Please enjoy the deadline work of two heavyweights–Jimmy Cannon and Murray Kempton–on the unlikely winner and hard luck loser of Game 5 of the 1956 World Series. The 2-0 win by the Yankees gave them a 3-2 series lead (they’d win it in 7) but the game is remembered because Don Larsen threw the only perfect game in the history of the World Series.

From The New York Post, here’s Cannon on Larsen and Kempton on the losing pitcher, Sal Maglie.

“Perfect Day for a Dim-Time Guy” 

By Jimmy Cannon

You’re Don Larsen, the dim-time guy who pitched the perfect game. You’re a midnight kid who doesn’t miss any laughs. It’s one more for the road and no one ever gets sun-burned by a sallow morning sun. But yesterday on a sun-spangled afternoon you achieved everlasting fame in baseball. You pitched a no-hitter, the first in any World Series game, the perfect one because no one reached first base in nine rapid innings. So let them rib you about busting up a past-curfew car in St. Pete last spring. You weren’t hurt and yesterday it was 2-0 against the Dodgers in the fifth game of the World Series in Yankee Stadium.

All the night-long bus rides around the no-sleep leagues, from the village of Aberdeen to Globe-Miami in the Arizona Texas League, through the Three Eye League, through the North League, through Wichita and Wichita Falls, they brought you to the Stadium yesterday. From the St. Louis Browns to the Baltimore Orioles, and to the Yankees in ’55 after being dropped back to Denver, there fun all the way. And some grief, too, because in ’49 in Globe-Miami the right arm was sore. It wasn’t too much but down there you don’t get much help from specialists with the club picking up the bill. You were an outfielder for a while, a respectable one but pitching is your business. The arm healed itself and you returned to your trade.

You don’t counterfeit humility for the reporters. You don’t turn it on for the crowd. You’re a tall, slow-walking man and that’s the way you go. You kept to the usual routine of your life. You knocked over a few beers, grabbed a couple of laughs and hit the sheets at midnight, You belt a few every night and why not? Why go to bed early? You knew you don’t sleep. You’re a dim-time guy.

It occurred to you in the sixth or seventh inning you might be the first man to throw a no-hitter in a Series. You can’t remember exactly when this thought took shape. You don’t know who the batter was. You were taking them one at a time, hitter by hitter. The infielders didn’t give you any advice. Even Joe Collins, who generally reminds a pitcher to cover first when a lefthanded hitter is up, stayed away from you.

On the bench, Billy Hunter rolled the practice ball out to the infield. He made certain he did it every inning. Once Mickey Mantle came in and sat where Hunter had been all game long. Whispering so you wouldn’t hear it, Hunter asked Mantle for lis lucky seat. They were guided by superstition as the innings passed, each man following the same routine but not mentioning it to you.

Under the stands, Rip Coleman, who rooms with you on the road, tried to walk out the tension. He didn’t want to see the base hit that would take it away from you. A grounds-keeper told Coleman you were pitching a no-hitter. And Coleman didn’t reply, just glared at the guy.

You didn’t wind up once yesterday as you pitched the first perfect game since Charlie Robertson did it for the White Sox against Detroit during the regular season of 1922. You figured Del Baker, the Red Sox coach, was catching your pitches and tipping off the hitters. So you experimented without a wind-up after the Yankees had won the pennant this year. But your roommate claims you got this style from a comic book character called The Ghoul.

You used the fast ball, the curve ball and the slider. Only once, in the first inning to Pee Wee Reese, did you throw three balls to hitter. It came down to three and two and they the shortstop stood transfixed as a third strike was called by Babe Pinelli. In the ninth Yogi Berra told you that you had to get Jackie Robinson who was the first hitter. You threw him out, then Roy Campanella hit a ground ball to Martin and Dale Mitchell, batting for Sal Maglie, took a third strike.

At times you resembled a reflective man throwing stones into a river, so easy was your motion. Occasionally, you examined the ball as if it were made of crystal and could reveal the secrets of the innings to come. Against you, Maglie, sad as old men are who desperately hold onto their youth, squeezed the ball in both hands as if it were made of snow and he could press it smaller. He was marvelous, too, and stingy with his five hits. But Mantle hit a curve ball that slanted toward his wrists for a home run in the fourth inning. In the sixth a single by Andy Carey, your bunted sacrifice and Hank Bauer’s leftfield single made the other run.

Only four times was your perfect game in jeopardy. In the second, Robinson’s line-shot jumped out of Carey’s glove but Gil McDougald fielded it. In the fifth, Mantle, running sideways, made a spectacular back-handed catch of Gil Hodges’ fly. Also in the fifth, Sandy Amoros’ fly ball abruptly turned foul. If it had fallen fair, it would have been a home run. The one-leap ground ball Jim Gilliam hit to McDougald in the seventh was difficult, but the shortstop performed the play.

Early in the season, you were a five-inning pitcher but your stamina came back. You pitched one-and-a-third inning in the second game of this Series, but the four runs they made off of you on a hit and four bases on balls were unearned. The hell with al [sic] that. You’re Don Larsen, a dim-time guy, who pitched the perfect game.

“Maglie: Gracious Man With Dealer’s Hands”

By Murray Kempton

There was the customary talk about the shadows of the years and the ravages of the law of averages when Sal Maglie went out to meet the Yankees yesterday afternoon. It was the first time, after all the years, that he had ever pitched in Yankee Stadium, the home of champions.

He threw that humpbacked setup pitch that is last in the warm up, and then for the first time looked at Hank Bauer. He threw the curve in; Hank Bauer made a gesture at hunting; and the strike was called.

The hitter leaned over a little; the pitch was high; Hank Bauer skittered back in haste and the ball went by the catcher’s mitt and back to the wall.

“If I know Sal,” the old Giant writer in the stands said, “He threw that to tell -em on. He knows the Yankees probably think he’s a little tired. H’s saying to them, look fellas, I’m still around. You’ve got to come and get me.”

“The call was for an inside pitch,” said Sal Maglie later. “I threw it too high and it got away.” He is a gracious man who takes no pride in the legend of professional venom.

He worked his arm a little and blew on his hands as though he came from a world no sun could warm. And then Bauer plunked it up to Reese; Maglie looked once at the ball and then at the fielder, and, without needing to see the catch, bent over and worked his long, brown, dealer’s hands into the resin bag.

He got Joe Collins to hit on the ground to the wrong field; MickeyMantle went all the way around; Sal Maglie heard the sound and judged it. The left fielder was still circling under it when Sal Maglie crossed the foul line on his way to the dugout. He gives very little and can afford to to spend less.

He went that way through the line-up for the first three innings. It seemed a memorable incident when the first pitch to the eighth Yankee batter was a ball. The utility infield of the fifth-place team in the Westport Midget League League would have eaten up anything hit by either team in those three perfect 18 outs. “I figured,” said PeeWee Reese, “that both you guys weren’t giving anybody anything, and we’d have to call it at midnight.”

Sal Maglie ended the third for the Dodgers, walking out slowly carrying one bat, digging his spikes In as though anything ls possible in this game, driving the first pitch straight to Mickey Mantle and walking over towards third base to change his cap and get his glove. He threw the warm-up pitches; Roy Campanella was standing up and almost dancing at the plate.

Maglle got the two quick strikes on Bauer who hit to Jackie Robinson; Maglle did not look at the play; he was busy with the resin. He pushed the curve by Joe Collins; it was the third strike. Mantle was back.

The first strike was a curve and called. There were no times intrudlng upon the memory when he had seemed more sharp. He threw the next pitch outside, and then hit the corner again. He waited awhlle, rubbing his fingers on his shirt, wiping the afternoon’s first sweat of his forehead. He threw a pitch on the corner that was low by the distance of a bead or sweat from the skin; it was that close and was called a ball.

Mantle hit a foul. Sal Maglie knew it was out of play; the left fielder was still running and he was working on a new ball. The next pitch he threw Mantle was down the middle a little inside. Roy Campanella said later that he hit on his fists. Sal Maglie watched it almost curve and then stay fair in the stands; with the unseeing roar all around him. he walked back to the rubber and kicked it once.

“He’d been fouling off the outside pitches,” he said later. “I thought I’d try him Inside once.” He stopped for a minute, naked and dry beside his locker, the skin showing through the thin hair above his forehead. “That shows what can happen when you’re thinking out there and the other guy isn’t.” That was as close as he came to suggesting that God is too tolerant with the margin of error he assigns the very young.

Then Yogi Berra hit one hard to the wrong field; Duke Snider ran the distance of years, and tumbled up with lt. Sal Maglie had no reason lo know it then, but that was the inning and the run.

In the fifth Enos Slaughter was walked very fast. Billy Martin bunted. Sal Maglie came scuttling onto the grass and snatched the ball and turned around and fired it high and smoky to second just in time, a 40-year-old-man throwing out a 40-year-old-man and knowing he had to hurry. He was sweating hard by this time. Harold Reese went up half his height and knocked it into the air and recovered it for the double play. Sal Maglie was watching the way the ball went now; the sound was different; for the first time today he had to think of the fielders.

Don Larsen went on making the rest period painfully short. Sal Maglie took his warmups for the sixth; he was throwing the last one in hard now. Andy Carey hit one over his head into center and the old remembered tight rope walk had begun.

Larsen bunted the third strike; Maglie and Campanella scrambled off too late to get the runner at second; they had made their mistake. Carey went far off second; Bauer slapped the ball to lwft. Sal Maglie drove himself over to back up third, but the run was in and safely in. Walter Alston came out; the conference went on around Maglie. A man in the stands said that if Labine was reasy, it was time to bring him in. “Take Sal out?” Campanella said later, “the way he was pitching?” Joe Collins hit a low, hard single; Maglie went over to cover third again and came back slamming the ball into his glove. Mantle was up.

The first pitch was out of control; then he threw two strikes, one called, one swinging. Mantle hit the ball to the first baseman who threw to the catcher, who threw not well to the third baseman, who fell away and threw around Bauer to get him. After the game, Sal Maglie looked at Jackie Robinson sitting sombre across the dressing room: in a moment of surprise, Robinson’s hair was gray. “That was a throw,” he said. “Him falling away like that.” Maglie saw it and walked to the third base line and waited for the rundown so as not to interfere, like a waiter at his station, and then walked slowly back to the dugout.

He was the last to come out after the swift Dodger half of the seventh. That appears in the box score to have been all it was, except that in the bottom of the eighth, Don Larsen was the first to bat. Sal Maglie went on with his warmups; alone in that great ballpark, he and Campanella were not looking at the hitter. He struck out Larsen; he struck out Bauer; he struck out Joe Collins swinging. When he walked back, the crowd noticed him and gave him a portion of its cheers. It was the last inning of the most extraordinary season an old itinerant, never a vagrant, ever had. “If figured,” he said later, “that, for me, either way, it was the last inning and I didn’t have to save anything.”

