A few hours after the Yankees mopped up the Phillies in the 1950 World Series, Toots sat chatting with a customer in the dining room when a waiter whispered that Joe Page had just come into the bar. Hastily, the proprietor excused himself and went out front. For three seasons and two World Series Page had been undisputed king of the Yankee bullpen, but 1950 had been a bad year for him and he was ignored during the Series. In no mood to attend the team’s victory party, he had left the Stadium by himself.
Pretty soon the waiter came back smiling. “The boss gave him a hero’s welcome,” he said.
Bernard Shor is not necessarily better for people than whiskey. Not as good, he would say, and he would say it out of respect, not false modesty.
On Grantland Rice’s seventieth birthday, he was inexpressibly pleased to receive seventy red roses from Toots Shor. “Gee, that was thoughtful, Toots,” a friend said. “Wish I’d thought of it.”
The saloonkeeper made a brushoff gesture, backhanded. “Whiskey,” he said. “That’s all it takes—whiskey, and heart.”
A few nights later there was a birthday party for Granny in the Coffee House, a quiet gathering of a dozen or so. After cocktails—Toots always remembered there was just one apiece—there was dinner at one long table. Then Eddie Rickenbacker got up and made a spread-eagle speech knocking labor. Roy Howard got up and damned the administration. Somebody else was clearing his throat when Toots bounced up.
“You creepy bums,” he said with the Old World grace that has always distinguished him, “I thought this party was for Granny Rice.” He walked around the table, bent and planted a kiss on the pate that Granny used to say looked like a half-picked cotton patch. “I love ya,” Toots said, and resumed his seat. It was the closing address of the evening.
Toots Shor has had many fights but only two feuds—with Sherman Billingsley and a man in Philadelphia named Paul Harron.
“‘Hate,’ “he said one night in philosophy class, “is a word I don’t use. I say ‘dislike.’ One time my little girl Kerry was sick, in a coma. I prayed to God.
“I told God, ‘If this little girl gets better, I’ll never dislike anybody again as long as I live—except two guys.’ “
He had to level.
AL LANEY’S PROSE
1978
Twenty-five years late but, still not too late, the Metropolitan Golf Association has chosen Al Laney to receive the organization’s Distinguished Service Award. The choice speaks well for the literary taste and for the memory of the selection committee, for more than a decade has passed since Al’s sensitive reporting and beautifully crafted prose last appeared in the daily press. He covered sports in America and abroad for the New York Herald Tribune, retiring in 1966 when the paper died. Now eighty-two, he lives quietly in Spring Valley, New York. When Al was a schoolboy in Pensacola, Florida, the Cleveland baseball team, called the Naps after their manager, Napoleon Lajoie, pitched its spring training camp there. “It was a thrilling enough experience,” Al has written, “to speak with Joe Jackson and Napoleon Lajoie, but of course they were not the Giants. In those days Christy Mathewson was a shining knight, and if the Giants won, then were the gods just and life a lyric.”
Equal in stature with the princely Mathewson in Al’s young eyes was the dramatic figure of Maurice McLoughlin, the “flame-thatched” California Comet of tennis. In 1914 Al was on vacation in New York and sat in the stands at the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills watching McLoughlin defeat Norman Brookes of Australia, 17-15, 6-3, 6-3, in the historic match in the Davis Cup challenge round that did for tennis in America what Francis Ouimet had done for golf a year earlier by beating Harry Vardon and Ted Ray in the United States Open.
Al already had a regular after-school job on the Pensacola Journal and that afternoon at Forest Hills he conceived an ambition to become a tennis writer. In time he covered all sports but it was tennis and golf that brought out his most graceful writing.
The Metropolitan Golf Association citation notes that “despite his international reputation—or because of it—Mr. Laney worked just as hard at covering Met area events as he did at the Masters. No one knew more local golfers and no one made more visits to local clubs than he. He made his readers aware of golf in their area and thus set a standard that forced other newspapers to re-evaluate their local coverage. Mr. Laney covered golf on the Tribune for more than forty years. His collective efforts during that span form a body of work that stands as a major contribution to the game of golf.”
Before World War I Al worked on the Dallas Dispatch and the Minneapolis News. He fancied himself as a tennis player in those days, but a wound incurred with the 308th Infantry of the 77th Division put an end to his playing. Back in the United States he landed on the Evening Mail, and in 1925 he returned to France, where a job on the Paris Herald opened hours before his last francs slipped away. He was night editor but got away to cover golf and tennis championships for the parent paper, the Herald Tribune. He and O. B. Keeler of Atlanta were the only American reporters who covered the British Open and Amateur in 1930, the year of Bobby Jones’ grand slam. In the middle thirties he returned to New York but for some years went abroad each spring to do Wimbledon, the British Open and similar events.
