Born to Fish

by Tim Gallagher

  “Sorry, your day is over,” repeated the doctor. Greg ignored him and started walking out of the locker room with his teammates, followed closely by the doctor. “Look, you’re done, kid. You can’t play anymore today.”

  Greg finally whirled around, grabbed the doctor by the shirt and shoved him hard against the wall. “Look, if I don’t play the second half, I will kill you!” he said.

  “You could see the doctor’s eyes saying, ‘I don’t think he’s kidding,’ ” said Hoag.

  So Greg walked onto the field with his left arm bound to his chest under his jersey and one sleeve blowing in the wind—and Greg is left-handed. “He was playing defensive end, and his left shoulder was hurt, right?” said Coach Ottochian. “So he was playing right-handed with one hand.”

  The Blue Dragons rallied, throwing everything they had against Lyman Hall, determined to turn the game around, and their effort was paying off. Early in the fourth quarter, Middletown was down by only four points, and they had possession on the Lyman Hall ten-yard line. A single touchdown would put them in the lead. Middletown quarterback Dennis Wade seemed unstoppable, methodically moving the ball forward, pass after pass, while the Trojans ran around all over the place, trying to halt their advance. A sense of despair began moving through the Lyman Hall team. “He’s really good,” one player said in the huddle. “He’s doing whatever he wants with us now,” said another. “How can we ever stop him?”

  Greg frowned. “Fuck that guy!” he shouted, in a rage. “Let’s go fucking kill him!” The intensity of his anger and determination were contagious.

  “Yeah, fuck him!” said the others. “Fuck him!” And they stormed back to the line of scrimmage, eager for play to resume.

  The instant the center snapped the ball, the Trojans rushed, breaking through the Middletown line and charging toward the quarterback. Two linebackers hit Wade simultaneously, one high and one low, and he folded like an accordion, losing the ball, which went flying straight up nearly twenty feet in the air. Lyman Hall defensive end Ralph Riley leapt up and caught the ball, then ran and ran and ran—all the way to the Middletown goal line, scoring a touchdown and boosting the score to 28–18. The Lyman Hall fans erupted, jumping to their feet and cheering as the Middletown fans sat silently, mouths agape in disbelief.

  The Blue Dragons refused to be rattled and came on again more determined than ever. The next time Lyman Hall had possession of the ball, the Middletown team turned their full attention to Greg. Like sharks smelling blood, they sensed he was a weak link they could pry open and come flooding in, sacking the quarterback.

  “As hurt as I was, they kept trying to run around my side, but I just kept running them down,” said Greg. “They were just like, ‘What the fuck!’ They had never been behind their whole year. They were really good.”

  Greg continued to hold firm—“with one arm—one arm!” said Coach Hoag, his eyes misting up. “And he played better than anyone. He was making plays you wouldn’t believe. And when I say he was El Cid, it was literally, he got back up on the horse even though he was half dead.”

  “He was tackling people, rushing and passing, and they still couldn’t get to the outside of him,” said Ottochian. “That’s how good he was. I’ve always said that I’ve coached some great players through the years, but Greg was the most talented.”

  Everyone on the Lyman Hall team rallied, saying, “We’re not going to lose this game, no matter what!” By then, the thin crust of snow and ice that had covered the field at the start of the game had melted, creating a muddy bog. As the teams struggled desperately in the mud, throwing themselves at each other again and again, no one willing to give up an inch, the game began to look like the Battle of Agincourt in Kenneth Branagh’s film version of Shakespeare’s Henry V.

  At the end of the game, the score still stood at 28–18, with the Lyman Hall Trojans the unlikely victors. And as the players walked off the field, many on both teams limping and bloodied, with torn uniforms, they knew something remarkable had taken place on the field that day.

  “There was nothing left,” said Greg. “They left it all on the field that day. I’ve never seen that in any sport. Ever. It was just unbelievable.”

  Everyone was covered with mud as they walked to the locker room, too dazed to celebrate. Greg remembers seeing Matt Schmitt, a Lyman Hall running back who had run for 100 yards in the game, lying face-down on the shower-room floor, still wearing his helmet and uniform as the water washed over him, mud streaming down the drain.

