Dispatches From the Sporting Life

by Mordecai Richler

  September 1985

  9

  From Satchel, through Hank Greenberg, to El Divino Loco

  Come spring, I turn hungrily to the sports pages first every morning to ponder the baseball scores, held in the thrall of overgrown boys whose notion of humour is to slip an exploding device into a cigar, drench a phone receiver with shaving cream, or line the inside of a teammate’s hat with shoe polish. But, to be fair, a certain corrosive wit is not unknown among some ball players. Asked if he threw spitters, Hall of Fame pitcher Lefty Gomez replied, “Not intentionally, but I sweat easy.” Invited to comment on whether he favoured grass over AstroTurf, relief pitcher Tug McGraw said, “I don’t know. I never smoked AstroTurf.” On another occasion, a reporter asked McGraw how he intended to budget his latest salary increase. “Ninety percent I’ll spend on good times, women, and Irish whisky,” he said. “The other 10 percent I’ll probably waste.” Then the immortal Leroy “Satchel” Paige once said, “Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.”

  Satchel Paige, one of the greatest pitchers the game has ever known, was shamefully confined to the Negro leagues in his prime. Only in 1948, when he was forty-two years old, did he finally get a chance to compete in the majors, signed by Bill Veeck to play for the Cleveland Indians. Paige helped the Indians to win a World Series in 1949, went on to pitch for the St. Louis Browns for a couple of years, and then dropped out of sight.

  The film director Robert Parrish once told me a story about Paige that he then included in his memoir, Hollywood Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. In the early fifties, Parrish was shooting a western in Mexico, The Wonderful Country, in which Robert Mitchum was playing the lead. Mitchum suggested that they get Satchel to play a black sergeant in the U.S. Tenth Cavalry.

  “Where can we find him?” Parrish asked.

  “Why don’t you call Bill Veeck?”

  Parrish called Veeck and learned that Paige was now with the Miami Marlins in the Southern Association, but he didn’t think that Parrish could contact him because he was in jail on a misdemeanour charge and the judge, who was a baseball fan, would let him out only on the days he was to pitch. Parrish called the judge.

  “Well,” said the judge, “I think we can work it out. Leroy has a sore arm and has lost his last four games. I’ll let him out if you’ll guarantee he doesn’t touch a baseball until he comes back to Miami.”

  Paige arrived in Durango, Mexico, a week later, accompanied by a beautiful teenage black girl whom he introduced as Susan. Parrish knew he had a daughter and assumed that’s who she was. “Paige … stayed with us for six weeks,” wrote Parrish in his memoir, “and when it was time to send him back to Miami, Mitchum and I took him to the airport. Susan boarded the small commuter plane, and Mitchum, Paige, and I stood on the tarmac … and after a while, Mitchum asked a question that had been bothering both of us since Paige arrived. “Is Susan your daughter?” he asked.

  “No,” said Paige. “She’s my daughter’s nurse.”

  There was a pause and then Mitchum finally said, “But your daughter’s not here.”

  Paige looked at Mitchum and smiled. “How about that?” he said. Then he turned and boarded the plane, still smiling.

  The late Hank Greenberg wrote in his autobiography, Hank Greenberg: The Story of My Life, of John King, a legendary left-handed slugger who hit .380 in the Texas League but never made it to the bigs because he couldn’t cope with southpaw pitching. Once, according to Greenberg, King came out of a restaurant and saw a beggar with a tin cup: “King slipped a quarter into the cup. As he turned around, he saw the beggar pull the quarter out of the cup with his left hand and John went back and grabbed the coin out of his hand, and said, ‘No left-handed son of a bitch is going to get any of my money.’”

  If my devotion to baseball is an occasional embarrassment to me, I blame it on being a Montrealer. We put up with plenty here. Going into the 1989 season of dubious promise, for instance, Claude Brochu, president of Les Expos and a former Seagrams marketing maven, pronounced that the year would be successful if fans would just increase their consumption and spend $7.25 per game on soggy hot dogs and lukewarm beer rather than the measly $5.50 they grudgingly parted with the previous season. Baseball, once a game of inches, was now a business of pennies. Hank Greenberg’s father, a prescient man, understood this as early as 1929, when Hank signed his first pro contract.

