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.”

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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.

. . . 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.

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You Can Run…

By John Schulian

I went to graduate school in journalism at Northwestern, and the best thing about it was that it kept me out of the Army’s clutches for one more year. Other than that, I didn’t care much for the experience. I’d spent the summer before I went there playing ball and blacktopping roads, so I had a pretty good tan. No sooner had I started hunting for an apartment than some guy asked where I’d “summered.” “On the end of an idiot stick,” I told him. When the guy didn’t realize I was talking about a shovel, I knew I was in the wrong place. Nothing against Northwestern–it’s a great school and having a master’s from there definitely helped me get a job in Baltimore when I finished my two-year hitch in the Army. But Northwestern is also a haven for children of privilege, and I’m allergic to them. Always have been, always will be.

It was like I was watching a movie as one big car after another delivered a succession of beautiful coeds to campus, mothers and fathers bidding adieu to their little darlings. It didn’t take me long to realize that I had nothing in common with about 90 percent of my fellow grad students. Some were horse’s asses like a guy from Brown who wore a suit but no socks with his penny loafers. Some were budding drones who knew lots about government but couldn’t write a letter home. Some were lost causes like the guy who decided he’d rather join the Air Force. And then there was the professor who yelled at me for showing up early for a meeting. He was the biggest horse’s ass of all. But if he or anyone else on the faculty had taught anything I was interested in, I would have made myself pay attention. Unfortunately, the faculty in 1967-68 was fixated on covering courts and government and water and sewers, and I wanted to write about flesh-and-blood people, the more colorful the better. I got my best lesson in that when Jimmy Breslin blew into town to cover a Mafia trial for the Sun-Times. He wrote a piece about getting a tip on a racehorse from one of the defendants, Paul (The Waiter) Ricca, and the judge declared a mistrial. Now that was what I had in mind when I went to Northwestern.

Ultimately, I wound up spending almost all of spring quarter in the bleachers at Wrigley Field. I think it’s safe to say I had the best tan in grad school. I got my master’s, too. And 30 days after I returned home, the draft board reclassified me 1A. And 30 days after that, I reported to the Army induction center. My heart may have been God’s, but for the next two years, my ass belonged to Uncle Sam.

Hell, yes, I was afraid of going overseas, because overseas in those days usually meant Vietnam, and even though the women and the country were beautiful, it was no vacation for American troops. Most of them were REMFs (Rear Echelon Motherfuckers), but there were enough bombs going off in Saigon to kill you just as dead as you could get killed humping through the jungle.

I’m getting ahead of myself, though. Let’s go back to the beginning of this particular chapter of my life. I wasn’t the least bit political when I was an undergrad from 1963 to 1967. Nor do I remember seeing that many kids at Utah sporting peace signs or even long hair. I know I didn’t have long hair; I leaned toward the short look favored by Peter Gunn, the TV detective. What can I tell you, I was just a kid in Bass Weejuns, khakis or Levi’s, and a button-down collar shirt. If there had been an anti-war rally to go to in Salt Lake, I would have looked completely out of place. Not that I had my head in the sand about Vietnam. I read Jonathan Schell’s “The Village of Ben Suc,” which gave me a good idea of how screwed up things were in Vietnam. But the Salt Lake papers were running wire service stories from the war, and they leaned on body counts and bombing runs, not trenchant analysis. Time magazine, which I read regularly, was foursquare behind the war, to the point that its New York editors were replacing the truth its correspondents found in Vietnam with lies and propaganda. David Halberstam of the New York Times was one of the few brave reporters on the scene who refused to buy the military’s bullshit, but I didn’t read the Times then. And the news about anti-war demonstrations elsewhere in the country seemed so far away. Sometimes everything seems far away when you’re in Utah.

David Halberstam, far left

I don’t know many guys from Salt Lake who wound up serving in Vietnam. One who did was a wonderfully funny guy I played football with; his reserve company got called to active duty, and the next thing he knew, he was building an airstrip and praying that a sniper didn’t draw a bead on him. He made it back in one piece, by the way. There was another kid-–he was two years behind me in high school-–who I heard got shot up pretty badly over there. Among guys my age, there was a stampede to get in the reserves -–Army, Marines, anything to avoid the draft. They were even going up to Idaho if they heard of openings there. If I’d stayed in Salt Lake, I probably would have joined them. But I was off at Northwestern and didn’t really start thinking about what I was going to do until winter quarter. I remember exploring officers candidate school in the Navy, but when they told me I’d have to sign up for four or five years, I said forget about it. I’d take my chances with the draft.

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George Kimball

Also reviewed in the Times yesterday was “At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing.” I’ve been touting the book all spring. It was edited by two veteran writers I’m fortunate to call friends: George Kimball and John Schulian. I was thrilled that it received nothing short of a rave from Gordon Marino:

More than any other sport, even baseball or golf, boxing calls forth the muse in writers. It’s no surprise. Where there is risk there is drama, and boxers put more at risk than other athletes. In a single evening, they roll the dice with their health, marketability and sense of identity. When you have a bad night in the ring, you can’t make it up in a double header on Sunday, or on another football field in a week’s time. And after the very last bell, there is seldom a diploma to fall back on, and there sure won’t be any pension checks coming in the mail.

It’s a very hard game — maybe even crazy — but as the affection-filled writers who have attached themselves to these warriors know, the masters of the ring possess a unique nobility. That nobility is perfectly framed in this remarkable volume from the Library of America. The essays here capture every angle of this world, both solemn and comic.

…I would bemoan only one omission, namely, the wise, lustrous pages of F. X. Toole’s introduction to his short-story collection, “Rope Burns.” Though “At the Fights” weighs in at 500-plus pages, it doesn’t contain a single flabby contribution. Over and over again, writers and readers have sought to get behind the eyes of a fighter, to fathom the fighter’s heart. This is as close as you can get without catching a hook to the head.

It’s my favorite book that’s come out this year. Perfect for Father’s Day or any other day you want to be graced by a collection of great writing.

[Cartoon by George Price]

UNDER THE SPELL OF THE BIG SCREEN

By John Schulian

We didn’t have a TV in our house until 1954, when I was nine. Maybe it was for economic reasons, maybe my parents just didn’t think it was important. They seemed perfectly content with listening to the radio, my mother in particular. I listened along with her. The first thing I remember hearing was the news that Babe Ruth had died. Honest. I was three years old and I had not the slightest idea who the Babe was, but there was something about the way the man on the radio talked about him that made it possible for even a child like me to grasp the importance of his death. Just remembering that moment makes me feel older than dirt. It’s the same when I remember listening to Tom Mix’s radio show-–his doctor was my mother’s doctor, by the way-–and Fibber McGee and Molly, Lum and Abner, Arthur Godfrey, and Art Likletter’s House Party. Linkletter’s band leader had one of the great names ever: Muzzy Marcellino. Muzzy, for crying out loud.

