The Boys of Summer (38 page)

“The bean balls,” I said. “Did Jack get the worst you saw?”

“I guess so,” Reese said, slowly. “Yes, sure, I would guess so. You know eventually they have had to have black people in baseball, but just thinking about the things that happened, I don’t know
any
other ball player who could have done what he did.

“To be able to hit with everybody yelling at him. He had to block all that out, block out everything but this ball that is
coming in at a hundred miles an hour and he’s got a split second to make up his mind if it’s in or out or up or down or coming at his head, a split second to swing. To do what he did has got to be the most tremendous thing I’ve ever seen in sports.”

He rose and broke out a bottle of Scotch. “Okay?” he said. “Or am I still bad copy?”

“Excellent for a man with a poor memory.”

He seemed settled now. The ulcers were healed. He looked contented. Mark Reese came home from school. Mark was twelve, very serious, very polite. “Could you and the gentleman throw some forward passes to me?” he asked.

“Soon as we finish the drink, Mark.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll meet you out front.”

“How’s your arm?” Reese said.

“Chicken.”

“Don’t worry about that,” he said solemnly.

We walked to the front lawn. Mark began running what he called a post pattern, starting straight and curling toward a sycamore tree that symbolized a goal post.

Pee Wee threw flat hard passes to Mark’s fingertips at the base of the sycamore. To throw the same distance, I had to loft the ball. The first throw brought down a few leaves. So did the second. After my third pass through the sycamore to Mark, Pee Wee looked at me and made a little grin.

“Hey,” he said, “you got something against my tree?” I kept the next throws lower. Settled at fifty, the captain is the captain yet.

The wine has soured. There are not going to be any more hurrahs for Carl Furillo, and those that he remembers, if he truly remembers any, are walled from him by harsher, newer memories. His career ended in anger, lawsuits, frustration. He speaks of one prominent baseball official as “that prick.” Another is “a lying bastard.” One of his lawyers “ended up buddies with the guy I paid him five thousand bucks to sue.”

When I found Carl Furillo, he was a laborer, installing Otis Elevator doors in one tower of the World Trade Center, rising bright, massive, inhuman, at the foot of Manhattan Island. We sat in a basement shack, beneath incalculable tons of metal and cement, and talked across ham sandwiches at lunch. Furillo seemed to enjoy being interviewed. He wanted to hear about some of his teammates, Carl Erskine and Preacher Roe. But mostly he wanted to spit rage. He believes that he has been cheated. The Dodgers released him while he was injured. He
fought back with litigation. “You can’t beat them bastards,” he says. “I won. I got my money. Then all of a sudden I was blacklisted. Nobody wanted me to coach, to pinch-hit, not even in the minors. You seen me. Could I play ball?”

Carl Anthony Furillo was pure ball player. In his prime he stood six feet tall and weighed 190 pounds and there was a fluidity to his frame you seldom see, among such sinews. His black hair was thick, and tightly curled. His face was strong and smooth. He had the look of a young indomitable centurion. I can imagine Reese running a Chevrolet dealership and Andy Pafko coaching high school football and Duke Snider operating a dude ranch in Nevada. But I cannot imagine Carl Furillo in his prime as anything other than a ball player. Right field in Brooklyn was his destiny.

He was a solitary, private man, but not unhappy. He had stopped school at the eighth grade, and on a team of facile, verbal athletes, he felt self-conscious. He thought that he and his wife, a Pennsylvania Dutch girl named Fern, were treated as outsiders. His locker stood diagonally across from the tumult of Reese, Robinson and Snider. “Where I dress,” he said, “is where I am. They don’t want me in the middle of things.”

“Does that bother you?”

“Nah. I ain’t got the mouth for that crap”—he said, nodding at the others—“if you know what I mean.”

He played with dedication and he played in pain and he was awesome in his strength and singleness. People came early just to watch Furillo unlimber his arm. The throws whined homeward, hurtled off a bounce and exploded against Roy Campanella’s glove—pom, pom, pom, pom—knee-high fast balls thrown from three hundred feet. Throws climaxed his most remarkable plays. With a man on first, someone stroked a hard, climbing line drive. It was going to hit the wall, then carom at one of five angles. Furillo glanced up and ran to a spot. The drive cracked into cement and bounced into his hands. He whirled and loosed
a throw. The base runner had to stop at third. The batter had to settle for a single. The crowd gasped at the throw, and then Dodger fans, appreciating how Furillo had read the right-field wall, began to clap, not wildly but rather with respect. Throughout the grandstands men said to one another, “He’s a master.”

