The Seeds of Discontent

By John Schulian 

George Solomon made sure I hit the ground running. I covered a couple of Redskins practices- it couldn’t have been much different than covering the Kremlin. Then I took off for Detroit to cover a three-game series with the Orioles, who were very much in the pennant race. And to write two features on them, too, even though I’d never covered a big league game before and they had never laid eyes on me. And I had to cover the Howard University-Wayne State football game, too. My football story was a stinker, but the baseball stuff I could do, partly because I had always followed the game and partly because the Orioles were so easy to get along with. All I remember from that weekend is typing, checking my watch, grabbing cabs, and drinking Vernor’s ginger ale when it was still strictly a Detroit delicacy. It was a trial by fire, and I knew I’d passed when George apologized for not being able to play my Monday feature on Jim Palmer on the front of the section.

It didn’t take George long to figure out that I wasn’t meant to be a beat reporter. It was like I had SHORT ATTENTION SPAN written in neon lights on my forehead. Besides, we had Len Shapiro as the first-string Redskins reporter, and he was terrific-–intrepid, fearless, tireless, all in the face of the paranoid monster that was George Allen. Lenny will tell you today that covering the Redskins, the prize beat in the Post sports department, took years off his life.

Shirley Povich

I filled in wherever George wanted me, the Redskins, a big NFL game, the NBA. But mostly I wrote features and series. One series was about black dominance in the NBA (to show you how long ago this was) and another was about the NFL psyche. I remember Shirley Povich, a lovely, classy gent whose sports column was an institution at the Post for half a century, coming up to me after part one of the NFL series ran and saying, “This is too good for a newspaper.” I was deeply gratified by the praise, but at the same time I was surprised that Shirley, who had been the Post’s sports editor when he was barely out of his teens, would say something like that. I’d read somewhere that Jimmy Cannon had said nothing was too good for a newspaper. He wasn’t in the same league with Shirley when it came to being gracious, but I think Cannon was right on the money about that one.

I had freedom at the Post and yet I didn’t. Nobody told me what to write, so I could continue trying to figure out what my voice was. That was one of the great things about the sports page in those days: it was a laboratory for writing. As time went on, there would be stylish writing throughout all of the country’s best newspapers, much of it inspired by the Post’s Style section, where there was great work done on society dames, movies, TV, books, and rock and roll. But the Post’s sports section was my new playground, and I was happy to be there.

I would have been even happier if George Solomon had let me turn one of my ideas into a story once in a while. But George didn’t do business that way. He bubbled over with his own ideas, many of them good ones but some clinkers too, and he had the energy level of a hyperactive two-year-old. As a result he didn’t expect you to ever be tired. I remember coming off one of his hellish road trips-–Columbus, Ohio to St. Louis to Milwaukee to Toronto to Cleveland in five hectic, work-filled winter days-–and the first thing he said to me was, “Come on in the office. We’ll talk about what you’re going to do next.” I told him that what I was going to do next was pick up my paycheck and go home and go to bed. And that’s what I did.

It wasn’t long before I realized that I was probably the only writer on the staff who questioned authority. Everybody else was too damned nice. I mean, the place was crawling with good guys -– Tom Boswell, Dave Brady, Ken Denlinger, Paul Attner, Angus Phillips, David DuPree, Gerry Strine, Mark Asher. But I never heard any of them raise their voices. And they had reason to, particularly after the copy desk got through making a hash of their prose. All they’d do, however, was whisper among themselves while they licked their wounds. I couldn’t make myself do that. I marched into George Solomon’s office one day and said, “I’ve had more stories fucked up here in five weeks than I had fucked up in five years in Baltimore.” And that was the God’s truth.

When I finished reading “Blindsided: The Jerry Joseph Basketball Scandal” by Michael J. Mooney my first thought was how nice it will be to see the piece in the next edition of “The Best American Sports Writing.” The story features good reporting and is well-constructed. It is also written in the kind of clean, succinct prose that I love. Best of all, it took me somewhere unexpected, all without drawing attention to writing style. It is top-notch storytelling. I am a newcomer to Mooney’s work but he’s been around and is accomplished. Check out his website for more, and do yourself a favor: read this story.

[Photo Credit: AP]

THE DEEP END OF THE POOL

By John Schulian

Like every other job candidate at the Post in those days, I had to get the approval of Ben Bradlee, the executive editor who had covered himself in glory with the paper’s Watergate coverage. One of the first things he said to me was that he liked my Jimmy Breslin style. As soon as I heard that, I knew I’d better develop my own style, and do it fast. If I was going to prosper at the Post, I couldn’t be a cheap imitation.

I realized I was in the deep end of the pool the instant I walked into the place. It was crawling with heavy hitters and on-the-make newcomers, intrepid reporters and positively wonderful wordsmiths, all of whom seemed to buy into Bradlee’s theory of creative tension. I’d hate to think of all the intramural treachery that went on there — and that was in addition to going out and bumping heads with the New York Times and L.A. Times and Boston Globe and Wall Street Journal. On top of that, the people at the Post seemed exceedingly full of themselves-–no surprise, I suppose, since I showed up in the wake of Woodward and Bernstein bringing down Nixon and his cronies. In fact, the paper was building its Batman and Robin an office back by the sports department. Nobody thought it was funny when I asked if they were going to take high school football scores on Friday nights. What did I know? I’d just come from Baltimore, where people took their work seriously, but not themselves.

I’m probably going to wind up sounding negative about my time at the Post-–it was not the greatest 17 months of my life-–but I want you to know that it was an honor to work there. I was never on a better paper, never kept company with more talented people, never had more of a sense of the glamour of the newspaper business. Bradlee was forever strutting around in his Turnbull & Asser shirts-–the kind with bold stripes and white collars-–and he loved to go slumming in the sports department so he could see what we’d dug up on the Redskins. He was big pals with the team’s owner, Edward Bennett Williams.

One day I get into the elevator to go up to the newsroom and a guy jumps in at the last minute. He’s dressed the same way I am: tan corduroy sport coat, blue button-down collar shirt, Levi’s, cowboy boots. One big difference, though: he was Robert Redford and I wasn’t. They were making “All the President’s Men” then, and Redford must have been hanging around to do research on Bob Woodward, whom he played in the movie. When we got off the elevator, it was like I was invisible.

There was a copy boy at the Post-–the head copy boy, to be specific-–who wore Gucci loafers and was said to have a degree from the University of Virginia. And there was a copy girl who was an absolute babe-–absolute babes are a rarity in the newspaper business–and was said to have a tattoo of a butterfly on her ass.

In the midst of all that whatever-it-was, there was Donnie Graham, son of Katherine, the publisher who stood so tall during the Wategate era. Donnie would be publisher one day, too, but on his way there, he spent time doing every kind of job there was at the paper, from loading trucks to reporting to taking a turn as an editor in the sports department. This in addition to having been a beat cop in D.C. for a year or two. All of which is to say he was as decent and down to earth as he could be. I forget what job he had at the paper when I was there, but he still used to swing by sports to shoot the bull. One day he comes up to me while I’m pounding away on my typewriter and asks what I’m working on. I tell him it’s a feature about a former University of Maryland quarterback who washed out of the NFL and is playing semipro football in Baltimore on Saturday nights. And I mean down-and-dirty semipro football, on a field as hard as an interstate highway. “Oh,” Donnie says. He didn’t need to say anything else. I could tell he thought this one was a loser. But I wrote the hell out of it, and when I came into the office the day after it ran, there was a note from Donnie saying that in the hands of a good writer, anything could be a wonderful story. With the note was a copy of George Orwell’s essays. Memories don’t come much better than that.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the pressmen’s strike a month or so after I started at the Post on Labor Day 1975. The paper was getting ready to change from hot type to cold type and jobs were being lost in the backshop. One night everything went sideways, blood got spilled, the paper didn’t come out, and the next thing I knew, my fellow members of the Newspaper Guild and I were voting on whether to honor the pressmen’s picket line. I thought we should. Many more people thought we should cross it. And so we did. A few people actually left the Post because of that. I wasn’t one of them, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t feel a sense of shame and betrayal every time I crossed the picket line. I did, and it has stayed with me to this day.