Something else we listened to was Lux Radio Theater, where Hollywood stars of a certain wattage acted in half-hour recreations of movies that were then in the theaters. In my house, we ate up movies, all three of us in the beginning, then just my father and me as time went on. There wasn’t any reason for this movie love. My parents weren’t star-struck, nor were they given to long, thoughtful discussions of performances, directing choices, or cinematography, good or bad. It was just something that was in the air in L.A. along with the aroma of the orange groves and the stench of the burning tires that warmed them on winter nights. If you listened to the radio, you could even hear broadcasts of the premieres of big movies and breathless interviews with stars like Cary Grant and Lana Turner.

The movie house we went to most often was the Academy, an art deco palace near the intersection of Manchester and Crenshaw boulevards. (It’s now a church.) If I went to see Burt Lancaster in “The Crimson Pirate” with my parents on Saturday night, I’d be back at 1 p.m. Wednesday for the kiddie matinee, two movies for a quarter. Might be two Abbott and Costello comedies, or two war movies (“Halls of Montezuma” with Richard Widmark and “Operation Pacific” with John Wayne), or an Audie Murphy Western paired with one starring Jeff Chandler, or-–hang onto your hat–“King Kong” and “Mighty Joe Young.”

Come summer we’d head for the Centinela Drive-In, where we saw “Shane,” “Strategic Air Command” and the truly awful circus movie “The Greatest Show on Earth.” (There’s a scene in “Heat” that was shot at an abandoned drive-in. I’d swear it was the Centinela, which sits in what is now regarded as hard-core gang territory.)

When 3-D movies were all the rage-–”Hondo,” “Charge at Feather River,” “House of Wax”–we went to see them at the big movie houses on Hollywood Boulevard, which was still glamorous and exciting then. (The first movie I remember seeing was “Pinocchio,” at the Pantages.) Afterward, we’d eat at Café de Paris, a little French restaurant around the corner from Charlie Chaplin’s studio. My father’s French buddies hung out there. My parents ate escargot and I drank Shirley Temples.

And then it was just my father and me going to the movies. It had to be by design. My parents were ancient by the standards of the day: when they married, my father was 41 and my mother 39. My guess is she was going through menopause and desperately needed some time away from her rambunctious son.

It was a blessing in disguise for my father and me. We didn’t get to spend much time together, mainly because he worked such long hours and spent a lot of time sleeping in his easy chair when he was home. I don’t want you to think he was distant or cold, though. He was, rather, the nicest man I have ever known. He was charming and funny and gracious, and he had a Danish accent that gave him, I don’t know, a continental air, I guess you’d call it. No wonder he oversaw all the big weddings in Salt Lake when he became catering manager of the Hotel Utah, the No. 1 hotel in the city. He took care of not just Mormons but Greeks and Jews and Italians and anybody else who wanted to be treated right. He loved them all, but he loved the good tippers best. To me, however, he was the dad who took me to see the Hollywood Stars in the old Coast League. And who played catch with me in the backyard, and, when we lived in Inglewood, took me to sprawling Centinela Park to pitch me batting practice and hit me fly balls. And remember, he’d never played an inning of baseball. He was a Danish immigrant who didn’t see a game until he worked in Chicago at a hotel where the big league teams stayed. He told me about players who took out their tobacco chaws only to eat, and of how forlorn the Pirates-–well, I think it was the Pirates–were when the Cubs’ Gabby Hartnett beat them with his Homer in the Gloamin’.

Truth be told, though, he was probably more comfortable going to the movies with me. His choice of theaters was an odd one, not any of the first-run houses, the Academy or the 5th Avenue or the United Artists, but a second-run house called the Inglewood Theater. And it was there that my education in movies, such as it is, began. We saw the John Ford-John Wayne cavalry trilogy, and “The Big Sleep” and Red Skelton comedies and Robert Mitchum in “Blood on the Moon.” Sometimes the old movies bored me witless-–”Saratoga Trunk” with Gary Cooper, in particular-–but more often they fed my imagination and my dreams.

The fact is, I loved movies before I loved baseball. For all I know, I read the movie ads in the newspaper before anything else. And I read Louella Parsons’ column, too, checking it for movie-star names in boldface. Then I would cut out the movie ads and paste them in a scrapbook, which wasn’t as pointless an exercise as it might seem, because I would then use the title of a movie that had captured my imagination and create my version of it. The movie I remember was “Kansas Pacific,” a Republic Pictures Western starring Sterling Hayden that I didn’t get around to watching until a couple of years ago. It was dreadful.) I drew the story in cartoon blocks on pieces of paper about the size of a postcard and I taped or glued the pieces together. Then I took a piece of cardboard, drew a screen with curtains around it, and cut slits on both sides of the screen. Then I would pull the strip of paper on which my movie was laid out through the slits while I provided the dialogue and narration. nd my parents would watch. But only after they had paid a nickel or a dime for the privilege. Even then, at the age of 9 or 10, I realized that movies were for making money.

There was something at work besides the profit motive, though. It was the ability to imagine, to let a couple of words in a newspaper inspire me to create the most primitive kind of art. I suppose the same forces were at work when I listened to the Mutual Game of the Day on the radio and envisioned what the Green Monster in Fenway Park looked like and how the ivy on the walls at Wrigley Field was coming in. I could even read about a minor league slugger in the back pages of the Sporting News-–Frosty Kennedy or John Moskus or Chuck Weatherspoon-–and spend my paper route imagining how they looked as they smacked another home run. It was as though I imagined life with a score by Dimitri Tiomkin or Max Steiner and a big, booming orchestra to back them up. If I listen closely, I can still hear the music.

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

Here’s Jeff MacGregor on W.C. Heinz:

Too often on American sports pages, we use the long-bomb language of war to talk about games. And too often on the editorial page, we use the slam dunk language of sports to obscure the realities of war. By doing so, we corrupt our honest understanding of both. The symbols and mythologies, the lessons and the metaphors might seem interchangeable — devotion, honor, fortitude — but one is a harmless funhouse reflection of the other. Sports are a kind of necessary human nonsense. War is the abject failure of everything that makes us human.

…Before he became a sports writer, Bill Heinz was a war correspondent. He spent months in the North Atlantic; landed at Normandy; chased Patton across France. He drank with Liebling and with Hemingway and watched American boys felled like trees in the Battle of Hürtgen Forest. That’s what I think made him great. Not just the writing or the craft or the work ethic. But in knowing exactly how much — and how very little — is at stake in sports.

Because every word Bill Heinz ever wrote about sports was informed by what he carried out of that war. By the things he could never forget.

Salute.

A WORLD OF MY OWN DESIGN

By John Schulian

My parents were devoted newspaper readers. They subscribed to two newspapers everywhere we went. In L.A., it was the Times in the morning and Hearst’s Herald Express in the afternoon. When I was 11, I started delivering the Herald: 77 copies Monday through Saturday from, if I recall correctly, 75th Street and Florence Avenue, between Crenshaw Boulevard and 8th Avenue, in Inglewood. I can’t tell how many stories about pachuco gang fights in East L.A. I hurled onto lawns with my trusty right arm. It was the same stuff I read about when I was home. I was a monkey-see, monkey-do kid, so, following my parents’ lead in my own particular way, I’d spread the paper on the living room floor and scan everything that was in it, right down to Sam Balter’s sports column and the ads for a downtown burlesque house that booked big-time strippers like Lili St. Cyr. I was aware of the bald-headed row long before I knew about “Macbeth.”

