If I Only Knew Then...

by Charles Grodin

  On Tuesday, the heavy snow stopped and we got what we came for—high-altitude skiing on glaciers in champagne powder. The kind that stings your lungs when you inhale. The kind you can dance through. The kind you see in a Warren Miller film. And the skiing was great. But there was something about the leadership of the group of eleven skiers that did not sit right with me. The guide kept on saying, “I’ll see you at the bottom” and skiing away, expecting everyone to find him farther down the mountain at the helicopter meeting point in some unknown place. But the thrill of skiing the deep powder was powerful.

  By lunchtime, my legs were really hurting from the exertion and the thrills. As we skied down to the middle of a field for lunch, I saw my lodge roommate and great friend, David Karetsky, sitting on a chair made from his skis and canvas. Giving him my best macho voice, I said, “Does it get any better than this?” He answered, “This is as good as it gets.” I moved on and ate lunch with some of the others. After lunch, I conceded to myself that I shouldn’t ski any longer as my legs were really hurting. The helicopter was going back to the lodge to refuel, and some of the others were feeling the same exhaustion I felt, so I went in to a take a nap.

  As I lay in bed, I was unable to fall asleep. My mind was racing from the exhilaration of the morning. Then my mind shifted to the discomfort I was feeling and the idea that there were so many ways in which I could get hurt helicopter skiing—crash, unmarked object, tree well, cliff, rock, you name it. Finally, I thought about everyone back in New York who’d told me not to go and if I did go to be careful not to ski outside my comfort level. I decided I would leave the lodge immediately and head back to New York, three days early. There was a helicopter going to the road, where I would call a taxi to take me the five hours to Calgary.

  As I was putting my bag onto the helicopter, the entire staff came running out, threw my bag off the chopper, and told me there had been an accident and they needed the chopper to get to the scene. About an hour later I found out that nine of my fellow skiers had been killed in an avalanche—including my good friend who’d said, “This is as good as it gets.”

  I never saw the accident scene. I only saw one of the “Skadi” transponders, which are used to locate avalanche victims. They are made of unbreakable plastic, but this one was mangled.

  As I traveled back to New York from Calgary in a mournful daze, I went through my trip file. I came across a Sports Illustrated article written about five months earlier, about a Canadian Mountain Holiday trip in the Bugaboos on which someone had died. On the article was a Post-it note from me to David Karetsky reading, “David, this looks pretty dangerous. Do you really think we should do it? See you in Calgary.”

  WHAT I LEARNED

  Trust your instincts. Something told me that this was not a good idea. All my defenses were talking to me and telling me to stop—my legs, my racing mind, my inability to sleep, my family and those who loved me. Finally, I woke up to the signals and let my instincts take over.

  RICHARD ZOGLIN

  Time Magazine Critic

  Critics don’t like to admit mistakes. Indeed, it’s part of the critic’s very DNA to try to maintain the illusion that you’re incapable of them. A critic’s job is to convince readers, in the most colorful and convincing language possible, that his or her opinion is the only one any sensible person could hold. And nothing that happens afterward can prove you wrong. So what if the gritty police drama you hailed is canceled after two weeks, or the sitcom you trashed becomes a runaway hit? It’s the audience that fouled up, not you.

  For a dozen years I was the television critic for Time magazine. I privately cheered when shows I praised from the start—Thirtysomething, ER—went on to have long and acclaimed runs. I was just as happy when I was a lonely voice of dissent. I still think Amerika—the 1987 ABC miniseries about a Soviet takeover of the United States that bombed in the ratings despite my raves—was an underrated gem. And my snarky review of Friends in 1995? I still wish I could have strangled that show in its cradle. But one review remains a thorn in my side, mainly because I dumped on a show that later became one of my favorites, the only network series that today, nearly a decade after I left the TV beat, I still make sure to watch or tape every week: The Simpsons.

