So we talked about why the things he did were held in such low regard, why the pass rushers got the big contracts and all the publicity, how coaches always stressed a firm run defense but then gave all their praise to the sackers. I agreed. I hated it almost as much as he did. He was passionate on the subject, and I liked that about him. The place was practically locked up by the time I got out of there.
Move ahead a few years to the Wednesday press interview day before the 2001 Super Bowl, Ravens vs. Giants. The Baltimore players were being interviewed at their special tables in the ballroom of the Hyatt Westshore Hotel. The two tables that commanded the biggest collection of writers belonged to Ray Lewis and Siragusa, a full-blown 350 pounds now, raconteur, storyteller, future color commentator for Fox. He read a newspaper during the Q&A session, establishing obvious unconcern. His answers drew quick laughs, but I noticed that his eyes never seemed to move downward from the one area on which they were focused. Ah, well, if that’s his shtick.
“Is this Ravens defense the best in history?” someone asked him.
“Name a better one,” he said.
“Steel Curtain Steelers,” I said.
“What are you, from Pittsburgh?” he said, looking up from his paper.
“No, from Jersey, same as you,” I said. A few writers laughed.
When the meeting broke up, the Goose came over to me, plainly annoyed.
“What did you want to do that for, break up my act like that?” he said. I waited a moment, just to see if there was any recognition at all.
“You don’t remember me, do you?” I said.
“No,” he said. “Should I?”
Strangely enough, I liked that exchange. I liked what it did for my ego, or against it. It helped keep things in perspective. Some writers like to present themselves as characters in the drama. Newspapers discourage it, magazines encourage it to a certain extent (subject to review), but books, ah, you’ll get encouragement on that level, if, truly you have something to say, presenting a point that cannot be made without your presence. When you have covered sports for 48 years, though, you can step aside for long periods and let the panorama present itself through your memories, and Lord knows, I can close my eyes, and those memories and visions will come flooding back: Al Oerter’s primal scream in the little room under the Olympic Stadium in Tokyo, after he had ripped the tape off his torn rib cage and thrown the discus far enough to win his third straight Olympic championship; Muhammad Ali taking some of the most awful, the most devastating shots from Earnie Shavers, a fearsome puncher, the sweat bouncing off his head 10 feet as he shook his head, no, no, no, you can’t hurt me; the Dallas Cowboys’ running back, Duane Thomas, silent, totally incommunicative, trapped in his own private hell as the centerpiece of a weird, silent press conference with no words being spoken. The memories rise in a flood, and yes, I see myself in there, too.
Getting into the Olympic Village in Munich meant running a gauntlet of a double line of German security guards and taking a rifle butt to the head that knocked me to my knees, but I got in and was witness to the drama of the Israeli hostage crises, the single most terrifying event of the history of the game. To interview Igor Ter-Ovanesyan, Russia’s assistant track coach whom I had known for many years, I had to join him in the middle of a deserted field. This was during the 1980 Moscow Olympics. “Never stand near metal when you are interviewing anyone here,” he said. “Everything is bugged.”
There were moments of high hilarity, a raucous chorus from an era now dead. An 11-year stint as a beat man for a metropolitan New York daily, covering the Jets for the Post, gave me the closest thing the sports beat had to war reporting. The trips to Oakland and the Weeb-Ewbank-Al Davis conflicts were like forays into a battle zone. I can see Weeb, his jowls trembling in fury, as he had the driver stop the team bus on Highway 17 outside the Oakland Coliseum to eject a guy Davis had planted on the vehicle, big fat former linebacker Maury Schleicher, “Schleicher … Schleicher,” Weeb was growling, barely able to get the words out.
