Everything They Had (4 page)

“There will be some money on Dumna,” said Tadeusz, who considered himself a professional at the Sluzewiec track but claimed that in his later, less revolutionary, years he had found the will power to break the habit. “The sire of Dumna was a famous horse who won the Derby here 10 years ago. I am positive that I won on his father many times.”

The American, who knew nothing about Aqueduct, let alone about racing in this Communist country, said Dumna sounded fine.

It was a windy Wednesday at the races. The sun had been out earlier in the day but it had gone now, for the races on Wednesday are held in the late afternoon so the workers can come out and bet after the job. During the 74-day season in Warsaw the races are held on Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday, but it is on Wednesday afternoon that the real bettors, the real faithful, gather.

Saturday and Sunday, Tadeusz noted with a slight measure of contempt, brought out women, people who think the race track is a place for a picnic, and rich peasants from the surrounding countryside who sell vegetables to Warsaw.

“Often their children are quite plump,” he said.

He was right in his estimation of the crowd. There were about 3,000 people there (as many as 10,000 on a good Sunday) and they were almost all working men in their 50's and 40's.

“There are few young people here anymore,” he said. “Now they don't want to spend their money on the races. They want to buy a car or a record player or take their girl to some student cellar and buy a bottle of wine.”

Before the war, he added, there were men with their sons. “And there were always lots of Jews, too, from the Nalewki section of Warsaw, tailors and shoemakers, and they were the ones who taught me about horses, but now there are not many of them left in Warsaw,” he said.

The people who go to the races now are often poor, he said, and they take the races seriously and play the long shots.

The cheapest bet is 20 zlotys (the zloty is officially valued at 24 to the dollar) and one can also bet at a 100-zloty window. This is a Communist country and though horse racing and betting on the races are not necessarily the kind of thing that Communist officials see as part of a workers' paradise, racing continues to thrive here. One reason is that it is a major source of income. Not only does the State get a percentage of all admissions but it gets 22.5 per cent of everything bet at the track.

The rough estimates are that between two and three million zlotys are bet every day at the track here and that on Derby days the figure may go as high as four or five million.

The Government theoretically runs and controls all betting and the grandstand is ringed with betting windows. But there are the inevitable entrepreneurs, some working at the track, some filtering in and out of coffee bars downtown.

One tout suggested to Tadeusz quite modestly that he had a sure thing in the fifth.

Tadeusz listened dubiously. The tout assured him that he couldn't go wrong. “Bet wisely and buy one ticket for me. That's all I ask. One for you and one for me,” the tout said. But it was not Tadeusz's kind of horse.

Another reason that racing continues here is that it is deeply ingrained in the Polish blood. Poland has been known for fine Arabic horses for several centuries and racing has been going on here for more than 120 years. Before the war, when there were 16 race tracks in Poland, Polish cavalry regiments had their own racing stables and the breeding of horses was a specialty of Polish noblemen.

Now the noblemen have gone but the horses remain. In many cases the breeding of horses, which is run by the State, is done by some of the same families that did it before the war.

After some talk of the success of breeding horses here, Tadeusz took the American on a tour of the track to see the regulars: a blind man who comes all the time “and sometimes even wins”; a 20-year loser who regularly sinks deeper into debt and lives off his wife; a police captain who fought in the 1944 Warsaw uprising alongside Tadeusz; a man in a flashy sports shirt and sunglasses who was a big bettor until recently “and who now bets less but wears fancier clothes to disguise the fact that he does not have so much money.”

Just then one of Tadeusz's friends arrived. He introduced the new Pole proudly. “This is one of the survivors of Auschwitz.” The survivor, Zygmunt, rolled up a sleeve to show the concentration camp number on his arm. Then there were more serious things to attend to. He quickly began to argue with Tadeusz on behalf of the favorite, a horse named Arbiter.

“Dumna looks nervous and edgy,” Zygmunt said.

“That's good. A little fire,” said Tadeusz.

“Maybe you should wait a few races before you bet Dumna,” said Zygmunt.

Then the two Poles began a furious argument. Zygmunt went away somewhat embarrassed. The American asked what had happened. “He started to tell me that this is an honest year at the track,” said Tadeusz.

The race came and the odds dropped on Dumna from 4 to 1 to 2 to 1. Nearby, two other Poles were talking. It was clear that there was interest only in three of the five horses running. They decided to make a 50-zloty bet on the two other horses, the winner being the one that finished closer to the front.

The trouble with the races here, said Tadeusz, “is that everyone knows all the horses. They know some of the horses better than they know their wives.”

The race was a good one, Arbiter and Dumna fought side by side and Arbiter won in the last few yards.

Zygmunt immediately materialized, magnanimously praising Dumna, claiming that the race showed both that the horse had a bright future and that the track was honest. Tadeusz was pleased, too. He had bet the horses one-two and in a situation like this it does not matter which is first and which is second. He had three tickets. He won 200 zlotys.

And so it went. It was a pleasant afternoon. The winnings were small but they were at least winnings. In the last race the favorite was a horse named Brama and the betting was very heavy.

At the start Brama was, incredibly, 20 lengths behind. The favorite finally was third. The crowd booed and jeered and threw paper. The public address system announced that the jockey had been suspended for five racing days. Tadeusz beamed, congratulated himself for having broken the habit and went off joyously to find Zygmunt.

