by Roy Blount
“Wait a minute,” Dr. Pacheco said. “This was good, or bad?”
“It was great!” Bert said. “The crowd …”
But that wasn’t enough for him either. Not when Dr. Pacheco asked him, “How would you like to be green?” Pacheco raised the question in a speculative way. A friend of his, another doctor, was present, and Pacheco likes to bring out a person’s character for others to appreciate. (That’s why he called in a lawyer friend when a woman brought her husband to his office and complained that a “’plosion” in a neighboring building had caused the husband to “fracture his peanits.” I wish I had room here for the fractured-peanits story, but I don’t.)
“How do you mean, green?”
“Everything—your whole body. Your arms and legs, your face, your teeth, everything green.”
“It would rub off.”
“No, it wouldn’t. There’s this new dye out,” said Pacheco. “They use it to test for cancer. You swallow it, it turns you all green, except the cancer. The only thing wrong with it, it’s experimental. It could kill you. And also, you stay green for two weeks.”
“Great!” In his natural state Bert was not physically imposing enough to be a pro wrestler, which was what he wanted to be more than anything else in life. But green he could write his own ticket. He rushed to a phone and called a promoter he knew in Texas.
“How would you like a green wrestler?”
“How do you mean, green?”
“All over. My whole body, teeth, everything. Won’t rub off.”
“Can you wrestle?”
“Sure. I referee. I know how they fake all the stuff.”
“Well, sure. We could use something like that on the tour—”
“Great! I’ll be there Monday.”
“You’ll be green. Right?”
“I guarantee. All I got to do is be in Miami every two weeks for a pill.”
Bert dashed back to Pacheco and his colleague. “It’s set! Give me the dye.”
Well, the other doctor was inclined to see what could be done. But Pacheco said no. “Actually,” he said, “it’s too dangerous. It’s a government-controlled substance. I told you, you could die.”
“I don’t care! I’ll sign a paper, release you from all responsibility.”
“I’m sorry,” Pacheco said. “We took an oath.”
Bert was disconsolate. But ethics are ethics. I think Hippocrates would have loved Ferdie Pacheco—even if he didn’t know that Ferdie paints, writes, collects antique cars, has a beautiful flamenco-dancer wife, is a friend of Candice Bergen’s and Petula Clark’s and was cornerman and personal physician to the one and only Ali from 1962 to 1978. The only reason I mention malpractice is that Florida medical authorities are after Pacheco, who made some $14,000 annually from Medicare. They allege “overutilization.” That means collecting from the government for seeing too many patients too often. Last year the Dade County Medical Association peer review board confronted Ferdie with such charges, and Ferdie blew them out of the water. Incensed, he pointed out that he was a ghetto doctor and as such had “no peer in my enclave.”
The board wanted to know why Pacheco gave so many shots. Because his patients couldn’t afford to have prescriptions filled and couldn’t read the dosage instructions anyway.
The board wanted to know why Pacheco didn’t hospitalize certain patients. Because if they left their apartments, thieves would clean them out.
The board wanted to know why Pacheco was himself absorbing the sixty dollars each Medicare patient is supposed to pay annually before receiving benefits. Because his patients didn’t have sixty dollars.
An orthopedist on the board wanted to know why Pacheco treated arthritis. Because he couldn’t find any specialists who would take his patients. “Will you see them?” he asked the orthopedist. The orthopedist said, well, if his nurse could fit them into his schedule …
“Don’t give me the Nazi-nurse routine!” cried Pacheco.
Finally the board conceded that his practice was “unusual” and absolved him. But six months later the state-level Medicare board sent him a bill for $26,000 worth of overutilization. Pacheco vows to fight out the matter in court if necessary. “I’m tilting at windmills,” he says. “I’m Don Quixote.”
