Q&A with Rus Bradburd

by Nicholas Reading

Recruiting Shawn Harrington to New Mexico State from Marshall High School in Chicago, Rus Bradburd described him as an “exceedingly smart, unselfish, and fearless” basketball player. Then an assistant coach, Bradburd was known for bringing Chicago players to the southwest. A decade prior, he lured the future NBA great Tim Hardaway to Texas at El Paso.

In 2014, when Harrington was back in Chicago coaching at Marshall, his unselfish fearlessness was on full display, as he covered his daughter’s body to protect her from drive-by bullets in a case of tragic mistaken identity. In saving his daughter’s life, Harrington was left paralyzed.

“Shawn’s shooting was all over the Chicago news. A coaching friend texted me about it within an hour of the incident, so I began tracking it on the internet,” says Bradburd, now a creative writing professor at New Mexico State. “Although I hadn’t seen Shawn in 20 years, I had spoken to him when his mother was killed in 2003, so I still had his phone number. I waited a week to call, but I thumbed through the New Mexico State basketball programs to rattle my memory of his time playing for us at New Mexico State — which is where things got complicated.”

That complication eventually led to the book, All the Dreams We’ve Dreamed: A Story of Hoops and Handguns on Chicago’s West Side, which will be released on May 1, 2018.

 Nicholas Reading: Your book invites the reader into the lives of Shawn Harrington and the Chicago West Side community. The value of making folks, who might be otherwise unknown, into very real, very living people, is immeasurable. You write intimately and personally about their experiences. What do you hope this portrait contributes to the national discussion about guns, violence, and the state of our communities?
Rus Bradburd: I only wanted to tell Shawn Harrington’s story, and the story of the Marshall High School community. At the outset I had very strong opinions about guns, cops, education, and the situation on the West Side of Chicago, but whenever I tried to address the bigger issues — or pretend I had answers — the book started to spin out of control. So I kept the story smaller, which of course became tricky as more and more Marshall players got murdered.

NR: It is one thing to sympathize, even empathize, with someone who has experienced hardship. It’s quite another to initiate the task of writing a book and giving someone’s experience a wider audience. How did you arrive at the idea for this project?
RB: Initially I was only advocating for Shawn, writing to friends who were journalists: Hey! Here is an astonishing story of courage. I was going to sleep at night thinking of Shawn’s trouble, waking up and wondering how I might help. And the more he was ignored — and I was ignored — the more determined I was to keep banging on my drum. I have a daughter the same age as Shawn’s younger one, so the act of heroism in saving a girl’s life was profoundly moving.  Finally, Alex Kotlowitz [bestselling author of There Are No Children Here] said to me, “Why don’t you write this yourself?”

NR: What is so striking about sports is that it is often a confluence of social, racial, economic, political concerns. If Shawn’s story and your writing is a lens through which to closely examine our society, what issues does your book bring into focus?
RB: I think people will read the book differently. As they should, I suppose. Basketball, more than any other sport, gives us a window into African American culture. Even in Chicago, though, you can go through your entire life and never really come in contact with what it’s like for millions of Americans on a day-to-day basis. My hope is that in the specifics of Shawn Harrington’s story that there might be a more universal feeling of empathy. Although I only wanted to tell his story, there are issues of health care, race, guns, unions, poverty, education, basketball, and community policing all swimming around in the book.

NR: What do you think are the most damaging or prevalent misconceptions about communities ravaged by gun violence?
RB: I think the Black Lives Matter stance is badly misunderstood at times. Here’s where it became real to me: nothing tears apart a community like an unsolved murder. In Chicago, there are far fewer murder detectives than there was a decade ago. That’s the institutionalized problem: shootings and killings are never brought to justice, and an unsolved murder encourages revenge. The closing of schools ruins neighborhoods, too. Marshall, when Shawn attended, had over 2,000 students. Today it’s below 400. Empty schools aren’t good for the community. Schools should be the center of the community.

NR: How did the team respond after Shawn was shot? What is their response when mounting numbers of teammates and friends are victims of gun violence? What does this response say about them? About their reality?
RB: One of the surprising things about writing the book is learning how everyone has a connection to the violence. This was mirrored for me in the 10 months I lived in Belfast: everyone had been touched by “The Troubles,” and people mostly didn’t want to talk about it. I was surprised that the players and coaches never talked about their own gun violence experiences, but maybe that’s just me: my impulse is to talk about something until I’m blue in the face. That’s something I learned from writing the Nolan Richardson biography, Forty Minutes of Hell: things don’t get better by not talking about them.

NR: The book opens with a quote from Langston Hughes that seems to both lament and hold dear a, “dream that’s almost dead today.” Obviously, an inspiration for the title of the book, but I wonder if you could explain how the poem speaks to you? What is the dream?
RB: To my ear, Langston Hughes has two voices speaking in the poem, and the refrain “America was never America to me” feels reflective of the West Side community of Chicago. I think if Shawn had saved a girl’s life in Iraq while on duty, he’d be on the cover of Time Magazine. Because it happened in Chicago, it’s just another shooting, and, in fact, a “good” story because he lived.  In any other Westernized country, Shawn would have a far better safety net than in America.

NR: Sports are sometimes relegated to mere pastime, entertainment, and maybe exercise. Though, it seems that the role of basketball in the lives of the folks you present is far from just a hobby. In your view, how does the sport, the gym, offer not only a haven from the streets, but mentor-ship, a way of surviving?
RB: Basketball can be a blessing, but only 20 or 25 boys play at every Chicago Public School. And in some ways, for the ballers, the game can be a mirage or a time-killer. For so many, once basketball season is over senior year, there’s the stark reality: Now what?  The game gave them discipline, teamwork, a goal. But what about when the game is over? And I think a more important question might be, “What about the other kids, the 90 percent who do not play?”

NR: What does Harrington say, what does the community say, what do you say about a hope for a solution to gun violence? You have brought to our attention, with intimacy and urgency, the faces and lives of people living in an America that many can’t fathom. You have called Harrington’s situation a “failure of America,” and I think the reader understands why. This question might be an unfair burden, but where do we go from here?
RB: I don’t know. One thing I stress is that there are great people who have dedicated their lives to ending the violence, so I’m modest about offering any solutions as the “new guy” who just arrived. While Shawn has remarkable courage and endurance, and so many of us find that inspiring, I think the big answers are complicated.  Poverty, education, family, community policing, ending the drug wars — they’re all tied in, but again, I only really know Shawn’s story. Yet, there’s the “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind” idea that if you know one thing, you know the world. I guess I’m saying that I hope that reading about Shawn’s life might be a start — just as basketball was a window into a part of black culture for me, perhaps his story might a window into the West Side for others.

NR: What does Shawn envision for his family, the future of Marshall? For himself? And is his story unique?
RB: Shawn’s struggles are very much day-to-day. Get out of the house. Get his exercise. Go to therapy. Talk to Marshall kids and ex-players. That’s one of the great tensions in the book: I want him to be Jackie Robinson or Muhammad Ali, be the spokesman for progressive movements. He wants that stuff, sure, but it’s the daily grind that wears on him, I fear. The scariest part to me is that there are thousands — really, thousands — of young men in Chicago like Shawn who have been physically and emotionally torn apart by guns. There won’t be a book about many of the others, or not an in-depth study. But who will advocate for them?

NR: Writing about your relationship with Shawn you observe, “… our lives were intertwined. His success or failure would contribute to mine.” How has Shawn’s life changed your own?
RB: I believe that Shawn’s suffering and struggle stands for more — that it has enriched my life, as strange as that is to say. He’s both fully heroic and fully human. That’s part of the human psyche, sort of Joseph Campbell 101: The Hero makes things better for everyone else.

NR: Is there an experience or realization that you encountered over the course of writing this book that surprised you?
RB: Let me see if can answer that sideways.  What I miss most about coaching in Division I basketball — where I spent 14 years and made 8 NCAA tournaments — is the total, free health care. No waiting, no charge, no hassles, you get to see the doctor right away.  I’m fairly healthy, although not that young, so I don’t worry so much about health care. But seeing it up close, how you need a full-time advocate to battle the system — well, what kind of country is this?

NR: How does Shawn’s story, the story of gun violence in Chicago, and the story of hope fit into the national discussion on the subject?
RB: Dorothy Gaters, the legendary Marshall girls’ coach, says that Columbine, Sandy Hook, and Marjory Stoneman Douglass High School are not on the West Side. She’s right: it’s a national problem, and it’s uniquely American. The “line” is always drawn somewhere — I can’t own a bazooka or a tank or an ICMB, right? We just need to move the line. That’s happened so many times in American history, and it’s always a collective consciousness that changes. I hope Shawn’s life can be part of that conversation.

