Suitors of Spring, The: The Solitary Art of Pitching, from Seaver to Sain to Dalkowski (Summer Game Books Baseball Classics) (14 page)

An Angel of His Time

My career?” he says with a shrug. “It was no big thing. I could never get the knack of what they wanted of me.” He takes a delicate sip from a tall glass, purses his lips slightly, then continues. “Oh, I might have had a career if they could have tied me to the mast. You know, like Ulysses? When he heard the mermaids’ wailing he wanted to crash against the rocks.” He raises his glass to his ear and shakes it gently until the ice cubes tinkle. “You know, Babe—like vodka on the rocks.” He smiles. His eyebrows are raised and his mouth is pulled back and down into his jaw. It is a self-mocking smile. It distrusts itself. It is the smile of a man who is accustomed to looking at himself from outside of himself, who takes what he sees with such slight regard that he can smile not at his pun, which is almost cruelly close to the mark, but at the man who can make such a pun.

There is a photograph of Robert “Bo” Belinsky in the May 6, 1962, edition of
The Sporting News
. A slick-looking young man in a California Angels’ baseball uniform is surrounded by a number of aging baseball dignitaries and Angels’ executives. The older men are dressed in business suits. They are smiling stiffly at the camera while Belinsky, his head cocked slightly to the left, one eyebrow raised, is smiling that slightly ironic, distrustful smile of his at the baseball he is holding up for view. With that baseball he has just recorded his fourth straight major league victory and history’s first no-hit, no-run game by a rookie left-handed pitcher. That no-hitter will make Belinsky, at the age of 25, the most celebrated athletic personality in the country. He will be courted by such Hollywood beauties as Ann-Margaret and Mamie Van Doren, and he will eventually marry a
Playboy
Playmate of the Year. He will become an intimate of Hugh Hefner, Walter Winchell, Frank Sinatra and J. Edgar Hoover. He will say to the press, “J. Edgar! Man, he’s a swinger! He let me shoot tommy guns at FBI headquarters. I told him if I ever quit this game I might need a job. He said, ‘Bo, there’ll always be a place for you on the force.’”

Belinsky will also become the star in a prospective television series about a motorcycle loner named Buddy Solo, and in a Las Vegas nightclub act with Mamie Van Doren. Of her “Bo,” Mamie will say, “I’ve got better curves than Bo, but he’s got a heckuva better voice. I know, because he sings to me in his car.”

Belinsky will be dogged and quoted voluminously by sportswriters, who recognized in him a unique and colorful personality who could always be counted on for such outrageous quips as: “If I’d known I was gonna pitch a no-hitter today I would have gotten a haircut”; or, “My only regret in life is that I can’t sit in the stands and watch me pitch”; or, “My philosophy of life? That’s easy: If music be the food of love, by all means let the band play on.”

In short, within days after his no-hitter Robert “Bo” Belinsky, a former pool hustler from Trenton, N.J., would be heralded as sport’s most original and engaging playboy-athlete. His name would become synonymous with a life-style that was cool and slick and dazzling, epitomizing not only the life-styles of such later athletes as Joe Namath, Ken Harrelson and Derek Sanderson, but also those of an entire, ephemeral decade—the Sixties. And eventually, only a few short years later, that same name would become synonymous with dissipated talent.

Bo Belinsky won only 24 major league baseball games in the nine years following that rookie no-hitter. He lost 51 times. He was traded away by five major league clubs and fined, suspended and banished to the minors regularly for what had come to be viewed as his unstable and childish behavior. Those same sportswriters who had written adoringly of the rakish Belinsky as a winner became less than adoring with Belinsky the loser.

“There is a race to Bo Belinsky’s pad every morning,” wrote one sportswriter. “It is a race to see who arrives there first, Belinsky or his milkman. Belinsky has yet to win.” Another wrote, “The Angels are about to market a new Bo Belinsky doll. You wind it up and it plays all night, all morning, and three innings in the afternoon.”

One morning Bo Belinsky was picked up by the police at five o’clock for throwing a female companion out of his moving “lipstick-red” Cadillac on Sunset Strip. The Angels’ fined him, and the girl sued him. On another morning at three o’clock Belinsky was accused of punching a sportswriter in his hotel room. For that incident he was suspended from the Angels and, without a hearing by the commissioner of baseball, immediately banished to the minor leagues. On still another morning, this time at four o’clock, the hotel in which Belinsky and his teammates were staying burned down. While his teammates assembled sleepily in the streets, the manager began to count heads. “My god!” screamed the manager. “He’s not here! He must be inside.” From behind the crowd a voice mumbled, “Who’s inside?” The players and their manager turned around to confront Robert “Bo” Belinsky stepping from a cab, as he put it, “reeking of bitch and booze.” The following morning Belinsky explained his fine to the press thusly: “Boys, you know you’re going good when you beat a bed check and then your hotel burns down.” His record at the time was 1 and 5.