Pacheco grew up in Ybor City, the old Spanish section of Tampa, where he began hustling for money and amusement at an early age. By such devices as peddling at a football game peanuts approved for swine consumption only, he worked his way through premed studies at the University of Florida, then pharmacy school, and then the University of Miami Medical School. It isn’t easy for a young doctor to establish a practice, but in 1959, there was one waiting in the black ghetto of northwest Miami, known to blacks as Overtown and to whites as the Swamp. The people there couldn’t pay much, but they did have a lot of potentially lucrative accidents. When a lady’s poorly maintained ceiling falls on her while she is taking a bath or when a defective gas heater blows up a tenement, Ferdie provides the medical testimony that helps force the insurance companies to cough up healthy compensation. This practice brings him into contact with occasional spurious claimants, such as a family known as the Falling Folsoms because of their propensity for seeking out tumbles on other people’s property, and also with characters straight out of old racist jokes (he once testified for a wino who fell into an open grave late at night). But besides satisfying his sense of social justice, his court work is remunerative, as is his “white office,” in Miami’s prosperous Cuban community. Still, he spends 75 percent of his working hours treating whoever comes into the Overtown office. He doesn’t claim nearly as much Medicare as he’s entitled to, he says, and anyway he ought to get a medal rather than a hard time. In spite of the bricked-up windows, his waiting room has bullet holes in the walls.
Pacheco makes a point of keeping no money or abusable drugs around, but people still try to hold him up. Once a man came in with a sawed-off shotgun. He was wearing a yellow rain-hat, a yellow suit and bright yellow shoes.
“Are you new at this?” asked Pacheco.
The gunman didn’t see any humor. He wanted money. Ferdie gave him what little he had left in his wallet. “Here, this is it, take it all. But put that gun down. Next time you don’t need to bring the gun. You don’t even need to come in personally. Just send me a postcard marked ‘Burglary’ and I’ll mail you what’s here.” At length Ferdie talked the intruder off the premises. Throughout the ordeal he comforted a terrified patient. “That gave me a reputation in the neighborhood for being heroic. Actually I was keeping her considerable bulk between me and the shotgun,” he says.
After Ali visited the downtown office a few years ago, he refused to sell Ferdie his Rolls-Royce. He said nobody working in such a place could afford to spend $20,000 on a car. This from Ali, who goes through his millions so fast that he had to keep on fighting, well beyond his prime, to keep himself and his hangers-on solvent. Before the first Frazier fight, Ferdie crossed Eighth Avenue three times with Ali. In the course of those crossings Ali handed out $5,000 to strangers who claimed they needed $100 to buy a ticket.
Ali won’t listen to Pacheco’s financial advice, but he accepted his medical treatment consistently, even when Muslims were warning that a white doctor was liable to poison him. “Ali has a big and gentle heart,” says Pacheco.
In his book Fight Doctor, Ferdie tells of Ali’s waking up after the resetting of his jaw, broken in the first Ken Norton fight. Anyone coming out of such an operation is bound to be in considerable pain, says Pacheco, but Ali never mentioned hurting. He just reassured each person around the bed, in turn, that things weren’t so bad, that he had seen worse times, that he would be back to earn big money again.
Now Pacheco is working on a book called Ghetto Doctor, and also on a vegetarian diet book for people who hate vegetables. This last manuscript defies succinct description. One chapter begins: “Leftenant Packer-Smythe could hear his men shoving wet asparagus into their empty rifle breeches. They made a wet suc
king sound as the bolts snapped shut.”
Pacheco even has stories he has no book for yet. There was the mob-backed trumpet player who wanted to do some fighting. His sponsors didn’t want him to ruin his lip, tried to dissuade him, eventually arranged for him to work out but warned promoters not to let him in a ring. “When am I going to get a fight?” he kept asking. Finally they got him an opponent. They told this opponent, who knew that he was dealing with people who didn’t mess around, “We want you to fight our boy. But don’t hit him.”
The trumpeter didn’t know the fix was in. He was thrilled. The night of the fight, though, as the apparent reality of the occasion came upon him, he began to grow pale and rubbery. By the time the bell rang to open the first round, all he could do was walk to the center of the ring and faint dead away.
Now the opponent was shocked. He looked at the glowering boys at ringside. “I never hit him!” he cried. “I swear. I never touched him!” Then he fainted.
“Now they’re both down,” says Ferdie, “and the referee is counting, ‘Seven! One. Eight! Two. Nine! Three …’”
Ferdie looks after all of Angelo Dundee’s fighters. That’s how he started seeing Ali, back when Ali was Clay. Ferdie makes his rounds at Chris Dundee’s Fifth Street Gym as regularly as he does at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. At the gym the scene is changing. “We got an upsurge of white guys, and the black guys are petering out,” says Angelo.
