by Roy Blount
So it isn’t easy to figure, but I’ve spent a lot of time on it. I figure, give or take thirty points, I would be hitting .117 right now in the major leagues. In the American League, anyway. If I could run and field well enough to play.
At thirty-five that’s not bad. In my prime, around ’71 or ’72, I possibly would have hit .195. I can live with that. Of course I’ve lost out on a lot of intangible benefits, passing up a career in baseball. But some of them I can get at the Batting Cage. Leaning against the screen watching other fast-machine guys hit, waiting for my turn, comparing notes with other guys who’re watching.
“Thing git to be an addiction.”
“Eah.”
“Machine’ll cross you up. Move it around on you.”
“Thing’ll bad-ball you.”
“Th’ew one behind me.”
“Hit on one in Rhode Island. Christ, that thing caught me right on the wrist!”
Then, wups, the machine lets fly with a duster. Guy in the cage doesn’t hang in there too well. He goes down, bat flies, the machine is inexorably pitching on, he’s thrashing around on the ground, people are scurrying around to pull him away.
As he leaves the cage disgruntled, his last pitch is thrown. WHANG it goes against the screen. “Scuse me,” I say to the writer who is interviewing me for this column. “I got to go hit.”
MERELY SHOT IN THE HEAD
ONE OF THE FEW good reasons I can think of for running twenty-six miles would be to escape being shot in the head. But Dennis Rainear, twenty-eight years old, of Midland, Michigan, runs such distances for his own gratification. And when somebody did shoot him in the head, after ten miles on November 4, he kept on running.
The .22-caliber slug in his scalp slowed him down enough over the last sixteen miles, though, that he took 3 hours 9 minutes to finish the Grand Valley Marathon in Allendale, Michigan. That time was nine minutes too slow to qualify for the Boston Marathon next April.
“I was all prepared,” Rainear was quoted as saying when he finished the race. His best previous marathon time had been 3 hours 31 seconds. “I was sure I could knock 31 seconds off my time, and then this silly thing had to happen.”
On reading this statement, I finally had to break down and admit that I was impressed by the running state of mind. Just when running was becoming more boring as a sports topic than what is wrong with the Giants, just when the average non-running American was firming up several good reasons why he was not out there pushing past pain barriers in perfectly fitted shoes himself, here comes Dennis Rainear. Here comes a runner who is so absorbed in biting the bullet that he can’t be bothered by the bullet in his head.
“This silly thing,” he calls it. It seems to me that being shot in the head, when it occurs, should be a big thing in a person’s life. To a nonrunner, it would make more sense to hear someone say, “All my life I have been trying to avoid getting shot in the head, and here it has to happen while I’m running this silly race.”
I wanted to know more about Dennis Rainear. Maybe all this was a hoax, and I could stop worrying about it. I called him at the Dow Corning Company in Midland, where he works as a chemist.
He said he had been having trouble getting much chemistry done lately—not because of his wound but because of his fame.
“You’ve been getting a lot of calls on this thing?”
“Is the sky up? I’m hearing from about every newspaper and magazine and TV show in the country.”
The story was true, he said.
“I don’t know exactly where the bullet came from, because I don’t know which way I was facing or what the angle of my head was when it hit. But it landed just to the right of the top center of my head. I remember there being a thud when it struck me, and it damn near took me off my feet, I thought I’d been hit by a brick or something.
“I looked around to see who’d thrown it, but there was nobody there. Other than yell a little bit, I probably wouldn’t have wanted to take the time to do anything anyway. But I had trouble focusing my eyes. It was like I was drunk. I kept blinking. And I kept opening my jaw, trying to get my ears to pop.
“I’ve had worse races, in the heat, when I really felt wracked. But I ran through a really bad period at the twenty-two-mile mark. I was wobbling, and my eyes were going in different directions. I assumed it was undertraining, or overfatigue, or dehydration. So I slowed down to a walk, but that made it worse. I thought: ‘The blood must be pooling in your legs. Running will help pump it back up to your brain.’
“So I started running again, and I felt better. I thought, ‘I must have run through whatever it was I was in.’
