My brother and I reminisce a lot these days. That’s what’s left for people who have shared a life when they reach their 80s.
We speak our lives to each other, because who else would listen or care? We try to remember who we were so that we can understand how we became who we are. There are lessons embedded in our experiences. We wonder what we passed on to our children, consciously or not.
To us, our lives seem like a diminishing stream carrying nuggets to be deposited in the dark delta that precedes the deep.
Tom has urged me to write a memoir. But I hesitate to launch our experiences into that digital stream, to bob along with billions of selfies destined to be trapped in endless eddies.
Maybe someday, a social historian will find that our experiences flesh out a statistic. But what we really want is to live from generation to generation in campfire stories.
It’s not about being enshrined in a familial hall of fame. I want to know if my life will have had any meaning or value beyond the graveyard stone or memorial urn. Have our communicated experiences altered any lives? Feedback from a few former students tells me maybe so.
The other day, in this whirl of reminiscences, I told Tom, “You know, whenever I reflect back on my best days, they are all crowded in my childhood. That doesn’t say much for the choices I made.”
“Those were your knuckleball days,” he replied.
“Huh?”
“You were lucky. Yours came early and stayed with you for decades. Some of us never have a knuckleball day.”
I think I understood what he was saying.
* * *
The year 1951 bridged my sophomore and junior years in high school. It was to become one of the most pivotal years in my life.
It was the year that my New York Giants came from 13 games behind in August to tie the hated Brooklyn Dodgers for the National League pennant – going on to beat them in a playoff game with a walk-off home run by Bobby Thomson.
It was the year that my baseball idol, Willie Mays, joined the Giants, finally filling the hole in my heart left by the retirement of Hammerin’ Hank Greenberg.
It was the year that I made the varsity baseball team as a pitcher at Salesian High School in New Rochelle, N.Y.
It was the year that I mastered the knuckleball with minimal effort.
* * *
In my generation, Major League Baseball dominated sports in America. College football was bigger than the NFL. The NHL was a winter oddity. And the NBA didn’t even exist.
So all our hopes and dreams were rooted in baseball. Those of us who loved the game could name every player on the major league rosters – 16 teams divided into two leagues.
At the age of 15 I weighed 113 lbs and could not have been more than 5’5” tall – definitely spectator height for the game of baseball. Yet when it came to intramural athletics, the proper term for me in those days was “spunky.”
My coming of age in sports happened in my sophomore year (1950-51), my first year at Salesian. I had no choice. The entire student body (probably 100 in all) was divided into three weight classes, and I was in the small group. We all had to participate in a series of individual sporting events annually on Columbus Day.
My first surprise came in the 100-yard (roughly measured) dash. The fastest kid in the school across all weight classes, Assad Karam, was in my group. I ran the course in 12.5 seconds, beat him and took first. I was utterly surprised at the outcome.
Another event involved catching a football deep in the end zone, something I had never done before. With a one-handed over-the-shoulder grab of a softish football, I came up a winner again.
I also won the running and standing long jumps. This was getting ridiculous.
The hardest was yet to come – the cross-country race. That was a killer, up and down hills and through the woods with no real running path. I emerged on a grassy flat in the lead but missed a turn marker and had to retrace my steps. During that process, I lost the lead position to the lone runner in contact. In an exhausted dash to the finish line, I managed to pass him and win the race.
At day’s end, there was an award ceremony, and I got the gold statuette for being first in my weight division. The following year, though I hadn’t gained any weight, they moved me up a division, and I came in second.
Anyway, these accomplishments on a small stage didn’t mean I was ready for prime time. I played on my class intramural team, where I sucked at basketball, and made some good outfield plays on the softball team.
* * *
Now begins my baseball story.
A few weeks before spring tryouts were to begin in 1951, the varsity catcher, Clemente, asked a few guys to throw to him. When it came my turn, the pop in his glove was audible. The pain in his hand forced a grimace on his tough face.
“Man, where did you learn to throw like that?”
“It’s my first time,” I answered.
“I want you to try out,” he said. “I’ll tell the coach about how hard you throw.”
So they gave me a uniform, and I pitched batting practice for a few weeks. I had a fastball that tailed into righthanded batters and away from lefties. Coach told me to throw only fastballs and not to try curves. But I had a surprise in store for him.
