The Splinter and The Lip

After the passing of Muhammad Ali, I began thinking about another departed sports hero, Ted Williams.  ‘The Louisville Lip’ and ‘The Splendid Splinter’ had more in common than a stranglehold on Sports Illustrated covers.

Both were among the greatest in their respective sports at a time when competition was keen.  The heavyweight division was never stronger than it was in Ali’s era.  As formidable as Sonny Liston was, Ali’s TKO and KO wins over ‘The Bear’ remain tainted by allegations of a mafia fix.  With Liston’s personal troubles before and after the Ali fights, it is not hard to make a good argument in that direction.  Yet Ali held the championship twice in the seventies in a time that Joe Frazier and Ken Norton and George Foreman demanded a shot at the title.  Williams prowled the outfield for the Red Sox at a time when the Yankees dominated the headlines and the World Series.  Win or lose, Williams clocked in everyday, took his licks and did his damnedest to win.  I don’t think anyone who has ever read or seen an interview given by Williams would doubt his commitment to the game. 

  Neither Ali nor Williams ever pleaded injury when their efforts didn’t produce the hoped-for outcome, such was their fierce pride.  You would have to be an idiot to think they didn’t occasionally, or often, ply their trade while in pain.

They shared a great pride in their abilities.  When Williams began to decline as a hitter (almost imperceptibly to the layman), he would mutter to himself in batting practice, “I am Ted Fucking Williams and I am the greatest fucking hitter in the game.”  Prior to his bout with Ernie Terrell, Ali's opponent was quoted as saying, “His Mama called him (Cassius) Clay, I’m going to call him Clay.”  Yet in the ring, as Ali turned Terrell’s face into hamburger, Ali taunted, “What’s my name?  What’s my name?”

Each gave up a piece of their athletic prime for the U.S. military.  Williams, because he chose to serve, Ali because he refused.  Williams could have made appearances for the U.S.O. or coached a baseball team comprised of soldiers.  But he wanted to be a pilot and flew missions during the Korean conflict.  Ali refused induction, knowing he also could have been an ‘attraction’ for the Army and entertainment for the troops, though he refused the easiest path as well.  He chose to endure the scorn of the press and much of conservative America, insisting, “Ain’t no Vietnamese ever called me nigger.” 

Both had an up-and-down relationship with the press, Ali having a slightly better experience because his career was longer and his words, incendiary or not, made better copy.  Even if Williams had had his own Howard Cosell, a journalist he could speak expansively to at times and pick on at other occasions, I don’t think Williams would’ve become the icon Ali did.  Williams lacked that gift of gab.

In terms of an exit, Williams got the best of that deal.  On a late September day in 1960, Ted hit a game-winning home run and walked off the field for the last time as a player.  Ali stuck around for years after becoming the champion for a third time, finally leaving the boxing game as a loser in a lopsided decision to a middling heavyweight named Trevor Berbick in the Bahamas in 1982.  Yet Ali had been to the mountaintop three times while Williams never won the World Series for the BoSox.  Would Williams have mortgaged his batting titles and his position in the Baseball Hall of Fame for one World Series ring?  I think he might have.

If there is a specific afterlife for sports heroes, a heavenly arena or stadium where the cigar smoke hangs in the air and the floors are still sticky with beer, that would be where I would like to imagine Ali and Williams meeting.  Would they shake hands and congratulate the other for all that had been accomplished?  I think they would.  They were true to their sport and true to themselves.  Float like a long fly ball, sting like a bee.

At Your Bacon Call

It wasn’t a night that would stand out in most people’s minds when they looked back on their lives.  It might not have been enough to be a highlight of the week.  There wasn’t a big storm, there wasn’t a major news story, no member of the family had been empowered or imperiled. 

It was a normal weeknight evening when Kathy and I greeted our daughter, Lucy, who’d arrived after dinnertime to take a few things from her high school bedroom to her post-college house.  It was only going to be a few minutes of course, but when talk about the new job and updates on the old gossip stoked the conversational flames, it was quickly nine o’clock.  It’s the time of the evening when I typically begin snacking and the monkey on my back was craving bananas.

I asked my daughter, “Are you feeling peckish?”

Lucy replied in kind, in old movie fashion, “I could eat.”

