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

by Craig Carton

  I went home thinking I had at least escaped my folks’ finding out, that is, until the phone rang in the middle of Friday dinner. I was only three forks into my spaghetti and meatballs when my mother answered the call, listened for a minute, then looked at me and said, “Oh really, is that so?” I knew who was on the phone and what was being said. I even knew what the punishment would be. I knew my weekend was ruined.

  I was sequestered in my room from Friday night through Sunday night, only allowed out for meals and bathroom breaks. In two and a half days, I did the entire project that took everyone else three months. I even built a huge castle with a moat, fake trees, water, and people. I brought it in on Monday, the day it was expected, and killed with the presentation. I deserved an A but only got a B because I rushed it in three days.

  This lesson may have been valuable, but it was not the one my parents wanted me to learn. I learned that I could do well in school without doing the legwork. That worked out fine for me until they decided I couldn’t play soccer in high school. Later, when I was applying to colleges, I still had a good enough reputation to be invited to some schools for visits by the coaches. But by then I had lost my interest in soccer altogether, and was running an illegal living room casino and dating a Playboy centerfold.

  Barely a day goes by that the athletic world isn’t affected by one type of scandal or another. At the collegiate level, typically it’s in relation to star athletes either cheating on exams, having someone take those exams for them, or passing classes without even taking exams. When I was a junior at Syracuse, I had access to the athletic facilities set aside for scholarship athletes. Not because I was one, but because I had played club baseball my freshman year there. As a result, I had a pass that never expired.

  One day when I was walking through the locker room after playing ball, I saw a note stuck to every mirror. The note said, “Psych 205 students: If you need a copy of the midterm, see Joe.” There was a telephone number there as well. I had Psych 205, so I called the number, and within thirty minutes some random guy came and gave me the midterm that I would be taking in a few days.

  My studying, as little as it was, came to a halt. I began solely to study the questions on the test. This was before the Internet, so professors reproduced their tests on old copier machines and the carbon copy that was left behind contained the test. Someone had gotten hold of it and made copies for the athletes so that they could pass it. In theory, you didn’t even have to study the questions and learn the answers. You only needed someone else to know the answers and give them to you, and then you just had to memorize the order: A, D, C, A, etc.

  A few days later, I sat for the test. It was the exact test I had in my possession days earlier. I purposely got some questions wrong so it wouldn’t look like I had cheated. It was a tough class, after all.

  The following week, we were supposed to get our grades back. The professor walked in. He was pissed. He announced that he had learned that someone had stolen a copy of the test before he administered it. The entire test we took was now void. He would be giving us a new test right now, and it was the hardest test he had ever created. He guaranteed us that no one would get over a 40. I was crushed, and only hoped he’d be grading on a curve. Thankfully he did, and my 58 was actually a B+ because everyone else did so badly.

  While you might expect this kind of thing at a hugely successful Division 1A sports school, you wouldn’t expect it at an Ivy League school.

  Wrong.

  As the basketball team at Harvard has gotten better and better under coach Tommy Amaker, they have apparently also gotten envious of ball players at non–Ivy League schools who don’t have to study. Even worse for the Ivy Leaguers is that they are not offered sports scholarships. They have to pay, and they have to study. Damn the injustice.

  In late summer of 2012, nearly half of the 279 students in a government course were embroiled in a cheating scandal. Included in the mix was Kyle Casey, the leading scorer on the men’s basketball team. He has since withdrawn from school, and fellow co-captain Brandyn Curry did, too. Why withdraw from school, though? Well, withdrawing before the school year allowed them to retain an extra year of eligibility to play.

  Hello, Princeton!

  What’s next? Crib notes at the Scripps Spelling Bee?

  In September 1986, I was a senior in high school. I still had not focused on what colleges I wanted to apply to. I wasn’t all that worried about it, though. I assumed I would figure it out eventually. But I didn’t have to worry. My parents had already begun the process of choosing a school for me. I had given up trying to emancipate myself from my parents. I just went with the flow.

  This attitude had started years ago, and it was now serving me well. I mean, what seventeen-year-old allows his parents to control every aspect of his life without the slightest bit of rebellion? Maybe I was lazy, or maybe I was a big pussy afraid to challenge the authority of my parents. Regardless, while my buddies applied frantically to dozens of colleges and universities across America, I didn’t.

  I applied to only five schools, and of them, I only picked one myself. My parents wanted me to follow in my brother’s footsteps and go to an Ivy League college, but my grades weren’t of that caliber, and I didn’t want them to be. As a high school senior I visited my brother at Dartmouth. I saw that his course load was ridiculous, plus they were on a trimester setup, so he had to go to school for what seemed like the entire year. I also didn’t care for the other kids I met up there—all booshie and pretentious—and the girls weren’t pretty. The Ivies were out.

  My most memorable experience at an Ivy League school was being in Hanover, New Hampshire, for my brother’s graduation from Dartmouth. The night before he graduated, his fraternity had a big party, as did all the other frat houses. Most of the kids had lined up a guaranteed 100K job, or graduate school. Looking back on it now, the idiots I graduated with—myself included—had no job prospects, much less making big bucks. A life of gay porn was a more likely pursuit.

