Via Laughing Squid, check out these map portraits by Ed Fairburn.

Reading this news item makes me pine for the days, well before most of us were born, of John Lardner or A.J. Liebling. Man, how a story like this would make for a great column in the right person’s hands. A light touch is all that’s needed.

Over at Cinemanerdz check out this lift of 15 great neo-noir movies.

My father loved Damon Runyon’s Broadway stories so I grew up hearing phrases like “certain parties” and “more than somewhat.” I started reading Runyon when I was in high school and had a book-on-tape of Runyon’s short fiction that was read by Joe Mantenga–or was it Jerry Orbach? Either way, I enjoy the stories and every so often will pick up one of his compilations and choose a random piece just to get a taste.

Here’s the novelist William Kennedy writing about Runyon for the New York Times back in 1992:

[The] Runyon merriment was, and is, chiefly an achievement of language — the language of gamblers, hoodlums, chorus girls and cops that he acquired by listening, then infused into his stories, and is therefore credited with inventing. It is a nonesuch argot, and he uses it like no other writer who came before or after him. In the best of his short stories there is a comic fluency in this invented tongue, an originality of syntax, a fluidity of word and event that is wondrous to encounter.

…Far more serious writers than Damon Runyon have fallen on their faces and other parts because they lacked what he had: a love and mastery of language. His plots, on the other hand, were usually convoluted exercises in simple irony — O. Henry reversals, frequently predictable, sometimes zany, with resolutions, at times, sticky with treacle — and will not stand up in court.

And yet he salvaged these stories, more often than not, with his rhythmic street idioms, his indefatigable wit, and his peculiar acceptance of the paralegal rules of this world that he chronicled.

And here is Pete Hamill from the Introduction to a fine Runyon collection:

The beautiful thing about Damon Runyon is that he still speaks to us across the decades. He was born in the nineteenth century—fittingly in Manhattan, Kansas—and died in 1946 after a long struggle with cancer. In between, he wrote millions of words of journalism, some poetry, and the wonderful Broadway stories that make up part of this book.

Almost all of them are tales related by an unnamed narrator (who is surely a stand-in for Runyon), and they describe a world that vanished long ago, if indeed it ever existed at all. The world was located in about ten square blocks of midtown Manhattan during the second and third decades of the twentieth century. Usually the area is called Times Square, although Runyon, who worked for Hearst and never The New York Times, seldom uses that name. It is a world primarily inhabited by the New York children of Irish, Jewish, and Italian immigrants, although Runyon enjoys describing the collisions of his Broadway people with various outlanders: slumming members of the upper class, greenhorns from way out in America, ambitious grifters in town to make big scores. There are almost no African-Americans (and in the racist argot of the era, Runyon refers to various black porters and waiters as “stove lids”). Harlem in that era was vivid with life and ambition. Runyon, the story writer, never bothered going there, except for glancing visits on the way to and from the Polo Grounds, where a team called the Giants once played baseball, long ago.

The Runyon world appears in these stories to be a male club (one critic describes it as “homoerotic”). His gangsters, gamblers, old bootleggers, prizefighters, waiters, musicians, and newspapermen are triumphantly male. Their language has a male rhythm. So do their lives, where the macho codes often lead them to mayhem. But many of the stories feature women, and the effect they have on men. The women are often tougher than men, and certainly more realistic. Most of them accept the notion of love, but they almost never separate that dangerous and delightful emotion from the hard realities of economics. Runyon’s showgirls all seem to understand that their beauty is a transient thing, an accident of genes and luck, but that with clarity and a certain amount of guile, a doll can build a secure future upon that splendid accident. Most of Runyon’s females would have agreed with Runyon’s advice to young writers: “Get the money.”

Hamill continues:

The voice of those stories is usually the “historical present,” as in “Butch Minds the Baby”:

“One evening along about seven o’clock I am sitting in Mindy’s restaurant putting on the gefilte fish, when in comes three parties from Brooklyn wearing caps as follows: Harry the Horse, Little Isadore and Spanish John.”

The narrator is not sitting in Mindy’s while be is telling the story; this unfolding story happened in the past even though Runyon uses the present tense. But the simple device gives the stories a kind of energy that would be absent in most uses of the past tense. It looks easy, until you try to do it. The voice was above all urban, drawing on Yiddish, which in the 1920s was New York’s second language, as Spanish is today. Thus, a five-dollar bill is a “finiff” and various people are “starkers” {tough guys) or “gonophs” (thieves, cheats, pickpockets). Sometimes we can hear Runyon’s people talking above their station, playing social roles that are lies, but we certainly don’t mistake them for cbaracters out of Edith Wharton, who do the same thing.

This is, of course, a fictional world. The gangsters don’t speak the way real gangsters spoke in that era, or in ours. There is no obscenity, for example, no compounding of vile words to express contempt. And in the tales of romance there are subtle implications of sexual activity but no clinical details and no eroticism. Runyon is often accused of sentimentalizing his gangsters, and is sometimes guilty as charged. But a close reading of most of these stories shows us a clear darker side. His people often do terrible things to each other, and out of base motives.

Runyon’s influence on pop culture is undeniable, you can see his language filtered on down through Tony Soprano and his boys. And Francis Ford Coppolar, Martin Scorsese, and David Simon have all been accused of sentimentalizing their gangsters.

Anyhow, if you’ve never read Runyon, I found his Omnibus on-line, so I’m going to take the opportunity to reprint some of his work in this space. Meanwhile, over at the Internet Archive you can find some radio shows based on his stories.

For now, please enjoy…

“Romance in the Roaring Forties”:

By Damon Runyon

Only a rank sucker will think of taking two peeks at Dave the Dude’s doll, because while Dave may stand for the first peek, figuring it is a mistake, it is a sure thing he will get sored up at the second peek, and Dave the Dude is certainly not a man to have sored up at you.

But this Waldo Winchester is one hundred per cent. sucker, which is why he takes quite a number of peeks at Dave’s doll. And what is more, she takes quite a number of peeks right back at him. And there you are. When a guy and a doll get to taking peeks back and forth at each other, why, there you are indeed.

This Waldo Winchester is a nice-looking young guy who writes pieces about Broadway for the Morning Item. He writes about the goings-on in night clubs, such as fights, and one thing and another, and also about who is running around with who, including guys and dolls.

Sometimes this is very embarrassing to people who may be married and are running around with people who are not married, but of course Waldo Winchester cannot be expected to ask one and all for their marriage certificates before he writes his pieces for the paper.

The chances are if Waldo Winchester knows Miss Billy Perry is Dave the Dude’s doll, he will never take more than his first peek at her, but nobody tips him off until his second or third peek, and by this time Miss Billy Perry is taking her peeks back at him and Waldo Winchester is hooked.

In fact, he is plumb gone, and being a sucker, like I tell you, he does not care whose doll she is. Personally, I do not blame him much, for Miss Billy Perry is worth a few peeks, especially when she is out on the floor of Miss Missouri Martin’s Sixteen Hundred Club doing her tap dance. Still, I do not think the best tap-dancer that ever lives can make me take two peeks at her if I know she is Dave the Dude’s doll, for Dave somehow thinks more than somewhat of his dolls.

He especially thinks plenty of Miss Billy Perry, and sends her fur coats, and diamond rings, and one thing and another, which she sends back to him at once, because it seems she does not take presents from guys. This is considered most surprising all along Broadway, but people figure the chances are she has some other angle.

Anyway, this does not keep Dave the Dude from liking her just the same, and so she is considered his doll by one and all, and is respected accordingly until this Waldo Winchester comes along.

It happens that he comes along while Dave the Dude is off in the Modoc on a little run down to the Bahamas to get some goods for his business, such as Scotch and champagne, and by the time Dave gets back Miss Billy Perry and Waldo Winchester are at the stage where they sit in corners between her numbers and hold hands.

Of course nobody tells Dave the Dude about this, because they do not wish to get him excited. Not even Miss Missouri Martin tells him, which is most unusual because Miss Missouri Martin, who is sometimes called ‘Mizzoo’ for short, tells everything she knows as soon as she knows it, which is very often before it happens.

You see, the idea is when Dave the Dude is excited he may blow somebody’s brains out, and the chances are it will be nobody’s brains but Waldo Winchester’s, although some claim that Waldo Winchester has no brains or he will not be hanging around Dave the Dude’s doll.

I know Dave is very, very fond of Miss Billy Perry, because I hear him talk to her several times, and he is most polite to her and never gets out of line in her company by using cuss words, or anything like this. Furthermore, one night when One-eyed Solly Abrahams is a little stewed up he refers to Miss Billy Perry as a broad, meaning no harm whatever, for this is the way many of the boys speak of the dolls.

But right away Dave the Dude reaches across the table and bops One-eyed Solly right in the mouth, so everybody knows from then on that Dave thinks well of Miss Billy Perry. Of course Dave is always thinking fairly well of some doll as far as this goes, but it is seldom he gets to bopping guys in the mouth over them.

Well, one night what happens but Dave the Dude walks into the Sixteen Hundred Club, and there in the entrance, what does he see but this Waldo Winchester and Miss Billy Perry kissing each other back and forth friendly. Right away Dave reaches for the old equalizer to shoot Waldo Winchester, but it seems Dave does not happen to have the old equalizer with him, not expecting to have to shoot anybody this particular evening.

So Dave the Dude walks over and, as Waldo Winchester hears him corning and lets go his strangle-hold on Miss Billy Perry, Dave nails him with a big right hand on the chin. I will say for Dave the Dude that he is a fair puncher with his right hand, though his left is not so good, and he knocks Waldo Winchester bow-legged. In fact, Waldo folds right up on the floor.

Well, Miss Billy Perry lets out a screech you can hear clear to the Battery and runs over to where Waldo Winchester lights, and falls on top of him squalling very loud. All anybody can make out of what she says is that Dave the Dude is a big bum, although Dave is not so big, at that, and that she loves Waldo Winchester.

Dave walks over and starts to give Waldo Winchester the leather, which is considered customary in such cases, but he seems to change his mind, and instead of booting Waldo around, Dave turns and walks out of the joint looking very black and mad, and the next anybody hears of him he is over in the Chicken Club doing plenty of drinking.

This is regarded as a very bad sign indeed, because while everybody goes to the Chicken Club now and then to give Tony Berzola, the owner, a friendly play, very few people care to do any drinking there, because Tony’s liquor is not meant for anybody to drink except the customers.

Well, Miss Billy Perry gets Waldo Winchester on his pegs again, and wipes his chin off with her handkerchief, and by and by he is all okay except for a big lump on his chin. And all the time she is telling Waldo Winchester what a big bum Dave the Dude is, although afterwards Miss Missouri Martin gets hold of Miss Billy Perry and puts the blast on her plenty for chasing a two-handed spender such as Dave the Dude out of the joint.

‘You are nothing but a little sap,’ Miss Missouri Martin tells Miss Billy Perry. ‘You cannot get the right time off this newspaper guy, while everybody knows Dave the Dude is a very fast man with a dollar.’

‘But I love Mr. Winchester,’ says Miss Billy Perry. ‘He is so romantic. He is not a bootlegger and a gunman like Dave the Dude. He puts lovely pieces in the paper about me, and he is a gentleman at all times.’

Now of course Miss Missouri Martin is not in a position to argue about gentlemen, because she meets very few in the Sixteen Hundred Club and anyway, she does not wish to make Waldo Winchester mad as he is apt to turn around and put pieces in his paper that will be a knock to the joint, so she lets the matter drop.

Miss Billy Perry and Waldo Winchester go on holding hands between her numbers, and maybe kissing each other now and then, as young people are liable to do, and Dave the Dude plays the chill for the Sixteen Hundred Club and everything seems to be all right. Naturally we are all very glad there is no more trouble over the proposition, because the best Dave can get is the worst of it in a jam with a newspaper guy.

Personally, I figure Dave will soon find himself another doll and forget all about Miss Billy Perry, because now that I take another peek at her, I can see where she is just about the same as any other tap-dancer, except that she is red-headed. Tap-dancers are generally blackheads, but I do not know why.

Moosh, the doorman at the Sixteen Hundred Club, tells me Miss Missouri Martin keeps plugging for Dave the Dude with Miss Billy Perry in a quiet way, because he says he hears Miss Missouri Martin make the following crack one night to her: ‘Well, I do not see any Simple Simon on your lean and linger.’

This is Miss Missouri Martin’s way of saying she sees no diamond on Miss Billy Perry’s finger, for Miss Missouri Martin is an old experienced doll, who figures if a guy loves a doll he will prove it with diamonds. Miss Missouri Martin has many diamonds herself, though how any guy can ever get himself heated up enough about Miss Missouri Martin to give her diamonds is more than I can see.

I am not a guy who goes around much, so I do not see Dave the Dude for a couple of weeks, but late one Sunday afternoon little Johnny McGowan, who is one of Dave’s men, comes and says to me like this: ‘What do you think? Dave grabs the scribe a little while ago and is taking him out for an airing!’

Well, Johnny is so excited it is some time before I can get him cooled out enough to explain. It seems that Dave the Dude gets his biggest car out of the garage and sends his driver, Wop Joe, over to the Item office where Waldo Winchester works, with a message that Miss Billy Perry wishes to see Waldo right away at Miss Missouri Martin’s apartment on Fifty-ninth Street.

Of course this message is nothing but the phonus bolonus, but Waldo drops in for it and gets in the car. Then Wop Joe drives him up to Miss Missouri Martin’s apartment, and who gets in the car there but Dave the Dude. And away they go.

Now this is very bad news indeed, because when Dave the Dude takes a guy out for an airing the guy very often does not come back. What happens to him I never ask, because the best a guy can get by asking questions in this man’s town is a bust in the nose.

But I am much worried over this proposition, because I like Dave the Dude, and I know that taking a newspaper guy like Waldo Winchester out for an airing is apt to cause talk, especially if he does not come back. The other guys that Dave the Dude takes out for airings do not mean much in particular, but here is a guy who may produce trouble, even if he is a sucker, on account of being connected with a newspaper.

I know enough about newspapers to know that by and by the editor or somebody will be around wishing to know where Waldo Winchester’s pieces about Broadway are, and if there are no pieces from Waldo Winchester, the editor will wish to know why. Finally it will get around to where other people will wish to know, and after a while many people will be running around saying: ‘Where is Waldo Winchester?’

And if enough people in this town get to running around saying where is So-and-so, it becomes a great mystery and the newspapers bop on the cops and the cops hop on everybody, and by and by there .is so much heat in town that it is no place for a guy to be.

