July 2023

Game: A Sport Literate Anthology

Years in the making (literally), Game: A Sport Literate Anthology, features 25 of our favorite essays from our first 25 years (1995-2020). Arranged alphabetically by sport, Jay Lesandrini leads off with his baseball short, “Waiting on Deck.” Mark Pearson’s wrestling piece, “The Short History of an Ear,” wraps up the collection. Coincidentally, both those essays were published in our “15th Anniversary Issue” in 2010.

In between our lead-off hitter and reflective wrestler, you’ll find the work of Anthony D’Aries, Justina Elias, Lucy Ferriss, Benedict Giamo, Linnie Greene, Jeffrey Hammond, Michael J. Hess, William Huhn, Mark Anthony Jarman, Michael Kula, William Loizeaux, Rachel Luria, Lance Mason, Michael McColly, Allessandra Nolan, Virginia Ottley Craighill, Liz Prato, Cinthia Ritchie, Bill Roorbach, Frank Soos, Robert Wallace, and Mark Wukas. It’s full of several of our “Best Americans,” along with their good humor, occassional heartbreak, and really wonderful writing.

To get some of the best of our best all within a 228 page collection, you can order the book for $24.95, plus $5 for shipping and handling. Pick it up through PayPal below.

Should that link not work, send us a message at billsportliterate@gmail.com and we’ll figure it out. Or go old school, sending a check, made payable to Sport Literate, to our Michigan home base: 1422 Meadow Street; Mount Pleasant, MI 48858. Or go new school and Venmo… @William-Meiners-3.

Five for Five

by Scott Palmieri

Somewhere near the middle of a row in the middle of my eighth-grade homeroom, not far from the end of middle school, I await morning announcements, which begin with the end of the Pledge of Allegiance. I hate every day here. But I can’t wait for this one to start, my last chance to emerge from the endless middle.

Part of me is still in yesterday, our last baseball game of the season, only our third win, when I have five hits, my last a bloop that drops well enough behind the second baseman, far enough from the right fielder. A cheap hit but a clean hit. No other middle schooler in the world is five for five.

We rumble back on the bus, change in the locker room, and I start my walk home, past the blacktop behind the school, between the track and the soccer field, dreaming of my imminent fame. I can already hear the next morning’s words muffling through the stiff tan weave of the speaker, fastened near the classroom clock, the voice of Mrs. Radinsky saying to the world of West Hollow Middle School, “Scott Palmieri had five hits.”

I need this more than ever. I am failing math. And in science, a kid in a Guns N’ Roses t-shirt pokes my back, wanting the answers to our daily quiz. I am only a little better at science than he is. English is better, but I make the dubious choice of writing a book report on Fred DeCordova, longtime producer of the Tonight Show. No other middle schooler in the world has done this. But this will not boost me up the social ladder, nor will the revelation from my elderly teacher, who wears a bright auburn wig, that she also loves Johnny Carson. Social Studies reminds me that my problems will not qualify for its syllabus.

I cross our vacant field to the space I played shortstop all spring. The big diamond, the real diamond, 60 feet and six inches from mound to home, 90 feet from base to base, the long throw from the middle of the infield, a burden I am just strong enough to bear. The song “Cycles” plays through my Walkman headphones because my father raised me not just on baseball but Frank Sinatra. No other middle schooler in the world hears:

Life is like the seasons
After winter comes the spring,
So I’ll keep this smile a while
And see what tomorrow brings.

I soar past the melancholy tenor because, as the song implies, even middle school days can be good, even here, tangled in hormones in the middle of Long Island, where strip malls bracket everything, even the first home of Walt Whitman, who spoke with affection about baseball in its earliest days, his farmhouse not far from my baseball field, which borders a cabbage farm that stretches like rows in a long homeroom. Up two long hilly streets, I turn into my driveway and submerge into my house.

I am neither the oldest nor the youngest of nine children. We are nine, but we are not all baseball. We are Irish-Italian but also a family of adoption. So we are South Korean, and we are Puerto Rican, in the middle of a grand transition. Unlike Whitman, I do not yet celebrate our shared atoms. I am 14 and selfish. I cower and cringe from the gaze of neighbors and the parishioners who gawk at our differences when we enter Mass, always a few minutes late, and shuffle down the middle aisle.

Maybe five hits can help me overcome the clarinet, the choice that doomed me to the cluster between flutes and trumpets, a good distance from the kid in the Megadeth t-shirt who plays electric guitar, his wild hair bouncing atop the bandstand beside the percussionists, who sport feint mustaches and joke about girls and getting to second base. Among the meek woodwinds, I gawk at the lone oboe, puckering my mouth around the splintering reed.

