Street Games

Time soils the heroes of our youth. When we were 16, Thomas Wolfe's passion shivered us. Today, he often sounds like an intemperate blowhard. The late John Dos Passos marched for Sacco and Vanzetti; in sour old age, he wrote for National Review. Was F. D. R. really the valiant knight we saw waving to a crowd one rainy October day on Eastern Parkway? And did not Al Smith, whom we rooted for against Hoover (aged seven, I tearfully defended Al against my cousin's slander that he was "a stinkin' drunken bum"), become a reactionary crank?

Luckily for our illusions, there is one breed of boyhood idol whose glory never tarnishes. No exposés, no reassessments by smart-aleck historians or peckish critics can sully their memory. They are, of course, the athletes of our youth, forever brave, forever agile, strong, elegant. Here are a few of my personal immortals:

Football: Sid Luckman, red-faced, chunky, fading into the end zone at Baker Field on a hot September afternoon. The Army line rushes him, the Columbia defense wilts--frail premeds and prelaw students. Sid wriggles loose, cocks the mighty right arm, pumps....

Baseball: Pete Reiser, gallant and doomed center fielder of the Brooklyn Dodgers, rising high against the treacherous center-field wall of Ebbets Field, cracking bones, bruising flesh. He soars upward, a ballet of the undefeated, a man whom only the gods can crush.

Basketball: A City College of New York basketball team of the late Thirties--Fliegel, Katz, Paris--playing the haughty blond Californians from Stanford at Madison Square Garden. Five short Jewish boys, dazzling the crowd with passes, feints, strategy, but knowing (as we all did) that they must lose. Final score: Stanford, 45; CCNY, 42.

Punchball: Jos Dratel and Stanley Budesa, the greatest punchball players of their time, each 14 years old, taking the field--jogging lightly on sneakered feet--against the fearsome Rens, self-proclaimed champions of Brownsville, average age: 16!

You will find those last two names in no record book, no sports encyclopedia. But they live indelibly in my memories of Depression years in Brooklyn. Like Willie Mays and Joe DiMaggio, Dratel and Budesa were the aristocrats of their sport. Moreover, it is my conviction that our corner of the city, a small wedge between Ocean Hill-Brownsville and Crown Heights, played the toughest, smartest punchball ever seen. As Baltimore is to lacrosse, so was Prospect Place to punchball.

It was a game of stark simplicity, yet subtle, demanding, explosive. For many years, I have heard men who grew up in New York at the time I did, the Thirties, speak reverently (continued on page 198)Street Games(continued from page 194) of stickball, as if it were the supreme street game. Perhaps elsewhere--the Bronx, Flatbush, Queens. But in Brownsville it was played only occasionally, and with not much fervor, a time-wasting game of no real merit.

What punchball and stickball did have in common was the Spalding Hi-Bouncer. I doubt that any single ten-cent item, before or since, has given so many boys so much pleasure for so little cost. Pink when new, a reddish-gray after a million bouncings on dirty pavements and against buildings, it was a hollow rubber affair, slightly smaller than a tennis ball. But what versatility it possessed! It could be squeezed, sliced, cut, spun, smacked hard, punched, thrown, flicked, made to bob, hop, curve and reverse direction. Like the eggs of some savage sea bird, fresh new Spaldings always nested in a cardboard box in the fly-specked window of Lieberman's candy store. Locked in their spherical perfection were a thousand games, a thousand days of wild sport.

It was a superbly adaptable ball. At least three versions of handball were played with it. In the insanely marked, lopsided, urinous schoolyard of Public School 144, we played "regulation" handball against a high wall, smashing "killers" at the juncture of wall and pavement and screaming "Hindu!" (presumably for "Hinder!") when we were blocked.

Chinese handball, sometimes called Chinky handball, was played by several boys, each guarding an adjacent square of sidewalk, against a wall. The ball was babied on one bounce from box to box, against the wall and into the opponent's square. It was a relaxing and mild game and the ball was rarely struck hard. Placements and tactics were valued above strength. It was one of the few games I could play well.