But what is to be done about this situation I do not know. Personally, it strikes me as very bad indeed, and while Johnny goes away to do a little telephoning, I am trying to think up some place to go where people will see me, and remember afterwards that I am there in case it is necessary for them to remember.

Finally Johnny comes back, very excited, and says: ‘Hey, the Dude is up at the Woodcock Inn on the Pelham Parkway, and he is sending out the word for one and all to come at once. Good Time Charley Bernstein just gets the wire and tells me. Something is doing. The rest of the mob are on their way, so let us be moving.’

But here is an invitation which does not strike me as a good thing at all. The way I look at it, Dave the Dude is no company for a guy like me at this time. The chances are he either does something to Waldo Winchester already, or is getting ready to do something to him which I wish no part of.

Personally, I have nothing against newspaper guys, not even the ones who write pieces about Broadway. If Dave the Dude wishes to do something to Waldo Winchester, all right, but what is the sense of bringing outsiders into it? But the next thing I know, I am in Johnny McGowan’s roadster, and he is zipping along very fast indeed, paying practically no attention to traffic lights or anything else.

As we go busting out the Concourse, I get to thinking the situation over, and I figure that Dave the Dude probably keeps thinking about Miss Billy Perry, and drinking liquor such as they sell in the Chicken Club, until finally he blows his topper. The way I look at it, only a guy who is off his nut will think of taking a newspaper guy out for an airing over a doll, when dolls are a dime a dozen in this man’s town.

Still, I remember reading in the papers about a lot of different guys who are considered very sensible until they get tangled up with a doll, and maybe loving her, and the first thing anybody knows they hop out of windows, or shoot themselves, or somebody else, and I can see where even a guy like Dave the Dude may go daffy over a doll.

I can see that little Johnny McGowan is worried, too, but he does not say much, and we pull up in front of the Woodcock Inn in no time whatever, to find a lot of other cars there ahead of us, some of which I recognize as belonging to different parties.

The Woodcock Inn is what is called a road house, and is run by Big Nig Skalsky, a very nice man indeed, and a friend of everybody’s. It stands back a piece off the Pelham Parkway and is a very pleasant place to go to, what with Nig having a good band and a floor show with a lot of fair-looking dolls, and everything else a man can wish for a good time. It gets a nice play from nice people, although Nig’s liquor is nothing extra.

Personally, I never go there much, because I do not care for road houses, but it is a great spot for Dave the Dude when he is pitching parties, or even when he is only drinking single-handed. There is a lot of racket in the joint as we drive up, and who comes out to meet us but Dave the Dude himself with a big hello. His face is very red, and he seems heated up no little, but he does not look like a guy who is meaning any harm to anybody, especially a newspaper guy.

‘Come in, guys!’ Dave the Dude yells. ‘Come right in!’

So we go in, and the place is full of people sitting at tables, or out on the floor dancing, and I see Miss Missouri Martin with all her diamonds hanging from her in different places, and Good Time Charley Bernstein, and Feet Samuels, and Tony Bertazzola, and Skeets Boliver, and Nick the Greek, and Rochester Red, and a lot of other guys and dolls from around and about.

In fact, it looks as if everybody from all the joints on Broadway are present, including Miss Billy Perry, who is all dressed up in white and is lugging a big bundle of orchids and so forth, and who is giggling and smiling and shaking hands and going on generally. And finally I see Waldo Winchester, the scribe, sitting at a ringside table all by himself, but there is nothing wrong with him as far as I can see. I mean, he seems to be all in one piece so far.

‘Dave,’ I say to Dave the Dude, very quiet, ‘what is coming off here? You know a guy cannot be too careful what he does around this town, and I will hate to see you tangled up in anything right now.’

‘Why,’ Dave says, ‘what are you talking about? Nothing is coming off here but a wedding, and it is going to be the best wedding anybody on Broadway ever sees. We are waiting for the preacher now.’

‘You mean somebody is going to be married?’ I ask, being now somewhat confused.

‘Certainly,’ Dave the Dude says. ‘What do you think? What is the idea of a wedding, anyway?’

‘Who is going to be married?’ I ask.

‘Nobody but Billy and the scribe,’ Dave says. ‘This is the greatest thing I ever do in my life. I run into Billy the other night and she is crying her eyes out because she loves this scribe and wishes to marry him, but it seems the scribe has nothing he can use for money. So I tell Billy to leave it to me, because you know I love her myself so much I wish to see her happy at all times, even if she has to marry to be that way.

‘So I frame this wedding party, and after they are married I am going to stake them to a few G’s so they can get a good running start,’ Dave says. ‘But I do not tell the scribe and I do not let Billy tell him as I wish it to be a big surprise to him. I kidnap him this afternoon and bring him out here and he is scared half to death thinking I am going to scrag him.

‘In fact,’ Dave says, ‘I never see a guy so scared. He is still so scared nothing seems to cheer him up. Go over and tell him to shake himself together, because nothing but happiness for him is coming off here.’

Well, I wish to say I am greatly relieved to think that Dave intends doing nothing worse to Waldo Winchester than getting him married up, so I go over to where Waldo is sitting. He certainly looks somewhat alarmed. He is all in a huddle with himself, and he has what you call a vacant stare in his eyes. I can see that he is indeed frightened, so I give him a jolly slap on the back and I say: ‘Congratulations, pal! Cheer up, the worst is yet to come!’

‘You bet it is,’ Waldo Winchester says, his voice so solemn I am greatly surprised.

‘You are a fine-looking bridegroom,’ I say. ‘You look as if you are at a funeral instead of a wedding. Why do you not laugh ha-ha, and maybe take a dram or two and go to cutting up some?’

‘Mister,’ says Waldo Winchester, ‘my wife is not going to care for me getting married to Miss Billy Perry.’

‘Your wife?’ I say, much astonished. ‘What is this you are speaking of? How can you have any wife except Miss Billy Perry? This is great foolishness.’

‘I know,’ Waldo says, very sad. ‘I know. But I got a wife just the same, and she is going to be very nervous when she hears about this. My wife is very strict with me. My wife does not allow me to go around marrying people. My wife is Lola Sapola, of the Rolling Sapolas, the acrobats, and I am married to her for five years. She is the strong lady who juggles the other four people in the act. My wife just gets back from a year’s tour of the Interstate time, and she is at the Marx Hotel right this minute. I am upset by this proposition.’

‘Does Miss Billy Perry know about this wife?’ I ask.

‘No,’ he says. ‘No. She thinks I am single-o.’

‘But why do you not tell Dave the Dude you are already married when he brings you out here to marry you off to Miss Billy Perry?’ I ask. ‘It seems to me a newspaper guy must know it is against the law for a guy to marry several different dolls unless he is a Turk, or some such.’

‘Well,’ Waldo says, ‘if I tell Dave the Dude I am married after taking his doll away from him, I am quite sure Dave will be very much excited, and maybe do something harmful to my health.’

Now there is much in what the guy says, to be sure. I am inclined to think, myself, that Dave will be somewhat disturbed when he learns of this situation, especially when Miss Billy Perry starts in being unhappy about it. But what is to be done I do not know, except maybe to let the wedding go on, and then when Waldo is out of reach of Dave, to put in a claim that he is insane, and that the marriage does not count. It is a sure thing I do not wish to be around when Dave the Dude hears Waldo is already married.

I am thinking that maybe I better take it on the lam out of here, when there is a great row at the door and I hear Dave the Dude yelling that the preacher arrives. He is a very nice-looking preacher, at that, though he seems somewhat surprised by the goings-on, especially when Miss Missouri Martin steps up and takes charge of him. Miss Missouri Martin tells him she is fond of preachers, and is quite used to them, because she is twice married by preachers, and twice by justices of the peace, and once by a ship’s captain at sea.

By this time one and all present, except maybe myself and Waldo Winchester, and the preacher and maybe Miss Billy Perry, are somewhat corned. Waldo is still sitting at his table looking very sad and saying ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ to Miss Billy Perry whenever she skips past him, for Miss Billy Perry is too much pleasured up with happiness to stay long in one spot.

Dave the Dude is more corned than anybody else, because he has two or three days’ running start on everybody. And when Dave the Dude is corned I wish to say that he is a very unreliable guy as to temper, and he is apt to explode right in your face any minute. But he seems to be getting a great bang out of the doings.

Well, by and by Nig Skolsky has the dance floor cleared, and then he moves out on the floor a sort of arch of very beautiful flowers. The idea seems to be that Miss Billy Perry and Waldo Winchester are to be married under this arch. I can see that Dave the Dude must put in several days planning this whole proposition, and it must cost him plenty of the old do-re-mi, especially as I see him showing Miss Missouri Martin a diamond ring as big as a cough drop.

‘It is for the bride,’ Dave the Dude says. ‘The poor loogan she is marrying will never have enough dough to buy her such a rock, and she always wishes a big one. I get it off a guy who brings it in from Los Angeles. I am going to give the bride away myself in person, so how do I act, Mizzoo? I want Billy to have everything according to the book.’

Well, while Miss Missouri Martin is trying to remember back to one of her weddings to tell him, I take another peek at Waldo Winchester to see how he is making out. I once see two guys go to the old warm squativoo up in Sing Sing, and I wish to say both are laughing heartily compared to Waldo Winchester at this moment.

Miss Billy Perry is sitting with him and the orchestra leader is calling his men dirty names because none of them can think of how ‘Oh, Promise Me’ goes, when Dave the Dude yells: ‘Well, we are all set! Let the happy couple step forward!’

Miss Billy Perry bounces up and grabs Waldo Winchester by the arm and pulls him up out of his chair. After a peek at his face I am willing to lay 6 to 5 he does not make the arch. But he finally gets there with everybody laughing and clapping their hands, and the preacher comes forward, and Dave the Dude looks happier than I ever see him look before in his life as they all get together under the arch of flowers.

Well, all of a sudden there is a terrible racket at the front door of the Woodcock Inn, with some doll doing a lot of hollering in a deep voice that sounds like a man’s, and naturally everybody turns and looks that way. The doorman, a guy by the name of Slugsy Sachs, who is a very hard man indeed, seems to be trying to keep somebody out, but pretty soon there is a heavy bump and Slugsy Sachs falls down, and in comes a doll about four feet high and five feet wide.

In fact, I never see such a wide doll. She looks all hammered down. Her face is almost as wide as her shoulders, and makes me think of a great big full moon. She comes in bounding-like, and I can see that she is all churned up about something. As she bounces in, I hear a gurgle, and I look around to see Waldo Winchester slumping down to the floor, almost dragging Miss Billy Perry with him.

Well, the wide doll walks right up to the bunch under the arch and says in a large bass voice: ‘Which one is Dave the Dude?’

I am Dave the Dude,’ says Dave the Dude, stepping up. ‘What do you mean by busting in here like a walrus and gumming up our wedding?’

‘So you are the guy who kidnaps my ever-loving husband to marry him off to this little red-headed pancake here, are you?’ the wide doll says, looking at Dave the Dude, but pointing at Miss Billy Perry.

Well now, calling Miss Billy Perry a pancake to Dave the Dude is a very serious proposition, and Dave the Dude gets very angry. He is usually rather polite to dolls, but you can see he does not care for the wide doll’s manner whatever.

‘Say, listen here,’ Dave the Dude says, ‘you better take a walk before somebody clips you. You must be drunk,’ he says. ‘Or daffy,’ he says. ‘What are you talking about, anyway?’

‘You will see what I am talking about,’ the wide doll yells. ‘The guy on the floor there is my lawful husband. You probably frighten him to death, the poor dear. You kidnap him to marry this red-headed thing, and I am going to get you arrested as sure as my name is Lola Sapola, you simple-looking tramp!’

Naturally, everybody is greatly horrified at a doll using such language to Dave the Dude, because Dave is known to shoot guys for much less, but instead of doing something to the wide doll at once, Dave says: ‘What is this talk I hear? Who is married to who? Get out of here!’ Dave says, grabbing the wide doll’s arm.

Well, she makes out as if she is going to slap Dave in the face with her left hand, and Dave naturally pulls his kisser out of the way. But instead of doing anything with her left, Lola Sapola suddenly drives her right fist smack-dab into Dave the Dude’s stomach, which naturally comes forward as his face goes back.

I wish to say I see many a body punch delivered in my life, but I never see a prettier one than this. What is more, Lola Sapola steps in with the punch, so there is plenty on it.

Now a guy who eats and drinks like Dave the Dude does cannot take them so good in the stomach, so Dave goes ‘oaf,’ and sits down very hard on the dance floor, and as he is sitting there he is fumbling in his pants pocket for the old equalizer, so everybody around tears for cover except Lola Sapola, and Miss Billy Perry, and Waldo Winchester.

But before he can get his pistol out, Lola Sapola reaches down and grabs Dave by the collar and hoists him to his feet. She lets go her hold on him, leaving Dave standing on his pins, but teetering around somewhat, and then she drives her right hand to Dave’s stomach a second time.

The punch drops Dave again, and Lola steps up to him as if she is going to give him the foot. But she only gathers up Waldo Winchester from off the floor and slings him across her shoulder like he is a sack of oats, and starts for the door. Dave the Dude sits up on the floor again and by this time he has the old equalizer in his duke.

‘Only for me being a gentleman I will fill you full of slugs,’ he yells.

Lola Sapola never even looks back, because by this time she is petting Waldo Winchester’s head and calling him loving names and saying what a shame it is for bad characters like Dave the Dude to be abusing her precious one. It all sounds to me as if Lola Sapola thinks well of Waldo Winchester.

Well, after she gets out of sight, Dave the Dude gets up off the floor and stands there looking at Miss Billy Perry, who is out to break all crying records. The rest of us come out from under cover, including the preacher, and we are wondering how mad Dave the Dude is going to be about the wedding being ruined. But Dave the Dude seems only disappointed and sad.

‘Billy,’ he says to Miss Billy Perry, ‘I am mighty sorry you do not get your wedding. All I wish for is your happiness, but I do not believe you can ever be happy with this scribe if he also has to have his lion tamer around. As Cupid I am a total bust. This is the only nice thing I ever try to do in my whole life, and it is too bad it does not come off. Maybe if you wait until we can drown her, or something–‘

‘Dave,’ says Miss Billy Perry, dropping so many tears that she seems to finally wash herself right into Dave the Dude’s arms, ‘I will never, never be happy with such a guy as Waldo Winchester. I can see now you are the only man for me.’