By that time, the place in his esteem once occupied by Maurice McLoughlin had been taken over by Bernard Darwin, the great British golf writer. They became friends, and Al’s writing may have been influenced by his admiration for Darwin. Maybe not, too. Perhaps his graceful style was a natural expression of his own courtliness. What did he write like? Well, in 1954 he covered Babe Didrikson ‘Zaharias’s twelve-stroke victory in the Women’s National Open just a year after a cancer operation.
“She acted the part of a champion to perfection,” he wrote, “and her progress twice around the course was a queenly procession with her nearest pursuers, already dimly seen in the far distance at the start, fading more and more out of the picture as the day wore on.”
Al is a gentle man, fanatically neat. On the golf course you would usually see him walking alone, always wearing a snap-brim hat of Confederate gray and, in the most stifling weather, a jacket and tie. He spoke in a voice so gentle it was often barely audible. “Dammit!” his sports editor, Stanley Woodward, shouted during one effort at conversation. “I’m going to have you wired for sound!”
In several winters when he wasn’t covering hockey, Al wrote a series of where-are-they-now features about sports stars of the past. He spent weeks scouring through Harlem in search of Sam Langford, the old Boston Tar Baby, whom some considered the greatest fighter the ring ever knew. Again and again Al was assured that Sam was dead but he found him at last, penniless and blind and lonely, in a dingy room on 139th Street.
The story Al wrote had no trace of mawkishness, but it so moved readers that voluntary contributions poured in, creating a $10,000 trust fund to take care of Sam.
On the day before Christmas Al visited Sam again. The room was gay with decorations and Sam sat surrounded by gifts—a guitar, three boxes of cigars, a bottle of gin, that sort of thing.
“You tell all my friends,” Sam said, “I’m the happiest man in New York City, I got a geetar and a bottle of gin and money in my pocket to buy Christmas dinner. No millionaire in the world got more than that, or anyhow they can’t use any more. Tell my friends all about it and tell ‘em I said God bless ‘em.”
WRITING LESS—AND BETTER?
1982
Up to now, the pieces under my byline have run on Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Starting this week, it will be Sunday, Monday, and Thursday—three columns instead of four. We shall have to wait and see whether the quality improves.
Visiting our freshman daughter (freshwoman or freshperson would be preferred by feminists, though heaven knows she was fresh), we sat chatting with perhaps a dozen of her classmates. Somehow my job got into the discussion. A lovely blond was appalled.
“A theme a day!” she murmured.
The figure was not altogether
accurate. At the time it was six themes a week. It had been seven and when it dropped to six that looked like roller coaster’s end. However, it finally went to five, to three and back to four, where it has remained for years.
First time I ever encountered John S. Knight, the publisher, we were bellying up to Marje Everett’s bar at Arlington Park. He did not acknowledge the introduction. Instead, he said: “Nobody can write six good columns a week. Why don’t you write three? Want me to fix it up?”
“Look, Mr. Knight,” I said. “Suppose I wrote three stinkers. I wouldn’t have the rest of the week to recover.” One of the beauties of this job is that there’s always tomorrow. Tomorrow things will be better.
Now that the quota is back to three, will things be better day after tomorrow?
The comely college freshman wasn’t told of the years when a daily column meant seven a week. Between those jousts with the mother tongue, there was always a fight or football match or ball game or horse race that had to be covered after the column was done. I loved it.
The seven-a-week routine was in Philadelphia, which reminds me of the late heavyweight champion, Sonny Liston. Before his second bout with Muhammad Ali was run out of Boston, Liston trained in a hotel in Dedham.
I was chatting about old Philadelphia days with the trainer, Willie Reddish, remembered from his time as a heavyweight boxer in Philadelphia.
“Oh,” Willie said apropos of some event in the past, “were you there then?”
“Willie,” I said, “I did ten years hard in Philadelphia.”
There had been no sign thatListon was listening, but at this he swung around. “Hard?” he said. “No good time?”
From that moment on, Sonny and I were buddies, though it wasn’t easy accepting him as a sterling citizen of lofty moral standards.
On this job two questions are inevitably asked: “Of all those you have met, who was the best athlete?” and “Which one did you like best?”
Both questions are unanswerable, but on either count Bill Shoemaker, the jockey, would have to stand high.
This little guy weighed 96 pounds as an apprentice rider thirty-two years ago. He still weighs 96 pounds and he will beat your pants off at golf, tennis, and any other game where you’re foolish enough to challenge him.
There were, of course, many others, not necessarily great. Indeed, there was a longish period when my rapport with some who were less than great made me nervous. Maybe I was stuck on bad ballplayers. I told myself not to worry.
Some day there would be another Joe DiMaggio.
The Red Smith Reader Page 38