The eyes, thank God, have not gone vacant yet. Henry Fonda in On Golden Pond, my father when he was nearing 80, you would occasionally see a reflected kind of light in his eyes, but very little from within. Unless you got him annoyed or angry. Then the stokers would report for their shift, and you’d see the start of a small flame. I would deliberately provoke him at times, just to see those flickers, unable to face the fact that there really wasn’t much left.
No, I haven’t gone blank yet. But the other one is tougher, that startled look you see in old people when someone comes into the room, without warning, or somehow their perspective has been even slightly altered. Their eyes flash, almost in pure terror, and then the look subsides. That’s the one that scares me. I say to my redheaded wife, “You’ll tell me, won’t you, if my eyes get crazy and scared for no reason?” Yes. I’ll tell you, she says, but I wonder. The thought terrifies me, the dimming of the flame, the eyes that gradually pick up that glaze.
So far they’re just the eyes of someone looking for an excuse. To get angry or to tap a never-ending vein of hilarity, which, really, is the way to keep the party going, isn’t it? As the immediacy of old age reaches out and takes hold, it seems like the middle ground between anger and hilarity keeps shrinking. Some say that it didn’t occupy much space to begin with.
Nothing especially pleasant is revealed by the mirror, but nothing really startling, either. Hair and mustache in correct formation, ears appearing slightly larger, but doesn’t that always happen as you get older? Teeth reasonably in place, except for a front one that was evicted many an autumn ago on some gridiron I don’t even recall … kicked, punched, otherwise forcibly removed, who can remember? Usual scars reflecting many years in self-destructive sports, a long one straddling the left cheekbone that becomes more apparent during summer tanning. Occasionally I’m asked about it.
“A dueling scar,” I say, repeating a line that has yet to draw a laugh. Actually it was the gift of a fat-assed lummox of a guard named Tom Burbank, who tripped over me and fell, his football shoe catching me under the eye, in a 1957 scrimmage on the WACOM (Western Area Command) Rhinos’ field in Vogelweh, Germany. I remember the German doctors having an awful time getting the contact lens out. I haven’t been able to wear one in that eye since.
Pencil scar running across the center of my nose. It’s in an odd place. Usually your helmet gouges a permanent one higher up, but this was the result of the last break, which for some reason occurred in a more southerly region. The best picture ever taken of me was on the day after, showing both eyes blackened and the nose squashed flat against my face, which accurately reflected my outlook on life at the time.
Finally the chin, and the region beneath it, which can wreak such havoc among old people, which can produce such grotesqueries as the swollen orb of flesh, the fat bloop euphemistically called a double chin, or the horrible, stringy, cock a doddle doo of the emaciated throat. Long ago I recognized the fact that the neck was sacred, at first in deference to a Jack Dempsey quote I once read in Boys Life magazine that he always made sure he had a strong neck, so he could take a punch, and then, carrying through on an exercise I had begun at 15 to keep the muscles toned. Later it was designed to forestall the fat bloop or the Red Rooster Come Over Syndrome.
It was the same exercise through the years. Lie on a bench, first on my back, then my stomach, with my head hanging over the edge, put a towel on the back of my head, or my forehead, hold a weight on it — 30 pounds when I first started, gradually increasing to 50 — and do three sets of 15 raises each way. It only began to draw notice in my 60s, when I was going through my health club phase, and was managing to keep the underchin atrocities at bay. Invariably some Samaritan would wait till I was finished and then politely inform me that I was risking permanent infirmity.
“Look, I’m an orthopedist (or a neurologist, or chiropractor or psychopath) and I can tell you that what you’re doing is extremely dangerous, extremely so,” and so forth. Recognizing his kind intentions, I wouldn’t inform him that I’d been doing the exercise for, roughly, 50 years.
But a woman, whom I found out was French, evidently had been watching me for a few weeks because one day she came over and said, “You know, in France we have a name for a person like you. We call him a centrique.” Centrique, eccentric, I’d presume. That’s been the path, all right, from centrique to freaque. My life story.
