by Adam Gopnik
The boys came running from school, excited to have been wearing their Metrozoid T-shirts all day, waiting for practice: Eric and Derek and Ken, good athletes, determined and knowing and nodding brief, been-there-before nods as they chucked the ball around; Jacob and Charlie and Garrett talking a little too quickly and uncertainly about how many downs you had and how many yards you had to go; Will and Luke and Matthew very verbal, evangelizing for a game, please, can't we, like, have a game with another team, right away, we're ready; and Gabriel just eager for a chance to get the ball and roll joyfully in the mud. I was curious to see what Kirk would do with them. He was, first and foremost, a teacher, and his lectures still resonated in the halls of the institute. But how would he teach these eight-year-olds to play football? Orate at them? Motivate them? Dazzle them with plays and schemes?
“Okay,” he said very gently, as the boys gathered around him in an attentive, slightly wary circle. “Let's break it down. First thing is how you stand. Everybody get down in a three-point stance.”
The boys dropped to their haunches confidently.
Kirk frowned. He walked up and down the line, shoving each one lightly on a shoulder or a knee and showing how a three-point stance could be a weak or strong tripod, a launching pad or a stopping place, one that let you push off strongly or one that held you back. At last he got everybody's stance correct. “Okay, let's run,” he said. “Just run the length of the field, from these cones to those cones, and then turn back. Last guy does fifteen push-ups.” Luke stumbled and was the last guy, and Kirk had him do fifteen push-ups. The point was made: no favorites.
Right around then a young park worker came up in one of those officious little green carts the park people ride around in. “I'm sorry,” he said, “you can't play here. It's ruled off for games.”
I was ready to get mad—I mean, hey, who was making these rules? We had been playing touch football here for years—when Kirk stepped in.
“We-ell,” Kirk said, and the Southern accent he brought with him from his youth in Savannah was suddenly more intense, an airplane captain's accent. “Well, uh, we got ten young men here eager to play football. Where can we take them to play?”
To my surprise, the park worker was there for the enlisting. “Let me see—I'll come back,” he said. We went on with the drills, and ten minutes later, the guy scooted up again in his cart.
“I think I've found just the place,” he said. “If you go off there, right over the road, and take the left fork, you'll find this field that's hidden there behind the parking lot.” He added almost confidentially, “It's just opposite the toilets near the Ramble, but it's flat and large, and I think it's perfect.”
“Much obliged,” Kirk said, and he gestured to the boys, a big arm-sweeping gesture, and led them off in search of the promised field. They followed him like Israelites. We walked across the road, took the left, went down a hill, and there it was—a little glade that I had never seen before, flat and fringed by tall trees, offering shade to the waiting moms and dads. It had a slightly derelict look—I could imagine that in a livelier era, this field might have been a Francis Bacon mural, men struggling in the grass—but today it was perfect.
“Gentlemen,” Kirk said clearly to the boys as they straggled on, looking around a little dubiously at the tufts of grass and the facing bathrooms. “Welcome to Metrozoid Field. This is the place we have been looking for.” He set out the red cones again around the fringes.
“Okay, let's scrimmage,” he ordered. He divided the guys in half with a firm, cutting gesture, and they began an intense, slightly nervous touch-football game. Kirk watched them, smiling and silent.
“Shouldn't we teach them a play?” I suggested.
“No,” he said. “They're off to a good start. Running and standing is a good start.”
The scrimmage ended, and the winning team began to hurrah and high-five.
“Hey,” he said, stepping forward, and for the first time I heard his classroom voice, his full-out voice, a combination of Southern drawl and acquired New England sharpness.
“No celebrations,” he said, arriving at the middle of the field. “This is a scrimmage. It's just the first step. We're all one team. We are the Giant Metrozoids.” He said the ridiculous name as though it were Fighting Irish, or Rambling Wrecks, an old and hallowed name in the American pigskin tradition. The kids stopped, subdued and puzzled. “Hands together,” he said, and stretched his out, and solemnly, the boys laid their hands on his, one after another. “One, two, three, together!” and all the hands sprang up. He had replaced a ritual of celebration with one of solidarity, and the boys sensed that solidarity was somehow at once more solemn and more fun than any passing victory could be.
He had, I realized on the way home, accomplished a lot of things. He had taught them how to stand and how to kneel—not just how to do these things but that there was a right way to do these things. He had taught them that playing was a form of learning—that a scrimmage was a step somewhere on the way toward a goal. And he had taught them that they were the Giant Metrozoids. It was actually a lot for one hour.
