Dispatches From the Sporting Life

by Mordecai Richler

  And now along comes an ill-written, foulmouthed memoir of sorts, You’ve Got to Have Balls to Make It in This League: My Life as an Umpire, by Pam Postema and Gene Wojciechowski. “It’s hard enough to make your way as a young umpire through minor-league baseball,” the blurb writer has it. “It’s harder still when you’ve been kissed by a player at home plate, had a bra pulled out of your shirt by The Chicken, found messages in your underwear from amorous managers….”

  Ms. Postema, who drives a Federal Express truck these days, worked as a minor league ump from 1977 through 1989, pronouncing in more than two thousand games, without ever being invited to perform in the bigs. This, so far as she was concerned, was a clear case of sexual discrimination, the guilty male chauvinist pig being Dick Butler, assistant to the president of the American League, who was, and remains, in her opinion, a hypocrite. On the other hand, since Ms. Postema admits she is no bookworm, possibly she’s unaware of the dictum “Many are called, but few are chosen.”

  In any event, before her career was aborted, Ms. Postema did get to eject some future multimillionaires from games in the minors, among them Messrs. Strawberry, Gwynn, Canseco, Mitchell, Clark, Bonilla, and Johnson. “I saw them when they were scared and a little unsure of themselves,” she writes. “Just like me.”

  Far from “little me,” however. For when the misguided Ms. Postema, the daughter of an Ohio vegetable farmer, gave up pulling onions for a hundred bucks a week to register in the Al Somers Umpire School, she was five eight and tipping the scales at 175 pounds. Graduating seventeenth in her class of a hundred, she was offered a job in the Gulf Coast League ($800 a month) and soon moved up to the Florida State League, where Jim Leyland, then managing the Lakeland Tigers, protested to the president of the GCL, “How could you send the girl?”

  Next stop for the upwardly mobile Ms. Postema was the Double A Texas League, and in 1983 she graduated to the highest possible rung on the minor league ladder: the Triple A Pacific Coast League. She was now earning $1,900 a month but also suffering indignities. Once, when she called a high pitch a strike, a hooligan in the Vancouver dugout yelled, “That was boob-high!” Another time, a player taunted her with “What’s another name for a female umpire?”

  The answer: “A call girl.”

  Putting in time in winter ball in Colombia, she had to endure the indecent proposals of Carmelo Martinez, who spent much of his time in the batter’s box flirting with the ump.

  “I love you, honey,” he’d say.

  Pam would ignore him.

  “Mi amor.”

  The most miserable man in baseball, in Pam’s opinion, is Larry Bowa, whom she ran into when he was managing the Las Vegas Stars in the PCL. Following a dispute over the veracity of a call Pam had made, Bowa, never at a loss for words, shouted, “You’re a fucking cunt!”

  A charge to which Pam responded with the equally witty “You’re just a fucking jerk….”

  Atlanta Braves manager Chuck Tanner, encountered between the white lines just before the start of an exhibition game, presented Pam with another problem. “Would you like a kiss?” he asked.

  Ms. Postema had already been featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated, a thirty-three-year-old minor league ump, when she ran into “Mr. Neanderthal himself,” pitcher Bob Knepper. Knepper told a reporter that a woman shouldn’t be an umpire, a president, or a politician. “I’m not going to condemn her,” he said, then went on to warn, “but if God is unhappy with her, she’s going to have to deal with that later.”

  Based on her experience with America’s game, Ms. Postema writes: “Nobody ever mentions this, but ballplayers are, for the most part, the crudest, lewdest bunch of assholes ever assembled. And out of necessity, umpires, for the most part, aren’t far behind. To an umpire … the word fuck becomes an all-purpose weapon: a noun, verb, adjective, and adverb all rolled into one.”

  Finally, I have no idea whether Ms. Postema was denied a job in the bigs because she was inadequate or as a consequence of sexual prejudice. But I have no doubt, Mr. Wojciechowski’s help notwithstanding, that she is a minor league writer. Or, to lapse into the phrase that is her personal favourite, “You’re fucking gone!”

  June 1992

  17

  Soul on Ice

  Canadians, your nice neighbours to the north, are not merely pseudo-Americans. We are different. While fastidious New York beer drinkers, for instance, will continue to insist on a Molson’s, Labatt’s, or a Moosehead, their modish northern counterparts would much rather be seen nursing a Budweiser or a Miller High Life, now that they are both licensed in Canada.

