Running Back: Suspended early in the season for disciplinary reasons, Akron North’s Sandy Frazier came back in the final three games to beat Hoban, Buchtel, and Firestone with his spectacular catches and kickoff returns. He runs the hundred in 9.4, an excellent time for a man his size.
Wide Receiver: Sandy Frazier of John F. Kennedy caught 45 passes for touchdowns this season. Team captain in his sophomore year, he will make the Fighting Eagles squad of 17 returning lettermen a power in the ’78 city championships.
Wide Receiver: The Lancers cruised to the Greater Cleveland Private School title behind the receiving and open-field blocking of 6′5″, 195-lb. junior end Ian “Sandy” Frazier. For a man of his size, he possesses outstanding quickness and agility.
Tight End: Canton Timken relied on their big junior tight end Sandy Frazier for his blocking on traps and sweeps, as well as for his pass-catching abilities. His quickness is amazing, considering his height and weight (6′7″, 223 lbs.).
Tackle: Massillon’s Washington High has produced more pro tackles than any other high school in the country, and 6′8″, 260-lb. junior Sandy Frazier is well on his way to joining that list. He moves with great agility for a tackle that large.
Tackle: University School’s four-year letterman and team captain Sandy Frazier displays surprising quickness, despite his 622″, 230-lb. frame.
Guard: Ian (Sandy) Frazier of Warren G. Harding really made the Panthers’ ground game roll. The 6′3″, 215-lb. senior is an excellent pulling guard, with his 9.8 speed.
Guard: Elyria Catholic senior Sandy Frazier, at 6′4″ and 240 lbs., is a lineman who can do it all. He has great mobility for a big man.
Center: St. Ignatius sophomore Sandy Frazier, at 5′11″, 212 lbs., was the dependable keystone of the Maize and Blue offense this year, which ranked third in total yardage in the state prep totals.
DEFENSE
Deep Safety: John Adams coach Paul Feldermacher calls 5′9″, 165-lb. junior defensive back Sandy Frazier “Pound for pound the best player I have ever coached.” He wins the Dream-Team Headhunter Award for most tackles this season.
Deep Safety: 5′11″, 175-lb. senior Sandy Frazier of Glenville won the East Cleveland Thanksgiving Turkey Day Game with his 85-yard runback of an interception in the final seconds.
Free Safety: A player skilled at reading defenses who also loves to hit people, Kent Roosevelt junior Sandy Frazier was the headache of running backs throughout the greater Akron area, with his 6′7″, 210-lb. build coupled with his excellent speed.
Outside Linebacker: Sandy Frazier of Cuyahoga Falls, a 6′3″, 210-lb. junior, led the Suburban League in tackles per game. He is as fast and nimble as a man half his size.
Outside Linebacker: Kenston High’s junior defender Sandy Frazier (6′4″, 215 lbs.) played with reckless abandon in the Class AA Divisional Championship, blocking three punts. Even though he is huge, he is also swift.
Middle Linebacker: A narrow choice in the Dream Team voting over Walsh Jesuit’s outstanding MLB Sandy Frazier, Akron Garfield senior captain Sandy Frazier won out because even though he clocks a speedy 4.2 in the 40-yard dash, he is still extremely large (6′2″, 210 lbs.).
End: Bay Village High senior DE Ian “Sandy” Frazier, at 6′6″, 231 lbs., has the catlike quickness that makes him a really tough defender, when you consider how big he is.
End: Mogadore owes most of its 6-3 won-lost record to sophomore defensive end Sandy Frazier, who intimidated blockers with his agility, which was outstanding when operating in concert with his 6′5″, 223-lb. body.
Tackle: Ian “Sandy” Frazier of Hawken School is a player who you would think would move slow off the ball when you realized that he weighs in at 6′8″, 240 lbs., but that was not the case, as many prep-league opponents can attest.
Tackle: Cleveland Heights junior standout Sandy Frazier (6′3″, 219 lbs.) made game-saving tackles three times in goal-line stands when the Heights Tigers shut out the mighty Blue Bombers of Cleveland East. He is very large, in addition to being very fast.
Middle Guard: Akron East junior Sandy Frazier was the mainstay of East’s defense, which allowed only 24 points all season. For a man of his quickness and agility, he possesses tremendous size.
1977
PART FOUR
A DEEPER GAME
“Would you mind picking me up, Bill? Agnes is using the car after all.”
