a time. To be safe I blocked the wheels with logs of wood and took off the distributor cap. The tractor had a self-starter.

With the Smiths established in Malverne, the next move was to get a racing writer. I wrote about twenty-five letters to people in racing—horse owners, promoters, trainers, jockeys, concessionaires, and gamblers. I asked each one whom he considered to be the best racing writer available to the New York Herald Tribune. The response was nearly 100 percent unanimous: “Joe Palmer.”

I asked Smith if he knew Joe Palmer. He said, “Yes, and he’s a hell of a writer.”

I found that Joe had a regular job on the Blood Horse of Lexington, Kentucky, that he was also secretary of the Trainers’ Association and was currently in New York tending to the trainers’ business.

I got hold of Bob Kelley, my old Poughkeepsie associate, and asked him if he would make an appointment for Palmer to meet for lunch in Bleeck’s restaurant at his convenience. Kelley had left the Times and had become public relations counsel for the New York race track. He got hold of Palmer and conveyed my message. Palmer answered as follows, “Tell that son of a bitch I won’t have lunch with him, and if I see him on the street I’ll kick him in the shins.”

I told Kelley that his answer was highly unsatisfactory and sent him back to talk further with Palmer. This time Joe came into Bleeck’s with his guard up. What he didn’t like about me was that I made a specialty of panning horse-racing. But once we got together we were friends in no time.

Joe liked the idea of working for the Herald Tribune. We came to terms quickly. It was agreed that he should go to work for us on the opening day at Hialeah, some months away. He needed the intervening time to finish his annual edition of American Race Horses.

I didn’t know at this time what a remarkable performer I had hired. Palmer turned out to be a writer of the Smith stripe, and his Monday morning column, frequently devoted to subjects other than racing, became one of the Herald Tribune’s most valuable features.

I was misguided in the way I handled Palmer. I should never have tied him down with daily racing coverage. He would have been more valuable to us if I had turned him loose to write a daily column of features and notes as Tom O’Reilly did for us much later. But Joe was effective whatever he wrote. He even did a good job on a fight in Florida one winter, though he hated boxing.

He and Smith were at Saratoga during one August meeting, and Smith persuaded him to go to some amateur bouts, conducted for stable boys and grooms. On their way home Palmer panned the show.

“I’d rather see a chicken fight,” he said.

“Why?” said Smith, outraged. “Chicken fighting is inhuman.”

“Well,” said Joe, “what we just saw was unchicken.”

Palmer was a big man physically and as thoroughly educated as John Kieran. Joe had earned his master’s degree in English in Kentucky and had taught there and at the University of Michigan where he studied for his Ph.D. He could speak Anglo-Saxon. His knowledge of music was stupendous and he would have made a good drama critic for any newspaper.

He had started his thesis at Michigan when he discontinued his education and went to work for the Blood Horse.

He first attracted my attention with a St. Patrick’s Day story in which he revealed that the patron saint’s greatest gift to the Irish was the invention of the wheelbarrow, which taught them to walk on their hind lefts.

Joe, himself, was of Irish decent and was brought up a Catholic. When he moved into a house in Malverne near the Smiths, he didn’t like the public education and sent his children to the parochial school. He decided on this course after a long talk with the mother superior. She asked him if he wanted his children instructed in religion and he said he did.

One day Steve and young Joe were learning the catechism. One of the questions was, “How Many Gods Are There?”

“That’s an important question and I want you to be sure to give the sister the right answer,” said Joe. “Now say this after me: ‘There is but one God and Mohammed is his prophet.’”

The story ends there. Nobody ever found out whether the boys told the sister what Joe told them. It’s a safe bet, though, that their mother, Mary Cole Palmer, touted them off Mohammed.

A few days before Palmer came to work for us, we carried a special story by him explaining his credo of racing and a four-column race-track drawing by the distinguished artist, Lee Townsend. The main point of Joe’s story was, “Horse-racing is an athletic contest between horses.”

He was not interested in betting or the coarser skullduggery that goes on around a race track. For a long time he wouldn’t put the payoff in his racing story.

“Why should I do that?” he asked Smith.

“Because if you don’t, the desk will write it in and probably get it in the wrong place.”

A few days before Joe went to work for us, Tom O’Reilly, another great horse writer, heard about it. He said, or so it was reported to me, “Holy smokes! Those guys will be hiring Thomas A. Edison to turn off the lights.”

Excerpted from PAPER TIGER by Stanley Woodward. Copyright © 1962 by Stanley Woodward. Originally published by Atheneum, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Excerpted with permission by Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

You can order “Paper Tiger” here.

