by Roger Kahn
“Damn. That’s what I was always trying to do in school. Write a decent essay.”
“Oh, this is a decent essay all right, but we have this newspaper here and we want news stories.” He held the story in one hand and a yellow pencil in the other. “You’ve left out the time,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“When did you visit DeWitt Clinton High School?”
“Yesterday.”
“But I don’t believe the word yesterday appears anywhere.”
I recaptured three pages, rolled my chair back to my desk and an hour and a half later, on the third try, satisfied him. Marsh walked over to the head of the copy desk, a raucous and unpleasant man. “Here’s a pretty fair little piece,” he said, and the story was saved from butchery.
With time, I subdued the sports page idiom and Marsh moved me into a higher league. “I was talking to someone up front,” he said, “and if you write a good piece for under-the-cartoon, they’ll print it.” A cartoon ran on the editorial page, and the space beneath it was reserved for long articles supposedly lucid and often thoughtful. United States Senators wrote or signed articles under the cartoon.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You’ll get twenty-five or thirty dollars if they use it,” Marsh said. “Fifteen hundred words.”
That was half a week’s pay and I said I would try and two weeks later I presented Marsh with a fourth draft of an interpretive article. He put me through two further drafts. The final story was successful enough to prompt the former assistant editor of the women’s page, now city desk education reporter, to plant her stocky frame before me and announce, “That piece put a number of decent guys on the spot.” Even, or especially, women responded to the territorial imperative.
“I always knew,” Robert Frost said one day in his cabin at Ripton. He had been talking about obscure years and how he had held on.
I could give all to Time except—except
What I myself have held. But why declare
The things forbidden that while the Customs slept
I have crossed to Safety with? For I am There,
And what I would not part with I have kept.
I wonder if anyone always knows—you, me, Jackie Robinson, even Robert Frost—that we will cross to Safety. Or is it rather that when we are There, we think we always knew? As a fulltime Herald Tribune sports reporter at the age of twenty-one, I thought I always knew. It had been waiting out there all the time, I told myself, journalism, this marvelous newspaper, these rousing people, the point at which my passion for sports and for writing intersected. But that is comfortable, settled, Calvinist, and I was not (nor am I) any of these. My truth is that I never knew. During the seasons among ferocious Brooklyn Jewish intellectuals and poseurs, I never considered what a newsroom looked like, never envisioned rewrite men with luminary writing wisdom, never knew a man like Stanley Woodward walked the earth. The paper was an intoxicating discovery, and when I found it, I put my Brooklyn past, except for baseball, behind me as rapidly as I could. I bought a car and found a girl. We married and moved into one large room on the ground floor of an old white-stone house, just out of cheering range of Ebbets Field. The Dodgers of 1950, probably the best team in the league, never untangled themselves and finished second. That autumn my wife invited my parents to the one-room flat for a first formal dinner. When they arrived, my father commandeered our principal piece of furniture, a sectional sofa of coral red, and started a monologue. He had lived half a century, he said, and he felt the years sometimes as when caught in a subway crush, but he couldn’t be through yet because Joe Herzberg had suggested that he take a job at the Tribune, as an assistant to the night editor. He was plainly uncomfortable visiting and combative at the reversal in our roles, with which time threatened him.
“How much for the job?” I said.
“Seventy-five hundred.”
“Take it, but the night editor’s a pretty rough fella.”
Gordon’s nostrils flared. “I wasn’t asking,” he said. “I’ve already declined.”
“I’m sure you have enough problems with your own career without trying to counsel your father,” Olga said.
Joan, my wife, chose silence.
“Look,” I said, “this is more exciting than anything you know, I’m telling ya.”
“ ‘Telling ya’? “ asked Olga.
“I’m flattered,” Gordon said. “Oops.” He had dropped a cloud of Pall Mall ash on the sectional.
“I’m delighted that you aren’t selling shoes,” Olga said, “but I’d be more delighted if I could understand what you were writing. God. Touchbacks and what else? You ought to be writing novels. Not that you could. You ought to try.”
“Is there any chance,” Gordon said, “of your covering baseball?”