Although I mentioned Sam Balter, I’m not sure any of the L.A. sportswriters really registered on me when I was a kid. I remember Balter mainly because he was an ex-USC basketball player who played in the Hitler Olympics and broadcast the Trojans’ games. He certainly wasn’t a great prose stylist. In the Fifties, the brightest lights in L.A. sportswriting were Maxwell Stiles at the liberal Mirror and Morton Moss at the Examiner, Hearst’s morning paper. When I’ve had reason to go back and look at the Times from that era, it had a truly dreadful sports section. Jim Murray didn’t start writing for it until after we moved to Salt Lake. Bad timing on our part, because he took the sportswriting world by storm.

There were books in our house, too, of course, even though neither of my parents had made it past the eighth grade. They were from families where work came before education, and yet they made it perfectly clear that I was going to get the kind of education they never had a chance for. I have a hazy memory of my mother reading me “Treasure Island” and “Robinson Crusoe” and “Swiss Family Robinson,” and then handing me the books to see how well I could read from them. That’s probably why all these years later, I never go anywhere without a book. It probably helped, too, that I walked past a small public library to and from my way to Lutheran school. When I started going nuts about baseball, I would check out player biographies and histories of the game. One day I marched up to the checkout desk with “The Hank Sauer Story”–he presumably merited hard-cover immortalization because he was the National League’s 1952 MVP–and the librarian gave me the thrill of my young life. She said Hank lived on the same block she did. How great was that? But I never asked if she would introduce me or get me an autograph. I never hopped on my bike and tried to track old Hank down. I was going to get the kind of education that had eluded them.

It becomes more and more clear to me how much I lived in a world of my own design when I was a kid. The one year I was in junior high in L.A., I read 100 books in addition to whatever I had to read for class. Lots of Hardy Boys mysteries, lots of John R. Tunis, which was predictable for that time, but also lots of Duane Decker, who wrote about a fictional team called the Blue Sox, with Marty (Beef Trust) Blake at first base and the octopus-armed Patsy Bates (a guy, definitely a guy) at shortstop. I’m sure I read a pile of sports bios, too, you know, so I’d know the right thing to say when I was a big-league star who had his own biographer. I did a lot of dreaming like that, particularly when I was out on my paper route, riding my bike up and down those streets.

The first serious author I read-–Updike doesn’t count because “Rabbit, Run” was so far over my head-–was J.D. Salinger. No surprise there unless you consider the fact that I fancied myself more jock than anything else when I discovered him in my junior year of high school. Some seniors on the football team turned me on to “Catcher in the Rye” and I became a fan for life. The guys who told me I should read Salinger were an interesting group: one was the son of one of my future professors at Utah, another was the son of a sports columnist at the afternoon paper in Salt Lake, and I’ll be damned if I can tell you what the third kid’s father did, although he may have been an academic, too. What these guys were telling me and another friend who fell under their spell was that it was okay to nurture an intellectual streak and play sports, too. It was certainly a message no high school coach I played for was ever going to deliver.

As far as finding newspaper writers in Salt Lake who inspired me, fat chance. There were two editors from the Salt Lake Tribune who moved on to have splendid careers, Bob Ottum as a very stylish writer of skiing and auto racing at Sports Illustrated and Hays Gorey as a Washington correspondent for Time. (I went to high school with Gorey’s son, who always seemed incredibly grounded and preternaturally mature.) But I don’t think I ever saw their bylines in the Trib. And the sportswriters at the Trib and the Mormon Church-owned Deseret News were primarily living, breathing examples of how not to practice your craft. Once in a while, the Trib ran a Jim Murray column, but more often it relied on Arthur Daley, the New York Times snoremonger, for an out-of-town voice. That should tell you all you need to know about local tastes.

Jim Murray

When I was in college, I interviewed with the editor of the Tribune, a sallow, pinch-faced gentleman who looked like a good laugh might kill him. He asked me what I wanted to do in the business and I told him I wanted to be a syndicated sports columnist. As soon as the words were out of his mouth, I knew that I was a dead man in his eyes. In Salt Lake’s newspapers, you dreamed of life beyond the city limits at your own peril.

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

THIS TRAIN GOES ONLY SO FAR

By John Schulian

I wouldn’t cross paths with McGurk again until I was out of grad school and holding an Army draft notice. By then, his promise to keep an eye on me didn’t matter. I was fully aware of the fact that I wasn’t good enough for pro ball. But that doesn’t mean I stopped loving the game. Of I hadn’t love it anymore, it wouldn’t have hurt so much to make the first truly difficult decision of my life. I was a sophomore at Utah and we were working out in the fieldhouse, an old barn with worse lighting than an abandoned coalmine. It seemed like every day I’d wind up catching this left-handed maniac who eventually signed with the Giants. He had a great fastball, a wicked curve, and absolutely no control. While his pitches bounced off my chest and shins, I started looking at my future in a different light.

In the fall quarter, for the first time in my life, I’d done really well in school. Something like three A’s and a B. And it felt good. Better still, I was starting to think I might want to be a newspaper reporter. But if I played baseball, I was going to miss classes and not have as much time to concentrate on my writing as I needed, and, really, for what? For the chance to sit in the bullpen when the wind was turning Laramie, Wyoming to ice? For the chance to do that for one season and maybe two before I got a decent shot at starting? Baseball wasn’t my future anymore. My brain was, for better or worse. Whatever the future held for me, I knew I wasn’t going to stay in Salt Lake. I needed to get the best grades I could so I could use them as my ticket to ride. So I walked away from my baseball scholarship. Nothing dramatic. No pleas for me to stay. The team would get along fine without me. I cried a lot of tears that nobody ever saw, but I knew I’d done the right thing. And I graduated Phi Beta Kappa, which is something I’ve never made a lot of noise about, mainly because I’ve never fit my idea of what a Phi Beta Kappa should be. A Phi Beta Kappa should be legitimately smart, a true intellectual. I’m just the guy Pete Radulovich turned into a catcher.

I thought that was the end of me and baseball. But come summer Utah Power & Light’s amateur team called and offered me a chance to play. I promptly went out and had the worst year of my life. I’m not sure I hit .250. But they asked me back the next year, when the team added two terrific players from BYU, one of whom happened to be a catcher. I wasn’t sure why UP&L needed me, but I hung around, doing a little catching and wondering if I was wasting time. And then one night I whacked a pinch-hit double over the left fielder’s head, and everything changed. They made a place for me in the lineup, sometimes catching, sometimes at third, but mostly in the outfield because our other catcher’s idea of playing there was to wait until he saw where a fly ball landed before he went after it. I led the team in hitting and he was right behind me.

