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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.

OF A MORAL LEGACY
A Review of Kara Goucher’s The Longest Race

by Scott F. Parker

By the time Kara Goucher’s memoir landed on my front porch, the big news had already broken. In The Longest Race, Goucher describes being sexually assaulted by her former coach Alberto Salazar and reveals that it was her accusations that eventually led to Salazar’s lifetime ban from professional coaching. (After his doping suspension is served, he will be eligible to coach high school and college athletes).

If you’ve been following this story for the past several years, this revelation does not come as a total surprise. Goucher and her husband, Adam, also a former member of Salazar’s Oregon Nike Project (NOP), worked with the FBI and the USATF for years at great personal cost to protect the integrity of track and field (such as it is) from Salazar’s amoral and possibly immoral approach to biological tinkering. Their success came when the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency banned Salazar for four years (upheld on appeal) for possession of testosterone, tampering with the doping control process, and for complicity in the administration of a prohibited method. In the course of that investigation, Goucher mentioned two sexual assaults that Salazar committed against her. This accusation sparked an investigation from SafeSport, which eventually implemented Salazar’s lifetime ban (also upheld on appeal).

The Longest Race represents Goucher’s most comprehensive statement on the sagas that have ensnarled her life since she first became involved with Salazar and is a riveting read on those merits alone. But aside from the details of the two monumental scandals, The Longest Race’s success stems equally from its depiction of the human being at the center of them. The self-portrait of Goucher at NOP is of a woman beset by self-doubt and dependence in the face of the powerful, charismatic, and domineering Salazar. One lowpoint is illustrative. Goucher, who as a young child lost her father to a car accident involving a drunk driver, is being driven through Portland’s notoriously twisty West Hills by a drunk Salazar and is too cowered by him and his role in her life to object, despite the profound inner torment her silence causes her. It is such emotional transparency that provides the book with so much feeling. And when Goucher does summon the courage to start speaking out against Salazar’s repeated transgressions, we know what a triumph it is for her.

Goucher finding her voice, despite the pressure and incentives not to, is the real story here. The book’s refrain consists of variations of “I was also fearful of speaking up”; “I worried about saying anything at all”; “Why didn’t I say anything?”; “I felt choked, deafened by my own silence”—a refrain that is ultimately replaced by “I realized, my power wasn’t in my legs. It was in my voice.” One way to understand this transformation is that Goucher was accustomed to subordinating herself to Salazar and might have gone on doing so indefinitely if it were a matter only of her own suffering but that she understood herself to have responsibilities to her sport and her community that compelled her to disrupt the status quo. Which is to say, claiming her voice was a byproduct of Goucher’s pursuit of the Good. Understood this way, Goucher’s heroism is as moral as it is personal—but either way it is heroism.

None of which even touches on the standard tribulations of life as an athlete in the strange world of professional running, all of which are present in Goucher’s story, including the capriciousness of career-sustaining sponsors, the unhealthy incentive structures that promote injury, the role of luck in a career, the prevalence of eating disorders, the joy-sucking pressure to succeed, the industry-standard hardships faced by mothers, and the egregious conduct of Nike, which violated USATF rules to unfairly advantage its athletes and then used its influence (it seems) to ensure that the cheating would not be penalized.

FIt’s a mess of a sport and one that not many elite athletes seem to get out of with their integrity intact. That Goucher has is testament to her judiciousness as well as her courage. She has been sober and circumspect, even kind, in her accusations when she might have been reckless and reactionary. Her example serves not only future runners but anyone who is reluctant to claim their own voice. Goucher may not have wanted to tell this story, but this is the story she has, this is the life she has lived. And it is this—Goucher’s complete self-acceptance, regrets and all—that most impresses me in The Longest Race. I come to this book a great admirer of Goucher and leave it the same. No one represents the sport better.

Scott F. Parker is the author of Run for Your Life: A Manifesto and The Joy of Running qua Running, among other books. His writing has appeared in Runner’s World, Running Times, Tin House, Philosophy Now, the Believer, and other publications. He teaches at Montana State University and is the nonfiction editor for Kelson Books.

On the Run with Scott F. Parker

Running Book Reviews from an SL Veteran

Scott F. Parker has been a quadruple threat for our small press publication for several years now, contributing poetry, essays, literary journalism, even a video essay. Now, with running book reviews, he’s offering some critical insight into writings on a sport that is close to his own beating heart and blistering feet. Check out the following from “On the Run With Scott Parker.”

 

 

 

TENDA WEMA NENDO ZAKO^[1]

A review of Sarah Gearhart’s We Share the Sun

by Scott F. Parker

^[1] Do what is right and go your way.

As long as I’ve been writing about running, I have been extolling the virtues of running for the sake of running. If you’ve come across my writing before, you’ve likely seen me discouraging the focus on results, miles, training plans, and watches; you’ve maybe known me to encourage you to attend, instead, to the quality of your experience as you move your body through space and when you detect joy in the process allow yourself to freely move toward it.

Well, We Share the Sun: The Incredible Journey of Kenya’s Legendary Running Coach Patrick Sang and the Fastest Runners on Earth is not that. Sarah Gearhart introduces readers to runners who have dedicated their lives to succeeding at the far reaches of human possibility. Running in this world is very much about winning, with self-actualization falling much farther down the list of one’s priorities. Sang’s runners “‘come into the sport to make a living,’ he says. That is the driving force: to fight poverty.”

And yet Sang is hardly a typical winning-is-the-only-thing coach. Far from it, he comes across in Gearhart’s portrayal as a modern-day Stoic more concerned with character than success. His gnomic utterances could easily place him in the company of Marcus Aurelius. Consider that, for Sang, “character is everything,” where character means, in part, controlling what you can control. “What I’ve learned in life, and it started way back when I was young, is do your best. There’s nothing else.” If you do your best, after all, the results are just the results, nothing to feel overly good or overly bad about. And if you can’t something cannot be controlled, what sense is there in worrying about it? “If there’s no answer to anything that’s complicated, just leave it. Why should I struggle?”