One of my favorite major league pitchers was the knuckleballer Dutch Leonard. I liked how, with the same arm speed as a fastball, the ball would float up to the plate and confound hitters. I developed my own version. The ball would not rotate even once on its way from the mound to the catcher.
Then came the intrasquad games, rookies against the varsity first team. When they posted the players for the last tryout game, my name wasn’t on the list.
I went to the coach and pointed out I had not had an opportunity. He changed the lineups and made me the starter.
In three innings, I struck out six batters, getting out of a bases-loaded jam in the third. No one could make good contact with either of my pitches. The overhand knuckler seemed to hang in front of the batter, never spinning, before suddenly dropping onto the plate and reaching the catcher on a bounce.
I was the runt of the team, but after that performance, coach could not deny me. Yet he relegated me to intrasquad practice games for the whole season. The one time I warmed up to get into the game, the rains came on and I did not.
I only got one comment on my pitching that I can remember. The team’s star, Ralph Berardi, was at bat with the bases loaded in a practice game. I blazed a ball under his hands for a swinging strike. The practice umpire, standing behind the pitcher’s mound, admonished me, “Don’t throw that pitch to him again.” Hell, it worked the last time – but Ralph promptly deposited it into Echo Bay for a grand slam homer.
Maybe I wasn’t coachable. But no one ever explained to me the value of varying pitch speeds and locations to keep a batter off stride. And so my knuckler was wasted by the rent-a-coach who supervised practices and accompanied us to games.
* * *
As the 1952 season rolled around, I suffered an eye injury when some prankster threw sodium into a lavatory sink. It exploded into my face. There was no guarantee that I would have any vision after the wraps came off my eyes a week later in the hospital. My recovery took up the whole spring training schedule. Coach told me, “I won’t cut a senior from the team, but you won’t be getting much playing time. But we do need someone to cover our games for the Standard Star.” For some reason, the chance to get bylined in New Rochelle’s daily paper and the opportunity to get off the boarding school campus seemed irresistible.
It was a significant moment – deciding to move from participant-in-waiting to observer.
The test as to whether I really loved journalism more than baseball came the following year at Brooklyn College. I decided to try out for the track and baseball teams. Stepping on the field, I soon realized I was maybe the smallest player there. A quick calculation determined that this would not be my moment to shine, so I retreated to the sports pages of the campus newspaper.
The lid was finally closed on my sports ambitions a few years later at Columbia Journalism when Time magazine selected me to interview for their sports writing staff. I sought out Penn Kimball, one of the J-school’s highly accomplished and intimidating professors, for advice.
“Once you become a sports writer, you’ll never be able to work in another department,” he admonished. And so, ignoring the possibility of going to the 1960 Olympics in Rome as part of the coverage team, I turned the interview down, fearing it might limit my future possibilities.
Who knew how big sports would eventually become in American business and culture? Never mind that some of our best American writers came out of sports journalism: Grantland Rice, Damon Runyon, Ring Lardner.
Had I not turned away from that baseball tryout in college, could my knuckler have produced a career rivaling that of the greatest knuckleball pitcher of all time, Hoyt Wilhem? He pitched 20 years in the bigs, with a career ERA of 2.52, most wins in relief (124) and election to the Hall of Fame.
Had I not listened to Prof. Kimball, could I have summoned the creativity that propelled Grantland Rice’s classic lead about the Notre Dame backfield demolishing Army in 1924?
Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as Famine, Pestilence, Destruction, and Death. These are only aliases. Their real names are Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden.
* * *
Looking back on some decisions, I would say there were more knucklehead days than knuckleball days in my life.
At first glance, one could see a simple fear of failure in not trying out for the college team or going to the Time interview.
It was more like fear of not being the best, not being unique. Where that came from I don’t know, and I suspect it has played out many times in my life, including my knuckleheaded attitude that kept me from reading certain writers, such as Hemingway, lest their influence impede the development of my own style.
My high school friends may have been aware of my idiosyncratic qualities long before I was. They assigned the following Latin motto to my bio in the high school yearbook: Maximus in minimis.
I translated it as: Greatest in little things – or as translated by others, The very greatest in trifling things.