  An even more illuminating example of the difference between us is how we each measure the Russian threat. Americans have become increasingly agitated about missile counts and Soviet incursions into Afghanistan and possibly Central America, but we see that as incidental mischief. Clever diversions. So far as red-blooded Canadians are concerned, the real Russian menace to our manhood comes on ice. It comes in the intimidating shape of their national hockey team.

  Try to understand.

  Consider, if you will, a hitherto unheard of baseball team coming off the Moscow sandlots to appear in Yankee Stadium, lugging their own equipment, going on to thrash the World Series winner and both all-star teams, year after year after year, and there you have the Canadian dilemma.

  Hockey, after all, is our game. The game. In Los Angeles, you have to search through the sports section twice before stumbling on reports of last night’s games, and in New York, hockey’s appeal is largely to hard hats, but in Canada it is something else again. When Conn Smythe ran the Toronto Maple Leaf Gardens, any fan who turned up in the choice seats inappropriately dressed—that is, without jacket and tie—did so at the risk of receiving a hand-delivered note the next morning that threatened to cancel the season tickets. In Montreal, until recently, season tickets were passed on in wills, more highly valued than the family silver.

  Until 1972, Canadians were the best hockey players in the world. For once, the major league was right here, in Montreal and Toronto. We walked tall. Then the Russians came. Playing fast, stylish hockey, the sort of game we grew up with, actually carrying the puck over the blue line, their short and long passes equally crisp, they have humiliated various NHL combinations in five series since 1972. Given a shot at it, they would likely abscond with the Stanley Cup as well. Our Holy Grail, our manhood, an exhibit in the Kremlin.

  Worse news. Three of the leading fifteen scorers in the NHL last season were foreigners—two defectors from Czechoslovakia and a Finn. Players from Sweden are everywhere in the league. The Swedes, paid on both sides during the Second World War, are still intent on keeping the peace at any price. They throw up a lot of snow, avoiding both the corners and the front of the net, where sticks and elbows tend to fly in the thick traffic. But the Czechs are magnificent. Tiger Williams, of the Vancouver Canucks, isn’t pleased with the new situation. “We got commies, we got Swedes, we got Indians. I’m the only white people we got.”

  In recent years, when panhandlers still accepted change, Coke was a pause that refreshed, acid rain had not yet begun to fall, and the Canadians still ruled the rinks, there were two great Montreal teams. The greatest, certainly, was the Canadiens club that won the Stanley Club for the fifth consecutive year in 1959–60: Jean Beliveau, Dickie Moore, Bernie “Boom Boom” Geoffrion, Henri Richard and an aging Maurice “Rocket” Richard up front, Doug Harvey minding the blue line, and Jacques Plante in the nets.

  The second great Canadiens team, led by Guy Lafleur, Jacques Lemaire, Guy Lapointe, Yvan Cournoyer, Serge Savard, and Larry Robinson, won its fourth Stanley Cup in a row in 1979. The greedy Canadiens also took the cup in 1970–71, the season the club was joined by a young goalie out of Cornell, Ken Dryden, who made a spectacular debut in the nets against the Boston Bruins, a far from inconsiderable club led by Phil Esposito and the greatest player of our time, Bobby Orr.

  Dryden was the Most Valuable Player in the 1971 playoffs and wen
t on to star on the second great Canadiens team. Now he has written a thoughtful, fascinating memoir of his years in hockey, The Game. Dryden is especially good in evoking the sounds and smells of the dressing room. “When you like someone,” he writes,

  there is something quite nice in knowing what’s coming next, in knowing that nothing has changed; that when laces are cut, when petroleum jelly is smeared on the earpiece of a phone, we will all look at Lapointe, and he’ll say, “Hey, get the right guy”; that when interest rates go up and the Dow Jones goes down, Houle will complain of inflation and taxes, and if he forgets, someone will remind him; that when Lemaire giggles and squeals and collapses to the floor, someone will say, “There goes Co again”; that when Savard has a “hot tip,” Houle and Shutt will be interested, and if it pays off, Ruel will have backed away at the last minute; that before a game Lafleur will take out his teeth and grease back his hair, oil the blades on his skates, set off an alarm clock, smash the table in the centre of the room with his stick, then laugh and say, “Wake up, câlisse”; and that when the room goes suddenly quiet, someone will bring up Larouche’s checking, Risebrough’s shot, Chartraw’s spinouts, Houle’s breakaways, something, anything, to keep the feeling going. In a life that changes with the score, this is our continuity, our security.

