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by John Gifford

It was the final day of the 1989 Tour de France, and French rider and race leader, Laurent Fignon, sat in the start house at the head of the course, straddling his Raleigh, preparing himself for the 24-kilometer (15-mile) time trial that would take him from Versailles to Paris: his hometown, and, on this hot July day, the sporting capital of the world. Dropping his gaze, strands of his long, blond hair fell from his head, radiating out like spokes from a hub and shielding his face from the reporters’ cameras. After three weeks and over 2,000 miles, it had come down to this final stage. The race was Fignon’s to win or lose. What was he thinking? Was he contemplating his strategy? The painful saddle sore he’d acquired in the Alps just a few days earlier? The 50-second advantage he held over American Greg LeMond, whom had just departed the start house ahead of him? Perhaps he was imagining the taste of the champagne he’d sip later that evening, after claiming his third Tour de France victory.

As the Tour’s leader, Fignon had the privilege of starting last and he’d elected to have time splits relayed to him during the race to keep him apprised of his performance. And in what would prove to be perhaps the most momentous decision of his career, the Frenchman declined to have his bike outfitted with aerodynamic handlebars, which LeMond was using today, just as he had a couple weeks earlier, when he’d won the Stage 5 individual time trial. Nor, for that matter, did he elect to wear a helmet, as LeMond and many of the other riders had — a choice less about practicality, perhaps, than vanity. Fignon had a blond ponytail which would flap in the breeze as he made his way onto the Champs Elysees in front of, not only tens of thousands of spectators lining the Paris streets, but also three billion television viewers around the world who were watching what had turned out to be the most exciting Tour de France in recent memory, and, one that, in less than 30 short minutes, would deliver the closest finish in its long history.

At last, Fignon sat up in the saddle and clipped his shoes into the pedals. Now clutching the handlebars, he took a deep breath and exhaled, listening as the official counted down the final five seconds. Cinq! Quatre! Trois! Deux! Un! Then the clock beeped and the crowd roared as Fignon — already a two-time Tour de France champion and the country’s greatest hope to win the 1989 event — rolled out of the start house wearing the maillot jaune of the race leader, his brown legs turning a massive gear, his blond ponytail flapping in the wind as he made his way through the frenetic streets of Versailles, toward Paris, and history.

At the 5-kilometer mark Fignon’s longtime coach, Cyrille Guimard, told his star rider that he’d lost 10 seconds to LeMond. Fignon couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Mild panic set in. He pedaled faster.

***

I stood among a small crowd that day, watching the race from inside a sporting goods store in a Carlsbad, California shopping mall. I was 19 years old and a passionate cyclist who hoped to one day turn professional and ride in the Tour de France. Six years earlier, I’d watched Fignon win the 1983 Tour and I was thrilled to see him competing for a third title today after winning the Giro d’Italia (Tour of Italy) only the month before. Like my father, I was heavily involved in bicycle racing. But whereas his favorite rider was Bernard Hinault, the famous Frenchman and five-time Tour de France champion, who was nicknamed “The Badger” for his unrelenting tenacity, Fignon was my hero and I cheered for him now, even as the others rooted for LeMond, America’s best rider. It was easy to understand why. LeMond was a nice guy. He was always smiling and willing to talk to the press. The French loved him because he was fluent in their language. Fans around the world admired him because he gave them hope. After surviving a hunting accident only a few years earlier, and now vying for the Tour de France title, with residual shotgun pellets still imbedded in his body, he seemed to suggest that anything was possible. Watching him sail along the streets at 34 miles-per-hour, hunched over the aerodynamic handlebars in an efficient, wind-cheating posture, he reminded me of Superman.

Fignon exuded a different kind of charisma. With his wire-rimmed spectacles and thin, blond hair, he was the most unique and interesting rider in the peloton, as far as I was concerned. The other riders had nicknamed him “The Professor,” not only for the eyeglasses he wore, but also for the fact that Fignon was one of the few riders in the peloton to have completed his baccalaureate exams. After winning the Tour de France in 1983 and 1984, he was one of cycling’s biggest stars, and yet he shunned reporters and cameras. When he did give an interview, he appeared guarded and mysterious. I wanted to know what he was thinking, and he gave the impression he didn’t want you to know. He was aloof. He was distant. His responses to questions were often witty quips. I liked that. He had an appetite for Stephen King novels. I liked that, too.

What many reporters and fans disliked about him was his arrogance. After his 1983 Tour victory, Fignon traded his Renault for a Ferrari. “Everyone drives one of these!” he said with a sniff, much to the dismay of the French who were discovering that, in Fignon, they had a hero they could not afford, nor tolerate. He threw water bottles at reporters, spat at cameras, and generally allowed the world to see him at his absolute worst. Still, I liked him. Fignon seemed to go at his pace and do things his way, something I’ve always tried to do.

Mostly, I admired Fignon for his ability on the bike, and for his graceful, flowing style, which, unfortunately, wasn’t apparent on the final day of the 1989 Tour de France. I assumed the saddle sores were tormenting him. Still, he was a brilliant tactician and I had confidence he could hold on to the lead, especially given the final stage’s short, 15-mile course. Having begun the day with a 50-second advantage over LeMond, it seemed reasonable that he would win, even if the American turned in a brilliant performance. I think everyone expected this, because when the Frenchman crossed the finish line that day, collapsing and falling to the ground, reeling in the reality of his defeat, the cameramen mobbed him while the television announcers exclaimed — never mind that Greg LeMond had just made what may have been the greatest comeback in sports history — “Laurent Fignon has lost the Tour de France!”

The loss would haunt him the rest of his life.

***

It was a crash that heralded the end of my cycling career. While out on a training ride one day I overlapped another rider’s back wheel. I remember looking down at my front wheel veering into the other wheel and knowing I was going to go down. A moment later I was sliding across the highway, feeling the pavement peeling away the skin on my knees and elbows, and burning a hole into my chin. Fortunately, I’d been wearing a helmet, though the crash had still knocked me out for an instant. I don’t remember falling or hitting the ground; I only remember overlapping the other wheel, and the sight of a distant car approaching as I slid across the highway on the side of my face.

I was out of commission for several days. I couldn’t walk or drive my car. I didn’t ride my bike again for weeks, and when I finally did, I began to realize I was never going to become a professional road racer. Whereas I’d once been fearless on my bike, now, riding at high speeds unnerved me and I was afraid of crashing. I might have overcome this setback — rather quickly, even — but my day job prevented me from spending more time in the saddle. Time I needed to reacquaint myself with high speeds, and to put in many miles on the road. Time I didn’t have. Time I spent, instead, at the office.

It simply wasn’t going to happen for me, and as frustrating as this was, I had to accept it.

Eventually, I sold my bike and took up running. It was a sport I loved, and still do, for its inherent simplicity. Not only this, but running shoes are much less expensive than a racing bicycle. And I can get a great workout in 45 minutes — the same amount of time it used to take me to warm up before a long bike ride.

***

Fignon always considered himself a winner. And he was. In addition to his two Tour de France victories, he won the French National Championship in 1984, the Giro d’Italia in 1989 — after losing this same race on the very last stage only five years before — and was twice winner of the Milan-San Remo classic (1988 and 1989), to name a few of his accomplishments. As his team’s leader — Fignon rode for the Renault, Système U, Super U, and Castorama cycling teams before spending the final two years of his career as co-captain and mentor to the rising Italian star, Gianni Bugno, on the Gatorade-Chateau d’Ax squad — he was often expected to allow his teammates to win smaller, less prestigious races. Instead, especially during his prime years in the mid- to late-1980s, Fignon rode in these races to win, preferring to bask in the glory himself.

When his teammates complained that he was too quiet, that he never discussed his personal life with anyone, Fignon said, “They are paid to ride for me, not be my friends.” He once commented that his combative nature was essential to him being able to compete at such a high level, an attitude reflected, perhaps, in the Federation of International Cycling Professionals (FICP) rankings. In 1989, the year he lost the Tour de France by eight seconds to Greg LeMond, the year the press awarded him the Prix Citron (Lemon Prize) for his rudeness during the Tour, Fignon was the world’s No. 1 rider.

By virtue of his previous Tour de France wins, and all-around talent, he was a star and allowed to do things his way. Things like climbing off his bike, ducking into the team car and abandoning a race if he started poorly or if the weather conditions were not to his liking. Others might criticize him, but Fignon always found a way to come back and contend for another victory. As a professional, he knew the exact conditions necessary for him to have the best chance of winning, and, in the absence of such criteria, he had no problem waiting for the next race, and favorable conditions.

This attitude helped teach me the importance of listening to my own body, that I didn’t have to train if I felt tired, that it was okay if I didn’t want to run in cold weather. While I haven’t always enjoyed the luxury of deciding when and how I’ll train, now that I do, I’m reminded that a champion knows when to compete and when to rest.

In my own athletic endeavors, from racing bikes to running, I have always remembered Fignon, his temperamental personality and the competitiveness he displayed throughout his career. While serving in the Marine Corps, I ran 20 miles or more every week. As enthusiastic as I was about competition, I entered races and sometimes won them. Much of my semiannual performance reviews were based on my Physical Fitness Tests (PFTs), which consisted of a 3-mile run, 20 pull-ups, and 80 sit-ups within a two-minute period. These reviews were actually competitions, with accolades and bragging rights going to the winner. I trained for them like someone obsessed, usually finishing at or near the top of my company. Everyone who knew me regarded me as a model Marine, both for my work ethic and for my physical fitness — qualities I’ve tried to carry into civilian life and middle age.

I still run, primarily for enjoyment, but also for the health and psychological benefits it brings. Going out on a hot summer day and putting in five miles is one of the most invigorating and cleansing things I know of. Often, I’ll think of Fignon and what others must have thought at seeing him ride by, his blond ponytail streaming out behind him, so cultured and debonair, and yet always willing to attack and compete for the win. When I see another runner up ahead, something in me changes and I find myself turning the situation into a race. Maybe it’s a way of briefly reliving my athletic prime, or perhaps it’s only a test to find out how much gas I’ve left in the tank. Regardless, I give it everything I have to catch and pass the other runner. Even more motivating is spotting another runner behind me. This forces me to push myself, to increase my speed and focus on my form to ensure he doesn’t catch me — because I tell myself that’s exactly what he’s trying to do. This is as much a mental challenge as a physical one, and it’s a game I recall playing during my cycling days, when I would put my head down and push a big gear, trying to establish a steady rhythm to put as much distance as possible between myself and my nearest competitor. As I pedaled, I would try to emulate Fignon, even his facial gestures. I grimaced. I squinted. I even forced myself to smile while ascending steep hills. Though my legs and lungs were burning, I persevered, knowing it would certainly demoralize my opponents to see me smiling while they, too, were suffering.

***

In the years since the 1989 Tour de France, it’s been proposed time and time again that, had Fignon simply used aerodynamic handlebars that day, as LeMond did, he would have won the race. Granted, at the time, these strange triathlon handlebars were still a novelty in the European peloton. And because of the obvious aerodynamic — and time saving — advantages they afforded, they were also controversial. But they worked for LeMond, who demonstrated just how much more efficient they were than Fignon’s handlebars, which forced him to scoop air like a sail, slowing him, costing him the race.

It has also been proposed that, had Fignon worn an aerodynamic helmet, as LeMond did, he would have won the Tour de France.

Some have dared to suggest that Fignon could have won the Tour simply by cutting off his wind-catching ponytail. But of all three scenarios, this was certainly the least likely. After all, if there is anything the French expect of their champions, it is panache, the concept of verve, style, flamboyance. When one wears the maillot jaune, they believe, this person, above all others, must ride with panache. For the French, it’s a matter of style and pride. And dignity. Fignon understood this, perhaps better than any other rider in the 1989 Tour de France. And he upheld this concept to the best of his considerable abilities, which led to his defeat.

The French never forgave him for it.

***

Part of what intrigued me about Fignon was the Tour de France, itself: the world’s largest annual sporting event and, arguably, the greatest, covering over 2,000 miles in three weeks, attracting more than 10 million spectators along its route, fans who come out to see some of the most elite athletes in all of sports — athletes who race 100 miles or more during a single stage, burning up to 10,000 calories a day — push their bodies to limits humans were not designed to reach. The event is so arduous and demanding that teams groom their young riders, limiting their involvement to a select number of stages, sometimes for several years, before allowing them to complete an entire Tour. Which makes Fignon’s 1983 victory even more remarkable. It was his first time competing in the event and, at 22, he became the youngest rider in half a century to win it.

***

In 1987, after Greg LeMond’s near-fatal hunting accident, Fignon was the only European rider, outside LeMond’s own team, to send the American a get-well note.

***

Over the years, I lost track of Fignon. After I took up running, I no longer subscribed to the cycling papers which had once kept me informed about the sport, and I found myself less interested in following the Tour de France, probably because I no longer recognized any of the riders.

To my great surprise, however, some years ago, during graduate school, one of the students I tutored brought his physiology textbook into the writing lab one day. On the book’s cover was Fignon, a photo from his racing days. He sat on a treadmill in what looked like some kind of medical laboratory, his long, blond hair falling onto his bare chest, to which was connected all sorts of electronic devices to monitor his heart and lungs. There was even a tube fitted into his mouth to measure his maximum rate of oxygen consumption. Elite cyclists have always astounded scientists for their seemingly superhuman endurance capacities, and I suppose Fignon was at the top of this list for not only for his athletic abilities, but also his colorful character. He made you want to look at him and listen to what he might say next. And, like him or not, you respected him for what he could do on a bicycle.

By now (2010) we were well into the Internet age and Fignon had long since retired from professional cycling. Occasionally, something would remind me of him and one day it occurred to me that I could search the Web to find out what The Professor had been up to in recent years. I was elated to discover that he’d written an autobiography, We Were Young and Carefree, which had just been published in English and which I wasted no time in ordering. I was also shocked to learn that he had just died of cancer at the young age of 50.

It took several weeks to receive the book, which shipped from England. When it arrived, I read it in a few short days, fascinated by Fignon’s account of his life — before, during, and after his cycling career. But I was saddened by the pain he surely carried around with him in the years since the 1989 Tour de France. For the opening chapter of his book, which is entitled, “Eight Seconds,” begins with an epigraph:

“Ah. I remember you: you’re the guy who lost the Tour de France by eight seconds!”

“No, monsieur. I’m the guy who won the Tour twice.”

 

John Gifford is the author of the story collections, Wish You Were Here (Big Table, 2016) and Freeze Warning, which was named a finalist for the 2015 Press 53 Short Fiction Award. His work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, The Saturday Evening Post, Southwest Review, U.S. News and World Report, and elsewhere. He lives in Oklahoma.