A third handball variant was boxball, in which two opponents faced each other, each standing at the rear of a square of sidewalk, the line between the squares serving as the divider. The ball was bandied back and forth, struck only with the palm of the hand. The cut, the slice, reverse English, were crucial in this game. An expert boxball player could put such a wicked slice on the Hi-Bouncer as to make it jump erratically back over the dividing line.

A digression: My own children, raised among suburban trees and running brooks, know nothing of these games. Yet, some years ago, I found them playing a game called four square on our blacktop street. It was clearly derived from boxball. Each child manned a chalked square and tapped a large, colored rubber ball back and forth, using placements and baby shots and, by apparent accord, not attempting hard kills. A degenerate form of our game, it lacked finesse, but they enjoyed it immensely. Was some primordial urge sending them back to the streets?

In those lean years, we improvised. One game led to another. Tiring of boxball, players could keep their positions at the back of their square of grimy sidewalk, place a penny on the mid-line and start a new--and nameless--game. It consisted of bouncing the Spalding against the coin, attempting to push it over the opponent's rear line. Good players could spend hours at it.

Stoopball had several versions. There was a basic tame game--often played by little squirts and girls. Players took turns throwing the Spalding against a flight of stairs, or stoop (from the Dutch stoep, a closed porch with steps). Scoring varied, but I seem to recall ten points for an ordinary catch, 20--or was it 50?--for a ball that struck the point of a step and bounced back to the thrower in a high, swift arc.

The more violent version of the game was not played against a stoop but against a first-floor window ledge or any projection from a handy building. It was a team game, three or four men to a side. The "batter" ran up to the projection and hurled the ball against it full force, so that it rebounded into the gutter (in New York, streets were and may still be, called gutters)--on a fly, on a line or on the ground. Defensive players, arrayed in the street and on the opposite sidewalk, had to make the put-out. No bases were run. Hits were awarded thus: one bounce, a single; two, a double; and so on. Scoring was low because fielders were extremely agile. Many of these games ended in ties, after dragging on for hours. For some reason, stoopball on Prospect Place was a night game.

I've already categorized stickball as a minor game. It was, at least in my domain, but it had some interesting mutations, one of which was known as catcher flyer up. Years later, I deduced that the game's actual name was catch a fly, you're up, because that was the point of the game. There were no teams and no score was kept. The batter played against the field. Hitting fungoes with a broomstick shorn of its sweeping end, the batter was allowed to belt flies, grounders, line drives. The other contestants, stationing themselves haphazardly, earned their turn at bat by catching the Hi-Bouncer on the fly or, if it were a grounder, rolling it in to the horizontal broomstick placed on the ground. If the ball struck the stick and the batter failed to catch it as it popped into the air, the fielder came to bat. I enjoyed the game because it was not fiercely competitive; there was a gentleman's agreement that all players, no matter how inept, be allowed a chance to bat.

Catcher flyer up could also be played with a regulation bat and a softball or "indoor" baseball. As the block's "rich" boy (my father was an impecunious doctor), I often brought the "indoor" to the madman's diamond we used in back of P. S. 144. It was an idiot's notion of a baseball field: crazily truncated, shortened by stockadelike fences, harder than adamant. Negro boys, dark avengers, would stand outside the fence, curse us and steal the ball when it was hit over. Once, the intrepid Stanley Budesa pursued four of them and singlehandedly, by force of personality and a display of guts that stunned them, retrieved my new ball.

Regulation baseball was played even less often. It required equipment we never seemed to have--enough gloves, a good hard ball--and a trip to Lincoln Terrace Park. We preferred the tree-shaded privacy of Prospect Place and the crystalline perfection of punchball. Once, we went to the park for a baseball game and discovered that none of us was qualified to play catcher. Naturally, Budesa volunteered. I see him as clearly as I did that June day--a skinny blond boy with a polite manner, squatting behind home plate and pounding the ragged first-baseman's mitt he is using, wearing neither mask nor chest protector nor shin guards, squinting behind gold-rimmed eyeglasses. We lost, but Stanley threw out two men trying to steal and put the tag on a fat galoot trying to score on a long fly. More than a great athlete, Stanley had style and grace.

