“The Earl of Baltimore”

By John Schulian

BALTIMORE—Based on the available evidence, it is easy to assume that Earl Weaver perfected managerial sin. After all, the profane potentate of the Orioles has spent the past thirteen seasons kicking dirt on home plate, tearing up rule books under umpires’ noses, and generally behaving as if he were renting his soul to the devil with an option to buy. Yet here it is the middle of August and he has only been kicked out of one game. Reputations have been ruined for less.

Understandably, Weaver is not pleased to hear that his dark star appears to be fading. In his corner of Memorial Stadium’s third base dugout, he looks up from a pregame meal of a sandwich and a cigarette and searches the horizon for an explanation. “Musta been the foggin’ strike,” he says at last. “Guys like me, I coulda got tossed five foggin’ times in the time we were off. I’m streaky that way.”

Satisfied, he resumes dining only to be interrupted moments later by Jim Palmer, the noted pitcher and underwear model. With a mischievous smile, Palmer raises his voice in a song that suggests one more reason why his fearless leader has been wont to raise hell with umpires: “Happy Birthday.”

“Oh,” Weaver says, “you remembered.”

“Of course,” Palmer says.

“I know why you remembered, too,” Weaver tells his favorite rascal. “You know that at my age, it’s gotta hurt.”

He has turned fifty-one on this gray Friday, but there will be no party for him. The Orioles will play the White Sox, and then Earl Weaver, the owner of a full head of hair and none of his own teeth, will go home to be with his wife and his prized tomato plants. He will go home to rest, to savor his stature as the winningest manager in the big leagues, and to get away from all the insufferable questions about how the White Sox are pretending to be a new and improved version of the Black Sox.

They have been quoted anonymously in the press as saying they would throw games at the end of this split season if it would help them get into the playoffs. The mere suggestion of such chicanery has horrified the lords of baseball and forced the team’s management to talk faster than a married politician photographed in the arms of a Las Vegas strumpet. To Weaver, who once marched his team off the field in Toronto to save his bone-weary pitching staff, the Sox’s scheme sounds like the work of dummies.

“What the fog,” he says. “The White Sox better not lose too many foggin’ games deliberately or they’re not gonna be in it. The simplest thing for them to do is win as many games as they can and root like hell for foggin’ Oakland. Look at us, we’re in the same boat. We gotta hope New York beats every-foggin’-body except us. Ain’t that something? I gotta root for them damn pinstripes.”

Nobody said the split season would honor tradition. Indeed, there are those who believe that cutting the season in half smacks more of the old Georgia-Florida League than it does of the American or the National. “Oh, no you don’t,” says Weaver, who spent his playing career in towns where two cars on Main Street constituted a traffic jam. “I don’t want no foggin’ headline sayin’ WEAVER CALLS SPLIT SEASON BUSH.” As a matter of fact, if he had his way, every season would have two chapters, strike or no. “If you start bad,” he says, “it’s nice to be reborn again.” When was the last time Bowie Kuhn addressed any issue so eloquently?

The next thing you know, Weaver will find himself running for commissioner when all he really wants to do is figure out a better way to handicap horse races. That’s the way baseball works: What’s dumb gets done. So lest the game’s kingmakers get the wrong impression from his bleats about old age and his apparent flirtation with respectability, Weaver tries to erase some of the points he has scored with the establishment. The best way to do that is to discuss the fine art of making umpires look like donkeys.

He remembers hearing how a minor league manager named Grover Resinger responded to being given five minutes to get off the field and out of the ballpark. “He asked if he could see the umpire’s watch,” Weaver says, “and when the dumb fogger handed it to him, Resinger threw it over the top of the foggin’ grandstand.”

Then there is Frank Lucchesi, an old sparring partner from the Eastern League. Once, Lucchesi sat on home plate until the police came and carried him into the dugout. Another time, after being ordered off the premises, he climbed the flagpole behind the outfield fence and flashed signals to his team from there. But what Lucchesi did best was drive Weaver to heights of creative genius.

“I forget what the foggin’ call was,” Weaver says, “but the umpire blew it, so I went out and talked like a Dutch uncle and they changed it back. Then Lucchesi comes out and he talks like a Dutch uncle and they change it back. I’m standing there on the mound talking to my pitcher, and when I see them do this, I grab my foggin’ heart and fall on my face. Right there on the mound.