The next year was even better. I caught full-time and my friend Steve Radulovich, Pete’s son, who’d been drafted by the Yankees and Cincinnati but never signed, played first base. We had a lot of good college players and a couple of former minor leaguers on the team, plus a curve-baller from Utah who went 8-0. We won our league and the state amateur championship, and I hit .397, best year I ever had, even if Radulovich out-hit me by 70 points. (It’s almost embarrassing to remember this stuff, but I do.) One of the guys I played with—we called him Starchy—still says I was the craziest SOB he ever saw, and he’s probably right. After doing nothing but study in school, I had a lot of steam to let off. I hardnosed our pitchers, bitched incessantly at umpires, challenged a lot of opponents who could have kicked my ass, and swore like a stevedore if I hit a weak ground ball. I’ve still got the trophy they gave me as the team’s most valuable player. But the story I want to leave you with has nothing to do with that.

We had a pitcher, one of those kids who’d been a monster all the way through high school and then hurt his arm. I could have caught his best fastball barehanded. But one night he’s throwing a beautiful game — it might even have been three innings of no-hit ball–and he calls me to the mound. Our manager, a big guy with the face of a baby bird, trots out immediately.

“What’s the problem?” our manager says.

“I’m tired,” the pitcher says.

Our manager looks at him for a beat, then slaps him on the back and says, “John will tell you when you’re tired.”

Click here for more “From Ali to Xena.”

[Painting by Dane Tilghman]

By John Schulian

THE GAME THAT DEFINED ME

I loved playing baseball beyond reason and certainly beyond my talent level. I was never a natural athlete and I was never the best player on any team I was on, but I was a dogged son of a bitch. I got my teeth on that bone and I wouldn’t let go until I was able to do it on my terms. To be honest, if we had stayed in L.A., I’m not sure I would have been able to play as long as I did. Most likely I would have been bowled over by the competition and either been a benchwarmer or just some dreamer sitting in the stands. But Salt Lake was a different story. There were some wonderful ballplayers there, guys who played pro ball and even one from my era-–the Mets’ George Theodore-–who played in the majors, but there weren’t so many of them that I couldn’t compete.

The question was finding a position to play. All through Little League and Cops League, I’d been a third baseman and an outfielder and, just once, a shortstop who almost killed his amigo the second baseman when we were turning a double play in infield practice. (Did I tell you I had a hell of a throwing arm? If you don’t believe me, ask my amigo about the time I almost threw a ball through him.) When it was time to try out for Babe Ruth League, however, there were lots of third basemen and outfielders who were just as good as I was. Our coach was the first truly hard man I ever met, an ex-minor league catcher who could be irascible, profane, quick to throw a punch even if it cost him a job. But when he sensed how desperately I needed baseball and the identity it gavee me, his better self emerged. He asked if I wanted to try my hand at catching. I said yes, and he proceeded to give me the kind of education at the position that kids today take for granted and kids of my generation almost never got. He taught me how to shift behind the plate, how to block low pitches, how to throw properly, how to flash signs to the pitcher without having them stolen, how to catch pop-ups-–and it was a rare kid catcher in those days who could catch one. He spun me round in circles as he hit me pop-ups that first day and I dropped a bunch of the. After that, I never dropped another.

The coach’s name was Pete Radulovich. He was the first of many people who would give me a break that somehow changed my life for the better. I put him right there with Pat Ryan, who gave me my first assignment at Sports Illustrated, and Steven Bochco, who gave me a shot at Hollywood even though I’d never written a script. Pete’s eldest son, Steve, was the second baseman I almost decapitated in Cops League. We played ball together from the time we were 14 until we were 22, and we still stay in touch. I had dinner with him in Las Vegas, where he lives, a year or so ago, and he said that when his dad was in his final years and they were talking about baseball, his dad said that one of the things that made him proudest was that I’d become such a good catcher. I’ve lived a long time and I’ve had a decent share of success, but that really made me proud. Pete didn’t throw around a lot of compliments.

I did better than all right in high school and American Legion ball and got a baseball scholarship to the University of Utah. The biggest thrill I had was in the state Legion tournament in 1962. We were the Cinderella team and we were playing the juggernaut that had won the high school championship. It was a bad night to run out of pitching, but we did, and we got clobbered. But I had a couple of hits, threw out a couple of runners, and picked another off second base. Afterwards, this guy with a big cigar comes out of the stands and says, “I’m John McGurk of the Boston Red Sox. You caught a big league game tonight. I’m going to keep my eye on you.” Swear to god, this really happened. I didn’t need a ride home after that. I could have floated.

Pete Radulovich

Click here for Part I and here for Part II.

[Painting by Roger Patrick]

One Isn’t the Loneliest Number

By John Schulian

Somehow I survived the constant moves and my social backwardness. When I went back to East as a junior and senior, I found a comfort level that I’d never had before. I played baseball and football, got good enough grades, wrote for the school newspaper, emceed the farewell assembly my senior year, and had friends, the best of whom I’m still in touch with all these years later. By some wonderful twist of fate, I’d landed in a public high school that had all the qualities prep schools charge $20,000 and $30,000 a year for today. Great teachers cared about you and pushed you. I had a U.S. history teacher who actually got me to spend one Christmas vacation working on a paper for her class. I got an A on it, too. I’ll bet 90 or 95 percent of the class of 1963 went on to college of some kind. The best and brightest went to schools like Yale and Columbia and Berkeley. I, like most everybody else, just moved down the street to the Univesity of Utah.

Looking back, I’m amazed at what an innocent time it was. Maybe it was the last innocent time. A couple of years later, it seemed like half the kids who’d been underclassmen when I was at East were drinking and screwing and raising all kinds of hell. (No drugs yet, however. You have to remember this is Salt Lake I’m talking about.) My class, on the other hand, was tame in the extreme. There was a small group that boogied until they puked, but the vast majority seemed to get their high from sugar and make-out sessions. Me, I went to Utah basketball games and hung out in poolrooms with some buddies who were as inspired by “The Hustler” as I was. Never had a date, I’m embarrassed to say. I came close with a long-haired girl who reminded me of Audrey Hepburn–I even walked her home a couple of times–but I was still too damn shy. Graduation night, a friend from the football team and I–he was the good fullback, I was the other fullback–went to a Coast League baseball game instead of the dance. But a terrific girl (not Audrey Hepburn) came up and kissed me as I was on my way out the door. She may not remember it, but I do. It was a lovely moment.

The biggest thing about bouncing around the way I did as a kid was that I learned to never be afraid of solitude. I was pretty self-sufficient emotionally before I was self-sufficient in the sense of being able to actually take care of myself. If there was a high-school dance, I’d hang around the house until 8:30 or 9, then walk over to the neighborhood variety store and look through the magazines and paperbacks. (I had a driver’s license but no car; the car wouldn’t come until I was a sophomore in college.) That’s how I discovered “Rabbit Run” by John Updike. I read the first page and thought it was about basketball. Let’s just say I had a rude awakening when I bought it and read the second page, and the third, and so on. I made it all the way through, eventually. But it wasn’t until years later that I read “Rabbit Run” again and finally realized what it was about.