As one of Sang’s athletes, Eliud Kipchoge, the consensus greatest runner of all time, said in explaining to a journalist how Sang gets the best out of his runners, “And above all, how to make that athlete a human being. In our camp, we want the best athletes. At the same time, we want to be human beings.”

So while economic realities might account for the plethora of eager Kenyan runners, by the time they find themselves in Sang’s company, something like self-actualization begins to come to the fore. This is demonstrated by the fact that, “For years, Sang has permitted locals in Kaptagat to attend his trainings.” Can you imagine, in this country, being welcome to join Des Linden’s workout (as she once joined Sang’s group)?

Running isn’t just about international results and prize money, for Sang. It’s about finding out who we are deep in ourselves. “‘Whenever I run, I always pray. I always confess. I correct myself. Whatever I’d done wrong. I get the right answers. I find myself apologizing,’ he says. Sang doesn’t let on any specifics, just that running affords a space for him to ‘get all sorts of solutions.’” There’s something ephemeral to Sang in We Share the Sun. Maybe it’s the language barrier, maybe it’s the limited access Gearhart had to him, or maybe it’s his propensity to ask questions rather than answer them: “‘Who are you?’ is the root question he wants each person he coaches to consider. ‘If you take athletics out of a human being, what is left?’ he says.” Whatever it is, the elusiveness makes for a compelling figure. I come away from Gearhart’s book curious to know more about Sang yet somehow also grateful not to know more but to be left with the curiosity itself.

Prior to coaching, Sang competed for Kenya in the steeplechase, winning silver at the Barcelona Olympics. For much of his professional career, he coached himself. “Self-coaching is just being aware of yourself. If you do too much, listen to your body. If you do less, listen to your body. Evaluate yourself after competition. You tend to sort of mold your way into the business of coaching.”

He comes by coaching naturally, then, and is seemingly an ideal fit for the job. The only hitch seems to be that Kenya has been hit with a spate of doping violations in recent years, including some for Sang’s athletes. Most disturbingly, one of Kipchoge’s training partners, Philemon Kacheran Lokedi, received a three-year ban for testing positive for exogenous testosterone. Gearhart’s book would have gone to press before the Lokedi suspension, but she might have dug into this difficult reality instead of simply celebrating Sang, easy as he is to celebrate. Even assuming Sang isn’t implicated in Lodeki’s case, it reveals the limits of his influence. Character, Sang would be the first to say, cannot be granted, it can only be earned.

Scott F. Parker is the author of Run for Your Life: A Manifesto and The Joy of Running qua Running, among other books. His writing has appeared in Runner’s World, Running Times, Tin House, Philosophy Now, the Believer, and other publications. He teaches at Montana State University and is the nonfiction editor for Kelson Books.

THE MYSTERY PERSISTS

A Review of Paul C. Clerici’s Oregon Running Legend Steve Prefontaine
& Steve Bence’s 1972: Pre, UO Track, and My Life with Them All

by Scott F. Parker

Two recent books have me thinking again about the legend and legacy of Steve Prefontaine. The first is Paul C. Clerici’s Oregon Running Legend Steve Prefontaine, a research-driven retrospective of Prefontaine’s career that offers as dense a packaging of Pre arcana as even a devoted fan is likely to need. I’d be surprised if there were a race result or an address change that Clerici fails tio note. It doesn’t make for the liveliest reading, but the coupling of information and archival photos will make this book a useful resource for track historians.

One of the sources Clerici quotes is the blog of Steve Bence, a former teammate of Pre’s, who is also the author of 1972: Pre, UO Track, and My Life with Them All (written with veteran journalist Bob Welch). The book is exactly what its subtitle suggests: a whimsical, good-natured, scrapbook of a read.

Bence’s humble narration feels authentic. And the awe-shucks style makes Bence something like a transparent lens through which to recall the storied events he witnessed: Bowerman’s tenure at the University of Oregon; Prefontaine’s transcendent life and tragic death; and the rise of Nike, where Bence made his career. The portrayals are warm and simple. But the innocuousness that Bence aspires to is threatened by his employer’s regular controversies, some of which he raises only to dismiss, others of which (Alberto Salazar, the Vaporfly 4% “super shoes”) he ignores entirely. Needless to say, Bence manages to find his way to Phil Knight’s side of every issue, even if the defenses wear thin.^[1]

But the reason to pick up 1972 isn’t to read about Bence or Nike but to read about Prefontaine. Pre is such an enthralling figure that having been in his proximity is enough to warrant a book. And Bence was right there time and again. Most memorably, when Pre pulled him away from studying for his final exams to play cards before what would be Pre’s last race. At that same fateful meet, Bence would race in the 800m with a broken jaw. A photo taken before the race shows Pre offering tender assurances to a nervous Bence. According to Bence, Pre told him “I don’t think I could do what you’re doing, so why not make it worthwhile?”

Anecdotes like this bring Pre into focus more effectively than Clerici’s accumulation of data. Still, neither of these books, nor any other, can sate our curiosity about him. In the same way that another Dylan biography only confirms the need for still more Dylan biographies, a book about Prefontaine scratches an itch only to make the itch more compelling. The intrigue of Prefontaine only deepens.

And at the heart of the intrigue is the mystery that lurks behind every consideration of Pre: What accounts for genius? And what but genius can we call his example? Genius for Emerson is self-reliance, the courage to “believe your own thought,” which Pre embodied as well as anyone. And so, like Emerson, he calls upon us to become better versions of ourselves. I dare the most sober and rational thinker to read one of the books or watch one of the movies about Prefontaine and not feel greatness inside themself.

And yet, the mystery persists: what accounts? We might name here Pre’s charisma or his success or his confidence or his look or his personality or his Munich result or the timing and circumstances of his death and say that each is necessary but that even all of these together are not sufficient. I think of what Greil Marcus said about Dylan: that if effects like these had causes, there’d be genius on every corner.

