Dedicated to Joe Gawrys Bill Gavaghan

BEGIN

Dedicated to

Joe Gawrys Bill Gavaghan 1954-2010 1951-2010

15th Anniversary Issue 1 Foreword William Meiners

n the grand scheme of things there’s nothing particularly significant about Ia 15 year mark. I mainly marvel at how quickly we arrived here with Sport Literate. It hardly seems like 15 years ago when I stepped outside Ed Eusebio’s small press publishing class and began hatching plans for a “real” magazine with Jotham Burrello, a fellow Columbia College student. Our first efforts were very green and “zine” indeed. But it was 15 years ago, the same season when my Cincinnati Reds last made the playoffs. Their lackluster, early exit against the Phillies this year only reminded me of how bittersweet baseball can be. And how far away next year sometimes seems. Our cover player knew all about what could be achieved at 15. That was the tender age of Joe Nuxhall, when, at the height of World War II, he became the youngest player to ever appear in a Major League game. And for the Reds at that. But I grew up listening to him urge long fly balls out of Riverfront Stadium when Marty Brennaman was on the play-by-play — “Get out of here!” I also tuned into his “Star of the Game” interviews after Reds games. He’d always sign off the WLW airwaves saying, “This is the old lefthander, rounding third and heading for home.” Though he headed home for good in 2007, that Joe was an important storytelling voice from my youth. This anniversary issue really is our best collective yet. We’re bookended by baseball — from an essay that harkens back to the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers to the tricky race relations negotiated by a Boston Red Sox fan who grew up in the 1970s. In between those hard-ball reflections are the runners and a wrestler, a swimmer, a surfer, a tennis player and the other poets and writers who’ve turned their sporting lives into literary art. We’ve been focused on creative nonfiction for 15 years atSport Literate. I suspect the poetry may be that close to the bone, too, but it’s not a requirement. We definitely want the truth with the essays. We can handle it. Two writers, both SL alums, push that nonfiction form here. Dale Rigby turns poetic throughout his chess prose, and Ben Giamo offers us our first alternative history piece with his musings, however well-researched, on the what-if possibilities had Jack Kerouac followed Frank Leahy to Notre Dame. We held both poetry and essay contests for this special collective. I’ll direct you to Philip Gerard’s thoughtful words on the essay winner he chose from five

2 Sport Literate finalists (Ackerman, Herlihy, Lesandrini, Pearson, and Stine). And though we didn’t ask him to explain why, Frank found the winner among the poets. Sean Prentiss provides us with my favorite interview to date — a conversation with poet Jack Ridl. Jack says many wonderful things about his approach to poetry and the trials of being a son of a big-time college basketball coach. Through an alumni piece I wrote for Columbia’s Demo magazine, I had the chance to meet Adolph Kiefer. He’s probably the most famous athlete most of you’ve never heard of. I hadn’t. And shame on us for now knowing what this man achieved through swimming and social causes. I shook the hand of a 1936 Gold medalist who shook Hitler’s hand, and he also shared some of his photos with us. I feel like it’s taken me about 15 years to learn how to put a magazine together. I’ve had a lot of help along the way, but it may take another decade and a half to turn it into a business. Your continued readership — along with a gift subscription or two — could help in that regard. The older I get, the more I realize how quickly it all slips away. In 2010, two of my cousins died. We dedicate this issue to them. Both were great athletes and teachers — sport literate in their own ways. Joey Gawrys, a swimmer, planned his funeral for more than a year as he battled brain cancer. Billy Gavaghan, a long-distance runner who ran several Boston Marathons, collapsed and died after a run in late October. There’s a tragic symmetry there. I never knew them as well as I should have in life, but I’ve since learned of the passions, both academic and sporting, that marked their days. We end this anniversary issue as we began the very first with my father’s grainy World War II image seemingly striking on a bunt (last page). There’s also a little self indulgence on my part with a 250-word essay on my father’s pen- chant for palindromes. Just another reflection on time, but maybe they all are. Here’s to making the most of all that remains.

15th Anniversary Issue 3 Volume 7, Issue 1

William Meiners Gina P. Vozenilek Editor-in-Chief Managing Editor Frank Van Zant Erin Ingram Poetry Editor Graphic Designer Nicholas Reading Glenn Guth East Coast Editorial Mouthpiece Lafayette Printing Gretchen Stahlman Printer Intern

Sport Literate™ (ISSN 1080-3247) is a literary journal published by Pint- Size Publications, a nonprofit corporation. We feature creative nonfiction, poetry, photo essays, and interviews. Individual subscription rates are $20 for two issues, domestic; $30 for two issues, foreign; and $30 for two issues, libraries and institutions. We now publish one issue per year. If you’re a subscriber moving, please alert us by mail or email at www. sportliterate.org. Bulk mailings are not forwarded and we’ll lose track of you. Send subscriptions, queries, and other stuff to:

Sport Literate 2248 West Belmont #20 Chicago, IL 60618 www.sportliterate.org

Writers, we welcome poetry and all types of creative nonfiction (personal essays, literary journalism, travel pieces, ect.) that fall within our broad definition of sport. Query, too, with interview and photo essay ideas. Only submissions with a self-addressed, stamped envelope will be returned. Read this issue, and any back issues if you like (available online), and send something good our way.

4 Sport Literate Support your name here

A little like public television (except you have to read everything), Sport Literate is published by Pint-Size Publications, Inc., an Illinois nonprofit. While we can produce a single issue a year, we don’t want to end up in the poorhouse over it. Beyond a subscription, won’t you consider joining our team to help offset the high cost of printing? Below are some folks who’ve stepped up to the plate. We sincerely thank you all.

Franchise Players ($500) Pinch Hitters ($100) The Bench ($50)

Illinois Arts Council Franchise Players

Russell Bradburd, Giardi & Keese, Patrick & Beth Gavaghan, Glenn & Kathleen Guth, Doug & Courtney Howie, Mick & Kris Meiners, Karl & Barb Meyer, The Dave Thurston Clan Pinch Hitters

Pete & Beth Battista, Tim & Jennifer Buhrfiend Colleen Gavaghan, Bob & Lisa Meiners, Bridget Quinn, Robert Schwab, Rick & Brenda Thomas, Mark Wukas The Bench

Sport Literate falls under the umbrella of Pint-Size Publications, a nonprofit corporation. Checks, made payable to Sport Literate, can be sent to: 2248 West Belmont #20 Chicago, IL 60618

Subscribe, donate, or peruse online at www.sportliterate.org.

15th Anniversary Issue 5 Table of Contents 15th Anniversary Issue Volume 7, Issue 1

8 Who’s on First Hal Ackerman Talk to the Stars

14 Winning Poem Scott F. Parker Racing Ghosts

16 Essay Peter Stine Detroit Marathon

22 Poetry Tom Reynolds Mile Run

24 Poetry David Ebenbach How to Run Your First 5K

26 Interview Sean Prentiss Jack Ridl

32 Poetry Jack Ridl from Losing Season

40 Alternative History Ben Giamo Jack of Jacks

58 Essay Mark Pearson The Short History of an Ear

68 Poetry Paul Nelson Boxers

70 Poetry John Mavin Two Minutes

Zebra

6 Sport Literate 72 Essay Dale Rigby Playing Weight

76 Poetry Donna J. Gelagotis Lee Running from Predators

Sure Footing

Washing My Horse’s Sheath

80 History Patrick Moser Soul Surfing

92 Photo Essay William Meiners This Swimmer’s Life

98 Poetry Michael Barach Swim Lesson

100 Essay B. J. Hollars The Last Loss

105 Essay Contest Philip Gerard The Winner is…

106 Winning Essay Jay Lesandrini Waiting on Deck

108 Essay Kerry Herlihy A New Baseball Nation

15th Anniversary Issue 7 Talk to the Stars WHO’S ON FIRST Hal Ackerman

was 15 when the Dodgers deserted Brooklyn and took with them my belief I that the universe was looked over by a sage and benevolent entity. Two years prior, in 1955, they won their first World Series, at long last beating their arrogant indomitable uptown nemesis, the New York Yankees. I kept my own set of statistics that year. In pen on graph paper, I recorded the score of every game, the pitcher of decision, his record, home runs hit, the team’s record. What a year it was! They won their first 10 games, lost one and then reeled off another 11 straight victories, and won the National league pennant by a huge margin of 16 games. Big Don Newcombe won 20 games that year and lost but five. Future Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax had yet to find his greatness. Tommy Lasorda, who would never find greatness as a pitcher, worked four total innings that season and gave up six earned runs for a bloated ERA of 13.56. Duke Snider had his most outstanding year, hitting 42 homers with 136 RBIs. Jackie Robinson, near- ing the end of his greatness, slid to .257. A pair of primitively produced television shows that played before and after each Dodger home game was hosted by a round-faced, portly, bespectacled character named Happy Felton. The pregame show was called “Warm up Time” and allowed three Little Leaguers to play catch with a couple of the Dodgers players. My moment of glory came on the post-game show called “Talk to the Stars.” The two outstanding players of the game would be in the booth with Happy and would answer three or four pre-selected baseball questions that had been sent in by fans. The great wrinkle was that they would be simultaneously speaking on the telephone to the person whose question was being considered, answering them directly. I was not yet 13, a chubby bespectacled replica of Happy Felton myself, the summer day I got the call saying that my question had been selected and asking if I would be at home that Saturday following the ball game. I leapt on my Schwinn and tore through the suburban Long Island neighborhood where we lived, yelping out the news like a modern Paul Revere. My question was going to be on television! On game day I was even more glued to our eight-inch black and white RCA than usual, praying that my own personal hero Duke Snider would be the star of the game so I could talk to him. Gil Hodges would be fine. Peewee, Carl, Jackie, anyone would be great. But the Duke. In the bottom of the

8 Sport Literate Yahoos: Then unaware of what would be their team’s westward ho in two years’ time, Brooklyn Dodger fans celebrate a World Series championship in 1955. National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, NY

15th Anniversary Issue 9 eighth inning he drove in the game-winning run with a double, high off the right field wall, and I was in heaven. The phone rang with one out in the ninth. It was a friend of my mother’s. I waved at her, big arm gestures to get off! But she insisted on carrying the conversation to its natural conclusion. “I’m not going to be rude,” she said. Moments later it rang again and I grabbed it and breathlessly assured the operator that yes, I would indeed hold on. Joe Black pitched the ninth inning, got the side out in order, and it was time for the show. Don Hoak was the second star of the game — a sub who filled in that day for an injured Billy Cox and made a couple of terrific defensive plays at third. Neither of the first two people whose questions were used that day had any interest in talking to Hoak. One was a woman who barely knew the game and had asked a pretty silly question about players’ wives. The other asked something equally banal: Who is your toughest pitcher to hit against? Mine was a thoughtful and provocative hypothetical question that went to the heart of a complicated rule interpretation: I had written it in my best crappy handwriting, as per the rules, on the back of a penny post card. We had stretched the phone wire as long as it could go and turned the TV around to face the kitchen. And there I watched Happy pick up that card and heard his voice through the phone in my ear read the words that I had written: A runner is on third. As the pitcher goes into his windup, the runner breaks for home to steal. Seeing this, the pitcher carefully steps off the pitching rubber to make it a “throw” and not a “pitch” and wings it home to catch the runner. The batter, however, hits it to the outfield for a base hit. Question: Is it a balk on the pitcher for stopping his motion? Or interference on the batter for hitting the ball that was no longer a pitch? I had to choose who would answer. I had been watching poor Don Hoak be ignored, invisible, excluded, irrelevant, and had spent a lifetime discovering exactly how that felt. Pity and empathy led me to choose Hoak to answer my question. But luckily self-interest intervened at the last moment and Duke picked up the phone and, in his golden California avocado-grown voice, and with that smile that lit up all of Flatbush, said, “Hiya there. How are you doing today?” He thanked me for being a loyal fan and asked what I thought of those great plays Don Hoak made today and let me talk to him, too. Everybody won. That was the Duke. (It was, by the way, a balk. A pitcher cannot stop his motion once it has begun.) Following the final question there was a commercial (for HerbertTareyton cigarettes) during which the players would deliberate and choose the best question of the day. In addition to the two box seat tickets and a carton of Tareytons

10 Sport Literate that each entrant would receive, the winner would receive a $50 Benrus wrist- watch. When they came back, Happy played up the dramatic moment and asked whom they had chosen. “There was no question about it,” the Duke smiled. His co-star agreed. They said my name on TV. A few weeks later the watch arrived in its own case with velvet material to cushion it. I wore that watch every day on my left wrist for 13 years, sweat eventually eroding the cloth band it came with and making me replace it with a silver colored twistable metal band made by Speidel. I wore it until October 16, 1968, a day before my birthday. It was removed from me at knife and gun point in Riverside Park where I was walking with the woman who would one day become my second ex-wife (while I was still married to the woman who would soon by my first). I was living on the upper west side of Manhattan, teaching in a ghetto high school as alternate service to the Vietnam draft. I got married for the three reasons that any relationship expert tells you are guaranteed to predict a long and satisfying union. She could throw like a guy and was the Yonkers free-throw shooting champion as a kid (one). She had a great singing voice and could do flawless imitations of both Ethel Merman and Barbra Streisand (two).And (three), she was a virgin living with her parents and had a very traditional view of sex before marriage. Oh, and of course (four) they gave draft deferments to married men. I cleverly jested to friends that we had taken out a six-month trial marriage license. You didn’t have to be Doctor Phil to predict that this marriage was not going to last forever. I had become goofily infatuated with a young teacher in the history department. She was tall, an artist, a French cook, and by far the most beautiful woman who ever spoke to me. On this gorgeous New York autumn day we were walking together in Riverside Park after school. We had not yet begun our affair but we knew it was soon to happen. We had not yet lived together, married, had a child together, separated 16 years later, and divorced. But on that afternoon we were quivering on the brink of it all. It was 4:30, the sun just dropping its shoulder toward Jersey, rippling the Hudson with gold, when I saw them from the corner of my eye. There were three of them, and they were walking with purpose in our direction. I had the impulse to run, and if I had been alone I certainly would have done so. I knew my companion was not fleet of foot, and women don’t generally find overt acts of craven cowardice attractive traits in a prospective lover. Had I run, it doubtless would have preemptively terminated our relationship. We would not have jettisoned our current mates, later migrated to California. She wouldn’t have become a model and, when that career ended, run the art program of a prestigious private

15th Anniversary Issue 11 school. The person who is our daughter would not have existed. So I stayed and pretended to be a better man than I was. In a moment the three of them were around us. One had a blade the size of a harpoon. The leader had meth-crazed eyes and a gun that he put in my mouth. He wanted it all. The money? Fine. The wedding ring? Even as I twisted it off my finger I was concocting a story I would tell my wife of how I lost it… if I lived. (Playing basketball at the YMCA. Locker was burgled?) But the Happy Felton watch. The thought momentarily crossed my mind that I could explain to him the value it had for me. A thought to which I wisely gave no voice. Even under the best of circumstances, one’s capacity for eloquence is severely compromised by having the barrel of a loaded gun scraping one’s molars. Conjuring a nostalgic memory of the Duke smiling as he said, “No doubt about it,” I handed over the Benrus. After it was over we hiked 10 blocks up to the nearest precinct station to describe the perpetrators so that other citizens might be spared. (No money for bus or taxi.) The officers were so impressed by our altruism they only made us wait an hour on a wooden bench before assigning a one-finger typist to tran- scribe our story. And then, knowing we had no money and that we had suffered a life-threatening trauma, we were driven all the way – not home but to the border of their jurisdiction, eight and 11 blocks’ walk from where we lived. Irritation and myopia often blind us to the true essence of a situation. Only now, 40-odd years later, do I see how the experience of having the fruits of my creativity forcibly taken from me by men who had no idea of its value had perfectly prepared me for my future life as a Hollywood screenwriter.

Hal Ackerman has been on the faculty of the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television since 1985 and is currently co-area head of the screenwriting program. His book, Write Screenplays That Sell…The Ackerman Way, in its third printing, is the text of choice in a growing number of screenwriting programs around the country. His short stories have appeared in North Dakota Review, New Millennium Writings, Southeast Review, The Pinch, Storyglossia, Passages, and The Yalobusha Review. His story, “Roof Garden” won the Warren Adler 2008 award for fiction. “Alfalfa,” was included in the anthology, I Wanna Be Sedated…30 Writers on Parenting Teenagers. His play, “TESTOSTERONE: How Prostate Cancer Made A Man of Me,” won the William Saroyan Centennial Prize for drama and enjoyed a successful run in Los Angeles and has been performed nationwide for prostate support groups. His first novel, Stein, Stoned (www.tyrusbooks.com), was released July 2010.

12 Sport Literate Where Good Writing Counts And Facts Matter Edited by Joe Mackall and Dan Lehman

“What these journalists and essayists have to say will ring true for anyone who writes nonfiction. Sooner or later in writing real life, something will get to you and won’t let go. When that happens, you learn what it means to tell a true story and to count its costs.” - Volume 11, Number 1, Dan Lehman: Editor’s Notes

1-year subscriptions: $25 | 2-year subscriptions: $40 Single Issues: $16 Visit www.ashland.edu/riverteeth or call 419-289-5957 for more information.

15th Anniversary Issue 13 Racing Ghosts WINNING POEM Scott F. Parker

Turning the south corner of the lake there’s an opening in the trees, And the Minnesota wind jostles my stride. The oncoming runner betrays no notice. Eyes forward, Concentrated. We pass in anonymity and fellowship, a tribe of rogues, Moving in a million unique tangents toward oblivion. I cross the grass where, if this were summer, Girls would lie out in bikinis and I would run faster not slower. I run faster, regardless, A narrow line drawn through nothing, Tracing the perimeter of the nurturing body. I’d be nowhere without this lake To orbit, these feet To caress the ground and learn its curves and bumps, these arms To pump the rhythm for these legs Gliding my cycles around, this torso Floating, forehead sweating, mind swimming. At the lake’s north end, cresting the small rises, I never can’t remember why I run, Through the avenue of trees looming over me I think of New York, Fitzgerald, romantic. This won’t last. I finish hard. There’s a railing where I stop to stretch my muscles. I lean my stomach against the wood and spit, The splash attracting fish.Memento mori. Where do the turtles go in winter? I wonder as a muskrat chews cattail. I look out over the water and wait for my shirt to dry.

Scott F. Parker’s poetry has been published in Four and Twenty. He is a fre- quent contributor to Rain Taxi Review of Books. His prose has also appeared in Philosophy Now, FragLit, Epiphany, Oregon Humanities, and The Ink-Filled Page, among other publications. His book Coffee: Grounds for Debate is forthcoming from Wiley-Blackwell’s Philosophy for Everyone series.

14 Sport Literate Join the Dance Sport Literate writers merge the black and white reflections on the games they’ve played with an attempt to make some literary sense of the larger world around them. Perhaps akin to yesteryear, where a battery of Washington Senators danced on the field — not just around the issues. When seven hoopsters improved footwork through Charleston moves without hopes for their own reality show. And the proof and the payoff were in the publication — not in politics and advertisements. A 20-spot gets you, or yours, the next two issues of Sport Literate. RSVP through PayPal online (www.sportliterate.org), or through the USPS (2248 W. Belmont #20; Chicago, IL 60618).

15th Anniversary Issue 15 Detroit Marathon ESSAY Peter Stine

am 65 now with one hip replacement. All that is left of my career as a recre- I ational runner is stumbling down a path in the woods in Ann Arbor with my two Labs, propelled less by my legs than by gravity, leaning forward so much I have to move my feet to prevent a fall. This makes for a disquieting image, yet the effort still delivers me to a mental space I have visited as a runner for 45 years. It is a fresh and therapeutic space of freedom, self-reliance, and the motion linking me with memory and reflection, a kind of American Zen. I have no doubt that without running in my life, somewhere along the line I would have, figuratively speaking, blown my brains out. But marathons are another matter. As few would deny, the excess of any virtue leads to fanaticism. I knew that running a marathon violated common sense. I knew that Pheidippides, a Greek, ran the first one in 490 B.C., delivering good news 26 miles from the Plains of Marathon to Athens. The Greeks had conquered the Persians, the city and Greek civilization were saved. Then Pheidippides promptly expired from exhaustion. His name means “sparer-of-horses,” and the moral always seemed obvious to me. Man should not aspire to be a horse. But I remember in 1980 I was bitten by what was clearly a foolhardy ambition, and I confess now for no better reason than injured vanity. I fancied myself a tough and vintage runner, eight years in the canyons of California, eight in the neighborhoods and parks of Detroit. On the fire trails above Berkeley, inside a tunnel of fragrant eucalyptus leaves, I had encountered everything from rabid dogs to rattlesnakes, drug-addled hippie pacifists to gunfire from black revolutionaries taking target practice. I had run in the first Bay-to-Breakers down the streets and over the hills of San Francisco to the Pacific, no police escort, jostling through the winos on Mission Street, a kaleidoscopic crowd on LSD listening to the Grateful Dead in Golden Gate Park. That first race had 242 entrants instead of the 250,000 who ran last year. In northwest Detroit, I had been confronted by whores and their pimps trolling Woodward Avenue in mattress-furnished vans, and once turned an ankle in front of West Lawn Cemetery and gotten a lift home in a hearse. This was what running should offer: existentially grounded adventure. Marathons were for dedicated masochists on the lam from psychotherapy. I felt superior to these parvenus. They may have beaten a dirt track around Palmer Park, but I was running when there was no one there, nothing but virgin grass, a rusted muffler here, a fallen lamppost there.

16 Sport Literate But suddenly my sense of superiority was shaken. It wasn’t good enough anymore to just jog around Palmer Park, passing the abandoned blue hood of a car, Stroh’s beer cans, sanitary napkins, empty Salem cartons, chicken bones, condoms, White Castle bags, overflowing barrels of trash, dozing truckers parked along Woodward, old homeless men planted on benches, red-winged blackbirds dive-bombing my unruly thicket of hair, drunks out seven days a week “just fuckin’ the dog.” It was unpatriotic not to identify with the running movement and health craze that were sweeping the country in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Suddenly marathons were the rage. Teachers, businessmen, high school kids, lawyers, autoworkers, middle-aged housewives, senior citizens, sportswriters, the physically handicapped, everyone was into the act. They trained like East German Olympians, clutched expensive stopwatches, covered up family photos on the refrigerator with training schedules, had gleaming ascetic eyes, mused dreamily over glossy foldouts of Nike shoes in Runner’s World. Here was a new breed of fanatic to challenge my amateurism. So feeling there was something to prove, I egged myself into running that October in the Detroit Free Press International Marathon, on the condition that I would train only three weeks over short distanc- es. At the time, it seemed unsporting to enter such a race actually ready.