  “He didn’t have an ounce of energy left in him,” said Greg. “I was the same way. And my arm was killing me. I remember there were ten reporters interviewing me after the game. I had so many microphones in my face; I don’t even remember what they asked me. My brother was trying to get in to see me, but he couldn’t even get close. He was looking at me and smiling like, ‘Have your fucking moment.’ I got on the bus later wearing my suit and jacket and tie, and I had my arm in a sling. The town cop, who was about to retire, sat down next to me on the bus, and he pulled out a bottle of whiskey and handed it to me. ‘You done good, kid,’ he said.”

  “Even now, more than thirty years later, when any of us from that season get together, Greg is always in the first line of the conversation,” said Hoag. “ ‘Do you remember . . . ?’ ‘Did you hear . . . ?’ I run into people who played against us in that state championship game, and they still talk about what he did. He was legendary. He was El Cid. No one who was there that day will ever forget him.”

  * * *

  Mob Justice

  Near the end of high school, Greg started placing football bets with a small-time local bookie named Marco, who owned a meat market. Greg had seen him a few times at his father’s parties and approached him about making some bets. None of the other local bookies would take bets from Greg, because they were afraid of his father, but Marco had some serious gambling debts of his own and needed to make money fast. He owed Herb $30,000 and had been trying to delay paying him.

  Greg’s betting was a disaster, and he soon owed Marco more than $2,000. Somehow the story got back to Herb, and he was furious about it—but he became absolutely apoplectic when he heard that Marco had tried to make a large bet with another bookie when he still owed money to Herb. The bookie refused his bet and tipped off Herb, who sent Al and Sal and two other goons to pay a visit to Marco at his meat market. He told them to take Greg along to stand guard—and to give him a glimpse of the perils of the gambling life.

  Greg climbed into the back seat of the red Cadillac Eldorado and rode to the meat market with the four men. As they started walking to the door, Al turned and said, “Hey Greg, go back and get the duct tape. I left it on the floor by the front seat.” Greg grabbed the tape and caught up with the men as they were entering the shop. Marco blanched when he saw them. He was standing at the cash register, taking care of an elderly woman buying some pork chops.

  “Hey, we’re closed now,” said Sal as he ushered the woman outside. He flipped the sign in the window around to read “Closed” and turned to Marco. “You know, you really should pay your bills on time,” he said, glaring at him. Marco trembled.

  Sal told Greg to watch the door and tell anyone who tried to enter that the shop was closed. Al cleaned out all the money in the cash register—more than $800. The other two men went behind the counter and grabbed Marco by the arms.

  “What are you going to do?” he asked, frantically. No one answered. Sal unbuckled the man’s belt and pulled down his pants and boxer shorts. “Oh, God, please . . . don’t do this. I can get you the money soon, I swear.”

  “Bend over and grab your ankles,” said Sal.

  “You know you can take anything you want from here . . . hams, steaks . . . anything,” said Marco. Al, who was standing nearby, smiled and pulled a big, long salami from the meat cabinet. He held the salami in front of his own pants, pointing it upwards like a giant penis. “Hey, it’d be nice to have this, huh?” Everyone laughed—except Marco
, who exhaled deeply and closed his eyes.

  “I said, grab your ankles!” said Sal.

  The other men pushed Marco’s torso down and began duct-taping his hands to his ankles. By now Marco was sobbing convulsively, and he screamed hideously as they tried to push the salami into his ass.

  “Gag this piece of shit!” said Sal. The meat market was in a small strip mall, with all the businesses connected, and people in the other shops might be able to hear what was going on. One of the men grabbed a bloody meat rag that had been used to clean the counter. It was covered with tiny scraps of meat and fat. They crammed it into Marco’s mouth until none of the rag was showing, then wrapped duct tape around and around his head to keep it in place. After pushing for several minutes, the salami was still protruding almost a foot, so one of the men picked up a metal snow shovel leaning against the wall next to the door and started pounding the salami into Marco, slamming the shovel against it again and again and again—clang! clang! clang!—until less than an inch of the salami showed. They finally let Marco drop to the floor and stepped aside.

