by Steve Rushin
Often it is. I go out drinking with Reds pitcher Jack Armstrong immediately after his Saturday night start in Cincinnati, and sneak him in my rental car into Riverfront Stadium on Sunday morning, long after he was supposed to arrive. The photographer on that feature story, with a plane to catch after the Sunday matinee, cabs to the airport, leaving his rental car in a parking garage in downtown Cincinnati. He isn’t sure which one. “I’ll call Hertz,” he tells me. “They’ll find it. I’ve done it before.”
The expense scarcely matters. Sports Illustrated is minting money, chockablock with the advertising bounty of Philip Morris, General Motors, Anheuser Busch, Seagram’s, and various companies clamoring to get their perfume strips up the nostrils of SI’s three million subscribers and twenty million weekly pass-along readers.
I’ve been shot out of a cannon, far past the safety net, with no idea when or where I might land. One day I fly from Chicago to Montreal to write about the Expos, check into my hotel, see the red message light on the nightstand phone, am told by the front desk to call my office, am told by my office to forget the Expos and fly to New York to write about the Mets, and then check out eight minutes later with the same clerk who checked me in: “Did you enjoy your stay, Mr. Rushin?”
I get back into the same cab, return to the airport, fly to LaGuardia, and cab next door to Shea Stadium, where a famous member of the New York Mets, naked in the clubhouse, pauses in front of a group of reporters en route to the shower and stage-farts at us from point-blank range. And I ask myself, not for the first time: What kind of job is this? Is this the real life, or is this fantasy?
There is no distinction now between work and life. I get no haircuts, make no dental appointments, eat one large daily meal like a boa constrictor, usually at 2 a.m. after night games. I get my glasses from LensCrafters “in about an hour,” so that I am described by a journalist, in a hardcover history of the magazine, as looking like Funky Winkerbean from the comic strip of the same name.
It doesn’t matter. The job is all there is now. This is made clear on the night that my apartment keys unknown to me fall out of my backpack in the press box in Cincinnati, so that I arrive in New York late at night and go straight to the Time & Life Building to sleep on the couch in Bambi’s office, where I’m awakened in the morning by the squeegee squeak of window washers suspended eighteen stories above Sixth Avenue, looking at me through the glass like I’m a reticulated python in a herpetarium.
And perhaps they are right. I’m not doing anything fundamentally different from what I always have, writing in my bedroom on Mom’s Royal. When managing editor Mark Mulvoy calls me into his office and says, “I’m promoting you to staff writer”—staff writers can live anywhere they want, so long as they’re near an airport—he immediately follows with, “Now don’t tell me you want to move to Keokuk, Iowa.”
“It’s Minnesota,” I want to say, but don’t, because East Coast natives, I’ve discovered, make no distinction between Minnesota and Michigan, between Minneapolis and Indianapolis. The Bloomingtons—in Indiana and Illinois and Minnesota—are all the same.
There is another reward for my formal promotion to writer. In recognition of my thirty-eight weeks on the road in 1990, Mulvoy sends me to Bali, Indonesia, to write a travelogue for the annual SI swimsuit issue. Beyond forty-five minutes in Tijuana on a family trip to California in 1977, and my forays into Canada to cover hockey, I’ve never left the country. But now I get a rushed passport in Midtown and fly from JFK to Amsterdam, Amsterdam to Karachi, Karachi to Singapore, Singapore to Jakarta, and Jakarta to Bali. (Six days later, I’ll fly home through Tokyo, making a complete circumnavigation of the globe in a week.) On one long leg of the outbound flight—Karachi, Pakistan, to Singapore on KLM Royal Dutch Airlines—I am the sole passenger in the upper deck of a Boeing 747, the airplane cabin that captivated me as a kid. Only now I have the upstairs berth entirely to myself, except for the Dutch flight attendant with whom I chat for most of the eight-hour journey, all the while wondering: How did I get here, wherever I am?
In our house in South Brook, above the fireplace, hangs a painting that Dad bought for five bucks in the Philippines. It depicts a man and his mule. In Bali, I buy a large wood carving of a man and his ducks. On my return to New York, I ship it to Mom, who gamely displays it on the mantel, under the donkey painting she never loved.
