At most ballparks, the media lounge remained open for an hour and a half before and after the game and was closed while the game was actually in progress. But in Arlington, the bar not only never closed, a couple of college kids (Jeff and Eddie—why is it I remember their names to this day?) remained on call in the pressbox to fetch drinks.
Jeff and Eddie and I learned to work well together. We were a team. With the slightest gesture, a subtle wave of my right index finger, like a countess signaling the auctioneer during a sale at the Tate Gallery, Jeff or Eddie would be there instantaneously with my drink. The drink, by the by, consisted of José Cuervo, on the rocks, in a twelve-ounce plastic cup, a concoction locally known as a Fort Worth Air Conditioner.
Usually, I would require at least four of these to overcome a chronic condition known as writer’s block and usually, by around the top of the eighth inning, I would at last muster the confidence to describe the latest Rangers defeat with the depth and grandeur that the event deserved. So when Dick Allen hit his homerun, that was not just another garden variety, pissant homer but perhaps “a celestial comet, streaking across the night prairie sky while earthlings in the cheap seats quivered with reverence and awe.”
I suspect that there were occasions when readers and perhaps my superiors at the newspaper might have perused this type of material, paused and wondered to themselves: “What was that fucker on when he wrote that?” And to them, I hereby extend an honest answer. Usually, I was on straight tequila. Not that I was concerned about critiques from my superiors at the paper. The Star-Telegram, after all, was the newspaper that somehow managed to print “Championship Game … Madison Square Garden Fuck You Classic” in the basketball scores. That appeared in 300,000 papers and when a reader called to complain, Bob Lindley, the sports editor, told him, “You should have seen what was in there before we cleaned it up.”
I should also add here that I was not the only person in that pressbox to eventually receive honorable mention for the Betty Ford Hall of Fame. I saw guys being hauled out of there on stretchers. Some team official of the Rangers once told me what the liquor bill in the Arlington Stadium press lounge totaled for the entire season (although this was after Brad Corbett had bought the team and ordered in an additional enormous supply of red wine), and the number was so unbelievable that I erased it from my mind.
The Sunday contest against the White Sox was rained out. But this was probably the last time that the crass deity that administrates the elements during a baseball season would offer any benevolent gestures on behalf of the woebegone Rangers.
Monday, I was aboard the Ranger charter, destination Kansas City, about to be indoctrinated to the coast-to-coast stag party otherwise known as baseball travel, Rangers-style. Herzog, like most managers, sanctioned an open bottle policy on team flights. The presumption was that these ballplayers were adults and well-to-do professionals and if they wanted to drink their careers into early oblivion, then that was their absolute privilege.
Several players were in the process of doing exactly that, including one utility man with a conventional Rangers transcript … his job skills had eroded to the extent that he was no longer of use to his previous organization in the National League but were still serviceable enough to perform for Texas. He stood in the back of the plane chatting with a flight attendant and suggesting that the two of them might participate in a carnal act that would also include a seesaw and a German shepherd. In our current society, the flight attendant would have filed suit against the player, the Rangers, the American League, the airline, probably the FAA and the air traffic controllers union, claiming sexual harassment. But that never happened back then and the flight attendant simply informed the player, “I don’t get paid enough to put up with shit like that from dickheads like you.”
The player was only mildly chagrined. “She took it all wrong,” he complained. “I wasn’t talking about getting it on with a dog. I meant a real German shepherd, this fat guy I know named Fritz.”
I was sitting next to one of the players who was listed among the “bright hopes” of the organization in the Rangers pre-season promotional literature. He ignored his teammate’s encounter with the flight attendant. The “bright hope” was reading Playboy and was disturbed by the contents. “Look at these women,” he said, pointing at Miss April. “They don’t look like real women. These models look like … plastic.
“The ones that I think are more attractive are the ones in that section they print in Oui, where the readers send in pictures of themselves and the caption always reads that the photo was taken by their boyfriends or their husbands. A lot of them are from New Jersey. You see some pretty strange looking bodies, with these saggy little monkey tits. But I’d a hell of a lot rather look at that stuff than at Miss April.” Go figure that.