”I would like to see him.” he said later, “pitch with men on bases.” Someone asked him if he had minded Larsen getting his no-hitter. “I might have wanted him to get it,” he answered, “If we hadn’t had a chance all the time.”

They asked him was he satisfied with the game he pitched. “How,” said Sal Maglie, “am I to be satisfied? But you got to adjust yourself.” To time and to ill chance, and the way they forget, you got to adjust yourself. Someone asked if you knew when you had a no hitter, and he said, of course you do. You remember who had hit, for one thing. “lf you ask me two years from now,” said Sal Maglie, “I’ll be able to tell you every pitch I threw this year.” He said it, in passing naked, his body white except for the red from countless massages on his right arm, tearing his lunch off a long Italian sausage.

On the other side of the room, somebody asked Campanella if Maglie had made any mistakes out there. “Sal, make mistakes?” said Campanella. “The only mistake he made today was pitching.” He pulled on jacket and turned to what was last of the assemblage. Maglie was going now, as losers are required to go, to get his picture taken with Don Larsen in the Yankee dressing room.

“I told you,” chided Roy Campanella, as Sal Maglie went out the door, “that there should be days like this.”

All efforts have been made to reach the rights-holders for these stories. If you are the rights holder and would like the material removed, please contact me.—Alex Belth

“Quitting the Paper”

By Paul Hemphill

On the Kansas City Star you were forced to learn to write a simple declarative sentence. This is useful to anyone. Newspaper work will not harm a young writer and will help him if he gets out of it in time.

—Ernest Hemingway

Late one night in the fall of 1969, with the rain splattering against the front window and the gray light of a television set dancing across the bar, I sat in a booth at Emile’s French Café in downtown Atlanta with a feisty young newspaper reporter named Morris Shelton and methodically proceeded to get paralyzed on Beefeater martinis. By now this had become a daily ritual. I was thirty-three years old. I was the featured columnist for the Atlanta Journal, the largest daily newspaper between Miami and Washington. I had been one of a dozen journalists around the country to be selected to study at Harvard under a Nieman Fellowship the previous year. I fancied myself a sort of Jimmy Breslin of the South, cranking out daily one-thousand-word human dramas on everything from flophouse drunks to Lester Maddox, sufficiently loved and hated by enough people to have that sense of pop celebrity with which most newspapermen delude themselves. I had the most envied newspaper job in Atlanta, if not in the South, and now and then I would see a younger writer in a town like Greensboro or Savannah or Montgomery imitating my style just as I had once stolen from Hemingway and Breslin and too many others to talk about. I had been sloppy and inaccurate, from time to time, but I had also written some good stuff. I had hung around all-night eateries and gone to Vietnam, and hitchhiked and lain around with hookers and shot pool with Minnesota Fats and sat in cool suburban dens with frustrated housewives.

And yet, with the next column due by dawn, I had run out of gas. I don’t know why men make dramatic decisions at the age of thirty-three—change jobs, leave families, kill themselves—but they often do. “You have to remember,” I recalled a friend’s saying as he dumped a secure advertising job and ran off to Hollywood to write scripts, “we are no longer promising young men.” I figured I had written a total of two and a half million words for five newspapers in the previous ten years, at a time when you had to move to another paper and another town for a ten-dollar-a-week raise, and about all I could show for it was bad credit and a drinking problem. Working for the mill, as it were, I was earning from Atlanta Newspapers Inc. a net of $157.03 a week; I was drinking too much, staying out all night, fighting with my wife, and choking on the notion that perhaps it was as a “well-read local columnist” that I had reached my artistic peak.

“No ideas for tomorrow?” Morris Shelton said, once we had run out of fanciful ways to cuss the paper. Morris was about ten years younger than I, an aggressive young Texan who hadn’t yet chased enough ambulances and beat enough deadlines to be weary of it. He was one of the younger ones on the paper who defended me when the old-timers there called me a prima donna and, once I bailed out, much more vigorous stuff.

“Just a title,” I said.

“You always start with the title?”

“This time I do.”

“What?”

“Something like ‘Quitting the Paper.’ ”

“‘Quitting’? You quitting?”

“You’re my star witness, Morris.”

And so we darted through the rain, up to the fourth floor of the old Atlanta Newspapers building, and while he dabbled around the newsroom I called my wife of the time to tell her the apocalypse had arrived (“Come on home and I’ll have a whole bottle ready”). I turned to my typewriter and rattled a stark memo—“Dear Mac … I’m quitting newspapers because I am sick”—and then we went off to get supremely drunk at Manuel’s Tavern. Manuel Maloof, counselor and padrone to scores of journalists over the years, was at first astounded and then fatherly. “You got a half-million people out there gonna be disappointed,” he said. I said, “Let ’em all chip in a penny a week.” When Shelton allowed as how maybe he ought to quit, too, I told him it wasn’t his turn yet.

Freelancing isn’t recommended for everybody, especially those with mortgages and kids and an attraction for whiskey.

The next morning broke cold and bleak but, somehow, refreshing. There was the feeling that an exorcism had taken place; that I had successfully negotiated the move from one plateau of my life to another; that after ten years of writing magazine pieces and dabbling in nonfiction books, I would then move on to something else, like writing films or novels or both. I heard from Jack Tarver, of Atlanta Newspapers Inc., around ten o’clock, “astonished,” wanting to know if there had been a personality clash—if so, he said, he could switch me over to the Constitution—but I told him the problem was bigger than that, and we quit as friends. By noon I had an agent in New York, by two o’clock I had a bank loan of $2,500, by five o’clock I had a modest office above a tire-recapping place, and by bedtime I had enough insurance—disability, hospitalization, life—to take care of a Marine platoon in combat. At some point during the day I drifted back to the paper to clean out my desk, while the old-timers glared tight-lipped at one with the audacity to quit (“Well,” one was later quoted as saying, “it takes a certain breed of man to be a newspaperman”), and one of the young ones blurted that it “takes a lot of guts to quit like that.” I said, “Christ, it takes a lot of guts to stay. I can steal the kind money they’re paying me.” I thought, filled with myself, it was a Line to Remember Hemphill By.

Freelancing isn’t recommended for everybody, especially those with mortgages and kids and an attraction for whiskey (“Make your wife lock up the liquor cabinet and take the key to work with her,” was the only advice I had for a friend who recently made the move). All of a sudden there is no Big Daddy to make you write, give you a paid vacation, pay your phone bill for business calls, make sure your typewriter is clean and working, let you take the day off, refund your business expenses, give you a Christmas bonus, deduct your taxes, cover your hospital bills, pay your postage, clean the office, or pay you every Friday at noon. You are out there, alone, you against the editors and publishers in New York, and newspapers and advertising agencies all over the country are stocked with people who had once hankered for the day they could “get away and write.” Making it as a free-lance writer requires many things—talent, energy, a financial cushion—but from my experience the most important quality is the motivation to go to the mines and write every day. It’s a pisser. “I can’t say I enjoy writing,” somebody once said. “I much prefer having written.” Your deadlines aren’t at the copy desk anymore. They are at the bank.

Upon making the plunge, I was in better shape than some. My first book was making the rounds in New York, beginning to show promise—meaning they knew me up there and I could wheedle more advance money from my publisher. During the first week my agent got me a snap assignment for a sports piece, which quickly led to an association with Sport magazine. One piece led to another, and in spite of the shrinking magazine market I found I always had a half-dozen pieces to work on. My book got rave reviews, mostly, and it led to other books and other connections. I wrote for Life and Cosmopolitan and Pageant and TV Guide (I once considered printing up calling cards saying I would do “Anything legal or halfway moral”), and the business, as we say, expanded. There are the hairy moments when the checks are slow, and I have been locked in combat with my old nemeses Johnnie Walker, and the old debts from those years of wandering and grubbing along on newspaper pay make it necessary for me to produce better than two thousand dollars a month to stay out of jail. But it occurred to me when I was offered a fat chance to go back to newspaper columnizing, in a big Eastern city, that I am doing precisely what I want to do: writing what I want to write, when and where I want to write it, which ought to be about all a serious writer should expect out of his life. Now and then you have to write a little tripe to pay the insurance premiums (one more piece about country music or one more about minor-league baseball and they will have to come and get me), but it is the price you pay for relative freedom. Marshall Frady, an Atlanta writer who really does talk as expansively as he writes, said it one time in Harper’s: “I think maybe writers ought to be scattered out over the land … [people who] just have this secret eccentricity to write … And all the time, covertly, you’re actually a kind of undercover agent stranded out in the cold, sending dispatches from the dark, brawling outback of life to Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dickens, all the others, letting them know what’s going on now.”

I am convinced that the newspaper is the writer’s boot camp. You learn how to use the language. You learn how to interview people. You learn how to work under pressure.

The temptation is to take out after the Journal and Constitution for their dedication to mediocrity over the years. God knows I’ve got a lot of good stories to tell. Atlanta and the South and the nation are teeming with talented ex-Atlanta newspapermen such as Jack Nelson, one of the country’s most respected investigative reporters (now, alas, with the Los Angeles Times), who would have stayed on with the Constitution in 1964 if he had only been shown a single sign of love. Earning ten thousand a year at the time, Nelson told Tarver he would turn down the Times for something like twenty dollars a week and was accused of using the job offer as a “wedge to get more money.” The paper made famous by Ralph McGill and his early-on pleas for racial moderation suddenly got a craw full of civil-rights coverage (i.e., “nigger news”) and was one of the few of any size in America not to staff the Selma-to-Montgomery march. A star editorial-page columnist there was a retired Marine officer, John Crown, who addressed the Vietnam War with all the compassion and neutrality of a Holmes Alexander. The paper’s best-loved columnist was old Hugh Park, waiting out retirement, who got a lot of laughs out of caricaturing the drunks and niggers and wife-beaters parading before Municipal Court every Monday morning. One of the most lyrical and sensitive writers they ever had was Harold Martin, but he was reduced to writing about squirrels and grandchildren before he quit in a huff when ANI wouldn’t increase his pay from the twenty-five dollars per column he was getting twenty-five years ago. (“Consequently,” he said, “I began writing columns worth twenty-five dollars.”) And there was the night my first wife and I had to break away early from a Christmas bash at the home of my managing editor Bill Fields, because I had to go and take phone calls until three a.m. on high-school football games so we could have some Christmas money. “Why, that’s terrible,” said the wife of the man who had made it all possible. “What a waste of talent.” Yes’m, that’s what me and the little woman was thinking. Bunch of dumb-asses. No wonder the newspaper business is in such a mess. They can’t make up their minds whether they want unionized robots or writers. There have been a lot of good people with the Atlanta newspapers—McGill, Martin, Nelson, Eugene Patterson—and there are good ones now. But seldom have the good ones worked in management. There were too many times, in my day there, when the motto should have been (rather than “Covers Dixie Like the Dew”) something like “No News Is Good News.” If it cost money, or might cause legal trouble, it was likely not to be covered.