The mystery persists. And we are left in wonder. Wonder that there ever was a person such as Pre. Wonder that wholes sometimes are not reducible to their parts. Wonder that the depths of us are never reached. Wonder that one runner could teach us so much about ourselves. Wonder that no matter how many times we hear the story it never gets old but that, as Molly Huddle (quoted in Clerici) describes running at the old Hayward Field, it’s “like an old memory is happening now.”

^[1] And please don’t get me started on Nike’s attitude toward Hood to Coast, which Bence relates in a remarkably self-unaware chapter. What can you do with someone who comes away from that race saying “No more of this ‘winning-isn’t-everything’ stuff” but pity them and maybe keep your distance?

Scott F. Parker is the author of Run for Your Life: A Manifesto and The Joy of Running qua Running, among other books. His writing has appeared in Runner’s World, Running Times, Tin House, Philosophy Now, the Believer, and other publications. He teaches at Montana State University and is the nonfiction editor for Kelson Books.

THE MIND INSIDE THE MYTH

A Review of Emily Pifer’s The Running Body

by Scott F. Parker

There is no mistaking the fact that Emily Pifer’s memoir, The Running Body, is a distinctly literary effort. Only secondarily—almost incidentally—is it also a book about running. Like any good memoir, it is less concerned with what happened than with the sense the author can make of what happened.

From a distance, what happened to Pifer is what happens to runners all the time. She was fast. She restricted her eating. She got faster. Then came the injuries. She never ran as fast again. Under a lesser pen, the arc of that story takes care of itself. Just tack on a reminder for younger runners to learn from the example and there’s your book.

But in refusing to keep the reader at a comfortable distance from which to feel sympathy for her younger self, Pifer brings the reader all the way in to that younger self’s experiences, revealing her inner world in all its torment. This approach is well suited to the material. As anyone who has become obsessed with her or his body and diet knows, the objective world can easily be blocked out by the bright-shining needs of the self. Taking us so deep into her subjective experience, Pifer sacrifices the familiar support of chronological narration. It’s a sacrifice that’s central to her project. She correctly anticipates the response she will get: “What happened? You are asking. Be more clear, you are saying.” And she knows how to respond: “But I have been wanting to show you what looking at this wound looks like to me.”

What do we see through Pifer’s self-conscious gaze? Here she is in her first paragraph introducing her idée fixe: “Flesh wrapped tight around muscle around bone. Every rib self-evident. Tendons so exposed. There were all these parts of me I had never seen. I called the sum of these parts the running body.”

It sounds so inspiring. So powerful. So healthy. In her own eyes, Pifer is like those runners she has observed: Shalane Flanagan and Kara Goucher and dozens of others. “I thought it was so beautiful how you could tell just by looking at their bodies that they were made to do the very thing they were doing.”  Yes! Watching such runners run, like watching Michael Jordan play basketball, can feel like glimpsing the essence of human prowess. But we know all too well that essentializing the human body as one that runs turns pathological in a moment. The temptation to want to look like what a runner looks like quickly becomes an obsession with the body’s appearance that eventually supplants even the running.

In addition to the professionals, Pifer compares her body to the collegiate women she races against for Ohio University. More punishing still, she compares herself to the male runners in her life. About her boyfriend Aaron, she writes, “every time we ran together, jealousy and resentment threatened to masticate away at all the good feelings. His body was harder and smoother than mine.”

At times it’s hard to witness the suffering Pifer undergoes. Seeing life as someone with an eating disorder does is to understand viscerally that solipsism itself is a form of pain. The self unfettered is a malignancy on the psyche. One wants to reach into the book, grab Pifer by the shoulders, and command her to eat. But a healthy diet—one sufficient to sustain a runner through weeks of long miles—would treat only a symptom of what ails Pifer. Beneath her disordered eating lies an unhelpful metaphysic that pits mind against body. Fundamentally, The Running Body is about the limits of will and the impossibility of control, no matter how desperate one is to achieve it.

Even when things are going well for Pifer, running-wise, the problem stalks. The true appeal of running for her is that it can liberate her from the controlling self. “Empty your body of what weighs it down. Empty of what you can’t use for distance and speed. Run your self out of your body, then you can be free.” Freedom, as in freedom from an oppressor, is the only concept that could apply here: “The way I ran for miles without having a single thought—like my mind wasn’t there at all.”

At moments like these, we could almost be talking about the selflessness of mysticism, but this is not the mystical insight of no-self. This is Pifer seizing a momentary victory on the way toward ultimate defeat, as the terms of this liberation are entirely the products of the mind, specifically a mind that defines itself in contrast to the body. The contradiction of the self trying to extinguish itself serves only to further entrench the self. Ruling over a shrinking kingdom, Pifer wants a control she can never have. In the end, she has only two options: either she must cede her power or pursue it to oblivion.

Fortunately—and I use that term only relatively—she goes the former way. “I lost control—could not stop eating. . . . I would be jamming handfuls into my mouth. My hands would always try to do as much damage as they could before my mind intervened.” (45)

What are the people in Pifer’s life saying to her as her health spirals? The most striking response is not from those who gently probe her eating habits or from the teammates who are suffering similarly themselves but from Pifer’s coach, who practices self-interested neglect in choosing not to notice the danger Pifer is in as long as her results keep improving. In this, it becomes hard to tell much difference between collegiate distance running and other domains over which our extraction economy has spread. Like overlogging or overfishing, the cost lags the returns. You can encourage a runner to overwork and underfeed herself for a while, until you can’t. “And although I had been dangerously underfed, it seemed as if the running body that resulted in my undereating and overtraining had been encouraged, expected, and celebrated by nearly everyone surrounding me, especially our coaches.” (62)

Later, after her injuries, Pifer emails her coach, Rick, about possibly rejoining the team. “Rick never responded to that email though, and I haven’t communicated with him since.” (91) She was easily expendable when she could no longer produce the returns he needed. He walks away from her as if abandoning a depleted mine.

