Dispatches from the Sporting Life (18 page)

Where I come from, hockey and baseball appealed to every class and faith, distinctions limited only to where fans could afford to sit. Since then, however, we have suffered the National Hockey League’s ostensibly mindless expansion into the American sunbelt, a move actually informed by a subtext seldom mentioned. The owners hope to eventually acquire fan support by offering rednecks the only team sport left that is just about 100 percent white.

In the thirties and forties we counted football, golf, and tennis as strictly WASP as sliced white bread. We associated football with universities fastidious enough to have Jewish quotas, and golf and tennis with country clubs and resorts that wouldn’t tolerate any Jews whatsoever. A down-and-dirty sport like boxing, on the other hand, belonged to tough kids out of Italian, black, Polish, Irish, and Jewish mean streets. Jack Solomons, one of ours, was the promoter with heft in London, and Joe “Yussel the Muscle” Jacobs called the shots in New York, where the great and near-great trained in Lou Stillman’s gym. And welterweight champ Barney Ross, the son of a Talmudic scholar, gave us bragging rights.

In those days boxing-beat hacks in Toronto had not yet been muzzled by political correctness. Describing a 1934 fight, one of them wrote: “For once, the Gentile barracking brigade will have to
choose between the lesser of ‘two evils,’ when Sammy Luftspring and Dave Yack, a pair of Hebes, battle for supremacy at Frank Tenute’s Elm Grove show at the Mutual Street Arena on Monday night.” Not much later Lou Marsh, of the
Toronto Daily Star,
got to cover what was, as he put it, “an honest-to-Henry grudge fight between a Celt and a son of Moses.” Sammy Luftspring vs. Chick McCarthy. The good news was this promising “slugfest” had attracted an all-Canada record attendance of 6,000, “of which 5,795 talked turkey to the box office staff.” Luftspring won a unanimous decision, but not before, wrote Marsh, “McCarthy opened the final round with a right-hander that made the aggressive little Jew boy lean like the Tower of Pisa.”

A couple of days after Maxie Berger died in August 2000, both the Toronto
Globe and Mail
and
National Post
ran obituaries, noting that Maxie had briefly been world junior welterweight champion. Lacking the earlier verve of the
Star,
the tame
National Post
headline ran:

In common with other newspapers, the
National Post
featured a silly photograph of Maxie, obviously retrieved from an ancient Canadian Press file. It
harked back to the days when newspaper photographers in a hurry could always be counted on to honour their own code of clichés. Photographing a novelist, they had him hold his latest book to his chest. Snapping two politicians shaking hands, they enjoined them not to look at each other but to smile menacingly sincerely into the camera. Dispatched to shoot a photograph of a real estate developer who was launching a hospital building campaign with a $25,000 donation, they got the donor and recipient to pose together, both clutching a four-foot-long copy of the cheque. I used to drink with one of those photographers when I was a teenager writing for the long-defunct Montreal
Herald,
filing for two cents a line. Late one afternoon he told me that he had been paid fifty bucks by Nat Sugarman, who was running for alderman again in our district, to attend his debate with Herb Feingold, who also coveted a job that came with advance real estate information that could be worth plenty. “Now listen to me,” said Sugarman, “you don’t load that fucking camera with film because I’m not paying for that. But every time I hold up my pencil like this. Watch me, see, I’m now holding up my pencil. Every time I do that, you leap out of your chair to go flash flash flash. But whatever that shit Feingold says, you never take his picture. Got it? Good.”

The incongruous photograph of Maxie showed him assuming his ring stance, leading with his left. But he is standing in the corner of a room, wearing an open-necked sports shirt and trousers belted high, addressing a blank wall. His swept-back hair suggests it was brilliantined or he had just got out of a shower.

“Clean up good, Maxie, for Christ’s sake. You know how long it is since they took your picture for the papers?”

