The Red Smith Reader Page 5

  “When my Joe comes home,” the suburban ladies concede, “he’s generally tiddly and sometimes rotten. But he does get home for supper.”

  Briefed on these simple, sordid facts, an exploring party set out at five P.M. guided by a Melbourne taxpayer whose feeling for the six o’clock swill is one of warm appreciation. “There’s bound to be jostling,” he said, “and you’re odds on to slop some beer on another bloke. You say ‘Sorry.’ When you’ve spilled enough beer on him you’re friends for life. Makes it a quite decent social do, if you know what I mean.”

  First stop was the pub in Hosie’s Hotel, an old place lately rebuilt, rather shiny with blond paneling. It’s a fairly sizable room with two bars forming an L down the lefthand wall and across the back. Drinkers weren’t three deep as they are in a good New York saloon in rush hours. They simply packed the joint from wall to wall, laborers, clerks, businessmen, truckers, here and there a sailor or soldier. All were males. “The women,” the guide said, “are breaking down the barriers. It’s only in the last five or six months that they’ve been showing up in pubs. By the time the games are over, I think it will be broken down altogether, except in a blood house like this. Toss that off and we’ll go along.”

  He led the way down the street to the Port Philip Club Hotel, a long arcade with bars in the arcade proper and bars in rooms branching off to right and left. The place was jammed with sailors. When you ordered a beer, the barman didn’t carry your glass to a tap. He carried a pistol-shaped spigot hitched to a long tube and squirted your glass full where you stood.

  “For mass production,” the guide said, “Detroit couldn’t beat this. Would you call it Willow Run? Let’s go meet Chloe.”

  Chloe is a gilt-framed blob of pink loveliness in Young and Jackson’s pub a few doors down the street. She hangs on a battered, scaly wall, gloriously nude and internationally famous. She was painted in 1875 from a model—legend says—named Marie, a lively lady of Paris. The tale is told that one night Marie gathered all her friends for a lavish feast, wined them and dined them and sent them away, then boiled match heads into a poisonous potion and gulped it down.

  It was getting on toward six o’clock and the jam in Young and Jackson’s several bars was beyond describing. More than a few customers had heavy-looking satchels full of bottled beer that they would take home, the guide said. Six o’clock struck and a voice of dire warning came howling out of loudspeakers. Some drinkers lined up three or four glasses, for they would have fifteen minutes to empty them and clear out. A minute after six, men were pleading for one more and bartenders were opening the taps from which beer no longer flowed.

  Downstairs somebody had shut off a master valve.

  “SKULLDUGGERY” EXPOSED

  NEW YORK, 1956

  Well, the sordid truth is out, and from now on Allen Dulles will keep his snooping beak away from here if the miserable reprobate knows what’s good for him. He and his whole Central Intelligence Agency might as well be told right out what they can do with their flamin’ cloaks and daggers.

  A Russian periodical called Literary Gazette has revealed that when we were all in Melbourne for the Olympics last fall, Dulles had a stable of shapely dolls on call to corrupt the Soviet athletes.

  How about that for discrimination? Our own agents skulking around Olympic Village plying Bolsheviks named Tcherniavski and Bachlykov with dainty viands and toothsome blonds, and who consoles the flower of the loyal American press along Flinders and Swanston Streets? Avery Brundage, that’s who. As they say Down Under, well ecktually!

  It’s all clear enough now that Literary Gazette has blown the whistle, but it is humiliating to realize that scores of the busiest ferrets in American journalism could be on the scene and fail to see what was going on under their twitching noses.

  A fellow thinks back to Olympic Village now and recalls scenes in the Recreation Center which seemed innocent enough at the time. It was bright, airy and a generally merry place where kids of all nations frolicked in their spare time. During the day you might see Andy Stanfield, the sprinter, beating a Russian hurdler at chess. Others would be whacking a ping-pong ball around or writing letters or playing cards while the walls trembled under the impact of a rock-and-roll record.

  In the evening Mrs. Earlene Brown would take over, and then the joint started jumping. Earlene was the belle of the ball, the darling of the international set. She is a jolly Negro woman out of Los Angeles, 226 tireless pounds, a smasher on the dance floor.