But all of that is another story, and from what I hear from others who learned to write on other newspapers, the Atlanta Journal isn’t much different from the rest. A newspaper is (or was, before automation set in) a great place for a Linotype operator but a lousy place for a self-respecting writer to work. It is the first line of news gathering before the glamour boys move in for their glossy “in-depth” pieces and Dan Rather comes along flashing his teeth, and I have the greatest respect and gratitude for the grit and tenacity and dampered fury with which a great one like Jack Nelson firebombs the “public servants” hunkered down behind their stacks of press releases on Capitol Hill. But there aren’t many Jack Nelsons. Most of us are inviting suicide or alcoholism or early senility if we continue to labor for too long at a newspaper, thinking we are going to uncover corruption and change the system, because most newspapers themselves are tidy, model plantations. “Boys,” this beautiful old fellow on the Constitution copy desk would tell us summer interns as we waited for the last edition at one a.m., his voice broken from whiskey and his gnarled fingers yellow from cigarettes, “the newspaper is a monster. You fall in love with it, it’s so big and strong, and you promise you’re gonna feed it every day. But what you feed it is you. Every day you come in and feed it a little more, and then one day you’re out of food. There’s nothing left to feed the monster.” I don’t know whether he did it for emphasis, but he always then broke into a terrible coughing spell that was enough to scare the living hell out of a twenty-year-old journalism major.

What you do, then, is use the paper before it uses you—take what it has to offer about the craft of writing, which is almost everything—and then, as Hemingway learned, “get out in time.” I am convinced that the newspaper is the writer’s boot camp. You learn how to use the language. You learn how to interview people. You learn how to work under pressure. You refine what Hemingway once called a writer’s “built-in shit-detector.” You see things few others see, every day, for as long as you work at it. Unlike magazine writing, with its long time lag, you get an instant reaction to everything you write. But all of these are the fundamentals of good writing, and sooner or later many of us become restless with the discovery that there are the facts and then there is the truth. There isn’t time or space or enough perspective to rush the truth into a newspaper. And so you either stay with the paper and go crazy with that knowledge or you simply thank the paper for its help and move on to places where there is more time to do the job properly. It seems to be an altogether natural progression.

The first full-time boss I had in the newspaper business was Benny Marshall. Benny had grown up in the country outside of Birmingham in Alabama. He attended little Howard College and, during the 1950s, became sports editor and sports columnist for the Birmingham News. A witty gnome who could cry at the sight of a wino passed out in an alley, and then make you cry when he wrote about it, Benny was a one-man show when I joined him as a writer of high-school sports in 1958: absolutely committed to reading, writing, editing, and planning the sports section. He would be in the office making up the paper at six o’clock in the morning, up in the composing room to oversee the makeup, back down to remake the home edition, out to Alabama football practice seventy miles away in Tuscaloosa, and back at his typewriter turning out his daily column as the sun went down. He was like father to me. He boosted my ego and covered up my mistakes and gently showed me the way.

Benny was too good for the Birmingham News or any other newspaper. He was built more along the lines of a novelist, or at least a shimmering magazine writer; instead it was his lot to write two-column forty-two-point Bodoni Bold headlines and interview football players and fight cold wars with fat-bellied compositors. He never said it to me, but I suspect that a sense of dread began to fall over him around the early 1960s, when he turned forty and I left the News to wander. A terrible gambler, drinker, and womanizer—as prolific at each as he was at writing beautiful prose—he was strapped with debts and family obligations and a deteriorating body at a time when, perhaps, if he had gone on to the books and other things, he might have been doing great work. This was not the only cause of Benny Marshall’s demise, but it certainly contributed.

One day in the fall of 1969, just before I was to quit the Atlanta Journal, I went through Birmingham on a column-writing expedition through the South. I hadn’t seen Benny in some time, although I had heard from him now and then (“Fan letter,” he scribbled on the envelope of a note to me in Vietnam, and “To One Who Passed This Way But Wouldn’t Stop” on the flyleaf of a paperback collection of his columns), and I was irked when they said he was in New York accepting some kind of an award. I was sitting at his typewriter, rushing to finish a column on Birmingham before Western Union closed and I would have to drive on down the road to Montgomery, when someone answered a phone and turned to me. “You may have a chance to help out an friend,” I was told. Benny was at the airport, drunk, insisting on coming to the office. Maybe I could take him out for coffee in order to get him out of there. Thirty minutes later the elevator doors opened, and there he was, reeling drunk, waving a cup of coffee at me. “Hemp,” he said, and we embraced.

Suddenly the executive editor of the News, Vincent Townsend, glowered from across the newsroom. Townsend was very good at glowering. He also had a son who floundered through more than one college, flunked the Birmingham News aptitude test, stumbled as a reporter, and finally, as part of his education before ascending to upper management, was put in charge of the paper’s weekly pick-the-winner football contest. (Of course, Vincent Townsend intended to see that the football contest succeeded.)

“Mister Marshall,” Townsend boomed.

Benny weaved and spread his hands. “Chief,” he said.

“Have you ever been to Siluria, Mr. Marshall?”

“Shiluria. Sure I been to Shiluria.”

“How would you like to go back to Siluria?”

“Well, sir, I don’t like Shiluria very much.”

A fellow who ran a service station down the road in Siluria had won the week’s football contest, and Townsend wanted Benny and a photographer to drive down that afternoon for a picture and a story. One of the others talked Townsend out of it, saying Benny was tired from his trip and that he would do it instead, and tried to straighten Benny up before driving him home. “You want to go in and watch a real ass-chewing?” Benny said to him. He stumbled out of the car, negotiated the walk to his front door, went straight to the bathroom, shut the door, put a .38 to his head, and pulled the trigger. The News, under Vincent Townsend’s orders, said fine things about Benny in a front-page editorial the next day. I quit newspapering five weeks later.

This story originally appeared in Southern Voices Magazine. You can also find it in the collection, Too Old to Cry.

It is reprinted here with permission from Hemphill’s estate. His wife, Susan Percy, watched the election last night at Manuel’s Tavern, Paul’s favorite hangout even after he quit drinking. “It’s about the only classic old neighborhood bar around,” said Percy. “It’s a great place to watch the election returns, surrounded by writers, lawyers, journalists, cops, city workers, political junkies and other disreputables. They even let the occasional Republican in.”

For more Hemphill, check out his archive at The Stacks Reader.

[Photo Credit: portrait of the author by Louis Favorite for the Atlanta Journal Constitution; Postcards From Here; Jonathan Phillips; Elvishwisdom]

Head on over to Sports on Earth and check out my Q&A with Mickey Herskowitz about Jock, his short-lived but wonderful magazine.

Here’s Mickey talking about Woody Allen and Paul Simon:

Q: I like the non-sports-writing celebrities you featured in the magazine, like William F. Buckley and Woody Allen.

A: I called Woody Allen’s agent, [Jack] Rollins and [Charles] Joffe. I don’t know whether I talked to Rollins or Joffe. I told him I was running a magazine called Jock and wanted to know if Woody would be available to write a piece about what it was like growing up playing stickball in New York. He said, “I doubt it, but I promise you I’ll mention it to him.” An hour later I got a call from Rollins or Joffe, and he said, “Yeah, Woody would love to do it. He’s doing a play, ‘Play it Again, Sam,’ and does two shows on Sunday. Come between the matinee and the evening performance, bring a photographer and you can get your story and your pictures.”

Q: So it was ghostwritten by you?

A: No. I went there and Woody dictated it to me, it wasn’t ghostwritten. And he said, “What are you doing to do for photographs?” I told him I thought we’d just take a couple of shots of him there in his dressing room. “That doesn’t make any sense,” he said, “not if you’re doing a story on stickball. I know a perfect brownstone about four or five blocks away, let’s go down there.” So about six of us walked down past Eighth Avenue to this brownstone. I had two of my kids with me, they were like 10 and 11, and two of their friends, and they were the rest of the teams. Woody had a stick and a ball, and one of the kids pitched to him and the others played in the field. And that’s where we got the pictures.

Q: All-schoolyard.

A: Now, we did this shoot before the Mets had won the pennant, and after they won I get a call from one of Woody’s managers. He said, “Woody wanted to know if he could ask you a big favor?” I said, “Sure.” “Can you get him four tickets to the World Series?” Honest to God I had to bite my tongue. Are you kidding me? You don’t think that Woody Allen would mean more to the Mets than Mickey Herskowitz from Houston, Texas? For some reason that didn’t occur to him. So I called the Mets PR guy and got him tickets to every home game. Next week I got a handwritten “thank you” note from Woody.

Q: You also had an encounter with Paul Simon, right?

A: I sure did. I was thinking of stories, and it dawned on me that Rollins and Joffe also managed Paul Simon. “The Graduate” had come out, and the song “Mrs. Robinson” was everywhere. So I called up and asked if they thought Paul would be willing to do a story for me on what it was like growing up as a Yankee fan. And Rollins or Joffe said, “Well, I don’t know. I didn’t think Woody would do a story and he did. We’ll ask Paul.” The next day I’m sitting in my office … the secretary put a call through and the voice said, “Mickey?” I said, “Yeah.”

“This is Paul.”

“Paul, who?”

“Paul Simon.”

I was stunned that Paul Simon called. I said: “Paul, jeez, terrific of you to call, and call back so quickly. And to call back yourself. Everybody usually goes through three or four layers of gatekeepers, I’m really impressed.” He said, “Well don’t be. It’s an everyday courtesy.” He talked about what I had pitched and said, “I think it’s a groovy idea and I’d love to do it.” And so I explained what I wanted but also said I’d love it if he could talk about the Joe DiMaggio line, which everyone was so touched by. It took everybody back to nostalgia in their lives.

Q: What did he say about it?

A: He said the line just came to him. He hadn’t had DiMaggio in mind, but his name came to him; he had to have a long enough name to fit the melody. It was funny because he told me that a month or so after the song hit big he was on a TV show with Mickey Mantle and Mantle said, “How come you used DiMaggio’s name in your song and not mine?” Simon said he had to explain to him that it had to do with the melody and not the name.

Q: That’s funny that Mantle asked him. Because he was also a player of Simon’s generation more than DiMaggio.

A: That’s right. Anyhow, we didn’t talk long, maybe about 10 minutes. I was out of things to say. But I was so flattered and grateful for the call, I felt like I had to say something. So I told him that “Mrs. Robinson” was my favorite song. I made it up; it was such a dumb, bulls— thing to say, but I felt I had to say something complimentary to him for calling. There was a pause on the other line. And the next thing he said was: “You didn’t like ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’?” You talk about the insecurity of an artist?

Q: He was straight, he wasn’t joking?

A: I said, “Oh, no, no, no. ‘Mrs. Robinson’ was my favorite sports song. I love ‘Bridge Over Troubled Waters.’” And the truth is, I didn’t know what he was talking about. I had been hearing it for weeks but didn’t know the name of it.