‘Well, well, well,’ Dave the Dude says, cheering right up. ‘Where is the preacher? Bring on the preacher and let us have our wedding anyway.’

I see Mr. and Mrs. Dave the Dude the other day, and they seem very happy. But you never can tell about married people, so of course I am never going to let on to Dave the Dude that I am the one who telephones Lola Sapola at the Marx Hotel, because maybe I do not do Dave any too much of a favour, at that.

 

Gather close, listen carefully…Ken Dawidoff breaks the news.

[Drawing by Craig Robinson]

Peter Richmond is one of the finest takeout writers of the past thirty years. According to his website:

Peter Richmond attended Yale University, where he studied under the late, great John Hersey and the very alive, great David Milch. Somewhere in there he also attended auto mechanics school, from which he never graduated, but which led to his eventual purchase of a ‘77 Eldorado which is currently his family’s most mechanically reliable vehicle. He was awarded a Nieman Fellowship in Journalism at Harvard, where he studied art, architecture, paleontology, playwriting and humility.

His stories have been anthologized in 13 books, including “Best American Sportswriting of the Twentieth Century,” and four appearances in “Best Sportswriting of the Year” anthologies. (And, yes, he had the title essay in Riverhead Press’ “I Married My Mother-in-Law.”) He is the co-host, with author David Kamp, of a public radio show about his tragic attachment to the New York Giants called “Tangled Up in Blue,” which airs weekly on NPR’s smallest affiliate, WHDD-FM.

…His work has appeared in several periodicals, including Grantland.com, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Parade, GQ, Details, Architecture, Parade, Golf Digest, Travel + Leisure Golf and TV Guide, as well as two amazing magazines which, sadly, no longer exist: Play and New England Monthly.

He forgot The National where, along with Charlie Pierce, Johnette Howard, and Ian Thomsen, he made “The Main Event” a must-read.

Please enjoy this story, originally published in The National, and reprinted here with the author’s permission.

“Jimmy The Greek”

By Peter Richmond

His words break the silence of a breakfast conversation that has wound down to nothing. They are as soft and insubstantial as rust flaking away, so soft that at first you think you might have heard him wrong, except that his eyes are focused on something that isn’t there, and the flesh of his face has gone completely slack, and part of a bagel sits forgotten halfway to his mouth, and there really couldn’t have been any mistaking them at all.

“I’m dead.”

He doesn’t mean he’s dead tired. He doesn’t mean he’s dead because he’s in trouble. He doesn’t mean he’s literally dead; in fact, after spending nine months in and out of Miami Heart Institute, with the bad heart and the chicken pox and shingles and diabetes, he’s looking much, much better than last year, if dangerously overweight, certainly younger than 71.

He means he’s dead as in without life. He’s says “I’m dead” because no other word wraps as neatly around the emotion that dominates his life. Because when CBS took away his job two years and four months ago with a one-paragraph release that called him “reprehensible”—to be precise, it was his remarks they called reprehensible, not him, but that distinction blurred long ago within Jimmy Snyder’s mind—they apparently carved his guts right out, which have since been replaced completely by the singular obsession that he was wronged. And instead of diminishing, that sense of injustice has festered, until all that seems left of Jimmy Snyder is the core of anger and bewilderment.

“I still don’t know what I did,” he says, but there’s no outrage to the words, no heart to them, no Greek to them. The Greek would have bellowed those words. Not whispered them into a bowl of granola.

Andy Rooney, the apparent philosopher, no simple setter of odds, may or may not have said that blacks watered down their genes, but he definitely did say that “homosexual unions” were a cause of “premature death.” He didn’t say this in a spontaneous interview in a restaurant, but in a prerecorded network television show. Then, in a draft of a letter to a magazine, Rooney said that he considered sex between men “repugnant.” For this, Rooney was given a three-month suspension. Within days his producer, Don Hewitt, said, “I spend 90% of my waking hours trying to get Andy Rooney back.” And 22 days after the suspension was announced, Rooney was indeed back.

Jimmy the Greek said some strange and unconscionable things about black athlete, which he insists reflected his admiration for them, although it didn’t come out that way, and now he’s dead. His own boss, Brent Musburger, within days of The Greek’s indiscretions, excised Snyder’s name from history the way Winston Smith used to eviscerate history for a living in Orwell’s 1984. Today no one at CBS is losing any sleep over the return of Jimmy Snyder. In fact, except for a director who has since quit the “NFL Today,” no one from CBS has even given him a phone call since they pulled the trap door.

Maybe no one really thought he’d take it this hard. Maybe that’s why Brent and Ted Shaker and the rest of the crew haven’t bothered to drop so much as a postcard in the mail. Maybe they all said to each other, “Forget it, guys, it’s just The Greek.” As if for The Greek all the rules were different. As if maybe he wasn’t the guy Musburger’s kids once loved, or the guy Shaker once thanked for having paid for the new extension on his house because the ratings of the show he was producing had grown so high.

Maybe they all thought that if anyone was a survivor, The Greek was, and that losing the “NFL Today” gig was no different than losing his right to vote when the feds convicted him of interstate gambling in 1962. But it was different. It was everything.

The truth is, The Greek had spent the first 50 years of his life in one world and then vaulted, to his surprise, into another, and he wanted, desperately, to finish his life in that second world. The first was a fringe kind of world where a man might be a “felon or might not be, where money might flow unnaturally swiftly from sources best left unseen, where distinctions between good and bad were as vague as the distinction between night and day in a town where the neon glowed 24 hours. The second was the network TV world, a place where the morals are similar but the trappings arc not.

And while it may have never seemed to the people who watched him on Sunday afternoons that it mattered to The Greek that he was on a sound stage instead of at a betting window, it mattered more than you can imagine. A man who’d once been surrounded by federal marshals loosed by Bobby Kennedy had suddenly found himself surrounded by makeup artists and the high-priced talking-head spread of Brent and Phyllis and Irv, and it felt not only good, but legitimate.

So when they yanked it out from under him, the way The Greek sees it, they might as well have yanked out the stool from beneath the feet of a man with a noose around his neck. And here he is, living in an overstuffed luxury hotel on Miami Beach where the other guests glance at him in sidelong fashion as he fills the corner table alone.

“I got to start doin’ something,” he says. “I wake up some mornin’s and you say, ‘Jesus Christ! You’re not doin’ nothin’!’ And you get a little lonesome. And disgusted. With everything. It gets a little lonesome. No one comes around. No one calls.”

And here it is again:

“I’m dead.”

Iit’s not true. A few days later, he is besieged by autograph-seekers and the rest of the bit players who make up the supporting cast of his life at the race track. As he peels hundred~dollar bills with his left hand from the baseball-sized clot of bills in his right, Jimmy the Greek is wildly alive. And if it’s only alive the way a character on stage for the 2000th production of a fraying Broadway play is alive, it nonetheless breathes and moves and barks and snarls, which beats the hell out of being dead.

So there he sits, in his customary chair near the $50 window in the clubhouse at Gulfstream, still too weak from the three months in a hospital bed to jump to his feet and run to the window when the odds suddenly get good. So he throws fifties and hundreds at the half-dozen men with the oddest of morphs who circle him like distant planets all day without ever leaving the orbit.

“Jeff!” he’ll yell, or Mike, or someone else, and Jeff will skip over and take the hundred and head for the window while The Greek says, “Get the one-four and the four-one for 50 each.”

Sometimes the one-four hits. Sometimes not. He’s down a couple thousand after the sixth race. After the seventh he’s up a couple thousand, after picking the winning horses in the fifth, sixth and seventh, the Big Three, for $3,500. One of his pals cashed his ticket, and he had to be careful on the walk back across the floor lest the bills all spring out of his hand, they’re so thickly stacked. In this he is still The Greek. When the five horse runs in and The Greek shouts in glee, other horseplayers smile and say, “Way to go, Greek,” mostly because they’re so glad to see him looking half-alive again.

But even afloat on a seas of green, The Greek’s mind is elsewhere. He’s motioned to a tall blond kid to come over for a second.

“You play basketball?” The Greek says, and the kid nods. The kid’s built like a lamppost. The kid is a friend of one of The Greek’s track friends. The kid has wandered over because The Greek is a friend and The Greek is all right.

“C’mere,” says the Greek, and the kid steps up close to the Greek’s chair.

The kid walks over. The Greek reaches out and lays his incongruously lean and fragile fingers—they should be sausages with a body like his, but they’re more like angel-hair pasta—on the kid’s calf. In the adjacent chairs, The Greek’s track friends lean in to listen, as do some other people he doesn’t know.

“See how he’s built?” says The Greek as he describes the contours of the kid’s leg with his left hand. “See how his calf is like this, then it leads up to his thigh, and there’s hardly any difference in the size? The thigh’s hardly any bigger’n his calf?”

His friends nod, and the kid is looking down at The Greek’s hand with remarkable detachment considering the circumstances.

“Now the blacks, the thigh would go out like this, and that’s where they get their spring,” says the Greek.

“But you can’t say that,” the kid says.

“Can’t say what?” The Greek asks, pleading.

“‘Black,'” the kid says. “You can’t say ‘black.'”

The friends all nod, and their heads go up and down like pistons. “Work for CBS, tell the truth, get fired,” says one of them.

“We have a coach, he was a scoring champion in his conference,” says the kid, adding, “and his thighs are, like, out to here.”

“That’s all I said!” says The Greek, spreading his hands. “That’s all I said!”

NOT ENTIRELY. What he said during lunch at Duke Zeibart’s on the Friday of Martin Luther King Day in 1988, was, essentially, three things. The first was, “If they over coaching, like everybody wants them to, there’s not going to be anything left for white people.” This one packed the most immediate impact. Snyder insisted afterward it was just a bad joke, and a compliment to blacks, too. They’ve taken over all of sport because of their drive and their desire. They want it so badlv they’ve pushed the whites right out. (Look, he said, if anyone should have been mad, it was whites. He said whites were lazy. No whites got angry at what Jimmy said.)

Then he said, “There’s 10 people on a basketball court. If you find two whites you’re lucky.” The last word was the killer. Otherwise, it’s no different from the famous tabloid basketball columnist saying, a few years ago, “The blackest thing about the Celtics is their sneakers” in reverse. But he never should have said “lucky.” He might have been using it In nothing but a careless sense. but can’t be careless with live ammunition. More than anything, this was the statement that was indefensible.

Finally, he said, “[Black superiority] goes all the way back to the Civil War, when during the slave trading the owners would breed his big black with his big woman so he could have a big black kid.”

This is the one that stuck.

At any rate, within hours, Musburger and Shaker had viewed the tapes and talked to the CBS brain trust, most of whom happened to be in Hawaii. Later than night CBS issues a statement saying it found his remarks to be “reprehensible.” No one actually said he was fired. But when Sunday showed up, he’d been deleted.

“You know, on Friday afternoon, our former colleague Jimmy the Greek, made some regrettable and offensive remarks for which he has apologized,” Musburger said the way he might have recited the Seahawks’ injury list. “Yesterday, CBS issued a statement disassociating itself from those remarks. It goes without saying that his comments do not in any way reflect the thinking or attitude of the rest of us here at CBS Sports. While we deplore the incident, we are saddened that our 12-year association with Jimmy had to end this way. And the “NFL Today” will continue from RFK Stadium in Washington in just a moment.”

And that was the sum total on CBS of discussion about the several issue The Greek had raised. Elsewhere, reaction was mixed, and Snyder had his defenders.

“Much of what he said seemed unexceptional to most whites and a good many blacks as well.” wrote Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen. “Blacks are more athletically gifted than whites. He spoke of racial differences. That is a taboo. Never mind that there are such things.”

“He’s right.” Jim Rice said a few weeks later, in the weight room off the Red Sox locker room at Fenway Park, during an interview for a Miami Herald series that had been prompted by The Greek’s firing. “It’s just a gift. Raw talent.” And a few days after that, at Yankee Stadium, Jesse Barfieid nodded: “Leaping, running—physiologically, we have an advantage.”

Recently, Synder’s former colleague, Jayne Kennedy-Overton, said, “If he was telling the truth, why blame Jimmy? Why not blame the people who made the history he spoke of?”

 

AFTER THE eighth race, he was up several thousand. He’d taken the 10 horse across the board for $400, and it won at 6-1. After the ninth, he was up another couple thousand with the two horse. He now had a bundle of hundred-dollar bills the size of Zeus’s fist in his right-hand pants pocket, all earned in a dizzying 90-minute span that left your mouth dry and your hands shaking just to he next to him. He has not mentioned the money on the drive back to Miami Beach.

“Brent panicked,” he says. “If he’d opened up his mouth that day for me. he could have saved my job. But he didn’t. Or if he did, it wasn’t to say anythin’ good. If only [Howardj Stringer had been there, he’d have looked at the tapes, and sat everyone down, and they coulda suspended me for that last game, and that would have been enough. But the big guys were in Hawaii, and Brent and Shaker were the only ones talkin’ to ’em. Nobody stood up for me. When you got the No. 1 producer and Brent against you nobody’s going to go against them. Who’s gonna say somethin’? Irv? The only guy who could have said somethin’ was Madden, but he was at a meeting of some sort and said it was all over by the time he got there: Summerall said somethin’ good in my behalf.

“Aw,” he says, “don’t let me start this.”

It’s absolutely huge, Jimmy’s car, as wide as a whole lane. It has a blue leather interior and the dashboard looks wooden, but it’s really only wood-pattern contact paper. On the glove compartment the pattern has all peeled away, leaving a bare metal panel. The inside of the passenger door is pocked with gray spots from the ash of his cigar, like a wall that’s been riddled with bullets.

Gliding the Cadillac to the hotel curb is like trying to dock a tugboat. It’s a car that has somehow survived beyond its age and now it is unwieldy and impractical. In these respects, it’s a lot like Jimmy. He has not gone into the new age gracefully. Watch him yelp at the pretty women—”Hey! Are you married?”—with that old man’s license to leer. He struts through his hotel, this outsized guy all in white and gold with his cane with the heavy steel knob as a handle, this purely exotic figure from some Graham Greene novel, part Sidney Greenstreet, talking too loudly, flashing that wad of hundreds. He doesn’t seem to realize that we’re in the mall age now, where the people we admire don’t come outsized any more They come in a garb of discreet homogeny. They come smooth. They come so they fit into a preconceived notion of special.

He’s not alone in this stumble into the late 20th century. Surely some of Rooney’s indiscretion can be chalked up to his inability—voluntary or otherwise—to evolve with the flow of time.

