“I heard the blackout whistle and went outside to listen, but I couldn’t hear anything. I had to go downtown at four o’clock today to get my uniform, so I went to bed early.”
Uniform for what?
“I go in the Army today. They kind of gave me a sendoff, eh?”
GORGEOUS GEORGE
1948
The announcement which came through the mail bore the return address of Mr. Toots Mondt, the rassling tycoon. It read:
“The most sensational wrestler of all time—the man who has swept the national (sic) with his personality and color and the fact that he is different—Gorgeous George is here at last! You are cordially invited for cocktails and the first New York appearance of Gorgeous George in New York at Marye Ward, Hair Stylists, 356 East 57th Street. The pride of Hollywood and everywhere else he’s appeared is scheduled for a hair marcel and will then play host to the Press of New York whom he’s been most anxious to meet. Don’t miss it!”
Well, the back room of this ladies’ barber shop was pretty well jammed when Gorgeous George arrived, wearing long blond curls and somewhat formal afternoon attire—black coat with mother-of-pearl buttons on the sleeve, soft white shirt with nine-inch points on the collar, striped trousers hung on braces. Ahead of him came a valet spraying the joint with an atomizer.
“That’s George No. 4 in the atomizer,” said a man with curly black hair and a fairly fancy suit of a small, checked pattern. “He never enters a ring that hasn’t been sprayed with it first.”
Gorgeous George sat in front of a mirror and a couple of barbers with curly black hair took down his hair and started putting it up in little metal gimmicks. Gorgeous George has a thick red neck and the features of a Roman senator.
A rather awed crowd clustered around Gorgeous George, talking. From the background, only an occasional phrase could be heard. Once George said, “In other words, alius I do is what I please and nobody stops me.” Somebody else suggested the hairdo was decidedly feminine and George flew into a noble tizzy, shouting about George Washington and other distinguished characters who wore long hair.
In the background, the man in the checked suit was talking. He said he was a rassler himself and George’s business manager, name of Sammy Menacher. He displayed a program of some shindig run by a thing called a Coiffure Guild in Hollywood.
“Each year,” he said, “they pick a Coiffure Queen out there. See? Here’s a picture of this year’s queen, Frances Langford. This year, for the first time, they picked a Coiffure King. See? Here’s a picture of Gorgeous George. ‘Our King,’ it says here. The hairdo he’s got, that’s the Gorgeous George Swirl.”
“Has this critter a name?” Mr. Menacher was asked.
“Gorgeous George is his legal name.”
“What’s alleged to be his history?”
“He started wrestling nineteen years ago,” Mr. Menacher said, “when he was fourteen. About six years ago he started letting his hair grow. It was black. Then he had it bleached, the way it is now. No, that’s not platinum blond, or even honey blond. It’s Lana Turner blond.
“He’s got fifty-nine dressing gowns and the sixtieth is being made. One has an ermine cape. No, not quite a stole, more like a collar. He never wears the same dressing gown into the same arena twice. His valet keeps a chart.”
“Is he a fiend in the ring,” Mr. Menacher was asked, “or an Ail-American Boy?”
“He is savage,” Mr. Menacher said. “He is a rough customer in there. That’s the amazing thing, the way he changes.”
“Amazing to whom?”
“To the public,” Mr. Menacher said.
“It’s the worst corn I ever saw,” said Mr. Mondt, whose orange hair is worn only across the back of his thick neck. “But he sure draws the customers. When he struts down that aisle with his chin in the air, he looks the queen of a carnival midway.
“The closest thing I ever saw to him,” Mr. Mondt said, “was a guy they called the Wrestling Minister. He looked like a blinkety-blank parson and he dressed like a blinkety-blank parson and he walked like a blinkety-blank parson. And he was the biggest blinkety-blank scoundrel I ever knew.”
After a long while they took the drier off Gorgeous George’s skull, brushed him up, and he arose, his head a mass of lovely, soft curls.
“Now I feel more relaxed with my hair done,” he said. “I alius feel such a mess before.”
Mr. Menacher had a gold bobby pin in his lapel. So did the valet.
