“Is that Scheidemann out there?” he said, and I mumbled a “No, sir,” and moved away from him, down the sidelines, trying to attract Scheidemann’s attention in a combination stage whisper and shout … “Carson! Carson!” Finally he noticed me. I pointed to the assistant D of A. Carson took one look and made his exit, holding one hand over his face, like a Mafioso on his way to arraignment. The kickoff was delayed because the guys on the unit were laughing so hard.
Oh we had fun, all right. That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? At one point, Jack Lauterborn, one of our tackles, whom I happened to be drinking beer with at the West End the night before, showed signs of fatigue, and I pulled him out of the game.
“Put me back in,” he said. “There’s a prick I gotta get even with.”
“Be my guest,” I said and sent him back in for the next play. And I watched him as he wound up and delivered a huge, bolo right hand punch to the guy opposite him. Tweet! Whistles everywhere. A blizzard of flags. The ref started marking off the 15 yards. But he hadn’t announced the penalty to our bench, and I liked to put on a sideline show for the kids anyway, so I started yelling, “The penalty, ref! What’s the call?”
He was one of those old-time ECAC officials. He kept walking, never turned to the bench but announced in an authoritative Boston accent, “Fifteen yards. Intent to main and disfigyah!” Sure, we all broke up again, myself included. We had a hell of a time that year.
My own dealings with officials have been interesting. The NFL likes to wrap them in cellophane. You can interview the president or the pope but not an NFL official. I have been arguing for more than 40 years, ever since I started covering pro football, to make them available to the press. Maybe Roger Goodell will change the protocol … he’s young and seemingly forward-thinking … but so far it hasn’t happened. And I’m not as revolutionary about it as I used to be.
The system that was put in by Pete Rozelle involved one designated pool reporter to forward the press questions to the referee or the official involved and then forward it back to the press. The weakness of the system, from our standpoint, is that the pool reporter is a writer who’s working the game, and he has to worry about his own story and quotes, in addition to getting to the officials. Delay is deadly in the postgame hurly-burly, which, of course, is known to the officials and acted upon accordingly.
Well, in 1973, I was covering a Jets-Bills game in Shea Stadium. The game hinged on a key pass interference penalty on Burgess Owens, a rookie defensive back for the Jets. It was an awful penalty, actually a blown call on a foul that never had taken place. Dick Creed, a first-year back judge, made the call. Our pool reporter was Bob Kurland from The Bergen (N.J.) Evening Record, a nice little guy, kind of mousy, but a decent person. We pumped him full of fire and brimstone. “Talk to the guy who made the call,” we told him. “Find out whether he was in position to see the play,” etc.
Pat Haggerty, a nasty, overbearing old warhorse, was the referee. He approached Kurland outside the officials’ room and turned on a tape recorder. Val Pinchbeck from the league office was on Kurland’s other side, running a tape machine of his own.
“The official ruled that the defender had made contact with the receiver in such a manner as to prohibit him from …” blah blah blah, Haggerty intoned into his recorder.
“Can I talk to the official?” Kurland asked him.
“You’ve got your statement, now get the hell out of here!” Haggerty yelled at him. A few years ago Haggerty’s name came up for possible Hall of Fame induction. It never got very far. I told the Hall of Fame people that the only way he’d ever get in would be if I were dead or fired as a selector.
Kurland reported his information to us as we were writing our stories. Everyone jumped him. “Waddya mean, you didn’t talk to the official?” etc. Poor guy, he got hammered from both ends. I was still fuming hours later, when I drove down to the Post to write my game piece. We were an evening paper, which meant practically unlimited deadlines. Damn lying sons of bitches. They knew they blew it.
I turned to the officials page in the NFL yearbook. Richard Creed, back judge, first year, Poland, Ohio. I looked at my watch. Would he have had time to fly home already? Maybe. I dialed Ohio information. His number was listed. I called it. He had just gotten home.
“Dick,” I said, “this is Dick Maxwell from the league office.”