  My parents, my sister, and I drove up to New Hampshire with my aunt, uncle, and grandma trailing along. My sister and a girlfriend of hers went to the party with me. At this stage of my life, I could already hold my drink, having learned the skill at Gary’s Barleycorn in New Rochelle, just a few blocks from the Iona College campus. We hit the frat party and said yes to every shot and stale beer served to us in the basement of the house. I will never forget the smell of cheap brew, or the sound of Ping-Pong balls hitting sixteen-ounce plastic cups during a marathon game of beer pong. I’ll also never forget hearing “Hang On, Sloopy” forty-seven times in a row.

  Drinking wasn’t the only thing I was good at. I had developed a complete disregard for my own welfare when it came to fighting. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t get in a lot of fights, but I didn’t mind stepping up to someone looking for one, nor did I back down from a guy who deserved to get his ass kicked.

  After playing beer pong with random dudes and chicks for a while, I went upstairs and found my brother playing a game of pool. I grabbed another beer—probably my eighth—and watched. As my brother started draining balls all over the table, I noticed that the demeanor of his opponent was getting worse.

  The kid was drunk. His face got tighter and redder with each perfect strike of the cue ball from my brother. My spidey senses started to tingle all over. The kid was about to snap. With four balls to go, my brother hit a sweet bank shot and I saw the dude grab his pool cue with two hands like it was a bat. I moved right next to him so he could feel my hip bumping up against his. It distracted him from my brother, which was my goal. I wasn’t done.

  I was drunk, and happy to engage with this douchebag. I leaned into his ear and said something witty, like “If you take one step toward him with that stick, I’ll drive it so far up your ass, you’ll be spitting wood for a month.”

  The kid looked at me and said, “Fuck you, who the fuck are you?”

  Game on.

  He pushed his hand into my chest.
I pulled him to the ground, got on top of him, and put my hands around his throat. In my best Rambo voice, I said, “I could really fuck you up. Now when I get up, don’t be an asshole.” By that time my brother and a few of his frat brothers came rushing over, pulled me off him, and told me to go home.

  I went downstairs, got into the family station wagon with my sister and her friend, and began the twenty-minute drive back to the Holiday Inn. I was buzzed, no doubt about that, but I mistakenly thought that I had reinvigorated my senses during the nonfight and thought I was fine to drive. The brisk nighttime New Hampshire air also seemed to help.

  I was wrong, of course. On the way home, I drove over the curb twice before straightening out the car. As I made it to the street that the hotel was on, I saw the big green sign about a quarter mile ahead. I put on my turn signal and started to make a left. The problem was that the sign was about 250 yards before the actual entrance to the parking lot. I was now crossing a double yellow onto the off-ramp of a major highway.

  I realized what I was doing and turned hard, back across the double yellow and onto the right side of the road. Within a few seconds, I saw police lights behind me.

  I pulled into an empty gas station, the cop following me. I had never been pulled over before, drunk or sober. As a virgin at this, I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. So I did the worst thing possible. I put the car in park, opened my door, and started to jog toward the cruiser. My sister and her friend thought the whole thing was hysterical and couldn’t stop laughing. I could have strangled them both.

  The police officer was halfway out of his car as I began my jog. He grabbed his gun, got into a two-point stance, and hollered, “Freeze!” He had every reason to shoot me. I raised my hands and said, “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.” He barked at me to get back in my car and to put my hands on the steering wheel. I was frozen with the gun pointed at me, but he wasn’t putting it away until I obeyed. I went back to my car. My sister and her friend were still laughing like hyenas, and I kept trying to make them shut up.

  The officer came to the car, asked for license and registration, and went back to his vehicle. More hilarity from the girls, more time passing, and more worrying by me. After ten minutes that felt like an hour, he came back to the car and asked me what we were doing. I explained that my brother was graduating the next day, and we were coming back from a family dinner. He of course asked if I had been drinking, and I said I’d had two beers with my meal.

  He explained in detail how he had been following me for miles and saw me hit the two curbs, and then he told me to get out of the car. He didn’t give me a Breathalyzer, thank God, but he did give me a roadside sobriety test. Hand out, index fingers to the nose, recite the alphabet, and then the hardest part: close your eyes, tilt your head back, and touch your nose without wobbling, followed by heel-to-toe walking a line. After the test, he told me to get back in the car and asked me where I was staying. I told him the Holiday Inn right next door. He asked if my parents were there. I said that not only were they there, but they were sleeping, and I’d rather he not wake them up.

  “Follow me to the hotel,” he responded. He drove first, lights on, and I followed as instructed. When we got in front of the lobby, he came to my window and asked me my father’s first name and told me he was waking him up to tell him what happened so my dad would make sure I stayed in my room the rest of the night.

  It was three in the morning. There ain’t nothing to do in New Hampshire at that time of night unless you’re cow-tipping, or making the walk of shame back home from a fat girl’s house. He went inside the hotel, spent about five minutes in there, and came out alone. He said, “I’m not going to tell your dad, but do all of us a favor and don’t drive when you drink. Now go to bed, and enjoy your brother’s graduation.”