“In Hollywood,” Mr. Menacher said, “everybody wears one. Have you heard the new song hit ‘Gorgeous George Is the Man I Mean ‘? “
He spoke to an almost empty room. A large number of guests had departed, looking a trifle green about the gills. Too much whiskey, no doubt.
STRICTLY CHICKEN
1948
Only a few strands of light escaped from the whitewashed stone building under the trees and you had to get almost to the door to hear the roosters crowing. Inside there were probably two hundred men seated and standing on wooden bleachers around the cockpit, a patch of hard clay twelve feet square, within low board walls.
A red cock and a gray—that is, one with a cream-colored hackle on which a crimson stain was spreading—were in the pit. The gray obviously was losing. His legs wavered and he tottered in small, blind circles like a helpless prizefighter. Now he collapsed, a shapeless mound of damp, soiled feathers. But when the other bird closed with him he fought back, pecking at his enemy’s head and lashing out with the inch-and-a-quarter steel gaffs curving upward from his natural spurs.
“The gray’d kill that red if he could find him,” a man muttered.
“He’s got the wallop,” another agreed, “but he can’t connect.”
As they fought, a man wearing a duck-hunter’s cap explained the rules, which vary from state to state and pit to pit. While the birds are fresh enough for an outright kill their handlers let them fight, breaking them only when they are hung (when one sinks a heel into the other’s head or wing or body). Then the referee says, “Handle,” and starts counting.
The handler has fifteen seconds to work on his bird, rearrange his feathers, clean head and bill, breathe on his head and back to warm or cool him as the need dictates, walk him briskly around holding him by the tail. After counting to fourteen the referee says, “Down cocks,” or “Pit ‘em,” and the chickens are set down in diagonally opposite corners.
If they fight until too weak for a kill, one handler will say, “Gimme a count,” provided his bird has struck the last blow with beak or gaff. If the other bird doesn’t peck or kick in retaliation before the referee counts off ten seconds they are parted for another fifteen-second rest. When one cock has scored two unbroken counts often in succession, they are breasted—pitted head to head in mid-ring—and after the bird owning the advantage has kicked at the other, he can win with a count of twenty. The loser can break the final count only by kicking, not pecking.
By the time this exposition was finished, the red had scored two consecutive ten-counts. When they were breasted, the gray’s head sank slowly to the earth and he lay inert through the long count while the other slashed at him.
“The gray was the best cock,” the man with the ducking cap explained, “but he lost an eye and got hit in the brain early and he couldn’t see.”
“He’s dead now?”
“As good as. Sometimes you can save a beaten bird, but they’ll kill this one.”
Spectators paid off bets while another pair was brought in and weighed. Then a tumult of wagering arose for the next event. “A hundred on the spangle.” “It’s a bet.” “Twenty-five the red.” “Make it fifty.” “Bet.” Wagers ranged from $5 to $100. This was a $300 derby in which each owner put up $300 and entered eight chickens. Ordinarily there’d be upward of ten entries and the stake money of $3,000 or more would be split, sixty-forty, between the cocker winning the most fights and the runner-up.
However, this derby had drawn only four entries, or thirty-two birds, so i
t was winner-take-all the $1,200. In addition, owners are expected, but not required, to make side bets, generally $50 or $100, on each of their eight fights.
As the next event started, handlers “billed” their cocks, holding them aloft head to head so they would discover and peck each other, then pitted them in opposite corners. The cocks tore into each other, meeting in midair on each fly, uppercutting savagely with the flashing gaffs. They went down with a heel deep in the spangle’s head. Next time his handler put him down, the spangle held his head cocked to one side.
“He’s been brained,” said the man with the cap. “See, he’s a little wry-necked. Sometimes that don’t matter, just affects a nerve center a little while.”
“That fellow,” he said, indicating the spangle’s handler, “has good cocks. But he won a derby about six weeks ago and he’s fighting the same cocks back tonight and I think they’re a little tired. See how the other chicken’s comb is a brighter red? He’s got better condition.”