At 6:00 a.m. the morning of the race, under a cold drizzle and darkness on Belle Isle, a throng of us waited to be taken across the river to Windsor, Canada, and the start of the race. I stood to one side, my head poking through the bottom of a garbage bag for poncho, as the empty buses rolled in. Runners, whose eagerness was a bit alarming, besieged each of them. On the last ride over, I chatted with a woman with massive thighs who had been running less than a year. This marathon, she confided, was madness but at least one part of her life she could finish. I felt stale as outside the bus window the skies were lightening into a purple bruise of dawn. We were dumped on the outskirts of Windsor, into a field full of folk, brightly clad, deep into isometrics and final preparations. A helicopter droned overhead. One runner split his four squares of toilet paper with me, another in a camper gave me a small roll, and I headed through a gap in a fence, down a rail- road track, then into a field surrounded by sparse woods. I could spy the heads of other runners squatting like Buddha in the high grass. I squatted too. Then came the pop of a gun and a roar from the starting line. A poor beginning, but no matter. I made contact with the pack in downtown Windsor. Here the going was easy, cozy small-town intersections, a movie theater with an old-fashioned marquee, some curious Canadians at the

15th Anniversary Issue 17 curb, our spirits high. Runners like myself were still in a state of innocence. Only the Burroughs computer clocks mounted on black car roofs blinked out an ominous measure of strength-sapping time. Cruising by, a runner gave me a swig of his energy juice or “erg.” I gulped some. I prayed maybe this liquid was what might have spared Pheidippides. Joe Louis Arena looked like a tiny mural across the river. Then we swept down into the Detroit-Windsor traffic tunnel, a surreal descent, snug with a long downgrade and sallow yellow lights and a thrill of the improbable. Talk and footfalls echoed against the stained tile walls, holding back millions of tons of water. The disorientation was complete. It felt like we were passing through a giant animal house at the zoo or running in an empty swimming pool. During construction, I remember reading that an explosion had occurred in the tunnel and one sandhog, which workers were called, was blown right through the ceiling and shot up to the surface of the Detroit River. He survived, and he was my inspiration today. Emerging from the tunnel and flowing into downtown Detroit, we were again on familiar ground. Ornate office buildings rose up on either side of us, and behind them you could detect empty lots marked with piles of debris from demolition. We were welcomed by a vigil of spectators lining the curbs. We watched them watch us, and were showered with encouragement and local TV slogans. “You’re lookin’ good! . . . Go-4-it!” Now I had been suspicious about public enthusiasm for some time. Could Mayor Coleman Young or the Free Press have hired these folks for an ostentatious display of the spirit that civic leaders promised would revive a moribund city? Most runners in the pack seemed to bathe in the exposure, delighted to be cast as symbols of hope, but it was just too much, the enthusiasm excessive, more theirs than ours, and a whiff of something else. What we had at this moment was the spectators’ high school time trip. I felt more kinship with the bushy, skeptical eyebrows we raised while winding through Greektown. But all unkind thoughts — indeed thought altogether — left me as we began the punishing grind up Jefferson Avenue, past Belle Isle, along Lake St. Claire, heading north. The pack was stretched out of sight. To a cynic, it might have served as a symbol of white flight. A snowdrift of paper cups littered the curbs at each refreshment stand. I was 10 miles out now and into uncharted regions of depleted stamina and physical pain. High-rise apartments rose on my left like wavering Hollywood props. My right calf and thigh started to tighten up. No recourse now but to declare this state normal and become one-who-navigates- with-one-leg.

18 Sport Literate ThinkStockPhotos.com

15th Anniversary Issue 19 Approaching a realm of crew-cut lawns and moneyed quiet, the wealthy suburb of Grosse Pointe Woods, I was heartened by a long stretch along the grassy shoreline. A huge red-hulled freighter stood like a toy on the horizon of distant blue water. But if natural beauty helps, and it always does, it has limited restorative powers. Isolated clumps of bystanders clapped the pack on, but grew silent as I passed by. Some extremes of facial pain are not an edify- ing sight. For a while I pulled beside two middle-aged women wearing Head T-shirts and stole some applause aimed at them. “Way to go, girls. All right . . .” “Thank you,” I muttered back, “thank you . . .” Then came the moment of truth, some 16 miles out, making the loop through Grosse Pointe Farms and back south down Kercheval. I hit the Wall, legendary among marathoners — that point when the dying body trumps the will and recognizes an almost posthumous, yet absolute imperative to halt. Tasting the absurdity of it all, utterly humbled, I walked. But only for perhaps 100 yards. My will revived once again as we passed back into Detroit. Maybe it was the abysmal ugliness of the abandoned Uniroyal factory that did it, or the damp morning curses wafting from dilapidated apartments and liquor stores, or the fact that I was returning home. Now six miles from the finish line, I could mentally transpose myself to the terrain of my training runs and imagine it over. The body suffers, the mind creates. So back down Jefferson I came, eyes sightless but wide as pizzas, then finally over the Belle Isle Bridge in a comatose state, those cheerleaders with their obnoxious air of festivity tagging alongside. Circling the island I could now see the finish line, the cheering bleachers, the army of tents and medical staff awaiting us: nirvana. Then at last I was among them, wobbly-legged, shaking off an alarmed physi- cian, then leaning on my 12-year-old son who led me back over the bridge as it started to rain.

That afternoon I rested in a lounge chair on my porch in northwest Detroit, my legs elevated, a Rolling Rock in my hand, watching rain dancing in the street. The race was history and had rendered my whole body just a numb cellu- lar nothingness as if I had turned invisible. High school football, college soccer, rugby in England, minor league Class D baseball in Texas — all had required running but nothing like the punishment I had endured just to finish this marathon. My son and wife were at the mall. Awakening from a brief doze I recognized a perfect self-image — my precious white Falcon, bruised, battery gone, squatting in a puddle at the curb. Its high fenders, like mini-skirts, exposed the drollery of sagging and rusted private parts.

20 Sport Literate A year later I found the official post-race program that was sent to all entrants by a sponsor, Focus: HOPE. Pages of calibrated times concealing all that pain. I was the 2,927th runner to finish, in 4 hours, 18 minutes, and 28 seconds. I noticed that 10 out of the 14 wheelchair entrants beat me. It was a well-organized marathon, one that fueled a sense of community, I would grant at least that. Actually I could recommend it to all comers, the well-trained and the fools alike. But with three weeks to prepare for the 1981 Free Press marathon, I was not vacillating. About suffering, the ancient Greeks were never wrong. Man should not aspire to be a horse.

Peter Stine is the author of The Art of Survival, a collection of literary essays. His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in The Iowa Review, Boulevard, The Threepenny Review, The New York Times, Contemporary Literature, Harold Bloom’s Modern Critical Views, and elsewhere. He was the editor-in-chief of Witness from 1987 to 2008 and during that time received ten editorial grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.

15th Anniversary Issue 21 MILE RUN POETRY Tom Reynolds

Winner: Fifth, Sixth, Seventh: His parents turn up Brothers. Their jacket collars Unable to separate, They move And congratulate Elbow to elbow. Their sperm and egg.

Eighth: Second: A converted His baby sister sports Javeline thrower A furtive grin Trying hard Because he now To keep the faith. Understands her life.

Ninth: Third: The sound of the gun A medal the size Is like something Of a quarter From the Old West, For four months It was so long ago. Of torture.

Dead Last: Fourth: The mother’s hand No medal Moves in slow motion But a monarch as she lifts the coffee Lands on his chest all the way to her lips. As he lies in the grass.

22 Sport Literate ThinkStockPhotos.com

Tom Reynolds is an assistant professor of English at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kansas. In 1987, his chapbook titled Electricity was published by Ligature Press of Topeka, Kansas. His first full- length collection of poetry, Ghost Town Almanac, was published in 2008 by Woodley Memorial Press of Washburn University of Topeka. His work has been published in numerous print and online journals, including Alabama Literary Review, New Delta Review, Prairie Poetry, Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature, American Western Magazine, Midwest Poetry Review, Potpourri, The Pedestal Magazine, Flint Hills Review, Muscadine Lines: A Southern Journal, 2River View, 3rd Muse Poetry Journal, Ash Canyon Review, and Magaera.

15th Anniversary Issue 23 How to Run Your First 5K POETRY David Ebenbach

24 Sport Literate 15th Anniversary Issue 25 26 Sport Literate David Harris Ebenbach’s poetry has appeared in, among other places, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Artful Dodge, and Mudfish. His first book of short stories, Between Camelots, won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Recently awarded an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council, a MacDowell Colony fellowship, and a nomination for a Pushcart Prize, Ebenbach has a PhD in Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an MFA in Writing from Vermont College, and teaches Creative Writing at Earlham College. Find out more at www.davidebenbach.com.

15th Anniversary Issue 27 Interview with Jack Ridl

INTERVIEW Sean Prentiss

ean Prentiss interviewed Jack Ridl on March 4, 2010, at Margaritas Mexican SRestaurant in Holland, Michigan. Jack Ridl (pronounced Riddle) is a retired professor at Hope College in that town. Jack’s father, Buzz Ridl, was the University of Pittsburgh basketball coach from 1968–1975. Jack’s newest book of poetry, Losing Season, is a chronological narrative of a basketball season in small town America. Jack also has another book of poetry, Broken Symmetry, published by Wayne State University Press to go along with three chapbooks. Sean Prentiss is assistant professor at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids.

SP: How did you become a writer? How did you go from being a coach’s son to a poet? JR: Looking backward from my current age, I see that I would have been an artist of some kind even had I not been a coach’s son. My father, without pressure, taught me how to be an athlete. But I didn’t have much skill. I became an athlete through determination and an act of imagination. I had to do that to survive the expectations of most everybody. I had to pretend to be great. Developing a life of imagination was occurring all the time. It was how I got through things. I know I daydreamed all the time. I remember my father saying, “Get back here,” meaning, “Get back to the real world.” It was never mean-spirited. My wife, if she were here, would say I’ve always been this way.

SP: What athletes or coaches influenced you as a writer? JR: I’ll start with my father because he was incredibly inventive. For example almost every coach in the game today would know about the offenses and defenses he invented, whether or not they knew he pretty much invented them. My dad was doing the motion offense back in the late ’50s. He just thought, “What if I have everyone move?” He created the amoeba defense, now called a match up, that so many teams now use. The idea he had was not a zone or man-to-man but to guard or fill passing lanes. The year he died, he taught John Calipari that defense. But why he was influential to me as a poet was because he cared about the game, not what the game would lead him to. So I care about the poem rather than where the poem will take me. And my dad taught me how to respond versus impose. So when players came to play for my dad, he looked

28 Sport Literate at their strengths and worked with those strengths. That’s so valuable as a teacher and a writer. It’s very William Stafford-y. You let the material come in and work with it rather than imposing your will on the material. The player who influenced me was Oscar Robertson. I would pretend I was him all the time. What was influential about Robertson was that he mastered everything about the game. He wasn’t just a shooter or a point guard. And then he could respond like a jazz musician. You could tell this was a guy who respected the game and Poet in Conference: The present-day Jack Ridl learned everything. To me, every part as captured by Joy Gaines-Freidler. matters. The line breaks, whatnot, they all matter in a poem. It’s not one thing, it’s all the parts.

SP: Can you talk about why you wanted to explore America’s obsession with sports? JR: What little American town doesn’t have a team? Sports just seem to be so central. On news channels, there is news, sports, then weather. The big three. My father didn’t understand the obsession. He loved the game but didn’t understand the energy that goes into being a fan. He once said, “I love the game. I just don’t understand why all these people are here.” Also, where else can we go that allows us to laugh, cry, yell, boo? Rock concerts. I wish poetry readings would be like concerts. Everyone just sits there and assesses poetry. Where else can this natural part of who I am have a place to express who I am?

SP: Can you talk about the similarities and differences between sports and writing? JR: One thing that is really really important is loving to practice. I loved practice. I did theater, and I loved rehearsal. You try this and you try that. I was always experimenting. I was always wondering if I could do this or do that. That experimentation enabled me to write without feeling defensive. It was always, “Let’s see what happens if I change.”

15th Anniversary Issue 29 The second thing was learning to live without knowing the outcome. An athlete needs to accept this. Athletes always talk about the next game. So you learn that you never know what is going to happen. The poet Paul Zimmer told me, “You never learn to write poetry. You must learn to write the next poem.” What the next one asks of you, you don’t know. So for me, that lack of knowing is a place I’m very used to. I sit down to write having no idea what will show up. And if it is lousy, I never worry. I go on to the next one. It’s like losing a game. Time to go on to the next one. After that it’s all those buzz words. Just do it. Discipline. Hard work. But this kind of hard work is more play. Basketball players know this. I also just like it. I am really grateful for the fact that something happens in the doing, in the writing, that is separate from depending on success. You can win the game and score 40 points, but what happens when you’re playing the game? Whether you win or lose, what happens during the game? That time you’re spending in the game is so enriching. When our daughter was very little, she asked, “What is art?” We said art is a place, a safe place to be yourself. I always wanted students to think about what happened when they are writing. The monks say, “We’re in prayer.” I like being in prayer.

SP: I’m thinking about sports movies and how so many sports movies are overly sentimental. Yet I know you promote sappiness and sentimentality in your poems. Why? JR: Well, my friend Mary Ruefle wrote an essay about sentimentality and how the word “sentimentality” has “sentiment” and “mentality” in it. I like that idea. I’m just trying to be sort of Zen-y with that word. Though I don’t think sentimentality is the right word. I just wish we had appropriated the word for what we want it to mean. I don’t want overly emotional. I don’t want anything to do with that. So I don’t know what the word is for not telling the reader to feel but instead inviting them to feel. Showing the reader emotion, that’s not what we should be afraid of now. It’s dishonest emotion that I hate. When I was teaching, my students would tell the class, “Sorry this is cheesy.” They didn’t understand the difference between tender and cheesy. My daughter said, “I’m worried about being cheesy.” I said, “You can’t be cheesy if you are yourself.” When a poem fails with sentimentality to me, it’s because I tell the reader what to feel. “Dare the sentimental,” said Richard Hugo. If you pull back so far what have you got? Dead wood.

30 Sport Literate SP: A review said that Losing Season “is a book that can bring people into poetry.” Can you talk about this? About if you were hoping to bring people into poetry? JR: I wasn’t trying to bring people to poetry. Now, I think this is going to sound cutesy, but I wanted to bring these poems to people not the people to poetry. By writing this book, I get a chance to give people something that has been taken from them—poetry. School is often the last train station for people. If they don’t get poetry when they are in school, they might never get it. I’d rather have them love the worst poem than take it away from them. I hold out hope that what we do enriches people’s lives. So these poems were like that. I wanted to give them to people who might be at the last train station. And one of the things that writing does is show a culture. Poetry in general hasn’t really looked at one of the central parts of this culture—sports. It’s looked at politics, religion, the arts, education. It writes about just about anything else. Sports, uh-uh. So I thought, it’s only right to do. Then I felt permis- sion to write about sports because Thoreau writes about beans. Melville writes about whales. Poe writes about a bird. American literature is really strange.

SP: This book has a sustained narrative, a beginning, middle, and end. What were the challenges and the rewards to working with a chronological narrative in a book of poetry? JR: Well, that was not a challenge at first because I didn’t realize it was happening. Then I noticed it and said, “Oh my god. There might be a narrative.” Later I thought, “Can I try to have the narrative not be there? What if I create a series of poems in such a way that the reader goes, ‘Is this a novel in poems?’ and then thinks, ‘No, I’m making it up.’” Could I create this book of poetry in such a way that the reader turns this into a novel? It seems as if that did happen. Once I realized this book could be novelistic, I had to search through and make sure I didn’t manipulate anything. What I expected was a response where people say, “This is more like Spoon River, the book by Edgar Lee Masters.” I thought they would see this as a documentary of a town. That’s not what I wanted. I wanted them to see this book as a novel, so I’m glad you did.

SP: Along with my last question, was it hard to construct a book that had to have each poem stand on its own while also working as a whole? JR: I did write them to stand alone. Paul Zimmer said to me, “Never write a poem that can’t stand alone.” Richard Jones at Poetry East wouldn’t know a

15th Anniversary Issue 31 basketball from a kumquat, (don’t tell Richard I said that!) but he took a bunch of these basketball poems and published them. So I figured they were working on their own, even outside of sports. So I really tried to make them so they’d stand alone. So someone can say about each poem, “Yeah I can experience that” and not need the whole book.

The Gym, January

Ice hangs from the roof. Inside, the great furnace huffs the heat up into the bleachers. The cement hallways shine. The glass in the trophy case shines. The trophies shine. In the locker room, each scarred locker stands solid against the concrete block walls, the benches steady in front. Against one wall, the blackboard, chalk and an oily rag sitting in its trough. In the corner, a water fountain. One door opens outside, another to the court. The gym floor glistens. The blue W in the center circle glistens. Above it all, the scoreboard. Outside, Jack’s Jumper: The poet as player, circa 1970. the temperature stays below zero. Library of Congress

SP: What made you decide to have this be a losing season? Why not a successful season? Why not a championship season? JR: Because that’s what you come to know best as a coach’s kid. You know the consequences of losing. Winning is just the absence of losing. For my sister and me, our fears were all about what happens when you lose. The barber scares you about your old man. I remember being eight-years-old and getting a haircut. The barber has his scissors in his hand and asks, “Why didn’t your dad play Doran?”

32 Sport Literate I always wanted other parents in the town’s eye like my dad was. I wanted newspaper headlines like, “Buick dealer blows sale at the end of the day” or “You call that a root canal?” for the dentist. Being a coach’s son was just too hard on us as kids. It was an exciting world, but I don’t know how many people know how awful it is. My father always said, “It’s my world. Don’t let it bother you.” That’s not something as a child you can handle. Blood stuff. It’s tough. Tough stuff.

SP: This book has a very ethereal feel. There are all these quiet moments with snow falling and empty hallways and sad lives and desperate hopes. Can you talk about that mood? JR: Hearing you call this book “ethereal” means the world to me. You being along with me in these poems, that makes me so happy. The book opens with Coach at age 50 realizing what he can’t do anymore—hit his free throw shots anymore, hit the jump shot. So he steps outside of time and pulls weeds. The book opens with that word, but spelled t-h-y-m-e. In the first poem in the book. Coach “gets up, goes over to the garden, reaches for the ball, stops and pulls some weeds growing through the oregano, basil, sage, and thyme.” And Scrub is forever hoping, Scrub is about neglect. He’s thinking, “I’m on the team, but not really. I’m in the family, but not really.” He’s in so many ways outside time. There’s not a poem about an actual game. So there are no moments of high tension. Yes, the equipment manager is doing his job, but the big moment is when he looks at a car in the parking lot and reflects on his wife. Or Star goes into K Mart and has this metaphorical experience where he thinks, “Maybe I have wasted my life.” Jack’s Jumper: The poet as player, circa 1970. The snow throughout the book is meant to be snow, but it’s also the objec- Library of Congress tive correlative, the spirit of things. Sometimes the snow comforts, sometimes it hides a dead dog. Sometimes it just piles up against the door, like at the end.

Night Gym

The gym is closed, locked for the night. Through the windows, a quiet beam from the streetlights lies across center court.

15th Anniversary Issue 33 The darkness wraps itself around the trophies, lies softly on Coach’s desk, settles in the corners. A few mice scratch under the stands and at the door of the concession booth. The night wind rattles the glass in the front doors. The furnace, reliable as grace, sends its steady warmth through the rafters, under the bleachers, down the halls, into the offices and locker rooms. Outside, the snow falls, swirls, piles up against the entrance.

SP: Can you talk about the endings of your poems? It seems like sports poems’ endings can be easily made to be loud and big. But so many of yours are slow and quiet and hushed. Why? JR: I didn’t, um, know consciously that my endings were doing this until I was on a panel with Naomi Shihab Nye and Conrad Hilberry. A question from the audience was about structure of a poem. Conrad said the poem usually begins with something small and opens out into something big. Then he went on to add, “Except for Jack’s poems that start really big and get smaller and smaller except that the small thing in the end does something big.” There was a poem I wrote called “Love Poem,” and because of its cheesy title, I’ll affirm it by saying it was in the Georgia Review. The beginning line is, “The smaller the talk, the better.” The ending lines are, “When we wake I want us to begin again never saying anything lovelier than garage door.” The implication at the ending is subverting the whole notion of love, that we really can’t live up to it. So, I think that these poems in Losing Season are similar. When the Equipment Manager leaves the gym, he sees these kids kissing in this car. He realizes that he’s older than when he left the building, and he thinks about his wife and all they’ve repaired, which is a great word because it also means to re-pair. It’s this quiet moment, this hush, this resonance of lifelong love.

34 Sport Literate Maybe a poem that undermines all that is where Scrub is dreaming of making his last shot. It’s all tense. But, still, the big moment disappears. There is no last shot. And what appears to end that poem is Scrub at the dance with his dream girl, “and Jennie cups her hand around Scrub’s neck.” It’s hushed but it’s huge.

SP: Can you talk about your titles? They seem very telling, as if you’re letting the reader know exactly what is to come. A few examples are “Pep Rally,” “Coach Tells His Wife about the Big Game,” “The Big Snow,” and “Before the Game.” JR: It was a big decision to do that. And these titles are very different than my other poems where I really have a great time coming up with titles like “The End of Irony.” These titles in Losing Season were like newspaper titles. There were a couple of reasons. These weren’t poems to figure out, these were poems to experience. So with these simple titles, I was like, “Here it is, go experience.” I think with poems, more than with novels, titles have an integral part to play. The poem’s title is doing something to the poem. In one sense, in this collection I put the narrative in the title. The poems are the lyrical response to the narrative titles. Students very often, because they are taught that poems should be difficult, try to have their reader figure out the poem. So students think that poems should be hard. But students seldom get to experience those complicated poems. They figure them out and then they move on to the next difficult poem. But they never really read them. I don’t want to figure out that a poem is about a dog. Just tell me. Now I’m in that experience with you. All kinds of things can open up because you’ve given me the bottom line. I’m not telling someone to not write a dense poem. It’s that Donne didn’t write a poem thinking, “This will be hard to figure out.”

SP: Can you talk about form? Almost all of your poems, except maybe two or three, seem to be long and thin. Why? JR: That was to embody pragmatism. Americanism. Cut to the chase. No long lines. Because it seemed appropriate for this small town, nothing artsy fartsy. The world was fix-your-car, utilitarian. How do you get a structure that suggests Americanism? Nothing fancy here. I grew up in that culture. Mill working people. Don’t put on airs here. My father was very impatient with anything that seemed to be showing off. I remember him saying, “Why do these Sports Illustrated articles always toss in things I don’t know anything about?”

15th Anniversary Issue 35 Family Ridl: Father Buzz, with trophy, coached the Pitt Panther basketball team from 1968 through 1975. Library of Congress

36 Sport Literate SP: Why are readers so drawn to Scrub, the bench warmer on the team? JR: Because he’s a dreamer, but he has a very moving reason for his dreams. He dreams to survive. He doesn’t have any way to get through life if he doesn’t dream. It’s the only world he has. Every other world has kicked him out. And then he’s so goofy when he thinks, “Someday I’m going to come back home and have a dog.” He just wants an everyday life. But he’s got no hope of getting out. He’s still going to be in the same damn town all his life. Poor guy. He doesn’t dream of getting out of there and showing up the town. He just wants to be with them, but he never gets to.

Walking Home Late After Practice

Walking home late after practice, Scrub kicks the snow, imagines each flake a phony word, a lie, a promise he believed, floating up off into the air, mixing in the wind, melting. Scrub keeps walking, passes under the streetlight across from his house, sees the light on in the kitchen, pauses, looks back, suddenly starts to dance, dance under the long deflected pass of the moon’s light. His feet slide softly over the layers of snow piled and trampled hard by schoolkids, teachers, people heading to a friend’s house. Scrub, the dancer, whirling himself into the soft night, into the wild applause of the falling snow.

