Dispatches from the Sporting Life (19 page)

To begin with, Plimpton had trouble getting a team to allow him to work out with them, let alone take part in an actual game. Red Hickey, coach of the Western Conference All-Stars, said, “Did I hear you right? You—with no experience—want to train and then
play
—in the Pro-Bowl game?”

The New York Giants wouldn’t have him and neither would the Jets. Fortunately George Wilson, the earthy coach of the Detroit Lions, was amused by
the idea and invited Plimpton to camp. From the moment of his arrival, Plimpton reveals a necessarily good and receptive nature and an enviable eye for detail. Of course, he’s got a lot going for him. Even a run-through of some of the names on the Detroit roster has a distinctive tang to it: Milton Plum, Yale Lary, Nick Pietrosante, Dick LeBeau, Scooter McLean … as well as a linesman, nicknamed the Mad Creeper, who was, Plimpton writes, a near pathological case. “No one knows who the Mad Creeper was…. His habit was to creep along the corridors late at night, three or four in the morning, sneak into someone’s room, lean over his bed and throttle him hard and briefly, just closing his hands around the fellow’s throat and then skittering off down the corridor, listening to the gasping behind him.”

The trade idiom is rich. Night Train Lane speaks of his “captainship,” tells how you get “a great communion to get to the Hall of Fame,” and teases Plimpton about the unstoppable Roger Brown the night before the intersquad scrimmage. “Jawge, you set to find if Roger’s going to
disjoin
you? I mean in Pontiac you are goin’ to have expectation in this whole question—he’s goin’ be at you shufflin’ and breathin’
hard.”

Paper Lion
is very rewarding on superfans and hangers-on, including a tailor who has become a touchstone to the rookies. Before the rookies know whether they’ve made the squad, the tailor, who has the ear of the coaches, may come to measure them for a team blazer. Conversely, he may pass them by. Plimpton seems to catch exactly the tension between rookie and veteran, the competition for
jobs; the night of the team out-offs; and the nerves that build up before a game, even an exhibition game. Originally, Plimpton had hoped to pass for just another rookie, but Wayne Walker, a regular, had read
Out of My League.
This killed Plimpton’s ready-made (and libellous) excuse for his own ineptitude, the bare-faced lie that he had once been good enough to play ball with a semi-pro Canadian team, the Newfoundland Newfs. Canadian pro football, let me point out at once, gives gainful employment to many an American journeyman player, as long as he is able to adjust to a slight difference in rules, such as the need to say excuse me before tackling. Then, just as we came through for the United States during prohibition, the year Plimpton was maligning us in Detroit, my permissive country was able to take on several first-line NFL players who had been suspended for gambling. Neither is the Canadian game without its glories. Only a few years ago our Super Bowl, the Grey Cup game, had to be called in the third quarter because of fog. It was no longer necessary to conceal the ball. Players couldn’t find each other and fans couldn’t see the field. A moment in sports history, I think, that rivals the 1951 boat race, when Oxford sank.

Before Plimpton left to join the Lions, a friend in New York, who had once played for the Washington Redskins, warned him about the stupidity of ball players and told him to expect juvenile behaviour. The barracks room humour of the camp (water pistols, jock straps) does seem more than a bit over-hearty at times, but Plimpton makes a convincing case for similar lapses among supposedly loftier
groups, such as
New Yorker
staff writers; and I must admit that I found the fright masks funny. Working off tensions, the players would, it seems, some nights don masks made of thin pliable rubber—vampire heads, Frankenstein monsters—and sneak up on a sleeping teammate to startle him.

Curiously, it is not until page 300 of
Paper Lion
that Plimpton goes into the question of salaries and bonuses and then only fleetingly, almost as though talk about money embarrasses him. But as Red Smith has written again and again, there is no question that the name of the game is money, and that these are men being paid to play a boys’ game. One needn’t be a football fan to know about the $400,000 paid to Joe Namath for signing with the New York Jets, the bigger bonuses that have been handed out to others since, and the $15,000 earned by each of the Green Bay Packers for a day’s work against the Kansas City Chiefs. At the risk of sounding old-fashioned, I’d say it goes against the grain. This sort of reward
is
socially unbalanced. I would have liked to know more about the money in the game and what the players felt about it. Without asking for a grey sociological work rather than the lively journal Plimpton has given us, I still could have done with decidedly more information about the economics of the football business and the profits involved.