The red killed the spangle without a count. A Wisconsin Red Shuffler was pitted with a white chicken, which made a few flies and then fled in circles like Jersey Joe Walcott in the fifteenth round with Louis. The crowd jeered.
“There he goes! Give ‘im room! Open the door, Richard!”
“Those wheelers are dangerous,” a man said. “I don’t like ‘em, but just when you think you’ve got ‘em on the run they come back and wallop you.”
The thing degenerated into a long “drag” fight, with innumerable ten-counts alternately broken. The cocks were taken to the “drag” pit, a smaller square where such fights are finished when a fresh pair is ready for the main pit. Ultimately the white “wheeler” won. Good-humored growls of disgust saluted his victory.
The crowd was almost universally good-humored, winning or losing. Once a handler accused another of roughing up his chicken while separating them, but as they began to bicker the spectators shouted, “Fight the cocks!” Another time, a chicken began to squawk whenever hit, and there were more jeers.
“The sucker’s got donkey in him, Mike,” a man said.
Mike agreed. “Sure, he’s a donkey.”
Donkey, or dungie, means a cock with a strain of cold blood. Besides the sixteen fights in the derby, there were several “hacks,” independent fights arranged by the owners. In one of these, a cock was hit and flew right out of the pit, not once but three times. That ended the fight.
“Wring his neck,” somebody yelled, and the bird’s handler thrust his chin out.
“You do it,” he challenged. Nothing happened.
RODEO HEADMASTER
1963
Jim Shoulders walked into Toots Shor’s and set his wide black hat on its crown on the checkroom counter. The girl scooped it up with somebody else’s overcoat—the cowboy wore none—and Jim’s hand shot out in polite haste. “Please, “he said, turning the crown down to preserve the expensive curl of the brim.
There was a time when the price of a hat like that . . . well, at fourteen Jim was a scrawny kid slinging a pitchfork as a harvest hand in Oklahoma. He rode over to Oilton in Creek County, where the Cimarron snakes up toward the Osage Reservation, and won $18 in a bush-league rodeo. That was about what a field hand could clear in a month. Jim never looked back.
It was the dinner hour, but the king of cowboys said no, he’d just have a Jack Daniels. “I ate once already today.” He was due at CBS to help edit film for a sports spectacular on rodeo. Twenty-four hours later he would be aboard an angry Brahma bull in San Antonio, an ill-tempered beast that would try to buck him off and hook him before he lit.
“And I’d deserve it,” he said. “You buck off, you deserve to get punished. You’ll try a little harder next time.”
After eighteen years, Jim says, arena floors are getting harder, bulls and bareback broncs taller, the travel jumps tougher. “I don’t haul so good anymore.” You wouldn’t know that to look at him, slight, smallish, with a curiously catlike springiness even in the way he sits in a saloon.
You might put his age at anything between twenty-five and thirty. He is thirty-three, going on thirty-four. “Old Boney,” the cowboys call him. They have called him other things, especially during the decade of 1949-59 when he shattered all records with sixteen championships, seven in bull-riding, four barebacks, five all-around.
Over those years there may have been two or three major-league ballplayers and half a dozen jockeys who topped his average income of $37,827. His 1956 total of $43,381 still set a record.
Now he has a side interest—a rodeo school on his ranch at Henryetta, Oklahoma, offering six-day courses for beginners in bull-riding, barebacks, and saddle bronc. He limits classes to sixty in each event and puts up pupils in a bunk house which he calls, with graphic candor, the boar’s nest.
“We started last year,” he said. “Had one boy from Hawaii, two or three from Canada, one from Brooklyn, three from New York, kids from all over that want to ride rodeo. The youngest was fifteen and the oldest thirty-four.
“You see there ain’t any place a kid can get stock he can ride and instruction in fundamentals; he cain’t buy buckin’ horses and bulls and build an arena. Even the smallest local rodeos cost him entrance money and he’s got to draw for stock.
“He might draw a bull that’ll pitch him leaving the box and maybe hook him, too. He can’t learn nothin’ that way except how to git up and run for the fence. And maybe, learning, he wants to change his rigging or something, but with $100 entry money up, that’s no time to change. He’s tryin’ to win something.”