  As they were leaving, Al noticed a slow-cooker full of hot meatballs stewing on the counter. “Hey, any you guys want a meatball sub?” He took a long hoagie roll from a plastic bag, made a slit down the side with a knife, then piled on the meatballs, sauce, and mozzarella. Cutting it in two, he gave half to Sal. They were munching on the subs as everyone walked from the shop, while Marco lay on the floor behind the counter, his muffled groans barely audible.

  “They left him there like that, gagged and duct-taped, with a salami stuck in his ass,” said Greg. “Probably did all kinds of internal damage. It was horrible to watch. My dad made me go along. He was brutal. We got in the car, you know, and I never bet with a bookie again.”

  * * *

  Busted

  Greg was sitting at the kitchen table of his family’s home eating a bowl of cereal when he heard the knock at the front door. Thinking nothing of it, he got up and turned the knob. Wham! The door flung open, and several burly FBI agents and SWAT team police burst inside, wearing full body armor and wielding machine guns. “Get on the floor now! Now!” they shouted, one of them pointing a machine gun in his face, while another grabbed him and threw him face-down on the living room floor. “Don’t move!”

  Simultaneously, other cops were coming in from the back door and the basement windows, streaming in through every possible entrance to the house.

  “Is there anyone else here?” one asked.

  “Yeah, just my father,” said Greg.

  “They grabbed him like two seconds later,” Greg told me. “He was lying in bed in the room where he took all his bets—the room where he ‘took his action,’ as he called it.”

  They laid Herb face-down right beside Greg on the old shag carpet, and it stunk. Herb glanced over at Greg, who looked terrified. He was still just a high school student, a few months from graduating. Although Herb was in pain and twitching noticeably from his Parkinson’s disease, he smiled broadly at his son.

  “He was looking right at me and said, ‘You know, that’s where Ollie [one of their dogs] took a shit this morning.’ We both started laughing. And the cops were looking at us like, ‘What the fuck are you guys laughing about when you’re under arrest?’ That’s the way he was. He didn’t want me to freak out.”

  One of the people involved in the raid was a state policeman, and when things settled down he let them get up from the floor. Greg went into the kitchen with him. The policeman recognized Greg.

  “You’re a great football player,” he said. “I was at the championship game. My next-door neighbor is the head coach at Middletown, and he says you’re one of the greatest players he ever played against.”

  “Wow, thank you,” said Greg. “That’s really an honor.”

  After some small talk about where Greg might go to college and what he intended to do in the future, Greg asked if they needed him for anything else.

  “No, we’re just going to take pictures of every room in the house,” said the policeman.

  Greg cringed, remembering the six-foot-tall marijuana plant he’d been growing in his bedroom window all winter. As soon as he could slip away, he went upstairs and moved the plant behind a bookcase, but it was so large, part of it stuck out over the top. After telling the policeman he was going to take off now, Greg walked to the house of a neighbor who had been involved with Herb in his bookie operation, hoping to warn him. But it was too late—he was already being led away in handcuffs. Greg slipped into the woods and hid out for a few hours, waiting for things to settle down.

  The next time Greg saw his father, Herb laughed and said, “Thanks a lot. Not only did I get arrested for several racketeering charges but also possession and cultivation of marijuana!”

  “My father took all the charges,” said Greg. Some thirty mobsters in all were arrested in the roundup, many of them far worse criminals than Herb: mob bosses and enforcers.

  “Some of them went to prison forever,” said Greg. But the court was lenient with Herb. “His Parkinson’s was really getting advanced by that time. They brought him into court in a wheelchair, and the state didn’t want to deal with it. I don’t think they really wanted to put him in prison. They just put him on probation for five years, and that was that.”

  * * *

  Herb’s Illness

  Herb’s physical condition was deteriorating fast. When he had first shown signs of Parkinson’s disease in his early forties, when Greg was twelve, it had come on gradually and was barely noticeable—some stiffness in his leg, a slight limp—so he was still fully able to run his bookie operation and to punish people who crossed him. But by the time Greg was in his late teens, Herb’s illness had progressed to the point that he twitched constantly and had a hard time doing the most basic physical activities. He was so desperate for relief that he volunteered to take part in experimental surgery and was one of the first people to have fetal tissue implanted in his brain. At first, the procedure seemed successful. Herb was awake when Greg went to visit him and seemed noticeably better.