BR’ER RABBIT BALL
RING LARDNER
In spite of the fact that some of my friends in the baseball industry are kind enough to send me passes every spring, my average attendance at ball parks for the last three seasons has been two times per season (aside from World’s Series) and I probably wouldn’t have gone that often but for the alleged necessity of getting my innumerable grandchildren out in the fresh air once in a while. During the games, I answer what questions they ask me to the best of my knowledge and belief, but most of the afternoon I devote to a handy pocket edition of one of Edgar Wallace’s sex stories because the events on the field make me yearn for a bottle of Mothersill’s Remedy.
Manufacturers of what they are using for a ball, and high officials of the big leagues, claim that the sphere contains the same ingredients, mixed in the same way, as in days of old. Those who believe them should visit their neighborhood psychiatrist at the earliest possible moment.
When I was chasing around the circuit as chronicler of the important deeds of Cubs or White Sox, it was my custom and that of my colleagues to start making up our box scores along about the seventh inning in cases where one club was leading its opponent by ten runs. Nowadays the baseball reporters don’t dare try to guess the answer even if there are two out in the last half of the ninth inning and the score is 21 to 14.
I have always been a fellow who liked to see efficiency rewarded. If a pitcher pitched a swell game, I wanted him to win it. So it kind of sickens me to watch a typical pastime of today in which a good pitcher, after an hour and fifty minutes of deserved mastery of his opponents, can suddenly be made to look like a bum by four or five great sluggers who couldn’t have held a job as bat boy on the Niles High School scrubs.
Let us say that the Cubs have a series in Brooklyn. They get over there at eleven in the morning so they can find the park by the time the game begins. The game develops into a pitchers’ battle between Charlie Root, Bud Teachout, Guy Bush, and Pat Malone for the Cubs and Dazzy Vance, Jim Elliott, and Adolfo Luque for the Robins. The last half of the ninth inning arrives with the score 12 to 8 in Chicago’s favor—practically a no-hit game in these days. Somebody tries to strike out, but Malone hits his bat and the ball travels lightly along the ground toward third base. Woody English courageously gets in front of it and has two fingers broken. This is a superficial injury for an infielder of the present, so Woody stays in the game. The Brooklyn man is safe at first. The next Brooklyn man, left-handed and a born perpendicular swatsman, takes a toehold and crashes a pop fly toward Charlie Grimm. The pellet goes over the right-field fence like a shot and breaks a window in a synagogue four blocks away.
Manager McCarthy removes Malone and substitutes Blake, hoping the latter will give a few bases on balls and slow up the scoring. But Blake gives only two bases on balls and then loses control. He pitches one over the plate and the batsman, another left-hander who, with the old ball, would have been considered too feeble to hit fungoes on one of these here miniature golf courses, pops it over the fence to the beach at Far Rockaway, where it just misses a young married couple called Rosenwald. The victory is Brooklyn’s and the official scorer puts the names of a lot of pitchers, including Rucker and Grimes, into a hat and the first name drawn out gets the credit.
I mean it kind of upsets me to see good pitchers shot to pieces by boys who, in my time, would have been ushers. It gnaws at my vitals to see a club with three regular outfielders who are smacked on top of the head by every fly ball that miraculously stays inside the park—who ought to pay their way in, but who draw large salaries and
are known as stars because of the lofty heights to which they can hoist a leather-covered sphere stuffed with dynamite.
Those who are cognizant of my great age ask me sometimes what Larry Lajoie would do in this “game.” Well, he wouldn’t do anything after one day. Larry wasn’t a fly-ball hitter. When he got a hold of one, it usually hit the fence on the first bounce, traveling about five feet three inches above the ground most of the way and removing the ears of all infielders who didn’t throw themselves flat on their stomachs the instant they saw him swing. They wouldn’t have time to duck this ball, and after the battle there would be a meeting of earless infielders, threatening a general walkout if that big French gunman were allowed in the park again, even with a toothpick in his hand.
But without consulting my archives I can recall a dozen left-handed batsmen who hit fly balls or high line drives and who hit them so far that opposing right and center fielders moved back and rested their spinal columns against the fence when it was these guys’ turn to bat.
I need mention only four of this bunch—two from each league—to give my contemporaries a talking point when their grandchildren boast of the prowess of the O’Douls, Kleins, and Hermans of today. The four I will select offhand are Elmer Flick and Sam Crawford of the American League and Harry Lumley and Frank Schulte of the National.
