"When they send you the bats," I said, "are they Pete Reiser models?"
"Sure," he said. "They write to Louisville and get 'em."
"It's nice to be remembered," I said.
"Yeah," he said. "It sure is."
A nun, in white habit and wearing glasses, had come in.
"How are you this afternoon?" she said.
"So-so," Pete said.
"Have you seen a priest since you're here?" she said.
"Yep," Pete said.
She walked over to the stand and took the water carafe and carried it into the bathroom. We could hear her emptying it and refilling it, and she brought it back to the stand.
"I'll leave a little prayer here for you," she said.
"Thank you," Pete said.
On her way out she must have passed the maintenance man, because she had no sooner left than he was standing there. He was carrying a small aluminum step ladder, and he had on one of those wide leather belts with tools on it, worn gun-slinger fashion.
"There's something wrong with your air conditioning?" he said.
"Yeah," Pete said, nodding up at the circular vent in the middle of the ceiling. "It blows right down on you when you're in bed here."
"I can flatten the louvres," the other said.
"You do that," Pete said.
We watched him climb up on the ladder, and take the cover off and bend the louvres and replace the cover.
"I didn't close it all the way," he said, getting down. "Now the air is blowing to the side and not down on you."
"It's got to be better," Pete said. "Thanks."
"You're welcome," he said nodding and leaving.
"I don't know who the hell designs these hospitals," Pete said.
"It's not the patients," I said, "but you could."
"I've been in enough of them," he said.
In 1946 the Dodgers played an exhibition game in Springield, Missouri. When they got off the train, there was a young radio announcer there, and he was grabbing them one at a time and asking them where they thought they would finish that year.
"In the first place," Peewee Reese and Hugh Casey and Dixie Walker and the rest were saying. "On top . . . We'll win it."
"And here comes Pistol Pete Reiser," the announcer said. "Where do you think you'll finish this season, Pete?"
"In Peck Memorial Hospital," Pete said, and with that left ankle he broke sliding back to first against the Phillies, he did.
A young black woman in the uniform of a nurses' aide had come in now. She had walked over to the stand and had picked up the water carafe to look into it. Now she put it down, and picked up a sheet of paper.
"How many glasses of water you drink honeybun?" she said.
"Today?" Pete said. "About three."
She wrote it down, and without saying anything more, left.
"This artificial turf," I said. "How do you think you'd have done playing on that?"
"I'd a loved it," he said. "I'd a played run-run, bounce-bounce all day."
In 1941 the Dodgers trained in Havana, and one day they clocked Pete at 9.8 for 100 yards. That was in baseball spikes and the loose, heavy flannel uniform, the garb that seemed so right then and that now, in the old photographs, seems so shockingly and sadly comical. Five years later the Cleveland Indians were bragging about George Case and the Washington Senators had Gil Coan. The Dodgers offered to bet that Pete was the fastest man in baseball, but there were no takers.
"As Mr. Rickey used to say," he was saying, breathing it again and pausing between the sentences, " 'It takes no talent to hustle. The easiest thing a man can do, outside of walking, is to run.' I believed him."
I heard the sound beside me, and when I turned a young woman was pushing in the wheeled apparatus with the glass tank on top. She was wearing a nurse's white pants suit, and she looked up from a piece of paper she had in her hand.
"Mr. Riser?" she said, giving it the German pronunciation.
"Ree-sir," I said, thinking that, if Pete weren't listening, in thirty seconds I could tell her who and what he was.
"I been waitin' for you," Pete said.
She was adjusting the two knobs on the front and checking the two dials, turning the apparatus on and off. She uncoiled the plastic tubing and handed the end to Pete. He put the orange plastic mouth-piece in, and there was the evenly spaced sound of the air and of Pete's breathing.
"What is this called?" I said to her as we watched Pete, his chest rising and falling.
"It's called an IPPB."
"What does that mean?"
"Intermittent Positive Pressure Breathing," she said, and then to Pete, "How's that feel? Too high, or too low? Okay?"
He nodded.
"It's hooked up to oxygen," she said to me, "and also has humidity."
Pete had taken the mouthpiece out and he was coughing into a gauze wipe.
"Are you productive at all?" she said.
"I wasn't then, but I have been," he said, putting the mouthpiece back in.
She took his pulse and walked over and examined some of the wipes in the wastebasket, making notes.
"Getting tired?" she said, and Pete shook his head. "Take a rest if you get tired."
I had clocked it, and after fifteen minutes she shut it off.
"When will I be gettin' another one?" he said.
"Every six hours," she said, smiling.
"Every six hours?" he said. "But every day it's a different six hours."
Pete sizes up hospitals and doctors the way he sizes up ball clubs and ballplayers, and he has his own views, which are sometimes contrary to prevailing opinion. In 1938 he was with Superior, Wisconsin, and three days before the season ended, in an exhibition game at Oslo, North Dakota, he was going into second base when he felt something snap in his left knee.