15th Anniversary Issue 37 SP: I read that Losing Season took you 20 years to write. Can you describe the process? JR: Twenty-five really. My wife says, “I remember you starting this. It was 25 at least.” This book was material that was there all along but I put it aside for very human reasons. I didn’t want to be the coach’s kid. I wanted to be my own person. So you publish three volumes of poetry and three chapbooks and you become your own person so you can write about being the coach’s son. But what really killed me while writing this book was “belief,” “not belief,” “belief,” “not belief.” “Will this book work? Can I create a narrative in this book?” The process was one poem at a time until there were maybe 20 of these. And then a few journals were so affirming of these poems that I thought, “I can create a town, and then I thought I could create a novel-in-poems that takes place in this small town.” So it was nice that way, just coming to me. The writing is so much smarter than I am. It’s helping me along.

SP: You’ve won lots of awards, and some very big ones, for your teaching. What role do you see teaching playing in your life? JR: I can’t believe how lucky I am. I’m amazingly grateful for my students. A little tiny school like this, Hope College. I’ve had sixty-five students go on to get MFAs and do great things with their writing. It’s crazy. They went to terrific programs. It’s not me, it’s them, these great students. I’m grateful that I love teaching so much. The poetry thing would have killed me. The competitive side of it. To place my wellbeing in that, I just don’t know if I would have survived. I appreciate your understanding that I’m saying these things about my students in a delighted way. I love to give stuff to people.

SP: Jack, it’s been an absolute pleasure to talk with you. Thanks for a great conversation. Is there anything else you’d like to add? JR: Yes. It means everything to have someone attend to the poems as thought- fully as you have, Sean. Thanks so much.

38 Sport Literate Losing Season: Everybody Talks

It’s the way December turns into March. It’s the teeth on the right side tight, all eyes finding a way to see around the corner. It’s not making the coffee, not saying good morning anymore, not fixing the dent in your car, the draft under the door, the difference between the two of you.

Sean Prentiss is a former lightweight high school and college wrestler who now teaches creative nonfiction and poetry at Grand Valley State University. Though he no longer wrestles, he skis, mountain bikes, plays hockey and ultimate, and rock climbs.

15th Anniversary Issue 39 Jack of Jacks Alternative history Ben Giamo

ack Kerouac had a dream in 1953, two years after he wrote the scroll manu- Jscript of On the Road. He was 31 years old and still musing about the road not taken. Well, in order to dream you must be asleep, and that night in ’53 Jack was down under weaving together the debris of his unconscious into a red and white sweater with a big N sewn on the front. Granted, the color scheme was off, but the N stood for Notre Dame. Walking through the streets of Lowell, Massachusetts, sporting his Notre Dame jersey, he was worried people wouldn’t understand the partial signifier. But in Jack’s mind it was very clear. He was heading towards South Bend, Indiana, to play football with the Fighting Irish — that one fall championship season that he let slip away in the prime of his athletic prowess. Yes, he could’ve been a contender, a Notre Dame man gal- lantly defending the grid glory of lost time. In the dream he’s too old for this, yet feels driven towards completion nonetheless: “I’ll be tired but I go to do it One Season,” he remarks in his Book of Dreams. I reflect on a possible coda to Jack’s dream — the surreal journey to South Bend, the twists in the road, how easily one gets turned around and lost, like the Susquehanna ghost, and finally spy the determined yet weary footballer walking with rucksack through the streets of Newton Heights, reporting for duty to Frank Leahy, head coach of the Boston College Eagles, who won the national championship in 1940, defeating Tennessee 10-0 in post-season play. Kerouac’s dream was based on experience. He played football, starting off as a boy on the sandlot of Dracut field, just outside of Lowell. “All footballers know that the best football players started on sandlots,” Kerouac wrote in Vanity of Duluoz, the last novel he published before his death. (Case in point: Johnny Unitas.) Ti Jean — a spry youth quick out of the blocks in the backfield — took his licks on the Dracut Tigers neighborhood team. When the Tigers tested their mettle against the older kids from Lowell, Jack often ended up at the bottom of the pile, where the wings of fleet-footed runners were clipped and their bodies flattened out — rolled, pinched, and punched so they would not rise again. But Kerouac rose time and again as if running with a ball through and around defend- ers were simply a fulfillment of his spirit. He dusted himself off, dashed, blocked, received, and rose all the way to his senior year at Lowell High School, where he played behind “a magnificent line” — tall, strong, and fast.

40 Sport Literate In his senior year at LHS, Kerouac was not a regular starter, although he did star whenever on the field in the second half or fourth quarter. At about 5’9” and 170 lbs., he distinguished himself in the backfield: he could run off-tackle or around end with grit and grace, gut it up the middle, catch almost anything that was within reach, punt, pass, and kick. The college scouts took notice. And Kerouac was a conscientious footballer; one could even say, in keeping with his French-Canadian Catholic background, overly scrupulous. When he dropped a pass at the Lynn goal line that could have tied or won the game for Lowell, he couldn’t forgive himself. “I’ve never gotten over the guilt of dropping that pass,” and this written when he was 45 years old. The game against Nashua, in which he started, was decisive for Jack. It was played in the rain and mud, a true slog-fest that was conducted mainly up the stacked middle, yard by filthy yard. Kerouac recounted in Vanity of Duluoz that “it was the toughest best game of football I ever played.” And, he added, the most beautiful. This was no razzle-dazzle football game. It was all guts and no glory, with Kerouac utilized as a workhorse: “pile driving through the murk with mud-blood[i]ed lips, the dream that goes back to old Gipper and Abbie Booth games on old rainy newsreels.” Although Lowell lost a close contest 19-13, Kerouac had his best day, rushing for 130 out of 149 total yards, including a 60-yard run and a 15-yard TD reception. The scouts had their eye on Jack that day. If there were any doubts, the Thanksgiving Day rivalry between Lowell and Lawrence cleared the air. Jack did not start until the second half, but he scored the only touchdown in the game on an 18-yard run down the sideline to give Lowell the win. Shortly afterward, Frank Leahy from BC showed up in the parlor of Kerouac’s home, followed a few days later by Lou Little from Columbia, who led his Lions to victory against Stanford in the 1934 Rose Bowl. What to do? Jack received scholarship offers to play football at both colleges. The respective coaches were aggressive in courting the young recruit. Leahy even sent a postcard to the printer’s shop in Lowell where Kerouac’s father was employed that simply read: “Get Jack to Boston College at all costs.” Taking matters into their own hands, the owners turned this into an all or nothing propo- sition for Leo Kerouac — a promotion or his walking papers. Kerouac’s father and mother were split on the decision: Leo, of course, opting for BC out of sheer self-preservation, and Gabrielle siding with Columbia, mainly because she wanted to follow Jack to New York and enjoy the bright lights of the city. Young Jack was in a quandary, but his allegiance to his mother finally won out. Plus in Vanity of Duluoz he reasoned thusly: I wanted to go to New York City . . . and see the big town, what on earth was I expected to learn from Newton Heights or South Bend Indiana on

15th Anniversary Issue 41 Irish Legend: With his championship team behind him, Frank Leahy, head coach of Notre Dame, addresses the press in 1943. Courtesy of the University of Notre Dame Archives.

42 Sport Literate Saturday nights[?]. . . . I agreed my mother was right as usual. . . . There were big arguments in the kitchen. My father was fired. He went down- trodden to work in places out of town, always riding sooty old trains back to Lowell on weekends. What to learn from South Bend on a Saturday night? Well, the first thing one realizes is that the Bend is 90 miles due east of Chicago, and the South Shore train would have taken him there — to the antidote of an urban elsewhere. But Kerouac decided on Columbia. First, however, before matriculating at Columbia, where he wanted to “dig New York and become a big journalist in the big city beat,” he had to spend an academic year (1939-1940) at Horace Mann School for Boys to make up credits in math and French. He regarded himself as one of the “ringers” at the prep school — average students who were athletes. At 17, Jack was a dedicated student-athlete. Living in Brooklyn with relatives, he had to commute five hours round-trip to Horace Mann in the Bronx each and every day, located at 246th Street, overlooking Van Cortlandt Park. He did his homework on the subway, standing up a good part of the way. On a typical day, he arrived back in Brooklyn for supper at 8:30 in the evening. Despite the hardships of com- muting, and the awkward social situation (he was a working-class hero in an afflu- ent school), he thrived at Horace Mann both scholastically and athletically. In this respect, it was the best year of his life, not to mention hanging out with William F. Buckley, Jr. on campus and street corners. Jack was happy on the field as well as in the classroom. He started every game that season, “playing every minute . . . in exactly the manner I was born to play.” Kerouac was pleased that the Horace Mann football coach recognized his versatility, the “manner” in which Jack was meant to play, that is, to run, punt, kick, pass, block, receive, and return. In this sense, he was an all-rounder. He could punt the ball 65 yards with the wind behind him, and he was adept at pulling off the quick-kick as well. After losing the first game of the season, the Horace Mann team won all of its remaining games, even beating the second-string Columbia frosh 20-0, to become the preppy high school champs of New York City that year. With his steady and varied contributions, Kerouac helped turn the ringers into champions. The Horace Mann Record referred to Kerouac as a “classy backfield lumi- nary,” and a school reporter even took the liberty of reminding the Columbia head coach of the talent that helped to defeat his freshmen squad: Attention Lou Little: In all probability, you have already received news of Jack Kerouac’s magnificent punting in the Columbia Freshman game. To amplify what you have already heard, Jack quick-kicked the

15th Anniversary Issue 43 wet ball an average of 55 yards without even the wind at his back. This is much better than any man on your present Varsity squad can do even with a dry ball. Jack ran your Lion Cubs dizzy, in addition to catching several passes and doing more than his share of the blocking. What more can you possibly ask of any man? Don’t let this pot of gold, that is in your back yard, slip through your fingers.

All of this fanfare should have stored up treasure for Jack at Columbia in the fall of 1940. But the fates were against him. For some reason, the freshman coach was not supportive, and so Kerouac did not start in the backfield. Even so, with his strong legs and good speed, Jack played during the second half of the first game against Rutgers and got noticed. In the second game against St. Benedict’s, he returned a kick-off 85 yards to the five-yard line. St. Benedict’s put up a goal-line stand and stopped the offense dead in its tracks. Then the saints had to punt deep in their own territory. Jack was back to receive and eager to make a repeat return to impress Lou Little and a visiting Army coach on the sidelines. The punt was a long, high spiral, and Kerouac should have called for a fair catch. But of course, vanity of vanities, he didn’t. As soon as he fielded the ball, two opponents were upon him, holding fast to his ankles, “squeezing like vices.” Kerouac recounts the incident: “Puffing with pride I do the complete vicious twist on my whole body so that I can undo their grip and move on. But their St. Benedict’s grips have me rooted to where I am as if I was a tree, or an iron pole stuck to the ground, I do complete turnaround twist and hear a loud crack and it’s my leg breaking.” Jack cracked the tibia is his right leg. At practice the following week, before the X-ray, Little told him to “run it off.” He was accused of favoring his right leg: “get going . . . and stop limping.” After obliging his coaches, spending the entire week running on a broken leg, the limp got worse. He ended up with crutches and a cast on his leg. That finally convinced the coaching staff and they implored no longer. At 18, removed from the daily grind of the gridiron, Kerouac settled into the tweed peace of an Ivy League college student, getting into his studies, smoking his pipe, and listening to classical music on the radio in his dorm room at Livingston Hall that looked out to Van Am Quad and the Low Memorial Library. And, taking full advantage of his injury and red-shirt status, he continued eating rare filet mignon every evening at the Lion’s Den on campus, for he lived to play another day. In the meantime, he began reading Thomas Wolfe and something else besides football started to take root in the marrow of his bones. “He just woke me up to America as a Poem instead of America as a place to struggle around and sweat in,” Kerouac recalled in Vanity of Duluoz. “Mainly this dark-eyed American poet made

44 Sport Literate me want to prowl, and roam, and see the real America that was there and that ‘had never been uttered.’” This feeling of wanderlust and urge to discover and utter the real America came amidst the usual hem and haw of college life, including working as a dishwasher in the dining room to pay for his meals and as a coffee waiter in John Jay dining hall, where he once poured a cup for Thomas Mann. By the end of his freshman year, Jack had aced Mark Van Doren’s Shakespeare class, failed chemistry, and was voted vice president of his sophomore class. Kerouac must have healed well. He spent the summer of 1941 in Lowell at his leisure, swimming at Pine Brook (a.k.a. bare-ass beach), eating huge suppers, having a few toots with his buddies in the local taverns on Moody Street, reading, and staying in shape. He continued his close late-adolescent friendship with Sebastian Sampas, who recited Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” to him while Jack floated on the flotsam of the Merrimack River. Shortly before returning to Columbia for the fall semester and football season, Kerouac, ensconced in a chair in his family’s Pawtucketville home, imbibed a deep draught of American ambition. These were his glory days, and he set his sights high — hitching his cleats to the stars. In the “wildest daydream of my life,” Kerouac imagined himself as the Columbia Rose Bowl hero, leading the team to victory two years in a row. Of course, the fantasy was just getting going: he would also excel in his studies, ace chemistry, emerge as a phenomenal track star, turn into the next Joe DiMaggio, and become a celebrated author to boot. This incredible burst of Faustian power was capped by fighting Joe Louis for the heavyweight championship. In the daydream, Jack knocks him out of the ring and all the way into the third row. In Kerouac’s own words as described in Vanity of Duluoz: “I’m the world’s heavyweight boxing champion, the greatest writer, the world’s champ miler, Rose Bowl and (pro-bound with the New York Giants football non pareil) now offered every job on every paper in New York, and what else? Tennis anyone?” How many lifetimes would it take to accomplish all this? When Jack returned to reality, he looked up at the night stars over Lowell and had a Taoist notion that would register at the moment, yet take many more years to really settle in. “It just didn’t matter what I did, anytime, anywhere, with anyone. . . . I suddenly realized we were all crazy and had nothing to work for except the next meal and the next good sleep.” It’s a sweet thought — a restful ontology. Simply be, exist in time, without all the pressure (from within and without) to become somebody, some Übermensch of the American imperium. Jack’s youthful exuberance was taken down a notch or two when he figured out that Lou Little was not going to start him in the lineup for the fall 1941 season. And so he did the unthinkable: he quit. He proclaimed himself a quitter, clearing out

15th Anniversary Issue 45 his dorm room, and walking right past the coach in the dining hall and right into the American night. He had always wanted to go south, so he took a bus to Washington, D.C., just to get the lay of the land. Once there, he booked a seedy, roach-infested room at the Astor Hotel. His first time on the road was not a pleasant experience. In a letter sent to his dear friend Sebastian from the Astor, he wrote: Oh Sam! I’m driven and weary. I’m mad, desperate. Yes–‘My arms are heavy, I’ve got the blues: There’s a locomotive in my chest, and that’s a fact …’ I don’t know what I’ve done—afraid to go home, too proud and too sick to go back to the football team, …no place to go, I know not a soul….I was lonely, sick, and cried…. For Kerouac, leaving Lou Little and Columbia was “the most important decision of my life so far.” The decision was more than an encumbrance; it was traumatic. It was also momentous. When he returned from D.C., he had to face his parents as well as the deflation of his overly ambitious ideals centered on the sporting life. As Jack recollected in Vanity of Duluoz, he “was just a sad young man.” But the one ambition he did not forsake, much to his father’s consternation, was the huge desire to become an American writer. So the life-altering decision to quit football and college life altogether pushed Kerouac into exploring, adventur- ing, and reinventing himself — all preconditions for the romantic tradition of American letters. His first stop en route was to take a “grease monkey job” at the Atlantic Whiteflash Station in Hartford, Connecticut, where he wrote stories every night (à la Saroyan, Hemingway, Wolfe) on an old Underwood typewriter in his very small, dingy room. The stint at the Atlantic Station provided Kerouac with a good apprenticeship for writing off the beaten path. His knack for mechanics, on the other hand, was quite lame. He was given the job of pumping gas and checking the oil under the hood. Nonetheless, it was a beginning. From there, Jack returned home and took a job as a cub sport’s writer for the Lowell Sun in the winter of 1942. At this time, he discovered Joyce’s stream of consciousness. Still, he argued with his father: Leo: “Do you think you can do what you feel all your life?” Jack: “Yes.” So in 1942 — only 20 years old — Jack joined the Merchant Marines and shipped out on the S.S. Dorchester to Greenland as a scullion, mainly because he felt like it. The war was on full blast, and he wanted to play his part. Plus, it was good money. Most importantly, it gave him the chance to exercise his wanderlust and launch his adventurous education for the writing life he envisioned. Yet all that way to Greenland and back, riding along the suspicious swells of the Atlantic, flanked by a convoy of destroyers, the past was close behind.

46 Sport Literate Kicking Kerouac: Jack Kerouac (hands on hips) learning to punt from high school teammate, Joe Sorota, in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1938.

Mello Burst: Irish fullback Jim Mello races through the open hole in a 1943 game against Michigan.

Photos courtesy of the University of Notre Dame Archives.

15th Anniversary Issue 47 Surprisingly, Kerouac still had not given up the ghost, and practiced halfback runs on the deck of the Dorchester “so I could be ready for Columbia College football the following week.” When he returned to Lowell in October, a telegram from Lou Little awaited him, but it proved too little too late. In typical coach-speak, it read as follows: “Okay Jack now is the time to take the bull by the horns, we’re waiting for you here, we expect you to make up your chemistry deficits and credits and play some ball this year.” Kerouac went along with the charade and showed up for the final round at Columbia. (Incidentally, the next time the Dorchester embarked from Boston it was sunk by a German submarine in Baffin Bay with two to three thousand soldiers aboard.) Returning to college may have saved Kerouac’s life, but it didn’t improve his prospects on the football field. Prior to the Army game, Leo Kerouac went down to New York City to meet with Lou Little about that printer’s job the coach once promised him should Jack sign on board. It didn’t go well. There was a good deal of yelling, and Leo was turned down. This was the final falling out with Little. Leo stormed out of the coach’s office, and Jack soon stormed out of Columbia again — this time for good, because Little, most likely holding a grudge, did not play him during the Army game later that week. This was especially galling to Jack because a rival runner from LHS was playing with Army. He had Leo’s support for calling it quits this time, and Jack rode home on the train with his father in December 1942, both justified, each in his own way. Back in Lowell, Jack waited for the U.S. Navy to call, and brooded: “The Ivy League is just an excuse to get football players for nothing and get them to be American cornballs enough to make America sick for a thousand years. You shoulda stuck to Francis Fahey [i.e., Frank Leahy].” And what if Kerouac had thrown his lot in with Leahy? How would this have changed the course of his life, and that of American literature and culture? Certainly, it was not for lack of trying that Leahy never landed Kerouac. He had sent Jack a typed recruitment letter on July 13, 1939, shortly after Kerouac had graduated from LHS and upon his visit to Boston College. In the letter, Leahy writes: “Personally I was not only impressed with your athletic ability but you seemed to be just the type of boy we are most anxious to have here [at BC].” The head coach goes on to predict Kerouac’s athletic success and good publicity. Then he throws long, stating the following: Your requirements as a football player could best be utilized under the Notre Dame system of football. I say that because you seem to be a climax runner type. You are apt to break away for a long run anytime during a football game. Also a boy does not necessarily have to weigh two-hundred pounds to star under a coach who employs the Notre Dame style.

48 Sport Literate As a postscript written in blue ink, Leahy reassures Jack: “If you come here in 1940 everything will be taken care of.” Then again, in the winter of 1940, when Kerouac was at Horace Mann, Leahy met Jack in Times Square and took him to see a William Saroyan play, Love’s Old Sweet Song. (Saroyan was Kerouac’s favorite playwright at the time.) During this meeting, Leahy informed Kerouac that he would be taking the head coach job at Notre Dame, and that he would bring Jack along with him to South Bend. As a final effort to turn the tide, in the summer of 1940, Leahy brought Kerouac to BC to give him a tryout, reiterating the merits of the Notre Dame system, an offensive strategy based on the backfield box formation and the off-tackle play and the end sweep, with a balanced running and passing game. Leahy knew the system well because he had played tackle for Knute Rockne’s 1929 national championship team. After the tryout, Leahy’s backfield coach, Edward C. McKeever, who followed him to Notre Dame, reported back to the head coach: “‘Fran, that’s the best halfback I ever saw. You’ve got to get him to BC’” On more than one occasion, Jack was tempted to follow Leahy to Notre Dame. He thought seriously about it after his injury and aborted freshman season at Columbia. In early 1941, Kerouac wrote to Sebastian Sampas, who was a student then at Emerson College in Boston, and asked for advice about ditching Columbia for Notre Dame. Knowing Jack’s ambitions off the gridiron, Sebastian was emphatic. In his letter to Jack, written on February 20, 1941, he replied: Jack, I’ve no right to hand advice to any Ordinary individual. You’d be a downright fool to go to Notre Dame — I know the prestige etc. that goes with that particular school, Jack, but you want to major in journalism and you do not intend to coach. (Or do you?) Notre Dame would mean just that — you would probably have to spend the major part of your time with football and football alone.... Why leave Columbia and New York? You know what opportunities abound in New York — Jack, please, please be sensible. Sebastian was persuasive, and the issue was resolved in Jack’s mind for the most part, although it would erupt again in fall 1941, after Jack quit Little for the first time in his sophomore year. In a letter to Sebastian posted from Hartford on October 12th, he writes: “May go to Indiana soon to settle with Notre Dame. If so, will take a room in Chicago hotel and write “Young Writer Remembering New York.” If Kerouac had settled with Leahy and Notre Dame, what would have happened? What would the future have brought? Would “football and football alone,” and a career in coaching or pro-ball, have been in the cards for Jack? Would he

15th Anniversary Issue 49 have ever prowled and roamed through America to see and utter it anew? In retrospect, it seems that Kerouac’s most decisive act was to cast his lot with Lou Little. His fierce commitment to the writing life was a direct result of his col- legiate misadventures at Columbia. It was at and around Columbia that Kerouac would meet Edie Parker, and through her Lucien Carr, and Carr would then introduce him to William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. Not to mention Neal Cassady, who came into the circle a bit later through an introduction by fellow Columbia student Hal Chase, who hailed from Denver. And what of the eventual bi-coastal Beat phenomenon? The strong links to Ferlinghetti, Snyder, Whalen, Lamantia, McClure, et al. would have been missing. In short, the seeds of the Beat Generation, which inspired the counter-culture of the sixties, were planted on the Upper West Side of New York City, migrating to and merging with the Bay Area, and not on the French Gothic campus of Notre Dame du Lac. If Kerouac followed Leahy to South Bend, would he have ever published a word?