For more on Woodward, check out “Red: A Biography of Red Smith” by Ira Berkow and “Into My Own,” a memoir by Roger Kahn.

And read this about Joe Palmer:  blood horse.

(Thanks once again to Dina C. for her expert transcription.)

Here’s something to keep you warm on a cold winter day, the late George Kimball’s essay from our book “Lasting Yankee Stadium Memories.” It’s all about the old ballpark, Billy Martin, finks and phonies, brawling, and, of course, drinking with Bill Lee.

By George Kimball

There are things you learned about the old Yankee Stadium once it became your place of work that never would have occurred to you as a kid going to watch a game there. Making your way from the visiting- to the home-team dugout, or to the pressroom where they fed us and the adjacent quarters where we wrote our stories after games, involved negotiating an elaborate system of labyrinthine tunnels that could have been a large-scale Skinner box. A dim-witted scribe could spend hours trying to find his way around down there, but once he did figure it out, he’d be rewarded with supper, or maybe a beer after the game.

And since we only made two or three trips a year to New York, we were always making wrong turns, ones that inevitably brought us face-to-face with one of New York’s finest on a security detail. Some of the cops had been drawing this plum assignment for years. Others, newer to the job, couldn’t tell you how to get from A to B any better than another sportswriter could. They should have handed out road maps with the press credentials.

But the overriding memory of all those hours spent wandering around beneath the House That Ruth Built remains the smell. If you grew up in suburbia, it wouldn’t have meant much to you at all, but if you’d spent much time in a big-city tenement or in the stockroom of a grocery store or ever wandered beneath street level in a restaurant that abuts a subway line, the permeating odor of Decon, the rat poison, would have been familiar.

My friend, John Schulian, must have recognized that smell too, because at some point in the late 1970s, he came up with a description of Billy Martin so apt that it should have been chiseled on Billy’s gravestone: A rat studying to be a mouse.

The funny part of it was that, while Martin had carefully cultivated an image of a guy ready to fight at the drop of a hat, he wasn’t actually very good at it. If you look at the fights he won, they were usually against marshmallow salesmen or mental cripples (Jimmy Piersall was just months away from the loony bin when Martin beat him up under the stands at Fenway in 1952) or a guy who was even drunker than he was (Dave Boswell at the Lindell AC in 1969). Sometimes he’d gain the advantage with a well-timed sucker punch, and sometimes he’d just think he had the advantage, as was the case in St. Louis in 1953, when he picked a fight with a short guy wearing glasses. (The guy, Clint “Scrap-Iron” Courtney, turned out to run against stereotype.)

If you watched him carefully over the years, he was careful to pick his spots. When Martin went at it with somebody bigger or tougher than he was, it was usually in a setting where he knew it would get broken up right away. In fair fights—and there weren’t many of them—he almost always got his ass kicked. (See: Martin vs. Ed Whitson at the Cross Keys Inn, Baltimore, 1985.)

I’d been at Yankee Stadium the night Thad Tillotson bounced a pitch off Joe Foy’s helmet in 1967. “Watch this,” I told my then-wife when Tillotson came to bat a couple of innings later. Sure enough, Jim Lonborg drilled him in the back, both benches emptied, and when they finally pulled them apart, there were Joe Pepitone and Rico Petrocelli rolling around in the dirt.

I was also at Fenway Park the day in 1973 when Stick Michael missed a bunt on a suicide squeeze. With Thurman Munson barreling in from third toward Carlton Fisk, whom he didn’t like much anyway, the result was somewhat predictable. Both benches emptied after the collision, and even as they dragged Munson away, Fisk and Michael were going at it. Boston lefty Bill “Spaceman” Lee said the whole thing looked like a bunch of hookers swinging their purses at each other. Everyone save Thurman Munson thought that was pretty funny.

So, by the time Billy Martin came back to manage his old team, Red Sox–Yankee rhubarbs were nothing new. Their history long predated the return of Number One. I’d seen them start for good reasons and for bad reasons, and sometimes they’d started just because they were Yankees and Red Sox. So, when another one broke out on May 20, 1976, I wasn’t surprised. You could see this one coming a mile down the road. It was like watching a fight develop in slow motion.

Lee had a 1–0 lead with two out in the bottom of the sixth. Lou Piniella, at second, represented the tying run; Graig Nettles was on first. With the count 2–1 on Otto Velez, Spaceman threw a sinker on the outside of the plate, and Velez stroked it into the opposite field. It was hit so hard that when Dwight Evans grabbed it on one hop, it briefly crossed my mind that he might even have a play on Nettles at second. That’s when I looked down and saw Piniella rounding third, and he didn’t seem to be slowing down.

