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Examining my charter for this space I find that am authorized to write about
anything that comes into my head. This is encouraging because if I had been
restricted just to things I know about, it would have been frustrating, and
possibly psychologically damaging. Anyway, maybe I do know something about
things besides cop stuff. Sports, for instance.
Just writing under the banner I use, Strike Me Pink, makes it almost a
requirement that I say something or other on the subject. It’s even possible that
there are readers who remember this was once the name of New York’s best-known
sports column and click on it in the hope of seeing something in the
tradition. The tradition was commentary on three sports, boxing, racing and baseball
and damn little else. The columnist harked back to the day when these were the
dominant sports in the country and he wasn’t inclined to change his focus.
So other sports got a nod, but that was all. The Big Three reigned all alone
like a queen on a throne
They weren’t approached in a spirit of reverence, though. Muckraking was the
order of the day, except in the case of baseball, which had been so
thoroughly well cleaned up by Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis that there wasn’t any muck
left to rake. Racing and boxing needed a lot of work, though. Racing was
honest overall, but at all times under siege by an army of small-time fixers and
horse dopers who bore constant watching to prevent them from achieving their
masterpiece, a “boat race” where every horse would finish in the exact order
the fixers had assigned it in advance.
Dan Parker, the sportswriter I’m writing about, also delighted in exposing
the touts, or tipsters, who sold race tips to unwary bettors for a percentage of
the winnings that came to them from this inside information. One way to
ensure a profit on this operation was to sell as many separate tips as there were
horses in a race, so there’d be at least one grateful customer at the end.
Another way was to litter the trains returning from the track with tip sheets
dated yesterday, but naming the winners of today’s races. The losing bettor sees
from these that some miracle man has succeeded in picking nothing but winners
all day and therefore must be reached before tomorrow so as to get a seat on
his bandwagon before it’s too late. The tipster collects his fee in advance
this time and makes a killing with the bettors who never stop to think that he
might have done a rush printing job after getting the results of the first
few of the day’s races.
Boxing was just as colorful, but, as might be expected, more violent in its
little ways.
Its evil genius was a mobster named Frankie Carbo, always referred to as Mr.
Grey, who was in cahoots with a Canadian ice hockey entrepreneur named Jim
Norris to control the fight game in New York and elsewhere. Their downfall came
through a fix they arranged for Jake LaMotta, enabling him to score a big
upset over a Philadelphia boy named Billy Fox, as I recall. Parker and others
hammered on this so hard that the District Attorney took notice and eventually
convicted Carbo and broke his power. Things have been better since then, or at
least no gangster has since been identified as the ruling force in boxing,
dictating the results of every fight in advance.
Baseball was a relief from all this chicanery. Dan cast doubt on Lou Gehrig’
s actual desire to fight when he challenged an opponent one time, but that was
as close to duplicity as the game went. During WWII there was a
French-Canadian poem about Pete Grey, the one-armed Canadian outfielder, which started “
Pete Gray, he’s play for Trois-Rivieres...” going on to describe Pete’s
exploits with one arm, and ending “by gar, eef he had two!”
Dan also had a soft spot for a pitcher named Johnny Antonelli, whose strength
came entirely from a diet of pasta fazoole, and another pitcher for the
Yankees named Frank Shea, who was a native of Dan’s home town, Naugatuck,
Connecticut. The most memorable story he ever wrote, though, was about the Brooklyn
Dodgers in their training camp in Havana in the late Forties. One of their fans
was Ernest Hemingway, who entertained them at his nearby home, La Finca
Vigia, in the evenings. Hemingway was free with his rum and the atmosphere was
clubhouse all the way. But Leo Durocher, the manager, who told the story, sensed
after a while that Hemingway and one of the ballplayers, Hugh Casey, a
pitcher, were sizing each other up and taking one another’s measure. Hemingway, it
seemed, was not about to bid a farewell to arms. He apparently considered
Casey as one for whom the bell would soon be tolling. The final evening, the two
of them jumped up went to war. They fought up and down the stairs and in and
out the rooms, laying waste to the furniture. They were both big men and
well matched. The house took a good beating and so did the battlers. When they
had had enough, they quit and got back to the rum. Durocher was close to
collapse. Over the threat to American literature? Not quite. The big threat had
been to the Dodgers. Hemingway could have broken both arms and still been
able to produce books, but Hugh Casey couldn’t even produce gopher balls without
his.
Okay, leave it to a bookworm to inject reading even into a sports story. I
plead not guilty to that, not that I expect it to convince doubters. I
maintain I’m capable of appreciating sports for their own sake, without any literary
references. Right now, for instance, I’ve got my eye on basketball. I’ve
found that the sportswriters and broadcasters covering it are too young for
their jobs and lack the background of experience of their seniors, like myself.
For example, one of the new players in the NBA has impressed everyone with
his hard-driving style and versatility. He’s a crowd-pleaser who gets the
audience up on its feet with spectacular plays. The boys have exhausted their
vocabularies describing him, but not a single one of them has noticed his
outstanding characteristic -- he’s a ringer for Bob Cousy, not just in appearance,
but in carriage and in playing style. I know. I saw Cousy.
The reporters have also overlooked another player who does something I’ve
never seen before. A right-hander, he dribbles right and shoots left, but with
no hesitation or hitch in his movement. It’s totally deceptive, giving him a
shot that can’t be stopped. Every other player switching hands in this way has
to make an effort which is a tipoff to his defender, no matter how smoothly
he does it. Again, I’m the only one who’s noticed it. This is called
analysis and it’s very hard to do, but I will go on.
N.B. This website gets updated every Monday. Look for it then.
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