Right here, narratively, is where Pifer the author could have succumbed to memoir’s temptation toward straightforward redemption, but she approaches it only to blow right past it to a deeper, more careful reading of the self:

The correct response is to find meaning in the injury. To tell the story this way: I overcame. To say I hurt my body, but because it is a body, it healed. And because my body healed, I too have healed. And when I look back, I see a broken body but one that has taught me all the things that breaking is supposed to teach you. And look how I’ve let go, moved on, gotten over it. Look how I’ve told myself the story of a body redeemed. Look how I’ve organized my life around this new body, this new me. Look how much stronger and smarter and better I am. Look how I leave out the details that trouble me: all that I have not been able to pull myself out from, the phantom fractures and the way they haunt me, the dream that even on my least delusional days still pulses in my blood to the rhythm of maybe maybe maybe.

Narrative closure is the last thing Pifer will settle for. She’s too sensitive, too honest a writer for such fantasies. Consider this crucial admission: “I wish I could say with certainty that if I had understood the costs, I would have done things differently. But I can’t say that, or much of anything about that time, with certainty. I think I was just sick, is what I mean.” A life is what a life is, and the self looking back can’t imagine undoing the past without simultaneously undoing itself. And how scary it is to let go the past: “Healing is supposed to be a beautiful thing, but healing requires you to shift your relationship with the past. It requires you to rewrite the story, or at least, the ending. To heal properly you must forget, maybe not the whole thing but parts, certainly. The whole must become hole-y. In this way, healing is its own kind of loss.” Who is Pifer if not her miles, her injuries, her disorder?

A story of the self in crisis is not one that can be easily resolved. But in this it is only a stark example of what is always the case: that the self can never be entirely beyond itself. It is always a pile of sand. The ground is always giving way. There is always another reflection in the reflection. Narrative closure can only be imposed from the outside, from someone else’s point of view. But a memoir is bound by the life it depicts, one that hopefully fumbles toward consciousness, knowing all the while that it will never arrive.

Pifer is dead center in The Running Body as she enacts the various riddles of consciousness and butts up against the limits of their representation: “Now I know I must either find an alternative way out of this story, or stay in here forever, spinning. I don’t know if it’s wrong or right to presume I have the ability (the power? the agency?) to make the choice. Of course the choice is yours to make, part of me says. If the choice were mine to make, why have I not made it? Another or perhaps the same part, answers.” (95)

Writing a life is like running on moving ground, but that doesn’t mean you stop running. The job of meaning making goes on.

Scott F. Parker is the author of Run for Your Life: A Manifesto and The Joy of Running qua Running, among other books. His writing has appeared in Runner’s World, Running Times, Tin House, Philosophy Now, the Believer, and other publications. He teaches at Montana State University and is the nonfiction editor for Kelson Books.

On Being a Human Being

A Review of Des Linden’s Choosing to Run

by Scott F. Parker

If you know just one thing about Des Linden, it’s that she won the Boston Marathon. If you don’t already know about her victory in Boston, it’s right there on the cover of her memoir. Either way, there will be little suspense as Linden and her co-author Bonnie D. Ford recount the 2018 race over the course of the book in chapters alternating between that race and Linden’s life and career before and after her greatest career achievement. And yet, to pluck just one more word from the book’s cover (this one from Angela Duckworth’s blurb), the retelling is utterly gripping.

Even if, like me, you watched it live and cheered for Linden as you had for years; even if you can recall the horrific weather conditions on that day, with some runners dropping out, some developing hypothermia, and some doing both; even if you scratched your head when you saw one runner (Linden) waiting outside a toilet (mid-race!) for another runner (Shalane Flannagan) to rejoin her; seeing the race again from Linden’s perspective is revelatory. No matter how well you know her race, only she ran it. And that point of view is everything.

Linden’s ability and willingness to see clearly and say plainly is part of what has endeared her to running fans since her career began. Her charm, which comes through in the book as it does through the screen, is that of someone who knows herself and is herself and doesn’t apologize for herself. Lauren Fleshman got right to the point during her recent appearance on Nobody Asked Us, the podcast Linden hosts with Kara Goucher, when she said: “One thing I’ve learned from following your career, Des, is you’ve done a much better job for a much longer period of your life of not giving a fuck about other people’s opinions.”

But alongside the fucks Linden doesn’t give are those she does. She cares deeply about her success on the road. Running, though, is only part of who Linden is. One of the recurring refrains in Choosing to Run is the breadth of Linden’s self. Her interests outside running — including coffee, bourbon, and literature — are well known in the running world, but still how unusual, how refreshing, it is to hear an elite athlete say, time and again, things like “running was what I did, not what I was” and “I left my running gear at home, ditched the one-dimensional self I had to be in training, and steeped myself in trying to learn something new.”

There would be a way of reading this to suggest that Linden is hedging against her future disappointment. If there’s more to life than running, she has a ready-made excuse for failures (relatively speaking). Except that Linden’s disappointments are deeply felt and lead her to periodically consider retiring from the sport, thinking she’ll never improve on her second place at Boston in 2011 (by two seconds). Time and again, though, she returns from these losses. Her resilience isn’t that of someone who is monomaniacal in her drive but that of someone who can find rewards in the work itself independent of outcomes. As she quotes from the Bhagavad Gita,

“You’re entitled to your labor. You’re not entitled to the fruit of your labor.” Linden doesn’t always exhibit this kind of attitude; more impressively, when she’s feeling dejected she is able to work her way back to it.

The most striking example of Linden’s resilience follows 2017, the low point of her career. Coming in in great shape and with years of experience, that was the year she “was going to win in Boston.” But even hitting her goals for the race she came in fourth, more than two minutes behind the third-place finisher, Jordan Hasay. Having watched the leaders run away from her in supershoes that were not yet available to Linden or most other runners, she was dejected. “Overall, my sport seemed to be descending into disorienting chaos. It seemed easier to let go of ambition and stop caring.”