Evans may have had the best arm in the American League back then, and not even a good base runner would have challenged him in this situation, but Piniella was, at this point, committed and kept on coming. Evans threw in one fluid motion, a strike to the plate, and had him by at least ten feet. If it had somehow been a closer play, maybe what happened next wouldn’t have happened at all, but now it was inevitable. Out by a mile, Piniella’s only chance was to run right over Fisk, barreling into him so hard that he might dislodge the ball. Fisk, aware of this, was determined to make the experience painful enough that Lou would think twice before he ever tried it again.

As tags go, it was pretty aggressive. Fisk may even have tried to tag him in the nuts—and with his fist, not his glove, holding the ball. Naturally, Lou came up swinging, and in what seemed barely an instant, there were fifty or sixty guys in uniform going at it in the middle of the infield. Or that’s the way it seemed. Actually, some of them took a bit longer getting there than others. Traditional baseball protocol in these situations calls for the occupants of both bullpens, even the ones intent on serving as peacemakers, to make a mad dash all the way to the infield, where they are to then grab one of their opposite numbers and wrestle for a while until the smoke clears.

Logic would suggest that it would be a lot simpler to just pair off out in the bullpen, particularly since, in its new configuration, Yankee Stadium’s bullpens shared a common gate. So, when the fight started, everybody from both bullpens jumped up simultaneously to race in to where the action was. Tom House, then a Boston reliever, told me that when he got to the gate, Catfish Hunter was gallantly holding it open for him.

“See ya in there, kid,” said Catfish as House trotted past.

Fisk and Piniella were rolling around on the ground following the collision when Lee, who’d been backing up the plate on the play, spotted Velez trying to be third man in.

The first guy to hit Lee was actually Mickey Rivers, who must have been taking boxing lessons from Billy Martin. Mick was running up and down behind the scrum, looking like a guy playing Whack-A-Mole as he lashed out at the back of every Boston cap he could spot. (Somebody watching on television later told me that Ken Harrelson, in his blow-by-blow call on a Boston station, said “Rivers is just basically just running around sucker-punching everybody!”)

The next thing I saw was Nettles grabbing Spaceman from behind, seemingly lifting him over his head, and body-slamming him. I don’t know for a fact that he was trying to throw Lee on his left shoulder, but that’s how he landed. (Nettles claimed later that he was just trying to drag Lee off Velez, since Rivers’ punch hadn’t done the job.) Lee was 6-foot-3 and 210 pounds, almost the exact dimensions of Muhammad Ali, but truth be told, he couldn’t fight any better than Billy Martin could, even though he did have an impressive one-punch KO on his résumé.

That had occurred in a winter league game down in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, several years earlier. When Eliseo Rodriguez charged the mound, Lee reflexively stuck his hand out in self-defense and, to his own surprise, knocked Rodriguez cold. Only when he read the next morning’s papers did he realize that he’d knocked out the island’s former Golden Gloves light-heavyweight champion.

The return bout took place in Caguas a week later. Rodriguez and two of his relatives were waiting when Spaceman got off the team bus. They beat him up and rammed his face into a light pole for good measure.

“I did get a nice new set of teeth out of the deal,” said Spaceman.

With Lee now apparently out of commission, Fisk and Piniella separated and Rivers dragged away by several Yankees, things seemed to calm down in a hurry. That’s when Lee made the mistake of getting up.

In his college days at USC, Bill had played summer ball for the Alaska Goldpanners with Nettles’ brother. Until a few moments earlier, he had considered Graig a friend. Now, he was screaming incomprehensibly as he staggered toward the New York third baseman.

“I think,” Lee said later, “it might have been the word ‘asshole’ that set him off.”

In Nettles’ defense, what he probably saw was just a crazy man charging at him. In any case, when Lee got close enough, Nettles cut loose with a right cross, and when Lee tried to block it with his left, he discovered that he couldn’t lift his arm above his waist. The punch caught Spaceman flush in the face and dropped him in his tracks.

A few months later, Ali and Ken Norton fought in almost exactly the same spot, and in fifteen rounds neither one of them landed a punch as hard as that one.

Oddly, I don’t remember Billy Martin throwing a single punch in that brawl. Maybe he found Don Zimmer and the two of them sat it out.