Maybe the ability to entertain yourself comes with being an only child. It just seemed natural to me. Lots of days there wasn’t anybody around to play with me, so I’d dream up something on my own. Or I’d turn on my little table radio and listen to Mutual’s Game of the Day or, when I was living in L.A., the Hollywood Stars’ baseball game. I listened to a lot of music on the radio, too. Not just Elvis, either, though he was the coolest thing going. I found myself, at the age of 10 or 11, attracted to black music. There were two disc jockeys in L.A.–Hunter Hancock on KPOP and Johnny Otis on KFOX–who played nothing but black music, and there I was, this blond, blue-eyed kid utterly mesmerized by Sam Cooke and Jackie Wilson and a guy named Sonny Knight, who had a hit with a song called “Confidential.” It was as though I considered this black music an antidote to the Pat Boone 45 my mother gave me as a birthday present. (Pat Boone singing Little Richard? For the love of God, Mom!) There was that incredible mix of Saturday night and Sunday morning in the music-–saxophones straight out of whorehouses and voices right from the choir. I can tell you for sure that I was the only kid in my neighborhood who made Ivory Joe Hunter’s “Since I Met You Baby” the first 45 he bought. Only later did I hear the influence of country music on the song, so in addition to being proof that I loved my rhythm and blues as a child, I was harboring the inner hillbilly who would emerge later.

Click here for Part One of From Ali to Xena…

Speaking of the Seventies…how about the Cobra?

Here’s Roy Blount, writing in Sports Illustrated about Parker back in the spring of 1979:

“He’s like the 10th man in Softball out there,” says First Baseman Stargell. “On a ground ball he’s backing up first before I’m there to take the throw. We were both after a foul ball one time with our arms outstretched, and we came together face to face like two big pairs of scissors. It was the only time I ever kissed him. We hit and flew apart by yards and yards.” Parker covers second on infield pop-ups, he gets involved in rundowns between second and third, he is everywhere. Pete Rose may be Charlie Hustle, but Parker hustles just as hard and considerably faster.

On the bases, too, he takes all he can get. Says Parker, “The highlight of the game to me is scoring from first on a double in such a way that people look at me in amazement, as if they’re saying, ‘My, how fast that big man can move.’ ”

Big he is—6’5″, 230 pounds. His legs terminate, after a lengthy run, in an upper body that looks like two Doberman pinschers bound tightly together. In addition to his speed afoot, he has general quickness—hence his nickname, Cobra—and a rifle arm. “He’s one of those rare individuals who come along every 15 or 20 years,” says Stargell. “Rare, and unique, and strong.”

John Schulian is one of our most gifted storytellers and a wordsmith who has been compared to Red Smith and A.J. Liebling. He came of age as a newspaper reporter and sports columnist in the 1970s, part of a generation of young turks that featured the likes of David Israel, Leigh Montville, Mike Lupica, Jane Leavy, Tony Kornheiser and Tom Boswell. Then he left sports behind and went to Hollywood where he wrote for “L.A. Law,” “Miami Vice,” “Wiseguy,” “JAG,” and numerous other series–including “Slap Maxwell,” the short-lived Dabney Coleman show about a sportswriting hack. He was also the co-creator of “Xena: Warrior Princess.” Before, during and after his foray into show business, Schulian wrote long-form articles for Sports Illustrated and GQ. His work has been collected in “Writers’ Fighters and Other Sweet Scientists,” “Twilight of the Long-ball Gods,” and the forthcoming “Sometimes They Even Shook Your Hand.” Schulian has been featured in “The Best American Sports Writing,” and, on ten occasions, the old “Best Sports Stories” series. He also edited “The John Lardner Reader” and co-edited (with George Kimball) “At the Fights: American Writers of Boxing.”

Last fall I sat down with John to talk about his career and what came out was more than just an interview but an oral history of the newspaper business, of the sporting scene and of Hollywood.  So I am proud to present John’s story, in his own words, “From Ali to Xena,” which will be posted in column-like segments twice a week.

You are in for a treat.

–Alex Belth

From Ali to Xena

By John Schulian

PREAMBLE

Good things have happened to me all my life, whether I deserved them or not, and “At The Fights”is the latest of them. When George Kimball and I started working together, we had nothing more in mind than a modest book of stories by writers who had won awards from the Boxing Writers Association of America. The way we looked at it, no sport has inspired more wonderful prose than the Sweet Science. But for every great piece we found, there was another one that even a generous critic would have had a difficult time calling mediocre. I won’t say we were ready to give up, but the bloom definitely was off the rose.

Then, out of nowhere, George’s literary agent, Farley Chase, called and said the Library of America was interested in having us edit an anthology of great boxing writing. “The same Library of America that does Twain and Poe and Raymond Chandler?” we said. “That’s the one,” Farley said. So we wrote a proposal and talked to LOA’s big cheeses and lobbied like a couple of Tammany Hall politicians. And we got the gig.

It turned out to be an incredible amount of work that was definitely pleasurable. You don’t have to ask me twice to read Heywood Broun, W.C. Heinz, and Carlo Rotella, and I know George feels the same. But there was also more than a little pain in the process because we didn’t have room to include all the pieces we love and all the writers we admire. The book we wound up with, though, is one we believe in wholeheartedly. “At the Fights” reflects both our personal tastes and the importance of boxing in American nonfiction. Just think of the big names whose work we’ve showcased: Mailer, London, Baldwin, Schulberg, Plimpton. Maybe George expected to be to sit in judgment of them at some point in his career, but it’s a complete surprise to me.

Honestly, I never expected any of what has happened to me over the last four decades. Not the big-city sports column or the magazine work or the books, not Hollywood and the modest success I had in TV, not the fascinating projects that still fall in my lap as I enter my golden years. Sure, I dreamed about it when I was a kid, but dreaming is far different than expecting. There were guys I met on newspapers who fairly radiated their expectation of success and became wet-behind-the-ears sensations. I, on the other hand, moved at a far slower pace, forever unsure of what lay in store for me.

I don’t mean to be disingenuous. That’s just a natural fact. I knew I wanted to be a newspaper reporter and columnist, but I thought I might just as easily wind up as a copy editor. (I can hear the copy editors I worked with saying, “You never could have cut it.”) If I saw myself doing anything, it was bouncing around to a lot of different newspapers — but not papers in glamorous cities and not papers with glowing national reputations. I was thinking more along the lines of Toledo for a couple of years, then maybe see what was available in Portland or Albuquerque. The only thing I was sure of was that I had a shot at an interesting life.

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Here is a wonderful essay by Pat Jordan which originally appeared in The Southern Review…

The Haircut

By Pat Jordan

Susie said I was starting to look like a French diplomat. She meant my hair. Long over my ears and swooping back on the sides like wings into a DA in back. I’d let it grow out of indifference ever since we left Fort Lauderdale three months ago to take up residence in Abbeville in the up-country of South Carolina. Abbeville was a small town of fewer than five thousand, a little bit old, a little bit worn, and a little bit out of the way. It was a “very Southern town,” code words of the locals which meant more than a few of its citizens had not yet reconciled themselves to the defeat of the Confederate States of America in the War between the States. They referred to those not born and raised in one of the original Confederate states as “Yankees,” but tried not to do it to their faces. When they slipped up, they quickly apologized, “I’m sorry I called you a Yankee.” I told them I was a “Yankee,” a Connecticut Yankee, actually, and that only people from New England were truly Yankees. People from New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, et cetera, were just northerners. They smiled, but did not accept that distinction.

