I am not now, nor have I ever been, fond of the game of soccer. Part
of the reason is probably attributable to my age and the fact that
when I was growing up along the southern shore of New Jersey a half
century ago, the sport was virtually unknown to Americans, except to
those of foreign birth. And even though my father was
foreign-born-he was a dandified but dour custom tailor from a
Calabrian village in southern Italy who became a United States
citizen in the mid-1920s-his references to me about soccer were
associated with his boyhood conflicts over the game, and his desire
to play it in the afternoons with his school friends in an Italian
courtyard instead of merely watching it being played as he sat
sewing at the rear window of the nearby shop to which he was
apprenticed; yet, as he often reminded me, he knew even then that
these young male performers (including his less dutiful brothers and
cousins) were wasting their time and their future lives as they
kicked the ball back and forth when they should have been learning a
worthy craft and anticipating the high cost of a ticket to immigrant
prosperity in America! But no, he continued in his tireless way of
warning me, they idled away their afternoons playing soccer in the
courtyard as they would later play it behind the barbed wire of the
Allied prisoner of war camp in North Africa to which they were sent
(they who were not killed or crippled in combat) following their
surrender in 1942 as infantrymen in Mussolini’s losing army.
Occasionally they sent letters to my father describing their
confinement; and one day near the end of World War II he put aside
the mail and told me in a tone of voice that I prefer to believe was
more sad than sarcastic, “They’re still playing soccer!”
The World Cup soccer finale between the women of China and the
United States, held on July 10, 1999, in Pasadena, California,
before 90,185 spectators in the Rose Bowl (the largest turnout for
any women’s sporting contest in history), was scheduled to be
televised to nearly 200 million people around the world. The live
telecast that would begin on this Saturday afternoon in California
at 12:30 would be seen in New York at 3:30 p.m. and in China at 4:30
a.m. on Sunday. I had not planned to watch the match. On this
particular Saturday in New York I had already made arrangements for
midday doubles in Central Park with a few old pals who shared my
faulty recollections on how well we once played tennis.
Before leaving for Central Park I thought I’d tune in to the
baseball game that started at 1:15, featuring the New York Mets and
my cherished Yankees. Irrespective of the weary, though at times
wavering, counsel of my leisure-deprived and now deceased father,
the Yankees had captured my heart and enslaved me forever as a fan
back in February 1944 when, prompted by wartime gas rationing and
its limiting effect on travel, the team shifted its traditional
spring training site from Saint Petersburg, Florida, to a less warm
but more centralized, if rickety, rust-railed ballpark near the
Atlantic City airport, within truancy range of my school. From then
on, through war and peace and extending through the careers of Joe
DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle to the turn-of-the-century stardom of
such newcomers as the shortstop Derek Jeter and the relief pitcher
Mariano Rivera, I have reveled in the New York Yankees’ triumphs and
lamented their losses, and on this July Saturday in 1999, I was
counting on them to divert me from several weeks of weak hitting at
my typewriter.
I needed to relax, to put aside my book for a while, I decided; and
I readily accepted my wife’s suggestion, expressed days earlier,
that we spend this weekend quietly in New York. Our two daughters
and their boyfriends would be driving down to the Jersey shore to
make use of our summer home, which we had bought near my parents’
place thirty years ago, following the birth of our second daughter;
on Saturday evening my vigorous ninety-two-year-old widowed mother
was looking forward to taking her granddaughters and their
boyfriends to dine with her at the Taj Mahal casino on the Atlantic
City boardwalk, where she liked to have coffee and dessert in the
lounge while feeding the slot machines.
