Fathers & Sons & Sports (30 page)

If I was doing all this largely to please my father—and I can think of no other reason—he never made me feel that he cared very much how I performed. During games, he would cheer loudly, and torment me, no matter how hard I pleaded with him to stop, by using my nicknames: Prodge (short for progeny) and Beamish (from the Lewis Carroll poem: I got used to waving off my teammates when they would walk up and ask, “What’s he calling you?”). I remember none of those clichéd angry silences after lost games, only a lightening, a sense of relief that at least it was done. And if all that professional baseball that I watched from on high, with that perfect view, seemed to me like modern dance—intriguing but in the end inscrutable—we were together. I was never bored when I was with my father.

The real joy for me came after the game; after I had followed him into the locker room, where he would dutifully get his quotes while I stood behind him, horrified by all the giant
exposed phalli that were bobbing past me at eye level; after the other sportswriters had gone back to their houses or hotels (he was the Redbirds’ “beat,” or all-season, writer, which meant that he often had to file two stories before packing it in); after he had settled back into his seat and flipped open his notepad, the long, lined, narrow pages blue now with his swirly shorthand. That was when the stadium emptied out and the bums who had somehow found a way to evade the security guards would emerge from the shadows, like ragpickers, and move about in the diminished light, finishing off half-empty beers. Looking down at the stands, I marveled that a place so recently full of bodies and noise could in such a short time empty out and take on this tremendous, cathedral-like silence. I would cross the suspended metal walkway that led from the press box to the bleachers and play by myself in the stands, now and then getting into some awkward, upsetting conversation with one of the bums. After a few months I built up my nerve and started venturing onto the empty field, running the bases, pitching invisible balls to ghostly batters, calling up to my father, high above in the press box window, to check me out. He would wave. On one of these nights, when I was restless, I learned to pick the lock on the door to the press-box concession stand by sticking a straightened paper clip into the tumbler on the handle and wrapping it around the knob. From then on, after hours, it was unlimited Cracker Jacks for me, and unlimited six-packs for my father, in whose delight at my ingenuity I took bottomless pride.
There he would sit, an open beer next to his Porta Bubble (an early laptop computer that weighed as much as a four-year-old child), a burning cigarette in his fingers, pecking out strange, clever stories about inconsequential games. There was a mildly retarded janitor who took me up onto the roof of the “box” one night and taught me the constellations. As the sky got darker, armadas of giant green bugs would come in at the windows, which were left cracked on account of the smoke. I would roll up a program and do battle with these, rushing around smacking the walls while my father sat with his back to me, typing and smoking and typing and drinking.

I can still reenter the feeling of those nights: they were happy. My father and I hardly spoke to each other, or I would ask him something and he would not hear me, or else he would answer only after the twenty-second delay that was a private joke in our family, suddenly whipping his head around, after I had forgotten the question, to say, “Um, no,” or “Sure, son.” But for me this distance somehow increased the intimacy. This was no trip to the zoo. I was not being patronized or baby-sat. I was in his element, where he did his mysterious work, and this—being close like this—was better than being seen or heard.

When I got older, there was another kind of distance between us, one that we both noticed, and both minded. I was angry at him for years, at the way he had passively allowed his marriage to my mother to drift into dissolution, at the fact that he was visibly killing himself. That night, in his room at
Riverside, there was a certain unspoken feeling of “Here we are” between us, which may explain the morbidity—one might say the audacity—of the question I found myself asking him, a man of only fifty-five. There had, in the preceding year, already been the aneurysm surgery, then the surgery (unsuccessful) to repair the massive hernia caused by the aneurysm surgery. For almost a year he had walked around with a thing about the size and shape of a cannonball protruding from his stomach. “My succession of infirmities,” as he put it to me in a letter, “has tended finally to confront me with blunt intimations of mortality.” Otherwise, however, it was not a morbid scene. This last operation had gone well, and he seemed to be feeling better than he had any right to. The waning sedative and, I suppose, twenty-four hours without cigarettes had left him edgy, but he was happy to talk, which we did in whispers because the old man with whom he was sharing a room had already gone to sleep.

I asked him to tell me what he remembered from all those years of writing about sports, for he had seen some things in his time, had covered Michael Jordan at North Carolina, a teenage John McEnroe, Bear Bryant, Muhammad Ali. He had followed the Big Red Machine in Cincinnati and was on the Cleveland Indians beat in the nineties when the Tribe inexplicably shook off its forty-year slump and began to win. He had won awards and reported on scandals. A few years ago, when my job put me into a room with Fay Vincent, the former commissioner of baseball, Vincent asked me who my father was, and when he heard,
said, “Oh, yeah. I remember he was very fair about the Rose thing.” I had to turn to my friend, a baseball expert, to put together that Vincent meant the story about Pete Rose betting on his own games in 1989, when Rose was managing the Reds.

