Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin (34 page)

“I can’t believe he had checks framed on the wall of his office,” my wife said.

“I refer you to page one hundred fifty-nine of
Our Crowd,
” I said. “Schiff had made two particularly large advances to the Pennsylvania Railroad, and he had the cancelled checks framed on his wall.”

“Did he really?” she said, showing some interest.

“One of them was for $49,098,000,” I said.

“That is kind of crude,” she said.

“Not as crude as the other one,” I said. “It was for $62,075,000.”

“I think that’s rather embarrassing,” she said.

“I would say so,” I said, putting away the book. “I just hope that no one in St. Jo hears about it. My Uncle Benny would be mortified.”

1975

THE SPORTING LIFE

“I believe it was the legendary Grantland Rice who wrote, ‘For when the one Great Scorer marks / Upon his pad just how you played / He cares not if you won or lost. / He rates the deal your agent made.’ ”

Benno Schmidt, Jr., the new president of Yale, has been described in the press as a “renowned constitutional-law scholar who is an expert on the First Amendment, race relations and the New York Rangers.” The man he will replace, A. Bartlett Giamatti, has been described as “a professor of English and comparative literature and an expert on Dante, Spenser and the Boston Red Sox.” It’s no wonder I’m never
asked to be the president of a major educational institution: I don’t have a team.

I used to have a team. When I was growing up, the Kansas City Blues were my team. They were in the American Association, along with the Minneapolis Millers and the Milwaukee Brewers and the Toledo Mud Hens (the league patsies) and several other teams that Schmidt and Giamatti don’t know the first thing about.

Because I grew up in Kansas City, people assume that the Kansas City Royals are my team. Not so. My loyalty to the Kansas City Blues was so pure that their demise ended my interest in the national pastime. Oh, sure I could have skipped to the Kansas City Athletics and then to the Royals. I had opportunities. “It’s the big leagues,” everyone in Kansas City said when the Athletics came in to replace the Blues.

“Big leaguers don’t ditch their pals,” I replied.

I could see myself running into one of the old Kansas City Blues someday—Cliff Mapes, maybe, or Eddie Stewart, or Carl DeRose, the sore-armed right-hander I once saw pitch a perfect game. Or maybe Odie Strain, the no-hit shortstop. “I guess you follow the Royals now,” Odie would say, with that same look of resignation he used to wear when the third strike whisked past him and thwocked into the catcher’s mitt.

“No,” I’d say. “I don’t have a team. My team’s gone.” A smile would spread slowly across Odie’s face.

Meanwhile, I don’t have a team. I can just imagine my appearance before the presidential search committee of, say, the Harvard trustees. I’m being interviewed in a private room at the New York Harvard Club by a former secretary of defense, an enormously wealthy investment banker, and an Episcopalian bishop. So far, I feel that things have been going my way. I have analyzed Dante’s
The Divine Comedy
in constitutional terms, concentrating on whether any movement from purgatory is federally regulated travel under the Commerce Clause. I have transposed the first ten amendments to the Constitution into Spenserian stanzas, although not in a pushy way.

I can see that the committee is impressed. The former secretary of defense, who at first seemed to be concentrating on some doodling that resembled the trajectory of an intercontinental ballistic missile, is now giving the interview his complete attention. The investment
banker has slipped me a note that says “Hold onto Humboldt Bolt & Tube. Sell Worldwide Universal short.” The interviewers are exchanging pleased glances and nodding their heads. Finally, as the interview seems to be coming to an end, the investment banker says, “Just one more question. What is your team?”

“Team?” I say.

There is a long silence. Then the bishop, in a kindly voice, says, “You do have a team, don’t you?”

“Well, not exactly,” I say.

“No team?” the bishop says.

“I used to have a team,” I say, “and I still turn on the tennis now and then, just to hiss McEnroe.”

The bishop shakes his head sadly.

I am beginning to get desperate. “I know the University of Missouri fight song by heart,” I say.

But they are gathering up their papers, preparing to leave. The former defense secretary is carefully feeding his doodles into a paper shredder.

“But why do I need a team?” I say.

Nobody pays any attention, except the bishop who says, “We need a regular guy. Presidents who aren’t regular guys frighten the alumni.”

“But I
am
a regular guy,” I say. “I owe the Diners Club. I had a dog named Spike.”

“Regular guys have teams,” the bishop says.

Desperately, I begin to sing: “Every true son so happy hearted, skies above us are blue. There’s a spirit so deep within us. Old Missouri, here’s to you—rah, rah. When the band plays the Tiger …”

But now they are at the door. Suddenly, the investment banker walks back to where I’m sitting, snatches his stock tips off the table, and marches out with the rest of the committee. I sit stunned at the table as a club steward comes in to straighten up the room. He glances down at my résumé, still on the table.

“Kansas City, huh?” he says. “You must be proud of those Royals.”

“The Royals are not my team,” I say. “I don’t have a team. If I had a team, I’d be the president of Harvard.”

1986

1993

As if we didn’t have enough contention in the world, a Chinese academic, Professor Ling Hongling, has gone and upset the Scots by claiming that golf was invented in China.