Poetry talk and poems from Charles W. Brice

by Nicholas Reading

Charles W. Brice’s poems root us. They root us in the Wort Hotel, Jackson Hole, Wyoming while the speaker witnesses his parents’ violent argument. They root us in PGE Park for a triple A game between the Portland Beavers and the Tacoma Rainiers while a father and son, for five dollars a piece, reinforce bonds in a way that seems possible only at a baseball game. They root us in Walloon Lake and the Odawa Casino while three friends find a meal after a long hike. And through these places and events, Brice roots us in reflection, nostalgia, the importance of being still and listening. Family, friends, nuns and pitchers populate his poems and his subjects are brought to life and treated with compassion. His echoes range from Nietzsche to Robin Williams, from Elvis to Yeats. Brice’s new collection Flashcuts Out of Chaos (WordTech Editions, 2016) is an impressive and fresh look at the natural world around us and the world we inhabit naturally. The poems are finely crafted and provide a measured and valuable glimpse into the complexity of the human condition.

Brice was kind enough to take time out of a busy summer to field SL inquires. We cover his inspiration, love of sports, and Mario Lemieux’s broken puck. Warning, there are frightening, though heartfelt, accounts of nuns.

Nicholas Reading: What does poetry mean to you?
Charles W. Brice: Poetry names the unnameable. When I was in practice as a psychoanalyst, I often recommended poems to my patients when we, the patient and I, were having trouble articulating what he/she was going through. “Margaret Are You Grieving,” by Hopkins and “It May Not Always Be So; And I say,” by Cummings, were favorites. They both named the tremendously complicated field of loss that reduction to a few psychological shibboleths just wouldn’t cover.

NR: What does sport mean to you?
CWB: To me, sport is something, along with poetry, music, dance, that makes life worth living. The Penguins just won the Stanley Cup and all of Pittsburgh came together to celebrate. Sport is a way of connecting to people, something precious we have in common. Of course, my great friend, Jim Hutt is a big Sharks fan, so it can also be a means of lording a win over a good friend from now until eternity!

NR: Is the intersection between poetry and sports a natural one for you?
CWB: Absolutely. Especially when it comes to baseball. Everything about the game is poetic, from the way the pitcher addresses the mound to the “psychology” that goes on when there’s two out in the bottom of the ninth and the bases are loaded.

NR: Was a love of sports a common denominator in your house?
CWB: I lived the first 18 years of my life in Cheyenne, Wyoming. My dad was a great baseball fan. He drank too much and wasn’t exactly talkative, but we had good times watching the Game of the Week with Dizzy Dean and Pee Wee Reece. I used to love listening to Diz ruin the English language. In our house in Pittsburgh — when Ari was five, I responded to a flyer asking if I’d like our son to be in an under 6-year-old soccer league. I checked the “yes” box and the box that said I would volunteer to help the organization (which was just getting underway). I included a note that I didn’t know the difference between a golf ball and a soccer ball, but would be happy to answer the telephone, stuff envelops, etc… . I went on vacation and came back and got a call from my “assistant coach.” Thank god, my so called “assistant,” Bill Modoono, played soccer in college and knew the game. I was a coach for five years, until Ari became good enough to be on an all-star team. I loved every minute of it. So yes, sports have always been a big deal in the Brice family. Oh, one more thing: when Ari was 10 we got his mom, my wife, Judy, a present for Mother’s Day: a Spalding infielder’s mitt! Now, as I wrote in my poem, “The Game,” Judy thinks that a baseball game should last as long as it takes her to eat some ballpark food. So she is no great fan, but she was a terrific sport. We spent a good part of Mother’s Day playing catch!

The Game

Twenty-one years of Ariel beam
from under a baseball cap. “We’re going
to the game tonight,” he says,
“The Portland Beavers Vs. The Tacoma Rainiers.”
He knows that I’ll love it
and apologizes to his mother
who thinks baseball should last
as long as it takes to eat a foot-long and fries.
Five dollars a piece that night to sit
behind home plate. It turns out that
the difference between triple A baseball
and the major leagues is 25 bucks a seat.
The scoreboard is hand operated:
no hits, no runs, and a bald head
where the errors should be.
It’s hair cut night! Ten barbers
stationed in PGE Park give fans
their choice of haircuts. A radio
announcer sits in the 20^th row,
swinging his arms over his head,
doing a Harry Caray imitation
during the 7^th inning stretch.
Arms around each other Ari and I sing,
“Take me out to the ball game.”
“I love you, dad,” he says.
I kiss his cheek, laugh out loud;
slap him on the back. I really
don’t care if I ever get back.

NR: Your poem, “The Game,” has so many interesting layers. On one level it seems to act as a metaphor for the current American consciousness. Triple A vs MLB. The haves and have-nots. And ultimately it is a poem about family and love. Can you speak to the ways in which sports unite us? About their importance to our communities? To us personally?
CWB: Sport ties us all together and makes for memories that will outlive all of us. The first time I took our son to a hockey game, he was five years old. In those days (31 years ago), I got tickets in the first row at the old Igloo for $20 apiece. At some point, Mario Lemieux scored his 17^th goal of the season. He broke the puck in the process. Yes, broke it! The ref took a look at Ari and me, skated over, and flipped that puck over the plexiglass and gave it to us. Ari still has that puck. At baseball games, no matter what age he was, Ari would talk and talk to me. We could talk about anything at a game. This is still true. He’ll tell his grandchildren about some of those games.

NR: In your house, what is it like when your team loses? When your team wins?
CWB: Big celebrations with wins, philosophical statements about another day when we lose.

NR: What opportunities do you see in using sport as the poem’s subject?
CWB: Sports just lend themselves to poetry. Anytime I can, I use sport as a subject. In the poems I’ve sent you, “Safe at Home” is about McCutchen and what a terrific athlete he is, but also about the fact that young African American males are in grave danger in our present society. “Blatherskites,” addresses identity, baseball, and the hypocrisy and confusion of modern psychoanalysis. All kinds of subjects are kicked off by contemplating the deeper meanings of sports.

NR: Your poem, “Three Blatherskites and You’re Out,” is a wonderful read. You write:

“So many struggle all their lives
to find themselves;
create and sustain
an identity.”

And the poem is introduced by a quote from Charlie Morton that reads, “…I’ve get to get my bread and butter back. That slider is what I am.” It would seem that your identities are intertwined. Can you talk about that poem a bit more and where you found the inspiration?
CWB: Ha! You are analyzing the analyst! I’d never noticed the fact that Charlie and I have the same first name! You have made me read my own poem differently now. I’d go with Charlie Morton’s assessment that his being is in his slider. You may have noticed from my other poems that I’m a Sartrean at heart (even though I make fun of him—I make fun of everyone and everything). I would go with CM’s feeling that he is what he does, or what he throws, in his case. We humans are never static or positional unless we are dead. We are always there, always throwing, always out ahead of ourselves. I am a poet so long as I write poems. Charlie is his slider until he throws a curve ball!

NR: Your poem, “My First Poetry Teacher,” which follows, is especially intriguing. The layers go from Cheyenne to Longfellow to . . . martyr? What did this first poetry teacher mean to you?

My First Poetry Teacher

If she liked you, Sister Humbert would
pull out her pen and draw a red check
mark on your cheek, grab that cheek
between thumb and forefinger, and
shake it back and forth until you screamed.

When you angered her she’d wrap fifteen
decades of rosary around your throat and tug,
or cold-cock you as she did Ronnie Davis
one frigid Cheyenne morning when he
pushed through a crowd of girls to get into our
classroom and its promised warmth.

She knocked Ronnie on his ass with a hard right
to the nose. People crossed themselves while
Ronnie rose up like some sixth grade god and
landed one to her gut. She fell like a huge
cottonwood strewn with Halloween toilet tissue.
The clangor of rosary beads when she hit the tile
made Hector’s fallen armor sound silent and inglorious.

She made us memorize poems that year.
Mine was Longfellow’s, “Excelsior!”
Some young Alpine buck climbed a
mountain pass even though a wise old
peasant warned him not to, and a maiden
offered him her breasts for a pillow, an
image that electrified my eleven year
mind. People crossed themselves, but they
found him dead in the snow the next day:
“There in the twilight, cold and gray,
lifeless but beautiful he lay,” was Longfellow’s
description, which also described Sister
Humbert’s Dominican habit, with its black
grotto hood and white scapular, and Ronnie’s
face as she led him away from us forever.

CWB: “My First Poetry Teacher” is a completely true story. Sr. Mary Humbert, OP, was my sixth grade teacher. I didn’t know it then, of course, but I’ve come to see her, and the vast majority of her colleagues (Dominican nuns), as some of the most disturbed, sadistic, and cruel people I’ve ever met. Clinically, she was a sadist through and through. She was also very stupid, as were most of the nuns that taught me. Stupid and mean: a horrible combination (cf. George W. Bush). I went on a road trip about 10 years ago with a friend of mine, Jim Hutt, who was also taught by Dominican nuns and who is also a psychologist. He felt, and I concurred, that we had been psychologically abused by those nuns. In my poem, “Burnt Offering,” I relate another true story of a nun, Sr. Silvester, slapping my friend Bill who, she was convinced, was smirking at her. He had been badly burned in the face over the summer and what she took as a smirk was his attempt to smile through scars. I have another poem, “Follow Me,” just accepted by Borfski Press, that recounts how, in second grade, our nun decided to dress a little boy named Pat in a girl’s pink dress, shoes, with a pink bow in his hair and force him to go out for recess where grades 1 through 5 had a wonderful time shaming him. This was for the sin of being talkative (what today we’d call ADD). You know, in Ireland, the priest molestation scandal metastasized to include nuns who had horribly mistreated mostly young pregnant women. I sometimes wish that some of these people could be held accountable in this country, but mostly I want to let it go. Sr. Humbert would mark us with pens, grab our cheeks and aggressively shake our mouths around. I’m sure now, clinically speaking, that she was getting sexual thrills by doing so. Not all the nuns were like that. There’s a poem in Flashcuts about Sr. Johanna who, along with Sr. Marie (both English teachers), inspired me to read good literature and to think. Sadly, these were the only two who were encouraging. In his heartfelt elegy, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” W. H. Auden wrote, “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.” I can say that these mad nuns hurt me into poetry, and for that I’m grateful. They may have been sadistic dolts, but they were terrific muses!

NR: Spirituality, as it relates to the natural world, seems central to your sensibility. “Walking Townsend Road, Petoskey, Michigan,” is a good example. It is a poem that is driven by Buddhist tenants and also a Midwestern appreciation of nature. How did you find that intersection? And I dare ask, what is the importance of spirituality to the poet?

 

Walking Townsend Road, Petoskey, Michigan

One day it’s the red-twigged dogwoods
ringed by rag weed yellows and
chicory blues that clarify mind
and confirm insignificance.

Another day it’s the garter snake
whose crushed head reassures
and saddens, the long green body
pocked with purple checks
stretched out on the southbound lane,
the sheen of life still coats its skin,
its breath, now, of the expired world
where there is only awe.

Today, like Buddahs at sunset,
three sand hill cranes stand
on Billeau’s farm facing West,
enacting contrariness. Rusty
feathers hug their shoulders
like prayer robes,
as maples and ashes
ablaze in crimson and orange,
conduct cornstalk symphonies
in the dying autumn sun.

Against sunset’s gleam
it’s hard to tell, at first,
whether those cranes are deer
or birds or monks.
Their hunched silhouettes mark
the force of sun over meadow,
breeze over grass: a tyranny of calm
in this bloody, battle-fed, world.

CWB:  It’s wonderful that you picked up on the “spirituality” as it refers to the natural world in my poetry. That combination comes from the influence of Jim Harrison on my writing. I was lucky enough to know Jim and spend some time with him. He was a totally original American character. We once spent 15 minutes on the phone trying to understand what a dog’s thinking process was. We were especially intrigued by how smell was represented in the dog brain. Anyway, it was his fascination with the natural world and his respect for Native American spirituality that rubbed off on me. I am an atheist, so the spirituality to which I refer has to do with what Nietzsche or Sartre meant when they spoke of the human spirit. Nature presents us with something that is strictly beyond us. We are part of nature, but we’ll never capture its essence. Every time I walk down Townsend Road (which is near a cottage we have on Walloon Lake in Petoskey), I experience something new, something completely beyond me. It reminds me of one of Jim’s favorite sayings, “You can’t step in the same river even once.” On the other hand, I’m a big fan of Buddhism (there is no god in Buddhism—you can have one if you want, but in terms of the dogma, a god is not there). The idea that all we are is what we are in the moment makes us appreciate the moment. My idea in this poem was to capture a moment that I was present to, that lifted me out of myself.

NR: I’d love to hear about how you came to the title of your collection, Flashcuts Out of Chaos. Could you talk about how you transition between poems, subjects, and “scenes instantaneously, with no time for fade-in or fade-outs.”
CWB: So neat that you asked about the title. I had a number of titles before settling on Flashcuts: The Inverted World, and Chaosed in Love’s Love. The title comes from the last couple lines of my poem, “Fall, Up North.” I’d had another ending to that poem for months that was weak. I just didn’t like it, so I let the poem sit around for another few months. In the meantime I was writing a screenplay with my friend Ivan Rami and, of course, I was involved with all the screenwriting lingo. In our screenplay I wrote several scenes that were Fade Ins, Fade Outs, and several that were Flashcuts. A Flashcut is an instantaneous switching of one scene to another. I realized, when I went back to “Fall, Up North,” that much of life is an instantaneous switch from one event to the next, and that this walk that we were on was a flashcut out of the chaos of our lives. How many times in life are we involved in one thing, only to have something else completely take us into another realm—whether that be illness, the birth of a child, the death of a loved one, the publication of a book, or even a gorgeous sunset? Life is chaotic. For me it has no ultimate meaning. We must make meaning where we live: in the tiny scenes of our lives, that’s where we find the beauty, the splendor of existence.

Fall, Up North

Everything dying up here
is so alive. We walk
through a maple leaf blast,
the deep red explosion
coating us in color, anointing

our entry into gamboge
birch and aspen—
leaves lit as if from within.
No wonder our dog, Mugsi,
thinks they’re as energized

and happy as her tail.
Our neighbor, Jim, on
this morning walk with us,
points to a patch of myrtle
he’s planted that will creep,
if we live long enough,
towards our property.
Judy sits on a step

at the public access park,
and for the trillionth time
is flummoxed by the sun
beads bouncing across
Walloon Lake, its blue
liquid canvas conducting
the daytime lightshow.
We watch in reverence.

