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Doubleheader

by Jeffrey Alfier

Thanksgiving. I listen to the final voicemail
my father left me, third week of September,

autumn but a hint fanning the heat of late summer.
He says he’s fallen again, this time in the kitchen

while leaning on my mother’s chair —
the woman who’d left three years ago

in a morphine sleep. I enter the house
and he appears unhurt — a toppled but intact statue

who’d found himself at a right angle to gravity.
I am angry with him for no discernibly sane reason.

But I don’t let it show. He wears that stupid red sweater,
as winterworn as a fugitive’s.

Lifting him is lifting a sparrow, so frail now
he leaves no footfalls. I take him upstairs,

settle him in his chair and we watch
a ballgame together — a late doubleheader.

He will fall again before the final inning,
relievers in the bullpen, warming up,

and staring at the rain.

 

Jeffrey Alfier’s most recent book is Gone This Long: Southern Poems (2019). The Shadow Field, another poetry collection, is forthcoming from Louisiana Literature Press (2020). His publication credits include The Carolina Quarterly, Chiron Review, Copper Nickel, Midwest Quarterly, Permafrost, Southern Poetry Review, and Sport Literate. He is founder and co-editor of Blue Horse Press and San Pedro River Review.

Turkey 

by Alex Taylor

I get drunk and buy a bowling ball. The first game I bowl a 122. I’m the only one here besides the manager and a girl running the snack-shack. I’d say the silence of the place is because of COVID-19 but it’s a Monday afternoon in a Gillette bowling alley.

“How’s the ball feel?” asks the manager, who sold it to me.
“Alright,” I say.
“Try another game, you get three for free with the ball.”

I order another pitcher of Bud Light from the snack-shack and she brings two glasses along with it. I fill both. It’s my first day living in Wyoming and, between the beer, the ball and shoes, I’m already $175 invested into a new hobby.

I think of the first night you and I went bowling together back in Michigan. Neither of us were any good. We drank beer and ate bowling alley nachos. You complained they didn’t give you enough sour cream. I placed eight two-ounce cups of sour cream on the table while you were in the bathroom.

I start another game and bowl a 116. The snack-shack employee goes to smoke a cigarette in the parking lot. I finish both beers and pour two more.

“Any better?” the manager asks.
“Worse.”
“You just have to get angry at the pins,” he says. “That’s what I do.”

I think of the engagement ring collecting dust in your closet. I start another game and bowl a 154.

“Drinkin’ for two?” the snack lady says.
“Habit.”

She brings me another pitcher, $8 more to the tab. Monday is the alley’s pitcher special, like a minor league baseball team having $1 hotdog nights without any fans.

Maybe it’s the shoes, I think, so I buy a pair of bowling shoes. My tab grows to a considerable percentage of the building’s rental payment. I pour two more beers and slip into the footwear that makes me feel like I’m wearing clogs.

I think of all the unanswered messages and the missed graduation, of the happy birthday that never came and the new guy you’re probably using to erase the memory of me. I bowl a 171.

“That’s better,” the manager says, with nothing else to do but critique my game and pretend to wash bowling balls. “Did the advice work?”

I think of shame. I think of the time spent feeling bad for myself. I think of the year I’ve spent away from you and the year you’ve spent away from me. I bowl a 182.

Another $8 to the snack lady nets me a fresh pitcher as I fight the craving to smoke.

“You gonna be here all day?” she asks.
“Lookin’ that way.”

She takes the empty pitcher and goes back to her bar stool across the alley. The dog at home needs to be let out. One more game of therapy.

I think about the day you promised we’d never break up. I think about all the days I believed you. I think about the letters you wrote for all our anniversaries. I think about you and aim straight at the two-pin. I think about you and bowl two turkeys. I think about you and bowl a 211.

“Whatever you were thinking about was working,” the manager says.

I pack the bowling ball and the bowling shoes in my trunk. I drive away from the bowling alley not feeling much like a winner. I haven’t been bowling since.

 

Alex Taylor is a sports reporter for the Gillette News Record in Gillette, Wyoming. He graduated from Western Michigan University with a creative writing degree and regretted it so much he went and got an MFA in creative writing at the University of Tampa. His work has been published in the Tampa Bay Times, Fleas on the Dog, and The Daily Drunk.

To Sport Right Now

by Dale Rigby

I sympathize with what baseball is trying to do,
but it is almost like they are swatting at locusts.

                                           –Bob Costas on CNN, July 28, 2020

Swish. It’s sixth grade Field Day, and I’ve already won the chess tournament, the South America trivia contest, and finally nipped Cindy Barr, my secret sharer, in the 50-yard dash.   And now she’s peeking a smile from over by the hopscotch chalk when I bend my knees and swish my first free throw.  “Attaboy” shouts Mr. Snell.

 Is to watch Justin ginger locks Turner hit a walk-off intra-squad home run and feel deep despair, a premodern eclipse, as a visible caravan of cars queue in the panoramic Dodger Stadium parking lot cum makeshift testing site.

 Swish. Have some faith, Montaigne! This be no pimply-male-captain-of-the-playground narrative. Count on sum comeuppance. Even now I’m not sure why I tainted that triumphal stage. But boy did the boy. This gafted child broadcast to a playground of peers a curious propensity he’d hidden like Portnoy his wanking from all but his pinkie-sworn parents.

Is to remember that the 1918 Red Sox World Series victory over the Cubs ended on September 11, in a season shortened by the national draft board’s “work or fight” order that deemed sport unnecessary labor.

 Swish. At the age of my kindergarten naps with Dick and Jane you, the Doogie Howser of the early Renaissance, were already un-schooling in your father’s famous petri dish, gamboling from peasant nursery to Latin mastery, groomed a free and feral spirit from the larval stage.

Is to wonder whether to call this week’s waltz from West Side Story between the Dodgers and the sign-stealing Astros a melee or a brouhaha or a bench-clearing-brawl or a fracas or a donnybrook when it brings to mind jittery juveniles social distancing at a Sadie Hawkins dance.   

 Swish. And then, alas, at age six, he banished listless you to the College de Guyenne and the fourth grade. That sucked, eh? When even steely Headmasters fear to accost a superior tongue, the fellows don’t exactly welcome one of the fellers. Take me out to the bully-game, eh?

 Is to revere Dr. Fauci’s Topp’s card despite that errant opening pitch, while remembering with recrudescent anger that President Woodrow Wilson never uttered one single solitary public word about the 1918 influenza which would, ironically, cause his debilitating stroke.

Swish.  And you might have grown to hate reading like your fellow nobles but for the indulgence of a mentor allowing indolent snatches at Ovid’s Metamorphosis; my savior was a Mr. Snell in sixth grade, who just smiled when catching me dawdling with The Natural during his basal math lessons.

 Is to kneel for eight minutes and forty-six seconds before the National Anthem.

 Swish. You contend that at “dancing, tennis, wrestling, [you] have never been able to acquire any but very slight and ordinary ability; at fencing vaulting, and jumping, none at all,” but your every sentence speaks gymnastics. And you, modest one, were an inveterate horseman.