Here’s more on how Jock came to be.

Bronx Banter: Before we get to Jock magazine, let’s talk about your early career in Houston.

Mickey Herskowitz: I don’t need to exaggerate what a sports-nuts state Texas is. In fact, the most famous line I ever wrote was when one of the Super Bowl’s came here, I tried to explain Houston and one of my stories started, “We never knew how important Religion was in Texas until people started comparing it to high school football.”
And so way back, I was with the Houston Post.

BB: This was before Wells Twombly, right?

MH: Well before Wells, about ten years before he came along and then he was at the Houston Chronicle. The funny thing is I hired Wells to write for Jock and then had to renege when we started running out of money. He was really hurt. I couldn’t tell him that we were going broke at the time so I had to make up some sleazy excuse. Years later, he asked me about it and I told him the truth. So anyway, I was at the Houston Post and a couple of guys came to me and wanted to have a magazine about sports in Texas. This was the year Elvin Hayes was leading the University of Houston to prominence in college basketball. So a couple of advertising guys came to me and they had a little bit of money.

BB: You were a columnist at this time for the Post, right?

MH: I was in my twenties but a columnist.

BB: You’re younger than Dan Jenkins then.

MH: I was the next generation. Blackie [Sherrod], Dan, a wonderful writer in Fort-Worth named Jim Trinkle, Orville Henry in Fayetteville and Dave Campbell in Waco, Dan Cook in San Antonio, a named Jack Gallagher in Houston, those were the top-rated writers in the state as far as sports went. Bud Shrake came a little later. Gary Cartwright came after that. I don’t know if I was their mascot but they all looked after me.

BB: And you grew up in Houston?

MH: I was born there in the late 1930s. I remember Blackie never missing a chance to pay me a compliment. And years later when Dan was at Sports Illustrated he actually referred to me in print as the best baseball writer in America. Dan told me that on Mondays or Tuesdays when the out of state newspapers came into the office there’d be a scramble to get the Houston Post to see what my ledes were on the Astros ballgames. He really told me that. They brought me up there and offered me a job and I reluctantly turned it down because I was doing a TV show and a radio show in Houston along with the column and the money couldn’t match the three jobs I had back home. The three jobs in Houston were probably easier to handle than one in New York because of the cost of living.

BB: This was before Jock?

MH: Yes, and getting back to Jock, I had these advertising guys come to me about doing a magazine about sports in Texas and if it made sense to do something about sports anywhere that’s where you would start. It was called Sport Folio. I didn’t have any literary figures but I had all the top sports writers in Houston and Dallas, Austin. It was a monthly.

BB: Did you model it after Sport magazine?

MH: No. I stayed at the Post, this was a part-time job. Truth is, I modeled it after Esquire, which is what I did with Jock, as well. Sport Folio lasted about a year. Par for the course, ran out of money the second year. Then about a year after that I got a call from Chris Schenkel. Some money people out of Dallas were going to put out a magazine out called Chris Schenkel’s Sport Scene. Chris was the Bob Costas of his day, the go-to-anchor of his time. Did the Olympics forever, a lot of golf, was a terrific football play-by-play announcer, basketball too. SI did a great cover story on him. At one time he was the biggest name in sports broadcasting. He was the anti-Cosell. Totally factual, understated, non-dramatic. And a golden voice. So Chris called and asked if I would commute to Dallas an edit the magazine. And I did. I had Blackie and Jenkins and Steve Perkins who was a fine writer from Dallas and been in New Orleans.

BB: SI would let Jenkins moonlight for you?

MH: I say I had Jenkins, he maybe did one story for me on TCU but he did it under the radar. He wasn’t freelancing for anyone else.

BB: Did you have Gary Cartwright?

MH: No. I want to put this the right way so it doesn’t seem like a criticism but at that time Gary was still young and he was fourth or fifth in line behind Dan, Blackie and Bud Shrake. Thing about Gary is that he just got better and better and he’s still around of course. But we only had four or five big stories per issue so I didn’t have a big line up. Sports Scene was in mind a success because it was really classy. The people who owned it put a lot of money into it. It was glossy. We could go anywhere and write about anything. I covered the Olympics for that magazine in ’68. And what happened was an advertising guy in New York saw Sports Scene. Keep in mind New York magazine had just made a big splash and was a big success. There may have been city magazines at the time but they were small. In Houston, you had one that strong-armed ads for dentists and doctors and lawyers. Had little fashion stories, luncheons.

BB: They were provincial.

MH: Right. They were not for reading. They were beautiful and glossy but no content. New York was the first real city magazine unless I’m overlooking something in Boston of Philadelphia. So this advertising guy saw Sport Scene and compared it to New York, which was showing a profit after three years, which if you know magazines, is rare. You are lucky to show a profit after three years, hell, you are lucky to still be in business after three years. The stock market had had a real go-go run from about ’66-’68 and he thought he could take the model of Sport Folio and Sport Scene and get a Wall Street company to back it. And that’s exactly what we did.

BB: Did you move to New York?

MH: I did. Had an apartment in the same building with the mayor though he didn’t live there. John Lindsay played tennis with Hank Greenburg outside my window on Sundays. I was at Sutton Place. Cost me about $295 a month to park my car and a luxury apartment in Houston at the time cost about $350.

BB: Did the deal happen quickly?

MH: I flew to New York and met with their key sales people. It was like Alice in Wonderland. I’m almost embarrassed. It was so easy because so many people love sports. The only people they invited to the business meeting were the ones that were nuts about sports. Why wouldn’t they want to take this company public? I called coach Paul Bear Bryant, Jimmy Demerit, AJ Foyt, Cosell, Curt Gowdy, that was my role.

BB: You wanted them to invest in the magazine?

MH: No, no, they agreed to be on the board of directors and each got 10,000 shares. They did it as a favor, nobody asked for anything. But it was a marquee lineup. We went public in June of 1969, just as the recession began. In July, the Mets were 9 games out of first place. I came up with the idea for the first cover. It would be 4 or 5 Met players raising the flag on Iwo Jima except it was on the pitcher’s mound. That was on the inaugural issue, must be worth a pretty penny today. Cleon Jones, Tom Seaver, Ed Kranepool and those guys.

BB: This was after the Jets had already won the Super Bowl.

MH: The same year. And the Knicks had lost to the Bullets in the playoffs but they won the championship the following season, in June of 1970.

BB: New York hasn’t seen a banner year like that since.

Stayed tuned. All week,  we’ll be featuring a different article from Jock.

Here’s John Schulian, writing about Jim Murray in the Wall Street Journal.

Jim Murray made the sports page seem as if it should have a $10 cover and a two-drink minimum. In the last four decades of the 20th century, he wrote four, five, even six columns a week, delivering one-liners faster than a stand-up comic with his pants on fire. Casey Stengel’s rambling oratory reminded him of “the sound a porpoise makes underwater and an Abyssinian rug merchant.” Louisville, he wrote, smelled like “a wet bar rag.” One look at boxing’s baleful Sonny Liston and Murray told readers, “you only hope it doesn’t bite.” Even when he railed against the carnage at the Indianapolis 500, there was a laugh, however dark, in his outrage: “Gentlemen, start your coffins.”

He’d throw a change-up once in a while, something serious about racism or violence, and it was when deep pain entered his personal life that he wrote perhaps his best columns. Still, the Jim Murray I most loved to read was the one who wisecracked his way onto a stage made of newsprint. Sportswriters before him had dealt in humor—Damon Runyon, Red Smith, Ring Lardner and Ring’s boy John—but Murray played a different game entirely: Even when a joke tanked, you had to stick around because his next one would slay you.

You can order Ted Geltner’s new Murray biography, The Last King of the Sports Page, here. And if you’ve never read Rick Reilly’s 1986 bonus piece on Murray, check it out. 

Wayne Coffey has a nice piece in the Daily News today about R.A. Dickey and my friend, the late Mike Gitelson. Mike died earlier this year from myeloid leukemia.

It is a touching story. Mike, who we called “Getty,” was my best friend in middle school. We collected comics, records, and pined for someone to take us to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show at the 8th Street Playhouse. Getty did not care about sports. At all.

My mother once took a group of us to Yankee Stadium for my birthday to see the Angels because Reggie Jackson was my favorite player. We sat in the bleachers. Mike made a placard at home and brought it with him. It read: Reggie Sucks. During batting practice, Reggie shagged flies near us and Getty waved the placard and yelled at him. At one point, Reggie turned in our direction, grabbed his crotch and spit on the ground. Getty whooped and laughed, his mission accomplished.

He was a political kid. Both of Getty’s parents were social workers and so he came by his left-leaning attitudes naturally. (I remember him railing about something once when we were in high school. We were  in the car with his father, who was a funny guy, and his dad said, “Michael, you are the only socialist I know with a bank card.”) By the time we were upperclassmen in high school, Mike had gone through the Clash and the Sex Pistols and was listening to the Dead Kennedys and Jello Biafra. He was the only guy we knew who was into the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Fishbone and Bad Brains.

His senior quote came from a Chili Peppers song: Don’t be a slave/No one can tell you/You’ve got to be afraid.

Getty was an angry kid (then again, so was I). He couldn’t wait to get to college. We had a falling out by then and I didn’t talk to him again for more than twenty years. But because we still had some of the same interests, I ran into him periodically: at a rest stop in New Jersey in 1994 or ’95 on the way home from a Mumia Abu Jamal demonstration in Philadelphia; at Fat Beats, a hip hop record store in the village; in ’96, on the night the Yankees won the Whirled Serious, at a De La Soul/Fishbone concert at Roseland; on the subway platform of the Carroll Street station in Brooklyn. I approached him at the rest stop after the Mumia Abu Jamal rally and startled him. It was clear that he didn’t want to reconnect so the other times I saw him–“Getty Sightings”–I left him alone.

I was surprised, then, when he reached out to me about five or six years ago. We exchanged e-mails and whatever hard feelings that might have existed were gone. We didn’t see each other but touched base every now and then. Mike had become a baseball fan through his wife who was–and is–nuts for the Mets. I thought that was amusing coming from a guy who loved to ridicule overpaid, conceited jocks.

Mike suffered with Crohn’s and he died too young. Go figure that baseball would provide distraction and comfort for him. His encounter with R.A. Dickey was moving. You know, when we were kids, Getty laughed in the movie theater at the end of Terms of Endearment when everyone else sobbed. During The Breakfast Club when the kids bared their souls and the theater was quiet, Getty cackled.  He was allergic to sentiment. But after R.A. Dickey called him on the phone, Mike cried. And I think he’d very much appreciate Coffey’s article.

Yet another reason to pull for Mr. Dickey who sounds like some kind of mensch.