Visions of Notre Dame ne thing is certain: had Kerouac decided in favor of Notre Dame, he would Ohave played plenty of football with one of the greatest coaches and teams in the storied annals of college ball. Leahy started coaching under Tommy Mills at Georgetown before he took the job as Fordham line coach. He transferred to BC in 1939, succeeding Gil Dobie. There he led the Eagles to the Cotton and Sugar Bowls and to a national championship. Leahy then joined his alma mater in 1941 as athletic director and head coach, taking the Fighting Irish to an undefeated season in his first year at Notre Dame. The team went 7-2-2 the following year, and in 1943 it won the consensus national championship with a 10-0 record. Leahy is credited with four Notre Dame national championships in his coaching career with the Irish. Despite his allegiance to the Notre Dame system, he broke with tradition in the fall of 1942, converting the Notre Dame offense to the T-formation. No doubt, this proved a winning strategy. If Kerouac had gone to BC after his year at Horace Mann, he would have played with the Eagles for the fall 1940 season, most likely on the freshmen team. Providing he stayed in college continuously, he would have been a sophomore in 1941, when Leahy transferred to Notre Dame. We can assume Frank would have taken Jack with him as promised. So, by fall 1943, Kerouac would have been a senior and an integral part of that national championship team, led by quarterback Angelo Bertelli, the “Springfield Rifle,” who won the Heisman Trophy that year with a 75 percent completion rate and 11 TD passes. (Bertelli only played half the season before he was summoned to Marine Officer Candidate School on Parris

50 Sport Literate Island; overall, he threw 29 touchdown passes in three years of play, and his completion rate was 52 percent.) Johnny Lujack replaced Bertelli and the team did not skip a beat. Creighton Miller, an All-American left halfback voted fourth for the Heisman, Jim Mello, fullback, and Jules Rykovich at right halfback rounded out the starting offensive backfield — “a peerless galaxy . . . of stars,” observed the Notre Dame Scholastic. The backfield had incredible depth as well, capably supplied by Earley, Palladino, Hanlon, Kelly, and Kulbitski. The line, which sparkled with three All-Americans — guard Pat Filley (the captain), tackle Jim White, and end John Yonaker (who at 6’4’, 222 lbs, was one of the largest men on the team) — proved strong, rugged, and tenacious, game after game. The only player missing from the official roster that year is Zagg Kerouac. Zagg, Zaggo, or Zagguth, as Kerouac was called variously by his close friends in Lowell, would have fought his way into the starting backfield lineup by the ’43 season. On the whole, according to the Scholastic, that year the Notre Dame team held “an undisputed stranglehold on the football world, and has been hailed as the strongest Irish representative in history.” Given Ed McKeever’s preference for Kerouac as the best back he’d ever seen (prior to arriving as the backfield coach at ND in ’41), it’s very likely that Jack would have zigzagged his way into the right halfback slot, usurping Jules Rykovich, who was a transfer student from Illinois. Jules was no slouch as a running back. He carried the ball 66 times during that championship season, averaging about five yards per carry, and scoring eight touchdowns. However, it’s clear that he was not the favored back that season; Mello carried 137 times, and Miller 151 times. So Zagg Kerouac likely would have started at offensive right halfback, perhaps rivaling Creighton Miller for the lead back position and All-American title; no doubt, whether playing first or second fiddle, Kerouac would have added his own special torque and thrust to that “load of T-shot” (as a Scholastic reporter aptly put it). Imagine Kerouac back deep on the kick-off return unit, offering up an invoca- tion. In his own words from “Story of a Touchdown”— He thinks: the enemy has kicked off, and I am receiving it on my own ten yard line! The Good Lord help me! Men of my old alma mater, save me, save me, block for me, save me! Save me from that raging band of devils which tears down upon me now with bloody eyes, with foaming mouths, with churning mad legs.... Oh God, help me, somebody help me, perhaps I shall manage to help Myself, here let’s go up this way for a while, straight up the middle of the field. . . O my lord, save me, they come nearer and nearer, they are infuriated bulls, they are not human, they are strangers, and I want to run

15th Anniversary Issue 51 National Champs: Even though they lost to Chicago-based Great Lakes 19-14 in the season finale, Notre Dame won the national championship in 1943. Courtesy of the University of Notre Dame Archives.

Offensive Eleven: Jack Kerouac may have found a backfield spot among the 1943 squad that featured sophomore signal caller, John Lujack, an eventual Heisman Trophy winner in 1947. Courtesy of the University of Notre Dame Archives.

52 Sport Literate away from all this foolishness, I want to get out of this Place, but a crowd of 40,000 bodies and stadium cement keeps me Imprisoned here forever, and now I must save myself from sure death... here now, near the middle of the field, they are all converged at one point expecting me to run into them, I shall fool them and cut to the left and dart around them and dash on to glory [. . .] with all the beautiful thrum in my swift and sure legs, good old pins of mine [. . .] and now let’s see what confronts me, oh-oh, I’m in for it, trapped all around, like a rat, I shall bore into them, because suddenly I am no longer afraid but merely and calmly hate them and shall hurt them. Despite any fleeting trepidation, that 1943 championship season would have been a memorable one for Kerouac. He would have played in lopsided victories over Pitt, Georgia Tech, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Navy, Army, and Northwestern, and aided the team in squeaking by Iowa and Great Lakes in the last two games. Against Navy, in which the Irish won 33-6, he would have run amuck amid 86,000 screaming fans at Municipal Stadium in Cleveland, Ohio. He would have received good press that season and filled an entire scrapbook of clippings and photos — the dash-line of an arrow on the sport’s page pointing downfield on a pass from Bertelli to Kerouac all alone in the end zone. Who knows? Cassady might have made good on his desire to see a Notre Dame home game, frantically urging the Irish on to a frenzied victory. After the contest, slipping down to the field, and imploring the star running back to autograph his program, Jack and Neal would have looked into one another’s eyes eerily, perhaps wondering what might have been. A lost look exchanged between them — a missed connection. Then again, given the wartime exigencies of the period, Kerouac might have been a commissioned officer in the Navy V-12 unit at Notre Dame. The number of gold stars on the Domer’s service flag had reached 68 by mid-November of ’43. He would have been sympathetic. On campus, Jack might have befriended Professor Richard Sullivan in the English Department. Sullivan wrote a couple of popular novels, his second one serialized in Cosmopolitan. It’s likely Jack would have read fullback Jim Mello’s poetry, but not thought much of it, since it was inspired by Mello’s girlfriend. But Kerouac might have warmed up to Professor John Nims, an award-winning poet. Jack could have studied journalism with Jim Withey, a gifted teacher, since this subject was offered at the time. Without question, Jack would have been inspired by Frank O’Malley, legendary English professor who viewed literature as an expression of religion. Kerouac would have enjoyed his Philosophy of Literature and Modern Catholic Writers courses, and especially O’Malley’s visionary lectures on Milton, Hopkins, Blake, Eliot, and

15th Anniversary Issue 53 D.H. Lawrence. Since O’Malley held his office hours in downtown bars, Jack would have shown up frequently to imbibe the spirits and nourish his soul. Imbued with Catholic humanism, O’Malley might have challenged Kerouac to “redeem the times” and transform the world. In turn, it’s a safe bet that Jack would have appreciated his intensity and commitment to Catholic literature. Despite the dilemma of what to do on Saturday nights in the Bend, Jack would have felt right at home in a town that was, in many ways, comparable to Lowell (the red-brick Studebaker factory corridor substituting for the color and texture of the textile mills back home). And it would have been hard for Kerouac not to admire the lovely campus and its religious symbolism — the Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes would have reminded him of his hometown and the same eponymous grotto just off of Pawtucket Street. Of course, he would have admired Sacred Heart Church with its crypt, now a minor basilica, and the Golden Dome with the Blessed Virgin reigning on top. The lakes would have provided him with a natural setting to contemplate his life. He might have strayed to nearby St. Mary’s College to survey the female students, strolling along the sycamore-lined entrance to the campus. And how could he not like the priests who belonged to Notre Dame’s Order of the Holy Cross, being French Catholic in origin and Irish Catholic in spirit. They managed the “female problem” rather rudely, and Jack would have been in the mix. When one visiting priest asked a member of the Order how the clerical administrators of an all-male school handled their charges’ rising libidos, the host priest responded: “We don’t have a problem here. You see, it’s rather simple. We run them until they drop, and let them drink till they puke.” Ultimately, Jack would have found Notre Dame too provincial and limit- ing, and I guess he would have bucked at the parietal hours and policy of in loco parentis. He would have had to take the train to Chicago on a regular basis in order to dig the jazz and blues scene — to keep the beat alive and vibrant. And, of course, the attractive women in the city, plainly beautiful with Midwestern friend- liness, would have caught his eye and captured his attention. Who might he have met in Chicago — the Second City? Perhaps an alternative urban universe would have emerged around him to complement his Notre Dame experience, or maybe even tempt and seduce him away from campus, although this seems unlikely. Instead, upon graduating from Notre Dame, I imagine, Kerouac would have played some pro football, coached at the college level, and then tried his hand as a sports journalist for a Chicago newspaper. Then, following in the early footsteps of his father, he might have decided to go for broke after a stint of journalism and get into the insurance business, becoming a conventional man of commerce. Jack’s own alternative vision of himself in Vanity of Duluoz as an insurance salesman

54 Sport Literate speaks directly to a different future had he followed Leahy to the Midwest and Notre Dame. He sees himself wearing a gray felt hat getting off the train in Chicago with a briefcase and being embraced by a blond wife on the platform, in the smoke and soot of the big city hum and excitement. . . . Then I pictured myself, college grad, insurance success, growing old with my wife in a paneled house where hang my moose heads from successful Labradorian hunting expedition and as I’m sipping bourbon from my liquor cabinet with white hair I bless my son to the next mess of sheer heart attack (as I see it now). Given such a complacent sideways scenario, I imagine Kerouac in his retire- ment years — stable, secure, successful, having recovered from triple bypass surgery at age 70 — gimping out onto the 50 yard line in The House that Rockne Built at halftime on an autumn afternoon, wearing his Notre Dame jersey (sporting number 35 on the backside), to receive an alumni lifetime achievement award: in recognition for leading the Fighting Irish to the 1943 national championship title, and for his generous donations to the university (having endowed the Kerouac Chair in American Studies), indefatigable support for free enterprise, charitable contributions to eradicating poverty on the South Side of Chicago, and positive role model for succeeding generations of youth. In his remarks to the crowd of 60,000, after extending his hearty gratitude for the award to all concerned, he would have read a scrap from a work in progress attempted long ago, long abandoned, with the working title of The Town and the City. He knew that it would sit well with his alma mater: Young Peter sat on the bench, a new sophomore halfback, hooded among the others in the shades of historic day, aching and burning in every bone to run out into the middle of the field which was like the middle of the world’s life, and stand there among these great sanctifications which, for his soul, were like the Tribute of the Angels in the great arcades of Judgment Day. Move over, Rudy. Yes, by all means, the dream could have been have been fulfilled — and crowned — but at what cost? Kerouac’s strong drive to become a great American writer might have prevailed, but the John Kerouac who authored The Town and the City, written in the solemn romantic style of Thomas Wolfe, would never have become Jack — the unconventional writer whose work, as Ann Douglas so rightly put it, “represents the most extensive experiment in language and literary form undertaken by an American writer of his generation.” In short, John Kerouac would never have developed into a “climax” writer — the Jack of Jacks — a distinctive

15th Anniversary Issue 55 prose artist who dared to utter something entirely new: spontaneous bop prosody, improvisational jazz on the page of Life Abundant — Spiritus (the inspiration to breathe freely). So, Jack’s unorthodox climax novels, such as On the Road, Visions of Neal, Doctor Sax, The Subterraneans, Tristessa, Visions of Gerard, The Dharma Bums, and Big Sur would neither have been conceived nor written. His poetic choruses, such as those contained in Mexico City Blues, would have fallen by the wayside. And the 90 boxes of papers, manuscripts, notebooks, letters, journals, diaries, and the like, now contained in the Kerouac Archive at the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection, would not exist, clearing up a whole lot of shelf space. Readers and would-be writers around the globe would be much worse off because of this absence. They would be aesthetically and spiritually impoverished. It does not end there. Without Jack Kerouac, there would not have been an Allen Ginsberg, at least not the dissenting Allen of the long, confessional, emotionally charged poem. There would have been no Howl, because it was the dynamic interrelationships among the Ur-Beats that made matters so determi- native. Kerouac opened Ginsberg up to spontaneous poetry — to jazz — and the long line of extended rhetorical exhalation, blowing deeply like a jived-up Whitman. In fact, it was Kerouac who gave Ginsberg the title for his ground- breaking poem. And, since it was Jack and Allen who encouraged — pestered — Burroughs to write, it’s doubtful that William would have stepped into the fray of the publishing world without them. So we would not have Naked Lunch — the title, arrangement of the manuscript, and typing was a collaborative effort among Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac. Without the triad of seminal Beat figures, there would be no major postwar cracks in consciousness, no beatnik phase, no blue- print for the counter-culture of the sixties to consult, no cultural source, no 20th century American literary Big Bang. The sixties would have gone on — and been the contentious happening that it was — but without a certain libertine dimen- sion and critical depth-charge that hammered away at the hegemonic symbols of postwar authority, setting a precedent for the oppositional counter-culture to come. Think of Neal Cassady. With or without Kerouac and the Ur-Beats, he still would have been dreaming in the immensity of IT — both ecstatic and forlorn. But he never would have risen to mythic proportions without Jack’s On the Road, which makes it improbable that he would have been “on the bus” with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, setting the tone and style of the sixties, let alone driving it. In light of such non-developments and abysmal holes in the literary, cultural, and social life of the nation, it seems only appropriate that the University of Notre Dame confer a posthumous honorary degree of literature, honoris causa, on Jack Kerouac for snubbing the university and deciding upon a path that would lead to

56 Sport Literate the culmination of great literary talent. I imagine the citation, spoken by the pro- vost at the 166th Commencement Exercises to read as follows: For his personal attainment as a man of literary stature — sensitive writer, serious innovator who bridged modernism and postmodernism, distinguished prose artist published in numerous languages and countries. On Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac, because of your momentous decision to attend Columbia and play football for Lou Little, then quitting to become a beatific American author by going forth into the American Night — into the darkness on high — to moan for man (blessed are they that mourn; for they shall be comforted) — Notre Dame confers this honorary degree for writing stories that teach something of religious reverence about real life. Your belief that spirit was both the foundation and flying buttress of human existence blew the dust cover off American literature. As you once wrote, “Man can die & not only live in others but give them life, and not only life but that great consciousness of life that made cathedrals rise from the smoke and rickets of the poor.” Mr. Kerouac, you were such a man who gave “that great consciousness of life” to millions of people, both young and old. Your lasting appeal to readers worldwide corresponds with Thomas Merton’s insight into Boris Pasternak’s strong attraction. To quote Merton from the July 1959 issue of Jubilee, “It is the man himself, the truth that is in him, his simplicity, his direct contact with life, and the fact that he is full of the only revolutionary force that is capable of producing anything new: he is full of love.” Thank you, Jack.

Ben Giamo is an associate professor of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame. His teaching interests encompass literary and cultural studies and poverty and homelessness. His book, Kerouac, the Word and the Way, exam- ines the prose art of Jack Kerouac as an expression of an ever-shifting spiritual quest. More recently, he has been diving into the Kerouac archive at the New York Public Library to track down his formative football career and its impact upon his life and literature. The question — what if Jack had played for the Fighting Irish? — kept coming up, so he decided to answer it. Giamo’s other books include The Homeless of Ironweed, a study of William Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, and On the Bowery. His new book, Homeless Come Home: An Advocate, the Riverbank, and Murder in Topeka, Kansas, forthcoming in fall/winter 2011, will be published by the University of Notre Dame Press.

15th Anniversary Issue 57 The Short History of an Ear essay Mark Pearson

Just as the face is a paradox of diversity within similarity, so, too are the ears, which have characteristics that can be read, just as the face can be read, to reveal their inner nature. Reading the Body: Ohashi’s Book of Oriental Diagnosis

he knee hit hard, crumpled the vinyl halo, not much in the way of ear Tprotection, but enough to pass the safety standard. The full force of the knee brought to bear upon the ear inside the halo. The bruised ear, echoed with pain, skin separated from cartilage, and blood filled the space between.Within moments, the ear transformed itself into an overripe plum, split and dripping thick red nectar. Weeks later, the doctor said: “I can still get a few milliliters of blood out of there.” His hypodermic needle poised on the examining table like a massive mos- quito. I had seen ears, drained again and again, only to refill and harden, moon- scapes, pocked with craters, rimmed with ridges. This ear was mine, earned, and paid for; he would not deflate it with his hungry hypodermic. On purpose, I waited too long, a week, maybe two, as the sharp twinges of my heart beat in my ear. When I walked outside, the Midwestern winter wind felt good, iced the skin, and numbed the pain. The ear, once soft, a pliable blood balloon, overflowed its rim then it shrank like a receding flood and hardened. Fissures formed like dry- ing mud flats. “That’s OK,” I said. “Leave it.” He looked at me. Slightly amused, he asked, “Where are you from?” “Pennsylvania.” “A tough guy from Pennsylvania, huh?”

We weren’t quite from coal country, but we were close enough. Twenty-five minutes away they fired the Bethlehem Steel mills with the coal that was mined a little farther north. Next town over, Allentown, they bent and shaped steel into Mack Trucks. An hour away they were ripping slate and shale from the moun- tains and turning the hillsides into black stick forests of dead trees and mud. I grew up wrestling against the sons of the men who worked in those places, tending the furnaces, shoveling the coal, and bending the steel.

58 Sport Literate Picture the image of a tiny baby tucked in your ear with its head nestled in your earlobe. There are hundreds of acupuncture points on the ear. You can treat the whole body through the ear. The ear is like some mystical spiral that unfolds into an entire body, everything flows through it.

15th Anniversary Issue 59 My father worked with steel in a different kind of factory. He was a furniture designer for Knoll International. He made sculptures in his spare time, and our living room was filled with his plaster, plastic, and wood found-object sculptures. His Pearson Chair was in the Louvre in Paris in a Knoll exhibition. The Pennsylvania Dutch kids, whose fathers were farmers and factory workers thought we were weird, but they liked to look at my father’s creations, filled with branches and plastic action figures caught in plaster like some abstract recreation of Pompeii. To add to it, we lived in what they called a modern house. It was more than 100 years old. What was modern about it, I wasn’t sure. When my parents bought it, it had no plumbing and its heating system consisted of black potbelly stoves. They bought the house from an old man who used to shoot deer from the living room window. He would come back to the house sometimes to pick wild mint to make tea. My father gutted it before we moved in. He and a friend took an electric saw to the outhouse then kicked it over and it rolled down the hill. He knocked a hole in the three-foot thick stonewalls to put in a kitchen window. He rounded the corners of the new window instead of squaring them. This was apparently modern to the neighborhood kids. We lived in the middle of the woods on the side of a steep hill that ran down into a narrow valley split by a trout stream where I spent most of my springs fishing for rainbows. One time when I was six or seven, I made a model chair like the ones I saw him make. I used scraps of leather and balsa wood. It was covered in white glue and crooked. My father looked at it and said, “It looks like a dancing chair.” It hurt when he said it. Later, when I wondered if I should follow him into design, he just said, “It’s too hard to make a living at it.” Growing up, we didn’t have much more than dreams. Knoll shut down its design department and my father found another job. When that company closed down, he tried to freelance. It didn’t work out. That winter we had a cold snap and our electricity was shut off. I’d shower in the gym each morning when I got to school. When I got home, I would carry tin buckets in the dark to the top of the hill behind the house to get water from the spring. The water line had frozen and we had no running water in the house. I’d fill 10 one gallon buckets and leave them in the living room, so my brothers and sister could take baths the next day. The hillside was frozen over and the spring looked like a miniature glacier.

Years later, it was still with me. “Your ear doesn’t bend,” the barber said. One finger pressed the back of it, scissors snipped hair, and each cut exposed it

60 Sport Literate more. There is not much hair to hide it anymore and just as well. I never wanted it hidden. “Cauliflower ear,” I said. She nodded and said: “I don’t like people playing with my ears.” She held the ear gently between her thumb and forefinger, and trimmed the hair around it. The electric razor hummed in my ear as she worked. She was unfazed, not like the girl at the coffee shop, who stared, and asked: “Is it a birth defect?” “No.” “Does it hurt?” “No.” “Can you hear OK?” “What?” She looked down, counted the change into my palm, made eye contact with the next customer. The folds of skin and cartilage that make up the external ear are what got damaged. The external ear is there to protect the eardrum, collect and guide sound waves into the ear canal to the eardrum. It’s an intricate system designed to catch sound waves. It did its job of protecting the middle and the inner ear, those delicate internal mechanisms where the eardrum passes its vibra- tions to the middle ear (ossicles), then on to the hammer (malleus), then the anvil (incus), and then on into the labyrinth where eventually the sound passes through a liquid chamber where nerve impulses transmit to the brain. The internal mechanisms of my ear are intact. I can hear just fine. People ask: Can you get plastic surgery? I ignore it. In Japan where they have a cultural respect for martial arts it is seen as a badge of honor. Here, people just think it’s ugly. Medical sources refer to it as a deformity, prescribe treatments: ice, drain, and pack tightly.

What I hear is my father’s story about wrestling in the national finals in Laramie, Wyoming. It’s 1958 — a year before I was born. Thirty seconds from the end of his final match, he’s winning and he has a vision of himself step- ping to the top of the awards podium and accepting the national championship plaque. The image floats there for a moment and then it’s gone. A last second takedown erases his lead and he loses 7-5.

15th Anniversary Issue 61 The vision, born in the old gym on the high desert plateau of Wyoming, blew east, across the western plains, and Midwestern cornfields, and caught up with me when I was a boy in the Appalachian foothills of eastern Pennsylvania. It hovered above me until it became my dream. One day at my elementary school, the principal announced that the youth association was starting a wrestling team. I couldn’t wait until the end of school. When I got off the bus that afternoon, I ran all the way home, clutching a sign-up sheet, and sat on the front door step until my father got home.

It took me a long time to learn that wrestling was nothing but a fight with some rules to make sure nobody gets killed. It’s a painful lesson, not just physical. I want to make my father proud, but early on, I get beat, and beat badly. I’m on my own. My father made a wrestling mat out of vinyl and foam rubber and vinyl tape he got from Knoll’s Design and Development department. We rolled it up against the wall in our living room. We would unroll it twice a week to practice, my father putting my younger brother, Eric, and me through drills. He was an expert at the side roll and bottom wrestling in general, technique that were nearly lost as American folkstyle later got closer and closer to freestyle — an international style. One night I got angry because I felt he was unfairly using more strength on me while letting Eric, who was younger and smaller, execute his moves with ease. I was about 12, a skinny kid. I weighed 75 pounds. We got in a flurry and I caught him off balance and shoved him into the wall, then I jumped up and threw a wild punch that grazed his head. He shook it off and then launched me into the air — my head skimmed the ceiling and my legs were moving before I hit the ground, and they didn’t stop moving until I was up the stairs and in my room. A few minutes later, I was back on the mat, finishing the drill. Don’t lose your composure was all he said. My ears burned with anger and the constant abrasion from the vinyl mat. It was just the beginning. From the time I was 9 years old, wrestling hijacks my imagination. I dream of moves in my sleep. I walk through the days pictur- ing my next match. I wrestle through elementary school and junior high school. Eastern Pennsylvania was a hot bed of wrestling and every weekend I faced opponents who went on to successful college wrestling careers. I got better, and then I got good. I started winning, but I was never dominating wrestler, never did someone say: Man, that guy is great. That sort of notoriety eludes me, but it doesn’t matter. I loved it. At first, I would make the finals of local tournaments, but end up second. Finally, I started to win.