  Not only Russians, but Afghans, Turks, Slavs and Finns learned rock-and-roll from Earlene. Who’d ever suspect that this jovial Mata Hari’s dark purpose was to wean Soviet music lovers away from Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich into the imperialist camp of Elvis Presley?

  Yes, and under cover of Elvis’ bawling, manly Muscovite hammer throwers would be out strolling beneath the Southern Cross, murmuring state secrets to Allen Dulles’ “flopsies,” to use the solicitous Australian term.

  Allen must have swiped a leaf from Jim Norris’ book and signed all available talent to exclusive service contracts, for downtown Melbourne after dark reminded hardly anybody of the Casbah.

  It was downright pitiful to see dashing correspondents of the romantic Richard Harding Davis type languishing in the International Press Bar of the Melbourne Cricket Ground with no better way to pass the evening than a celibate game of ricki-ticky for the bartender’s shillings.

  Only once were traces of rouge and lipstick detected on Melbourne’s sternly Puritan face. A chunk of the American Navy sailed in one day about noon. Within an hour, the streets swarmed with gobs and every blessed one of them had a bit of fluff on his arm.

  The Games were pretty well along when the fleet arrived. By that time, no doubt, the last Russian broadjumper had been brainwashed and Mr. Dulles had turned his delectable operatives out to pasture.

  American agents, Literary Gazette reports, “tried to palm off ‘secret documents’ on our girls and boys. They tried to give them photographs of military objectives in order to convict them later of espionage.” It is mortifying to realize that a lot of us saw that happening and thought it was only a cuddly camaraderie characteristic of childish games.

  In the opening ceremonies, the big U.S.S.R. team followed the big U.S.A. delegation into the Stadium and the two groups lined up side by side on the infield. Pretty soon they broke ranks and mingled, indistinguishable in their white jackets except for a trace of tattletale gray in the Soviet uniform.

  American women took off their shoes and wiggled their toes in the grass. Men swapped lapel badges for souvenirs. American women traded white gloves for the Soviets’ red breast-pocket handkerchiefs. Who could have known there was microfilm in every glove?

  Literary Gazette says sneak thievery went on, and blames American spies. Melbourne hotel owners who applied the time-honored Kentucky Derby gouge will properly resent that. Since the days of the immortal robber, Ned Kelly, the home-grown Australian bandit has been the equal of any,

  WHEN IN ROME

  ROME, 1960

  This town was raised on wolf milk, as any friend of Romulus and Remus could tell you, and the critter is regarded as more or less sacred here. When a guy is a wolf, Romans don’t dignify him by calling him that. They call him a parakeet, presumably for the way he whistles.

  A parakeet sidled up to Mrs. Olga Fikotova Connolly and made signs indicating that he deemed her a right tasty dish. Olga, defending Olympic discus champion, married the Boston strongboy, Harold Connolly, after winning the Gold Medal for Czechoslovakia in Melbourne. She now is competing for the United States while her mate defends his championship in the hammer throw.

  “Husband,” Olga said, scaling the language barrier like Lee Calhoun clearing a hurdle, “hammer . . . boing!”

  When last seen, the parakeet was headed down the Appian Way, lengthening stride at every jump. The moral seems to be that things haven’t changed much around here since J. Caesar was making passes at Cleopatra.

  There
always are minor changes, of course, one of which will be noted tonight when the Romans jump the gun on custom and bring the Olympic torch into the city a day ahead of the opening of the Seventeenth Games.

  Ordinarily this hallowed Roman candle, lighted in Olympia and hauled from Greece to the site of the games by steamship, Ford truck, and boy scouts in running pants, travels on a schedule calculated to bring it into the main arena just at the climax of the opening ceremonies. There a runner flings it into a big birdbath full of benzene, which bursts into flame and is kept blazing until the last weary marathon runner has tottered through his last paces three weeks hence.