Nicholas Reading is the author of the chapbook The Party In Question (Burnside Review Press, 2007) and Love & Sundries (SplitLip Press, 2014). His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Bat City Review, jubilat, Nimrod, Painted Bride Quarterly, and San Pedro River Review. He serves as the poetry editor for Sport Literate and teaches a freshman seminar on sports and literature at Butler University.

Rus Bradburd spent 14 seasons as a college basketball coach at UTEP and New Mexico State, then two more in Irish Super League. He is the author of All the Dreams We’ve Dreamed (Chicago Review Press, 2018), an examination of gun violence in Chicago; the novel-in-stories Make It, Take It (Cinco Puntos Press, 2014); the controversial Forty Minutes of Hell (HarperCollins/Amistad Books, 2010); and the memoir Paddy on the Hardwood: A Journey in Irish Hoops (University of New Mexico Press, 2006). He lives in New Mexico and Chicago.

Super Bowl Ring

by Michael Downs

The game ended, and then came the rush outdoors into the noisy February dark, fireworks and gunfire the exclamation points at the end of every hell yeah and damn right. Joyce shimmied on her porch.

Across the street, Kenny and Tracy’s daughter, Elsa (not yet a year) slept in her grandmother’s care.

All Sefton Avenue envied her parents — Kenny who worked for the team, and Tracy, unsettled at leaving her daughter for the first time. But when would she and Kenny ever have a chance like this again? So that night, as Elsa wrinkled her nose and made fists of her hands, her parents partied in the Big Easy, blinking away the glare of celebrities and their glitter and bling.

Months later, the ring arrived. Kenny first showed Joyce and even let her slide it on her finger. Word spread, and we all gathered to marvel. Diamond after diamond after diamond. A Raven on the face, Kenny’s name on one side. Nearby, Tracy watched, bouncing Elsa in her arms and grinning. We cradled the ring in our palms, felt its heft.

“What’s that?” Sylvia yelled from her fence.

Kenny brought it over for her to see. After, he knocked on Bert’s door.

Months earlier, just home from the hospital, he had carried infant Elsa door to door, the child for whom they had waited years and years. Elsa Bear, he called her. Little Elsa Bear.

 

Michael Downs’ debut novel, The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist, is forthcoming from Acre Books (May 2018). His other books include The Greatest Show: Stories (Louisiana State University Press) and House of Good Hope: A Promise for a Broken City (University of Nebraska Press), which won the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize.

Driving by a Baseball Park in Winter

by David Evans

Three spindly-legged crows were occupying
a piece of snow crust between second and third,
their beaks pointed toward home plate, as if
waiting for a hot grounder to scramble their wings,
or a frozen-rope single to sizzle right over their heads,
making them duck . . .

when I slowed down for
a closer look they lifted and turned around as one and
flew way out over deep center, heading, I guessed,
for the scattered concessions in the Western Mall
parking lot on 41^st Street.

 

 

David Evans has had nine poetry collections published. His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in many magazines and anthologies including Aethlon: The Journal of Sports Literature, The Norton Book of Sports, Splash: Great Writing About Swimming, and American Sports Poems. He was a Fulbright Scholar twice in China, and a professor and writer-in-residence at South Dakota State University. He was also poet laureate of South Dakota for 12 years, and received the Governor’s Award for Creative Achievement in the Arts in 2009.

Another Day in Key West

by Jack Ridl

Our houseboat is a little houseboat.
Some here are two stories, three

bedrooms, a roof-top patio garden,
the view taking the eye across

the bight out over the cypress
and onto the Gulf where the tarpon

slow dance and the fishing boats
settle in, lines tossed or dropped.

Those on vacation can rent a charter
and hope to take home a photograph

of their catch, the tough scaled fish,
having fought and given in, now hanging

alongside the smiles. Today again
the clouds will pass over us,

the sun will bring sliding light
across the water, time will bring

its illusion to carve its way
into our ephemeral cells,

and we will sit again on our deck,
the wind chime alchemizing the breeze.

Jack Ridl’s most recent poetry collection, Practicing to Walk Like a Heron, received the Gold Medal from Indie/Foreword Reviews. Broken Symmetry won the best collection award from The Society of Midland Authors. Losing Season was named one of the 10 best sports books of the year. His joy, too, he says, is that more than 85 of his students are now publishing. Two years ago, two of them won major first book awards.

 

Names of Old Teammates

by Robert Brickhouse

Spike
ran our rival’s T-plays
on the scout team
with such joy
the coaches put him in the real game
to baffle and wreak havoc.

Moose
hitchhiked to school with no breakfast
no braggadocio, anchored
both sides of the line, retired
a multi-millionaire.

Willy
wore thick glasses with a head band,
wasn’t fast or strong,
guided us up and down the court
with calm precision.

Rags
had a gentle heart, a twisted
smile if he liked you,
sharp elbows if he didn’t and
a fo’-barrel fifty-fo’ Ford.

Bokey
could barely see
over the middle he backed. Any
runner who got that far
never knew what hit him.

Bugsy
saved my ass one night
when I walked alone through his part of town.
Challenged to a fight by a dimwit in a beater,
I said “you know Bugsy?”
He said “any friend of Bugsy’s is a friend of mine.”

Bull
led the state in sacks and held the shotput record.
He’d lock his hands behind his head
at the end of every wind sprint,
strut around to catch his breath and teach us
how good it was to be alive.

Robert Brickhouse, a multi-sport benchwarmer in his youth, has worked as a newspaper reporter and writer for university publications in Virginia. His poems and short stories have appeared in many magazines, among them the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Southern Poetry Review, Poet Lore, the Texas Review, Atlanta Review, Pleiades, and Light Quarterly. “Names of Old Teammates” first appeared in the American Journal of Poetry.

Local Rules

by Andrea Dejean

In the French overseas département of French Guiana, located north of Brazil, we play golf on a course carved out of the Amazon rainforest. Perhaps not unlike courses in other “wild” areas, we have a long list of local rules.

You get a free drop if your ball lands on a red ant nest or close enough that you can’t properly take up your stance without getting bitten; if a monkey moves your ball or steals it, you can replace it (no penalty); grounding your club in a hazard is acceptable only if you are assuring yourself that there are no snakes or in the event that the resident caiman emerges from the water hazard on #5. Back-ups are possible between holes #6 and #7 because the wasps nesting there tend to attack for no reason — and, no, you don’t have to be close. You can almost always place your ball, clean it, or move it — especially on the greens where tunnelling insects wreak havoc on putting lines. The giant anteater on #10 is not aggressive, but don’t get too close or it will wrap you in a suffocating bear hug. If you make a ‘pit-stop’ in the bathroom before teeing off on #13, remember to check that no hairy, urticating spider is snuggled up in the toilet paper tube. Dogs are allowed on the course, but a female puma has been seen teaching her young to hunt along fairway #18, so it’s probably best leave your pup at home.

Tournament play is almost never called due to rain, no matter how torrential, especially because electrical storms are extremely rare. If, however, you cannot find relief from standing water in the middle of the fairway, you can tee up your ball. If you cannot find your ball in the middle of the fairway because it has plunged deeply into the humid earth, you can drop a ball in the closest approximate area — which is not always as easy as you might think because the first ball rarely leaves a trace. On the contrary, during the dry season when much of the course turns to hard pack, you can place your ball on grass as long as you do not move it closer to the pin and as long as you can find some grass. Seasoned players will advise you to avoid the tufts that resist the drought. Clubheads have a tendency to get stuck behind them and the ball usually squirts out any which way, but not generally the way you intended.

You are also advised to resist the temptation to try to fly your ball up and over any of the oil palms on the course at the risk of finding it perched in the fronds (especially on #8) or nestled out of sight behind the protective shell covering the pendulous strings of seeds on two ‘maripa’ palms on #11. Luckily, as the seeds ripen, the shell slowly detaches itself and falls and you can get your ball back — but it might take a week or so. These palms pose another, improbable threat. Several years ago a friend “ker-plunked” her tee-shot into the foot of one of the sock-like weaverbird nests hanging from one of the palms on that same hole.