  “Pop,” Hank said, “are you against baseball as a career?”

  His father nodded.

  “The Tigers offered nine thousand dollars.”

  His father whistled softly. “Nine thousand dollars,” he said. “You mean they would give you that kind of money just to go out and play baseball?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And they’ll let you finish college first?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought baseball was a game,” his father said, “but it’s a business—apparently a very good business. Take the money.”

  My problem with Montreal baseball is compounded by the fact that in a climate where we are fortunate to reap seven weeks of summer, maybe six, the game is played on a zippered carpet in a concrete container that resembles nothing so much as an outsize toilet bowl—a toilet bowl the cost of which would humble even a Pentagon procurement agent. The ugly Olympic Stadium, more properly known in Montreal as the Big Owe, cost $650 million to build in 1976, more than the combined cost of all the domed stadiums constructed in North America up to that time. And this price doesn’t include the parking facilities, which set taxpayers back another $70 million. Nor did it take into account the so-called retractable roof, finally put in place in 1988, its reported cost another $80 million. A roof that retracted only erratically come 1989 and already leaked in several places.

  Despite these local difficulties, I am not only addicted to the game but also to books that celebrate it: say, George V. Higgins’s Progress of the Seasons: Forty Years of Baseball in Our Town, composed in praise of those who came closest to the sun, playing in Boston’s Fenway Park. Baseball, writes Higgins, differs from football and basketball in that it is “a game played by generally normal-sized men whose proportions approximate those of the majority of onlookers, and whose feats are therefore plausibly imagined by the spectator as his own acts and deeds.”

  There is a lot in that, certainly, but also an exception to the rule, the towering six-foot-four Hank Greenberg, who first came up with the Detroit Tigers in 1930 and before he was done, in 1947, had hit 331 home runs in a career that was interrupted by four years of military service in the Second World War. Greenberg, whose lifetime batting average was .313, was twice named MVP. He drove in 1,276 runs and remains tied with Lou Gehrig for highest average of runs batted in per game with.920, or nearly one RBI a game for his career. He is also one of only two Jewish players in the Hall of Fame, the other being Sandy Koufax.

  Ira Berkow, who did an admirable job of editing and amending Hank Greenberg, an autobiography that remained unfinished when Greenberg died of cancer in 1986, notes that Greenberg’s onetime teammate Birdie Tebbetts recalled, “There was nobody in the history of the game who took more abuse than Greenberg, unless it was Jackie Robinson.” But Greenberg, a man of immense dignity, refused to either anglicize his name or flaunt his Jewishness. Instead, he put up with the taunts, though on one occasion he did walk over to the Yankee dugout, which was riding him hard, and challenge everybody on the team.

  The racial slurs that Jewish players once heard in the majors were not always devoid of wit. Andy Cohen, a New York Giants infielder who came up to the bigs before Greenberg, tells about one Texas League game in 1925. “I made a good catch and the fans gave me a pretty big hand. Then I heard one guy yell out, ‘Just like the rest of the Jews. Take everything they can get their hands on.’”

  Even more famous, of course, was the end of the 1938 season, when Greenberg hit fifty-eight home runs, two under Babe Ruth’s record, with five games left to play. When he was unable to hit another homer, a
lot was made of the story that pitchers had thrown him anti-Semitic fastballs, racist sliders, and Jew-baiting curves, but Greenberg would have none of it. “Some people still have it fixed in their minds,” he writes, “that the reason I didn’t break Ruth’s record was because I was Jewish, that the ball players did everything they could to stop me. That’s pure baloney. The fact is quite the opposite: So far as I could tell, the players were mostly rooting for me, aside from the pitchers.”

  Walter Matthau told Berkow that when he was growing up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, his idol was Hank Greenberg: “Greenberg for me put a stop to the perpetuation of the myth at the time that all Jews wound up as cutters or pants pressers. Or, if they were lucky, salesmen in the garment centre.”

  Years later Matthau joined the Beverly Hills Tennis Club only because Hank Greenberg was then a member.