Once order was restored, both Nettles and Lee were ejected. (Neither Fisk nor Piniella were.) In Lee’s case, it was somewhat moot. Before the Red Sox finished batting in the next inning, he was on his way to the hospital.

He would later describe the episode by saying “I was attacked by Billy Martin’s brown shirts.”

There was clearly no love lost between the dope-smoking Spaceman and the whiskey-swilling Fiery Genius. There were unconfirmed rumors, before and since, that Martin had personally placed a bounty on Lee, but there were enough Yankees players who intensely disliked Lee that they probably didn’t need any encouragement from Billy Martin.

Obviously, the fight hadn’t been started just to get at him, said Lee, “but once it did start, it sure seemed like there were a lot of guys in pinstripes trying to find me.”

It might be noted here that, going into that game, Lee ranked as the number three Yankee-killer of all time, with a lifetime percentage against the Bronx Bombers bettered only by those of Babe Ruth and Dickie Kerr. Ruth, of course, had stopped pitching even before Harry Frazee sold his contract to Colonel Ruppert, and Kerr, pointed out Lee, may have accomplished the greatest pitching feat of all time—winning two games in the 1919 World Series with five guys playing behind him who were trying to lose.

Bill Lee’s career didn’t end that night, but it’s fair to say he was never the same pitcher again. He had won seventeen games in each of the previous three years, but he never won as many in a season again. He had torn ligaments and a separated left shoulder, and nearly two months would go by before he pitched again. Between 1973 and 1975 Lee had thrown fifty-one complete games. In 1976 he would throw just one.

Nobody knew this that night at that ballpark, of course. All we knew was that Lee had been taken away in an ambulance, but when the team bus pulled up in front of the New York Sheraton an hour and a half after the last out, there was Spaceman, waiting in the lobby.

Since I was then writing for a weekly and didn’t face a postgame deadline, Lee and I had earlier made plans to terrorize a saloon or two in Greenwich Village that night, and now, with his arm and a sling and sporting a black eye, he was determined to keep the appointment.

“Come on,” he said. “We’re still going to the Lion’s Head, aren’t we?”

Stan Williams, the Red Sox’s pitching coach, had other ideas. “Come on, big boy,” he said to Lee as he grabbed his good arm. “No curfew for you tonight.”

So, with Stanley as our tour guide, we went bouncing on the Upper East Side. I vaguely remember visiting a gin mill with a hospital motif—the ER? the Recovery Room?—where the waitresses were all dressed like nurses, or dressed like nurses wearing white miniskirts, anyway.

Either the sight of a bona fide patient had scared all the nurses away or we’d moved on to another joint. Thirty-three years later, all I can swear to is that, a bit after 3 AM, we were the last three customers in the bar, and Lee had been chasing shots of VO with the Demerol they’d given him in the real hospital, or maybe it was the other way around, but anyway, just then the saloon door swings open and who comes walking in but—think about the odds of this for a moment—Lou Piniella, all by himself.

As soon as he saw us he was all over Lee like a long-lost brother: “Gee, Bill, I’m so sorry. If I’d ever known this was going to happen . . .” I think tears may even have welled up in his eyes. And, of course, he bought us all a drink, and then another one.

The sun was coming up by the time we left, Sweet Lou in one direction, and Bill, Stan, and I back to the hotel. In the cab, I remarked to Lee that Piniella was a pretty nice guy after all, and that he had seemed properly contrite over the outcome of the affair he’d initiated at home plate that night.

“What else was he going to say?” Spaceman sighed wearily.

“There were three of us and one of him.”

Out on an early morning foraging run, a solitary rat darted across the sidewalk. We all saw him, but nobody said a word.

When he was twelve-years-old, Scott Raab saw the Cleveland Browns win the championship game. He was there, in person. No Cleveland team has won a title since, and Raab’s new book, “The Whore of Akron: One Man’s Search for the Soul of Lebron James,” is partly about being a Jew and a Clevelander and it is about noble suffering.

This is a good bit:

I know: it’s only a game. But what a game. The Colts were 7-point favorites, on the road. Coached by thirty-four-year-old Don Shula–drafted by the Browns after going to college in Cleveland–they boasted the league’s best offense, with six future Hall of Famers, led by Johnny U at quarterback–and the NFL’s best defense. But Unitas threw two picks into the wind. Dr. Ryan tossed three TDs, and Jim Brown gained 114 yards. The Browns won, 27-0.

The official attendance that day was 79, 544, and not one of them would’ve believed that he’d never live to see another Cleveland team win a championship.

The Cuyahoga River catching fire?

Maybe.

