Dispatches from the Sporting Life (23 page)

Ms. Postema, who drives a Federal Express truck these days, worked as a minor league ump from 1977 through 1989, pronouncing in more than two thousand games, without ever being invited to perform in the bigs. This, so far as she was concerned, was a clear case of sexual discrimination, the guilty male chauvinist pig being Dick Butler, assistant to the president of the American League, who was, and remains, in her opinion, a hypocrite. On the other hand, since Ms. Postema admits she is no bookworm,
possibly she’s unaware of the dictum “Many are called, but few are chosen.”

In any event, before her career was aborted, Ms. Postema did get to eject some future multimillionaires from games in the minors, among them Messrs. Strawberry, Gwynn, Canseco, Mitchell, Clark, Bonilla, and Johnson. “I saw them when they were scared and a little unsure of themselves,” she writes. “Just like me.”

Far from “little me,” however. For when the misguided Ms. Postema, the daughter of an Ohio vegetable farmer, gave up pulling onions for a hundred bucks a week to register in the Al Somers Umpire School, she was five eight and tipping the scales at 175 pounds. Graduating seventeenth in her class of a hundred, she was offered a job in the Gulf Coast League ($800 a month) and soon moved up to the Florida State League, where Jim Leyland, then managing the Lakeland Tigers, protested to the president of the GCL, “How could you send the girl?”

Next stop for the upwardly mobile Ms. Postema was the Double A Texas League, and in 1983 she graduated to the highest possible rung on the minor league ladder: the Triple A Pacific Coast League. She was now earning $1,900 a month but also suffering indignities. Once, when she called a high pitch a strike, a hooligan in the Vancouver dugout yelled, “That was boob-high!” Another time, a player taunted her with “What’s another name for a female umpire?”

The answer: “A call girl.”

Putting in time in winter ball in Colombia, she
had to endure the indecent proposals of Carmelo Martinez, who spent much of his time in the batter’s box flirting with the ump.

“I love you, honey,” he’d say.

Pam would ignore him.

“Mi amor.”

The most miserable man in baseball, in Pam’s opinion, is Larry Bowa, whom she ran into when he was managing the Las Vegas Stars in the PCL. Following a dispute over the veracity of a call Pam had made, Bowa, never at a loss for words, shouted, “You’re a fucking cunt!”

A charge to which Pam responded with the equally witty “You’re just a fucking jerk….”

Atlanta Braves manager Chuck Tanner, encountered between the white lines just before the start of an exhibition game, presented Pam with another problem. “Would you like a kiss?” he asked.

Ms. Postema had already been featured on the cover of
Sports Illustrated,
a thirty-three-year-old minor league ump, when she ran into “Mr. Neanderthal himself,” pitcher Bob Knepper. Knepper told a reporter that a woman shouldn’t be an umpire, a president, or a politician. “I’m not going to condemn her,” he said, then went on to warn, “but if God is unhappy with her, she’s going to have to deal with that later.”

Based on her experience with America’s game, Ms. Postema writes: “Nobody ever mentions this, but ballplayers are, for the most part, the crudest, lewdest bunch of assholes ever assembled. And out of necessity, umpires, for the most part, aren’t far behind. To an umpire … the word
fuck
becomes an
all-purpose weapon: a noun, verb, adjective, and adverb all rolled into one.”

Finally, I have no idea whether Ms. Postema was denied a job in the bigs because she was inadequate or as a consequence of sexual prejudice. But I have no doubt, Mr. Wojciechowski’s help notwithstanding, that she is a minor league writer. Or, to lapse into the phrase that is her personal favourite, “You’re fucking gone!”

June 1992

C
anadians, your nice neighbours to the north, are not merely pseudo-Americans. We
are
different. While fastidious New York beer drinkers, for instance, will continue to insist on a Molson’s, Labatt’s, or a Moosehead, their modish northern counterparts would much rather be seen nursing a Budweiser or a Miller High Life, now that they are both licensed in Canada.

An even more illuminating example of the difference between us is how we each measure the Russian threat. Americans have become increasingly agitated about missile counts and Soviet incursions into Afghanistan and possibly Central America, but we see that as incidental mischief. Clever diversions. So far as red-blooded Canadians are concerned, the real Russian menace to our manhood comes on ice. It comes in the intimidating shape of their national hockey team.

Try to understand.

Consider, if you will, a hitherto unheard of baseball team coming off the Moscow sandlots to appear in Yankee Stadium, lugging their own equipment,
going on to thrash the World Series winner and both all-star teams, year after year after year, and there you have the Canadian dilemma.

Hockey, after all, is our game.
The
game. In Los Angeles, you have to search through the sports section twice before stumbling on reports of last night’s games, and in New York, hockey’s appeal is largely to hard hats, but in Canada it is something else again. When Conn Smythe ran the Toronto Maple Leaf Gardens, any fan who turned up in the choice seats inappropriately dressed—that is, without jacket and tie—did so at the risk of receiving a hand-delivered note the next morning that threatened to cancel the season tickets. In Montreal, until recently, season tickets were passed on in wills, more highly valued than the family silver.

Until 1972, Canadians were the best hockey players in the world. For once, the major league was right here, in Montreal and Toronto. We walked tall. Then the Russians came. Playing fast, stylish hockey, the sort of game we grew up with,
actually carrying the puck over the blue line,
their short and long passes equally crisp, they have humiliated various NHL combinations in five series since 1972. Given a shot at it, they would likely abscond with the Stanley Cup as well. Our Holy Grail, our manhood, an exhibit in the Kremlin.

