Playing in Time: Essays, Profiles, and Other True Stories

by Carlo Rotella

  The sun goes away behind a thickening overcast and does not come back. Seagulls and pigeons circle above the open bowl of the stadium. A potent chill spreads upward from concrete seats into bodies in which alcohol is dying a slow death.

  In the second half, Ryan Fitzpatrick settles into a heroic groove, making unimpeachable decisions with the ball and improvising shrewd, twisting runs for first downs. The game rapidly moves out of reach for Yale, which fights hard on defense and gains ground on offense but cannot stop Harvard or get into the end zone. At the end of the third quarter, Harvard leads 35–3.

  It’s Stover at Yale time. In the great American college novel of 1911, a halftime pep-talker addresses a Yale team that’s losing badly to unbeatable Princeton. “You can’t win,” he says. “You never had a chance to win. But, Yale, you’re going to do something to make us proud of you. You’re going to hold that score where it is! Do you hear me? All you’ve got left is your nerve and the chance to show that you can die game. That’s all you’re going to do; but, by heaven, you’re going to do that!”

  And, by heaven, they do. Yale doesn’t score in the fourth quarter, but neither does Harvard. Barton Simmons angles in to nail ball carriers, trying to force a fumble. Rory Hennessey keeps his man away from Cowan. Ralph Plumb catches every ball thrown to him, and one that wasn’t.

  The note-taking scout may see all this, or he may not. He and a colleague representing another team leave the press box at halftime and never return. Maybe they move to a different spot in the stadium, maybe they call it a day and make for the nearest Hooters. Whether or not the pros notice, Simmons, Hennessey, and Plumb play out both the Stover at Yale scenario and the prospects’ drama to the bitter end.

  When the game ends, some fans jump down from the stands and run around. Mounted police ride onto the playing field. Premature evening descends, and everybody starts thinking about what comes next: more tailgating, traffic, the evening’s round of dinner and parties, life after football.

  At the postgame press conference at the Varsity Club, Yale’s coach, Jack Siedlecki, sits with three of his players at a table. The players have not yet changed out of their game gear; their cleats leave disk-like clods of mud and grass on the red rugs and polished wood floor. The players slump deeply in their chairs, vacant-eyed. They may well believe that they are inconsolably desolate, but they are impossibly young—the tenderness of fresh hurt accentuates it, making them look like enormous twelve-year-olds whose dogs have died—and they will recover quickly. The coach, an intense bald man whose nightmarish day at the office appears to have put new lines on his taut face, will take much longer to get over it. He praises Harvard’s team and his own players’ effort, his voice thickening when he says, “I’m disappointed in the team, but not in individual performances. They’re great kids, they’re going to go on and do great things, and I’m proud of them.” But he can’t resist revisiting his quarterback’s one big mistake, which led to an interception and a Harvard touchdown. Yale was about to score to close within seven points, then suddenly Harvard was up by 21. “That put us in a hole,” says Siedlecki. “Big-time hole.”

  Alvin Cowan, sitting at the table with the coach, manfully takes responsibility for the ill-advised throw. He also notes that Yale has been running that particular play at the goal line all year, perhaps suggesting that Harvard knew it was coming. It could be that a little tension moves under the surface of both men’s comments. If Mister Hotshot Quarterback hadn’t made that dumb throw . . . If Mister Offensive Genius Coach hadn’t called that predictable play. . . . But they both try to do the right thing. Mustering their will at its lowest ebb, they rise above the temptation to squabble in defeat.

  Dink Stover would approve. “He went out, head erect, back to meet his college, no longer shrinking from the ordeal, proud of his captain, proud of his coach, and proud of a lesson he had learned bigger than a victory.”

  In the margin of his program, in no obvious proximity to the name of any of the prospects he was observing, the scout wrote Bad decision. Perhaps he referred to Cowan’s goal line throw, or one of Fitzpatrick’s two long passes that Simmons nearly intercepted, or something else—a blocker’s error, a defender’s misreading of a formation. Oops. Sorry, coach. Won’t happen again.