And then there was the time I tried to see how many Raider venues I could be ejected from. First I was thrown out of Davis’ office when I called attention to a framed photo of Ben Davidson breaking Joe Namath’s cheekbone that had been taken down from the wall and stashed behind a desk. Then I was thrown out of the Raider locker room, bodily, by the two biggest assistant coaches, Tom Dahms and Ollie Spencer, one grabbing each elbow. This was too rich to pass up. I had to find out where they were practicing that day, show up and collect my hat trick. I found out, Cal State Hayward, the bowl. I lasted about 15 minutes inside until Al spotted me, pointed a finger and mouthed the words that I knew meant heave ho. The guy assigned to do the job was Bugsy Engelberg, the kicking coach. The piece I wrote that night was headed, “Kicked Out by the Kicking Coach,” and my last vision of the scene was Bugsy, standing in the middle of the road, the wind flapping the towel around his neck, making sure that my car was departing.
Early in my career on The Sacramento Bee, I wrote one of the first pieces ever done on Rosemary Casals, who became one of the world’s top-ranked women tennis players. I wrote about her in the Central Cal Juniors at the Sutter Lawn Tennis Club in Sacramento, a tiny 10-year-old, who could barely see over the net, battling a 13-year-old girl named Leslie Abrahams on a blistering 110-degree day. It was the greatest tennis match I’ve ever seen, two children racing around the court, tears streaming down their faces, clawing, scratching, the match finally won by Rosie in almost three hours. She traveled to the tournaments with her father, a tiny Mexican girl and her elderly Mexican parent denied access to all areas of the clubs except the court or the stands, spending their nights sleeping in their car to save money. I remember her telling me in a squeaky little voice how tough it was trying to get a full night’s rest.
I wrote my first serious mood piece, poured my heart and soul into it, wrote about the “vicious 110-degree heat.” One of the desk men tossed me a style guide. It had been written 50 years previously by Old Man McClatchy, the owner of the paper, and hardly changed. One of the rules was that you could never say it was hot in Sacramento. “Warm” was as far as you could go. I read, in my piece, the edited line, “110-degree warmth.”
I had the last interview with Sid Luckman, the great old Bears quarterback, before he died. He was one of my earliest sports heroes. Seemed like every Fox Movietone Newsreel you saw in a theater had a clip of Sid throwing a long touchdown pass. Years later I did a film study of some of my old heroes and what I saw from Sid was a complete package of every route that’s on the book today with absolute mastery of two of them, the timed up-and-under fade pattern and the deep go route, thrown with incredible softness and touch.
“I feel fine, except for my balance,” Sid said that afternoon in Miami. He was 81. When he would stand up, a personal attendant would position himself alongside him. “I just keep falling down, can’t stay on my feet.”
My wife, Linda Bailey Zimmerman, and I drove down to Maryland to interview John Unitas a few years before his death. (Editor’s note: This article appears in Chapter 10.) We sat on the covered porch of his house and relived old memories. I mentioned the winning drive against the Giants in overtime in the ’58 championship game, and he stiffened, and an irritation that must have been bugging him for more than 40 years jumped up because he only mentioned one play, the six-yard pass to Jim Mutscheller that carried down to the Giants’ one, in overtime.
“A gamble,” he said, sniffing. “They said it was gamble. No damn gamble when you know what you’re doing” He glared at me. Hey, John, I didn’t write it. Honestly, I didn’t. He turned to Linda. “Look,” he said. “This is how you move the strong safety over when you’re running a diagonal and you want him inside.” He set it up, he gave her the look he employed to look the safety off, the head fake. He got her out of position. No way she could have covered Mutscheller on that play.
At a family gathering, I he
ard her tell two of her brothers about getting down on the floor in the porch area of John Unitas’ house and having him look her off the coverage on Mutscheller on one of history’s most famous drives. They didn’t believe her. Yeah, right, just you and Johnny U., the most famous quarterback in history.
I’ve been blessed with a wife who not only enjoys sports but understands them. No, not the technical aspects, the playbook element, but the heart of the competition, the emotion, the soul. We are at the 2003 Super Bowl in San Diego. We have dinner set up with Mike Giddings, former linebacker coach for the 49ers and the private personnel consultant for 13 NFL teams. He asks me if we minded if he brought a few people. Sure, why not? These are the people he brought: Curly Morrison, former Bears’ and Browns’ fullback; Billy Wilson, the 49ers’ finest receiver of the 1950s, and San Francisco’s Hugh McElhenny, “The King,” one of pro football’s great broken field runners of all the time. How many Sundays did I sit in the sunny side end zone in Kezar, shirt off, swilling my beer and screaming my head off for The King? Oh no, we don’t mind.
