Dispatches from the Sporting Life (12 page)

September 1986

I
n an otherwise generous review of my most recent novel,
Barney’s Version,
that appeared in the London
Spectator,
Francis King had one caveat. Noting the sharpness of protagonist Barney Panofsky’s intelligence and the breadth of his culture, he doubted that he could also be a sports nut. “Would such a man, obsessed with ice hockey, be able to pronounce with such authority on topics as diverse as the descriptive passages in the novels of P. D. James,
Pygmalion
as play, musical and film, the pornography published by Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press and Dr. Johnson’s
The Vanity of Human Wishes?
—rather strains credulity.”

But North American literary men in general, and the Jewish writers among them in particular, have always been obsessed by sports, an enthusiasm we acquired as kids and have carried with us into middle age and beyond, adjudging it far more enjoyable than lots of other baggage we still lug around. Arguably, we settled for writing, a sissy’s game, because we couldn’t pitch a curve ball, catch, deke, score a touchdown, or “float like a butterfly and sting
like a bee.” Never mind manage a 147 clearance on a snooker table.

George Plimpton, acting out our fantasies, did get to pitch in Yankee Stadium, while a bona fide intellectual, Robert Silvers, editor of
The New York Review of Books,
marked a scorecard in the stands. Plimpton next trained with the Detroit Lions and wrote engaging books about both his experiences. He also wanted to try his hand at tending the nets of the Detroit Red Wings, but, he told me, he was refused permission by the coach who warned him, “The puck is mindless.” And, he might have added, can come zinging in on a goalie at a hundred miles per hour.

Norman Mailer got to spar with both Archie Moore and José Torres. And, in perhaps the most famous boxing match in literary history, Morley Callaghan fought Ernest Hemingway in a Paris gym in the twenties, Scott Fitzgerald acting as timekeeper. In his memoir,
That Summer in Paris,
Callaghan claimed that he had famously knocked Hemingway down only after Papa had both startled and insulted him by spitting in his face. The embarrassed Hemingway, on the other hand, accused the duplicitous Fitzgerald of allowing the round to go beyond three minutes, or there would have been no knockdown. He also complained that Callaghan, in search of publicity, had passed on news of Hemingway’s humiliation to a New York newspaper gossip columnist, but Callaghan denied the story.

Sport weighs heavily on the American literary man’s psyche. Back in the seventies, when I once met Irwin Shaw for drinks in the Polo Lounge, in Beverly Hills, he was still touchy about being patronized by
the Jewish literary mafia, the
Commentary
intelligentsia rating him far below the trinity of Bellow, Malamud, and Roth. “They could never forgive me for being such a good football player,” he said.

North American men of letters, incidentally, are not the only literary sports nutters. Albert Camus, for one, liked to brag about his prowess on the soccer pitch. However, if we are sports obsessed, at least we don’t attempt to dignify our boyish enthusiasms with intellectual gibberish. Were you aware, for instance, that the soccer ball is a symbol of sainthood? Or that goalkeepers are patriarchal figures with roots deep in the culture of European Christendom? Such, in any event, were the conclusions reached by Günter Gebauer, professor of philosophy at the Institute of Sport in Berlin, speaking at Cité Philo, a month-long philosophy festival that took place late in 2000 at Lens, near Lille in northern France. Ruminating on the meaning of the soccer ball, Herr Gebauer said, “It is mistreated in the most vile fashion… but it returns to your feet and is cherished and loved. This is like the saint who is thrown out of town and comes back to conquer people’s hearts.”

He also had some original thoughts on the goal and goalkeeper. “They are bound up with intrinsically European values, where our house is our castle and the source of pride and honour. We guard it against intrusion, just as a goalkeeper guards his goal. Scoring is like penetrating into a stranger’s house, burning his belongings or raping his wife and daughter.”

Then, as no conference of European intellectuals would be complete without its anti-American dig, he added, “In the U.S. the attachment to notions of
honour and pride are far less strong, which no doubt explains why there is no goal or goalkeeper in their version of football.”

Never mind that the American corruption of soccer does include a goal or touchdown line, coveted by rapists, but what about ice hockey?

My all-time favourite hockey goalie, Gump Worsley, also a philosopher of sorts, once tended the nets for the hapless New York Rangers.

“Which team gives you the most trouble?” a reporter once asked.

“The Rangers,” he said.