62 Sport Literate All that mat time primes the ear. It’s a matter of repetition: a head butt, an elbow, bang, bang, bang, agitate the skin and the cartilage. All it will take is one solid hit and then: the big blow up. The ear as it was previously known will disappear. The ear isn’t the only body part that takes a beating. I break my nose at least four times, tear ligaments in both ankles, snap my ACL and tear cartilage in my knee and ribcage. I break my thumb — the same thumb I also dislocate — a dislocation so bad that when it happened all I could see of my thumb was the end of it with the fingernail sticking out of the other side of my palm. I almost puked. I held my hand up and my assistant coach snapped it back into place. Then my palm blew up to the size of a baseball. At the medical center, they shot my hand full of painkillers, and then a doctor cranked my thumb around in a full circle like it was the hour hand of a clock. “Yeah, I’d say you’re done for a while,” he said casually.

One night freshman year, overheated and starved from trying to cut to 129, I stick my head out of my dorm window into a starless Michigan night and open my mouth to catch the snowflakes that sift silently to the ground. I once told my father I was going to Paris because I wanted to write and Paris was the place to go if you were young and wanted to write. He looked up, and squinting his eyes as if he was sighting a distant object, said: “If you want to write, go to Bayonne, New Jersey.” Then he picked up a shovel and returned to tending his garden. His words have stayed with me all of these years although he had forgotten them long ago. At one point in the intervening years, I asked him if he remembered them; he said no. Clearly, he never gave the significance to those words that I did. They were a kind of sphinx’s riddle to me, and I sensed that if I could grasp their meaning, I would have unlocked the secret to artistic success. I wor- shiped my father in the way that some sons do, so his words — not frequently or carelessly issued — had the gravity of important things.

My wife, who is studying acupuncture, has a poster of an ear with all its acupuncture points hanging on a wall in our home office. In another picture in one of her textbooks, the image of a baby — a curled up embryo — is super- imposed over an ear. All the acupuncture points in an ear apply to the rest of the human body. Picture the image of a tiny baby tucked in your ear with its head nestled in your earlobe. There are hundreds of acupuncture points on the ear. You can treat the whole body through the ear. The ear is like some mystical spiral that unfolds into an entire body, everything flows through it.

15th Anniversary Issue 63 Ear is even part of my name — Pearson. I’ve seen it spelled other ways too, Pierson, and Pehrson, the Swedish version. The name made its way from its Nordic roots to Scotland, down through England, and then on to the states when my father’s parents immigrated here from the border of Scotland and northern England in the 1930s.

The lights flash in my eyes and leave spots. I blink, blink, blink, bridge, bridge. I’m skidding across the black mat on my face. The arena is upside down. I see feet, legs of chairs, then people sitting in them, my coaches. They’re screaming something at me, but all I hear is my heart pounding in my ears, inter- mittent yells, thuds, my own strained breathing, an opponent clamped tight to my chest, breathing in my face. I’m wrapped tight, fighting off my back. It can’t end here, I think — in a pigtail match at the Big Ten’s. How’d I draw the pigtail? Loser is out of the tournament, no chance to wrestle back. I twist, arch, drive with my feet, punch my hand across my chest, and I’m on my stomach, but two minutes have expired. A minute to go in the first period and I’m already down by five. 0-5. No time to waste. What happened? He was in on my legs. I tried to throw some junk move, but not the way I usually did it. I hipped to the side instead of rolling straight back and kicking him over me. Five years of my coach yelling: “Don’t throw that crap,” so I went a different route. Bad time to experiment. I should have known. I get a one point escape at the end of the first period to cut the lead to four. In the second period, I start to score, first an escape, then a takedown, but he escapes for one point. He has riding time from the eternity I fought off my back in the first period, and he scores just enough to stay ahead by 5-4 going into the third. He escapes in the third, to go up 6-4. He still has riding time, but I rode him enough to cut it down. I get over aggressive, as the clock winds down, and he scores a takedown, I’m down by five again, but I escape, score a takedown, run down his riding time. He’s too hard to turn, so I cut him loose, but before I can score, time expires. I lose 9-7, and my college career is over.

Walking down the hall one day to teach a class at the University of Georgia, a middle-aged man, gray hair, squat, crushed nose, paused as I passed and asked: Where did you wrestle … what college? I had been lost in thought, reviewing the day’s lesson and his voice sounded alien in the polished corridor. As he spoke, I heard the familiar singsong dialect of the Pennsylvania Dutch — the rising inflection at the end of the sentence. Living in the south, I had nearly forgotten it. He was a coach from the athletic department, arranging

64 Sport Literate a tutor for an athlete. When I told him I wrestled at Michigan, he said: You don’t see many ears like that around here.

I go to the acupuncture clinic for the pain in my hips and knees, residual effects from wrestling. The Chinese doctor sticks a needle into my hardened, thickened ear. It burns and I flinch. “Your ear is very special,” she says. She seems to think it’s congenital, some miraculous sign from a blessed birth, not from a violent blow to the head. “It’s from an injury,” I say. She nods, but I’m not sure she understands that there are wrestlers, boxers, rugby players, and others walking around with the same injury caused by some similar brutal collision. There’s nothing miraculous or strange about it. It’s a brutal trademark of a sport I sometimes love and sometimes hate. For days after the treatment, I can feel the place where the needle punctured my ear. It’s a vague burning that makes me reach up and rub it. It feels too thick, almost alien, and reminds me of the past.

One day, I see a Knoll sign in the window of a furniture store. I turn the car around at the next intersection and go in. Max Pearson is my father, I said to the store manager. She seemed mildly amused. We sell lots of your dad’s chairs, she said. I look around the store and see the furniture we grew up with. We had prototypes from the different designers in our house. Saarinen’s pedestal table was our dining room table. At some point, the works of Pollock, Shultz, Platner, and the other icons of modern furniture design drifted through our living room. It feels strangely like home — the hillside home in Pennsylvania, where I heard the names of the other designers nearly every day. The same living room where we wrestled on the wrestling mat my father made out of vinyl and foam and rolled up against the wall, so we could practice whenever we wanted. In the humid, urban, Houston environment, I realize how far I am from those cold winters in rural Pennsylvania. In the end, when it was clear I wasn’t there to buy, the manager seemed to care that I was Max Pearson’s son as much as those kids I wrestled against when I was a boy.

Another barber sees the ear. You’ve got a broken ear, he says with an accent that sounds middle-eastern, Iranian, or perhaps Turkish. “Me too,” he says pointing to a pair of flattened ears.

15th Anniversary Issue 65 Broken ear, I said to myself. I’d never heard it called that before. I liked it. The name seemed so simple, so true — much better than cauliflower ear. I’d always thought of it as more stone — fossil even — than vegetable. We talked about the sport that deformed our ears. He was from one of the places where it was an honor to have a broken ear and he spoke fondly of his days in the sport.

My father doesn’t remember anything these days. He’s deep in the throes of Alzheimer’s. The last time I saw him, he didn’t know who I was. For a while he used to take out his old wrestling scrapbook, and look over and over at the pictures and the headlines. “Did you see what they gave me?” he said once about his outstanding wrestler award from the Big Ten’s. “I must have been pretty good.” But he’s stopped doing that now. He spends his time running his fingers over chairs and fabric. In his mind, he must still be designing furniture. I read somewhere that in his final years, when he was suffering the final blows of Alzheimer’s, they used to put Willem Dekooning in front of a canvas and he would go to work just like he always did. My father isn’t designing furniture any more. The little workshop that he built out of trees that he felled in the backwoods of our house has fallen into chaos. He lives in a nursing home now. It’s painful to see him that way. He’d always striven for independence. He always had a copy of Walden nearby. For a long time, he kept exercising. When my oldest daughter was seven, he raced her up the hill behind his house. When he was well, he used to bike and run, hike, and paddle his kayak on the Susquehanna River. One day he walked off into the woods and they found him in the darkness eight hours later, walking across a field at three o’clock in the morning. There were a 125 people and a helicopter looking for him. When the paramedics checked him out, they said he was in amazing physical condition for a man his age. But, the exercise has stopped now. The last time he got lost in the woods seemed to take more of his life out of him. Even in his emaciated physical state, it seemed his body wouldn’t quit on him. It compelled him forward, just like it had done 50 years before in the NCAA championships, pushing his opponents purposefully into overtime, where he knew he had an advantage. There was no advantage now, just some stubborn impulse to keep moving, to stay alive. The mice are scratching at the insulation in the air conditioner in my father’s studio. It’s December and cold air whistles at the windows. Drafting tools and sketches of chairs that no one will ever sit in are piled on his desk. A router sits on the floor. He built the studio himself out of trees from his

66 Sport Literate property, framed it up, put a roof on it and nailed some sheetrock inside. He installed a woodstove designed by a former colleague of his. The windows face the forest. I lift a torn piece of paper with notes on it. He has distinct handwriting. Strong lines. When I was a boy, I used to imitate his signature. The paper says: Sculptures that move by air pressure; Random patterns of raindrops on a ceramic plate.

The only wrestling I do anymore is with my daughters on the living room rug. They think it’s great fun to jump on my back and get caught in the bear trap of my legs. They scream, Let’s wrestle daddy, come on, get down on your hands and knees. Let’s go! We roll around on the floor in a knot of arms and legs. It’s two on one, and I lose every time. When I pick up my 3-year old daughter, her small fingers find my ear. She hangs on to it as if it is handle that keeps her from falling. She runs her fingers over it and it almost tickles. She looks at it, and then checks my other ear, her fingers pinch lightly, like tiny calipers, measuring the thickness of each ear. I can see in her eyes that she has noticed the difference between the two ears, but she doesn’t say anything. She just holds the damaged ear. I’m 50 now, and I’m glad I have two daughters. I grew up with two brothers and a sister, but I have no sons of my own to teach wrestling the way my father taught me. But, that’s all right with me because the thought of teaching a young boy to wrestle at my age seems much too painful. My knees and hips ache after a long walk. I have screws and staples in my knee from a wrestling injury. But, the truth is, as much joy and pride as there is between a father and a son, I don’t know that I could endure much more of the unspoken pain that marks the lives of fathers and sons. It never ends.

Mark Pearson attended the University of Michigan on a wrestling scholarship, and then returned to his home state, Pennsylvania, where he worked as a journalist and pursued his interest in fiction. He later earned a PhD in English from the University of Georgia; he also has an M.A. in English and creative writing from the University of California, Davis. His fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming in Aethlon, Blueline, Broken Bridge Review, Carve, Gray’s Sporting Journal, Short Story, and Stories. He currently lives in Houston, Texas, with his wife and two daughters.

15th Anniversary Issue 67 Boxers poetry Paul Nelson

Ahead on points in the last rounds the Champ falls in love again like Beowulf in old age wanting that last barbaric passion with a shiny sweating dragon

Who does he want to kill if that’s what it’s all about by forgetting to box by going toe to toe loading up telegraphing punches simply fighting his demon who catches on dropping his left going for the bolo right of romance

Their corners go crazy over this espousal this once and for all free for all a big left hook whacking meat and bone circuits blown the Champ down the victor staggering up the delirious applauding aisle having forgotten his fine green silk robe draped on the ropes like all his life’s joy

willing now to sleep the comforting dream of the skilled early rounds the honor and duty of being there at all within the precise battering and probability of being knocked unconscious himself content with no desire left to rise erect and peer over the veldt grass for a familiar loved figure far off yet approaching his open arms

the great and handsome Champ in his own sort of bliss sprawled flat on the canvas quivering reluctant to wake to crawl from pre-lapsarian gloom

68 Sport Literate just to grow legs churn in the caravan of hobblers across the wet ash of Olduvai down with one eye closed squinting at lingering incredulous fans those rows of fickle beefy hearts still squat in Vegas the Voice of God announcing exits

Why get up to scan the horizon for a clean start dawn’s light a stainless steel counter rosy with the ring of business over which his body has been passed like a slab of milk-fed veal for years tied up in the priced white paper of contracts

Why not dream on in the happy violent streets of youth getting crazier losing his mind over and over to the girl who loved him so hard she’d take his all

They are getting him up He’s lost He doesn’t want to find the ordinary man who also filled his heart who sits in the locker room finally alone having satisfied the press with incoherence his bare feet in a confusion of scissored tape holding an ice-pack to his pulped face feeling no pain but troubled for his legendary love who came to him suddenly in the 13th who came as if called who gave him everything he had, his crown and beat him

Paul Nelson has six books out, including an AWP Winner and a University of Alabama Press Series Selection. Sea Level came with Main Street Rag’s Press in 2008. He was for years a professor and director of Creative Writing for Ohio University and has received an NEA Fellowship. Thirty years of basketball, 23 years of 4-wall handball make boxing look like a brief enough form of disaster. At least according to the surgeon who is replacing his parts as he goes along toward enigma, a Celtics fan now living on the North Shore of O’ahu where he trolls offshore, looking back at the island from 5 miles out as if it were his discovery. Trolling… a lot like writing poetry.

15th Anniversary Issue 69 Two Minutes Poetry John Mavin

When they lock you in that box I can’t see your eyes over those boards, only the slow shivering of your head – like the day you were born when that doctor took you away from me and put you on that cold metal scale. I want to hug you, touch you, tell you this isn’t fair. That other boy, that mean boy, he tripped you. You were just the one who didn’t fall. But they won’t let me say anything, anymore. Not to you, not to that mean boy, and not to that little referee blowing that stupid whistle. And when this penalty is finally over, I wave from behind this glass and call your name, but you keep your helmet down and return to that bench where your coach says he sometimes cries when he gets a penalty, too. And again, I have to watch as you smile at him.

70 Sport Literate Zebra

He’s not blind, he’s not deaf. His proctologist didn’t call and neither did his village. He’s not pregnant, his head isn’t stuffed anywhere, and no, he’s not being paid by the other team. He’s just a boy, two years older than your son, who wears a black and white striped shirt and loves this game so much he’s willing to put up with you.

John Mavin holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia. His work has been published internationally, his plays have been produced locally, and he teaches creative writing at Simon Fraser University. To learn more, check out his website, www.johnmavin.com.

15th Anniversary Issue 71 My Playing Weight essay Dale Rigby

as no mere metaphor at two bracing bills, the day I joined Weight WWatchers, that distaff domain, dupe of an Aristophanic joke by a married friend, a tennis-playing poet gone equally slack, who fibbed how the Program was stocked with single women on the cusp of erotic confidence, a fit fancy for a fool just shy of fat and 50. Can ring defiant, as when beefy Charles Barkley quipped it “is whatever I weigh when I’m playing,” his metabolism defying the dubious shill of Dan Marino — “Now I’m back to my playing weight — and it wasn’t that hard” — in a NutriSystemForMen commercial, which is not to disparage this idiom of the ex-athlete, for it whispers softly, lamentably, of trim letter jackets saved in our hope chests like forget-me-nots. Smiles in a 24” by 24” washed-out watercolor signed in December of 1980 by an artist at Fisherman’s Wharf named Smokey, enshrining a sporting young man in Bermudas and Birkenstocks and beach-blond beard leaning forward on a case of beer in Golden Gate Park, playing chess with himself, moving his pieces with the alacrity with which expert Scrabble players arrange their tiles, my grin as large as a Redwood. Puns upon my eight-year (and unwise) hiatus, through the torpor of academic tenure and the pain of divorce, from playing the 64, a synecdoche for that too grave and serious a diversion Montaigne found not play enough, that pursuit literary critic Louis Menand deemed in prose I find unfriendly “not friendly to prose,” clucking I recall from days eschewing my writing classes to play speed chess in the windowed foyer of the Berkeley student union, as thousands of more industrious students strolled past our motley subculture and wagged their tongues at its lack of enterprise. Struggled still for equipoise by graduate school, where, despite composing a well wrought urn, a gift from Caissa (the goddess of the 64) awarded the 1990 Hames Brilliancy Prize for the most artful postal game of the year, synchronous inattentions incurred the umbrage of my mentor — “Dale, Orwell did not jump over that puddle” — and left me dumbstruck, fearing another exposure of my secret life, as when Coach Barber sent my 165-pound frame fetal to the floor with a chair toss worthy of his eponymous mentor, Bobby Knight, upon discov-

72 Sport Literate ering that his quick-handed backup point guard skipped a game to moonlight at the Ohio High School Chess Championship. Realized a symbolic death one day after I joined Weight Watchers in the creation of a shrine — six sets, scores of books, several clocks, a framed movie poster of “Searching For Bobby Fischer” — in a nook near my neglected writing desk, as I’d been roused hours earlier by a mother’s loving call — “I was thinking of you” — because tragic genius Robert James Fischer had died that night in Reykjavik and “They said he was ‘reclusive,’” at which I blanched, and then shared my plan for a shrine, its piece de resistance a chess set of shot and liquor glasses, sounding my return to the 64, but eliciting an “Oh honey — other men find their mates through more social enthusiasms.” Inched ten pounds lighter after three weeks, obligating me to stand and testify, praise be these new habits of ours, but I went atavistic, acted-out, tried to squeeze back into my letter jacket, failed to speak of Smokey’s smile, or my well wrought urn, joshing instead that “I switched to light beer,” which, while juvenile and mock-masculine, might, at least, still find some small salvation as the next best beer commercial, and was, actually, much closer to the confessional bone than the ensuing chorus of catcalls allowed. Neither ballooned as sadly — all those feral mugshots paparazzied across the Internet — nor lasted as interminably — those 20 exiled years ‘twixt teasing matches with Boris Spassky — as did Bobby’s (rest his tortured soul), but he would have loved the anonymity gracing its end, last night in Nashville, with a first-round loss to a strong master from Asheville, a psychiatrist confessing during our post-mortem to writing a book “about psychology and chess for the masses,” a coupling I praised, and then he praised my play, “Though it’ll take awhile to find your playing weight,” to which I nodded, then smiled, thinking that here, in this wondrous diversion, was company to keep, equipoise, if gradually, to redeem.

Dale Rigby, an associate professor of English at Western Kentucky University, fantasizes about moving to Bermuda under the alias of Jackson Showalter and with the bravado of Sir George Somers, where he’d play the 64, search for ship- wrecks, and read Lauren Slater and William Strachey and Joan Didion while dreaming of becoming majority owner of his beleaguered Los Angeles Dodgers.

15th Anniversary Issue 73 Looking for a Sport Literate Byline? contributor guidelines

port Literate is perhaps the nation’s lone literary journal S that explores pastimes through creative nonfiction (primarily; the poets probably make stuff up). We’ve been awarded 15 consecutive grants from the Illinois Arts Council and have garnered several awards. We’ve produced 21 Erin Ingram issues since 1995, including special baseball, football, and all-Chicago collections. The Best American Essays anthology has recognized three issues as notable. The departments below make up our standard issues.

Who’s On First: A first-person account of how a leisure activity affected your life. Mark Wukas’ “Running With Ghosts,” from our “Spring Eats 1997” collection was cited as a notable essay in Best American Sports Writing of 1998. Michael McColly’s essay, “Christmas City, U.S.A.” won a creative nonfiction award from the Illinois Arts Council.

How-To: The Sport Literate How-To is tongue-in-cheek. Most explore relationships above giving advice. John Conway’s “How To Serve” in our “Pacing 1998” issue earned him a creative nonfiction award from the Illinois Arts Council.

Travel: What did you learn as a stranger? What does the leisurely life elsewhere have to offer to literature? Robert Parker’s travel piece, “The Running of the Bull,” was cited in Best American Essays, 2006.

Personal Essay: We’re hip to all the nonfiction forms—nature writing, first- person journalism—whatever floats your prose.Best American Sports Writing cited Frank Soos’ SL work twice (1997 & 1999). Michael Steinberg’s “Elegy for

74 Sport Literate Ebbets,” from our baseball issue was our first “notable essay” inBest American Essays, 2002. William Huhn’s essay, “The Triple Crown,” was mentioned in Best American Essays, 2004.

Sport Definition:Sport has many meanings. In the past we’ve listed them inside the front cover. Patricia Ann McNair’s essay utilized sport as a particular form of pastime in her essay, “And These Are the Good Times,” from the “Pacing 1998” issue, earning her an award from the Illinois Arts Council.

Poetry: Send your best verse and we’ll have poetry editor Frank Van Zant give it a read.

Photo Essays: Shutterbugs, lend us your lenses. Tell a modern sports story with black and white photographs, or recycle your grandfather’s Kodak moments. Query with ideas.

Interview: These are really just good conversations. Past interviewees include former Chicago Bear and Cardinal, Chris Zorich and Marshall Goldberg, and sportswriters Bill Gleason and Robert Lipsyte, a collective interview from the Special Olympics, and more. Query with ideas.

Most submissions come online. Buy a back issue and submit online at www.sportliterate.org.

Sport Literate 2248 West Belmont #20 Chicago, IL 60618 www.sportliterate.org

15th Anniversary Issue 75 Running from Predators Poetry Donna J. Gelagotis Lee

Lead me to the starting gate, trusted pony. Do you

understand the cheers? The crop is just in the corner

of my eye. Now it’s behind the leg. I know

what’s coming. I see the finish line. I know that there

a weight will be lifted, the reins loosened. I’ll go back

to get food and water, a rubdown.

I never understood this short run. In the fields my ancestors ran together, ran from fear.

Listen to the rumble. Feel my heart pumping as the crowd rises to its feet.

76 Sport Literate Sure Footing

I had to gallop over that field with fresh inches of snow. I had to feel the dusting of snow hit my face as my horse kicked through my pointless journey.

But the path was covered and uncertain, and we were finally hidden in white woods when my horse slowed and then stopped and refused to go on. I urged him with my calves. I clucked. I asked him to continue as I felt a leg lift beneath me and then not fully straighten. I felt his weight shift, and dismounted, slid into the snow, and there in the middle of forest I didn’t know, ran my hand down his leg to discover a ball of ice wedged in the hoof, my horse now teetering and quivering. I searched for a stick and started to chip away, piece by piece, when I suddenly realized: three more hooves, and the sun’s settling into the field, and, when I let go of the reins to reach the hind legs, he could bolt. But I sensed a certain gratitude as he stayed, still as dusk, silent as the snow, while I mounted again and as slowly as I could, bending over every few steps to check, proceeded back to the gravel drive, where I could hear each hoof hit the hard ground.

15th Anniversary Issue 77 Washing My Horse’s Sheath

We were ready for the show—I’d groomed the horse, hosed him down

ahead of time. I’d polished the tack, shined the bit, cleaned my boots.

Even the wraps were clean and the stall of the trailer, washed. The braids were in.

The tail was combed. And then you, my married friend, noticed the sheath, crusted and hanging

like a dirty sign. You grabbed it, bare handed. I was shocked at the way

you massaged the crusty skin away and how the horse stood perfectly still and how

you, matter of factly—don’t you ever clean this?—picked up the hose and aimed a steady

stream. And I—at seventeen—I’ll never clean that thing—took the lead and led

the happy horse into the trailer stall, morning just a show away of what had already begun.

Donna J. Gelagotis Lee earned a B.A., cum laude, in English and creative writing from Sweet Briar College, where she was a Davison-Foreman scholar. She lived in Athens, Greece, for many years. Her poetry has appeared in numerous literary and scholarly publications, including CALYX: A Journal of Art and Literature by Women, Feminist Studies, The Massachusetts Review, The Midwest Quarterly, the Seattle Review, and Women’s Studies Quarterly. Her book, On the Altar of Greece, is the winner of the Seventh Annual Gival Press Poetry Award.