Maybe five hits can ease my black and white yearbook picture: a pale, braces-laden smile, drably parted dark hair, my eyes tired from staying up late to watch Johnny Carson, all squared alongside the rococo 1980s ambitions of hair spray. Or protect me from the likes of Rocco Scarpoli, who once volleyed my snarky comment with his large hand, shoving my head into a cafeteria table. I promptly rose and stared in his direction, and then promptly sat back down, when a friend from elementary school, who still cared enough, shook his head and winced as if to say, “He will kill you, man.”

On the baseball field, everyone can like me, even our chain-smoking pitcher, whose name I can’t remember and whose photo I don’t find in the yearbook, who laughs at my snarky comments because he hates middle school, too. He survives by doing the wrong things while I do the opposite. When our third baseman, Michael Gipp, yells out in disgust, “C’mon guys!” after I make an error, frustrated at our series of errors amidst a series of losses, the smoker tells Gipp to go fuck himself, flashing a smile at me.

But now it’s all up to Mr. Reiser, our hapless manager, who made up for his lack of coaching with a wealth of apathy. Though no matter how bad it got, no matter how limited the instruction, the special education teacher smiled and called out our names with each at-bat, sitting flat footed on the long, low bench behind the chain-link fence, his arms crossed in his short sleeve button-down and blue jeans. For us, his meager stipend was earned with one job: handing Mrs. Radinsky the highlights, when names and athletic feats, though we had few, soared through every room and hallway across three grades.

The announcements begin. The spring production of Grease will be this weekend. Sandy will be played by the angelic Jessica Pepe. The spring dance tickets are available, too. I will attend neither. I will rent Mel Brooks films from Mega Movies, near the Walt Whitman Shopping Mall, where on the walls, fronting J.C. Penny’s and Buster Brown Shoes, are imprinted lines from “Song of Myself.”

I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the begin-
ning and the end,
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end

Since my mother raised me on poetry, maybe my five hits can make me believe that “there will never be any more perfection than there is now.” Maybe I can salvage myself from the sinking shyness that stopped me from spinning the bottle, that dropped me from birthday party lists, that made me drift lonesome through the jangled locker spaces of the crowded halls.

Mrs. Radinsky’s sports recap begins. Don’t just say my name in a list among others. Tell them all I had five hits. Please, Mrs. Radinsky. Please, Mr. Reiser.

Then Mrs. Radinsky says it. She says it better than I ever could have hoped.

“Scott Palmieri went five for five.” She lands on each number. Five for Five. She gives me my own sentence, not a mere mention in the middle. Everyone knows that yesterday, I was extraordinary. In another room, Jessica Pepe must wonder who I am. Heads turn in my direction. Eyebrows rise, mouths open.

But Mrs. Radinsky must go on. The heads turn back. The announcements end as has middle school baseball. For the rest of the day, no one cares about five for five. Math class does not. The same for the Guns N’ Roses kid expecting the right answers and the one sporting Megadeth, who jams by himself in the band room, before class starts, creating, what must be for him, something beautiful, with no chance of Mrs. Radinsky telling the world.

I will get an A on the book report, walk home with Sinatra, and, by the next September, attend a high school where no one knows me, a new start, like Whitman, who left his Long Island hometown. Baseball will help send me to college, where I will study English, cycles of leaving home and returning to my family, whom I will rightly find extraordinary.

Tonight, my wife, a school nurse, tells me that today she found a girl sitting in a middle school hallway, back pressed against the wall, her face in her hands, sobbing.

“Why won’t anyone be nice to me? No matter how hard I try?”

I wish I could give the child my five hits and then 500 more, let her have my morning announcement, tell her that these words have been for her, though the truth is that this was already written and dedicated to my chain-smoking pitcher, whom I’d like to find again, finally thank for being kind.

Scott Palmieri is a professor of English at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island. His writing has been published in Sport Literate, Aethlon, Hobart, The Leaflet, The Alembic, and The Result Is What You See Today: Poems About Running. He played baseball at Providence College and continues his love of the sport through writing, coaching Little League, and playing, as long as his legs will allow, in a senior men’s league. He lives in Wakefield, Rhode Island, with his wife and three children, his biggest fans.

Concrete Charlie and The Golden Boy

by Hal Ackerman

The crash sounded like a train wreck. Cheers caught in the throats of 63,000 fans. Frank Gifford who had just caught a pass, lay flat on his back, motionless. Chuck Bednarik, the Eagles linebacker who had laid the hit on him, pulsed his closed fist skyward in triumph. Fans who were there and millions who saw the iconic photograph mistook the gesture for savage glee. Gifford would later defend it as a perfectly clean tackle, and Bednarik’s explanation of the gesture was not about the damage he’d inflicted but elation that his team had clinched the game and the division championship.

