No, Williams didn’t acknowledge the crowd after his home run; as John Updike so famously wrote in the New Yorker, “Gods don’t answer letters.” But what a résumé Williams left for us. He won the Triple Crown twice, was the last man to hit .400, and led the American League in batting six times. He went on to become a world-class fly fisherman with—who else?—Curt Gowdy.
It’s odd that my most memorable game at Fenway—the game that subconsciously started me on this strange and wonderful path of wanting to be a sportswriter—was football, not baseball. In 1964, my father somehow got a couple of tickets to see the Boston Patriots play against the Oakland Raiders in Fenway Park. The football configuration was laid out left to right, covering the infield, with temporary bleachers set up in front of the Green Monster to seat five thousand fans.
It turned out to be one of the most memorable games in the AFL. A long-ball tie, 41–41, in the crisp October air. Babe Parilli and Gino Cappelletti flew up and down the field against Al Davis’s black and silver Oakland Raiders. I made my way down to the field (only a few feet from the stands) and I stood next to the biggest man I’d ever seen, the great lineman Jim Otto. When I became the first woman enshrined into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2006, Otto, now a longtime friend, whispered to me, “Pretty good for a girl who stood shivering on the sideline in Fenway.” It was the moment I got hooked. I loved the game, I loved the time of year. I knew this was the place for me.
Today the Patriots are the equivalent of a Fortune 500 company behind the brilliant organization of Robert Kraft and his family, but when I was growing up, the Patriots were vagabonds, moving from Boston University to Boston College to Fenway Park to Harvard and finally, when I had the chance to cover them, to Foxborough. The stories of the early Boston Patriots were like something out of the Three Stooges. One player arrived driving a bus, followed by the state police because he’d plowed through the turnpike tolls. Running back Bob Gladieux, who’d been cut by the team, went to a game with his buddies anyway. Up in the stands, drinking beer, he heard the public address announcer say, “Would Bob Gladieux report to the locker room?” His friends were wondering where he’d gone when they heard, “Tackle on the kickoff made by number 24, Bob Gladieux.” One year, like something out of a Mel Brooks movie, the Patriots were playing the Dallas Texans when someone in a trench coat swatted away the Texans’ winning pass. Years later, Billy Sullivan, the glib and gutsy original owner of the Patriots, who always wore a trench coat, never denied it. Sullivan was never flush with cash. He once famously told the players not to turn down the bedsheets while taking a nap so the hotel wouldn’t charge him an extra $10.
My family wasn’t wealthy, either. Or anywhere close. We would buy a new pair of shoes for school at Kinney-on-the-Highway and some new clothes from Filene’s, the oldest off-price retailer in the country. We’d drink Hood milk and honey-dipped donuts from Dunkin’ Donuts, founded right there in Quincy. My mom got a job teaching at exclusive Derby Academy, the oldest coeducational school in the country, founded in 1784. Everyone was addressed as “Yes, Sir” and “No, Sir”; my classmates had names like Johnson (as in Howard) and Talbot (as in the store), and when they would go on vacations to places like St. Lucia, I’d be home reading the sports section. The art teacher at Derby, Doris Hauman, was the legendary illustrator of The Little Engine That Could.
Being in Boston year round did give me time to fall in love with the Celtics, who were unstoppable in the fifties and sixties. In the late fifties, I was crazy for six-foot-four Sam Jones, the Celtic shooting guard who was known as “Mr. Clutch.” He was a small-town boy from North Carolina (Red Auerbach drafted him sight unseen), and he helped the Celtics win ten world titles. Everyone honored Bill Russell, as they should, but on Halloween, when other girls would dress up as Mary Poppins or Cinderella, I would go as Sam Jones, wearing high-cut Converse sneakers and the number 24 in Magic Marker on my T-shirt. Every year, Sam calls me and asks me not to do it anymore, but I don’t care. I once did a radio show on Halloween wearing the authentic Celtic jersey that he’d finally given me.
With my idol Sam Jones, former guard of the great Boston Celtics. I wear his jersey every Halloween to this day. He begs me not to.