[Photo Credit: Matt Cerrone]

David Waldstein has a long profile on Russell Martin and catching in the New York Times:

The physical penalties paid by the catcher, of course, are not often characterized by the spectacular violence of a wide receiver clotheslined by a safety. Neither are they frequently accompanied by the angry acoustics of a crunching hockey check into the boards.

The price paid, as much as anything, is one of plain, penetrating exhaustion, both mental and physical. It is about enduring a grinding, dirty routine, where, in St. Louis or Arlington, Tex., in August, a catcher can shed 10 pounds in a game. In 2007, when he was with the Los Angeles Dodgers, Martin started 143 games behind the plate.

Three times this season, Martin has caught at least six games in six days. From May 11 to 17, he caught seven consecutive games, and once, from June 5 to 13, he caught nine in a row.

“When you’re going through it, you don’t notice it,” Martin said of the grind. “It’s when you stop for a day or two and then the aches from the foul tips and the fatigue kind of bubble to the surface and you’re like ‘Whoa, did I get hit by a train?’

“Sometimes I’d rather just plow through and keep playing, just soldier on, because it almost feels harder when you’ve been off for a day and you come back.”

Worth your time.

[Photo Credit: Jyekn; Thomas Ferrara/Newsday]

Check out this story by Jessica Bennett on the New York Times morgue over at Storyboard.

[Photo Via: The Five]

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

Have at it.

Dig the newspaper work of Ernest Hemingway.

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

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

[Picture by Bags]

Jack Curry is known to Yankee fans as one of the faces of the YES Network’s Yankees reporting team, but he wasn’t always a “TV guy.” Prior to joining YES in 2010, Jack enjoyed a decorated career as a sportswriter, most notably at the New York Times. He forged his path without having to go to smaller markets and work his way back east, a rarity for those who work in media, particularly in New York. His full bio can be found here. You can follow him on Twitter @JackCurryYES.

Jack was a staple on the Yankees beat when I covered the Yankees from 2002 through 2006 for yesnetwork.com. At that point of his career, he was one of the Times’s National Baseball Reporters and I was a punk trying to figure out how to become a better reporter and writer, assignment editor, and do all of it without getting in anyone’s way. I recall that Jack was a pillar of professionalism; someone not only I, but also every other writer respected and liked. He’s the same person on camera as he is off camera.

Over a series of conversations and e-mails, Jack and I discussed a number of topics, ranging from what inspired his career choice to the move from print to TV and Internet, and more.

Bronx Banter: At what point did you “know” that you wanted to become a sportswriter? Was there a “eureka” moment while you were at Fordham?

Jack Curry: When I was in the seventh grade, I started a newspaper at my elementary school. It was only two or four pages. But I remember the jolt I felt when everyone at the school was commenting on my articles. It was the first time I had a byline and I loved how that felt. Writers like to know what people think of their writing so I grew to love the idea of being a sportswriter. I hung on to the dream of being a major league player through high school, but that faded. I played high school baseball, but I was a much better writer. I went to one baseball practice at Fordham under coach Paul Blair. It lasted four and a half hours and I missed dinner that night. Even if I had made the team, I would’ve been a backup. So that one practice told me it was time to stop playing baseball and start covering baseball (and other sports). I funneled all of my energy into journalism and broadcasting after that.

BB: Who were the writers that you admired growing up, and how did they influence your reporting / storytelling style?

JC: I grew up in Jersey City, NJ, and the Jersey Journal was the first newspaper I remember reading. They syndicated Jim Murray’s column so it always had a prominent spot in the sports section. But, since I didn’t know anything about syndication as a kid, I just thought Jim Murray was some guy from Jersey City who had the greatest job in the world. He covered all of the biggest sporting events and, man, he could write. I wanted that job. When I finally realize who Jim Murray really was, it didn’t change my thoughts. I still wanted that job. I got the chance to meet Jim Murray at a college football game, which was an absolute thrill. My regret is I didn’t tell him my “connection” to him. I’m guessing he would’ve thought it was pretty cool.

BB: How did you get from the Jersey Journal to the New York Times?

JC: I worked for the Jersey Journal for three summers while I was in college. I’m going to bet that I covered more Little League baseball in those summers than anyone in the state of New Jersey. But I loved it. I loved going to the games and watching which kids cared and which kids were coached well and which kids were so much better or, unfortunately, so much worse than the other players on the field. Trying to get decent quotes out of 11- and 12-year-olds can be more challenging than trying to get decent quotes out of some major leaguers.

After I graduated from Fordham, I worked at the Star Ledger of Newark for about a year. I covered high school sports there, but I wanted to do more than that. I applied for a position in the New York Times’s Writing Program. Basically, the Times hired you to be a clerk for 35 hours a week and then you could use your days off or your hours off to pitch story ideas and to volunteer to cover events, etc. When I was hired as a “writing clerk,” I wrote a lot of stories that appeared without bylines. The Times had some arcane rules about not giving the clerks a byline, which I always thought was nonsensical. When you were hired as a writing clerk, you were told that there was no guarantee you’d ever be a reporter at the Times.

Anyway, once I got my foot in the door, I was on a mission to do anything and everything to stay there. I wanted to do enough so that they had to keep me. I needed to prove to them that I could be a sports reporter there. It took about three years, but I was finally hired as a reporter.

BB: So many sportswriters jump from sport to sport now. I can think of a number of current beat writers from several of the area papers who have shuttled back and forth. What drew you specifically to covering baseball and keeping yourself on that beat?

JC: I covered college basketball and football and the New Jersey Nets at the Times before I started covering baseball in 1990. I wanted to cover baseball. To me, there was no other sport to cover. I was fortunate that the Times recognized that and trusted me with covering a baseball beat. I took over the Yankees beat at the All-Star break of 1991 and have essentially only covered baseball since then. I like basketball and I’ll watch some football, but I would have never been as happy covering those sports as I was in covering baseball.

BB: When I started at YES and began setting the editorial direction of the website, we were trying to do something completely different in our coverage of the Yankees. Our goal wasn’t to compete with the papers, but to be considered legitimate. How did you view YESNetwork.com’s presence on-site in those first few years?

JC: In the early years, I viewed YESNetwork.com’s presence as another entity that was immersed in covering the Yankees. When I first started as a beat writer, you were concerned about the other beat writers and what they were doing. But, with each year, more and more outlets began to cover the team and you had to pay attention to them, too, and see what they were producing.

BB: What struck you about the way YESNetwork.com covered the team, and the games? How, if at all, has that changed since you became a YES Network employee and contributor to the dot.com?

I think YESNetwork.com has tried to be different than the traditional newspaper sports website, as it should be. The Yankees are the brand and there’s obviously an attempt provide as much Yankee content as possible. I think there’s more interaction with the fans, which is another positive. What I’ve tried to do is use the 20-plus years of experience that I have covering this team to offer analysis on players and trends, develop feature stories and, obviously, push to break news.

BB: Describe the events that led YES to call you and offer you the YES job, and what drew you to make the jump to TV on a full-time basis.

JC: After 22 years at the Times, I decided to take the buyout and pursue other opportunities. The timing was good for me. I felt confident about making a career switch in my 40s. I’m not sure if a person can do that in his 50s. I had always had a good relationship with John Filippelli of YES because I had been a guest on “Yankees Hot Stove” since 2005.

Before I even took the buyout, YES was the place where I hoped I would land. Shortly after my departure from the Times became official, I heard from YES. There was mutual interest and I was excited about the chance to transition from print to broadcast. My colleagues at YES, people like Flip, Michael Kay, Bob Lorenz, Ken Singleton, Jared Boshnack, Bill Boland, Mike Cooney, John Flaherty and so many others, all welcomed me and helped make that transition a smooth one for me. I work with a lot of very cool and very talented people.

It’s rewarding to work for and with people you admire and respect and people that you consider your friends.

BB: Peter Gammons and Jayson Stark were among the first two prominent baseball writers who became “multimedia” guys. Later, your former colleague Buster Olney, Ken Rosenthal and Tom Verducci followed. Did it just make sense for you to do the same?

JC: You forgot to mention Michael Kay. Michael had worked for the Post and the News and did clubhouse reporting for MSG. Obviously, he also was a radio announcer before moving to YES. He was the one person who implored me to give TV a try. I will admit that I was resistant. I liked being a baseball writer. There were times where I thought I would end my career as a newspaperman. But I’m very happy to have made the switch. I love what I’m doing at YES. They have given me terrific opportunities in the studio with Bob Lorenz, who is as selfless as any co-worker I’ve ever had. Flip has also trusted me with chances to do work in the booth during games, which have been great experiences.

BB: In the last 10 years — heck, the last five even — so much has changed in how sports are covered on a daily basis. Responsibilities include blogging and tweeting, in some cases web-exclusive video reporting. The beat writer/columnist’s audience is broader than ever. Has that caused you to change your journalistic approach?

JC: My journalistic approach hasn’t changed. I’m trying to find insightful and interesting stories and tell them as adeptly as I can. I’m trying to dig up timely and pertinent information and deliver it as quickly and as accurately as I can. That’s the way I did the job at the Times. That’s the way I do the job at YES. But I am moving faster in telling those stories and chasing that information. Because of Twitter and blogging, we’re all doing that. When I was a beat writer in the early 1990’s, my world revolved around deadlines: 7 PM, 11 PM, 1 AM, etc. I’m on TV now, but, when I write for the website or I tweet, it’s usually about getting it done as quickly as I can, not about getting it done by 7 PM.

BB: Speaking of journalism, you broke the story of Andy Pettitte returning to the Yankees. What was the internal reaction to your scoop?

JC: My bosses at YES were elated that we broke the Pettitte story. I first tweeted about it and wrote a news story that was up on our website five minutes later. About 25 minutes after that, we led our spring training broadcast with the news about Pettitte’s return. Since that story came out of left field, they were thrilled that we led the way.

BB: What was the reaction to the Twitter war that ensued due to ESPN claiming credit for the story?

JC: It doesn’t behoove me to revisit what happened on Twitter after the Pettitte story broke. From a journalistic perspective, that was a very good day for YES. That’s what’s most important.

BB: Is the rapport with former players you used to cover, like Paul O’Neill, John Flaherty, David Cone, and Al Leiter, any different now that you’re on TV, considered an “analyst” like them?

JC: What’s interesting about all of those guys is that I had a great relationship with all of them when they were players, so those relationships have simply carried over. I liked talking baseball with all of those guys when I was a writer. I like talking baseball with all of them now that we’re colleagues.

BB: Which part of your career was, or has been, the most challenging?

JC: The most challenging part of my career were the earliest days at the Times, but, to be honest, those were also some of the most enjoyable days. Like I said, when I first started there, I wasn’t guaranteed anything other than a future of answering phones. I had to show a lot of different editors that I could write and report.

At first, I was going to answer this by saying the most challenging time was being a new beat writer on the Yankees. But, by that point in my career, at least I had become a reporter at the Times. I knew I had made the staff. In the early days, I didn’t know if that would ever happen. I’m glad it did.