A memorable dinner, my God, the stories. “Every time someone mentions George Halas, I have to laugh,” McElhenny said. “He kicked me once, right in the side of the head. I was tackled near the Bears’ sideline. Next thing I knew this wingtip, Thom McAn, is clunking me on the helmet. There’s Halas, in his suit, kicking me in the head. I yelled at him, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ He just turned away.”
That night Linda said to me, with just a bit of a catch in her voice, “I wish my father could have been with us tonight.” He had died a few years before I met her. He had been a high school coach at one time. “He would have loved that dinner.”
You live through the magnificent moments of sports as a spectator. Most of the time you are presenting a second view to a large mass of people who already have seen what you have. Writers with great narrative and descriptive talent can use their words as a paint brush and provide an artist’s or a poet’s rendition of what they have seen. It’s called “writing the scene.” It is also a technique used by people who don’t really understand what has taken place, often ridiculing those who would try to solve the puzzle and venture into technical writing.
Technical writing is rare nowadays. I am still waiting to hear how America defeated the Soviet Union in that great Olympic hockey upset, but oh my God, how many stories have I had to endure about the magnificence of the human spirit or Old Glory or The Stars and Stripes or the will to win? Please, just tell me how we did it! But that kind of writing never really has been fashionable. I always thought the answer to the problem is to combine the intellect, in the form of technical writing, with the artistic, which means writing the piece as well and as colorfully and meaningfully as you can. Sometimes you can make it work; often you can’t, but too often one or the other is neglected, for convenience sake.
But once you have locked a great event into your memory, what you are left with, and this is something that always remains fresh and meaningful, is the face-to-face presentation of the individual or individuals most vitally involved in the drama. This can be in the form of an interview, one on one if you’re lucky, or in a mass setting, if you can see through the artificiality of the scene. What can become special, though, is the ability to approach a certain event or way of life or philosophy with one of the elegant spokesmen of the world of sports; it need not be a superstar, or even a regular, just someone who through words or deeds has achieved a certain elegance of spirit and, when approached through the luxury of reflection, can present it in a meaningful way.
There are some people I knew well enough to interview at length, and sometimes, during the course of that interview, the gate would open, if only for an instant, and I’d realize that I had just been allowed a rare look down a secret path. And then it would be gone. Sometimes it would come back, as a quick flash. Sometimes it would remain open, and those are the times during which I have developed friendships among the people I cover. It’s not really a healthy route for a writer to follow. What happens if honesty demands the harshness of criticism?
In the early stages of Frank Gifford’s career as a TV analyst, he was very sharp in his criticism, surprisingly acute. Then he just seemed to flatten out. One day I mentioned it to him.
“It just wasn’t worth it,” he said. “A lot of people I was criticizing were guys who’d been my teammates, or I’d played against. I knew a lot of them socially. Our wives were friends. And I’d say something, and it would change the relationship. No, it just wasn’t worth it.”
My best friend in all the years I covered the Jets was Winston Hill, the big tackle from Texas Southern. We’d work out together. Our wives would play tennis, our two infant daughters would play together in the playpen. One day he said to me, “There’s going to come a time when I won’t be playing as well. You’re going to have to write it. I don’t want our friendship to have anything to do with it … I want you to write it.”
I shook my head. I couldn’t talk. Tears were streaming down my face. “I’ll never write it,” I finally blurted out. “I’ll write about something else.”
I never wrote it. I wrote about other things. Besides, he never really slipped that much.
There were some scenes that just stood out in such sharp relief. One was an interview with Joe Namath on the dock behind his home in Tequesta, Florida. In 1969, my fourth year of covering the Jets, with Namath as the quarterback, something came up, and he stopped talking to me. Just like that, bang! I thought it had something to do with the league office forcing him to get out of his nightclub, Bachelors III. I was writing from training camp; a city-side reporter on the Post was covering the gossip stuff, the city angle. The paper combines our bylines. I guessed that had something to do with it, but I never found out.