Football was also a minor sport, although when the air was crisp (amazing how sweet the slum air was then!) and the leaves on the streets' poplars and maples blazed red and gold, we filled the sky with my own bloated, misshapen pigskin or a sock stuffed with rags. Two genuine games and one ur-game derived from football. One was the familiar two-hand touch, the sport later popularized by the Kennedys. Another was the more basic throwing association, with no blocking and the passer always given a chance to get off his heave. The ritualistic affair was "saloojee"--the origin of the word mystifies me utterly--and it was played by seizing a victim's ball, or cap, or book, and tossing it about over his outraged head and waving arms. It required anticipation, speed and sometimes rage to get the stolen item back. Fistfights often resulted from a round of saloojee.

The games of which I have written grew out of standard American sports--baseball, football. But there were others that were sui generis, city freaks, nurtured in the dust and stink of Brooklyn. What is one to make of a clangorous business called kickety can? It must have borne some relationship to soccer, but we never played soccer or even knew about it. Opposing teams kicked a tin can across the street--trying to cross each (continued on page 277)Street Games(continued from page 198) other's goal. It was a maddeningly noisy game and infuriated adults, notably my ill-tempered father. As he lay on his deathbed, 18 years ago, a gang of screaming kids ravaged the night with kickety can. I suspect he was too deep in Demerol to have been annoyed.

One game that did not utilize a ball or a stick, or any artifact, was ring-a-levio. The term has since been popularized by night-club comics. Like saloojee, its no-menclatural origin defies analysis. It was played over a wide area of Brooklyn--I learned this from an urban anthropologist--and apparently elsewhere in the United States. Chet Huntley tells me that in his Montana boyhood, he played a similar game of mass pursuit and escape. A gentleman from Waycross, Georgia, wrote me, after I described a ring-a-levio game in a novel, and said he had played an identical game in the rural South.

Actually, it was nothing more than group hide-and-go-seek ("hinegoseek"), in which two teams alternated as pursuers and escapees. There was a good deal of ranging over back-yard fences, empty lots, deserted stores and hallways. It was a rambling, chaotic business, with no true winners or losers, and I have since concluded that it was less a game than a tribal ritual. The appeal of the game was the group sense it nurtured, the chilling pleasure of the haunting cry of "Ring-a-levio!" (like "View halloo!") echoing across schoolyard and junk yard, the thrill of hiding, entrapment, escape, chase. It was not a proper sport but a formalized dance, as unfathomable but as satisfying as the bloodless war games of New Guinea head-hunters.

Another nonball game was Johnny-on-the-pony. It was played by two teams and one neutral boy, called the pillow. The pillow was usually a fat, amiable fellow, whose job it was to brace his back against a wall. The first defensive player rammed his head into the pillow's abdomen, bending over at the waist, as if about to be sodomized. The next man jammed his head into the first player's behind and wrapped his arms around his thighs, and so on, presenting a solid line of bowed heads, backs and rear ends. The offensive players, gathered across the street, took running starts and vaulted on top of their opponents. The trick was to apply maximum pressure at a weak point, all the jumpers attempting to land with force where a head joined a buttocks, using combined weight in order to break the chain. The pillow then led the ritual chanting: "Johnny-on-the-pony, Johnny-on-the-pony, Johnny-on-the-pony, one-two-three, all off!"

Both teams would then hit the sidewalk in a tangle of arms, legs and behinds, wallowing in the rich dirty smell of sidewalk. There would be much punching, mauling and goosing, and often we would break wind. The game probably had some cryptohomosexual significance (witness Mailer's argument that football's T formation is a buggerer's dream), but in our innocence, that aspect eluded us.

If crude pastimes such as Johnny-on-the-pony represented the nadir of street games, punchball was the unquestioned aristocrat. It was the truest test of skill, speed and coordination, the court tennis of the ghetto. I doubt that it is played anymore; it required a long stretch of street free of automobiles. In those bleak times, my father's black Buick--standard for doctors--was the only car on the block. Today, crumbling slum that Brownsville is, the streets are full of purple Pontiacs and chartreuse Chevys.