So, it’s funny that when you are playing on a manicured course in some other part of the world and stopping yourself midway as you bend down to place your ball quite unnecessarily because the ball is sitting on a perfect lie or topping a second shot on lushly carpeted fairways because the thought of taking a divot breaks your heart or five-putting on greens smooth as billiard tables how much you’ll miss this place. You’ll miss the golden quality of the light as the sun sets and the zany, bouncing flight of the toucan overhead, the sound of laughter and conversation as members share cold beer and stories in the open-air clubhouse and how the mangoes that fall onto the tee-box on the third hole make the sweetest jam.

Perhaps the most important local rule, here and elsewhere, and totally contrary to what every instructor has ever told you is: do lift your head. Lift your head, look around, take it all in and realise what a privilege it is to be standing where you are.

The Association de Golf de l’Anse in Kourou, French Guiana, celebrated 20 years of existence in 2015 and is managed entirely by volunteers.

Andrea Dejean is the translator of a book on biodiversity and has published her own poetry and creative fiction and nonfiction in both independent and university-affiliated literary journals. A native of Michigan, she is now a permanent resident of France.

The Lost Cause

by Virginia Ottley Craighill

Disaster Artist
It’s raining and cold. The massive crowd is going nowhere fast. Mashed together like cattle in a stockyard, we are about 30 yards from the entrance. From here we can see only two security screens, like the ones at the airport. Some guys farther behind us get ugly, start pushing, and scream at the gatekeepers, “What’s the fucking holdup?! You guys are idiots! We paid a lot of money to stand here in the fucking rain. Get us inside now, ASSHOLES!” People close to the entrance turn and collectively roll their eyes, although we’re probably all thinking the same thing. It’s 7:15 and kick-off is in an hour.

We’re waiting outside the Mercedes-Benz stadium in Atlanta, Georgia with tickets to the 2018 College Football National Championship Game between the University of Alabama and the University of Georgia. The Tide vs. the Dawgs, in the vernacular. The guy behind us is right about one thing: everyone in line likely paid a lot of money to be here. My husband went to Georgia, and he loves football, so he paid some obscene amount of money, an amount I never want to know, to take us, our son and daughter and me, to this game.

The problem, I suspect, is Donald Trump. The President of the United States flew to the game earlier on Air Force One and is now ensconced in a cozy luxury box with former Georgia Governor and current U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue. My suspicion is later confirmed by one of the ticket takers, who says Trump’s arrival set security back hours and caused traffic gridlock and unconscionable waits at the entrances. Trump knows he has a fan base in Alabama and Georgia.

We’re now 30 minutes from the coin toss and have only moved two feet. The man behind me presses his crotch into my backside. I am tempted to #MeToo him after watching the Golden Globes, but he appears to be pushed forward by the aggressive crowd behind him and probably can’t help where his crotch ends up. I give him the benefit of the doubt. My husband keeps telling the people in line around him how badly he needs to use the bathroom, which is probably not what they want to hear. My son, who wears a Georgia sweatshirt and a red ribbon in his hair, points out a woman a few yards ahead of us in line. She has a whitish translucent pointy poncho over her head that we all agree looks disturbingly like either a condom on a penis or a KKK hood. But her hair will be fine once she gets inside. My husband holds up a broken and ineffectual umbrella

The National Football Championship Game would be an excellent setting for a disaster film. Instead of a vengeful sniper (Two-Minute Warning) or a suicidal Vietnam vet flying an explosive blimp over the stadium (Black Sunday), in my version the electricity in the stadium would be cut once everyone is inside and the stadium doors locked while kidnappers with night-vision goggles hired by a secret cadre of Republican senators seek out the President. This is not as far-fetched as one would think since the electricity went out at the Atlanta International Airport two weeks before Christmas.

When I mention this to my family, my daughter, who is wearing a Georgia football hat and ear plugs, tells me to keep quiet in case the Secret Service is listening. In disaster films of the 1970s, the smart, attractive people always made it out alive, while the stupid, unappealing characters died in horrifically entertaining ways. The drunk, screaming guys behind us would definitely meet their maker in my film. Even a nice character like the one played by Shelley Winters in The Poseidon Adventure had to die because she was fat and somewhat old. At least she drowned sacrificing herself for one of the cuter, younger characters. At fifty-seven, I most likely would not be saved in my own film, but my children would probably make it.

Getting inside has become a matter of increasing urgency for my husband. We slowly inch closer to the security screens, jamming ourselves toward where you empty your pockets into the little bowl, raise your arms and submit to metal detectors. Shouts of joy come from those who have finally made it through to the other side. The women in front of me have clear plastic purses with the Georgia bulldogs insignia on them; they get through quickly. The men take longer because they have to pull everything out of their pants pockets and often forget some piece of change. That sets off the scanner, and they have to get a pat down from the guards, who probably do not enjoy it any more than the fans do.

My husband goes first, after telling the guard, the woman scanning the electronic tickets, and everyone around him that he’s going to piss himself. He does not get a pat down. The woman points him in the direction of the nearest bathrooms, three floors up. He hands me his phone with the electronic tickets for the rest of us, and runs. Not having bathrooms on the ground floor seems like short-sighted planning for a building that costs 1.5 billion dollars. After our son and daughter scan in, they take off for our seats. It’s close to kick-off. They yell back at me to go to Section 309. I stand on the gray concrete floor and wait for my husband, though we did not communicate about where to meet, and I have his cell phone, which has the seat numbers on it. After five minutes, I get anxious and head up the first flight of stairs. The stadium is cavernous, bigger than anything I’ve ever been in, bigger, probably, than the ship in The Poseidon Adventure. It has no logic. Crowds of people who just made it through the scanner run past me to their seats; it’s a blur of red and black. Someone has urinated on the second flight of stairs. I pray it’s not my husband.

“Fuck Trump”
Section 309 is all the way on the other side of the stadium, about two miles away, over something called the Sky Bridge. The announcer introduces President Trump, and there are sounds of booing, hissing, and cheering. My feelings about him become more negative, if possible, because of the inconvenience he has caused the people trying to get in, and I mutter under my breath, “fuck you, Trump.” I realize I sound like the rude people in line behind me, but their anger was misdirected at the security guards. Apparently, I am not alone in my sentiments: protesters projected “FUCK TRUMP” in giant letters onto the stadium before he arrived. At this point, people are mostly in their seats, though many are frantically buying $8 beers. We had our beer and chicken tenders from Publix earlier while sitting in our car in a vacant lot where we’d paid some guy $30 instead of $50 to park. We gave the attendant a piece of chicken, and he left to get a cup of coffee and never came back. My husband will probably spend the rest of his life trying to make up the cost of these tickets, so I hope our car is still there when we get back.

I see my children standing in the hallway outside Section 309. They don’t know where the seats are, and they don’t know where their parents are, who know where the seats are. I pull out my husband’s cell phone and show them, but they’re angry that I left him. He’s a big boy and probably knows where to go, I say. We spot him a few minutes later. His pants are clean, so we all embrace for a moment before heading in. We’ve missed the anthem, the president, the coin toss, and the kick-off, but are otherwise on time

0 to 0
There is no way to express the hugeness of the new stadium; it is huger than Trump’s hands, and the crowd — over 77,000 people — is possibly bigger than his inauguration. Our seats are high up on the 25 yard line, but the field and players are clear; we can see every play. And if we can’t, there are multiple Jumbo-trons that make it possible to see each hair on UGA quarterback Jake Fromm’s scruffy beard. We’re in the UGA section and the fans around us seem reasonable enough. All of them are white, though I don’t correlate reasonableness with whiteness. In the first quarter, UGA makes some stunning plays, and the crowd erupts. The woman in front of me wears a black sweater, black pants, and black booties, has a red and black G painted on her cheek. She turns around and high-fives me every time something good happens for the Dawgs. The man next to me high-fives me, too. Everyone’s congenial and rabidly excited by Georgia’s strong opening.

13-0
I should explain that I am not a football fanatic, or even a fan. I’m from Atlanta and went to graduate school at UGA but never went to a game, so my loyalty is questionable. If I watch football, it’s because people in my family are watching it. I’ve come along with a sort of anthropological mindset. What makes so many people spend their hard-earned money for this event?  Why is it so important?  What will change if Georgia wins?  Or loses? Why is college football like some kind of religion?  The man next to me graduated from UGA in 1997 (he looks older). He flew out to Pasadena the week before for the Rose Bowl (Georgia beat Oklahoma, which is why we’re here). The woman next to my husband flew down from Washington with her husband, but left him in their hotel room because he is older, she explains, and she doesn’t want him to have a stroke or a heart attack if the game gets too intense. People should not die over football games. Neither my son nor daughter went to Georgia, but my son feels some esoteric emotional connection with this team, perhaps inherited from his father. My husband and my son played football, but my daughter is the real athlete of the family, and her interest stems from a physical and intellectual understanding of what it takes to do what these players do on the field.