One night Belinsky took a few friends to dinner at an exclusive French restaurant. He ordered a bottle of wine. The waiter informed him that he was mispronouncing the name of the wine. “It is Châteauneuf-du-Pape,” said the waiter. Belinsky looked up from his drink, his eyebrows raised inquisitively. “Oh, it is, is it?” And then he picked up the table, which was loaded with shrimp cocktails and bread sticks, and threw it through a window.

Eventually, events so turned on Belinsky that even Mamie Van Doren became disillusioned with her “Bo.” One day she announced tearfully to a host of reporters that Bo and she were terminating their engagement. “I’m returning his ring,” she said. “I’m afraid if I don’t he’ll cut off my finger and take it—or worse, make me take over the payments.” Belinsky’s response was characteristic. “Mamie’s a good broad,” he said to the press. “I still think she’s got a little class—very little.”

Despite growing public disenchantment with his behavior, Belinsky was undaunted. He denied that his acts were those of an unstable man. “I feel I’m very stable,” he told a sportswriter. “Proof of which is that I’m still single. Only unstable guys get married.” Shortly after that remark, Belinsky married Jo Collins, a
Playboy
playmate. That marriage ended prematurely one night when Belinsky tore a $500 wig from his wife’s head and threw it onto Sunset Strip. “It just goes to show,” he said afterwards, “you can’t play hearts and flowers with a product of nudity.”

Finally, on his thirtieth birthday, four years before he would retire unnoticed from baseball, Bo Belinsky admitted publicly that his once-promising career had ceased to exist. (At the time he was struggling with a 1-5 record for the Houston Astros.) His career had collapsed, he said, under the weight of too many fines, suspensions, trades and banishments to the minors—not to mention the weight of his own personality. And it seemed, he added, that each setback was visited upon him just as he was about to reach his peak, until now, at 30, there were no more peaks in sight. He also admitted that his public, which had found him an entertaining enough young man as a winner, had grown increasingly weary of, and finally annoyed with, what it felt was unstable and self-destructive behavior. As an aging and unsuccessful playboy, Bo Belinsky had become a parody of himself.

When a Houston sportswriter asked him how sport’s most notorious playboy felt upon reaching 30, Bo replied with a smile. “Babe, it’s no fun knowing that in every home in America your birthday is celebrated as a day of infamy.” An exaggeration, perhaps, for it is doubtful whether anyone in America, including Belinsky himself, celebrated his birthday at all. However, that remark was telling. It was characteristically clever—one might say almost too clever. It seemed to have been delivered more for affect than truth by a man more concerned with style than substance. It was tossed off, discarded really, with an ironic smile of disavowal, as if to say it was nothing but the surplus from a warehouse of such remarks, remarks its author must unload whenever he felt the occasion deserved. Despite all this, one still had the annoying suspicion that Bo Belinsky felt his remark contained more truth than wit. It was not clear whether this feeling was the overblown self-pity of a too-shallow man or the heightened perception of a too-sensitive man. It was only clear that Robert “Bo” Belinsky had dissipated a promising career, that his public had grown weary of him and that much of his difficulty could be traced to his personality. It seemed he did not have the knack of such later athletes—the Namaths, Harrelsons, and Sandersons—of consciously cultivating his personality precisely up to, but not beyond, that point at which the public becomes bored with it.

Bo Belinsky, 35 years old, leans forward in his armchair to better examine the picture of himself holding that no-hit baseball of nine years past. With his fingertips he displaces a lock of hair from his forehead. It is an exquisite, almost delicate gesture done in slow motion. His hair is black. He wears it long and shaggy rather than slicked back and gleaming as he did nine years ago. Its blackness, coupled with his tanned skin and slightly flattened features, gives him the appearance of a man of Mexican descent. He is still darkly handsome, although his skin is no longer tight and sleek. There are small lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth. He is wearing only a cream-colored bathing suit with the word “Bo” scripted above the left leg.