  Rome, however, figures that she’s learned a thing or two in the last 2,500 years about putting on a circus. The torch will make its scheduled appearance in Stadio Olimpico Thursday afternoon, but before that it will have been carried ceremoniously up the steep stairs to the Capitol itself, heart of this ancient city. Passing through Naples tonight, the torch will reach the Appian Way at evening tomorrow, come blazing through the darkness under the triumphal Arch of Constantine and arrive about nine P.M. in the Campidoglio, the lofty little piazza designed by Michelangelo.

  It is revealing no secret to observe that the Latins are an emotional race, flaky about melodrama. This characteristic is reflected everywhere, in the dress that the whole city has put on for the carnival, in the way the organizing committee has managed to blend the antique and modern in the stage settings.

  There isn’t a street that is not festooned with flags and banners—the red, white, and green flag of Italy, the burgundy and gold of Rome, the white Olympic flag with its five interlocking rings. Olympic posters appear on building fronts everywhere, especially those marked affissione vietata, meaning post no bills.

  While runners and cyclists and soccer players and fighters and swimmers are competing in magnificent new stadia and arenas—built for this festival with $70,000,000 of gambling profits from the national football lottery—rasslers will be writhing and gymnasts gyrating in some of the most ancient monuments of the civilized world.

  Mats will be spread under the mighty arches of the Basilica di Massenzio, built by Maxentius in A.D. 306 at the end of the Roman Forum, and the grunts of the rasslers will be heard where other crowds heard the roars of lions. Among the arches, pillars, and crumbling walls of the Baths of Caracalla, gymnasts will fling themselves about in premises that were devoted to physical culture 1,700 years ago.

  Not since 1896 in Athens have any games of the modern Olympic era had a setting to compare with this, yet antiquity hasn’t taken charge altogether.

  Bravely holding the fort for the modern view is Flaming Mamie, a splendid new statue executed for this show, that stands outside the glaringly modern Palazzo dello Sport, the boxing and basketball arena.

  Mamie is a tall marble broad wearing a union suit and holding a torch aloft. She is knock-kneed and flat-chested, but the most striking feature is her abdomen.

  It may be art, but any respectable obstetrician would take another view.

  WINNERS TELL JOKES

  ROME, 1960

  Thirty-seven soft-shoe shufflers in their underwear crowded up to the starting line for the 20,000-meter walk—a sprint of about twelve and a half miles—and a guy in the press box said: “Did I ever tell you about my Uncle George? He was disqualified from the Olympics for beating the gun three times in the 50,000-meter walk.”

  The hikers went wriggling and squirming away like night crawlers after a rain, elbows pumping, shoulders shrugging, hips swinging, and laughter followed them around the brick-red track and out onto the baking streets. Last one through the gate was a Tunisian named Naoui Zlassi, wearing a pillowcase on his nob. About an hour and three-quarters later he would get back last, with his headgear missing and sunset rays lighting his glistening scalp the way the sunset lights Mount Rainier.

  “As a chart-caller would put it,” a guy said, “he raced evenly,” and this was pretty hilarious, too, for as they say around the poker table, the winners tell funny stories and the losers say, “Deal.”

  This was on Friday, when American hearts were light and gay for the first time in the Seventeenth Olympic Games. In the morning faces had been longer than the Appian Way, for on the afternoon before, John Thomas of Cambridge, Massachusetts, had lost to two Russians the high jump he couldn’t possibly lose and Ray Norton, considered the world’s greatest sprinter, had run last in the 100 meters. Now, though, it was a bright new day, and the band kept whomping away at a truncated version of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and the banner itself kept creeping up the flagpole, and chauvinistic kissers gleamed with broad Yankee grins.

  In the morning there’d been guys around ready to horsewhip Thomas because, after shattering every high-jump record ever set by man and making “seven feet” a dirty pair of words, he had been, on one day of his young life, unable to clear more than 7 feet 1/4 inch. Fact is, he had more excuses than anybody needs, and nobody who jumps seven feet needs any.

  After a bout with the popular tourist disorder called the Tyrrhenian two-step, he came up to the biggest day of his nineteen years feeling plumb peaked. He was second-guessed severely for passing his turn when the bar was at the Olympic record of 6 feet 11 1/2 inches. This was a tactical decision. He felt he had one good jump left in him, and he made it, and this day it wasn’t good enough.