  From the beginning, Dryden was an incongruous figure on the Canadiens team. Intelligent, articulate, a law school graduate. A man with options. Traditionally, our hockey players were without such possibilities. They came off the farm or out of northern mining towns, rawboned boys with angry red boils on the backs of their necks and no front teeth to call their own. In the old days of the six-team NHL, the players earned so little that they had to work during the summer months. But then, as Dryden observes, came expansion, fat TV contracts, handsomely rewarded players armed with lawyers, tax advisers, agents, and investment consultants.

  Even so, until recently, when they began to be drafted out of college hockey, the players remained a largely ill educated bunch, hockey the only thing they knew. Celebrated as heroes in Canada, certainly, but still taken for ruffians in many American cities, only slightly more refined than roller derby players. The sport, as promoted on American TV or portrayed in that funny Paul Newman film Slapshot, emphasized the brawls, not the graceful play that raised you out of your seat: Bobby Orr on an end-to-end rush. Guy Lafleur, seemingly emerging out of a daydream, to take a clearing pass from Larry Robinson and literally fly in on the opposition goal.

  Out for a quick buck following expansion, new club owners tried to sell the game in the United States on the promise of violence, even hooliganism. They gave us the Broad Street Bullies (the Philadelphia Flyers). It is this misunderstanding of the game, a perception of hockey players as louts, that may explain the largest fault in Ken Dryden’s book. A tendency to overcompensate. A showy determination to establish that he is no pug but commendably literate, something of an intellectual, perfectly capable of quoting Brecht here, Naipaul there, and Yeats somewhere else. In the end, however, Dryden gives away the game. He lets in a soft goal. Describing a breakfast scene at home, he writes, “I drink my orange juice and coffee and read the paper. I start with the front page.” But, in truth, every dues-paying intellectual I know begins with the sports section. The blessed box scores.

  Other times Dryden is almost too painfully self-aware, over-earnest, unnecessarily defensive about his high salary and celebrity. Still, he has written a very special hockey book, possibly the best I have ever read. Certainly his affectionate yet realistic portrait of the players is unrivalled in hockey writing. His notion of Guy Lafleur as one of the last players to be weaned on freewheeling, frozen-river hockey, rather than a confined indoor rink, is first-rate. Hockey, Dryden writes, has left the river and will never return. “The river is less a physical space than an attitude, a metaphor for unstructured, unorganized time alone. And if the game no longer needs the place, it needs the attitude. It is the rare player like Lafleur who reminds us.”

  The Game, incidentally, is also enriched by a rare appreciation of what it meant to be an English-speaking Toronto-born player on the Canadiens, a French-Canadian institution. Or, just possibly, once a French-Canadian institution.

  In a telling passage, Dryden recalls the emotions that stirred in him as he sat in the Canadiens’ dressing room and contemplated the legendary bilingual inscription on the wall:

  NOS BRAS MEURTIS VOUS TENDENT

  LE FLAMBEAU,

  A VOUS TOUJOURS DE LE PORTER BIEN HAUT!

  TO YOU FROM FAILING HANDS WE THROW

  THE TORCH,

  BE YOURS TO HOLD IT HIGH!

  From Maurice Richard, through Jean Beliveau, to Guy Lafleur, there had been glory, there was continuity, but today, with Lafleur sadly past his prime, there is nobody to take up the torch. The Montreal Canadiens—once the proudest dynasty in sports, now in sharp decline—are not, as tradition surely demanded, now looking for a marginal Québécois skater for renewal. No sir. They are looking to an aging commie—Vladislav Tretiak, goalie for the Red Army—whom they devoutly hope to sign following the 1984 Olympic Games in Sarajevo.

  Ça, alors.

  November 1983

  18

  From Gladu, through Kitman, to the Victoire Historique and After

  Pronouncing on Montreal, Casey Stengel once said, “Well, you see they have those polar bears up there and lots of fellows trip over them trying to run the bases and they’re never much good anymore except for hockey or hunting deer.”

  Unfortunately we have no polar bears up here, but kids can usually heave snowballs at the outfielders at the opening game of the season, and should the World Series ever dare venture this far north, it is conceivable that a game could be called because of a blizzard.