I’m still not sure exactly why the Post came after me, particularly when so many good young sportswriters around the country would have sold their wives/mothers/firstborn for a chance to work there. Nor am I sure whether it was Donnie Graham or George Solomon who spotted me first. Sometimes I heard that it was my SI story on the Baltimore fight promoter that stirred their interest. Other times it was a funny but barbed Evening Sun feature I’d done about students at the school where the Colts trained standing up to the team’s abrasive general manager.

A funny thing about that fight promoter. Well, not funny, because he died in the time between my departure from the Evening Sun and my arrival at the Post. His name was Eli Hanover and he was barely into his 50s, one of those guys who’s so full of piss and vinegar that you figure he’ll outlive everyone. George Solomon told me he tried to get hold of me to write something about Eli, but I was off on an assignment for Sports Illustrated and nobody knew how to reach me. (Ah, those were the days.) The Post had a new sports columnist, a guy named William Barry Furlong who had had a truly distinguished career as a magazine freelancer, and he wound up writing about Eli. But all he did was lift things from my SI story, quotes and paraphrases and anecdotes. I don’t recall his having another source for his column. I hope he did. I hope he made at least one phone call. But if he did, I don’t remember it. Uncharacteristically, I didn’t say anything about it, not to Furlong, not to Solomon, not to anyone. It was one of those things I just filed away and said, Okay, pal, it’s good to know that’s how you play the game.

Click here for the full “From Ali to Xena” archives.

Over at SI, Joe Pos has a piece about Adam Dunn, “The Least Exciting Player Ever.” In it, he mentions former Yankee, Bobby Abreu:

I’m not talking about winning and losing here. I’m not talking about value. I’m talking about excitement. And that’s something different. I’ve often written that Bobby Abreu is the MBGPIBH — Most Boring Good Player In Baseball History. I have immense respect for what he has accomplished as a player, what he continues to accomplish. The guy has a lifetime .400 on-base percentage (and a .400 on-base percentage this year). He’s had two 30-30 seasons. He’s won a Gold Glove, and he really seemed to be an excellent fielder in his younger days. He has scored and driven in 100 five times. I’m assuming he has 21 more home runs in him (though his power has dwindled to almost nothing) and that will make him only the eighth member of the 300-homer, 300-stolen base club. I don’t want to get into it here because this post is already drifting, but it seems every couple of weeks I have a discussion with a friend about Abreu’s Hall of Fame case. I think he’s making a case. I also think he’s headed for the Hall of Not Famous Enough.

Abreu, though, is an agonizing player to watch, at least for me. His at-bats feel like audits. They just go on and on, an endless stream of near strikes called for balls, good pitches spoiled, swings and misses, more near pitches called for balls — he’s doing exactly what he SHOULD be doing. Abreu controls the batter’s box as few ever have. He is an artist at the plate, but an artist in the way that a good auto mechanic is an artist. I admire what he does. I appreciate the value of it. But I wish they would give me a magazine or something to read while he does it.

Excellence and excitement don’t always mix. In Abreu’s case, his lack of flair or visceral artistry will hurt his case for greatness. His artistry is there, as Pos notes, but it is not dynamic. He is a fine player, better than fine, a winning player, but he never put the asses in the seats. But I liked watching him more than Pos does. What makes him different than Hideki Matsui? That Godzilla hit more home runs?

There are thrilling players who have style to burn who aren’t nearly as accomplished as a guy like Abreu or Matsui. Sometimes, you can’t have it all. At least Bobby’s got good teeth and a nice smile.

Up, Down, Up, and Out

By John Schulian

In my mind, it was going to be either a city column at the Evening Sun or a job at SI, and trust me, I campaigned like a mad man to get my foot in SI’s door. The magazine’s Baltimore stringer was a big-hearted, hugely energetic guy named Joe D’Adamo, who ran the backshop at the Evening Sun. Not a writer or editor, but a guy who oversaw the actual physical production of the paper. The editors at SI appreciated Joe because he was a fount of ideas, and Joe liked the way I wrote enough to talk me up to them. When Frank Deford came to town  to promote a novel he’d written, I did a visiting-author story in which I described him as looking like a waterbed salesman. I just couldn’t resist. Frank must have recognized the impulse, because he didn’t hold it against me. The next thing I knew, Joe D’Adamo was telling me that Frank had mentioned me to SI’s editors. Just the same, when Robert Creamer showed up in Baltimore to hustle his Babe Ruth book, I wrote about him, too.

Finally, in 1973, Pat Ryan, SI’s freelance editor-–soon to be known forever in my mind as the wonderful Pat Ryan-–asked me to send her a list of four story ideas. I did, and the one she liked the best was about the boxing promoter on the Block. When I sent in my first draft, Pat asked me to rewrite the ending so it involved a night at the fights. I did, and that was the last change that was made to the piece. Every word that appeared under my first byline in Sports Illustrated was mine. I was amazed, gratified, and filled with bigger dreams than ever.

Pat had a wonderful way with writers, a real gift for nurturing them. Her father, if I recall correctly, was a successful racehorse trainer, and she had started at SI as a secretary and worked her way up to writer and then editor. Nobody had strewn rose petals at her feet, and if she got the idea that you were committed to your work, she would beat the drum for you. She invited me to New York, took me to lunch, introduced me to other key editors, and treated me like I belonged even though I must have seemed like a rube. She kept giving me story assignments, too-–short items for the front of the book as well as longer stuff like the magazine’s first Moses Malone story and a piece on the amateur baseball team in Baltimore that produced Reggie Jackson and Al Kaline.

All the while I was still writing for the Evening Sun. It was a terrific place to work, as I’ve said, and the people I worked with were salt of the earth. They knew and cared about the city, and they were passionate about honest, energetic, imaginative reporting. They also knew how to put on a great ugliest tie contest. No, I never won. I was actually a pretty good dresser. I remember when I went to interview Jerry Lee Lewis, he looked me over with those spooky eyes of his and said, “I like a sharp-dressed man.” What I might have won at the paper was a bad temper award. Just about anything could set me off-–typos in a story I’d written, an inability to get a long-distance line, the list is endless, really. My standard response was to pound my desk or stand up and punch the nearest wall while yelling the obligatory “fuck!” It’s funny how in the 36 years since I left the paper, the legend of my temper has grown. One woman said I broke the window in the managing editor’s office. (Not true.) A guy said I broke a typewriter. (Also not true.) The only thing I might have broken was my hand when I punched a wall. The fact that I didn’t proves that God really does look out for drunks and fools.

By the time 1975 rolled around, I was starting to get antsy. SI didn’t have any openings for writers at my level and wasn’t expecting any. I could have lived with that if I sensed that I was about to be anointed the Jimmy Breslin of Baltimore. Instead, I was told that the managing editor had decided to kill my music column because nobody cared about rock and roll anymore. This, mind you, just as Springsteen was taking flight-–do I need to say more about the thickness of the managing editor’s skull? I was more than pissed off. I was crushed. Looking back, it was a great life lesson, because it was awfully easy to get comfortable at the Evening Sun and in Baltimore, which was just entering its resurgence. But the only way you’re going to get better is by challenging yourself, by going up against writers who are better than you are. If you do that, it’s sink or swim, and that was what I needed if I was going to make anything out of the career that consumed my life.

When I finally got my wits about me, I started plotting my great escape. I figured I could freelance for Sports Illustrated and a new magazine called New Times, which was showcasing up-and-coming writers like Bob Greene (already a star columnist at the Chicago Sun-Times), Frank Rich (in his pre-New York Times days), Paul Hendrickson (later a star in the Washington Post’s Style section), and Robert Ward (a novelist from Baltimore whom I didn’t meet until we both wound up in Hollywood). I was going to wait until my fifth anniversary at the Evening Sun-–September 1975-–and then I’d be gone. I just had to get through the next three months.

