The Red Smith Reader Page 8

  Jews were barred from swimming facilities in Germany, from the ski resort of Garmisch-Partenkirchen and from all private and public practice fields, and of course they were not permitted to compete in Olympic tryouts. Yet Frederick W. Rubein, secretary of the United States Olympic Committee, said: “Germans are not discriminating against Jews in their Olympic tryouts. The Jews are eliminated because they are not good enough as athletes. Why, there are not a dozen Jews in the world of Olympic caliber.”

  Said General Sherrill: “There was never a prominent Jewish athlete in history.”

  The Olympic brass won that time. We did not meddle in the internal affairs of Germany.

  The games went on in Australia almost immediately after Soviet tanks crushed a revolt in Hungary, though blood flowed when Hungarians met Russians in water polo. The games went on in Mexico City two weeks after Army machine guns massacred more than thirty students in the Plaza of the Three Cultures. The games went on in Munich while Arab terrorists were murdering eleven members of the Israeli delegation. On that occasion, though, they took time out for a memorial service that Avery Brundage turned into a pep rally.

  “We have only the strength of a great ideal,” Avery said. “I am sure the public will agree that we cannot allow a handful of terrorists to destroy this nucleus of international cooperation and good will we have in the Olympic movement. The games must go on.”

  That day it was written here: “The men who run the Olympics are not evil men. Their shocking lack of awareness can’t be due to callousness. It has to be stupidity.”

  ON PLAYING IN IVAN’S YARD

  1980

  President Carter has warned that the United States might withdraw from the Moscow Olympics if the Soviet Union’s aggression in Afghanistan continues. Some voices have seconded the motion, Saudi Arabia has already pulled out, and sentiment in favor of a boycott will spread as Soviet tanks and troops press on with their bloody work.

  It is unthinkable that in the present circumstances we could go play games with Ivan in Ivan’s yard. The United States should lead a walkout now, making it clear to the Russians that even if the shooting ends and the invading forces go home, the rape of a neighbor will not be quickly forgotten. With their parades and flags and anthems and the daily count of medals won, the Olympic Games are a carnival of nationalism. The festival is a showcase for the host nation to display its brightest face to the world. It is inconceivable that we should lend our presence to a pageant of Soviet might.

  Dispatches from Moscow tell of an “Olympic purge” already under way to present the Communist society as an ideal surpassing even the dazzled view that Lincoln Steffens got. (“I have been over into the future, and it works.”) To scrub up the capital for an anticipated 300,000 visitors, “undesirables” will be sent out of the city and contact with foreigners will be discouraged. Dissidents, drunkards, psychotics and Jews who have applied for emigration are undesirable. School children will be sent to summer camps. Kevin Klose, the Washington Post correspondent, reports that some teachers are telling their pupils that American tourists will offer them poisoned chewing gum.

  Unofficial sources, Klose writes, “sardonically use the Russian word chistka or ‘cleaning’ to describe what is going on. It is a word with dread connotations for Soviets because it is the term used in designating the Stalinist purges that swept millions to their death in slave labor camps beginning in the late 1930s.”

  All of this hints at how important the Olympics are to the government. Diminishing their vast propaganda show or possibly causing its cancelation would be a sterner measure than many might think. And the millions of tourist rubles involved are no small matter.

  It was inevitable that as soon as the President mentioned the possibility of a boycott, the stuffed shirts in the Olympic movement would revive the threadbare argument that politics should not be injected into the Olympics—as if the games ever had been free of politics, as if the Olympic movement itself weren’t shot with politics. Not that the playground directors have a monopoly on unrealistic thinking or fatuous speech. Consider the statement of Gerhart Baum, West Germany’s Interior Minister:

  “In the opinion of the government, sports cannot be used as a means for political ends. Sports cannot solve problems whose solution can only be achieved politically.”