On the way back Judy
wants to turn right when
I know we should turn
left. Jim knows it, too,
and we watch as Judy
finally reads the road sign,
sighs, and says we should turn
left. Never undone, she declares
that Jim is right while I am wrong
(that’s forty years of marriage
in a song). Hungry,
at walk’s end, we decide on lunch
at the Odawa Casino. They
once owned all we just saw:
their leaves a bed for spring trillium,
their eyes the hues of autumn
identical to the land we love. Now

their ears the mind-numbing
clang of slot machines, their eyes
every color not known to nature.
We get the senior buffet special,
all you can eat for seven bucks apiece.
They’ve done a fine job with the casino,
the food is spectacular, Judy and Jim
eat the fish while I enjoy a steaming
bowl of bean and ham soup. Mugsi

waits asleep in the car. She dreams
of leaves that fly away from her
like the moths and butterflies
she loves to chase. I dream
that we four will take this walk
again, this flashcut out of chaos,
this path with all the right turns.

NR: SL is a journal devoted to “honest reflections on life’s leisurely diversions.” Many of your poems embody this philosophy. A walk through the woods and you consider mortality. These moments demand meaningful perspective. Can you speak to how those walks, those moments, influence your writing? Your life?
CWB: Poetry, like sport, lives in the details and awareness of the details makes life more worthwhile. A walk down Townsend Road in Michigan is enhanced because you start to notice all the details. The same happens when you notice how Melencon dances on both feet before going into his windup, or how Stargell pumped his bat before waiting for the pitch. If you pay attention to these details, the world is a brighter more vibrant place.

NR: Do you see any parallels between preparing for a game and preparing to write?
CWB: This is a great question! I’ve never thought about it. I guess the parallel for me is the anticipation: when I sit down to write a poem I really don’t know how it will end. Often the endings are very surprising. Sometimes the poem I thought I was writing is really about something else. The same happens when getting ready to watch a game, or even play a game: part of the excitement is not knowing how it’s going to end.

NR: Your collection, Flashcuts Out of Chaos, deals with family and relationships, politics and sports, the liminal and the metaphysical. Can you speak to the unique opportunities that poetry offers the author, and the reader, to communicate in new and authentic ways?
CWB: Poetry is a succinct form. Done correctly, it gathers vast amounts of experience, expression, and feeling into a very small space. Poetry is the only art form where each line, each word, becomes tremendously important and where stanza breaks become critical. Because of this, the communication value of poetry is tremendous. It packs a punch in each line, each stanza. This allows a tremendous amount of information to be communicated and allows the listener/reader to interact with the poem. Each poem becomes the reader’s poem.

NR: In the end, what value have sports brought to your life? To your writing?
CWB: I am who I am because I write and because I love sports. The bonds brought by both interests are tremendous. I don’t particularly care for football, but every season I, and three of my cronies, get together and go to a sports bar in the Burgh and watch the Stillers (yes, that’s how you must spell it). A friend’s daughter made us red baseball hats that read: Stiller Scholars. Of course, we hardly watch the game. We gab about our children and our careers and complain about our spouses, you know, the usual. I’ve already touched upon the wonderful memories and connections sport has brought between Judy, Ari, and me.

NR: This last question is broad, I know, but I expect your answer to be illuminating. What brought you to poetry? As a reader? As a writer?
CWB: What brought me to poetry? When I was 16, my mother bought me a portable Royal typewriter. For some reason I immediately began to write poems on it. I didn’t save any of them, but I enjoyed the writing. At that time, however, I was a drummer in a rock band, and later in a soul band, and my world was music. In senior year of high school we were allowed to bring in the poems of a writer we admired. This was in Sr. Marie’s English class. I have no memories of what poet I found, but one of the other students, a girl named Bonnie, brought in e. e. cummings. I was blown away and became a huge fan. The first poem I ever memorized was, “It May Not Always Be So; and I Say.” I wrote poems all through college, but stopped when I met my wife to be, Judith Alexander Brice. I read her poems, which were terrific, and decided that I had no talent. Judy, by the way, published a splendid book of poetry three years ago entitled, Renditions in a Palette (David Robert Books). So I didn’t write poems for 20 years. About 16 years ago I talked Judy into going to a writer’s conference in Michigan, the Walloon Writers’ Retreat. I wanted to be a novelist and short story writer. Again, the faculty there seemed to be much more interested in Judy’s poetry than my fiction. I met some incredible poets there: Maria Maziotti Gillan, Marie Howe, Dorianne Laux, Robert Fanning, M. L. Liebler, Tomas Lux, and others. In a workshop with Maria Gillan I wrote a poem, “The Game,” about going to a minor league baseball game with our son, Ariel. I just sort of tossed it off. I had sent a short story to the journal, “Barbaric Yawp,” and they turned it down. So, just for fun, I sent them “The Game.” They accepted it right away! While I kept writing stories, I started writing poetry in earnest. I have had tremendous success as a poet. My poetry has appeared in over 45 publications. I write poetry every day. It’s like breathing to me now.

Charles W. Brice is a recovering psychoanalyst. His first poetry collection, Flashcuts Out of Chaos, was published by WordTech Editions in June 2016. His poetry has appeared in The Atlanta Review, Avalon Literary Journal, The Paterson Literary Review, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Spitball, VerseWrights, The Writing Disorder, and elsewhere. He is an International Merit Award winner in the Atlanta Review’s Poetry 2015 International Poetry Competition, and his poem, “Wild Pitch,” was named one of the 75 best poems in Spitball magazine.

Nicholas Reading is the poetry editor of Sport Literate. He 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.

Elegy for Ebbets

by Michael Steinberg

2002: Two years ago last spring I was in Minneapolis on a Saturday night, looking for something to do. It was early April, a cold, drizzly evening. The writing conference was over, and my plane didn’t take off until the next morning.

“Let’s go see the Twins and the Orioles,” my colleague, Tom Romano, says. “Ripkin’s only three away from his three thousandth. Maybe it’ll happen tonight.”

“Are you kidding?” I say. It’s 35 degrees out there.”

Tom reminds me that the Metrodome’s an indoor stadium. This perks me up a bit. As a kid I used to haunt major league ball parks. When I was 13, my dad and I visited every National League stadium, beginning with the three in New York and ending up in St. Louis. Back then, there were only eight teams in each league.
So it’s not unusual that I lost some passion for baseball when all the domed, Astro turf stadiums were built. Tonight, in fact, will be the first time I’ve ever been inside one.

***

I grew up in New York in the 1950s, an era, according to Roger Kahn, “when the Yankees, Dodgers and Giants ruled the world.” Hyperbole aside, baseball may not have ruled the world, but it surely was a city-wide religion. And its three ball parks were our houses of worship.

Each of the three — Yankee Stadium, the Polo Grounds, and Ebbets Field were shoe-horned into surrounding neighborhoods. And each had its own idiosyncratic character. The left and right field foul lines at the Stadium were less than 300 feet from home plate, while the left center and right field powers alleys were over 400 feet away. The Polo Grounds was shaped like a horseshoe and had even shorter foul lines — 279 down the left field line, and 257 in right field — while the clubhouse in dead center was almost 500 feet from the plate. Both parks had seating capacities of over 50,000.

But to me, Ebbets was the most alluring of the three. A 32,000-seat bandbox of a park set in the heart of Flatbush, it radiated a cozy intimacy and a quirky ambiance that the others lacked. From the center field bleachers, you could hear left fielder “Shotgun” Shuba yell to center fielder Duke Snider, “I got it, Duke;” and from the upper deck behind first, you could see the grimace on Jackie Robinson’s face as he went head-to-head with umpire Jocko Conlon.

At Ebbets the double-decker grandstand in center field dramatically jutted away to a 40-foot high black concrete scoreboard that extends to a 10-foot vertical screen. Our right fielder, Carl Furillo, “the Reading Rifle,” knew how to play every carom off that wall. Then there was the (seeming) ease with which Duke Snider could crank rainbow home runs over the huge scoreboard.

***

Our cab approaches the Metrodome. Through the mist the stadium looks like a gigantic parachute. Like most domed parks, it’s a generic, multi-purpose structure that houses college and professional football, as well as basketball and rock concerts. Still, I feel a twinge of anticipation when I step up to the outside ticket kiosk and ask for the two best field boxes between home and first. It kicks me back in time to the moment when I bought my first set of tickets at Ebbets Field.

***

My throat tightens with anticipation when the five of us approach the rotunda entrance to the old gray concrete and steel park at 55 Sullivan Place, on the corner of Franklin Avenue. “I’ll get the tickets” I said to my pals. I felt so grown-up, so important, when I stepped up to the General Admission window and squinted through the wire mesh screen where the chubby, bald-headed ticket seller perched. He was wearing a green see thru visor and puffing on a stinky cigar.

Knowing the other guys were watching, I barked out “Gimme your five best general admissions, upper deck between third and home. And not behind a post, okay?”

The guy blows stale cigar smoke in my face, and without looking up he fanned the orange tickets like a deck of cards and pulls four from the middle. “That’ll be six and a quarter, Jack. Step up, pal, who’s next?” he barked, as he slid a small white envelope beneath the wire screen. For a buck and a quarter apiece, we got four upper deck seats, third row, right between third and home.

“These are fantastic. How’d you get ‘em?” asked Heshie.
“Man, I told you I know how to handle ticket guys” I said.

I was 12 when I saw Ebbets Field for the first time. When my four friends, Heshie, Kenny, Sugar, Billy and I passed through the third base portal, I surveyed the field for a long moment, entranced by what I saw: emerald green, manicured grass surrounding a smooth, tan/brown infield; powdered sugar foul lines and chalky, white-wash bases; the imposing right field scoreboard; and multi-colored outfield billboards advertising “Abe Stark: Hit This Sign and Win a Suit,” and “Fill ‘er up with Tydol, ‘Flying ’A.” It was as if I’d stepped through the Looking Glass.

As Ebbets filled up, you could hear the lazy hum and buzz of the pre-game crowd, smell the pungent odor of Schaefer beer, munch on a brown bag of Planter’s salted peanuts, and witness the counter man casually tossing Harry M. Stevens’ hot dogs into a huge bubbling vat.

Then I’d watch, transfixed, as the Dodgers played “pepper” and took pre-game batting practice. From any section of the stands, you’d hear a solid “thwack” as wooden bats connected with horsehide baseballs. The echo reverberated throughout the canyons of the slowly filling ball park. While outside on Bedford Avenue, scruffy neighborhood kids with old leather mitts, camped under the scoreboard, waiting to scramble for batting practice “dingers.”

Throughout pre-game warm-ups, the five of us kept up a steady stream of chatter: quoting stats, playing baseball initials, arguing with neighboring fans about the new pennant race, and reliving “classic” Dodger games from the past. Heshie mentioned Bobby Thomson’s homer. It jump-started me back to that early October afternoon last fall. I was at Hebrew School recess when I heard the news. For the rest of the lesson, I sat under a tree and cried. Even my teacher, Arthur Hoffman, couldn’t coax me inside.

While the others swapped stories, I was remembering an early June afternoon when my dad picked up my brother Alan and me at school, and took us to a day game against the Cubs. It was Alan’s first time at Ebbets. For the first few innings he was flushed both with the euphoria that comes from witnessing your first big league game, and the rush you feel when you’re playing hooky for the first time. By the fifth inning though, he was bored. While my 7-year-old brother nodded off, Carl Erskine retired the last 12 Cubbies to complete the first live no-hitter I ever saw. I still remember how exhilarated I was on the last play of the game. When Eddie Miksis hit an easy ground ball to Pee Wee Reese, I neatly penciled 6-3 in my scorecard and then jumped to my feet to watch as players and fans headed for the mound to celebrate.

***

All throughout batting practice, we stood with our mitts on behind the box seats between third and home, and sometimes when foul balls bounced crazily off the concrete promenade we wrestled for the prized souvenirs with Bensonhurst hoods — guys who sported greasy D. A. haircuts and wore pegged pants, motorcycle jackets, and black shit kickers.

An hour before the game, we drifted over to the right field bullpen to watch “The Knothole Gang,” WOR-TV’s pre-game show. Wearing a Dodger blue warm-up jacket and cap, Happy Felton, the chubby host, introduced Gil Hodges to the TV audience. Gil grabbed a bat and hit a bunch of easy grounders and pop flies to three kids. They were all about our age, and each wore his Little League baseball uniform. One of them in a baggy, “Brooklyn Kiwanis Club” shirt won an autographed baseball. He also got to go to the dugout with Hodges.

We walked away grousing about the injustice. “How is it those kids get chosen for the show?” Billy asked.
Heshie yelled “Hey Happy Man, when do we get to be on?”

Old Hap looked up and smiled at us. Then he turned away, unclasped his microphone and shuffled his cue cards.

As Dodger players perched on the top step of the dugout, a wave of cheers cascaded down from the upper stands. This lets us know that up in “the old catbird seat” behind home, Red Barber has just announced, “And the Dodgers take the field” to everyone listening in on the radio, or watching on TV. While Gladys Gooding played the National Anthem on the Hammond organ, and Lucy Monroe sang “Oh say can you see…” in her high-pitched soprano, I watched fathers in shirt sleeves and fedoras, and young boys with Dodger caps and two toned, reversible jackets tied around their waists, place their hats in front of their hearts and sing along.

On the field, the players stood silent and still. When they too placed their hats over their hearts, I noticed that Pee Wee’s sandy blond hair was thinning, and that the Duke was prematurely graying.

Then Tex Richart’s voice reverberated over the P.A., “Batting first, first for the Giants, Giants, number nineteen, nineteen, Alvin, Alvin, Dark, Dark, shortstop, shortstop.” The home crowd booed loudly when Dark took his practice cuts with his trademark black bat. And they cheered in unison when Don Newcombe threw a called strike on the games’ first pitch. Once everyone settled in and the game was underway, I sat quietly, scorecard resting in my lap, recording each put-out neatly in pencil. In the Giant’s half of the inning, Bobby Thomson flied out to Duke Snider in center field. I looked over to the press box and I imagined Red Barber telling the radio and TV audience that “Thomson’s inning ending fly ball is just an easy can of corn for the Duke.”

***

I’m jolted from my reverie when the Twins’ ticket booth guy asks me for $52. It takes a few seconds for it to register.

“Fift” I start to say, then stop myself.

“I guess I’ve been away from the game longer than I thought,” I tell Tom as we head up the first base ramp.