“One of my players comes runnin’ out and rolls me over and starts fannin’ me with his cap. The umpire is right there with him. He says, ‘Weaver, if you even open one eye, you’re out of this game.’ Well, hell, by then, I couldn’t resist, and you know what I saw? There was Lucchesi with one of them old Brownie box cameras. He told me later it was the greatest foggin’ thing he’d ever seen.”

A mischievous smile creases Weaver’s face. “Hey,” he says, “maybe I oughta do that again.”

It could save his reputation.

From his fine collection, Sometimes They Even Shook Your Hand, here is John Schulian on Stan the Man:

Of all the heroes I encountered, though, the one who best fit the description was Stan Musial, who managed to be a regular guy even with a statue of him standing outside old Busch Stadium, just as it does now in front of new Busch. In 1982, with the Cardinals on their way to the World Series, it seemed fitting that I should write about him. We met at the restaurant that bore his name, and as soon as I mentioned an obscure teammate of his—Eddie Kazak, a third baseman in the forties—it was like we were old friends.

When I finally ran out of questions, Musial offered to drive me back to my hotel. We made our way through the restaurant’s kitchen, pausing every few steps so he could say hello to a cook or slap a dishwasher on the shoulder. At last we reached the small parking lot in back. The only other people in sight were two teenaged boys with long faces. Musial was unlocking his Cadillac when one of them said, “Hey, mister, you got any jumper cables? Our car won’t start.”

“Lemme see, lemme see,” Musial said. He repeated himself a lot that way. It only added to his charm.

He opened his trunk and started rooting around, pulling out golf clubs, moving aside bags and boxes until, at last, he found his cables. By then, however, I was more interested in watching the boys. One of them was whispering something to his buddy and I could read his lips: “Do you know who that is? That’s Stan Musial.”

The statue in front of the ballpark had come to life.

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

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

You can order the paperback here.

The Giants play the Eagles tonight. In honor of this old rivalry, check out our pal John Schulian’s classic portrait of Chuck Bednarik:

He really was the last of a breed. For 58 1/2 minutes in the NFL’s 1960 championship game, he held his ground in the middle of Philly’s Franklin Field, a force of nature determined to postpone the christening of the Green Bay Packers’ dynasty. “I didn’t run down on kickoffs, that’s all,” Bednarik says. The rest of that frosty Dec. 26, on both offense and defense, he played with the passion that crested when he wrestled Packer fullback Jim Taylor to the ground one last time and held him there until the final gun punctuated the Eagles’ 17-13 victory.

Philadelphia hasn’t ruled pro football in the 33 years since then, and pro football hasn’t produced a player with the combination of talent, hunger and opportunity to duplicate what Bednarik did. It is a far different game now, of course, its complexities seeming to increase exponentially every year, but the athletes playing it are so much bigger and faster than Bednarik and his contemporaries that surely someone with the ability to go both ways must dwell among them.

Two-sport athletes are something else again, physical marvels driven by boundless egos. Yet neither Bo Jackson nor Deion Sanders, for all their storied shuttling between football and baseball, ever played what Bednarik calls “the whole schmear.” And don’t try to make a case for Sanders by bringing up the turn he took at wide receiver last season. Bednarik has heard that kind of noise before.

“This writer in St. Louis calls me a few years back and starts talking about some guy out there, some wide receiver,” he says, making no attempt to hide his disdain for both the position and the player. “Yeah, Roy Green, that was his name. This writer’s talking about how the guy would catch passes and then go in on the Cardinals’ umbrella defense, and I tell him, ‘Don’t give me that b.s. You’ve got to play every down.’ “

“Concrete Charlie,” is also featured in Schulian’s recent collection: Sometimes They Even Shook Your Hand.

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.

Somehow, probably out of sheer orneriness, Jack was an even better reporter than he was a writer. He proved it forevermore when he hired on at the New York Herald Tribune and found himself on the horse racing beat. Looking back, you might say he was simply part of the Trib’s grand tradition of turf writers. Joe Palmer preceded him and Pete Axthelm followed him. One problem, though: Jack didn’t know one end of a horse from the other when he got the job. But he showed up early, stayed late, and asked the right questions. By the time I saw him in the barns at Churchill Downs, drinking a 7 a.m. beer with Spectacular Bid’s trainer, he knew as much as anybody and what he didn’t know he would bust a gut trying to find out.