Most of us adapt. Some adapt by shedding ignorance. Others adapt by burying it. Only The Greek knows which camp he’s in. No one who’s ever spent any time at all with The Greek thinks he’s racist—”No black ever got mad at me,” he says. “The blacks all loved me”—but it doesn’t matter anymore.

Now he’s winking at the little girl in the scotch-plaid dress in the lobby. He is mugging. His face is all rubbery. She is fascinated. Her mother is leery. He loves kids. He’ll drop anything—anything—to wink a kid. How could he not? He lost two to cystic fibrosis, and he was never one himself, not after his mother was shot to death by his aunt’s estranged husband when Jimmy was 9. So he pats them and reaches out to them and laughs at them and mugs for them, and the kids love it, but the mothers wonder what in the hell this old guy is up to. And, of course, the mothers don’t know who The Greek is. The mothers only know who Bryant Gumbel and Willard Scott are.

“Without even saying goodbye. After 13 years. You think that’s fair? You think that’s fair?”

In the morning he’ll try to walk a mile on the beach, but it takes an hour. He’d rather linger over breakfast for a couple of hours until it’s time to go to the track, although these breakfasts can daunt an ego, because in the restaurant there are often several young families with children who won’t be all that amused by the man in the gold chains who frequently commandeers the telephone in the middle of the dining room and starts swearing at his stockbroker.

“I got some money in an Austrian money fund. and it was doing really good until this morning Gorbachev said somethin’ and it’s going straight down,” he says, returning to the table after one rant. “The market’s all I got. It’s the only excitement I have out of life. I win or lose 10 or 20 (thousand} a day. That’s all I got.”

He is spending a lot of time in Miami Beach. His wife, Joan, is in the house in North Carolina. “We don’t want to talk about that,” he says. Then he grows disgusted with himself: “Oh, listen, you take the good with the bad, what else you gonna do.”

Wilburn, the waiter, refills his cup. Wilburn is from Jamaica. Wilburn knows what Jimmy wants to eat before Jimmy can tell him. Jimmy regularly summons Wilburn by saying, “Get your black ass over here.” He loves to say things like, “I’m gonna get your black ass fired,” and Wilburn laughs.

Jimmy speaks like this loudly enough for the people in the restaurant to turn around and some of them smile. He does this because he wants the world to know that that is the Steubenville way he speaks, and that is the way he was speaking on Martin Luther King Day, casually, and not from prejudice. He will not allow the perception to endure. He simply will not. He Is adament.

That is the most important thing now. Not the firing. The firing, he concedes, was inevitable.

“It had gotten to the point where I kept fighting’ over the show with Shaker almost every Sunday by the end,” he days. “The last year they a;most cut me off completely. Shaker kept wantin’ to know what I was going to say beforehand. But I never knew. Which is what made it a great show. Tell him first? I’m sitting there with 100 things to say and I never knew what I was going to say. That’s what was so great about it. Everything was spontaneous.

“But I overcome that. I overcome so much. I overcome hittin’ Brent. I overcome a situation where I went to a racetrack and asked someone for figures and they were trying to grab the guy. Turned out he was a bookmaker. I overcome that. I went to Denver on a speaking engagement and said something about rednecks. Overcome that. I told Phyllis I hated her friggin’ husband, right on the air. Overcome that. I overcome everything. Then all of a sudden the thing I was paid to do I was fired for.”

Now there’s passion. The Greek has turned his chair to face his companion head on, and he’s squinting. Suddenly, it’s The Greek’s voice, all blustery and rough.

“Listen. I was the only person who never went with one camp or the other. l never cared about personalities. All I ever cared about was the good of the show. Ask anybody. I didn’t have grudges. I didn’t have vendettas. The show was everything to me. I thought this was supposedly going to be my life. “NFL Today” was … I mean I had a good PR firm, but little by little I gave everything up because of a show, then all of a sudden I woke up one day and I didn’t have it. All of a sudden I was the sonofabitch who said blacks were better athletes.”

Three men have dropped by the table. They have tans like they watched a nuclear test in person. They are on their way hack to the marina to sell more boats at the boat show, for $375,000 each.

“You got screwed, Greek,” says one, and the other two nod. After they leave, The Greek’s smiling.

“Next to survival, what’s the most important thing?” he says after they’ve gone. “Recognition.”

More important than health? Family?

Silence.

“Those are both part of survival,” he says.

Silence.

“I had a son and I lost him,” he says. Quietly. “So brilliant. He was a mathematic marvel. Professors from all over the United States—Michigan, Indiana—used to send him problems when he was a student at UNLV. He’d sit there for hours. Finally he’d look at me and say, ‘I got it Dad.” Once when a teacher went on vacation they let him teach the class. That’s how good he was. The teacher said, ‘The guy can spot me the deuce and still beat me at mathematics.'”

Silence.

“Oh, well”—these words like marbles dropping off the edge of a kitchen table.

Silence.

“He was somethin’. Tried so hard to live. He was 26. He was supposed to be dead at 2.”

Silence.

“Look,” Jimmy says. “I’ll survive. I’ll get a show. I’ll have a 900 number by the fall.”

Silence.

“Why’d they have to do it the way they did it? I begged them to not use reprehensible. It was just a word that wasn’t needed. “Take that word out,” I said. They wouldn’t. I said, “I can’t overcome that.”

How much is Russell Martin worth?

[Photo Credit: Thomas A. Ferrara]

Please go to this blog: James and Karla Murray Photography. And buy their book. Inspiration.

Marvin Miller, one of the most important figures in 20th century American sports, has died. He was 95.

I had the opportunity to speak to Miller more than a dozen times when I was writing a book about Curt Flood and a few years later I visited his apartment to talk about the possibility of making a documentary about his life. He was gracious, bright, and funny.

I will compile all of the tributes to Miller later today or tomorrow so that you can get a full appreciation of the man and his lasting professional accomplishments.

Meanwhile, here is a Q&A I did with him talking about Flood for the Banter back in 2003.

Here’s a Yankee site that you must check out, bookmark, and make part of your regular Yankee reading: 161st and River (not to be confused with the stellar River Ave. Blues–and speaking of RAB, they have word today that the Yankees have reportedly resigned Ichiro and are close to a deal with Andy Pettitte).

As for 161st and River,  dig these recent posts: ALCS Programs; Whirled Serious Programs; SI Covers.

Over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Greil Marcus chats with David Thomson.

[Photo By Sander Meisner via Je Suis Perdu]

His was an all-too short career, much of it spent writing about his favorite blood sports, boxing and politics, but it’s most remarkable aspect may have been the improbable sequence of events at its fairytale inception. At age thirty, Joe Flaherty (c. 1936-1983) was still a laborer on the New York waterfront whose unpaid (and often un-bylined) stories occasionally appeared in his Brooklyn community weekly. When the weekly deemed his account of a rowdy police gathering too hot to handle, a friend surreptitiously sent it to The Village Voice. Impressed, the Voice’s editors hired Flaherty to write a follow-up story, an assignment that ended when the fledgling reporter came to blows with one of his subjects. Flaherty’s next piece incensed Pete Hamill, largely because it painted an unflattering picture of a middleweight named Joe Shaw, in whom Hamill, Norman Mailer, and George Plimpton had acquired an interest. The New York Times Magazine then asked Flaherty to write an expanded follow-up about the feuding Brooklynites, thus launching a career that would produce bylines in magazines from the Saturday Review to Playboy, the journalism collected in Chez Joey (1974), the novels Fogarty & Co. (1973) and Tin Wife (1983), and Managing Mailer (1970), an account of his experience as campaign manager for Norman Mailer’s 1969 mayoral run. As Flaherty put it: “A lesson for young journalists: in your early rounds forget the body and go for the head.”

—George Kimball and John Schulian on Flaherty in At the Fights (now out in paperback).

Here’s another good one: Joe Flaherty on Jake LaMotta. This piece originally appeared in the January 1981 issue of Inside Sports. It is reprinted here with permission of Jeanine Flaherty.

“Sympathy For The Devil”

By Joe Flaherty

All lives are failures in some degree or another. Somewhere along the line we fudge the pristine youthful dream. Even when we achieve, the compromises we’ve made, the injuries we’ve inflicted sully the prize. But most of us can live with this, since we deal in minor declinations of the soul.

Not so with Jake LaMotta. LaMotta’s fortunes and misfortunes have been so cosmic they could be considered godlike if it weren’t for the sacrilege implied. The ruin he has heaped on himself, and on many of those who’ve come in contact with him, seems pagan. Those who lament LaMotta would have you believe Attila the Hun would have to move up in class to get it on with Jake.

When you go in search of the good word on LaMotta, no soft, illuminating adjective is forthcoming. Since most of the naysayers are from within boxing, the word is even more damning. The ringed world is awash with evocations of loving motherhood, guiding priests and golden-hearted gladiators. Cauliflower corn pone bows only to the jab as the basic element of boxing.

But when the talk turns to LaMotta’s character (his boxing ferocity is always lauded), the usual benediction of hot water turns to spit. The only bow to grace is that no one wants his quotes attributed, though this “nicety” could be interpreted as fear of retribution, since no one believes the 58- year-old LaMotta has mended his savage ways.

Thus, one of the game’s gentlest promoters calls LaMotta “a reprehensible, obnoxious, despicable sonnuvabitch,” and then apologizes that he has characterized a human being in such a fashion.

To be sure, it’s a tough assessment, but even LaMotta wouldn’t deny he worked like a bull to earn his unsavory rep. Born on the tough Lower East Side of New York, he and his family moved to the Bronx when he was a boy. In that borough of hills (peaks and valleys in psychological jargon), LaMotta’s cyclonic emotions got untracked. Young Jake wasn’t one of those angels with dirty faces, a wayward street urchin with tousled hair who pinched apples from outside, the grocery store and puckishly threw rocks at schoolhouse windows. Jake’s mayhem was main arena, armed robbery, assault, rape.

As a teenager he pummeled the head of the local bookie (whom he liked!) in a robbery attempt and left the man for dead with a crushed skull. Subsequently, the papers falsely reported the bookie’s death and LaMotta did not learn until years later, after he won the middleweight championship, that the bookie, following a hospital stay, had moved to Florida to recuperate. In fairness, LaMotta had ongoing pangs of conscience about “the murder,” but the primal concern of the heart was how best to beat the rap, not the devil.

The horror his early violence wreaked also didn’t stop him, in later years, from battering various wives for “love” and numerous opponents for loot. LaMotta’s Life has been so unappetizingly gamy, so foully unpalatable, it bends the conventional limits of social understanding, as graphically documented in the film of his life, Raging Bull.

Even those who shared the same mean streets can find no sympathy. An Irish trainer from the same boyhood Bronx said, “Look, he just went too far. I grew up there, too. We always hustled a fast buck, put out other guys’ lights in fistfights, and even brawled with cops. Hell, the Irish are great cop-fighters. But we stopped short of some things, the animal stuff. Beating people’s head in with weapons and wife-beating, Christ, that’s as low as you can get.

“Ask anyone. That bastard didn’t even know how to say hello. But don’t take my word for it. The Micks are notorious. for not having a good word for Wops. Go ask his own kind. His own kind hate him because he was a squealer. He even screwed them. You go ask the italians what they think. When your own kind hate you, that tells you something.

Indeed, the “wise guys,” the sharp money guys who always have leeched on the tit of boxing, long ago wrote off LaMotta for his testimony before the Kefauver Committee that he went into the water for the mob when he fought Billy Fox in Madison Square Garden in 1947. But even before that, !he wasn’t acceptable. Hustlers who live off “the edge” dislike dealing with a “crazy” man.

EVEN ITALIAN-AMERICAN  director Martin Scorsese, while creating a technically beautiful film and coaxing marvelous ensemble acting from his cast, was in the moral quandary about what to make of LaMotta the man. If the film had to stand on redeeming social qualities, Raging Bull would have been castrated by the censors. Scorsese, like so my who have faced LaMotta, was overwhelmed with the brutishness of the life and in the end, using Robert DeNiro’s great talents, settled for an exposition of poetic rage. The violence is softened by slow motion and an operatic score. This creates the illusion that one is dealing with a demon.

But the frightening things about LaMotta is that he is very real, and removing him from our orbit with technical skill and art is cleverly slipping the punch. The only way to explore LaMotta’s life is to delve into the festering place in his heart of darkness.

The LaMotta you meet today hardly qualifies for a portrait in ferocity. If it weren’t for his classically failed soufflé of a face and the thickness of his articulate speech, you wouldn’t suspect he had made his living at demolition. His weight is back to the 160-pound middleweight limit, and his manager is deferential. His hands belie their destructive force in that they are small, slim and tapered.

“I should have been an artist, or a fag,” he jokes. But the jibe has insight. They look like the hands of someone who would beat helplessly on the chest of a bully.

ONLY THE eyes give a clue to his former life. They are so sad and placid, they almost look burned out. Twin novas which which didn’t survive the Big Bang, memos to some terrible past.

So you’re not surprised when he responds to a question about his current life, “I’m a recluse. I stay at home and read, play cards, and watch television. And I love to cook. I’m a gourmet cook. It’s a knack.”

His oldest son Jack Jr. (by his second wife, Vikki) concurs: “I’d rather eat at home with him cooking than go out to a fine restaurant.”

LaMotta’s forays outside are restricted to long walks, infrequent trips to an East Side bar to meet Rocky Graziano, who pulled time with him at reform school when they were in their teens, and some evening blackjack games. “I don’t want to go out anymore,” he says. “I seen it all, and I had it all.’ Fame, fortune, Cadillacs. There’s nothing out there for me. Besides, I don’t like the kind of people I attract.”

When asked to elaborate, he has trouble pinning if down. “I don’t know. Other people like to go out. It must be me. I dislike a lot of people.” He amends, “I don’t mean a majority of people. Maybe I’m too cynical. But sometimes I hear the first word out of their mouths, or see a smirk on their faces, and I know they’re not sincere. They’re jealous or something. Jealousy is a word I use a lot, but I think it’s right. Well, I think like that anyway. I guess I attract those kind of people, so I stay home.”

The recluse pose is really nothing new, if one applies it to LaMotta’s inner emotions. In his fighting days, though public, he was notorious for being a loner in the things that mattered. He managed his own career, ostracized the mob until it promised him a shot at the crown for dumping to Fox, and had the intimate counsel of no one. He viewed his wife of that period, Vikki, with insane jealousy and suspicion, and forced his brother Joey, who worked his corner, “to do my bidding.” The adjectives applied to Jake were “suspicious,” “paranoiac.”