***

Sometimes at Ebbets, it was fun just to watch the characters in the stands. In the fifth inning of today’s scoreless tie, old Hilda Chester, a stout, white-haired woman dressed like a rag picker, ran through the stands clanging metal cow bells and leading cheers. We stood up and yelled with everyone else. She was accompanied by the Dodger “Sym-Phony,” a group of rag-tag musicians who were all decked out in tattered tuxedos and stove-pipe hats. I instinctively started tapping my toes as they played tinny, off key Dixieland jazz. And during the seventh inning stretch, Gladys Gooding urged the fans to sing along as she played “Follow the Dodgers,” the team’s theme song. Like a church choir, we all joined in.

On this day, Newcombe and the Dodgers beat their nemesis, Sal Maglie. The game winner was a three run homer by Gil Hodges in the bottom of the seventh. As the ball disappeared over the Brass Rail sign in left center field, people behind me began to shower the lower grandstand with confetti; and all around us we saw grown men and women standing on their seats and hugging one another. When the game ended, the exuberant crowd refused to leave until the team emerged from the dugout to wave their hats at us.

Later, we stood at the third base entrance outside the park and watched the younger kids impatiently waiting for the players to come out. A little blond boy in an over-sized Dodger hat yelled “Hey, there’s Pee Wee and Robbie,” and they all milled around their heroes–thrusting scuffed baseballs, Topps bubble gum cards, and black vinyl autograph books at them. Some players signed for a few minutes, then ducked into touring cars or taxis taking them, I imagine, to exotic Manhattan destinations.

During the hot, crowded subway and bus ride home, we’d keep the glow alive by replaying the day’s highlights to one another — complete with simulated crowd noises and sound effects. Heshie would imitate Red Barber saying “Hodges has just parked one in the left field seats, and that’s all she wrote for Maglie.” Some people applauded. Others looked at us like we’re crazy. I didn’t care: the ticket stub in my pocket made me feel a part of an elite, exclusive club.

***

Once we’re inside the Metrodome, I scan the vast, extravagant structure, searching for familiar landmarks. In place of light towers, thousands of high intensity lights line the stadium’s rim. When I look down at the playing surface, I’m disappointed to see that there’s no infield dirt; the playing field is a huge swatch of green artificial turf. It looks like an immense pool table.

And what about the ambiance? Loud, intrusive rock and roll assaults you from all sides — interrupted by infomercials for local automobile dealers, supermarket chains, and real estate agencies. Each sales pitch is accompanied by an animated graphic that appears simultaneously on the four message boards surrounding the playing field. When we aren’t being hyped by the ads, a prerecorded soundtrack keeps informing us about the souvenirs, hot dogs, peanuts, beer, and soda on sale at the concession stands. As I watch batting practice and infield/outfield drills, I wonder how the players manage to screen out all the noise and distractions. Especially the starting pitchers who are warming up in the bullpens.

Even after the first pitch, the merchandising blitz doesn’t let up. The between inning commercials are timed to play at specific intervals. An overhead blimp drops souvenirs into the crowd every three innings. And every other inning, screaming teen aged girls and boys sprint around the perimeter of the field throwing balled-up Twin’s tee-shirts into the stands. As soon as they’re gone, we get another round of loud music. Sometimes, I notice, it gets piped in between pitches.

“God forbid, they should leave you alone for more than 30 seconds,” I say to Tom.
He laughs. “Yeah, maybe they’re afraid you might watch the game.”
“Not much chance of that happening” I say, as I scan the crowd.

I notice that some fans have brought their electronic toys with them. A teenager two rows in front of us is wearing headphones. A middle aged man with his baseball hat on backwards channel surfs on a palm sized TV. The woman to my left is chatting on her cell phone, while her young son plays video games on his lap-top computer. I wonder if there will be a karaoke contest during the seventh inning stretch — just to see who can do the most outrageous rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”

One of the things I used to love about watching baseball was the slow, contemplative pace of the game, especially those quiet interludes between pitches, when you could sit back and savor the circus catch or home run you’ve just witnessed. Or you could talk to the people around you and second-guess, even argue about the managers’ strategies and maneuvers.

Everything here, however, is designed to distract you — to pull your attention away from the game that’s unfolding on the field. And if you miss anything, they’ll show it to you again — and again and again and again— on the giant TV screen in center field. I tell Tom that it feels like we’re conducting a field study of professional baseball at the beginning of the new millennium. And in some ways, we are.

***

I grew up playing sandlot baseball and rooting for the Dodgers. Both were a big piece of my adolescent identity. I wasn’t part of the “in” crowd at school. I was chubby, scared to death of girls, and an undistinguished student. So, naturally I felt a simpatico with this team of hopeful underdogs. “Wait ‘til next year” was the fans’ official mantra. And aptly so. Because until they won their first World Series in ‘55, the Dodgers had lost seven straight to the Yankees.

Throughout high school, from June to early September, Ebbets became my sanctuary–a place where I was happy and secure — where I fit in. As an avid Dodger fan, I belonged to a fraternity of like-minded dreamers.
But that abruptly changed in 1957, when Dodger owner, Walter O’ Malley, announced that the franchise would be moving to Los Angeles. The news seemed to have dropped suddenly from the sky. I felt betrayed, stunned. Just like that, I no longer had a refuge, nor a team to root for.

It was purely by coincidence that I happened to end up in L.A. the year after the Brooklyn Dodgers officially became the L.A. Dodgers. In June of ‘58, my parents moved to Los Angeles, and the next fall I enrolled at UCLA where I pitched freshman baseball and wrote sports for The Daily Bruin.

Two years had passed and I was still angry at the Dodgers. When I left New York, I‘d vowed to friends that I wouldn’t go to see them play. But in April of ‘59, Mike Mandell, a fraternity brother, invited me to opening day. Mike’s father, Harry, a minor studio exec at Universal, had managed to score three field boxes behind the Dodger dugout. I thought it over for a few days before my curiosity got the best of me.

The speeches by city officials, turncoat Dodger brass, and a few Hollywood celebs were pompous and self-serving. And except for Duke Snider, Johnny Podres, Gil Hodges, whose best years were behind them, most of the players I remember had either been traded or had retired. Before the move to L. A., Jackie Robinson was sold to, of all teams, the Giants. I inwardly cheered when Robbie decided to leave the game.

The stadium irked me even more than the ceremony. The Coliseum is a 100,000-seat football palace that in the ‘50s and ‘60s housed three teams; UCLA, USC, and the LA Rams. The Dodgers had temporarily moved here because their new park at Chavez Ravine was still under construction. At the local taxpayers’ expense no less.

For my money, the Coliseum was a spectator’s nightmare. The inner structure is a round, dirty white concrete slab with no tiers, no upper deck, and no backs on the bleacher style seats. Like most football stadiums, the interior is a widening band of concentric circles. The higher you sat on the circle, the further away you were from the game.

And what about these oddities? There was more room in foul territory behind the plate than on the entire left side of the field; and the left field wall was only two hundred and fifty feet away from home plate. A wind-blown fly ball to left stood a chance of drifting over the outfield screen. And because the right side of the field angled out away from the plate, a 400-foot fly ball to left or right center was a routine out.

None of it seemed to bother the fans, though. At first, they acted as if they were charmed by what was happening on the field. Every time a player hit a high pop fly, they cheered like it was a home run. But by the third inning, most of the conversation around me was about movie agents, lunch meetings, and script deals. Nobody talked the old Ebbets Field lingo, and only a handful of people took the trouble to score the game. Some of the Hollywood types in fact, couldn’t seem to figure out what the numbers in the score book meant. I wasn’t even tempted to explain it to her.

“How come the first baseman is wearing number 14, and the program says he’s number 3?” asked a peroxide blonde in pedal pushers and spike heels.

I also took note that there were only a handful of fathers and sons in the crowd. At 19, I was one of the youngest males in attendance. Most of the crowd looked like they’d been shipped over from Central Casting. Many of the older men wore garish, flowered shirts and monogrammed sun visors. Some of the younger ones even brought their surf boards. Several women dressed in gauzy see-through blouses, form-fitting short shorts, and tongs. And I saw a few in halter tops and bikini’s. Every two innings, the celebrity wanna-be’s would preen for the TV cameras; and all throughout the game there was an unbroken flow of traffic to and from the concession stands. By the seventh inning of a one run game, the Coliseum was less than half full. When I left that afternoon, I knew I would not return.

In the fall of ‘59, I transferred back to New York and enrolled at Hofstra College. At 20, I was a typical college kid; I went to fraternity parties, slept in, and chased girls. I pitched middle inning relief on the baseball team, majored in English and wrote sports for The Hofstra Chronicle, the school weekly. My vague hope was to someday become a writer and teacher.

The summer before school started, I didn’t pay a lot of attention to major league baseball. When I went to Yankee Stadium, I kidded to friends that I was only there as a tourist. But in the winter of ‘60, I stumbled across a Newsday article announcing the impending demolition of Ebbets Field. How could I not attend? Maybe I’d find some closure here.

1960: A bone chilling, late February morning. For the first time in years, I took the Green Bus and IRT subway to Brooklyn. Alone. I walked down Franklin Avenue and saw the light towers of Ebbets in the gray distance. When I reached Empire Boulevard, I turned left and walked through the marble rotunda, past the boarded up ticket windows, before heading up the third base grandstand ramp.

The first thing I saw when I reached the portal was the huge, black scoreboard in right field. Then I gazed around the outfield for a last look at the old Abe Stark, “Hit This Sign and Win a Suit” billboard, and the fire engine red Tydol Flying A” sign.

I closed my eyes, and for a moment I was 12 years old again. But the reverie ended when I looked out at the brown outfield grass and saw jagged ruts and bare patches, the residue from two years of stock car races and neglect. Then below me, I noticed the shabby looking blue box seats, surrounded by faded, chipped red railings.

A sparse crowd, maybe a few hundred men and three or four women, huddled behind the third base dugout. But they weren’t waiting for autographs. We’d gathered here to witness the demolition of Ebbets Field. In the crowd, I recognized two of the old players; pitcher Carl Erskine, always a winner, always a classy guy, and next to him the unfortunate Ralph Branca. Who’d have expected that kind of loyalty from Branca, a man who was so unfairly maligned by the fans and press? Is it penance he’s seeking here?

Lucy Monroe sang the National Anthem just as she’d done at countless Dodger games. But the speeches were canned eulogies. While some phony Brooklyn politico with bad teeth droned on, informing us — without any sense of irony — that Ebbets Field was now 46 years old, I was thinking about Walter O’ Malley, the owner who sold out millions of naive, loyal, baseball fans like me. I recalled the scene in The Great Gatsby where Jay Gatsby introduces Nick Carraway to Meyer Wolfsheim. Wolfsheim is the character who’s based on Arnold Rothstein, the gambler who’d allegedly conspired to fix the 1919 World Series. As Nick shakes Wolfsheim’s hand he thinks: “It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of 50 million people — with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.”

The demolition crew were fittingly outfitted in Dodger blue wind breakers; and as the giant white-washed, red stitched “headache ball,” crunched into the third base dugout, chunks of concrete and splintered wood flew in all directions. I felt an ache in the pit of my stomach.

I caught my breath and closed my eyes again. This time, I was back in the center field bleachers watching Duke Snider camp under a lazy fly ball. The Duke casually pats the pocket of his mitt, waiting to gather in what Red Barber used to call “an easy can of corn.” Then I imagine I see Jackie Robinson crouched between second and first base, hands on knees, waiting for Newk, Ersk, Padres or “the Preach” to deliver the next pitch.

I was jolted back to the present when the “headache ball “smashed into the right field scoreboard. The concrete beneath me started to quiver. It felt like a minor earthquake.

While I was walking back to the subway, I made a promise not to attend another major league game.

In my senior year of college, I was engaged and making plans to attend graduate school in Michigan. I hadn’t attended a ball game since the demolition. That is, until the Mets happened upon the scene.
When the Mets arrived in the ’62 expansion, their home field was the Polo Grounds, the ancient green walled stadium atop Coogan’s Bluff. Recalling those weekend outings with my dad, I took the Broadway-Seventh Avenue Express and got off at 158th Street. By instinct, I headed east until I saw the horseshoe shaped stadium I remembered so well. I walked down from the platform and sat in the third base lower grandstand– my father’s old seats. I felt like I’d taken a step back in time.

For the first season, I tried to love this new team. But something was pulling against my enthusiasm. I sensed a similar caution in a lot of the old Dodger and Giant diehards. Maybe we were holding back because we knew the Mets would soon be moving to a new park.

We’d been hoping against hope that the Mets would move to Brooklyn, or even Manhattan. But Flushing Meadows? At least the owners were smart enough not to call the team the Flushing Mets.

Sure enough, in ‘63 when the Mets moved into Shea Stadium, the Polo Grounds was razed and replaced by an urban housing project. I’d read somewhere that the wrecking ball that demolished the Polo Grounds was the same one that wiped out Ebbets Field three years prior. And what about this absurdity? Today, a housing project stands where the Polo Grounds used to be. At the exact spot where Thomson took his historic swing is a sign that reads “No ball playing allowed.”

For a time, I felt as if I’d been abandoned again. But soon, my curiosity caught up with me again. On opening day weekend, I went to see the Mets play in their new park.

Shea Stadium sits on a tract of marshland near the old World’s Fair site. There are no row houses, tenement or apartment buildings, no kids playing in the streets, no trees, candy stores, taverns, newspaper or scorecard and peanuts’ hawkers. Without a vibrant urban neighborhood to surround it, the setting had an eerie, hollow ambiance.

The inside of the park was not much more appealing. Unless you sat in the expensive boxes near home plate, you felt like you were in a cavernous football palace, like the Coliseum. The outfield fences had no billboards–just stark, blue walls with orange numbers like “390” and “410” painted on them. The only recognizable links with the ball parks of my youth were the field’s natural grass and dirt.

To me, Shea lacked intimacy, warmth, character. Like many of the newer ball parks, the stadium was designed as a single level concentric circle. Perched high above the playing field were luxurious “sky suites” complete with television sets, sofas, plush carpeting, and wet bars. Inside the stadium, vendors no longer hawked ball park hot dogs, or Dixie cups with wooden spoons, or waxed paper cups of Schaefer beer. Instead they pedaled foot long bratwursts, gourmet ice cream, and premium draft beer served in clear plastic cups. A “brat and brew” were more expensive than the price of a field box at Ebbets Field.

Mets fans were fanatical about their new team; and they were as loyal to their heroes as we were to the old Dodgers. And that’s as it should be. But each time I went back to Shea, the Mets had acquired new players, guys named Smith, and Hunt, and Christopher. Some, like Marvelous Marv Throne berry, even had zany personalities. It was just that I’d never heard of them. And every two weeks, the owners would bring in several new guys.