That same dogged intelligence was what drove Jack to become, at Newsday, one of the architects of the sports-page revolution in the 1960s, hiring bright young men and savvy old codgers and telling them to turn the clichés upside down. You don’t do something that bold, however, without stepping on toes, and Jack brought his foot down hard almost willfully, maybe even perversely.

It happened everywhere he went – New York, Detroit, Miami, Washington, Baltimore – and it cost him job after job. He didn’t even last two years at Sports Illustrated, which was where I first read him. But he made me a fan for life with his crackling good profile of Bill Bradley at Oxford, and as a fan I felt an obligation to find about more about him. Impressionable lad that I was, I thought there was a certain romance to his prickliness and the way he bounced from one paper to another.

I was starting to move around a bit myself when I landed at the Washington Post in 1975. I put in my time on the Redskins and the NBA Bullets, made my mark with features, and then George Solomon dispatched me to write a column about the Touchdown Club’s annual Christmas bash. What I said about those smug, sloppy, powerful drunks was hardly in the spirit of the season. But Don Newcombe, the former Dodgers pitcher and a recovering alcoholic, wrote a letter to the editor praising my column, and Jack dropped me a note of congratulations tempered by his own experience. “I have seen the Shriners,” he said, “and they are the fucking worst.”

A few weeks later, after I had written him back to say thanks, I spied a visitor to the sports department, fiftyish, not real tall and a bit disheveled, with a wry smile and eyes that bored into you from beneath jutting brows. “Jack Mann?” I said. “I’m John Schulian.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “We write letters to each other.”

For reasons I never quite fathomed, we were friends, or at least friendly, ever after. We talked when our paths crossed, traded thoughts on writers and athletes, shared the occasional pre-game meal. I received only one invitation to go drinking with him and turned it down because I don’t believe in pro-ams that involve alcohol. The next day he showed up in the press box bruised and abraded. He said he’d gotten in a bar fight with some Marines who were less than half his age and most assuredly didn’t realize that they were putting dents in someone who had been a Marine himself in World War II. “You were a Marine, weren’t you?” he asked me. When I told him I wasn’t, I don’t think he ever looked at me the same way again. But he wouldn’t have been Jack Mann if he had.

John Schulian is the co-editor of “At the Fights.” His next collection of sports stories, “Sometimes They Even Shook Your Hand: Portraits of Champions Who Walked Among Us,” will be published this fall.

Mann in Charge

By Tom Callahan

Someday I’ll pass by the great gates of gold,
And a man will walk in, unquestioned and bold.
“A saint?” I’ll ask, and old Peter will reply:
“No, he carries a pass. He’s a newspaper guy.”

-a favorite jingle of Jack Mann, who was sentimental about absolutely nothing except newspapers

In fedora days, sportswriters wholeheartedly embraced only four games: baseball, college football, boxing and horse racing. Like most of the papers, like all of the writers, the last two are dying out now.

At dinner on the road, neither the beatmen nor the columnists said much about sports. They stuck to one topic of conversation: newspapers. It was the only thing any of them really cared about. Which starts to describe Jack Mann, who, even when he was serving magazines (even when he was serving drinks on Fire Island), was emphatically a newspaper guy.

As a matter of fact, he was a legend in the trade, probably the best writer better known as a talent scout and blue pencil editor since Stanley Woodward or at least George Kiseda.

For Newsday on Long Island, Mann gathered fresh reporters in several senses of the word fresh and showed every one of them how to squeeze a pound and a half of gee-willikers out of their stuff. A renowned headline writer, Jack regularly lent himself to the copy desk for marking special occasions such as when George/Christine Jorgensen “Returned From Abroad A Broad.”

Because Mann kept telling bosses to go fuck themselves, he was obliged to move around a lot. In 1979, Jack found himself in Washington for the afternoon Star covering the hell out of Baltimore trainer Bud Delp, minor-league jockey Ronnie Franklin and Triple Crown candidate Spectacular Bid. Mann literally rode in the van with the horse. He hated the word literally.

After winning the Kentucky Derby and Preakness in a walk, The Bid got an overwrought ride even for Franklin and finished third at Belmont Park. The alibi was that he had stepped on a safety pin in his stall. “Leave it to Delp,” Mann said, “to find the needle in the haystack.”