“The Olympics on TV made boxing more glamorous for the white kids,” explains Ferdie. “And the black kids have welfare.” He even finds himself administering to college-educated fighters now. “Angelo has a trick in the corner. Toward the end of the fight, when his boy is slowing down, he’ll pull open his trunks and pour in all the melting ice from the ice bag. The fighter goes, ‘Oh! Ooo! Okay, hey!’ He did that to a kid the other night, and the kid looked down—there were all these cubes and cold water running down his legs—and the kid made a face and said, ‘Was that really necessary?’”
One more story. “If anything was going to get me into malpractice trouble, this was it,” Pacheco says. Years ago, a person in women’s clothing came into the Overtown office and said, “Doc, I’m missing my period.”
The person was a man. He was so sincere, though, that Ferdie didn’t have the heart to turn him away. “Well, watch your diet, and come back next month,” he told him.
The patient kept coming back. Ferdie began to worry that the pregnancy was getting out of hand. But he couldn’t just say, “Okay, enough’s enough.” He is not that kind of doctor. So, as the ninth month began, he told the patient: “There’s one more thing you’ve got to do to keep from losing the baby. I want you to take this laxative, and then I want you to hold in for six hours. If you do that, everything will be all right.” The laxative he gave the patient was extremely strong.
The next day the patient was in again, crestfallen. “Doc,” he said, “I couldn’t do it. I lost the baby.”
Dr. Pacheco commiserated with the man in the dress, pointed out that at least he had come through with his own health intact, and wished him well.
“Now whenever he sees me on the street,” Pacheco says with a sigh, “he hollers, ‘Hey, Doc! I’m getting my period okay!’ He beams and shouts to everyone around, ‘That’s my obstetrician!’”
Ferdie Pacheco is the kind of doctor who will entertain an illusion. But when I asked him how he felt about Ali’s fighting on after the last Norton bout, he answered, “Horrified.”
Not; because Ali’s body can’t take another outing, but because “when this beautiful fifteen-year idyllic run among the clouds goes down to an old fighter trying to stay alive, I’m going to hate it.
“People around a champion never think that age will get to him. They think Manolete will never get old, then—bing!—the bull gets Manolete. And they go on to Dominguín.”
He is confident, however, that Ali has the wit to stay busy after his fighting days. Ali is as good at finding interesting work as his doctor is. And after the idyll, Dr. Pacheco will still have the diamond ring Ali gave him, with the raised letters that say DR. PACHECO, and also the picture Ali autographed with the same inscription he leaves with thousands of other people: “The man who have no imagination stands on the Earth. He have no wings—he cannot fly.”
DEDICATED TO FAIR HOOKER
THE OTHER NIGHT A couple of the New York press lords who try to control what I do in this space were plying me with country ham and making suggestions: “Lissen. My cousin Billy throwed in fourteen the other night against East Fork Junior. You reckon you could …”
I was holding out for the column I had in mind—a closely reasoned proposal for cutting down on hockey violence by converting all the ice in America into cubes—when one of the press lords said, “How about a column on names?”
“N … names?” I said weakly.
To suggest to a sportswriter that he write about names is like suggesting to a fat man that he eat pie. If he is a fat man without character, he will say, “Aw, I better not …” If he is a sportswriter without character, he will say, “Ah, I don’t know, I was up all night with the ghosts of Granny Rice and W. O. McGeehan choosing an all-time all-woman baseball team—Babe Ruth, Pete Rose, Larry Sherry, Tex Shirley, Bill Lee, Carlos May, Dick Sharon, Clay Carroll, Carlos Paula, Harry Ernest Pattee, Sam Leslie, Lyle LeRoy Judy …”
If he is a sportswriter with character, however, he will take a swallow of coffee, give his head a shake, and begin:
“Frenchy Bordagaray, Roscoe Word, Earsell Mackbee, Chuck Cherundolo, Orval Overall, Marcelino Lopez, Coy Bacon, Native Dancer, Ebba St. Claire, Eppa Rixey, Ebbie Goodfellow, Sibby Sisti, Garo Yepremian, Cornelius Warmerdam, Coco Laboy, Fair Hooker, Evonne Goolagong, Napoleon Lajoie, Larvell Blanks, Boots Poffenberger, Jethro Pugh, Gump Worsley, Beattie Feathers, Cloyce Box, Hackenschmidt and Gotch, Lavern Dilweg, Pudge Heffelfinger, Honey Mellody, Council Rudolph, Jubilee Dunbar, Cesar Geronimo, Syl Apps, Fidel LaBarba, Van Lingle Mungo, Dit Clapper, Jesus Alou, Young Stribling, The Only Nolan, Coleman Zeno, Small Montana, Clair Bee, D’Artagnan Martin, Wilmar Levels, Clyde Lovellette, Verl Lillywhite, Roxy Snipes, Burleigh Grimes, Urban ‘Red’ Faher, Urban Shocker, Urbane Pickering, Enos ‘Country’ Slaughter, Schoolboy Rowe, Preacher Roe, Perrine G. Rockafellow, ChaCha Muldowney, Harthorne Nathaniel Wingo, Steve Smear and Vida Blue.”