Off the field, Furillo sized up people slowly, then made intuitive, unshakable decisions. He hated Leo Durocher. He disliked Jackie Robinson. He respected Campanella. He admired Dick Young. For reasons I never knew, he accepted me. He spoke with honesty rather than discretion and trusted you to keep him out of trouble. Once in a while, when something he said fired controversy, he stood by his remark. “Maybe I shouldn’ta said it, but I did.” He was a man of uncomplicated virtues.

He was proud of the way he had learned to hit good righthanded pitching and of the way he played the wall, but his deepest pride was in his arm. After Willie Mays followed a remarkable catch by whirling and throwing out Billy Cox at home, Furillo said, “I’d like to see him do that again.”

“Well,” I said, “he did it once.”

“I’d like to see him do it again, know what I mean?” Furillo said.

“He can’t throw with you,” I said, and Furillo nodded.

He seemed enduring as granite in Ebbets Field. It shocked me to see him playing in Los Angeles. Without the old wall, he had lost his native backdrop. He ranged an Antony without the Capitoline, a gladiator in a cardboard coliseum.

I had not kept close track of Furillo when
Newsweek
magazine dispatched me in 1959 to Los Angeles, where the Dodgers and White Sox thrashed through a World Series. In a crowded press row, I found myself beside the Hollywood columnist for the
Herald Tribune,
who had been ordered to cover the Dodger clubhouse and complained periodically, “I don’t know what I’m doing here. I haven’t seen any baseball since I was thirteen, and I never liked it.”

Furillo was no longer starting, but that day he pinch-hit a single with the bases loaded. The ball scooted up the middle, hopping narrowly over the shortstop’s glove. It was not an old-time Furillo hit, but it won the game. (And the Dodgers went on and won the Series.) Some ninety thousand people cheered, and I told the columnist, “If you think that’s something, you should have seen the homer Furillo hit off Allie Reynolds.”

The columnist frowned. Near dusk I saw him alone in the press row, crumpled yellow paper scattered about his typewriter. He seemed near tears. “I can’t write
anything,"he
said. “I don’t know these people, so I thought I’d write down quotes and look at their backs and get the numbers and check the program later and see who it was who’d said what. But”—terror touched his face—“they take off their
clothes
in the dressing room. They weren’t wearing shirts. Who is the black-haired, handsome guy who talks in short sentences?”

That is how I came to write three sports stories for an infirm
Herald Tribune
under the by-line of a gossip columnist. It was fun trying my hand again and the columnist provided ob-bligatos of Hollywood chatter, plus door-to-door transportation in the Mercedes-Benz he said had been given to him by Lauren Bacall. But among the shine of walnut dashboards, the glitter of pool parties, I thought, what a hard way for stolid Carl to finish: pinch-hitting in a strange town and being interviewed by people who were surprised to discover that a baseball was stitched with red yarn.

That next spring the Dodgers fired Furillo. Newspapers told a fragmented story of lawsuits, and Furillo faded. Episodic publicity greeted his reappearance as part owner of a delicatessen in Queens, but then he sold his interest and no one seemed to know where he had moved. Several ball clubs offered me addresses, but Furillo no longer lived at any. The telephone company had no record of him in New York City. Someone said he had gone south. Someone said he was living out west. Someone
else was certain he had remained in Queens, under another name. I looked for months and mailed half a dozen letters, but I had all but given up when the telephone rang at 9:30 of a Friday morning and a large voice boomed my name.

“Who’s this?”

“Carl Furillo.”

“Where in the world are you?”

“Downtown. The family’s back where I come from, but I’m working in the city during the week.”

“Nobody knows that.”

“You want to be bothered a hundred times a week? But I got your letters and I been thinking and it’s okay. But look, when you come down, do me one favor. Put it down right. I ain’t greedy. I ain’t nuts. I only wanted what I had coming. I read my fucking contract so many times I got that part memorized by heart.” Then he recited the lines that precede this chapter.

By the time Furillo called, winter had come. One tower of the World Trade Center had been topped and sheathed. It stood 1,350 feet, the tallest building on earth, an aluminum hulk against the sky. The other tower still showed girders. Wind was slamming across the Hudson, blowing bits of debris from unfinished floors. Four thousand men had been working for two years, and the sprawling site had acquired the scarred desolation that comes with construction or with aerial bombardment. The sun gleamed chilly silver. It was 11 degrees and getting colder.

A broad stairway led below grade to a cement floor that was wet and patched with ice. Enough daylight entered the vast basement so that wall signs were clear.
“TO HELL WITH GOODELL.” “VOTE BUCKLEY.” “VOTE CONSERVATIVE.”
This was hard-hat country.

“Otis is over there,” someone said, pointing toward a
clutch of unpainted wood cabins. “Furillo? The ball player? He dresses in that one.”

Inside, a workman standing under a bare bulb said Furillo would be down in a minute. “See that paper bag on that bench? You
know
he’s gonna be here. That’s his lunch.”

