It was clear.
“We appreciate your faith in us, sir,” said George.
We immediately went to Allen’s to celebrate our good fortune of being able to remain in school. George lifted his first glass of beer to mine.
“To Dean Tate,” he said.
“A fair man,” I answered.
“To FarmHouse fraternity,” said George.
“Cock-a-doodle-doo,” I answered him.
“To our butts,” toasted George.
“To our butts,” I toasted back.
I suppose what has happened to discipline and authority these days is that most everybody has a lot more control over his or her own butt than they used to. But I’m not so certain that’s all for the better.
There have been many times, even recently, when I wished somebody would take charge of mine again, if for no other reason than to render the much-needed service of pointing out to me when I was about to put it on exhibition.
12
Women Don’t Wear Jocks
THE CURRENT PERIOD in which we’re living is probably the worst time in history to be a man. Just my luck. We had it absolutely made for thousands of years. Cave men did a little hunting now and then, but that was about it, and they ruled their women and their roosts with clubs. If the wife, or whatever cave men called their mates in those days, got a little out of hand, a gentle tap on the head did wonders in readjusting her attitude.
Later, when men became more civilized and learned how much fun it was to fight wars, they all got together on horseback and went and sacked other countries. They raped and pillaged and generally had high times.
Throughout most of history, men stuck together and did manly things and talked about manly things. In an attempt to sustain their elite and separate status over women, they formed male-only clubs, such as the Jaycees. The Supreme Court ruled recently that the Jaycees no longer can exclude women from their membership; that’s an indication of how much slippage there has been in the area of male domination.
Some men today feel as though they should apologize for their fathers’ attitudes toward women, and many of us have been made to feel woefully inadequate in the face of the rising force of feminism, which seems dedicated to telling men everything that is unacceptable about us.
The litany of our alleged failures is long.
Women are quick to inform us that we are lousy in bed and that we don’t know how to satisfy them sexually. There is a feminist joke which says it all. A feminist asks a man, “What does a woman say when she has been totally and completely and incredibly satisfied sexually?”
The man walks into her little trap and answers politely, so he won’t spoil her joke, “I don’t know.”
“I didn’t think you would,” returns the feminist, and once again the man is made to feel like a fool.
Think of all the other complaints today’s women have with men: We work too hard, we’re too ambitious, we drink too much, we aren’t sensitive enough, and we care more about watching a stupid ball game on television than we do about spending “quality time” (a new eighties term) with them. We sexually harass women in the work environment (formerly known as the “office”), we choose which woman is to be promoted within the firm based on breast size rather than professional ability (That made sense for several hundred years. It’s difficult to change overnight), and we refuse to pay women salaries equal to those men get for doing the same job — which isn’t fair, of course, but it also isn’t fair that men have to shave before they go to work every day, and women don’t.
Not only have the Jaycees lost their ability to exclude women, but it is almost impossible to keep women out of any location formerly reserved for men only. (Location, nothing! Women are even wearing men’s underwear these days, and one smart-aleck feminist was quoted as saying, “It’s only fair. Men have been trying to get in ours for years,” which is a really blatant sexist remark if you think about it. I’m glad I don’t have to resort to such a low grade of humor to get my points across.)
I am a former sportswriter. When I was covering sports, all press box tickets included the warning, “No women allowed in press box.”
This wasn’t because sportswriters didn’t want women around when they were busy covering ball games; it was because the people who ran the press boxes knew that sportswriters in general are people who never let work get in the way of a good time. Were women not excluded from the press boxes, there wouldn’t be room for everybody to sit down, what with all the writers and the cocktail waitresses they had met the night before.
Excluding women from the press box is against all sorts of laws these days, however, so even if a male writer did bring a cocktail waitress to the game with him, she probably would have to stand, because all the extra seats have been taken up by female sportswriters.
I must make another confession here. I’m certain there are many females eminently qualified to cover and report on sporting events, but I still would rather read a male’s report, because I am not convinced, and never will be convinced, that women fully understand the subtleties and nuances of certain athletic events.
Okay, so allow women to cover tennis matches. Tennis is a very simple game. The person who hits the last winning shot wins the match. Professional tennis players like John McEnroe and Chris Evert are always complaining that the press is more interested in their private lives than in their tennis. That’s because tennis, although loads of fun to play (I’m an incurable participant in the sport, myself. I have no talent for the game, but playing all afternoon certainly makes the evening beer taste better), is not that interesting to read about. I had much rather know why Chris dumped John than why she won’t change her tactics and play serve-and-volley against Martina Navratilova. I already know why she won’t come to the net against Martina: She’s afraid that big ol’ girl will knock her head off with a topspin forehand.