[Photo Credits: YESNetwork.com, New York Times, Twitter]

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

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

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

Enjoy.

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

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

Mark Kram, left, Tito Francona far right

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

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

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

BB: Really?

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

BB: What happened when you submitted the story?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Father and Son at Graceland, 2002

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

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

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

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

BB: Ordinary people…

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

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

BB: You played sports in high school, right?

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

BB: How did Buddy’s story choose you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BB: He was not alone.

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

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

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

BB: That makes sense.

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

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

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

BB: He was tortured.

Jimmy Miley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Buddy Miley and Karen Sheilds on Graduation Day, 1974

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

BB: That’s a huge get on your part.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BB: Damn, that’s nothing.

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

BB: Oh, I can only imagine.

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

BB: Did you show your editor any early drafts?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enjoy.

Opening Day at Fenway Park

By George Kimball

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fat Howie would have thrown them both over the wall.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Raise a glass to Furman Bisher who passed away yesterday. He was 93.

The featured image shows Bisher and Shoeless Joe Jackson.

“Damn Yankees” is a winning new collection of essays about the Bronx Bombers. Edited by Rob Fleder, it features an All-Star lineup and is a must not just for Yankee fans or baseball fans but anyone who appreciates good writing. I recently talked to Fleder about the project. Here’s our chat. Enjoy.

Rob Fleder at Yankee Stadium

RF: We’ve been catching up the TV series “Friday Night Lights.” I don’t really watch much TV but it’s great, just so well done. If you summarized the plot line, it would sound like cliché after cliché, but that never occurs to you because it’s great story telling, it’s so well executed. It makes me think of Colum McCann’s piece in the book. We’ve all read some version of that story. If you’re a Sports Illustrated editor you’ve seen it a hundred times—and almost none of them have worked. It’s very rare that someone can pull it off, and he did spectacularly. I think it’s a fantastic piece.

BB: It’s the father-and-son piece, the outsider-coming-to-baseball story.

RF: Right, but you don’t even think about reducing it to those terms because it’s so beautifully done.

BB: I think it’s one of the best pieces in the book. Now, when you approached Colum, did you know that was the piece he was going to write?

RF: Yeah. Even before I got in touch with him, I knew from Dan Barry that Colum had a son and that he’d come to baseball through his son. He has lived here for many years but he’s still an Irishman too. His kids have grown up here. I’d read “Let The Great World Spin” and some other things by him and loved his work. I thought if anybody could do this kind of story, it’s him. What’s cool is that because he didn’t grow up in a baseball culture, I think he was more or less oblivious to the fact that he was doing something that many other people have tried, usually without much success.

BB: There is no guile or irony in his story.

RF: That’s right, and it’s an enduring theme in baseball, fathers and sons—except that he does turn the whole thing on its head, in a way. He’s coming to the game through his son, and that process takes him back to his father and grandfather. It’s great when someone is artistic enough to take material is familiar and seems predictable in some ways and does something truly original with it. That’s the magic—to take something that’s right in front of the readers eyes and to dazzle him by revealing something he never saw. That’s what good writing is about to me.

BB: The other piece in the book that I think took a familiar theme and did a nice job making it work is Will Leitch’s essay, which is really a Babe-in-the-Woods story. It’s funny, and I think he really got the tone right.

RF: Very much so. I hadn’t met Will, but he’s a friend of my friend Dave Hirshey, who’d edited him at Harper Collins. So Dave said, let’s go get a drink with Will Leitch. And when I started this whole project, my son, Nick, a deeply knowledgeable sports kid, said, “Oh, you’ve got to get Will Leitch, he’s really funny and a really good writer.” We sat down at a bar and we connected immediately. He had an idea for the book, and I was like, “Yeah, Huckleberry Finn comes to New York, that’s it.” And he ran with it. Again, a hard one to pull off, but he did a great job with it. His piece is laugh-out-loud funny but it’s also sincere. The irony in it doesn’t create distance, it does just the opposite.

BB: Going back for a minute, how did this book begin?

RF: Roy Blount was in some ways the genesis of the whole book. Dave Hirshey reminded me of this, because I’d forgotten. There is a charity dinner I go to every year where Roy is a featured guest, and he’s always hugely entertaining. So I mentioned to Hirshey that I’d been to this dinner and Roy was telling all these great old Yankee war stories from his days writing sports. I don’t know how the subject came up but Roy had all these great stories. I mentioned this to Hirshey in passing and he called me the next day and said, “Do think there’s a book in this? The best writers you can think of, writing about the Yankees?” At the very least, I thought, it’d be a lot of fun to think about, and that’s how the whole thing started.

BB: Did you know what you wanted each writer to do before you approached them or did they have an idea in mind when you first talked to them? Or did you say, I want Leigh Montville, I want Richard Hoffer, and they’ll figure it out?

RF: Some had specific idea, and some didn’t. I tried to have several possible ideas for each writer I called, things I thought might appeal to them and they might be especially good at, but I always wanted to hear the writers’ ideas first—if they had anything specific—before I suggested possible topics for them. But I did want them to be aware of the range of possibilities, so I would tell them the sorts of things other writers were doing.

BB: You do have such a wide range in the book, not only of writers but of takes on the Yankees. I mean, you’ve got Dan Okrent and Frank Deford who are classic Yankee haters.

RF: Plus, there is a little cluster from Boston, Charlie Pierce and Leigh Montville. Montville, of course, had written a big biography of the Babe as well as one of Ted Williams, and Jane Leavy had written about Mickey Mantle. And these are big books—-not just “big” as in best-sellers, but deeply researched, substantial volumes that cover a lot of ground. So I asked, “What’s the best thing that didn’t make the book?” It took Leigh a while and of course he drew on material that he’d used in the book, but his take was new, and I think what bubbled up for him with passage of time was a new perspective, a fresh insight about Ruth. And Jane just went out and did a whole lot of new reporting. She had a situation with Frank Sullivan, the old Red Sox pitcher, where she mistakenly pronounced him dead in her Mantle book. Sullivan contacted her and wondered when she planned to announce his rebirth—or something like that. It was very funny. She was mortified by her mistake, but he had a great sense of humor about it. So she dug into it and—typical of her—she did more reporting and came up with a terrific piece. So sometimes I went to people who’d already written about subjects involving the Yankees and other times I went to people who were just writers I admired who I knew had some feeling for baseball, though I didn’t know what their feelings were about this team.

BB: Who were some of those guys?

RF: I knew our friend Dexter watched every Yankee game. And as much as I’ve talked to him about the Yankees over the years—even gone to Yankee games with him—it’s never clear what Pete’s going to come up with, how he’s going to land on a subject. That’s true with anything that he’s going to write.

BB: Yeah, like that book review he did last year for the Times on the Jim Harrison novel.

RF: The book report, he called it. Exactly. You’ve read his columns and magazine pieces. That’s part of Dexter’s genius—-you never know where he’s going to be coming from on a particular subject, or where he’s going to land.

BB: Were you amused then when in typical Dexter fashion he chose Chuck Knoblauch, of all people, to write about?

RF: Well, Pete had been very sick a few years ago, very nearly died, as he writes about in the piece. Then it took him a long time to come back and there was a stretch where he felt seriously damaged by his illness, where he couldn’t write. And it was awful. And it was during that period when he landed on the idea of Chuck Knoblauch, a guy who had done something as well as anyone in the world, had done it every day of his life, and then woke up one day and suddenly couldn’t do it at all. Pete had a personal connection to that story, something you couldn’t have predicted. I mean, I knew about Pete’s illness and its aftermath, but I never could have predicted that he would connect it to that Yankees by way of Chuck Knoblauch. And you look at it and it’s a brilliant, funny piece about the awful things that went wrong for him and for Knoblauch. Nobody else could have written that piece.

BB: You’ve known and worked with Pete for a long time. You edited “Paper Trails,” his collection of newspaper columns and magazine pieces. How much editing did you do with him on his piece, and with the other writers too, for that matter? Did Pete give you a final draft and that was it or did you actually work on the piece with him? 

RF: It varied with each writer how much editing it took to get from the first draft to the final. In Pete’s case, it’s hard for him to let go of what he’s writing. He’s a perfectionist. He will rewrite everything until you badger him to give you a peek at it. He sent a draft and it was late in the process of the book’s production—meaning I was feeling the crushing weight of a deadline. The piece was brilliant, it was fall-out-of-your-chair funny but he kept working on it. He was just getting back up to speed for himself. A week or so later he sent a draft that was completely different. He tried to come at the same subject from a totally different direction. It was written like a mock children’s book, and it might have been one direction too many. He sent me about half or two-thirds of it. He’d written the whole thing and then lost the original version on his computer— he was having technical difficulties as he sometimes does. It was like “Paris Trout”—

BB: Jesus. That’s when he lost more than 100 manuscript pages somewhere in his computer back in the mid-‘80s and then took a baseball bat to the machine and had to start over from the beginning.

RF: Right. The second version of his Yankee piece was still funny but I liked the earlier way he did it better. So he did a third version, which was recreating the first version, different and better. That was classic Dexter.

BB: You talked about Pete not wanting to let things go and being a perfectionist, does there ever come a point where a writer can cross a line and keep hold of something too long?

RF: I think it happens to writers all the time, and usually they know it and can see that they’ve pushed it too far or changed directions once too often, and will go back to the sweet spot that was working before. For instance, Pete bounced the second version of his piece off me, and by the time I got it and read it—we don’t work electronically with Pete, it still comes the old fashioned way, on paper, by Fed Ex—he’d already gone back to his first version, or what he could remember of it, and finished it that way.

BB: Is he the only writer in the collection who works like that?

RF: In technological terms, Frank [Deford] was like that for a long time—he was the last guy I worked with who used a typewriter—but he moved decisively into the electronic mode a long time ago. But there were other writers who were as meticulous as Pete, who worked on things until the last minute and wanted to see every draft, every galley, every version. It’s a matter of style, I think—some writers work one way, some work another. It doesn’t mean that someone like Frank or Jim Surowiecki or Roy Blount, who file pieces that are virtually finished the first time you lay eyes on them, are any less meticulous or aren’t perfectionists. Their process is different—at least, that’s the way it looks from the vantage point of an editor—but I think they’re all trying to make their words as good as they can possibly be, one way or another.

BB: I’m sure for some writers it’s never going to be good enough, even when the book is published they’ll still look at their piece and want to tinker with it.

RF: Yeah, Bruce McCall is a very meticulous writer who found things he wanted to fix in his piece until the very end. And when the book was about to close we shot this little video, and Dan Okrent left the shoot with a copy of the galleys, which were outdated by that point, and by the time I got home from the video shoot I had a message from Dan saying that there were two mistakes in Bruce’s piece. And Bruce is a careful writer. We were able to correct the things Dan found at the last minute, even though the book was already at the printer. I know there will be other things that we missed—it’s inevitable—but you do the best you can in the time that’s allotted.