“When I crossed the finish line my wife knew immediately I was disappointed. ‘By the way,’ I told her, ‘somebody clobbered me with a brick or something.’
“I had a big goose egg. So we had the physician who was there look at it. ‘I can see something shining in there,’ he said. All of a sudden things really made sense. It wasn’t just muscle fatigue.”
At the hospital Rainear was taken to, X rays showed a slug flattened up against the skull. “The doctor had to use plastic tweezers to pull the bullet out so it wouldn’t be damaged for the ballistics tests. He had a hard time. He kept jerking my head, jerking my head.”
Fortunately the slug had hit a solid part of the skull and hadn’t penetrated at all. “All I’ve got now is a small scab. I’ve been out running every day. The other day I was out on a new road, and I heard a gunshot crack. I hightailed it out of there. I figure I’ve used up my luck.”
Rainear assumes that the bullet that hit him was a stray. “I could as easily have been hit sitting in a bar somewhere. Some of the stories that have come out have concluded that running is no longer safe—that if you go out running, ipso facto you’re going to get shot.”
Rainear deplores such conclusions. It’s true that when he is training, people occasionally try to run over him, or they open their car doors as they drive past to try to bowl him over, and he is a bit worried that “some nut” watching his next race will say, “Okay, you took a twenty-two bullet; try this thirty-ought-six.” Still, Rainear thinks that “running is the best thing going.”
“It’s free-form exercise. It’s great for cardiovascular fitness. And it’s cheap. Anybody can do it. I’m just the average Joe on the road, and I’ve run races with Bill Rodgers, Lasse Viren, Frank Shorter, all the big shots.”
I suggested that he would be something of a celebrity himself at the next Boston Marathon, in which he will compete by virtue of a special invitation.
“No,” he says, “I still consider myself a little shot.”
A BAIT BOX OF GREEN JADE?
YOUR CHANCES OF SEEING a show of cricket cages and other cricketing paraphernalia are apparently slight. The Asian Gallery on East Eightieth Street in New York claims its current exhibit is the first in the United States to feature “the unique art forms associated with the ancient Chinese sport of cricket-fighting.”
I don’t know much about art, but I know one form of cricket-fighting. Nearly every time I go fishing with crickets someone turns over the tricky wire bait box they are kept in; and in a flash everyone in the boat is covered with crickets. Fishing is relaxing but wrestling with crickets is exercise. My friend Vereen Bell once came home from a fishing trip, sat down at the table, and a cricket hopped out of his shirt pocket into his chicken gumbo soup. The Bells’ Siamese cat Beep saw the cricket jump and went after it. A cricket can add a lot of shouting and grappling to your life.
The Chinese fought crickets, however, in the sense that the Vanderbilts race horses. According to Insect-Musicians and Cricket Champions of China, a 1927 pamphlet by Berthold Laufer, which Richard Ravenal of the Asian Gallery showed me, it was a peculiarity of the ancient Chinese that they “were more interested in the class of insects than in all other groups of animals combined.” Hence, silk; and hence also the great enthusiasm, as early as the tenth century, for watching prized crickets fight each other in a pottery jar
. As late as 1927 the sport was so big that wagering on a single cricket-match in Canton might go as high as $100,000 and a national shou lip (winning or victorious cricket) would bring his home village as much honor as Johnny Bench brings to Binger, Oklahoma.
I am not making this up. Crickets with black heads and grey body hair, Laufer says, were held to be the best fighters. Next were those with yellow heads and grey hair. The trainer of a first-class cricket would keep the temperature in its cage just right. If the cricket’s mustache started to droop, it was too warm. Fighting crickets were fed rice mixed with fresh cucumbers, boiled chestnuts, lotus seeds and mosquitoes. Sometimes a cricket fancier would allow himself to be bitten by mosquitoes, which he would then feed to his cricket. When time for a fight drew near, the cricket might be deprived of food for a while, until its movements became slow, whereupon it would be fed small red insects in water. A cricket enthusiast might carry a caged favorite around in his breast pocket so that the fighter could keep warm and all the world could hear it sing. A strong chirping voice was an attribute of the best cricket gladiators.