  “For thirty years,” said Matthau, “I told a story which I read in the newspapers about Hank Greenberg at a port of embarkation during the Second World War. The story had it that there was a soldier who had had a little too much to drink, and he was weaving around all the soldiers sitting there. He was quite a big fella. And he said in a very loud voice, ‘Anybody here named Goldberg or Ginsburg? I’ll kick the livin’ daylights out of him.’ Or words to that effect. Hank had been sitting on his helmet, and he stood up and said, ‘My name is Greenberg, soldier.’ The soldier looked at him from head to foot and said, ‘Well, I said nothin’ about Greenberg, I said Goldberg or Ginsburg.’ I told this to Hank when I met him at the club. He said it never happened. I told him I didn’t care to hear that. I was going to continue to tell that story because I liked it. He said, ‘Okay, whatever you say, Walter.’”

  The most original and quirky baseball book I have read in ages, El Béisbol: Travels through the Pan-American Pastime, by John Krich, is an antic tour through far fields, where Fan Appreciation Day is El Día de Los Fanáticos, the Day of the Fanatics; pitchers must beware of a robador de bases; and Roberto Clemente is still worshipped above all. El Béisbol abounds in vivid set pieces, among them a game Krich attended in Puerto Rico with Vic Power, a slugger with the Cleveland Indians in the late fifties, and Rubén Gomez, a.k.a. El Divino Loco (the Divine Crazy), who pitched for the Giants in the first game they played after their move to San Francisco. “Oh, baby,” Power told Krich. “My biggest salary in the major leagues was thirty-eight thousand dollars. Now the average Puerto Rican kid wants that for a signing bonus. The kid’s mama, she knows too much!”

  July 1989

  10

  Eddie Quinn

  On July 28, 1939, the following item appeared in the Montreal Gazette:

  FORUM WRESTLING

  TO RESUME AUGUST 8

  At a meeting of the Montreal Athletic Commission, yesterday morning, Eddie Quinn, of Boston, was granted a matchmaker’s licence as representative of the Forum in succession to Jack Ganson…. [Quinn] was given permission to go ahead with the arrangements for his first big show on August 8…. Yvon Robert, formerly recognized locally as heavyweight champion, will appear in the inaugural program….

  Apparently Quinn intends to have no traffic with the “noble experiment” which was Ganson’s swan song locally; that of a return to straight, scientific wrestling. Quinn stands solidly behind rip-roaring rassling with all the frills. He is not even daunted by the plethora of “champions” that infest the mat landscape…. Referring to Ganson’s attempt to take the fun out of wrestling, Quinn said, “The public will not fall for that pink-tea stuff.”

  Quinn, who used to drive a taxi in Brookline, Massachusetts, never looked back. In 1960 he not only promoted all the wrestling matches at the Montreal Forum, but, as he said, “I got most of Canada, Boston, thirty percent of St. Louis, and fifty percent of Chicago. Things have gone pretty fast in the last twenty years.”

  So fast, in fact, that Quinn was netting as much as a quarter of a million dollars a year for his activities. He had made wrestling the number-two spectator sport in Quebec.

  Quinn, who necessarily travelled a good deal, was a difficult man to catch up with. His offices, Canadian Athletic Promotions, were in the Forum. The first time I dropped in, there were two men seated in the outer office: Larry Moquin and somebody called Benny. Moquin, who books the wrestlers for Quinn, used to be a famous performer himself. He was a semi-pro football player when Quinn discovered him. Benny, a greying, curly-haired man-of-all-jobs, reminded me of the horseplayers I used to know as a kid around the roaring Main.

  Moquin and Benny were playing gin rummy, $10 bills changing hands often. The phone rang a couple of times, and Moquin, his tone belligerent, said, “He’s gone fishing. Yeah.” Once Benny answered the phone, held it, and looked quizzically at Moquin. “For God’s sake,” Moquin said, “he’s gone fishing.”

  Actually, I was waiting for one of Quinn’s publicity men, Norman Olson, to show up. The first thing Olson said to me after he came in was “Are you here to knock us?”

  I told him no.

  Olson, in his early thirties, was a fat, swarthy man with a little black moustache. “Eddie isn’t here,” he said.

  “He’s gone fishing,” I said.