Cauliflower ears. Soft dim eyes. Scarred eyebrows. Pulpy nose. Swollen knuckles. And no wonder. Over the wasting years, the New York mob had fed Maxie to Fritzie Zivic, Beau Jack, and the great Sugar Ray Robinson, among others. Maxie took on Sugar Ray in Madison Square Garden in 1942, knocked to the canvas twice before the referee stopped the fight. Maxie had wanted to continue, but the referee had shouted at him, “Do you want to get killed?”

The son of immigrants out of a Polish
shtetl,
Maxie had an education limited to elementary school, after which he went to work as a grocery delivery boy. He learned to box at the YMHA, on Mount Royal, which was then in the heart of the city’s working-class Jewish quarter. He won a silver medal in the British Empire Games in the 1930s before turning pro, fighting out of the Bronx. Married four times, on his retirement he returned to Montreal and opened a custom-made shirt business, where the smart guys could acquire those ghastly white-on-white shirts, inevitably worn with initialled cufflinks, and what we used to call a one-button-roll sports jacket with outsize padded shoulders.

I first encountered Maxie in the forties in the Laurentians, our minor league Catskills, at the Castle des Monts Hotel in Ste Agathe. A seething Maxie came roaring out of the hotel pursued by a hollering wife. When we shot
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz
in 1974, I made sure there was a small part for Maxie. The
National Post
obituary writer
noted that Maxie was “like a character in a Studs Terkel novel,” but Terkel never wrote a novel. The obviously nice man who had written Maxie’s obit also had it that “he became a stockbroker in the early 1960s, profiting from the 1960s stock market boom.” Actually, he served as a factotum for a brokerage house. In those days he would occasionally turn up in the Montreal Press Club, then in the Mount Royal Hotel, and I would chat with him there, an uncommonly gentle man who had taken too many punches to the head in close to a hundred fights. He was out of it for the last ten years of his life, a sufferer from dementia.

R.I.P., Maxie.

September 2000

W
atching Luis Miguel Dominguin fight in Valencia in 1951, I suddenly saw a scrawny boy, two rows down, leap from his seat, vault the
barrera,
broomstick and sack in hand, and make it clear onto the sands of the bull ring, stamping his foot for the bull to charge. Around me people were cheering or laughing warmly, but I remember watching the boy, my heart hammering, until attendants hustled him off. I did not yet know that these boys, called
espontaneos,
were commonplace. A week later, in Paris, a friend showed me a new French Communist Party publication, a
Life-size
picture magazine lampoon about America. On the first page there was a photograph of Harry Truman, then president, looking bumpkinish as he waved a shoe aloft at an American shoe convention. Opposite, Al Capone smiled darkly behind a cigar, and there was a quote from him endorsing capitalism. The best system, Capone said. On the following page, clinching the case for bestiality, there was a full-page spread of a behemoth of a football player: crouching, the eyes mean, the mouth snarling, arms hanging ape-like.
This, the caption said, was a typical American university student.

I toss in these two memories, seemingly unrelated, because at the bullfight in Valencia it did not occur to me that a gifted reporter, mulling over just such a bit of adolescent daring, as George Plimpton once did, could develop it into two unusual sports books:
Out of My League,
published in 1962, and now
Paper Lion.
And then I have always shared what I take to be the French Communist Party line on American football. I am, I should hastily add, not so much a fellow traveller as a committed sports fan. Living in England for more than twelve years, I follow the baseball and ice hockey results conscientiously in the Paris
Herald,
but football, even after reading Plimpton’s uncommonly good
Paper Lion,
is still alien to me. Possibly my prejudice against football, like just about everything else, breaks down to race and class. On our street, a working-class street, we wanted to be boxers or, failing that, baseball pitchers. Bonus boys. Speaking for myself, I got so far as to train for the Golden Gloves when I unfortunately came up against a schoolmate called Manny, who was already fighting professionally, working in preliminaries under an alias in small towns. Manny had the unnerving habit of blowing his nose on his glove before swatting me. I still insist he didn’t knock me out. Revolted, I fainted. In Montreal we had the example of Maxie Berger, who fought in the Garden and once went the distance with Ike Williams; and we also had our one and only Ziggy “The Fireball” Freed, who would have been a star with the Athletics had Connie Mack not been such a lousy anti-Semite.
Ziggy was actually signed by a scout at the age of eighteen and was sent out for seasoning with a Class D team in the Carolinas. He lasted only a season. “You think they’d give a Jewish boy a chance to pitch out there?” he asked. “Sure, in the ninth inning, with the bases loaded and none out, with their home-run hitter coming up to the plate, the manager would shout, Okay, Ziggy, it’s your ball game now.”