So I’m sitting at my desk one afternoon, not really giving a damn about whatever I was supposed to be working on, and my telephone rings.

“Hello?”

“Is John Schulian there?”

“You got him.”

“This is George Solomon, from the Washington Post. How’d you like to make George Allen’s life miserable?”

I’m not making this up. That’s exactly how the conversation went. Solomon was the Post’s new sports editor, and Allen was the Washington Redskins’ head coach and the Richard Nixon of the NFL. And I, as I hastened to point out, was a guy who had never written a sports story for a newspaper. I mean I’d cheated a couple of times and done features about Willie Mays in retirement and a great local playground basketball player, but I’d never written a story about a game. You know, one with a score in it.

So I said, “Are you sure you’ve got the right John Schulian?”

“I’m sure,” Solomon said.

My life had just changed.

Click here for the complete “From Ali to Xena” archives.

“Just a Guy at Oxford” (Bill Bradley)

“The Great Wall of Boston” (The Green Monster)

“Sam, You Make the Ball too Small” (Sam McDowell)

“The King of the Jungle” (Walter O’Malley)

George Vecsey, right, with his arm around the wonderful Ray Robinson

I recently exchanged e-mails with George Vecsey, the veteran columnist for the New York Times, who started his career at Newsday under Mann.

Here’s our chat. Enjoy:

Bronx Banter: When Jack Mann took over the Newsday sports department was he influenced by any sports editors that came before him? I’m thinking of someone like Stanley Woodward.

George Vecsey: I don’t know. He came up through the news department at Newsday, had some college, was well read, surely knew about sports editors, but was so much an outsider that I doubt he would consider himself an acolyte of anybody.

BB: How would you describe to young readers what the climate of the press box was like in 1960? And how did Mann and “his Chipmunks” differ from the older writers?

GV: Well, the dichotomy was not as clear as I guess we would like to have thought. It may have been a function of age. But Isaacs and Len Shecter of the Post and Larry Merchant of the Philly Daily News were not children, and were capable of thinking for themselves, with Jack only part of it. The Chipmunks were young and energetic and brash. The split was probably on the same generational lines of the Kennedy-Nixon election – new vs. old (politics excluded). Even in 1960, some of us (me at least) were anticipating the forces of the mid-60’s in style and music and attitude. But we all were pretty traditional, except in comparison to the older writers, who were often hooked into the free drinks of the press room and the party line of the clubs they covered, or so we thought. Sounds pretty simplistic, looking back.

BB: Who else writing for the New York papers in the early 60s were like-minded? I’m thinking specifically of Shecter at the Post. Who else was part of the new breed?

GV: Len Shecter, Isaacs, Merchant, of course. And Stan Hochman A lot of the younger guys were Chipmunks just because we chattered a lot, and hung out together. Looking back, it would be hard to put one label on me, Steve, Maury Allen, Vic Ziegel, Phil Pepe, Paul Zimmerman, Joe Donnelly, Joe Gergen. We (or at least I did) admired Dick Young, who was no Chipmunk, but I knew him through my dad when I was a little kid, and Dick was very gracious to me when I came along as a young writer. I was friendly with older guys like Harold Rosenthal (more acerbic than any of us) and Barney Kremenko (a kind man, a friend), and I learned a lot from Leonard Koppett, one of the great people of the business, and I adored Jimmy Cannon. I don’t know that Bob Lipsyte considered himself a Chipmunk, but he and I hung out a lot in those days, and his excellent early work as a sports columnist (in his first tour of duty, I emphasize) re-defined the genre. So it’s hard to define Chipmunk, at this late date. Every generation has its new look. When I came back to Sports in 1980, there was Jane Gross, Allen Abel, Michael Farber, Jane Leavy, Phil Hersh, all good pals of mine. New faces.

BB: And now, the climate is different from then.

GV: The one difference between then and now was that everybody talked in the press box. Talked about the game. Argued about politics. Bickered about where we were going to dinner. Nowadays, the kids are all hunched over their machines, with headsets on, tweeting and facebooking and blogging and goodness knows what else. Nobody talks in the press box. I miss arguments. I miss human contact. I think we had more fun than the Thumb Generation. But the output in the New York Times is really good, probably better than ever, which is what matters.

(more…)

Michael Sokolove has a measured and insightful piece in the New York Times Magazine about aging athletes. Derek Jeter is a feature player:

The careers of elite athletes, enviable as they may be, are foreshortened versions of a human lifespan. Physical decline — in specific ways that affect what they do and who they are — begins for them before it does for normal people. The athletes themselves rarely see the beginnings of this process, or if they do, either do not acknowledge it or try to fight it off like just another inside fastball. They alter their training routines. Eat more chicken and fish, less red meat. They try to get “smarter” at their sport.

A great many of us, their fans, live in our own version of denial — even in this age of super-slow-motion replay and ever more granular statistical data. We want to think our favorite players have good years left, great accomplishments ahead of them, just as we would hope the same for ourselves. The writer Susan Jacoby, who happens to be a devoted baseball fan, is the author of “Never Say Die: The Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age.” “Fans don’t like to watch aging in these relatively young guys,” she told me. “It makes us uncomfortable. We think, If it happens to them, what the hell is going to happen to us?” Jacoby, a self-described insomniac who listens to sports-talk radio in the middle of the night, said she has been appalled at the “venom” she sometimes hears directed at Jeter. “It’s like they’re saying, ‘The hero is not performing.’ Well, he’s gotten older.”

Older, for ballplayers, begins much sooner than we think. “A lot of fans, if they really studied it, would be surprised at how early players really peak, especially hitters,” Jed Hoyer said when he spoke to me by phone from San Diego, where he is general manager of the Padres. Previously he was an executive with the Red Sox, one of the more data-driven franchises in baseball. “The years of 26 to 30 are usually the prime years,” Hoyer continued, “but you’ll see plenty of guys start to trend down, even if it’s subtle, before they’re 30.”

It is almost impossible to age gracefully as an everyday player. You can transition to a role player like Jason Giambi has done in Colorado, but Jeter is in a tough spot and Sokolove is dead-on in describing Jeter’s career as “charmed.” Yet Jeter’s relative good fortune has changed over the past year. Everything about him these days is touchy:

The prospect of this article did not sit well with the Yankees, or at least elements of its hierarchy. Jason Zillo, the team’s media director, would not grant me access to the Yankees’ clubhouse before games to do interviews. I have been a baseball beat writer, have written two baseball books and have routinely been granted clubhouse credentials for a quarter-century, as just about anyone connected to a reputable publication or broadcast outlet usually is. “We’re not interested in helping you, so why should I let you in?” Zillo said, before further explaining that he views his role as a “gatekeeper” against stories the Yankees would rather not see in print.

I was surprised that he would deny access to The New York Times Magazine. But if I learned anything over the course of working on this article, it is that aging is a sensitive issue. It happens to everyone, but that doesn’t mean we’re comfortable with it. Jeter has become a lightning rod on the topic. We see him getting old, but we’re supposed to pretend he is just in a prolonged slump. “The reason the response to athletes’ getting older is so powerful is that the decline occurs in public,” Susan Jacoby told me. “We don’t see it when a man has trouble with an erection for the first time. Or a mathematics professor forgets something. It’s not Alzheimer’s, but it’s age, and it’s difficult. But it’s private.”

This is a long story but well-worth reading. Fine job by Sokolove.

[Photo Credit: David Goldman/AP]

The Book of Dreams

By John Schulian

The stars were beginning to align for me even before I headed to Nashville in early 1974. The previous fall, I’d sold my first story to Sports Illustrated, and it ran a month after I scribbled my last notes at the Grand Ole Opry. The story was about a promoter in Baltimore who put on fights at Steelworkers Hall and ran a gym that was above a strip joint on the Block. I don’t think the guy could have existed anywhere else.  The smell of the sausages at Polock Johnny’s across the street drifted into the gym when the windows were open. You could feel the music downstairs coming through the floor. The promoter’s best fighter kept getting the clap from the dancers. And I thought I captured it all perfectly. A fat lot I knew.