From there, the “bright hope” moved on to one of his favorite topics, that being himself, and recalled the events of his past that led him into pro ball. To the fans, the player usually offered a grim and brooding countenance but the player I was coming to know here was a sentimental cuss, at least when it came to his childhood years. “Me and some other guys would go over to each other’s houses,” he fondly recalled, “raid the parents’ medicine cabinets and take every pill that was in there. And then,” he said, “we’d each drink a six-pack.”
Since this “bright hope” did eventually move on to enjoy a reasonably long and often productive career in the major leagues, I have often been given cause to think of the slogan “Breakfast of Champions” in a whole new context.
Chapter 5
After about one month’s exposure to the nomadic nocturnal adventures of the Texas Rangers, a strong suspicion had begun to grow that I had somehow become a living character in a television script written by Rod Serling. Racked with chronic jet lag, I could not now help but sense that my late-night experiences more and more had taken on a rather surreal quality.
In Minneapolis one cheerless Friday night, I found that the hotel lobby and bar had been commandeered by a state convention of the Teamsters. They tried to ignore Don Stanhouse, the Rangers pitcher, as he cruised the lobby shouting, “Paging Mr. Gozinya! Mr. Peter Gozinya!” The Teamsters had also spilled into our usual haunt across the street, the Blue Ox, obliterating the oxygen supply in there with their Dutch Masters. These guys all knew where Jimmy Hoffa was buried and he wasn’t even dead yet. Their collective brotherhood offered such an unmitigated sinister posture that Galloway, Billings the catcher and Bones Merritt, a lefthanded relief pitcher, and I were forced into the cold outdoors.
If people around the country think that Texans talk funny, they might listen to some native Minnesotans next time. Their twang is a hell of a lot more nasal than anything I ever heard in rural Texas, and I think the reason is that, in the winter, their sinuses actually freeze and rupture. The stoic Scandinavians maintain the plurality in that region and these people could not be reasonably depicted as passionate fools or hopeless romantics. This was in evidence at a topless bar. While the girls wiggled and danced, the customers, most of whom looked like the illustration on the label of a sardine can, just sat there, expressionless, as if they were attending a lecture on eighteenth-century Lutheran theology. With one of our group standing on his chair shouting, “Yaahhh, Baby! Shake it! Shake it!” I must say that I felt a little bit out of place.
Three hours later we decided to top off still another festive evening on the road at an all-night dive. Galloway ordered his usual Grand Prairie Special—fried eggs, fried potatoes, a bottle of Tabasco and a JB and soda. In the next booth, an old man with extremities and a neck of enlarged circumference suddenly pitched on his back and had a seizure. Apparently he’d overheard Galloway’s selections from the menu. The poor guy was writhing and twisting, producing whoops and gurgles. Finally, Rich Billings sprang to his aid and offered the old-timer a cigarette.
The events of that evening were in no way atypical of the various small dramas that took place night after
night after night, and usually late at night at that, since there was frequently a ball game to get out of the way before the serious explorations of the urban underworld could begin. The cumulative effects, I discovered, tended to make one rather nuts. At the time I was reading Dan Jenkins’ (who, like me, had started writing at the Fort Worth Press) novel Semi-Tough and realized that the apocryphal madness he described in that book seemed genteel when compared to some of my recent experiences.
In mid-May the Rangers were enjoying a weekend in Detroit and, as usual, congregated at the Lindell AC, the nation’s first and certainly most authentic sports bar. Back then, all four Detroit pro teams—Lions, Tigers, Pistons and Red Wings—played downtown, either at Tiger Stadium, the Olympia or Cobo Hall, and personnel from visiting teams practically lived in Lindell’s. Consequently, a collateral population of groupies appeared there as well, making for colorful mating rituals. It was on the Friday night of my first visit to Detroit that I heard a Rangers player tell a young woman, “What do you mean you’re not into one-night stands? Hell. We’re in town until Sunday.”