There was a monument on the town square, a mini version of the Washington Monument, in Washington, D.C., but this one was devoted to the memory of soldiers who had given their lives for the CSA. On special weekends there were reenact- ments on the square. Men with beards, dressed in butternut and gray uniforms, rode tired-looking horses around the brick streets of the square to the strains of “Dixie.” The men carried flags, the Stars and Bars, which they waved at the townspeople, who waved back with mini flags. Last year, two black Abbevillians had donned Confederate uniforms and marched. Shelley, the owner of the Rough House, a local bar, told me Yankees didn’t realize that a lot of slaves fought and died for the Stars and Bars. I asked, “Why?” He looked at me and said, “Because it’s part of their heritage, just like ours.”

Shelley is very Southern. Over his bar he has a yellowed proclamation heralding Senator Strom Thurmond Appreciation Day, Abbeville, 1984. Shelley’s mother owns an antiques store and one of the items she had for sale was a painting of Abraham Lincoln. When Shelley saw it, he waited until his mother was busy, then took the painting and disposed of it. Shelley is a professional actor—stage, screen, TV. I told him he’d be perfect as Jeb Stuart for one of the reenactments.

Then I said, “I could play Grant.” He gave me a pained smile. And then he gave me some books to educate me about the War between the States. The books claimed the war was not about slavery, that was a pernicious Yankee lie, but was really about States’ Rights. He directed me around the corner to a bookstore that would further my education about the South’s insurrection. I stood in front of the bookstore window above which was a sign, All Things Confederate. It was closed. I saw a big Stars and Bars flag on a wall inside. On the front window was an ink drawing of General William Tecumseh Sherman over which was printed: Wanted For War Crimes.

The genteel ladies of the town who live in big, colonial houses on North Main hosted reenactment parties at which “Period dress is optional.” In Abbeville there is only one period of note, 1860 to 1865. Abbeville calls itself “The Birthplace and the Deathbed of the Confederacy.” When Jefferson Davis fled the Yankee army in 1865, he stopped long enough in Abbeville to sign papers dissolving the CSA. Five years earlier he had hosted a conference of South Carolina statesmen in Abbeville, where they signed the first articles of secession of any of the Southern states. That conference was held on a hill where our 1884 Victorian house sits. It’s called “Secession Hill.” Two concrete pillars stand sentinel on either side of Secession Hill, with plaques embedded in them that urge Abbevillians never to forget that once “no nation rose so white and fair” as the CSA. Our house is on top of that hill, on Magazine Street, named not for the magazines I work for, but a munitions factory that manufactured gunpowder as far back as the Revolutionary War. There’s a big old oak tree at the top of the hill. Rumor has it that during the great unpleasantness of 1860 to 1865, Yankee spies were hanged from that tree.

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Our man Glenn Stout is the latest writer to be interviewed by Chris Jones over at Son of Bold Venture. I love this bit:

CJ: As either a writer or an editor, you’ve had a hand in more than eighty books. Your blog is called verbplow. I get the sense that you must treat words like work, like a more manual brand of labor—that during the course of most days, you must sit down and force yourself either to read or to write something. How do you make yourself do it?

Glenn Stout: That’s funny you ask about that because just the other day I had this realization that all the things I’ve ever really liked to do are activities that require me to use my hands and my brain simultaneously. You are right that in a sense I do see writing as manual labor, and the metaphor in verb plow is intentional, but that doesn’t mean it’s not valued, or necessarily laborious, because there is also that “labor of love” thing. I love doing what I do and can’t believe I get to do this every day. Growing up the idea of becoming a writer was unimaginable. We didn’t have a lot of money. My parents didn’t read much. Words saved me. They took me away, sent me to college, delivered my life. Now I get to mine the language every day, and talk and work with other writers—that’s dreamland stuff.

I don’t see my work as a chore, and only rarely does it feel forced—I want to do this and by now it’s all a part of my life, like breathing. I spent a number of years doing actual manual labor and I have to say I learned as much about writing from pouring concrete and hauling steel as I ever did in any workshop, or any course. Manual labor teaches you to work in increments, to maintain, to stick to things, to finish what you start, and that’s what I do. On a practical level, I’ve been on my own, completely independent as a writer, mostly working on projects that I think have real value, for almost twenty years. I’m not on the faculty somewhere, on the staff of some publication, or living off a trust fund. For every second of the last twenty-one years I’ve always had book contracts to fulfill and deadlines to hit and either I take that seriously or I’m done, out of work.

Serving as Series Editor for Best American Sports Writing is like a part-time job at minimum wage, and is only a small part of what I do. People assume I’m incredibly disciplined, and in their terms, maybe I am, but I’ve never understood writers who say that they write 2,000 words a day, like punching a clock. I mean, good for them, but I don’t work that way, I can’t be that rigid. I think every writer has to discover that what works for others might not work for you. For me it’s like the old Earl Weaver line: “This ain’t football; we do this every day.” A significant part of doing anything stems from getting up early and putting your ass in the chair every day, and I do that. The rest is experience—learning how not to sabotage yourself.

Right on, Big Dog. Or as Woody once said, “Eighty percent of success is just showing up.”

George Kimball and Thomas Hauser headline this week’s Varsity Letters speaking series, brought to you by the good people at Gelf Magazine. If you are around on Thursday night, do yourself a favor and fall through, you are sure to be entertained and learn a thing or three. I’ll be there for sure.

Here is a recent interview with Kimball discussing “At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing”:

Arts Fuse: A. J. Liebling is generally considered by critics to be the best American writer on boxing. If he is at the top, who are the runners-up and why?

Kimball: Not Mailer and not Hemingway, although they’d probably think they were. Just off the top of my head, the worthy contenders would include Budd Schulberg and W.C. Heinz for certain, but also Mark Kram and Pat Putnam from SI, Ralph Wiley, all of whom really understood the sport in addition to being wonderful writers.

AF: There are some really rare finds here — for example, pieces by Richard Wright and Sherwood Anderson on Joe Louis. How difficult was the research for the anthology? What are some of your favorite pieces?

Kimball: I wouldn’t describe the research as “difficult,” because it was such a pleasure. We probably read a half-dozen really good pieces for every one that wound up in the anthology. We read some pretty awful ones, too, mostly when we’d been touted by someone who should have known better.

…I’ve been asked that question by several people over the past couple of months and usually manage to duck it by saying “Which of your children is your favorite?” But I will say that John Lardner’s masterpiece on Stanley Ketchel, “Down Great Purple Valleys,” is sort of the cornerstone of the whole book. With all the other changes we went through in compiling At the Fights, that was the one, indispensable story if only because it so exemplified what we wanted to do with the rest of the book –- and that was setting the bar pretty high.

Man, Ralph Wiley is overlooked these days, isn’t he? And since George mentioned “Down Great Purple Valleys,” here again, is one of the greatest openings in the history of American journalism:

“Stanley Ketchel was twenty-four years old when he was fatally shot in the back by the common-law husband of the lady who was cooking his breakfast.”

This week, Gary Smith profiled the Phillies starting rotation in SI’s Baseball Preview issue.