I had a depressing story many years later when Red Auerbach, who’d come to my wedding to Dick Stockton, refused to let me in the locker room just one year later, saying, “It’s not for girls.” It was yet another layer of scar tissue. I told him cigar smoke smelled terrible anyway, but I was crushed. I had to get quotes much later, when the players left the locker room, while hoping I didn’t miss the deadline.
My family moved to Cincinnati when I was eleven years old. It was the true Midwest, where the people had easy temperaments (no rough edges), kind of like the Ohio River that flowed so easily. My brother and I went to Crosley Field, where the Reds played, a couple of times. Like Fenway, it was asymmetrical, fitting into the neighborhood, and it had a funny incline in left field. It actually rose up and was famously called “The Terrace.” The NBA Royals had fantastic players like Oscar Robertson and Jerry Lucas, and my brother even cut Jack Twyman’s lawn. I’d started reading Sports Illustrated and the Sporting News—articles about people I’d never get to see, like Y. A. Tittle, Cassius Clay, or John Wooden.
After the football experience in Fenway, and reading about people like Bill Bradley, I told my mother I wanted to be a sportswriter. This was 1965, and it was like saying I wanted to go to Mars, since the job didn’t exist for women. Instead of my mom telling me it would be next to impossible, she said the greatest words I have ever heard: “Sometimes you have to cross when it says ‘Don’t Walk.’ ” It crystalized everything for me, changed my life in an instant. I was ready to lasso the moon.
CHAPTER 2
My parents’ divorce came after I’d been shuttled to three different sixth grades. My mom packed up Chris and me and drove cross-country at about 38 mph, while terrified, to South Hadley, a bucolic eighteenth-century New England town. The home of Mount Holyoke College, one of the original Seven Sisters, South Hadley is a perfect place: a leafy town of rolling hills and maple trees centered among Smith College, Amherst College, and the University of Massachusetts, so everyone is either a farmer’s kid or from the family of a professor. I didn’t miss Ohio, although that’s where my mom had given me the greatest opportunity of my life, telling me to cross when it says “don’t walk.” She’d even taken me to Stratford-upon-Avon that year to see Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She told me Shakespeare wrote for the masses, and even at eleven years old, I could handle the comedies. One day, she let me buy a miniskirt from the famous Carnaby Street in London, so my skinny knock-knees were the hit of Cincinnati. In South Hadley, though, with no money from my father, we lived in a lower-middle-class box house with two bedrooms (my mom called it “Treeless Acres”), and she got a teaching job in nearby Granby, Massachusetts.
We were only ninety miles from Boston. No one drove there, but once she did the coolest thing. Remember when you’d take a class trip in high school to the museum or the aquarium? My mom rented a Peter Pan bus and took her class to Fenway Park! She called it a historical trip. We followed the Boston teams on the radio and sang along with pop music from WHYN out of Springfield (“Grazing in the Grass” or anything by the Beatles), and South Hadley was small enough that my brother and I captained every sport. One year, I was even voted the best athlete in the class, but I never talked about it to anyone. When you work with Phil Simms or Dan Marino or Bill Walton, you really don’t want to talk about your MVP trophy from South Hadley High School.
The late sixties and early seventies were a tidal wave of social change. Golda Meir (raised in Milwaukee!) became the prime minister of Israel and Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. But they were also there when U.S. bombers secretly attacked Cambodia and Laos and more than 600,000 U.S. troops were fighting in Vietnam, many of them young people I knew. At South Hadley, we were let out of school for peace marches. I remem
ber one afternoon we all met on the grassy green commons in the town center to sing “Give Peace a Chance” while holding white candles. We had no idea what Spiro Agnew was saying half the time, and we thought Nixon was from outer space. For the first time, most cars had air-conditioning. Not ours. My mother had a Dodge Dart, but it sat unused until Chris and I got our driver’s licenses. Young women read Jane Austen and Gloria Steinem, and young men wanted books about hitchhiking and the universe. We put Sun-In in our hair and listened to weird lyrics from bands like the Flying Burrito Brothers. Concerts meant going to UMass to see Sly and the Family Stone. My mother taught Dostoevsky at night school at Mount Holyoke, and quoted the wits of the Algonquin Round Table and William Wordsworth (“The music in my heart I bore, / Long after it was heard no more”). I thought life was a blast, even if we didn’t have any money.
