Dispatches From the Sporting Life

by Mordecai Richler

  Before the main bout, a precautionary net was tied around the ring. This was necessary because Kowalski, a strapping six feet seven, is, all the same, a most bashful performer, given to fleeing the ring when the going gets rough. Not only that. Struck the slightest blow, he tends to whine and even plead for mercy from his opponent. Even so, the wily Pole made short work of the golden-haired Nature Boy and won the coveted championship belt. This was a popular win with all us non–Anglo Saxons.

  The next afternoon, back in the modest offices of Canadian Athletic Promotions, Kowalski told me, “I indulge in lots of histrionics in the ring. I shout, I snarl, I jump up and down like a madman. Am I mad? I earn more than $50,000 a year.”

  Kowalski told me that he used to work on the Ford assembly line in Windsor for $50 a week. He was paid more than that for his first wrestling match in Detroit and quickly realized that he was in the wrong business. A top performer in 1960, Kowalski wrestled three times a week, usually for a percentage of the gate, and lived with his brother and sister-in-law in a house he had recently bought in Montreal. He was thirty-three years old and expected to be able to go on wrestling until he reached his mid-forties. Meanwhile, against that retirement day, Kowalski had been investing his money in securities.

  “I’ve built up a personality,” he said, “a product, and that’s what I sell. Ted Williams is no different. Why do you think he spat at the crowd that day? It’s showmanship. Everything is showmanship today. Richard Nixon has his act and I have mine.” Kowalski bent over and showed me a scar on his head. “Last week in Chicago,” he said, “after I’d won a match, my opponent hit me over the head with a chair. You think he wanted to hurt me? He wanted to make an impression, that’s all.”

  Norman Olson, who had joined us earlier, now began to stir anxiously. “You’re forgetting that wrestling takes a lot of natural ability,” he said.

  “Sure,” Kowalski said.

  “You’ve got to keep in shape.”

  “The most dangerous thing,” Kowalski said, “are those crazy kids. They come to the matches with clothespin guns and sometimes they shoot rusty nails at us. Once one got embedded in my side.” Kowalski also pointed out that young performers, taking part in their first big match, are also a threat. “They’re so nervous,” he said, “they might do something wrong.”

  I asked Kowalski if there was any animosity among wrestlers.

  “No,” he said.

  “Tell him about the night here when you ripped off Yukon Eric’s ear,” Olson said gleefully.

  “Well,” Kowalski said, “one of my specialties is to climb up on the ropes and jump up and down on my opponent. One night Eric slipped aside, trying to avoid me, and I landed on his ear, ripping it off. He was very upset and he fled to his dressing room. Before long the dressing room was full of reporters and relatives and fans. Finally Eric looked up and asked for his ear. He’d forgotten it in the ring. The referee had picked it up, put it in his pocket, and by this time was showing it to all his friends at the other end of the Forum. When they got it back from him it was too late to sew it on again.”

  A few days later Olson arranged for me to have lunch with Eddie Quinn in the Kon-Tiki Room in the Mount Royal Hotel. Quinn was already there when I arrived, seated with one of his referees and Olson. He wore rings on both hands—one was an enormous signet and the other was diamond encrusted. A chunky man with an expressive if hardbitten face, he spoke out of the corner of his mouth, just the way promoters did in the movies. “There’s nothing left,” he said, “but death and taxes. They belt you here, they belt you there. I just go on to keep people working. The government takes all the money, you know.” He turned to the referee. “I dropped ten thousand this morning,” he said.

  “You’re used to it.”

  “That doesn’t mean I like it.”

  “Eddie’s got a wonderful sense of humour,” Olson said.

  “You’re too fat, Norman. Hey, where’s your broad?” Quinn asked the referee. Then, turning to me, he added, “We’re waiting for a French chantoosie.”

  “She’s at the hairdresser’s upstairs.”

  “Well, go get her. We want to eat.”

  The referee hurried off. “Hey, what’s your name?” Quinn asked me. “Norman here says to call you Moe for short but not for long.”

  “Norman’s too fat.”

  Quinn laughed and slapped my knee. The referee returned with the girl. “Meet the Freedom Fighter,” Quinn said. “She was Miss Europe. She worked with Chevalier. She can’t sing, either.”

  The referee shook with laughter.