 Is to discover that in 1918 Babe Ruth, presaging The Curse of the Pandimo, went 13 and 7 and hit .300 with eleven home runs.

Swish.  Micheau, was your sport colored by the tragic fate of your soldier brother,  hit by an innocuous court-tennis ball a bit above his right ear,  dying of apoplexy five or six hours later sans contusion or wound?

Is to watch Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old and grasp why the mandatory 1918 draft sent “many ballplayers,” patriots rightly horrified by trench warfare, “scurrying for jobs that were ‘essential,’” according to John N. Barry’s The Great Influenza.

Swish. Montaigne, you had some stones. When the plague zone reached your Tower in August of 1586 you became a homeless wanderer, leading a small caravan from your estate for six miserable months, unable to settle, forgoing your Essays, having to “take to road again as soon as any one of us felt so much as a pain in the tip of his finger.”

Is a childhood daydream listening to velvety Vin Scully — Davis goes back, a WAY back, to the wall — she’s gone! — before awaking to the piped-in nightmare of the ball rending asunder a cardboard cutout in the left field stands.

 Swish. In case of contact, the quarantine was forty days and forty nights, while you were “grieved to see the bodies of the dead scattered about the fields at the mercy of the wild beasts, which quickly overran the country.” Healthy folks would “dig their own graves betimes,” whilst “others lay down in them while still alive.”

Is to not whistle past the grave fact that after only eight days of Major League Baseball a full 20 percent of the games are postponed.

 Swish. My dear Montaigne, you said you were only made fearful those six months by the onus to “bear with the suffering of others,” because you carried your own “antidotes within me — which are resolution and patience.” Might you help us out a little here? We need an antidote, for our-center-is-not-holding, that’s for sure, but surely you’ve got something less below the Mendoza line, less bromide-like than resolution and patience?

Is to swat at locusts.

Clank!!  “Some groovy scene, all-timer school record and all little man…” said the hippie child DJ with a rainbow-dappled microphone from the community radio station….

“Oh that’s not so boss,” I told him, sounding like I’d just caught The Red Balloon, and then I went… 248163264128256512102420484096…droning on…oblivious…doubling digits into the many-too-many millions…like a precocious 1970 poster child for Ritalin.

Is to aver that even in virulent times it feels essential work to confess that my Winnie Cooper, the prettiest and smartest and fastest girl in the whole world, froze into an embarrassed frown at this new nerdy boy crazed with cooties. For to sport right now is to shelter in this place, to allow that, in memory’s cardboard cutouts, I am still that boy and she still that girl.

Dale Rigby, when not coaching nonfiction prose and trying to sell that Montaigne had some stones within the MFA program at Western Kentucky University, may be found on the golf course sporting black and gold headcovers from his beloved Iowa Hawkeyes. Among others, his essays have appeared in Sport LIterate, Fourth Genre, Iowa Review, Writing on the Edge, and Under the Sun.

Waiting on Deck

by Jay Lesandrini

I’m kneeling in the on-deck circle with two outs in the ninth, and we’re losing again. Losing by a lot, and all I want is one more at bat. Eighteen years of playing baseball is coming down to this — one more chance to stand in the batter’s box. The sun is dipping behind the trees in left field, and what had been a warm Sunday afternoon in late April has become something much colder. If I were sitting in the dugout with two or three guys waiting ahead of me to hit, I’d already be past this. I’d be thinking about getting back to my off-campus apartment and drinking a cold beer, or I’d be thinking that I still have to read The American for my Lit final next week. I’ve been putting it off all semester. I hate Henry James.

Instead, I’m here in the on-deck circle and I reach down, grab the pine-tar rag, tacky the bat handle with optimism. The batter takes ball one. I shout at him. Tell him to make the pitcher work. Suggest to him that the pitcher’s getting tired. Urge him to make sure it’s a strike before he swings. But I know he’s not listening. And I’m not really talking to him, anyway. I’m talking to the pitcher. I want to get inside this guy’s head. I want him to be thinking about me instead of the batter. He knows the game is over. He knows he’s got a long bus ride home and wants to get started as soon as possible.

He throws a breaking ball that freezes the batter, and looks low and away to me. The umpire calls a strike. It’s getting cold out here for him too.

I look into the visitor’s dugout and they are all laughing at the call. They start to bag up their equipment. Everyone wants the game to end except for me — and the guy in the batter’s box. The pitcher reaches back and brings the high hard stuff, and I can see the batter’s eyes turn into saucers. There’s something about a high fastball that makes you want to take a bite of that grapefruit as it dances up to the plate.

A swing and a miss. The count is one and two, and I know that the pitcher’s coming back with another high fastball. I give the batter the benefit of my wisdom, but he still isn’t listening. The pitch is head high, right down central and I see that moment of hesitation in the batter’s knees right before his bat comes forward. I’m already walking back toward the dugout when I hear the slight ping of cowhide glancing off aluminum, and the hopeful chink of the ball hitting the fence behind us. There’s still a chance for one more at bat.

I pick up the pine tar rag and stand there wringing it in my hands like a widow at a wake. I think about the afternoon when I was four years old and my mother stood behind me and shaped my fingers onto a bat handle for the first time. I think about the first game I played in the 12-year-old league when I was only nine, and how I was so scared that I bunted with the bases loaded. I think about all the nights after practice in high school waiting for the city bus to take me home, while my friend’s parents picked them up. I think about passing up the opportunity to go to Marquette because they didn’t have a baseball team, and about the day my high school coach told me that Butler University was offering me a scholarship. It all comes down to this.

It comes down to me waiting in the on-deck circle, hoping the guy at the plate, a junior who still has another year to play, will find his way on base and give me one last opportunity to hit a baseball. There is nothing in the balance. No record to be set. No game to be won to extend a season. This is it.

Eighteen years of playing baseball and I could never hit a slider. I could never pick up that tight rotation of the seams in time to recognize the pitch… until now. I see the ball leave the pitcher’s hand and watch the batter swing at a pitch that would strike me out.

The instant that the ball comes off his bat, I imagine the pitcher being undressed like Charlie Brown as the ball whizzes by his head. Then I hear the snap of cowhide on leather. Charlie Brown isn’t pitching today.

I feel the weight of 18 years of baseball drop in my stomach, and I kneel down to catch my breath, using the bat as a cane to keep me upright. On his way to the dugout the batter pats me on the back and tells me that he’s sorry, and I know that he really means it.

As I think back now, 20 some years later, I don’t remember what happened during the last at bat of my baseball career, I only remember waiting in the on deck circle hoping that it would never end.

Jay Lesandrini holds an MFA in creating writing from Butler University. His publications include Bluestem, Booth, Caesura, Mythic Indy, Punchnel’s, and Sport Literate. His essay “Waiting on Deck,” won our 2010 essay contest and was also named a notable essay in the Best American Sports Writing 2011. He lives in Carmel, Indiana, and is the Director of Communications and Marketing at Indiana University-Purdue University Columbus, where he also teaches writing.

 

SL contest history

Over nearly 30 years in print, we have held a number of essay and poetry contests. On the essay front, more often than not, we pick an SL veteran, sometimes even a previous contest winner, to serve as a guest judge, picking his or her favorite from a short list of anonymous finalists.

