They Called Me God

by Doug Harvey

  I went up against a couple of their players and after we finished, he said to me, “Son, you have no left hand.”

  In other words, he saw that I didn’t dribble or pass with my left hand.

  I shrugged my shoulders and went back home. It didn’t bother me. I ended up enrolling and playing football, basketball, and baseball at El Centro Junior College. I was sure I was going to get at least one scholarship offer, but March became April, and no offers came. I told myself, Fuck it, and in a rage and a feeling of self-pity I quit school and eloped with my high school sweetheart.

  — 10 —

  I was very much in love. I was crazy about her. I was a freshman at El Centro Junior College and Joan Manning was a senior at El Centro High School. She was my high school sweetheart. One of my friends bet me that we wouldn’t go to Yuma, Arizona, and get married.

  “Yes, I will,” I said.

  “Bet you won’t,” he replied. “Bet you five dollars.”

  “The hell I won’t,” I said. I probably shouldn’t have.

  Joan and I were driving around at night on a date. We were about sixty miles from Yuma, Arizona, which—according to the Guinness Book of World Records—is the sunniest place on earth. It’s also the place where my first true love and I were married.

  We went before the justice of the peace, got married, and drove home. The next day I went to her home and knocked on the door. Her father answered.

  Being the honest guy that I am, I said to her father, “Cliff, I want you to know something. We’ve run away, and Joan and I have gotten married. But we have not completed the marriage. We’ve had no sex. I want you to know this in case you want us to annul this.”

  Her father wasn’t happy.

  “Get the fuck off my porch,” is what he said to me. I guess he was angry. But he didn’t tell us to get an annulment. In hindsight, I wish he had.

  Unfortunately for the marriage, Joan liked to live high on the hog. We rented a nice house, and right after we got married she proceeded to fill it with expensive furniture, a newfangled refrigerator, and a phonograph and music that we paid for on credit. We didn’t have much money and we ran up a huge debt. We were in love. She was a great gal. We were having a baby. I gave her everything she asked for.

  One day I took stock. I believed in frugality—something else I inherited from my dad—and I suddenly realized how horribly in debt I was and that just ate at me. There was nothing I could do about it but quit college and go to work to pay it off.

  My timing couldn’t have been worse. After I quit college I received eight scholarship offers. USC, UCLA, and the University of Nevada all wanted me to come and play basketball. My grades were good; I had a B average. But I had quit school, gotten married, and taken on two jobs. A lot of guys would have skipped out on their debts, taken their wife, and headed for school—but again, it was a question of integrity. I had forged my destiny, and I wasn’t about to go back.

  — 11 —

  As I said, the large debt we had rung up just ate at me, so I went to work on the night shift for a company called Arden Farms, which was a milk company. I had to be at work at two in the morning, and I would load milk and unload ice cream off the trucks that came down from San Diego, and then I loaded the ice cream onto milk trucks that went from house to house delivering products from Arden Farms. After my shift was over at ten a.m. I would then go pump gas at a local gas station. Then I’d go home, sleep, get something to eat, and head for the Arden Farms job again.

  I was never home. After two years, sad to say, our marriage broke up. I got out of debt, but I had lost a wife—who, as you will see, then proceeded to make my life as miserable as she could make it.

  I then took a job working for Eddie Maljin, the lettuce king of El Centro. His company boxed lettuce and shipped it to Chicago. One day Mr. Maljin said that if I would go to Hollywood and try out for the movies—and if he could be my manager—he would pay for singing and dancing lessons.

  It could have changed my life, but at age twenty-two I didn’t see a future in it for me.

  “No,” I told him, “that’s not my thing.”

  For two years I worked Mr. Maljin’s farm. I would get to the fields and climb on a tractor before sunup and I’d leave at sundown. From farming I learned important lessons in life: You have to accept the fact that the job has to get done and you have to be patient. If you want the vegetables to thrive in time for harvest, you had better be in that lettuce field at five o’clock in the morning. You got out and had to wait until the sun warmed the ice off the lettuce plants. The first thing you did was reach underneath the lettuce to see if there was any ice on the leaf. If there was, then you would have to wait. You felt again, and if it was still icy, you would wait some more. Once the ice melted, you had one day to pick the crop, whether it was lettuce or carrots.

  It was a brutal existence. I worked in 125-degree heat in the summer. The dust would come off those front wheels and blow across my face. From sunup to sundown in the winter you could do 180 acres, either cultivating or cutting all the weeds down, getting the soil ready for planting, seeding, or putting the plants into the ground. I would drink a ten-gallon bottle of water a day. I gurgled when I walked.

  “How do I get around having to drink ten gallons of water a day?” I asked a friend.

  “Try this,” he said.

  He handed me a package of chewing tobacco. It wasn’t long before I became addicted to it. I was so addicted that I chewed tobacco while refereeing basketball games. I’d take an empty pack and fill it with Kleenex, and I’d spit into that. I chewed the stuff for years, until the day in 1997 when I was diagnosed with throat cancer.