  I watched Matt Groening’s animated segments on the old Tracey Ullman Show, which introduced the Simpsons characters, and I was unimpressed: lots of belching and shouting, juvenile jokes, and crass drawings. When the half-hour series debuted on Fox in January 1990 and became a pop culture phenomenon—high ratings, T-shirts, catchphrases like “eat my shorts”—I was even more turned off.

  I resisted even reviewing the show initially, then included it in an April 1990 story on “anti-family sitcoms,” lumping it in with Roseanne and Married with Children. I had a few nice things to say about the show, but I made my dissenting view clear: “The Simpsons, however, is strangely off-putting much of the time. The drawings are grotesque without redeeming style or charm and the animation is crude even by TV’s low-grade standards.” I refused to put The Simpsons on my 10 Best list at the end of the year. Instead, I found Bart Simpson a place on another list—as the “Most Overexposed Underachiever” of the year. (Bart still wound up on Time’s cover that week. Ah, the follies of newsmagazine cover making. But that’s another essay.)

  I started to come around a year or two later. I still insist the show got better, as the emphasis shifted from Bart, the wisecracking brat, to Homer, the doughnut-loving dunderhead. The characters deepened; the satire grew denser and more audacious. And yes, even the animation got better. Still, it would have been nice if I had recognized The Simpsons’ spark of originality the first time around, before the rest of the world did. If there’s anything a critic likes less than being wrong, it’s looking like a bandwagon-hopper.

  WHAT I LEARNED

  A critic’s opinion can change. We can even make mistakes. Which is why readers shouldn’t take us too seriously.

  PHIL MUSHNICK

  New York Post Sports Columnist

  My biggest mistake came the day I, now a sportswriter with more than thirty years on the job, said yes to Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder, at the time the noted tout on CBS’s NFL Today.

  It was a mistake I learned from. Heck, I didn’t duplicate it until, oh, an entire day later, when I again said yes to Jimmy the Greek.

  In 1983, as a kid sports columnist for the New York Post, I wrote a piece that, for better or worse, endeared me to Snyder. It was about how, for all his fame and fleeting fortune, nobody knew the troubles he’d seen: Two of his children had died from cystic fibrosis. A third, hospitalized with the disease, was slipping.

  The Greek was touched, so much so that I couldn’t lose him. He’d call three, four times a week, inviting me to join him at the racetrack, a casino, in Miami or Vegas, bill it all to him.

  He thought that everyone shared his reality, that anyone could just pick up and leave. And he did not, for a second, even try to understand that as a journalist I could not accept such favors from those I covered.

  One night in 1985, the Greek called from Louisville, where he’d be working the Kentucky Derby telecast that weekend for CBS. He insisted that I immediately fly down as his guest. No way, I told him. I again had to explain it to him. Besides, I told him, there was a press conference I had to cover the next day, in Manhattan, at the Americana Inn.

  “You’re kidding,” Snyder replied. “I’ve got a friend staying there. He’s a prince, a real prince, from some kingdom somewhere. He’s got a package for me. I’ll arrange for you to pick it up. Okay?”

  “Sure, no problem.”

  The Greek’s princely pal—I never got the name, just the room number—was staying in a penthouse suite, closer to outer space than to the lobby. I rode the elevator, walked a hallway, went around a corner, knocked on the door.

  The door was opened by a huge man, built like an anvil, but he wasn’t as big as the other guy in the room. Both glared at me as if they couldn’t help it. I figure
d them for bodyguards. Or murderers. Or both.

  A nearly naked young woman was seated in one corner of the room. I figured her for the princess. Or a hooker.

  The “prince,” a light-skinned black man (or dark-skinned white man), was summoned from a side room. In a French accent, he asked me for identification. Huh?

  “What do you need my ID for? I was sent here by the Greek; you were expecting me, no?”

  “How do I know you are who you say?”

  “I never said I am who I am.”

  Seeing how I never play a small room well anyway, I produced ID. The prince nodded at one of his XXXL boys, and he began to display the contents of “the package.” On the couch, next to the princess, they counted out stacks of hundred-dollar bills, ten to a stack, twenty stacks. Good grief—$20,000 in cash, more money, by about $19,900, than I’d ever even had in my pocket. By “package,” I’d thought, I don’t know, maybe a nice shirt.

