Loudmouth: Tales (and Fantasies) of Sports, Sex, and Salvation from Behind the Microphone

by Craig Carton

  My father asked me several more times if I was sure I didn’t want to hang out with him. I felt guilty over it at the time. We never got to hang out alone, and I was saying no to the opportunity. But instead I decided to go to camp and play. I still regret not saying yes. Who knows what would have happened had I stayed home. I might have had one awesome experience of bonding with my dad. Instead I don’t have any memories of that—not to say they’re all bad, but I just don’t have a single shining one that stands out.

  I know my decision stung my father, and I know it for a fact because of what happened a few days later. We were all hanging out in the backyard, and my brother and sister were playing on our big swing. At that point I looked like I could be of Far Eastern descent. I had a round face, almond-shaped eyes, and pin-straight, almost-black hair. My mother had nicknamed me “Bagel” because my face was perfectly round. “If you had a hole in the middle of your face, you would look just like a bagel,” she often said. My brother and sister used to tell me that I was adopted from Vietnam. They’d make airplane noises, as if I were landing in America to be adopted, to piss me off. The first Saturday after I decided to go to camp, my father got in on the act.

  As my brother and sister made the jet noises, my father cupped his hands over his mouth and pretended to be an airport announcer. “Now arriving from Vietnam on flight 986, little baby boy Carton; let’s call him Craig.” On and on this taunting went, with my brother and sister making the same sounds as they were swinging and my dad announcing my arrival. After a while I got pissed and yelled at him to stop. I didn’t realize that I had walked right in front of the swing, and its corner struck me on the edge of my left eye and sent me flying.

  My father’s initial reaction wasn’t “Oh my God, are you okay?” It was “What the fuck were you walking in front of a swing for, you idiot?”

  I got the proper medical attention and a scar above my eye to show for my petulance.

  One month later, they were all at it again with the Vietnam baby act. Unbelievably, I walked in front of the same swing and took it in the other eye. And yet again I was scolded for being an idiot. I still have a scar above each eye, but far more important was the realization that I was really on my own, even when surrounded by the people who loved me the most—or the most they were capable of.

  Two recurring dreams were constants throughout my childhood. I had these two dreams when I slipped into bed. I looked forward to them as a way to put the day’s distractions aside and allow myself to fall asleep. The first was before I turned ten, and I still smile every time I think about it: I was an undercover FBI agent passing myself off as an elementary school student. I gave myself superpowers, such as creating the world’s first invisible water slide that could carry me to any part of the school. As bad guys invaded the playground, I turned invisible, too.

  The second one was far beyond my maturity level. I dreamed that one day I would be famous enough to appear on the Johnny Carson show. Not only was I a guest, I had something specific to say. What did I desperately need to tell the world? My message was as simple as it was important for me at that time: in my dream, I wanted to tell the world that my father was a disciplinarian; that life wasn’t fun growing up inside the walls of the Carton family prison. And yet if not for the way my parents raised me, I wouldn’t have gotten to the places I had.

  I was one fucked-up kid.

  The desire to be famous lived in my subconscious. I never contemplated it when I was awake. But uttering those words about my family life motivated me and gave me a sense of peace.

  To be clear, I don’t hate my father. I love him, and I spent a good portion of my life trying to please him. Yet I also find it hard to spend time with him, and at this point I don’t care in the least what he thinks of me or how I live my life.

  My father grew up throughout the five boroughs of New York City, and he grew up tough. He had no choice. His father, Jack Carton, was one of the toughest guys in New York in the 1930s. A Golden Gloves champion twice as a middleweight, a standout lifeguard on the beaches of Coney Island, an accomplished pilot, and the muscle for the Jewish mob, nobody fucked with my grandfather.

  Nobody, that is, except cancer.

  By all accounts, what Jack Carton said, went. After a stint in the army, where he taught soldiers how to fly the latest military planes, he opened up a gas station and diner on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. When he fought for the Golden Gloves, the Post accidentally printed his name as Jack Carter. Attempting to capitalize on the notoriety, he called his diner Carter’s and used the tagline “Good to the Last Morsel.” He worked eighteen-hour days to support his family, which consisted of my father, my aunt Meryl, and my grandmother.

  Jack believed in the handshake over the hug, that a man should act like a man, and not reveal his emotions. He didn’t spend much time with his kids, but he noticed that my dad was starting to make some bad choices—such as joining a gang—so he decided to teach him a lesson. He told my father that he, my dad, was going to work side by side with him for the whole summer, doing manual labor from sunup to sundown for ten weeks straight. At the end of the summer, Jack sat my dad down and said, “Son, you have a choice in life. You can earn a living with your hands like you just experienced, or with your brain. It’s a decision you have to make.”

  My father chose to live by his brains and wound up excelling at school, being voted class president, and enrolling at Alfred University. My grandfather never saw him graduate. He died of leukemia when my dad was a sophomore in college. My dad could have dropped out, but he decided to honor his father by graduating. Unfortunately, my father also decided to inherit many of his dad’s traits.