What they do on the field is slam into each other a lot. The Tide plays dirty. Because of the Jumbo-tron, we can see when one Alabama player takes down the UGA ball carrier then knocks him in the head after he’s on the ground. We can see another ‘Bama player put a last minute choke-hold on a UGA player that doesn’t get a flag. It’s beginning to make me mad, and this surge of emotion is actually helpful because now I’m standing up and screaming at the ref and cheering “sic ‘em, sic ‘em, sic ‘em” when Georgia kicks to ‘Bama after another touchdown. My husband takes a picture of me doing this to send to his friends who bet him I would be reading a book throughout the game. It suddenly seems hopeful and joyous, though there is a gnawing sense that the evil genius Nick Saban will never let Alabama lose.

At the end of the second quarter, Georgia is up 13-0 and the crowd is elated. My son notes that, curiously, Saban has benched his first-string quarterback and put in the second string “true freshman” quarterback, a guy from Hawaii named Tua who’s never started a game. It interests me that Tua is from Hawaii, which is nowhere near Alabama. A “true freshman,” by the way, is someone who is actually a first-year college student, not someone who’s been sitting on the bench for a year. So the two quarterbacks in this game now are just around 18 years old. What would it be like to be eighteen and the center of this storm of insanity and adulation? What would it be like to know that the President of the United States (whoever it is) has flown down in Air Force One to watch you?   What would the rest of your life be like after this?

Kendrick
My son is excited that rapper Kendrick Lamar is the halftime entertainment. It’s the first time the National Championship has had a halftime performer, and certainly the first time Donald Trump has seen Kendrick Lamar perform (it turns out Trump did not see him perform; he supposedly left before halftime). When I comment to my son that the majority of the people in the stadium are white, so Lamar’s rap might be lost on them, he notes that the majority of people who go to Georgia and Alabama are white, with the exception of the players on the field. I tell him this sounds racist, but he tells me it’s not racist if it’s true.

Lamar appears on the Jumbo-tron but he’s not on the field. They’ve set the halftime show outside in Centennial Park, a free, non-ticketed venue, instead of inside the stadium, which makes sense. Why should Kendrick Lamar perform for all the rich white people in the stadium (including Trump, if he were still here), who probably only listen to Tony Bennett or Taylor Swift, when he can entertain the people of Atlanta, the majority of whom are of color (at least it appears so on the Jumbo-tron) and have been waiting outside in the cold and rain? It seems like a very egalitarian choice, except for the fact that we’re inside a warm, dry stadium, and they’re outside freezing

Most of the people working in the stadium are also of color, blacks, Latinos, immigrants: the servers, bathroom staff, security, no doubt a few of them from what Trump will allegedly call “shithole countries” this very week. When I go to the bathroom (surprisingly empty), the woman cleaning has a knitted rainbow scarf around her head. I thank her, but she doesn’t acknowledge me. No one seems terribly happy to be working the game. Maybe because Trump is here. Maybe because we’re playing Alabama

And fans of other teams hate The Crimson Tide. Sometimes that gets mixed up with the state, though having just marginally disposed of racist and alleged pedophile Roy Moore in the special Senate election, one is inclined to cut Alabamians some slack. To be fair, the whole stadium is a sea of red, and it’s not just because both teams wear the same colors. Both Georgia and Alabama are red states, and I wonder how many rosy-robed fans here voted for Trump. An Alabama judge once described former Governor George Wallace, a demagogue in the same mold as Donald Trump: “’[Wallace] keeps tellin’ ‘em, ‘You the children of Israel, you gonna lead this country out of the wilderness!’ Well, goddamn. We at the bottom of everything you can find to be at the bottom of, and yet we gonna save the country. We lead the country in illiteracy and syphilis, and yet we gonna lead the damn country out of the wilderness…’”  And maybe that’s why some people love the Crimson Tide the way they love Trump. Because they’re always on top. They are always winners. Nick Saban is gonna lead them out of the wilderness and into another National Championship. But not yet.

20-10
Halftime passes quickly while everyone catches up on their texts. People are sending pictures and Snapchats to their friends watching the game at home, or they are posting on Instagram or Facebook. I have friends in San Antonio and Italy who keep sending me game emojis. People who have no reason to be Georgia fans are completely invested in the outcome. Once we were in Seville when Spain was in the finals of the World Cup Soccer tournament; our lodging was on a big square in the heart of the city and every single bar and restaurant set up enormous television screens on the border of the square. All the patrons were sitting outside drinking and screaming at every play; everyone was unified in their desire to beat Germany, or whoever it was. It felt good to be there, to be a part of a larger organism, something that everyone agreed on and cared passionately about. It felt very human. But maybe there’s another side to that, like possibly rabid nationalism.

The good part, the unifying part, seems to be what’s happening here, too, but not quite. The walls of the aptly named Mercedes-Benz stadium contain a fairly rarified group, most of whom have paid full price. A man on our row walks past us on his way to the bathroom and says something to my son. After the man has gone, my son tells us what he said: “I hope you know how privileged you are to be here.”  This is curious and somewhat ambiguous. Does he mean my son is privileged to be watching the University of Georgia play in the National Championships?  Is he privileged to see Georgia beating Alabama, to see Kirby Smart defeat Nick Saban? Is it a privilege to be in the same building as the President of the United States? Or is everyone in this arena simply privileged because they have enough disposable income to blow on four hours of football?

20-20
In the somewhat inevitable, at least to my mind, denouement of the fourth quarter, Tua rides the now rising Crimson Tide the way he might ride a surfboard in his native state. Since he’s never started before and hasn’t played much in other games, the Dawgs don’t know what to expect from him. He’s creative and unpredictable. We start to hear from the other side of the stadium, as the Alabama fans get louder and louder and the Georgia fans look more and more like deflated balloon animals. “Sweet Home Alabama” plays over the loudspeaker, a song I like, but know I’d better not sing or dance to now. The woman in front of me is no longer reaching back to give me high-fives. Someone several rows back dumps what must be a Coca-Cola onto us. I feel the sticky, syrupy mess drying in strands of my hair as the Tide gets closer to a tie. And then it is a tie game. You can almost hear the breath leaving the balloon animals as if they’d all been punctured at the same time. Alabama is going to kick a field goal in the last 3 seconds of the game, which seems to me to be a cowardly loser way to win. This would be a good time for the electricity to go out.

The kicker misses the field goal. The lights stay on. We’re in overtime.

23-26
It’s midnight. I pray for a quick ending, and hopefully a positive one for Georgia. It is quick. Georgia’s Roderigo Blankenship, who should get credit for his name alone but is also a great field goal kicker, makes one, and it’s 23-20. Now the ball goes to Alabama. The quarterback gets sacked, then he throws, the ball is caught, and ‘Bama scores. As fast as that, all the hopes and dreams of the people on our side come to an end. Suddenly, the other side of the stadium bursts into cheers on the other side and glittery confetti explodes from the ceiling of the dome. Everyone in our section stands there dumbfounded. My husband sits down. Our daughter has her hands on her head. Our son says, “We’ve got to get out of here, NOW.”  There might be tears in his eyes. The feeling seems familiar, as if it had happened before, maybe back in early November of 2017.

Exodus
As if all the Georgia fans had the same thought at the same moment, like ants silently communicating, there’s a unified and dignified movement out of their seats and into the hall. No one says anything as at least 50,000 people march towards the stairways. And just like the beginning of this disaster, we are suddenly pinned in a flesh press of bodies all moving the same way. On the stairs, one man has the temerity to squeak out, “Roll, Tide,” in a tiny, uncertain voice, but he recognizes the danger of being celebratory on this side and fades into the crowd.

I am holding my husband’s hand with one hand and grasping my son’s sweatshirt with the other because this is the kind of crowd that would trample you in an instant, the kind of crowd where you could get shanked and your body would be carried along upright until you got outside, the kind of crowd where you could lose your children forever. My daughter is farther ahead; I can tell she’s pissed and she’s not going to hold anyone’s hand; she’s just going to get out, but we keep track of her.

The short-sightedness of the stadium planners again becomes evident as tens of thousands of sad, angry, disappointed, possibly suicidal and/or homicidal Georgia fans attempt to squeeze through two solitary exits before Alabama fans really start celebrating. Personally, I am not feeling all that bad now. It was a good game, and it was exciting; Georgia played better than Alabama. But nobody around me wants to hear it. My son starts whining about how it’s a curse on Georgia teams and recounting the admittedly depressing story of the Atlanta Falcons’ loss in last year’s Super Bowl against the New England Patriots.