We do not have a contest in the works for 2023. In 2022, Virginia Ottley Craighill was the guest judge on a “social justice contest.” Frank Van Zant, our longtime poetry editor, crowned the champion poet. Our two winners: Flavian Mark Lupinetti, for his poem “Wrestling Lake Burn,” and Sydney Lea, for his essay “The Cardinal, the Cops, and the Say-Hey Kid.” Lea’s essay, by the way, earned a notable nod in The Best American Essays 2023.

Some recent contest winners include the following.

• Hal Ackerman, “Concrete Charlie and the Golden Boy” (a “sport short”)
• Dave Fromm, “Tool Town Left to Its Own Devices“
• Matt Hohner, “Mob Hit at the Ark Ramp“

 

Meat Squad

by Peter Stine

I was relaxing in my brother’s kitchen over in Palmer Woods, waiting for him to return from the hospital, when Jack came in from a night class down at Wayne State. Last weekend he’d shaved his head again to make the hair grow back thicker. He sighed heavily and took a place at the table under a large round Faygo clock that glowed purple on the wall.

“Peter, I need a change, and not the minor things. New job, new pussy, the whole thing across the board.”
My sister-in-law walked in with a pile of laundry. “Hi, Jack. How was teaching tonight?”
“Betsy, I walk in there and they haven’t put the chairs around in a circle. Why do I have to ask them every class to put the chairs in a circle? I mean I’m a consistent person.”
Betsy chuckled and went to the cabinet to get some chips. I rolled a couple joints and placed them in the middle of the table. “This is what they would have preferred down at the soup kitchen today.”
“How’s that article coming?” she asked. “For Metropolitan Detroit, right?”
“Sister Mary Watson is a cool lady, Bets. She runs a remarkable shelter. I just hope to draw a little more attention and money her way.”

At that moment Pat arrived back from the hospital. Still thin as a rail after Vietnam, he grabbed a Lowenbrau and joined us at the table. His face was red from exertion.
“Patrick . . .” Jack said, reaching for a joint. “How’s it going?”
“A little busy in the ER,” he said, without elaboration, that mysteriously benign blankness on his face. “There was some basketball practice afterwards. Henry Ford has a team, mostly blacks from the ER. For a completely useless team member, I have quite a following.”

We passed the joint around, and talk meandered from the Boy Scouts to past summer jobs to what we might do with a videotape of Ronald Reagan butt-fucking a chimp, if we uncovered one. The three of us had been meeting regularly for mid-week bull sessions for a year now. This night Pat led us back to sports and some memories of his career as a half-miler in high school.

“I remember the Flint meet best,” he began. “I ran the first 440 in sixty, coasted the next 220, and then waited to see what I had left. Dad had the movie camera rolling. With about a hundred yards to go I started my kick. You knew it was time because these guys with long strides all around me were stretching it out, pulling away. But I had nothing left. Zilch. You feel the legs go rubbery, the vision blurs, and your body stiffens into some hysterical hunchback gasping for air. Your teammates are no help, standing along the track waving towels at you, yelling at you to pump your arms, as more runners are passing you, now pouring over the finish line, the camera recording all . . . On the ride home everybody’s horsing around, while I’m in the back of the bus, a wet towel over my head, puking my cookies into a pail . . . Christ, I remember after the Clio meet I went blind, simply lost my vision for half an hour.”

Maybe it was just dope profundity, but it struck me sitting there that over time jock humiliations like Pat’s became silver trophies, far more precious than memories of victory. It is the losing that unites us. “Buzz, as I remember you had some problems at the Huron Relays too.”

“Yeah, that was my first race on an indoor track, a medley relay, in Ypsilanti. I remember Jim Cooley ran the first 220 and handed me the baton with a thirty-yard lead. I jumped out and ran, entirely alone, just the tic-tic-tic of my shoes on the track. I lost a little ground by the second lap, but was still way ahead. I was really flying. But on the third lap, I went into the curve under the balcony in first place, and came out of the turn in fifth! Teammates on the infield were screaming and waving at me. I had run the whole race in my outside lane . . . It never occurred to me to merge.”

“You were taught as a kid to color inside the lines,” I reminded him. “So what do you expect?”

Jack popped a third of a joint in his mouth, and then leaned back, rubbing his shaven head.

“Pat, we had a defensive football coach in high school who believed that the way you proved you had guts was by spear-tackling, with your head. But at 130 pounds I didn’t want any of that. I remember once I went down to cover a kickoff and cut through traffic to the middle of the field, doing a good job of avoiding people. Suddenly there was a parting of bodies and a guy with the ball was galloping straight toward me. We ran full speed into each other in a straight-up position. I fell back and down as a knee went squarely into my nuts. Then I rolled over and passed out . . .”

“Jack . . . ” Betsy groaned, back at the sink.

“After that I made it clear to the coach: no defense. But it seemed to follow me. In lacrosse, I think it was a Rutgers-Princeton game, I got into an even worse collision. That was enough. I got up and just walked off the field, some guy clubbing me with a lacrosse stick all the way to the sidelines . . .”

Pat put a helmet of hands over his head in sympathy.

“Jack,” he said, “that’s what freshman football at Rumson High in New Jersey was like with my brother at quarterback. The first play of any game Peter would always call my number, 23-halfback dive, you know, just to feel out the defensive line.  And every fucking time I would get creamed, swallowed up in a grunting pile of bodies and choking dust. To this day I remember no pain, just stars, like in the cartoons.”

“Jack, why is he complaining? This was the days of standard T-formation football. Remember that? The end-run option was worse for Patrick. I’d get in trouble, after a few ineffectual fakes on the defensive end, and had to lateral to him as the secondary came charging in full speed. Right as my brother grabbed the ball, about eye level, they’d run his ass over.”

“Then they’d grab my jersey and shoulder pads and whirl me into the yardsticks.”

“You guys,” Betsy said. “These experiences are so violent.”

“Self-inflicted wounds,” Jack said with fatuous solemnity. “Self-inflicted wounds.”

“Look here, Bets.” I pulled up the front of my alligator pullover and pointed to a smooth disc of skin the size of a dime in the middle of my breastbone. “Our locker room at Rumson was about as ventilated as a dungeon. Everything stank. Shoulder pads were always caked with mud or soaked with sweat, rank and stiffening. I was fourteen with acne all over my shoulders, back and chest, and pulling on that equipment was like feeding a fire. So one day I’m sitting on a bench in front of my locker and pop this huge inflamed pimple. I keep pressing the skin around it until there’s a stream of yellow pus running down to my stomach, pooling at my hip, then, no lie, running down the inside of my thigh until it reached my knee! When I wiped away the pus there was a wound in my chest that looked like a bullet hole.”

“That was our assignment on the meat squad,” my brother said, redirecting the conversation. “We were road kill for the varsity during practices. Freshmen or sophomores, totally outsized, in worn-out equipment, yellow tank tops, unnumbered jerseys, battered cleats. Our heads poked out of those oversized shoulder pads like wary turtles… We were pitiful.”