Fish by the thousands washing up dead on Lake Erie’s shore?

Possible.

Cleveland a national joke?

Not bloody likely.

But the notion that generation after generation of Cleveland fans could be born and grown old and die without celebrating a title?

Get the fuck outta here.

I was there. I saw it happen. It gave me an abiding sense of faith–in my town and its teams–that will never fade, that no amount of hurt and heartbreak can destroy. All those fucking Yankees fans are absolutely right. Flags fly forever. Forever.

“The Whore of Akron” can be purchased here.

[Photo Credit: baseballoogie]

My grandmother on my mother’s side had dementia and spent the last years of her life in a home. I was told that she liked to bite people. I never saw her during that time–she was in Belgium, I was here in New York–but hers is the only experience I have with Alzheimer’s. I got to thinking about her as I read Charlie Pierce’s beautiful memoir about the disease, his family curse, which claimed his father and four uncles, and which may eventually claim  him, as well.

Here is an excerpt:

The waking dream is of a dead city.

There was a great fire and the city died in it. I am sure of that. I can see the smoldering skyline, smoke rising from faceless buildings, flattening into dark and lowering clouds. I can hear the sharp keening of the scavenger birds. I can smell fire on damp wood, far away. I can feel the gritty wind in my eyes. I can taste the sour rain.

The waking dream comes upon me when I forget where the car is parked, or when I buy milk but forget the bread, or when I call my son by my daughter’s name. Wide awake but dreaming still, I walk through the ruined city.

When it happens, I remember. I remember everything. I remember anything. For years, I have been a walking trove of random knowledge, but I’ve come not to believe in the concept of trivia. I do not believe that anything you remember can be truly useless because I have seen memory go cold and dead.

“Why do you know stuff like that? people ask.

I smile and shrug. I do not tell them about the relief I find in remembering that Leon Czolgosz shot President McKinley. Not to remember Leon Czolgosz is to realize that one day you may not remember your son.  Leon Czolgosz goes first, and then your children. Not to remember is to realize that the day will come when you cannot find your way back home, that the day will come when you cannot find the way back to yourself. Not to remember is to begin to die, piecemeal, one fact at a time. It is to drift, aimlessly, deep into the ruined city, and never return.

…There’s a game I play now, when the waking dream comes. I make a deal with the disease. All right, I say. I will allow you to have some of my memories. You can have my first polio shot, all the lyrics to “American Woman,” two votes for Bill Clinton, and both Reagan administrations.

Leave me my children’s names.

Let me know them, and you can have all four Marx Brothers.

This is not clinical. I know the disease does not work this way. But sometimes, when the waking dream comes and I can feel the wind all gritty on my skin, I play this game anyway, and I am very good at it. I was born to play it. I was raised to believe that truth is malleable, and that you can bend it so that even its darkest part can be shaped into the familiar and the commonplace. I can play this game. I can play it well.

Makes you appreciate the moment, this moment, for what we have.

You can order Hard to Forget: An Alzheimer’s Story, here.

[Photo Credit: Best of Rally Live and  Jason Langer]

Over at Esquire, you’ll find an excerpt from Scott Raab’s new book about Lebron James:

It turns out the Heat have printed three covers of tonight’s program — one with Wade, one with Bosh, one with James. I take one of each.

On his cover, LeBron glares into the camera, head lowered, eyes hooded, tight-lipped, his thick white headband riding ever higher on his forehead as his hairline approaches oblivion. He stands with his hands on his hips, with his shoulders thrust forward, the visual embodiment of his summertime tweet:

“Don’t think for one min that I haven’t been taking mental notes of everyone taking shots at me this summer. And I mean everyone!”

He’s ready to wreak havoc upon the NBA. No prisoners. Blood on the hardwood. Mano a mano. If your name’s on Bron-Bron’s list, you’re going down hard as a motherfucker.

That’s the pose. I think back to a game his rookie season, against the Indiana Pacers, when NBA tough guy Ron Artest was mugging James as he fought for position to take an inbounds pass. Artest had an arm across LeBron’s upper chest and neck and a leg planted between James’s knees bowing him forward. Paul Silas was coaching the Cavs, and Silas came up off the bench screaming — first at the nearest referee for not calling a foul on Artest, and then at LeBron for letting Artest unman him.

James has grown stronger and smarter over his seven seasons in the league, but he still tries to finesse defenders like Artest. His game has never hungered for a battle, much less marked him as the cruel-eyed enforcer who glares out from the program’s cover.

You can pre-order “The Whore of Akron,” here.