It's How We Play the Game

by Ed Stack

  Anyway, after Golf-A-Thon ended, the staff packed everything up and hauled it back to the store. Once it was all put away, my dad would take everyone out to dinner at Cortese’s. One year my father was drinking, maybe more than usual, and somebody made a remark, or something got under his skin, and the evening ended with his firing everybody. The whole staff, every last man.

  The next morning he was sleeping it off when the phone rang. Donna answered. It was a customer down at the store, reporting that the doors were locked and the lights were off, and asking why. Donna called a couple of the staff, who told her they’d been fired.

  Aw, no, she told them. Dick didn’t mean that.

  Oh, he meant it, they assured her. You should have seen him.

  She pleaded until a couple of the guys agreed to go in and open for the day. Later, my dad apologized to the staff. Everyone stayed, and normalcy—or Dick’s version of it—returned, as if nothing had happened.

  Third and final episode: One hot and humid summer day before the start of my senior year, I followed up a brutal football practice by joining a bunch of friends bound for a nearby lake. Our high school had sororities and fraternities back then, and the girls of one sorority had a cottage up there. The gathering was unsupervised. No parents would be around. On the way, we stopped for some beer.

  Now, you have to bear in mind that although I played quarterback on the football team, wearing 14, the number of my Giants idol, Y. A. Tittle, and although I played catcher on the varsity baseball team, I was no big man on campus. I was never one of the cool kids at Binghamton North. In retrospect, I lived too much on the straight-and-narrow, overly mindful of my dad’s warnings that anything I did reflected on the family business. I didn’t party like the popular kids. And I had no idea what I was doing when it came to beer.

  We football players hadn’t had anything to eat since practice, and as hydration wasn’t the priority it is today, I doubt we’d had nearly enough water. I drank a six-pack of beer on an empty stomach, chugging one after another. I remember trying to walk and toppling sideways to the ground. Then I got sick and stayed that way.

  A classmate, bless her, looked after me. The next morning, I hiked with the others to another classmate’s family cabin, where his mom offered me breakfast with a knowing smile and the words, “Ed, you’re not very hungry this morning, eh?” She knew that I’d crashed and burned as a beer drinker.

  I sat in the back of a pickup truck on the ride home, just to get fresh air. What my father and my uncle Ed had started, that experience finished: I was never much interested in alcohol after that. As I got older, my dad would make fun of me for not drinking or smoking. “You’re a ham-and-egger,” he used to say. That’s an old boxing expression, used to describe a fighter who doesn’t have a lot of fight in him, who’s in it just for a meal. Not sure how that applied to my abstinence, but that’s what he called me. “Lighten up,” he’d say. “Every man drinks. You need to drink.” That only encouraged me to dig in my heels. I won’t say I never have a drink, but my friends say they love going out to dinner with me, because when I order a glass of wine they know I’ll take two sips and hand the glass to them.

  * * *

  In March 1971, when I was sixteen, my dad made an unexpected move: he opened a second location. Fifteen years had passed since the Hillcrest disaster, and he remained conservative in his approach to business: he wasn’t interested in expanding our range of products or the customers we drew. But a guy who ran a small chain of groceries west of town also owned a little sporting goods store, called Sports Unlimited, on Main Street in Vestal, a village across the Susquehanna from Endicott. He offered the store to my dad at a great price, and my dad couldn’t let the deal pass. When I say it was small, I mean it—2,800 square feet, or roughly half the size of the store in Binghamton. With that addition, the company’s payroll grew to about twenty people.

  The Vestal store did solid business from the start. That was great for Dick’s, and ultimately for my family, but it did nothing to lift me from the depths of misery I felt whenever I was stuck working at the Court Street store. I enjoyed working with customers and liked the guys on the staff; in fact, it was exciting to be a teenager among those older, more worldly guys, and to listen to them talk about women, nightclubs, and other grown-up stuff. But my days on the sales floor remained torture. While I marked time, the summers raced by without me. I hated being there in my mid-to-late teens even more than I had early on, because now it took me away from the serious business of getting ready for the big leagues.

  The only place where I was able to find clarity during my high school years was on the field. Whatever my shortcomings in retail sales or the classroom, I made up for them with the enthusiasm I showed my teams. They were everything to me. I remember vividly walking home in the rain with Tim Myers. Baseball practice had been canceled, and I was heartsick about it. What were we going to do? What was there to do? The day was ruined. We stopped at Al’s Market and got cream-filled cupcakes and a Coke—then, as now, I had a fierce sweet tooth—and the weather cleared, and the sun came out, and I thought: I wonder if we can go back.

  We couldn’t, but that’s typical of the single-minded devotion I had for the game. I lived for baseball. And if it’s possible, that might have gone double for football. I tried to be the first at football practice, which in August amounted to “three-a-days,” or three hard-core training sessions: in the morning, in full pads; after lunch, in helmets but without pads; and in the late afternoon, back to full pads. I wanted more. I stayed late with classmates Gary Dombroski and Joe Hein, who ran routes while I threw passes to them. When I was a junior and senior, the whole team went away to weeklong training camps. I gave them my all, and I wished they lasted longer.

