Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin (35 page)

After
BASEketball
came out, I began to regret that no founder of frizzball became a movie director. What a film
Frizzball
would be! You’d set the historical period in the opening scene by simply not having any jokes at all about bodily functions. Everybody would be talking about frizzball—at least all the men. The women would be rolling their eyes.

The climactic scene is a game for the Frizzball Championship of the World—which is, by chance, what we called all our games. The batter resembles me. The pitch is a slice ball. I hit it to the second garbage can—a 7.3-run homer. The game is won. I glance up to see my wife in the stands (well, all right, the backyard). She has been caught up in the excitement of the game. She is cheering wildly.

1998

1994

Most people don’t know that the real George Gipp—the George Gipp of “win one for the Gipper” fame, the George Gipp played by Ronald Reagan in
Knute Rockne All American
—is still alive. That’s right.

Yes, I realize that in the movie George Gipp died, so that Coach Knute Rockne could invoke the name of the Gipper in the great halftime pep talk that inspired Notre Dame to go out there and wipe up the field with what had been up to then a pretty rugged Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute eleven. But not everything they say in movies is true. That’s right. In real life, as it happens, George Gipp survived. In real life—now that we’re being absolutely factual about all of this—Notre Dame lost the game. RPI creamed them. In real life, as a matter
of fact, George Gipp only went to Notre Dame because he couldn’t get into Holy Cross. That happens to be the truth.

How do I know? Because George Gipp told me. I visit him pretty regularly. He lives in an old age home in Massapequa, Long Island, these days, and keeps himself in pretty good shape stiff-arming nurses’ aides and dying bravely off camera. His memory is absolutely phenomenal, and he’s in good spirits, particularly considering the fact that he’s had to go through most of his life being assumed dead. As you might imagine, just about every person he has ever been introduced to says something like, “But I thought you were … well … uh … nice to meet you, Mr. Gipp.” Apparently, though, he learned to deal with that a long time ago. He usually just says to the person, rather quietly, “Stick it in your ear, buddy.”

He’s been particularly cheerful this fall, ever since he started monitoring Ronald Reagan’s campaigning for Republican senatorial and congressional candidates. Every night, when the network news comes on, George Gipp and some of his friends can be found in the nursing home’s television lounge sitting in front of the twenty-six-incher. He’s armed with two or three Magic Markers and a large map that shows the congressional districts of the United States. I happened to be in the lounge several weeks ago on the evening that a clip of Reagan campaigning for a senatorial candidate in Louisiana showed him saying to a cheering crowd something like “So this November I want you to win one for Louisiana, win one for your country, and, if I may add a personal note, win one for the Gipper.”

Mr. Gipp and the other people in the lounge started cheering, and a couple of old gentlemen came up to clap Mr. Gipp on the back. Mr. Gipp, smiling broadly, got out one of the magic markers and ceremoniously colored in the entire state of Louisiana. By his count, that made twenty-eight states or congressional districts in which Ronald Reagan had asked the voters to “win one for the Gipper.”

I hated to spoil Mr. Gipp’s fun, but I felt I had to ask him if it struck him that the president was being just a tad insincere by saying “win one for the Gipper” in twenty-eight different election campaigns.

“Oh, no,” he said. “Rockne—the real Rockne—did the same thing. You know, I was pretty sick when he made the original
speech—don’t let anyone tell you that anything hurts worse than an impacted molar—but I played every game the next year, and every single halftime, Rockne said ‘Win one for the Gipper.’ He said it with me sitting right there in the locker room. After a while, some of the players started saying, ‘Coach, wasn’t the Swarthmore game last week the one you told us we were supposed to win for the Gipper?’ Sometimes Rockne would say he couldn’t remember ever saying that, and sometimes he would remind us that we had lost the Swarthmore game, not to speak of the Kenyon game and the MIT game, so, in fact, we hadn’t really won one for the Gipper yet and it was about time we did.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Gipp,” I said. “But I didn’t realize Notre Dame lost to schools like Swarthmore in those days. I’ve always seen the Notre Dame team of that era referred to as a football powerhouse.”

Mr. Gipp smiled. “That was the spin Rockne put on it,” he said. “Swarthmore murdered us. But Rockne was careful never to admit that, except to us in the locker room. After the game, he always told the sportswriters how proud he was of the Fighting Irish. By the next September, he’d be saying that it’d be hard to repeat an undefeated season that had seen us whip teams like Michigan and Ohio State and Army. The sportswriters never seemed to point out that we hadn’t played those teams and that the teams we had played, like Haverford and Oberlin, had slaughtered us. He was a charming man, Coach Rockne.”

“Oberlin!” I said. “Notre Dame was slaughtered by Oberlin!”

But Mr. Gipp, lost in his recollections, seemed not to hear me. “When I read in the paper that Reagan left the summit in Iceland cussing about his failure and two days later decided it was a big triumph, it really brought back those memories of Coach Rockne,” he said. “That’s exactly how the coach would have handled it. Yes sir, the president learned all that at Notre Dame.”