  “Say hello to Mr. Richler,” Quinn said to the girl. “Hey, waiter. Another round of the same.” The waiter handed Quinn a menu. “How do you order this stuff?” Quinn asked, and then he made some loud, unintelligible noises that were supposed to sound like Chinese. The Chinese waiter smiled thinly. “Just bring us lots of everything,” Quinn said, and then he turned to me. “You like this food? Looks like it’s been through a sawmill. Hey, waiter, if you don’t know what to get us, just call the health board and ask them to recommend something.”

  “Eddie’s a natural-born kibitzer,” Olson said.

  I asked Quinn about Yvon Robert, the most popular performer ever to wrestle in Quebec. “Around here,” Quinn said, “it used to be the pope, Robert, and Maurice Richard. In that order.”

  “Robert was great,” Olson said.

  Quinn, who had a phenomenal memory for facts, told me the exact date, place, and take of his most successful bouts. In 1959, he drew ten thousand people to the Forum with a novel attraction, boxer versus wrestler. Former world heavyweight champion “Jersey” Joe Walcott took on Buddy Rogers, the Nature Boy. Rogers dived for the canvas immediately and seldom rose higher than a low crouch. In the first round Walcott nailed the wrestler with a hard right and seemed to have him nearly out, but in the third Rogers got Walcott’s legs and Walcott quit.

  Quinn’s biggest gates came from the three Yvon Robert matches against Gorgeous George. George’s gimmicks included long curly hair that he had dyed blond and a female valet who used to spray the ring with perfume before the wrestler himself deigned to appear. Religious leaders objected to the gorgeous one’s effeminate antics and brought pressure to bear on the Montreal police. As a consequence, George never wrestled in the Forum again.

  I asked Quinn about midget wrestlers. “The crowd loves ’em,” he said.

  The girl who had sung with Chevalier produced some photos of herself and handed them around. She explained that she had to take the photos to a theatrical agency round the corner and asked Quinn if he would accompany her.

  “Delivering pictures is Benny’s department,” Quinn said. He seized a linen napkin, wrote a phone number on it with a ballpoint pen, and handed it to the girl. “Call Benny,” he said. “Hey, waiter”—Quinn made some more Chinese-like sounds—“the bill.” He didn’t look at the amount. Turning to me, he said, “Shall I sign it Eddie Quinn, the Men’s Room?”

  I smiled.

  “We must meet again and talk,” he said. “Come to my pool one day. Norman will fix it.”

  “Sure thing,” Norman said.

  On the way out we ran into the French chantoosie. She told Quinn she owed the bellboy a dime for the phone call. “Here, kid,” Quinn said, and he handed the boy a dollar.

  “Couldn’t we walk there?” the girl asked Quinn once more.

  “Walking is Benny’s department. I only walk as far as elevators.”

  A couple of nights later I went to another wrestling match, this time at the small Mont St. Louis Gym. There wasn’t much of a crowd, but those who did turn up were fierce. There were several fistfights. A fan attempted to break a folding chair over Killer Kowalski’s back. On the whole, though, this was an evening of indifferent performances. Obviously, wrestlers, like actors, need a big, responsive audience. Only Tiger Tomasso, a dedicated performer, put on a good exhibition: spitting, eye-gouging, biting.

  I was lucky enough to meet the T
iger a week later.

  I had asked Olson if, once the wrestlers started to travel on the summer circuit, I could drive with one of them to Trois-Rivières. Olson arranged for Ovile Asselin, a former Mr. Canada, to take me out. Asselin picked me up at four in the afternoon and we drove to a road junction, outside of town, where we were to meet another wrestler, Don Lewin. While we were waiting, two other cars, both Cadillacs, pulled up and out stepped Tiger Tomasso, Eddie Auger, Maurice Lapointe, and three other wrestlers who were on the card that night. I immediately went up to chat with the Tiger.

  Tomasso told me he used to be a deskman in a hotel in Hamilton. All the wrestlers used to stay there, and he began to work out with them. Finally, he went into the game. “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  I was writing an article, I explained, as two pretty girls in shorts strolled past.

  “That’s the only kind of article I’m interested in,” Tomasso said.

  Eventually Lewin, a surly ex-marine, arrived, and he, Asselin, and I drove off together. Lewin, a suspicious type, wouldn’t talk much in my presence. He had performed in Buffalo the previous night and had been driving all day to make the date in Trois-Rivières. He was, understandably, extremely tired. And unfriendly. On arrival, he made it clear that I would have to find another lift back to Montreal.