I wasn’t given to asking other people their opinion of my work, but this time a voice in my head said I’d better stash my pride. If I screwed up the story, I might never get another shot at SI. So I took my deathless prose to an editor in the Evening Sun’s business department and asked him to read it. He wasn’t a close friend and his conversation usually had an edge to it, but I trusted him to be unsparing. And he was. When he walked up with his verdict, there was a wary little half-smile on his face. “If I was you,” he said, “I’d hit me with a sack of snot for what I’m going to say.” In short, the piece was good enough for the Evening Sun and most any other newspaper, but it wasn’t good enough for Sports Illustrated.

I spent the next couple of nights tearing it apart, reworking the structure and figuring out new transitions. I knew I had a winner as soon as I wrote my first sentence: “Baltimore is a gritty old strumpet of a city where unwritten sociological imperatives require a boxing arena to have Polish bakeries on one side, steel mills on another, and redneck bars all around.”

SI called the story “On the Block — Way of All Flesh,” and it wound up in the old “Best Sports Stories” anthology and put my name in bright lights. Tony Kornheiser told me years later that when he read the piece, he knew there was a new gun in town. He wanted to work at SI as badly as I did, and there were hundreds of other writers out there who had the same dream. SI was the holy grail.

Getting in “Best Sports Stories 1975” was the first time I felt like I’d really accomplished something professionally. I’d been fascinated with the anthology since I discovered it at Northwestern, mainly because it showcased the kind of writing I wanted to do. There were always big names like Red Smith and Jimmmy Cannon in the book, but the ones who captured my attention were writers from places other than New York who were doing great things: Myron Cope in Pittsburgh, Sandy Grady in Philadelphia, Wells Twombly in Houston and Detroit and San Francisco, even a young Philly basketball writer named Joe McGinniss, who went on to write “The Selling of the President” after he infiltrated Nixon’s 1972 campaign.

When the Evening Sun made me a one-man bureau in Harford County, I checked the public library there and found an even better collection of the “Best Sports Stories” anthologies than Northwestern’s. Every now and then, I’d slip down to the library and grab one. And I wasn’t just reading the stories. I was reading the bios of the authors who wrote them. I wanted to see where they came from and if the path I was on bore any resemblance to the one they had traveled. As soon as my story about the fight promoter ran in SI, I knew I was going to submit it to “Best Sports Stories.” I found out I’d made the book when a copy landed on the front porch of my $155-a-month furnished apartment. I was thrilled, naturally, but there was more to what I was feeling than that. I felt like I’d finally done something that would last longer than a day, something with permanence. Hell, my story was in a book.

It wasn’t that much longer before there was a year when “Best Sports Stories” didn’t come out. The editors had gotten old and one of them had died, and nobody had stepped forward to replace them. I wrote an essay for Inside Sports in which I said goodbye and, lo and behold, someone at the Sporting News read it and jumped in to bring the anthology back to life. It’s long gone now, of course, replaced by Glenn Stout’s more sophisticated and vastly superior “Best American Sports Writing” series, but I’m glad I got to do “Best Sports Stories” a good turn. I owed it.

Click here for the complete “From Ali to Xena” archives.

[Illustrations by David Noyes]

Last week, Tom Verducci profiled Derek Jeter in SI:

“In all my years playing with him,” says Paul O’Neill, Jeter’s teammate from 1995 through 2001, “I don’t think I ever heard him have one technical discussion about the mechanics of hitting. He keeps it simple. He just plays. It’s like he’s still playing high school baseball.”

…”I worked on staying inside the ball in the minor leagues and pretty much every offseason in Tampa with [coach] Gary Denbo,” Jeter says. “But he didn’t teach it to me. That’s just how it was: Keep my hands inside the ball. It’s still the same thing. A lot of people stay inside the ball, but I don’t know about to that extreme.”

Jeter’s hands-in approach relies on making contact with the ball so late—farther in its flight path—that he can hit even inside pitches to the opposite field with authority. Entering this season, on pitches he hit to rightfield, Jeter had a .479 average and a .718 slugging percentage.

“All these years he’s stayed true to what he does best,” O’Neill says. “He had a year or two where he started to gain some strength and turned on some balls, but for the most part he is an example of taking something you do that is good and making it great. In a time when there was pressure in baseball to hit more home runs, he never caved in to that.”

It’s a defensive-looking swing. Jeter hasn’t changed his approach all these years and shortly after he returns from the disabled list he’ll reach 3,000 hits. We’ll be there cheering him on.

[Photo Credit: Sports Illustrated]

Living and Dying in ¾ Time

By John Schulian

Call me self-deluded, but my shortcomings as a writer didn’t stop me from campaigning to become the Evening Sun’s city columnist, the Breslin of Baltimore, if you will. The strategy I concocted was simple: in addition to writing the best feature stories I could, I would write about rock and roll. There were always great acts coming through town or playing in D.C. or out at Meriwether Post Pavilion in Columbia, the planned city. But the Evening Sun acted as if rock and roll didn’t exist, even with Rolling Stone getting bigger and bigger in the cultural zeitgeist. So I asked the city editor if I could write about a Grateful Dead concert, and he said sure, why not. And then I wrote about Alice Cooper, who borrowed my pen and used it to stir his drink. I wrote about Muddy Waters, too, even though he was too drunk to talk before his show and I spent most of my time hanging out with his piano player, Pinetop Perkins, who was a hell of a nice guy.

Anyway, one thing led to another, and before I knew it I had a once-a-week pop music column. I spent a lot of weeknights and weekends going to shows and interviewing musicians in hotels and motels and bars. I still had to take my regular turn on re-write and do my features and anything else that came my way, but it was all worth it. The music was great even if Sly Stone never showed up and Al Green’s girl friend looked like she wanted to dump hot grits in my lap. I wrote about great, great talents like Bruce Springsteen (just before he hit it big), Bonnie Raitt, Stevie Wonder, Emmylou Harris, Sonny Stitt, Steve Goodman, Ernest Tubb, Bo Diddley, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and Arthur (Big Boy) Crudup, the bluesman who wrote “That’s All Right, Mama,” which became one of Elvis Presley’s early hits. I wrote about Kinky Friedman, too. Twice, in fact, because he was so funny, Groucho Marx in a cowboy hat. He played the old Cellar Door in Georgetown and dedicated a song to my future ex-wife. Thank you for being an American, Kinky.

Wonder of wonders, when I said I’d like to go to Nashville to write a week’s worth of stories about country music, the Evening Sun sent me. Yeah, that’s right, the paper that threw nickels around like manhole covers. Nobody ever told me why and I never asked. I just went. And I had the absolute best experience of the nearly 16 years I spent in newspapers.

In a week of reporting, I played pinballs with Waylon Jennings, whose greasy mixture of country and rock stirred my soul; had an audience with Dolly Parton-–a genius songwriter, in case you didn’t know-–and she was as smart as she was funny and self-effacing; sat with Chet Atkins, the king of Nashville in those days, while he puffed on a cigar in his darkened office and mused about the shadow that Hank Williams still cast over the country music business 20 years after his death at the ripe old age of 29; had a beer and a bowl of chili at Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, where all the great songwriters–Willie Nelson, Roger Miller, Kris Kristofferson–had taken refuge when they hit town; spent an afternoon with Tom T. Hall, a wonderful songwriter, while he laid down a demo of a song called “You Love Everybody But You”; and got on stage at the Grand Ole Opry when its home was still the Ryman Auditorium and it was strictly a radio show.

For the sake of perspective, I wanted to do a piece on Nashville as a whole–its aristocracy was locked in a culture war with the folks on Music Row–so a friend from the Army told me to call a guy he served with in Vietnam. A reporter from the Nashville Tennessean named Al Gore. He picked me up at my hotel and drove me all over town, giving me the rundown on its politics, social structure, race relations, and everything else I wanted to know about. Gore couldn’t have been smarter or more accommodating or nicer. Years later, when I saw his presidential campaign, he seemed like a completely different person, and not one I’d want to show me around Nashville. More like one whose brain waves had been intercepted by Martians.

