Past Their Prime

The Pitcher telephoned me, which should inform you that he was a veteran athlete. Young baseball players do not waste change telephoning writers who are male.

He was coming to town, the pitcher said, and he was going to start a baseball game in Yankee Stadium. There weren't many games left in his arm and I knew that he had (continued on page 274)Past Their Prime(continued from page 133) become afraid of the rest of his life. But mostly his fear was stoic, wreathed in resignation, like the fear of certain brave, old, dying men. Anyway, after the game, he wanted a woman.

The pitcher felt a fulminating lust for a particular tennis star and, when I called her, she agreed to meet him with one proviso. I would have to date someone she called her "new best friend." That was the woman superintendent of the brownstone house where the tennis player cohabited with cats and fantasies.

The building super, I thought. A woman who spends days stacking garbage bags and reaming toilet drains. Dating her would be some enchanted evening. We would all turn into frogs, I thought. But I owed the pitcher certain favors.

"What should I know about the tennis player?" he asked me on the morning of the game. He didn't have to ask about opposing hitters anymore. He knew all their rhythms and their weaknesses. "I mean, gimme a little scouting report on the lady, so I can plan my moves."

"Miss Center Court," I said, "loves to talk dirty, and if you don't press hard, she gets wild and delicious. But she has one peculiarity. She has to be the one to talk dirty first. If the man comes on raunchy, Miss Center Court turns off."

"Got ya," the pitcher said, with a confident nod. He then lost to the Yankees, six to one, in punishing sunlight.

When the ballplayer marched into an East Side bar at 7:30 that night, he was swaggering bravado. Actually, of course, he was covering up. He had always despised losing and he hated losses even more now that so few afternoons of stadium sunlight were left.

Technically, he suffered from an irreversible chronic tendinitis in one shoulder. The condition would be annoying, but not much more than that, for an accountant or an internist or a bond salesman. But this man was a major-league pitcher, and chronic tendinitis meant something more extreme. His major-league arm was all but dead.

He looked at the tennis player and blinked and smiled. She was attractive, not merely for a lady jock. She was large-eyed and lissome and she wet her lips before she spoke. Abruptly, the ballplayer became desperately cheerful.

"Say," he said, dropping into a captain's chair, "you all know about the city boy and the country girl and the martinis? This here country girl had never heard of martinis and the city boy got her to drink a batch." The pitcher's tongue was brisker than his slider. "Finally, the country girl says, 'Them cherries in them maranas gimme heartburn.'

"The city boy, he says, 'You're wrong on all three counts. They're not cherries, they're olives. They're not maranas, they're martinis. And you don't have heartburn, your left tit is in the ashtray.'"

The pretty tennis player made a face like a dried apricot. Then she and my date, the woman superintendent, went to the washroom.

"Dead," I told the pitcher. "The German word is tot. I believe the French say mort. The Yankees knocked you out this afternoon and you just knocked yourself out now."

"It's a good joke," the pitcher said. "I used it at a supermarket opening in Largo, Florida, and they loved it, even the mothers with kids."

"We're north of Largo. Didn't you listen to me? Miss Center Court has to set the tone herself. If she lets guys start the rough talk, it might seem as though she's an easy lay."

"Isn't she?"

"That isn't the question. The question is style."

The women dismissed us civilly after dinner and the pitcher said, the hell with them. He knew a Pan Am stewardess who could do unusual things with a shower nozzle. He called and an answering machine reported that its mistress was in Rome.

"Forget it," I told the big pitcher. "Everybody has nights like this. John Kennedy had nights like this. The dice are cold. Let's go to sleep."

"Stay with me," the pitcher said. We rode down to a Greenwich Village club that was cavernous and loud with bad disco and empty of talent except for a dark-haired teenaged girl from Albany. The pitcher was quite drunk by now. He scribbled love notes and sexual suggestions on cocktail napkins, which a small Spanish waiter delivered. The girl from Albany paid her check and fled in fright.

A serious thought suddenly made the pitcher sober. "I can't pitch big-league ball no more," he said.

"You knew this was going to happen," I said.

His voice was naked. "But now it's happening."

One tear, and only one, rolled down the man's right cheek. "Shee-yit," he said, embarrassed. "Shee-yit."

"Like hell, shee-yit," I said. "You've got something to cry about."

He was 39, hardly old. He was well conditioned and black-haired and every movement he made suggested physical strength. Most would have called him a young man. But because he was an athlete, his time was closing down. He had won premature fame at 22 and now he was paying with a kind of senility at 39.