“None.”
“None?”
“None, Dad.”
“Where did you find such unusual green wallpaper?” Olga asked Joan.
“It was here.”
“And, Mother,” I said, “I can’t afford to have it changed.”
“The stove isn’t very good either,” Joan said, “and dinner may be late, but we can all have another drink.”
“I can get Dodger passes now, Dad,” I said.
“Congratulations, but I can get my own.”
When the schoolboy sports season ended, major league baseball came round again, and the editorial board of the Tribune decided to introduce a large box in the city edition, with “up-to-the-minute scores of every big league night game, plus pitching summaries and home runs.” I was put in charge of the box for a summer, which boiled into a demanding test of my affection for baseball. The gracious mistress turned bitch in summer heat.
Various editions closed through the night, and the editors, particularly the head of the sports copy desk, thought that it was essential that we beat the Times by recording in our city edition “nothing for Cleveland in the top of the fourth,” while the Times city edition recorded only a scoreless tie through three complete innings. The extra zero would be evidence of our superior enterprise. To achieve this beat, a Western Union sports ticker had been installed in the composing room, on the fourth floor. The room was noisy and heated beyond the norm of a New York summer by scores of machines producing the molten alloy that became hot type.
After a snack at seven, I typed the names of all the teams playing night games, and the starting pitcher and catcher, the battery. These were set by machine and presently placed in specified positions within the metal form for the box. The scores for each game were set in monotype: that is, individual pieces of type were used for each inning. A printer hovered over the page and responded quickly to the information I fed.
“Nothing for Brooklyn in the first.”
“A zip for the Bums.” Using tweezers, the printer fished in a box and came up with a zero. The printer wore work pants and an open work shirt, hanging loosely. I wore a white shirt, open at the collar, but always a necktie. The printer was earning $105 a week. I was drawing $55.
As edition time approached, pressure increased. On Tuesdays and Fridays, when eight games were going simultaneously, the ticker chattered continually, and I was hard put to keep all my records straight. I stood in the heat, perspiring and wilting the collar of the white shirt.
“Two for Detroit in the fourth.”
“Two for Detroit in the fourth,” repeated the printer.
The ticker noted that Chester Laabs had hit a home run. I penciled rapidly but neatly “Add Browns” on top of a sheet of copy paper, circled “Add Browns” to indicate it was a slug, or label, and then wrote: “Home run—Browns: Laabs.”
“How the Cubs doing?” It was Buddy Weiss, who had been a copyboy with me and was now working on the night desk. He had finished closing his pages and had come to visit and root.
“Nothing for the Yankees in the fifth.”
“Nothing for the Yankees in the fifth.”
“Come on, Cubbies,” Weis
s said.
“Are you using a dash or a colon after ‘home run’? “ Sol Roogow, head of the sports desk, wanted to know.
“Dash. Hold it. One for Pittsburgh in the third.”
“Well, goddamnit,” Roogow said, “why the hell do you have a colon in one game and a dash in another?”
“Sorry. Nothing for Boston in the second.”
“American League or National League?”
“The Braves. National League.”
“Nothing for Boston Nationals in the second.”
“Goddamn, you gotta be more careful,” Roogow said.
“Whoop,” said Weiss, bent over my ticker. “Randy Jackson just hit one. We’re ahead.”
I wrote: “Add Cubs: ‘Home run—Chicago: Jackson.’”
“You got the dash in the right place this time?” Roogow said.
“Nothing for Washington in the fourth.”
“He doesn’t know the diference between a dash and a colon,” Roogow explained to Weiss.
“Battery change,” a young printer cried.
I checked my record of the battery at Cleveland, then wrote: “Sub Cleve batts,” circled it and continued: “Feller, Newhouser (4) and Hegan.”
“About ready to close up?” Everett Walker, the assistant managing editor, asked.
“I’m waiting for a battery change,” I said.
“Close it up,” ordered Roogow. Then to Walker: “We’re not going to sell any papers in the Bronx on a battery change in Cleveland.”
“I guess not, Sol,” Walker said.