Secretariat’s sire was Bold Ruler, Spectacular Bid’s grandsire. So it made a kind of sense for The Bid to stand at Claiborne Farm in Kentucky. But did he have to stand right next to Secretariat? In abutting two-acre paddocks, they raced back and forth at the fence line. Though six years older, Secretariat never once let the gray colt win. Bid turned completely white except for a black mane and tail. He was gorgeous. But he was no world-beater at stud. Disappointment is hard on the heart.

His fee that had started at $150,000 per live foal dropped, and dropped again. He was moved to less and less exalted places on the property, eventually all the way to Unadilla, New York, where he died dispensing favors at $3,500 a throw.

“He wasn’t Affirmed,” Mann said, “let alone Secretariat. And I guess he could never look you in the eye around the breeding shed. But he was a hell of a sweet horse to me, the son of a bitch.”

Tom Callahan is the author of many books including “Johnny U: The Life and Times of Johnny Unites,” and “The Bases Were Loaded (And So Was I): Up Close and Personal With the Greatest Names in Sports.”

A Difficult Mann

By Dave McKenna

I used to write about horse racing as a freelancer at a very low level in the late 1990s, so I got to watch Jack at the Maryland tracks for his last several years of typing. Everywhere you look at the racetrack you see people you won’t see anywhere but the racetrack, but even in that glorious circus Jack stood out. He was mean as a motherfucker to me, but it never bothered me because he was mean as a motherfucker to everybody except young women. He would make a wisecrack every time he walked by me, and it always took several minutes for me to get what the hell he was insulting me for this time. Often it turned out that he’d read something I’d written and his wisecrack was destroying some lousy sentence or misused word that showed up under my byline. I don’t remember many specific walk-by barbs, but they were all along the lines of “What sort of fool would say ‘prior to’ instead of ‘before’?” then I’d remember that a week prior to him mumbling that I’d typed “prior to” in a story.

Jack surely didn’t like that I wasn’t as committed to words as he was. Hell, Webster’s took a backseat to him, maybe that’s why he was so pissed at the world. but, over time, watching how much he cared about his work, and how hard he worked,you had to love the guy. and even if you didn’t know his back story, you knew there wasn’t anybody like him. In small doses, he was totally unbearable. But you can’t ask more of a grown man than consistency, and pretty quick you could tell how straight he was. He took motherfuckerhood to a genius level; kinda like Van Morrison on stage, if you’ve ever had the painful pleasure of seeing him live.

I still think about him all the time, and I’m sure I’m not alone.

Damn, I just had a flashback of that look of disgust he always gave me. What a lucky bastard I was to be around that guy for all those years of Saturdays.

Dave McKenna writes for Washington City Paper and is getting sued by Dan Snyder for a million dollars.

Last night, Jon DeRosa and I went to a book party at the New York Athletic Club for “At the Fights.” It was well attended–contributors like Robert Lipsyte, Thomas Hauser, Larry Merchant and Gay Talese were there. Joe Flaherty’s wife showed up, and so did W.C. Heinz’s daughter. Art Donovan, the football legend whose old man was a great boxing ref, was there too. George Kimball and John Schulian, pictured above, gave lovely speeches.

George talked about the relationship between boxing and writing, about how they are both difficult, solitary experiences. He said, ”Writing is hard but editing this book was a complete pleasure.” Sure, the editors had to make agonizing choices–some fine stories like Jack Murphy’s “The Mongoose,” Frank Deford’s “The Boxer and the Blonde,” and J.R. Moehringer’s “Resurrecting the Champ,” didn’t make the final cut–but still, selecting from a wealth of fantastic writing must easier than writing itself.

If you care about good writing, doesn’t matter if you are a boxing fan or not, this is a book to have.

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.

Check out this fine post by Chris Jones at his blog, “Son of Bold Venture” (named after a horse in W.C. Heinz’s classic column, “Death of a Racehorse”).

Here’s Jones:

It’s probably the hardest lesson in writing: learning when you’ve already written enough.

We’re taught to believe that words have a value, a power, a weight. Logically, then, the more words, the better the sentence or paragraph or story. But writing isn’t always a logical exercise. Sometimes—most of the time—it’s about things that are harder to measure.