During the previous month my lovely wife and I had celebrated our
fortieth wedding anniversary, and I hope I will not be perceived as
unromantic if I suggest that this lengthy relationship has succeeded
in part because we have regularly lived and worked apart-I as a
researching writer of nonfiction who is often on the road, and she
as an editor and publisher who through the years has carefully
avoided affiliating herself with firms to which I am contractually
connected. But when we are together under the same roof, sharing
what I shall take the liberty of calling a harmonious and happy
coexistence that began in the mid-1950s with a courtship kindled in
a cold-water flat in Greenwich Village and then moved uptown and
expanded with children in a brownstone still owned and occupied by
the two of us (two spry senior citizens determined not to die on a
cruise ship), I must admit that I have frequently taken advantage of
my wife’s domestic presence as a literary professional, seeking her
opinion not only on what I am thinking of writing but also on what I
have written; and while her responses occasionally differ from those
expressed later by my acknowledged editor, I consider myself more
blessed than burdened when I have varying views to choose from,
finding this far preferable to the lack of editorial access that
many of my writer friends often complain about. But to writers who
bemoan their lives of neglect and loneliness, let me say this: When
one’s own work is not going well, having a wife who is an editor can
be even more demoralizing, particularly during those at-home
weekends and nights when she is avidly reading other people’s words
while reclining on our marital bed under a crinkling spread of
manuscript pages that lie atop our designer duvet or between the
sheets, which in due time she will shake out in order to reclaim the
pages and stack them neatly on her bedside table before turning out
the lights and possibly dreaming of when the pages will be
transformed into a beautifully bound, critically acclaimed book.
In any event, on this weekend when we decided (she decided) to
remain in New York, and while she was upstairs editing the chapters
of a manuscript we had slept with on Friday night, I was downstairs
watching the Yankee-Mets game (the Yankees took a quick 2-0 lead on
Paul O’Neill’s first-inning homer, following Bernie Williams’s
single). Between innings I was thinking ahead to my tennis match and
reminding myself that I must toss the ball higher when serving and
seize every opportunity to get to the net.
I had been introduced to tennis by my gym teacher during my junior
year in high school, and even though our school did not then field a
tennis team, I played the game as often as I could during lunchtime
recess because I could play it better than the ungainly classmates
whom I selected as opponents and who also served under me as staff
members on the student newspaper. That I never achieved distinction
while competing on a varsity level in a major sport (football,
basketball, baseball, or track) did not upset me because our
school’s teams were mediocre in these sports. Besides which, as the
players’ chronicler and potential critic (in addition to working on
the school paper I wrote about sports as well as classroom
activities in my extracurricular role as scholastic correspondent
for my hometown weekly and the Atlantic City daily), I was suddenly
experiencing the dubious eminence of being a journalist, of having
my callow character and identity boosted, if not enhanced, by my
bylined articles and the stamp-size photo of myself that appeared
above my school-page column in the town weekly, to say nothing of
the many privileges that were now mine to select, such as to travel
to out-of-town games on the team bus in a reserved seat behind the
coach, or to catch a ride later in a chrome-embellished Buick coup
driven by the athletic director’s pretty wife.
As ineffectual as the players usually were, fumbling the football
constantly, striking out habitually, and missing most of their foul
shots, I never humiliated them in print. I invariably found ways to
describe delicately each team defeat, each individual inadequacy. I
seemed to possess in my writing a precocious flare for rhetoric and
circumlocution long before I could accurately spell either word. My
approach to journalism was strongly influenced throughout my high
school years by a florid novelist named Frank Yerby, a Georgia-born
black man who later settled in Spain and wrote prolifically about
bejeweled and crinoline-skirted women of such erotic excess that,
were it not for Yerby’s illusory prose style, which somehow
obfuscated what to me was breathtakingly obscene, his books would
have been censored throughout the United States, and I would have
been denied the opportunity to request each and every one of them
sheepishly from the proprietress of our town library, and
furthermore would not then have tried to emulate Yerby’s palliative
way with words in my attempts to cloak and cover up the misdeeds and
deficiencies of our school’s athletes in my newspaper articles.