Friday nights were for dances at the gym, where crummy high school bands played “Crimson and Clover” or “96 Tears.” WHYN once mentioned my field hockey team (I was the captain) and you’d think I’d been recognized by the Wall Street Journal. We’d go to Mount Tom to ski in the winter and to eat cotton candy at the makeshift carnival in the summer. My friend Fizzy Plouffe ran the roller coaster for two months, and he’d let me go twenty times in a row without paying a dime. My high school boyfriend’s family, the Newtons (whose earlier relations had invented Marshmallow Fluff!), had a house near Wildcat Mountain in New Hampshire, so we spent every New Year’s freezing on the ski slopes, wearing only corduroy jeans and thin parkas, with maybe some hot chocolate between the long, cold runs.
I was neither great looking nor unattractive, but no one cared back then. High school wasn’t really difficult for me; we had moved so many times that I knew how to fit in. I tried to write sports for the high school paper, but I got assignments like “What does the quarterback’s girlfriend do while he’s at practice?” Not for me—I wanted to cover UMass football games!
Being the daughter of an English teacher, I loved to read—Dickens, Wharton, Hemingway (much more than Fitzgerald)—and anything about the 1967 Red Sox “Impossible Dream” team. People in western Massachusetts followed them like a cult. The Sox had risen from ninth place to win the pennant under new manager Dick Williams. Carl Yastrzemski won the Triple Crown and “Gentleman” Jim Lonborg, the pitcher from Stanford, added twenty-two wins. The team was a cast of characters and Ken Coleman carried every game to us on radio. The season hit a sad note when Tony Conigliaro was hit in the left eye and cheekbone by Angels pitcher Jack Hamilton in early August. I remember I cried when I saw his picture in the paper, his face all swollen and bruised, his left eye shut tight. Conigliaro’s agent, and eventually my good friend, Ed Kleven got Dionne Warwick and her pal Frank Sinatra to come to Boston and do a fund-raiser for Tony C! When he finally regained his sight, we were all relieved, and the season went back to being a celebration. The Red Sox won their first flag in twenty-one years and headed to the World Series for the first time since 1946. Of course, Curt Gowdy was the announcer, but this time for NBC. The Sox got all the way to Game 7—a dream matchup of Cy Young winner Lonborg against the legendary Bob Gibson. Lonborg, on only two days’ rest, lost to the Cardinals Hall of Famer, 7–2. It would take Boston another three years to beat a St. Louis team—remember the glorious image of number 4, Bobby Orr, flying across the goal to beat the St. Louis Blues in the Stanley Cup Final? All became right with the world.
The three of us, plus our extended Irish family, didn’t watch much TV, except we’d all seen the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination back in 1963. That was when we lived in Boston, and it was a profound moment for everyone. The whole world became Bostonians twice in my lifetime: the JFK assassination and the Boston Marathon bombings. “Where were you when Kennedy was shot?” is still a question people ask to this day. I was in the fourth grade at Derby Academy and the headmaster let everyone out of school. My mother took us to a church in Hingham and I’ll never forget the people sobbing over the altar, totally out of control. For days, everyone watched the news and the funeral. I don’t remember any television before that. By high school, kids watched Johnny Carson if your parents let you stay up that late. But I loved The Mary Tyler Moore Show because she was a single girl with an important job, and five of the episodes were written by my friend Susan Silver. Other than that, I don’t remember watching TV, except for some New York Giants games.
I didn’t really know what I was doing in applying to colleges. My dad worked for the Stanford Research Institute, but I wasn’t going to get into Stanford and I had no guidance about going to college or writing sports for a college paper. One guy from my high school, Marc Leonard, went to Boston College, so I called him. He liked it, so I applied. BC had everything I was looking for: great city, good school, big-time sports, and only four miles from the Green Monster. It wasn’t like now, when parents take their kids on expensive road trips to look at schools. There was very little discussion in 1970. You picked a couple of schools and applied, $50 each. This was the hippie era, and people wanted to play the guitar (“House of the Rising Sun” or “Leaving on a Jet Plane”) and just hang out. You couldn’t tell who had money and who didn’t. Everyone wore bell-bottom jeans and Indian print blouses and parted their long hair down the middle. We all wanted to look like Ali McGraw as Jenny Cavalleri in Love Story. The irony is that I married the real Oliver Barrett, her mythical boyfriend from Harvard. My husband, Bob Kanuth, is six foot four, gorgeous, and captained the ‘69 Crimson basketball team. He didn’t even need a script.