Sports, obviously, is a bloody big business, a growth industry, as they say, with the National Hockey League expanding to twelve teams next season, new professional basketball and soccer leagues promised, and the purses offered on the PGA circuit the highest ever. If the profit to be made from sports
is immense, just possibly immorally high, then club owners differ from the tycoons in other industries by asking for our hearts as well as our money. We are entreated to trust them with our boyish admiration and enthusiasm, with what we retain of the old school holler, at an age when we are more immediately concerned with falling hair, mortgages, and choosing schools for the kids.

Professional sports, though I am still addicted to them, have begun to alienate me in yet another way. It was George Plimpton’s notion that as a sort of Mr. Everybody, a Central Park quarterback, a Sunday pitcher, he would try his hand at baseball, football, and other sports. James Thurber, he told the editor of
Sports Illustrated,
once wrote that the majority of American males put themselves to sleep by striking out the batting order of the New York Yankees. Yes, but if at one time Plimpton’s idea of testing himself, seeing how well he could do in pro company, seemed a feasible, even charming, conceit, I fear it is considerably less so today. If once athletes were really rather like us, only more beautifully made, better conditioned, more gifted, suddenly too many of them are not like us at all. All at once basketball players tend to be seven feet tall and football players weigh three hundred pounds. Then football, rather more than most sports, has come to suffer from overspecialization, with different teams for offence and defence. In contrast it would seem that soccer players, all of them ninety-minute men, must be far more resourceful. They are certainly more elegant and recognizably human to watch, trotting out onto the field in jersey and shorts, unarmed, so to speak.

Finally, George Plimpton’s
Paper Lion
joins a growing body of first-rate writing about sports: one thinks immediately of Norman Mailer on the fights, Updike, and Mark Harris. Nevertheless, I have a reservation. Much as I enjoyed Plimpton’s book, I can’t help feeling guilty, like having been to a movie on a fine summer’s afternoon. An earlier generation of American writers had to test themselves not against Bart Starr and Archie Moore but the Spanish Civil War and the Moscow trials. In Europe, Isaac Babel, looking for a change, rode with the Red Cavalry. George Orwell went to Wigan Pier and then Catalonia. Arthur Koestler came out of Spain with his
Spanish Testament.
This is not meant to be an attack on Plimpton, but all of us, Plimpton’s generation and mine. One day, I fear, we will be put down as a trivial, peripheral bunch. Crazy about bad old movies, nostalgic for comic books. Our gods don’t fail. At worst, they grow infirm. They suffer pinched nerves, like Paul Hornung. Or arthritic arms, like Sandy Koufax.

1967

C
learly, he came from good stock. Interviewed on television in 1979, his eighty-seven-year-old father was asked, “How do you feel?”

“I feel fine.”

“At what time in life does a man lose his sexual desires?”

“You’ll have to ask somebody older than I am.”

His son was only five when he acquired his first pair of skates. He repeated the third grade, more intent on his wrist shot than reading, developing it out there in the subzero wheat fields, shooting frozen horse buns against the barn door. When he was a mere fourteen-year-old, working in summer on a Saskatoon construction site with his father’s crew, both his strength and determination were already celebrated. He could pick up ninety-pound cement bags in either hand, heaving them easily. Preparing for what he knew lay ahead, he sat at the kitchen table night after night, practising his autograph.

Gordie Howe was born in Floral, Saskatchewan, in 1928, a child of prairie penury, and his hockey
career spanned thirty-two seasons in five decades. The stuff of legend.

Gordie.