He looks to be about 6-1 and 190 pounds—a gain of 10 pounds over the years. And yet, despite the added flesh spilling over the waist of his trunks, despite the tiny stubble of beard and the lines and the look of aging, somehow Bo Belinsky looks better than he did nine years ago. He looks truer, more substantial, as if the lines and added weight had forced upon him dimensions and substance he did not have nine years ago, and which he had not consciously cultivated since. He looks less slick, less glossy, less conscious of his external self. He no longer possesses that pampered, self-satisfied look that gave one the impression that if you tried to grab hold of him your hands would slip off with the grease.

After his no-hitter his mother told reporters that her son worked out every day in a gym. “Bo just loves his body,” she said. Today, a hot summer morning six months after his retirement from baseball, Bo Belinsky no longer “works out.” As is his custom, he will do nothing more strenuous than sit for hours in the living room of this spacious ranch house tucked high into the Hollywood Hills overlooking Los Angeles. Possibly he will work out his horoscope. He is a Sagittarius. (“The most flexible sign in the universe,” he says. “A Sag gets along with everyone.”) But it makes little difference what his day’s horoscope suggests (a long hike in the mountains?), for his routine will not vary. He will sit until noon in the shadow of the chimney centered in the living room so as to best avoid the sunlight pouring through the sliding glass doors to his left. He will sip steadily from the glass on the coffee table beside his armchair and, to amuse himself, will watch a morning quiz show; or answer the constantly ringing telephone; or just gaze at the many paintings, poems, camp artifacts and photographs that litter the walls. Most of the photographs are of his friends, some in cowboy suits with drawn guns and pixy smiles, others bearded, with windblown hair and glazed, meditative looks. Throughout the day Belinsky will pass the time in an endless stream of gossip and small talk with those same friends who will drift into and out of this room over which he presides, the orchestrator of the day’s unfolding.

It is nine o’clock in the morning and the room is occupied by about seven or eight people in various states of sprawl. All are strangely quiet, self-contained, as if this huge room was a universe and each person in it a planet unto himself, spinning in an orbit entirely his own. Most of them, including Belinsky, have yet to get to sleep after last night’s party, which concluded only minutes ago.

To Belinsky’s left on the other side of the coffee table sits a pudgy, gray-haired little man in his 50s. He is wearing striped bellbottoms and no shirt. His name is Phil. He works for a company that makes locks and burglar alarms. (“I’ve been trying to get him to give me the combinations,” says Belinsky. “What a score, eh?”) Phil is bent forward, his elbows on his knees, his face buried in his hands. He is moaning softly. Beside his chair, folded like a jacknife on the couch, sits a tall, slender girl in a flowered bikini. Bonnie is about 18, maybe 17. She has the face of a young Sophia Loren. Her chin is resting on her raised knee so she can best paint her toenails with complete self-absorption. Occasionally she will look up, wide-eyed, and blow a kiss in Belinsky’s direction. He will smile back. (“A stray,” he says. “I found her last night on the Strip. She says she wants to stay.” He shrugs.)

Another girl in a flowered bikini is moving languidly about the room, collecting glasses, emptying ashtrays, dusting. She is older than Bonnie, maybe 30, but also tall and cool. She is not quite so pretty. Linda has pale blue eyes, bright red hair and a fleshy, but attractive, body. She, too, seems self-absorbed as she works, only her self-absorption seems less single-minded than does Bonnie’s. (“Linda’s a good chickie,” says Bo. “She’s got her share of patches.”)

To the left of the couch, standing in front of the mirror above the leather-padded bar, is a small, lean man in his late 30s. He has fine, straight features, unblinking eyes, a long ponytail and gray muttonchop sideburns. He is studiously fluffing out his sideburns with one hand, while with the other he adjusts the cartridge belt slung over one shoulder. His name is Chris. He is a prophet. Every afternoon at lunchtime he walks down to Schwab’s drugstore on Sunset Strip, climbs onto a soap box and, with his German shepherd panting beside him, preaches to the passersby. Today he will warn them that if they continue to worship material things they will never be able to see spiritual things. “Dead things are for blind people,” he will say. And then, “The jackals of hell will lick your blood from the streets.” Then he will walk back to the house, prepare an organic lunch for himself and his dog and watch “The Dating Game” on television. Sometimes he watches the news. But when he does he invariably ends up arguing with one of the commentators. It is not an uncommon sight to walk into the living room and see Chris standing with his finger poked at an image of David Brinkley, who is laconically reading from a paper as Chris shouts at him, “Distorter of facts! Harbinger of doom! Tool of corrupt establishments!” (Bo says of Chris, “He’s all right. A little freaky, maybe, but aren’t we all? He’s got his little act, so what? Everybody’s got a little act.”)