On Saturday, after a day game (Tigers win, 7-1), several of the Rangers troupe ventured to Joe’s Chop House, fancier than it sounded and a rather famous restaurant. After the dinner an endless cavalcade of distilled beverages appeared at our table while Harold McKinney and Burt Hawkins became entangled in perhaps the bitterest of an ongoing series of acrimonious political discussions.
Burt Hawkins was the Rangers’ traveling secretary, or in his case, zookeeper. It is the immense task of the traveling secretary to coordinate plane, bus and hotel arrangements for the players, management and media—about thirty-five people in all. As a person with a hair-trigger disinclination to take any crap off anybody, Hawkins sustained the total respect of all of his strange ensemble of eccentrics and malcontents. With a battalion of wayward caballeros like this outfit, it became Hawkins’ additional duty to inform next of kin when one of our number became hospitalized or incarcerated. Hawkins held the same job with the Senators before being transferred to the simmering flatlands of Texas, and prior to that had covered baseball for the old Washington Star. Hawkins despised all those “liberal pansies” at the Washington Post and told me that whenever he heard Sousa’s “Washington Post March” he would break out in hives.
Everyone called him Hawk, and politically he was exactly that. In his final years back in Washington, Hawkins had hired David Eisenhower to work as his assistant and statistician. Hawk liked the hell out of Ike’s grandson and was obviously sympathetic with the policies of David’s father-in-law. But the onset of summer 1973 was not the best of times for the then First Family. Spiro Agnew (the letters of whose name can be rearranged to spell Grow A Penis) was about to resign and the troops were assembling for the first bloodletting in the Battle of Watergate.
Harold McKinney, who had intense political convictions of his own and envied and admired the likes of the Black Panthers, was equipped with limitless pejorative resources when his blood alcohol content matched the Rangers team batting average, about .217. On this Saturday at Joe’s Chop House, Harold’s hissing diatribe against Richard Nixon reached such a crescendo—with Hawkins responding in perfect harmony—that I decided to evacuate the premises before the FBI showed up.
There’s nothing like a prolonged solo stroll through the streets of Motown at midnight if a person wishes to display a disregard for his own well-being. So I was rather pleased with myself after making it back to the hotel room intact, a sensation that vanished after I couldn’t get my key into the door. After several attempts, it occurred to me that my motor skills were not at blame here. It was the key’s fault.
I returned to the lobby, approached the night manager and expressed my dissatisfaction with the faulty key in a short speech of fiery eloquence. The manager examined the key and, as a rather self-satisfied half-smile crossed his face, announced, “It appears, my man, that the problem isn’t the key. The problem is that you seem to be in the wrong hotel. But don’t look so glum. You only missed it by a block.”
At the time I certainly did not regard the hotel episode as such a stupendously misguided excursion into the land of the absurd. If I had I certainly would have kept the incident to myself. After all, hotels, like most everything else in Detroit, all look the same. But when I casually recounted the event to someone the next night on the plane headed to Milwaukee, the story became quite the little knee-slapper.
On a day when Toby Harrah would play nine innings at shortstop with congealed vomit in his hair, here I was being held up as the village imbecile. For months—even years—later, I found myself being introduced to people as “this is the guy I’ve been telling you about—the schmuck who wound up in the wrong hotel.” It wasn’t until I started fighting back—“Yeah. Well, at least I didn’t get arrested driving south in the northbound lane of the freeway like some people I know”—that the derision began to subside.
Actually, the Rangers were easily amused by the slightest off-the-field diversion because the on-the-field aspects of their act were deteriorating from mediocre to melancholy to sometimes macabre. In a game at Chicago, Dave Nelson, the second baseman and anything but a power hitter, cracked a two-run homer in the seventh inning and banged a three-run shot again in the ninth. Thanks to Nelson’s rare explosive display, the Rangers only lost 10-5 instead of 100. The wire services were starting to carry scores like 172 (once against Oakland and a week later against Detroit).