Sure, they resurrected Stengel, the Duke, and Roger Craig. But it was just to sell tickets. None of them could help this patchwork quilt of a ball club. As a matter of fact, Craig, a proven winner with the Dodgers, lost 20 games in his first season as a Met.

It was a new regime all across the board — and a new era. The announcers, Lindsay Nelson, a network football guy, Ralph Kiner, the old Pirates’ slugger, and side-man Bob Murphy, were knowledgeable enough about the game. But compared to the Old Redhead and Connie Desmond, these three seemed as bland as Cream of Wheat. After a while I even quit scoring the games: I couldn’t keep track of all the new guys. If I was still searching for the old Ebbets Field magic, I knew I wouldn’t find it here. I gave the Mets two seasons before it was time to move on.

In the fall of ‘64, I left for Michigan and quickly got caught up in graduate school, my marriage, and adjusting to the Midwest. But in the spring, a colleague took me to Tiger Stadium, now one of the oldest ball parks in the majors.

I turned off the Lodge Expressway at Grand Avenue, and for a few bucks I parked my car in someone’s back yard. To get to the stadium you had to walk past blocks of wooden row houses, past knots of people sitting on front porches and steps, through twilight streets where kids were playing ball in fenced in school yards and treeless, concrete parks. It reminded me of the old Brooklyn neighborhoods that surrounded Ebbets Field.

Through the night mist and factory smoke I could see in the distance the enormous towers atop the ball park, and the bluish white glow of the stadium’s arc lights. My heart was in my throat. It felt just like the day when my four cronies and I headed down Franklin Avenue to attend our first Dodger game.

Even the crowd at Tiger Stadium reminded me of the old Brooklyn fans: factory rats from nearby automobile plants, newspaper reporters and white-collar guys from downtown office buildings, fathers and sons from the outlying burbs. I sat in the first row of the upper stands, between third and home. From my vantage point, I could see the sweat rolling down Mickey Lolich’s cheeks as he checked the runner at first; and I could hear the infield chatter, as well as the profanities coming from the Yankee dugout. The aroma of stale beer, hot dogs, and popcorn perfumed the chilled night air. Maybe, this was the replacement I’d been searching for.

For the next five seasons, I went back to Tiger Stadium each summer. I even rooted for the team when they won the ‘68 World Series against the Cardinals. But over the next few years, I found myself getting restless and edgy whenever I read the sports pages. In October of ‘69, the “Amazing Mets” became the first expansion team to win a World Series. Why wasn’t I elated? This was a team, after all, that I could identify with. Seven years ago, the Mets were a rag-tag aggregate of rookies and retreads. Their manager, Gil Hodges, was even an old Dodger favorite of mine. My indifference was a bad sign.

By 1970, I was more disenchanted with baseball than I’d been since the Dodgers left Brooklyn. Tiger Stadium and the people were the same. But the game was undergoing big changes.

From the early 60ss on, franchises began building suburban, multi-purpose indoor stadiums. In the middle of the decade the player’s union was established, and for the first time in over fifty years, both leagues had added new teams. Franchises appeared in old minor league towns like Seattle and Kansas City. By the end of the ‘69 season, there were 24 teams — eight more than had existed 10 years ago. Far too many for me to keep track of.

Both leagues had also split into two divisions, East and West; and a playoff round now proceeded the World Series. To encourage more offense, pitching mounds were lowered by several inches. In spring training games, both leagues were already experimenting with designated hitters. Team uniforms had also changed. The baggy flannel grays and whites had given way to form-fitting, brightly colored polyesters. The most flamboyant players even wore flashy white spikes. By the end of the decade, professional baseball had undergone so many transformations that I couldn’t keep up.

None of this should have surprised or upset me. Baseball was simply reflecting the temper of the times. Since the mid-60s, the culture had undergone radical upheavals. Why should professional sports be any different?

By the early ’70s, I was attending fewer and fewer Tiger games. When I did go, I’d often leave before the seventh inning. My excuse was that I wanted to beat the traffic home. Truth is, I’d lost interest in baseball. The two leagues had expanded to twenty-eight teams; there were owner-player lock-outs; Astro-turf and domes were de rigeur; free agency had taken away what little continuity was left; and too many players looked and sounded like rock stars.

In 1974, I got my Ph.D., took a job teaching writing at Michigan State, and began to write. By the end of the decade, baseball had all but dropped out of my life.

Curiously enough, it was writing that led me back to baseball, if only for a short time. In 1984, a play I co-wrote was produced in Chicago. And when rehearsals turned out to be more grim than glamorous, I found myself escaping to the left field bleachers at Wrigley Field.

Like the neighborhoods surrounding Ebbets Field, “Wrigleyville” had that gritty urban feel I used to love: the Addison Avenue “El” rumbling on the overhead tracks; hurly-burly traffic noises outside the park; beer-and-shot- bars where people gathered to talk before and after the game. And on Sheffield Avenue, fans in beach chairs watched from tenement rooftops.

The park itself was a throw-back to the old days: ivy-covered outfield walls and manicured, emerald grass surrounded the infield diamond. Hard-hat “bleacher bums” drank beer and sun bathed in the left field stands. An upper deck grandstand populated by kids and dads in shirt sleeves. It was like being in a time warp. Each time I went to a Cubs’ game, I felt a strange mix of familiarity and contempt. Why couldn’t all ball parks be like this?

After the play closed, I went back to Michigan. Now when I look back on that time, my fondest memories are of not of nights spent at the theater watching the play, but those lazy summer afternoons when I hid out in the bleachers at Wrigley Field.

In the next five years, I got more absorbed in teaching, writing, and travel. My next visit to a ball park, in 1989, came about in a most unusual fashion. Enroute home from a trip to France, my wife Carole and I had an overnight layover in Boston. The plane landed at 6:30 in the evening, and as we were riding the shuttle bus to the airport hotel I overheard two pilots making plans to go to the Red Sox game. We were dog-tired from the flight, yet I was overcome by an impulse to head straight for Fenway Park. Fenway was one of the last of the old urban ball parks. I’d always wanted to see a Red Sox game here. Who knows how much longer this legendary dinosaur will even exist.

Despite Carole’s objections, we dropped our bags at the hotel, rushed to catch the MTA, and arrived just in time for the first pitch. When I saw the vendors selling steamed peanuts outside the park, and the forty foot “green monster” in left field — when I bought two grandstand seats and found that I wasn’t a football field away from the action, when I ate a steamed ball park hot dog and scored every put-out — it was if I’d never fallen away from the game. Carole fell asleep in the fifth inning. I stayed up for the full nine.

As usual, I was buzzed when I left the park. But the feeling lingered for less than an hour. That’s when I knew this was only a one-night stand. I was almost 50 and I was getting on with my life.

By the early-90s, you couldn’t pick up a newspaper or watch a sports show without hearing about free agents, salary caps, and multi-million dollar contracts. The real baseball news was now reduced to the daily box scores.

Once in a while when I needed a break from my writing, I’d peek at the box scores. And a few times during the summer, I’d attend a local minor league or city league game. As for the rest of it, Skydomes, Kingdomes, Astrodomes never inspired me. Neither did the second generation of new stadiums; the cookie-cutter, suburban parks with luxury suites and plastic grass. Nor did I like the network shills who interviewed owners about lockouts and strikes; or millionaire players and agents who’d talk only about thirty million-dollar deals made with teams I’d never heard of. And it occurs to me that for two of the last five years the World Series was won by the Toronto Blue Jays, a team from a foreign country; a franchise that didn’t even exist until I was in my late thirties.

Moreover, the Series’ games I used to look forward to on hot September afternoons are now played at night, in late October, sometimes under retractable “moon roofs.” After the last recap has been broadcast–interrupted by six beer and automobile commercials — it’s usually past midnight, and a light frost has begun to coat the grass on my front lawn. Neighbors who work in the morning, and kids who have to get up for school, have long since fallen asleep. So have I.

Just before the owner’s lock-out of ‘94, I was ready to give up on baseball for good. Or so I thought.
One night, I was watching a ball game on ESPN. And between innings, I found myself getting caught up in, of all things, a beer commercial. It was a scene shot in a bar, featuring two cranky ex-Brooklyn Dodger fans — both of whom were about my age. They were kvetching about the Dodgers’ defection from Brooklyn in ‘57, arguing about how greedy the owners and players had become, and grumbling about what a crime it was that baseball had become such a commodity. Yadada, yadada, yadada, I thought. Same old litany I’d been chanting for the past three decades.

The first few times I thought it was mildly amusing. But after several viewings, the commercial started to irritate me. Before long, I figured out why; I was beginning to identify with the guys in that ad.

Around that same time, I was reading Pete Hamill’s collection of essays and memoirs about New York in the ’40’s and ’50’s. One segment in particular gave me pause. “Why,” Hamill writes, “are the middle-aged almost always talking, at the risk of maudlin cliché, about the old Neighborhood, about places gone and buried, about Ebbets Field and Birdland, the Cedar Tavern and the old Paramount?”

“The reason is simple,” he says: “In those places, they were happy. Sentimentality is always a form of resentment.”

That last phrase hit a nerve. For days afterward, it troubled me that I had become so crotchety about a game I was once on fire for. Perhaps I needed to take a step back and rethink this. Maybe I should give baseball — and myself — one more try.

My reentry began somewhat tentatively. Following the cancellation of the ‘94 World Series, it was still easy to remain cynical and detached from the game. But in the summer of ‘95 — the season that Ripken broke Lou Gehrig’s consecutive game record — I read that the Oriole’s were playing in a new downtown stadium — a replica of the concrete and steel parks I’d grown up with in the ‘50s. Even the name, “Camden Yards,” called up memories of the old urban ball parks. That same season, ESPN began its “Sunday Night Baseball” series. And as Ripken inched up on Gehrig’s record, I found myself tuning into the late innings of Oriole games and surfing some of the sports talk shows, just so I could keep up with the streak.

My interest waxed and waned over the next two years, but I always managed to perk up right around playoff time. In ‘96, the Yankee’s Series comeback against the Braves caught my attention, but the unscrupulous dismantling of the ‘97 champion Marlins’ soured me on the game once again.

But in 1998, like every other baseball fan in the universe, I got caught up in the McGwire-Sosa home run derby, and the Yankee’s remarkable winning season. And dotted throughout that summer were a series of extraordinary moments. Cub rookie, Kerry Woods struck out 20 men in a game; the Yankee’s David Wells’ pitched a perfect game; and Ripkin’s record breaking hitting streak ended. By the time regular season was over, a half dozen players had hit forty or more home runs, and three of the four pennant races went right down to the wire. When the playoffs and World Series came around, I was hooked.

As the playoffs evolved, I noticed that three of the eight teams — the Yankees, Red Sox, and Cubs — were playing in the same stadiums they’d inhabited since the 20s; two others, the Indians and Rangers, played in parks that were modeled in one way or another after Yankee Stadium, Fenway Park, and Wrigley Field. Moreover, of the three remaining play-off teams, the Giants and Padres had reverted back to playing on natural grass. Only the Houston Astros were still housed in a domed stadium — and even that would change within two years.

For the first time in decades, I followed the post season with more fervor and interest than I’d thought myself capable of. But it was during the Cubs-Giants wild card play-off, that I became aware of just how preoccupied I was becoming. I rooted for the Cubs; partly because I loved Wrigley Field, partly because the team’s futility reminded me of the old Dodgers; and partly because the Giants used to be the Dodgers’ old nemesis.

By the middle innings, I found myself admiring the clutch pitching and graceful defensive plays on both sides. I marveled at the hitting talent of Sammy Sosa, and of course, Barry Bonds. I even got teary and nostalgic when during the seventh inning stretch, when comedian Bill Murray, dressed in a Cubs’ jersey and hat, led the crowd in a poignant rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” And I felt a surge of hope and identification when the old Cub veteran, Gary Gaetti, atoned for a costly error by hitting what would turn out to be the game winning homer. I bit my fingernails and paced the room during the tense, dramatic ninth inning, when the Giants almost pulled the game out.

In early October 1998, what mattered most was not the buzz and hype, but the game itself — the human drama, spectacle, and aura. When the season ended, what I recalled most were singular moments like the look of dismay on Padre pitcher Kevin Brown’s face when he served up a game winning homer to the Braves’ Michael Tucker; and the Yankee’s Scott Brosius trying to contain his joy as he completed the last put-out of a remarkable 114-win season. That’s the kind of stuff I used to savor back when I was sitting in the third base upper grandstand at Ebbets.

***

A similar kind of moment keeps Tom and I riveted to our seats at the Metrodome on that blustery March night. It’s the top of the eighth, and Ripkin is only one shy of hit number 3,000. Most likely, this’ll be his last at bat. For once, the crowd is hushed and still. No cell phones ringing, no music blaring, no computer games bleeping. We’re all in this together, holding our collective breath, concentrating on each pitch. When the Twins’ pitcher goes to ball two in the count, even the home fans begin to boo. On the next pitch, a low slider on the hands, Ripkin slices a bleeder to the right side. Everyone groans. It looks like a sure out. But just as the second baseman move over to field it, the ball takes big hop over his shoulder, skids across the carpet, and winds up in short right field. We all stand in unison and cheer. On natural grass, that ball would have been a routine play.

So for that one moment, I don’t hate artificial turf. The Twins first baseman hands the ball to Ripkin, and the umps stop the game. Ripkin holds the ball up and waves his cap to the crowd, exposing a shiny, bald pate.

Kids are jumping up and down on their seats, adults are high fiving each other, and everyone applauds as the hero takes a victory lap around the circumference of the diamond. It’s a spontaneous, unscripted scenario — reminiscent of the old camaraderie I’ve missed for so many decades.

2002: On the flight home, it strikes me that for the last three plus decades I’ve been trying to recapture the feeling of a time and place when a trip to the ball park was a magical journey and a communal ritual; an adventure you’d later brag about under the streetlights, or out on the front stoop.

Well, I’m no longer that 12-year-old kid, and Ebbets Field, the Dodgers, and that bygone world no longer exist–except in my memory and imagination. But the game endures; and people still love to go to the ball park. And who am I to criticize their motives?
These days, I’m learning to look beyond the media circus and corporate P.R. And sometimes, there are moments in between the beer, car, and dot.com commercials when I can appreciate baseball the same way I would an opera, a ballet, or a play.
And whenever I like, I can switch off the TV before the shills and hype artists spoil the afterglow.

Michael Steinberg founded Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction in 1998. He’s written and co-authored five books and a stage play. Still Pitching won the 2003 ForeWord Magazine/Independent Press Memoir of the Year. An anthology, The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers Of/On Creative Nonfiction, with Robert Root, is now in a sixth edition. Currently, Steinberg is the nonfiction writer-in-residence in the Solstice/Pine Manor low residency College MFA program.