The year got worse from there, with Linden suffering a major health problem that limited the quality and quantity of her training. When she showed up at Boston the next year it was without her “usual competitive mindset.” Instead of expecting to win, she doubted she’d finish. The cold rainy weather that day was its own variable, but it’s hard not to think that Linden’s victory wasn’t also affected by the freedom with which she seems to have run. It is as if, without the pressure to perform, she felt free to open herself to the moment and respond to it as it unfolded. After expecting to drop out early in the race, she decided to stay in the race to support Shalane Flanagan, even waiting for Flanagan when she stopped to use the bathroom. This generosity was its own reward for Linden. “Working in Shalane’s service puts me in a more productive headspace.”

If you’ve ever had an athletic moment in which you feel like you’re simultaneously making no effort yet performing better than ever, Linden’s finish to Boston reads like that—a creative as much as an athletic act. About taking the lead, she writes, “I abandon any idea of a plan and start improvising.” This is Linden with the courage to run straight into the unknown, curious and without expectations about what she’ll find there. And what does she find? Before you accuse me of reading psychology into mere sport when I propose that she finds the self she has been creating most of her life, consider that choosing to run “was the first real decision I ever made.” And if you’ll give me that, I hope you’ll give me this, too: discovering what it’s like for someone else to self-realize in this way is the next best thing to doing it yourself.

There are a lot of books by runners. Many of them are good. Few of them are as human as Choosing to Run. Because Linden knows herself as a human in essence and only contingently as a runner, she writes not for other runners only but for any reader who suspects they might be human, too. It is examples like these that make us so.

Scott F. Parker is the author of Run for Your Life: A Manifesto and The Joy of Running qua Running, among other books. His writing has appeared in Runner’s World, Running Times, Tin House, Philosophy Now, the Believer, and other publications. He teaches at Montana State University and is the nonfiction editor for Kelson Books.

Track’s Sociologist:
A Review of Lauren Fleshman’s Good for a Girl: A Woman Running in a Man’s World

by Scott F. Parker

One of the hazards of the celebrity memoir — and one of the reasons it tends to be such a cringey genre — is the temptation to seize what is already a public narrative and revise or authorize it to serve the author’s own interests. Inevitably, such “memoirs” read more like brand-approved releases from someone’s PR team than like literature. Memoir works when an author is willing to subordinate the needs of her ego to the needs of her book. It is therefore a genre ill-suited to the self-satisfied and even to the successful.

Which puts Lauren Fleshman in a tough spot as a writer. She, first and perhaps best among runners, used social media to give herself a “platform” from which she could successfully self-brand. And so when she shows up on the pages of her memoir, Good for a Girl: A Woman Running in a Man’s World, not only does her reputation precede her but her largely self-created reputation precedes her. Well-known, well-liked, and supremely accomplished, Fleshman is nothing less than a generational star in her sport. What can memoir hope to do for someone who is already enthusiastically, even reverentially, received by thousands of fans?

Falling in line with other public figures as the last holdouts for memoirs that span the entirety of a life so far rather than narrowing their books’ focus to an area of inquiry, Fleshman takes us from childhood through COVID. Predictably, Good for a Girl is at its worst when Fleshman is running through her many achievements like lines on her resume: the Picky Bars company she co-founded, the Believe Training Journal series she co-authored, her popular website AskLaurenFleshman.com, and her sponsorship with the upstart women’s running-clothing company Oiselle. It’s all quite impressive and good material for her Wikipedia page, but in the book we need to see the narrator go inward in a sincere and sustained effort to make sense of her past.

Fleshman does this by interrogating rather than concealing her own shortcomings. No matter how Forrest Gumpy she gets in recounting her career highlights, it is her willingness to portray herself in a harsh light that earns her the reader’s trust and respect. For instance, at the 2008 U. S. Olympic Trials, Fleshman finished fourth in the 5,000m, one spot away from qualifying for the Beijing Olympics, after training through and around injury. It was a pivotal moment in her career. She had to write about it. But she did not have to write about what happened next. Two of the women who beat her, Shalane Flanagan and Kara Goucher, had already qualified for the Olympics in the 10,000m. If either one of them elected to skip the 5,000 to focus on the 10,000, at the Olympics Fleshman would go to Beijing in her stead. “I wrote each of them a brief email, reiterating our shared dream of being Olympians, the heartbreak of facing four years of unknowns and aging out, and explaining the contract consequences of not making the team. They both turned me down.” Pride, in other words, is not going to come between Fleshman and the truth.

Thankfully, it is to such ins and outs and ups and downs of competitive running that Fleshman gives the bulk of her attention. She writes with deep feeling and insight into what it was like for her to be among the world’s elite runners. Within Good for a Girl is a very good memoir, celebrity or otherwise.

Fleshman found early and regular success in running, posting the fastest times in gym class week after week until the day one of her male classmates displaced her by a substantial margin. But puberty would signify more to Fleshman than just that “a boy’s changing body threatened [her] identity.” In the relative advantage puberty gives male over female runners lies the opportunity to start seeing the female body itself as a deviation from the norm. And not only do girls not gain the advantage boys do from puberty, often puberty makes them slower, at least in the short term, and therefore can be seen as something that needs to be suppressed.

This view, pervasive among competitive runners, is one that Fleshman would herself internalize despite dominating her sport. After finishing second at the Foot Locker Cross Country Championships as a high school senior, winning multiple NCAA titles at Stanford, and starting a professional track and field career, Fleshman nevertheless finds herself unhealthily restricting her eating, despite her intentions not “take it too far” (1640), in an effort to take pounds off her body and seconds off her times.

What she doesn’t know during this period — and what many female runners don’t know — is that the physical damage of starvation takes time to announce itself. In the short term, runners often improve. But as the body’s stresses accumulate, the injuries accumulate, and the decline begins. “Looking back on the places we came from, thin, sick girls continued to lower records, win Foot Locker, succeed at NCAAs for a season or two, and then disappear.”

The pressure to deny the female body starts early. Recounting her own experience, Fleshman writes, “A period was a rite of passage into womanhood, and womanhood didn’t stand for anything I wanted” (702). And yet there are penalties to be paid here as well. The male gaze resides not only in Fleshman’s psyche but in the culture around her too: “The body that made me feel powerful in sports was not at odds with being the right body, the body that qualified as feminine.”