“Can a boy learn enough in six days to give him a start?” Shoulders was asked.
“He can learn one thing quick—whether he’s got any business in rodeo. And, of course, most of ‘em don’t. I had this nice kid from Kentucky—”
Jim chuckled at the memory. “He was enrolled for bulls and bareback, and he’s never been on anything before. He froze on his first horse. I blew the whistle right away and got him down. He watched the others awhile and I kept saying, ‘Want to try one now, Gary?’ 1 think I’ll just watch awhile,’ he’d say. Finally, I put him on a Hereford bull that just walked out and stood. I got the kid to loosen up and relax his back and move around a little, but he said he guessed he’d wait till tomorrow to ride anything else.
“Next morning he pulled me aside. ‘I don’t want you to think I’m chicken,’ he says, ‘but I guess, by God, I am.’ I told him, ‘Gary, I don’t know what makes a man right for rodeo any more than I know why Mickey Mantle can hit better than somebody else just as strong and fast as him, and in better health. Don’t worry about it, because like I told you all yesterday, hardly anybody’s going to make it.’ But he was such an honest kid I had to laugh.”
“Did you have any boys who looked good?”
“There was one showed some promise on bulls and one looked real good riding bareback. Try? He was on thirty-seven head of bucking horses in six days. One bucked him plumb over the fence out of school.
“I told him, ‘Now you know what it means to get your tail pitched out of class.’ He got up laughing.”
THE BOAT RACE
1970
In many American newspapers, the most absurdly overplayed event in sports is the “competition” for the America’s Cup. This is a boat race in the horse player’s sense of the term. Under the terms dictated by the New York Yacht Club, it is almost totally devoid of competition. It is frequently deficient in sportsmanship. A dentist filling a tooth offers livelier entertainment for spectators. It commands substantially less reader interest than the Treasury’s statement of gold balances.
Still, there are papers that assign one or more staff men to the story for an entire summer, publish lengthy daily accounts of the trials leading up to selection of a challenger and a defender, and devote six or eight columns of space to the predictable results while the races are underway.
Perhaps the gazettes are motivated by a mistaken notion that national pride and prestige are somehow invo
lved in the fortunes of Intrepid or Gretel II, or maybe publishers are impressed by the staggering cost of these sleek and comfortless craft. At any rate, the trivial adventures of a few millionaires getting their bottoms wet at play are reported with a respectful solemnity that borders on servility.
The first race of the current challenge series was sailed in rain and cold and controversy and frustration. When it was over, only the race committee knew who won, and the committee wasn’t telling. After preliminary jockeying for position, both yachts went over the starting line with protest flags flying, but the nature of the objections was not disclosed and the skippers were instructed not to talk.
Fans and readers, if any, owners of the boats and their crews had to wait until the next day to learn that Gretel’s protest had been rejected and the Australian challenger had indeed been walloped by almost six minutes. The authorities were right there on the committee boat when the protest flags were broken out. If the evidence of their own eyes wasn’t sufficient, the committeemen could have talked with the skippers and issued a ruling immediately after the finish. But the New York Yacht Club doesn’t work that way.
Not that anybody expected the committee to uphold a foreign protest. For 119 years, the New York Yacht Club has applied the rules with the single aim of keeping the America’s Cup right where it is, bolted to a heavy oak table in the trophy room on West 44th Street. You’d think the old ewer was the Kohinoor diamond instead of a singularly ugly pitcher with a hole in its bottom, not fit to hold a pint of beer. The tiger mother protecting her young is a gentle old tabby compared to the New York Yacht Club in defense of its hardware.
After the rakish schooner America won the mug by whipping fifteen British boats in a race around the Isle of Wight on August 22, 1851, the custodians of the trophy took steps. The first challengers were required to sail against a whole fleet of defenders, and for years the races were conducted over the “inside” course in New York harbor, where familiarity with local conditions was an overwhelming advantage. “A penny show in a puddle, “was how the late William P. Stevens, yachting editor of Forest and Stream, described those competitions.
The Red Smith Reader Page 32