The workman’s name was Chester; Chester Yanoodi. “Carl stays with me out on the island,” Chester said. “He’s moved his family back to Pennsylvania. He’s in good shape. Real good.” Chester was a compact man, with leathery skin and eyeglasses. “I’ve played some ball myself. On the Grumman Aircraft softball team. I could hit a few.”

Furillo entered. “Ho,” he called for “hello.” Then, “Cold mother out there, huh?” He wore baggy brown pants and layers of clothing. His hair was still black, but he looked heavier. He peeled off a windbreaker and walked in front of an electric heater, beating his arms and blowing on his hands. “Ho,” he said again. Then, “Hey, what do you think of the building? It’s something, huh? I’m still learning about elevator doors, but I’m not bad. Do I look fatter? I go around 220. Preacher called me one time, and when I told him, he said he was ready to wrestle. Him, that skinny guy, Preacher weighs 223. How do you like that?”

According to a spokesman for the Port of New York Authority, each tower of the World Trade Center requires a thousand elevator doors. “What do you do, Carl,” I said, “when all the doors are in and the job is through?”

“Then I’m through.”

“Meaning?”

“Back to Pennsylvania. Hunt. Fish. You remember my boy, Butch? He’s gonna be a trooper. We’ll be all right where we came from. I like to hunt and fish.”

“And clam,” Chester Yanoodi said. “He’s a helluva clam-digger.”

“I’m bitter about baseball,” Furillo said.

“He could break some necks,” Yanoodi said.

“Lousy bastards,” Furillo said.

He sat on a bench and opened a sandwich and offered me half. Chester handed me a Thermos cup full of coffee. Three other workmen ate silently along the opposite wall, under another naked bulb. Furillo was one of them in the work clothes, but an interview reminded them that he was set apart, too. They knew it. They sat respectful. Furillo began to tell what had happened.

He never won the batting championship again after 1953, but he had six more good years. In 1955 he hit 26 homers and batted .314. In 1958, when the Dodgers sank to seventh at Los Angeles, he was still the solid man, with a .290 average and 18 homers. By then he was fighting pain. Under the beating of fifteen thousand innings and five thousand sprints to first base, his legs began to cramp. He had to miss days and later weeks. Professionalism and toughness drove him, but in 1959, the year of the World Series ground single, he played in the outfield only twenty-five times.

During the first week of the following season, Furillo was running out a ground ball, hurrying across first base, when his left foot found a soft spot on the floor of the Los Angeles Coliseum. Something tore in the calf. Pain crippled him.

Buzzy Bavasi wanted change. The Dodgers of 1959 were ribbed by Brooklyn veterans. Nineteen-sixty was a time to turn over personnel. A team must change constantly if it is to win. The calf injury convinced Bavasi that Furillo’s glories were history. He summoned Furillo to his office at the Statler Hilton Hotel and asked, “What do you think of Frank Howard, Carl?”

“I don’t think he hits the curve good.”

“But he has promise.”

“You don’t hit the curve, you don’t belong here.”

“How’s your leg?”

“Coming along, but slow.”

“That Howard’s gonna be something,” Bavasi said.

Bavasi was bearing a message down Byzantine ways. He was suggesting that Frank Howard had arrived, and that Furillo, like Carl Erskine, should make way gracefully to the judgment of years. Retire. Then, perhaps, the Dodgers would find him a job.

Fighting for his career and the last days of his youth, Furillo beat off that conclusion. Three days later, as the Dodgers prepared to fly to San Francisco, an official telephoned and said, “Carl, don’t bother to pack.” Furillo decided that Bavasi was giving him more time to rest his leg. But after the series Bavasi himself called and said, “I’m sorry to have to inform you that you’ve been given an unconditional release.”

Furillo cursed and hung up. Then he studied his contract. He drove through thirty-two arid paragraphs until he found the clause he wanted. He was hurt, unable to play, and the Dodgers had released him. It didn’t matter how slick Bavasi was or how much money O’Malley had. They
couldn’t
release him when he was hurt. He took out a pencil and began to calculate.

His salary for 1960 was to be $33,000. He had drawn $12,000. That meant the Dodgers were welshing on $21,000. “You know, Fern,” he said, “I think I’m gonna do something. I got an idea.”

Within an hour reporters came unannounced to the house he rented in Long Beach. A Dodger official had tipped them to the story. “What do you think about being released?” one sportswriter said.

“I don’t like it.”

“Are you hurt bad?”

“I can’t play, and that means they can’t release me.” Furillo explained the official contract succinctly.

“What are you going to do?”

“You asked me so I got to tell you. I’m gonna talk to two guys I know.”

“What two guys?”

“You asked me so I got to tell you. Two guys who’re lawyers.”