The Red Smith Reader Page 15

  He is not an easy man to know. Those who do know him are utterly devoted to him.

  N.F.L. IN AMERICAN HISTORY

  1976

  In a hot flush of patriotism, the National Football League has jumped aboard the Bicentennial bandwagon and is sponsoring an essay contest for high school students from fourteen to eighteen years of age. For the best paper on “The Role of the N.F.L. in American History,’’ first prize is a $10,000 college scholarship and second is a $5,000 scholarship. There are ten scholarships worth $1,000 each. In addition, the winner gets an all-expense trip to Super Bowl X in Miami next January with his, her or its parents. The following is submitted in the hope of helping young minds to think along productive lines.

  N.F.L. Bicentennial Essay Contest

  Box 867

  Winona, Minn.

  I think pro football is boss and quite historic. I like to read books about pro football, like Semi-Tough and North Dallas Forty. My little sister likes them, too, and is learning most of the words.

  The N.F.L. has made contributions to legal history, medical history and pharmaceutical history. In fact, the Houston Ridge Case was a milestone in all three areas. Houston Ridge was a defensive end with the San Diego Chargers who got hurt and sued the club, the team doctor and the league. He said they gave him pep pills to kill the pain so he could keep on playing after he was hurt. He said he did keep on playing and got hurt worse. He was on crutches a long time.

  There was testimony that the Chargers’ trainer made phys-ed history by leaving a package of “bennies” or “greenies” or “uppers” in each locker before each game. After the game if a player was afraid he wouldn’t sleep that night, they gave him “downers” to settle his nerves.

  A druggist testified that he sold 10,000 amphetamines to Irv Kaze, the business manager of the Chargers. “Did you expect Mr. Kaze to ingest 10,000 pills himself?” the druggist was asked. He didn’t answer. This is a whole chapter in the history of pharmacology.

  Houston Ridge was paid more than $300,000 to settle his suit. That was pretty historic. Later Pete Rozelle, commissioner of the N.F.L., put eight of the Chargers’ players on probation for using drugs and fined them different amounts. He fined the club $20,000 and Harland Svare, the general manager, $5,000.

  This year the Chargers have played eight games and lost them all. Historians think they ought to go back on greenies.

  George Burman, who was a reserve center on the Washington Redskins, is one of the most historic Americans since George Washington. In his Farewell Address, President Washington said: “I hold the maxim no less applicable to public than to private affairs, that honesty is always the best policy.”

  So when somebody asked George Burman about taking dope he said sure, lots of Redskin players smoked grass and ate bennies. This made a lot of people in pro football sore, but today George Burman is a professor of economics at Carnegie-Mellon University, which used to be Carnegie Tech. He tells it like it is about laissez-faire and gross national product.

  Our teacher says Samuel Gompers and Eugene V. Debs were great Americans because they did a lot for the labor movement in this country. St also says David Dubinsky, John L. Lewis and Walter Reuther made contributions.

  So did Norm Van Brocklin of the National Football League. He was coach of the Atlanta Falcons and when the players went on strike in the summer of 1974 he called up the team representative, Ken Reaves.

  “You and your picket sign are going to New Orleans,” Norm Van Brocklin told Ken Reaves.

  About the same time the Chicago Bears traded away three players including their player representative, Mac Percival. Their owner, George Halas, made a statement that has gone down in history. “This is the greatest thing that’s happened to the Bears in five years,” he said. “We got rid of those malcontents. It’s a great day, a great day!” Since then the Bears have had no malcontents and very few football players.

  On November 22, 1963, an opera was having its premiere in a brand-new opera house in Munich. After the first act, word came that President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas 6,000 miles away. The theater closed and the people went home. In Rome, Italian taxi drivers draped a cab in black and parked it in front of the United States Embassy. In Israel, every shop closed in every town and kibbutz. In the United States while mourners filed past a flag-draped coffin in the Capitol Rotunda, the National Football League played a full program of games.