Now divorced from his fifth wife, he is even more insular. The film is a hiatus in this isolation. Jack Jr. is up from North Miami Beach on leave from his job to guide his father through the publicity maze connected with the film. Vikki and his five other children also came to New York for the film’s opening and some of the attendant hoopla. But when the stardust settles, he will be back living alone in his Manhattan apartment. The isolation may be complete for a long period if some job offers don’t result from the film since LaMotta, in earnest, declares, “I’m now practicing celibacy,” which could be construed as the last word on the people one attracts.

Jake attributes his decision on unilateral withdrawal to “the failures of my romantic life.” His first marriage broke when he met Vikki, “the love of my life.” Vikki left when LaMotta lost all control of his temper, his calorie­ and alcohol intake, and his ability to find his way home to his wife’s bed after his retirement. “I think I suffered a nervous breakdown during that period,” he says, “and didn’t realize it. I was crazy. I was drinking a bottle or two .a day. I owned my own joint [in Miami Beach], the price was right. Plus, there were a lot of broads. I blacked out a lot and didn’t remember. I really think I was crazy and didn’t it.”

LaMotta seems to be hesitant about going all the way back. His notion is that life would have been fine if he and Vikki could have worked out their problems. If they had been “mature” enough to realize he was going through a bad time after retiring, “the small death” all athletes must face, as the novelist John Updike called it. Similar is the lament that three marriages broke up because finances were tight, and the one thing he regrets is his dump of the Fox fight. The one thing?

LAMOTTA DEALS with his woeful experiences piecemeal, not as the pattern of a life. For LaMotta, to have led a conventional life, it seems he would have had to be born in different circumstances, or somehow been able to overcome the ones he was dealt. The latter is no mean trick. The should is cankered with barnacles of who and what spawned us. Only the imperial George Bernard Shaw had the audacity to state that if he had one thing to change in his life it would have been his parents. And for good reason. There’s a reverberation in that shot that might ricochet back to our own siring.

LaMotta makes some earnest attempts. “You know, I think they brainwashed us. You know, this is your life, you’re poor, and this is the way it’s going to be. I always felt I didn’t deserve good things. I was always guilty. I thought I killed someone, but it was more than that. Years later, I even thought of the way I fought. Letting guys hit me in the face. I didn’t have to do that. I think I was brainwashed to be punished.”

If you want to find the man, it helps to find the boy, and then the father of the boy. LaMotta’s father was an Italian immigrant who beat his kids and beat his wife, and it’s safe to say Jake was tutored in raucous romance early. And even though LaMotta hated the bullying, like so many sons of fathers who beat, drank, molested or committed suicide, he replayed the old man’s aberrations. The psychiatric statistics are too firm in these area to be taken, as happenstance. In dismal surroundings finesse is lost, you take what is offered.

Since the home life was a microcosm of the neighborhood, he had only to expand the MO of violence. In such neighborhoods the glittering prizes of bread, broads and booze wenI to the wise guys. “Artists and fags” (same thing really) need not apply.

To anyone who knows those streets, the real triumph is to make it through time-honored devices in the neighborhood, not in the outside world, There’s a sense of betrayal when one makes it “legit” and moves away. You turn your back on the highest gutter canonization—”a regular guy. It’s not for nothing that artists with such roots can’t completely resist the swagger, highlighting the accent, the tough-guy stance. These are love notes thrown back over the barricades from their now “effete” surroundings. Worldly success is so much manure—the real bones are still made back on he block.

LaMotta only seems an aberration to us because he achieved celebrity and money and didn’t find the happy life. That is the height of anti-Americanism. But to use Willard Motley’s phrase, “Knock on any door,” and you could find countless LaMottas—violent, suspicious, self-destructive, who have left disasters in their wake, but there was nobody there to chronicle them. We prefer happy endings to our social neglect: saccharine Sylvester Stallones. pugs who are pussycats or flower girls who end up at Ascot.

But even in the field of achieving and then destroying celebrity, LaMotta is not unique. Streetwise black, basketball players with fat NBA contracts still get high on more than slam dunks, and up-from-the-pavement union leaders who have had access to the seats of government can’t resist the chance to turn a little change on the side. The outside world might be astonished, but the boy on the block understand all too well. What’s felonious to some is “regular” to others.

When LaMotta got the chance, he didn’t get out. When he made his score in boxing, his first move was to buy an apartment house in the Bronx for his family (parents, brother, sisters). Obviously, to erect a shrine in such heathen lands as the other boroughs never occurred to him, nor should it have. It had to be accessible for worship by those who lay down turf theology.

YEARS LATER, when he was broke and serving time on a Florida chain gang for allowing a teenage prostitute to work his nightclub (he claims innocence about her age and trade), his father sold the apartment house (it was in his name but Jake’s property), deserted his family and moved back to his native Italy alone.That’s the caliber of doublebank that makes street legend.

If one knows the code of the streets, wife-beating is no surprise either. Women (mothers exempted) were only revered as sexual trophies. The language of lovemaking sounded like contracts: “bang,” “screw”—love delivered from a running board. Jealousy is easy to divine, too. You simply ascribed to others the reason you wanted women. If your own intentions were base, so were the world’s.

One has only to remember the photos of Vikki LaMotta then, or to look at her now to realize her erotic worth as a trophy. At age 50, after giving birth to four children (three by Jake and one by a subsequent marriage that also ended in divorce), she still could make a bishop want to break a stained glass.

Vikki realizes the cloud a sexual aura casts. “People see the blonde hair, the beautiful body and look no further. They never search for the dignity. My problem with Jake was that he consumed me. He did it in a very beautiful way, but he consumed me. I was only 15 when we met in June 1946, and we were married in November of the same year. In a way you could say Jake kidnapped me.”

It’s a lovely turn of phrase: “kidnapped me.” It evokes Fay Wray and her rough-hewn suitor. “Our marriage was fine when Jake had control. On the beginning he trained me, molded me to be his kind of woman, but later on when I matured and deviated from what he wanted, he couldn’t handle it. I watched Pygmalion on television the other night, and I saw many similarities.”

LaMotta’s mad jealousy was fueled by the long periods of sexual withdrawal when he was in training. He believed in the old adage that sexual activity sapped strength. “It was a mistake, but in a way it worked. It made me an animal in the ring. Bu now I think I should have had it once in a while.”

Worse, the intensity of training began to render LaMotta impotent when he wanted to perform. For man like LaMotta to fail at all, but especially with his “kidnapped” goddess, was excruciating. So instead of swatting airplanes, Jake disfigured opponents such as Tony Janiro, whom Vikki found handsome; his brother, who had introduced Vikki to Jake, and who made the mistake of kissing her warmly whenever they met; and Vikki herself, for offering her cheek to be peeked by friends.

The beatings were serious enough to require medical attention, and when once Vikki retaliated, she said, “It was a mistake. He reacted like a fighter. He came back at me and nearly killed me.”

Yet for all this, she claims they had glorious times together (rarely shown in the film), and finds her ex-husband spiritual. “Just look into those sad, soft eyes. Whenever I’m sick, Jake is the first at my bedside. What greater love? I love him dearly. No longer in a sexual way, but who knows? That could come back, though I’m frightened to put the heat back into the relationship. It’s so loving and warm now. I just don’t think of him in a sexual way. To be blunt, I have no desire to ball him. He doesn’t like me to say that, but it’s the truth. And I’d need that to get back with him. I’m a woman, and a woman means hot. But love him I do, and who knows what the future will bring? That’s the exciting thing about the future.”

They, have stayed in constant contact 34 years. Jake visits Vikki in North Miami Beach (in the home he bought for her) a few times each year and stays at the house. “Separate bedrooms,” he is quick to add. He talks to her by phone three or four times a week. And he admits that his continuing affection for Vikki hindered his other marriages. “Aw, they knew,” he says. “I’m not smart enough with women to hide anything.”

Of course, LaMotta’s love for Vikki might be heightened by their golden period together. “We had everything,” he says. “Love, home, children, money, the championship, his and hers Cadillac cars.”

Their children hint at more solid stuff. The two boys I met, Jack Jr., 33, and Joe, 32, seem well-adjusted and carry no scars. Neither remembers the parental brawls. Those took place in private, and Vikki says that when she was black and blue she retreated behind her bedroom doors until the damage healed. There is a courageous civility about that.

Jack Jr. is sympathetic about the forces that fashioned his father’s life. “He grew up in the Depression, and everything was struggle. Everything was denial. His generation had to fight to get out. That’s why you don’t see fighters with the ferocity of the ’40s fighters anymore.”

JACK CONCURS. “The fighters today are spoiled. Only Duran and Muhammad Ali could have stood with the greats of the past. You know, we fought every three weeks. When I started to make money, I couldn’t get enough. It was a Depression thing, I’d fight anyone. Then when I made it, I didn’t know how to handle it. After all those years of denying myself, I went crazy with everything from booze to broads.”

Fight everyone, he did. Nobody puts a knock on LaMotta as a fighter. Harry Markson, the retired president of Madison Square Garden boxing, said “Outside Sugar Ray Robinson, he was the greatest middleweight of that era. He fought black fighters, both light-heavyweight and middleweight, that no one else would touch. He was fearless.

Much is made of LaMotta’s dump to Fox, but many forget he was top-ranked for five years without getting a title shot. And going the in the water wasn’t his province alone. It is common knowledge that good black fighters of that era often had to swoon for the mob to get bouts. Robinson was one who refused and had wait until he was 30 to get his crack at the middleweight crown, which, perversely, was granted by LaMotta.

Also, some members of the pious press didn’t seem to have the clout to force legitimate showdowns. This wasn’t for ignorance of fistic worth, but for the most venal of reasons. You still hear gossip about members of the fourth estate who picked up “envelopes” under the guise that they were gifts for their kids’ birthdays, graduations, or some such.

Harry Markson, while making no case for LaMotta’s action (“Robinson never did it”), added that boxing commissions were either nonexistent or had no clout, and that the press and television didn’t have the power they have today. “Let’s just say that in that period there was ample skullduggery.”

LaMotta’s sole defense is that he wanted the crown. “I always hated those creeps and never let them near me. They offered me a hundred thousand to dump, and I refused. I only wanted the title. And even when I went along, I still had to kick back $20,000 under the table to get the fight with Cerdan.”

Jake testified before Kefauver when the statute of limitations ran out. In his original affidavit Jake named Blinky Palermo as the fixer, but later testified he didn’t know who masterminded the dump. “You know who was around in those days. Palermo, Carbo, draw your own conclusions.”

LaMotta, in a way, as like John Dean. He validated the bad news in high places everyone knew about but no one wanted to talk about. Finking no matter how cleansing, is never appreciated. It isn’t strange that LaMotta can recite verbatim Brando’s Terry Malloy speech, “I coulda been somebody …” from On the Waterfront with feeling.

When Jake finished talking about this painful period, Jack Jr. massaged his shoulders into relaxation. “No one knows my father except his family. They only know of him back then. Not what he became. A gentle, sweet man. The ending is the exciting part of his life.”

Jake, grandiose as ever, proclaimed, “Now I have the patience of a saint. You’ll lose your temper before me.”

Joe and Vikki concur. Jake, realizing the “saint” line is as gaudy as his leopard-skin fighter’s robe (the material of macho bathing suits in the ’40s, though LaMotta didn’t add the black slim comb as a final fillip), tempers his canonization: “I still make mistakes, but less and less. Isn’t that what life is about? It has to be less and less, if I am going … going to …” He trails off.

Jack says he finds lessons in his father’s life: “There are deep meanings in dad’s struggle.” LaMotta, where his family is concerned, seems not to have passed on the sins of his father.

MARTIN SCORSESE defends his unrelenting, unprobing film portrait of LaMotta by declaring he didn’t want to apply tired psychology, that he found LaMotta to be an “elemental man.” By which I gather he means a man unfettered by influences. It’s a quaint notion: The Abominable Snowman Comes to Mulberry Street. The director’s peg tells us more about Scorsese than about LaMotta.

Numerous articles have related that Scorsese was sickly child, consumed by movies and movie magazines, looking down from his window on those mean streets below. As a man, the same articles tell us, he is still house bound, running endless private tapes of movies in a more spacious, affluent setting. This sequestered life comes through in all Scorsese’s films, the art of a meticulous voyeur.

Scorsese gets the mannerisms, the speech patterns, the language and the interiors precisely right. What formed the tableau seems beyond him. From a bedroom window—his first viewfinder—barbaric action in the street with an opera record playing in the background might indeed look like the rites of a primal society.

The only way to dispel reverential awe was to know those streets. Saloons and poolrooms were not pagan temples, merely colorful neon way stations in a drab culture. Bright bars were concrete equivalents of the neighborhood’s best painted women, and a rack of pool balls cascading under fluorescent lights transported the shooter into a colorful galaxy. People didn’t die gothic deaths on those streets. Life was drained by the dullness. If LaMotta’s hook were a little slower, his temper a shade less manic, he would have been the Friday night undercard in the local beer joint, not a celebrated “Raging Bull.”

For Scorsese to plumb LaMotta’s psyche he would have to have a narrative curiosity, and that is not the art of a window kid for whom stories take place down below—on the streets. Talk is the province of the comer guys, the verbal spritzers who gaudily throw it around in lieu of money, dreams or hope.

And, of course, narrative is interruptive. It breaks up, sullies the purity of the scene. To visually oriented artists such as as Scorsese, narrative is as sacrilegious as inserting dialogue balloons on a Magritte

So Scorsese too an astringent tone in his film. With Raging Bull, he effectively holds boxing films such as Champion and Body and Soul, which explored Social beginnings, up to ridicule. Through attempts at reason and understanding, these films made overtures to the heart. To Scorsese, obviously, these were cluttered films, weakened by sentiment. So he used his camera as an unsympathetic X-ray machine, the bed boy finally making his bones.

CONTRARY TO stereotypes, “house-grown” kids are often filled with confidence. The doting of parents, the coloring books and ice cream brought to bedside, the extra blanket for the precious body, the music spinning in the background are the trappings of tyke kings. Consequently, they learn to manipulate an audience early. So it’s not surprising Scorsese couldn’t understand LaMotta’s self-loathing and lack of confidence. LaMotta was only one of the litter.

Also, LaMotta feared and hated priests early. When Scorsese made a bow to such emotion in his Mean Streets, he had Harvey Keitel sacrilegiously bless his whiskey glass, evoking Stephen Dedalus in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The Jakes and Studs Lonigans of he world took damnation seriously, not as baroque artistic fodder. To LaMotta, the fear of immolating fire was never aesthetic, it was real: “I felt for some reason my opponent had a right to destroy me.”