  I thanked him, and my sister and I swore each other to secrecy on the evening’s events. We crept back to our rooms and went to bed. We kept that secret until the following Thanksgiving, when my sister told the whole story to everybody in my family.

  Now, less than a year later, I sat in a car with my mom and dad on our way to Boston to check out Tufts. I wanted nothing to do with Tufts, but they insisted on my applying to Ivy League schools, and Tufts was as close as I could get. I was miserable and uncomfortable, like the first time your parents take you shopping for a suit and make you try on nine of them on a sunny Saturday afternoon while you’d rather be outside. After a whole day spent touring Tufts and getting the academic load, my parents looked at each other and said, “This is where you should be.”

  I told them I had no interest in it. But they had this amazing superpower whereby they could turn their hearing off and become deaf when I spoke. On the long ride back, they contemplated aloud what I should write my essay about, and whether I would be—excuse me, they would be—applying early.

  Applying early meant that you sent in the application to the school of your choice in the fall, and by late January you could find out if you were accepted or not. Within forty-eight hours of our returning from Tufts, my application was in the mail. I was now just a few months away from potentially being in a college that I wanted no part of. If you do not get in, you have to hedge your bets, so they sat me down to ask what other schools I was interested in.

  I hadn’t given it any thought. They chimed right in with “How about Colgate, Ithaca, Hamilton, and Hobart?” Hamilton was an easy choice because its soccer coach had been involved in Westchester soccer and knew about me before my folks banned me from playing. While they didn’t offer scholarships per se, they did offer me a merit-based scholarship to play soccer.

  The good news about these schools was that they were all close to one another, so theoretically, visiting them could be done in one easy trip. My dad decided that he and I would go on a father-son road trip to see each of those schools in early October.

  Of course, he chose a day that the Mets were in a playoff game. He didn’t care one bit about the Mets or sports in general. There was no arguing with him. Bright and early on a Saturday morning, we got into the car at six o’clock and started out toward Ithaca, New York, on the road trip of all road trips. The idea was that we would see three or four of the schools that day, find a shitty motel to stay in, hit one more the next morning, and return home. The problem with the plan was that my father and I had nothing to talk about.

  We got in the car and began our trek to a never-before-seen part of upstate New York. I adjusted the radio, and my father yelled at me for it being too loud and turned it off. I turned it back on, lowered it, and settled in to Bon Jovi singing “Livin’ on a Prayer.”

  “What is this noise? Turn it off!”

  This was going to be a long trip.

  I leaned against the window, hoping to fall asleep. Before my head made contact with the pillow I’d brought along, I heard, “You’re not going to fall asleep and leave me all alone.”

  It was a four-hour drive to Ithaca, and other than a few awkward attempts at small talk, we made it all the way without a single meaningful conversation. This could have been the most amazing father-son road trip. He could have gotten creative and agreed to hit some bars or strip clubs along the way. He could have opened up and told me some great college stories from his days at Alfred. Instead, he wanted to discuss what kind of time we were making.

  Maybe it’s a Jewish thing, but it seems that my people are overly concerned with making good time on car voyages. Everywhere we went, there was always some sort of inevitable conversation among the adults about it: “What kind of time did you make?” “Oh, we made great time.” Well, we were making good time that morning, and it seemed to make my dad happy.

  I don’t want to be too hard on him. It’s not like I was engaging him in dialogue, either. Here we were, two closed-off peas in a pod, driving endlessly. The one thing my father didn’t know yet was that there would be no motel, there would be no staying over. Most important, there would be no missing the Mets playoffs. There would be, however, more miles
driven in a single day by any Carton in the history of the family.

  We visited the Ithaca campus, and then on to Hamilton and Hobart. At Hamilton we met with the soccer coach, got a tour of the athletic facilities, and enjoyed lunch in the student dining hall.

  The biggest issue was that both schools required a fifty-page essay on one of four different topics. I would have to write this essay in addition to my regular homework and turn it in with my application. They lost me right there. If I had to do a fifty-page anything just to be considered for admission, imagine how much work I’d have to do once I got there. I wasn’t looking for a school that required me to do a lot of work. I was looking for high school extended; a place where I could do enough to get a solid B average and spend the rest of the time having fun.

  We had no plans to visit Syracuse, and after seeing Ithaca, Hamilton, and Hobart, and enduring the silent driving treatment, I was good to go home. My father looked at his map and said, “If we make good time, we can hit Colgate, too.” So off we were to Colgate. Another brief walk through campus, and then an executive decision by my dad that changed the course of my life for the better. He decided that since we were there and we’d never do this again, we should check out Syracuse, too. “Okay,” I said, and off we went.

  Of the five schools that I visited, Syracuse was the only one I didn’t set foot in. We drove through campus, and I saw the frat houses and the quad and tons of hot chicks. We never stopped to get out.

  I had found my home. Great sports, big school, and enough great-looking babes that even I should be able to disappoint at least one a week. It was four in the afternoon when we were done with our drive-by of the ’Cuse, and we had to make a decision: find a motel, grab dinner and crash, or be daring.