And then there was Paul Hemphill, who was as open as Gore became sealed off. Along with Johnny Cash’s “Live at Folsom Prison,” which I listened to almost every day that I was in the Army, Hemphill’s book “The Nashville Sound” opened my mind to country music. There’s certainly never been a better piece of work on the subject. I’d read Hemphill in Life and Sport, and one of the guys at the Evening Sun had worked with him at an Atlanta paper and carried his favorite Hemphill column in his walle. He said Hemphill was good people, so I got his home address and wrote him about the trip I planned to take to Nashville. He wrote back right away with the names of people I should look up. From that moment forward, we were friends until he died last year. Mostly we stayed in touch by phone and letters and, later, e-mail. I was stunned by how candid he was about his life, especially his drinking and his frustrations as a writer, but that was Hemp, honest in the way every truth-seeker should be.

We only met once, in ’97 or ’98, when I was in Atlanta working on a story for Sports Illustrated. He took me to a bar called Manuel’s, which was a favorite haunt for politicians, cops, and newspaper reporters He loved the place-–he’d written about it a lot-–and you could tell the people there loved him. He was one of the great writers of his generation and one of those true Southern liberals who overcome the ignorance and bigotry they’re born into. I wish more people knew about him, just like I wish I’d been able to make more trips to Manuel’s with him.

Click here for the complete “From Ali to Xena” archives.

The Cardboard God of Hellfire, our man Josh Wilker, has a new book out. I recently had a chance to ask him a few questions about it.

Dig:

Bronx Banter: How did this project come about?

Josh Wilker: I guess the series editor, Sean Howe, is a fan of my blog. He contacted me to see if I had any interest in working on something for the series. I wrote him back an email listing several of my favorite movies, including “The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training.” Sean liked the idea of me writing about Breaking Training rather than any others on the list, and I was into it, too. (I also would have gotten excited about writing about “Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia,” but it’s probably better for my mental health that I focused for a long while on Tanner and Kelly and Ogilvie rather than Warren Oates and a severed head.)

BB: How long is the book–it’s really a long essay, right?

JW: Yeah, it’s not that long, maybe a little over a hundred pages. I just checked the Word doc I sent the editor—it’s about 30,000. It’s got chapters though, which is kind of book-like. I think the idea was for the books in the series to be similar to those in the 33 1/3 books on albums.

BB: I love that this is a pocket paperback. When I got it the first thing I did was see if it fit in my back pocket. There is something so comforting about that.

JW: Right, all books should be that way. Nothing better than heading out the door and not having to carry anything and still have something to read on the train.

BB: What was the first baseball movie you saw as a kid?

JW: “Breaking Training” was probably the first. I’d read a lot of baseball books by the time I saw that movie, but I don’t think I saw any other movies. I guess the first time I saw any sort of fictional baseball on the screen was when Bugs Bunny took on the Balboniesque sluggers on the Gashouse Gorillas.

BB: Why did you chose it over the original “Bad News Bears”?

JW: Probably because I suck. There are lots of other reasons, too, among them that the second movie had a much stronger personal connection to me, and felt more like my own flawed little love rather than a generally acknowledged classic, and also that the second movie seemed to me to have much more potential as a jumping off point to talk about a lot of facets of American culture that fascinate and/or nauseate me, such as the central American myth of the road narrative, the changing ways in which children are raised in America, the malignancy of sequels, the “man alone” myth, etc. But above all that, if I’m being truthful, I don’t see myself as worthy of tackling something canonical. I’m too flawed to be some learned authority shedding light on “Citizen Kane” or “The Godfather.” I relate to the lesser sequel, even love it, and wanted to sing its praises. Maybe it’s kind of a Charlie Brown Christmas tree kind of thing.

BB: When did you see the original?

JW: Unlike my first viewing of “The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training,” which I remember vividly, I don’t remember when or where I saw “The Bad News Bears.” In line with a life that has often felt like an aftermath, like I arrive everywhere just after the things that mattered occurred, I saw the sequel first, and it was years before I saw the original. I probably saw it in my twenties, during which I spent a lot of time catching up on all the classic movies from the 1970s. If I were a couple years older, I probably would have seen it in the theater when it came out, and I’d surely have a different relationship to the two films.

BB: What did you think of “The Bad News Bears” when you finally saw it?

JW: It’s a fantastic movie, one of the last great films of the gritty late 1960s to mid-1970s golden age. I don’t recall my first time watching it, as I’ve said, but I’ve watched it many times since then—as with Breaking Training, I own the DVD. Matthau is of course brilliant, and I also like the occasional long reaction shots some of the Bears get to have, those long wordless shots that you don’t see anymore in movies (and which were gone even by the time of the sequel two years later). Jimmy Feldman gets one of these, as does Rudi Stein, in both cases showing a heart-wrenching human kid reaction to Buttermaker getting caught up in a win at all costs mentality. Both of these characters are marginal, so the fact that they each get to have one of these moments lends a sense to the movie that everyone is worth something.

BB: Where did you see “Breaking Training?”

JW: I saw it at the Playhouse Theater in Randolph, Vermont. In piecing together my personal experience of the summer of 1977, I came to the conclusion that my brother and I would have seen the movie during our yearly two-week summer visit to see our dad in Manhattan, but we lost a couple of movie-going days due to the blackout. It was god to see it back home, because I saw it in a theater packed with all the kids I played little league with, which could not have been a more receptive audience. It’s the most alive, enthusiastic movie audience I’ve ever been a part of.

(more…)

HE’S BRESLIN AND YOU’RE NOT

By John Schulian

The Evening Sun didn’t have the biggest staff in the world, so a lot of us had to do double duty. For me, that frequently meant coming in at 6 or 7 in the morning to work re-write for the first edition before they turned me loose on the world. It was great experience because when I was under the gun, I had to force myself to write fast. You know, a news story 700 to 1,000 words long in 20 minutes or less, and you had to get the facts right from the reporters in the field who were calling them in.

Just as often, I’d be the one out on the street, hoping I’d be able to get back to the office in time to write the story myself. I’d get a call from an assistant city editor at 4:30 in the morning to get over to a rowhouse fire in West Baltimore that killed a couple of kids, and by the time I got there, I could hear their mother or grandmother screaming “My babies, my babies!” from two blocks away. Or it would be a shantytown fire in a speck on the map called Principio Furnace, with more dead babies. Or a bunch of volunteer firemen who drowned while trying to rescue somebody in a hellacious rainstorm. Or maybe just two motorcycle gangs that shot each other to pieces.

The story that still haunts me was about a town out in Western Maryland called Friendsville.  Population 600 and six of its boys had been killed in Vietnam. I went out there to talk to the families of the first five casualties and wait for the body of the sixth to come home. I got a number for what I guess is best described as Friendsville’s general store, talked with the woman who ran it, and she wound up saying she’d have everybody ready to talk to me. And she did. If you want an example of small-town trust and graciousness, there it was. But the story was still a painful one to report because I knew I was opening old wounds for everybody I interviewed. The people I remember best were a couple my parents’ age, which is to say well into their 60s. They lived in a stone house on a dirt road outside town, just the two of them and the photos of the boy they’d lost in the war, their only child. All I could think of was how I could have been that dead boy instead, and my parents the ones stumbling around under the weight of their loss. Somehow I made it through the interview without crying, but as soon as I got in my car, I bawled like a baby-–for them, for my folks and me, for all the dead soldiers in that godforsaken war.

I wish I could tell you I turned Friendsville into a great story, but I didn’t. I didn’t have the chops yet. I wrote it in, I think, 1971, and I was still trying on styles for size, still pretending I was somebody different every time I sat down at the typewriter. When David Israel and Mike Lupica burst onto the scene a few years later, I was struck by how fully-formed they were as writers, and they were kids. To read them was to think they never suffered from self-doubt or indecision. Tony Kornheiser was that way, too, an absolute joy to read seemingly from Day One. I had days when I was good, I suppose, but mostly I was a work in progress.