Another professor of philosophy at Cité Philo, Jean-Michel Salanskis, ventured that soccer was not for the, um, mentally disadvantaged. “Wherever you go in the world,” he said, “people talk about soccer in terms of theories. There is the theory of the playmaker, the theory of the counter-attack, the theory of the three-man defence and so on.” Such capacity for abstract thought, he suggested, made every fan a potential philosopher.

Obviously he had never been to a British soccer match, the riot police and ambulances in attendance, the philosophers in the stands, many of them with shaven heads, heaving bananas at the black players, pissing against the nearest wall or even where they sat, an intimidating puddle once forming immediately below.

It was sport that first enabled me, as a child, to grasp that the adult world was suspect. Tainted by lies and
betrayals. This insight came about when I discovered that our home baseball team, the Triple A Montreal Royals, which I was enjoined to cheer for, was in fact made up of strangers, hired hands, most of them American Southerners who were long gone once the season was over and had never been tested by a punishing Montreal winter. Only during the darkest days of the Second World War when deprivation was the unhappy rule, coffee and sugar and gasoline all rationed, American comic books temporarily unavailable, one-armed Pete Gray toiling in the Toronto Maple Leafs outfield—only then did French-Canadian players off the local sandlots briefly play for the Royals: Stan Bréard at
arrêt-court,
Roland Galdu at
troisième bu,
and Jean-Pierre Roy as
lanceur.
A few years later my bunch could root for a Jewish player, outfielder Kermit Kitman, who eventually married a Montreal girl and settled here, ending up in the schmata trade. Lead-off hitter for the Royals, only twenty-two years old, but a college boy, rare in baseball in those days, he was paid somewhat better than most: $650 monthly for six months of the year, a bonanza enriched by $13 a day meal money on the road. Kitman told me, “As a Jewish boy, I could eat on that money and maybe even save a little in those days. The Gentile players had enough left over for beer and cigarettes.” If the Royals went all the way, winning the Little World Series, he would earn another $1,800.

My disenchantment with the baseball Royals, counterfeit hometowners, didn’t matter as soon as I discovered that I could give my unqualified love to the Montreal Canadiens,
Nos Glorieux,
then a team unique in sport because most of its star performers
were Quebeckers born and bred, many of whom had to drive beer trucks or take construction jobs in summer in order to make ends meet. I speak of the incomparable Richard brothers, Maurice and Henri; goalie Jacques Plante, who knitted between periods; and Doug Harvey, universally acknowledged as the outstanding defenceman of his time, who never was paid more than $15,000 a season, and in his last boozy days earned his beer money sharpening skates in his brother’s sports shop, for kids who had no idea who he was.

Then as now I turn to the sports pages first in my morning newspaper, unlike Frederick Exley, who would begin by reading the book review and entertainment sections: “Finally I turned to the sports sections. Even then I did not begin reading about the Giants. I was like a child who, having been given a box of chocolates, eats the jellies and nuts first and saves the creamy caramels till last. I read about the golf in Scotland, surf-boarding in Oahu, football as Harvard imagines it played, and deep-sea fishing in Mexico. Only then did I turn to the Giants….”

In the forties radio was our primary source of sports news. Saturday nights we usually tuned in to the overexcited Foster Hewitt on
Hockey Night in Canada.
Like millions of others on the night of June 18, 1941, we huddled round our RCA Victor radio to listen to the broadcast from the Polo Grounds in New York, as former light heavyweight champion Billy Conn took on the great Joe Louis. The Brown Bomber, patronizingly described again and again as “a credit to his people,” also qualified as a Jewish hero ever since he had redeemed our people by knocking
out Max Schmelling in their second meeting. Conn, a clever boxer, was ahead on points after twelve rounds, but in the thirteenth he foolishly stood toe to toe with Louis, intent on flattening him. Instead, Louis knocked him out at 2:52 of the thirteenth.

My heart went out, however grudgingly, to the Brooklyn Dodgers, if only because so many of their players had served their apprenticeship with our Montreal Royals. One autumn afternoon I joined a concerned knot of fans outside Jack and Moe’s barbershop, on the corner of Park Avenue and Laurier, to listen to the radio broadcast of the infamous 1941 World Series game, wherein catcher Mickey Owen dropped that third strike, enabling the dreaded Yankees to trample the jinxed Dodgers yet again.