This attitude makes me think about a line from the film “Talladega Nights,” which, I should point out, is set in Alabama. Ricky Bobby, the main character played by Will Ferrell, is a race car driver at Talladega, and lives by the motto, “If you ain’t first, you’re last.” It doesn’t matter if Georgia won the Rose Bowl and the SEC Championship; it doesn’t matter if they had a fantastic season and played honorably and well in their home state in the National Championships. If they’re not first, they’re last.  This could be Trump’s motto, too. Trump loves winning, thinks of himself as a winner, no matter the facts. The president is no doubt now an Alabama fan even if he was a guest of Sonny Perdue because Perdue is now on the losing side. Later this week, Sonny’s first cousin, Senator David Perdue, will defend Trump’s profane comments on immigrants from Haiti and Africa, claiming he cannot recall the president using any such derogatory terms.

We’ll Get ‘Em Next Year
Once outside, we head in the wrong direction and have to walk all the way around the stadium. The crowd is still eerily silent and controlled. No one screams or fights or curses. The concrete barriers around the stadium are covered with beer cans and bottles from earlier tailgaters. I think about the stadium workers and their grim, stoic faces, who will be cleaning up this mess until dawn. A tall gangly black man coming from the direction of Centennial Park walks in front of us and yells, “Fuck Alabama! Fuck Saban!” to some white fraternity guys with Georgia shirts on. They hesitantly high-five him and mildly respond, “Yeah Dude, Fuck ‘Bama!” The frat guys walk closer together. The man keeps on walking beside the boys, mumbling to them, “Yeah, fuck that! We’ll get ‘em next year!”  He kicks some empty beer cans and kind of trips off the curb. The fraternity boys walk faster.

Virginia Ottley Craighill grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, and received her Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing from the University of Georgia. She has been teaching English at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee since 2001, and lives in Sewanee. She has commentary on the letters of Tennessee Williams  in the Winter 2018 issue of The Sewanee Review and has a chapter on Eudora Welty in the upcoming volume Teaching the Works of Eudora Welty. Her poems have been published in Gulf Coast, The Chattahoochee Review, and Kalliope, among others.

Got a late-night taste for tater tots by Ore-Ida? I’d rather not, my snowflake friend. If you’ve given up Tuesday night baseball for news from the Trump lane, try wrapping your mind and taste buds around these potato bombs of historic proportion. Dick Taters™, fashioned in the honor our beloved 45^th “president,” might just be highly caloric enough to stop your heart in its tracks. Why reach for a proven old frozen (Ice Queen) treat when you can make a hot mess of your own?

Recipe for Disaster: Peel two pounds of Idaho potatoes (maybe the only brown tolerated in the Rust Belt), and throw in a sweet potato to achieve that tangerine glow. Parboil in pot for six minutes and just get used to that sinking feeling; it’s the environment being poisoned, democracy scorched. Shred those soft potatoes — “Shred the shit out of them!” — and mix into a bowl with salt, coal, Nazi nostalgia, oregano salt, a big spoon of All White (Alt Right?) Flour, dried dill, angry redneck, Russian vodka, and anything else you can choke down for the next four years. Don’t wash your hands. Even if they look and smell like tiny sausages. Squeeze tots into bloated likeness of a man so crooked, he makes Nixon look like a straight shooter.

Heat while High. Prebake, then set your oven for 666 and cook for 110 days. Read that pint-size copy of the U.S. Constitution and put your legislators on speed dial. Resist urge to stick your own head in the oven.

Snide Effects. This product may cause mild nausea in FBI directors. Poor baby, hope you don’t throw up all over your clown shoes. Maybe call in sick on May 9^th. Anyone with the following preexisting conditions may experience extreme vomiting just smelling this food… Women. Women who may become pregnant. Women who may someday think about terminating a pregnancy. Women who may object to any fat-fingered predators. Anyone checking anything other than white on an application. Evangelicals, eat up!

Red State Diarrhea Alert. If you voted for this fucker, bamboozled by his call for jobs, swamp drainage, boy talk about kittycat manhandling, Muslim or Mexican bans, or even wishing “Merry Christmas” again, you might want to eat these tots on the toilet. These curds will run through like a goose at an all-you-can-eat breadcrumb bar. When the splatter hits the bowl, look up from your wrestling magazine, ask your better half if that job plan included a new draft for World War III. And kiss your own filthy ass goodbye.

Dick Taters™  When Trump says, “There’s no there there,” just swallow this shit wholesale. It’s toxic, piping hot.

 

Mad Dog Goes Yard

by Tom McGohey

The Tigers’ Bill Madlock was an unlikely candidate to become the 12^th Major Leaguer to hit four home runs in one game, joining the likes of Hall of Famers Lou Gehrig, Willie Mays, and Mike Schmidt (Gehrig and Schmidt in consecutive at-bats). He was a four-time National League batting champ, but in his 15-year career he hit a modest 163 homers, with a career-high of 19 in 1982. Though he had “some pop,” as announcers like to say about players with middling power, he was not the kind of belter that made opposing teams pitch around him.

But against the Orioles on June 28, 1987, “Mad Dog,” as he was known for a rabid temper that was as much bite as bark, was lofting home runs into the left field seats at Tiger Stadium like he was playing “HORSE” using paper wads and a wastebasket. A power surge all the more shocking considering that when the Dodgers, his fifth team in 14 seasons, released him on May 29, he was batting an embarrassing .180 and had played in only 21 games. It seemed the Mad Dog, 36, had become a toothless, mangy mutt only four months in baseball-years short of euthanasia. But Tigers’ manager Sparky Anderson, remembering Madlock’s smart approach to batting from his days running the Cincinnati Reds, embraced GM Bill Lajoie’s plan to add a veteran right-handed bat to a team that was sputtering along at two games over .500, 5 ½ games behind the Yankees in the American League East Division. And though the core of the 1984 World Series Champs was still in place, the odds of reprising that brilliant season were looking murkier than stale water in the concession hot dog steamers.

Twenty-five years earlier, when I was 10, my father took my brother and me to our first major league baseball game, Tigers vs. White Sox. The Tigers won on an RBI double by Jake Wood, (a once promising infielder who slipped into mediocrity and out of baseball after a half dozen seasons, his career preserved only in the franchise stat books and the memory of a fan prone to nostalgia even at the age of ten.) It was a hot, humid day, and I ate so much peanuts, Cracker Jacks, cotton candy, hotdogs, and soft-serve ice cream that after the game I threw up on the sidewalk of what is now Kaline Drive. (My apologies, Al.)

Now I was returning the favor, treating the old man to what I anticipated at the time could possibly be our final outing at the old ball park at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull. In a few weeks, I was moving to North Carolina to attend graduate school, and my father, widowed the previous year by my mother’s death from cancer, had recently announced his engagement to a lady from Toronto, a recent widow herself, and that they would be starting their new life together by resettling in a place new for both of them.

At the time, Madlock’s signing did not inspire much excitement in me. That old guy? I thought. What’s he got left? But as the stand-in for the quiet, polite Jake Wood in this reprise father-son ritual, Mad Dog and his reputation for fisticuffs — he was known to punch his own teammates, as well as opponents who crossed him — did lend an air of celebrity scandal to his arrival.

Nonetheless, his former All-Star fielding skills diminished by age and portly physique, Madlock still had potential as a part-time DH on a team looking to jump-start a lineup still loaded with talented if slumping hitters, and he rewarded their faith immediately with eight hits, including a homer, in a four-game series with Boston, and with four hits in a game against Milwaukee. Explaining this torrid resurgence, Madlock said at the time, “They seem to throw more breaking balls for strikes over here [in the American League]. And when you make a mistake with a breaking ball, it’s usually up. In the National League, they throw more forkballs and a mistake with a forkball is usually in the dirt. And batting average doesn’t mean as much over here. Here, we’re talking home runs and RBIs. I’ve messed myself up a few times already, swinging for the fences. I’ve been up and down because of it.”

A down streak included an 0-21 slump that got him benched for two games before returning to the lineup against the Orioles June 28, as the DH, batting second. Why Sparky decided to reinsert Madlock for this particular game, who knows? Maybe just a gut move based on experience: .304 career-hitters generally figure things out on their own.