How it was possible for more than a few fans to watch a big cricket bout Laufer does not explain, but the event would take place in a demijohn-sized jar placed in the middle of a public square. Opponents were matched according to size, weight and color. Before each set-to they were carefully weighed on a pair of tiny scales.
Crickets are natural fighters in defense of their own turf, but in the ring, or rather the jar, they had to be provoked. The referee, using a device made of hare- or rat-whiskers inserted into a handle of bone or reed, would twiddle first the contestants’ heads, then the ends of their tails, and finally their large hind legs. Then the crickets would stretch out their antennae and jump at each other’s heads. An antenna would break off, then a leg. Usually the struggle would end in the death of one fighter; often the winner would manage to land with its full weight on the other’s body and sever its head.
The sport has died out, at least on the mainland, since the revolution banned gambling; who wants to watch crickets fight if you can’t bet on them? But in the old days emperors and other high officials put a lot of money and artistry into cricket cages and accoutrements, and these are the objets that the Asian Gallery is showing. In winter the crickets were kept in cages made of gourds that were about the size of a swallow. The beauty of these cages resides in their perforated tops and in the designs on the gourds themselves. The caps were carved into flowers or dragons or intricate vinelike tangles, from sandalwood, elephant- or walrus-ivory, coconut shell, green jade, white jade, ebony, bamboo or tortoise shell. Some of the designs on the bodies of the cages were etched, but most were raised. Molds with indentations on the inner surface were fastened around gourds while they were still on the stalk, so that the gourds would grow into patterns.
Some of these gourd cages are exquisite antiques, and they’re more interesting to explain to guests than, say, a Tiffany lamp. Their prices range from $250 to $550, and the gallery will continue to sell the objets after the exhibit closes. Ravenal implied that he might well throw in one of the cricket ticklers, cricket water bowls, cricket beds (singles), porcelain cricket-bout scorecards or hard-to-describe small decorative items (apparently trophies or memorials to cricket champions) that are also part of the collection. Another interesting piece is a sash worn by a cricket-fight referee. Evidently, judging from the size of this sash, the referee was a man. I had hoped he was a field mouse.
JOCK LINGERIE
ALL I CAN SAY is, the thing I wanted most when I was a kid was to be a big-league ballplayer, and the last thing I wanted was for magazines to run pictures of me in my underwear. To walk through the lunchroom and have people nudge each other and say, “He pitches for the Orioles,” would have been very easy to live with. To walk through the lunchroom and have people nudge each other and say, “Did you see him—in little tight underpants?” would have been hard.
So what does a kid think today when he sees Jim Palmer of the Orioles, the three-time Cy Young Award winner, posing in magazine ads—and even on a poster—for Jockey shorts? In some ads Palmer wears matching T-shirts, but the poster shows him in nothing but Jockey’s Élance briefs. The world now knows that Palmer throws right, plays tennis left (to protect his pitching arm) and dresses (an unusual case, but there it is) right down the middle.
In locker rooms over the last years, to be sure, I have noticed more and more pro athletes wearing other than run-of-the-mill underwear—some of it even briefer than Élance. Some of it apparently satin. The pioneers in this, as in so many locker-room style (and linguistic) trends, were black players, who have tended, generally, to eschew roomy attire—Muhammad Ali’s and Joe Frazier’s ring shorts being obvious exceptions. I can remember when a player’s conversion to bikini pants might inspire his more reactionary roommate to loudly demand a chaperone. Today in clubhouses you see fewer and fewer boxer shorts or plain modest Jockey shorts like the kind Palmer’s mother bought him when he was a boy.
Palmer told the “Today” show’s Jane Pauley: “What I am seeing is that after 229 victories I’m going to be more famous for my underwear ads than for throwing a baseball.” He didn’t sound too chagrined. “Most [men’s] underwear is bought by women,” Palmer continued. “I guess that’s why they used me in the ad.” (If men bought most men’s underwear, whom would they have used? Yogi Berra?)
At this point I am going to make a terrible admission, right in front of everybody: No one has ever bought me any fancy underwear. Are there actually, in real life, moments when the woman hands the man a little something flimsy and says, “Would you … try these on … for me?”?