This did not seem too promising until I found a deeper definition:
The greatest in the littlest. (Notice that maximus is a masculine adjective, not neuter. The full form of this saying comes from Augustine: Deus magnus in magnis, maximus in minimis, "God is great in great things, greatest in the littlest things.")
In other words, whatever fear I had was transmuted into being a “big fish in a small pond.”
Is this the defining theme that runs through my life, or are there more Knuckleball Days lurking in the recesses of my memory?
Let’s see. There was that day in 1971 at the banquet marking the end of the league bowling season in Ramsey, N.J. Distracted by the dessert being served, I barely heard my name being called. “Most improved bowler.” A novice at the start, I remembered the crowd around my lane as I closed in on a 300 game. The 275 was the best of the season. And so my name was memorialized on a long-lost brass belt buckle.
End of story.
POSTCRIPT
I am sitting on my bed in a Carmelite convent in Rome thinking about my knuckleball, which I threw last when living in a Catholic boarding school. It is the symbol of what could have been and never was. I am wondering if I ever achieved my potential in anything.
Where were the adults who when confronted by a boy with a unique talent didn't latch on to it. Where was the Dad with fulsome praise?.
I imagine myself trying out for the Brooklyn a College baseball team, a little guy who could float the ball up to the plate in a way that none of those batters had ever seen. But who was there to encourage me to do that.
My brother and I lived young lives without advice from any competent adult. Every decision I did on my own, not realizing all the possibilities, and often wrong.
So my life has been full of rudderless decisions. Sharp thinking is no substitute for transactional worldly experience.
I found successful moments building out of my failures . You take the road that's open to you.
But I can't help fantasizing that the Detroit Tigers could have used one more good arm to back up Hal Newhouser, another of my early heroes.
As it all winds down I realize I could have wanted more, pursued more - but there was zero behind me, to guide me, helping me find the me that I was meant to be. Sister Florinda was better with the strap than in motivating her charges.
My brother had an incredibly successful career in publishing until the industry deconstructed. And though I reached the top ranks in higher education, time ran out on my dreams.
Most people start reviewing their lives at point zero. I believe we started out in negative territory. Hopefully I’ll find a narrative that organizes some sense in the life I’ve lived.
POSTSCRIPT - 2
The windows in our Moscow kitchen are floor to ceiling and the 6 a.m. sun is full force on my back which, combined with a cup of rich Russian brew, sends warm freshly-oxygenated blood into my thought centers.
About to post this reminiscence, the narrative of my life suddenly expands with new insights . In my life I have found that unorthodox approaches to situations, relationships and challenges have worked best for me and have been interpreted by others as risky behavior.
I may have been the doofus Brooklyn College freshman who openly pointed out Mussolini’s infrastructure efficiencies as a response to his atrocities. But I was also that cocky kid who walked into the Classical Lounge at Brooklyn College, where Steve Weinstein was lord of the chess board and wiped him out with an invented opening that he had never before seen. Of course, I never played him again and coasted on my reputation. The same happened with single ping pong victories over both the New York State Junior Champion and over the US champion.
The biggest feint I pulled off was in getting tenure at Loyola University. I was hired to create the communications major, and after my first year the academic VP lauded my presence on the campus for its “unprecedented” impact. I coasted on that until I later found out that he was not planning to support my tenure application. He actually told me that it was easy to be popular with students but I lacked the respect of my colleagues. My response was to get elected president of the faculty senate and latter out negotiate him as Chair of the Compensation Committee. I also stopped reporting my academic publications on my annual report and they emerged full blown on my tenure application. His weak opposition was easily overridden by the Faculty Tenure Committee.
Ingenuity and unorthodox approaches seem to be the hallmark at every step of my career and personal life. How else at 86 am I waiting for a significant SBA recovery loan after my study abroad business was virtually wiped out?
I see a clear causal relationship between the lack of early guidance, the need to rely on my inexperienced self, the strategy of highly individualistic and unorthodox approaches - all adding up to assertive self confidence and a failure to discern risk.
You know, I’ll take a cozy suburban cape cod, a guiding dad, a loving mom and a fluffy dog any time as precursors to the predictable and ordinary.
Sent from my iPad