On a rare summer visit to the office to do my expenses, I read in my complimentary copy of the Times that a grisly discovery has been made on North 25th Street in Milwaukee. An alleged serial killer named Jeffrey Dahmer has been apprehended there, five blocks from my old apartment in a neighborhood that was—the Times notes—“popular as inexpensive housing for Marquette University students.”
Dahmer had worked downtown at the Ambrosia Chocolate Factory, whose bewitching Wonka bouquet reached me on a westerly wind. His first Milwaukee victim was slain in the fall of my senior year, in a room at the faded art-deco Ambassador Hotel.
But there is a happier reminder of Marquette too. At Mass on a Sunday morning at Saint Patrick’s, I see a heavyset rugby player I passed on campus during my freshman and sophomore years. He’s walking up the aisle to receive communion in zebra-striped Zubaz sweatpants, a white T-shirt, and black Chuck Taylor high-tops, unlaced. He’s three years older than I am, and I didn’t know him at school, but I am pleased to see him—hours after performing on Saturday Night Live and presumably attending its famous after-party—finding comfort, as I have, in the ritual of Mass.
When Chris Farley stars in his own movie, Tommy Boy, he’ll set the first ten minutes at Marquette, in off-campus housing like my own, where a young person’s dreams seemed—at the same time—distant but somehow inevitable.
The doorbell rings in a rented beach house in Malibu. I’m sitting inside, consuming the Doritos and Diet Cokes I’ve just retrieved from a local strip mall, at the request of the French supermodel being photographed on a rented white horse on the beach. I’m here to write a story for the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, about this photo shoot, but I’m too self-conscious to do anything but run errands and sit inside and watch TV and wait for FedEx to deliver a lens for the fashion photographer who is running the show. When the bell rings, I open the door and find the FedEx man holding a package and proffering a clipboard for my signature. He looks at me—in my Minnesota Timberwolves cap—and smirks. Only then do I notice that the French swimsuit model has joined me in the doorframe, in a bikini, to see who’s at the door and what he’s delivering.
And I laugh, because the FedEx guy thinks I’m the homeowner, and the model is my girlfriend, and that I’m living a fourteen-year-old boy’s dream in his kid sister’s Barbie Malibu Dream House.
He’s wrong in every particular but this: the job is one fourteen-year-old boy’s dream, though there are many weeks when I sit in a baseball press box, surveying the crowd on a Friday night in Baltimore, and wish that I was among the twenty-four-year-olds in the seats drinking beer, not up here hammering out two thousand words on the Orioles. But at this point I’m a passenger on a bullet train. It’s much easier to stay on than to jump off.
On the road four weeks out of every five, I return to New York long enough to file my $15,000 in monthly expenses. To pay off each staggering American Express bill, I get a cash advance in the Time & Life Building and walk it three blocks up Sixth Avenue to the Amex office inside the Hilton. Every month, the ritual is the same, my pockets filled with bricks of cash as I go “stompin’ on the avenue by Radio City.” When Steely Dan sang those words every night on the boom box between the beds in the room Tom and I used to share in South Brook, I didn’t know it was an affirmation.
I walk north, green lights all the way up Sixth Avenue to Central Park, where the city appears to end abruptly at the edge of an uncharted wilderness, the great unknown.
In the vestibule of my apartment building, where my subterranean room holds all my possessions, I collect my mail. In it, a postcard. On it, two aerial photographs of a c
loverleaf freeway interchange. I recognize the image immediately as the western terminus of the Strip in Bloomington, even before I see the yellow letters: METRO AREA 494 STRIP. Quite why anyone would manufacture this postcard, or anyone would buy it, is a mystery. But I know why the sender sent it. Because she knows this was the boulevard of my adolescent dreams.
On the reverse of the postcard, a caption: “Aerial view of two of the interchanges of the Metro area’s I-494 in Bloomington, Minnesota.” Beneath that is a message in gorgeous cursive: “Dear Steve, Having a great time. Wish you were here. Thought you would like to keep this on your desk as a reminder of this garden spot. Love, Mom.”
She knows that I’m on my way, as a writer if not quite as a grown-up. And I know that she knows this because she has added a PS:
“Books on way tomorrow.”
15.