When I say that I began working harder, I can barely begin to explain what his idea of working hard meant: It was Bear Bryant's idea of hard work circa 1955, it was General Patton's idea of being driven, only more military. It was coupled with a complete openness and equality, a vulnerability to his students’ criticisms so great that it was almost alarming. Kirk was working that hard, and was as eager to have you spot his weights as he was to spot yours. In what now seems like the halcyon days of 1984, a Saturday morning in winter would begin with a phone call and a voice booming, breaking right through the diaphanous protection of the answering machine, “Hey, folks, it's Kirk. I got up early to walk the pooch, and I think I got some progress made on this here problem. What say we meet at eleven and trade papers?” I would curse, get out of bed, get to work, and be ready three hours later with a new draft of whatever the hell I was supposed to be working on. We would meet at the little island that separates Soho, where we lived, and Tribeca, where he and his wife, the artist Elyn Zimmerman, had their loft, and, standing there, he would turn the pages, and I would turn the pages, and he would show me all the ways in which I had missed the boat. Above all, he would insist, break it down: Who were the artists? What were the pictures? Give me the dates. Compile lists, make them inclusive, walk through it. You break it down in order to build it back up. What does it mean, why does it matter, for this artist, for art history, for the development of human consciousness? I would go back to work, and the phone would ring again at three. “Hey, folks, it's Kirk. What do you say we meet and go over this new draft I've done and then maybe get some dinner?” And we would meet, and all four—or six or eight or ten—people would come together around him, and have dinner, and drink a good bottle of white wine and a good bottle of red wine and finally, exhausted, I would get to bed.
And then the phone would ring again. “Hey, folks, it's Kirk. I got to walk the pooch one last time, and I was just thinking that I may finally have sorted out the locomotive from the caboose in this thing. What do you say …” And I would put a coat on over my pajamas and go out one last time, in the whipping cold of midnight, and he would open the envelope right there and start reading, signaling to me to do the same, while his black Chow raced around, and we would try one more time to clarify exactly why Picasso looked at African art or why Gauguin went to Tahiti, while a generation walked by us in Astor Place haircuts and long vintage coats on their way to the Odeon.
He gave football all the credit. He had discovered himself playing football, first at his prep school, St. Andrew's in Delaware, as an overweight and, by all reports, unimpressive adolescent, and then at Williams, where, improbably, he became a starting defensive end. The appeal of football wasn't that it “built character”—he knew just how cruddy a character a football player could have. It was that it allowed you to make a self. You were one kind of person with one kind of body and one set
of possibilities, and then you worked at it and you were another. This model was so simple and so powerful that you could apply it to anything. It was ordinary magic: You worked harder than the next guy, and you were better than the next guy. It put your fate in your own hands.
I had always loved football, too, and we watched it together on Saturday afternoons and Monday nights for years. We saw a lot of good games, but we missed the big one. In 1984 we went up to New England to celebrate Thanksgiving, and we were supposed to watch what promised to be the greatest college football game of all time, Boston College–Miami, Doug Flutie versus Bernie Kosar. But our wives wanted to do something else—go look at things at a Shaker fair, I think—and we came home to find that we'd skipped the greatest college football game of all time, which Flutie had won by a Hail Mary, a long desperation heave on the last play of the game. We stared at each other in disbelief—we missed that?—and for the next twenty years, “Boston College–Miami” was code between us for something you really, really wanted to do but couldn't, because your wife wanted to do something else. “You want to try and grab a burger at six?” “Uh—Boston College–Miami.” It was code between us also for the ironies of life, our great, overlooked game, the one that got away.
I think I'm going to make the motivational speech,” I said to Luke as we walked over to Metrozoid Field the next Friday. I had been working on the motivational speech for several days. I didn't see a role for myself on the Metrozoids as a leader, and I thought I might make a contribution as the Tommy Lasorda type, raising everyone's spirits and bleeding Metrozoid blue.
“Okay,” he said, relenting for the moment. “Tell it to me again.” “We're here to separate the men from the boys,” I said, stopping at the Miners’ Gate entrance to the park, at Seventy-ninth Street, and trying to growl like Gary Busey as the Bear, “and then we're going to separate the warriors from the men.” I paused to let this sink in. “And then we 're going to separate the heroes from the warriors—and then we're going to separate the legends from the heroes. And then, at last, we're going to separate the gods from the legends. So, if you're not ready to be a football god, you don't want to be a Metrozoid.” Long pause. “Now, won't that make the guys motivated?”
He reflected. “I don't know if they'll be motivated. They'll certainly be nauseated. Nobody wants to be motivated to play football, Dad. They want to play football.”
Kirk ran another minimalist practice on this second week, and he missed the next because he was too sick from the chemo. I ran the session, and I thought ambitiously that it would be good to try a play at last, so I set about teaching them a simple stop-and-go. I got them to line up and run short, stop, and then go long. They ran it one by one, but none of them could get the timing quite right, and the boy who was supposed to be quarterbacking the thing couldn't get the right zip on the ball. Everyone was more annoyed than motivated, so I stopped after ten minutes and sent them back to scrimmaging. They were restless for their coach.
It wasn't any surprise that he missed a practice; the surprise was that he made as many as he did. The chemo he was getting was so caustic that it had to be infused gradually, over sessions lasting three or four hours. Years of chemotherapy had left the veins in his arms so collapsed that sometimes it took half an hour for a nurse just to find an entry. He would grimace while being poked at with the needle, and then go on talking. He had the chemotherapy at one of the midtown extensions of the hospital, where the walls were earnestly decorated with Impressionist posters, Manet and Monet and Renoir—the art that he had taught a generation to relish for its spring-coiled internal contradictions and tensions there as something soothing for dying patients to look at.