  My mother, Bobbe, was born Roberta Louise Rosen to a poor family in New Jersey and spent a few years as a child in South Carolina before moving back to Whippany, New Jersey. Her father was a brilliant engineer who wound up getting work at the Newark, New Jersey, airline hangars in between World Wars I and II. When work dried up there, he became a door-to-door salesman, selling whatever products he could. My grandmother never worked a day in her life. From what I’ve been told, she was borderline loopy, and as my mother describes it, her loopiness led her to wild swings of emotion, and she was cold and quiet, although she was never medicated or hospitalized. For my mother, every day could be bad.

  As a kid, my mother excelled academically, and her high school grades were so good that she was offered one of the first-ever full academic scholarships handed out at Johns Hopkins University. But she never went. My grandparents decided that it was too expensive even to drive her there, to Baltimore, and that their money would be better spent sending her brother to college instead. It was a man’s world, they reasoned, and they made this decision without considering how it affected my mother.

  The next summer, my mother did some summer stock theater, which resulted in her being nicknamed Chesty Larue. I don’t know that she ever danced or shook her ass for money, or if “Chesty” was merely a character she played in a show, but ever since I first heard the nickname, I have teased her about it. The following fall, my mother went to nursing school. She became a registered nurse and worked at Mount Sinai Hospital, where she met my father. I have always admired her for overcoming her parents’ not thinking she was good enough. She became a real estate broker and agent in her thirties, and owned her own successful real estate agency in New Rochelle, New York, for more than a decade before retiring. Sadly, though, she inherited her parents’ knack for being emotionless and inconsiderate when it came to decisions that affected their kids.

  I grew up without hugs, kisses, or verbal confirmation of being loved. It was all I knew, and I accepted it for what it was well into my adult life. At that point, I began to resent my father for not being warmer toward me. But the resentment morphed into feeling sorry for my dad and forgiving him. That was the only way he knew to act. I once asked him why he was so cynical, and when he got that way. He replied, “When I was eighteen.” He didn’t have to elaborate; that was
when his father died from cancer.

  I think about my dad a lot, yet I don’t see him or talk to him much now; certainly not as often as when I used to call him daily just to stay in touch. I view him as a cautionary example that drives me to love my children and make sure they know it, feel it, and hear me say it often. I try hard to do better than he did. And yet I also hope I’m as successful a parent as he was. He raised three kids who are doing amazingly well today, regardless of whether it’s in spite of him or because of him.

  What kind of asshole am I that I would say that, and would still think about my childish desire to tell the world that I didn’t like living with my parents? Well, that’s the thing about me: I look at life through the split prism of a forty-year-old man and a ten-year-old child. I am both immature and mature at the same time. I filled out an application to join the FBI when I was in my mid-twenties and living in Philadelphia, only to realize that there were no invisible water slides to transport me to the scene of a crime. I never sent in my application.

  To me, life should be like day camp. Yet I have to make adult decisions that impact my wife, my kids, my work partners, and so many others. I’m always happy—that’s what they say about me, and that’s what I say about myself—but I can’t say I know what happiness is, other than whenever I look at my wife and kids.

  One aspect of my mental well-being, or lack thereof, is that I have been diagnosed with multiple disorders: Tourette’s, OCD, ADD—I have them all. They drive every movement I make and every thought that enters my mind. Everything has to be done in even numbers. If I touch something twice with my left hand, I have to touch it twice with my right. I have to take an even number of steps before I hit a crack in the sidewalk. When I golf, I can’t swing a club unless I take an odd number of practice swings, so the real swing winds up on an even number.

  The OCD is relentless, yet it combats my lack of focus from the ADD. Most of the time the OCD wins because the Tourette’s comes into play. When I have a Tourette’s tic, such as having to touch my nose and sniffle, it has to be done in a specific way, or my brain will not allow me to move on. If I do not tic in a precise manner, I may as well be locked in mental prison, as I can’t do anything without performing the tic “right.”

  When I was living in Denver, my wife, Kim, at the time still my girlfriend, came to visit. We were at a red light in the car, and I had to tic. As an adult, I’ve become good at hiding these physical urges so you’d never know I had any. But this time I couldn’t hold it back. I put my right hand to my face and started to do a combination of touches and taps to my nose and face while sniffling in an uncontrollable manner. I couldn’t get it just right, or in the perfect order. The traffic light turned green, but I was locked inside the Tourette’s. The light turned red, and we still hadn’t moved. Finally I performed the motions in the appropriate manner to release the lock on my brain. I looked at Kim and she said, “What the fuck was that?”

  “I have Tourette’s. Let’s go grab dinner.”

  I’m in a constant battle with myself, and I’ve survived it without ever telling a soul—until now. I built a career based on one lousy college demo tape. I suffered the indignity of being fired without cause. I never had a single girlfriend for more than three weeks, and yet I married the best-looking girl I ever dated, who came with a unique personality to match. I never played professional baseball, but several dozen strippers and Hooters girls will swear to their kids that they slept with the backup third baseman of the Philadelphia Phillies.

  I’ve been to the bottom career-wise, and now I am blessed to have been to the top. The top is much better than the bottom—unless, of course, you’re a veteran porn actor who likes that sort of thing.