My son was due to quit his work shift thirty minutes later as Lucy shouted, “Somebody better text Dan.”  Kathy quickly grabbed her cell phone and pounded a staccato beat on her keyboard before pulling another dusty box out of Lucy’s closet. 

It was fifty cents worth of eggs, maybe a buck-and-a-half in bacon.  Biscuits in a tube brought the total to three bucks tops.  If you want to factor in the cheese slices and the margarine, hell let’s make it five bucks.  I probably dropped something that the dog ate and I chose to forget it.

Anyway, what I’m saying is, it was just intended as a late night snack.  Seconds of preparation had gone into the menu plan, so it was surprising to me when the back door flew open with splintering force and my son walked in.  Dan, who never met a curfew he did NOT like, a fellow who often bridged directly from the time clock to the buddy’s apartment, was home for a mid-evening visit.  “Mom texted me there was hot breakfast cooking,” he volunteered, an explanation that was sorely needed at the time. 

I had it on the dining room table five minutes later and five minutes after that, you would’ve needed a C.S.I. team to find evidence of it.  We ate too much and we stayed up too late, but I don’t think any of us regretted it.  I felt a peculiar pride in having produced the humble supper that stuck with me into the next day.  I was at my place of employment, changing out of my loafers into my work shoes…

Shoes… 

Shoes equal love…

My mother always had a special bond with her father because of shoes.  As a small child with a rheumatic heart, five year-old Carolyn Johnston wasn’t allowed out of bed.  Most people would have just shook their head sadly when they heard the sickly child wish for an accessory she couldn’t use, but my grandfather didn’t.  He bought his baby girl a pair of shoes.  He bought them with money he didn’t have for a child that couldn’t use them…yet.  My mother, to this day, has a fantastic set of shoes.  It’s not at the Imelda Marcos level, but it should be respected.  There isn’t a member of my family that hasn’t been shoe shopping with her.  You knew she might buy herself a pair, but you knew for sure she was buying you a pair.  Maybe two.

And where shoes equal love for some, it seemed breakfast was my Valentine’s card.  When I was courting Kathy, I would come by on Saturday mornings after an all-night shift, with two Hardee’s fast-food platters.  That obviously worked.  A few years later, I was married to that girl, though still working midnights.  We were, at the latter point, eating cinnamon rolls in our own house with our first-born, watching “The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh”.  When Dan came along, Kathy had attempted chocolate chip pancakes.  By the time he was three, she had mastered them.  There was more than one sleepover that wound up at our house because of a promised flapjack feast.

They didn’t know at the time that we often substituted breakfast food for the usual dinner fare because many of the morning staples were cheaper than the steaks, chops and chicken we might have preferred.  I could make an omelet that looked like it jumped off of a Denny’s menu.  What I couldn’t do was stretch the grocery budget any further.  They didn’t know it then and they don’t care now.

Now breakfast equals love.

Dan graduated from community college this weekend, opting to have the family gathering at The Bomber, a historic diner in downtown Ypsilanti, for the post-ceremony meal.  There were eight of us, unanimously choosing breakfast for our mid-day sustenance.  My rapidly growing boy showed me his scuffed dress shoes and asked if I thought they had any life left in them.

“Better talk to Grandma,” I advised.

Yeah, I know, a pair of shoes lasts a lot longer than a plateful of hash browns.  But you can’t make an omelet out of a penny loafer, either.

Singing Merle Back Home

When I moved into my first college apartment at the tender age of eighteen, neither I, nor my roommates owned any sort of sound system.  We had a transistor radio with a broken antenna to pull in Tiger games from the voice of the Midwest (WJR in Detroit) and a cassette player.  Not a boom box, mind you, with real speakers and perhaps a tweeter or something.  A cassette player, with one tiny, tinny speaker.  You had to flip the cassette to hear side two.  Jim was the guy that was as broke as I was, staying home while our other roommates pursued theatre interests and sorority girls.  I don’t know how many times we flipped that solitary cassette, but I would bet I could still sing every song it played.  I bet Jim could, too.

