Once They Heard the Cheers Read online

  Books by W. C. Heinz

  Once They Heard the Cheers

  Emergency

  Run to Daylight!

  (WITH VINCE LOMBARDI)

  The Surgeon

  The Fireside Book of Boxing

  (EDITOR)

  The Professional

  ISBN: 0-385-12609-3

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 78-20076

  Copyright © 1979 by W. C. Heinz

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  FIRST EDITION

  To

  those who did the living and the telling

  An Acknowledgment

  In sports the scene changes quickly, about once every ten years. As each new generation shoulders its way in, occasioning its own clamor and claims to greatness, a writer experiences a hesitancy to attempt to intrude with his own memories of the people who moved him and stay with him still from a time now gone.

  Certainly it had never occurred to this one to do so until a day three years ago when Dr. H. Richard Hornberger, known as Richard Hooker to readers of his novel MASH and, as they say in medicine, its sequelae, made the suggestion to Sam Vaughan, publisher at Doubleday. Thus, in addition to the debt I owe to those about whom I have written and to whom this effort is dedicated, my appreciation goes to Dick Hornberger and Sam Vaughan as starters, to Jim Owers for early assistance, and especially to Hugh O'Neill who, with the energy and enthusiasm of youth, weighed every move in the manuscript and, more often than I like to admit, caught me punching off the wrong foot. It also goes to my wife for whom, over the years, many of these have been more than twice-told tales but who, having to live with them again during the building of this book, did so with characteristic understanding and patience.

  Let us, while waiting for new monuments,

  preserve the ancient monuments.

  Victor Hugo, Notre Dame de Paris.

  Transition

  (Autumn 1945)

  Those were the good years, right after the war. I mean that if you got out of it alive and all in one piece, and if you did not lose anyone close to you, and if you had done honest work during that time, no matter what it was or where it was, you knew that the next years, after all that had happened, had to be the good ones, as long as your luck held out.

  It was early in the fall after the war ended, and I was standing in the sports department by Wilbur Wood's desk. Wilbur Wood was the sports editor of the paper, and before that he had been its boxing writer. He was rather large-boned and balding, and because at some time his nose had been hit he looked tough, but he was a soft and sentimental man. During the war he used to write me V-mail letters, giving me the gossip of the office and recounting something that he had found memorable or amusing in sports. Once he described a block that Doc Blanchard, the Army fullback, had thrown in the Yankee Stadium on Tree Adams, a 6-foot, 7-inch Notre Dame tackle. I can still see it the way Wilbur described it in the letter—which I got after we had crossed the border into Germany—with Adams going up in the air and turning a somersault and landing on his head. In all his letters Wilbur said he liked what I was writing, and several times he added that he guessed now he would never be able to get me into sports.

  I had been wanting to get into sports since I had been in high school, and trying, with time out for the war, for the eight years I had been on the paper. In high school I weighed 118 pounds, and my heroes were the football players, the ones who 10,000 came out to see in a big game, filling the concrete stands and, across the field, the wooden bleachers, and lining the sidelines. Several of them were six feet tall, or more, and must have weighed 180 or 190 pounds, and I felt that I was fortunate when I was in the same class with one or another of them.

  I would sit near the back of the room, so that I could watch them in their letter sweaters lolling behind the desks, their legs out into the aisle. They made their desks seem small, and the books seemed small in their hands, and at the end of the class, when we all stood up and walked out, they towered not only above the rest of us but above the teacher. They seemed to me to be men, and as we all walked out of the class I felt that they could walk right out of the school and be men out there in the world too.

  Many years later, when I came to live in training camp and travel with the New York Football Giants and then the Green Bay Packers in their great years, they still seemed big to me, those heroes of my youth. Remembering them, in a Giant or a Packer dressing room, I still had to tell myself that Tommy Mallon and Eddie Williams and Ernie Jansen had been only teen-agers, really, and.that they were never such superb football players as Andy Robustelli or Alex Webster or Frank Gifford, with the Giants, or Bart Starr, Paul Hornung, Jimmy Taylor, Forrest Gregg, Jerry Kramer, or Willie Davis of the Packers.

  That was how bad I had it in high school, when I was too frail for football and afraid of a baseball thrown near the head and had been a reluctant starter and worse finisher in street fights. Once, when we were both eight years old, they put the shoemaker's son and me together in the school playground with gloves on us, and he punched me around for three one-minute rounds.

  "You know," I said, a long time after that, to Sugar Ray Robinson, the greatest fighter I ever saw, "you and I fought the same guy. When we were little kids he punched my head off in a playground fight."

  "Who was that?" Robinson said.

  "Vic Troisi," I said.

  "Vic Troisi?" Robinson said. "Did I fight him?"

  "Yes," I said, "you fought him in the Eastern Parkway, and knocked him out in the first round."