I know what you’re thinking: This is going to remind the Russians that they used to claim they invented baseball, which will provoke the English (who really did invent baseball but got tired a long time ago of arguing with people from Cooperstown) to talk about having invented ice hockey, which will enrage the Canadians (who hardly ever
get mad) and provoke the Lithuanians into claiming the invention of darts, and that will lead into a sort of chain reaction of claims and counterclaims until—
powee!
—World War III.

I wish I had some reassuring words about that possibility, but I have to report that—according to a piece in the Toronto
Globe and Mail
by Carl Honoré, which is where I read all about this—the Scots are as angry as hornets. Scottish tabloids have referred to Professor Hongling as “a nutty, Oriental professor” and an “Eastern bogeyman,” the
Globe and Mail
article says, and Bobby Burnet, golf historian to the Royal and Ancient Golf Club in St. Andrews, is quoted as calling the whole business “a load of malarkey.”

It is only a matter of time, I think, before some Scottish golfer gets mad enough to point out that Professor Ling Hongling’s name sounds more like a Ping-Pong match than a round of golf.

Writing in the
Australian Society for Sports History Bulletin
—a journal, I should admit, that I might have missed had the alert Honoré not pointed the way—Professor Hongling concluded from pottery depictions and murals and other evidence that a game very much like modern golf was played in China around the middle of the tenth century, five hundred years before the Scots claim to have invented it. It was called
chiuwan
, or hitting ball—which, you have to admit, is a more logical name for the sport than golf, even though, during my brief fling at it many years ago, I often missed the ball completely.

Burnet tried in the
Globe and Mail
piece to explain away the pottery and murals: “If you take any kind of patterned plate or blanket or stained glass and play around with it long enough, you’ll soon find a man holding a club and hitting a ball towards a hole.” Being an open-minded person, I tried this theory with an old patterned plate, and it didn’t work: After looking at the design for twenty minutes (some of that time squinty-eyed), what I thought I saw was a man in an undershirt eating a herring. What I’m saying is that Burnet’s attempt to explain away Ling Hongling’s murals may say less about the history of golf than it does about Burnet, or me.

As I understand Ling Hongling’s theory, he believes some early traveler to China brought golf back to Europe, the way Marco Polo is said to have brought back to Italy what Italians came to call pasta and the way more recent travelers from the West have brought back
hot tips on how a government can get rid of students who are demonstrating for democracy in large public squares.

As you might imagine, this early-traveler theory does not have a big following in Scotland, where, according to
The Globe and Mail
, “Golf sits snugly alongside clan tartan, whiskey and haggis as a symbol of Scottish ingenuity.” I should say right off the bat that I have tasted haggis—it is described in my dictionary, rather discreetly, as a pudding “made of the heart, liver, and lungs of a sheep or a calf minced with suet, onions, oatmeal, and seasonings and boiled in the stomach of the animal”—and if the Scots are worried about somebody else taking credit for inventing it, I think I can put their mind at rest on that score.

I think they’re also overreacting in talking about the threat this may represent to the industry that is based on foreigners going over there to play golf on Scottish courses. Rich Americans and Japanese do not go to Scotland, wearing funny costumes and lugging golf clubs, because they believe that golf was invented by the Scots; they go there because they like the whisky.

I do believe that if the Scots will just calm down, we can ride this one out. I think it should start with Bobby Burnet apologizing for the harsh language he’s used about Professor Ling Hongling. They should meet like gentlemen, perhaps over a round of hitting ball.

1991

2009

I hope the drubbing that movie critics gave a summer gross-out called
BASEketball
—which concerns a homemade game similar to one that the director once actually invented—will not poison the public’s mind about hybrid sports created by bozos with nothing better to do. I speak as one of the founders of frizzball.

Even before the release of
BASEketball
, I did not entertain hopes of winning my wife over to the view that frizzball was a serious competitive sport. In the more than thirty years since its invention—at a summerhouse, on a day when it was too cloudy to go to the beach—her kindest description of frizzball has been, “It was the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen.”

“They tried to hit a Frisbee with a stick,” she’ll say. Not so. It was a broom. The batter, standing in front of an old barn in the backyard, tried to hit the Frisbee with a broom—no cinch, I can attest, when the pitcher’s repertoire included an effective slice ball. Imaginary base runners advanced according to a formula having to do with logarithms. After that, the rules got complicated.

The summerhouse, which was shared by several young couples, would have been a friendly enough place except for frizzball. This was at a time when society mandated different cultural norms for males and females—the days before women began following the NFL and men began weeping softly in movies about doomed love or lost pets. The women in the house couldn’t understand why anyone would want to spend hours playing frizzball and more hours analyzing
each game. They didn’t understand how the men could judge someone’s character by the way he played frizzball. Cruelly burdened by a culturally imposed sense of perspective, these women were unable to take frizzball seriously.

The progress made in the decades to follow did not completely wipe out such differences between the genders. When the United States invades a tiny country, for instance, women are still more likely to dwell on the disparity in size. Men understand that, regardless of the size of the opponent, combat is combat: You detonate large bombs; you win medals; you could get killed. In that summerhouse, the men understood that regardless of the origin of the game, you still have to analyze the plays. You still have to keep statistics. You still have to play to win. You still have to cheat.