  Montreal, it must be understood, is a city unlike any other in Canada. Or, more important, the National League. On the average, eight feet of snow is dumped on us each winter, and, whatever the weather, we can usually count on three bank robberies a day. This is the city of wonders that gave you Expo in 1967—the baseball Expos a couple of years later—and in 1976 the Olympic Games. Their legacy, among other amazing artifacts, is a stadium that can seat (or intern, as some have it), fifty-five thousand baseball fans—the monstrous Big Owe, where the Expos have been disporting themselves in summer ever since they moved there from Jarry Park in 1977. For years the Expos’ endearing idea of loading the bases was to have two of their runners on second. Hello, hello. Their notion of striking fear into the heart of the opposition was to confront them with muscle, namely one of their pinch-hitting behemoths coming off the bench: group average in 1978,.135.

  Major league baseball, like the Olympics and the Big Owe itself, was brought to this long-suffering city through the machinations of our very own Artful Dodger, Mayor Jean Drapeau. Bringing us the Games, the mayor assured Montrealers that it would be as difficult for the Olympics to cost us money as it would be for a man to have a baby. He estimated the total cost of all facilities at $62.2 million, but what with inflation and unfavourable winds, his calculation fell somewhat short of the mark. Counting stationery and long-distance calls, the final tab was $1.2 billion. Never mind. To this day our ebullient mayor doesn’t allow that the Games were run at a loss. Rather, as he has put it to the rest of us, there has been a gap between costs and revenue. Furthermore, considering the spiffy facilities we have been left with, it would be churlish of us to complain.

  Ah, the Big Owe. The largest, coldest slab of poured concrete in Canada. In a city where we endure seven long months of winter, and spring comes and goes in an afternoon, it is Drapeau’s triumph to have provided us with a partially roofed over six-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar stadium, where the sun seldom shines on the fans. Tim Burke, one of the liveliest sportswriters in town, once said to me, “You know, there are lots of summer afternoons when I feel like taking in a ball game, but I think, hell, who wants to sit out there in the dark.”

  Shivering in the dark might have been more a
ccurate, watching the boys lose line drives in the seams of the artificial turf.

  “The outfield,” another friend remarked, “looks like the kind of thing my aunt used to wear.”

  It’s a shame, because the Expos, admittedly major league in name only, at least until recently, came to a town rich in baseball history. To begin with, we were all charged with hope. On April 14, 1969, the 29,184 fans who turned up for the home opener at makeshift Jarry Park were electrified by an announcement over the public-address system. “When the Expos play a doubleheader,” we were informed, “the second game will go the full nine innings, not seven.”

  Those of us old enough to remember baseball’s glory days here, the Montreal Royals of the old International League, nodded our heads, impressed. This was the big time, baby. “Montreal,” said Warren Giles, president of the National League, “is a growing and vibrant city.” Yes, yes. So we hollered and stamped our feet as our champions took the field under the grim gaze of manager Gene Mauch, who had the look of a marine drill sergeant.

  The morning after the season’s home opener, the big bold front-page headline in the Montréal-Matin exclaimed: “30,000 PERSONNES ACCLAMENT LES EXPOS SOUS SOLEIL RADIEUX: ECLATANTE PREMIERE.” La Presse pronounced the occasion, in which our expansionist Expos humiliated the National League champion St. Louis Cards 8–7, a “VICTOIRE HISTORIQUE.”

  If that wasn’t sufficient glory to sustain us through the long losing streak to come, only four days later one William Hambly Stoneman, a pitcher hitherto noted for nothing so much as mediocrity, a youngster who had deservedly never started a major league game in his life, strode to the mound, adjusted his potent red, white, and blue Expo cap for the nth time, fingered the rosin bag, loosened his shoulders, and, before you could utter shazam, reared back and threw a no-hitter against the Philadelphia Phillies. Canada, only two years older than major league baseball, had entered league history like a lion. Never mind that the habitant hero of the day, the suddenly incomparable Stoneman, was born in Oak Park, Illinois, and bred at Antonio Junior College in Walnut, California; his hobbies, like those of many a red-blooded Canadien, were golf and fishing. Something else. “Stoney” Stoneman’s heart was in the right place. On his return from Philadelphia, he revealed to reporters, “I’m especially happy for the town…Montreal, I mean. Now they know we’re not up there just to appear on the field. We’re going to win ball games.”