And in the latest edition of the New York Times Magazine, Pat Jordan takes on Philadelphia’s four aces:

Mike Schmidt was standing behind a batting cage, still as trim as during his playing days. A handsome, middle-aged man with swept-back, silvery hair and a thick mustache. I asked him what he thought of the four Phillies pitchers.

“Well,” he said, “now when the Phillies come to town, the other team knows they’re being challenged by four No. 1 pitchers. They have to amp up their mental game. I used to see my at-bats the night before a game when I laid my head down on the pillow. Gibson, Seaver, Ryan. I had to have a plan. When I went to Houston, they had three good pitchers. The fourth was Nolan Ryan. I could go to sleep with the other three, but Ryan kept me awake. Ryan! Ryan! Ryan! My plan was, don’t miss his fastball if he threw it over the plate. If he got two strikes on me, I’d have to face his curveball.” He turned and looked at me with his small blue eyes, which had fear in them. “Ryan was scary!” he said. He shook his head, as if seeing Ryan on the mound. Ryan began his motion and fired the ball at his head. Schmidt had a split second to make a decision. Was it a 100 m.p.h. fastball that could kill him if it hit him in the head, or was it that wicked curveball? If he dove away from the plate and the pitch was a curveball that broke over the plate, he’d look like a fool and a coward. But if it wasn’t a curveball, if it was that 100 m.p.h. fastball, and he didn’t dive away from the plate . . . well, he didn’t even want to think about that.

“Ryan, Gibson, Seaver, they made you defensive,” he said. “Does that make sense? You were afraid of the ball. There’s no fear of the ball today with cutters, splitters and changeups.”

“What about the Phillies’ four pitchers?” I said.

“They’re not scary,” he said. “Even if they all win 20 games, the Phillies don’t have a pitcher who strikes fear in a hitter.”

Two very different takes on “the best rotation in baseball” from two very different writers.

And while we are talking pitching, here’s Steve Rushin’s piece on the Braves’ five aces from the 1993 SI Baseball Preview.

Over at Deadspin, here’s my guy Pat Jordan on Bo Belinsky:

No character in sports was more authentic than Robert “Bo” Belinsky, a left-handed pitcher in the ’60s. Bo personified “cool,” real cool that was intrinsic to his nature, not his public persona. As a rookie, Bo pitched the first no-hitter in California major league history for the Angels. It made him a star and an instant celebrity whose name became synonymous with a lifestyle that was cool and slick and dazzling. But that no-hitter was the high point of Bo’s career, which, after eight years, saw him leave baseball with a 28-51 record.

After his no-hitter in 1962, Bo said, “If music be the food of love, by all means let the band play on.” Bo instantly became the first original playboy-athlete. He f**ked Ann-Margret, Mamie Van Doren, Tina Louise, Connie Stevens, and he partied with Eddie Fisher, Dean Martin, and Henry Fonda. But in those days f**king Hollywood starlets and showing up at his team’s hotel at 5 a.m., “reeking of bitch and booze,” was not exactly what team owners, managers, sportswriters, and fans expected from their idols. Bo was suspended, arrested, banished to the minor leagues, traded, and traded again and again, which confused him. Bo never understood an essential fact of celebrity in those days. He never had that knack of later, more beloved playboy athletes like Joe Namath of cultivating his persona precisely up to, but not beyond, that point at which his public would become annoyed, bored, and eventually furious with him. By the time Bo left baseball his name had become synonymous with dissipated talent.

George Plimpton once wrote, “The smaller the ball used in the sport, the better the book.” But this doesn’t account for boxing, a sport that word-for-word has produced more great writing than any other. For hard evidence, look no further than “At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing,” an outstanding new collection edited by George Kimball and John Schulian.

All of the heavyweights are here–from Jack London, James Baldwin and Norman Mailer, to A.J. Liebling, W.C. Heinz, Red Smith and Jimmy Cannon. And that’s just for starters. How about Gay Talese, Pete Hamill, George Plimpton, Pete Dexter, David Remnick and Mark Kriegel, not to mention the veterans of the boxing scene like Larry Merchant, Mark Kram, Vic Ziegel, Pat Putnam and Richard Hoffer.

I’m not a huge boxing fan but I adore boxing writing and this is the finest anthology I’ve ever come across.

Check out the Library of America’s website for a fascinating and in-depth interview with Kimball and Schulian.

Here’s Kimball:

The wonder shouldn’t be that there are two Liebling pieces, but that there are only two. (He and Schulberg have the only double-barreled entries in the anthology.) If I’d been compiling that list, The Sweet Science would be No.1, and A Neutral Corner, Liebling’s other collection of (mostly) New Yorker pieces No. 2.

Putting At the Fights together was a painstaking, year-long process that was often like a jigsaw puzzle, because sometimes the decision to include a par- ticular piece would, due to subject matter or tone or approach, displace others. John and I made a conscious decision early on to hold Liebling in reserve. We knew whichever of his pieces we wound up using, they were going to work. Our initial inclination, for instance, had been to include Liebling’s terrific account of his visit to Sonny Liston’s training camp, but if we’d used that we probably wouldn’t have been able to include Joe Flaherty’s wonderful “Amen to Sonny,” and if we hadn’t used Liebling’s “Kearns by a Knockout” we’d probably have had to find two more pieces to adequately address Doc Kearns and Sugar Ray Robinson. It was sometimes like playing Whack-A-Mole, because every time you’d hammer one down, three more would pop up somewhere else. But in that respect Liebling was a constant security blanket, our wild-card, because of our unshaken confidence that whatever we wound up using was going to be great.

Anyone who has written about boxing for the last fifty years owes a great debt of gratitude to Joe Liebling, so yes, his influence has been both pervasive and profound, but woe be unto the conscious imitator. Any writer who sets out trying to write his own “Liebling piece”—and there have been a few—is inex- orably doomed to fall flat on his face.

And Schulian:

It’s too much to say that the best boxing stories are about losers. That argument is contradicted time and again throughout the book. But losers and eccentrics and guys who never quite made it to the mountaintop have inspired some classic writing. You want to weep for Primo Carnera after read- ing what Paul Gallico had to say about the way he was used as a patsy and a stooge and a pretend heavyweight champion. And then you have Stanley Ketchel and Bummy Davis, two crazy-tough fighters who would have been swallowed by the mists of time if it weren’t for the stories written about them. Was John Lardner’s piece on Ketchel better than the fighter himself? Absolutely. And Bill Heinz’s on Davis? Without a doubt. And the amazing thing is that Lardner and Heinz never met their subjects, both of whom were prematurely dispatched from this life by gunshot. But Lardner and Heinz were intrepid reporters as well as stunning writers, and they proved it with their renderings of the two fighters’ hearts and souls.

Click here for an excerpt.

Don’t sleep, pound-for-pound, this will be the most rewarding book–never mind sports book–you’ll buy this spring.

A few months before I was born, two previously undefeated boxers, Muhammad Ali (31-0)and Joe Frazier (26-0) fought for the heavyweight title in the so-called “Fight of the Century” at Madison Square Garden. That was forty years ago today. It was not their greatest fight–that would be the Thrilla in Manila–but it was possibly the biggest spectacle in boxing history.