  It paid off. Despite my size, I held my own on the gridiron. I remember one of my football coaches saying, with surprise: “You can throw that ball with some serious zip.” The first game of my junior year, when the starting quarterback wasn’t playing well, I was sent in with orders to throw the ball “all over the field,” to get things moving. It was my first game as a varsity QB: I’d moved up from the JV team late the year before but hadn’t come off the bench, and I joined the huddle both excited and scared to death. When I took the first snap, all my fear evaporated. I played for four minutes, during which I went four-for-four and passed for two touchdowns, and we beat Chenango Forks High School. The following year, I was the starter and co-captain of the team. I loved every minute of every practice and game.

  So I had some gifts, one being a willingness to outwork my innately more talented competition. If life were fair, that would have been enough, and you’d be reading the memoir of a retired New York Giants legend who also won a few World Series rings with the Yankees. God knows, I wanted it.

  But making it as a pro athlete requires a huge helping of God-given ability. We lesser mortals can learn technique, and with practice we can get better—a lot better. We can more or less perfect the tools we have. But in the end, a top-tier athlete needs to have size, speed, and quickness. You can’t learn to be fast if you’re born slow. As they say in basketball, you can’t coach height.

  Still, every kid dreams. That’s something we keep in mind at Dick’s today. When a parent comes in to buy his or her kid a baseball glove or soccer cleats, we’re selling them a dream of greatness for that child. I saw my dad demonstrate his understanding of just how important sports can be to a kid when I was fifteen or sixteen, working the sales floor. One day a little kid walked in and wandered over to the baseball section, then bolted for the door with a glove. Someone in the store nabbed him as he reached the parking lot and brought him back inside. He was yelling at the thief when my dad saw what was going on and walked over.

  He looked the little boy up and down and laid a hand lightly on his shoulder. It was clear this kid came from a family with no money—the ragged way he was dressed signaled as much. “Why’d you steal the glove?” my dad asked.

  The kid, about ni
ne years old, looked up, eyes as big as saucers. Tears streamed down his cheeks. “I just want to play baseball.”

  My dad nodded. “You can’t steal,” he said. “No matter how bad you want something, you cannot steal it. I want you to promise me you’re not going to do this again.”

  “Yes, sir,” the kid said.

  “Okay,” my dad said. Then he walked him over to the baseball section of the store and had the kid pick out a ball and a bat to go with the glove. “You go play baseball,” he told him. “Stay out of trouble.”

  I think my dad figured out early on that I wouldn’t have a career in sports. He recognized that I was too small for football and too poor a hitter to make it as a baseball prospect. But he was encouraging. He urged me on. Reality dawned on me slowly. I noticed that no college was scouting me in either baseball or football, for starters, and by my junior year in high school, I understood enough about how both games worked to know that didn’t bode well. With my average grades, I’d need an athletic scholarship to win admission to any big conference school. That seemed a more distant possibility with each passing month.

  When it came to football, I needed only to look in the mirror for an explanation. I stood five-ten and weighed 160 pounds. If I were going to be a realistic prospect as a college quarterback, I needed to wake up one morning four or five inches taller and fifty pounds heavier.

  Coming to terms with my limitations in baseball was harder to take, in some ways, because my physical size wasn’t a deal-breaker. I had my first glimmer that I wouldn’t play for a living when I went out for the one local Legion team, composed of boys sixteen and older. As always, my fielding was good. My hitting, unfortunately, was no better than it ever had been.

  I remember a scene during tryouts when I was in the batter’s box and finally ripped a line drive over the shortstop. On my way to first I passed the coaches, all making notes, and overheard one say: “Huh. Just when you make your mind up about somebody, they surprise you.” Still, that hit came too late, and I didn’t make the team. When I got cut, I remember thinking: Well, Stack, maybe you’re not as good as you wish you were.

  Then, in the spring of my senior year, I lost my place as Binghamton North’s starting catcher. Joe Hein, my football teammate, beat me out. It came as a surprise. That’s understating it. It stung bad. I lay awake in bed the night I got the news, confused and hurt and determined to work harder. I lifted weights, tried to build up my strength, stayed late to take extra batting practice.

  For a while we went back and forth—he’d catch some games, I’d catch some—but eventually I had to admit to myself that Joe was better. Not by much, but enough: we were both good behind the plate, but he could hit. He was a more complete player. And with that came a final, sad epiphany. If I couldn’t beat out Joe for a spot on our high school team, I couldn’t very well beat out seventeen million guys hungry to make a living in baseball.

  * * *

  Had Dick Stack been the sort of dad to offer me encouragement at such times, he might have shared his insights into the lasting value of athletics, having been an athlete himself—might have told me that playing the game is its own reward, for example. That I’d be a better man for the triumphs and disappointments I’d had on the field. That making the big leagues wasn’t the point. He wasn’t that kind of dad, however, at least not then. I came upon my insights on my own, and they’ve grown clearer to me in the years since I played.