So it’s okay with me if women cover tennis, and they can cover golf, too. If tennis is boring to read about, golf is a sleeping pill. Women can also report on other sports that encourage dozing, such as marathon races, bowling, swimming, gymnastics, ice skating, track, field, and soccer. In fact, women can even cover pro basketball and it won’t bother me, because pro basketball is simple, too. The team with the biggest black man usually wins ... unless it happens to be the Boston Celtics, who have Larry Bird (the only white man in the last twenty years who doesn’t suffer from the dreaded “white man’s disease,” which causes slowness afoot and the inability to jump very high).
What I strongly object to is women covering football and baseball, because they’ve never played either sport. Men are born with the innate ability to understand the blitz in football and the hit-and-run in baseball. Women may learn the basics of these sports, but I daresay few really watch anything more than how cute the football players’ butts look in those tight pants, or how baseball players spend an inordinate amount of time scratching their privates and adjusting certain necessary athletic equipment that’s worn under the uniform.
In fact, that may be the crux of the problem: Women cannot achieve credibility as sports reporters with men because we know they’ve never worn a jock strap. And if they have, I don’t want to read an inside look at the problems of the Atlanta Braves’ pitching staff written by some woman who obviously has problems of her own.
If women winning their way into press boxes wasn’t enough (and it wasn’t), women later insisted that they also be allowed to go into the locker rooms in order to hear the pearls of wisdom that players dispatch to the press following the games. I speak from authority here, because for many years it was my job to go into dressing rooms and to be the recipient of these pearls.
Players say things like: “Well, you know, I, you know, caught the, you know, ball, and then, you know, I ran, you know, just as fast, you know, as I, you know, could, and I, you know, would like to, you know, give, you know, God the credit, you know, for, you know, making me, you know, a, you know, rich superstar.”
&nbs
p; While the players are, you know, treating the press to these marvelous exhibitions of their ability to express themselves, you know, they normally are quite naked. I’m not certain what it is about ball players, but they like to sit around naked a lot, dangling their participles at whomever happens by to speak with them.
When women first attempted to enter players’ locker rooms, authorities tried to block them. But a court order here and a court order there, and suddenly post-game dressing rooms, with the players sitting in front of their lockers and all sorts of women running around with notepads, looked like a Saturday afternoon flea market.
When women no longer could be kept out of dressing rooms, most players were forced to put on bathrobes. I have noticed over the past few years that athletes do not seem nearly as dedicated and don’t hustle and give their all as much as they once did. This could be due to the fact that they no longer can look forward to sitting around naked after games.
“I mean, you know, before these, you know, broads started, you know, coming in here, you know, asking a lot of, you know, questions, and looking, you know, at us like we were, you know, just big hunks of, you know, meat, we could, you know, relax after the, you know, game. Man, we could, you know, sit here without no, you know, clothes on, and sort of, you know, mellow out and, you know, think about next year’s, you know, contract. You know what I mean?”
I know exactly what they mean. Men enjoy and relish the companionship of other men. They simply need to be off with other men occasionally, with no women around, so they can feel comfortable expressing their thoughts and frustrations and can pass gas without having to apologize for it. (Incidentally, that’s how the Jaycees originally grew to be such a large and popular organization. I think women are going to be terribly disappointed when they join the Jaycees and find out that it was nothing more than a bunch of guys getting together once a week to have some lunch and talk about raising money for charities and passing gas in peace.)
Men learn some of the most important lessons in life from hanging around with other men. Let’s take baseball, for instance. Baseball is a man’s game. Women get more involved with football because it’s played only once a week and there’s a lot of pageantry involved, but women think baseball is dull.
“Why doesn’t somebody do something?” they ask when the tension has reached the cutting edge in a baseball game. Meanwhile, the manager in the dugout is flashing signals to the third-base coach, who relays them to the batter; the catcher is trying to keep the runner on second base from stealing his signal to the pitcher; and the pitcher is signaling a pick-off attempt to the shortstop. And she asks why doesn’t somebody do something.
In addition to that, the hit-and-run is completely lost on most women, and no woman on earth, even an exceptionally smart one, can comprehend the infield fly rule and why baseball simply wouldn’t work very well without it.
I played baseball from the time I was five until I was eighteen, and I learned all sorts of manly things that I probably couldn’t have learned anywhere else. I learned to cuss, for instance.
There are different curse words for different baseball situations. Let’s say you’ve just led off the game at the plate and the pitcher has struck you out. When you return, bat in hand, to the dugout, the other players always inquire, “What’s he got?”, meaning, Is the pitcher talented?
Baseball, a macho sport, is very competitive by nature. No man who has just struck out to start a game is about to give the pitcher any credit, so he always answers the above question by declaring, “The sonofabitch ain’t got a thing.”
“Come on!” the other players then beseech the second batter, “base hit him. The sonofabitch ain’t got a thing.”
There are also appropriate curse words to use when the umpire has called you out and you’re convinced you were safe; when you make an error and allow two unearned runs to score; when the manager did not pencil your name into the starting lineup; and when the sonofabitch who didn’t have a thing has struck you out for the fourth straight time. I’m making every attempt to keep this a fairly-clean book, however, so please use your imagination to figure out which cuss words fit which of the previously-listed situations.