  There was only a thin crowd at the seedy little arena in the city, and Lewin, excusably, pulled his opponent out of the ring after five minutes of lacklustre wrestling and held him there long enough to be disqualified. Larry Moquin arranged for me to be driven home by a young French Canadian who had taken part in a tag-team match earlier in the evening. His side, the villainous one, had lost.

  The wrestler had taken a bad fall, and on the drive back to Montreal he kept rubbing his back. “Tomorrow,” he said wearily, “I have to go to Hull. I’m working there.”

  “Don’t you guys ever take time off?” I asked.

  He explained that you had to be available when a promoter wanted you; otherwise, you were considered unreliable. “It’s a dangerous profession,” he said. “My insides are all shaken up. You take your life in your hands each time you step in the ring.” He had wrestled for a long time in Florida, where a Puerto Rican fan had once knifed him. “But that’s a good territory. They liked me there. The worst was the West.” Once, he said, he had driven 450 miles each way to make matches in two western cities. Four wrestlers, taking turns at the wheel, had managed the trip there and back within a day. “The worst things are canvas burns. They’re extremely painful and we all get them. Sometimes they last a week, other times a month.” Suppressing a yawn, he added, “I used to sell cars. I could always go back to that. I like meeting the public.”

  November 1960

  11

  Cheap Skates

  In the distant future, after I die before my time, a promising 120-year-old writer, my seminal novel unfinished, I can anticipate my youngest son saying to his son, “I’ll tell you what your grandfather was like. Wonderful, truly wonderful, except for Wednesday and Saturday nights from October to May.”

  “What happened then?”

  “There were hockey games on TV, and if I dared to tiptoe into the living room to inform him, say, I’ve just won a scholarship to Harvard, or I’m getting married tomorrow, or, ‘Hey, congratulations! My wife just gave birth—you’re a grandfather,’ he would glare at me and say, ‘Not now, you fool. We can discuss such trivialities between periods.’”

  My wife will have another story to tell.

  “On New Year’s Eve 1975, when all the other ladies were preparing to go out to dinner parties or dances, dressed in their finest gowns, he took me to the Forum, where I could eat lukewarm hot dogs and watch the Canadiens play the Russians.”

  The quality of play isn’t what it once was; the endless regular season is meaningless. After 840 games, only five of the twenty-one teams in the NHL have been eliminated from the playoffs. I know, I know. But once that first puck is dropped, I’m married to my TV set. Come game time, if one of my daughters is foolish enough to protest that Hamlet, with Olivier, is playing on another channel, I will point out, justifiably, that I know how Hamlet comes out but not how the Montreal Canadiens will fare tonight against the fabled New Jersey Devils.

  In the fall, professional sports schedules overlapping as they do, I watched football, a baseball playoff, and a hockey game all in the same day.

  Bliss.

  Speaking of baseball, Canadian paranoia, never far from the surface, suffered a vintage eruption even as the skies turned wintry, the trees went black and bare, and we were adjusting to the coming hockey season. In a bar where I drink, nobody was surprised when the Toronto Blue Jays lost the first game of their crucial end-of-the-season series with the Yankees. Instead, there was much wagging of knowledgeable heads. “Of course, the Jays are not going to make it,” I was told. “If they did, can you imagine what a disaster it would be for NBC-TV? The fix is in.”

  As we all know, the Blue Jays did take their division title but choked in the playoffs they were favoured to win. Mind you, by failing to appear in and perhaps win a World Series, they did avoid a possible international incident. Obviously had the Blue Jays won the World Series, calls of congratulations to the dugout would have come from both President Reagan and Prime Minister Mulroney. Which one would manager Bobby Cox have put on hold?

  Another problem: Even had the Blue Jays won, after the shouting had died down it would still not have counted as much as it once did to bring home our true Holy Grail, the Stanley Cup. It would only mean that Toronto’s hired hands out of California and Florida had beat somebody else’s mercenaries out of the same sunbelt states. Once, however, it was different, certainly in the grand game of hockey. Once, if the Canadiens won a Stanley Cup, something of a habit in the old days, the players who had turned the trick were either from Montreal or Thurso or Trois-Rivières or Chicoutimi, which is to say they were Quebeckers like the rest of us. They were our team, unlike the players, however splendid, who performed for other dynasties, say the Yankees or the Reds, but were not really of New York or Cincinnati, Pete Rose being the happy exception to that rule.