The adulatory press conferences were ending. He would not again travel as grandly as he had; he would never again earn as much money as he had been making. Already his manner with attractive women had regressed. He was finished, or he thought he was finished. The two often are the same. I thought of Caitlin Thomas' wrenching phrase, created after Dylan's final drink: leftover life to kill.

•

Santayana wrote:

Old Age, on tiptoe, lays her, jeweled hand, Lightly in mine.-- Come, tread a stately measure.

This may have been true for a philosopher, who sought out the stony tranquillity of cloisters, but time rings for athletes with a coarser cadence:

Old age, in nailed boots, wrenches at my limbs, And stomps my groin.

In the usual curve of ascendancy, the American male completes so-called formal education in his 20s and spends the next 15 years mounting a corporate trapeze. If he is good and fortunate and very agile, he will be soaring by 40. More than that, he will proceed in sure and certain hope that even more triumphant years are beckoning.

Athletes follow wholly different patterns. They soar almost with puberty. Life for a great young athlete is different from other children's lives, even as he turns 14. Already he is the best ballplayer of his age for blocks or miles around. He is the young emperor of the sand lot.

With enough toughness, size, nutrition and motivation, the athlete will feel his life expanding into a diadem of delights. He does not have to ask universities to consider his merits and tolerate his college-board scores. A brawl of jock recruiters solicits him. If necessary, they offer him a free year at prep school, finally to master multiplication tables.

Assuming certain basic norms, the athlete has a glorious pick of women. Pretty wives are not an exception around ball clubs; they are characteristic.

It is all a kind of knightly beginning to life, isn't it? Doing high deeds, attended by squires moving from stately courts to demimondes? But most knightly tales conclude with the hero full of youth.

I remember a marvelous quarterback named Ben Larsen who dominated high school football in Brooklyn. His passing was splendid and he ran with a deceptive gliding style. Perhaps 30 colleges offered him scholarships. He chose one in the Big Ten, where the wisdom of football scouts proved finite. Ben was suddenly pressed harder than he had ever been, by athletes of comparable or higher skills. He wilted quickly and never finished college. He was the first of my acquaintances to become an alcoholic.

Larsen's life reached its peak while he was a schoolboy. For many, the climax comes in college or as a young professional. Others (Carl Yastrzemski and Fran Tarkenton) can play well and enthusiastically as they approach 40. Once an eon, a Satchel Paige or a Gordie Howe makes it to 50. Technical literature doesn't yet tell us much. Studying human behavior is still a science of inexactitude. But broadly, and obviously, we're dealing with two elements.

The first is physical. An athlete must be granted a good body, a durable body, and--I hate to be the one to make this point--he'd better take care of it. I don't know whether or not all those careless nights cut short Mickey Mantle's career, but unwillingness to do proper pregame calisthenics and to perform therapeutic drills on all those hung-over mornings sure as hell cut off his legs.

Then there is emotion, world without end. How long can an athlete hold all his passion to be an athlete? How long can he retain all his enthusiasm for repetitive experiences?

One hot afternoon last spring, Johnny Bench, Tom Seaver and I were riding together to make an appearance at a book fair in Atlanta. Bench at 26 was the best catcher baseball has known. Not perhaps; not one of; just the best. Last spring, at 30, he was in decline.

Bench's batting average lounged below his old standard. He was getting hurt frequently. His matchless play, his Johnny Bench-style play, seemed limited to spurts. "You get bored, John?" I asked in the car.

"With what?"

"Catching a baseball game every day."

"Do I?" Bench has a broad, expressive face and he lifted his eyebrows for emphasis. "You know why I envy him?" he said, elbowing Seaver.

"For my intellect," Seaver said. "My grooming and my skills at doing the New York Times crossword puzzle."

"Because he's a fucking pitcher," Bench said. "He doesn't have to work a ball game but one day in four. All that time off from playing ball games. That's why I envy Tommy."

Seaver grew serious and nodded. Both men are intelligent, curious, restless. As they grow older, and recognize that the universe is larger than a diamond, it becomes increasingly difficult to shut out everything else and play a game. It also hurts more. The human body was not designed to play catcher from April to October.

•

It was also not designed to fight for the heavyweight championship at the age of 36.

Last September, I flew to New Orleans to watch Muhammad Ali make a fight he really did not want to fight. He won easily over Leon Spinks, the St. Louis Cypher, but a new sourness invaded Ali's style. "It's murder, how hard he's got to work," said Angelo Dundee, the sagest of Ali's seconds.