For as long as I have been a hockey fan, Mr. Elbows has been out there, skating, his stride seemingly effortless. The big guy with the ginger-ale-bottle shoulders. I didn’t always admire him. But as he grew older and hockey players apparently younger, many of them younger than my oldest son, he became an especial pleasure. My God, only three years older than me, and still out there chasing pucks. For middle-aged Canadians, there was hope. In a world of constant and often bewildering change, there was one shining certitude. Come October, the man for whom time had stopped would be out there, not taking dirt from anybody.

Gordie, Gordie, the old fart’s champion.

Gordie Howe’s amazing career is festooned with records, illuminated by anecdote. Looked at properly, within the third-grade repeater there was a hockey pedagogue longing to leap out.

Item: In 1963, when the traditionally stylish but corner-shy Montreal Canadiens brought up a young behemoth, John Ferguson, from the minors to police the traffic, he had the audacity, his first time over the boards, to go into a corner with Mr. Elbows. He yanked off his gloves, foolishly threatening to mix it up with Howe.

“In this league, son,” Howe cautioned him, “we don’t really fight. All we do is tug each other’s sweater.”

“Certainly, Mr. Howe,” the rookie said.

But no sooner did he drop his fists than the old educator creamed him.

Toe Blake, another Canadien who played against Howe, once said, “He was primarily a defensive player when he started, and he’d take your ankles off if you stood in front of their net.”

That was in 1946, when eighteen-year-old Gordie, in his first season with the Detroit Red Wings, scored all of seven goals and fifteen assists. Thirty-four years later, Steve Shutt, who wasn’t even born in 1946, reported a different problem in playing against the now silvery-haired legend. “Sure we give him room out there. If you take him into the boards, the crowd boos, but they also boo if you let him get around you.”

Which is to say, there were the glory years (more of them than any other athlete in a major sport can count) and the last sad ceremonial season, when even the fifty-two-year-old grandfather allowed that he had become poetry in slow motion. But still a fierce advocate for his two hockey-playing sons, Marty and Mark.

“Playing on the same line as your sons,” Maurice Richard once observed, “that’s really something.”

When I finally caught up with Howe, I asked him if, considering his own abilities, it might have been kinder to encourage his sons to do anything but play hockey.

“Well, once somebody said to Marty, ‘Hey, kid, you’re not as good as your father.’ ‘Who is?’ he replied.”

Consider the records, familiar but formidable.
Until Wayne Gretzky came along, Gordie Howe had scored the most assists (1,383) and, of course, played in the most games (2,186). He won the National Hockey League scoring title six times and was named the most valuable player (MVP) six times in the NHL and once in the World Hockey Association. He had scored more goals than anybody (975—801 of them in the NHL). His hundredth goal, incidentally, was scored on February 17, 1951, against Gerry McNeil of Montreal as the Red Wings beat the Canadiens 2–1 on Maurice Richard Night. Obloquy. And a feat charged with significance for those of us who cut our hockey teeth debating who was really
numero uno,
Gordie Howe or the other number 9, Maurice “Rocket” Richard of the Montreal Canadiens.

Out West, where the clapboard main street, adrift in snow, often consisted of no more than a legion hall, a curling club, a Chinese restaurant, and a beer parlour, the men in their peaked caps and lumberjack shirts—deprived of an NHL team themselves, dependent on CBC-Radio’s
Hockey Night in Canada
for the big Saturday-night game—rooted for Gordie. One of their own, shoving it to the condescending East. Gordie, educating the fancy-pants frogs with his elbows. Giving them pause, making them throw snow up in the corners. But in Montreal, elegant Montreal, we valued élan (that is to say, Richard) above all. For durable Gordie, it appeared the game was a job in which he had undoubtedly learned to excel, but the exploding Rocket, whether he appreciated it or not, was an artist. Moving in over the blue line, he was incomparable. “What I
remember most about the Rocket were his eyes,” goalie Glenn Hall once said. “When he came flying toward you with the puck on his stick, his eyes were all lit up, flashing and gleaming like a pinball machine. It was terrifying.”