“No,” I said, “we were sacrificial… ”

“I wised up about meat squads long before my brother,” Pat said. “He’s still on the meat squad. After that freshman year I switched to golf.”

***

Elizabeth and our son Alex were asleep when I returned home that night. One remark from the bull session kept sticking in my mind. He’s still on the meat squad. It was therapeutic to linger a while on the sofa, my Labrador beside me, and go back 20-odd years to those first two seasons of football at Rumson High.  How my gut used to fill up with anxiety each day as last period ticked down in study hall. Whether rain or fall sunlight was at the tall auditorium windows, I felt the lassitude of someone about to be ordered to walk in formation across open terrain toward woods alive with the crack of rifle fire. Every afternoon, I watched two rows below me our starting senior guard, a muscular pockmarked gnome named Earl Scholl, hold a cigarette lighter to the seat in front of him and char the wood with fierce concentration. He was just getting ready for practice. Up front the faculty proctor seemed too distracted trying to locate who was arcing pennies high into the air to notice Earl’s work. When the pennies came down with a metallic clank around the auditorium, like toy grenades, a ripple of laughter went up. Anything was possible, even permissible. When the final bell rang, while students flooded out of noisy corridors into airy freedom, I would file down to the locker room.

This was the late Fifties and locker rooms were a logical command post for preparing young American boys to be fed into the meat grinder of an inevitable war with Soviet Russia. They were cramped, filled with a gray din, like a crowded holding cell in some county jail. Despite the chorus of curses and jokes, slamming metal doors, the mood was somber among the meat squad. I would file out with the others into the slant light of afternoon, cleats clicking on the asphalt as we walked across a parking lot to the practice field. The distant goalposts stuck into the sky like lances. There the team loitered on a grassy knoll to await the arrival of Coach Rosotti. The meat squad stayed apart, like orphans. I remember how the woods beyond the field stood silent and remote, autumn leaves a lovely quilt of red and yellow, almost mystical, having nothing to do with football.

Memories of the meat squad kept surfacing in my mind, causing a quick, unexpected anxiety. I got up to pour myself a glass of bourbon, and then went back to the sofa.

When practice started, the team operated as a unit, stretching, doing jumping jacks, running laps, going though formational drills. It was like a wholesome boot camp. But soon the drills became violent. There were no facemasks on the helmets then, and I dreaded in particular the tackling drill. Two dummies were set up about four yards apart, and two lines faced each other on either side of the opening. At the sound of the whistle, a player at the head of one line ran with the football between the dummies. The player at the head of the other line did a somersault and met the charging runner in the opening. One afternoon I came out of a somersault late and rose up to catch a knee square in the face. I got up groggy and went to the back of the other line, where Mr. Early, the high school principal, who had stopped by to watch practice, started talking to me long enough to recognize I was standing up but out cold. I had a cracked cheekbone and concussion, and the next two days were a permanent hole in my memory. But meat was not expected to think.

In the second half of practice the meat squad scrimmaged the varsity. On offense I played the quarterback of the next opponent, Matawan or Point Pleasant, and whether handing off to a running back, running the option, or dropping back to pass, I was leveled. Every play was the same play: the signal count, then soft crunch of shoulder pads, confused yells and grunts, then contact like the rush of a train, a distant whistle, and the quiet weight of bodies piled on top of me. It wasn’t much different on defense, where I played cornerback. Billy Lewis, with a gang of blockers, was always breaking through a giant hole in the line and stampeding toward me. Maybe 5-10 and 140 pounds at the time, I just toppled over backwards and reached up to grab feet and legs as they ran over my body. Scrimmage offered the meat squad the pure experience of enduring blows.

When it grew dark, the team would huddle around the coaches for strategy sessions, the meat squad on the margins, a ghostly irrelevance now. But sometimes we were summoned to take more. Once, when the varsity was ordered back on the field to return kickoffs, I jogged down in coverage and was blind-sided by John Kunce, our best lineman and 240 pounds. I lay on my back in the torn grass, never wanting to move, feeling the relief of the dead. When I opened my eyes, there was the towering figure of Coach Rosotti staring down at me. On his mafia face was a look of the most exquisite compassion. John was staring down as well, innocent and uncomprehending. It was the closest I have ever come to being welcomed into heaven.

Once practice was over, back in the locker room, all the pain was replaced by the deepest sense of solidarity I had known. For the meat squad, the challenge had been met and we were still alive. Even the varsity players seemed to treat us like comrades-in-arms. The shower room, with its broken nozzles, chipped tiles, billows of steam, was abuzz with jokes and horseplay. Earl stood under a shower talking with the team captain, Paul Dobrowski, a James Dean look-a-like whose attentions kept the fawning lineman from realizing that the captain was pissing on his leg. For the meat squad, this was a restoration of justice. When he looked down, Earl jumped back, went berserk, and everyone broke up. We were inside the magic circle.

At the varsity games on Saturday afternoons, I recorded all the plays on a clipboard from the sidelines. I also tended to the injured. When Bobby Clark went down with a torn-up knee against Red Bank Catholic, I was a crutch, helping him to the bench, where he wept in pain in a litter of plastic cups, chewed orange rinds, and ultimate neglect. In a brutal away game against Sayreville, played on a field that storms had turned into a prairie of mud and standing water, I watched as our backup defensive end, Rob Hamilton, entered the game in the second half wearing a clean uniform – a splash of Technicolor in a world of indistinguishable brown shapes. But this was no mark of transcendence, rather an irresistible target for the Sayreville linemen. They jeered as Rob crouched into position. He came off the field a play later with his two upper front teeth knocked out. On the bus ride home, I sat next to him as he clamped his mouth into a blood-soaked towel.

I never played varsity football at Rumson High. My family moved to Michigan my junior year, where I quarterbacked another high school team, pretty well, until late in my senior season my career ended the way John Kunce started it – a blind-side hit after the whistle, blowing out my knee. But that seemed fated too. I was still on the meat squad. Nothing matched the existential edge of being aligned with a hopeless cause, the voluntary martyrdom of joining it, the complexity of surviving it. This was formative, and left me with an irrepressible, if distorted way of viewing events outside the chalk lines.

“I was an awful dope when I went into the last war,” Ernest Hemingway wrote. “I can remember just thinking that we were the home team and the Austrians were the visiting team.” This classical analogy between war and sport, a tragic confusion of realms, was drowned in carnage. A British captain, W. P. Nevill, led his men at the Somme attack by dribbling a soccer ball up to the German front lines. He was killed instantly, as was the spirit he embodied, by an engagement that cost the British 60,000 killed and wounded that day, for an advance of a hundred yards – the length of a football field. General Haig declared the battle a success.