  In 1956, Egypt, Lebanon, and Iraq withdrew from the Melbourne Olympics to protest an Israeli invasion of the Sinai and the Gaza strip. Spain, Switzerland and the Netherlands walked out to protest the Soviet march into Hungary. In 1976 the entire African continent boycotted the Montreal games because of the presence of New Zealand, which countenanced athletic relations with South Africa. The quadrennial quarrel over the two Chinas remains unresolved.

  And still the Olympic brass clings to the fantasy that these are contests for individuals, not nations. Then after each contest they raise the winner’s national flag and play his national anthem. Between games, Olympic fund raisers beg for contributions to help beat the Russians.

  Aside from the garbage about politics, the only argument against withdrawal is that it would penalize American kids who have endured the drudgery of training for four years or more with their dreams fixed on this one opportunity for international competition.

  It would, indeed, be a disappointment, perhaps not their first and surely not the last they will ever experience. But any measures taken against Soviet aggression will demand sacrifices from someone. As Mary McGrory observed in her Washington Post column, if we got into war, those kids are the ones who would do the fighting.

  Chances are the savants who write editorials in The New York Times today weren’t even reading that page in 1936, but the paper opposed American participation in the Nazi Olympics of that year. When the Nazis “deliberately and arrogantly offend against our common humanity,” the Times said, “sport does not ‘transcend all political and racial considerations.’”

  “Deliberately and arrogantly” sound like the words Jimmy Carter used last week. Considering the provocation, they are mild. The Soviets invaded an independent nation—which happens, incidentally, to be a member of the Olympic family—executed the leader of that nation’s government and then said the government had invited them in.

  In ancient Greece, wars were suspended when the Olympics rolled around. It says here the Olympics should be suspended when the caissons roll.

  2.

  Racing

  GODLY GAMBLING HELL

  SARATOGA SPRINGS, 1957

  The pastor at St. Peter’s announced the annual fuel collection. By old local custom, this announcement is scheduled for this weekend in August when the godly horseplayers are in town holding enough of the folding money to defray the cost of heating church and school, rectory and convent through Saratoga’s long winter when the snow lies deep on the racetrack and visitors have forsaken the mineral springs and health baths.

  “I heard it said,” the priest said, “that Saratoga and the racetrack especially have been enjoying their best season in history. More people have been attending the races and more money has been going through the mutuel machines than ever before.

  “I understand that yesterday the daily double windows were kept open longer than usual and when they closed there were still lines waiting and 150 people were turned away. If any of those people are here this morning, we will cheerfully accept those bets, in the collection basket.”

  The cheerful words came pleasantly from the pulpit. Maybe there are churches where tolerant mention of gambling would seem out of place, but not in Saratoga, where racing remains a recreation first and a business enterprise last. It has often seemed here that there is a happy affinity between horse playing and piety, and it is an established fact of theology that men who live on the racetrack live long and do good deeds.

  “Last Sunday,” the priest said, “I told you about Archbishop Cushing taking up the collection in a little church in Scituate, a village on the south shore of Massachusetts. I told you the collection came to $17,000�
�that the people in the pews contributed $7,000 and just afterward a man came in and gave the Archbishop a check for $10,000.

  “Later a man said to me, That was a pretty good story, Father, but you didn’t identify the guy who gave you $10,000.’ He thought he had me stuck, but I said, “I’ll tell you who that man is. It is Mr. Perini, owner of the Milwaukee Braves.’

  “Mr. Perini is a highly successful contractor and his team is leading the National League and last night they played to 43,000 people and the night before there were 44,000 in Milwaukee Stadium, so we know Mr. Perini can afford to be generous. I understand he gives $10,000 every year to the Archbishop’s charities.

  “Because of his generosity, we are happy that a man like that has his team at the top of the National League.”

  This was pretty early, before breakfast for some, but priests rise early and have time to scan the sports page before mass. It was gratifying to be brought up to date on the baseball and racing news, including attendance figures. For some reason not altogether obscure, memory recalled a Sunday morning in Edgartown, on Martha’s Vineyard, when a visiting priest was making a pitch for the foreign missions.