  Bad decision. Ideally, collegiate athletics creates situations in which young people must make decisions, must act and be acted upon in character-shaping ways, without external consequence beyond the course of the game and the school’s rah-rah fortunes. It doesn’t work that way, of course. What happens on the field can shape budgets, application yields, professional futures. Still, a bad decision in even the most important Division I-AA football game seems almost without consequences when compared to bad decisions like marrying the wrong mate, choosing the wrong job, getting behind the wheel of a car after the fifteenth drink. Ask the homeless people who spent the night camped on the grass along the Cambridge side of the river.

  Actually, maybe you shouldn’t ask them. Maybe you should ask the alumni at the tailgate. Most people feel, rightly or wrongly, that their lives are shaped by what the world visits upon them, rather than by what they choose to do. But, rightly or wrongly, most people who graduate from Yale and Harvard feel that they hold the course of their lives in their own hands, that good or bad decisions matter more than good or bad fate. Part of what draws alumni to the Yale-Harvard game every year may well be nostalgia for a feeling of cozy distance from the consequences of one’s own decisions—nostalgia for a long-lost undergraduate moment of insulation from the fact of an increasingly irrevocable life course already beginning to form beneath the surface of classes, parties, and games.

  Ralph Plumb and Rory Hennessey were invited to some NFL training camps but never made a regular-season roster. Barton Simmons, who did not try to catch on with an NFL team, became a football reporter, broadcaster, and scout. As of this writing in December 2011, Ryan Fitzpatrick, in his seventh season in the NFL, was the starting quarterback for the Buffalo Bills. Yale was ten wins up on Harvard, 65–55–8.

  * * *

  Original publication: “Youth & Consequences,” Yale Alumni Magazine, January/February 2005.

  Playing in Time

  SETH ARENSTEIN, A 42-YEAR-OLD editor of cable industry publications and amateur trumpeter, had always played from sheet music. He had shied away from jazz, and especially from improvisation. Not that there wasn’t any improvisation in his life. Putting out a magazine, plus a daily update known for its barbed acuity, required a certain ability to be creative within the structure imposed by journalistic form and deadlines. But when it came to music, his first love, he had left the improvising to his younger brother, Michael, a 40-year-old otolaryngologist who was also a gifted jazz pianist. Seth played and listened to classical music, mostly. He had had a solid early musical education in childhood lessons and school bands, then he had put down the trumpet in his twenties as he embarked on his career, but he had taken up the instrument again in his late thirties to join an amateur orchestra. He had returned to his first love as a hobby, but it was more than that: He lived more deeply, more vividly, in music. When he could not play, he listened; when he could not listen, there still was music in his head—phrases, fragments, bits and pieces of beauty sounding in the mind’s ear.

  On a Thursday evening last summer, Seth found himself on the stage of Kilbourn Hall in front of an audience at the world-famous Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, with a moment of truth upon him. He was part of a small jazz group churning through “Autumn Leaves,” a standard. The preceding soloist played his closing notes, the crowd applauded and subsided, the rhythm section drove into the start of another chorus, and there came an expectant pause into which it was Seth’s turn to step. It was either a dream come true or a sheet-music player’s version of the actor’s nightmare. He considered for a long moment, trumpet raised to his lips.

  Seth and his brother, both of whom lived near Washington, DC, had arrived in Rochester the previous Sunda
y for a week at the Tritone Jazz Fantasy Camp. Michael, a veteran player and a soulful improviser, was looking forward to studying with accomplished teachers and to a good vacation. Seth, though, described himself as “a blank slate” when it came to improvisation. Four days of master classes, theory classes, small combo and big-band rehearsals, open-mike jams, lectures on jazz history and style, recitals by the professional musicians who taught at the camp, practicing, late-night hanging out, and conversation about jazz with teachers and fellow campers had inscribed on Seth some principles to follow. He was anxious about playing a solo, but trying to improvise no longer made him feel—as it always had before—as if he were adrift in a trackless desert of jazz spontaneity, where the very possibility of pursuing your inspiration in any direction made it almost impossible to get your bearings or go anywhere at all.