I had turned 18 on that November afternoon of 1960. My dad and I were seated in a VIP section among the players’ wives, courtesy of Joseph Sheehan, a sportswriter for the New York Times and a client of my dad’s. The New York Football Giants played their home games back then at Yankee Stadium. As diehard Brooklyn Dodger fans, even three years after their desertion to some city on the west coast, we had never set foot (or backside) in any other ballpark than Ebbets Field. Certainly not the home of the despised New York Yankees. So the Bronx was foreign territory.

Our drive from suburban Long Island took longer than we’d expected. All the parking lots close to the stadium were filled. We drove around the unfamiliar streets, circling further from the gates. My father was 46 and had already suffered two heart attacks: warning shots across the bow. He could not walk far. We pulled up to a lot that had a thick iron chain pulled across the entrance. The guy in charge was maybe 19, lean, Valvoline hair slicked back, wearing a blue work shirt with a pack of Camels in one pocket, a wad of bills rolled in the other. He waved his arms across his chest. “Sorry bub,” he said. “All filled.”

It was funny hearing my father called “bub.” He was not a “bub” kind of guy. A CPA. Mild mannered, prematurely grey. Pleated trousers and dress shirts even on weekends. He rolled down his window and leaned out to talk to the guy. I guessed he was going to slip the guy a five spot. Instead, in a real quiet voice so I wouldn’t hear, he said, “I have a weak heart.”

I heard the shame and apology in his voice but all I felt was angry. I hated his weakness. I didn’t want us to get in because of pity. The guy unlatched the chain and we left the car. I walked deliberately faster than he could on the way to the stadium, then pretended not to realize I’d gotten way ahead of him and made a big ceremony of slowing down for him. It was an unexpectedly warm day, in the low fifties. I don’t want to see his distress. I don’t want to inherit his faulty manufacture. It was not until I was nearly 60, when a urologist who had just read the results of my prostate biopsy, leaned across his desk and said to me, “Well. Mister Ackerman, you’ve got a good bit a of cancer there,” that I understood the terror my father woke up to every day, knowing that the rope suspending the ten ton safe that dangles over every one of us from the day we’re born had been snapped and the safe was plummeting.

Philly won the game 17-10. The sun had gone down, and the temperature had dropped by late afternoon. My father looked tired. I took the keys from him and told him to wait out of the wind while I went for the car. I felt like a World War II scout behind enemy lines. I felt my heartbeat skipping and feared that his malady had found me. I breathed easier when I found the lot. I had never driven his car except once when he was in the hospital and I’d snuck it out for a ride around our neighborhood. Traffic was brutal. The streets were unfamiliar. Trucks and taxis with grown up men driving them blasted their horns at me as I made my uncertain way back. What if I never found him? With relief I turned onto the street in the right direction. I stayed where I was and opened the passenger side door for him. “Get in, bub.” He gave me a look that said, “Don’t be a wise guy,” but he got in and let me drive.

My back found a space in the indentation worn by his back. I followed the signs in the gathering dusk and made it onto the Throgs Neck Bridge. The steady thrum over the mesh roadway was hypnotic. His eyes fluttered and he drifted to sleep, like I used to do in the back seat, to the familiar secure murmur of adults talking. I put the radio on softly to the classical station. I kept the car at a steady speed and changed lanes very slowly so not to wake him.

The third attack got him. He was dead two years later. Bednarik lived to age 90. “Concrete Charlie” was the last man to play full games both ways — offense and defense. Gifford sat out the rest of 1960 and all of ’61, then played five solid seasons, did Monday Night Football, married Kathy Lee, and died at 85. Their names would remain linked in folklore like Ralph Branca and Bobby Thompson, Ali and Frazier, Magic and Bird. Me? I lived to remember it all. The crash, the stadium falling into stunned silence, the ride home with the Alfred Deller Consort performing a Bach Cantata, and a perfect moment earlier in that game when 265-pound Jim Katcavage (huge for that time) smeared the Eagles quarterback for a loss, and his hundred pound wife leapt out of her seat and shouted at the top of her voice, KILL HIM, KAT!”

Hal Ackerman’s short fiction has appeared in New Millennium, The Pinch, Southeast Review, The Idaho Review, and elsewhere. “Sweet Day,” read by the late Robert Forster is available at Harper Collins. “The Dancer Horse” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and is available on Audible, read by Adrian Pasdar. “Bob Dylan and Me” appears in Visiting Bob, among 100 poets writing about Dylan. He has published two “Soft boiled” murder mysteries in a detective series about an aging counter-culture P.I His One-Man play, Testosterone: How Prostate Cancer Made a Man of Me (renamed Prick) won the William Saroyan Award for Drama and was named Best Play at the 2012 New York Solo Festival. The 15th anniversary edition of his book, Write Screenplays That Sell…The Ackerman Way is now available.