So much for nostalgia

Tough as it is to admit, those were the days

Oh my God, they've really done it. They're really freezing Ted Williams, for thawing at a later date, in hopes that someday they'll find the magic elixir that will bring the Splendid Splinter back to life. But as what? A frail 83-year-old or a young Splinter, ready to rip those screaming liners through the Williams Shift? Aren't you supposed to come out of the freezer as you went in? It's all too depressing.

I know this is a football column, and I'll get to it by and by, but a great part of my childhood and adolescence centered around my love of baseball and this great hitter. I met him just once, when I was covering the Little League World Series in 1961, shortly after he had retired. He was involved in some pregame ceremonies in which he stood in the batter's box. A Little League official threw him a pitch and he took a mighty swing and missed. I didn't care about that nonsense. I just wanted to say that at least I got a chance to interview my boyhood idol, so I asked him, "What did he throw you?" and he said, "The most terrific curveball I've ever seen." And that was it.

What I wanted to tell him was that as a boy I used to play something at home called the Ethan Allen Baseball Game. For each player in the majors there was something that looked like a CD disc, only it was divided into a pie chart, with a piece representing everything he did the previous year -- a section for single, double, triple, strikeout, walk, groundout, etc. You fitted the disc onto a spinner, then spun it and whatever area it hit, that was what the player did in his at-bat. And you played an entire game that way. I formed a league and played a whole season with the Ethan Allen spinner.

I kept it pretty honest until it was Williams' turn at bat. Then I cheated for him. If it came up groundout or fly out or something bad, I'd say, "No, I spun it wrong," and it would be a do-over. Until something good happened. Based on that system, Williams hit around .900 in my league (there was a limit to how many do-overs I could get away with). He was the only player afforded that luxury. Not even Joe D. or my favorite Yankee, Tommy Henrich, got that kind of VIP treatment.

I wanted to tell Williams all that, but there were lots of people waiting to talk to him that day and, well, it just wasn't the thing for a grown man to do, that kind of gushing. Anyway, that's the way I felt about Ted Williams. Didn't get along with the press? With the fans? Who cared? He was the greatest, the greatest hitter, the guy with such purity of vision that he absolutely wouldn't swing at a bad ball. That was the part that really got me, the idealism he attached to his performance. And now he's in the deep freeze. It's sad.

NFL training camps will be opening soon. Has there really been an offseason? Has anything happened? Yeah, some linemen and DBs were drafted high along with the usual quarterback or two, and Jeremiah Trotter went to the Redskins to highlight the most boring free agency period I can remember. And pretty soon I'll be doing my camp circuit, standing behind the designated roped-off areas during practice, interviewing people after first clearing it with the p.r. department, reporting to the dining room only after the team personnel has cleared out, all the trappings of modern media coverage, as stale and sterile as a trip to a hospital.

It didn't used to be that way, which is a phrase I try to avoid these days, but sometimes it just can't be helped. In the old days you actually felt welcome in a training camp. You interviewed the players in their rooms, you went out and had a beer with them, you ate your meals with the coaches or players. At practice, I used to like to stand right behind the one-on-one linemen's drills, and some grizzled old coach would shoot me a wink and tell his guys, "Look sharp now, you got the press watching."

Sometimes I felt like a father confessor. I remember sitting in the press room at the Jets' dorm at Hofstra University in 1973, trying to type a story, when John Riggins came in and told me that was it, he was quitting. He was holding out for $150,000 that year; the Jets were offering $75,000, an unheard of sum for them.

"I just wanted you to get your story right," Riggins said. We talked for about an hour and I tried to talk him into staying in camp. It was a weird scene, Riggo in his leather vest with no shirt underneath and his mohawk haircut. Outside a storm was brewing and the wind was whipping up, and the lights were flickering, threatening to cut out at any moment, and we were discussing all this deep, career stuff. When he left, I had the depressing feeling that I'd never see John Riggins again.

I remember the first year the Jets set up camp at Hofstra. We were in Weeb Ewbank's room and John Free, the traveling secretary, burst in and stammered, "Weeb ... Weeb ... the players are downstairs in the girls' rooms."

And Ewbank, who always was about three beats ahead of the rest of the world, looked at him tiredly and said, "John, where would you rather have them, in some honky-tonk 20 miles away, and then racing back on the highway trying to beat the curfew, or right here in their own dorm? They've got to get it somewhere, so they might as well get it here."

It wasn't always wonderful. There was always something up with Joe Namath, always something to keep you at your typewriter and extra hour or two -- or three or four. Bachelors III one year, a holdout the next; it never seemed to go smoothly. During one of these periods, I got a letter from a woman who complained about us jackals of the press who never left Namath alone.

I was working late that night, extra late because of Namath, but I took the time to answer this woman. I wrote her that my wife was eight months pregnant, and didn't she think that I'd rather be home with her than hanging around waiting for the latest report on the Namath front? Didn't she think that I'd rather do a nice feature on a rookie and wrap it up early? Did she think that we really liked having to write all this Namath stuff?

"Yes, you do, you bastards!" she replied.

I always got a kick out of Ken Shipp, the receivers coach, a wry and comical person from Murfreesboro, Tenn. "Mistakes are killing us" was his standard litany. We'd be coming off the buffet line and I'd trip and spill a plate of spaghetti all over myself and I'd hear Kenny murmuring under his breath, "Mistakes are killing us."

His young receivers drove him nuts. "In Soviet Russia they don't have this problem," he'd say. "A guy screws up, and that's it. Candidate for elimination. Up against the wall, one shot in the back of the head, and you don't have to worry anymore." We'd be out at practice and a receiver would drop a ball and Shipp would look over at me, cock his finger like he was pulling the trigger and mouth the words, "Candidate for elimination."

I remember the year that Charley Winner was hired as an assistant on the Jets. He was a little guy but rumored to be a legendary eater. "Charles H. Winner," he used to say. "H is for Hungry." There was talk about matching him against me in an eating contest. It finally did come about, but not in a formal setting, just on one of those nights when they had a really knock-'em-dead training camp meal -- prime rib and Cornish game hen and corn on the cob, and a whole lot of good things. Everyone knew this was it and a little crowd gathered. I matched him plate for plate and I didn't know how much longer I could go on. Finally he let out a sigh and went for the dessert, which I matched, figuring the contest had ended in a tie.

So I got halfway through the dessert when Charley hit the line again and came back with another Cornish hen on his plate. That was it. I was broken. The psychological ploy had worked.

Nowadays? Forget it. You're not a writer anymore, you're a member of the media. Strictly an outsider. Which I guess is necessary, figuring the crush of radio and TV and print people, but the fun has gone. Ain't like it used to be.

Sports Illustrated senior writer Paul Zimmerman covers the NFL beat for the magazine and is a regular contributor to CNNSI.com. To send a question to Dr. Z's Mailbag, click here.

 

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