“Yeah, Dick, what is it?” His voice sounded shaky.
“There’s gonna be a lot of flak about the interference call,” I said. “You’d better tell me what happened.”
“Hell, I was screened from the play, but it was my call,” he said. “I didn’t really see it. I looked around for help. It was a veteran crew, Pat Haggerty, Tony Veteri, that bunch. They all looked the other way. I had dropped the flag. I had to call something …”
“OK, look,” I said. “If anyone else calls you … any writer or someone like that, just refer it to the league office, OK?” He said OK and hung up.
I called Art McNally, the supervisor of officials, who lived outside Pennsylvania, a good guy who happened to be working within a system, a person I could talk to. I related the previous conversation.
“You did WHAT?” he said.
“Look,” I told him, “if I wanted to be a prick, I could have the whole back page of the Post, with a nice red, banner headline, I DIDN’T SEE IT — NFL OFFICIAL. That’s how easy it is. Why the hell don’t you guys loosen it up and let us talk to these officials?”
Well, I never used the Creed stuff, obviously. And the league people never changed their system. The change they did make, however, was to remove the officials’ home addresses from their guide.
Last year someone sent me this question for my SI.com mailbag column: “What’s the worst call you ever saw on the football field?” I couldn’t answer it, not exactly, but I mentioned the worst call you saw on any field. Our rugby club, the Columbia RFC, was playing at West Point for first place in our division. I had enjoyed visiting there, particularly when my best friend, Paul Lansky, was a cadet, the tradition, the beauty of the place. But what I learned through the years was that if you were up there for any kind of athletic competition, be ready for a royal screwing. No site was as bad. After a while the whole traditional legacy … the Corps, the Long Grey Line, Benny Havens O, paled in comparison to what they did to you.
It was a hot day for the rugby game. We trailed by a couple of points. The game was almost over. Then Pat Moran, our fullback, kicked ahead, and the ball hit one of the uprights, boink! And bounced straight back and Tommy Haggerty, our open side winger who had been an all-Ivy halfback and a rookie in the Giants camp, caught it in full flight and ran it in for the score. Tweet! Whistle. Game’s over. We cheered and hoisted Haggy onto our shoulders. The West Point guys hung their heads and slouched off the field. It was up to the referee, a big fat guy in white pantaloon type things, or knickers like old-time golfers wore … I’ll never forget him … he still haunts my dreams … to announce the score. He was studying his sheet, and I was getting a real queasy feeling in my stomach.
“Final score,” he announced. “Columbia 25, West Point 27.” What? No waaaait just one minute, podnah. I was on him like a flash. I mean, I’d been in college, off and on, for almost seven years. One thing I knew how to do was add.
“Excuse me, sir, your honor, your worship, can we just go over the scoring for a minute?”
He turned his back on me. “I’ve announced the score,” he said and began to walk off.
“Take it easy, Zim,” said our captain, Dick Donelli. “Take it easy? Take it easy! You dumbshits! He’s stealing the game from us.” Past tense it, please. Stole the game from us.
Later in our party, the other team, a rugby tradition, in a woodland spot called The Grove, a couple of the cadets I was drinking with just shook their heads. “I’ve seen some bad ones up here,” one of them said, “but this was the worst.”<
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I had been through with serious rugby for a few years, into my 40s I would guess, when I got a call from Billy Campbell, Ballsie we called him, who’d been my Columbia and Old Blue RFC teammate for many years. Ballsie later would go out to Silicon Valley and make a fortune, starting his own computer company called Claris, but those days he was Columbia’s head football coach. He said the college was trying to drum up interest in the rugby program, and they thought it would be a rather catchy idea to bring back alumni who might be known in the sporting world as guest competitors for one of their games.
“I’ll do it if you will,” Billy told me. Oh yeah, fine for him. He was still an avid jogger, and I just knew he did a full workout program with weights and things. As for me, I wouldn’t lift anything heavier than a fork, but what the hell? Yeah, I’ll do it.