The motivated athlete responds to the physical effects of age by conditioning himself more intensively. "That Spinks, he looks like Dracula, but he's only twenty-five," Ali said, in a house he had rented near Lake Pontchartrain. "So I have to make myself twenty-five. I been up every morning, running real long, real early for five months. Five months. I've done the mostest exercises ever, maybe three hundred fifty different kinds, so's I could become the first man ever, in all history, to win back the heavyweight championship twice."

For the first two rounds in the New Orleans Superdome, Ali toyed with a dream of knocking out Spinks. But all the roadwork and the sparring could not bring back the snake-tongue quickness of the hands. Ali missed badly with two hard rights. Then, yielding to reality, he made a perfect analysis of Spinks's style and how to overcome it.

Spinks had no style, really. Move in standing up, move in, move in, punch, lunge. Devoid of style, he still is strong and dangerous. From the third round, Ali simply moved around and about Spinks, flicking punches, holding, sliding, holding, always staying three moves ahead of the St. Louis Cypher. It was a boring and decisive victory and it must've hurt like hell.

Afterward, at a press conference in the Superdome, Ali spoke in the crabbed tones of age. First of all, this huge crowd--70,000, give or take a few thousand--had come to a black promotion. "Wasn't no blond hair or blue eyes doing no promoting," the champion said. That is accurate but only in a lawyerly way. The man who put together Ali-Spinks II (and the marvelous undercard) is Robert Arum, whose hair is black and whose eyes are brown. He is, however, white. Under the Arum umbrella, so to speak, two blacks and two whites, all from Louisiana, were subsidiary promoters. They are now suing each other.

Having stretched truth until it snapped, Ali offered a brief return to his old form. "Was that a thirty-six-year-old man out there, fighting tonight? And not only fighting but dancing? Was that dancing man out there thirty-six?"

"Thassright," chirped a parliament of votaries.

"That Time magazine," Ali said, "that great Time magazine, goes all over the world, they wrote Ali was through. Could Time magazine be wrong ... ?"

Crabby again, he was settling an account he had already closed in the ring, treating a buried story as though it were alive. It was a graceless effort from a man Dundee says now has to work too hard.

Why, then, does Ali drive on past his prime?

Supporting himself and his children and his wife and former wives and his retinue and his properties, Ali said not long ago, costs $60,000 a month, after taxes. His investment income is far short of that. He fights on because he believes he needs the money.

•

Over three recent months, I explored cash and credit, concentration and distraction, professional life and professional death--in short, how the jock grows older--with 31 remarkable athletes. They have worked their trades--baseball, boxing, basketball, football, hockey--from San Diego to New England. One (Fran Tarkenton) was sufficiently sophisticated to evoke Thomas Jefferson. "Doing a variety of things, like Jefferson did, keeps you fresh." Others (Lou Brock, Merlin Olsen, Brooks Robinson) showed positively Viennese instincts for self-analysis. One (Roger Staubach) declined to be quoted because of the nature of this magazine. (Debating morality with someone who makes a living out of the commercialized, televised, knee-shattering violence of the National Football League tempts me, but it will have to wait.)

"Did anyone say that money had nothing to do with why he kept on playing?" asked Fred Biletnikoff. He's been a wide receiver at Oakland for 14 seasons.

"Some said the money wasn't primary."

Biletnikoff drew a breath to prepare his own comment. "You know," he said, "they're full of shit."

Generally, the athletes were honest and direct. Away from cameras, one on one, athletes speak more honestly than entertainers or politicians.

Most shared annoyance at America's blinding obsession with youth. They found subtle prejudice against age in certain executive suites. "In the front office I have to put up with," one 41-year-old baseball player said, "they're always looking for a reason to replace me. Maybe it's because a young guy would cost less, but I think it's not just that. They got a mind-set on the axiom that baseball is a young man's game."

Willie McCovey, the mighty first baseman who reached 41 in January, is discomfited by a particular fan in Chicago. "There's this dude who sits behind the on-deck circle in Wrigley Field," McCovey reported, "and when I get a hit, he doesn't make a sound. But every time I swing and miss, I hear the joker holler, 'You're getting old, McCovey. You're washed up.'"

McCovey shook his head in annoyance. "That's shit," he said. "Doesn't the guy know I missed pitches years ago? Does he think I never made an out until I was thirty-five?"

"He's just needling," I said.