  Olson laughed. “Aw, Eddie’s in the pool. He’s in the pool all day. On the phone. His phone bills come to $2,000 a month.”

  Quinn lived in the town of Mount Royal, one of Montreal’s more affluent suburbs. His swimming pool, he would later tell me, held 38,500 gallons of water and cost him $12,000. Olson got him on the line and all at once the office jumped to life. Everybody wanted to talk to Eddie, who had just flown in from Chicago. “How’s the Irishman?” Olson asked with a nervous little laugh. There was a pause. “Sure,” Olson said, intimidated. “I’ll fix it.”

  Dan Parker, then the New York Daily Mirror’s sports editor, had made a sarcastic remark in his column about Quinn’s having one world champion wrestler in Montreal, another in St. Louis, and a third in Chicago.

  “Parker doesn’t like Eddie,” Olson said. “There’s more to wrestling than meets the eye. We’ve got all kinds of people coming here. I know one psychiatrist who never misses a match. All day people tell him nutty things. At night he comes here. It relaxes him.” Olson believed that wrestling, like golf, had great therapeutic value. “The immigrants come here,” he said, “because it makes them feel good inside to see the Anglo Saxon, the blond guy, get it. The French like it too, you know. It’s a release for them.” He felt that TV had given the sport a big boost. One-hour shows in Detroit and Chicago, he said, outdrew other sports. Before TV, Killer Kowalski and Yukon Eric drew only $1,500 at the gate in Chicago, but after three months of appearing on studio shows with a small invited audience, the same two performers drew $56,000.

  Quinn, Olson predicted, would begin to run studio shows out of Montreal as soon as his contract with the CBC ended. “These days,” he said, giving the TV set an affectionate slap, “you’ve just got to come to terms with the one-eyed monster. But it’s killed the nightclubs, you know. Today only the walkers will bring them in.” Walkers, he explained, were girls who took their clothes off on stage, slipped into them again, and then drank with the customers on commission. “I could tell you a lot about this town,” he said.

  Olson gave me a couple of wrestling magazines, tickets for the next show, and promised to arrange meetings for me with Killer Kowalski and Eddie Quinn. “Eddie’s a wonderful guy,” he said. “He’s got a wonderful sense of humour.”

  In the outer office Benny and Moquin were still playing gin rummy. Moquin was losing.

  “You’ll like Kowalski,” Olson said. “A lovable guy.”

  Before going to the match the next night I read up on the sport in Wrestling Revue and Wrestling News. The former, a most spirited quarterly, featured biographies of top performers, action pictures, and an especially informative department called “Rumours versus Facts,” wherein I learned that 640-pound Haystack Calhoun does not suffer from a glandular disorder (he’s a big boy, that’s all), and that Skull Murphy do
es not rub a special kind of animal grease over his hairless head so that opponents cannot hold him in a headlock (in Skull’s own words, “I use ordinary Johnson’s baby oil on my head. I find it helps to prevent irritation from rubbing on the dirty canvas”). However, Princess Zelina, slave girl of the hated Sheik, does come from a royal family in Lebanon (her old man, living in penurious exile in London, hopes to regain his throne before long). In Wrestling News, which is actually a section of Boxing Illustrated, I was taken with a defence of girl midget wrestlers by Buddy Lee. In a truculent piece titled “Don’t Sell These Girls Short,” Lee assured his readers that those “pint-sized pachyderms, Baby Cheryl, a real toughie for one so tiny, and Little Darling Dagmar, ‘the Marilyn Monroe of the Maulin’ Midgets,’ are a couple of sweet kids, happy with their work.”

  Both magazines rated Killer Kowalski as number three among the world’s wrestlers. This was especially gratifying to me as the following night I was to see the Killer battle “Nature Boy” Buddy Rogers for the world championship and an $18,000 winner-take-all purse.

  There were, I’d say, only about four thousand fans at the Forum for the occasion. Many of the older men still wore their working clothes. The teenagers, however, favoured black leather jackets, their names implanted with steel studs on the back. The most engaging of the preliminary performers was Tiger Tomasso, an uncouth villain who not only eye-gouged and kicked below the belt but also bit into his opponent’s shoulder when aroused.