My editor, Peter—he will hate that I’m about to praise him in public—is one of the best in the business. He’s particularly good at carving the little excesses from a story that might either push it into sentimentality or turn the screw a little too hard. Because I’m often writing about emotional subjects, I’m especially dependent on Peter’s eye and knife. He just seems to know when even the smallest trim will serve the story. Peter understands restraint. He knows the value and power and weight of the words that aren’t there.

The older I get, the more I am drawn to restraint in cooking, moviemaking, music, and writing. It takes courage and discipline, not to mention confidence, to show restraint, to leave things out.

I e-mailed Glenn Stout, editor of the Best American Sports Writing series, about Jones’ post. He replied via e-mail:

Well, I’ve always thought it important to note that “In the beginning was the word…” Not “In the beginning was the words…” Although I wouldn’t necessarily say that more stories are ruined by underwriting rather than overwriting, because I see a lot of work in which the writer appears to have missed an opportunity, I will say that more ambitious stories could probably use more restraint. That’s one of the reasons I think that writers of any stripe should read poetry – it not only teaches tangible things like economy, sound and rhythm, but it also teaches that the negative space in writing – what’s not there, and the heartbeat of recognition that takes place over the empty space at the end of a line or a phrase – is as important as what is on the page. The way we connect with a piece of writing is how our brain fills in the blanks.

It’s like backing away from a painting rather than standing too close.

I understand negative space when it comes to painting, like in Giorgio Morandi’s wonderful still life pictures, but have only recently come to appreciate it in writing as well. Which is not to say that I don’t enjoy expressionists, just that I am more drawn to writers like Heinz and Pat Jordan, Elmore Leonard and Pete Dexter.

My pal John Schulian also sent the following e-mail:

The interesting thing about this is that Chris Jones writes with such restraint in the first place. For him to go public with a confession that even he needs an editor to keep his prose from going over the edge is truly remarkable. And instructive. Every writer caves in to his worst instincts sooner or later. Problem is, not every writer has an editor as sharp as Jones’s Peter (I assume he means Peter Griffin, Esquire’s deputy editor). Also, not every editor is working with a writer as wonderful as Chris Jones. Not that the wonderful-ness of a writer would stop some editors from screwing up their prose. But the trims that Peter made were as artful and restrained as what Jones wrote. They eliminated the unnecessary and, just as important, preserved the rhythm of Jones’ prose. Peter heard the music and left no fingerprints, and that, perhaps, is the ultimate proof of his artistry as a line editor. No wonder Jones saluted him.

It is not easy to find a good editor. Jones has it good and seems to know it. Perhaps the most instructive book I’ve read about editing is Susan Bell’s “The Artful Edit.” It’s an essential guide for me and rests next to “The Elements of Style” on my night table. Bell uses the relationship between F. Scott Fitzgerald and his editor Maxwell Perkins throughout her text.

Dig this one example from “The Great Gatsby.” First, from a rough draft:

They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just blown in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments on the threshold, dazzled by the alabaster light, listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall.

And then revised for the the final version:

They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall.

Fitzgerald dropped “dazzled by the alabaster light…” a vivid, but ultimately, distracting flourish. Man, you’ve got to be ruthless to murder your darlings. It is nothing short of inspiring when the great talents have the conviction to do just that.

[Painting by Girogio Morandi]

This is one tune of his that I love:

And here is a 1975 newspaper article on the Boss by our pal John Schulian.

Here’s Vic Ziegel, from the introduction to his collection Sunday Punch: Raspberries, Strawberries, Steinbrenner & Tysons–a Famed Sports Columnist Takes His Best Shot at Sports’ Big Shots:

Many of the pieces contained here were written in the press boxes, very close to deadline, with the stranger next to me typing a lot quicker. When sportswriters describe other sportswriters, good is high praise, quick is the ultimate. (The two words, quikc and good, make the work sound almost lewd. Me? I never got it for free and I never will.) The deadline is the problem, the enemy. It is there, at the same time, every night. You stand still and it comes closer. You can’t fake it out because it doesn’t move. It grows shorter and towers over you. It doesn’t understand that you want a better word than fast to describe a baserunner. Very fast is very bad. Fleet is out. Swift, nimble, speedy. No, no, no. Fast is starting to look better. There’s coffee spilled on my notes, you know in your heart that the press lounge has run out of beer, and now the stranger is on the telephone telling someone named Sweetie that he’s on the way.