The same sentiment resurfaced in my twenties, during the civil rights struggle in the South. Meridian, Selma, Orangeburg. I was drawn down there upon reading in Paris, in The International Herald Tribune, of Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodwin, an early meat squad of the Congress of Racial Equality, being murdered by the Klan in Mississippi. The moral rightness of this struggle was self-evident, with a clear underdog, an engagement no more complicated than wanting to beat Sayerville. Only one injunction here: put your body on the line. Passive but resistant meat, something I understood. Beaten by whites in a Meridian bus station, only to be rescued by two black Vietnam vets returning home on leave. On the back steps of Brown’s chapel in Selma, keeping watch against marauding whites, an unloaded rifle on my lap. On the streets of Montgomery, arrested after being thrown through the window of a department store. On the sidewalks of Orangeburg, the first white guy to teach at South Carolina State College, blocked by a giant barber with a razor, a Klansman without his hood, eyes glinting from two cups of flab. None of this matched the terror of a Mississippi summer. But I suspect its leader, Bob Moses, put an end to the strategy when it became clear that someone on the meat squad, especially when white, became a far more useful symbol when dead. Yet what I remembered was the holy sense of community.

Over those years I watched the U.S. military in Vietnam prove less merciful with their “search and destroy” missions. Dump teenage grunts into the trap-laden, mine-filled, guerrilla-controlled jungle, and once they were ambushed, call in the napalm. An anti-war activist in the South, it was my shame to recognize only later that the grunts of Vietnam were the tragic meat squad of my generation: brothers sacrificed for nothing, 58,000 of them, including Earl Scholl, one way or another wasted, greased, iced, their poetic language for death a reminder of their physical mortality, an antidote to the Orwellian lies that justified the war. As I saw it, the war came to an end only when the nation woke up to white middle-class KIAs coming back in body bags, while the meat squads in-country mutinied through drugs and fragging. And as for the returning vets, twice as many committed suicide after the war as those killed in Vietnam itself, as if in loyalty to fallen comrades, as if survival guilt could be purged by death alone.

Afterwards a member of any meat squad carries off a dangerous respect for loss, for what could success possibly mean now? Lethargy settles in that in my case bordered on immobilization. An absence that is really loyalty to what has passed. Across the room from me, on the shelf of a bookcase was a framed picture of my mother. Last year I had leaned over her casket in Florida and kissed her cheek, firm and cold as marble. I had been away a year and a half, failed to reach her side in time. The same mother who, rightly fearful of meat squads, failed to see how her own open heart had inspired her children to volunteer. The same mother who, after dinner was over and my homework done, would apply sulfur compresses to the acne on my back and shoulders. The same mother who, every morning for the three months of the football season, was always there to help me out of bed I was so sore.

Peter Stine is the author of The Art of Survival (Rocky Shore Books), a collection of literary essays on Isaac Babel, Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Conrad. Regent Press published a collection of his short stories in 2019. His fiction, poetry, nonfiction and journalism have appeared in many publications, including The Threepenny Review, The Iowa Review, Boulevard, The Gettysburg Review, North American Review, The Antioch Review, Crazyhorse, Chicago Quarterly Review, Sport Literate, The New York Times, and Harold Bloom’s Modern Critical Views. He is the editor of four books: The Sixties (Wayne State University Press), On Nature’s Terms (Texas A&M University Press), Sports in America (Wayne State University Press), and The Best of Witness: 1987-2007 (Michigan State University Press).

And In This Corner…

Michael Gawdzik

From time to time, coach made his fighters stay in a pushup position while he whacked them with a bamboo stick. “Humility is the way to greatness.” So he beat them to keep them humble, to have them know that, no matter how hard they trained, they would never be better than a bamboo stick.

I had come to South Korea to get as far from Indianapolis as possible. It was 2013, I was fresh out of college, looking for adventure, and had just spent months listening to old teachers complain incessantly about the state of Indiana education. It was a sermon I wanted no part in writing. What I wanted was to get rid of everything, leave the country, burn my couch, break up with my girlfriend, crush my bike, disembowel my bed, and stomp on all the frozen loaves of bread in my freezer. I wanted to get in a fight and see what I was made of.

So that’s what I did. I heaved my couch into a dumpster, tossed my bed in next to the couch, turned down teaching suburban kids on the south side of Indianapolis, and sold my bike for twenty bucks. I gave the bread to a buddy, broke up with my girlfriend, and headed for the airport. By day I would teach Korean children conversational English, and by night I would learn how to punch and take punches; I would learn how to box.

The gym was all hardwood floors crisscrossed with electrical tape. To the right of the door was the coach’s desk littered with forms, empty food containers, and a big green ledger filled with the progress of boxers. The place smelled like sweat, rubber, and rice. Mirrors hung on all of the walls and hand wraps and jump ropes hung from the posts of the ring in the back of the gym. A pile of towels stiff with blood sat in a corner. The first night I got my gloves coach told me to hit the heavy bag for nine minutes. Jab, cross, hook to the body, hook to the head. My gloves were thin, black, and shiny like a beetle shell. I got too excited and fought that bag like I could win. The next day at school my hands shook so much I could barely hold a pen to grade papers.

Movement, balance, flow, strategy — concepts that, when followed, allow a boxer to transcend the fistfight into a tactical test of skill. At best I had flashes of coherence, but only flashes. Weeks passed. I started sparring. I began to feel confidence percolating through my fists. The muscles in my body relaxed, allowing me to take deep breaths and move less like a robot and more like a boxer.

For my first sparring session coach and I sparred three one-minute rounds. He, fit and short with gleaming black hair and pearl skin, came out of his corner, chin down, gloves up, shoulders loose. There’s a saying among boxers to be afraid of the guy who looks relaxed in the ring. Coach could’ve been napping as he stalked toward me. I, on the other hand, couldn’t hear anything outside the pounding of my heart. He faked a right cross to my head to cover a left hook to my body. I brought my arms over my head, exposing my ribs. His hook landed flush against my stomach and all the air inside me vanished. He finished with a hard jab to my nose. I crumpled to the canvas while he strolled to the nearest corner.

Getting punched in the face didn’t hurt immediately like I’d thought. I got all the other aspects of it though — the sudden shock, disorientation, buckling knees, blurred vision. If I was hit really hard, my mind would go blank. My whole world would skip like a record, and, when I came to, I’d either be down or still on my feet with my opponent coming at me.

My first taste of victory came against a Korean guy named Ji-Ho, who was in his late twenties and wore thick glasses. I punched him once in the gut then threw a jab and a cross to his head. I dropped him to the canvas. At the end of sparring, I lifted weights then ran a half-mile up Buramsan — the mountain near the gym — turning around at a cluster of Buddhist temples, before shadow-boxing back.

After training, Ji-Ho told me in broken English over beers and cigarettes about a boxing tournament happening in a few months in a small town twenty-minutes south of North Korea. I demanded he run up to the gym to tell coach I wanted to fight. Moments later Ji-Ho came down and said coach would sign me up in the morning.

A few weeks before the tournament I watched all the Mike Tyson I could on my laptop. Mercedes, Colay, Canady, Nelson, Bruno, Spinks — Tyson destroyed them all, anyone dumb enough to step in the ring with him. And in studying his destruction, I took note of how to keep my feet apart and chin down, how not to grin when I eyeball my opponent, and how to hit, as Tyson’s coach told him, “with bad intent.”