It is observations like these that lead Fleshman to her thesis that all too often female runners are treated by the sport as defective males, when what they need is to be understood as biologically distinct and treated as such. Females develop on a different timeline from males and have different biological needs. “During the small window of years through age twenty-six when women’s endocrine systems are responsible for building the entire bone bank we spend the rest of our lives drawing from, so many of us are creating an environment where we’re barely able to maintain what we have” (1731). Yet generation after generation of female runners is pushed past their breaking points, sacrificed at the altar of normative masculinity.

Fleshman is a sociologist of her sport. Her primary research method as a memoirist is self-reflection, but this self-reflection is always carried out with an eye toward the societal implications of her observations and experiences.

In the 50 years since the passing of Title IX, girls have widely been extended the opportunity to participate in sports. Now, Fleshman is demanding, they need to be extended the opportunity also to be girls and to be allowed to become women. On this point, Fleshman is persuasive. How dispiriting is it to witness a system that encourages young athletes to sacrifice their health and well-being for the sake of their sport? Surely, these cannot be our priorities.

Except, as we know from the traumatic brain injuries that are a part of football, athletes will reliably accept substantial personal risk if that’s what their sport entails. What are we to say to female runners on this front beyond “Compete at your own risk”? Fleshman considers the football analogy, citing the fact that the NCAA, “when confronted with concussion research and potential liability, created research-backed and strictly enforced checklists and policies for head injuries that all programs must adhere to” (812) and bemoaning the fact that “the NCAA still has no official policy concerning eating disorders, despite creating the ideal environment for them to propagate.” But the analogy breaks down when you recognize that football can change its rules to try to decrease the incidence of concussions, whereas no sport can define “healthy diet” let alone enforce it.

As long as the incentives point in the direction they do, with weight loss tending to improve times, appeals to abstract notions of health are unlikely to carry the day. So unless we are going to return to the paternalistic days of protecting fragile women from running competitively (we don’t want their uteruses to fall out!) before age 26, our only appeal will be to culture: the culture of women leading by example as they attempt to balance performance, longevity, and health; the culture of women coaches and experienced women athletes establishing better norms and expectations around diet; the culture of Lauren Fleshman writing this book and challenging the prevailing values of winning at all costs and of just doing it and of treating women like proto-men.

It can come as no surprise that for Fleshman, “Making everything about winning, about the Olympics, about being the best . . . it felt bad. Not just when things went wrong, but most of the time.”  How far away Fleshman got from what attracted her to running in the first place — that feeling she can still recall: “I would ramp up my speed until it was impossible to think of anything else but the running; until I wasn’t a girl, or a middle schooler, or in PE class at all. I was just a body, limbs and blood and breath and power.” Isn’t that why any of us run, for that feeling that running, when it really happens, is nothing less than a source of deep elemental meaning in what I have no choice but to call our souls. Fleshman isn’t telling us something we don’t know when she reflects that “any pursuit of excellence had to center these moments of joy, or it wasn’t worth doing”; she’s reminding us of the priorities that are already our own. Or should be.

Scott F. Parker is the author of Run for Your Life: A Manifesto and The Joy of Running qua Running, among other books. His writing has appeared in Runner’s World, Running Times, Tin House, Philosophy Now, the Believer, and other publications. He teaches at Montana State University and is the nonfiction editor for Kelson Books.

Max and Me and Uncle Itch:
Lessons About Sports Betting

by David Blumenfeld

In the 1950s when I was in high school, my father Max and I and a close family friend, my “uncle,” Itch Fink, each learned a lesson about betting on sports. This is the story of those lessons.

Max’s Lesson
“Hello, Potsy? It’s Max. Let me have $100 on the Sox today, and $500 on the Pirates against the Cubs tomorrow. Yeah, I’m splitting that one with a few friends. You know, the usual: Put it all on my account. I’ll get back to you later today for the odds on a couple of fights.”

“Right Maxie. You got it.”

For as long as I can remember, Max had regular phone conversations with his bookie and close friend, Morris “Potsy” Pearl, a leading figure in the Chicago bookmaking racket. Max was the biggest sports nut I have ever known. I realize that sounds like hyperbole but it’s true. He had two passions in life: his retail jewelry business in the steel mill town of East Chicago, Indiana, and sports. But sports — and especially betting on sports — was the bigger passion. Max followed just about every sport popular in the U.S. except hockey and he always had a bet on the games that interested him most. He’d fly across the country to see important ballgames or boxing matches, frequently to Las Vegas where he’d stay up for as much as three days and nights straight, gambling and going to sporting events with his pals Louis Prima and Prima’s ebullient sax player Sam Butera. He’d also fly to New York, where he could buy merchandise for his store, Max Blumenfeld Jewelers, and go to games at Yankee or Dodger Stadiums or boxing matches at Madison Square Garden and St. Nicholas Arena (aka “the Bucket of Blood.”) Max would take me to big, local sporting events, such as when Joe Louis boxed an exhibition nearby, when Willie Pep did the same, or when Satchel Paige pitched a game in our area. I must have been awfully young when I saw Paige because I exclaimed, “He cheated, Dad!” when in his first time at bat Satchel laid down a bunt and Max had to explain to me what a bunt is.

To appreciate just how much Max loved sports and betting on games, consider this. No one I have ever known disliked cold weather more than my dad. He’d do anything to avoid it, including staying inside as much as possible during the mean northern Indiana winters. Yet he always had season tickets on the 50-yard line for the Bears football games, many of which were played in freezing rain or on snowy, windy Chicago days and nights. Despite the occasional subzero weather, there was Max shivering on the 50-yard line, packed up in a Parka, sheepskin gloves, heavy wool sweater, and — underneath it all — long winter underwear. While watching the Bears, Max would have a radio to his ear listening to another game, on which he also had a bet. Once, I seem to recall his having two radios, one to each ear. (Can this be true? Memory is a poor historian but that’s what I recall.) Potsy Pearl would sometimes be at his side, ready to take yet another bet, if necessary. When I was in high school, Max told me with an earnest look and resolute voice, that although he occasionally had more than one bet going at a time (“occasionally” ha!), he never bet a lot and never, never more than he could afford. I’m not sure why he told me this: I had no problem with his gambling and didn’t regard it as any of my business. I assumed his little speech was advice on prudence and rectitude for me. It wasn’t long thereafter that Max had a lesson on prudence and rectitude himself.