78 Sport Literate Old School, Smart, Affordable Sport Literate could be a century too late. We may have been a better fit for literary fans when every basketball league was six foot and under. When the only swimsuit issues were related to hypothermia. And football pinup girls could have played left tackle for the Bears. But you don’t have grandbabies to get Sport Literate Twenty bucks, online through PayPal (www.sportliterate.org) or through your postal carrier (2248 West Belmont #20; Chicago, IL 60618) brings it to your crib.

15th Anniversary Issue 79 Soul Surfing sl history Patrick Moser

y search for the origin of soul surfing began the daySurfer magazine Mlanded in my mailbox. Editor Sam George had written an article called “Soul Search” in the January 2000 issue. He led off with the question: “Is Surfing’s Soul Black?” The words caught my eye because they implied that African Americans had an important connection to surf culture’s highest ideal: the soul surfer. This was news to me. I knew blacks had surfed since the 1940s. Or at least one black man did, undoubtedly the most famous one (the first, according to some). Nick Gabaldon drowned at the Malibu pier in June 1951 at the age of 24. A World War II Navy veteran and Santa Monica lifeguard, Gabaldon learned to surf at a segregated beach in Santa Monica known as “The Ink Well.” Because he didn’t own a car, he’s also reputed to have paddled his board 12 miles up the coast to Malibu where he’d surf, then paddle back home. That level of commitment could hardly be matched by many surfers today, black or white. Gabaldon’s exploits and death have become legend in surf culture, popping up through the years in places like the novel Gidget (1957) that repeats “the story of this colored boy who was killed just the other day riding on a surfboard and being smashed against the piling of Malibu pier.” The biggest danger these days at Malibu is not pylons, or even the monstrous overcrowding, but sewage. Los Angeles has the worst water quality of any beaches in California, and Malibu typically rates in the bottom 10. Certainly you’d think twice before making a 12-mile paddle to surf there. Beyond Gabaldon’s amazing story, black surfers hardly get a mention in surf magazines. You have to go back to the early ’80s for the first full-page spread in Surfer (“Black Surfers of the Golden State”) that reports on the found- ing of the Black Surfing Association in Southern California. That group is still in existence today, as I understand, but you wouldn’t know by reading most surf magazines. So Sam George’s question — “Is Surfing’s Soul Black?” — was more than provocative. “Or, more accurately,” George added on the next line, “black with a clear board?” Ugh. Sucker punched. He was talking about black wetsuits, not black culture. For surfers, the reference was immediately clear. Back in the ’80s, when neon wetsuits and surfboards lit up beaches in blinding hues of pink, yellow, and green,

80 Sport Literate small tribes of surfers who longed for the mellower ’70s (a period in surf history known as the “Soul Era”) quietly rejected mainstream fads by stretching into black wetsuits and riding waves on all white surfboards. The severe color lines drawn by these laconic figures said it all: Surfing is a personal expression, not a competitive or commercial one. I ride waves for myself, for my soul. Surf culture’s highest ideal, then — and this remains true today — makes a distinction between those who ride waves for profit, and those who ride them for pleasure. The notion of “soul” lends surfers in the second category a certain purity of spirit in the ocean, their actions unmotivated by any crass desire for money. In a world that rings up most of our accomplishments in dollar signs, soul surfers keep at least one part of their lives free from greed and personal gain. At least in principle. Because the ideal of the soul surfer remained sacred even in the new millennium, George assigned himself the task of tracking down “when the word ‘soul’ first entered the surfing consciousness.” Intrigued by his initial play on words, and surprised that black culture earned no mention in his article, I wondered: What if surfing’s soul really was black? That is to say, what if the expression itself had come from black culture? Wouldn’t that suggest deeper connections between two cultures that, at least on the surface, appear to have so little in common? What new perspective might we gain on surfing if the sport’s highest ideal came from the speech and sensibility of blacks? I didn’t know. My musings might have remained just that if I hadn’t been doing a little soul-searching myself. I was 37 years old. I’d moved to Springfield, Missouri, to work as a college professor. Dry-docked 2,000 miles from my home in California, I wasn’t unhappy in my job or marriage. I’d been lucky in both. But surfing formed such a strong part of my identity. The move to the Midwest with my wife and two-year-old son had been an adventure at first, a chance to see another part of the world (that’s how far away it seemed to us at the time). But after three years — and the prospect that three might stretch into 10 or 20 — I started to doubt my decision. Especially in winter. Some days I sat in my third-story office between classes and stared out the window as snow storms swamped the campus. I dwelled on distance and exposure. Could locale, I wondered, like a form of radiation or a virus, desiccate a person’s — a surfer’s — soul? My trips to California became less a welcome opportunity to enjoy what I loved and more a forced attempt to convince myself I was still a surfer. I struggled through obscene ocean conditions I never would’ve considered before — choppy swells, biting wind, thick fog — all because I worried that if I didn’t force myself

15th Anniversary Issue 81 to paddle out, I’d lose a part of who I was. It seems ridiculous, I know. But as the seasons passed (and in Missouri we get all four), I saw no clear alternative. Around this time I started thinking about visiting Matt Warshaw. Matt was (and is) surfing’s preeminent historian. We’d never met, but I knew he lived in San Francisco and had the most complete collection of surf magazines anywhere. If I wanted to investigate soul surfing, I’d need to get my hands on that research library. Plus I wanted to talk with him, see what he thought about my theory (it had become one by then) that African Americans had influenced surf culture. I figured if anyone knew about such things, it’d be Matt. Best of all, a trip out west would give me the chance to catch some waves, reassure myself that I was still a commit- ted surfer. This was back in December of 2000. I told my wife and colleagues that I was doing research over winter break. I stuffed my wetsuit into a backpack and hopped a plane to San Francisco, to the Sunset District of Ocean Beach and the apartment of Matt Warshaw. Surf History Central.

• • • • •

My first afternoon in California I sat at Matt’s kitchen table feeling raptur- ous. The midday sun had just reached his west-facing windows, and I tilted my face into the warm rays. I wanted to dig my claws into the nearest rug and stretch out for a nap. Springfield lay under two feet of snow when I’d left, a 30-below wind-chill whipping the city streets. The water temperature of Ocean Beach is cold in December, but not that cold. Below me, the largely residential Sunset district gradually sloped to the Pacific. I’d never surfed San Francisco — I grew up in Sonoma County, 50 miles to the north — but I knew the awesome reputation of Ocean Beach. It was the wildest, most challenging beach break in the whole state. Its power lay not only in large winter swells and shifting currents, but in its sheer-blue expansive beauty which drew my attention away from the work at hand. On the kitchen table sat five bound volumes of Surfer magazine, 1967 through 1971. I read them diligently — letters to the editor, articles, ads, picture captions, cartoons — looking for any mention of “soul surfing.” I’d found nothing in the issues indexed back to 1960, the inaugural year of Surfer, also known as “The Bible of the Sport.” If soul wasn’t in the Bible, I mused, it wasn’t anywhere. I was glad to get hold of the magazines, but the most important resource in the place was Matt himself: a human encyclopedia of surf knowledge. If by chance some wave-related detail had managed to slip under his broad radar, then

82 Sport Literate he knew the person who could track it down. A former pro surfer and editor at Surfer magazine, Matt knew everybody. Except me, of course. I’d emailed him months before, basically invited myself to his place. It’s a questionable strategy of mine, but I’ve found a good deal of success with it. In my defense, surfers tend to travel a lot, and we rely on a network of local contacts, crucial for scoring the best waves. Even if you’ve never met another surfer, chances are you know someone in common, and that’s generally enough to secure an invitation (even if it’s your own). We did manage to find past connections: we’d both lived in LA’s South Bay in the early ’80s (Matt had grown up there), and we’d both attended UC Berkeley as undergrads (though at different times). Matt was more than generous, especially since he’d recently signed with Harcourt to download his brain into the firstEncyclopedia of Surfing, a massive tome of half a million words that was eventually published in 2003. He’d just finished the daunting task of indexing his entire collection — 40 years of surf magazines — into a database. Right before I’d arrived he began hammering out the first entries: 25 down; 2,975 to go (give or take). Matt, by the way, didn’t believe that soul surfing had anything to do with African Americans. He’d heard a shortened version of my theory when I first arrived. We’d sat down at his kitchen table over a pot of hot tea to get acquainted. Matt was three years older than I, tall and rangy — a good surfer’s build — and though he grew up in trendy Southern California, he’d blended entirely into the more rustic Northern California scene. He wore old jeans and a sweater, drank tea, kept a playful cat around for company. He’d passed over prestige and financial security in the surf publishing world to live by the beach and eke out a life writing only on topics that interested him. His apartment wasn’t quite Kahuna’s beach shack, but soul drifted through the rooms like a pleasant ocean breeze. He’d sat across from me and listened patiently to my ideas about soul surfing, asking me questions now and then for clarification as he stirred his tea. The tea and conversation became a routine for us over the next several days as we took work breaks, and I shared what I’d found in his library. That first day, though, after hearing me out, Matt set his spoon on the table and shook his head. “Black culture’s got as much to do with soul surfing,” he told me, “as those Chicken Soup for the Soul books.” His tone was decisive, a bit flippant, backed by the kind of bold self-assurance it takes to write an entire encyclopedia by yourself. I shrugged and angled for the many bound volumes of Surfer on his book- shelves. I’d come a long way, and I wasn’t ready to give up before I’d even started. Besides, I had a personal stake. If I could find out where the expression “soul surfing” had come from, and what it meant to be a soul surfer, maybe I could get a read on my own situation.

15th Anniversary Issue 83 Inkwell Legend: Nick Gabaldon learned to surf at this segregated Santa Monica beach. Legend has it that the WW II Navy veteran, without a car, would paddle 12 miles on his board to surf the Malibu coast. He drowned at the Malibu pier in June 1951 at the age of 24. SurfsAntamonica.com

BlackSurfing.com BlackSurfing.com

84 Sport Literate • • • • •

“Found it,” I called out. Matt stopped typing and ducked into the hallway. “When?” “1969.” “What issue?” “Number six. January. Rolf Aurness is giving an interview.” Rolf, son of Gunsmoke’s James Arness, was the 1970 world surfing champion. I lifted my voice and read Matt the quote: “To some people, it’s an art; to some, it isn’t. To Corky [Carroll] it isn’t; to some soul surfer, it is.” Matt came down the hallway. I held up the article for him. “It’s the earliest mention of soul I’ve found.” He stared at the magazine and nodded slowly. He was either curious to hear more or simply needed a break. “Want some tea?” he asked. “Sure.” As he filled a pot with water, I explained to him in more detail the first part of my theory on how surfers got their “soul” from black culture. Like much of white America, I said, surfers first saw the word “soul” during ghetto riots in the mid-60s when shop owners hung signs that read “Soul” and “Soul Brother” to escape looting. Matt nodded and mumbled, “The Pump House Gang” — Tom Wolfe’s famous account of surfers who drive into Watts and record street sounds during the riots. “Exactly,” I said. By 1967, this symbol of black pride had become a huge commercial success. Sam and Dave’s “Soul Man” sold a million records that year. In June 1968 Aretha Franklin graced the cover of Time magazine as “Lady Soul.” According to Sam George’s article in Surfer, and now my own research, “soul” began to appear in surf magazines right at this time. The influence was clear in my mind: like whites who’d stolen into Harlem late at night to listen to Jazz and perform “black” dances in the early ’20s, surfers of the late ’60s were riding yet another wave of negrophilia. “Not black as in wetsuit,” I said. “Black as in African American.” I looked up from my notes and found Matt checking the surf with binoculars. He was distracted. My topic was esoteric, and he already had a full plate: indexing topics, writing entries, making calls to his editor, and receiving them from his friends Doc Renneker and Dan Duane who, after having surveyed the tide, the wind, and the swell, had decided to meet for a late afternoon surf

15th Anniversary Issue 85 session at Ocean Beach. Before I could slide into the second part of my theory, Matt lowered his binoculars and asked, “Wanna come?” I hesitated. This was the question I’d hoped for. And dreaded. Of course I wanted to surf. But did it have to be Ocean Beach? In the winter? The place had such a heavy reputation. I was warm and comfortable sitting in the sun, at a point in my research where I expected “soul surfing” to start popping up in the magazines. I glanced out the window. We were half a mile from the Pacific, but white water rumbled in the distance, a sight that tightened my gut. The larger sets would be double overhead. A wipeout would feel like a mugging. After three years living in the Midwest, my shoulders were hardly in shape to paddle across a swimming pool, let alone tackle the horrible rip tides and large ocean swells that Ocean Beach churned up. Et cetera, et cetera. Excuses flowed from me like shit from a busted sewer pipe. Truthfully, I didn’t want to go. But refusing was out of the question. My whole credibility was on the line, not just for Matt, but for myself. Surfing wasn’t some academic project. You either paddled out, or you didn’t. And if you didn’t, you weren’t really a surfer. That possibility seemed much worse to me at the time than drowning (not out of the question at Ocean Beach). I pushed back from the table like I couldn’t believe he’d waited so long to ask. “Let’s hit it.” Matt lent me his 8’ 6’’ big-wave gun, and we coasted down to the Great Highway running the length of Ocean Beach. Dan Duane and Doc Renneker waited for us on the sand. Renneker was an Ocean Beach hell-man by reputation and the protagonist of a famous article penned by William Finnegan for The New Yorker. Dan Duane had published, several years before, the highly lyrical Caught Inside: A Surfer’s Year on the California Coast. Both men wore thick wetsuits, booties, and hoods. They looked ready for battle, an idea that grew stronger in my mind as they quietly checked their gear and surveyed changes in the ocean. I trailed behind the group as they attached their leashes and plunged into the rough water. Twenty-five minutes later, I was alone and struggling through the impact zone. Another wave crashed ahead, sending another wall of white water rum- bling toward me. Exhausted, I shoved my board aside yet again and kicked under the pounding foam into blackness. I fought the turbulence and popped through the back of the wave, gasping for air. I quickly retrieved my board and hauled myself on the deck, working my arms through the soup even before I cleared the salt water from my eyes. If a lull didn’t come soon, I’d have to turn around and admit defeat.

86 Sport Literate I got lucky. The farther I paddled, the darker the water grew, telling me I’d finally cleared the impact zone and had now reached the relative safety of the lineup where the outside sets broke. Surfers calmly sat on their boards around me, eyes to the horizon, waiting. Doc Renneker breezed by and asked me how long it’d taken me to get out. I told him, and he smiled broadly. “Took me five minutes,” he crowed, clearly enjoying a physical prowess acquired through years of battling the break. He dropped a rhetorical challenge before paddling on: “Only had to let my board go once!” I think I only held on once. But I felt better knowing this hardcore local had seen me, and knew I’d made it out. His words, though entirely friendly, suggest- ed that he too had something to prove. Somehow that reassured me, even more than catching a wave. But I did catch a wave. I’d been sitting outside for more than an hour, dodging sets like a fraidy-cat, when a beautiful peak swept in from the north. This was my last chance to catch a wave before dark. My last chance to prove that I still belonged. If I let this wave go by, I told myself, an important part of me might disappear with it. I spun Matt’s board toward the beach and stroked into the wall. I jumped to my feet at the apex and dropped over the edge; halfway down, my weight suddenly too far forward, I did a marvelous face-plant and bounced down the rest of the wave into the trough. I tried hard to relax. The wave sunk its teeth into me, gave my body a good thrashing, then spit me out. I bobbed to the surface and washed shoreward with the next group of waves. Not a distinguished debut by any means, but I’d made it out on a good-sized day, caught a wave, and made it back in. No small chore at Ocean Beach. My surfer’s soul, as far as I could tell, remained intact.

• • • • •

The following day at Matt’s apartment, I showed him information I’d collected from John Blair’s The Illustrated Discography of Surf Music that pointed to a cross-pollination of black culture and surf culture in the early ’60s. In 1963, a white, 20-year-old session guitarist from Ohio named Johnny Fortune released a song called “Soul Surfer.” Later that year “soul” inundated surf music like a tsunami: in song titles, album titles, even the names of bands. By the end of 1963, soul had definitely entered the surfing consciousness. “You’re talking about surf musicians,” Matt corrected me. “Not surfers. Surfers didn’t listen to surf music, they listened to jazz.”

15th Anniversary Issue 87 I stared at him. Based on what I’d seen in his magazines, or rather what I hadn’t seen, he was right. No surfers at that time had picked up on the expression “soul surfing.” I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I pushed ahead. “Where did Johnny Fortune get his soul?” I asked. “Did he pluck it out of thin air?” I think he did. Soul — combining gospel and rhythm and blues — had liter- ally been in the air since the mid-’50s, in radio waves that carried the tunes of Ray Charles and James Brown. In 1962, the year before Johnny Fortune released “Soul Surfer,” Booker T. & the MGs had played a song called “Soul Dressing”; R&B artist King Curtis belted out two hits that year, “Soul Twist” and “Soul Serenade.” Curtis was an especially interesting figure since he also released “Beach Party” in 1962, a surf song that sold over 750,000 copies. Blair’s Discography listed other black artists — Freddie King and Bo Diddley — who’d profited from the surf-music fad by giving their R&B music surfing-related titles. With black artists like Curtis releasing R&B songs with surf titles, I argued to Matt that white musicians began to release surf songs with R&B titles (like Johnny Fortune’s “Soul Surfer”), tapping into the distinctive and com- mercially successful vocabulary of black culture. Even if surfers didn’t use the expression “soul surfer” at this time, I insisted, at the very least we had an initial influence from black music that gave the surf world its first official exposure to the word “soul.” Matt reached for his binoculars, ever present on the table, and scouted the surf. Some internal alarm had sounded, indicating the possibility of waves. Ten minutes later we were standing on the dunes overlooking Ocean Beach. The weather had turned dismal. The beach was completely empty except for half a dozen fishermen who stood at even intervals down near shore, all of them bundled in thick jackets. False alarm. The outside sets were inconsistent and mushy, the result of onshore winds and a too-high tide. I was mildly relieved. My body was still sore from the previous day’s thumping. A last look to the horizon, and we turned our backs to the wind and motored up the hill. Settling at the kitchen table once again, another pot of tea brewed up, Matt finally admitted that “soul” could have come from black culture. But he was skeptical. “Didn’t black culture borrow the word in the first place?” he asked. Yes, I told him. It was an English word (linked to Germanic terms for “sea,” an intriguing possibility), but black culture gave it a new meaning, a new identity, especially in the mid-’60s. Surfers adopted the word because they wanted to associate themselves with that identity. Matt demurred. I took a deep breath and launched into the final part of my theory.

88 Sport Literate The rise of soul in America coincided exactly with the moment in surf history known as the shortboard revolution. Drew Kampion writes in Stoked: A History of Surf Culture that 1968 was the year “surfing experienced the greatest cultural and conceptual shift in its history.” In less than a year, the average board length dropped from ten feet to seven feet; the average weight from 20 pounds to 12. Along with the change in boards came a new perspective about why surfers rode waves in the first place. Influenced by the counterculture, most younger surfers no longer identified with a sport that had spent most of the ’60s becoming more competitive, more commercial, and more mainstream. For an older generation of surfers, the entire mindset toward surfing waves had consisted of conquering them at spots like Makaha and Waimea Bay in Hawai‘i. At smaller mainland breaks like Malibu, horizontal surfing — basically noseriding — was still the ultimate maneuver. For a younger generation of surfers, now riding vertically on waves because of the smaller boards, breaking from tradition and establishing their own identity meant opening up new spaces on the wave: flowing with the ocean, not trying to conquer it; riding inside the wave rather than standing outside and posing on the nose. A new ideal for these surfers required a new word to describe their innovative maneuvers and the religious communion they often felt with the ocean. “Soul,” the vernacular expression of an insurgent urban culture, perfectly suited their purpose. Matt didn’t need a lesson in surf history from me, but I showed him ads I’d found in his magazines from 1968 and 1969: WindanSea surfboards and Bing surfboards marketed the possibilities of “Body and Soul” and “Karma and Soul”; the inventors of a board-shaping machine assured surfers the contraption “blows soul”; a surf shop in Huntington Beach, “Soul Surfboards,” announced that its boards “come on with that pure funk soul.” Even more to the point, Sea Suits of California advertised its wetsuits as “Beautiful Black.” The copy read (and I’m not kidding): “Our black is beautiful because it doesn’t try to be beautiful, it just does its thing.” The ad asked readers, “Do you surf enough to dig Beautiful Black?” Finally, an article from Petersen’s Surfing profiling black surfers as “Lost Souls” gave a good indication of why black culture, though urban, attracted white surfers so strongly — because darker-skinned people are so often considered closer to nature: Black surfers: Are they really lost souls? If we are talking about roots running into the ground and keeping men close to nature, the black surfers may have it. Here are some ideas on more soul in surfing by getting your head free and your roots planted.

15th Anniversary Issue 89 With those words ringing in Matt’s ears, I made my final argument about the origins of soul surfing: “soul” allowed white surfers to express the same ideals black men and women sought by using the word: individual and group identity; personal expression, which prized spontaneity over rigidity; a stance at once anticapitalistic and highly commercialized. Above all, “soul” symbolized a religious connection to the ocean for white surfers and aligned them with blacks, a connection that distanced them from an older generation of adults, including an older generation of surfers. I closed the last volume of Surfer on the table, resting my case. Matt nodded politely, pointed out several areas that troubled him, then headed back to his office and began a flurry of typing. He was still preoccupied, as I would’ve been were I creating surfing’s vulgate. A historian, Matt is more literal minded than I, more interested in concrete facts than cultural suppositions. And I couldn’t blame him. For the soul I found ultimately offered little substance but commercial. The first uses of the word in the magazines were advertisements for surfboards, wetsuits, and surf trunks. I’d traveled 2,000 miles to discover that the sacred soul surfer, the arrière-garde of the sport’s noncommercial, noncom- petitive essence, was itself mere commodity.

• • • • •

The last morning of my trip I stood on the bluffs of Salmon Creek beach holding two pieces of a broken surfboard. Salmon Creek is my former home break, a two-hour drive north of San Francisco. I’d swung by my dad’s place in Sebastopol and picked up a board I’d stashed in his barn. I arrived just after dawn and paddled out alone, intent on proving something. A nasty riptide swept me north into a colony of Volkswagen-sized rocks. To escape them, I paddled like hell into a set of waves whose faces had looked much friendlier from the cliffs. They slapped me around for a good half hour before one of the hulks reared up and landed directly on my board, snapping it in half with an audible Crack! I hadn’t even caught a wave yet. I swam through the impact zone, negotiated the barnacle-covered rocks, collected the remnants of my lesson for the day, and hiked up the cliffs. More exploration needs to be done on “soul.” I could ramble for pages listing all the shared feelings the word expresses for blacks and surfers (not to mention black surfers). But since neither group agrees on a definition for either “soul” (for blacks) or “soul surfer” (for surfers) — yet another similarity — that discussion will have to wait for another day.

90 Sport Literate The least I can determine from my research is that whether you’re singing spirituals or surfing waves, you have soul if your actions are inspired by passion. So here’s what I’ve decided about my soul. I have no illusions about regaining skills I had in former years (modest at best), or even getting to the point where I feel totally comfortable in the water. My life at present is too far from the ocean, my treks to the lineup too infrequent. But if I’m willing to leave the comfort of a warm car and change into a clammy wetsuit, dive into a wintry ocean, suffer ice-cream headaches punching through frigid walls of white water, all for the possibility of riding even one wave, then I’ve convinced myself I still have a surfer’s soul. And that will have to be good enough. I don’t think Matt bought my theory about soul surfing. Maybe I’ll have better luck with my next research project: discovering why surf companies dye their wetsuits black. Like most rubber, the natural color of the neoprene in those body-hugging outfits — a virtual second skin with complement of booties, gloves, and hood — is white.