My coach had me sparring at least four times a week. With only two weeks before the fight, I started seeing myself as a mad dog, fighting sometimes six rounds in a night, getting beaten mercilessly, rarely landing any punches of my own. Now the pap-pap of gloves hitting punching bags and the tik-tik of jump ropes skimming the floor stayed with me well after I’d showered and gone to bed.

The morning of my fight was cold, and the air smelled like gasoline. My coach, two other boxers, and I piled into a car and drove the hour north to the tournament. As we drove, I thought of nothing other than my opponent. I boxed him in my mind, slipping all his punches while landing my own ferocious combos. I wanted to destroy him and prove to myself that, as long as I was conscious, I would never stay down.

Then reality hit. Why did I even sign up for this fight? I thought, as I entered the cold gym, thousands of miles away from home. And why did I think that studying Iron Mike’s knockouts would ever help me, a tall, freckly, skinny white kid with small hands and a big mouth? All the Tyson fights I had watched began to haunt me: Tyson hitting Michael Johnson so hard in the ribs Johnson crumpled to the canvas; Tyson calling his knockout against Francois Botha like Babe Ruth calling a home run; Tyson peppering Steve Zouski with organ deflating punches; Tyson knocking down Peter McNeely, the poor goofy bastard, twenty-two-seconds after the ding of the bell.

Ding.

I meet him at the center of the ring. He smashes a jab through my guard. I stumble back against the ropes, eyes on the canvas, bracing for impact. A few hooks to my ribs drops me for the first time. The ten count starts. I wait for eight, then spring back up. Something is different; time moves in fits. I’m stiff with fear; my mouth is dry. I avoid him for rest of the round.

Ding.

Coach pours water into my mouth. He tells me to punch fast then move away.

Ding.

Conjuring every Tyson knockout, I come out ready to do damage — to hit with bad intent. I meet him in the center, whip out a jab then a cross. Both slip through, connecting flush on the bridge of his nose. He stumbles back, coach cheers, and, for the briefest of seconds, I am Iron Mike Tyson.

My opponent comes roaring back — walloping my head and ribs with big rights and snapping lefts — at one point knocking me through the ropes to dangle half out of the ring. The ref helps me up by the shoulders, dusts me off, then, signals for us to continue.

Ding.

Coach had come with me on my last run before my fight. We ran in silence past the pear orchard and alders up to the summit of the mountain. As the frozen road tilted to the black sky, coach pulled ahead. I stopped once to catch my breath, sucking in the biting air with my hands on my knees, before continuing. I kept going, gravel and ice crunching under my feet, up the mountain, toward the forest and temples cast in moon and shadow.

Michael Gawdzik  is a teacher by day and a writer in Indianapolis, Indiana, by night. He enjoys
traveling and attempting to bestow his enthusiasm for reading and writing
on anyone willing to listen.

Touched by the Greatest

John Julius Reel

Angelo Dundee, Muhammad Ali’s corner man, was a fan of my dad’s column in the New York Daily News, so in the summer of 1978 my dad, brother and I were invited to spend the day at The Greatest’s training camp in Deer Lake, Pennsylvania.

A month earlier, I had been left off the Little League all-star team, despite having made it the two previous years. I hoped that meeting one of my heroes might snap me out of my slump.

We woke up early, and Mom dressed Joe and me up in plaid pants, fat-soled, Buster Brown shoes and wide-collared, short sleeved pull-overs, the kind that made my armpits itch and stink.

“Geez,” I said. “It’s not like we’re going to church.”
Mom would not be swayed.
“You’re meeting important men today.”

Dundee said he’d pick us up at the News Building. The last time Joe and I had been there, we’d run into Jimmy Breslin in the hall. His huge head, bushy hair and eyebrows protruding off a top-heavy frame had reminded me of a bison. He’d just grunted at us, with a cigar clenched between his teeth, then made some wisecrack that none of us understood. Dad nodded and smiled, until Breslin went away. The nicest guy had been the cartoonist, Bill Gallo, who invited Joe and me into his office and drew us our very own Big Bertha, who asked us in a bubble of dialogue to play ball.

The biggest highlight of that previous trip into Dad’s office hadn’t been his co-workers, but the building lobby, with its wall of clocks, each one set at a different time, for a different city around the world, and the centerpiece, an enormous globe with a railing around it, spinning on the same axis as the actual earth.

Today, as usual, we took the bus then the Staten Island Ferry into the city, then another bus outside Whitehall Station, getting off on Madison Avenue, a block away from what Dad called, “the quintessential spot to make sissy in the city,” the Yale Club. After leading us in to do our business – the urinals went straight down to the floor, like something you could prop up mummies in –, Dad gave the doorman a big hello on our way back out the revolving door.

“Little does that guy know,” Dad said, once we were walking home free down Vanderbilt Avenue, “that your old man was once arrested for pelting a New Haven cop in a campus snowball fight. I falsely pleaded ignorance.”

Once at the News Building, on 42^nd Street, we waited for Dundee’s limo beneath the mural above the entrance. The motto, “He made so many of them,” was sculpted into the stone. So many men, I guessed, since that’s what the mural showed, and that’s what the streets teemed with. Well, we were off to see the greatest of them, although he’d recently lost his title to Leon Spinks.

The rematch would be held in a month, on September 15^th, the day after I turned 11.

***

John Stearns was Bad Dude, Dave Kingman was Kong, and Pete Rose was Charlie Hustle. A few months after Reggie Jackson hit three homers in a single game in the previous year’s World Series, off the first three pitches he swung at, the Reggie Bar had come out. Joe and I agreed that the “Mr. October Bar” would have sounded better, although the second-rate name was small beans next to its wrapper – orange and blue, the colors of the Mets. Reggie Jackson was a Yankee! How could such a colossal error have been overlooked?

There was also Doctor J in basketball. The shots he was known for, the dunk and the finger roll, “didn’t even exist,” according to Dad, back when he’d played. We’d even heard of Broadway Joe, although more for Namath’s commercials with Farah Fawcett than for his football heroics. “A man about town,” my dad called him.

Of course none of these nicknames compared with The Greatest.
“Someone or something that’s impossible to forget” was how Dad defined greatness.
He’d often use the word when practicing with Joe and me. “Great play!” he’d say, or “Great catch!” Or even after we struck out: “Great swing!”
Sometimes, happy to be home after a long day’s work, or just lolling around the house on the weekend, waiting for Mom to call us into dinner, he’d pat one of us on the back, and say with an emphasis undiminished by his signature irony, “One of the all-time greats!”
We never doubted that’s what we were to him, and our plays and our swings as well. We were his sons, after all.

Perhaps Dad was great. He called his columns his “stuff,” the same word he used for a pitcher’s ability to get guys out. For instance, the Mets’ Jerry Koosman had “lost his stuff,” having gone from a 20-game winner in ’76 to a 20-game loser in ’77. This season he was doing even worse. Meanwhile, Tom Seaver, who’d been traded to the Reds the previous year, hadn’t lost an ounce of his. A few months ago, he’d thrown his first ever no-hitter. The Mets had tanked since he’d left. With the Mets, first he’d been Tom Terrific and then The Franchise, living up to both nicknames.