Since street kids get by with hustle, not substance, they always doubt themselves. The leopard skin was worn to keep outside tribes at bay. Street kids feel con, not concreteness, is their deliverance. When you work with con and swagger the final damnation is going to be your unmasking in the larger world.

When I was first published at age 30, after working the docks for most of my life, I was terrified instead of being elated. When I was at a social function with my betters, Norman Mailer, Robert Lowell, Arthur Miller, I laced myself with booze against the impending mass denunciation I felt would expose me as a cultural bodysnatcher. This dread was fortified by the oppressive Catholicism of the ’40s and ’50s. The most deeply felt commandment was that earthly glitter was suspect; it was tawdry, whorish rouge on both your religion and your roots. God, like the old gang, only dug regular guys.

An operatic score is much too florid for LaMotta’s life. It is a cultural pretension, akin to the canard that all the Irish are familiar with Yeats. For LaMotta’s odyssey of self-loathing, the Catholic hymn; “Lord I Am Not Worthy,” would have come closer.

Indeed, it is because LaMotta is not “elemental man” that he survived and softened his life. LaMotta is what he is today because he has made intellectual decisions, no visceral ones. Through reading, self-hypnotism and study of various religions, through studying acting and grooming himself as a lecturer—all things foreign to him *and elemental man)—he has found some grace in life.

These are disciplines of the mind, and LaMotta knows his is a life that has to be sentried. He carries this over to his physical well-being by dieting and shunning booze. His decision to be reclusive and his acquiring the domestic arts of cooking and cleaning are further monitors. In the future, he wants to talk to kids about violence and alcoholism (“I think they’ll listen to me”) and do charity work in hospitals. “You know, tell people stories, do some recitals from my stage and nightclub act Make people laugh.”

He’s a man who declares, “I love to do things. To keep busy. That’s why I love Vikki and the kids with me now. I cook every meal. I won’t let any of them touch a dish. I love projects.” Projects are the Dobermans that prowl his darker impulses. He is still a man who suspects before he greets. In frustration, Graziano says, “He’s very complex, very deep.

I tell him to relax, but he can’t. I introduce him to someone, and he says, ‘Who is he? ‘What does he do? What does he want?’ He can’t realize it’s someone who just wants to meet him; He just don’t know. I say hello to the world . He just don’t know.”

Even now, when someone greets Vikki in public with a kiss, he looks on with distrust, but he doesn’t act. Reason has brought him to that simple point. He mistrusts success, as well he should. Every high point in his life has been followed by a crash. The title “nobody is going to take from me” was gone 20 months later, lost to Robinson. From the crown, he went on to divorce, alcoholism and conviction on morals charges. He says now, “I can’t be happy, everything is going so well.”

Not quite that well. Again, success has a rectal side. The IRS has leaned on him for money accrued from the movie, his fifth wife is suing for an alimony settlement and his brother is suing the entire movie production staff, including Jake for their portrayal of him. In his most emotional statement, Jake declares, “Aw, that’s nothing. It’s part of living in this vicious, fuckin’, mixed-ups, sick world.”

To LaMotta’s credit, he keeps such dark rage on a tight leash these days. He has learned the elemental lesson of those streets. You can’t go back because some unhealed part never leaves. In this world our initial address, like tragedy, forever haunts.

For more Flaherty, check out “Toots Shor Among the Ruins.”

According to George King, Russell Martin and Ichiro Suzuki are willing to wait on the Yankees. So? Bring ’em both back, just one of them? Which one of these?

And how would you feel if Nick Swisher signed with the Red Sox?

[Photo Credit: Al Bello/Getty Images]

Over at GQ, here’s Gideon Lewis-Kraus behind-the-scenes at the Electric Daisy Carnival:

The only really crucial thing to note here about the music is that the whole thing is about the bass. People who know a lot about electronic music will disagree with me, but knowing a lot about electronic music is, these days, entirely beside the point. The progression of a house track, and one plausible reason for house’s ascendancy, goes like this: There’s some twinkly pirouetting melody in the higher registers, then some bass for a while, and then the introduction of a soaring, optimistic vocal track about saving the world or, for the slightly less ambitious, having a feeling re tonight’s bestness, then the simultaneous near-crescendo of the twinkles and the all-out vocal redemption, and then, right at the moment of presumed climax, the bass goes away for a few beats, everybody misses the bass so much and can’t wait for it to come back, maybe the snare reintroduces itself after a few seconds to remind you to get excited for the prodigal bass’s triumphal homecoming, a good DJ takes just longer than expected to bring the bass back, 20,000 or 50,000 hearts stop as one, lever arms hanging anxiously in midair, and then, when the bass kicks back in, the crowd goes out of their motherfucking minds, just like they did the time the bass disappeared and came back four minutes ago, pumping their right arms in genuinely exhilarated unison, survivors all of the briefly yet catastrophically lost bass.

[Photo Via: All You Can Love]

End of the holiday weekend gives shopping, chores, and football.

Shake it.

“So Fresh, So Clean”–Outkast

[Photo Via: mOrtality]

“I Got The Feelin'”-JB

This should get you goin’…

[Image Via: Aberrant Beauty]

Taking the day off. Hope you all had a great one. Kibitz here.

Picture by Bags.

Peter Gent was an accomplished college basketball player at Michigan State. Though he didn’t play football he was still drafted by the Dallas Cowboys where he played wide receiver and tight end for a handful of years in the mid-late ’60s. He was great friends with the quarterback, Don Meredith, became pals with writers like Gary Cartwright and Bud Shrake, and was the classic longhaired rebel to Dallas coach Tom Landry’s stern patriarch.

After he retired, Gent started writing and in 1973 published North Dallas Forty a novel based on his experiences with the Cowboys (and his relationship with Meredith). It was a sensation (for more on Gent’s career, do yourself a favor and pick up Steven L. Davis’s wonderful book, Texas Literary Outlaws).  Gent continued writing though he never had that kind of success again. However, he did write some terrific magazine articles. Who better to write about the Cowboys than Gent?

So it being Thanksgiving and all, please enjoy this story by Gent on Thomas “Hollywood” Henderson that appeared in the September 1980 issue of Esquire.

“North Hollywood Forty”

By Peter Gent

A FEW days after I got back from Dallas I was sitting at the Dinner Bell café on the square, drinking coffee with J.C. and Sonny, when J.C. the barber wanted to know: “What’s a paranoid?”

“Yeah,” said Sonny, the justice of the peace, “what’s this word paranoid mean? I hear the deputies always saying some guy is paranoid. What does that mean?”

They looked at me for an explanation.

“l’m paranoid,” I replied.

“They mentioned you first,” Sonny the JP said. “What’s it mean?”

“There are two definitions,” I said.

“Take your choice. One defines a paranoid as a chronic psychotic with delusions of persecution and/or grandeur. The paranoid defends his delusions with apparent logic, whatever apparent logic is.”

“What’s the second definition?” asked J.C., sipping his coffee out of the brown cups the café just got.

“That a paranoid is a man in possession of all the facts,” I said, watching Sonny shadowbox across the stone porch of the café. “William Burroughs said that. He was a junkie and writer with a rich Midwest daddy.”

There was a long pause. The only sound was the rustle of the hackberry leaves and the morning traffic through the square. It was a nice central Texas morning.

“You mean like Shaky?” Sonny said. “He was a junkie from Detroit. We caught him stealin’ and sent him back. Paid his way.”

I think the three of us agreed with William Burroughs, although nobody said one way or the other. The next day J.C. called me Paranoid Pete. I hope that name won’t stick.

There is a party going on now down at the low-water bridge, as there seems to be almost every night since summer arrived. It is midnight in central Texas.

I believe in an element of magic in sports. Even professional sports. I think Thomas Wayne “Hollywood” Henderson, the once and former Dallas Cowboy, was one of those magical players, like Cowboys Duane Thomas and Bob Hayes before him. I don’t think Tom Landry, who coached all three men and who fired Henderson last fall, believes in magic or miracles, though he professes belief in a God. Tom believes in statistics and numbers. What it says on paper. Actuarial. Tom cannot conceive of magic on the football field, and Hollywood thinks he is magic. You see the elemental problem, the basic conflict, shaping up here: the struggle between a magical black linebacker from east Austin and a white ex-World War II bomber pilot from the Rio Grande Valley over exactly who is who. And what is what.

The linebacker has magic on his side.

The Bomber Pilot has the Dallas Cowboys and the National Football League.

Any questions?

Any bets on a winner?

THE PROFESSIONAL athlete, like all show biz performers, often finds it necessary to violate one of the primary rules of survival in America: Stay low, move fast. The responsibilities of celebrity require the athlete to stick his nappy little head up once in a while and be a good boy for the crowd. Woe unto the nappy-headed fool who sticks his head up too high or too long—or not high enough for long enough—or to any height and for any length of time, if not with the correct attitude.

On the eighteenth of November, 1979, during the Dallas Cowboys’ loss to the Washington Redskins, Thomas Henderson waved a souvenir handkerchief that was being marketed by one of his teammates—the old attempt at planning for the tomorrow that never comes—into the lens of a live sideline camera. From my living room, the incident, as I recall, seemed no more extraordinary than the usual sideline antics that are hyped by the networks to give the viewer a feeling of being there. Wherever the hell there is.

Also, as I recall, there was sufficient time in the game for an inspired and magical team to rise from the ashes of certain loss, performing miraculously, never giving up until the final gun, and to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. And now came Henderson, a linebacker and athlete of phenomenal confidence and matching ability, stepping in front of the camera to flash his friend’s handkerchief and signal that the Cowboys were still number one. There is room to interpret his gestures as inspirational. Maybe not.

The following week Hollywood was called into the offices of the Cowboys organization and told that he was being placed on waivers. In effect, fired. Tommy Landry said that Thomas Henderson was being waived as a result of his antics on the sidelines and added that Henderson’s personality was such that he would be unable to tolerate demotion to the bench—the only other possible punishment, as Landry saw it, for Hollywood’s behavior.

This action, according to the Standard Player Contract and the Collective Bargaining Agreement, as well as a recent arbitration decision (Mitch Hoopes v. Detroit Lions), was illegal in the eyes of the National Football League Players Association. The union felt that Henderson was being denied his rights. Landry was waiving him illegally.

But then Henderson did a very strange thing. At the age of twenty-six, he voluntarily retired, went home, and tore all the phones out of the walls and beat the jacks with a hammer.

Six phones, is what he told me.

Six hundred dollars to Ma Bell.

During the time Henderson’s phones were out, the Players Association was trying to reach him and explain his rights. Thomas doesn’t read the fine print, but Tommy and Cowboys general manager Tex Schramm and vice-president Gil Brandt do.

And they also know how to pull a guy like Hollywood around by his ego like a puppy dog on a leash.

Why not retire? Go out on top?

It was almost a month from the day he was fired before Henderson finally called the NFLPA to inquire about his rights. When lawyer Rick Schaeffer answered the phone, he heard: “This is Hollywood calling from Hollywood.”

Schaeffer knew this case would be trouble. It was. It still is.

Attorney Schaeffer explained to Hollywood that in the judgment of the Players Association, it was improper for the Cowboys to have fired him merely because Landry had objected to his attitude and decided he couldn’t be benched.

“The Standard Player Contract allows a player to be terminated if, in the opinion of the team, he is not competitive with the other players at his position,” Schaeffer says. “However, this was obviously not the case with Henderson. Landry’s feeling was that it would not be psychologically beneficial to Thomas to be sitting on the bench. This is similar to the case of Mitch Hoopes, who, after shanking a punt, was belittled in the press by his coach. The coach later cut him and stated that he was doing so because he had put so much pressure on Hoopes through public statements that Hoopes could no longer be competitive on the team.

“Because he was cut illegally, Hoopes was awarded the balance of the salary due him for the full term of his contract. We would have argued that the same award should be made in Thomas’s case.

“I offered Henderson any help whatsoever that the Players Association could give,” Schaeffer goes on. “And I told him that the first step would be to draft a telegram requesting reinstatement from the retired-player list, which we did immediately and dispatched to the commissioner the next day.”

Meanwhile, Henderson apparently changed his mind. After Schaeffer had begun the necessary procedures on his behalf, Hollywood told the NFLPA people that they, like everybody else, needed him worse than he needed them. That was the last Rick Schaeffer heard from him. The first, of course, being “This is Hollywood from Hollywood.”

Henderson’s behavior has been wonderful theater for those of us who take great joy in the public contradictions of sports as business-as-usual. A man like Henderson is a rare commodity. His actions have been outrageous and, at times, contradictory. But they have never been dull.

During his “retirement,” as Henderson tells it, he went to Landry on his knees and begged the coach to take him back. Hollywood said he’d clean cleats. Hollywood promised to mow the playing field lawn. Landry said no. Henderson then became publicly angry, and the theater continued. He is funny and clever—maybe even brilliant—with a well-developed killer instinct. But he began to demand rights he didn’t have, rights he gave up with retirement.

Now I see from an interview in Inside Sports that I Hollywood has stepped on his pecker again, calling various members of the Cowboys either bisexual, bald, or jealous assholes but conspicuously sparing those guys who said they wanted him back.

“Did you know that [owner] Clint Murchison took away [vice-president of personnel development] Gil Brandt’s wife, married her himself?” Hollywood asked in the interview. “There’s so much going on you wouldn’t believe it.”

I believe it, Hollywood. I believe it.

But, as the old country preacher told the man who came to the altar and confessed to coupling with goats, “Brother,” the preacher said, “I don’t believe I’d ‘a’ tol’ that.”

This could be the moment, as one Dallas fan put it, when Hollywood’s alligator mouth finally overloaded his hummingbird ass.

If it is end game for Thomas Henderson, it’s not because he lacked talent; he just didn’t have the innate sense to cover up the first time he started taking more punches than he was giving. The Bomber Pilot understands that.

My personal opinion, after a longtime acquaintance with athletes and coaches, and specifically with those of the Dallas Cowboys, is that what we saw on TV last November involving the Cowboys organization and Hollywood Henderson was a series of psychotic episodes. They all lost it there for a moment, right in front of everybody.

Psychotic episodes are daily occurrences in a business where the operative phrase is Stick your head in there.