Have I really reached 74, or is it some kind of terrifying joke? In my head, it’s all the same. Will I wake up tomorrow and find myself back in high school, waiting for the lunch hour break so I can play bottle cap hockey with Arnie Weinberg or Larry Van in the schoolyard?
When you’re 74 you look for edges. Look at what I have and you don’t! At least 50 more times in your lifetime, you will get something in your eye and you won’t be able to remove it for hours, even days. That will happen to me only three or four more times. There will be at least 200 times when you will lose something you “just had a minute ago.” You will be delayed; you will be late to where you’re going. On at least 20 of those occasions, you will never find it. Never. For me? Ten more. Fifteen, tops. I could go on. The hundreds and hundreds of little indignities, all the busted straights and flushes God will deal you. Not me, folks. I’ve seen them already. I know when they’re coming, when to fold my hand. Well, most of the time.
I am a chart freak. Everything must be charted and counted. Number of steps from ticket counter to plane in various airports, number of single shots fired in a movie, before the advent of automatic weapons, time it takes to sing or play the national anthem in various venues, top 10 football games seen, top 20 linebackers, 40 running backs. Top 10 incidents of pain encountered. (Makes it hurt less at the time. Try it, you’ll see.) And I have charted the decades of my life, with a capsule on each.
When I was nine I looked upon my 10th birthday as a gateway to what people kept calling the “teenage years.” I didn’t really understand what made them so special, but I was always seeing features labeled “Teen Topics,” “Tips for Teens,” etc. In my mind I would shoot through ages 10 and 11 without even thinking about them. A teenager, gosh. Someday.
No big deal about my 20th birthday. It came and went. The goal was 21. Legal drinking age in many states, not New York, where I grew up, but in other places where it was kind of a big deal. Voting age. Plus lots of, uh, other things that somehow got you out of the class of “minor,” and into major … or maybe that was 18. Not really sure. College dropout at the time, going to work, then back to school. Too many issues whirling around to worry.
Thirty was a big one. The worst. Goodbye youth. I checked major league and NFL rosters to see how many 30-year-olds they had. The more the team had, the harder I’d root for it. I despised those with only a handful. “Well, he’s 30 now. Don’t know how much longer he can carry the ball and keep taking those hits.” Words that would fill me with anger, and terror.
“What the hell, 30 isn’t old,” I’d say, and people would stare at me. Oh, God.
Forty was a breeze because for the last two years I had adopted the simple expedient of telling people I was 40, when my age was requested. I wasn’t going to be caught again, as I was a decade earlier. I had braced myself for the fateful day, and when it finally came, it slipped by unnoticed.
The lying started at 50. It was just too nasty a thing to admit to. What the hell, I was still physically active. I could beat my son at tennis, at one-on-one hoops. OK, so he was only 11, but I could still move around all right. Except for that one time he challenged me to a sprint at 50 yards, and early on I realized that if I were to take one more aggressive step, the left hamstring was going to go. Kaboing! I just knew it. Well, sprinting’s out, but the other stuff is still OK. So who needs to know I’m 50, right? RIGHT? Why are you turning away? They’ll believe it if I tell them I’m 43 or 45. I mean I don’t feel 50.
At 60 I sat down to write a piece called “Life at 60.” B
ut my finger hit a typo, and it came out 50. The number 60 was so terrible I just couldn’t type it. Sixty years old, 60. I shook my head to clear away the idea of it. It wouldn’t go away. The definitive break between middle and old age. People retired at 60. Not me. I had been divorced for a couple of years, I was paying off four assorted loans. Stop working? Not today, friends.
At the class reunions, I’d look at my schoolmates to see who looked older than me, younger. I wasn’t sure because I didn’t want to imagine what I looked like. Howard Slusher, the sports agent, had told me that his wife had “just run away with her 60-year-old golf instructor.” We both shuddered.