  There’s an old cliché that nothing is certain but death and taxes. While that might be true (unless you are Ted Williams’s head or Wesley Snipes’s accountant), the truism is off the mark. The only thing that is for certain is that no matter what anyone says or thinks, every good story that has ever been told includes a scandal.

  Scandal is the air we breathe, the gravity that keeps us grounded, the m.o. in our mojo—well, you get it.

  Scandal has evolved, or perhaps devolved, ever since the original debate over how the earth was formed. Do you really believe that there was an explosion in mid-space, and we got lucky enough that five billion years later Brooklyn Decker was born and, even more amazingly, agreed to sleep with a perennial loser like Andy Roddick for the rest of her life? Or maybe you believe that there is a higher being who decided one day that he needed a planet to play with, so in six days he created the earth, and was so satisfied with his work that he took Sunday off? When he got back to work, humans could have started our existence with the wheel, or the ability to make fire—or the ability of a 120-pound, slightly built American with no muscle mass to speak of to ride his bike through the Alps without putting some type of cancer-causing poison into his blood.

  Regardless of what you believe, scandal has indeed devolved into one of three areas, and every single controversy can be traced back to one of them. The Big Three, as I call them, are:

  SEX, DRUGS, and CHEATING.

  Two of the biggest cheating scandals happened nearly one hundred years apart. The first and probably most famous was the 1919 Black Sox scandal. Orchestrated by the notorious Arnold “the Brain” Rothstein, it involved several members of the Chicago White Sox conspiring with gamblers to intentionally lose the World Series. As a result, eight members of the White Sox organization, including superstar “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, were banned from Major League Baseball.

  The second was the Tim Donaghy scandal in 2007. Donaghy was a thirteen-year veteran official in the NBA. He had a big gambling habit, which resulted in him owing lots of money to the mob. He saw only one way out of the debt: placing thousands of dollars in bets on games that he was officiating. As a ref, he could control the final score by either blowing or not blowing his whistle in certain situations. Tim also provided mobsters with tips on who would win. The guilty verdict was a major blow to the credibility of the NBA, which continues to fight the appearance of impropriety with every playoff.

  The biggest drug scandals in sports involved steroid use or other types of performance-enhancing drugs. There was a time when drug scandals meant your favorite player got caught snorting a line of cocaine off a stripper’s ass, or simply that he played for the Dallas Cowboys in the 1990s—but not anymore.

  Today’s top drug scandals involve every sport, both amateur and pro. In baseball, it’s Barry Bonds, the all-time lead home run hitter, and Roger Clemens, the all-time Cy Young Award winner. Both linked to steroids; both the best at what they did; and both most likely never going into the Hall of Fame. And let’s not forget that Lance Armstrong, the most dedicated cyclist in the history of two wheels, recently admitted to years of blood doping throughout his storied career. In an interview with Oprah Winfrey, he claimed to have cheated during every one of his seven Tour de France wins. He said that he never thought of it as cheating because he figured everyone else was doing it. I tried that line of thinking once with my parents when I told them everyone else was getting high, but it didn’t seem to work.

  The biggest sex scandal of all time would have to be Tiger Woods banging half of North America while married. The most amazing part of Tiger’s cheating is that he won more major golf tournaments than any golfer playing on the tour, all the while juggling a wife, two kids, more than a dozen other women on multiple continents, and all the other shit that he must have had to do on a daily basis. This guy won more majors than any dude since Jack Nicklaus.

  This proves my point that golf is the world’s single most boring sport. He was so bored that in between shots, he had to spend his time setting up liaisons for after the round. And now that he’s divorced and apparently not banging half the free world, his golf game has gone to shit.

  There is no area more rife with scandal than the world of sports. Politics is right up there, but I’m not Bill O’Reilly, so
for this book we will focus on scandals that helped shape sports.

  For a guy like me, scandal is good business. Hell, for all of us, scandal is good business. Without scandal, what would millions of housewives have to talk about with each other; what would bartenders and their regulars chat about? Without scandal, we’d be reduced to talking about the weather.

  My first introduction to scandal took place when I was eight years old and playing youth soccer in New Rochelle, just north of the Bronx. My team had advanced to the championship game. I was the star player on the team. (Did you think I’d tell a story where I wasn’t the star?)

  This, though, is the true story of a boy and his soccer ball—and his Benedict Arnold of a mother. At these events, the parents kept the official clock, and many would arbitrarily extend the length of a game if their kid’s team was losing. Conversely, some parents shortened games to preserve one-goal leads, so their little future non-athletes could win.

  By the time we had made it to the championship, the league decided something had to be done, so they searched high and low for the fairest maiden of them all to keep the official clock. They chose my mother. Big-chested, yes; fair, fuck no! Not once could I eat a Drake’s Ring Ding if I didn’t shove broccoli down my gullet first. This woman wouldn’t let me go trick-or-treating one Halloween because I had a test two days later. My mother might have been a former burlesque dancer named Chesty Larue, but now she was the most honest gal in the neighborhood? Laughable!