Seasons in Hell Read online

  Plus, back in glorious 1973, a person could experience an active evening amid the neon on a twenty-dollar bill and there was no better place to attempt to accomplish that than in March along what they call the Sun Coast. The armored divisions from the college spring break set—a largely obnoxious group of children—were flocking down to South Florida in multitudes, but they were jamming the beaches down in Fort Lauderdale.

  Pompano Beach, safely situated maybe six miles up the road, served as the domain of the Canuck. Mostly female, they arrived in droves, twice a week, in tour groups from Toronto and were headquartered right there in the good old Surf Rider Resort and getting blasted nightly in the Banyan Lounge. The Canucks were a hell of a lot more approachable than the stuffy Kappas and Thetas from places like Bowling Green, some of whom had not yet learned about the adverse effect that too much saturated fat in their diets was imposing upon the backs of their thighs.

  Canucks, on the other hand, maintained more of an open-door policy and they were in Florida not so much to experience the sun and sand as they were to enjoy a reprieve from their Canadian boyfriends who, at least according to the Canucks, were as dreary as the weather back home.

  Don’t get me wrong. It was not my mission in Florida to go chasing after a bunch of nineteen-year-old blood technicians from Kitchener and Niagara Falls, but they were pleasant to talk to (at least until the evil specter of David Fink would arrive at the table, at which time the girls would shriek and disperse in wild panic).

  Even more appalling than Fink was the entertainment in the Banyan, consisting of the amazing Wayne Carmichael, who performed one of those lounge acts that comedians are always lampooning on “Saturday Night Live.” Wayne bore a rather striking resemblance to Mr. Joyboy, the undertaker in the late and lamented Terry Southern’s The Loved One.

  Carmichael despised the Texans, who were inclined to shout insults across the room while he was putting on his show. Sometimes I’d feel kind of sorry for Carmichael when that happened, but then he’d launch into his patently tortured and off-key rendition of “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Around the Old Oak Tree” and I would only feel sorry for myself. Wayne, I heard, quit the business after a Banyan patron finally couldn’t take it any longer, snapped, and sprayed the old trooper with a fire extinguisher.

  Other than that petty annoyance, I was rapidly coming to appreciate life as a baseball writer. After that first week, it seemed that I was fitting in nicely with the players and media.

  And why not? I was not only the consummate professional, but witty and urbane and had a large grocery bag full of premium grade marijuana under my bed. I never indulged in the stuff personally but didn’t see anything wrong with giving it away. Besides, the Texas legislature had just passed a law that essentially decriminalized possession of up to four ounces of goofy bush for white folks. Several candidates for the Rangers ball club were clearly elated when I presented them with that news.

  Contrary to the general public assumption, though, the baseball players of that era couldn’t really qualify as big dopers. The extent of their participation in the mind alteration league certainly ranked as feeble when compared to their brethren in the dignified sport of football, both college and pro. A well-known player for the Dallas Cowboys once told me that he and most of his teammates played every game of his senior season at a Southeastern Conference school loaded on LSD.

  The drug of choice in baseball of the Seventies, other than staggering quantities of CC and Seven, was greenies, mild amphetamines that the players referred to as “ability pills.”

  But according to what I was hearing from Whitey Herzog, no miracle of the pharmacological sciences could produce an ability pill potent enough to propel this assembly of Rangers talent out of the basement in the American League West. “Here’s a team that won 54 games last year and lost 100, and then, over the winter, Shortie [Bob Short] goes and trades off the only two decent pitchers on the team,” Herzog claimed. “And for what? The Beeg Boy!”

  The Beeg Boy of note was Rico Carty, the affable Rico Carty, whose bat had been every bit as lethal as Hank Aaron’s in the Braves lineup. Emphasize the word had. The ravages of age had caught up with Carty rather prematurely, which made him all too typical of the cast that Herzog was assembling in Pompano. Some of the players had a commendable past and some would have a future (except for the pitchers who had neither) but none of the players who would do battle for Herzog that season were experiencing what might be described as their natural prime.

  The legs go first, they say, and in Carty’s case, Herzog told me that the team doctor had said “he’d seen better knees on a camel.” This was the man signed up to act as the power supply, the horse hired to pull the wagon of the Rangers out of the ditch. “When Rico runs from homeplate to first, you could time him with a sundial,” said Herzog. He also voiced an additional concern. “I think the guy [Carty] must be practicing voodoo or something. Check out his eyes. Rico’s crazier than a peach orchard sow. This team is two players away from being a contender—Sandy Koufax and Babe Ruth.”

  Herzog offered this keen assessment in the bar of the Yard Arm Restaurant, where he was consuming containers of scotch and soda at a pace that I could not begin to approach—me, the bronze medalist from the Mexico City games back when scotch drinking was an Olympic event. The skipper assured me that the Rangers had the potential to put a cruel new twist on the baseball concept of the Long Season.