I thought the same way I did when I was in college. I mean I still do, but I evaluated people the same way, hated the phonies, liked the same foods, the same movies. OK, so sometimes when I got up in the morning, I encountered strange aches that never existed, but that’s not old age, is it? IS IT? And most of them eventually went away anyway. Sixty was an assassin that had hidden behind the door in a dark room. It was an outlaw that had ambushed me on a rocky trail. A blindsider. I never saw the hit coming, maybe because it had been such a gradual thing.
And then there was the matter of sex. For the most part, sex at 60 was a Three Stooges movie. I wouldn’t have minded watching it. I just don’t want to be in it. The cliché of old roue with young tootsie? Please. How about women my own age? I quote the words the famous winemaker, Andre Tchelistcheff, once said, and, of course, he was talking about women a bit older, but I still recalled his statement: “Tasting an old wine is like making love to an old woman. It’s possible. It might even be enjoyable. But it requires a great deal of imagination.”
Seventy was odd and indescribable. At the reunions I no longer sought comparison with my classmates. I rooted for them. God, look how youthful he looks. Isn’t it wonderful? Joe Kutchukian, the tennis player, for instance. Hair still dark, a real bounce to his walk. Then he died suddenly. News of it buckled my knees. Who had ever thought about the hand of death? But all of the sudden they started dying. And then you felt the breeze of it yourself … angina pectoris, a procedure followed by a staph infection that blew my femoral artery, ruptured it clean. What was it that Manolete, the bullfighter, died of? Horn wound to the femoral, right? He went into shock. Memo to self. Do not, repeat, not go into shock. Jammed a towel over it, tight, held it down with my elbow and drove my Honda with the other hand, eight miles to Morristown Memorial and the emergency room. Should I run this red light? Would be just like one of those Jersey cops: “I don’t care what’s wrong with you.”
Next day I asked the intern, Charlie Willekes, who’d played basketball at Iowa, or maybe it was Iowa State, “How much longer did I have?”
“About eight minutes,” he said.
When my daughter heard about it, she asked me, “Were you scared?” I had to think it through very carefully. Scared? Not really. Annoyed, actually. Annoyed that I’d get blood on the rug downstairs, that the towel would slip off in the car. A logistic problem more than anything. I don’t think she believed me.
That’s what you do when you’re 70. You tell people about your ailments, just the things no one wants to hear, and which I’d sworn I’d never mention. And I won’t. No more … except for that one.
But by the time I was 70, sunshine had entered my life — in the form of a flaming redhead from Arizona 20 years my junior, Linda Bailey. Up there in his office, God had opened his file cabinet and found my folder and said, “What do you say? Let’s give the old turtle a break.” And there she was. The Flaming Redhead is how she appears in my regular column on the Sports Illustrated website, a constant governor on the engine that wants to take me to pretense and hypocrisy and high blown invention, a welcome voice of sanity. I get mail from those who say they enjoy our relationship that finds its way into print, our obvious affection, especially when it involves a cranky old dog such as myself, and the cynic in me says that if I were reading this in another context, I’d call for an all aboard the Hallmark Express. But at this stage in life, what it has done has been to rub the edges off the bitterness, that at one time I felt would cripple me, and replace it with someone with whom to share the annoyances, and yes, the high hilarity, of life’s looniness.
And the craziness keeps growing doesn’t it, gathering steam? Language has become crazy. When did they start calling short people height deprived, and poor people financially deprived? When did nouns invade the stronghold of verbs and shell them into submission? Obsoleting, texting, liaising, impacting. When did airline personnel numb you with their linguistic bludgeoning?
“Why don’t you talk right?” I ask the stewardess, excuse me, the flight attendant.
Make that the air comfort coordinator.
“What do you mean?”
“Why do flights terminate instead of end? Why do people de-plane? Do they plane? Why are lights always illuminated instead of lighted? Or just lit?”
“Because it sounds better.”
“Do you go home and tell your husband, ‘Honey, please illuminate the light?’”
“I’m not married.”
The Flaming Redhead whispers to me, “See that, you can’t win.”
When the flight has landed, I tell the stewardess, “You know something? I didn’t put my tray table up for the landing.” The look is a look of abject horror.
“You DIDN’T?”