He would talk for hours. Sometimes he talked about the Metrozoids, and sometimes about Dylan or Elvis, but mostly, he tried to talk through the Mellon Lectures he was to give in Washington. He was, he said, going to speak without a text, just with a slide list. This was partly a bravura performer's desire to do one last bravura performance. It was also because he had come to believe that in art history, description was all the theory you needed; if you could describe what was there and what it meant (to the painter, to his time, to you), you didn't need a deeper supporting theory. Art wasn't meaningful because, after you looked at it, someone explained it; art explained itself by being there to look at.
He thought that modern art was a part of modern life: not a reaction against it, or a subversion of it, but set within its values and contradictions, as surely as Renaissance art was set in its time. His book on the origins of modernism, A Fine Disregard, used an analogy from the history of rugby to illuminate the moment of artistic innovation: During a soccer game at the Rugby School, in England, an unknown young man named William Webb Ellis picked up the ball and ran with it, and a new game came into being. A lot of people thought that Kirk was celebrating a Romantic view of invention. But his was a liberal, not a Romantic, view of art. It began with an individual and extended to a community. What fascinated him was the circumstances that let someone act creatively and other people applaud instead of blowing the whistle.
That was what he loved to talk about when he talked about Elvis. He revered the moment when, in 1954, Elvis walked into a studio and played with Scotty and Bill and Sam, and everything suddenly came together. Had any of the elements been absent, as they easily might have been, as they usually are—had the guitarist Scotty Moore been less adaptable, the producer Sam Phillips less patient—then Elvis would have crooned his songs, no one would have cared, and nothing would have happened. The readiness was all. These moments were Kirk's faith, his stations: Picasso and Braque in their studios cutting the headlines right out of the newspapers and pasting them on the pictures to make collage; Richard Serra (first among Kirk's contemporary heroes) throwing hot lead in a studio corner and finding art in its rococo patterns.
Toward the end of one chemotherapy session, as he worried his way through his themes, a young man wearing the usual wool cap on his head came around the usually inviolable barrier of drapery that separated one “suite” from the next.
“You are professor?” he asked shyly, with a Russian accent, and Kirk shook his head.
“No, you are professor. I know. We have treatment at same time, every week. Same three hours,” and he gestured toward his cap with a short we're-in-this-together smile. “I used to bring book, but now I just listen to you.”
That Sunday of the first Mellon lecture, Kirk walked to the lectern after an introduction. The room was sold out, and the overflow had been sent to another lecture room. “Can I have the lights down, please,” he said, and I saw that he had kept his word: He had no text, no notes, just a list of slides. He began to show and describe objects from sixties American minimalism—plywood boxes and laid-out bricks and striped paintings. He didn't offer a “theory” or a historical point. He tried instead to explain that a landscape that looked simple—there had been Abstract Expressionist splashes, and then there were all these boxes—was actually extraordinarily complex: There was a big difference between the boxes of Donald Judd, elegizing New York Canal Street culture, and the gleaming body-shop boxes of the West Coast minimalists, glorifying California car culture.
“The less there is to look at,” he said, pacing, as he always did, “the more important it is that we look at it closely and carefully. Small differences make all the difference. So, for example, the next time somebody tries to sell you on the mechanical exactitude of Frank Stella's stripes, think again about the beautiful, delicate breathing space in these stripes, the incredible feathered edge of the touch of the picture, which has everything to do with its kind of espresso-grounds, Beat Generation blackness that gives the picture its particular relationship to its epoch and time.”
So he walked people through it. There were the bright Matissean stripes of Ellsworth Kelly, made from the traced shapes of Parisian shadows, and those dark espresso-bar simplicities of Stella. There was the tradition of the Bauhaus diaspora, all those German refugee artis
ts who had been forced to go to South America and who had proselytized for a kind of utopian, geometric abstraction—which had then appeared in New York just as New York artists were using geometric forms to indicate a cool-guy stoical distaste for utopian aspirations, creating a comedy of misunderstanding and crossbreeding. An art that had seemed like a group of quadratic equations set by a joyless teacher had been revealed as a sequence of inventions thought up by people. Where there seemed to be things, there were stories. The audience, at the end of the hour, was riveted. Someone was breaking it down and then was going to build it back up. You didn't want to miss it.
Okay, we're going to learn a play,” he said the next Friday at Metrozoid practice. The boys were standing on Metrozoid Field in their Metrozoid shirts in a semicircle around him. He showed them the play he had in mind, tracing it in the dirt with a stick: The quarterback takes the ball from the center and laterals to the halfback, who looks for one of three downfield receivers, who go in overlapping paths down the right sideline—one long, one medium, one short. The boys clapped hands and ran to the center of the field, terrier-quick and terrier-eager.
“No, no. Don't run. Just walk through it the first few times.”
The boys then ostentatiously walked through the play, clowning around a bit, as though in slow motion. He laughed at that. But he had them do it anyway, five or six times, at a walk.
“Now let's just amble through it, same thing.” The play took on a courtly quality, like a seventeenth-century dance. The boys did it at that pace, again and again: Hike and pitch and look and throw.