  I finally quit farming when I got a better job. I was hired by the Southern California Gas Company as a meter reader. I hustled, and by noon I would have all the meters read in Imperial Valley, and I made sure they were read 100 percent the way my bosses wanted them read. It wasn’t long before they made me a new-construction representative at a raise in pay. It was very good money, but after a year I wasn’t given another raise, and I asked my sales-department boss why.

  “Because you don’t have a college education,” he said.

  “What the hell has that got to with anything?” I wanted to know.

  “I’m college educated,” he said. “Without a college degree, you’ll never get any further.”

  “Fine,” I said. “You have my seven days’ notice.”

  “What does that mean?” he asked angrily.

  “I quit,” I told him. “I’m going back to college.”

  CHAPTER 3

  HARD KNOCKS AT COLLEGE

  — 1 —

  About this time a process server showed up at my door. My wife, Joan, was suing me for divorce. She was tired of being left alone so much. We had stopped being civil. She was barely twenty-one, and having a son at such a young age had crimped her fun.

  We went to a lawyer and drew up papers, and as part of the agreement she gave me our son, Doug Jr., who was an infant.

  I was thrilled. My mom and dad agreed to help me take care of him. Mom would watch him.

  Then Joan’s parents got involved.

  “No mother gives up her child,” her mother told her.

  Before I knew it, the sheriff came and took my son away while I was at work. I was devastated when he came and took my child. I tried to fight it, but the law was on the side of the mother and there was nothing I could do about it.

  It was so unfair. Joan hadn’t even wanted the child. In addition, the judge ruled I had to pay her a burdensome thousand-dollar-a-month child support. He ruled that I could visit my son one day a week.

  I had to get away from her and El Centro. I was determined to go back to college.

  Timing is everything. I was umpiring a Little League game when I got to talking with one of the coaches about my wanting to go to college. He was a noted eye doctor in El Centro, and when I told him I had quit my job and was thinking of moving to San Diego, he said, “If you
do, contact Charlie Smith at San Diego State.”

  Charlie Smith was the San Diego State baseball coach.

  I went to see Coach Smith on a Thursday.

  “I don’t have time to talk to you today,” he said. “Come back on Saturday.”

  When I returned I could see he had all my school records in front of him. He found out I had lettered in football, basketball, and baseball for three years, and most important, he learned I had a B average.

  “Come with me,” he said. “Let me show you around campus.”

  During our walk I told him I was interested in joining the umpires’ association in San Diego.

  He apparently had bigger plans for me.

  After he showed me the campus and the baseball field, we walked into the college bookstore. He stacked up a pile of books and said, “Here we go.”

  “What’s this all about?” I asked.

  “You have just registered at San Diego State,” he said. “If you want to, you’re going to play baseball for me, and if you do, I will give you a partial scholarship.”

  It wasn’t nearly enough to cover expenses because of the high child support I was paying, but it was something, and I accepted gladly.

  — 2 —

  I transferred to San Diego State College as a sophomore in January 1955 and immediately joined the baseball team. I played two years of varsity baseball, two years of varsity football, and a year of junior-varsity basketball. My sophomore year I played second, short, and third, and my junior year I became the starting catcher. In our first game, Noel Mickelsen was our starting pitcher against Stanford. Noel eventually made it to Triple-A in the Pacific Coast League. In the first inning a batter flew out, and two struck out, but our catcher couldn’t hold him, so instead of there being three outs we were behind 2–0 and the bases were loaded with one out.

  I was the second-string catcher, and I was sitting in the bullpen when Coach Smith called over to me.

  “Harvey, can you catch him?” he wanted to know.

  “I can try,” I said.

  I had caught fast-pitch softball, and if you can catch that, you can catch anything. I went behind the plate and ended up catching almost all of our games that year.

  I was a line-drive hitter. I could hit and I could bunt. When the season started I asked Coach Smith, “Who won the batting title last year for us?” He said our top batter the year before had hit .360.

  “I’m going to beat that,” I said, and I did each year. I batted an average of .378 the two years I was there.

  We had a pretty darn good team. My senior year we traveled to the University of Arizona for a two-game series. Arizona was undefeated at the time, and we won one of the games. We were housed underneath the bleachers of the football stadium, and after our win a bunch of us snuck out and mounted a panty raid at one of the sorority houses. We were caught in the act and sent back to our quarters.

  We had some fun. We used to drive to our games, to L.A., Santa Barbara, to Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, and to Fresno, and often heading north we’d go through Laguna Beach, where an old ne’er-do-well stood on one of the busiest street corners directing traffic. I had seen him the first time through, and I thought it would be fun to buy a water cannon and soak him down as we drove past. Then, when we got to Santa Barbara, our team took half the second floor of the Santa Barbara Hotel, and we all went out and bought water guns and had gigantic water fights.

  I wasn’t a natural student, and when we’d go on the road I would take my books with me and spend much of the time studying. I was also worried about my eligibility, and I studied when I could to keep from falling behind.

  After my second season I was offered a chance at pro ball.