Throughout my time at the Evening Sun, Jimmy Breslin was my greatest influence, just as he had been since the day before I went in the Army. I’d ordered his classic collection “The World of Jimmy Breslin” as soon as I’d returned from grad school, but it didn’t show up until 36 hours before I became Uncle Sam’s property. I sat down and read the book from cover to cover, swept away by Breslin’s great characters–Marvin the Torch, Fat Thomas, Sam Silverware–and touched in a deeper, more profound way by his column about the man who dug JFK’s grave. When I put the book down, I told myself that if I lived through whatever the Army had in store for me, I wanted to come home and write just the way Breslin did. And I tried mightily when I worked in Baltimore. Of course I wasn’t the only young buck who worshipped Breslin. You could see his influence on hot young newspaper writers everywhere, whether they were on the city desk or in sports:  Lupica in New York, Israel in Washington, Bob Greene in Chicago. And the hell of it was, they were all better at imitating Breslin than I was.

Click here for the complete “From Ali to Xena” archives.

Jack Mann appreciation continues with three pieces by his colleagues. Please enjoy these memories of Mann from John Schulian, Tom Callahan and Dave McKenna.

Unvarnished Mann

By John Schulian

In the world according to Jack Mann, if a ballplayer dragged his private parts over the post-game spread while reaching for the mustard, a sports writer damn well better file it away for future use. Maybe he wouldn’t be able to re-create the scene for a family newspaper, but he could certainly offer some well-crafted hints. In fact Jack insisted on it when he was a visionary sports editor at Newsday because he would have done no less were he writing the story himself. He was, after all, a slave to the truth no matter how discomfiting.

Not everybody appreciated it. To this day, there are those who recoil at the sound of his name before recovering to rail profanely about his parentage, fondness for the grape, and well-worn mean streak. Jack was, in his time, the most complicated and divisive figure in sportswriting this side of Mark Kram and Dick Young. You either loved him or hated him, and if you loved him, there were still going to be times when you wondered why the hell he did some of the things he did.

Of course the legend occasionally got in the way of the facts. Jack may have thrown a tray of type out a window at the Washington Daily News, for instance, or it may have been his boss, Dave Burgin, who did the honors. God knows they were both capable of it in the days when they were making the sports section in that abysmal tabloid the liveliest reading in town. Or maybe the incident never happened at all.

What I can guarantee did happen was Jack’s constant and very public humiliation of Shirley Povich, the icon who anchored the Washington Post’s sports page for 70 years. Shirley was every bit as gracious and gentlemanly as Red Smith, and a fine writer, too, but by the early 1970s, his reportorial legs were gone and his column showed it. He covered more and more games by watching them on TV. Even the Redskins, who become more important than the White House during the NFL season, couldn’t get him off his couch. Jack smelled blood and went for the kill, parodying Shirley’s style (“The way it came across on Channel 9”) and sneeringly referring to the Post by its advertising slogan (“Over at ‘Quoted, Honored and Consulted’”).

It was not for nothing then that the Post never hired Jack full-time after the Daily News and his subsequent employer, the Washington Star, went belly up. To tell the truth, I was surprised he got so much as a freelance assignment at the Post, but when Casey Stengel died, there was that byline – Jack Mann – on the front of the next day’s sports page. I doubt the old Professor got a better sendoff. And there would be more pieces by Jack, not a lot of them but enough to keep his name alive. I still wonder how hard George Solomon, who was then settling into his job as the Post’s sports editor, had to fight for Jack. But they had worked together at the Daily News, and George understood just how good Jack was.

To read his prose was to get a sense of the man at the typewriter. It was blunt, no-nonsense, and it could, on certain occasions, feel like a punch in the mouth. And yet, while lyricism wasn’t his game, he wove enough literary allusions into his work to let readers in on the fact that he knew Hester Prynne wasn’t a baseball Annie from Boston.

(more…)

The Evening Sun Also Rises

By John Schulian

I’m always surprised and more than a little disappointed in myself when I tote up how many people helped me along the way and how easily I’ve forgotten some of them. The one I’m thinking of at the moment is Bill Tanton, who opened the door for me at the Baltimore Evening Sun. He was the sports editor there when I was using Army time to write letters in my campaign for a job at every paper that caught my fancy–the L.A. Times because of Jim Murray, the pre-Murdoch New York Post because of Larry Merchant and Vic Ziegel, the Washington Daily News because of Jack Mann. Tanton’s response was like most of the others in that he said he didn’t have any openings, but he didn’t let it go at that. He passed my letter and clips on to the Evening Sun’s city editor because he thought I had the makings of a good feature writer. It turned out that Tanton recruited a lot of the first-rate talent that passed through the paper –Tom Callahan, Mike Janofsky, Phil Hersh, Dan Shaugnessy–but I wouldn’t realize I was part of the parade until after I had rejoined the civilian world in August 1970 and chosen between job offers at the Evening Sun and the Miami Herald, which, by the way, didn’t want me as a sports writer, either.

Unfailingly, every editor I met yearned to save me from life in what serious newspaper people considered the toy department. It was, I suppose, the curse of being a relatively bright young man. They talked about transforming me into a cityside reporter who might one day cover the state house or the White House or even become a foreign correspondent. I could tell I was going to have to get to sports by my own devices. The important thing at the time, however, was to work, to get some experience, and to develop as a writer. I’m sure I could have done that in Miami — working there certainly hasn’t hurt Carl Hiassen. But what I remember best about my visit was sitting in an editor’s office and looking out at Biscayne Bay sparkling in the sunshine. I worried that if I said yes to the Herald I’d always feel like I was on vacation.

I didn’t have that problem when I visited Baltimore. The city looked the way I imagine Dresden must have after World War II-–burned-out, desiccated, hopeless. On the ride in from the airport, I saw a sign for Shilinksi’s Lithuanian sausage and, a short distance away, the landmark Bromo-Seltzer Tower. For me, a great first impression. The clincher, though was my interview with the city editor, a live wire named Ernie Imhoff who called everybody “babe.” We had a cup of coffee in the Sunpapers’ cafeteria, a setting about as joyless as Death Row, and then we went back upstairs to the city room, where I was treated to a view of the city jail. All this and the Evening Sun had to play second fiddle to the Morning Sun, which had overseas bureaus and a Washington bureau and, obviously, a far bigger budget than the A.S. Abell Company’s p.m. stepchild. Hell, the Evening Sun had yet to assign a single reporter to cover Washington, which was all of 30 minutes away by car. And it didn’t have enough money to send reporters around the block, much less around the globe. But it had been H.L. Mencken’s paper, and it put a premium on tough reporting and lively writing. Add all that to the view of the city jail and there was no way I could say no to Baltimore.

I knew I’d made the right choice when my first assignment was to go to what is called the Block to find out what the strippers and lowlifes there were doing to get ready for the World Series between the Orioles and the Cincinnati Reds. The Block was a stretch of East Baltimore Street downtown devoted to strip joints, dirty-book stores, the city’s only tattoo parlor, and Polock Johnny’s Polish sausage emporium, all in the shadow of police headquarters. The strippers, especially one who called herself Fanta Blu, turned out to be raunchy and wonderful, particularly when talking about big-name baseball and football players who occasionally stopped by. I could only quote them up to a point–the Evening Sun was a family newspaper, after all-–but the story I wrote still got me the right kind of attention.

Just the same, I spent my first year in Baltimore covering suburban Harford County. I shared an office with the Morning Sun’s reporter, Edna Goldberg, a middle-aged dynamo who doted on her two sons, had a husband named Sol, invited me to dinner with her family, taught me Yiddish curse words, and was as competitive as anybody I ever bumped heads with in the newspaper business. My salvation was that she loved doing stories about budgets and zoning, subjects I would write about only under threat of death. Mostly I wrote features and slipped back into the city to see if there was something there I might do. The one good political story I wrote was about Joseph Tydings, a liberal Democrat from Harford County who was driven out of the U.S. Senate by the pro-gun crowd. Years later, in Hollywood, when I was the head writer on “Hercules,” we hired Tydings’ daughter Alexandra as a guest star. She played Aphrodite as if the goddess of love were a surfer girl, and she was dynamite. Small world.