  That didn’t prove the N.F.L. callous or insensitive to history, though. They always play “The Star-Spangled Banner” at N.F.L. games, and the pièce de résistance between halves at Super Bowl IV was a re-enactment of the Battle of New Orleans. The British won.

  “I would rather be right than President,” said Henry Clay, statesman.

  “I don’t care what others think, so long as I satisfy myself,” says Al Davis, managing general partner of the Oakland Raiders.

  4.

  Baseball

  SENT TO BED HUNGRY

  1981

  When Gene Michael was rehired as manager of the New York Yankees starting in 1983, George M. Steinbrenner III said: “It’s like a child doing something bad at the dinner table. You send him to bed without dinner, but he’s back down for breakfast in the morning.”

  The child George III had in mind was Eugene Richard Michael, age forty-four. The bad thing Gene Michael had done at dinner was stand up on his hind legs like a man and declare for publication that he was sick to death of George’s interminable nagging, carping and fault-finding, and invite his employer to fire him here and now or shut up about it.

  After reading about sending the kid to bed without dinner, a friend of Red Reeder said: “This makes it clear to me that those two guys Steinbrenner beat up on the elevator must have been ten and eleven.”

  Michael’s ultimatum was a challenge, of course, and an immature, half-formed mind cannot let a challenge pass. There have not been many better examples than this of the way sports promoters think.

  George III picked up the challenge and acted on it, firing Michael as manager to satisfy his own macho appetite but keeping him in the company for later use. George III knew there would be later use for Gene; he admires Michael as a student of baseball, respects him as a bachelor of science in education and esteems him as a contemplative numismatist, but not even Steinbrenner has the crust to fire Bob Lemon right now, considering Bob’s record with the team. So when Lemon said he’d like to be manager one more year, George III said, “Goodie!” and put everything on the back burner.

  Fortunately for the manager pro tern, Lemon, and the manager presumptive, Michael, George III then struck a bargain with Ron Guidry’s lawyer, John Schneider. That was fortunate for Yankee managers of the foreseeable future, because in the foreseeable future the Yankees would not win a pennant without Guidry. He is the franchise, and he can show the figures to prove it.

  In no one of his five seasons since he became a member of the starting rotation, including the amputated season of 1981, has Guidry won fewer than 11 games. It goes without saying that the Yankees have not had 11 games to spare in any recent year.

  Guidry’s big league record starting in 1977 is 79 games won, 27 lost, for a winning percentage of .743. The Yankees in those seasons won 451 games and lost 303 for a percentage of .598. Ron is the stopper who ends losing streaks, the fireball who wins the big ones, the bull of the woods. Nobody else on the squad can assume that role. Also, he is going to be the only homegrown Yankee; all his playmates, save only Bobby Murcer, were nurtured in other gardens.

  Now that Steinbrenner and Guidry have reached agreement—or what passes for agreement before George III has signed a paper—there may be time for inquiry into the future of Reggie Jackson. It must come as a new and perhaps disturbing experience for Reggie to discover another player’s contract affairs commanding wider attention than his. It had to happen, though, just as Reggie will have to attain his thirty-sixth birthday next May.

  A year ago the big baseball news
concerned Dave Winfield and his obscene financial terms with George III. Perhaps that gave Jackson a taste of what it would be like when he was no longer playing the lead in the Bronx Follies. However, it was known then that his contract was valid for 1981; he could bide his time in a supporting part until the starring role was his again.

  Now, though, he was a free agent and nobody was looking his way. All eyes were on Guidry. The situation may change this week. The teams bidding, or prepared to bid, against the Yankees for Jackson are supposed to be Baltimore, Atlanta and California.

  One would be disposed to throw Baltimore out as a serious contender. As Earl Weaver, the Orioles’ manager, says: “Must you have Jackson to win the championship? Yes? Then get him. Could you win without him? We’d have a pretty good chance. Then don’t tap out for him.”

  The Braves’ Ted Turner is a different breed of operator. If Turner wants something he’ll let no obstacle get in his way, and if you don’t like his team or his town or his mustache he’ll talk your resistance away.