Patrick Moser has written articles for The Surfer’s Journal and Surfer. He edited Pacific Passages: An Anthology of Surf Writing (University of Hawai’i Press, 2008) and collaborated with world surfing champion Shaun Tomson on Surfer’s Code: 12 Simple Lessons for Riding Through Life. He currently teaches writing and French language at Drury University where he also offers a course on the history and culture of surfing. His latest project is a book of essays on contemporary surf culture.

15th Anniversary Issue 91 This Swimmer’s Life photo essay By William Meiners

wimmers know his name. From the first nylon swimsuits to the floating mod- Sern-day racing lanes, Adolph Kiefer and Associates have provided inventions and innovations for the competitive swimming world since 1946. Historians know of his fame. A world-record backstroke swimmer just out of high school, Kiefer brought home a gold medal from the 1936 Olympic Games in Munich. But for the rest of us, Kiefer’s story could be just another great unknown (certainly under- told) story from a larger-than-life character from that greatest of generations. The following photos and captions share some of the story for Kiefer, who has thrived in the water almost daily now for 92 years. As a 10 year old, he thought he invented the backstroke swimming back and forth across Sister Lake in Michigan. A self-described Chicago boy, Kiefer was told by his father after winning an early race that he was going to be the best swimmer in the world. “My father died shortly after that and I decided that I was going to be the best swimmer in the world,” he says. The once comfortable family lost everything in the Great Depression, and Kiefer was working two jobs by age 11, selling popcorn and magazines in the neighborhood. As a junior lifeguard at the Baby Ruth Swimming Pool at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1932, Kiefer met Tex Robinson, a University of Michigan national champion swimmer who encouraged the young talent. Kiefer was the first swimmer to break the one-minute mark in the 100-yard backstroke at Theodore Roosevelt High School. His 1936 time remained the Illinois state high school record until 1960. And when the U.S. Olympic team set sail for the Olympics, the “bashful” young athlete nicknamed “Sonny” was befriended by one of the most iconic athletes of the 20th century — sprinter and broad jumper Jesse Owens. Disputed legend has it that Adolf Hitler refused to shake Owens’ hand after he won four gold medals. The diminutive dictator definitely sought out Kiefer, wanting to shake the hand of an athlete whose name he shared. Even with the backdrop of Nazi swastikas all over the place, Kiefer says they were truly unaware of the madman’s designs. “I should have thrown him in the pool,” he says. World War II cancelled two consecutive Olympics, but Kiefer still dominat- ed the backstroke in exhibitions on a worldwide scene for a dozen years. For his

92 Sport Literate part in the war effort, Kiefer, a Navy man, taught thousands of enlisted men how to swim by authoring two Red Cross books. From his post in Norfolk, Virginia, he saw that with German submarines targeting ships off the coast, the U.S Navy was “losing more lives to drowning than bullets,” Kiefer says. “I couldn’t sleep at night.” Later, back in Chicago, Kiefer turned his attention to the Civil Rights movement the best way he knew how. He worked with the first Mayor Daley to build swimming pools throughout the inner city. With a life forever shaped by water (he’s still married to a former water ballerina from Northwestern), Kiefer seems to know both the dangers and restorative powers of water. He uses a walker now on land to help with his somewhat limited mobility. But, whenever he submerg- es, he must find comfort afloat in the waters he once flew through.

Olympic Gold: Adolph Kiefer, who broke his first world record in the backstroke at the age of 15 while at Roosevelt High School in Chicago, swam to easy gold in the 1936 Olympics not too long after graduation.

15th Anniversary Issue 93 Boy Wonder: Though nicknamed “Sonny Boy” for his apparent sunny disposition, Kiefer says he was a shy teenager when he arrived at the Olympics. Four-time gold medalist Jesse Owens took him under his wing and introduced him to the other athletes.

94 Sport Literate International Splash: Kiefer, seated here on block number eight, competed in more than 2,000 competitions around the globe after the Olympics, where he challenged the greatest swimmers in the world to an individual race. This may be a picture from Ecuador, Kiefer says. Otto Jaretz is the swimmer standing. Mike Peppe, the Ohio State swimming coach, has the whistle and the hat. He’s not sure about the other guy. Kiefer reportedly lost only twice in all of those competitions.

Champion Trio: Pictured here at Chicago’s Lake Shore Athletic Club are three members of the world champion medley relay team. That’s Max Brydenthal in front, Art Highland behind him, and Kiefer up top.

15th Anniversary Issue 95 Leading Man: After being photographed on studio lots, Kiefer returned to Chicago where he enrolled in the (then) Columbia College of Expression, graduating in 1940. “I was a good-looking guy then,“ Kiefer says. “Hollywood was going to make me into a lover. They didn’t want me to be Tarzan.” World War II ended any Hollywood dreams, but he took a leading role in the Navy as he helped ensure that thousands of enlisted men could learn how to swim.

96 Sport Literate Smooth Operator: Gillette came calling with endorsement offerings, like this gem that appeared in the May 17, 1947, edition of the Saturday Evening Post.

15th Anniversary Issue 97 Swim Lesson POEM by Michael Barach

Though I had never seen the magazines shelved high above my father’s fishing poles, it dawned on me that our instructor’s breasts, which I imagined waterlogged and cold to touch, were blessings that I shouldn’t take for granted. Standing in the shallow end, her hands a prayer clamped between her knees as when adults pretend to be real friends with children, she bent forward giving me a minted dream of flesh. She had us hold fast to the curb and scissor kick for her, which I did, furiously, although I knew I wasn’t going anywhere. The splash upstabbed from the pool, but I stayed right there.

Michael Barach grew up in Philadelphia, worked as a writer and editor for Moment Magazine and for RoyalShave, a company that sells exclusive straight razors and shaving products. Currently Michael writes and teaches poetry in Tallahassee. His recent projects include a book of collaborative poems and artwork, co-authored with his girlfriend, Brandi George.

98 Sport Literate Schoolhouse Sport Sport Literate can help turn watchers into readers, drifters into doers. At-risk, or otherwise uninspired, students may already be thinking about leisurely diversions. Why not let sports be the bridge to a literary lifestyle? Don’t be an old-fashioned schoolmarm, letting sleeping dogs gaze out the window. Be a teaching leader. Interested in getting Sport Literate in your high school or college classroom? Email us about discounted bulk rates. We’re all ears at [email protected]

15th Anniversary Issue 99 The Last Loss essay B.J. Hollars

LOVE-LOVE e weren’t good and we weren’t great, but somewhere in between, trapped Win our sub-par limbo, trying to hit our way out. Still, we wore our average-ness like a merit badge, proud of our ability to peek just beyond the upper half of the local tennis rankings. We closed each season as sectional runner-ups, our last loss falling to Homestead during the first weekend of October. Always a brisk morning, sweatshirt weather, and for four years we peeled oranges and drank Gatorade as if Vitamin C and electrolytes might save us. They didn’t — not ever. We preferred our humiliation in small doses, so when we lost we lost quickly — no sense dragging out the inevitable. Except I always found some sense in dragging out the inevitable, moonballing my opponent to madness, hoping his spirit (or legs) might break. We had a saying that last season: Even after you’ve already predicted your defeat, there’s no predicting rolled ankles.

LOVE-15 Practices began promptly in August, spurring the symbolic dragging of racquets from beneath beds, the checking of string tension, the debate as to whether or not our gut was in need of replacing. Each season, summer flashed before us as we slumbered to those 8 a.m. courts — unshowered and reeking of yesterday — none of us trying too hard. The chain link rattled from the volley of wayward soccer balls, and the boys’ soccer team (state champions 2002) galloped to retrieve their strayed shots that had lofted just beyond the crossbar. On the opposite side was the girls’ soccer team — a flurry of limber, half-tanned legs we gangly tennis players were not privy to. Still, we were privy to their practices, eyeing their elaborate stretches and warm-up through the diamonds in the fence. We watched them as long as we could, unraveling the mysteries of their thigh-high Umbro shorts, at least until some loose-cannon striker volleyed a soccer ball into our own chain- linked fortress. “Hollars, run down that ball, would you?” the coach called. Of course I would. It was proof I was good at something.

LOVE-30 I could give you their names if you wanted — some evidence of our existence. But the truth was, we were just another forgettable team for another forgettable season,

100 Sport Literate and for the four years we rendered ourselves so forgettable, we passed the time thwocking balls and running foot drills, shifting between western grips and conti- nentals depending on the current issue of Tennis magazine. Throughout August we thwocked balls, ran foot drills, and loitered in our parents’ houses with ice packs pressed to shoulders. Nights there was always some party worth going to, so we’d slink from one house to the next. These houses were too large for their own good — complete with winding staircases and full basements — and each night, as 2 a.m. stretched into 3, we’d settle into a couch or a cushion, pass out atop a pool table or beneath the pinball machine. We’d say our nightly prayer: Please God, let it rain tonight. Grant us mercy and cancel tomorrow’s practice.

15-30 Each season was a continuation of the last: a series of foot faults and double faults, unforced errors that felt awful forced to us. Still, we pulled off enough wins to convince ourselves we were doing something right. I held three singles — a spot reserved for the farthest fringes of varsity — and while I never advanced from that spot, I didn’t want to. Three singles required little skill, and since I had only a lapsed subscription to Tennis magazine (and no private lessons at the club), I relied solely on endurance, a will beyond my opponents’. I welcomed the chance to run down every drop shot and lob, and if that didn’t work, I would simply keep that ball in play. The notion of hitting “winners” was directly at odds with my greater strategy, and I believed (and was ultimately proven correct) that all that was required to earn the W was to ensure that my opponent submitted to his natural instinct to do more than he could. Let him cough up the ball to the back of the fence, let him slap haphazardly at the volley. No one said it would be pretty, but no one ever said it had to be. At the awards ceremony, I think they even invented some kind of award in my honor — something that made it abundantly clear that what I lacked in skill I more than made up for in sloppy grit.

30-30 Each August we thought only of October; the reality of our impending defeat etched deep into our racquets. We didn’t talk about it, much preferring to talk only of our sure victories — Adams Central, Prairie Heights, Concordia — but then one day even those matches became less of a sure thing. Still, we always had Northside — the one match each year where I knew not to linger; the match I’d strive to win in under 20 minutes. There was no class to it. I ran down the loose balls and served and won and ran down the loose balls again. I couldn’t win fast

15th Anniversary Issue 101 enough, convincing myself I was sparing my opponent further humiliation, though in truth I spared him nothing. And always, just before us, lingered Homestead, a cancer that grew until it could no longer be ignored. We had no choice but to face them and lose, return our racquets once more to their places beneath our beds.

30-40 The away matches were the worst, our Friday nights reduced to scorecards and the scent of a fresh can of balls. All we wanted was to be with our girlfriends, to press them into situations of which they were wholly uncomfortable, reassuring them that we were tennis stars and everything was natural and pre-ordained. After school we’d cram into short busses or school vans. Only occasionally did we earn the privilege to drive ourselves, but as we caravanned across rural Indiana, we blasted the most offensive rap music we could find and called it our “pump up” song. The music had no effect. We were always just terribly cool. Cool in a win, cool in a loss, but in some way we were always just terrible. And where were our girlfriends when we needed them? Sometimes they’d lock their fingers to the diamonds in the fence but sometimes not. Sometimes they’d opt out for the soccer game. We could never shake the feeling that they were in love with us because we were convenient; because we were practically athletes and as proof, our scores appeared in the local paper, a font so small and unreadable that even our losses could be turned into wins and no one ever bothered with the magnifying glass. We were convinced that our team was doing everything right, yet toward the latter half of the season our enthusiasm dissipated, a new silence folding into the bus seats. There were only so many oranges to eat and not even electrolytes could save us from October. We’d return to the school parking lot just after 8:00 p.m., gather around cars, call our girlfriends, anxious to exaggerate the margin of our success. Usually they’d pick up, but sometimes there was a soccer game.

40-40 We squandered our practices, dedicating our warm-up laps to pants-ing one another, tugging terribly on tennis shorts, careful not to take the boxers down along with them. It was not uncommon for our entire pack to set sights on a single player, a thousand calloused hands reaching out for the black fabric. The coach never said a word — after all, it made us run faster — and even during our more serious transgressions (eating a chicken sandwich mid-set, stopping for a cigarette), he remained remarkably silent. This, we figured, was his way of telling us we would never be winners. We were welcome to fake our way through the season, of course, but we would never capture a sectional title. This, too, was pre-ordained.

102 Sport Literate A newspaper reported that the last time Homestead lost the sectional was in 1978, “when disco was stayin’ alive, a gallon of gas was 63 cents, [and] portable phones were roughly the size of a Kleenex box…” We were aware of these facts and so, prepared ourselves for the inevitable. There was little expectation to win, and the losses came easier when we pretended it didn’t matter. We gulped down chicken sandwiches, lit cigarettes — what more could we possibly do?

ADVANTAGE IN We cared terribly, though this was a secret we never said aloud. For four years, on the night before our final match we’d ask ourselves how our lives might be different with a win — if our girlfriends might love us more, if we’d have a trophy to contribute to the case. All we wanted was our names one font-size larger in the paper, perhaps a team picture in the hallway. All we fought for was the possibility that after we lost our match for the last time, some future team might hear of our heroics. That all our tales of sandwiches and cigarettes might be overshadowed by some brief moment in the sun. How many oranges might it take? we wondered. How many gallons of Gatorade? My last loss occurred as it was supposed to, in October. The first week. Sweatshirt weather, and I can even remember my opponent’s name. It doesn’t matter. It could have been anyone assuming he wore a Homestead jersey. While I shot the ball to the moon and back, my opponent simply understood gravity better. He knew the proper grip, understood what it meant to hit “winners.” A backhand was just as good as a forehand to him, and a double fault unacceptable. I dedicated much of the match to appearing confident, pretend- ing I was as gallant as a soccer player as he worked me at the net. Then he worked me at the baseline. Then he mixed it up, working me over every inch of that court. Then he lobbed me. Then he passed me. All I could do was hold my racquet out. I deserved everything I received. After all, my Tennis magazine subscription had long since run out and I had no intention of renewing. My gut was in desperate need of replacement. Still, I took refuge in the knowledge that my opponent had gotten a minor in possession a few weeks prior. We’d overlapped at the same party, spotted each other from across the bonfire, but I left before the cops arrived. We shook hands — not that night, but after he routed me. There were no hard feelings, I assured him. As I zipped my racquet back into its case, I told myself there were simply no feelings at all.

GAME It doesn’t much matter what happened next, though I remember all of it — the song I played on the drive home and the pumpkin-colored leaves. During the

15th Anniversary Issue 103 match it hadn’t occurred to me that it was my last match, though as I scurried away from those courts, kicked my 1984 Volvo into the highest gear, this knowledge overwhelmed me. I pulled over at a self-serve carwash and inserted eight quarters, though my car was already clean. I guess I just wanted to be someplace loud and terrible, wanted to aim the high-powered water gun at my windshield until the paint peeled off. Eight quarters only bought me two minutes of noise, but it was enough. But even after the water hissed to a halt, I didn’t leave. I returned that gun to its holster, watching the water bead on the windshield, but still I didn’t leave. There is no melodrama to be had here. I didn’t even like the game. It was terrible, and I was terrible, but as long as I reminded myself of this often enough, I was willing to swallow the truth.

B.J. Hollars is an instructor at the University of Alabama where he also received his MFA in 2010. He is the author of the forthcoming Thirteen Loops: Race, Violence and the Last Lynching in America (University of Alabama Press, 2011) and the editor of You Must Be This Tall To Ride: Contemporary Writers Take You Inside The Story (Writer’s Digest Books, 2009) and The Borderlands: Explorations to the Fringes of Nonfiction (University of Nebraska, 2012). He doesn’t hate tennis as much as you’d think.

104 Sport Literate And The Winner is... essay contest Philip Gerard

eading the five finalist essays, I was reminded once again of how pro- Rfoundly the practice and rituals of sports affect the other parts of our lives: our dreams and ambitions, our family relationships and friendships, our tendency toward faith or skepticism, hope or cynicism, even our social contract with the strangers who inhabit our world. And most of all, our ability to face hard choices and hard times. Our early experience with sports seems to define whom we choose to be our heroes and why. As we emulate the behavior of our favorite sports figures, we learn what we are made of, and the lesson is not always flattering. All the pieces are first rate, each exploring some deeper aspect of personal history — parenthood, love, racism, injury, grief, self-respect — intimately related to wrestling, baseball, or running. But in the end, “Waiting on Deck” won top honors by a nose. It’s not a complicated essay in its structure or expression, though the subject it addresses redounds with all the emotional complexity of a familiar, beloved thing coming to an end. In that sense, it is the pure expression of a universal moment, conveyed in clean, honest prose that is true to the heart. The moment of ending is painful and suspensefully prolonged by extra pitches, a foul ball, the sound of a hit that almost instantaneously turns into the sound of a hardball thwacking into a leather mitt. And it’s not just a moment of ending; it’s also the moment of being robbed of one last chance to do the thing you love. In life, we rarely know when we are about to do something for the last time — that’s an insight mostly gained only in retrospect along with pangs of nostal- gia or regret — so the painful anticipation here is all the more exquisite. Applause to all five authors for reminding a reader like me that the glory days are never quite gone, at least not on the playing fields of the heart.

Philip Gerard is the author of three novels and four books of nonfiction. He chairs the Department of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

15th Anniversary Issue 105 Waiting on Deck winning essay Jay Lesandrini

’m kneeling in the on-deck circle with two outs in the ninth, and we’re los- Iing again. Losing by a lot, and all I want is one more at bat. Eighteen years of playing baseball is coming down to this — one more chance to stand in the batter’s box. The sun is dipping behind the trees in left field, and what had been a warm Sunday afternoon in late April has become something much colder. If I were sitting in the dugout with two or three guys waiting ahead of me to hit, I’d already be past this. I’d be thinking about getting back to my off-campus apartment and drinking a cold beer, or I’d be thinking that I still have to read The American for my Lit final next week. I’ve been putting it off all semester. I hate Henry James. Instead, I’m here in the on-deck circle and I reach down, grab the pine-tar rag, tacky the bat handle with optimism. The batter takes ball one. I shout at him. Tell him to make the pitcher work. Suggest to him that the pitcher’s getting tired. Urge him to make sure it’s a strike before he swings. But I know he’s not listening. And I’m not really talking to him, anyway. I’m talking to the pitcher. I want to get inside this guy’s head. I want him to be thinking about me instead of the batter. He knows the game is over. He knows he’s got a long bus ride home and wants to get started as soon as possible. He throws a breaking ball that freezes the batter, and looks low and away to me. The umpire calls a strike. It’s getting cold out here for him too. I look into the visitor’s dugout and they are all laughing at the call. They start to bag up their equipment. Everyone wants the game to end except for me — and the guy in the batter’s box. The pitcher reaches back and brings the high hard stuff, and I can see the batter’s eyes turn into saucers. There’s something about a high fastball that makes you want to take a bite of that grapefruit as it dances up to the plate. A swing and a miss. The count is one and two, and I know that the pitcher’s coming back with another high fastball. I give the batter the benefit of my wis- dom, but he still isn’t listening. The pitch is head high, right down central and I see that moment of hesitation in the batter’s knees right before his bat comes forward. I’m already walking back toward the dugout when I hear the slight ping of cowhide glancing off aluminum, and the hopeful chink of the ball hitting the fence behind us. There’s still a chance for one more at bat.

106 Sport Literate I pick up the pine tar rag and stand there wringing it in my hands like a widow at a wake. I think about the afternoon when I was 4 years old and my mother stood behind me and shaped my fingers onto a bat handle for the first time. I think about the first game I played in the 12-year-old league when I was only nine, and how I was so scared that I bunted with the bases loaded. I think about all the nights after practice in high school waiting for the city bus to take me home, while my friend’s parents picked them up. I think about passing up the opportunity to go to Marquette because they didn’t have a baseball team, and about the day my high school coach told me that Butler University was offering me a scholarship. It all comes down to this. It comes down to me waiting in the on-deck circle, hoping the guy at the plate, a junior who still has another year to play, will find his way on base and give me one last opportunity to hit a baseball. There is nothing in the balance. No record to be set. No game to be won to extend a season. This is it. Eighteen years of playing baseball and I could never hit a slider. I could never pick up that tight rotation of the seams in time to recognize the pitch. . . until now. I see the ball leave the pitcher’s hand and watch the batter swing at a pitch that would strike me out. The instant that the ball comes off his bat, I imagine the pitcher being undressed like Charlie Brown as the ball whizzes by his head. Then I hear the snap of cowhide on leather. Charlie Brown isn’t pitching today. I feel the weight of 18 years of baseball drop in my stomach, and I kneel down to catch my breath, using the bat as a cane to keep me upright. On his way to the dugout the batter pats me on the back and tells me that he’s sorry, and I know that he really means it. As I think back now, 20-some years later, I don’t remember what happened during the last at bat of my baseball career. I only remember waiting in the on- deck circle hoping that it would never end.

Jay Lesandrini is a senior marketing manager for Wiley Publishing in Indianapolis, Indiana. He holds a B.A. and an M.A. in English Literature from Butler University, and is in his final year of the MFA program in creative writing, also at Butler. He currently serves as a co-editor of poetry for Booth, which recently published his interview with Nick Flynn. He played baseball for Butler for four years, from 1984-1987. In 2009, he was named to Butler’s “All 1980s Baseball Team” as a third baseman. Although Jay can still be found swing- ing a bat once a year at the Butler Alumni baseball game, his weekends are more often spent playing golf or hockey, depending upon the season.