  “Son, we’d like to sign you to a contract.”

  “To where?”

  “You start in Florida.”

  “I’m not going to Florida,” I told him.

  I had a sick mother, and I wanted to see my infant son as much as possible.

  Instead of going to play pro baseball, I stayed in school. I played a second season of football when I returned in the fall. I played second-string halfback on offense and was a starting linebacker and back on defense. I could hold my own.

  — 3 —

  To pay my child support and the rest of the tuition not covered by my scholarship, I had to work. Once again I was on a merry-go-round. I would go to class from nine until noon, then I’d play ball for San Diego State. After baseball practice I was a one-man grounds crew/clubhouse boy. I’d rake the pitcher’s mound and the batter’s box, drag the infield by hand, then take a shower, wipe down the showers, and gather up all the wet towels. Then I’d take them to be laundered. I’d then turn off all the showers and close up the locker room. I’d head to my room, get something to eat, study for an hour maybe, and then head to my second job at the Safeway supermarket, where I’d stock shelves for two hours. Then I’d report to my third job at the Playhouse Bar on El Cajon Boulevard in San Diego. The bar was owned by a disabled fellow by the name of Monroe “Bookie” Clark. When Bookie was a student at USC, he would broker the athletes’ extra game tickets. He was a hustler, and he hired me as a bouncer who checked IDs at this shit-hole of a bar in east San Diego. I was also the cleanup guy.

  The place would close at two in the morning, and every night I’d restock the bar, mop the floors, run the vacuum, and usually lie down and fall asleep. Every night the place stank of stale beer and cigarettes, and it was my job to make sure it smelled nice in the morning. I even had to clean the toilets. It was the worst job I ever had.

  Around seven in the morning there’d be a knock on the door from a customer who wanted a drink. I’d get up, pour him a drink, write down how much it was and who ordered it, then go back to mopping the floor and scrubbing the bar. By then it was time to head back to San Diego State.

  As you can see, I wasn’t afraid of doing a little hard work.

  — 4 —

  My college career ended after I broke my leg playing football and our new football coach took away my half scholarship.

  In the fall of my junior year I was playing defensive halfback. I went to make a tackle and was hit from behind by one of my teammates. I heard something down in my leg that sounded like the ripping of cloth. I trotted over to the doctor on the sideline.

  He felt around and said, “There’s nothing wrong with it.”

  “Tape it up,” I said, and I went back into the game.

  The other team ran a play sweeping around their left end, and I went charging in there, and for a second time a teammate hit me from behind, and this time I knew I was seriously injured.

  “Coach,” I said. “Something’s very wrong. My leg isn’t right.”

  A teammate of mine on the baseball team, Jim Pyle, was standing on the sideline, and the coach asked him to take me to the hospital.

  We got in Jim’s car and drove to the local hospital, where they took X-rays of my ankle.

  “Nothing is wrong,” they concluded.

  “Okay, let’s get back to the ball game, Jim.”

  I could barely walk, but they said I was okay, so I was willing to give it a try.

  We took the elevator down to the main floor, and we began walking out to Jim’s car when a nurse came running over to say they wanted to take more X-rays.

  This time they took X-rays farther up the leg, and they discovered that my leg bone had been split in half. The ends of the bone were inches apart.

  They put me in a hard cast up to my ass, and I stayed in that cast for twenty weeks.

  At the end of the football season Bill Schutte, my head coach, retired, and he was replaced by Paul Governali, an all-American quarterback at Columbia University and a real asshole whom all the players hated. He was a horseshit coach. Governali came in and took away my half scholarship and gave it to another player.

  I would never forgive the son of a bitch. He knew the trouble I was in and he didn’t care. He was supposed to be all-everything, a big name, and he was ju
st a bad guy. Years later I ran into his ex-wife. When I told her I didn’t have much respect for him, she said, “That son of a bitch didn’t have anybody’s respect.”

  “I can understand why you divorced him,” I told her. “I would have if I could have.”

  — 5 —

  In addition to owing my ex-wife alimony, I also owed about $800 to a man who owned a gas station and fixed my car. I decided to drop out of school and work to pay my alimony and pay off my debts.

  I asked the gas-station owner if I could work for him to pay off my debt, and he agreed. In addition to my bar job, I also took a job as a guard with the Aztec Security Company. Even though I had a cast up to my ass, I was able to wear a uniform, stand there, and take IDs at events.

  Before long I was able to pay off most of my debts. Also helping me were my ex-wife’s futile, self-destructive attempts to shake me down for more money. You think you know somebody. It’s like she had become an animal, and all she wanted to do was rip me apart. You say to yourself, What did I ever do to her? And you go in and try to be decent and you say to her, “Let’s try to work this out”—and holy shit, all of a sudden, wow, she wants your hide.

  Four times she demanded I appear in court for a hearing, interrupting my college and ball playing, and four times I had to drive from San Diego to El Centro to go before a judge.

  The first time I came to court, the judge said I was being charged with not having paid my child support.