  "Is that so?" Robinson said.

  It was the same with Frank Boucher, another hero of ray youth, when he centered a great forward line of the New York Rangers, with the Cook brothers, Bill at right wing and Bun on the left, and they won the Stanley Cup twice. The year after the war ended, Boucher was coaching the Rangers, and he and I got on the subway at the Garden to ride out to Brooklyn, where the team was to practice, and I told him about a remembered youthful embarrassment that I still carried with me after thirteen years.

  "In high school," I said, as we sat together on the subway, "I played on the hockey team. We were a terrible team. We won one game and tied one in two years, and one night we played between the periods of a Bronx Tigers game in the Bronx Coliseum. You were refereeing, and in one scramble after a face-off I knocked you down."

  Turned toward him, I was watching Boucher's face. I was waiting for some sign of recollection to invade it, to start with a quickening in the eyes and then around them, but nothing was happening.

  "When I knocked you down," I said, "the crowd roared, and I wanted to melt into the ice, because I was so ashamed that I had knocked Frank Boucher down, and people were laughing. Do you remember me knocking you down?"

  "No," Boucher said, smiling now but shaking his head. "In fact, I don't even remember refereeing that game."

  There was no way I could ever be one of them—first the football heroes of high school and then, as I projected myself into manhood, those paragons of the professional sports. When I read the sports pages, though, I discovered that the sportswriters rode on the same trains and lived in the same hotels with the ballplayers and visited the training camps of the prize fighters and knew them man to man. Now the sportswriters acquired an eminence of their own by association with those whom, if my mother had known anything about sports, she would have referred to as "the higher ups." If you were a German-American family that had survived World War I in this country, when they called sauerkraut "Liberty Cabbage" and changed the name of Wittenberg Place in the Bronx to Bradley Avenue, and if you were not of that arrogant type that had always made trouble for themselves and the world, then yo
u were so humble that all you hoped for your offspring was that he would get a steady job on which he would come to know those who hired and fired.

  "He has a very good job," my mother said once, after I had started on the paper and she was telling me about one of my former high school classmates. "He works for the telephone company."

  "What does he do?" I asked, wondering if he climbed poles or sat in an office half the size of a gymnasium with half a hundred others, all of them at desks, all of them poring over open ledgers.

  "I don't know," she said, "but he's getting to know the higher-ups."

  They do not run newspapers the way they run ball clubs, though, because there is a paternalism that contravenes their professionalism. There is no place to trade off old baseball writers who can no longer go into the hole or get the bat around in time to meet the fast ball, and so they go on beyond their best days, while their replacements wait in vain to get into the lineup. For two years after college I ran copy, and when I was twenty-four they were still calling me "Boy." For the next four years, before they sent me to report the war, I covered and wrote almost everything from push-cart fires on the Lower East Side to political campaigns, but when I came back from the war I figured I finally had the leverage to get into sports.

  We were in Weimar, the birthplace of the Republic that had failed, and it must have been about seven o'clock when I was awakened that morning by a rooster crowing. They had us in two small hotels, and the sun was coming into the room, bright on the flowered rug, and I lay in bed and looked out the open window into the May morning. I could see tree tops, the new leaves yellow-green and clean, and through them house tops. I could hear Germans talking and working in the yard below, and I lay in the soft bed between the clean sheets and for the first time in a long time I was empty of fear. On the morning that peace came again to Europe I lay in that bed and it came to me that all of the rest of my life, for however long it would go on, would derive from this, morning.

  Some years later I asked the oldest son of a Massachusetts shoe worker what it had been like for him when he had awakened in that hotel room in Philadelphia on what must have been his own great and beginning morning. The night before, in the thirteenth round of one of the most vicious of heavyweight title fights, Rocky Marciano had knocked out Jersey Joe Walcott with a single right hand.

  "You know how it is when you wake up in a strange place and you don't know where you are?" Marciano said. "I thought to myself, 'Something nice happened to me.' Then I remembered, 'That's right. Last night I won the heavyweight championship of the world.' "

  We had the best duty in the war, those of us who by the accidents of age and occupation were picked to report it. The Army provided our transportation and our keep, and we who otherwise might have been carrying rifles and sleeping in foxholes, carried typewriters and slept under roofs even as we pursued our profession. We saluted no one physically, and figuratively only those we felt deserved it. We never had that responsibility that came down from generals to noncoms of sending others where they knew some of them would be killed and others maimed, and so we would never have to live with that for the rest of our lives. Our only responsibility was to order ourselves to go where we could see it, and then to try to tell it as it really was, as those who were being killed and maimed would have wanted to tell it if they could, and not as some of the big-name writers wrote it, or told it on lecture tours, after they came back from junkets on which they were briefed at any Army headquarters or maybe even at some Division command post.