"An old country doctor came running out," he told me once, "and he popped it back in—one, two—and I near died. He said, 'That's what you've got to do, sonny. The longer it stays out the worse it is, and then they'll have to operate on you. You put an elastic bandage on and don't let anyone operate on you.' "
"MacPhail," he said, and Larry MacPhail was running the Dodgers organization, "heard about it, and he sent me to the Mayo Clinic. They wanted to cut me for a torn cartilage, but I kept hearing that old country doctor say, 'Don't let anyone operate on you. It'll heal itself.' I talked the doc into letting me go home, and in '41 I went back to Mayo with Durocher and Medwick for checkups. In came the doc. He said, 'You're the one I want to see. Let's see the results of that operation.' I said, 'I had no operation.' He checked me over and he said, 'Remarkable.' "
Now, about five minutes after the respiratory technician had wheeled her apparatus out, a nurse came in. She took his pulse and unwound her blood pressure cuff and put it around his arm. She pumped it up, checking the dial.
"I don't know who's attracting all these people," Pete said, looking over at me. "It must be you."
"Maybe they think I'm from the Health Department," I said.
"Yeah," he said. "I can lay here for hours and nobody comes in."
"Is there something you want?" the nurse said.
"Yeah," Pete said. "The doctor. I haven't seen him all day."
"He'll be in," the nurse said.
"Yeah," Pete said, and then, after she had left, "He came in and I thought the top of my head was gonna blow off. I said, 'My sinuses are killing me.' He said, 'How do you know?' I said, 'I've been treated for sinuses since I was five or six years old.' He said, 'What do you mean sinuses?' I said, 'If you don't know, I'm not gonna tell you. I've had them cleaned out five or six times, and when you've had that done you know it.' "
"Pete," I said, "what about these salaries ballplayers are getting now?"
When I read about a .276 hitter who is a lackadaisical fielder and laggardly base runner on balls hit to the infield but who signs a multiyear contract worth almost two million dollars, I think of Pete. When he was fifteen and the Cardinals found him in that St. Louis
Municipal League, his father signed for him, and I asked him once what he and his dad got.
"A handshake," he said. "You felt honored if a scout even talked to you."
When Judge Landis freed Pete and those seventy-two others from the Cardinal chain and Pete signed with Brooklyn he got $100.
"I'm glad to see the ballplayers finally getting something," he said.
"I am too," I said, "but I often think . . ."
"You can't go back," he said, reading my mind, "and say what you should have got. When I played I guess there were guys who'd played before me who said they wished they were playing when I was, not that I ever got that much."
"That's the only way to look at it," I said, "and I'll never forget something you told me. I asked you if you ever thought that if you hadn't played the game as hard as you did, there would be no telling how great you might have been or how much money you might have made. You said, 'Never. It was my way of playing. If I hadn't played that way, I wouldn't even have been whatever I was.' "
"That's right," he said. "I may never have got there."
"You said, 'God gave me those legs and that speed, and when they took me into those walls that was the way it had to be. I couldn't play any other way.' "
"That's right," he said. "I had a good body, and I just wrecked it, that's all. It took a lot of beatin' to do it, but that's the way it was."
I didn't want to leave him on that, so I got to telling stories about some of the writers who covered the Dodgers in his time and what those who are left are doing now. We reminisced for twenty minutes or so, and then I said I would be going.
"So if you want anything," I said, "just call the Hilton."
"I'll be all right," he said. "As soon as I see that doc, I'm gonna get out."
The restaurant at the hotel is on the top floor, and the waitress, a middle-aged, semi-stout motherly type, led me between tables. At one of them, a man and a woman in their sixties were seated, and as I passed them he was speaking.
"So you married Frank," he was saying, "and I married Grace, and that's the way it was."
And that's the way Noel Coward would have written it too, I was thinking. A brief encounter forty years later.
"Is this all right?" the waitress was saying.
"It's fine," I said.
The table was at one of the picture windows, and I could look down at AI Lang Field where the old green-painted wooden stands have been replaced by a cantilevered concrete stadium. Dusk had descended and the lights were on in the towers, flooding what I could see of the field, and the two ball clubs—St. Pete and Tampa in the Florida State League—were getting ready to play.
"Would you care for a drink?" the waitress said.
"Yes," I said, giving her my order.
"While I'm getting it," she said, "you can watch the game."
When Pete appeared at the Dodgers' camp in Clearwater in 1939 he had never been in a major league camp before. He didn't know that at batting practice you hit in rotation, and he was grabbing any bat that was handy and cutting in ahead of Ernie Koy and Dolph Camilli and the others, and that impressed Durocher.