Here is our man John Schulian, writing for the Library of America’s website:

The two of them had been friends before their violent Garden party. When Ali was stripped of his heavyweight championship in 1967 for refusing induction into the military and found himself wandering the college lecture circuit, Frazier loaned him money. It was a fitting gesture, for Frazier now wore the crown that had been Ali’s. But he vowed he would give the deposed champ a chance to win it back, and when Ali was allowed to return to the ring in 1970, Frazier did something that isn’t standard practice in the cutthroat world of boxing. He kept his word.

They would each make $2.5 million and fight in front of a Garden crowd that overflowed with celebrities. Burt Lancaster, Sinatra’s co-star in From Here to Eternity, did the radio commentary. But the only thing that really mattered was the hatred that had erupted when Ali called Frazier an Uncle Tom and a tool of good-old-boy sheriffs and Ku Klux Klansmen. In a lifetime filled with kindness as well as greatness, it was a low moment for Ali. He knew full well that Frazier, the thirteenth child born to a one-armed North Carolina sharecropper, had traveled a far harder road than he had. By comparison, Ali was a child of privilege, raised in relative comfort in Louisville, his boxing career bankrolled by local white businessmen. But he got away with it because he was handsome, charming, funny, all the things Frazier was not.

And here’s Mark Kram from his book “Ghosts of Manila”:

Ali was the first in the ring, in a red velvet robe with matching trunks, and white shoes with red tassels. He glided in a circle to a crush of sound, a strand of blown grass. Whatever you might have thought of him then, you were forced to look at him with honest, lingering eyes, for there might never be his like again. Assessed by ring demands–punch, size, speed, intelligence, command, and imagination–he was an action poet, the equal of the best painting you could find or a Mozart who failed to die too early. If that is an overstatement, disfiguring the finer arts by association with a brute game, consider the mudslide of purple that attaches to his creative lessers in other fields, past and present; Ali was physical art, belonged alone in a museum of his own. I was extremely fond of him, of his work, of the decent side of his nature, and jaundiced on his cultish servility, his termopolitical combustions that tried to twist adversaries into grotesque shapes. It never worked, excerpt perhaps on Liston, who came to think that he was clinically insane. It did work on himself, shaped the fear for his face and general well-being into a positive force, a psychological war dance that blew up the dam and released his flood of talent. The trouble was that, like Kandinsky’s doubled-sided painting of chaos and calm, it became increasingly difficult for him to find his way back from one side to the other.

In a green and gold brocade robe with matching trunks, Joe Frazier almost seemed insectile next to Ali in the ring, and he was made more so as Ali waltzed by him, bumped him and said: “Chum!” Far from that slur, Joe was a gladiator right smack to the root conjurings of the title, to the clank of armor he seemed to emit. Work within his perimeter, and you courted what fighters used to call “the black spot,” the flash knockout. He was a figher that could be hit with abandon, but if you didn’t get him out of there his drilling aggression, his marked taste for pursuit and threshing-blade punches could overwhelm you; as one military enthusiast in his camp siad, “like the Wehrmacht crossing into Russia.” I was drawn to the honesty of his work, the joy he derived from inexorable assault, yet had a cool neutrality to his presence. In truth, with a jewel in each hand, i didn’t want to part with either of them, thus making me pitifully objective, a captial sinner in the most subjective and impressionistic of all athletic conflicts.

Frazier won the fight, of course, in front of a celebrity-studded crowd. Dali, Elvis, Woody and the Beatles were there. Burt Lancaster did the color for the closed-circut broadcast and Frank Sinatra was there taking pictures for Life Magazine.

In the latest issue of Sports Illustrated, Richard Hoffer has a nice little piece on the fight:

While it promised sufficient sporting spectacle and mystery (could Ali reclaim the grace of his youth and now, nearing 30, reclaim the title that many thought was still rightfully his?), the fight also operated as a social ballot box. Ali, who’d been a sort of political prisoner, commanded the support of every freethinker in the country and beyond, striking his revolutionary stance. In addition, he somehow cast a fight between two black men as a racial referendum, a puzzled and comically outraged Frazier now a stand-in for the status quo and the white man as well.

All this was accomplished with the primitive promotional platforms at hand: newspapers, radio and talk shows. The intrigue was still enough to make the fight the hottest ticket of a lifetime, possibly the most glamour-struck event ever. The excitement was overwhelming, even far beyond the Garden, but can you imagine what it might have been like if Ali, the ultimate pitchman, had, say, a Facebook page? If we’re so eager to exploit celebrity that a semifamous athlete like Chad Ochocinco has his own reality show, then you can be certain Ali would have had his own network long before Oprah.

Then again, how could our digital applications improve upon the analog beauty of their struggles that night, an eye-popping brutality that Frazier narrowly won, a contest of such evenly matched wills, such equal desperation that the words Ali-Frazier have come to signify a kind of ruinous self-sacrifice? The old ways are not necessarily the best, but once a generation, anyway, they’re good enough.

Ali taunted and humilated Frazer time and again in the press and Frazier has never forgiven him for it. From Bill Nack’s great 1996 piece on Smokin’ Joe:

He has known for years of Frazier’s anger and bitterness toward him, but he knows nothing of the venom that coursed through Frazier’s recent autobiography, Smokin’ Joe. Of Ali, Frazier wrote, “Truth is, I’d like to rumble with that sucker again—beat him up piece by piece and mail him back to Jesus…. Now people ask me if I feel bad for him, now that things aren’t going so well for him. Nope. I don’t. Fact is, I don’t give a damn. They want me to love him, but I’ll open up the graveyard and bury his ass when the Lord chooses to take him.”

Nor does Ali know what Frazier said after watching him, with his trembling arm, light the Olympic flame: “It would have been a good thing if he would have lit the torch and fallen in. If I had the chance, I would have pushed him in.”

Nor does Ali know of Frazier’s rambling diatribe against him at a July 30 press conference in Atlanta, where Frazier attacked the choice of Ali, the Olympic light heavyweight gold medalist in 1960 and a three-time heavyweight champion of the world, as the final bearer of the torch. He called Ali a “dodge drafter,” implied that Ali was a racist (“He didn’t like his white brothers,” said Frazier) and suggested that he himself—also an Olympic champion, as a heavyweight, in 1964—would have made a better choice to light the flame: “Why not? I’m a good American…. A champion is more than making noise. I could have run up there. I’m in shape.”

And while Frazier asserts at one turn that he sees “the hand of the Lord” in Ali’s Parkinson’s syndrome (a set of symptoms that include tremors and a masklike face), he also takes an eerily mean-spirited pride in the role he believes he played in causing Ali’s condition. Indeed, the Parkinson’s most likely traces to the repealed blows Ali took to the head as a boxer—traumas that ravaged the colony of dopamine-producing cells in his brain—and no man struck Ali’s head harder and more repeatedly than Frazier.

“He’s got Joe Frazier-itis,” Frazier said of Ali one day recently, flexing his left arm. “He’s got left-hook-itis.”

Check out this cool photo gallery of “The Fight of the Century” over at Life.com.