Then, “… and Coot Veal and Bubba Bean.”
Then, “… and did I say Orval Overall?”
Then he will go on to propose a few names that would be great sports names: Obadiah “Bad” Minton, Cesar Spang, O. L. “Oh Well” McFee, Memphis Briggs, Quick Ralph Click, Oliver “All of a” Sutton, Oliver “All Over” Musgrove, Arnold “Baby” Ionian, Chub Norsgaard, Laud Passwater, Eston Gozando (which Xaviera Hollander says is Portuguese for “I am coming”), Earl Riplet, Jr., Stash Hoist and Armstrong McKimbrow. And new nicknames for actual players: Larry “Good Old” Bowa, Roger “Pearly” Wehrli, Don “Bird Thou Never” Wert.
Then he will just wander off into The Baseball Encyclopedia, where he will discover, on virtually every page, one or more great names he had forgotten or had never heard of: Guy R. Sturdy, George “Yats” Wuestling, Irving Melrose “Young Cy” Young, Tony Suck, Inky Strange, John “Happy” Iott, Debs Garms (of Bangs, Texas), LeRoy Earl “Tarzan” Parmelee, Ossie Bluege, Flint Rhem (of Rhems, South Carolina), Elmer “Slim” Love (of Love, Missouri), Clarence William Pickup (played one game, 1918 Phillies, lifetime batting average, 1,000), Homer Estell Ezzell, Clarence Waldo “Climax” Blethen, James Harry Colliflower, Hap Collard, Clayton Maffitt Touchstone and Emil “Hill Billy” Bildilli.
Yes, sports are richer in names than any other aspect of culture except possibly literature, and in literature somebody made them up. Many sports names seem inevitable, fated. Imagine the future Mrs. Trucks saying to Mr. Trucks, “I don’t know if we better get married, ’cause my family don’t hold with baseball.”
“What in the world does that have to do with it?”
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br /> “Well, we got to have a boy. And name him Virgil. For my daddy. That’s the main thing I want out of marriage and life, is have a boy named Virgil for my daddy. And anybody with a name like Virgil Trucks, why, there wouldn’t be anything for it but that he’d go to be a ballplayer.”
“I guess you got something there. Probly hurl for the Tigers.”
I wouldn’t be any good as a coach because I would automatically play anybody named John Buick Sprawls or Butterfly Link over anybody named something flat like Joe Morgan or Bert Jones. I wouldn’t be any good as an athlete because I would see somebody coming through the line and think, “I can’t tackle him! He’s named Roosevelt Leaks!” Alex Karras has pointed out that it was the K in his name that enabled him to kick ass in the NFL. Considering the cases of Dick Butkus, Ray Nitschke, Larry Csonka, Chuck Bednarik, Jim Katcavage and Karl Kassulke, he has a point.
But I’m not here to give you just a bunch of jack-off onomastics. I got name stories.
Everybody has heard about the confusion over whether “Dick” or “Richie” Allen is correct. But few people are aware of how that controversial first baseman’s brother Hank, who also put in a few years in the big leagues, got his name. Hank himself told me the story:
My first year in the minors, the manager took me aside and said, “What’s your name?”
“Allen.”
“No, your first name.”
“Harold.”
“No, what do they call you?”
“Allen. Or Harold.”
“No, what’s your nickname?”
“Haven’t got one.”
“All ballplayers have nicknames. How about Henry?”
“Naw.”
“How about Hank?”
“Naw.”
And he went on with that for ten minutes! Finally he settled on Hank. He started calling me Hank and nobody else knew me, so they called me Hank. People back home would read in the papers and didn’t even know it was me.