Confessions Of A Stoop Ball Champion

My brother's memory no doubt serves him better than mine, but I recall yet another glorious event that in some ways surpasses even my romantic reconstruction of the stoop ball play. This one involves Saul, my best friend during our senior year at high school in The Bronx. Saul was a tackle on our football team. He was a moody, perhaps testy, redhead whose ambition it was to go to the moon. One dismal November evening we were scrimmaging the second team. Saul was on his hands and knees, waiting, in the rapidly fading light, for the second team to come out of its huddle. Pack, a little halfback who became a poet when he grew up, ranged behind the defensive linemen, exhorting them. When he came upon the silent and brooding Saul, he smacked him on the bottom and said, "Come on, Saul, talk it up. Where's your spirit?" The second team left its huddle. The linemen were about to get down when they stopped, dumbfounded. Saul was slowly arising. He turned and confronted Pack. Looking sternly down at him, he said in a loud, distinct and wrathful voice: "Noise is not necessarily a manifestation of spirit."

I have lost track of Saul in recent years. After graduating from college I visited him in Naples, where he lived above the flies. In his effort to reach the moon he had become a naval aviator and was flying admirals about Europe in R4Ds. I subsequently drank with him in bars in Hollywood, and in Baltimore, near the railway station. The last time I saw Saul was in Philadelphia. He was either an intern or a resident at Philadelphia General; now the way to the moon was through space medicine. One summer night I waited for him to get off duty, but he seemed to be awfully busy, and it grew later and later. About midnight I asked a nurse what was keeping him so long. "Dr. Saul refuses to allow his terminal cases to die," she said, with either respect or scorn. I have never been able to make up my mind which it was, undoubtedly because it was both. At any rate, I find that judgment and Saul's declaration on the football field that dreary evening in The Bronx to be of a piece.

Although I regarded myself as a great stoop ball player, I wasn't much good at baseball; in fact, I was lousy. The root of my trouble, I believe, was that I had no faith in my arm. This lack of faith made me concentrate so hard on throwing accurately that I either forgot to let go of the ball or else I released it too early. Throwing became a traumatic experience. Whenever I was fortunate enough to pick up a grounder, the necessity of next throwing the ball somewhere (but to what base, and how many outs were there?) panicked me. As a consequence, I always asked to play catcher, particularly in games where stealing was not allowed.

Last year I felt somewhat heartened when I watched two outfielders, both Los Angeles Angels as it happened, undergo experiences as shattering as mine. In a game against Baltimore, Ken Hunt held on to the ball so long on a mighty throw to the infield that when he finally released it, the ball struck the ground two or three yards in front of him. And, in a game with Washington, Lee Thomas let go of the ball so early in his windup that it fell two or three yards behind him while he looked, bewildered and in vain, after its nonexistent flight. Thomas, incidentally, was called Clang by his teammates; they told me his fingers were made of metal, and "clang" was the sound the ball made when it struck them and bounced off.

In pickup games I was always selected last, and regretfully. I am sure they would have rather made do with eight players. In fact, when they were choosing up sides, I would try to wander off to save either captain the embarrassment of picking me. Whenever I would come to bat, I'd be told to "wait 'em out" or "get a walk, for God's sake." Obedient, but inept, I usually struck out looking. I generally was put in right field, that preteen Siberia. I don't know why it was that there were no powerful left-handed hitters when I was a boy. On occasion, baseball fields were laid out more or less side by side where we played, and if the game I was taking part in was not sufficiently interesting, I would turn around and watch another or pass the time with my neighboring exile, a forlorn and uncoordinated wretch who had been banished to the right field of his game. Once, while gazing raptly at a game in which I was not playing, I heard a great shout at my back. I whirled around apprehensively, expecting to see the fateful descent of a tremendous fly I would never be able to catch in this world. I saw nothing, so returned to the game I was attending as a spectator. In a moment, a ball rolled intriguingly between my legs, as though I were a giant croquet wicket. I stared at it, fascinated. So that was what the yelling had been all about—a ground ball that had, quite literally, become a home run while my back was turned. I didn't laugh when Billy Loes said he lost a grounder in the sun.

Although graceless and unwanted on the playing field, I was, in the security of my room, a great molder, indeed a creator, of men. My brother and I devised games that we played with dice. There was dice baseball and dice football and dice boxing, etc. I made up teams and players for these games, endowed them with names—being careful to include the minority groups—and virile personalities, drew their steely portraits, kept voluminous records and statistics.

I don't suppose you have ever heard of the Gilbertian Goshawks, who once beat Georgia Tech, 33-20. Leon Lubbio, a halfback with toppling waves of blond hair, was their leading ground gainer. I am looking now at the team picture of the El Dorado Demons, a basketball team. The leading scorer was Mike Myers. I was a true believer in alliteration. He is very hairy, for hair was interesting to draw, his eyes are in meaningful shadows, he has outstanding ears and a religious medal hangs about his neck. Mike Myers was the Demons' leading scorer, making 471 points in 36 games, for a 13.1 average. Another one of my basketball teams was the Silver Zephyrs. I find, in their group picture, a business manager named Orovski. I had not forgotten the front office. He wears a snap-on bowtie and a room clerk's mustache. There's the assistant trainer, Canoek—only the players had the luxury of Christian names—and at the bottom of the page I have drawn a nondescript, and apparently huge, dog. The caption reads: "Bruno, mascot."

I don't suppose news of Big Ben Colfax, who weighed well over 300 pounds, has reached you. He knocked out Joe Louis in the sixth round for the heavyweight championship. Here's the Gilbertian Gladiators and their captain, Bill Oriko. Gilbertia is an island anywhere in the South Seas with a fine natural harbor, which is populated almost exclusively by athletes and fighter pilots. I come across Irv Goldberg and Clarence Debonair, who finished one-two in the 1,000-yard run for the Gilbertia AC. We blew that meet, 38-41, to the Thunder AC, one of my brother's clubs. I note, too, that someone called Afialara, whose first name has been lost to history, shared the dice baseball record for most hits in a game—five.

Another way of escaping the perpetual depression of competing with my peer group was to return to nature, or Central Park, where all clumsy boys are equal. We would hunt for crayfish there, finding them beneath stones in a shallow stream that runs under the Rustic Bridge in The Ramble; these names have always seemed to me to be way stations in a baffling religious allegory. We would fish with bread balls for catfish in the 79th Street lake—I hear it is stocked now by the Department of Parks with carp, sunnies and perch—and look for the gray-brown members of a certain family of moths that dwell, almost invisibly, on tree trunks. My brother and I were also bird watchers. This dedication led, years later, to my nearly having a nervous breakdown. One morning, in the woody heart of The Ramble, I became so frustrated by my inability to identify a swarm of warblers in their autumn plumage that I had to go home to bed.

The Central Park reservoir is a fine place to look at ducks when it is almost completely frozen over and as vast, calm and melancholy as a mountain's shadow. The puddle ducks are in the patches of open water near shore, the mergansers farther out, and the gulls stand in a great white crescent on the ice in the center of the reservoir, folding and unfolding their wings. It was on the cinder path that encircles the reservoir that I once endlessly jogged in the curious belief that this would make me a great 440 man. I never finished better than third in that race, but I once trotted past the Duke of Windsor walking with his dogs about the reservoir.