On those days I write in the Daily News‘ sports department, and the ax of a deadline isn’t about to drop immediately, when you might think I have words enough and time, it suddenly becomes important to play chicken with the blade. So I shmooze with the guys in the office, go downstairs for another cup of cardboard coffee, call home, anybody’s home, until I have finally arrived at the moment I dread: the sports editor standing over me and saying, “Where is it?” (This is what you answer, kids. You say five minutes. And not to worry. If you miss once, nothing happens. If you miss too many times, they make you sports editor.)

And here’s John Schulian remembering his friend.

It was Vic Ziegel who once began a story with these immortal words: “The game is never over until the last man is out, the New York Post learned late last night.” If I had a nickel for every baseball writer who has paraphrased or just plain stolen that sentence, I might be able to afford a box seat at a Yankee game.

But those 19 words, no matter how often they appeared in one form or another under someone else’s byline, would always belong to Vic. He took a cliché and, with one deft addition, told his readers that he had written about a game, not the end of the world. Better still, he was setting the stage for a story filled with fun and whimsy. It would also be wise and free of self-importance, because those were trademarks of Vic’s work, too. Most of all, though, his story was going to make people laugh.

Making people laugh was what Vic did best until he died the other day, at 72, and turned my smile, and the smiles of everybody else that knew him, upside down. At the old Dorothy Schiff Post, he tickled funny bones by writing a sports advice column he called “Dear Flabby.” When Red Smith invited him to go to the horse races in some exotic, Ali-inspired locale -– oh, did Vic love the horses -– the next thing he knew, Red had written a column featuring a character named “Bet a Million” Ziegel.

And then there was a story that never made print, the one Vic told on himself about his turn as a hockey writer. The old one had left the Post, and when the new one couldn’t start for a couple of weeks, Vic volunteered the fill in even though hockey left him cold. Somehow he survived. He was such a team guy, in fact, that he even escorted the new man to the first game he covered. Soon after the puck was dropped, the new man began waxing rhapsodic about the action in the crease.

“The crease?” Vic Ziegel, hockey expert, said. “What’s the crease?”

As the story comes back to me, I can hear him laughing. Not loudly -– there was nothing loud about him -– but with the joy he got from telling a funny story well. And if he was the punch line, so what? We’re all punch lines at one point or another in our lives.

He and I might have qualified in that regard when we wrote for P.M. papers–Vic the Post, me the Chicago Daily News–and still struggled to make our deadlines. It was funny for everybody except us and the desk men who were waiting to slap headlines on our copy as dawn came creeping. For all I know, that was how our friendship was born: We were the last two guys in the pressroom. The only thing I can tell you for sure, though, is that we met at the Muhammad Ali-Alfredo Evangelista fight outside Washington, D.C., in 1977, and we became friends, just like that.

It was one more stunning development in the year and a half or so that saw me go from cityside reporter in Baltimore to sportswriter at the Washington Post to columnist in Chicago. Here was Vic, whose work in the New York Post had been making me laugh since the first time I picked up the paper, in 1968, and he was giving me his phone number and calling me “pal” and treating me as if I belonged in the kind of company he kept in Manhattan. He had worked with Leonard Shecter, Larry Merchant, Pete Hamill, and Murray Kempton, and I’d read in the Village Voice that he hung out at the ultimate writers’ bar, the Lion’s Head. Now he was my friend — how cool was that?

There was a grace and good-heartedness about Vic that never wavered throughout the 33 years I knew him. He took me to the Lion’s Head for my first visit, and made a point of introducing me to Hamill and Joel Oppenheimer and Joe Flaherty, towering figures in the pecking order in my head.

When I was married and my wife and I visited New York, Vic and his wife, the pluperfect Roberta, hosted a brunch in our honor at their apartment, and who should show up but Wilfred Sheed, another writing hero. Vic knew the Italian restaurants I should eat at, and the movies I should see (especially if they were film noir), and the old jazz I should be aware of, by Bix Beiderbecke and Jellyroll Morton. I’m partial to country music myself, but one rainy night Vic picked me up to go to dinner and then abruptly pulled his car to a stop on a side street so I could listen to what he thought was the perfect blending of our sensibilities: Jimmie Rodgers, the Singing Brakeman, backed by Louis Armstrong. If a goy from Salt Lake City may say such a thing, he was the ultimate mensch.