“But the president didn’t really go to Notre Dame,” I said. “That was just a movie. You’re the one who went to Notre Dame.”

“Only because I couldn’t get into Holy Cross,” he said.

1986

SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND THE HEALING ARTS

“My idea of alternative medicine is a doctor who didn’t go to Johns Hopkins.”

Given the fact that our children were grown by the time debate about the V-chip got cranked up, I hardly paid any attention, except to observe how odd it was that what children watched on television was going to be controlled by an electronic device even though everyone knows that the only people in an American family who understand electronic devices are the children. Then a friend of ours named Molly, who was eleven at the time, confessed to her parents that she
had been watching Martha Stewart on television. Picture this: Molly’s parents are off at their respective offices, under the assumption that their daughter is doing her homework or at least taking in something broadening on the history channel. Molly, meanwhile, is planted in front of the tube watching Martha Stewart. Molly’s parents get home from hard days at work and listen to their eleven year old explain to them how the fall foliage in your backyard can, with a little imagination, be transformed into an attractive centerpiece for that festive Sunday brunch. I don’t know if Molly’s confession to her parents included handing over something like an exquisite Christmas wreath or the perfect baked apple. The details have never come out.

Molly’s parents did not panic. They are pretty cool, even by Molly’s standards. Not long after this happened, we all discussed it over Sunday supper not far from where Molly and her parents live, and voices were not raised. The conversation was so lacking in tension, in fact, that I felt it might be all right to ask Molly what she thought of Martha Stewart.

“She seems to have a lot of time on her hands,” Molly said.

That remark indicated to me that Molly had almost certainly come away from the experience unscathed. A little later in the meal, though, it was revealed that the same could not be said for her experience with a television advertising campaign against drug use—just the sort of programming that most parents hope their children will watch attentively. Several years before, she’d seen the most famous and widely praised drug commercial in the antidrug campaign. The commercial opens with a shot of an egg, while a voice says, “This is your brain.” The egg is then dumped onto a sizzling griddle while the voice says, “This is your brain on drugs.” As far as I know, the commercial had no effect on Molly’s views about heroin, but she won’t eat eggs.

But, you might be thinking, the commercial still did some good for Molly by blunting her interest in eggs: At age eleven, she must have had the lowest cholesterol count in the entire sixth grade. I wouldn’t know about that. One of the many pleasant characteristics of my conversations with Molly over the years is that she never talks about cholesterol. No, the lesson I would draw from Molly’s problem with eggs is that old one about the doctrine of unintended consequences. It’s the lesson that was always drawn from the Soviet propaganda film of
Cold War legend that had been intended to demonstrate the brutality of strike-busting thugs beating peaceful workers in Detroit but apparently left Russian audiences impressed instead with the fact that all the workers seemed to be wearing decent shoes. Even adults can come away with the wrong message—like the garment manufacturer who, according to the old story, remarked while walking from the theater after the opening night of
Death of a Salesman
, “That New England territory never was any good.”

1996

According to the latest survey on smoking, the percentage of smokers among people who didn’t finish high school is now twice as high as among people who have graduated from college. Who says that nobody is doing anything to raise the median level of education in this country? The tobacco industry seems to be on a campaign to kill off the dropouts.

I’m all for raising the education level, but you’d think that the way to reduce the rate of dropouts might be to give the people in question something like incentive programs or tutoring sessions rather than emphysema. I’m not even sure that this falls into the category of employing different methods to reach the same goal.

I’m going to try to look at it that way, though, because these days I’m trying to approach the news with the assumption that people may well have, at least in their own minds, good, constructive, socially useful motives for what they do. It’s a sort of New Year’s resolution. Before my resolution, I might have assumed from this latest batch of smoking statistics that the tobacco industry, finding its customers declining among those most likely to be acquainted with the overwhelming scientific evidence linking smoking and deadly diseases, started directing its pitch toward those less likely to be familiar with
such evidence—another example of the theory that, when it comes to the tobacco industry, the old economic saw that applies is the one that says profits equal marketers chasing victims. That was the old me.

Now, I’m reformed. The other day, for instance, a friend and I passed a billboard that was advertising cigarettes—an outdoor scene showing a couple of those absolutely beautiful and healthy-looking young smokers who can stay on a camping trail or a ski slope all day long without wrinkling their clothes. I noticed a blurry couple of lines in the lower right-hand corner that may or may not have been the surgeon general’s warning about the risks that these invulnerable-looking young people are taking of developing lung cancer.

“It appears that anyone who wants to see that warning would have to have the sort of long-range vision usually associated with the pilot of an F-14,” I said to my friend. “Perhaps the cigarette company or its advertising agency is trying to encourage regular and thorough eye examinations—an oft-stated public service message, if I’m not mistaken, of the American Ophthalmological Society.”

“Have you gone soft in the head?” my friend said.

“It’s also possible, of course, that the long-term goal is to play a significant role in the recovery of the American binocular industry, now in a bad way because of overseas competition.”

“Why are you talking this way?” my friend said.