Michael Steinberg on Creative Nonfiction

by William Meiners

For a first-time teacher like myself, about as calm and erudite as a young, professorial Jerry Lewis, it never hurts to bring a real expert into the classroom. When Michael Steinberg showed up to my creative writing class at the Saginaw Chippewa Tribal College in February I learned very quickly, alongside my students, what a great teacher Mike has been for about three decades. And a deep source of knowledge about the field of creative nonfiction.

Mike and Bob Root wrote the book on creative nonfiction. Well one very good one called Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction that’s now in its sixth edition and used in college classrooms all over the country. We caught up at a bookstore in East Lansing last month to talk more on the subject. Then we kicked the following back and forth through emails.

William Meiners: You mentioned that your anthology, Fourth Genre, which you wrote and put together with Robert Root, and the same-titled journal that came out more or less at the same time. Could you talk about both the timing of the two, as well as your initial ideas for putting such a collection together?
Michael Steinberg: Both publications were, in some ways, coincidences. The anthology, which came out in 1998, grew out of a course pack of readings that Bob and I put together for our graduate classes. At the time, there were no anthologies that covered the genre’s spectrum — personal essay, memoir, literary/personal journalism, and personal/cultural criticism. Since it was a teaching text, we organized the course pack as a writer’s conversation on/about the genre. Part one contained a series of selected pieces that represented the four subgenres I just mentioned. In Part two, we chose essays on/about matters of genre and craft. In addition to craft essays that Bob and I, and a few other teacher/writers wrote, we found a handful of pieces written by some of the writers whose work appeared in Part one. That gave us the idea to add Part three. We chose four essays that our best students had written; and we asked them to write an accompanying commentary on/about how they wrote their pieces.
We taught and revised the course packs for two semesters before deciding to expand the first two parts by adding about a half dozen essays, memoirs, literary/personal journalism and pieces of personal/cultural criticism — by a variety or writers. We kept Part 3 intact. At a point, we found that we’d collected enough work to constitute a teaching anthology. We sent out a proposal to 22 publishers. A few trade houses liked the idea but couldn’t provide the permissions/acquisitions budget we needed. Allyn and Bacon, then a small textbook house that published books on/about teaching writing and literature, offered to publish it. And today, the anthology is in a sixth edition.

WM: And the journal?
MJS: The first issue of the journal, Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, came out in 1999. It grew out of a conversation I had with an adult student in one of my graduate course in literary/creative nonfiction. She was an aspiring writer who’d never written personal essays or memoirs before. The readings and writing assignments, it seems, led her to believe that she could write with more ease and fluidity in this genre than she could in either fiction or poetry. Coincidentally, she happened to be the journals editor for the Michigan State University Press.
To make a long story short, she did some research and found that, at the time (1997), the only journal of literary/creative nonfiction was Lee Gutkind’s Creative Nonfiction (first published in 1995). As it turned out, The Michigan State University Press took on Fourth Genre. That was 17 years ago and today Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre (I‘m no longer the editor), and River Teeth (which first appeared in 1999, two months after we did) are still the three most prominent journals of literary/creative nonfiction in the field.

WM: I’ve read various articles about the genre. From Lee Gutkind getting the “Godfather of Creative Nonfiction” label to another on the thoughts about the “non” label, essentially calling something “not fiction.” It all reminded me about having read and been curious to learn more about In Cold Blood about 10 years back. And of course, I think two different movies about Capote were coming out around that time. But I read somewhere that he claimed to be writing a nonfiction novel, an oxymoron since a novel is defined as a work of fiction. Or maybe it’s getting into double or triple negatives. Nevertheless, does In Cold Blood come up much in the discussion of the genre? Or is it more linked to the writers/journalists who may have defined it a decade or so later?
MJS: There are a few different theories about this. Lee Gutkind (among others), for example, believes that the genre we’re now calling creative nonfiction, grew out of the New Journalism movement of the 60s; books of investigative reporting by writers such as Capote, Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, and Gay Talese, among others. Critics called these books “nonfiction novels.” Which really means that the writers of these narratives were journalists who were using a novelist’s tools — plot, character, scene, dialogue, setting, etc. —nin order to make their “true stories” read more like plotted narratives. In time, the term “nonfiction novel” got replaced by works of what we’re today calling “literary/investigative journalism.” Some journalists and critics will argue that literary journalism is the earliest and purest form of creative nonfiction.

WM: I suppose all writing is some sort of “truth-telling,” if only to attempt to write a story, poem, or play that smacks of the truth. What drew you specifically to telling true stories?
MJS: Although in my personal essays and memoirs I do use research and reportage, I don’t write “true stories.” Let me explain that. I’m one of many personal essayist/memoirists that use our experiences, our lives, as raw material for finding out what fiction writers call discovering “what we didn’t know we knew.” I think this process of exploration and discovery, in other words, writing out of a sense of “not-knowing,” is closer to the ways in which writers of literary fiction and lyric poems create their works than it is to the ways in which investigative journalists approach their craft. Many of the debates/controversies on/about truth in nonfiction — especially those on literary memoir — generate from these two differing approaches. Yet, along with many others, I consider both to be works of literary/creative nonfiction. In fact, some of the best work I’m reading right now combines the personal with reportage and research.

WM: You told my creative writing class that creative nonfiction might feel a little more natural to you. I think all writing is probably difficult. What’s the most difficult thing about writing in the “fourth genre”? What are the links to fiction and poetry?
MJS: Yes, all writing is difficult, especially when it’s required, like a class assignment or a job related project. But, in my case, I write because I feel compelled to do it. For years, I tried to express my deepest feelings and confusions in fiction or poetry. But, over time, I found that I could be my best self as writer when I wrote personal essays and memoirs. In those forms, I feel less inadequacy and doubt — less hesitant and self-conscious. More spontaneous, I’d say. There are a couple of quotes to that effect that I’ve taped up above my writing desk — one from the novelist/essayist David Shields, and the other from novelist/journalist Pete Hamill. Shields says, “Find the form that releases your best intelligence. Find what you do exquisitely well and play it to the hilt.”
In describing the shift from writing news stories to feature columns, Hamill writes, “From the beginning, the form felt natural to me. I was like a musician who had found at last the instrument that was right for him.”
Hamill adds, “It freed me from an impossible objectivity…”
That freedom, that feeling of being in sync as a writer, parallels my own discovery, when, after decades of struggling to write fiction and poetry, I realized that writing personal essays and memoirs came more naturally to me than either of those forms did. It was the writing breakthrough I’d been struggling toward for much of my adult life.
As for links between literary nonfiction and fiction and poetry, I think there’s an important relationship, at least in my experience, between good literary nonfiction and good fiction and poetry — and I’ll also include drama in that mix as well. That’s because what’s most important, most necessary, in all forms of writing — literary, critical, and popular — is how skillfully the writer shapes/structures the work. And that always comes down to matters of genre and craft.
Whether the work is narrative or lyric, all literary writers possess similar tool kits. For myself, a personal essayist/memoirist, I’ve learned from good fiction writers how to use narrative and plot; and how to create three-dimensional, fully rounded characters, (in my case, mostly first person narrators), as well as how to craft dramatic scenes.
The heart of the playwright’s craft is dramatizing conflict through the use of dialogue and scene. Poets, especially those who write lyric poems, bring a freedom of imagination, an ear for rhythm and language, an eye for imagery, and a comfort and ease with metaphor. And, literary journalists and cultural critics, we’ve increasingly found, are often combining research and reportage with more personal presence, and in some cases, more intimate, voices.

WM: Your memoir, Still Pitching, has baseball as a central theme, though of course it’s about much more. Why did you decide to frame, or at least build it, around these memories of being a young pitcher? I love the title, which resonates in many ways. On the mound, ball in hand and every part of the game depends on what this player does. In what ways has that been a metaphor for living your life?
MJS: All memoir, I believe, is, in one way or another, about identity (and loss). In my case, the catalyst for writing Still Pitching was an impulse/urge to try to go back into the past in order to better understand how being a kid baseball pitcher led me to being a midlife writer and writing teacher. It’s all speculation, of course; but that question sent me back to my New York childhood and adolescence to see if I could discover who and what might have been the most influential forces that helped shape my adult self. Baseball turned out to be one of those influences. That inquiry and curiosity also allowed me to focus the memoir on those early, formative years.
I don’t think, that, in the writing I fully answered such a complex question. But, through a long, long process of drafting, revising, and rewriting, I was finally able to execute and to understand what Annie Dillard calls the process of “fashioning a text.” Which, in the end, is what all of us who write literary work are trying to do.
What you say about the title Still Pitching being a metaphor for living my life is something I never really thought about. But, since I do believe that persistence, tenacity, and determination are so important to becoming a writer — or, for that matter, to accomplishing anything else you’re proud of — the Still Pitching metaphor does have some truth to it.

WM: Having started a literary magazine about sports 21 years ago, I knew I wanted the focus to be on creative nonfiction. And in my mind, I thought maybe this is literature with a small “l.” After all, it’s about sports. But then an essay you shared with us, “Elegy for Ebbets,” was our first to get a nod in Best American Essays, in 2002. Some affirmation, for both of us, I suppose, that it’s not just about sports. What make writing about sports, beyond the daily coverage or “hot topic” sense, important as fodder for literature?
MJS: We both agree that there is a difference between sports writing and writing about sports. For the most part, sports are an arena I seem to be able to understand from the inside-out. In conversation, a colleague who, himself is an athlete, referred to this kind of sensibility as a “sports intelligence.” And so, in my writing, I often use sports as a lens; by which I mean, a way of seeing, a way of better understanding and utilizing the strategies, the tactics we need to know, in order to get ourselves through, or even to master ongoing personal problems and confusions. And these internal struggles are what all human beings have in common. Whatever I’m writing about sports, challenging relationships, family difficulties, serious health problems, personal losses — or anything else, really — I’m always hoping that readers (in my case, readers of memoir), can identify with the narrator’s (the “I’s”) internal struggles; that is, his fears and self-doubts — as well as his/her need to belong to something larger and/or to comprehend and overcome whatever human obstacles he/she might be facing.

WM: I hate whenever someone asks me who my favorite writer is. Probably because I think they’re going to judge me and then ask about 10 writers I’ve never heard of. No one really wants to interview me, but I’ve got this fear that someone might give me the Sarah Palin treatment and I’ll be shaking my head saying “I love all of it and read everything,” which I don’t. That said, who are your favorite writers? And why?
MJS: It’s a bit like writing; you don’t know what works or doesn’t work until after you see it on the page. And even then, recognizing whether it’s good or bad can take years, sometime even decades. Something that might have been a good choice years earlier, might today look like a poor fit. This kind of evolution and change also relates to the shifts in my reading preferences over the years.
Different authors have captivated my imagination at different times in my life. When I was growing up, for example, I loved reading Salinger and Twain, as well as Clair Bee’s popular novels about teenage sports heroes. Those writers created characters and situations, that, as a kid, I could identify with and understand. When I was a young adult, I admired and identified with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s characters — people, who like myself, came from a lower middle-class background and who entertained dreams of greatness and who aspired to a life of stature and privilege. When later on, when I became enamored of literary nonfiction, I cultivated an appreciation for writers like Patricia Hampl, Phillip Lopate, E.B. White, Vivian Gornick, and Scott Russell Sanders. The list goes on and on. And, like most readers, I love the writer(s) and books I’m reading right now; that is, until I read the next author and next book.

WM: Fourth Genre is a staple textbook in creative nonfiction classrooms, and you’re up to six editions. Can you talk about the various additions to the book and where you see the genre heading in the next five to 10 years?
MJS: In the mid to late 90s, when the genre first began to get some recognition as a legitimate literary form, the majority of work that appeared in the first few editions and issues of the anthology and the journal, were largely internal, linear narratives; and by that I mean, “Montaignian” personal essays. In addition, I saw a sprinkling of memoirs and some works of literary/investigative journalism and personal/cultural criticism.
The works I’m seeing in journals today, as well as the best writing that my MFA students are producing, often are experiments in form, voice, narrative persona, structure, and language. For example: short pieces of prose that use language and form in most unexpected ways; increasing numbers of essays and memoirs that combine personal narrative with analysis, research, and reportage; as well as works of literary journalism and personal/critical essays, where the narrator’s persona (by which I mean, the “I”) is sometimes at the center of the piece and sometimes not.
I’m also seeing more segmented and disjunctive essays, as well as an increase in lyric and lyrical essays, some of which take the kinds of imaginative and linguistic leaps that the best poetry does. In addition, there’s graphic nonfiction, as well as blogs, visual and video essays, and forms that combine different elements of media.

In short, this genre, like the contemporary visual arts, is, I believe, pushing at the boundaries that once separated the more traditional and experimental literary forms. And as a result, we’re seeing more existing hybrid, forms.

WM: You shared your story with me, and my class, about being a 20-plus year professor of English and writing courses, and then making a decision that you wanted to become a serious writer (in your 40s, I believe). And of course you’ve been successful as a writer over another 20-plus years. Was it as easy (and I know it’s not easy) as just making up your mind to do this? As a teacher of writing, what’s your best advice for anyone who wants to write stories about his or her life?
MJS: My decision to write grew out of an urgent midlife need to try to do something I’ve always dreamed of; that is, for decades, I’d yearned deeply to become a literary writer. When I was coming up, fiction, poetry, and in some circles, drama, were considered to be the only legitimate literary forms. I’m being kind to myself when I say that I was a less-than-skilled-writer in all of those genres. For as long as I can remember, my best, most compelling works were my personal essays and memoirs. I taught and wrote personal essays with my composition students for decades. Yet at the time, personal essays were considered to be the province of freshman composition. A deliberate slight, to be sure. And so, I resigned myself to the fact that I was never going to become known as even a workaday literary writer.
But life can be full of surprises. About five years before literary/creative nonfiction began to get some national attention, I had my first of what would be two cornea transplants. The surgery was a wake-up call — a first brush with mortality, if you will. My greatest fear was the possibility of losing my sight. At that point in time, I told myself that, even if I didn’t succeed, it was urgent for me to put as much focus, energy, and commitment into my writing as I could. Failure would have been devastating; but knowing my nature as I do, I don’t think I could have lived with myself had at least not tried. Plus, I knew, that time was running out.
Five years later, literary/creative nonfiction began to slowly enter the literary conversation. And today, it’s considered by many to be “the fourth genre.” Not fourth in terms of its stature; but fourth in that it’s inclusive of the other three.
So the very short answer to the first part of your question is that I became a writer through a combination of luck, circumstance, will, desperation, and readiness. As I’m fond of telling my MFA students, talent and a buck fifty (it used to be a quarter) will get you a phone call.
As for the advice I’d give to those who want to write stories about their lives, in addition to the David Shields and Pete Hamill quotes [above], I’ll offer two others, the first by Donald Hall, the next by William Stafford — both of whom, are, by the way, among our finest poets. Since I’ve talked a good deal about baseball and determination, I’ll cite Donald Hall’s advice first. *When Hall refers to “poems” or “poetry,” I’ve extended it to all four literary forms (see italics below).
I watch the old ones, the athletes without the talented young bodies. I watch the intense, concentrated pushing of the self past the self’s limits. It is like writing poems *{stories, essays, memoirs}, or it is what writing poems ought to be if you’re going to last as a poet; you have to bring everything to the poem that you have ever learned as to the painting if you are a painter, or to the swing of the bat if you are a hitter, and everything you ever do. You have to push up to the limit and past the limit.
Hall indicates here that what’s most important is that we bring, not just an “I”, but our fullest, wisest, most experienced (three dimensional) selves to the writing desk. And I also agree with William Stafford’s belief that, for many, many different reasons, we all too frequently talk ourselves out of writing.
Here’s what he has to say about that.