BB: That’s agonizing but at some point—

RF: You have to let go. And the writers do the same thing. Some writers sent me drafts that were virtually perfect.

BB: Was Richard Hoffer one of those guys?

RF: Actually Rick and I worked on it because he was worried in his first draft of the piece about making it baseball-y enough. I always think of Hoffer as a great essayist. He’s always been one of my favorite SI writers.

BB: So understated and yet he’s not humorless. There’s a strong sense of wit in his writing. It’s just dry.

RF: Very much so. He’s extremely skillful and has a distinctive voice. And he has truly original thoughts in a world that I think is filthy with group-think. A Hoffer piece is never just the same old thing.

BB: And you don’t think of him as a baseball guy especially.

RF: No, but Hoffer’s one of those guys that I want to read on anything. I had an idea that I thought would make a perfect Hoffer essay, but at first he did much more of a narrative history piece without much of the essay component. He said to me as we were working, “I have two gears: this one and the other one.” I told him that I was envisioning a piece that included more of the other one, so he wrote a draft that was almost pure essay and left out much of the great historical narrative, all these great details. So we took both versions and put them together and I think it worked out beautifully. I love the piece. And I think it’s quintessential Hoffer.

BB: You were at Playboy and Esquire and SI as an editor and have worked with many of the writers featured in this collection. How many of the writers had you not worked with before?

RF: I can count them. I didn’t know J.R. Moehringer or Nathanial Rich or Jim Surowiecki. Pretty much everybody else I was at least acquainted with or had worked with directly. I met Will Leitch in the very early stages of the book. I’d been introduced to Colum McCann at Dan Barry’s book party, but that was the extent of it at that point. I’d admired Mike Paterniti’s work for a long time and tried to get him to write for me at one magazine or another, but can’t say I really knew him.

BB: What about Bill James?

RF: Bill James I’ve known since he was sending out his Abstract on mimeograph. I met him when I was a fact checker or a baby editor at Esquire. Okrent introduced Bill to us at Esquire, and in some sense, Esquire introduced him to a wider audience. It was great. Okrent wrote the first big piece about Bill that I remember and I worked on a little piece Bill wrote for an Esquire baseball package one year, and he was obviously an original thinker and, I thought, a terrific writer. I touched base with him every so often over the years and followed his ascension. I’d write to him from SI and say, “I don’t know if you remember who I am but would you be on a panel to pick the greatest all-time team…” or whatever. And he always remembered our connection from way back and was always generous with his time. So I called him for this book. He works with the Red Sox but is still as clear-headed about baseball as anyone I’ve ever read, and he’s a funny, quirky writer. I had no idea what he’d write about and neither did he, as it turns out. One day, late in the process, I got an e-mail from him in which he said, “I’ve been thinking about Yankee catchers….” And he was off and running.

BB: And it’s really a perfect kind of Bill James piece. It’s smart and irreverent.

RF: Analytical and full of all his digressions and humorous asides and deep baseball knowledge.

BB: That’s one of the things I noticed about the book, you’ve gotten kind of a quintessential piece from so many of the contributors.

RF: That’s the ideal—what you dream about as an editor. You pick writers of this quality and then you hope they get into it and just do what they do.

BB: I also like the variety. There are humorous pieces, memoir pieces—Sally Jenkins’s piece that is so evocative of New York City, historical stories, analytical pieces.

RF: I’m glad it hit you that way. My big picture idea was to have a bunch of voices that I really like to hear on the subject of the Yankees, more or less directly. In some cases I had specific topics in mind, like Jane Leavy on Mantle or Tom Verducci on Jeter. I told every writer who some of the other contributors were, so they knew who else was playing, and I just hoped all the writers would bring their game. As it turned out, they did.

BB: I’m forever grateful for Charlie Pierce’s piece if only because he punctured that horseshit Seinfeld routine, which has somehow become celebrated, that rooting for a sports team is like rooting for laundry.

RF: Charlie is another one you can count on to come up with something unpredictable.

BB: Right, because he starts there and shifts gears in the middle of the piece about growing up and what the Yankees meant growing up in Boston.

RF: He does lay waste that whole Seinfeld bit about laundry. But in a much larger context he also writes about what baseball’s tribal experience means to people who come to this country from somewhere else, and he does it in a way that is immediate and on a human scale. Charlie’s piece has a lot of common ground with Column McCann’s, but they are totally different essays.

BB: Taken as a whole were there any surprises in the collection, a theme, or a player who jumped out as somebody that appeared in more than a few of the pieces?

RF: There are some threads that run through the book, yeah. And I was aware of them when I was figuring out the order of the pieces and was conscious of spacing them out so that they didn’t come together too quickly. Catfish Hunter comes up more often than I would’ve anticipated. And he’s the focus for Mike Paterniti, who wrote just a beautiful piece.

BB: The book ends with Steve Rushin talking about Catfish, too.

RF: And I was aware that. I’d really admired Mike’s classic Thurman Munson piece in Esquire. When I spoke to him, he mentioned that he’d seen Catfish Hunter near the end of his life and had written a quick remembrance of him in the early days of Esquire.com. He sent me the little post he’d done and he went back to that and really dug in. So I knew that Mike and Steve were going to touch on some of the same ground, and Rushin wrote a gem of a piece in which he gets the last word in the book, which is fitting. And Catfish also comes up again in Bill Nack’s amazing story about the Bronx Zoo Era Yankees. There’s a different focus and context in each of the three pieces in which Catfish appears.

BB: Also, what a beautiful guy to come up. A guy with a sense of himself and a sense of humor about the Yankees and how crazy George was even though he was the first big free agent. Yankee fans love him but also probably saw himself as being apart from that too.

RF: And there was another surprise in the book. Steinbrenner comes up, obviously, over and over again. But Jim Surowiecki, the financial writer for the New Yorker, who is another really original thinker, did a revisionist analysis of what Steinbrenner did with the team economically—a totally fresh take on Steinbrenner’s ownership .

BB: I also like that there are a few essays on the modern Yankees. Verducci on Jeter but also Steve Wulf on Robinson Cano, which is important I think—to talk about a Latin star.

RF: As the book was taking shape I knew Tom was going to do Jeter but I thought it’d be good to have a piece on a player who represented the future. I think of Steve as the guy who first wrote about Dominican baseball, about Dominican shortstops. I remembered his piece from the ‘80s, and I thought Cano was the guy for this book. He is a monstrously good player and will be the center of gravity when Mariano and Jeter are gone. Steve took it and ran. He’s been an editor at ESPN for a while now, but he was a great baseball writer at SI for a really long time and knows the game as well as anyone. It was a perfect match of writer and subject.

BB: And it’s an important piece because for so many years the Yankees didn’t have Dominican players, certainly not stars, despite playing a stones throw from Washington Heights.

RF: That’s right. Another surprising piece came from Dan Barry.

BB: Which is great because the Mike Burke, CBS years were covered.

RF: The last thing you think of is the Yankees as underdogs.

BB: Celerino Sanchez.

RF: “Poor Celerino Sanchez,” is a little refrain from Dan’s piece, which is both poignant and very funny. And he had a deeper connection to that team than I expected before I talked to him. Then there’s Roy Blount, who I knew had Yankee stories to tell, but the nature of a Blount piece—the beauty of a Blount piece—is that you have no idea how he’s going to get at his subject and can’t possibly predict where he’s going to go with it.

BB: Then you see writers like Moehringer, McCann and Dexter and you think, I wonder what those guys have to say about them?

RF: J.R. Moehringer had an intimate connection with the team through his grandfather, who was a key figure in his life. “The Tender Bar” is J.R.’s great memoir about growing up with an absent father, and his grandfather is in that book. But what J.R. has done here is an element of the story that wasn’t in his book.

BB: And Moehringer is a Mets fan.

RF: I contacted him and he said that he wanted to write about the Yankees from a Mets fan’s point of view. And I already had Nathaniel Rich doing that. In fact, I had Nathaniel’s story already, and it was terrific, extremely amusing. So I told J.R. that I had that piece but that I really wanted him to write for this book. At that point I suggested a couple of topics, but he had something else he wanted to try. And after a while he sent me what he said was a really rough draft of something that was well on its way to being this piece. He’s another one who goes back to his copy over it over and over again, making it better and then going back to it again. It’s a wonderful piece about how he connected with baseball. It’s amazing.

BB: Plus, watching the games on TV and listening to the Scooter. You needed to get the Scooter in there.

RF: Had to. And he’s another thread. He’s also gets a prominent mention in Rushin’s piece.

BB: Yankee fans will obviously be interested in the book but there are enough of the writers in the book who are Yankee-haters that I suspect you want to draw readers that aren’t Yankee fans, too.

RF: Yeah, I think anybody who is interested in reading good writers is the potential audience for the book. The natural audience is Yankee fans, baseball fans. They are a team that people have strong feelings about: people love them and people really love to hate them.

BB: This is the book you want to read.

RF: That was the hope. The plan, insofar as I had one, was to get the writers I want to read on a subject I want to read about. Beyond that I didn’t really know where it would go. I wanted to be surprised and delighted, and by that measure I think the book is a real success.

“Damn Yankees” is available for pre-order at Amazon. It will be published on April 3rd.

[Photographs via N.Y. Daily News, N.Y. Times, ESPN, Corbis, Marisa Kestel, Peter Adams, SI, Illustration by Bruce McCall, photo of Pete Dexter by Stuart Isett]

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.)

From a wonderful, in-depth interview with our man Schulian by Pete Croatto, who runs a great site:

Yes, Ali was unspeakably cruel to Frazier in the build-up to their fights, calling him “a gorilla” and, worse, an Uncle Tom. But no one ever said Ali was perfect. He was as flawed and complicated as any other human being, with his mean streak and his public philandering and, for all I know, his snoring. He may not have been a Rhodes scholar, either, which was a point Kram hammered relentlessly. But somehow Ali always managed to find his better self when the occasion demanded it. Rising out of a business in which men are paid to destroy each other—Ali-Frazier III is a classic example—he performed acts of charity, bravery, and self-sacrifice. Some were high profile—opposing the war in Vietnam, championing black pride—while others were small personal gestures, like financing soup kitchens or building homes for poor families. Ali may have been acting on instinct instead of intellect in some cases; in others he may have seen his selfishness morph into something good. Who knows what was going on inside his head? All I can say is that I saw him do far more good than bad, and when he was done, he had become far more than a heavyweight champion. He had become a great man.

It seems anticlimactic to say he was great to cover, too. A writer’s dream. He was funny and irreverent and brash and, when the occasion called for it, humble and sensitive. There weren’t many people in the sports media whose names he remembered—Howard Cosell, naturally, and Dick Young and George Plimpton, whom he called “Kennedy”—and yet the media flocked to him because they knew that when he was around, something was going to happen. He might trade insults with Bundini Brown, the shaman of his entourage, or back up a prediction with a goofy poem. When he took a vow of silence before his first fight with Leon Spinks, he slapped a piece of tape across his mouth—and even then he was more interesting than anyone who was talking.