  Angel management comes at a free agent just as rapaciously as the Braves, and Southern California offers compelling charms to some individuals. To suggest that Reggie Jackson may be such an individual is not necessarily absurd.

  CONNIE MACK’S INEVITABLE DAY

  1952

  In the winter of 1883 a skinny young cobbler’s assistant who hated cobbling shoved his catcher’s glove into his pocket—it was a kid glove, skin-tight, with the fingers cut off—and went out through the snows of New England and got a job as a professional baseball player with Meriden, of the Connecticut State League. He knew then, of course, that the career he was starting would have to end some day.

  Throughout his sixty-seven years in baseball, Connie Mack has been aware that the day of departure must inevitably arrive. So has everybody else. But those who have known him have known also that when the time did come, it would come as a shock. It came yesterday. It was a shock.

  A shock, but not a surprise, for it is not exactly a secret that Connie will be eighty-eight years old on December 23. The only surprise regarding his retirement as manager of the Athletics stems from the appointment of Jimmy Dykes as his successor instead of Connie’s son Earle. For years Connie insisted that Earle, and Earle alone, would succeed him, and certainly Earle fancied himself for the job over a good many years.

  Only a week ago there was a story out of Philadelphia suggesting that Dykes was through with the Athletics, and it quoted Connie thus: “I hope Jimmy finds something good, real good.”

  So now Jimmy has found something, but how good it is remains to be seen. He is manager of a bad ball team with a barren farm system and a financial future that is a topic of wide speculation, because Earle Mack and his brother, Roy, went in hock to buy the club.

  Seems as though there’s always got to be a catch in it when Dykes takes a new job with the A’s. Sold to the White Sox in 1932, he returned to the A’s as coach in December 1948, and Connie welcomed him thus at the winter meetings in Chicago: “Jimmy, I’m afraid we can’t pay you enough money.”

  “Keeeripes!” Jimmy wailed. “Do we have to start in where we left off sixteen years ago?”

  But it isn’t Jimmy Dykes whose name is uppermost in mind today. It is Connie Mack and the shocking, indigestible knowledge that from now on when the Athletics go out to play, the old man won’t be sitting in the dugout erect on his little rubber cushion, his score-card held stiffly over his bony knees, his Adam’s apple jiggling above that high hard collar (he still buys them by the dozen from a firm in St. Louis).

  For one who traveled with Connie Mack for ten seasons, it would require at least ten years to tell about this glorious old guy who has been baseball’s high priest and patriarch, one of its keenest minds, its priceless ambassador, one of its sharpest businessmen, certainly its most indestructible myth.

  The plaster saint that they made of him in his old age, the prissy figurehead whose strongest expletive was “Goodness gracious!”—that was pure myth. The man was a ballplayer in the days when baseball was a roughneck’s game, and he did all right in the game. He was not a roughneck and not profane by habit, but on occasion he could cuss like any honest mule-skinner. Yes, and when he was younger he played the horses and drank liquor.

  He could be as tough as rawhide and as gentle as a mother, reasonable and obstinate beyond reason, and courtly and benevolent and fierce. He was kindhearted and hardfisted, drove a close bargain, and was suckered in a hundred deals. He was generous and thoughtful and autocratic and shy and independent and altogether completely lovable.

  There was a day when the Athletics, having broken training camp in Anaheim, California, and having left there Lena Blackburne, one of the coaches, with a leg infection, started out of San Francisco for an exhibition game. It was a nippy morning and somebody asked Connie if he wanted the auto window closed against the chill.

  “Dammitohell!” Connie exploded. “I’m all right, don’t worry about me! Everybody’s always fussing about me. Mrs. Mack says: ‘Con, wear your rubbers. Con, put on your overcoat.’ So I put on my coat and rubbers and go out to buy medicine for her!

  “And that Blackburne!” He was getting madder and madder. “It’s ‘Boss, are you warm enough? Boss, are you comfortable? Boss, you better come inside and rest.’ And where is Blackburne? Lying down there in Anaheim on his tail, dammit!”