I believe, due to certain of my own biases and a predilection for conspiracy theories, that Mr. Henderson was maneuvered into retirement, which deprived him of his salary and his right to sell his services elsewhere in the NFL. But why get rid of Henderson, a linebacker of exceptional talent? Henderson is quite possibly as good as he claims to be. Why all the fuss over this nappy-headed boy waving at the television camera, when football is, after all, show biz, based on illusion rather than reality?

I went to Dallas to ask around.

I WAS sitting at the window of a ninth-floor room in the Stoneleigh Hotel the week before Hollywood Henderson’s wedding, facing approximately north, reckoning by the Dallas Cowboys tower out on North Central Expressway. The clouds had closed back in after burning off for a while earlier in the day. A new storm was brewing; I could feel it in my joints.

I called Hollywood’s fiancee, Wyetta, who said he was sleeping. Hollywood had promised to talk to me at length but had yet to do so. Wyetta assured me that he’d return my call. No call came.

I spent several days waiting for Hollywood to regain consciousness.

I wanted to talk to him about his bizarre dismissal from professional football because it is the perfect story of what pro football is and where it is going in the 1980s.

The good. The bad. The ugly.

To perform well and earn fantastic sums of money and universal, eternal praise as a professional football player: that is the best. It’s rare, but that is it. The thrill of performing is usually as much as a player can hope for, and even that is wonderful. Athletes are performing artists, and most would do it for free; and that is good. But it also becomes the rub. The fine-print stuff. The Standard Player Contract. The Collective Bargaining Agreement. Owners. Ego. Bad. Ugly. Real.

Yes, pro football is a performing art, all right. And to perform in the National Football League, players need tremendous mental and physical talents. They also need tremendous egos in order to survive. An athlete’s ego is his sword and his shield, and each one uses these weapons differently. Some claim not to have them. Those are the guys not to show your back. No athlete survives without his ego, and it is in the organization’s interest to study each player to determine how best to use that ego—always for the club, sometimes against the player.

The Cowboys organization used to require all new players to take a battery of psychological tests. The test questions were not subtle. Among them you’d find things tike this:

What would you rather do?
A. Kill your mother
B. Jack off
C. Read a book
D. Eat live baby ducks

These tests gave management a personatity profile of each player, and the egos were there, diagramed and ready to manipulate. The organization then counseled each member of the team, interpreting his answers to the questions and telling him how certain psychological techniques would enhance his performance. (After I took my tests, I was never personally counseled, which was always a source of wonder and worry to me. I knew, however, that the correct answer to the question above was “D. Eat live baby ducks.”)

The teams were finally barred from requiring such tests, thanks to the NFLPA, but I don’t believe the psychological profiling of players has really stopped. It’s a basic method for better control of athletes. Coaches and captains from peewee leagues on up do it: psyching up their players and teammates, psyching out their opponents.

When the Cowboys organization decided that Thomas Wayne Henderson had become an opponent, they psyched him out. They hit him right in his monstrous ego and persuaded him to do something contrary to his own best interests.

They certainly pushed the right button: Henderson retired.

It cost him plenty.

A coach once told me that the difference between a coal miner and a football player is that a coal miner actually does productive work, whereas a football player’s job is to keep everybody sitting numbly in front of the TV on Sunday afternoons, tuned to the NFL. In return, the player gets to “feel,” to perform.

It’s the perfect trade-off. Lots of cash changes hands, but only about 20 percent gets to the players in the form of salaries. because deep down we all know they’d do it for free.

AT THE Stoneleigh Hotel the next morning, I ordered from room service and ate breakfast watching the Charlie Rose Show, Fort Worth’s answer to Donahue. Not much of an answer. The guests were local sportswriter Skip Bayless and Jack (They Call Me Assassin) Tatum. Tatum was promoting his book. He was well dressed and mannerly. The camera focused on his Super Bowl ring, and Bayless said. “That’s what everybody wants.”

Tatum, Bayless, and Rose lobbed a few beanbag questions back and forth. Tatum talked quite logically and calmly about the necessity of killing the receiver when he cuts across the middle. The vicious hit that left Darryl Stingley paralyzed and crippled for life was referred to as “an unfortunate incident.” Tatum meant to hurt Stingley; he just didn’t expect to break his neck. He was telling the truth, diluting the horror of what he was saying by discussing it intellectually.

At the end of the show, Tatum said. “You have to keep it all in perspective. After football, I plan a career in commercial real estate.”

Sounds like the old Assassin has it in perspective, all right.

At nine A.M. I called Thomas Wayne “Hollywood” Henderson. I let the phone ring a long time. There was no answer.

“IF I had a resource like Hollywood Henderson, it would be my responsibility to get the most I could out of it in terms of my business, not by insisting that he go to church with me every Sunday.”

I heard than at an elegant Highland Park party the Boomer held that night for an Australian publisher who was touring the United States and who had known the Boomer when he was a high jumper in the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne.

I think the Boomer was a 7-foot jumper.

High jumping. Jesus, what an event.

Boomer punted for the Cowboys in the ’60s when I was with them. To me, his greatest moment came at Kezar Stadium after he had kicked a towering spiral. Boomer stood there alone, cranelike, near the end zone. on real grass, shading his eyes against the San Francisco sun, watching the ball soar higher and higher from the tremendous force of his long leg. Suddenly, the treacherous Kezar wind swirled and caught the ball—a treasonous perfidious wind blowing out of the Haight-Ashbury. The ball hung in the air, the force of this tall high-jumper’s leg contending with nature on the Left Coast. The stadium was strangely silent as fate decided. Then, sounding shocked, but with its usual very proper Australian accent, came Boomer’s voice.

“My Gawd “he said clearly “it’s coming back.”

Boomer quickly retreated because the ball always drew a crowd. Boomer avoided the rush.

Jesus, the Boomer could kick that ball. It was also at the Boomer’s party that the amusements editor of one of the Dallas papers asked me what Spanish title the movie North Dallas Forty had played under, saying that Cabaret had been shown in Mexico City as Adios Berlin.

Magic language, that Mexican Spanish.

Returning from the Boomer’s party early in the morning, I saw a headline on the front page of the Dallas Times Herald: LANDRY SEES FILM AS OBSCENE. There was a picture of the Bomber Pilot. The chilling headline froze me in my tracks.

“Coach Tom Landry of the Dallas Cowboys, summoned by state prosecutors, testified Thursday in the obscenity trial of a local adult bookstore proprietor,” the article began.

“Landry, who appeared as an expert witness on community standards, … had made an earlier trip to the courthouse … to view an untitled 12-minute ‘peep show’ that portrayed sexual intercourse and oral sex.

“Landry testified that he addresses 8,000 to 9,000 people each year … and said he nearly always spoke on the problem of obscenity and pornography.

“‘I speak on the philosophy of humanism which is creeping into our society… ,’ Landry explained.”

Landry is an expert on obscenity.

Community standards by the Bomber Pilot.

Creeping humanism? Nigger, please. Not that.

Tom Landry sees films as ….Tom Landry sees life as…Tom Landry interpets God as … Tom Landry sees Thomas Henderson as … No wonder Hollywood is asleep all the time.

Adios Berlin.

THE COWBOYS always want you to be what they want,” says Hollywood Henderson. “They were always after me to join the Fellowship of Christian Athletes—not because I’d want to, but because it would be a good image. Hell, I’m too sincere in my faith to use religion like that. But these God-lovers on the Cowboys think nothing of it.”

In 1964, my first team meeting with the Cowboys was opened by Landry—I believe he held a Bible in his hand—talking about football and God. He had found a connection, and he recommended it to all of us. Landry’s connection escapes me now, but the picture of some gut hammer­ing the hell out of people was the jawbone of an ass always comes to mind. I don t think that was how Tommy connected it at all. He let slip that he was a Methodist.

On the blackboard every Sunday would be a list of cars and buses with times of departure for various churches in the southern California desert they called Thousand Oaks, which would eventually contain thousands of people but had at the time only a bowling alley and an all-aluminum Lutheran college where we trained. The country was so desolate it served as location for Gunsmoke.

That first Sunday, I checked the schedule and rode with Landry and his young son, Tommy Jr. That Sunday I became a full-blown Methodist.

I never went back, but in retrospect I think that by landing that first Sunday punch I gained me a little extra time in the NFL. It was worth it. One Sunday as a Methodist.

I should have gone twice. Apparently Hollywood Henderson didn’t go at all.

At that first team meeting, the Cowboys’ public relations man gave us the best advice of all, though I doubt that many players listened. A heavy man, he gripped the podium for balance and looked out at us with big sad eyes that were watery from emotion or drink or both. He was silent for a moment, gazing at the assembled group of anxious, oversize men in shorts and T-shirts. The very first words out of his mouth told me more about survival in the NFL than all the coaches and exercise programs and life philosophies and team doctors ever would.

“Boys,” he said, “this ain’t football, this is show business.”

The rest of his talk went on to explain each player’s role in the show, from attending photo sessions to granting interviews and presenting proper images.

The next speaker explained how our jocks should be rolled up inside our towels along with our socks. Then the trainers told us about medicine and pills, about which ones to take when, and why.

I never forgot the PR man’s words, and I always wondered what happened to him. The last I heard, he was sweeping out bars for drinks—but who knows? He probably hears the same about me.

“Boys, this ain’t football, this is show business.”

I never forgot those words, and you shouldn’t either. Don’t dismiss them with an oh yeah, sure, or use them without thinking. Realize what those words mean to you, the customer.

Are they really showing you the elephant, or are they just gonna tell you you saw it?

I WAS waiting on the ninth floor of the Stoneleigh for Dave Edwards. He was a Cowboys linebacker for many years, and the man Hollywood Henderson replaced. We were going to lunch at the Mecca Restaurant out on Harry Hines Boulevard.

The TV was on in my room when I called Henderson again. His fiancée told me he was still asleep.

Wake up, Hollywood.

Edwards arrived and paced the room. He has lots of energy, bottled up now without the release of football. We renewed our old friendship while the television provided background and a drain for Edwards’s brimming energy.

“You know,” he said, “we had to stay in this hotel after training camp in 1963. It was the only one in town that would take the black players.”

We left the Stoneleigh to eat lunch and then to see Edwards’s boys, Chris and Mike, play soccer.

“Why did Tom cut Hollywood?” I asked once we were in the car.

“Landry hates someone to go overboard and steal the limelight from the organization,” Dave said. He grinned at me. “I think they had a personality clash.” We both laughed at his understatement. “Show biz,” he went on. “That’s what they used to always tell us, wasn’t it? This is show biz.”

“Was Hollywood good?” I asked.

“You couldn’t control Thomas, but goddamn, he was good,” Edwards said. Dave Edwards played linebacker for the Cowboys for more than a decade, and he thinks Hollywood was good. He continued, “He’s a great linebacker and a great athlete. Linebacker’s a tough position to learn. All those keys and audibles. He picked it right up—fast. And he was funny.”

We were driving along in Edwards’s battered white Ford—the “war wagon”—on Harry Hines Boulevard, searching out the Mecca café.

“He was the first linebacker to return a kickoff ninety-seven yards. right? Goddamn, I say this sumbitch can get on with it. Goddamn. this boy is pretty good. Kinda fast,” Edwards said. laughing. “I chose to play this position because you could be slow and do it. Hollywood comes along. and time for me to get out.” He laughed again.

The construction along Harry Hines was frenetic, and Edwards scanned the neighborhood for the café.

“Thomas’s rookie year, he had a gold star put in one of his front teeth—always smiling, showing the star. Gene Stallings had just come in from A&M and walked into the linebacker meeting, dour and militaristic, and Hollywood was wearing sunglasses—you know the kind, dark at the top and clear at the bottom. Stallings says, ‘Thomas, the sun too bright in here for you?’ And Hollywood grins, showing that gold star on his front tooth, and says, ‘When you is cool, the sun is always shinin’.'”

We missed the Mecca on our first pass, and Edwards continued to talk. “That’s what I try to tell the people about, back then when things was real tough, when Landry didn’t put up with no shit. You remember when he cried in the locker room at halftime? Well, things have changed some. First Duane [Thomas] came along and kind of egoed out, or something like that. Duane didn’t have a hell of a lot of eloquence when he was speaking, and he got really paranoid. I tell you, that Duane was good, though, like Hollywood. He was a natural athlete. He hit the right groove at just the right time.”

Edwards suddenly stopped talking and looked blankly ahead, while inside he looked back:

It was 1974 and Dave Edwards had played pro football for a decade when he went to see his head coach because he was troubled and the coach was a Christian man who worried a lot about obscenity.

Edwards was afraid to tell the coach what was on his mind because of the deeply revealing nature of the story. Finally he said, “Coach, several nights ago I dreamed I killed you.” He had difficulty controlling the pitch of his voice. “I dreamed I pushed you off a cliff.”

Tom Landry looked shocked but had little concern, comment, or advice for Edwards. Later. Mike Ditka, one of the assistant coaches up from the player ranks, got drunk with Edwards. Landry had told Ditka about Edwards’s dream.

Landry’s advice was to forget about dreaming.

“Yeah, in the early years Landry didn’t put up with any shit,” Edwards began again. “You had to hit the floor running to just stay on the team.”

We had lunch at the Mecca: chicken-fried steak, homemade biscuits, three vegetables, and a big iced tea.

“One time l walked up to Hollywood and asked him how he was doing,” Edwards said, “and he spoke in a whiny little voice: ‘Oh, Dave, I ain’t doin’ too good. Look at these little arms, they’re so skinny and all, and I been sick.’ And then he lunges forward into my face and growls, ‘But I’m quick.’

“He was one funny guy, T.W.—l called him T.W. He made up all that Hollywood stuff himself. Knew exactly what he was doing. You would’ve loved Hollywood.”

“You know, I made a mistake back then when I was playing,” Edwards said as we crossed the hot parking lot to the war wagon. “I used to meditate on a tiger for fifteen minutes a day. You know, to get mean … and now … it’s like that tiger is loose inside my head. I can’t cage him up anymore.” His jaw was tight. He looked at me. He was searching my eyes.

Edwards and I passed the rest of the time until his boys’ soccer game at Bachman Lake “watching the animals,” as he called it. They roller-skate and barbecue around Bachman Lake, and generally get down. Dallas sure has changed. We reminisced about the old days when Landrv cried and constantly made errors that he would blame on athletes who had no recourse but to duck their heads and “react like football players.”

I don’t think Hollywood is gonna be ducking his head.

Duane Thomas didn’t.