Once I moved onto the city desk full-time, I was in high clover. Baltimore embraced weirdness and lionized eccentrics, and the Evening Sun basically let me run amok. I wrote features about pool hustlers and singing newsboys; vice cops on the Block and a saloonkeeper who put up a billboard supporting Nixon and Agnew; Edith Massey (the egg lady from “Pink Flamingoes”) and a vastly overweight Depression-era bicycle racer who watched me make the most of his neighborhood bar’s 10-cent beers and get hammered on the job for the first and only time in my career. One day I waltzed off to write about the Block’s last surviving tattoo artist and came back with a story about a hooker named Rosie who was just out of jail and wanted a rose tattoo. Our education reporter, a sweet little lady named Sue Miller, accused me of making the whole thing up. But the beauty of Baltimore was that you didn’t need to write fiction. The truth had it beat every which way.

And yet no matter how woolly the people I wrote about were, I was still who I was, and there was no getting away from it. I remember one of the pool hustlers I was always pestering for stories looking at me one day and saying, “John, you’re the straightest guy we ever met.”

Click here for the complete “From Ali to Xena” archives.

I don’t know from hockey but I thoroughly enjoyed this recent bonus piece by Leigh Montville on the Boston Bruins:

The standing ovation was a return to the past. No, not the standing ovation at TD Garden last Friday night, the 10-minute communal fret-celebration at the end of that 1–0, stomach-churning win over the Lightning in the seventh game of the Eastern Conference finals that sent the Bruins into their best-of-seven transcontinental arm wrestle with the Canucks for the Stanley Cup. No, that was frenzied normality, a universal sports staple, excited people in an exciting moment.

The standing ovation the next afternoon at Pizzeria Regina in the North End was different. That was the way life once was in Boston hockey.

“Milan Lucic came in….” Richie Zapata, manager of the restaurant, reported.

Yes, Milan Lucic. Bruins winger. Still only 22 years old. Fourth year with the team. Six-feet-three, 228 pounds. A fan favorite since he arrived as a 19-year-old, straight from the Vancouver Giants, his junior team. Banger, scrapper, thumper. Yes.

“Johnny Boychuk was with him….”

Yes. Johnny Boychuk. Defenseman. Twenty-seven. Six-feet-two, 225 pounds. Third year with the Bruins. Big-time slap shot from the point. Cannon.

“They were with their girlfriends…. ”

Yes.

“I gave them a booth in the back. They ordered a large pepperoni with peppers and mushrooms. I gave them some extra slices. Took care of it. They were nice. Signed some metal pizza plates for the waitresses. Just nice. Nobody bothered them.”

So when the two Bruins and their girlfriends finished their meal at the original Pizzeria Regina—not one of the other Pizzeria Regina locations around the area, the original, with the familiar red-and-white-checked tablecloths, with the smart-mouth waitresses, with the waiting line that goes out the door most of the time and down the stairs straight onto Thacher Street, when they stood up, well, everyone else in the restaurant also stood up. And started clapping. Just like that.

Game Six of the Stanley Cup Finals are tonight in Boston, with the Bruins trailing 3-2.

Over at Grantland, there is a long, entertaining oral history piece compiled by Alex French and Howie Kahn on “The National,” Frank Deford’s influential, short-lived sports newspaper:

Peter Richmond (Main Event Writer): I had a Nieman fellowship at Harvard when I heard about The National. You’re obliged, if you get a Nieman, to go back to the newspaper you were working at. I worked at the Miami Herald as the national sports correspondent. I’d go to the Super Bowl, the World Series, the NBA Finals. I’d go to prize fights. I had a column. Then I got a free ride at Harvard for a year. In the middle of it, I had heard in the New York Daily News that Frank Deford was rounding up this all-star team for The National. I thought, “Oh my god. I’ve got to get there.”

Charles P. Pierce (Main Event Writer): As soon as I heard about it, I basically hurled myself out a window.

Frank Deford: What was my sales pitch like? It wasn’t a reach, and I wasn’t blowing smoke. I’d say, “This paper is going to be the first of its kind. We’ve got this extraordinary staff and we’ve got a lot of money behind it. Go look up anything you want about Emilio Azcárraga. He’s into this, and these sorts of things have worked all over the world, so why can’t they work in the United States? Then I’d pause and say, “I understand it’s risky. We all know this is new territory. But you’re a sports guy. Don’t you want to be part of this?”

Rob Fleder (Main Event Editor): Here was this great adventure and chance to invent something new. It was clear even before it started, and certainly long before it failed, that you were going to get one chance to try this in your life. This was as close to a frontier as we had.

Pierce: Rob Fleder, who was one of the original founding members of Rotisserie baseball, literally in the Rotisserie restaurant, had seen some of my stuff in New England Monthly. He called and said, “Would you like to come down and talk about this thing we have?” So I went down to New York. They didn’t even have real offices yet. They were in some space with pieces of paper hanging on the door.

For all their fine work, somebody at Grantland should have known how to spell Glenn Stout’s name. Otherwise, this is a terrific read.

And while you are at it, dig Charles Pierce’s memories of “The National”:

Oh, money. Yeah, wait. I should tell this story about money, first. In the spring of 1991, the last spring of our newspaper’s life, I got a call from New York. Mike Lupica was leaving the paper to return to the New York Daily News, a development that surprised approximately nobody. He was taking with him his “Shooting From The Lip” column, the three-dot bullet template invented by the great Jimmy Cannon and subsequently appropriated by almost everyone else in the history of newspapers, including, most notably, in USA Today by Larry — “If it’s Wheatena, I’m all in!” — King. The column had been running in The National every Friday, and it had developed an audience. They wanted to keep the idea under a different name, and someone had mentioned that I’d done a similar kind of thing when I was writing a column at the Boston Herald. So they asked me if I’d do it.

Of course, I told them, but I’d need more money to do it.

How much, they asked.

I had no idea, so I quoted them a figure that I thought probably indicated I was on mushrooms at the time.

They didn’t even blink.

You start this week, they said.

Fun stuff.

Over at ESPN, Howard Bryant has a strong piece on Dirk Nowitzki and being a star player in the age of social media:

The truth, given time to breathe and be analyzed, is this: Nowitzki will go down as one of the greatest players in the history of the game, the greatest player of his franchise, the best (NBA) player Germany has ever produced. He has proved it this year — especially during these playoffs, when the Mavericks have transformed themselves from a team not tough enough to win into a formidable out — and in previous years that he can carry a team early or late. The outcome of the 2011 NBA Finals will do nothing to change that.

The concept of the “instant legacy” has permeated sport and lowered the level of intelligent discussion regarding how the game is played and the players who play it. TV commentators assess a player’s entire career based on two minutes at the end of each game. Meanwhile, the second-by-second instant analysis on social media doesn’t stop when the buzzer sounds. James has been in the playoffs for seven years, carrying a nondescript Cleveland team that without him is once again invisible after six straight postseasons — and his critics are legion. Peyton Manning was once a weak playoff performer, but that changed when he won the Super Bowl against Chicago. Then he lost to the Saints and was somehow relegated back to being subpar in the clutch. Before last year’s seventh and deciding game between the Lakers and Celtics, the ESPN pregame roundtable asked aloud if Kobe Bryant — already the greatest player of his generation — needed to win that night to “cement his legacy.”

Newspapers and magazines have always engaged in the same type of hero construction and deconstruction. The difference now is the speed of the technology and its volume.

I still think Miami will win the series, and I assume that LeBron James will have a great game tonight but man, I’d like to see Dirk match him and have Dallas win their final home game of the season.

[Photographs by Scott Mlyn]

Copyright @ 2011 Scott Mlyn All Rights Reserved.