  Now, soloing, he departed from the melody into unfamiliar territory. He played a simple figure, repeated it, varied it, easing without hurry into an understated, Miles Davis-inflected solo that was plain but musically correct. He had not memorized it in advance, and it was different from the one he had played in dress rehearsal; he had improvised it. The solo lasted no more than 40 seconds, but it formed the climax of an important week in his musical life.

  Fantasy camps have flourished in recent years, serving intertwined impulses especially well developed among men of the baby boom generation: to revisit one’s youth, spend disposable income, and mount a brief excursion along the road not taken. The most numerous and established camps are run by sports teams; staffed by coaches and retired athletes, they often feature cameos by active players. Baseball fantasy camps came first and still dominate the field, but there are others for basketball (including those for women run by WNBA affiliates), football, hockey, and other sports from motorcycle racing to luge. There have been music fantasy camps for marching band, rock, guitar playing, guitar making, country music, folk, and being Christina Aguilera or someone closely associated with her. There have been camps dedicated to pro wrestling, cooking, brewing beer, monster trucks, bull riding, radio. At covert ops camp, mild-mannered regular folks make document drops and stage hostage rescues with paintball guns.

  Besides offering amusement and a vacation spent doing something—rather than idling expensively in a less than satisfying way, as so many hardworking people do during a much-anticipated week off—fantasy camp can provide an occasion to consider what it would be like to have taken another road in life. For example, Michael Arenstein, the ivory-tickling ear, nose, and throat doctor, might have scratched out a living as a musician had he been willing to risk steep downward mobility. In other cases, the camper engages in pure fantasy, playacting an alternative life without any supporting evidence of potential or aptitude for it. Either way, having spent a week living a dream, the camper can return, satisfied and perhaps even relieved, to the home, career, and security of real life. That dynamic of departure and return helps to give fantasy camp its double-edged atmosphere of possibility and regret.

  “I’m Bob DeRosa, pseudo-musician.” The Sunday evening assembly that opened the Tritone camp had come to order in a big rehearsal room and recording studio in the Eastman School’s main building. Returning campers had hugged one another and their teachers, then found seats; first-timers fidgeted expectantly. DeRosa, a big, friendly bassist from Rochester who passed his workdays as a vice president of marketing for American Fiber Systems Inc., was in charge of introducing the campers to one another and to their teachers. Starting a jazz fantasy camp was DeRosa’s idea, which he brought to Fred Sturm and Jim Doser, professional teachers of music at Eastman. The three friends founded Tritone, which, in its fourth summer, offered two week-long sessions: one at Eastman, one at a resort in Wisconsin.

  As a first order of business, DeRosa introduced “some real musicians,” the camp’s teaching faculty, who took up their instruments and launched into Thelonious Monk’s “Well You Needn’t.” They were pros—not stars, but respected teachers (most of them on the Eastman faculty) and first-rate players who could hold their own in fast company. They knocked off a short set of standards, crackling with expert musicianship but not showing off. The campers looked impressed, scared, excited. After a while the band stood down and Janet Planet, the voice teacher, came on to sing a couple of showstoppers, accompanied by Gene Bertoncini on guitar. The singers bent toward her in their seats like sun-seeking plants.

  Of the 47 campers, who each paid $650 in tuition for the week (room and board was an additional $360), about half had been to Tritone in previous years, and perhaps two-thirds were from out of town. Among the campers, there were two guidance counselors, a college administrator, two students; various business people, from small-business owners to corporate executives; three government officials, a judge, an FBI agent; two journalists; a handful of physicians, a speech pathologist, a psychologist, a psychotherapist; a chemist, a “gizmologist,” a software engineer, other sorts of engineers; and two artists. There were also several retired people, finally free to devote themselves full time to music; most of them would spend the rest of the week walking around with beatific expressions on their faces. Each camper (except the singers) was assigned to a small combo and a larger ensemble. Combos would give a concert on Thursday evening, ensembles on Friday. They had four days to get ready.