  "It was a marvelous speech," Harry Markson was telling me some months after I came back. "You should have heard it."

  We had had lunch at Lindy's and were walking west on 50th Street back to Madison Square Garden. Harry was doing publicity then for Mike Jacobs when Jacobs was running boxing in this country, and later Harry would run the boxing at the Garden.

  "You know he was a big Roosevelt man," Harry was saying, talking about the writer, "and this was at a Democratic fund-raising luncheon at the Waldorf. I'll never forget it because at one point he said, 'And when your son, your brother, or your husband lands on that foreign beach under fire, and when he finally finds a moment of respite from the shelling and the horror and opens his K-ration, do you know what he finds therein? Among the other things, he finds four cigarettes. Now someone must have thought of those cigarettes. Could it have been F.D.R.?' "

  What I said I don't want in this book, and then I said, "If he'd ever landed on a beach or made an attack and opened a K-ration during his moment of respite, he'd have found that the cigarettes were Avalons or Wings, and he wouldn't have mentioned them."

  You see, if they didn't get the cigarettes right they weren't going to get any of it really right for the sons and the brothers and the husbands, and for all those who also served by waiting. We despised them while they were doing it, and there was one of us, who tended to be irascible anyway, who became absolutely irate one night when he read in a letter from his wife that she had spent $3.00 to listen to a lecture by one of them who had been with us for five days, and that she had found what he had said fascinating. After it was over though, and I was introduced to the cigarette shill, he was so impressed by a magazine piece I had written about Rocky Graziano and so humble and obviously ashamed of all his own work that, reasoning that it was too late to do any good, anyway, I found that I didn't have the heart to level on him.

  So we knew what the cigarettes were in the same breakfast issue with the insipid port-and-egg-yolk, and we learned the mechanics of how war was made on the ground, how attacks were mounted, and how men behaved under stress and great danger—and what they did and how they did it and why. We learned early, of course, the rules of self-preservation, how to analyze a situation map in order to decide where to go and where not to go, and our ears became attuned to the sounds of shelling, the difference between the incoming and the outgoing, so that we were not constantly cowering. When, in late afternoon we would come back from the front on a day when we had really been out, and not just covering something from the perimeter around regiment or battalion, we would be joyous in the jeep, sometimes even singing, so exalted were we to be still alive.

  "What's the matter with you?" John Groth said to me one evening. He had come into my room where I had been trying for more than an hour to write my piece about what I had seen that day. He was doing his drawing and his water colors then for the Marshall Field publications, and two years later I would take him into Stillman's Gym for the first time and then introduce him to the baseball and thoroughbred-racing people, and he would do those fine things he did on sports.

  "The matter?" I said.

  "You look terrible," he said. "What's going on?"

  "I'm coming apart," I said.

  It was late September, and we were inside Germany now. That day several of us had gone up to the Ninth Infantry Division, and a captain named Lindsey Nelson had taken us up to a battalion command post in the Huertgen Forest. Nineteen years later I was driving north out of Manhattan one night, and when I got on the Major Deegan Expressway in the Bronx, I could see, across the Harlem River, the lights of the Polo Grounds. That was after the Giants had gone to San Francisco and the Mets had moved in, and I turned on the car radio and I heard Lindsey doing the game.

  There were two hundred square miles of it in the Huertgen, the fir trees sixty feet tall and planted ten feet apart in absolutely straight rows. It was a picture forest, and there in the cool, soft, and shaded dampness, in a place that had once known the cathedral quiet that is a forest's own, they were dying between the trees and among the ferns.

  "I don't think I can do it any more," I said to John.

  "You have to," he said.

  "Day after day," I said, "I see those kids going out and sacrificing themselves. They haven't even had a chance to live yet. They're eighteen and nineteen and twenty, and they're giving their lives, and what am I doing for them? They deserve the best writers we have, and except for Hemingway, they're not here."<
br />
  John had just come back from living for several days with Hemingway in a house he had taken over in the Siegfried Line.

  They had become friends, and later John would illustrate the Living Library edition of Men Without Women.

  "I try," I said, "but it isn't any good."

  "You can't write War and Peace every night," John said. "Nobody can."

  "I'm not trying to," I said. "I'm just trying to get it right, but I can get so little of it in."

  "Just do the best you can for today," John said, "and tomorrow try again."

  "And then every afternoon," I said, "we wave them a hearty farewell, and we leave them up there. We run around with our little notebooks and pencils making a living, and then come back here and leave them to die up there."

  "Gee," John said, "you've got it bad. I don't know."

  "I don't know, either," I said. "The whole thing is wrong."

  "I mean I don't know about you," John said. "You'd better pull yourself together. You know what's going to happen to you if you don't pull yourself together?"

  "Who knows?" I said.

  "I know," John said. "They'll come around and wrap you up and send you home."