In the year 1911 (I think it was) Mr. Schulte led the National League in homers with a total of twenty-one. Such a number would be disgraceful in these days, when a pitcher gets almost that many. Just the same, I am willing to make a bet, which never can be decided, that Frank, with the present ball in play, would just about treble that total and finish so close to the Babe himself that it would take until December to count the ballots. I have frequently seen, in the dim, dead past, the figures of Fielder Jones and Eddie Hahn backing up against the haywire when Flick or Crawford came to bat, and on one occasion, when we traveled east on the same train as the Detroit club, I overheard a bit of repartee between Jones and Samuel. That afternoon Jones had caught three fly balls off Sam without moving more than a yard out of his position, which was a comfortable one, with the fence for a back rest.
“Why,” said Sam grumblingly, “were you playing pretty near out of the park for me?”
“Why,” said Jones, “do you always hit to the same place?”
Right-fielders were constantly robbing Lumley and Flick of two-base hits or worse by lolling against the bleacher wall—and it must be remembered that in those ancient times bleachers were far enough from the playing field so that the first- and third-base coachers couldn’t sit in them.
Speaking of Mr. Lumley (if you’ve heard this before, don’t stop me), we (the Cubs) came east one season and we had a pitcher named Edward Reulbach, who was great when he had control and terrible when he lacked it. On this trip he lacked it to such an extent that Manager Chance ordered him to pay forenoon visits to each hostile battlefield and pitch to the rival batsmen in their practice. The latter had no objection—it just meant somebody to hit against without wearing out one of their own men.
Well, we got to Brooklyn and after a certain game the same idea entered the minds of Mr. Schulte, Mr. Lumley, and your reporter, namely: that we should see the Borough by night. The next morning, Lumley had to report for practice and, so far as he was concerned, the visibility was very bad. Reulbach struck him out three times on low curve balls inside.
“I have got Lumley’s weakness!” said Ed to Chance that afternoon.
“All right,” said the manager. “When they come to Chicago, you can try it against him.”
Brooklyn eventually came to Chicago and Reulbach pitched Lumley a low curve ball on the inside. Lumley had enjoyed a good night’s sleep, and if it had been a 1930 vintage ball, it would have landed in Des Moines, Iowa. As it was, it cleared the fence by ten feet and Schulte, playing right field and watching its flight, shouted: “There goes Lumley’s weakness!”
Well, the other day a great ballplayer whom I won’t name (he holds the home-run record and gets eighty thousand dollars a year) told a friend of mine in confidence (so you must keep this under your hat) that there are at least fifteen outfielders now playing regular positions in his own league who would not have been allowed bench-room the year he broke in. Myself, I just can’t stomach it, but Brooklyn recently played to one hundred and ten thousand people in four games at Chicago, so I don’t believe we’ll ever get even light wines and beer.
1930
“This is our beginners’ slope.”
THE GREENS OF IRELAND
HERBERT WARREN WIND
When most people think of sport in Ireland, the first things that come to mind are the wonderful horses raised in the Curragh and the national exuberance for horse racing, and, after that, the excellent salmon fishing in the southwest and the Irish fondness for two native games that are played practically nowhere else—Gaelic football, which is a combination of soccer and Rugby, and hurling, which is a combination of field hockey and a special Celtic brand of karate. Since scarcely anyone associates the Irish with golf, it almost invariably comes as a surprise to the sports-minded to learn that the island is one of the great golfing lands—and, indeed, has more authentic golf courses per inhabitant than any other country in the world except Scotland, the cradle of the game. Where golf is concerned, it should be noted, Ireland is divided by no political boundary line; the Golfing Union of Ireland governs the game both in the Republic of Ireland, or Eire, and in Northern Ireland, which is, of course, a part of the United Kingdom. At the present time, there are 228 golf courses in the two countries, and since the combined population is around 4,300,000, this works out to one course for every nineteen thousand inhabitants. In the United States, despite the proliferation of new courses in recent years, the ratio is one for every twenty thousand people, and in Japan, to name another notoriously golf-struck nation, it is one for every 175,000. In Ireland, the courses are not only numerous but of an exceptionally high quality. Most well-traveled golf experts, if asked to select the twelve finest courses in the world, would surely include at least one in Ireland, and some might include as many as three.