15th Anniversary Issue 107 A New Baseball Nation essay Kerry Herlihy

he Red Sox from my girlhood are still a soft chant in my head: Scott and TRemy, Burleson and Hobbs, Fisk and Eck, Tiant and Stanley, Yaz, Evans, Lynn, and big Jim Rice. They were the ones who did not win a pennant or a World Series, the players who watched Bucky Dent smash away their dreams. They broke my heart each September, but that does not sit with me now. My father and I always believed they were the batters who would hit a homer in the ninth or our pitchers would come through with a strikeout, bases loaded. I lived then in the promise of Red Sox Nation, within the optimistic and naive hope that many girls have in the men they love. With my father’s encouragement, I convinced myself my rituals could over- turn the mysterious ill will of Babe Ruth, the one whose legacy spurned us, kept us losers for 86 years. I was convinced I alone could to take on the Bambino and win. We had strict tenets that never wavered. Wear the red shirt and faded blue cap on home Sunday games. Never go to the bathroom any later than the third inning. When the team was on the road, under no circumstances were peanuts to be eaten. This was my game-day rosary and I followed it with blind faith. Each Sunday in St. Patrick’s church, I asked Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and God himself to help my team win. I promised anything that felt valuable to the larger world, including my Barbie townhouse and the glazed donuts I gave up for Lent. At seven, I even considered my own grandfather (a Yankees fan) as a possible bar- ter. I thought if I could find the magical divine trade or the precise combination of devoted acts, the Red Sox would go all the way that season. Garnett, my partner of 10 years and the father of our daughter, had different heroes, but similar faith. His father took him to games in a stadium in Portsmouth, Virginia, where he watched the Tidewater Tides, a Mets farm team. Over 40 years later, Garnett says he still remembers holding his father’s hand as he walked into the stadium. Before the Tides came to town in 1961, the Dodgers were the team he and his father watched each week in the den on their giant wooden cabinet television with a 12-inch black and white screen. Garnett did not spend a lot of time thinking about Jim Crow, tried to block out the segregated dirty water fountains he had to drink from in the park, or the back door of the restaurants his family couldn’t enter, where he picked up their takeout order. Instead, he lived for the promise of his own heroes: the 1955

108 Sport Literate Brooklyn Dodgers, the team that won the World Series in seven games against the Yankees. Garnett remembers Robinson and Newcombe, Snyder and Koufax, Campanella and Pee Wee Reese. These were the players who made him think he was a winner, made him believe good guys sometimes won. At eight, when he went out on his own team’s Little League diamond, his dad coaching from the dugout, he would whisper the names of Robinson and Newcombe — his black heroes — invoking them to help him become somebody special. In 1978, when I was eight, my father and the Red Sox hovered somewhere near perfection. Several times that season, when I weeded the geranium beds without prodding or brought home a report card that impressed my parents, I would get the ultimate reward: to leave my brother and mother at home and go to Fenway with my father. On these trips, as we drove the 30 minutes into Boston from our suburb, he quizzed me at a rapid-fire pace to see if I still made the cut: “What’s Tiant’s ERA?” “What’s Remy’s OBP?” “Batting average?” As I sat, skinny legs suctioned to the white leather seat of his old Volkswagen Bug, my oversized first-base glove, once my dad’s, lay across my lap. With a shiny Red Sox batting helmet rolling around my small head like a mixing bowl, I answered the questions without hesitation: 3.34 as of last game, .273 for June, .231 but showing signs of life. When I passed the test, he asked me to analyze the game we were about to see, “Do ya think they’ll need Stanley tonight?” “What are the chances Rice will smash one over the Green Monster?” That night, like always, we left five hours before game time to make sure each piece of our ritual was executed. First, we headed to my father’s hometown of Chelsea, across the Charles River from Boston and Fenway. When we got there, we circled behind the high school where my dad was principal, over the tracks, to the Newbridge Café, located between the newspaper plant and a string of industrial parks. We went there often, after Dad’s own baseball games and his students’ basketball tournaments, and always before a trip to Fenway. After we ate steak tips in the shadow of the bar, we resumed our trip into Boston. As the principal of Chelsea High, my dad’s Bug was a moving landmark. Usually, when we went through the city, people waved before we reached them. In those moments, I felt like royalty. But not that afternoon. A couple blocks away from the café, on an empty corner, I saw him. A teenager, tall with milk-chocolate skin, so thin his tee shirt drooped off his frame. He straddled a bike that my five-year-old brother could have ridden. I stopped and stared when I saw his hair: black fuzz surrounded his head and a bright yellow comb protruded at an angle. I peered through my father’s open window as we passed. The young man looked straight at us; I thought he was about to wave

15th Anniversary Issue 109 as he raised his fist to us. I began to lift my hand in return. In that moment, he jacked up his middle finger and, after we were seconds away, shouted after us, “Fuck you, Herlihy!” My stomach lurched as those words hung in the air. I had never heard anyone, let alone a kid, say anything so awful to my dad. I turned to look at my father; I was sure he would go back and do something. After all, he had a reputation for being a hard ass. Instead, he merely muttered, “Punk.” We continued over the Mystic River on the rickety Tobin Bridge in silence. As we approached the field, as if the incident in Chelsea never happened, my father plucked yesterday’s half-sucked breath mint from the dashboard back into his mouth, looking for the perfect free parking space within walking distance of the Park. I kept waiting for him to explain the kid, his anger, or his choice to drive away. Instead, we circled around in near silence for almost an hour, until he finally found a space off Beacon Street that afforded him about a finger’s worth of room on each side of the car. “Perfect. Just perfect. This is a good sign, little Kerry. I have a good feeling about tonight. It’s looking great,” he said as we walked down the street. I like to imagine my father held my hand as we entered the park, but this could not be true. My whole life, my father has walked ahead of me, in a hurry, dodging oncoming pedestrians, slipping into slivers of empty space, with an occasional backward glance to make sure I was still there. I always had to keep the back of his head in sight to know where I was going. I am sure that day was no different. As we approached the turnstile, my father let me hold my own ticket. After we were funneled through the line, I stuffed the ripped stub into my pocket, pushing it deep so I could get to my seat if I lost my father. The dim concession area smelled like the YMCA locker rooms and beer and I wanted to move through quickly and get back up into the night. Finally, after my father took his predictable bathroom stop, we entered the shaft of artificial light and I tightened my fingers in my glove. We saw the field and the neon glow of the Citgo sign over the Gillette scoreboard. The curve of green gave way to the beige ripples of the infield. The white crisp lines met the puffy square bags as the busy crew dusted them off. Fenway made me feel like church was supposed to; it calmed and connected me to something far greater than my day-to-day world. It embodied all that was good and right about a place: optimism, allegiance, community, and love. I forgot about the angry kid and the knot in my stomach. My dad swiveled between the slower walkers towards the left field line, right in the shadow of the Green Monster. In those days, I never thought about being white at Fenway. With all the statistics I knew cold, I had no idea Jim Rice, my favorite player, was the only

110 Sport Literate African American on the roster that year. I only knew he was the clutch guy, the one who could save the day. My father said he was the glue that held the team together. I watched Rice pound his glove to ready himself for the next batter, or nod when Jerry Remy or Fred Lynn gave him the thumbs up for a play well done. His look was always serious, intense. I liked that in a player. That night, Rice walked over to the left-field wall and tossed a foul ball up into the stands. I like to think he saw me there with my open glove and threw it to me, even though I did not catch the ball. My father had students who worked the stands and it was not long before a kid from Chelsea with a shag haircut and pale skin spotted us, smiled and yelled, “Yo, Mr. Herlihy,” and held up a cellophane-wrapped hot dog. My father looked at me. I nodded yes. The kid threw a soft lob and I lunged to catch it. Fans cheered me as the wiener smacked my glove. My dad hugged me, chuckled and said, “Atta girl.” It didn’t matter that the Red Sox would lose the game that night. I was a star and my father had set up the limelight. We left early, as usual, at the top of the 9th, with the Sox down 9-4. My father hated being stuck in traffic; this was almost as bad as paying for parking. As we walked down Lansdowne Street, the crowd still roared inside the stadium. The boy on the street corner came back to me and I wanted to ask my father about him, but didn’t know how. I could not stop flashing between the street-corner kid and the hot dog seller, trying to figure out who was right about my father. On our drive home, the doubt in my father’s perfection crept in and wouldn’t shake. That same year, I started playing baseball with the boys in Little League. My father said it would be better than playing softball with the girls and I believed him. I was the only girl on the team and the boys usually snickered under their breath when I walked to first base with my father’s big glove dangling from my hand. I thought about how Jim Rice never let his competition get to him and I tried to put on a game face just like he did at Yankee Stadium. Guy Stone always tried to trip me as I rounded third and more than once I stumbled as I headed for home. But I could play first base, and I caught most of the balls those boys threw my way. Halfway through the season, the coach, Guy’s father, informed me that he was moving Guy to first base, my spot. “We could use a catcher,” he said. I complained to my father after practice that it wasn’t fair. “Life’s not fair, Kerry. If you want to play, you have to adapt.” He bought me a new stiff catcher’s mitt, assuring me I could become first-rate behind the plate. Each game, I squatted underneath the opponents, so close I could hear them breathe, so close their swings and foul tips rattled the wire on my mask.

15th Anniversary Issue 111 Library of Congress

112 Sport Literate Here, on the edge of the batter’s box, I learned fear. My father was no longer on my team; he moved behind me to umpire my games where I couldn’t see him wink or smile. I could only hear the click of the counter as he called the pitches. I wonder if he knew I shut my eyes when I saw the bat move and held my glove up, hoping for the best. Every once in a while, the ball would hit my glove. But most times, it would roll behind my father back to the screen. I scrambled to get it, and I could hear the loud sighs of my teammates each time I missed. I became a girl in the worst sense of the baseball world, and that shame eclipsed the easy confidence I had had my whole life. For the remainder of the games that year, I would pray for the clicks of my father’s counter to move in fast-forward motion so I could go home and escape into a book or the woods of my backyard. My father tried to encourage me, told me I just had to practice, keep my head down and forget about the boys. But my mind was made up, and I walked away from playing for good. I don’t think I could have made it as a catcher, but now it makes me think of Rice, how he stayed in Boston when so many other black players came and left, how courage can be just as important as skill.

In 1986, I was 16 when the Red Sox made the World Series and my rituals had long vanished. I hadn’t watched the Sox all season, but my father told me he believed they were going to finally reverse the Curse. We sat on opposite ends of the sectional couch as game six blared from the far corner. Roger Clemens had pitched a beauty and it was 3-3 at the end of nine innings. At the top of the 10th, Dave Henderson hit a home run for the Sox and then, for extra insurance, Boggs doubled and Marty Barrett singled him in, giving them a comfortable 5-3 lead as they headed into the bottom of the 10th. It was then we began to hope. “Your grandfather would have loved to see this day,” my father said as he sat smiling, trying not to cry, rubbing his palms together with anticipation. Any Red Sox fan knows what happened next. We can still see the replay: a soft grounder to first-baseman Bill Buckner. A routine ball. Then, as if the gods were playing a cruel joke, the ball slid through Buckner’s legs and into right field. In an awful minute, the Mets scored. 6-5. I sat stunned, silent. My father clicked off the television, disgusted. He yelled, “Jesus Christ, Buckner. This goddamned team is unbelievable, un-fucking believable.” As he walked away, leaving me on the couch, I could hear him mutter, “It’s the curse of the Bambino. They never should have let him go.” I could have said something cliché like there’s always next year and maybe I did, but if you follow baseball long enough, you know that these moments don’t come around each year. Our family had spent generations waiting and my

15th Anniversary Issue 113 father and I both could feel it slip away as if the possibility had never been. I tried to pretend I didn’t care, that I was too old for baseball, but I had inherited this obsession and I realized I could not escape feeling like we would never win. Two days later, the Sox went on to lose the World Series at Shea Stadium, 8-5. Moments after, at the University of Massachusetts, the school I would attend, white boys with backwards Sox caps, boys who grew up in towns like mine, stumbled out of high-rise dormitories; they were drunk, disappointed, and looking for someone to blame. In a courtyard, they encountered Mets fans, predominantly black kids from New York, pouring into the night to celebrate their unexpected survival. Within minutes, a clash ensued. Bottles were thrown; punches, scuffles, and challenges all flew around that square of Amherst. Ten people were injured and one black man was hospitalized. The media called it a race riot.

Although I grew up and moved to New York City, my loyalty never shifted from the Sox. My father was always a bit wary about the move. He felt the city was suspect and I would transform into someone unrecognizable to him. Ten years ago, when I flew home to tell him I was unexpectedly pregnant, I thought he would be angry I was not getting married. He hadn’t met Garnett and though I hoped race would not matter, there was a small part of me that worried it might. “I’m pregnant,” I blurted out over breakfast while he read the sports page. Then, before he could say a word, I began to cry in loud stuttering sobs. My father slowly put down his reading, perhaps an article about spring training in Florida or a recent trade. “Don’t worry, little Kerry. Don’t worry at all. I’ll help you. Stop crying. C’mon now.” He didn’t ask, but I told him the basics about Garnett. He was older than I was by about 20 years. He worked with me. He was still married. He was black. My father just nodded. “It’s all going to be fine. Don’t worry. Don’t worry at all.” With a grin he added, “As long as he’s not a Yankees fan.” When I was eight months pregnant, I moved from Brooklyn to Maine. All I remember Garnett saying was, “It could be worse. It could be Boston.” In the ’70s, he had seen snarling white swarms of Boston Irish lining the streets to their neighborhood schools: white tee-shirted men, women in flowered housedresses, and their children with fists cocked shouting, “Go home, nigger!” He remembers seeing those ugly people rocking a school bus until it teetered to the brink of a crash as small brown children tried not to scream. He remembers those same children, with shards of glass in their hair, running into their terrified parents’

114 Sport Literate arms. In his mind, the images from Boston and Birmingham are equated. He doesn’t remember, as my father does, the Irish cops, who had to react in tough situations. He didn’t care that some of those kids were Jim Rice fans just like me, that Red Sox Nation is more than those flashes on his screen from decades ago. When he came by bus to Boston when our daughter was still a baby, we drove the hour and a half south and waited for him in South Station. My daughter and I smiled broadly as he disembarked slowly, squinting to find us.

“Ukemani, who’s pitching today?” my father asked my three-year old daughter, even before she climbed the stairs to him. My father has rarely called Saoirse by her first name. Before she was born, when I told him the names I had chosen for her, he wrinkled his nose. “What kind of name is that?” “It’s Irish. It means freedom. Her middle name will be Imani. That’s Swahili for faith,” “I like Caitlin,” he said. “Caitlin is a good name.” As my due date neared, my father insisted he was not going to be able to pronounce it. Saoirse. “I’m going to call her Caitlin. That’s a better name.” He never did call her Caitlin, but settled on Ukemani, some strange hybrid of Imani he made up when she started to walk. “Bumpy, don’t you know? It’s Pedro!” she exclaimed without hesitation, ignoring the usual opportunity to inform him he had called her the wrong name. As she rounded the corner, she greeted him by jumping on his stomach full- force. It was a sweaty afternoon in 2004, the year the impossible happened. I sat crossed-legged on the floor and she stayed on the couch, her bare brown legs entwined between my father’s psoriasis-covered scaly ones; her Red Sox hat pulled down low, intently watching the game. My father alternated his gaze between the television and her, wanting to see her reaction as much as the game. It was a tenderness I’d wanted to see when she was born. He only held her once, awkwardly, when she was a baby, only long enough for me to run to get a diaper in the next room. Babies make him nervous; they could crack open too easily, he said. But here with the soft spot of her head long since healed, he let her settle into him and join his world. Later in the season, I was watching the soon-to-be mythic game seven at Yankee Stadium on television. It looked like the Red Sox were on their way to another World Series, at long last. Like most Sox fans, I didn’t believe it, in spite of the numbers pointing that way. However, at the top of the ninth inning, with the

15th Anniversary Issue 115 score 9-3, hope stirred. I went into the bedroom, picked up my sleeping daughter and tried to rouse her. Never mind it was midnight. Never mind she was not yet four. I wanted her to witness this moment. As she squinted into the light, I said, “We did it. We won!” She nodded sleepily and then closed her eyes and curled onto my lap as our team huddled and bounced around home plate, victorious. Meanwhile, Garnett sat at his apartment, less than a mile from the stadium in the Bronx, watching his team lose what had looked like a sure thing. A well-hit ball could smash his window. Since the Dodgers left for Los Angeles, he has fluc- tuated between the Mets and Yankees, but he made it clear early on in our relationship that Boston was out of the question. In spite of this, he called to congratulate me on the win, which I took as his purest moment of unconditional love. Our daughter continues to move between the world I have built for her in Maine, the whitest state in the country, and that of her father in the Bronx. She holds my Boston Irish-Catholic roots and his Southern heritage. She is both black and white, and even though in first grade she was “sick of white people” when Billy, her reading buddy, wouldn’t shut up, most days she embraces both sides of her family. I am grateful for her acceptance of her dual heritage, but in baseball, I have not wanted her to be open to possibility and choose both. I want her choose my side. But Garnett and our daughter force me to look at the history of the Red Sox in ways I might not have done, make me see my mythology is flawed. I know it was more than the Curse of the Bambino that kept the Red Sox in their decades- long losing streak. Still, I have moments where I try to ignore the facts of the last 60 years. I want to pretend Jackie Robinson wasn’t called a nigger and asked to leave Fenway. I want to pretend Tom Yawkey, the Red Sox’s owner for 44 years, did not pass on Willie Mays because he was “not the kind of ballplayer” they were looking for. I try not to think about the fact that the Red Sox were the last team to integrate their roster in 1959, two years after Robinson retired from his decade-long career. I want to pretend Boston and the Rex Sox did not ignore their hero Ted Williams when, during his Hall of Fame induction speech, he asked that some of the black ballplayers from Boston (including my dad’s hero, Sam Jethroe) finally be given their deserved place in Cooperstown. I want to pretend the racism of this club did not contribute to its mediocrity throughout most of my childhood. When I look at those facts, they disturb me, make me question whether Red Sox Nation is the right place for my daughter, for me, whether it is fair to ask her father to join us in embracing this tribe. But my father is here and will remain, and I can’t walk away. These days when I pray, I don’t pray for the Red Sox, but rather that my partner and my daughter are able

116 Sport Literate Library of Congress to understand why I continue to love this team with so many ugly ghosts. My daughter has never been sure about baseball, mostly because she observes me watch games with a passion she finds strange. She doesn’t understand why I swear at players who can’t hear me, why I care so much about a sport I gave up playing 25 years ago. “Mom,” she’ll say, putting her hands on her hips with a look of disapproval, “It’s only a game.” She sketches curtains and bathrooms in her design book, asks if we can flip to HGTV or reruns of “Project Runway” on Bravo when the Sox are on. Like her father, she thinks fashion trumps baseball. For a year, she booed loudly at the Red Sox as they played the Yankees, mostly to annoy me. Even so, she has worn the tee shirts of my favorite Sox players with enthusiasm since she was born: Martinez, Ramirez, Ortiz. Not long ago, she emerged from her bedroom with her braids undone. Her hair stuck up just like Pedro’s did in the 2004 World Series. She looked in the mirror and said, “I am just like Coco Crisp, don’t you think? I wish they didn’t trade him.” I smile and think about how happy this statement would make my father, how happy it makes me. Last summer, Saoirse went to Fenway for the first time. My father told her he would take her to a game if she named all the starting players and pitchers. Since he also promised to take her out for Chinese food after the game, she scribbled the names on a post-it note as they flashed on the television screen.

15th Anniversary Issue 117 Then she called him to recite the chant: Varitek and Youkilis, Pedroia and Gonzalez, Lowell and Bay, Ellsbury and Drew. And Dice-K, her favorite. “Not bad,” he said. “Not bad at all.”

The day of the game, we leave five hours before game time and drive in along Route One. Instead of baseball talk, my dad plays Hannah Montana. The Newbridge Café is closed and my father hasn’t returned to Chelsea since his last day at Chelsea High. Instead, we have pizza near Big Jim: With his entire Major League career spent in Boston, the park and head over to Jim Rice played for the Red Sox from 1974 through 1989. National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, NY Fenway, a good two hours before game time. It has been over 20 years since I was last at Fenway, and as we walk outside next to the Green Monster, I miss my father, even though he is steps ahead of me. He holds his granddaughter’s hand and I hear him telling her how he used to come here with his father, when tickets were a dollar, how he took me too, how the best seats were on the left field line and that is where we are sitting tonight. Saoirse nods as she looks around at the vendors selling sausages and blow-up bats, tee shirts and hats crammed onto an invisible pole. Without a word, my father makes a sharp right and heads into a huge store, calling over his shoulder, “You gotta look the part if you want to be a Red Sox.” Even though she already has on one of my Red Sox shirts, he buys her two more. She pulls one on in the bathroom while my father is in the men’s room. By the time we come out, my father is there, waving the tickets over his head. “Left field line, girls. Left field line.” The seats are tighter and harder than I remembered, but we look right down at the left fielder, and I wish we had brought a glove for Saoirse. My dad buys her ice cream, asks her to identify the Red Sox batters each inning and makes her stand up for the Wave and the 7th inning rendition of “Sweet Caroline.” She leans into him,

118 Sport Literate with a grin of a girl who looks like she has won something big. The Sox win, with a comeback home run by Big Papi in the 8th. My dad actually waits until the end of the game and then takes my daughter’s hand, leading her down the narrow path of the seats, swerving around the drunken fans, still singing. I follow behind them, hearing only my father’s voice as he continues to tell her the stories of the Red Sox, ones I have heard here before, but can never quite remember exactly right. I realize after almost 40 seasons of watching the Red Sox that maybe there was never any curse, no big rivalry, no reason to hold on so tightly to my narrow faith. Maybe Pedro Martinez was onto something when he said, “I don’t believe in rivalries. I don’t believe in curses. Wake up the damn Bambino, maybe I’ll drill him in the (ass).” Now, because I love my daughter more than I love the Red Sox, there is room for more than one team in our house. She has asked to go to Yankee Stadium for the past two or three years, but up until now I have always said no. This season I have bought tickets and will go to the Bronx when the Sox are playing, see what the game looks like from a different seat. Garnett will come and the three of us will walk over to this new house that Steinbrenner built. I’ll buy a glove for my daughter and let her wear whatever hat she wants. We’ll leave before game time, walk over to this brand new towering stadium of concrete, the one Ruth did not build, and sit on the left field line. My father won’t come, but perhaps Saoirse will tell him what it feels like to be in this other house, surrounded by her father and the Yankees. The Red Sox help me hold onto my father and this has a power all its own. I also know it may not be enough for my daughter, and she may prefer her own father’s team in the Bronx. No matter which team my daughter roots for, I want to teach her the true story of baseball, one whose truth rises in a whisper from the chalked dust of Fenway ghosts, one that does not rely on curses or blind faith, one that weaves the voices of Robinson, Mays, Rice, and Tiant, but also Williams, Ruth, Yawkey and my father, her father, and me. I hope Saoirse will build her own story within the promise of a new baseball nation. I hope she’ll call down to the new left fielders in Boston or the Bronx and they will throw a ball right into her open glove.

Kerry Herlihy is a writer and teacher living in southern Maine. Her essays have appeared in multiple publications, including The New York Times and Good Housekeeping and several anthologies including The Bitch in the House: 26 Women Tell the Truth about Sex, Solitude, Work, Motherhood, and Marriage. In addition, her story has been featured on BBC’s program Witness. She is currently working on a memoir about motherhood, baseball, and adoption.

15th Anniversary Issue 119 My Father’s Accounting William Meiners

ne Memorial Day nearly two decades ago, my widowed father was Odriving me and a woman who wore my mother’s ring back to Chicago. Our original ride had forsaken us. We would never marry, but maybe Dad thought we would. We surely harbored doubts. A financial planner, he applied numbers to memories. For our longtime home phone, he devised: He gets up at 8 each morning and takes 465 to get to work by 9:20. Not sure how long this fictional character kept his job showing up at 9:20 daily, but it kept my dad in line with the seven digits he needed to call home for a time. With radio music we couldn’t agree on, my father settled into storytelling on our way back to the bigger city that neither this woman nor I felt at home in. I lost my mother when I was 11, he began. I met your mother when I was 22. We spent 44 years together, which took me to 66. And if I live to be 88, which I hope to hell I don’t, that means I’ll have spent half my life without her. I envied his palindromes, his numerical flair. They resonated better than the words I spilled too few of in my halfhearted attempts to be a Chicago writer. Unmarried and untried, I’m 44 now — that ugly number of years threatening to separate my father from my mother, his first love. In three years, God willing, albeit bittersweet, he’ll celebrate 88. END

120 Sport Literate