Whatever the reason, the move paid off in the 1^st inning, with Madlock hitting a two-run homer to left, which probably surprised Orioles’ starter Eric Bell as much as it revived the Sunday afternoon crowd of 31,606 fans, who didn’t have to wait long to recover from the three-run homer by O’s Fred Lynn, off Jeff Robinson, in the top half of the inning. Unfortunately, Madlock’s quick-strike counter blow didn’t do much for Robinson’s stuff; he gave up three more earned runs in the 4^th inning, when he was relieved by Mark Thurmond, who promptly gave up another run, in the 5^th, leaving the Tigers in a five-run hole. Madlock, as if deciding it was up to him to keep the Tigers from getting blown out, responded with another homer, a solo shot off Jeff Habyn, again to left, in the bottom of the inning. The Tigers added a run in the 8^th on a Chet Lemon single, scoring Kirk Gibson from second base. In the meantime, Eric King, the Tigers’ third pitcher, had shut down the O’s through the 9^th, and the Tigers came to bat still trailing by three.

Fanatical numerologists with a spiritual bent might have ascribed the Tigers’ ninth to a miraculous trinity of divine power: a three-run deficit erased by three consecutive homers, the first by pinch-hitter Johnny Grubb, a former All-Star limping through a final season that would end with anemic stat line of 2/13/.202; the second by catcher Matt Nokes, who would finish the season with a career-high 32 homers; and the third, by our snarling hero, Mad Dog, the crowning blow of a hat trick that even the most faithful of sporting prophets or statisticians never would have bet on. (Alas, for stat-heads seeking record confluences of streaks, no matter how arcane, Madlock’s tercet did not come in consecutive at-bats: he flied out to short stop in the 2^nd.) So improbable was this power surge for a hitter better-known for stinging singles and frozen-rope doubles that my father and I could only shake our heads and laugh in wonderment at what we had just witnessed.

No matter the outcome, I was gratified that this game, more than likely our final one together at Tiger Stadium, had provided so much drama in such an unexpected fashion. Of course, I wanted the Tigers to win, but to expect more seemed almost greedy. What could possibly top that 9^th inning?  Certainly Madlock had used up his allotment of swan-song heroics usually reserved for Hall of Famers like Ted Williams. That he had granted my father and me extra innings in a farewell outing 25 years after our first game at Tiger Stadium should have been more than any grateful son could expect. But I was greedy. You always want more — more thrills, more odds-defying feats from aging players summoning powers unimagined even in their prime — even when a part of you recognizes that such unrealistic thinking more often than not leads to bitter disappointment.

At that point, I was just hoping Madlock would get another at-bat. The odds of that happening looked bad in the top of 10^th when the Orioles put men on first and third with two outs, Cal Ripken at the plate. The future Hall-of-Famer was having another All-Star season, with 17 homers and 51 RBI by midseason. And worse, after four innings of shut-out relief, the O’s appeared to be catching up to Eric King’s fastball. The unpredictable skills that had produced a 4.02 ERA, lamentable for a part-time starter, depressing for a reliever, were resurfacing. I think everyone in the stands, myself included, expected Ripken to do something dramatic. He struck out.

The Tigers, facing Doug Corbett, went down in order in their half of the 10^th. Still, regardless of what Orioles did next inning, Madlock would get to bat in the Tigers’ half. Willie Hernandez, MVP and Cy Young winner from the 1984 championship season, faced three potentially tough outs in Eddie Murray, Fred Lynn, and Ray Knight, and put them away in order, but not before a couple of fly balls by Murray and Lynn made me squirm more than they should have. Even in a proverbial bandbox like Tiger Stadium, they were not close to clearing the fences.

Nokes led off the bottom of 11^th with a single. That brought Madlock to the plate. Of course, everyone in the stadium, myself included, was hoping for a fourth homer, and chants of “Maad- daawg, maad-daawg,” like cheers for a rabid pit bull in an illegal dog fight, swelled and circled the stands. I wasn’t a chanter, too shy and reserved for that, especially in front of my father, but as each refrain grew louder, my heart rate pumped faster. Who wouldn’t want him to swing for the fences in that spot?  My father, that’s who. He was old-school, as they say, grew up rooting for the Brooklyn Dodgers, and valued good old-fashioned, conventional wisdom-percentage baseball strategy. And the conventional wisdom here was obvious: move the runner over. Beneath the cheering, more like a high-pitched ecstatic pleading, and the chanting, and the simultaneous slapping of plastic seats, I could hear my father mutter in a dry, sarcastic tone, as if he were a crusty old manager with decades of experience and dismissive of the fans’ emotional demands, “Move the runner over.”

And of course, that was the smart call. Put the runner into scoring position, and a single brings him home. Walk-off homers were for perennial bombers like Gehrig, Mays, and Schmidt; they were for majestic mastiffs, not for scrappy, rabid — figurative or real, and the verdict in this case was 50/50 — Mad Dogs. After all, what were the odds of Madlock hitting a fourth homer? Sabermetric gurus filling front offices today would scoff at the possibility. Future generations of fans looking up such a stat and finding Madlock’s name would, with good reason, think it was a misprint. Or at best, the name might register with the same blankness that I felt when seeing names of batting champs from the 1880s. Walk-off singles — does the term even exist? — just doesn’t ring like walk-off homer. Moving the runner over required one thing from Madlock: a sacrifice bunt. Could he make the mental downshift from adrenaline-fueled aggression of swinging for the fences to the cool calculations of laying down a good bunt? Remember that Madlock himself, recognizing the difference between small-ball and long-ball approaches to batting in the Senior and Junior loops, had confessed that he had “messed myself up” trying to hit homers when he returned to the American League.  Keep in mind also that Sparky Anderson, despite winning two World Series with a Cincinnati lineup that featured some legitimate bashers like Johnny Bench, Tony Perez, and George Foster, had acquired his managerial chops in a small-ball league that disdained adopting the DH, and played percentages so faithfully that he earned the nickname “Captain Hook” for changing pitchers at the first sign of trouble.

Sparky liked to talk. Sparky loved to talk. Talking was like breathing for him, and he never required a respirator to support his entertaining if inflated soliloquies with reporters. With so much verbiage on the record, he was bound to contradict himself now and then. For example, he once said that “Players have two things to do. Play and keep their mouths shut.” But in Cincinnati, he was also known for having two sets of rules for stars and role players. Madlock may have been the star this day, but as part-time DH at the end of his career, he had a clearly defined role: shut up and follow orders.

Would Sparky give Madlock the green light to swing for immortality or make the conventional call for a bunt? You’d have to be a naïve romantic to hope for the former. The pragmatist in me accepted that Madlock would be bunting; the romantic was silently begging for him to hit a homer. Such an improbable ending would elevate what had already been a memorable game to the status of an immortal one. If this did prove to be the last game my father and I attended, I could not imagine a better ending to a shared passion that had started 25 years earlier with my first sighting of the luminous lime green grass of the playing field at Tiger Stadium, and other images that for some odd reason became indelible in the memory of a 10-year-old kid: Rocky Colavito’s five o’clock shadow, already a dark blue-gray for a Sunday matinee game, and the chaw-stuffed cheek of White Sox veteran Nellie Fox, which seemed to swell with each swing in the batting cage.

So it came down to this — would the Mad Dog defy his master and attempt to go yard, knowing that if he failed he’d likely be sentenced to Sparky’s dog house for eternity (which would end with his being waived), or would one of the game’s most volatile yappers shut up and follow orders? For me, it came down to another question: should I honor my father’s time-honored wisdom and stale if savvy percentage-based practicality by issuing vibes to chill any impetuous cravings for immortality twitching in the Mad Dog’s feverish brain and calloused hands, or assert my own independence by openly joining the rest of the chanting mob around us in howling for the intoxicating reward of a risky, selfish act that was more likely to end in failure, and possibly defeat for the greater good of the team?

Madlock ended the suspense on the first pitch, laying down a bunt on the third base line. A charging Ray Knight fielded the ball cleanly, but not in time to make a play on Nokes at second. Madlock was thrown out easily, but he had done his job. He moved the runner into scoring position. As he trotted back to the dugout, the crowd reacted with cheers just a shade deflated by disappointment at being denied a fourth homer.