While my evasive and roundabout reportage might be ascribed to my
desire to maintain friendly relations with the athletes and
encourage their continuing participation in interviews, I believe
that practical matters had far less to do with it than did my own
youthful identity with disappointment and the fact that, except for
my skill in writing pieces that softened the harsh reality of the
truth, I could do nothing exceptionally well. The grades I received
from teachers in elementary as well as high school consistently
placed me in the lower half of my class. Next to chemistry and math,
English was my worst subject. In 1949, I was rejected by the two
dozen colleges that I applied to in my native state of New Jersey
and neighboring Pennsylvania and New York. That I was accepted into
the freshman class at the University of Alabama was entirely the
result of my father’s appeals to a magnanimous Birmingham-born
physician who practiced in our town and wore suits superbly designed
and tailored by my father, and by this physician’s own subsequent
petitions on my behalf to his onetime classmate and everlasting
friend then serving as Alabama’s dean of admissions.
My main achievements during my four years on the Alabama campus were
being appointed sports editor of the college weekly and the
popularity I gained through my authorship of a column called “Sports
Gay-zing,” which, often blending humor with solicitousness and a
veiled viewpoint, made the best of perhaps some of the worst
displays of athleticism in the school’s proud history. Even the
Alabama football team, long accustomed to justifying its national
reputation as a perennial top-ten powerhouse, suffered when I was a
student through many days sadder than any since the Civil War. While
gridiron glory would be restored after 1958 with the arrival of the
now legendary coach Paul “Bear” Bryant, the football schedule during
my time was more often than not the cause of a statewide weekend
wake; and the coach of the team, a New Englander named Harold “Red”
Drew, was routinely burned in effigy on Saturday nights in the
center of the campus by raucous crowds of fraternity men and their
girlfriends from sororities in which the pledges had spent the
afternoon sewing together sackcloth body-size figures with bug eyes
and fat rouge-smeared faces that were supposed to replicate the
features of Red Drew.
Although Drew never complained about any of this to me or my staff,
I began to feel very sorry for him, and in our sports section I
always tried to put a positive spin on his downward-spiraling
career. In one of my columns I emphasized the valor he had shown
while serving his country as a naval officer in World War I,
highlighting an occasion on which he had jumped two thousand feet
from a blimp into the Gulf of Mexico. This leap in 1917, when Drew
was an ensign, established him as the first parachute jumper in
naval history, or so I wrote after getting the information from a
yellowed newspaper clipping that was pasted in an old scrapbook lent
to me by the coach’s wife. I also illustrated what I wrote with a
World War I-vintage photograph showing a lean and broad-shouldered
Ensign Drew standing in front of a double-winged navy fighter plane
at a base in the Panama Canal, wearing jodhpurs and knee-high boots
and an officer’s cap decorated with an insignia and bearing a peak
that shaded his eyes from the sun without concealing an understated
smile that I hoped my readers would see as the mark of a modest and
fearless warrior-thinking, naïvely, that this would arouse their
patriotism and extinguish a few of the nighttime torches that they
raised in vilifying Coach Drew and also at times his venerable
assistant, Henry “Hank” Crisp, who specialized in directing
Alabama’s porous front line of defense.
In yet another futile attempt on my part to divert the fans from
such disastrous performances as were customarily presented
throughout such seasons as 1951, for example, when the team lost six
out of eleven games, I dramatized the tragedy partly with words
lifted from Shakespeare:
To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis Drew or Crisp who must suffer the
slings and arrows of outrageous blocking, or to take
arms against football writers, and by opposing end
them?
To win: to lose: to get wrecked, routed, o’erwhelmed
and consumed by prissy Villanova….
Ah, to sleep, for in that sleep of death one dreams
of our opponents who plunged and fled with leather football
under arm, around, under, and over Bama walls….
I left Red Drew to his own fate following my graduation in the
spring of 1953. A year later I read that he had resigned in the wake
of his team’s 4-5-2 record, which might have been considered
outstanding if compared with the accomplishments of his successor,
J. B. “Ears” Whitworth, who in 1955 lost ten games without winning
even one. During these two years I did not return to the campus to
witness any of these engagements, being assigned for my military
service to an armored unit in Kentucky much of the time, and then
stationed with that unit in Germany for part of the time, until my
discharge in the winter of 1955 enabled me to accept a reportorial
job in the sports department of the New York Times.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from A Writer’s Life
by Gay Talese
Copyright © 2006 by Gay Talese.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Knopf
Copyright © 2006
Gay Talese
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-679-41096-1