  It may have been that same day that he nearly broke a rookie’s heart by telling him he was going back to the minors and then, a couple of hours later, changed his mind and kept the kid, explaining apologetically: “At my age a man’s got a right to do what he wants to do once, anyhow.” (The rookie opened the season with the Athletics and was a bum and had to go back, after all.)

  One day Wally Moses, who was a holdout, burst from the room where he’d been haggling with the boss and tore out of training camp on the run, his face as white as paper. Another day Connie confided that in all his years of baseball there’d been two unpleasant tasks he’d never got used to: sending a young fellow back to the minors, and arguing with a ballplayer over salary.

  He meant it when he said that, and whatever he’d said that other time to Moses, he meant that, too. There never was another like Connie. There never will be.

  HENRY AARON’S FINEST HOUR

  1974

  The only way it could have been better would have been for Henry to hit the very first pitch, the one thrown by Gerald Ford.

  Of all the contributions Hank Aaron has made to baseball in twenty blameless years, of all his accomplishments as a player and his acts of graciousness, generosity and loyalty as a person, none was half so

  valuable as his achievement of yesterday. It isn’t only that his 714th home run matched a record that for more than forty years was considered beyond human reach, and it isn’t particularly important that this courteous, modest man has at last overtaken Babe Ruth’s roistering ghost. What really counts is that when Henry laid the wood on Jack Billingham’s fast ball, he struck a blow for the integrity of the game and for public faith in the game.

  With one stroke he canceled schemes to cheapen his pursuit of the record by making it a carnival attraction staged for the box office alone, and he rendered moot two months of wrangling between the money-changers and the Protectors of the Faith.

  Standard-bearer in the latter camp was Bowie Kuhn, whose rare exercise of authority as baseball commissioner brought about Aaron’s presence in the lineup. When the game’s upright scoutmaster notified the Atlanta Braves that he expected Aaron to play two of three of the team’s early games, he brought back to memory an observation made some years ago by the late Tom Meany as toast-master at a sports dinner in Toots Shor’s.

  “Ford Frick just reached for the rye bottle,” Tom announced between introductions. “It’s his first positive move in four years.”

  This is the sixth season in office for Frick’s successor-once-removed, and nothing he did in the first five years was anywhere near as important as his ac
tion in this matter. Bill Bartholomay, the Braves’ president, meant to keep Aaron on the bench through the first three games in Cincinnati in the hope that crowds would fill the Atlanta park to see Henry go after Ruth’s record in the 11-game home stand that opens Monday night.

  Kuhn realized that in the view of most fans, leaving the team’s clean-up hitter out of the batting order would be tantamount to dumping the games in Cincinnati. He explained to Bartholomay what self-interest should have told the Braves’ owner, that it is imperative that every team present its strongest lineup every day in an honest effort to win, and that the customers must believe the strongest lineup is being used for that purpose.

  When Bartholomay persisted in his determination to dragoon the living Aaron and the dead Ruth as shills to sell tickets in Atlanta, the commissioner laid down the law. With a man like Henry swinging for him, that’s all he had to do.

  Thanks to Mrs. Herbert Aaron’s muscular son, 2:40 P.M., April 4, 1974, will stand until further notice as Bowie Kuhn’s finest hour.

  That was the time of day when Henry hit the ball, and although his 715th home run will mean more to him because it will advance him into a class all by himself, it was his finest hour, too.

  To be sure, he didn’t realize that beforehand. While the controversy that Bartholomay started was going on, Henry said some foolish things. He talked about protecting the Atlanta box office and about the rights of Atlanta’s dwindling body of customers. He said it didn’t matter whether he played or not because the Braves weren’t going anywhere this year.

  When they said, “Suppose the commissioner orders the Braves to play you,” he said that in that event he guessed the commissioner would have to make out Cincinnati’s batting order, too. This smart-aleck line must have been fed to him, for Henry isn’t a smart aleck.