. . . But You Can’t Hide

By John Schulian

I worked as a copy editor at the Salt Lake Tribune while I waited for Uncle Sam to come calling. I think I was the only guy on the desk who wasn’t in AA. That was a great crew. Lots of laughs even if one of them kept trying to talk me into joining the Marines. (Like hell. I’d seen “The Sand of Iwo Jima.” Even John Wayne couldn’t survive in the Marines.) My last night at the paper, these old drunks took me out for a farewell toot-–steak and lobster and booze at one of Salt Lake’s bottle clubs where we found ourselves with a lovely red-haired waitress we promptly named Peaches. Ah, yes, Peaches.

I went into the Army in August 1968, with a master’s degree in journalism in hand and the news of the Tet Offensive echoing in my ears. My dad dropped me off at the Salt Lake induction center on his way to work. I don’t recall what we said to each other-–it certainly wasn’t much-–but he told me years later it was the worst day of his life. I thought about him and my mother a lot in my first days in the Army, and how if I got killed in what I was now certain was an utterly useless war, it might kill them, too.

The funny thing is, I never thought about running to Canada or hunting up a doctor who could concoct an excuse that would keep me out of the Army’s clutches. Hell, I have one friend who told me he got out of the draft when a doctor wrote that my friend’s mother would have a nervous breakdown if anything happened to him. That still bothers me. What made him and his mother so special? My mother would have had a nervous breakdown too. A lot of other mothers did have nervous breakdowns because their sons came home in a box. My two years in the Army were a waste of my time and the taxpayers’ money, but at least I didn’t hide behind mommy to avoid them. I just took my chances and lived to tell the story.

Basic training was at Ford Ord, California, up by Carmel and Monterrey, beautiful country. My company was a curious mixture of returned Mormon missionaries from Utah and surfers and street kids from L.A. Our senior drill instructor had one basic message: “You’re all going to Vietnam and you’re all going to die–unless you listen up!” In the middle of the night, he’d come back to the barracks drunk and wake us up to tell us about his two tours as a door gunner in Vietnam. That was creepy enough by itself. But other nights I could hear advanced infantry training units coming back from maneuvers. These were the guys whose next stop really was Vietnam. They’d be marching through the fog, singing “Wide river, river of Saigon” or–to the tune of the Coasters’ “Charlie Brown”–“In the night time when you’re sleeping, Charlie Cong comes a-creeping, all around-round-round-round.”

Lots of nutty things happened in basic: Guys at the beachfront rifle range deciding they’d rather shoot at luxury boats than Army-approved targets. A drill instructor listening to a drooling loony from airborne and then telling us, “Boys, there’s only two things that come out of the sky and that’s bird shit and fools.” The guy I was supposed to partner with on bivouac trying to kill himself when he learned that his next stop was advanced infantry training, which was likely his ticket to Vietnam. The long faces when we figured out that of our 165 men, 105 received orders that involved what was called “combat arms.” They knew where they were going.

The nuttiest thing of all, though, was that the Army, in its infinite wisdom, decided that I should be a computer programmer. “Get the fuck out of my sight,” my senior DI said when he handed me my orders. He only wanted men who were going to kill Commies for Christ.

My next stop was also my last stop: Fort Sheridan, Illinois. It was Fifth Army headquarters and had a huge data processing center, hence the need for computer programmers. It was also, as fate would have it, on the North Shore of Chicago, between Highland Park and Lake Forest, two very pricey suburbs, not far from Northwestern and, better yet, Wrigley Field. The guys I ran into at Fort Sheridan were mostly smart and funny and a hell of a lot better company than anybody I’d met in grad school. They’d been plucked from jobs at places like IBM, Texas Instruments and NASA, and they really knew what they were doing when it came to computers. I, on the other hand, had never even seen a computer.

Amazingly, nobody made a big deal over it. I ran errands for my civilian boss, an older guy named John Munn–everyone who worked for him was called a Munnster-–and I tried to read every book I hadn’t been able to in college. Six months later, just as I was about to lose my mind, I learned that the post newspaper was looking for an enlisted man to help its civilian editor run it. The editor was Joe Neptune. I’m telling you, that fort was loaded with great names. Joe Neptune, AKA the King of the Sea, signed me up immediately. A couple of other really talented enlisted men showed up not long afterward, and just like that, I was home free. The toughest thing I had to do for the rest of my tour of duty was put the paper to bed by 11 a.m. Thursday so I could jump on a commuter train and then the L and make it to Wrigley Field’s bleachers by the bottom of the first inning. War is hell.

It’s easy to joke about it now, but there was no joking when you saw the guys coming back from the ’Nam. I remember senior NCOs screwing over a black guy with a purple heart and a bad limp. It wasn’t enough that they’d gotten their pound of flesh from the poor bastard; they had to bust him back to private, too. I played basketball with a returnee who won a Silver Star in Vietnam–he’d crawled out in the middle of a firefight to rescue a couple wounded buddies. The one I remember best, though, was a solider who had been badly wounded in combat and whose hair was completely gray at the age of 22. When we were on KP, he fell asleep between breakfast and lunch and a cook tried to be funny by dropping a stack of trays on the table where he had laid his head. It must have taken us 10 minutes to pry his hands off the cook’s throat. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised by the violence. The potential for it was always there. I knew that for a fact when there was a shakedown inspection in the barracks next to mine and they found .45 automatics and machetes right next to the drugs and hypodermic needles.

I still thank God I never saw combat. Who knows if I would have lived, or if I had, what kind of a mess I would have come back as. On one of my last days in the Army, I was having an obligatory out-processing chat with my company commander, who was looking at my background for the first time. “Why, you have a master’s degree,” he said. “You could have been an officer.”  I didn’t bother telling him what the life expectancy of a second lieutenant was in combat. I just said I’d rather be a civilian. Free at last, free at last, great God almighty, I was free at last.

I left the Army as quietly as I had gone into it. I didn’t get drunk or get laid. I’m not sure anybody even shook my hand. I just caught a plane to Salt Lake for a brief visit before I started a job as a reporter at the Baltimore Evening Sun. In my bedroom, among the letters I’d written home, I found an obituary that my mother had clipped from the Tribune. It was of a guy I’d been in basic training with, a returned Mormon missionary who’d been killed in combat in Vietnam. He was a year younger than me, but we had the same birthday: January 31.

Click here for the full “From Ali to Xena” archives.

Grantland, Bill Simmons’ on-line magazine, is open for business today.

Our pal Chris Jones has a piece on the Blue Jays and the Red Sox in the American League Beast:

Without ithout looking it up, I can tell you the night the Toronto Blue Jays won their first World Series — October 27, 1992 — because that was also the night I lost my virginity. I’m not nearly so sure of the night they won their second World Series. I was in college, watching the game in my dorm’s common room, on a TV that was suspended from the ceiling. When Joe Carter hit that home run off Mitch Williams to beat the Philadelphia Phillies, I jumped up and cracked my head on the TV, opening a dime-size hole in my scalp. It turns out that holes in your head bleed a lot. Somewhere, there is a picture of me still celebrating, late that night, drunk, mostly naked, and covered in dried blood. I’ll be forever glad that we did not yet live in the digital age.

That’s how important baseball was to me back then. I still have the Ken Burns Baseball catalogue on VHS; I once spent an entire summer making a paper model of Fenway Park, complete with a ball-marked Pesky’s Pole. But then a couple of fate-changing events took place. First, there was that whole no-longer-a-virgin thing. Before sex, something like Dave Stieb’s wobbly retirement — ignoring his brief resurrection six years later — would have qualified as a significant life event of my own. Now, it barely registered as a brief. And then baseball went on strike. I was sitting on a couch in a Mexican hotel room when everything stopped — those 14 words are how all stories of loss should begin — and I took it very much to heart. The girl who claimed my virginity later cheated on me, and baseball’s cold shoulder gave me the same feeling: I should have left you before you left me.

Last month, Jones wrote a blog post that relates to this piece. It is worth checking out.