The other two roommates had decamped within a matter of months, both claiming that they just couldn’t live with people who insisted on them paying their fair share of the bills.  What had been an austerity budget before became a sustenance budget, spending only what we had to to stay alive while shouldering our share of the house as well as the shares of the absent renters.  It meant a lot MORE evenings that consisted of baseball radio broadcasts and hundreds of repetitions of the cassette tape.  There were only two artists...side A was Roger Miller, he of “King of the Road” fame (though that song was NOT on the cassette) and side B was Merle Haggard.

Jim was perhaps six months older than me, we’d graduated together from the same high school.  We’d known each other for years, yet both of us admitted years later that we weren’t sure that we would get along.  We wound up being best of friends, bound together by hard times.  You work with a person, you create a friendship.  You starve with a person, you become brothers.  I’m still humbled, all these years later, that I was selected to be the best man at his wedding.  There are ties that are forged by eating Cost-Cutter Macaroni and Cheese with only butter because the milk is gone.  Shit, we were grateful we still had the butter.

With all respect to Roger Miller, who I loved then and love still, our bond was forged by Merle Haggard, the poet of the common man.  His grasp of hard times and his lyrical hopes of better days to come was a thing to hold on to when you felt that the world was aligned against you.  We were two boys who thought they were two men, together but alone, far from the girls we loved and loath to admit defeat and move home to our parent’s houses.  When Merle sang, “Think I’ll Just Stay Here and Drink”, we did.  When “Misery and Gin” would play, we would both fall silent for two and a half minutes.  I don’t know what he was thinking and I never shared my thoughts.  It sure seemed like Merle knew what we were both thinking. 

By this time, Merle had been consigned (along with Hank Jr, Cash, Jennings, Kristofferson and Nelson) to “Outlaw” Country, meaning that he was too old to be considered marketable in the post-“Urban Cowboy” era.  While they still had a few tricks up their sleeves, separately and together, the Country music we had grown up with was largely vanquished.  The upstart artists called themselves “Young Country”, and while many made the attempt to describe the forefathers’ music as “Classic Country”, the implication was clear…if you ain’t “Young Country” you are “Old Country.”

Merle Haggard was born in a converted boxcar in an oil town not far from Bakersfield.  He lost his father when he was a boy.  He was in and out of jail as a youth, even while “Mama Tried” to raise him better.  He was a guitar-playing inmate in San Quentin when Johnny Cash played a concert there in 1958 and Merle thought he could see a future for himself.  As a boy, he’d hopped on freight trains to go see the country.  He eventually found himself in solitary after getting caught making “spud” (a potato-based intoxicant) talking to the man in the next cell…the soon-to-be-executed “Red-Light Bandit” Caryl Chessman.

Upon his release, Merle dedicated himself to his music.  He could sing, he could yodel like Jimmie Rodgers, and play both the guitar and the fiddle.  By 1970, he was appearing on network television alongside the man who had inspired him on “The Johnny Cash Show”.  Merle was an Okie in spirit but wasn’t from Muskogee, or even Oklahoma.  What the hell, it was a convenient rhyme.  He went on to have a long and storied career, with dozens of gold records and millions of fans.

When Merle died last week, after a long period of being ignored by the Country music establishment, my first thought wasn’t about his family or his legacy.  My first thought was about Jim.  About where we were then and where we are now.  Neither of us finished college and neither of us stayed with the girls we had pined for all those years ago.  Yet today, each of us can claim to have come through the fire, at times with only one voice on a cassette tape telling us that it was possible.  It was a voice that had been there, from a man who wouldn’t deny his past and wasn’t giving up on the future.

When I was a kid, my Mama used to cry every time she heard “If We Make It Through December”, because that was when the U.A.W. lay-offs happened.  But Mom and Dad always made it, just like Merle did.  I was fortunate enough to grow up with both of my parents alive.  Dad would always look skyward when I played the Nelson-Haggard duet, “Reasons to Quit”. 

Like all of us, we want to go out on top.  Merle’s career ended with an album co-written and performed alongside Willie Nelson, followed by a tour with the “Red Headed Stranger.”  The album went to number one on the Country charts the week it was released. The halls they played were jammed. Pneumonia was the ultimate winner, ending the tour early and sending Haggard home for his coda.  He predicted that he would pass on his 79^th birthday and was correct.

With only Loretta and Dolly and Willie alive, the rafters of Country music sag with Merle’s passing.  Yet when only the music remains, the sound of a cassette player in a shitty college apartment is a symphony to the people that lived it.