Although the News trucks had finished their work by the time I was out and about before school, and then, when the Night Owl edition was being delivered, Joe and I would already be in our pajamas, I knew Dad’s face had been plastered across the sides of every single one. So perhaps, in what he called “the newspaper business,” Bill Reel was as much a franchise player as Seaver, Jackson, Garvey or Schmidt.

How many trucks were needed to deliver all the copies of the News sold on Sunday? In any given moment of the morning, how many faces of Dad were spread across the Tri-State Area?
“Enough to fill Shea?” I had asked Joe one day.
Joe, whose paper route gave him an insider’s view, applied his mathematical mind to the question.
“Maybe enough to fill the box seats,” he’d mused.
Still, Dad’s definition of greatness wasn’t foolproof. Failure too was impossible to forget.

In August of ’75, a year before I had entered Little League with a golden bat and glove, proclaimed an eight-year-old prodigy in the national game, Mike Vail had debuted for the Mets. He went 4 for 4 against the Padres a few days later, beginning a hitting streak that had Dad, Joe and me going directly to the box scores in the News on mornings after games, more concerned with Vail’s performance at the plate than the final score. The streak ended at 23 games, the longest ever by a Major League rookie, and a tie for the longest by a Met. By the end of the season, he was being touted as the new miracle of the Miracle Mets. A .302 average, the second best on the team, behind only Ed Kranepool. Mighty Mike! Yet the following season, he hit just .217. And this year, during spring training, the Mets had finally let him go.

He was the Met I remembered most, for being a flash in the pan – exactly what Ali hoped to turn Spinks into, exactly what I hoped to never become.

***

The back of the limo was like a tiny living room, upholstered in tawny beige with gilt lining framing the pull-out ashtrays, door handles and overlaying the window lips. Dundee sat on the couch-like seat across from us, wearing dark gray pants and an open-collared shirt with shimmering pin stripes. A thin chain traversed the triangle of exposed flesh below his neck. A fatter chain circled his wrist. The frames of his eye-glasses, and even the top of his head – tan, shiny and balding – added to the sheen of gold. He also wore cologne. Because he’d shaken my hand, I wore it now, too.

“You boys ever had to defend yourselves?” he asked.
I considered telling him about the time I’d bashed Roy Jordan’s nose back in 3^rd grade. Instead of hitting back, he’d said, “Nice punch!”
“They’re ballplayers,” Dad replied.
Mr. Dundee nodded approvingly.
“I thought I saw fire in their eyes,” he said. “That’s what makes a champion.”

The radio was tuned to WNEW New York, exactly what we listened to at home. William B. Williams and Jonathan Schwartz, the station’s star DJs, played from what they called The Great American Songbook. To them, there was Sinatra, a.k.a. The Chairman of the Board, and then all the rest: Benny Goodman, Lena Horne, Nelson Riddle… The dudes and dames of something called “The Make Believe Ballroom.”

“Hello world!” Willy B would say, as Dad drove us back from St. Andrew’s on Sundays. We had a VW squareback, Dodger blue with cream interior, and a whistle in its engine tone. Dad would tap his fingers on the ball at the end of the stick shift, keeping time with the music.

Now, in the limo, I watched him ply his trade on Dundee. The give and take of their talk, its pace, made me wonder if they were angry at each other.

“It’s all about surprising the opponent,” said Dundee. “The greatest fighters even surprise themselves.”
“But he’s 36,” said Dad.
“Ali’s still got some surprises left in him.”
“He’s not the fighter he once was though.”
“He’s different. But his personality and character are the same,” said Dundee. “That’s what makes him the greatest fighter who ever lived.”

***

By the time we got to Deer Lake, the scent of Dundee’s cologne, mixed with the smoke from the cigarettes that he and Dad sucked down to the filters and filled the gilded ash trays with, had gone to my head. Also we’d skipped lunch. At one point, during complete silence, a fart had trumpeted out of me. Not even Joe had acknowledged it with a raised eyebrow or an elbow to the ribs. Now that we’d finally reached our destination, I just wanted to be back home, flipping through and talking baseball cards with Joe, eating one of Mom’s grilled cheeses with a glass of milk, ripping farts to my heart’s content.

Dundee must have sensed that we were faltering, because, as soon as we got inside the compound’s ring and training facilities, he went off to get us “Floats like a butterfly, stings like a bee” t-shirts, blue for me, red for Joe, and two brass, Muhammad Ali belt buckles, with his likeness cast in a boxer’s defensive pose, the metal the exact color and shine as the skin of the man I was now seeing in person, alone in the ring, shadowboxing, sweat sliding down him, his face transfixed, like Dad’s when he would pound out his column at the dining room table.

He gave a final flurry of punches, then shook out his legs and arms and bent to slip through the ropes, as an assistant wrapped him in a white robe. When they disappeared through a door, I thought that was it. But Dundee came over and asked Joe and me if we’d like to join Ali in a few minutes to watch the Spinks fight tape in one of the bunk house living rooms.

We immediately stood with all our stuff.

Dundee went off to find something for us to put it in. He returned with a shoebox that said EVERLAST, and Size 13. It was the biggest shoe box I’d ever seen.

***

A couple of The Greatest’s sparring partners flanked him on the sofa. The three of them wore loose, gray t-shirts and shorts and hunched down like sitting bears ready to roll forward into swift motion. The furniture seemed like what you’d find at a garage sale, or left out for the garbage men to pick up. The upholstery gave off the odor of sweet feet and something muskier that I couldn’t pinpoint. The carpet was dirty brown, and you could see where food and drink spills had been carelessly cleaned up. I stared at the soda cans in the fighters’ hands, looking as tiny as dice-rollers from my Parcheesi game.

Once, way past our bed-time, at a dinner party with some of Dad’s friends in the city, I’d overheard him tell of the time he’d seen Yogi Berra in the Yankee locker room.

“Yogi had just stepped out of the shower. Body hair covered him like a wet shag carpet.” Dad rose from his chair and propped his foot up on the seat to show how Yogi stood. “He had a slice of pizza up over his head, drooping down, dripping oil, about to send it in. And down below his paunch. . .” Dad dropped a hand to beneath his legs, as if holding a great weight there.

“Billy!” Mom said. “The children!”
“Some indelible memories you’d prefer to forget,” Dad said.
The room had burst into hilarity. It was a side of Dad I’d never seen before, nothing sacred, the life of the party, having forgotten his family was present.

***

In the bout against Spinks, there had been some controversy about a moment between the late rounds, after which Spinks came out with a second wind, key to his winning the fight by decision. Ali fast-forwarded directly to this part, with the cameras on Spinks in his corner, then pressed play. We all watched as one of Spinks’ corner men squirted a water bottle into the fighter’s mouth. Instead of spitting it into a stool-side bucket, Spinks swallowed it.

“Didja see? Didja see?” said Ali, jumping up from the sofa and beginning to bob and weave.

After a flurry of jabs, he turned to me. “Ain’t nobody gonna cheat the king! Ain’t no one gonna cheat the worl’! The greatest of ALL time! Learnin’ new tricks at 36. Ain’t over the hill, Spinks gonna get his fill. Don’t stand no chance ‘gainst an Ali who can dance.”