Or maybe I’m imagining that, projecting my own mixed feelings. In my mind the perfect scenario would have had him swinging away until he either connected or got two strikes, ratcheting up the suspense and stoking the crowd to a hysterical pitch, and then laying down the perfect bunt. But that would have been a foolish strategy, if not outright stupid. He might have struck out or, worse, hit into a double-play, leaving the Tigers with two outs and no men on base. He did the right thing, whether on Sparky’s orders or not, and clearly he’d been following orders. And I suspect that even if he’d been given the green light, a fantastical possibility, Madlock still would have been bunting all the way. He may have had a volatile temperament, but he was still a pro, an aging veteran who understood that a greater, if unspoken and lesser celebrated, glory came with doing the simple, fundamental things in the game correctly. That appeared to be my father’s reaction, anyway. He just looked at me, smiled, and nodded his head.

The next batter, Kirk Gibson, was intentionally walked, bringing Alan Trammell to the plate. He hit a single up the middle, scoring Nokes. Game over. Tigers won 8-7.

 

After acquiring Madlock, the Tigers played .649 ball, going 71-39. They entered the final week of the regular season trailing Toronto by 3 ½ games, and swept the Blue Jays in a four-game series at Tiger Stadium, clinching the Divisional title on the last day of the season on a home run by Larry Herndon. (Emotionally spent after that tense finish, they lost the ALCS to the Twins in five games.) By that point, though, I had moved to Greensboro, North Carolina, for graduate school, where I watched that miraculous sweep in a local laundromat-bar called “Suds and Duds,” wearing my newly purchased Tigers’ North Star starter’s jacket, despite the 90-degree-plus degree weather.

Shortstop Alan Trammell was the star of that team, hitting a career-best .343, 28 homers, 105 RBIs and placing second in AL MVP vote. In what proved to be his final season, Madlock contributed a solid but underestimated stat line of .279 / 14 homers / 50 RBI, all the more impressive considering that he appeared in only 87 games. In one of those endless musing of ‘what if” scenarios so popular in sports, especially baseball, I liked to think that extra-inning win over the O’s three months earlier was the difference in the Tigers winning the division and going home. There was no Wild Card in those days. What if Madlock hadn’t laid down that lovely bunt? What if, following my impetuous yearning for the splashy, history-making play instead of my father’s calm, rational demand for the smart play, he’d swung for the fences and missed?

It turns out that game was the final time my father and I sat in the stands at Tiger Stadium. He’s 90 now, and still a rabid sports fan, still rooting for the Dodgers — the “Doyers,” as he calls them, in some strange patois of Brooklynese he’s never explained — partly out of loyalty to octogenarian announcer Vin Scully, more so out of loyalty to the National League for disdaining the DH, a stubborn refusal that, so the argument goes, allows managers to show off their strategy and guts by lifting a dominating pitcher for a pinch-hitter. The latter issue is an ongoing point of contention when we get together during summer visits. He ended up leaving Michigan the same year I did, relocating to North Carolina, as fate would have it, with his new wife (a Canadian born and raised in England who couldn’t tell the difference between a Blue Jay and an Oriole, but otherwise a lovely lady), a three-hour drive away.

We still watch games together during those visits, but only on TV, as his wobbly gait can no longer carry him up the grandstand steps, which now would appear to him like one of Escher’s endlessly looping mazes. But his memory is still sharp. When he starts carping about how the DH has corrupted the game, I remind him that it was a DH who provided the dramatics of our final game at Tiger Stadium. He responds with a disdainful grunt betrayed by a flicker of a smile fighting suppression. Sometimes the joy of such personal memories trumps the purity of national pastimes.

I’ve seen some dramatic homers with my father at Tiger Stadium: Reggie Jackson’s Homeric blast in the 1971 All-Star Game, a liner that pierced the fading evening summer sky like a mythic hero on the way to carving its own constellation, was still rising when it hit the metal stanchions of the lights in left-center field.

A no-doubt mortar shot by Lance Parrish in the 7^th inning of the Tigers’ clinching Game 5 victory of the 1984 World Series against the Padres. It landed a few rows behind and to the left of our second-row seats in the left-field stands, close enough that I stretched my arm high overhead, hoping the sonic force of cheering would bend the ball’s trajectory into my mitt. It did not. Succumbing to such naïve optimism was still a thrill.

But the best homer I ever saw at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull was the one that never was.

They say a walk is as good as a hit. Sometimes a bunt is as good as a homer. And sometimes a nod is as loud as a cheer of thousands. Sometimes louder.

Tom McGohey taught composition at Wake Forest University for 20 years. He has published essays in Fourth Genre and Thread.  His essay, “Friday Night Fights with Mom,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and selected as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2006.

Life After Death in Golf

by Randy Steinberg

If you’re an elite professional golfer, you will most likely, when your playing days are done, be enshrined at the World Golf Hall of Fame in St. Augustine, Florida. This is the case for the top stars in most major sports. From halls of fame to retired numbers in the rafters to naming streets and stadiums after players, if you’re good enough your namesake will endure in a public place of honor. If you were a pro player but not good enough to make the Hall of Fame or have an avenue named after you, you’ll still be replayed and re-streamed in perpetuity, and thus millions of people will know about your accomplishments.

Going down a rung from the professional ranks, if you are a member of a swanky golf club, you might be lucky enough to have your framed photo on the wall of the main dining room. You’re smiling in tie and jacket. You are remembered in a highly personal way.

But what about the public course hacker, which is most of us after all? What is life after death in golf like for we common folk? Remarkably, your legacy might endure in a very visible way, too. You will not receive Hall of Fame, Golf Channel, or Country Club level attention. No rafters, TV replays, or dining room adornment for you. You’ll certainly have no face. Your name and dates might be displayed but not on a wall or in any place of prominence. Rather, your memorial is more likely to be a plaque or a marker on a bench by the 14^th tee, a rock by the 7^th green, the base of a tree along hole #2, or even a ball washer on, well, any tee box. You will live forever beneath a clump of windswept pine needles or buttressing someone’s rear end as they wait for the foursome in front of them to clear. Your name will be splashed with sudsy water every time a player cleans his ball.

Because golf is my passion perhaps I’ve only noticed this tradition on the golf course, but in my four decades I’ve played many sports, and I cannot recall seeing a memorial plaque to anyone on a tennis changeover bench or a ball return slot on a bowling lane. Are pick-up basketball men remembered with signage beneath the hoop at the town courts? Are softball players given markers on the trash cans where all the post-game beer cans are tossed?

Lest anyone think I’m putting down the practice of remembering a friend or loved one on the golf course, let me dispel that notion. Though I sometimes think it a peculiar tribute, it speaks to the uniqueness of golf — especially the way it honors its amateur and very average players. Cooperstown celebrates baseball greats, but are amateur baseballers accorded any status on town and city diamonds? Canton is a sacred space for the legends of the grid-iron, but are touch football men similarly remembered at the local playground?

I’m sure, in response to this essay, I’ll be corrected. Friends of Jim, who loved ultimate Frisbee, will tell me they honored his memory with a Frisbee-shaped escutcheon by the side of his favorite proving ground. Susie was remembered with a marker at mile 11 on her favorite biking trail, her survivors will state. It does happen in other sports and athletic endeavors, I’ll be told!

Though it might not relate to their hobbies or avocations, others may point out that crosses by the side of the road, where an accident occurred, are common ways to remember someone who has died other than at a gravesite or in a hall of honor. However, it would be an imperfect (if not inapt) comparison because I’m unaware of any golf course memorial that notes a golfer died on the exact spot where it is affixed. That might make some morbid sense if it indeed was practiced in such a fashion. Ralph had a heart attack walking up the slope toward the 15^th green and fell 30 yards short of the fringe: let’s put the plaque on that spot, with of course a free drop to anyone landing on it. I doubt any greens keeper would be amenable to this, but in an eerie way it would be fitting.

All kidding aside, what does the practice of memorializing people on the golf course say about the sport? Why does golf seem to treat death differently than other hobbies and pass-times, even down to its most unheralded practitioners?

***

One possible answer could be in the way golf is defined, which is the subject of much debate. Is it a sport or a game?

This question has been asked ad nauseum, and if any sports radio hosts are silly enough to pose it anymore, they can be assured of a precipitous ratings drop. But when discussing the way golf treats death, it might be worth revisiting.

Years ago, I might have sided with the “game” proponents. In as much as Nicklaus, Watson, Snead, Jones, Hogan, Player, and Trevino were great golfers they didn’t look like much. They didn’t have the appearance of a modern-day (even latter day) athlete. Flab and pudge abounded. I’m sure most of them smoked cigarettes and drank. Indeed, golf is the only sport in recent memory where a professional player can actively be seen smoking (a cigar) during a round. There are certain major league pitchers who appear wide in the mid-section, but can you imagine any one of them with a Camel in the corner of his mouth as he winds up for a pitch?