  What I learned on the field, as part of a team, transcended athletics. How to work hard, for starters: you have to commit—to practice, to improving, to making an effort. There were always people on our teams who were doggers, who didn’t go all-out in practice and didn’t give all they had in games. As an adult, I’ve come to see that there are people like that in any organization.

  At the same time, you learn that a team is only as strong as its component parts, and that if one of those parts fails, the whole team has a problem. If your left tackle lines up offsides and gets called for it, on the next play the whole team lines up five yards back. Successful plays work the same way: they inspire the whole team to reach farther. I’ve seen that many times at Dick’s.

  You learn that the team is more important than you are, that you’re part of a greater good. That can be humbling; it can mean taking a demotion or an unwanted reassignment for the good of the group. That willingness to sacrifice is key to teamwork, and to success in any collective effort.

  You learn how to win and lose, and how to be a good sport. When you win, you don’t rub your opponent’s nose in it, and likewise, you don’t resent it when he beats you. You take that lesson into whatever you do for the rest of your life. I’ve certainly applied it in my career. We’ve had our share of losses, along with wins.

  Individual sports are a little different. Everything hangs on how you, and only you, answer the call. In golf, wrestling, skiing, and singles tennis, you’re on an island. I think it takes a lot of guts to play those solo sports. But they share one important lesson with team sports, which is that what you get out of any endeavor is directly proportional to the effort you put into it.

  My life would be very different if I hadn’t played sports. Though I had grand ambitions as a player, it was the journey, not those dreams, that changed me. Being on a team focused me. It gave me specific goals. It gave me a community. And not least, it occupied my time; if it hadn’t been for baseball and football, I think I could have gotten into trouble. I wasn’t an engaged student, which put me at risk. I might well have ended up smoking, loitering, or worse with my uninspired classmates outside the Wigwam, a convenience store and hangout near the high school. And there’s no telling where, if anywhere, I would have gone from there.

  The latter-day revelations about the risks in some sports don’t cool my enthusiasm for them. Football, in particular, has come under scrutiny. At Dick’s, we’ve seen our youth football business nosedive in the last few years, as evidence mounts that a hard hit can cause a concussion, leaving lasting damage to a player’s brain. The decline has been especially big in equipment for peewee football—the younger the players, the bigger the drop in our sales. Parents are deciding the game’s risks are overwhelming.

  I can’t blame them. The concern is long overdue, and I can foresee the day coming, and soon, when top athletes no longer choose to play football, but take their skills to other, lower-impact sports. I can’t imagine that schools will be able to defend football without changes to the game that alter its very character. Then again, maybe guys good enough to play college ball will decide that its glories outweigh its risks.

  Would I have played, knowing of the dangers as I do now?

  No doubt about it. I loved every minute. Nothing could have kept me away.

  I say that as somebody who suffered his own share of injuries. Once, playing quarterback in a game against Union-Endicott, I was scrambling down the field when two opposing players sandwiched me. When I got up, my whole body felt like it was asleep, all pins and needles. Pretty clearly, I had a concussion. If it happened today, I’d be rightly subjected to a strict set of protocols to minimize the effects of the injury.

  But those were different times, and the prescription for most injuries was to play through them. To complain was to show weakness. “Rub some dirt on it,” you’d be told. “Suck it up.” You’d be mocked even for telling the coach you needed water. I remember mine scowling as he baby-talked to a player: “Aw, do you need a gwass of water?”

  In that game against Union-Endicott, I sat out for a couple of plays, until the coach asked, “Can you play?” I answered, “Absolutely.” He sent me back in.

  While we were in the huddle, the ref ran over. “Are you all right?” he asked me.

  “Yes,” I replied.

  “Well, son,” he said, “you have to be wearing a helmet to play this game.” I hadn’t realized I wasn’t wearing one. He went over to the coach and recommended that I stay on the sidelines the rest of the game. Luckily, I did.

  B
aseball was no kinder to my body: at various times I dislocated a finger, had a bat crash into my head, and stopped a wild pitch with my groin. Would I encourage my own kids to play, despite these injuries?

  Sure, I would. Of course.

  I wouldn’t trade my experiences on the field, with those teams, for anything. They were key to what I’ve done with my life. They helped make me who I am.

  CHAPTER 5 “I LOVE YOU”

  As I began my senior year, the question of college loomed. I wanted to go. I wanted to go because I wanted nothing to do with my dad’s business. I’d had it shoved down my throat for five years. I’d sacrificed my summers and, really, a whole lot of what it means to be a teenager to the store, and it would have been okay with me if I never entered Dick’s again.

  My father wasn’t eager to send me away for more schooling. His view was that I didn’t need college, that I could stay in Binghamton and learn from him. He’d teach me all I needed to know—certainly more than I’d learn sitting in class. We struggled over it for months. He didn’t appear to be budging until Donna finally got through to him. I’m guessing she told him that if he didn’t let me go, he’d lose me—I’d leave home, leave the store, and leave him behind. “Fine,” he said at the dinner table one night. “You can go to college. But I’m not going to pay for all of it.” We struck a deal: I’d work during holidays and summers, and save a thousand dollars or more per year toward my expenses. He’d cover the rest.