One day the Dodgers were to bus down and play the Cardinals here at St. Pete. Leo was still playing some shortstop, but he had a chest cold and besides, it was St. Patrick's Day and Pete's twentieth birthday, so he told Pete to start in his place. His first time up on that field below me now—the way it used to be with those wooden stands and not the way it is today—he hit a homer off Ken Raffensberger, and that was the beginning. In exhibition games that spring he was on base his first twelve times at bat, with three homers, five singles, and four walks. His first time against Detroit he homered off Tommy Bridges, and his first time up again on that field so changed below me now, he put one over the fence off Lefty Gomez.
"I thought I'd get my social security before I got this drink," the waitress was saying when she finally brought it. "You enjoying the game?"
I could see all of the stands, with about fifty people in them, home plate, and all of the infield within a line running from just beyond first base into shallow left field. When I leaned toward the window I could see second base.
"It's just about to start," I said.
"I don't know who they are," the waitress said.
"They're minor leaguers," I said, "all of them dreaming about someday being major leaguers."
"I guess that's so," she said.
"And I don't know that any of them will make it," I said.
"Well," she said, "they've got their dreams."
"Yes," I said.
"And it's keeping them out of trouble," she said.
Having another drink and then my dinner I watched the start of the game. The turf was very green under the lights and the base paths a clean tan, and Tampa got a run on a walk and a double to right that was out of my view. With one out, and that man on second, the man at bat hit a line drive and, leaning toward the window, I could see the second baseman, who apparently had been holding the runner near the bag, spear it and then just reach down and tag the runner trying to get back, to complete the double play.
Watching what I could see of it down there while I ate, I kept thinking, of course, of Pete and of the days he had there and all the other days elsewhere, and who was now, thirty-eight years later, lying in that hospital bed just across town, paying the price for trying too hard and now having trouble breathing. The next morning I phoned him.
"How are you today?" I said.
"Much better," he said.
"Did the doctor see you after I left yesterday?"
"No," he said. "I don't know where the hell he is, but I'm get-tin' out."
"Don't leave before you see the doctor," I said.
"I can't," he said. "I've got my clothes here, but they've got my wallet and all my credit cards locked in the safe."
"Good," I said.
Two nights later, from my home and as I had said I would, I called his home in California. His wife answered and said he was feeling better and, when he got on, he said the same thing.
"Then take it a little easier," I said.
"Yeah," he said. "I guess from now on, with everything I got wrong with me, I'll have to."
"Maybe," I wrote once, and I will stay with it, "Pete Reiser was the purest ballplayer of all time. I don't know. There is no exact way of measuring such a thing, but when a man of incomparable skills, with full knowledge of what he is doing, destroys those skills and puts his life on the line in the pursuit of his endeavor as no other man in his game ever has, perhaps he is the truest of them all."
17
I Remember, Mom
My mother is the kind of woman who
can't stand to see suffering and wants
to help everybody.
Rocky Marciano, 1955
They came from Italy, Pierino Marchegiano from Ripiatitina, near the Adriatic coast, and Pasqualena Picciuto from San Bartolomeo in the south central hill country. They met in Brockton, Massachusetts, where they worked in shoe factories and they were married in 1921. Their first child, a thirteen-pound boy, died at birth. The second, a twelve-and-a-half-pound boy, to be christened Rocco Francis, was born at one a.m. on September 1, 1923, and as Rocky Marciano he became the heavyweight champion of the world.
"I say to the doctor," Pasqualena Marchegiano told me once, "I ask him, 'How much this cost?' He say 'Forty dollar.' I say, 'Well, doctor, I give you cash.' He say, "Well, thirty-five dollar.' "
I went to see the doctor. His name was Josephat Phaneuf, and I found him, invalided and gaunt, in a wheel chair in his own ninety-four bed, red-brick Phaneuf Hospital.
"I remember a delivery at that time at 80 Brook Street," he said. "I recall it was fairly difficult because of the size of the baby."
This was in 1954, and he was sixty-six years old. As a general practitioner in and around Brockton he had delivered 7,235 babies.
"Strangely," he said, "I have never seen him fight. A great many of my patients talk about him, though, an
d when they do I say, 'I was the first one ever to hit him.' "
Six years before, I had stopped off one afternoon at the Catholic Youth Organization gym on West Seventeenth Street in New York to watch a fighter work out. I no longer remember who that fighter was, but there were a couple of heavyweights thumping each other in the ring. Charley Goldman was standing on the ring apron near one corner, leaning on the top rope and calling advice to the shorter of the two.
Charley was sixty-one years old. He had had an eighth-grade education and, as a bantamweight, more than four hundred fights. He was a little man, with a broken nose and one broken hand, and he was proud of his abdominal muscularity. Every now and then in one of the gyms or at a training camp he would get on the subject of conditioning, and he would take my right hand and press it there in front where the bottom of the rib cage meets the lower end of the sternum.
Once They Heard the Cheers Page 49