I wore a crocheted hat, thinking I looked like Ali McGraw. I read whatever she read and quoted whatever she said. We also had many books around the house. I read anything: Ayn Rand’s We the Living and The Fountainhead in the eighth grade, and I loved Herman Wouk’s Marjorie Morningstar. I didn’t understand, when I read Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour, why two female teachers were always holding hands. My favorite books were To Kill a Mockingbird and The Sun Also Rises. I also loved Basketball Is My Life by Bob Cousy. I guess that was a little strange. My husband, Bob, gave me a first edition of The Sun Also Rises as a present one time. It sits on the bookshelf next to my signed basketball from Dave Cowens.
Boston College turned out to be a perfect place for me, with nice kids from all over the country, and I had easygoing roommates: Jeanne from Old Tappan, New Jersey; Joan from Easton, Maryland; and Lori from Dixon, Illinois. We would read psychology books and debate politics, and sometimes I dragged them to Fenway. Jeanne put a poster on the wall of singer Grace Slick from Jefferson Airplane and I put up Tucker Frederickson, the standout player from Auburn who went on to be a running back with the New York Giants. Our dorm was off-campus freshman housing and looked like it hadn’t been cleaned since the Depression. We didn’t care. We bought eucalyptus branches, lit incense candles, and played David Bowie on someone’s beat-up record player. We got along great.
In 1973, all my roommates gathered to watch Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs in three straight sets. I knew it was the seminal moment of the women’s movement. It meant everything—social change, female strength, equal pay, gender politics, opportunity—a paradigm shift in perception. It was winner take all ($100,000) in Houston’s Astrodome. Billie Jean entered the arena Cleopatra-style, carried high in a chair by men dressed as ancient slaves. Riggs gave King a giant lollipop and she gave him a pig.
Some said that Riggs threw the match, but the great player Jack Kramer wrote, “Billie Jean beat him fair and square. Men my age were so stunned when Riggs lost that they figure he must have tanked.” But Billie Jean outhustled the hustler, continually giving him short balls that he was either too lazy or too out of shape to get to. In the beginning of the match, she ran Riggs from side to side, wearing him out. At the end—this, after he’d been on the cover of both Sports Illustrated and Time magazine—he told Billie that he’d underestimated her. The two of them were not all that different, really. Both had grown up in Southern California, he the son of a minister, she the
daughter of a fireman. Both were great competitors and Wimbledon champions. More than 90 million people worldwide watched their match from the Astrodome. And some, like me, just knew it would change the culture.
The flip side of my pride in Billie Jean’s victory was that I also worked at the BC college bar called Mary Ann’s (still famous to this day), where the owner told me I had to wear orange hot pants and wait on young women who were trying to meet BC football players. I had a job bartending for a week, but when all the women would ask for complicated drinks, like Tequila Sunrises or Kahlua Sombreros, and I would just hand them a beer on tap, I got demoted to waitress. They left lousy tips, anyway.
I’ve grown to love Billie Jean and all that she stood for. In fact, she gave me some of the strongest words (outside my mother’s) that I’ve ever heard in my life. They are words I try to live by. Billie Jean, brave enough to wear glasses as a professional athlete (unheard of except for Dom DiMaggio), was always in the Wimbledon Final—singles, doubles, mixed doubles—and she won twenty of them. I once asked her what the pressure was like of always being in the Wimbledon Final. Her answer changed the way I looked at life. It actually changed my way of thinking. She said, “Are you kidding? Pressure is a privilege!” From then on, I wanted the ball.
At BC I wrote sports for the college paper, called The Heights, and my editors were Mike Lupica and Lenny DeLuca—people I thought I’d never see again, but who both went on to great success. They, of course, took all the good assignments, like football trips to Miami, and I was left with baseball double-headers (and believe me, Boston College baseball was no Texas).
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