"Well, I say needle with a little intelligence. Judge me by my performance. Forget my age. I try to forget my age myself. Too much thinking about your age can psych you. It can make you press and panic and retire before your time." McCovey believes that is what happened to his friend Willie Mays.

Every geriatric athlete that I talked to maintained an unabated passion for the game. It was a passion to win, to prove certain points, to keep on making money. To those men, sport was no small sliver of the consciousness; it dominated them.

Brooks Robinson, the fine third baseman who played until he was 40, said, "My whole life had been baseball. Passion? It sure was for me. In the eighth grade back in Arkansas, I wrote a whole booklet about how I wanted to be a ballplayer. That never changed. I kept on wanting to be a ballplayer until my reflexes told me it was time to stop. By then I'd played almost as many big-league games as Ty Cobb."

"Didn't age hit you like a rabbit punch?" I asked.

"The first time something was written about my age, I was thirty. 'The aging Brooks Robinson,' the story said. I thought, What do they mean by aging? I'm a young man. And I went out to play harder. When they called me aging at thirty-five, it didn't hit me either way. I knew they were accurate in sports terms. But then, when I was called aging at thirty-nine, the thing became a challenge all over again. It stayed a challenge until I accepted what time can do and got out."

A few old athletes remain absolutely juvenile in their enthusiasms. George Blanda, the quarterback and place kicker, was 48 when he played his last game in the National Football League. "Hell, I didn't retire even then," Blanda said. "They retired me. I enjoyed it. I always enjoyed it. Proving myself week after week. Ego-building week after week. Who wouldn't enjoy all that?

"If you have the right conditioning and you keep the right attitude, the air smells cleaner, the food tastes better and your wife looks like Elke Sommer."

•

Across the past decade, big-time sport has become an explosive growth industry. That's fine for many investors and some of the athletes, but growth industry is no buzz phrase for fun. It suggests hard-knuckled grabs for every dollar anywhere in the country.

Newspaper reporters have concentrated on the new high salaries paid to athletes. It doesn't seem that important an issue to me. Ballplayers are entertainers, television performers. At last, Reggie Jackson and Bill Walton are being paid on the same sort of scale as Farrah Fawcett. That doesn't mean, as some journalists suggest, that the rich athletes will become complacent. (Was there ever a less complacent team than the rich and magnificent New York Yankees?) It does mean that the athletes work longer and harder and so may wear out sooner.

A generation ago, major-league baseball extended only from St. Louis to Boston. The professional hockey season was half the present schedule. Pro football was a secondary sport. The sporting life, the sporting pace was leisurely and more conducive to longevity than today's Sunday-afternoon and Monday-night fever.

I was fortunate enough to begin covering sports before the disappearance of the American train. Going from New York to St. Louis was a 24-hour hegira. You traveled in a private car and you ate in a private diner and a drink was never farther away than a porter's call button. Moving at double-digit speeds, trains gave your body a chance to adjust as you crossed time zones.

"But jet travel now is part of the package," said Lou Brock, a major-league outfielder since 1961 and the man who broke Ty Cobb's record for stolen bases. "Mentally, it doesn't make sense to eliminate or separate different aspects of a ballplayer's life. If you want the cheers and the fame and the money and the victories, you've got to accept the two-A.M. jet rides. They go together."

I first traveled a sports circuit in high excitement. I had never seen the Golden Triangle in Pittsburgh or the lake shore north of Milwaukee, or the drained malarial swamps around Houston, for that matter. Like the young men in the old stories, I ached for travel. Then, very quickly, sports travel--as distinct from a pleasure trip to Cozumel--became a minihell.

You had to be in St. Louis on four simmering July days because the team you covered was playing four games there. Often that was the week when a Chicago blonde called and said, "Please visit." You had to be in Philadelphia when the team was there, or Boston, or Cincinnati. Human nature being what it is, sports travel came down to a matter of always going to the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong companions.

"I don't look at travel like that," said Brock. "Not like that at all. To me, travel is still exciting. When I think of travel, I ask myself, How else can I get to my opponent? Get to where he is and whip him?"

Various athletes play tactical games with time. Phil Esposito, the hockey forward, keeps his weight 12 pounds lower than it was a decade ago. Tony Perez, the first baseman, says that at 36 he is far better at anticipating pitches than he was when younger. If you guess low slider and the pitcher throws a low slider, you stay in business. "You can sometimes beat the younger guys with your head," said Dave Bing, the basketball player, who decided to retire last August, when he was 35. "You figure their weaknesses and you play into them. But in the end. . . ."