“No, I ensured that it was in an upright position.”
She looks toward the cockpit for help, make that for assistance, for anyone who can assist her in dealing with this obvious freak, uh, freaque. It is too late. People are already starting to file out.
The Redhead helps me get through “the world’s madness,” to quote the words of poor Kid McCoy, the former middleweight champ, who killed himself with a bullet to the head. She is a sounding board for its hilarity. Then the men with the wrecking ball came and destroyed some of the most beautiful things in my particular province, which happens to be language. The beauty and grace of the King James version of the Bible, for instance, some of the most memorable phrases in the English tongue, have been edited down, dumbed down actually, by these tin-eared butchers. The late author, Isaac Bashevis Singer, put it best.
“I received a wonderful gift the other day. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Edited and Improved Upon by a Man Named Horowitz.”
Ah, but I’m running far afield, way off the track, which is what I’m afraid this memoir has in store for you. It is constructed roughly along the lines of my favorite sports memoir, Farewell to Sport by Paul Gallico, beginning with a chapter bearing the same title, out of respect: Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory. I will bring you into my world, of course, through almost 50 years of covering the vast spectrum of sports at every level, from the rock strewn high school fields of metropolitan New Jersey to five summer Olympics and 40 Super Bowls, and I’ll go back further, to my own days as a competitor.
3. Boxing Ernest Hemingway
They used to put me in the ring with Ernest Hemingway because we were roughly the same size, even though I was 15, and then 16, at the time. He was a little shorter than me. I stood 6-1 1/2, which was as tall as I’d ever get, and weighed 220, which, unfortunately, is only a streamlined memory now. I was the heaviest kid on my high school football team by 30 pounds (you have to remember this was 1948-49) and I had about five pounds on Hemingway. I think this was one of the reasons he liked to get in the ring with me; you’d have thought he’d have been annoyed at the idea of George Brown, who owned the gym, sticking him in there with a young punk, but once I heard him tell Brown, “I like to get in there with that kid. He’s big and he can take a punch and he doesn’t complain.”
I wanted to be a fighter. Other kids read about famous aviators and ballplayers, I read about Sullivan and Jake Kilrain and the famous bare-knuckle fighters, Bendigo and Mendoza and the great Heenan-Sayers match and how the British gentry would wager on firs
t blood, “first to show the scarlet.” My best friend in high school, Paul Lansky, shared my passion. Paulie was a lightweight with great savvy and ring awareness, “generalship,” they used to call it. Actually he did quite well in the ring, captain of the West Point team, when boxing was a collegiate sport. Then he had the sense to quit. I hung around for a while, putting together an unimpressive record in amateur and collegiate bouts and a final one in the army, never really getting myself in good enough shape but always able to take a punch — too many of them, actually.
“You want to go to my gym downtown to train?” He said one day in school. Oh my God, training in a real gym in downtown New York. It was a long subway ride away … our high school was in the upper reaches of the Bronx, where street numbers ran in the 240s. Hilltoppers from the Horace Mann, that was us. But who cared about a long ride after school? A gym, man, with actual fighters and everything.
I don’t know how Paulie got connected with George Brown’s. It was most likely through his father, who was part of the Manhattan celebrity whirl … yes, you’ve heard of his father, whose first name was Meyer. Once in a while, we’d catch a ride in his car down to the gym. He was friendly, he and Paulie had a loose, easy relationship. The kids in school talked about the fact that he was somehow connected with gambling, and there was mention of him hopping back and forth from Miami to Havana to a place in Nevada called Las Vegas. That’s all I knew. I don’t remember seeing anything about him in the papers in those days. Once I asked Paulie if his father really was into some kind of gambling, and he mentioned that he was involved with the Wurlitzer Company that made jukeboxes. It didn’t seem very interesting to me. His dad once seemed interested when he asked me what my father did and I told him he was a union leader.
“What union?” he said. “ILGWU, the Garment Workers,” I said. He nodded and smiled. “A fine union,” he said. “They really look after their workers there.”
Dr. Z Page 5