  He was a tall, rangy, lean-muscled young man you would peg on sight as South Boston Irish. You could imagine him playing plenty of first base for Boston College or Holy Cross. He was talking about how you can’t possibly lose doing charity, how true generosity inevitably repays itself:

  “My father,” he said, “ran a trolley car in Boston and I don’t have to tell you that things weren’t easy for him financially. One day two Sisters of Charity got on his car, and when they were about to get off he handed each one a dollar.

  “‘Sisters,’ he told them, I’d like you to take this, please, and use it for whatever purpose you think best.’”

  For a moment the quiet voice ceased. Then it went on: “This was true charity,” the priest said, “because two dollars meant a great deal to my father, but this was a gift from the heart.

  “It was charity that must be rewarded, and that same afternoon—that very afternoon—my father hit the daily double at Suffolk Downs, and he got plenty.”

  Thus for the sermon for the first Sunday after the Travers Stakes.

  MR. FITZ

  1963

  This is about Mr. Fitz. Not James E. Fitzsimmons, the great trainer of racehorses, but Mr. Fitz, the great man. Mr. Fitz has decided the first eighty-nine years are the hardest. When he starts his ninetieth year on July 23 he’ll be in retirement, he says. You can get bets.

  Officially and technically, Mr. Fitz will retire in June. After that, when the yellow and purple silks of Wheatley Stable or Ogden Phipps’ cherry and black appear on the track, Mr. Fitz’s name no longer will be printed on the righthand side of the program. When the alarm clock shows 5:30 A.M., there will be nothing to call him out of the sack.

  Mr. Fitz says he won’t mind that, especially on raw mornings or rainy ones. A fellow has to wonder, though. What’s he going to do with all that bustling energy, all that sparkling enthusiasm for living, all that affection for people? How about the bright mornings in the Hialeah Stable area and the soft afternoons under the old elms of Saratoga?

  Evenings he can still watch a good shoot-’em-up on television and then, before retiring, make the breakfast batter for the family—half buckwheat, half pancake flour with a little molasses for extra flavor. When there’s a party he’ll still bake the patty shells for canapes because his are the lightest and flakiest. Still, it is hard to believe that will fill the hours for a man who has had almost no empty ones since the day Grover Cleveland took oath as President.

  When they write about Mr. Fitz they write about Gallant Fox and Omaha and Johnstown, Dark Secret and Faireno and Nashua, Bold Ruler and Misty Morn and High Voltage—all horses. About the man—well, there was a morning at Hialeah when everybody was talking about the behavior of a jockey who seemed to be getting too big for his britches.

  Mr. Fitz sat listening to the arguments pro and con, taking no part until his opinion was sought directly.

  “There are two groups in racing whose rights should be considered,” he said then. “There are people who furnish the actors for the show, the owners with the costly stables. And there is the public that furnishes the money. Both of them got to lose, no chance in the world to break even.

  “All the rest of us—jockeys, trainers, grooms, everybody—we make our living off this game them other people support and it’s up to us to do as we’re told.”

  The best part of greatness, and perhaps the biggest part, is humility.

  Every August for some years now, one Sunday has been given over to a party at Fitzsimmonsville, the cottage colony on Lake Desolation where Mr. Fitz and his remarkable tribe live during the Saratoga meeting. The first time it was proposed, Mr. Fitz took a dim view.

  “A party?” he said. “Who’d ever want to come?”

  Outnumbered and overruled, he gave reluctant consent, but as the day approached he fretted and stewed, nervous as a bride. Chances are nobody knows whether there were 100 guests or 250, for who was counting? But it was a howling success, as it had to be, and Mr. Fitz was delighted.

  “Kathie,” he told his granddaughter—he was only about eighty then, “Kathie, if the good Lord spares you, we’ll do it again.” The good Lord has, and they have.