  Once hockey was ours, its nuances an enigma to most Americans and just about everybody British. When Canadians ran into each other in New York or London, cities rumoured to have other things going for them, we could talk about hockey, our joy, our secret idiom, excluding sniffy superior foreigners, much as my parents used to lapse into Yiddish on a bus when they didn’t want them to know what they were going on about.

  Now all that has changed. Though most Americans are still without puck sense, something red-blooded Canadians are born with, they do support fourteen of the twenty-one teams in the NHL. Where once the Canadiens, as well as lesser teams here, used to comb the northern bush and mining towns for raw talent, today they scout Sweden and Finland, they tempt adolescent Czechs to defect, and—above all—they cover the American colleges. Having watched a number of skilful but timorous Swedes on NHL ice, a sportswriting friend of mine has observed, “I now understand how come Sweden was neutral in the Second World War.” But young Americans do not avoid the corners; they are doing very well indeed here, six of them now regulars on the Montreal Canadiens. They are a new hockey breed—young men who have seen cutlery before, know how to dial long distance, and are capable of saying more to a young lady than “How much?”

  As if that weren’t enough of an intrusion, we are now being asked to suffer an American carpetbagger. That notorious amateur professional, George Plimpton, has had the audacity to surface with a book about our game, Open Net. Picking up this necessarily offensive trifle, I recalled the hero of Walker Percy’s memorable novel The Moviegoer. Only after a Hollywood company had filmed his hometown did it actually seem real to him. Would Plimpton, I wondered, having exhausted the possibilities of baseball, football, golf, and hockey—coming to our game in desperate middle age, as it were—make hockey real or would his cultural imperialist gesture be redeemed (f
or me, at any rate) by a plethora of boners, proving Plimpton out of his league at last?

  There are, it grieves me to report, no boners in Plimpton’s presumptuous study. If it is not the most knowledgeable book I have ever read about the game, it is certainly one of the most engaging. It is so intelligent, charged with such enthusiasm, such fun to read, that I can even forgive Plimpton, who is a fellow GQ contributing writer, for revealing in his final chapter that he once actually addressed the “Junior Achievers” of Edmonton. This, I should explain, is a group of prairie brats so unspeakably pushy as to sell stocks in their little companies and busy themselves with bottom lines and profit margins at an age when they could have been doing much more socially useful things, such as shoplifting or looking up dirty words in the dictionary. However, the trip did afford the intrepid Plimpton an opportunity to go into the nets against the Great Gretzky. Mind you, by this time Plimpton was an experienced net minder, certainly as literate as Ken Dryden, if not quite so adroit between the pipes.

  The core of Plimpton’s entertaining book deals with the post-Orr-and-Esposito Boston Bruins, a team that allowed him to mind the nets occasionally at their training camp. Why, they even let him risk life and limb in an exhibition game against the Philadelphia Flyers, or Broad Street Bullies, as they were then known, an aggregation of thumpers and slashers and goons that included Gary Dornhoefer and Bobby Clarke and Dave “the Hammer” Schultz. Plimpton’s account of his net-minding stint in this game and the teasing in the Boston locker room that led up to it is rendered with considerable panache.

  I am especially grateful to Plimpton for his portrait of Don Cherry, who was then coach of the Bruins. Cherry, whom I had long ago dismissed as insufferably brash, is revealed as a likable and astute observer of the game. He was particularly good on the days when he had to play for the notorious Eddie Shore, a former hockey great, in minor league Springfield. Shore, Cherry confirms, “was the stingiest guy you ever heard of. To keep the light bills down, we had our practices in the semi-darkness…. When it was payroll time, you never knew quite what was going to happen. If the payroll was too high for the week he’d simply fine guys for poor play… though maybe the guy hadn’t been on the ice for a month!” Shore, Cherry quotes, also had “these strange ideas about sex and especially sex and the athlete. Once, when the team was going terrible, he called a meeting for all the players and their wives, and in this little steamy locker room, with the jockstraps hanging from the pegs, he proceeded to tell the wives they were allowing their husbands too much sex. It was affecting their play. ‘Now you just cut that stuff out!’ he yelled at them.”