Merlin Olsen, the Mighty Mormon who played on the line for the Los Angeles Rams across 15 seasons, believes that athletes who endure are able to anticipate danger. "It's a kind of sense you have," Olsen said. "Don't push yourself harder this time. Don't extend with everything you've got just now. There's danger out there."

I remembered the kindly horses in all those terrible Western movies. The animals always knew that a bridge was out or that a landslide would be gathering its roaring strength or that 29 feet to the left, under a clump of gray-green sage, a sidewinder coiled.

"Good movie stuff, Merlin," I said. "Friends of mine have paid rent bills writing sixth-sense themes. But practically. . . ."

"Practically," Olsen said, "I played in the pits on a pro-football line for a long time: Consider all that tonnage and the carnage. But I, was never seriously hurt."

•

I have before me 27 pages of single-spaced comments from professional athletes, but curiously, or not so curiously, I keep turning back to Lou Brock. "When I think of travel, I ask myself, How else can I get to my opponent? Get to where he is and whip him?"

Major sport is American trauma. Crumpled knees drive halfbacks into early retirement; pitchers' arms go dead; hockey players slammed to the ice twist in convulsion. Before this onslaught, both the body and the psyche tremble.

The complete athlete measures pain against glory, risk against profit. He considers what is left of his body and then, I believe, he subconsciously decides whether or not he wants to go on. In the end, the difference between Carl Yastrzemski, a star at 39, and Mickey Mantle, an assistant batting coach at that age, is that Yaz wanted it more.

A temptation is to conclude with too much certitude on so-called qualitative distinctions among the experiences of various athletes aging into other men's prime time. Is Tony Perez, who grew up in the balmy poverty of Cuba, markedly afraid hard times will come now in the North? He says not. Is Gordie Howe, who still works hockey at the age of 50, clutching to the withered stump of his boyhood? Hell, no, Howe says. His wrists hurt and his legs are gone, but he loves playing pro hockey on the same team as his sons.

This temptation to conclude too much persists. To me it is rather like the saucy little tennis player was to the veteran pitcher. The object looks so damned attainable; then, in a blink of too-bright eyes, it is gone.

My journalistic interviews are not excursions into therapy. You ask. The athlete answers. You press a little. He tries to be honest. You press harder. He thinks of his image. He also tries to be macho. He tries to keep his dignity. You ask some more. You think. And you move on.

So I fight temptations glibly to write about predictable crises, self-flagellation or variable testosterone levels. If I can hear and share a little of the bar of music that is another man, I have my accomplishment.

The best and bravest and most competitive athlete I knew was Jackie Robinson. Breaking the major-league color line in 1947, he played with teammates who called him nigger. Rivals from at least four teams tried to spike him. The best I can say for the press is that it was belligerently neutral.

What Jack did--his genius and his glory--was to make obstacles work for him. Call him nigger and he'd get mad. Mad, he'd crush you. Misquote him out of laziness or malice and he'd take his disgust out on rival pitchers, as though they were the boozy press. Bar him from the dining room of your hotel in Cincinnati at lunch, he'd dominate your ball park in Cincinnati after dinner.

It was a cruel, demanding way to have to live. His career burned out in a decade and his life ended when he was 53. "This man," the Reverend Jesse Jackson intoned from the funeral pulpit, "turned a stumbling block into a steppingstone."

That is the fundamental. Something of what Faulkner meant in his famous speech at Stockholm. It is not sufficient to endure, he said. Man must prevail.

Only a few extraordinary athletes-- Stan Musial and Joe DiMaggio--are able to prevail in retirement. Their glory intact, they move from the ball park to other arenas, still special heroes. Some, like Jack Dempsey and Casey Stengel, even achieve Olympian old age. All these men learned how to transform obstacles into steppingstones.

"Did Robinson know he was dying?" my friend Carl Erskine, once a Dodger pitching star, asked after the funeral.

"I think maybe he did."

"How did he bear up?"

"It was amazing. He was getting blinder and lamer every day, and working harder and harder for decent housing for blacks."

"He was a hero," Erskine said.

"Apart from baseball," I said.

"But don't you think," Erskine said, "that disciplining himself the way he had to, and mastering self-control and commanding a sense of purpose--don't you think the things he had to do to keep making it in baseball taught him how to behave in the last battle?"

Before that moment, I had a distaste for people who saw sports as a metaphor for life. Where I grew up, life was less trivial than a ball game.

"I never thought of that till now," I said, still learning.

"He despised losing and he hated losses even more now that so few afternoons were left."