I believe that the so-called “writing block” is the product of some kind of disproportion between your standards and your performance… One should lower his standards until there is no felt threshold to go over in writing. It’s easy to write. You just shouldn’t have standards that inhibit you from writing.

And…

I can imagine a person beginning to feel that he’s not able to write up to that standard he imagines the world has set for him. But to me that’s surrealistic. The only standard I can rationally have is the standard I’m meeting right now….You should be more willing to forgive yourself. It doesn’t make any difference if you are good or bad today; the assessment of the product is something that happens after you’ve done it.

And to that I’ll add something that my colleague Mimi Schwartz often tells her nonfiction students, “You’re the only one,” Mimi says,  who can write your story.”

Michael Steinberg founded Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction in 1998. He’s written and co-authored five books and a stage play. Still Pitching won the 2003 ForeWord Magazine/Independent Press Memoir of the Year. An anthology, The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers Of/On Creative Nonfiction, with Robert Root, is now in a sixth edition. Currently, Steinberg is the nonfiction writer-in-residence in the Solstice/Pine Manor low residency College MFA program.

 

SL Essay

Christmas City, U.S.A.

by Michael McColly

In 1966 my family moved from the little farm town where I was born to Marion, Indiana where my father took a job as a high school teacher and basketball and baseball coach. Marion was a factory town that manufactured TV tubes, automobile frames, glass jars, and plastic Christmas decorations. In fact, Marion churned out more plastic Santas and reindeer than any other town in the world. Christmas City, U.S.A., a sign boasted outside of town, dwarfed the other two markers that announced its other two claims of notoriety: the birthplace of James Dean and home to the State Basketball Champs of 1926. Unwritten on the water towers and welcome signs on the highways, however, was any mention of the August night in 1930 when a mob stormed Marion’s jail, dragged two black teenagers accused of murdering a white man out to the courthouse square, strung them up in a tree, and tried to burn their bodies, giving Marion the infamous distinction of being the site of the last known lynching above the Mason-Dixon line.

We lived in an old farmhouse on the south side of town in a working class neighborhood populated by both blacks and whites who’d moved up from the South for factory work. There wasn’t much on our side of town except the VA Hospital, the town dump, 38th Street Park, and the Christian College, where Methodist missionaries taught Christian mathematics and Christian biology to their converts from poor countries I’d never heard of — like Ghana and Honduras. Walking home from school I passed by the campus and gawked at these foreign students, innocent smiles locked onto their faces, dressed in ill-fitting second-hand clothes. To me they looked like someone’s prized doll collection come to life. But when they looked back at me, and the broken, queer sounding words came out from their lips, I felt like mountains or giant trees from a jungle had popped up out of the monotonous middle-American landscape.

Summer evenings, coming back from the grocery store, my father would drive slowly by the park to keep tabs on his black players at 38th Street Park, which was where they all hung out. He pulled up to the curb, leaned his head out the window and studied their play. Sometimes, if he was in a good mood, he might holler out something to one of his guys, more for his sake than theirs, forcing my sister and me in the back seat to duck for fear of being seen: “Hey Pettiford! You got any feet? Use ‘em!” Thank God he never got out. I watched him watching them, his face softening from its usual hardened stare, as these black young men ran the court like they were some part of his youth that he could never have back. For my father, too, had played basketball in college and baseball in the minor leagues until he had to quit when age caught up with him.

The year Bobby Kennedy campaigned in Marion for president I made the fifth grade basketball team. We had uniforms, an electric scoreboard, referees with striped shirts, cheerleaders, and everything. Our team was half black and half white. I played forward, two other white kids played at guard, and two black guys who were cousins played center and forward, James and Clayton Stanton. Often my mom took some of my teammates home from the away games, and since James and Clayton lived down the street, they came with us. I don’t remember getting a ride with their parents, not that they didn’t come; they did. Sometimes I could see James’ mother sitting in a big old coat off by herself in the corner of the gym with his little sister. James lived across the street from the RCA plant where his mother worked. I often wondered, since she worked there, if they had TVs in every room of their house. If he had a lot of TVs, I never found out because he never invited me inside. But I did discover that in James’ house, as it was in my dad’s, there was no father.

My friendship with James began after that first season, and when winter turned to spring, he and his friends started coming to shoot hoops. My house became the place to play outside of 38th Street Park because my father had paved our driveway, found an old goal at the high school, and made an official backboard with a black square above the rim to guide our bank shots. From here, it wasn’t too long until I was allowed to follow James and his friends to the park. It was different at the park, however. I was usually the only white kid playing. So I got kneed or pushed around more than most, sometimes because I was white and sometimes because I played like a coach’s son — calling fouls or traveling until I learned to keep my mouth shut. But if things got too rough, James, and then some of his friends, came to my defense: “Just play ball and leaved that boy alone.” This was a risk for James. Even though he was respected, his respect came from his athletic abilities and not from bravado. He held a quiet presence among his peers. And they often made fun of him for being a momma’s boy, going to church, and baby-sitting too much for his little sister.

My relationship with James was a risk, too. But not as far as my parents were concerned; they were “good” liberals and relished their progressive tendencies in our small town made up mostly of republicans and redneck democrats. No, it was my relatives and neighbor men who often went out of their way to offer their so-called wisdom: “I seen some white boys down at the park. I don’t know if I would go there if I was them? Niggers you can’t trust with tour breath, you know? They’ll steal ya blind or knife ya, they will.” I just shrugged my shoulders and acted like I didn’t hear them. But I heard everything they said, and the words echoed in my head every time James and his friends took me down to the park.

That March, Marion lost in the state finals to an all-black team from Indianapolis. Then Martin Luther King got shot in April and Bobby Kennedy in June, and suddenly people seemed to say and do things I’d never seen before. Fights broke out at school. Fires were set for no reason. Streetlights got shot out and yahoos raced around in pickups stirring up old black people who were afraid to leave their houses. Night after night my parents sat in silence and watched the sad faces of Huntley and Brinkley as they described a world that seemed to be falling apart. But I was obsessed with basketball and didn’t care or know any better.

I would hang out at the park by the hour, playing, or more often watching from the sidelines the older guys running, waiting for that rare chance to get in. Fights, shouting matches, and dramatic debates broke out over who fouled whom with endless reenactments of rule interpretations. In fact, their whole way of playing began to fascinate me as it seemed not at all like the rational and orderly form taught by my father. I knew I wasn’t supposed to be there, but somehow I felt drawn to the distance they created between themselves and the white world just off court. It was like I had traveled to some distant country, when all I did was walk three blocks from home. Watching these black men and boys, I realized they were completely different here than they were around white people. They spoke in a language that was both English and yet not English. I could never figure it out. Sometimes it seemed like when they talked they were playing a game, turning words and sentences inside out, making jokes and coining new phrases, more like singing than speaking. Their cryptic jokes, especially those of the older guys, depended on secret meaning and signals I knew nothing about. Even their laughter seemed to originate from some unknown organ in their bodies. I’d never seen any white guy laugh like they did. Grown men, too, doubling over and falling on the ground, like people in seizures who needed wallets or spoons stuck in their mouths to keep them from swallowing their tongues. Sometimes it was funny to watch them and other times I found myself becoming nervous. Life was supposed to be more serious, I thought. What could they be seeing that I couldn’t that made everything so funny?

The big games were played on Saturday afternoon and almost every night during the summer. Men drove over from nearby Muncie or Kokomo. A crowd would form and guys would have to wait sometimes for hours to have the chance to knock off the team holding court. They came in long, low-riding, dark Oldsmobiles and Pontiacs, never station wagons or trucks or convertibles like white men drove. When someone new arrived, the men hanging around for the next game turned to see who had arrived. Slowly the car door opened and two or three pairs of long legs came out as they sat changing their shoes. Stepping out dramatically, the music of Curtis Mayfield and James Brown floated them onto the court. These weren’t the happy, snappy songs my sister and her friends listened to, jumping around in our yard; these were moody songs of love, with emotions that sank down the spine, into the groin, and then out through the shoes, inspiring images in my mind never before dreamed of.

Then they took off their shirts, revealing upper bodies that projected masculinity and majesty that magnified their true size. And by the time they’d run up and down the court, their skin took on a sheen that made them look the color of oiled guns.

If there was a game going on, newcomers stayed in their cars and drank tall bottles of Pepsi. But if all the men were shooting around between games, they ambled up the court, their bodies lanky like spiders, going sideways and circling around, casing the competition, nodding, slapping hands, allowing everyone to notice their presence. A player with a reputation commanded respect and got the ball as soon as he came on court. I remember one of my father’s best players, Avis Stewart, who’d returned from college, showed up. He wore a dark head band to keep back his afro, a ragged, sleeveless sweat shirt, trunks with his college emblem on them, and suede Converse tennis shoes the color of his gold skin. He towered over everyone, proud but cool, like a magnificent hawk that flew down from atop his perch. He took the ball, spun it in the air, and then dribbled around in and out through his legs to get a feel for it, as if it were a religious object that required ritual preparation. Then with a flip of a wrist, he put a little ‘English’ on the ball and made it bounce back to him so he could take a jumper. After he made the first shot, the ball came swiftly back to his waiting hands. Hitting the first shot was a good sign, hitting a third or fourth in a row cut the chatter and the court cleared. All eyes turned to Avis. He held out his hands and waited for the ball, his long gold fingers stiffened as if in some kind of trance, almost like they were separate from his body. From baseline to baseline, ‘round the world,’ we followed each of his shots as they sank with a sweet ring, hitting the bottom of the chain net and plopping out. Each shot propelled him faster and faster, making him even a little impatient for the ball to be back in his hands. Finally he missed. The spell he’d created broke and the court flooded with players again.

After more warming up, a game emerges suddenly out of the chaos. With white players a game came slowly; someone had to always organize it, line players up, five here and a group of five over there, pointing out who was guarding whom, setting up a defense, figuring out who should bring up the ball. But not so with black players; their game just began. Its logic came from within the game itself.

Once play started the game was all that mattered. No one was supposed to leave or concern himself with matters off-court. And the best players seemed oblivious to friends, dogs, kids, and even women. The world outside was forgotten. To be within that rectangular space, inside that timeless dynamic, a part of a rhythm and movement that they had created called them every weekend and every spare summer night. When I think about it now, the basketball court was perhaps the only place black men could be together in public without suspicion outside of their church.

Sometimes a ball would careen wildly off the rim, destroying the rhythm momentarily. But this was my moment — a chance to enter the game and thus their world. I ran to retrieve the ball as it rolled all the way to the swing sets or into the street. As fast as I could, I ran back to within heaving distance, and with all my might flung the ball with as much speed and accuracy as I could to the guy waiting for me off court, who gave me what I wanted most: a nod, a quick jerk of his head, his chin pointing to me in approval, acknowledging my presence.

My father had two lives: basketball season and the rest of the year. He coached baseball too, but there wasn’t as much passion for this in Indiana. But then nothing in our town could match the magic people felt for high school basketball. Nothing.

Not religion, not politics, not music, not the county fair in August, not even the trial of a woman and her lover who supposedly sawed up her husband and threw him in the Mississinewa River. When November rolled around, people talked of nothing else. In the barbershops and beauty salons, in the bars and bowling alleys, at church and even in funeral homes, everyone elsewhere talked basketball.

In Marion, everyone know the names of the 12 players on the high school team, the Sutters, the Prices, the Pettifords; everyone knew their families, the coach’s record, the schedule, the chances for a state championship. A spell came over our town when daylight waned and the darkness of December pulled people indoors. The stores brought out the purple sweaters and sweatshirts, the gold shirts and neck ties, the purple pumps and pant suits — all to match our school colors. The booster club sold stickers and pins and people stuck them onto bumpers and winter jackets. The signs on the stores no longer advertised sales and specials, but changes weekly to cheer on the team. Even the dentist, who my mom always suspected of being a John Bircher, took a break from his battle to get “the U.S. OUT OF THE U.N.” to lend his billboard to the cause. Week by week through the winter, basketball crept into our consciousness, taking over our lives, shutting out the world except for what was known of our rivals in the other factory towns of central Indiana. The War in Vietnam and the civil unrest in cities and on campuses were far away.

Basketball somehow kept our town together. It removed barriers and eclipsed the mundane circumstances of our lives, allowing us to celebrate the energy of youth — the beauty and innocence of young men who didn’t have much future off court, but who had promise and passion and a jump shot. Ironically, in these winter rituals the most feared and mistrusted members of our community, the black male teenager, often took center court. And they became my secret icons — heroes who couldn’t be heroes for white boys growing up in Indiana in the sixties. I idolized the players on my father’s team, black and white. I sat with them on the team bus, shot with them after practice, ate with them at restaurants before the game. I was privy to a world that boys and even adults in my town envied. I witnessed the pre-game pep talks, the half-time strategy sessions, the post-game celebrations. In awe I watched them shower, their long, lean, Herculean bodies, ageless and true. I watched my father whispering in their ears, his arms around their backs, yelling at them from courtside, talking quietly to them in the dressing room after they lost a game. I lived every moment of every game with them. With each shot, each defensive move, each pass, I followed the ball from player to player as if I were out there with them. I knew their nicknames and moves, and practiced with them in my driveway, muttering to myself the play-by-play, switching roles as I became each player. And as it was in my fantasies, it was the black players in real life who secretly captured the imaginations of the throngs of white people jammed into gymnasiums all over Indiana.