IF CUTTING Hollywood was a psychotic episode on the part of the Dallas organization, the thing to marvel at is the technique by which the organization recovered enough to remember the fine print and to allow Hollywood to have his psychotic episode, which consisted of refusing waivers and retiring. When he let sixty days pass without challenging the Cowboys’ right to cut him, Henderson deprived himself of his grievance case under the Collective Bargaining Agreement and the Standard Player Contract.

The organization, having first cited Hollywood’s sideline antics as the reason for his dismissal, later mentioned that his play had not been up to standards. They replaced him with Mike Hegman, who was thereafter seen chasing ballcarriers into the end zone—ballcarriers Hollywood might have caught in the backfield. Yet announcers and sportscasters were soon talking about the poor quality of Henderson’s play prior to his retirement. Wasn’t it a shame?

This ain’t competition. man. man
This is war
And you can’t hit the comers no more
—”Can’t Hit the Comers”
by Bob Seger

It ain’t even war, it’s just show business. But show business is a kind of war. It is a struggle over who creates and defines the illusions, not who puts the ball in the end zone or the strike zone. You don’t have to hit the comers if you.are the one who defines the corners.

I see in the trades that Cowboys owner Clint Murchison and broadcasting magnate Gordon McClendon have purchased a subscription TV system. McCiendon made his reputation in radio by creating imaginary baseball games, complete with sound effects—crowd noise, crack of the bat—while an associate telephoned the progress of the real game to him. The power to define reality.

You beginning to get the picture yet?

The illusion?

Thomas Henderson was trouble, and besides, he just didn’t have it anymore.

Everybody agreed.

Everybody important.

After a while, even Hollywood will begin to wonder.

Duane Thomas did.

I FINALLY get Hollywood Henderson on the phone He sounds sleepy. We make plans to meet at Biff’s on Greenville Avenue. On the phone Hollywood seems to be bobbing and weaving. After the long string of unreturned calls and all the “sleep,” I wonder if he will show up.

Greenville Avenue was all pasture when I was with the Cowboys. Now it is single-swinger city, with discos and all the trimmings. I get this visceral feeling that Hollywood is going to put on a show for me instead of putting out any information. His expected trade didn’t go through during the recent NFL draft. He is beginning to feel the pressure of the fact that the NFL is the only game in town.

I’m interested in the legal aspects of the situation, what his case means to the players’ union, but I’m afraid Hollywood isn’t going to oblige me by acting like Joe Hill or John Herny. At Biff’s my fears arc confirmed. It is Hollywood’s hangout, where he does some of his show business. In addition, it is allegedly on the NFL blacklist.

I am already seated and drinking when Henderson arrives, dressed in tight bells and his jersey from the Pro Bowl. Dallas sports and society experts Joe Miller and Roy Yarrow are at the table; they offer to leave and give Hollywood and me some privacy. Hollywood says no and checks his watch—two bad signs. He wants an audience and isn’t staying long.

It is long enough.

I enjoy all I can stand.

Hollywood is funny and full of jive, dodging and angry; at the slightest push, he explodes into vicious, unthinking tirades. I can see the pressure is on him. Time is running out. “If Landry got down on his knees right here and begged me to play for the Cowboys, I wouldn’t. I’d kick his head in. And he’s a nice guy—I call him Tom. I’m gonna be on the cover of Inside Sports.” He brags of his interview with Inside Sports, glancing restlessly around the room.

“The Forty-Niners want me bad,” he says. “The contract I want is a million for five years.” He holds up five fingers. “They need me.”

I ask Hollywood if the NFLPA has been in contact, and he begins an obscene attack on the union for not helping him.

“Rick Schaeffer said they couldn’t reach you, Hollywood,” I say, “because your phone was out of order.”

I tell him that I’ve heard he ripped his phones out. Hollywood grins.

“Yeah, I tore six phones out of the walls, and then I went around and hammered the jacks flat. Then I threw the phones into the street. The phone company charged me six hundred dollars to put it all back.”

Ma Bell better not mess with Hollywood. She needs him.

“I guess that means you’re negotiating for yourself?” I ask Hollywood admits that he’s cutting his own deal with the 49ers, but when I press him for details, he seems evasive or just ignorant, never answering directly, speaking more for effect or rhythm than for any substance. He keeps talking about the million dollars for five years that he has demanded of San Francisco; but according to the Standard Players Contract, he can’t demand anything. The Cowboys still own him because he retired with three years remaining on his contract. The commissioner has yet to reinstate him in the league. When I point this out, Henderson sloughs it off with “They better not fuck with me or else I’II write a book that makes North Dallas Forty look like a fairy tale.”

He grins his monster grin. “Read what I told that guy from Inside Sports.” he says. ‘Til be on the cover.”

He stands and says he’s got to go to the bank. He has given me fifteen minutes.

I order another drink and watch Hollywood swagger out. He is a handsome physical specimen.

“He’s a good-lookin’ guy, okay,” a Braniff stewardess tells me. “But without football, he’s just another blue-gum from east Texas.”

My drink arrives. It’s sure gonna be tough to make Hollywood’s story into John Henry versus the Chesapeake & Ohio or Joe Hill versus the Southern Pacific.

The waitress says she was born the year I joined Dallas. We were 4-10 that year, and most people had never heard of the Cowboys. The Central Expressway access road ended in cotton fields, and the only blacks in this part of town were carrying tow sacks across the prairieland, not swaggering out of singles bars.

Hollywood Henderson didn’t make the cover of Inside Sports.

MORNING. The ninth floor of the Stoneleigh Hotel in the Oaklawn section of Dallas, my favorite part of town. The air is cool, and there is a haze. I’m sitting with my feet up on the open window sill, watching the jets cruise into Love Field and recalling the ’60s in Oaklawn, when Love Field was the only airport around and the jets would come in bone-rattling low, screaming over the housetops. When Braniff was threatening a strike, their pilots came in extra low and loud, and the dogs howled and ran around in circles.

It is Hollywood’s wedding day.

At 2001 Bryan Tower, high in the Dallas skyline, the wedding is beautiful and classy, the people are gentle. l am sitting with former Cowboys teammates Bob Hayes and Willie Townes and their wives. The groom is wearing white tie and tails, and the highlight of the ceremony comes when the black preacher holds his hand over Henderson’s head and cries, “Bless this marvelous man called Hollywood.”

At the reception I meet Hollywood’s college coach, Big Daddy Nivens from Langston University. Big Daddy says, “At college Thomas used to meet the other team’s bus and ride with them to the stadium, telling them how bad he was gonna whip ’em. He never caused any trouble.” Big Daddy says, “I knew be was gonna be okay his freshman year. I always give freshmen pants that’s too big for them. They usually tape them up. But not Thomas. He took his to a woman in town and had them tailored. I knew he was gonna be great.”

“Wasn’t that a class wedding?” Hollywood says to me later. “Tell them my groomsmen are worth two hundred million. You think I’ll end up like Duane Thomas or Bob Hayes?” He grins knowingly. I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean.

All the groomsmen are white except two.

“Who are these white guys?” I ask an old teammate.

“They didn’t get no two hundred million giving it away at a colored boy’s wedding, ” he replies. “All of them supposedly own places that the league put off limits.”

The party moves to south Dallas and the Plush Pup, a black disco on Grand Avenue a couple of blocks from the Cotton Bowl. At the disco, a friend of Hollywood’s tells me he advised him to keep a low profile, get married, and stay away from white women. Seems like good advice for any man.

Willie Townes and I talk about the old days with the Cowboys.

“I knew about the Cowboys from the day Tex Schramm asked me, ‘Willie, how you doing?’ And I said, ‘Tex, my aunt just died, and—’ Tex interrupted: ‘Good, good,’ he says.’And how’s the rest of the family?'” Willie shakes his head. “I figured the rest out from there.”

“Who is advising Hollywood?” I ask Willie. “‘Tell them my groomsmen are worth two hundred million!’ What sort of bullshit is that? He needs the union. All the players do. Does Hollywood understand that nobody else helps you when you begin to sink?”

“He’s scared, Peter, ” Willie says and then tells me how it was after he got cut. “Peter, people would come up to me on the street and say, ‘Hey, ain’t you Willie Townes, that fat guy—the guy on the fat man’s table?’ People really love sticking it to you when you’re back down on their level.” Willie drank another Lite beer. He works for a Miller beer distributor.

“I can’t get a straight answer out of Hollywood,” I complain to Willie. “He’s all bluff. Why?”

“Look, man,” Willie repeats, “he’s scared. Time is short. The questions are coming hard and fast. ‘What are you going to do, Hollywood? Who are you going to play with?’ He is scared, man.”

Who is advising Hollywood? Apparently no one. It hardly seems a fair match. But after all, Hollywood is magic.

“He says he’s asking the Forty-Niners for a million,” I say.

Willie just smiles. “Can’t hurt to ask.”

We watch the party as Hollywood moves about the Plush Pup in his elegant white tails. He seems confident. He looks beautiful. Everyone looks beautiful, but Hollywood is the definite center. Can he hold?

The wedding party moves from south to north Dallas, and Willie and his wife eventually drop me off at the Stoneleigh. Up in my room looking out the open window: the Oaklawn section is quiet now. A night bird sings. I think about Tom Landry setting the standards for this town. I love this town. I came of age in this town. I learned things here, met people from the Northeast and Midwest, people of all colors, all sizes and shapes. A lot of them were athletes, football players. They needed the union then, and they need the union now. It is show business, and they are laborers with public images, and each player is responsible for his own image. Henderson must become responsible for Hollywood—not for the Cowboys or the NFL, but for himself and other athletes like him, men struggling to keep fame from sucking them under. Hollywood and the NFLPA need each other, or soon Landry will be setting standards for the world.

We are just the survivors, Willie. Think about all those guys who sank without a trace.

“Don’t hurt me, now, Pete,” Henderson said when I left. Hollywood was dressed in white tails. We didn’t discuss the union.

It was his wedding day.

Class wedding.

Two hundred million worth of groomsmen.

A COUPLE days later I start calling the newly married Henderson, trying to get my promised interview. The phone is seldom answered, and then only after it has rung for a long time. His bride. Wyetta, always answers, and Thomas is always asleep. I leave my name and number in case he regains consciousness. Apparently he never does, for my calls are not returned.

My final morning in Dallas is sunny, cool, quiet. I realize that the haze is not going away. It is constant, as it is in Los Angeles. In the morning paper is a story about Hollywood’s replacement: “Mike Hegman, the Dallas Cowboys linebacker indicted on forgery charges in March and scheduled to go on trial last Monday, has had his trial date moved to Dec. 8—two weeks before the end of the National Football League regular season,” the article begins.

“There have been no special concessions made because he’s a Dallas Cowboy,” the DA on the case is quoted as saying.

“It was just a coincidence that (the new trial date) happened to go into the season,” Hegman’s attorney is reported to have said. “It’s just one of those things.”

It’s also a coincidence, no doubt, that on the West Coast recently, Cowboys defensive back Dennis Thurman convinced authorities that he was only joking when he passed a note to a bank teller saying that he was holding up the bank. “Sorry, y’all, just kidding.”

Yet Hollywood is out. Out cold, apparently.

l start packing. My laundry has not returned, but it is time to leave. I can feel it in my bones.

I try one more phone call to Hollywood. His new bride says he is still asleep.

I guess so.

l finish packing.

I don’t wait for my laundry.

Adios Berlin.

A FEW days after I returned to hill country—the day J.C. the barber and Sonny the JP wanted to know the definition of paranoid—an article appeared in one of the Austin papers: “Thomas ‘Hollywood’ Henderson, the former Dallas Cowboys linebacker whose sideline antics prompted his dismissal from the team, has been traded to the San Francisco 49ers for an undisclosed 1981 draft choice,” the paper reported.

“Cowboy spokesman Greg Aiello said the trade was unconditional, explaining that Dallas would get a draft choice even if San Francisco ‘cut Henderson tomorrow.'”

The operative phrase is undisclosed draft choice—that and unconditional. These are usually the kiss of death, but maybe not for Hollywood, who has his magic and is a great linebacker.

Still, an unconditional, undisclosed draft choice is something that exists only in the realm of the imagination. It is the classic corporate ploy. Now when Henderson wakes up he’ll have another corporation—the 49ers—between him and the Cowboys. If he were to file a grievance over his firing now, which corporation would he file it against? And how?

Run too slow, they fuck you; run too fast, they bite you on the ass.

Call your shot, Hollywood.

IN AUSTIN, my wife phoned with a message to return Hollywood Henderson’s emergency call. The new bride answered, as usual, after a long series of rings. Then Hollywood came on the line and sleepily warned me not to repeat certain things he’d said about teammates and people at the wedding. I guess he’d finally regained consciousness—but a little late, I’m afraid. I was tired of dealing with his ego, but I understood his problem and have been trying to explain it to you.

Now that I finally had Hollywood on the phone, I didn’t want to talk to him. “Look. Thomas, I stayed in Dallas for ten days trying to talk to you. I thought your case was a good one to show how a player’s rights are so easily violated. How his ego is used against him. How they make him look crazy. How badly the players need to support the NFLPA. Have you talked to the union lately? To Rick Schaeffer or Ed Garvey?” I knew he hadn’t. I knew what he was thinking: They need me worse than I need them.

“I’m interested in your legal case, Thomas. I’ve been through all the name-calling bullshit. They can say worse things about you than you can say about them, and they can do it longer. No matter what you call them, they can always call you ‘not good enough.’ You got a new contract with the Forty-Niners? The one-million-dollar one?”

“Yeah, there’s a contract.” His voice was sullen. He was evasive again. No mention of one million. “I negotiated it myself.”

Hollywood paused. “You better not fuck me up, Peter. Everything’s going good.”

“Yeah, sounds wonderful,” I said. “Listen, Thomas, we both got enough paranoia without this.” I hung up.

I don’t know if Thomas understands. I’m not certain I do, either. But then, that’s the idea, after all: Just keep sticking your head in there.

After I hung up, I thought of Willie Townes puffing his cigarettes and drinking his Lite beer and saying, “He’s scared, man. He’s scared.”

Me too, Willie. Me too.

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

 

This isn’t a holiday that stirs me one way or the other but the idea of giving thanks, well, I’m always down for that. So hell, here’s to being thankful for what we’ve got.

[Photo Via: ModCloth]

The Knicks look to improve their record to 9-1 tonight in Dallas. Can they win another? Odds say they won’t after playing last night but so far these Knicks have proven us skeptics wrong.

Anyhow, here’s hoping they win. Kibitz here about those old bastards or any ol’ thing that you’ve got on your mind.

Countdown to Turkey…