  “Now you count it,” the prince ordered. I complied, all the time thinking, What the hell is going on and why is it going on with me?

  The prince put the money in a brown paper shopping bag, had me sign a receipt, and then handed me the bag. Time to go. Whew.

  But as I was leaving, it hit me: I’d just signed for the money and now these guys were going to follow me, then roll me for it. No, kill me for it. I walked out of the penthouse, then pivoted in the opposite direction of the elevator, figuring that they figured I’d be headed back the same way from which I came.

  I entered an emergency exit staircase, ran down several flights of steps, then reentered the hotel’s hallway and ran in no particular direction before entering another emergency staircase and running down a few more flights. I must’ve repeated this process ten times before—sweaty, breathless, and too young to die—I walked through an emergency door and into a ground-floor kitchen in the Americana Inn.

  Forget the press conference; I wanted out, and immediately. I headed home to New Jersey, confident that I’d cheated death but not at all pleased to be carrying $20,000 in hundred-dollar bills (for an on-person total of $20,009).

  When I got home, I called the Greek in Louisville. “Listen, you didn’t tell me what was in the prince’s package. It makes me nervous. First thing in the morning, I’m going to deposit it, then send you a check.”

  “No!” the Greek hollered. “You can’t do that!”

  The Greek went on to explain that he liked a bunch of Kentucky-breds on the next day’s Derby Day card and that they’d pay more at a New York off-track betting parlor than at Churchill Downs, and how he didn’t want to bet a lot down there, not with all the CBS execs around him. He pleaded with me.

  “You live just across the bridge from an OTB, don’tcha?”

  And then I did it again: I said yes to the Greek.

  Snyder began to read off all kinds of combination bets for six or seven races—$2,500 exactas, $1,000 trifecta boxes, a $2,000 “reverse wheel”—and I dutifully wrote them all down. Thankfully, he stopped dictating his action when he reached twenty grand.

  The next day, cursing myself along the way, I drove to an OTB parlor on Staten Island. I got in line at the window, two pages of bets and my brown paper shopping bag—now double-lined—in hand.

  When I reached the teller, I began: “The first race today at Churchill Downs, exacta box B, C, and F, two thousand dollars . . .”

  The teller went from looking down and uninterested to looking up and agitated. “Whoa, pal, you can’t just make that kind of bet at this window!”

  “Why not?”

  “’Cause I’m not going to punch a ticket for that kinda money until I see you have the money to cover it.”

  I beckoned him closer, then let him peek into my shopping bag. He looked up at me, and then, his eyes still on me, hollered, “Gloria!”

  Gloria, about sixty and a woman who had the look of a veteran of racetrack welfare, stepped forward from a back room. The teller whispered to her. She nodded, then looked at me.

  “Come down here with me,” she said.

  We went to a betting window at the far right side of the OTB, a window she opened just for me. I restated the recitation of the Greek’s bets. We counted out the money together after every bet, and then she punched out the tickets and gave them to me.

  About halfway through the Greek’s twenty grand, Gloria looked up. “Sonny,” she said, “this isn’t your money, is it?”

  I’d been waiting for that, hoping for that. Knowing she wouldn’t believe me, I told her the truth.

  “Nah, it’s Jimmy the Greek’s.”

  “Yeah, right,” she grunted, as if she figured she deserved a silly, wise-guy answer to her silly question. Then we went back to work.

  The Greek, it turned out, didn’t cash a single bet. All losers, $20,000 worth of losing tickets. I still have a stack of them, as souvenirs of the time I twice, on consecutive days, said yes to Jimmy the Greek.

  When I next spoke to the Greek I told him that I’d someday like to write about our little two-day episode.

  “Wait till I die,” he growled.

  “It’s a deal,” I said.