The punchball field was laid out between manhole covers, known as sewers. The word could refer both to the actual manhole cover and to the distance between two covers. Recently, I watched a newly appointed Catholic bishop being interviewed on TV and heard him tell a reporter that as a boy, he could "hit two sewers." The clergyman endeared himself to me, but the young Mod journalist looked at him with a bemused eye.

The sewer nearest the corner was home plate. The next sewer was second base. First and third bases were marked off halfway between them with chalked squares adjacent to the curbs to form the classic baseball diamond. A team consisted of six players. The first baseman and the third baseman were stationed directly to the rear of the chalked squares. A center--the key man--played in front of second base. There was a single outfielder. Inside an imaginary foul line, behind first and third, were a right sidewalk and a left sidewalk. The rules derived from baseball--three outs to an inning, a caught fly was out, a grounder required a play at first. There was no stealing, no pitcher or catcher, but runners could be forced or doubled off. If a play had to be made at home, the first or third baseman scurried to the sewer for the throw. Daring defensive teams often moved a player to home in a tight situation, leaving first or third unguarded.

The absence of a pitcher gave the "batter" a tremendous advantage and demanded fielding of the highest order. Therein resided the enormous challenge of the game. The batter started at home plate, bouncing the Spalding a few times to get the feel of it, often rubbing it sweatily to give it English. The defense crouched low, hands on knees. Then the batter advanced, dribbling the ball a few times. About halfway to first base, he spun gracefully to the right (if he were a right-handed batter), tossed the ball into the air a few inches and struck it. The fist was used for distance, the palm and fingers for placement. The ball could be hit long and high or lined into the sidewalks, to rattle around garbage cans, or placed neatly over a fielder's head, or smashed on the ground, a blur of pink lightning. One must bear in mind that by the time the ball was struck, the runner, under a full head of steam, was almost to first base. (I am told that in some neighborhoods, batters were restrained by a "baby line" over which they could not run while hitting. On Prospect Place, there was no such impediment, the batter restricted only by an unspoken accord to go no farther than halfway.)

As the ball flew, or skidded, or bounced into the field, the defense had only split seconds to catch it and make a play. I doubt that any baseball ever traveled as fast. Considering the abbreviated distances, I still find it incredible that defensive stars such as Jos Dratel, our center, and Stanley Budesa, our outfielder, made the plays they did.

Jos was captain of the Prospect Place Pirates. The fiercest competitor I have ever known, he was not too big nor did he give the appearance of great strength. But his chunky, well-knit body was a mass of springs and tensile metal and his ruddy face, with its commanding brown eyes, had the look of a man who detested losing and losers. He guarded the center of the diamond with dazzling speed--sliding, falling, scooping up grounders, spearing liners with one hand, making impossible plays, tossing the Spalding from flat on his back or over his head or with a whiplike sidearm delivery.

Budesa was of Polish-Austrian ancestry, always soft-spoken and courteous, ever sensitive to other people's feelings. We knew there was something different about Stanley: While the rest of us rooted for the Brooklyn Dodgers, he was a Cincinnati Reds fan. In the deep, lonely gutter of the outfield, he was a solitary, distant hero, a reassuring presence.

These two were the core of the Pirates' undefeated punchball team, six 14-year-olds who had destroyed the opposition in Brownsville and East New York in a series of heated angry games, played for a half dollar a man. In their last few contests, the Pirates were required to spot inferior teams such as the Uhlans and the Doughboys five runs in the first inning, just to get opponents. Like Joe Louis in his prime, they had run out of adversaries. At this point, the Rens entered the picture. They were lumbering 16-year-olds, muscular, foulmouthed monsters, and they promised to "mopilize" those fresh kids in blue-and-gold jackets. As official scorekeeper, I shivered when I learned that the game had been booked. It was a monumental mismatch--little Tommy Loughran against the ogre Primo Camera.

On a blistering July day, the crowds assembled on Prospect Place, packing stoops, windows, curbstones. A local boxing hero (was it Willie Suss, classy, crowd-pleasing Brownsville lightweight? Or was it veteran Billy Rykoff, former welterweight contender?) was engaged as umpire and holder of the six dollars. There was a crackling in the sultry air, a palpable tension.