His sparring partners chimed in, “Das right, champ!” . . .  “Uh huh!” . . . “Gonna whup him like you whupped the rest.”

Ali followed with a fiercer and more intricate display of shuffling and shadow boxing, as I sat on a foot stool below him.

“When that bell ring, gonna be so fast, he gonna think he’s surrounded. Be floatin’ an’ dancin’. Old enough to be his daddy, they sayin’. We’ll, I’m gonna beat him like I’m his daddy. Ain’t nobody gonna stop me. I’ll whup ‘em all. Gonna go outa boxin’ just like I came in…,” he squatted down in front of me, his face as big and golden as a gong. “Shockin’ the worl’!”

He bit his lower lip and popped his eyes out, as though it was all he could do not to let fly with the fist he held under his chin. I tried to smile, but a pathetic squeak betrayed me.

I felt his hand on my head, radiating heat.
“I would never hit you, little man,” he said. “Be afraid you’d hit back.” He stood and turned toward his sparing partners on the couch. “Someone get the champ here a Mountain Dew!”
He looked back at me, noticing the shoebox for the first time, then eyed me as though he’d caught on to my tricks.
“You tryin’ to put yourself in my shoes?”
He began to back away, still glowering in his jocular way.
“Spinks is a clean fighter,” he said, suddenly serious, “and a good fighter. People have to give him credit.”
Before he could take a seat, his sparring partner returned with my soda. Ali took it from him, popped the tab and stepped forward again.
The can changed from small to big, as he handed it to me.
“You know how smart Spinks gotta be to beat me?” he said.

***

On the return trip to the city, I stared out the window, like I would on school trips, so that it was just me and the outside world, my head pressed to the cool glass, my breath fogging it. I didn’t want to think about anything at all.

Little by little, as we approached New York, more and more homes, closer and closer together, began to line the highway. The greenery shrank, and became less exuberant, with more cars parked along the streets. Then the green merged with every other color into a general grayish brown. Factories spewed filth that warped the air. Warehouses surrounded by parking lots were crammed full with rows and rows of repair trucks, school busses or delivery vans, motors cooling, routes run, cargos unloaded.

An unending stream of cars, expanded now to three lanes, whooshed past in the opposite direction, or rushed alongside of us in the pell-mell return to the center of it all, bumper to bumper in front and behind. The driver put the radio on, louder this time. Sound surged up all around us. Jonathan Schwartz spoke low, his tone confidential, as though addressing only me. He said something about Satchmo, The First Lady of Song and summertime. A pause followed, interspersed with one or two pops of a needle on vinyl, then a muffled horn, a swell of strings and a sad, slow bell.

What did I need to do to be remembered forever, to have a nickname that everyone knew, or a candy bar named after me?
“One of these mornin’s you gonna rise up singin’,” sang a voice impossible to forget.

Satchmo was still at it when I saw the News truck pass in the opposite direction, with Dad’s face blown up to billboard size, plastered across the side of it. The east and west bound lanes had veered slightly apart at that point, so my eyes could linger long enough to read, “Get the Reel Story” – the same number of words and syllables as “I am the greatest.”

A short while later, when Dundee got dropped off at Grand Central, he said to the driver, “These young men are ballplayers. Get them home for dinner.”

There was still daylight left when the limo pulled in front of our house. Dad suggested that we play pepper in the street, while Mom got supper ready. I didn’t feel like it, but said yes, because that’s what ballplayers did to be the greatest.

John Julius Reel, born and raised in Staten Island, New York, has lived for 14 years in Seville, Spain. He is the author of a memoir in Spanish, ¿Qué pinto yo aquí?, and has collaborated as both writer and editor in El derbi final, an award-winning book about the Seville soccer derby. Among his English publications, the essay “My Darlings” stands out for having been recognized as “notable” in Best American Essays 2015. His two essays in the most recent issue of Sport Literate are part of a memoir in progress.

 

At Dodger Stadium

by Michael Konik

You attend a baseball game once a year. You don’t follow the sport or the players. Long ago, when you were a boy, you were a true fan who knew all the statistics and the nicknames, the characters and the storylines. These days, you’re only vaguely aware of who’s starting for the Los Angeles Dodgers, and even less aware of who’s playing for the other guys. You have no investment in the outcome of the contest, financial or otherwise.

You go for the spectacle, the grand circus of light and sound and motion, the hordes of humans swathed in blue and white. The players: beautiful in their graceful power. The field: radiating chlorophyll. The night sky: endless yet intimate. The air: redolent of grilled onions and cooked meat. Dodger Stadium itself: an elegant dowager confidently reassured by her place in history.

Being there is a pleasure, a constant offering of sensual enticements.
Except for the advertisements.
They’re everywhere.
Well, not everywhere. The players are not yet stickered with corporate logos, like NASCAR racers.

But almost every place a perspicacious marketer could hawk his goods is now “sponsored,” “branded” or “supported” by those with something to sell. The outfield wall. The scoreboard. The loge-level party boxes. The foul poles.

Yes, the foul poles. If you should chance to look at the gleaming yellow spires towering from the left- and right-field corners – and it’s sort of hard not to throughout the game – you’ll be reminded to Fly a Certain Airline. The message is affixed to a stiff banner that extends a foot or two off the pole into fair territory. If, say, Justin Turner or Corey Seager launched a fly ball toward the bleachers and the foul-line and the ball stayed just fair it would collide with the airline advertisement, simultaneously scoring a Home Run and a grand slam of value-added product placement.

Hooray.

We like to tell ourselves that Major League Baseball is “America’s national pastime,” an entertaining exhibition of grown men playing a child’s game. Maybe that’s right. For what could be more American than treating every person in attendance as a potential customer?

At the ballpark, our national urge to consume – whether pig innards served as “Dodger Dogs” or an international airline served as an umpiring tool – is reinforced with every pitch and at every interregnum in the action. Not participating in the commercial charade is only slightly less patriotic than neglecting to stand and applaud for the “Military Hero of the Game.” Few can say exactly why our brave soldiers are currently in Afghanistan or Iraq, but we all know intuitively that their sacrifices make our freedom to purchase stuff possible.

And to Fly a Certain Airline the next time we travel to the Middle East, preferably on non-war-related business.

When you make your annual sojourn to the stadium, you’re reminded at every turn how heartlessly mercenary the sport has become. This brilliant pitcher earns many millions of dollars, and that slugger earn many millions more, and, yet, in the curious mathematics of modern capitalism, they’re probably underpaid. Absent the coddled players, without their numbered presence and exalted skills, most of us probably wouldn’t pay to come to a place where our entire purpose is to cheer on cue and buy whatever’s being sold, whether $6 water, $15 beer or the comforting fiction that our cherished athletic competitions somehow transcend the tacky American imperative to make a profit.

Michael Konik was one of a trio of winners in the SL poetry chapbook contest for his collection, “Dodger Stadium Suite,” which became part of This Loss Behind Us. He is the author of many books, including the sports-gambling memoir The Smart Money and the golf-in-Scotland travelogue In Search of Burningbush.