Back home we rarely heard about any of this stuff. I had those idyllic nights with him at the park in Louisville, but that was triple-A ball, small-time city (which, in retrospect, was the reason I got to come along). My father’s position was that to talk about work was the same as being at work, and there was already plenty of that. A sportswriter gets used to people coming up to him in restaurants or at PTA meetings and taking issue with something he said in his column or on some call-in show. But my father was sensitive to the slightest criticism—really the slightest mention—of his writing, almost to the point of wincing, I think because he came to the job somewhat backward. As opposed to the typical sportswriter, who has a passion for the subject and can put together a sentence, my father’s ambition had been to Write (poetry, no less), and sports were what he knew, so he sort of stumbled onto making his living that way. His articles were dense and allusive and saddled, at times, with what could be called pedantic humor. They were also good, as I realized after he was gone—I seldom read them when he was alive.

His ambition, always, was to generate interesting copy, no matter how far from the topic he had to stray. Some of his readers loved him for it, but others—and it is hard to hold it against them—wrote angry letters wanting to know why the paper
refused to hire someone who would tell them the score, not use big words, and be done with it. Years of getting such letters in his mailbox at work had embittered my father, though never enough to silence his muse. When the
Other Paper
, the alternative weekly in Columbus, started running a regular column entitled “The Sully,” in which they would select and expand upon what they they felt to be his most bizarre sentence from the previous week (e.g., “‘Second base is still an undefined area that we haven’t wrapped our arms around,’ Tribe general manager John Hart said, sounding very much like a man about to have his face savagely bitten”), we were baffled by my father’s pained reaction. The compliment behind the teasing would have been plain to anyone else, but he would not have the thing in the house.

On top of the touchiness, which, senseless to deny, had more than a tinge of pride to it, my father was self-effacing about his knowledge of sports (staggering even for a baseball writer, that living repository of statistical arcana), and this in turn made him quiet when faced with the ubiquitous “sports nut,” his enthusiasms and his impassioned theories. The reaction could be painful to see, because the sports nut—with his team cap, powerful breath, and willingness to repeat nine times that Henderson was a moron to throw to third with two outs—often wants nothing more than affirmation. Few people understand, however, that the sportswriter, the true sports-writer, is never a fan. His passion for the game is more abstract. He has to be there, after all, until midnight, whether his team
wins or loses, and his team is a shifting entity, one that wears many colors. He considers the game—or the race or the match or the meet—with a cooler eye; and for him there is no incentive to exaggerate or distort events. For the fan, the game is theater; it has heroes and villains, just or unjust outcomes. But however much the sportswriter tricks out his subject in the language of theater, it remains in his mind something else, a contest not between the more and less deserving but between the more and less skilled, or lucky. The contest, only the contest, endures, with its discrete components: the throw, the move, the play, their nearness to or distance from perfection.

I was never a fan. I was something else: an ignoramus. And in the end I think that was easier for my father. We had other things to talk about; the awkwardness of trying to bring “the job” over into civilian life never got in the way, since there was no question of my keeping up. The few times I tried—“So, quite a game last night,” when by some chance I had seen it—he laughed me off, as if to commend the effort.

But now, this night, was different. I wanted to know, since the opportunities seemed to be slipping away. I wanted to hear what he remembered. This is what he told me:

My father had never mentioned this before. In fact, my only real awareness of the Kentucky Derby, growing up within minutes of Churchill Downs, lay in noticing the new commemorative glass that appeared in the cupboard each May, to be dropped and broken, as often as not by me, before the next one arrived. I knew that he had attended the race every year for more than a decade, and that he sometimes took my older brother along, but he never said anything to me about it apart from asking, when I got old enough, which horse I would like him to bet on with my allotted two dollars.

I wrote down what he had told me when I got back to his apartment, where my sister and I were staying the night. He lived two more months, but that was the last time I saw him alive.

y father saw Bill Mazeroski end the 1960 World Series with a home run, he saw Jerry Kramer throw the block that won the Ice Bowl, he saw Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier pummel each other in Manila, and he saw Reggie Jackson hit one home run in Game Six of the 1977 World Series. Jackson, of course, hit three home runs to help the Yankees beat the Dodgers in that game. My father saw him hit the first, off Burt Hooton. When Jackson hit his second, my
father was at a concession stand buying me popcorn. When Jackson hit his third, my father was buying me a soda. Eventually, he forgave me. I think.