When we were St. Urbain Street urchins, Hank Greenberg, the Detroit Tigers’ first baseman, was our hero. Proof positive that not all Jews were necessarily short, good at chess, but unable to swing a bat.

Numbering high among my most cherished sports memories is the night in the sixties, in New York, when Ted Solataroff, my writer chum, took me to the Polo Grounds to watch Sandy Koufax pitch a two-hitter. He went nine innings, of course, but those were the days when a starter was expected to go nine, or at least eight, rather than to be hugged by his teammates if he managed six, to be followed on the mound by a succession of multimillionaire holders and closers.

Although I spent some twenty years in England, I could never, unlike our children, who were brought up there, acquire a taste for soccer or cricket. So I can appreciate that most Englishmen of my acquaintance
have no interest in ice hockey and consider baseball a bore. “Isn’t that the game,” I have been asked more than once, “that grown men play in their pyjamas?”

The absurdity of sport in general, American football in particular, to people who weren’t brought up on our games was once illuminated for me by the Canadian writer and broadcaster Peter Gzowski. Gzowski, a frequent traveller to the Arctic, told me that as far as the Inuit were concerned, football was funnier than any sitcom available on TV. They would gather round a set in Inuvik falling about with laughter at the sight of the players in their outlandish gear, especially savouring the spectacle of them testing their armour on the sidelines, banging into each other like caribou in heat.

American literary guys tend not only to be obsessed by sport, but many have also written with distinction about games. George Plimpton, already mentioned, has hardly ever written about anything else. A baseball game between yeshiva students and goy boys was crucial to Chaim Potok’s novel
The Chosen.
Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth have both had their tickets punched with baseball novels:
The Natural
and
Our Gang.
Saul Bellow has yet to oblige, but in his most recent novel,
Ravelstein,
the imposing intellectual protagonist is also a sports nut, an avid fan of both the Chicago Cubs and the Chicago basketball Bulls. At the risk of appearing pushy, I will also include my own modest contribution here: a long set-piece in my novel
St. Urbain’s Horseman
about a baseball game
played by blacklisted expatriate American filmmakers on Hampstead Heath in the sixties.

Robert Coover contributed one of the most original baseball novels I know of,
Mr. Waugh’s Universal Baseball League.
But the classic baseball novel, first published in 1916 and happily still in print, as fresh and acute as ever, is Ring Lardner’s
You Know Me Al.

Boxing, above all, has attracted the attention of literary men in England as well as America. Dr. Johnson, Swift, Pope, and Hazlitt have all had their considerable say. In America Jack London, James Farrell, Nelson Algren, John O’Hara, Hemingway, Irwin Shaw, Budd Shulberg, Norman Mailer, and Wilfrid Sheed have all written about the sport. So have W. C. Heinz and Ted Hoagland, and of course there is Leonard Gardner’s wonderful novel
Fat City.
Not only guys have pronounced on what Pierce Egan dubbed “the sweet science,” but also Joyce Carol Oates. Her erudite
On Boxing
must be the only book about the game that refers,
en passant,
to Petronius, Thorstein Veblen, Santayana, Yeats, Beckett, Ionesco, Emily Dickinson, and both William and Henry James, among others. Joyce Carol Oates was introduced to boxing in the early fifties when her father first took her to a Golden Gloves tournament in Buffalo, New York. Happily, in her original, if somewhat eccentric, take on the game she does pay tribute, as is only proper, to the great Pierce Egan, who published his classic
Boxiana: Sketches of Ancient and Modern Pugilism,
acknowledging that his prose was as wittily nuanced as that of Defoe, Swift, and Pope. However, she finds herself “uneasily alone” in being
scornful of A. J. Liebling, a journalist whose boxing writing I cherish. She dislikes Liebling “for his relentless jokey, condescending, and occasionally racist attitude toward his subject.” Perhaps because it was originally published in
The New Yorker
in the early fifties,
The Sweet Science: Boxing and Boxiana—a Ringside View
is a peculiarly self-conscious assemblage of pieces, arch, broad in humour, rather like a situation comedy in which boxers are “characters” depicted for our amusement. Liebling is even uncertain about such champions as Louis, Marciano, and Robinson—should one revere or mock? And he is pitiless when writing about “Hurricane” Jackson, a black boxer cruelly called an animal, an “it,” because of his poor boxing skills and what Liebling considers his mental inferiority.