  Even more recently than that, Mr. Fitz was still driving his own car. He’s hardly big enough to see over the wheel sitting bolt upright, and he is too bowed to sit up. It was something to see him peeking up through the spokes of the wheel, especially with his friend Jonesy at his side. Jonesy was hard of hearing.

  “See anything coming, Jonesy?” Mr. Fitz would say approaching an intersection.

  “Hah?” Jonesy would shout, cupping an ear. “How? Whatzat again?”

  Jonesy was “with” Mr. Fitz. Probably his title was stable cook or something, but there have always been men “with” Mr. Fitz, not always in a clearly defined capacity. Jonesy got the blame for everything.

  Mr. Fitz says pancakes taste better if you make the batter the night before. When he has mixed up a big bowl and stashed it in the refrigerator, the kitchen doesn’t necessarily look like a hospital corridor. This has occasionally elicited comments from the distaff side.

  In a store Kathleen Fitzsimmons was reminded of her grandfather’s hotcakes when she saw a tall plastic pitcher with a snap-down lid. She brought it home late that night after a date, transferred the batter from the bowl and set the pitcher on the top shelf of the refrigerator, the narrow one up beside the freezing unit. Then she washed out the bowl, tidied the mess and retired.

  Down early the next morning, she found her grandfather in a rage. What was the matter? Why, that blasted Jonesy, wherever he was, must have stolen the batter. It was right here—

  “What’s this?” Kathie said, reaching for the pitcher.

  “How the hell did you expect me to see it way up there?” Mr. Fitz snapped.

  SECRETARIAT’S FAREWELL

  1973

  In Secretariat’s mail was a postcard signed Fiji. It read: “I can’t wait.” Fiji is a broodmare owned by Walter Salmon’s Mereworth Farm, one of thirty-odd mares that will be dating Secretariat next year when the celebrated sex symbol takes up his role as a lover, bestowing his favors at $190,000 each.

  Preparing for his new career, the best horse of his time formally closed up shop on the race trade yesterday with a ceremonious farewell to his New York public.

  It was a nippy day of sunshine and clouds, and if the big red colt didn’t draw children from their play and old men from the chimney corner, he did at least prompt thousands among Aqueduct’s election day crowd to put aside their past performance charts and venture out into the gusty chill for one last look.

  “He doesn’t know what to do,” said Mrs. John Tweedy, the mistress of Meadow Stable, as her champion posed in the winner’s circle under a blue-and-white blanket. “He’s not run, he’s not tired and he’s not won.”

&
nbsp; “Eddie,” called Henny Hoeffner, Lucien Laurin’s assistant trainer, when Edward Sweat, the groom, was leading the horse away, “go right back to the truck. He doesn’t need anything. He doesn’t know what he’s doing with all this applause.”

  It was Secretariat’s seventeenth visit to the winner’s circle and the only time he ever got there without working for it. This reminded some of the older crocks present of the day twenty-four years ago when Stymie made a similar valedictory at old Jamaica, then a stately pleasure dome affectionately known as Footsore Downs and now a housing development about three miles from Aqueduct.

  Stymie was a showy chestnut like Secretariat, and although television had not discovered horse racing in his day, he was as dearly beloved by his following of thousands as Secretariat has been among TV’s millions.

  Like his public at Footsore Downs, Stymie was common folks, a refugee from the claiming races, which became a millionaire by honest effort. It took the three-year-old Secretariat only twenty races to make a million dollars; Stymie faced the starter 131 times, running until the end of his eighth year.

  For his farewell, Hirsch Jacobs had Stymie ponied down the homestretch to the paddock instead of coming the shorter way around the clubhouse turn. He was unidentified by silks or bridle number, yet the horse players recognized him instantly and waves of applause followed him from the far end of the grandstand to the clubhouse. Saddled in the paddock, he returned to the track, but flatly refused to enter the winner’s circle.