  Though he didn’t mean to, he demonstrated why Olympic records seldom match world records. All around the globe there are guys shooting at world records every week of the year. An Olympian gets one chance in four years to surpass the best that the greatest have accomplished under ideal circumstances.

  “It isn’t everybody can win a bronze medal in the Olympics,” young Thomas said afterward, consoling himself.

  He was dead right, but in their disappointment a lot of Americans failed to recognize this until the next day, when the Yanks came on like gang busters.

  First the American hurdlers “ran the table,” as we say around the poolroom. On the little chopping block where the medalists get their hardware, Glenn Davis, Cliff Cushman, and Dickie Howard took their places. The self-possessed Davis, Olympic and world champion, bent low to let England’s old Olympian, Lord David Burghley, hang the gold medal around his neck, waved to the crowd, grabbed Lord David’s elbow with a companionable clutch, and shook hands. Cushman grinned like a blond billiken getting his silver bauble. Hands folded as in prayer, Howard bowed his neck as though for the guillotine.

  Then Wilma Rudolph, a leggy doll from Clarksville, Tennessee, ripped three-tenths of a second off the world record for females at 100 meters. The record won’t go into the books because of a following wind that blew one gasp harder than the legal limit, but she smashed her field and up went the flag again.

  Here came Earlene Brown to pick up a bronze medal for third place in the distaff shot put, and then the interminable business in the men’s broad jump soared to a climax.

  The broad-jump record has been a track-and-field freak, the only one to withstand the assault of postwar legions. Jesse Owens set the world record of 26 feet81/4 inches in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1935, and it stood alone as the oldest in the books until Ralph Boston beat it this year by three inches. When these Games opened, no Olympic jumper had ever matched Owens’ leap of 26 feet 51/4 inches in Berlin in 1936.

  Halfway through Friday’s round, Boston did 26 feet 7% inches. It wiped Owens’ Olympic mark off the books and virtually assured America of another gold medal. At this point Bo Roberson, a reformed halfback from Cornell, was second, but in his last try Russia’s Igor Ter-Ovanesyan moved ahead of him, and then the German Manfred Steinbach hurled himself into third place.

  Roberson had one jump left, last of the whole field. He teetered at the starting mark, a great big rubberized corset binding his damaged left thigh. Then he took off—and took the silver medal with a spring of 26 feet 7 1/2 inches.

  “I feel like a father watching his children do well,” said Jesse, beaming.

  MULTIPLE
MOM

  INNSBRUCK, 1964

  No doubt about it, said a guy in the Winter Olympics press center, a story had to go with this. He had heard that on the Swiss luge team there was a forty-two-year-old mother of five whose maternal duties did not deter her from swooshing down Alps in mile-a-minute lunges through a twisting trough of sheer ice while stretched supine on a toy sled.

  The guy had been told that her fifth child was born only four months after she won the world championship three years ago. So apparently she’d had a stowaway aboard, although there is no doubles event for gals in luge racing.

  If this was true and if there was anything to that theory about prenatal influence, then the chances were that by now mom’s littlest darling would be faster on a sled than Kris Kringle with all his bloody reindeer.

  Obviously, this called for investigation, not in a prying spirit but only to advance the science of eugenics. After all, in the Kentucky bluegrass horsemen breed for speed.

  Well, sir, it was a pity. The story had everything except the virtue of truth.

  Run to earth in Olympic Village, Elisabeth Nagele turned out to be a hausfrau, all right, but a hausfrau of thirty, not forty-two, a dewy and tasty thirty. She is a compact Swiss bonbon only five-feet-two with green eyes, rose-petal skin, a shy, sweet smile and long auburn hair clasped at the back and just allowed to ripple.

  Wrapped from throat to shapely ankle in a snowsuit of fire-engine red, she looked like something under the tree on Christmas morning.

  With one of the girl guides they have around here interpreting, the question about junior’s prenatal competition was put as discreetly as possible.

  Nein, said Frau Nagele, sweetly but firmly. She won the world championship in February 1961. The baby wasn’t born until December.