According to Jockey International (a company which incidentally has its headquarters in Kenosha, Wisconsin), only 3 percent of all of Jockey’s underwear sold in 1963 was “fashion underwear,” but today the figure is 40 percent and as the 1980s progress it should exceed 50. During this decade, in other words, only a minority of the men’s underwear in circulation will be just, you know, underwear. The rest—let’s call things by their right names—is going to be men’s lingerie.
“The Jockey Statement Is Bold,” reads the caption of one of Palmer’s ads. I don’t know. Maybe it’s okay for a ballplayer to make bold statements in his underwear, but surely not with it. “He’s not real talkative. He leads by example in the clubhouse. He lets his underwear speak for him.”
Jockey press releases also make the point that Palmer is an “All-American, All-Around Sportsman.” For one thing, Palmer is married to his high-school sweetheart. “There is nothing wrong,” says an ad person connected with the Jockey campaign, “with an American family man being sexy.” In an earlier campaign, not only Palmer but several other athletes, including Pete Rose, Steve Carlton, Steve Garvey and Lou Brock of baseball, Jo Jo White and Jamaal Wilkes of basketball, Jim Hart, Tony Dorsett and Ken Anderson of football, and Denis Potvin of hockey, posed in their shorts. Those guys seem like All-American, All-Around Sportsmen too, but they didn’t get the solo-poster treatment. Maybe Rose’s being cited in a paternity suit was felt to reflect on his underwear. Maybe Brock insisted on tying in underwear with the Brock-a-brella, a combination hat and umbrella product that he has promoted. My suspicion is that Palmer just looked more like Robert Redford in underwear than any of the others.
And who am I to complain? Palmer is younger than I am, in better shape and, okay, probably better-looking. The Seattle Mariners’ wives voted him the sexiest man in baseball, and they never voted me anything. Of course you might think that the Mariners’ wives would have something better to do with their time, like exhorting their husbands to work on fundamentals.
Working ballplayers wear really neat underpants, which ought to be more widely available. These underpants are Bermuda-short length, more or less. Made of something like sanitary-stocking material, they are light, stretchy, and snug, but not so snug as to give either the wearer or his opponents’ wives impure thoughts. If I had a few pairs of those under
wear, boy, I’d have them on all the time.
How would Jimmy Cannon have handled this story? “You’re Jim Palmer. You’re in a magazine and your shorts are getting smaller and smaller.” No. Jimmy Cannon couldn’t have handled this story. He would have thrown up his hands and lapsed into a few of his “Nobody asked me, but …” observations, such as, “I don’t like Boston because all the men look like me.”
If Jimmy Cannon couldn’t cover it, then the hell with it.
GET OUT THERE AND MAKE STATEMENTS!
FEATURE THIS: A PITCHER dissipates only lightly, gets to the park on time, avoids fistfights with his mates, keeps his head in the game, always gives at least 110, 120 percent. Only one thing: he insists on wearing his late father’s beat-up old fishing hat on the mound.
“You can’t wear a fishing hat on the mound!” cries his owner, and the umpires, and the commissioner himself.
“Why not?” the pitcher asks quietly. “People,” he adds with a smile, “wear baseball caps fishing.”
“Nobody in the entire history of organized ball has ever worn a fishing hat on the mound!”
“Ah,” says the pitcher.
Or this: A pass receiver hauls one in for a touchdown but when he enters the end zone he does not stop. He goes on to circle the entire field, holding the ball aloft, juking and springing into the air every few strides and engaging front-row fans in rudimentary dialogue, until at length a crotchety team physician fells him with a tank of oxygen.
One account begins: “Chicago edged the Lions 27–26 in Detroit Sunday to clinch the N.F.C. Central crown, as Bear wide receiver Freemason ‘Sweet-Tips’ Teal brought off a refreshing commentary upon the supposed finality of ‘scoring.’”
Another wire service reports: “‘Wide’ as applied to receivers was a cliché until Sunday, when Freemason ‘Sweet-Tips’ Teal opened the idea of wideness up and let it breathe, as the Bears edged. …”