This is not to say the golf legends I mentioned did not have great hand-eye coordination, superior concentration, and nerves of steel. Of course, to a man, they did, but compare them to golfers of the present day. There are exceptions, naturally. There are overweight golfers (John Daly and Brandon de Jonge immediately spring to mind) and averaged-sized men on the pro tours, but the rule is a tall, lean, toned, intimidating figure. Tiger Woods may have ushered in the modern player and made what was once a game, a sport, but the ground he broke is now worn over on the men’s and women’s tours. A 300-yard drive 30, 40, and 50 years ago was seen as near-miraculous. Now it is routine, with drives of 350 yards or more not too jaw dropping.

Pro golfers are muscled and physically prepared in ways their forbearers would not have thought about. Technologically, golf is cutting edge and it, along with most of the other “sports,” has its own 24-hour television network. Bridge and golf were games in the 1950s, but cards remain a game in the 21^st century while golf, the arriviste, has gone athletically mainstream.

Thus, if we see golf as a sport, the urge to memorialize its participants on the field of battle, so to speak, is more understandable. A plaque by the dartboard or the poker table doesn’t feel appropriate because the players just lounged and gabbed and drank. But on the golf course, where the mighty strode and struck — just like the heroes of the Iliad — an impermeable tribute is fitting.

Given that I’ve noticed the phenomenon of on-course tributes to everyday players is a more recent one perhaps there is something to the notion that golf as “sport-over-game” has taken hold — and thus the impulse to memorialize amateur players in the same manner as professional golf heroes makes a lot more sense.

But if this analysis feels incomplete, there’s more that lends golf uniquely to the on-course tribute.

In the famed golf movie Caddyshack, Rodney Dangerfield’s character Al Czervik quips, “…country clubs and cemeteries, biggest waste of prime real estate.” Why did he pair the two together? Both can be places of calm and rest and contemplation. If you are alone on the golf course, things can be as quiet as the grave, and you might stop a moment to reflect — or view someone’s memorial.

One could say the same about skiing, whether downhill or cross country, but skiing is a sport of constant motion, and even if you do stop it’s probably 20 degrees out and you’re unlikely to ruminate for long. And let’s face it, there’s not much to ponder on a hard-top tennis court or the town hockey rink. If you’ve seen one court or rink, you’ve seen them all, but even not too well tended public golf courses have their own charm and individuality. These sui generis attributes bind course to player, and after the player is gone those left behind understand how much the course meant to that person. Thus, they wish to mark forever the synergy of environment and man.

What’s more, golf courses and graveyards are both enjoyed best in perfect weather, if the latter can even be enjoyed, though many a golfer might wish he was dead after a blow-up round. Both settings have exquisitely tended grounds and invite tranquility. A rower, skimming along his favorite river on a calm evening might be similar, but he can’t stop the boat to view a marker (if it could be placed anywhere). On the golf course, you can pause your round to view a plaque in bucolic settings. I’m not sure if those who set up memorials for friends and loved ones on golf courses consciously understand that, but I don’t think it can be coincidence.

Lastly, golf is a sport that reveres tradition and history. Naturally, other sports do as well, but I don’t think to the extent golf does. Golf predates most other modern sports, and what other contemporary athletic endeavor has more picayune rules and devotion to etiquette than golf?

No one would think it odd if a baseball player was ejected from a game for corking his bat, but should a player be disqualified from a tournament for kneeling on a towel? The latter example did indeed happen when a professional golfer (Craig Stadler) had to hit a shot from a kneeling position. He didn’t want to muddy his pants so used a towel, not in any way to aide his shot, but simply to keep his trousers clean. No matter to the rules committee: he was tossed from the tournament.

Pickup basketball is a far rougher experience than a refereed game. What constitutes a foul in the NBA would be considered patty-cake on the playground court. But amateur golf can be just as serious as the top ranks. Go to a public course and try stepping in someone’s putting line or talking during a backswing. You will find little tolerance for such a breach of etiquette no matter what level of golf. Some golfers naturally — unfortunately — cheat, but gaining an edge by getting away with a rule breach, which is seen in most other sports as admirable, is frowned upon in golf. Golfers are famous for turning themselves if an infraction occurs. You’ll never see an NFL defensive back admit he held the jersey of a wide receiver, and you’ll never see a major leaguer on second base cop to stealing signs from the opposing team’s catcher. But in golf, if a player accidentally moves a ball he is addressing, more often than not, he will announce the violation.

How does this relate to life after death in golf? Most athletes, no matter what sport they play, see themselves as part of a brotherhood, but I believe fraternity in golf is stronger than all others. Thus, we take our golf identity with us to the grave, and it is no surprise that those who survive us seek to keep the fires burning brightly for the fallen. And they do it on the golf course, which bonds the quick and the dead to its terrain, its traditions, and its etiquette in a far more palpable way than can any other sport.

***

My grandfather passed away in 2007 in Florida. My grandmother moved closer to us after that (to Massachusetts), and she died in 2015. They were both lifelong golfers, avid fans of the sport and most anything related to it. Combined, they easily played the sport more than 100 years. When my grandmother passed, we had my grandfather’s remains brought to Massachusetts so they could be buried together.

At the funeral service for my grandmother, everyone was encouraged — per Jewish custom — to throw a handful of dirt on the casket. I opted for a sprinkling of golf tees. I recall, before I made the offering, looking to the Rabbi for any signs of disapproval. A more orthodox interpreter of the faith, he did not have a problem with this gesture. There was a smattering more controversy when my mother inquired as to what kind of headstone she could fashion for her parents. She wanted it to be in the shape of a golf green or something to that effect. The rules regarding what kinds of symbols and insignia can be used in a Jewish cemetery are rigid, but it seems my mother’s idea did not violate any Hebraic, death tenet.

I have not been to too many cemeteries, but I can’t say I recall any gravestones that display golf symbols. Again, I’m sure someone will point out where I am wrong on this, but whether or not the practice is common, perhaps this is the better way to honor the passing of a golfer.

As for me — and I’m speaking to my heirs — I would prefer to forego an on-the-course tribute. I understand the impulse, but to me it’s close to a backhanded compliment. Perhaps if you were to emblazon my name on the 18th green of a course I frequented, where it could never be missed, I might agree to the gesture. Every golfer who played the course, each round, would have to see my name and even perhaps aim for it depending on pin placement. But on a bench, beneath a tree, fastened to a ball washer. No thanks. Bury my heart in the graveyard and adorn my resting place there with golf imagery, but don’t remember me with signage on a rock besides the 13^th tee.

I wouldn’t go so far as to incorporate these wishes into my last will and testament, but if this essay could be considered, in the least, legally binding, I hope my successors will heed it.

Again, I beg pardon to those who have paid tribute to a loved one with this kind of memorial. My thoughts on their efforts to remember a father or a husband may seem condescending and rude, but from an eschatological point of view I wonder if any of it matters.

When the sun burns out in another five billion years and flares in its own death throes, the planet earth will most likely be engulfed and incinerated. When this happens, if humanity is even around and still playing golf, all the courses and the Golf Hall of Fame and all of our memories and tributes and everything else will be gone.

What of life after death in golf then? Will any of this matter — this essay included — when the solar system is gone, and there is no one to remember the memories of anything, let alone golfers?

Whether you prefer plaques on the golf course over golf imagery on a cemetery headstone, or vice versa, your best hope is that God or the supreme being or whomever is a golfer. For one thing, it would make all those golf jokes in which God or Jesus figure that much more appropriate. More importantly, all the ball washer and bench markers (and graveyard ones too) will most assuredly matter, for God will have taken note. People might not remember the tribute on the rock or the tree or the headstone, but the Lord will. This may not be much comfort to the atheist-golfer, but for all the praying golfers out there it will be sweet redemption.

As for me, I prefer to remain agnostic about golf, religion, and golf-course memorials. Though I might not want an on course tribute for myself, it’s a testament I’m proud to say is unique to golf. You might not have played to the level of Arnold Palmer or Jason Day, and you may have not been a country club patrician, but you can be remembered in a way that weekend warriors in other sports wouldn’t even contemplate.

 

Randy Steinberg has a master’s degree in film/screenwriting from Boston University. He taught screenwriting at BU from 1999-2010. Since 2011, he has reviewed films, television shows, DVDs, and books for Blast Magazine.com. He has published essays, articles, and short stories in Boston Magazine, The Good Men Project, and The Heat City Literary Review. This is his second Sport Literate essay. He lives in the Greater Boston area.