Across the stone table the printer looked at me and winked. “You know the Braves with their Spahn and Sain and two days of rain,” Weiss said. “The Cubs, we’ve got Rush and Kush and two days of slush.”
They laughed. “A lot of fun, huh, kid,” Roogow said. He was a joyless man, who suffered from backaches, but whenever Bob Cooke was around, Roogow became avuncular. “I’m teaching the kid a lot,” he announced inside Cooke’s glass office. “He’s got a lot to learn, but he’s coming along, getting to learn about deadlines.” Curiously, Roogow was right. I did learn about deadlines and more than that, how in the company of men one does best to put forth an unconcerned, brash or even graceful front when under pressure.
It was not until the spring of 1951 that I was permitted to cover baseball. “Do you have some time?” Bob Cooke said. “It’s not a regular assignment, and we can always use the college kid, but can you get away and take City College-Columbia? They’re playing at 3:30 at Baker Field.” I finished a Sunday feature in ten minutes and rode the IRT subway to the northern tip of Manhattan Island and made the field at game time. I wanted to display writing style in baseball, any baseball, even college baseball. I found a seat behind home plate, the better to watch pitching, but with the first out, a pop to left field, I abruptly recognized a shortcoming. I did not know how to keep score of a game.
I jotted, “Ritucci safe pitcher’s error,” on a large yellow pad, and recorded the rest of the game in longhand, man by man. It was a piercing day, chilly and relentlessly windy. My notes grew bulkier, my fingers froze. College baseball is an inferior game to one raised on the major leagues, and as I watched the two teams struggle, I felt somewhat offended about having to dignify the game with a story. That haughtiness faded toward nervousness. I had never written a baseball story before.
City College won, 4 to 1, and back in the office with still cold fingers I heard Roogow barking, “It’s late. Gimme it in takes. Where the hell ya been?” I typed a routine AP Formula One paragraph, giving the teams, the score and the place. Then I started to think: where should the story go from there?
“Come on,” Roogow yelled.
Ed Gross, another copyreader, walked over, and said quietly, “Write it well, but hurry up, son. We can fix it in the next edition.”
I recorded how each run was scored and supplied the box score just in time for the first edition, a reasonable job performed within forty minutes. But the story was not very good; it was flat.
Two days later, Bob Cooke asked me into his office. “Don’t take this in the wrong way,” he said, “but that isn’t how to write baseball.”
“I know, but I don’t know what to do to correct that.”
“Go to the library,” Cooke said. “Get the clips. Read the other baseball writers. Go back a long way. Read Hey wood Broun.”
“I didn’t have to read Grantland Rice to write football.”
“This is a different game.”
“I’ve played it all my life.”
“That doesn’t help you write it,” Bob Cooke said. His blue eyes moved about. A strong hand drummed the desk. “Your story didn’t have any sense of, of I don’t know what,” Cooke said. “I mean once I was covering a game and Rex Barney was wild and I wrote, ‘Barney pitched as though the plate were high and outside.’ That’s the way I want to see you write baseball. You can do it. ‘Barney pitched as though the plate were high and outside.’ “
I was promoted to general assignment, which meant that I was relieved of high school sports. Marsh worried that I was moving ahead too quickly. Cooke disagreed and, in a complex of other tensions, the two held their positions even to that day in the following spring when Harold Rosenthal asked to leave the Dodgers.
The phone rang at the small apartment in Brooklyn. “What are you doing Tuesday?” Cooke said.
“Oh. Hi, Bob.”
“I’ll tell you,” he said, and he was excited. “On Tuesday you’ll be covering the Dodgers.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Come on in here and then you better pack.”
I took a taxi all the way to the office. Cooke briefed me. “Just do what you’ve been doing. Write what happens and don’t take things too seriously.”
“ ‘Barney,’ “ I said, “ ‘pitched as though the plate were high and outside.’”
“Attaboy.”
As I started out of the department, Marsh was sitting at his desk, looking blue. “Could I have a word with you?” he said.
“I’ve only got a minute.” I sat in the chair where eighteen months before I had been taught to rewrite essays into stories.