A lot of my father’s buddies bet on sports and a couple of them had accounts with Potsy Pearl. A few others patronized Hymie “The Black Jew” Lazar, so named for his faith and his exceptionally dark skin. (Hymie was aptly named since his skin was considerably darker than that of many of my African-American classmates.) But quite a few of Max’s pals were reluctant to deal with a bookie directly, and they began asking him if he would mind placing a bet or two on their behalf. Because he was a good guy, and probably also because he liked being the center of the action, he obliged. In time, Max became the intermediary between a lot of his bookie-shy acquaintances and Potsy. Max would place the bets in his own name and pay off or collect from Potsy as if those bets were his own; my dad’s friends would then pay him back or collect their winnings from him, depending on how they had fared. Eventually, given the bets he placed for himself and his friends, Max became one of Potsy’s bigger accounts. This had some favorable and some unfavorable consequences.

First, the good news. At least a couple of times a year, Potsy would make a trip to Las Vegas to do some gambling of his own, taking a few of his biggest clients with him as his guests, covering their airfare and hotel expenses. Max was Potsy’s guest on several of these junkets, which is how my dad made friends with Louis Prima, Keely Smith, and Sam Butera. On one of these trips, Max was shooting craps next to Potsy, who was a “high roller.” That is, Potsy would make a large initial bet and if he won, he’d let it all ride on the next six, seven, or even eight tosses of the dice, thereby doubling his winnings each time and making a fortune or losing everything on a single toss. Max, by contrast, was betting small amounts and playing conservatively. When it was Potsy’s turn to throw the dice, a casino attendant told Max he had a phone call at the desk. As he left to take the call, Max glanced at the couple of hundred dollars he had on the table and, without thinking about it, said, “Potsy: play my chips for me while I take this call, will you?” The call was brief but when Max returned to the craps table, Potsy was still rolling the dice and Max was dumbfounded: at his place next to Potsy where a couple of hundred had been only a few minutes earlier was a cool five thousand dollars in chips, the equivalent of nearly $55,000 today. Potsy had played Max’s chips the way he played his own, letting the winnings ride over and over again in what had been a really hot hand. Max didn’t say whether Potsy’s lucky streak continued or whether he eventually “crapped out” and lost everything. Maybe it didn’t matter that much to Potsy either way: he was a major Chicago bookie who was in town to be seen as a high roller, and the excitement his hot hand caused achieved that goal win or lose. But whatever Potsy did — continue pushing his luck or stop while he was ahead — Max swore to me that he took his chips off the betting line immediately and didn’t gamble another cent the rest of the trip. Probably true, I thought, though the spiel was starting to sound like one of those set-the-right-example-for-son-David lectures. Or maybe that’s how Max got that dark green Cadillac Coupe Deville with those neat little fishtail lights a few weeks later.

Now for the bad news. At the time Max was booking bets for his friends, the Feds were looking into bookmaking in the Chicago area. With the aid of wiretaps, they had compiled a list of the names and addresses of some of the bigger clients of bookies like Potsy. Of course, the name Max Blumenfeld was on the list. One afternoon, to my father’s eternal mortification, federal agents entered Max Blumenfeld Jewelers at 3514 Main Street in East Chicago, Indiana, and took one Max Blumenfeld out of his store in handcuffs. Fortunately, I was away at college since the last thing I would have wanted to see or that Max would have wanted me to witness was him being taken from his own store by the Feds. In front of his employees and customers. And in handcuffs to boot! I only learned about the incident later from one of my dad’s salesmen who was present at the time. Max never mentioned it to me, and I never asked him about it.

The arrest understandably scared the life out of my dad. Although he certainly rubbed shoulders with some shady characters, he himself was a legitimate businessman who made his living legally.[1] To be whisked off like that by federal agents was the most humiliating thing that ever happened to him. Luckily, the matter didn’t go very far. The Feds questioned him but didn’t press charges and released him fairly quickly. I never discovered exactly what transpired but it seems likely that they weren’t interested in ordinary citizen gamblers but merely wanted to put the squeeze on them to see what they might reveal about their bookies. I’m sure Max didn’t reveal anything incriminating because he never got a visit from “Maish,” the 350-pound baseball-bat-carrying enforcer who took care of welchers or others in the area who ratted on the mob. My dad also remained fast friends with Potsy. But Max definitely learned a lesson from the experience: the handcuff incident marked the last time he ever booked bets for his friends. Despite Max’s diminished betting transactions, Potsy took him for one more trip to Las Vegas, not as thanks for his current bets but for the ordeal he had endured and for old time’s sake. And possibly because Max didn’t “sing.”

 

Uncle Itch’s Lesson and Mine
Uncle Itch’s lesson and mine were twins, or mirror images, of each other. We learned them together. Some background about our relationship will underscore the poignancy of those lessons.

Itch’s real name was Gene Fink. His family’s surname in the Old Country had been Finkelstein, which they shortened to Fink when they came to America, long before the term “fink” acquired negative connotations. But Finkelstein, Fink or whatever name with which Uncle Itch had been graced would not have mattered. He was a dynamic personality and nothing, least of all a name, could have held him back. He had the drive, the personality, and the charm to succeed under almost any circumstances.