There are people who knew Vic longer than I did, and there are people who knew him better, but I consider myself lucky to have spent the time I did reading him and hanging out with him. The last time was after last year’s Breeders’ Cup at Santa Anita. He stayed for a couple of days in the room where I keep my crime novels and a jukebox that I’m ashamed to say has only one jazz CD on it, Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue.” He had aged and he seemed less sure of himself physically, but if he had been diagnosed with the cancer that ultimately killed him, he never breathed a word of it. He wanted to talk, to laugh, to eat, and when I suggested that we watch The Friends of Eddie Coyle, he was up for that, too. He took the sofa, I took the easy chair, and we were both sound asleep before we got 20 minutes into the movie. It’s what old guys do. Then they say goodbye and hope they’ll see each other again.

When Vic was back in New York, he told me about the health problems that had begun to dog him, though still with no mention of cancer. But I’m not sure I ever told him about the anthology of boxing writing that George Kimball, another old friend, and I are putting together. I should have, because he’s in the book with a blissfully funny story he wrote for Inside Sports 30 years ago about the devoutly unfunny Roberto Duran. The story opens with Vic’s description of two chinchillas, Ralph and Steve, who live in a window cage in New York’s fur district. Now nobody will ever open another boxing story with chinchillas named Ralph and Steve, damn it.

[Photo Credit: NY Daily News, Corbis]

…For the Brown Bomber:

First up, a classic:

It is a sign of the times that our movie heroes no longer go traipsing off to Mexico to scratch their itch for unlikely nobility, filthy lucre, or good old-fashioned trouble. The show-me-your-papers crowd in Arizona would have us believe there are so many illegals heading north that even celluloid mercenaries looking south of the border better stay home lest they be trampled. Myself, I’d suggest that the abundance of lead being slung in Mexico’s drug wars makes telling stories about brave yanquis, especially the contemporary variety, about as plausible as having Madonna sing with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

Once, however, the land of Villa welcomed Humphrey Bogart so he could die a greed head’s death in “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” and Robert Mitchum, fresh out of a very real jail, as he tracked down a missing Army payroll in “The Big Steal.” You should know about “The Magnificent Seven,” of course, just as you should “The Wild Bunch”: two classic Westerns that sprang from the idea of American bad men finding something good inside them under Mexican skies, the former ending with a triumphant ride out of town, the latter with a fireball of dark glory. And then there is a hugely entertaining Western that is too often forgotten, “The Professionals,” which is about early 20th Century mercenaries who are crazy brave but not stupid. Four of them, to be exact: Burt Lancaster, Lee Marvin, Robert Ryan, and Woody Strode, each possessing more testosterone by himself than there is in all of Hollywood today.

Lancaster was a former circus acrobat who did his own stunts and, legend has it, could handle himself in a street fight. Marvin fought his way through World War II as a marine in the Pacific, and, with a mug like his, he must have put up his dukes a few times as a civilian, too. Ryan boxed in college (and was nothing less than splendid in the fight racket noir “The Set-Up”). Strode played football at UCLA, broke the NFL’s color line (alongside college teammate Kenny Washington), wrestled professionally, died a righteous death in “Spartacus,” and, though he was 52 when “The Professionals” was released in 1966, looked like he was made of steel cable.

You could hunt for a long time and not find a cooler cast, and I say this without having mentioned Jack Palance and Claudia Cardinale, who are in it, too. They were gathered together by Richard Brooks, one of those filmmakers whose biggest movies you may remember – “In Cold Blood,” “Elmer Gantry,” “Blackboard Jungle” -– but whose name has pretty much been washed away by time. Brooks wasn’t a powerhouse like John Huston, for whom he wrote “Key Largo,” nor was he the directing equal of a Huston or a Howard Hawks. He was a former newspaper reporter whose ideas and passions bounced all over the place, the way they must have when he worked general assignment. He found the inspiration for “The Professionals” in a Frank O’Hara novel called “A Mule for the Marquesa,” and it became one of only three Westerns on his resume. Maybe Brooks should have made more; “The Professionals” earned him Oscar nominations for best director and best adapted screenplay. But even so, every time I watch it, I come away thinking it was the cast that had all the fun.