Nothing but Flowers
Readers of my previous book, Sting-Ray Afternoons, will know that Mom died on September 5, 1991, of a swift-moving disease that left the remaining six of us bereft in the driveway at 2809 West 96th Street in Bloomington. I had been awakened before dawn by a phone call in the Marriott on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, where I was staying to write about the White Sox. The next month, the Twins won the 1991 World Series, and I wrote the story for SI overnight, while staying in the basement of my childhood home, in front of the basement TV where I first tried to catch a split second of scrambled nudity when cable came to South Brook.
“You’re the guy from Kennedy,” Kent Hrbek said to me in the Twins’ clubhouse.
Dad by then was a senior executive at Mickey Mining, in his fourth decade at the company. When any musical artist that recorded on Scotch brand tape achieved a significant sales milestone, their record label or engineers often sent Dad a plaque by way of thanks. Dad had never heard of—much less listened to—any of these bands (nor any bands at all), but he occasionally brought home one of these plaques from work and asked at holidays if we were familiar with the “artists” paying tribute to him and his colleagues at Mickey Mining.
“Ever heard of…” he’d say, squinting down through his bifocals at an engraved brass plate.
“Bytches with Problems?” I’d say, reading the inscription. “You’ve been given an award by the Rodgers and Hammerstein of explicit female rap.”
“So you have heard of them.”
He also received a plaque, never displayed in the office, commemorating the platinum status of MC Ren’s EP Kizz My Black Azz.
By then, Dad was living alone in the house in South Brook, though we all still gathered at holidays. That first Christmas after Mom died, all of us—except John, who was playing hockey for Notre Dame—took Dad to Hawaii, to escape Minnesota. Another Christmas, we went to Palm Desert, California, home to a strip mall called the Beer Hunter, which had hundreds of exotic beers from around the world in cans, bottles, and corked earthen jugs. Dad sat at the bar, examined the offerings, and told the bartender to bring him a succession of beers in increasingly larger containers, so that at the end of the night his empties appeared to be a lineup of Russian nesting dolls. One of the Rushin boys acted as a designated driver that night, and was urged by his brothers on the ride back to our rented house to give someone a “lawn job.” He complied, driving up the curb and across a front yard. The next morning, we drove past the lawn we had violated the night before and—reflecting on the effort and resources required to grow a lush lawn in the desert—were overcome with remorse. But the larger point remained: whenever the Rushin children gather, for the rest of our lives, we will become who we were when we shared that house in South Brook—one redhead, four shitheads.
Likewise, I remained that same kid long into adulthood whenever I was around Flip Saunders, in whose backyard we contested the SHIT tournament. Flip went on to become the head coach of the Minnesota Timberwolves in the NBA, as well as the Detroit Pistons, Washington Wizards, and Timberwolves again. I met Flip for a drink one night after a Timberwolves game and he introduced me to his friend, the former Celtics forward Kevin McHale, whose games so enthralled and occasionally enraged me, Mike, and Ope on the Richie the C TV in Mike’s basement. “I got Rush his job at Sports Illustrated,” Flip said to McHale. And in a very real way he did, for if he hadn’t invited us to play on his court, I never would have written to SI in the first place. In 2005, when his Pistons played in the NBA Finals and I received an award as National Sportswriter of the Year, Flip texted me: “We’ve come a long way from the SHIT.” He was joking, because of course we hadn’t come any distance at all: Flip was still trying to win a basketball tournament and I was still writing about it.
Flip died in 2015. On that day in 1984 when we watched Ryne Sandberg hit two home runs against the Cardinals on the NBC Game of the Week, Flip had vowed to name his firstborn after the Cubs’ second baseman. Two years later, Flip and Debbie Saunders had a son. Ryan Saunders—close enough—is now an NBA coach like his father.
Jane Bachman “Bambi” Wulf, who even more than Flip was responsible for getting me my job at Sports Illustrated—on faith, over the phone, never having met me—died in 2017. At her memorial service in Larchmont, New York, dozens of writers shared stories similar to my own, of being hired on a merit that was evident only to Bambi. Her obituary in Sports Illustrated stated, with a fact-checked accuracy that would have made her proud: “Perhaps no person has done more to promote the careers of sportswriters in the U.S. over the last 40 years than she did.” Among her charges were my first friends at the magazine, Sally Guard and Merrell Noden, both of whom died too young. I think of them whenever I have a beer (Merrell) or bologna sandwich (Sally).