  On April 21, 1996, eleven years later and at the age of seventy-six, Dimetrios Georgios Synodinos—Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder—died. That day, I wrote the story for the next day’s newspaper.

  WHAT I LEARNED

  And so what did I learn from this experience? What can we all learn from it? For starters, try to avoid situations in which you think there’s a good chance you’ll be murdered. Second, it’s amazing how many hundred-dollar bills can fit into a brown paper shopping bag. Try it yourself. Third . . .

  VICKI L. MABREY

  Nightline Correspondent

  Usually as we age, we look back on those carefree (careless?) renegade days of youth and wish we had listened to our parents. Sure, I should have obeyed curfew more often, straightened up my junk drawer, and ditched that boy from the other side of the tracks just like Mom and Dad told me, but there’s one area where I really wish I’d let my obstinate streak run free. That’s in real estate.

  Oh, the nest egg I would have now if I had spent my time fighting about mortgages instead of hemlines.

  It was my senior year of college at Howard University in Washington, D.C. I had lived in various dormitories for my first three years, but as a soon-to-graduate upperclassman, I’d had enough of the kids and the noise in the dorms. I was almost grown, you know. What senior wants to be bothered with a bunch of childish sophomores and juniors—and forget about freshmen. Who wants a pack of those on your dorm floor?!

  I looked longingly at the high-rise apartment buildings across the street from my dormitory on Washington’s Sixteenth Street NW. To my twenty-year-old mind, the Dorchester was nine stories of elegance and sophistication. Or maybe the Washington House, with its high white walls and curved turrets, and those circular driveways—they screamed Sexy Single Sophisticate. So, against my parents’ wishes, I rented a studio on a front corner of the Washington House. As far as I was concerned, $175 a month was a bargain for being able to breeze through the glass doors and be greeted by a cheery “Good evening, Miss Mabrey” from the very sweet Ethiopian receptionist. Never mind that my worldly air ended the second I stepped inside my apartment. There, I slept on a mattress atop a wooden pallet, and the rest of my furnishings consisted of a Huey Newton wicker chair and matching side table set in front of that fabled turret window.

  My parents were appalled. They were worried—not only for my safety, but also because they feared that by moving off campus I was no longer having The College Experience. They urged me to give up my lease and move back to the dorm. It was a verbal tug-of-war, but with them in St. Louis and me a thousand miles away, it was a battle I could win. I stayed put.

  Having tasted freedom, I wanted more. It was the 1970s. All over Washington, gracious old row houses and handsome apartment buildings in previously blighted neighborhoods were ripe for new life. One of those was a high-rise on Columbia Road
called the Woodley, in the heart of the romantically named Adams-Morgan community. It was one of those graceful wedding cake buildings from much earlier in the century: I marveled at the brick- and stonework every time I passed by.

  One day, a sign went up: the Woodley had been turned into condominiums! I could own my very own cosmopolitan plot. I stepped into the sales office and crunched the numbers. A studio was $19,000. One thousand down and my monthly payment would be $222. A one-bedroom could be had for $22,000.

  I raced home and called my parents. Serendipitously, my grandparents down in Texas had just recently put $1,000 in a savings account for me. It was as if this was meant to be. Except they added my father’s name to the account just to be sure I wouldn’t fritter it away, one $3.99 tube of lipstick at a time. Let me have the thousand dollars to invest in an apartment, I begged my dad. It’s only a few dollars more than I’m paying right now for rent, and it will appreciate, and when I need money later or I move away from Washington I can sell it, and I’ll never ask you for another single thing as long as I live, I swear. The answer was no. I’m sure I asked again. And possibly again after that, but the answer was always no.

  I let it go. Can you believe it? After the years of defiance, all the arguments, the cajoling, the headstrong opposition—this time I just folded. Oh, I groused plenty to my friends. They heard about it every time we shared a five-dollar plate of Cuban chicken with black beans and rice at Omega, a restaurant across the street from the Woodley. They heard how I could have been living in luxury in my very own apartment, if only my parents had let me have my very own money.