The story they find themselves in is strictly meat and potatoes. With the fires of the Mexican Revolution reduced to dying embers, railroad baron Ralph Bellamy summons Lancaster, Marvin, Ryan and Strode to present them with a problem he expects them to solve: The bandit chieftain Jesus Raza, played by Palance, has kidnapped Bellamy’s wife, the fetching Ms. Cardinale, and he wants our heroes to rescue her. They know Palance from the old days. They’ve fought beside him but they’ll fight against him because that’s what hired guns do. And so, once the money is right — $10,000 a man upon La Cardinale’s return — they set out to do it again.

There’s no great overarching truth here that I can see, no haunting message of the kind that Sam Peckinpah used to send about time passing men by. What Brooks does is simply spin a yarn that gets off the launching pad because the railroad baron is a liar. Everything else about the movie is pure entertainment of the pre-CGI variety, starting with a dandy opening sequence in which Brooks establishes all of his heroes in less that a minute: Marvin is the weapons expert, Ryan the horseman, Strode the tracker, and Lancaster the guy who goes out the window in his long johns when he gets caught loving up another man’s wife. He’s by far the most corruptible of the bunch, but he’s also a damn good explosives man. And then there’s that killer Lancaster smile, as broad as the windshield on a Peterbilt. No way he gets left behind.

Funny thing is, even though Lancaster packs the most charisma in “The Professionals,” the best lines in Brooks’s taut, engaging script come from Marvin’s mouth. Early on, Bellamy points at a photo of him as a young man and says, “Your hair was darker then.” “My heart was lighter,” the silver-thatched Marvin replies. When our heroes realize they’ve been gamed by Bellamy, it’s Marvin who tells Lancaster, “Amigo, we’ve been had.” Later, they’ll realize that Palance and Cardinale have been playing them for suckers, too. But their reward for getting past all the treachery is the moment when Bellamy, beaten and cuckolded -– has any actor ever had more female co-stars stolen from him? -– calls them “bastards.” “Yes, sir,” Marvin says. “In my case an accident of birth. But you, sir, you’re a self-made man.”

The only one of the movie’s stars who gets short-changed is Ryan, who has little to do and hardly anything worthwhile to say. He deserved better, and got it three years later in Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch.” Marvin and Lancaster banter back and forth while hatching clever plans, and there’s a particularly evocative moment when, as they’re about to square off with a gang bandits, Marvin tells his old running mate, “Same set-up as Durango.” With a single line of dialogue, Brooks has told us volumes about them. As for Strode, he’s such a mesmerizing physical presence that he renders dialogue almost unnecessary, whether he’s scaling cliffs or shooting flaming arrows. Palance looks right, though not particularly Mexican, playing a rebel. Cardinale, an Italian import who doesn’t appear until halfway through the movie, wears a peasant blouse in the last act that is enough to make any red-blood male bug-eyed. There seems to be no way it can possibly withstand the pressure it’s under. The fact that it does may, in some quarters, be regarded as a tragedy of epic proportions. But “The Professionals” hews to the Western movie tradition of keeping females in their clothes. I love it just the same.

I love it for the swagger and certainty of its heroes, for its gunfights, train robberies, and canyon passages. I love it, too, for Maurice Jarre’s jangling score and cinematographer Conrad Hall’s shot of sweating dynamite before the explosion that Lancaster and Marvin think will set Cardinale free. There’s a well-worn feel to much of it, I’m not denying that, but to me, watching “The Professionals” is like putting on a favorite pair of Levi’s, faded, frayed and so soft and comfortable that I never want to take them off.

And yet, when people ask about my favorite Westerns, I rarely remember to include it on my long and rambling list. The obvious choices -– “The Searchers,” “The Wild Bunch,” “Unforgiven,” you know the rest — are there, and I throw in “Will Penny,” “7 Men from Now,” even “Rancho Deluxe” to make things interesting. But too often “The Professionals” doesn’t get a call unless it’s as an afterthought, and I don’t understand why. After all, it’s not just one of my favorite Westerns, it’s one of my favorite movies, period. The blank I draw seems like a variation on always hurting the one you love. For years–no, decades, because time is no longer on my side–I’ve backed and filled and called people a day later to tell them I should have mentioned “The Professionals.” But I’ve never felt I’ve properly atoned for my forgetfulness.

Until now.