I also learned a lot of clichés playing baseball — clichés that could be used later in life as well, but clichés that women never understand.
There was “can of corn,” for example. When somebody lofts a lazy fly ball to the outfield, the cliché everybody uses is, “can of corn.” That means it’s a simple out. Later, when another man asks you, “Think you’re going to score with Roxanne Smitherington tonight?”, you can boast, “Can of corn,” meaning, turn out the lights, the party’s over.
“Caught looking” is a cliché used when a batter looks at a third strike without swinging. When a man knows his wife is running around on him and doesn’t do anything to stop the illicit relationship (such as attempting to beat the other man over the head with a fungo bat) and his wife eventually ditches him for the other man, he is said to have been “caught looking.”
“It’ll look like a line drive in the box score in the morning,” is another great baseball cliché. It also may be adapted to a sexual situation. In baseball, “It’ll look like a line drive in the box score in the morning” means you have reached base safely, but you haven’t hit the ball very hard. I once hit a ball off the end of my bat. It landed on the rightfield foul line spinning like a top.
The ball spun under the concession stand, and by the time the right fielder retrieved it, I was on third base with a triple. In the box score that ran in the weekly paper, however, there was a “1” by my name under the hit column. For all anybody who wasn’t at the game knew, I had knocked the cover off the ball.
Now, for the sex part. Let’s say a man is out with his girl and he wants to fondle her breasts. At first, she won’t allow it, but then she says she’ll let him feel a little, but she won’t take off her blouse.
She asks, “Is that enough for you?”
And if he has played baseball at some point in his life, he answers, “Sweetheart, it’ll look like a line drive in the box score in the morning.” That means, wait ’til you hear how he describes what happened to his pals when he runs into them the next morning.
* * *
Playing baseball also brings men closer together. Men who play baseball together, like men who fight wars together, always have a common bond between them.
When we were ten, Danny Thompson and I went to the county seat of Newnan to try out for Little League baseball. This was official, bonafide Little League, with new balls and bats and uniforms and smooth infields with lights and grown men to coach.
We had played the game before, but only in Danny’s yard or over at the school playground, where there was always only one bat and one tattered ball, with electrical tape around it, that would get lost in the high weeds three or four times an hour, forcing the game to halt for a search.
And there were never enough gloves or players to go around. We played four-on-four or, at best, five-on-five. You left the glove you were wearing in the field when it came your time to bat, and since we never had enough players to have a rightfielder, if you hit the ball to rightfield, God forbid, you were out.
I wanted desperately to make the Little League team in Newnan. I was shaking in my Keds the afternoon Danny’s father drove us for our first tryout.
The city kids from Newnan looked so much bigger than I felt, and some even wore regulation caps and baseball shoes with rubber cleats. We had heard that Newnan had a lot of rich people, but we didn’t know they were that rich. Every kid had his own glove.
I got cut the first day, but Danny made the team. It broke my heart. I was ashamed that he had made the team and I hadn’t, and I missed him those summer afternoons when he was in Newnan playing official Little League baseball and I was stuck at home swatting rocks with a broomstick out in the gravel driveway.
A summer later, however, I got a break. Of all the wonderful things that ever could hav
e happened, the Baptist church in Moreland decided to sponsor a boys’ baseball team, and it would play teams from other Baptist churches around the county.
Of course, I was a Methodist at the time, but I was fully willing to become a Baptist in order to make the team.
Before I could go through with my plan to switch denominations, however, the Baptist deacons voted to allow any boy in town who could run, hit, catch, and pitch to play on the team, thus saving me a dunking in the Baptist pool which always seemed to be covered with green scum, water bugs, and an occasional dragonfly.
We even were provided uniforms and new bats and new balls, and such was the excitement around town that several members of the team even received new gloves from their parents. I did, too, but the story isn’t that simple.
My stepfather, H.B., had been a permanent member of our household for approximately a year when the Baptist church started its baseball team. He and I were not getting on together. My real father had been a pushover, but H.B. insisted on regular chores, on regular bedtimes, and on cleaning my plate, even if we were having liver.
In contrast to my father, H.B. knew little of sport. He attempted one afternoon to play catch with me, but I quickly noticed that he threw the ball with far too much wrist. “You never played baseball?” I asked him.
“Never had time,” he answered. “There isn’t time for anything else but work on a tobacco farm.”
I wasn’t impressed. With my childlike reasoning, I even lost some respect for the man. I think he sensed that.
I had a baseball glove, but it was old and the rawhide strings that held it together were falling loose all about it. I came home from the first practice with the Moreland team in tears. I had seem all my teammates sporting new gloves. I cried in my mother’s arms.
“Maybe you’ll get a new glove for your birthday,” she suggested.
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