The college was playing the Cornell Medical School at Baker Field. As I was warming up, my graying hair and ample belly drew odd looks from the kids I would be playing alongside. I mean, was this a freak show, or what? I thought it through. What can I do to impress these kids? There must be something. I could think of only one thing. Start a fight.
So the game started, and I began checking the opposition for likely candidates. Early in the contest, I’d found my man, a short stocky roughneck who would cruise the edge of the loose scrums, the loose rucks, dart in and pop someone and then beat it. A sneak, in other words. Perfect. So I waited, and as he was breaking out of the next melee, I delivered my cobblestone right. Unfortunately, he’d been over the course before and he saw it coming and ducked his head. All I’d done was create an awareness in him that he was not liked and bruised my hand severely, bouncing it off the top of his rock head.
He came up swinging, naturally, and people jumped in and broke it up, and the referee shouted,
“You! You’re off the field!” And who was he shouting at and throwing out of the game? Why, the Cornell guy, of course. And out went sluggo, protesting mightily, which just ruined things beautifully for his sweet patootie date, who’d driven all the way down from Ithaca for the game.
Just to show him we were all God’s children, I offered him my hand afterward. “Hey, no hard feelings, OK?” To his credit, he turned his back and walked away. He should have spit in my lying, hypocritical face. Ah, Fra Diavolo!
I’ve known some boxing referees, colorful characters for the most part. Jimmy Devlin had been a promising lightweight in Ireland. When he retired he came to New York and worked at first as an equipment man at George Brown’s Gym on 57th St., the place where Ernest Hemingway worked out. Once in a while, Jimmy would spar with the customers, just exercise. I got to know him pretty well. Eventually he became a well-known ref, working the fights in the clubs around New York. A good storyteller, but not as good as Arthur Mercante was.
I had the pleasure of sitting next to Mercante, who was considered at the time the dean of boxing referees, having worked more than 120 title fights, including the first Ali-Frazier. This was at a New York University swim team dinner, of all places. Don’t ask me what I was doing there because I don’t remember, but Mercante was present because he was a distinguished alumnus and former swimmer for the Violets. He showed up a bit late, huffing and puffing a little. I asked him what was up.
“I’ve just seen the greatest fight I’ve ever seen in my life,” he said. I figured he’d worked something in St. Nick’s or Sunnyside Gardens in Queens or some other place. I asked him where it was and he said, “Driving east on 59th St., heading for the monument across the street from the Plaza.
“There’s a cab going side by side with a panel truck, and the cabbie and the guys in the truck are yelling at each other. And then they stop for the light at 5th Ave., and three guys jump out of the panel truck and run over to the cab driver’s side. They’re in sweatshirts, kind of rough looking, you know, street fighter types.
“So they open the door and start pulling the cabbie out, and he just keeps coming out, and coming out, and it’s the biggest, blackest guy I’ve ever seen in my life. Before he’s even all the way out, he pops one of them and put him on the ground. He rolls a few feet, and his head gets stuck under the front wheel of a Cadillac waiting for the light, and then the light changes, and a few people who are watching yell, ‘No! Don’t go! There’s a guy under there!’ So the Caddy driver gets out, and they pull the guy free, and by now the cabbie has decked the second one.
“The third one runs away. Both the cab and the truck are unattended and blocking traffic, and there’s this big honking thing going on, but a crowd has formed, and they’re watching the cabbie chase this guy around the monument. And then he catches him. The guy covers up his head with his elbows, and the cabbie is flailing away … he’s a little tired by now … and then the police arrive.
“They grab the cabbie, and the crowd yells, ‘No! Not him! The others started it!’ This one cop looks kind of puzzled. ‘Do you want to press charges?’ he asks the cab driver.
“‘No,’ says the cabbie. “I’ve had my pleasures.’
“How’s that for a story?” Arthur asks me. “Sensational,” I tell him. The speeches have started, but neither of us is paying attention. Our stuff is much more interesting.