An exhausting road swing that carried the Rangers from Anaheim to Spokane (which I thought was a hell of a place to spend my thirty-first birthday) for an exhibition game against Texas’ AAA farm team, to Oakland and then all the way over to New York, had seen Texas lose so much ground that the taillights of the fifth-place Angels had vanished into the distance. And the Angels were hardly setting the league afire. The only Rangers player who was accomplishing anything on a consistent basis was Alex Johnson, the guy Herzog had feared might “poison” the ball club. AJ was hitting about .315, but his promising production was of little use to the Rangers media. Johnson restricted his post-game remarks to bizarre figures of speech that were so off-color that I couldn’t begin to reproduce them in a “family” newspaper—hey, they couldn’t have printed them in Screw magazine.
On an early afternoon in New York an event happened that nicely summarized Whitey Herzog’s frustrations. After a rain-out at Yankee Stadium that completed the road swing, the team climbed aboard the bus to LaGuardia. While some equipment trunks were being loaded into the baggage bin, a kid of about twelve who was typical of the attitude and demeanor of the youth who prowl the badlands around the stadium, sneaked on the bus. Standing in the aisle near the front, the youngster began a little tap dance, all the while yelling, “Rang-uhs fuck! Rang-uhs suck! Rang-uhs eat shit!”
That routine continued for about forty seconds, to the combined amazement and amusement of everyone on the bus, until Herzog himself issued a suggestion: “Hey, kid. Why don’t you go beat your meat!”
“Yeah,” added the bus driver. “You gettin’ ready to get a shoe up you ass.” With that, the driver grabbed the kid by his shirt and heaved him through the door and onto the hard sidewalk. I was sitting close enough to Herzog to hear him mutter, “The hell of it is, the kid’s right.” He paused, then laughed and said, “And it hurts, too.”
Whitey Herzog, who had joined the team to oversee what amounted to a three-year neighborhood improvement project with the Rangers and who fully realized that the initial phases were going to be painful, was already at work planning radical reconstructive cosmetic alterations to the face of the 1973 Rangers. He passed the word around the major leagues that he was seeking, to paraphrase the Marine recruiting slogan, “a few men.” In this case, they didn’t necessarily have to be “good.”
Herzog had already traded his best pitcher, Dick Bosman, for somebody he thought was a bit better, Sonny Siebert. Rich Hand and Mike Epstein were gone by now, too, traded to the California
Angels. The manager had decided that the pitching material he had inherited in spring training offered physical tools more befitting the American Legion than the American League. Within weeks, Herzog had replaced the entire five-man starting rotation that opened the season. And he would replace that five with another five before the year was out.
One casting upgrade was located in Memphis, languishing in the Cardinals farm system. When righthander Jim Bibby joined the Rangers he presented an immediate departure in that he at least looked the part of a ballplayer. Most of the Rangers wore straggly mustaches, generally appeared consumptive and, when the team marched through an airport en route to the bar, could have been easily mistaken for a bunch of ex-cons. Bibby, at six-foot-seven, had legs like oak trees. His brother Henry had been a key figure in UCLA’s basketball dynasty and was now a star with the Knicks.
Jim Bibby, who for reasons known only to himself went by the “stage name” of Fontay O’Rooney, was by no means a complete major league pitcher. But he threw a vicious fastball—“serious heat … severe gas”—that would scare the bejesus out of most American League batters. Parenthetically, Bibby could also lay claim to owning the biggest apparatus of manhood in baseball—an appendage of near-equine proportions—and it was to Bob Short’s eternal frustration that he could never harness that particular novelty into a gate attraction at Arlington Stadium.
Short’s marketing scheme was entirely one-dimensional. Every night was Something Night at the ball park. Bat Night—they staged about five of those. Ball Night. Cap Night. T-shirt Night. Rangers Keychain Night. Rangers Calendar Night. Yes, and even Rangers Panty Hose (guaranteed to yield fewer runs than the home team) Night. Still on the drawing board was Insane Relative Night and Law Enforcement Appreciation Night, where Grand Prairie cops would stage a pre-game demonstration of interrogation techniques.
Seasons in Hell Page 4