“I opposed this,” Irving said. “I want you to know that. I think you’ll be a fine baseball writer. But not yet. It’s too soon.”
I set my teeth.
“Which doesn’t mean I won’t be rooting for you,” Marsh said. “Go knock ‘em dead.”
That was the Tribune then, or one touch of the Tribune, as it came into my life. I have forgotten as much as I can forget of its last writhing. Late in the 1960s I had occasion to visit the newspaper and the changes startled me, not merely because they were changes. The floors were littered. Apparently economy drives now extended to cleaning women. The new managing editor, Buddy Weiss, was rushing about without a jacket, encouraging people, like a football coach losing by four touchdowns in the final quarter. A third of the desks assigned reporters were bare. The staff was small and desperate. Two or three people asked if I knew of any jobs.
“If you wanna do an article, if you know anyone good who wants to do an article, we can pay anything, “cried Clay Felker, editor of the Sunday Magazine section.
“How much is anything?”
“For the right article, we’ll outbid anybody in the country.” (And for the Second Coming, I’ll go to church.)
I walked into George Cornish’s former office. A fat columnist bulged over his typewriter, cursing and reeking of beer. A hungry-eyed columnist sat nearby, squirming in his chair. “Gonna get them fuckers,” said the fat man. Between the two, a fat, hungry-eyed secretary slouched on a table, her short skirt hiked high on enormous thighs. “Aren’t they wonderful?” she said. “Isn’t what they’re doing to journalism wonderful?”
“Teach them fuckers to mess with me,” said the fat columnist.
Except for the pocked bust of Adolf Hitler, I would not have known where I was.
II
Underneath a patina of professionalis
m, the Dodgers I joined in 1952 twitched in shock and mortification. No major league baseball club before had been both as gifted and as consecutively disappointing. In 1950 the Dodgers fell far behind the Philadelphia Phillies, caught them on the last day of the season and seemed certain to prevail when an outfielder named Cal Abrams reached second base with no one out in the ninth inning of a tie game. Then Duke Snider singled to center field and Abrams was thrown out at home by three yards. The Phils defeated Don Newcombe in the tenth, winning the pennant, and the Dodgers dismissed their third-base coach. During August of the following season, 1951, the Dodgers held first place by a lead of thirteen games. In what has come to be regarded as the most exciting of pennant races, the Giants, now managed by Leo Durocher, overtook the team and forced a play-off series. The Dodgers lost in Ebbets Field, then won, 10 to 0, in the Polo Grounds. The second game turned when Bobby Thomson, at bat with bases loaded, struck out on a curve that Clem Labine broke half a foot outside. A day later, the Dodgers moved ahead and went into the ninth inning leading, 4 to 1. Then came two singles and a double. With one out, the Giants had the tying run on base. Dressen telephoned his bullpen. “Erskine is bouncing his curve,” Clyde Sukeforth, the bullpen coach, reported. “Labine seems tired.” Dressen called on Branca, who threw a low fast ball, then a hand-high fast ball, which Thomson, enacting an antithetic “Casey at the Bat,” lined into the left-field stands. The Giants had won, 5 to 4. Jackie Robinson followed Thomson’s lope, making certain that he touched every base. Ralph Branca wept. For the second consecutive year the Dodgers had lost the pennant in the last inning of the last game of the season. This time the bullpen coach was replaced.
Defeat, particularly dramatic defeat, confirms our worst image of ourselves. We are not effective, after all, not truly competent, not manly in crisis. We may dismiss a coach, but we cannot elude blame. We have failed. Everyone knows we have failed. We know it ourselves. We stand naked, before an unflattering mirror, hearing hard laughter that includes our own.
After Thomson’s homer, mirthless pseudo humor pricked the team. What has two legs, two arms and no guts? Why, that would be famous Dodger righthander Don Newcombe. Did the Dodgers always lose the pennant by one game? No; if necessary they could lose it by ten. How do you frighten a Dodger ball player? You don’t have to bother; he’s already scared. What, asked Sal Maglie, did a certain Dodger and a certain homosexual have in common? Ha, cried Maglie, they both choke up on the big ones.