Uncle Itch wasn’t physically attractive. He had a long, flat, bulbous nose with a point at the end, and a broad, flat face. But his looks, like his name, didn’t matter. He knew how to make everyone feel as though they were the most important person in the room, or anywhere else for that matter. Take me for example. For a seventh-grade writing assignment, I interviewed him about his World War II experiences in the tank core, where he was his unit’s cook. I listened raptly to his stories about advancing across Europe in those cramped Sherman tanks that were like hot tin cans, likely to break down or explode at any minute, if not from Nazi shells, then from their own defects. At the end of the interview, he gave me his tank corps insignia, which I kept for years, clutching it now and then as a kind of talisman to remind me of how Uncle Itch and his army buddies had fought their way to Berlin to defeat Adolf Hitler.

Even after Uncle Itch had children, he continued to treat me like a son and always had some surprise or gift for me. One day when I was home from my freshman year at Northwestern University, he came into my father’s jewelry store wearing a beautiful pink and black silk tie, which I admired. “What a good-looking tie, Uncle Itch,” I said. Off came the tie, which he gave me on the spot. A few minutes later he left for a business meeting in a suit and dress shirt but no tie. There’s the old saw about the good friend who would give you the shirt off his back. Uncle Itch gave me the tie from his neck. That same year, I learned to like cigars and would smoke one after dinner, dipping it first in Drambuie or Grand Marnier and savoring the taste and aroma of the sweetened tobacco. Itch was a cigar smoker too and when he saw me do this on an evening out together, he thought it was the funniest thing he had ever seen. Thereafter, he’d hand me a fine cigar whenever he’d see me.

I’m sure that everyone called Gene Fink Itch because he was always itching for something to do, somewhere to go, some scheme to hatch, some deal to make. On returning from the service without a nickel in his pocket, he was itching to make a buck. When he began selling insurance, Max switched all of his insurance business to him and introduced him to several other people who did the same. Like my father, Gene Fink was a born salesman and in surprisingly short order, he became extremely successful. In 1954 or so, Max told me that Itch had written more policies for one of the major U.S. insurance companies than any other salesman in the United States.

Our lessons came on June 20, 1960, when I was 22 and old enough to know better than to do what I did. A group of us went to a movie theater in Hammond to see the live TV broadcast of the return heavyweight title match between Floyd Patterson and Ingemar Johansson. In the previous fight, Johansson had stunned boxing fans by dealing Patterson a humiliating defeat. The fight was stopped in the fifth round after Johansson had knocked Patterson down an astonishing seven times. Many believed that Patterson was the better fighter and had simply taken Johansson too lightly. Now, knowing to stay away from Johansson’s right hand, Floyd would be sure to vindicate himself in the next go-around, they thought. Itch agreed. When we all discussed the question in the car on the way to the fight, he said he planned to make a big bet on Patterson. I piped up and took issue with that idea. Speaking in a confident tone, I asked: “How can you bet on Patterson, Itch? Johansson’s right is lethal. He knocked Floyd down seven times. One Johannsson right and it could be curtains. It’s crazy to risk your money on Patterson.” Itch changed his mind and placed a big bet on Johansson.

At first, it seemed that my judgment would be confirmed. In the second round, Johansson connected with a hammering right hand that staggered Patterson. I thought the fight would soon be over and congratulated myself on saving Uncle Itch a lot of money. What would he do without me? Instead of going down, though, Patterson shook the punch off and recovered his composure. Later, at about two minutes into the fifth round, Floyd unleashed a tremendous, leaping left hook. Some say it was the best punch he ever threw. It landed on Johansson’s neck, and it was all over. Ingemar Johansson landed on his back, out “cold as a cucumber.” Floyd was champ again and due to my sage advice Uncle Itch had lost his bet. But I had yet to find out how much he lost.

When we left the theater, Itch met Hymie “The Black Jew” in the parking lot to pay off. I was standing near enough to witness the transaction. Pulling a large wad out of his pocket, Uncle Itch peeled off seventeen one-hundred-dollar bills and handed them to Hymie, who folded them neatly, put them in his pocket, and was off. My confident little speech had cost my uncle $1,700, the equivalent of over $16,000 in 2022 currency. Even as I sit here now over 60 years later, my stomach turns to think about it.

The trip back from Hammond to East Chicago was quiet. I didn’t say a word but sat sheepishly and guiltily in the back seat. Itch neither reprimanded me nor mentioned my ill-starred advice. He wouldn’t have. He was an adult, he knew boxing, and it was his decision what bet to make. He never mentioned the incident to me and even kept giving me cigars and treating me like a son. I, on the other hand, learned a lesson I would never forget: if someone else has a lot to lose and you have no skin in the game, keep your big mouth shut. Uncle Itch surely learned a lesson too: if you are confident in your own judgment, don’t let some punk kid who shoots his mouth off change your mind.

I went on to graduate school at Berkeley, studied a lot of famous authors, and eventually became a philosophy professor. Now, even after more than 30 years as a student and 40 more as a teacher or higher education administrator, in my reveries, I occasionally still hear Max repeating a tired adage that used to get my goat when he’d say it: “There are some things you just can’t learn from books.” That old bromide still annoys me. But when I think about the incidents I’ve just described, I’m also forced to admit that it’s true.

[1] Actually, Max did a little more than rub shoulders with some shady characters. Among his good friends were Sonny Sheetz, Al Capone’s chief lieutenant in the African-American community, and my “uncle” Freddie Brenman, prison-mate of John Dillinger and Dillinger’s bagman. At his first business, The Island Queen, an early-1930s speakeasy on Chicago’s South Side, Max unwittingly became John Dillinger’s host and even took a sightseeing trip around Chicago with him.

David Blumenfeld, professor emeritus of philosophy, taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz; University of Illinois at Chicago; Southwestern University, where he held the McManis Chair in Philosophy and Religion; and Georgia State University, where he was philosophy chairperson and associate dean for the humanities. In retirement, he has returned to an old interest, writing nonfiction and children’s literature (under the pen name, Dean Flowerfield). Recent publications include Best New True Crime Stories: Well-Mannered Crooks, Rogues & Criminals, Mono., Balloons Lit. Journal, The Caterpillar, Beyond Words, and more. He and his wife (an artist/photographer) live on the Georgia coast, where they do much of their work on a small, semi-wilderness island accessible only by boat.