Football, however, was always remote. A middle-class WASP’s game. I still associate it with hip flasks, raccoon coats, and loud boring McGill alumni making damn fools of themselves in downtown Montreal. I also have a problem with the players, the boors of my university days. Of James Thurber’s university days too, if you remember Bolenciecwcz, the Ohio State University tackle, in
My Life and Hard Times.
“In order to be eligible to play,” Thurber wrote, “it was necessary for him to keep up on his studies, a very difficult matter, for while he was no dumber than an ox he was not any smarter.” Bassum, the economics professor, asks the star tackle to name a means of transportation (“Just any means of transportation. That is, any medium, agency, or method of getting from one place to another”), but this he is unable to do. “Toot-toot-toot,” the professor says. “Choo-choo-choo.” Finally, Bolenciecwcz comes up with train, thereby qualifying for the Illinois game.

I’ve been to pro games, and I can’t help feeling that there is something fundamentally unsportsmanlike about men, mostly oversize to begin with, strapping themselves into all that outlandish equipment and wearing cages to protect their faces, all for a game’s sake. It’s brutish. In the epilogue to
Paper
Lion,
Plimpton writes, “Detroit had a bad season my year. The team finished fourth in its division…. Injuries hurt their chances. Eleven of the first-line players were knocked out of the line-up with injuries, most of them on the defensive team. Joe Schmidt and Carl Brettschneider of the linebackers were crippled, and so were Yale Lary and Night Train Lane. Gary Lowe ruptured his achilles tendon….”

If I have already made it abundantly clear that football isn’t exactly my game, then I must say that George Plimpton’s
Paper Lion
is at once a more satisfying and complex book than
Out of My League,
wherein the writer unwinds the sometimes nightmarish story of how he came to pitch to an all-star lineup of National and American League players in the Yankee Stadium, the team with the most hits picking up $1,000.

Plimpton got
Sports Illustrated
to put up the pot. It was his notion, he told the editor, that he would pitch “not as a hotshot—that’d be a different story—but as a guy who’s average, really, a sort of Mr. Everybody, the sort who thinks he’s a fair athlete….” If it worked out, he hoped to go on to play tennis with Pancho Gonzalez, box with Archie Moore, play golf with Snead or Hogan, and so forth.

The writing in
Out of My League
is fresh and observant, but it suffers from spinning out a one-day adventure into a book. It is original, there is much to admire, but I think it would have read better as a shorter piece, like John Updike’s splendid account of Ted Williams’s last day with the Boston Red Sox. Ultimately, the most compelling thing about
Out of My League
is what I can only call the
author’s chutzpah, his actually going through with it, imposing himself on the players and the unsuspecting crowd at the Yankee Stadium. Many of the players were indifferent, others were cold. With Plimpton floundering on the mound, Mantle yawns ostentatiously. But then we never really worry about the author’s pitching performance per se as we do, say, about Jim Brosnan’s good and bad days in
The Long Season.
Plimpton’s professional pride, unlike Brosnan’s, could never be truly involved. Neither is his livelihood.

We also do not fret about how Plimpton will stack up on the field as the Detroit Lions’ last-string quarterback, but from the moment he begins haphazard practice, whacking a football into an armchair in his apartment, until he is finally allowed to call five plays in an intersquad scrimmage at Pontiac, Plimpton holds us with the force of sheer good writing. His account of his stay with the Lions makes for a most enjoyable, likable book. If he was, predictably, a disaster on the field, I can think of no other non-fiction book that evokes more successfully the special taste and feeling of a game and the men who play it.