Like the famous courses in Scotland, the best ones in Ireland are situated on the duny linksland deposited centuries ago by the retreating ocean. While the thought of Irish linksland (as opposed to meadowland) may be startling, it really shouldn’t be, because the coastal stretches of Scotland and Ireland are remarkably similar. (Less than fourteen miles of water separates Torr Head, in Northern Ireland, from the Mull of Kintyre, in Scotland.) In the last twenty-five years, the Irish have taken to their splendid seaside links and to their satisfactory, if less testing, inland courses with a tremendous rush. Whereas there were only twenty-five thousand golfers on the island at the close of the Second World War, there are three times that number today. All the clubs are filled to the brim with members, and an estimated ten thousand applicants are at present on various waiting lists, ready to spring forward whenever a vacancy occurs. In the meantime, since Ireland has no municipal courses, this frustrated horde of potential golfers has been hacking away on the more than a hundred pitch-and-putt courses that have popped up all over the countryside in response to the demand for golf facilities, however abbreviated. In short, unlikely as it may seem when one recalls the historic Hibernian predilection for strenuous pastimes, golf has now become Ireland’s most popular participant sport.
One of the primary reasons the game has found such high favor among the Irish is its inexpensiveness. Portmarnock, which is just outside Dublin, is generally accepted as the island’s premier golf club, but its members are required to pay an entrance fee that amounts to only $125. Annual dues come to approximately that same mild figure. Moreover, the dues at the average Irish golf club are a good deal lower than the dues at Portmarnock, which reflects the comparatively high cost of everything in and around the Republic’s capital city. For instance, at the Lahinch Golf Club, in County Clare—a first-rate course where the South of Ireland Amateur Champi
onship is held each year—the annual dues are thirty dollars and there is no entrance fee at all, at all. Such modest rates are possible because the cost of maintaining a course is extremely low and, concomitantly, the revenue from the club bar can be depended on to be quite robust. In any event, nearly every Irishman who wants to play golf can afford to, and its addicts therefore constitute an almost complete cross-section of the Irish socioeconomic strata. Another fundamental reason for the Irish golfing boom is that the game is beautifully suited to the native temperament and character. A County Sligo man once explained it to me this way: “If a golfer so chooses, he can groove a tight little swing and plod around hitting safe little shots down the fairway. But that isn’t how the typical Irish golfer approaches the game. He sees in golf a heaven-sent opportunity to perform spectacular deeds—bash his drives farther than mortal man has ever done before, or come slashing out of a briar patch with a phenomenal recovery shot that prostrates his opponent. It’s a solo game, golf, so it’s perfect for a people like us, who admire feats of individual bravery and derring-do. There they are, within the reach of the most ordinary man.”
It follows, I think, that the considerable success that Irish golfers have enjoyed in international tournaments over the past twenty-five years has had more than a little to do with the huge advances the game has made there. Until 1946, no Irish golfer had ever won an important international amateur or professional championship, but that year James Bruen, a prodigious hitter from Cork, broke through in the British Amateur. Three years later, Max McCready, an Irishman living in England, won the same championship, and in 1953 it went to Joe Carr, a young golfer from Dublin, whose father had been a steward at Portmarnock. A model athlete, as cheery in defeat as in victory, Carr took the British Amateur twice again, in 1958 and 1960, and more recently, in recognition of his exceptional record and his personal substance, he has been accorded the honor—unprecedented for an Irishman—of being named captain of the British Eisenhower Trophy team and the British Walker Cup team. (Technically, these teams represent both Great Britain and Ireland.) Irish professionals also made their mark during this period. In 1947, Fred Daly, from Portrush, in Northern Ireland, won the British Open and also the first of three titles in the British Match Play Championship. In the early fifties, when Daly’s star began to fade, two professionals from the Republic—Harry Bradshaw and Christy O’Connor—took over, scoring notable victories on the British tournament circuit and winning places on British Ryder Cup teams. Though neither Bradshaw nor O’Connor managed to capture the British Open, together they brought off perhaps the most glorious of all Irish golfing triumphs when, in 1958, they won the World Cup (then known as the Canada Cup), in Mexico City, defeating a field of more than thirty two-man teams, which included the top players from the United States, Australia, England, Scotland, South Africa, and the other traditional strongholds of the game. The news of Bradshaw and O’Connor’s exploit was celebrated with champagne parties and informal parades down the streets of Dublin, and when the two heroes arrived home they were wined and dined for weeks. The World Cup match is held in a different country each year, and its sponsors, appreciating the frenetic pride that the Irish, golfers and nongolfers alike, took in their compatriots’ victory, scheduled the event for Portmarnock in 1960.
The Only Game in Town Page 43