  Fred Sturm had more than half of the campers in his ensemble, a very big band that included most of the beginners and few of the top-level players. Three rows of horns, rotating crews of pianists and drummers, a small civilization. Much of his task would be to convince them that they could play together at all. At the first rehearsal on Monday, Seth Arenstein looked around from his seat in the third row and thought, “My God, this is going to be impossible. The band’s too big, we only rehearse an hour a day, and we’ve got less than a week.”

  “I’ve got an ambulance and a nurse ready,” said Sturm, raising his hands to cue the first number. “So here we go. We go ‘til we crash.” As the band roared into the head, he called out, “Watch your key signature, everybody, or I’ll kill you.” His smile caught and spread throughout the room, so that soon almost everybody was wearing a goofy, triumphant look.

  Having taught all manner of students, from hell-bent Eastman School preprofessionals to hormone-occluded middle-school band members, Sturm has a special talent for getting musicians who have good cause to be unsure of themselves to deliver their very best. He soon had the ensemble loosened up. When he finally called for volunteers to take a solo, a couple of camp veterans went first, then first-timers began taking the plunge. As each soloist played, the big band vamping gigantically in support, Sturm sought eye contact with the next prospective soloist.

  He made an expectant, encouraging face at Seth, who, still playing with the rest of the trumpet section, looked up from the sheet music to shake him off with a regretful grimace that managed to communicate a whole thought: Not yet, but thanks for asking.

  When he was younger, Seth thought he would pursue a career in music. He was president of his junior high school band, first trumpet, soloist, he even conducted. He and his brother regularly won the school band’s awards for best instrumentalist. Their parents had always encouraged them to play—their father, in fact, had told them when they were little boys that they had to take lessons for at least a year before they could decide for themselves whether or not to pursue music any further—but when Seth reached high school his parents told him that he was not gifted enough to play professionally. It’s a good hobby, they said, but it’s not a life, it’s not a career. He might have a good ear and nice tone, he might be as competent and as committed as his band teachers could wish for, but that would never be enough for him to make a living from music. Seth had to start thinking about college and the prosaic business of getting on in life.

  Michael, though, had a gift. From an early age, he could sit down at the piano and play what he heard. “I knew pretty early that there was a certain amount of innate talent he was blessed with,” says Se
th, “and I wasn’t. It happens. You have to face up to that. I knew enough about music to see that he was so good that he could even fake out his teachers, just play by ear instead of learning the piece.” So Michael went two steps further in music than his older brother could. Even though he already had medical school in mind, Michael majored in music at college, and he played professionally full time for a year before settling into a doctor’s life without too many regrets.

  Also on that Monday, in a small room high up in Eastman’s annex building, Gene Bertoncini’s combo had its first rehearsal. These were some of the camp’s best players, guys who could play gigs for money all the time if they wanted to. Warming up in a loose circle, waiting for the drummer to get ready, somebody started fooling around with the melody of “Out of Nowhere” and others picked it up. Bertoncini, a short, gray-haired Bronx Italian guitar genius with an old-fashioned stoopside manner, said, “Yeah, let’s play something, let’s play that tune,” and they were off at a moderate swinging pace. A trumpet-playing Canadian engineer took a robust solo, then a music teacher from Fayetteville, New York, took a flashier one on tenor saxophone, laying on the fancy runs and effects. A deputy administrator in the Federal Insurance and Mitigation Administration from Silver Spring, Maryland, played a complex, chordal guitar solo. Then Michael Arenstein took his turn.

  Michael’s playing was not as imposing as the music teacher’s or the federal actuary’s, not as busy; it was more relaxed, more direct, more elegant. The word for that quality is “musicality,” a kind of command that sounds like sophisticated ease rather than heroic strain. A key in the piano’s high range was broken, producing a tinny clunk when touched, but Michael played it anyway, smiling at the ugliness of the noise, making it all into music.