Bambi hired me largely on the word of Alex Wolff. His enthusiastic reply to a kid who wrote him a letter about a basketball tournament in a Bloomington backyard was one of hundreds of similar letters he wrote to aspiring journalists over the decades. Alex was honored by the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2011 for his “significant contribution to the game of basketball,” not the least of which was his In-Your-Face Basketball Book, whose co-author—Chuck Wielgus—became the boss of USA Swimming, whose athletes won 156 Olympic medals during his tenure.
Alex went on to write a book about basketball around the globe. Among the many players and innovators he profiled in Big Game, Small World was the itinerant coach of a professional team in Poland. His name was—still is—Mike McCollow. Mike has coached college and professional basketball in North America and abroad, including with Flip Saunders in the Continental Basketball Association. One night in New York, where he was advance scouting for the Toronto Raptors of the NBA, I met him for a drink and we recalled the last time we were both in New York together: at Alex Wolff’s apartment in the summer of 1988, when our nights-in-White-Castle dreams were just taking shape, and I marveled at a real writer’s real computer.
Speaking of computers: despite its memorable 1984 commercial, Apple did not free the world from the tyranny of looking at a screen. On the contrary.
Fortunately, we can still look at books unmediated by a pane of glass. In 1986, the chain of B. Dalton Booksellers was sold to a company named sixty-nine years earlier for partners William Barnes and Clifford Noble. In acquiring B. Dalton, Barnes & Noble instantly became the second largest bookseller in the U.S., on its way to superstore status.
Ramshackle Renaissance Books, a superstore in my estimation, was shut down by the city of Milwaukee, which cited the building’s “structural problems.” Long after the humans had left, thousands of books remained inside, like the sunken treasures of a wrecked ship. Radio Doctors of Milwaukee went the way of all record stores. But the Ambassador Hotel was purchased by a Marquette alumnus and restored to its former glory as an art-deco jewel. I’ve stayed in it several times on visits to Marquette, whose surrounding streets are almost unrecognizable. A decades-long campaign to revitalize the nearby blocks has made the campus safer. In the process, the Avalanche bar succumbed to the wrecking ball, prompting almost all of its patrons to ask, “H
ow could you tell?”
The same was said of McCormick Hall, torn down in 2019. It was replaced by a state-of-the-art residence hall called the Commons. I returned to Marquette in 2007 to deliver the commencement address. I told the Class of ’07, nineteen years after William Rehnquist spoke to the Class of ’88, just prior to my Golden Handshake, that I once ate chimichangas out of a parking lot mud puddle there.
Three years later, the Minnesota Twins moved out of the Metrodome to play home games outdoors for the first time since they left Bloomington twenty-eight years earlier. Outside gate 14 at Target Field is a bronze statue of number 14, Kent Hrbek, running the bases with his arms extended in triumph after hitting that grand slam in Game 6 of the 1987 World Series. He still lives in Bloomington, a corner of which will forever be the People’s Republic of Hrbekistan.
When I go to Twins games now, or anywhere else in the Twin Cities, I have the unsettling sensation of entering my house at night to find the furniture was replaced in my absence. This is especially true of Bloomington. In the 1980s, twin calamities—bankruptcy, bulldozing—befell the Carlton Celebrity Room, where Exile will never again appear at the Backstage disco to sing, “I wanna kiss you all over.”
The Carlton site was subsumed into Bloomington’s next claim to national relevance: the Mall of America. Met Stadium and Met Center were also torn down to make room for the nation’s largest shopping center. In 1993, the Minnesota North Stars moved to Dallas, where they dropped the “North” from their name. But if you visit the Mall of America now, you just might hear the faint echo of a seventeen-year-old boy meekly stage-whispering: “Pop-CAWN! Getcha pop-CAWN HEAH!”
Near the other end of the Strip, Wally McCarthy’s Lindahl Olds has vanished, along with its free Saturday morning hot dogs, and in its stead stands the world headquarters of the Best Buy Company, itself an endangered bricks-and-mortar species, with scarcely an inch of magnetic tape—audio or video—for sale.