From the start, the Pirates stunned the crowd and the humiliated Rens with their defensive feats. There had never been a center like Jos Dratel. Never had we seen such a brilliant performance. He leaped, he slid on the hot bubbly asphalt, he made unbelievable catches, breath-taking stops, last-minute throws. At one point, he lunged sideways, suspended parallel to the street for seconds, it seemed, like a Bolshoi dancer, to grab a wicked line smash with one hand.

Budesa--B'dees, as he was affectionately known--was no less spectacular in the outfield. Balls hit over Jos's curly head were his. If they bounced, he stopped them short. Anything on the fly was a certain out. Cunningly, he moved about, anticipating the Rens' batters' styles. He would challenge them by moving in, wait until the batters were well into their runup, outguess them by quickly moving back.

Characteristically, the Rens had a ringer in their line-up, an 18-year-old football player from Boys' High School, a certain Schmolowitz, a shambling lout with an anteater's face and a thick blue rubber band holding his lank hair in place. Contestants usually wore knickers open at the ankles, but Schmolowitz sported red-and-black Boys' High basketball shorts.

In a late inning, he came to bat with two men on base and one out The score was tied at one all It had been a game of startling plays, close calls--classic punchball. Now the crowd buzzed: There was a sense that the Pirates' number was up. The mighty Schmolowitz took his awkward run-up--he was not a natural punchball player--and let fly with his fist. I watched the ball soar and I was afraid.

"Jeez." someone behind me muttered, "a t'ree-sewer hit."

And so it appeared. Up, up rose the Spalding in seemingly endless trajectory. Two-sewer men were rare enough--cleanup hitters, heavy sluggers. But three? Through the heated humid air of a Brownsville summer, the ball ascended like an escaping dove. It must have caught an air current in the canyon formed by the opposing rows of tenements. It would rise forever. Three runs would score and the Pirates would be crushed.

But we had forgotten B'dees. He was flying down Prospect Place, his knickers flapping, his towhead bobbing. Did his gold-rimmed specs fly off? On he ran, until he was almost gone from view, dodging a lemon-ice pushcart, a horse-drawn seltzer wagon, not looking back until the last breathless moment, when he turned, stretched out a skinny arm and squeezed the rubbery skin of the Spalding. With a great clangor, he fell amid the garbage cans outside a tenement, bounced up and fired the ball to Jos. A runner was doubled off second base. No one scored. Hysteria overwhelmed us. We cheered and shouted for minutes; we kissed Stanley; we were convinced the Rens were doomed. But the defensive feats of Jos and B'dees had infuriated the bullies. Frustrated, they deliberately began a violent argument in the Pirates' half of the inning. I don't remember what the dispute was about--a close call at first, a tag. Fists flew. A nose was bloodied. Vile curses sullied the air. Jos had to be dragged off the Rens' captain, a 16-year-old hoodlum who had fought in the Golden Gloves. Older men intervened. The pugilist-umpire returned the bets and declared it no contest.

In a way, I was glad. The game unfinished, Budesa's shining catch would be long remembered as part of the deathless legend of Brownsville punch-ball. Who won no longer mattered; an act of individual brilliance and courage would be immortalized.

Such was the golden age of punchball, the king of street games. It is gone, I suppose, forever. But what about the endless potentialities of ordinary marbles? Or the delights of the humble soda-bottle cap? They made excellent checkers, sometimes markers in a complicated game--called skelly in certain quarters--wherein kneeling combatants would try to flick their caps into boxes chalked on the versatile square of soiled sidewalk. Those old Moxie and Nehi caps gave us hours of joy.

And what about tossing baseball cards? Pitching pennies? Running bases? On-and-off-the-ice-dock? Follow-the-leader? Chicken-fights? Red rover? King of the hill? Wolf are-you-ready? Church-on-fire? Take a giant step? Red light?

Once before I die, perhaps, I shall pass a gray city street and, in the cindery twilight, I shall see a teenage boy--in unhooked knickers and ragged, ankle-covering black Keds--bounce a Spalding twice, run forward with elegant grace, pivot to his right and strike the ball with cupped palm or clenched fist. And the ball will streak down the narrow diamond, a rose-gray flash. And the center will lunge to his left, fall, deflect the skidding ball, recover, throw....