  “He was just sitting there with his head completely wrapped in bandages, but for the first time in quite a while he was calm,” said Greg. “Normally, he would have been all over the place, twitching, flailing around.”

  But the positive effects didn’t last, and his symptoms came back stronger than ever. It wasn’t easy for Herb—or for Greg. One day he got so frustrated when he was visiting his father in the hospital, he threatened to throw the doctor out the sixth-floor window. The man called security, and two policemen came and stood guard outside Herb’s room while Greg visited.

  Herb was losing everything. He couldn’t take bets anymore, and several people who owed him money were ignoring his requests to be paid. Greg heard about one man who owed Herb $15,000 and was bragging to people that he wasn’t going to pay. “What’s he going to do to make me?” the man had said. Greg exploded when he heard that and paid the man a visit. Herb got his money a short time later. He knew nothing about what Greg had done.

  “I put the fear of Jesus in a few of those people back then,” said Greg. “They thought I was crazy and might do anything.”

  Despite Greg’s efforts, Herb no longer had an income. All they had was the money Diane made from teaching. They had to sell the house in North Haven, where Greg had grown up. It was a heartbreaker for everyone. They moved into a much smaller place, a condominium in another part of town.

  Herb lived in the basement, in a space they fixed up to accommodate his handicap. By then, he needed to sit in a special chair that would raise him into a standing position at the touch of a button. That was the only way he could get on his feet. But walking was a struggle because of his constant shaking.

  Then some of the medication he was taking started making him hallucinate. He frequently thought people were trying to attack him. He kept a pistol next to his bed, and sometimes when he got scared, he’d shoot off rounds, blasting gaping holes in the
walls of the condo.

  “The cops would always come,” said Greg. “They’d take him to the hospital. I rode in the ambulance with him a few times. The worst time was the day of the Super Bowl. He was downstairs alone while we were watching the game upstairs, and he fired five shots.” The police finally took away all of his guns.

  The emotional toll was heavy on Greg. At this point, his brother Dave was a Yale student and star pitcher on the university’s baseball team and didn’t come home much. (Herb had encouraged him to get away from all this and pursue his own life—first at Yale and then as an officer in the Marine Corps.) And Diane was emotionally checked out. A nurse took care of Herb, who spent most days smoking cigarettes and staring out the window as the television droned endlessly in the background.

  At first Herb had been hopeful about his life. Maybe things would improve for him, he thought. But after the failed surgery and the side effects from the medication, he became deeply depressed. He felt his life was over and he would be better off dead.

  Between his father’s depression and his mother’s raging mood swings, Greg couldn’t stand to be at home. He spent more and more time fishing, going far out into Long Island Sound in pursuit of striped bass. He felt such a strong need to be out there—he could face any hardship, endure any setback, as long as he could get out on the water. He was still using the old Brockway he’d bought as a child. The years were taking a toll on the craft and it was leaking badly, but he refused to let the boat’s condition limit him. He kept a small plastic bucket inside and bailed the water out whenever it got to be ankle deep.

  On a perfect fishing day in late summer, Greg motored out to the Race, just as he’d done so many times before, ever since he was ten years old. He had all of his bass rods and lures with him and planned to spend the day fishing there alone. But just as he came within sight of Race Rock, he suddenly felt cold water rushing up past his ankles. The planks of the boat’s hull were coming apart, and in seconds it started going under. Luckily, a couple of men in a nearby sport-fishing boat saw what was happening and quickly motored over to him. He handed them his best rod and reel, and then tried to save the outboard motor, unscrewing the clamp and hoisting it up from the transom at the rear of the boat, which was still above water. But the motor slipped from his grasp and quickly sank to the bottom. So Greg’s trusty old boat, his motor, and all of his bass-fishing equipment except one rod and reel were lost.