I like wearing the two hats. The first hat is ostensibly the more serious one, and my larger books on politics tend to take some five or six years; the other hat as a sportswriter I wear more lightly, I think. The books are shorter and I do them more quickly. I've come to see these books as a form of relaxation. College professors get sabbaticals, self-employed writers do not, so I see them as a form of partial sabbatical. They are work but they are pleasure.

S
PORTS AS A
W
INDOW
OF
S
OCIAL
C
HANGE

The Sporting News
,
May 23, 1994

I grew up as a semi-red-blooded all-American boy. That is, I loved sports, and like most true-blue American boys I followed almost all sports faithfully. This meant following baseball in the summer, football in the fall, and basketball in the winter; my only exemption was professional hockey, a sport I simply did not get then and do not get now. Following all sports was not as time-consuming an avocation in the forties, for those were the arid years of American sports, before the arrival of television and before the coming of the contemporary sports glut. As I write today in the spring of 1991, I can watch some eight professional basketball playoff games on the weekend, an equal number, it seems to me, of professional baseball games, as well as college baseball championships, a summer football league with teams from Europe, golf championships, and for those who feel that a summer football league is an inadequate substitute for professional football, some six hours of live coverage of the first round of the professional football draft. Less generous people might speak of this as an addiction.

As a worthy and rather typical member of my tribal species, North American, male, middle twentieth century (roots in radio sports rather than television sports), I did then, and still do, duly open the paper each day and turn first to the sports page; in the instance of tabloids, the first love of the tribe, this of course means reading from back to front. Cultural anthropologists may make of this what they wish. As an all-American boy, therefore, so far so good. Where I failed in my youth as a prototype of the species was in a number of things: I was not big and strong, at least not then; I wore glasses, which in the forties and fifties was a sign of nonathleticism; and worst of all, I displayed a premature and clearly unhealthy interest in that day's sportswriters, as well as the athletes. Even at the age of ten and eleven I checked out bylines, and I came to know and recognize certain ones. I loved the early, feisty work of Dick Young, whose reporting semed to burn with a toughness and candor unmatched elsewhere (as he turned meaner and more bitter in his later years as a columnist, I came to detest his work), and I was fascinated by Red Smith and Jimmy Cannon and Leonard Gross: Smith because he wrote so beautifully, indeed so delicately; Cannon because he provided a rare sense of immediacy in an age before television when cameras did not do that—a Cannon story always seemed to take the reader right into the clubhouse; and Gross because of his unusual sensitivity to the athletes themselves, and because he instinctively understood that sports was the first showcase of a broader Civil Rights revolution which was just beginning in this country.

When I was young there was no
Sports Illustrated
, which eventually became the most serious bastion of sportswriting as literature, but like a lot of my colleagues who later made our reputations in the great breakthrough in nonfiction letters of the sixties, I read the old
Sport
magazine carefully and I loved it. There was some very good writing in it, it was one of the first places where the writing seemed more serious, and one could sense the beginning of a literary touch, and an attempt to break out of the routine format of magazine writing of the day. (I was hardly the only young teenager affected by it; Dick Schaap, who went on to become one of the preeminent print and television journalists of this generation, likes to recall that there was a letter to the editor of
Sport
published years ago from a teenage boy named Gay Talese, singling out a piece he enjoyed and asking for more articles like it.)

If
Sport
was the monthly bonus, then I devoured every day if I could Smith, Cannon, and Gross. Smith, of course, was the great sportswriter of the time, the acknowledged champion, because of the fresh, graceful way he wrote, because it simply was not in him to offer up anything clichéd. I can remember, as a freshman in college, taking one of Red Smith's early collections,
Out of the Red
, from Harvard's Lamont Library and keeping it so long that I had to pay $13 in library fees, no small sum in 1951 dollars (the equivalent of four or five meals in Boston's Chinatown with my fellow editors of the
Harvard Crimson
). I can also remember a piece by W. C. Heinz, who was one of my favorite writers and who never quite got the acclaim I thought he deserved (it was his misfortune to work for a paper that was in faster decline than the tabloids I favored); it was about Pete Reiser, the great Dodger player known equally well for his extraordinary talent and for his penchant for crashing into outfield walls and thereby prematurely ending otherwise promising seasons. The piece was done, I believe, for the old
True
magazine, and it contained a memorable scene: it was spring training and a few Dodger players were sitting around talking about the season ahead. “Where you think you'll end up?” they were asked. Most said first place, a few said second. Finally it was Reiser's turn. “Brooklyn Memorial Hospital,” he answered. In retrospect, told some forty years later in a time of endless breakthroughs in nonfiction writing, it does not seem so world shattering a bit of writing, but the important thing is that four decades later I still remember it, remember that it was Heinz's way of saying that he was there, that he was going to quote these men as they actually spoke, not as writers thought they should speak, and I also remember that I wanted to be able to write like that.

I was not the only one who loved the work of Bill Heinz. Al Silverman, who edited
Sport
in the sixties and later became the editor of the Book-of-the-Month Club (and is one of the nicest men in this business), tells the story of being at a bar in New York in the sixties when Jimmy Breslin, by then a star columnist with the
Daily News
, was proclaiming that a piece by Heinz in
Sport
, on a fighter named Bummy Davis, was the best sports story of all time. Breslin was making this point with considerable enthusiasm and decided he needed some final bit of proof. “Hey, Rosemary,” he yelled to his wife, who was at the other end of the bar, “what's the best sports magazine piece of all time?” “Bummy Davis by Bill Heinz,” she immediately answered back. Wonderful, thought Silverman, but too bad it was
True
, not
Sport
, that published it.