I could go on and on, but you get my drift. Ali was a once-in-a-lifetime subject for a sports writer, maybe for any kind of writer. I know he was that way for me, and I always prided myself in saying the story came first. But he made me care about him in a way no other athlete did. It was his charm, his courage, his audacity, his greatness in the ring. When I saw Larry Holmes destroy him in Las Vegas, it was like watching an execution. It was the worst night of my life as a sports writer, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels that way. I felt bad for myself, of course, because I knew I wouldn’t be writing about him for much longer. But I felt worse for Ali because of the way he’d been beaten. Even though Holmes did what he could to hold back, he had to keep fighting until Ali’s craven manager, Herbert Muhammad, told Angelo Dundee to stop it. By then Ali had been damaged in a way he will never get past. All these years later, the memory still haunts me. Maybe that’s the measure of just how special he was.

[Photo Credit: Thomas Hoepker]

Last year, we ran John Schulian’s terrific memoir series, “From Ali to Xena.” It was originally published in 50 parts. Now, here it is again, in three long segments for easy reading.

Enjoy. It sure am sweet.

Part One: The Wander Years

Part Two: Ink-Stained Wretch

Part Three: Hooray for Hollywood

Last year I wrote a profile for Deadspin on the late George Kimball. It began as an interview for this site, conducted via e-mail, ostensibly to promote “At the Fights,” a boxing compilation George co-edited with John Schulian. Once I learned about what a fascinating life George had led, I decided to write a longer piece instead. However, I had five months worth of e-mail exchanges on my hand, George musing about his childhood and his career.  I’ve compiled them here, and while the following in no way presents a complete portrait of his life, I think you will enjoy a little more Kimball.

Bronx Banter: Your father was a career military man and you grew up all over the world. Did you follow boxing at all as a kid?

George Kimball: Aha, so this is going to be one of those psychological-minded interviews. My wife Marge would like that. She’s a shrink and says I’m the least psychological-minded person she knows. Sure, I watched the fights on TV with my father (and with his father) from the mid 50s on. It was a revelation to me at the live readings we did on each coast last year for The Fighter Still Remains to learn how just many of the people involved in that book had initially come to boxing the same way, as a sort of connection to their fathers at a time when there might not have been much else that did connect them.

Beginning in late ’57, which is when we moved to Germany, I followed boxing quite avidly in the papers, or really, paper. (There was an English-language weekly called The Overseas Family that covered our high school games but not much on a global scale.) Stars and Stripes, on the other hand, was a daily that carried pretty extensive coverage of both the important professional bouts (Robinson’s and Patterson’s in particular) as well as the military ones that took place in Europe, which were considered a pretty big deal, particularly as we edged toward the ’60 Olympics, which were going to be in Rome. So I’d have certainly known who all the professional champions and most of the contenders were, as well as the top Europeans (like Laszlo Papp, for instance). I don’t recall that we attended any of the bouts on the bases where we were (my father was stationed at Bamberg and Bayreuth, and I went away to the American school in Nurnberg), none of which harbored any of the really promising service amateurs, but I monitored the progress of “our” boxers – the Army guys stationed elsewhere in Europe – as they all fell by the wayside on the road to Rome with one notable exception, Sgt. Eddie Crook, who wound up being one of three U.S. boxing gold medalists in Rome. (Cassius Clay and Skeeter McClure were the others.) I liked Clay even then, since he was from Louisville, my mother’s hometown.

I don’t know that I regarded it as crushing at the time, but the Rome Olympics actually coincided with our move back to the states. I watched a lot of the Games at the home of one grandparent or another as we spent a few weeks visiting both after having been out of the country for three years. I don’t know that I’d have been able to attend had we stayed in Europe even a few weeks longer, but I had gone to Rome the previous summer, so it wouldn’t have been out of the question.

I played football and basketball at Nurnberg, and ran track in the spring. Summers I played in an AYA baseball league made up of towns that had bases. The football away games were same-day trips, but in basketball every other weekend there’d be a road trip – like you’d play a game in Munich or Heidelberg on Friday night, stay overnight, and then play in Augsburg or Mannheim on Saturday afternoon and bus back to Nurnberg on Saturday night.

The Army also had a really top-flight league of post teams that played a regular schedule, mostly, I think, on Sunday afternoons. The teams were open to everybody stationed there, so what you wound up with at a relatively large post like Bamberg was virtually a college all-star team. Everybody used to turn out to watch the home games, and I watched a lot of those on weekends when I went home. (They even used to broadcast a game of the week on AFN.) Eddie Crook, by the way, was the quarterback for the Berlin team, which was all the more unusual because most of the guys in his huddle would have been officers. He was the first black quarterback I’d ever seen, at any level.

BB: What was it like following sports when you moved around so much?

GK: My father followed the NFL avidly, or at least he did after we came back to the states in 1960 when there was football on television every Sunday no matter where you lived. We were in San Antonio my senior year, and also got the AFL games on TV. My old man had played both football and baseball at UMass (when it was still Mass State) and followed both sports. I remember sitting up with a couple of my classmates in the dorm in Nurnberg, charting the Colts-Giants overtime game off the radio broadcast. That was pretty exciting even on the radio, believe it or not.

Even moving around, you maintained your allegiances. I was a Red Sox and Cardinals fan and religiously followed both teams, even though in some cases the news and box scores were two days old.

That year in San Antonio I was working for nights 75 cents an hour, first sacking groceries and then, once I got my license, delivering prescriptions for a pharmacy, and without telling anyone saved up enough to buy two tickets to the first AFL championship game in Houston. Once the tickets came in the mail I still had a problem, because Houston was three hours away and I needed the family car to drive there with my date. When I finally worked up the nerve to ask my father his solution was that sure, I could borrow his car – as long as he got to use the other ticket. So I ended up at Jeppesen Stadium in Houston watching that game with my father.

BB: Were you tight with your siblings?

GK: Probably less so than would have been the case with an average family, simply because of the circumstances in which I grew up. My brother Tim, who is just a year and a half younger, only spent one year at Nurnberg when I was going there, and apart from my senior year in Texas I really didn’t live year-round with my family after my freshman year in high school. I was quite a bit older – six years older than the next-closest sibling – and my youngest brother wasn’t even born until I was in my second year of college. The age gap tends to shrink with the passage of time, so I’m probably more in contact with, and closer to, most of them now than I was when we were growing up.

BB: Did you read any sports writers as a kid?

GK: I think one of the early sportswriters I read avidly must have been Earl Ruby, of the Louisville Courier Journal. I also came across a collection of Furman Bisher’s pretty early on. I was reading constantly, absolutely haunted the library, but probably didn’t read a hell of a lot of sports books per se, and wasn’t much exposed to the great ones unless they were already dead and collected, like maybe Grantland Rice or Ring Lardner. I couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven when I read a collection of Irvin S. Cobb that my mother owned. But I don’t think I even began to form an idea that great sports writing could also be great writing until I started to pay attention to Sports Illustrated, which would have been the fall of 1960. I don’t know that we ever saw SI in Germany.

BB: Sounds like sports played an important part of your childhood. What about the arts? Was their music in your house as a kid? Movies, radio? What about books?

GK: That was always pretty important to me. When we were in Bayreuth I used to go to the Wagner festival with my mother because my father hated opera. I think my parents liked musicals even as much as I did, so that was there from an early age. I played the trumpet for a while and liked a lot of jazz. My parents had some jazz records, but I was the one, at probably age 15, who brought Charlie Parker into the house, and who introduced them to Miles Davis, Gerry Mulligan, and Chet Baker. Of course I listened to early rock, as did my contemporaries. Everybody listened to that, but only a few of my contemporaries were as into jazz as I was, and the number that listened to Broadway musical scores was even smaller, so when I listened to Rogers and Hammerstein or Mario Lanza, a lot of times it was alone in my room. Didn’t listen to much radio at all, that I can remember, apart from in the car.

I pretty much lived in the library, even in Germany. I’d even take dates there. No matter what else I was doing I was probably reading at least a couple of books a week for almost as long as I can remember. Movies were important during the years I lived in Germany. The new films would eventually get there, so we didn’t feel cheated that they’d been out for a few months in the states, and I can’t remember whether they cost 15 cents or a quarter, but they were certainly affordable. We had one night a week in Nurnberg where you could sign out for an early film, and then on weekends I’d usually see one too.

BB: I know you are a fan of musicals. I think Kiss Me, Kate was the first long-playing record my dad ever bought—he was six or seven years older than you.

GK: I first saw Kiss Me, Kate performed at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, in the Alps, in 1959. Went with my mother because my father didn’t want to go. I think we had all of the early Rogers and Hammerstein cast recordings at the house when I was growing up – Carousel, Oklahoma, South Pacific and The King and I, and I eventually saw all of those done in New York, in London, in regional theatre, what have you. Even saw Kiss Me, Kate on Broadway about ten years ago. I think the Rogers and Hammerstein led me back to their earlier collaborators like Lorenz Hart and Jerome Kern and their spiritual descendants like Lerner and Loewe, or Frank Loesser. I think there was a definable Golden Age that began in the late ‘20s with Show Boat and ended probably fifty years ago which was marked by a greatness that’s never been achieved since, which is why I enjoy the revivals more than most new musicals. I saw the Lincoln Center South Pacific nine times in three years, I think (and a few weeks ago I took Danny Burstein to DiBella’s boxing card at B.B. King’s.). At their best there were others in this era like Cole Porter and Irving Berlin who could be great but I thought both inconsistent. Annie Get Your Gun, for instance, is brilliant (despite a notably dumb book), and right up there with the best of Rogers and Hammerstein, but Berlin wrote some shows I wouldn’t want to even sit through. I think the symbiosis of great lyricists and composers is what defined these. I love West Side Story, for instance, but never warmed to some of Bernstein’s film scores, and I think Sondheim did his best work on that one when he was a lyricist, period. I like some of his stuff, and hope to go see Danny and Bernadette Peters do Follies at the Kennedy Center in May, but I don’t see Sondheim as an heir to the tradition.

BB: What about Gilbert and Sullivan?

GK: Gilbert and Sullivan is an acquired taste I guess I never acquired. It’s cute, but I don’t think especially good musically, and it makes you work to get the lyrics, which isn’t the way it’s supposed to be. I don’t think I’ve ever walked around with a Gilbert and Sullivan song in my head, for instance, but with some of these other classics, especially Rogers and Hammerstein, it happens all the time. Some of the movie recordings of Rogers and Hammerstein were quite good even if the movies themselves weren’t. John Raitt was the original Billy in Carousel, around the time I was born, and I met him years later when I had dinner with him and Bonnie.

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