“Hey Jimmy, what’s the story?” I asked Jimmy Walsh, his agent. It’s a scary thing to be a beat writer and not have access to the biggest name on your beat.
“He’s just in a tough situation now,” Walsh said. “He’ll get over it.”
It lasted for 24 years. It got ugly. A few others were in the same boat, Larry Fox, the beat writer for the New York Daily News, Dick Young, the News’ lead columnist. He wouldn’t even address a mass press conference if he spotted us in the crowd. He would tell other players to avoid us. You try to pretend you can shrug it off. It stayed with me like a lingering disease. I used to have nightmares about it.
Sometimes I’d dream that everything was fixed, and then I’d wake up to, Oh, God, it’s still going on.
Twenty-five years after the Super Bowl season, Sports Illustrated did a quarter-century retrospective, and they told me I’d be going down to Florida to interview Namath. I said good try, but he doesn’t talk to me. They said his secretary told them it was okay. I said his secretary didn’t know who the writer was. They said, go anyway, so I did, knowing exactly what would happen. I’d fly in, rent a car, drive to his house and hear, “I’m not talking to you.” I was ready for it.
What I wasn’t ready for was one of the best and warmest sessions with an athlete that I’d ever experienced. He talked about his life, his disappointment in trying and failing in an acting career, how the game had affected his life. We swapped old stories about people we knew. I told him that with a few minutes to go in the Super Bowl game, I made my way down to the field, as writers always do, so I could get position on the dressing room and I was standing next to John Sample on the sidelines, behind the Jets’ bench and I said, “Great game, John.” And we shook hands. And Gerry Philbin, the notoriously violent defensive end, saw us and screamed at me, “The game’s not over! Get the hell out of here!”
“My arm, feel my arm,” Namath said. “Goose bumps. That’s what I get when I hear stories about Philbin and those guys, goose bumps.” And that was the way it went for an afternoon. And finally, when I was getting back in my car, I asked him what I wanted to know for 24 years, obviously waiting until the i
nterview was over, “What did I write 24 years ago that bothered you so much?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t remember.”
“You don’t remember? You don’t remember?” I said, unable to hide the anguish. “You just about ruined my life and you don’t remember?”
“Well, I was different then,” he said. “I was more aggressive.”
If someone were to ask me which were the sports figures I got along with best, I’d have to say the funny ones, the ones with a developed sense of humor. I mean, are we all really finding a cure for cancer out here? I fell in love with Katie Schmidt, the Olympic javelin thrower and American record holder because of her sense of humor. First press conference she gave at the Montreal Olympics, she was asked how she ever got started in the sport and she said she was from Vermont, a departure of a long line of whalers from whom she was descended, and they had taught her to throw the javelin as they had thrown their harpoons. The only problem is that Vermont is a land-locked state.
“Well, some of them bought it,” she said. “I liked the headline the L.A. Times put on their story, ‘Something Fishy with This Tale.’” I remember very clearly strolling down one of the streets in the Olympic Village with Katie, and we passed Ruth Fuchs, the world record holder from East Germany who’d been rumored to have been feuding with Schmidt, which was strongly denied by all parties, especially the political ones, and they smiled sweetly at each other, and Katie said, “Oh, hi, Ruth,” and then sotto voce, “you bitch.” I burst out laughing. She grinned. Fuchs looked puzzled. The cavalcade of sports. Why can’t it all be like that?
One year the editors at Sports Illustrated asked me, “Who would you most like to do an off-season piece about?” and off the top of my head I said, “Jack Rudnay.” Huh? Blank looks all around. “The center for the Chiefs,” I said, the information, doing nothing to disperse the fog. Then I told them one story, and when it was over, they said, “Go and write him.” This is the story: The season was 1974, NFL veterans were on strike in training camp. Rudnay was the leader of the Chiefs’ strike faction, picketing the camp. David Jaynes was a quarterback from Kansas, the third-round draft choice. OK, rookies walked through the picket line, but when he issued the quote, “I feel that I can lead this team to victory,” Rudnay noted it and said, “Oh yeah, we’ll see about that.”
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