Worse news. Three of the leading fifteen scorers in the NHL last season were foreigners—two defectors from Czechoslovakia and a Finn. Players from Sweden are everywhere in the league. The Swedes, paid on both sides during the Second World War, are still intent on keeping the peace at any price. They
throw up a lot of snow, avoiding both the corners and the front of the net, where sticks and elbows tend to fly in the thick traffic. But the Czechs are magnificent. Tiger Williams, of the Vancouver Canucks, isn’t pleased with the new situation. “We got commies, we got Swedes, we got Indians. I’m the only white people we got.”

In recent years, when panhandlers still accepted change, Coke was a pause that refreshed, acid rain had not yet begun to fall, and the Canadians still ruled the rinks, there were two great Montreal teams. The greatest, certainly, was the Canadiens club that won the Stanley Club for the fifth consecutive year in 1959–60: Jean Beliveau, Dickie Moore, Bernie “Boom Boom” Geoffrion, Henri Richard and an aging Maurice “Rocket” Richard up front, Doug Harvey minding the blue line, and Jacques Plante in the nets.

The second great Canadiens team, led by Guy Lafleur, Jacques Lemaire, Guy Lapointe, Yvan Cournoyer, Serge Savard, and Larry Robinson, won its fourth Stanley Cup in a row in 1979. The greedy Canadiens also took the cup in 1970–71, the season the club was joined by a young goalie out of Cornell, Ken Dryden, who made a spectacular debut in the nets against the Boston Bruins, a far from inconsiderable club led by Phil Esposito and the greatest player of our time, Bobby Orr.

Dryden was the Most Valuable Player in the 1971 playoffs and went on to star on the second great Canadiens team. Now he has written a thoughtful, fascinating memoir of his years in hockey,
The Game.
Dryden is especially good in evoking the sounds and
smells of the dressing room. “When you like someone,” he writes,

From the beginning, Dryden was an incongruous figure on the Canadiens team. Intelligent, articulate, a law school graduate. A man with options. Traditionally, our hockey players were without
such possibilities. They came off the farm or out of northern mining towns, rawboned boys with angry red boils on the backs of their necks and no front teeth to call their own. In the old days of the six-team NHL, the players earned so little that they had to work during the summer months. But then, as Dryden observes, came expansion, fat TV contracts, handsomely rewarded players armed with lawyers, tax advisers, agents, and investment consultants.

Even so, until recently, when they began to be drafted out of college hockey, the players remained a largely ill educated bunch, hockey the only thing they knew. Celebrated as heroes in Canada, certainly, but still taken for ruffians in many American cities, only slightly more refined than roller derby players. The sport, as promoted on American TV or portrayed in that funny Paul Newman film
Slapshot,
emphasized the brawls, not the graceful play that raised you out of your seat: Bobby Orr on an end-to-end rush. Guy Lafleur, seemingly emerging out of a daydream, to take a clearing pass from Larry Robinson and literally fly in on the opposition goal.

Out for a quick buck following expansion, new club owners tried to sell the game in the United States on the promise of violence, even hooliganism. They gave us the Broad Street Bullies (the Philadelphia Flyers). It is this misunderstanding of the game, a perception of hockey players as louts, that may explain the largest fault in Ken Dryden’s book. A tendency to overcompensate. A showy determination to establish that he is no pug but commendably literate, something of an intellectual,
perfectly capable of quoting Brecht here, Naipaul there, and Yeats somewhere else. In the end, however, Dryden gives away the game. He lets in a soft goal. Describing a breakfast scene at home, he writes, “I drink my orange juice and coffee and read the paper. I start with the front page.” But, in truth, every dues-paying intellectual
I
know begins with the sports section. The blessed box scores.

Other times Dryden is almost too painfully self-aware, over-earnest, unnecessarily defensive about his high salary and celebrity. Still, he has written a very special hockey book, possibly the best I have ever read. Certainly his affectionate yet realistic portrait of the players is unrivalled in hockey writing. His notion of Guy Lafleur as one of the last players to be weaned on freewheeling, frozen-river hockey, rather than a confined indoor rink, is first-rate. Hockey, Dryden writes, has left the river and will never return. “The river is less a physical space than an
attitude,
a metaphor for unstructured, unorganized time alone. And if the game no longer needs the place, it needs the attitude. It is the rare player like Lafleur who reminds us.”

The Game,
incidentally, is also enriched by a rare appreciation of what it meant to be an English-speaking Toronto-born player on the Canadiens, a French-Canadian institution. Or, just possibly, once a French-Canadian institution.

In a telling passage, Dryden recalls the emotions that stirred in him as he sat in the Canadiens’ dressing room and contemplated the legendary bilingual inscription on the wall:

From Maurice Richard, through Jean Beliveau, to Guy Lafleur, there had been glory, there was continuity, but today, with Lafleur sadly past his prime, there is nobody to take up the torch. The Montreal Canadiens—once the proudest dynasty in sports, now in sharp decline—are not, as tradition surely demanded, now looking for a marginal Québécois skater for renewal. No sir. They are looking to an aging commie—Vladislav Tretiak, goalie for the Red Army—whom they devoutly hope to sign following the 1984 Olympic Games in Sarajevo.