“What’s the best fight you’ve ever seen?” Mercante asks me. I had to think it through, but then a real gem popped into my head. I told him I didn’t know if it was the best, but it was the most interesting. “Let’s hear it?” Mercante says.
I was working in Sacramento, my first newspaper job. My father had come out to San Francisco and I was meeting him for dinner. I had to walk through the financial district to get to the restaurant and somewhere near Montgomery Street I saw a small crowd gathered. Naturally, I stopped to look. A man and a woman were giving a loud, ugly argument. She seemed drunk and very noisy. He was well dressed in a dark business suit, good looking in a bland sort of way, mid to late-30s maybe, average height and weight.
“Will you come on? Can we go? People are looking at us,” he was saying, quietly but firmly.
“I don’t give a damn! I’m not going anywhere!” she was yelling. This went on for a short time, and finally someone stepped out of the crowd, a big guy, a Man-Around-the-House type.
“Why don’t you leave the lady alone?” he said.
“Why don’t you mind your own business?” he was told.
“Look, pal,” the intruder said and put his hand on the man’s shoulder. I swear, it happened so fast that, literally, I didn’t see it. Once I read a description of a piranha striking at a piece of meat, and the writer said it moved so fast that he only saw it in its original place and then gone, never in the process of getting there. That’s what the punch must have been like. I saw the hand on the shoulder, then the guy on the ground, little in between.
The crowd backed off a little at this. “Look what you’ve done, just look what you’ve done!” the woman was yelling drunkenly. His eyes were gleaming now. “Let’s just get out of here, let’s just go,” he said through clenched teeth. He took her arm.
“Let go of her,” said a new arrival, stepping forward, and this time I saw the punch, or at least the end of it, because I was expecting it. It was pure lightning and it landed somewhere around the throat, and the guy went right down, just as quickly as the first one had. And that did it. Something had broken, and now the fighting spirit of that bland looking guy in the business suit was aroused, his blood lust, and he turned on the crowd savagely, and yelled, “OK, who’s next? Come on, who’s next?” Only once in my life had I seen a crowd part that fast, and that was in the Bronx Zoo when a lion let go this long, steaming piss into the crowd outside his cage. It was the same parting of the Red Sea.
He turned to the woman. “Let’s go,” he said.
“OK,” she said, calmly, and away they walked. I turned to the guy next to me. “Did I really see this or was it a dream?” I said. “I’m wondering, myself,” he said.
; Well, it started as a chapter on officials, on authority figures, and it ended up with Greatest Fights of the Century. Sorry, but sometimes a twisted path gets you to the most interesting places.
14. National Anthem
Singing the Blues
This column appeared on SI.com on Feb. 26, 2004.
Whilst, snug in their clubroom,
They jovially twine
The Myrtle of Venus
With Bachus’ Vine.
Does it mean anything to you, this verse? Well, it’s obviously about a clubby set indulging, if you cut through the classical references, in the combined pleasures of fornicating and drinking.
This was the chorus of one of six verses of the club’s song, the club being the Anacreon Society, which flourished among young Londoners toward the end of the 18th Century. The melody might be familiar to you if you substitute for the words above, the following:
Oh Say does that Star-Spangled
Banner yet wave
Oer the land of the free,
And the home of the brave.
That’s right, the song is “To Anacreon in Heaven,” a paean to indulgence, and the chaps singing it were just the young Britons who, if the mood seized them, would buy a commission and venture across the seas to command a brigade or a battalion against General Washington’s Colonial Army in revolt. And that is the tune that is the basis for our national anthem. Ironic, huh? Our most cherished song a clubroom ditty for young blades from a nation at war with us.
I think I’ve mentioned before that I time the national anthem before every football game. And every other sporting event. Actually, I time it every time I hear it. If you ask me why, then you’ll be like some other people in the press box who have annoyed me through the years with that question. It’s so obvious that I don’t feel compelled to give them any answer at all, much less a sensible one.
Dr. Z Page 34