At that time there were maybe four or five black players on Marion’s team. Industrial cities like Fort Wayne, Anderson and Muncie also had black players, (and of course there were all black teams in Indianapolis and Gary), but by and large there was a clear taboo against blacks dominating any team of influencing the style of good old Hoosier high school basketball. Even for those teams which had several black players, five blacks were never allowed on court together. No one ever said exactly why. But everyone knew. They wouldn’t be able to do the set plays, chaos would break out. They needed a little smart white point guard to direct traffic. Once when several of the white players had fouled out, I remember that four black players and a Chinese American guy were sent to the floor to finish the game. Of course we won. But if we had lost the blacks would have been blamed, not the whites for fouling out. Yet everyone could see the dynamic of the game change with each black player added to the court. The pace of the game quickened and the fans got more excited as the style changed from the white game of defense and passing inside to the big man, to the black game of finesse, speed, shooting, and blocking shots.

From the bleachers I watched as did all the people in town lucky enough to have a ticket. Seven thousand people clung to their prized season tickets which people won in a lottery at the beginning of the seasons, while others procured them through clout or via family inheritance. The ticketless and the night shift huddled around radios. And the streets emptied from seven to nine o’clock. Everyone kept the players in the center of their mind, whispering prayers for each free throw. But when these heroes of Friday and Saturday night slipped out of their uniforms and walked out of the gym, those who had the wrong skin color became “colored boys” again who live on the wrong side of town.

I could never understand the hypocrisy that warped the people on my hometown, who otherwise seemed to see life so clearly and simply. When you’re 13, you don’t know how things get twisted like this, and it bothers you because in school and in life you’re trying hard to fit all the pieces together. It didn’t make sense why people distrusted one another because of the color of their skin. The riots and burning down of the cities, the KKK marches, the murders of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy seemed like scenes from folktales or stories in the Bible. Surely the good would win out in the end over evil. Yet distance always creates the illusion of righteousness: racism wasn’t our problem; what we saw on the nightly news had nothing to do with us, the good people in Marion, Indiana. Besides history told us that slavery and all the terrible things white peoples did to black people happened a long time ago. All that was fixed and forgotten. Yet, now that I look back, it never occurred to me to question why there were no black people at my church or at the Elk’s Club swimming pool or teaching at the high school or working anywhere but in the factories.

Then one day I was looking at an old scrapbook at my grandmother’s house. My cousins were showing me the obituaries of my grandfather, proving to me what I refused to believe when they showed me the rafter in the garage. I kept staring at my grandfather’s picture and rereading the newspaper clippings, wondering why what my cousin’s had told me had been omitted: that my grandfather had not simply died in the early morning hours, but had been found hanging from a rafter by my 10-year-old father when he went to the garage to look for his basketball. I flipped through the pages looking for him, but my grandmother had apparently unconsciously left him out and instead I could find only page after page of my ancestors, the poor Celtic-American farmers with stern faces and stiff bodies, who stared back at me as if judging me for my grandfather’s unforgivable act. And then, more horrible still: in a fold of a page I came across a yellowed newspaper article, unfolded it, and read the headline: “Mob Storms Jail in Marion,” Below the headline was a photograph of those two young black men hanging from trees on Marion’s courthouse lawn. With the image of my grandfather still trying to find its place in my mind, I stared at their heads drooping like puppets, their feet hanging off the ground, their bodies thin and long-stretched out of proportion, tongues hanging out of the corner of their gaping mouths. Below, looking up at them, glassy-eyed and giddy, some with remnants in their hands of the boys clothing as souvenirs, were the citizens of my home town — men and women, teenagers, relatives, uncles and aunts, perhaps even my grandfather there somewhere in the crowd.

After seeing that picture in my grandmother’s photo album, I would stare at those terrible trees on the courthouse lawn that I recognized from the photograph. And at Christmas when the town square was bedecked in holiday lights to proclaim our town’s status as “Christmas City, U.S.A.” I couldn’t help seeing the shadows of those teenagers hanging from the same trees gaily strewn with wreaths and reindeer.

When James and I reached 14, he looked almost like a man. He’d grown tall and the muscles in his arms and legs had grown thick and pressed out his skin. He became the star athlete in junior high. He was the team — the halfback, the pitcher, the 100-yard-dash-man. He hit all the home runs, blocked the shots, ran for the touchdowns, and captured the ribbons for the longest jumps. And when he pitched all you remembered seeing was not the white of the ball but the white of his clenched teeth as he struck you out. One Saturday, playing football in our yard, James ran so hard for a touchdown that he bulldozed an evergreen bush and it snapped off at the base. Confessing to my parents, he cried, promising my mother he would give her the money to buy a new one. But it didn’t matter. My mother worked at the urban League and slipped political pamphlets into people’s doors of McGovern. She liked that I had black friends playing in our side yard and spending the night. James could have burned our garage down, and she wouldn’t have cared. My father liked him too and would stand and watch us playing in the driveway, coaching James on how to flip his wrist for his jump shot: “Son, you’re gonna hit a lot more of those shots now if you follow through like I showed ya.”

James spent hours at our house, coming over when I wasn’t even there to practice and shoot around. When we went on vacations, he came over and mowed our yard and checked around to make sure the papers weren’t piling up on our porch. Sometimes, too, he spent the night. Lying there next to him in the dark, I thought about what would happen if some of my relatives would come over and see him next to me in my bed. Feeling him there breathing next to me, his eyes staring wide open into the dark, it felt like the Earth might crack open and swallow us down into that molten ball of fire at its core. Or, I thought, lightning might strike our house, like in a Frankenstein movie, and transform us. Him into me and me into him. When he went home after breakfast, I felt a sense of relief. My two worlds collapsed back into one. And I would go back into my room and quickly brush off his hairs left on the bed sheets, the little o’s that looked like they had spilled from out of a book.

It seemed like sometimes he never wanted to go home, and would stay past dinner, refusing my parents’ invitations to eat with us because he felt like he was imposing. So as we ate, we could hear the ball bouncing on the driveway and the goal shake when he missed a shot. At the time, I never understood why he didn’t want to go home, but now that I think about it, who ever wanted to be home at 14? My house was a refuge for James. His black friends made him uncomfortable, and at times teased him for being square and a mama’s boy. One day after losing yet another game to him at 21 and a little annoyed that he had been at my house nearly all day and showed no sign of wanting to go, I made up my mind to ask him a question that I knew he didn’t want to talk about — his father. I figured maybe he would just leave rather than talk to me about it. I knew the subject upset him because once he and his cousin Clayton fought over something about his father. James and I were resting between games, sitting against the giant ash tree that shadowed the court and hung over our garage. When I mentioned his father, he didn’t say anything, which was what I expected. James spoke only when spoken to, and then not always. So I asked him again, “How come you don’t have a dad, James?” He fidgeted, began itching his back, pulled up on his socks, then tried to spin the ball on his index finger but couldn’t. I pressed for an answer, ignoring his discomfort. “Everybody has a dad. How come you don’t?”

“No, I don’t have no dad,” he finally shot back with unusual emotion.

“Wol’ why not? What happened to him?”

For once I felt like I had ruffled his poise and made him sweat. He looked sick, and his mouth opened but no words came out. Then incredibly I saw tears like steel ball bearings sliding down his cheeks. He tilted his head up toward the branches overhead and blinked and blinked, trying to keep them wide open, hoping to keep gravity from letting them spill out. I was sorry I’d ever asked and wanted to take the ball from his hands and run for a layup, hoping he’d follow and all would be forgotten. Embarrassed for him, I tried to look away, but his Adam’s apple kept lifting and falling down his throat as he tried to swallow down his pride. He clinched his teeth and then burst out his explanation, choking between breaths, his eyes still staring up into the branches, as if I were looking down on him: “My daddy killed himself, put a gun in his mouth behind our house in the alley and blew out…”

I never heard the rest of it. I sat in silence, looking at the grass, afraid to see his face. Then he got up and stumbled around like a newborn colt, took a couple of shots and went home.

As James and I got older, we became absorbed into our separate racial spheres except during basketball season and in the summer when he would drop by my housed for a game. Our games became so intense sometimes I lost my temper and stomped into the house or threw the ball well into the neighbor’s yard. My temper had become a serious problem and often I had to be set down for getting so mad at myself in the middle of our games. It was like some kind of spell came over me and I lost all sense of reality. James, of all my friends and family, never judged me for it. He simply waited until I returned to myself. And then beat my ass one more time. Sometime we nearly fought, pushing and shoving for a rebound, or slamming each other against the telephone polls that held up the backboard. His jaw tightened and his eyes became small. Sweat poured off his forehead even in December. I loved playing this way, pushing out the world, maintaining my focus on his eyes and daring him to come in and try to get around me. We knew each other’s moves so well, we could close our eyes and play.

No longer a kid, James at 15 and about to enter high school had a reputation at the park that got him picked quickly for the big games. I could only play in the games with younger or white guys or when they weren’t enough players to make five on each side. In the big games, I remained a spectator. I could tell James felt uncomfortable when he would be allowed in game after game and I would be ignored or overlooked. He lobbied for me, pointing me out in that awful moment when the team had four players and a guy scanned the court looking for his fifth, taking his time to feel the power he had to make grown men feel their worth. “He’s the best shooter on our team, pick him. You know who his dad is, don’t ya?” James urged an older teammate. But the older black guys usually chose their friends.

Sometimes as I watched him play, I found myself envying James, envying his blackness and the world he lived in. I spent hours surrounded by black guys either at the park or playing sports in school. Unbeknownst to them, and perhaps even myself, I tried to imitate them on and off the court. I longed for a black leather jacket and shiny, exotic-colored three-inch heels, but my parents never allowed them. All I got was a bandana and colored shoestrings for my ugly white high-top Converses. I listened to the Jackson Five, Marvin Gaye, and the Motown sounds. I slipped their expressions subtly into my speech. I fantasized about the black girls they talked about. Alone in my room, I practiced that bounce and drag to their gait before the mirror.
One day, standing around on the sidelines waiting to get into a game, James pulled a muscle and waved me in to take his place. At first, I thought he just wanted my help, but hobbling off he pointed out a guy and said, “You got the guy in the blue sweatshirt.”

None of the older guys said anything as I took his place. I played like it was life or death, running as fast as I could up and down the court, thrilled to be jostled and pushed around for the ball by men twice my age. When I waved James back in, he shook his head. Our team won and won again, and I played three times that day thanks to James’ injury. Later, when we finally lost the court, James and I walked to the drugstore for a Coke. He had stopped limping, making me wonder if he had really been injured at all.

Breaking into the games I learned didn’t necessarily mean I was allowed into the game. I was still white and an outsider. Sometimes it felt like three teams playing at once — the opposing team, my team, and me.

I played whole games without once getting passed the ball. I got the ball only through my own rebounding efforts or by stealing a pass. When the ball did come my way, my sole option was to pass it back. But I didn’t care. I concentrated on defense, setting picks, and rebounding. Only toward the end of games, with our team well ahead or if I was wide open, did someone pass me the ball. But then, out of fear, I’d often pass it back, which drove them crazy. “Man, shoot the damn ball!” But if I made it, it was like I had grown six inches and my hair turned from thin blond spikes to a thick Afro. Then I was in rhythm of their world and I didn’t want out.

Most Sundays my family got together after church for dinner with my relatives — either they came for a visit or we drove over to my grandmother’s. One day, I wasn’t sure if they were coming or not, and so when James stopped by to play a few games, I grabbed my ball and slammed the kitchen door behind me, tossing it ahead to James for a lay in.

My relatives lived in a small farm town 20 miles away where no blacks ever lived, or even thought to stop and get gas. My uncles and grandmother weren’t exactly generous in their opinions about the “coloreds.” My grandmother, years ago, had attended Klan rallies with my grandfather. She was bred into a world that feared African-Americans, Jews, Catholics, and foreigners of all kinds. A dyed-in-the-wool Republican, she talked like FDR was the antichrist until the day she died.

As James and I fell into our usual competitive games of one-on-one, I lost all sense of time and concern about my relatives’ visit. But when James pulled up short on a drive to the basket and turned to look up the driveway, I knew instantly that they had arrived. I turned to see my grandmother getting out, followed by my aunt, uncle and two cousins. They waved, expecting me to run up to the car and help them unpack. But seeing James beside me on the court, the older adults walked toward the house without turning back. My cousins lingered longer, pulling picnic baskets from the trunk, looking at me for some sort of reaction. James, paying them little if any attention, continued shooting. Suddenly I felt small and getting smaller. My older cousins, who I revered, seemed to get taller and taller as I feared introducing them to James. Then James seem to become unnaturally prodigious, reaching his hand above the rim to tip in a shot, his body getting wide and thick, his shoes and elbows crowding me. I didn’t know what to do, but had to do something quickly. “Got to go,” I said, turning to James and seeing all of his blackness, his dark face and arms, his pink skin under his fingernails.

As my cousins edged closer, both curious but with little interest in playing, I pleaded to James out of panic. “Maybe you ought to go on home now.”

“I just want to shoot around some,” James said, draining his favorite shot from the corner. “That’s okay with you isn’t it?”
Of course it was. He could have come in and ate with my relatives and no one would have said anything. My uncles might have been nervous and might grandmother might say something stupid like, “I’ll bet you don’t get no pie like this at your house do you?” But I choked. I told him he had to go home and asked if he didn’t mind going the back way — behind our garage, over the back fence and through the field.

“Why through the back yard?” he asked.

“It’s closer,” I whispered. Not true. It was out of his way.

“Closer?” James looked embarrassed, his mouth opened looking for something to say. Then he looked over to my cousins and tossed me the ball. Without looking back at me he walked past our garage to the back fence. He climbed over it and into the empty field that separated our house from the black neighborhood behind it.

“No you can keep the ball until tomorrow,” I said running after him. “Maybe there’s a game at the park?” I was sure I could say the right thing to get him to understand. But as I reached the fence and called out his name his fast walk broke into a run.

The next time he saw me at the park, he acted as if nothing had happened. But the die had been cast. And as we grew older and went to high school, we came together only when we were playing at the park or during basketball season when the world around us, for a brief time, reduced to a colorless blur in the corner of our eyes.

Michael McColly, in 2000, won a creative nonfiction award from the Illinois Arts Council for “Christmas City, U.S.A.” In 2007, his book The After Death Room, a work of journalism and spiritual exploration centered on the AIDS epidemic, won the LAMDA Award. He teaches creative nonfiction, journalism and literature at Columbia College Chicago and Northwestern University.