  After about ten days of “conditioning” and intrasquad games at Pompano Stadium, the Rangers finally embarked on their exhibition schedule. For someone in search of the narcotic ingredients that leave so many baseball enthusiasts hooked for life, Florida is where they should go. When the vast legion of baseball existentialists congregate to sing their anthems of rejoicing about the serene rhythms and mystic qualities of the game that they find so hypnotic, the exhibition season offers the ultimate theatre.

  One can feel reasonably safe in the presumption that most major-league baseball players cannot be presented as paragon examples of culture and refinement after they’ve drained two quarts of Old Swamp Rat. But they are graceful creatures in that enchanted realm between the white lines of the ball field, performing some difficult feats of athleticism with a nonchalance and economy of motion that defies the accepted ordinances of physical kinetics. In these exhibition games, their skills are showcased in modest pavilions like the one at Pompano Beach, suitable for a county fair, and since the outcome of the game doesn’t count, the competition unfolds with the competitive intensity of a sack race at an office picnic.

  The mainstream regulars and stars of the league put in about three innings. Then they depart for the golf course, yielding the podium to youngsters who had demonstrated some unrefined potential last year with the Discouraging Word, South Dakota Sandblasters in the Class A Saltpeter League.

  Even in such an informal framework, Herzog, who was not only a virtuoso in the fine art of spotting baseball talent but also the absence of same, was offering dire prognostications. In his judgment, the entire pitching staff was afflicted with some rare phobic dysfunction when it came to confronting the strike zone. “It’s like they’re afraid they might get the clap or something if they throw strikes,” Herzog sputtered.

  The only comforting aspect of this discouraging scenario was that while I might have to create new adjectives to adequately describe the Rangers’ standards of performance, I would at least be equipped with suitable companionship to share the horrors of the ride.

  The aforementioned Harold McKinney would cover the team for the morning edition of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and in the category of hedonist pursuit, this man would be unsurpassed. McKinney had curly blond hair that he wore halfway down his back and a Fu Manchu mustache and could have been reasonably cast in a motion picture depicting the life story of George Armstrong Custer.

  McKinney was a major asset for my spring training situation. For every dollar of company money that I was to spend in Florida, Harold
was spending three to five, meaning that I would be totally protected when it came time to submit the expense forms. Plus, in my immodest opinion, the stories that McKinney was sending back to Texas made my stuff look like, say, John Steinbeck. McKinney established his own rules of professional conduct and one of those was never to devote more than ten minutes or so to the composition of a news story on the topic of baseball. Dick Risenhoover, who did the radio play-by-play for the team, once suggested that Harold devote more effort to his trade. “Harold, if you wrote like you talked, you’d be the greatest sports writer of all time,” Risenhoover said.

  “Good writing,” McKinney countered, “is too goddamned much trouble.” He was right, of course. McKinney had enough trouble in his life as it was, involving turbulent simultaneous relationships with the various women he had stashed across the continent. Women, I can’t figure why, were attracted to McKinney.

  My most poignant image of Harold goes back to a football trip to Indiana. I encountered a scene in a hotel hallway in which McKinney was stretched out on the floor with his head in the lap of a woman who claimed to be Hoagy Carmichael’s daughter. She was stroking McKinney’s hair and consoling him because he claimed to have an upset stomach.

  Another member of the writing crew, Randy Galloway from the Dallas Morning News, had spent most of his life in the suburb of Grand Prairie, home of an aircraft assembly plant and a community that has produced some of the nation’s leading paint sniffers. Galloway’s only quest in life that spring was to attain a permanent suntan, and for five weeks he dressed in only a tattered pair of cutoffs and some fungus-lined tennis shoes.

  I told Galloway that was a sorry strategy and shabby way to treat any human being. Later that summer, I would apologize to Galloway for having made those remarks.

  Even though I once had to restrain Harold McKinney from attacking Galloway with a knife because he was sick of hearing “Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road” on Randy’s car stereo, this group of writers was largely compatible.

  The big story of spring training that year didn’t involve the Rangers, naturally, but the Yankees, who were training in Fort Lauderdale. Two Yankees pitchers, Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekich, actually conducted a press conference to announce a trade. They were trading wives—and kids. It was entirely fitting that both Peterson and Kekich would eventually find their way onto the Rangers’ roster, because the wife-swapping stunt was obviously not conducive to longevity on a team that wears pinstriped uniforms.

  So when the Rangers played the Yankees in an exhibition game down at their lavish facility in Fort Lauderdale (unlike Pompano, the palm trees at the Yankees’ park seemed free of disease), the Texas press corps condescended to attend the game.

  Rather than exchange unpleasantries with the newspaper geeks who covered the Yankees, we climbed onto the roof of the pressbox so that Galloway could “absorb some rays.” In the third inning, a security guard appeared on the rooftop. He must have presumed from the attire and demeanor of the trio lounging there that they could not possibly be representing the esteemed fourth estate but had more probably arrived in Fort Lauderdale for spring break via freight train some years earlier and chosen to stay on.

  “Listen, the city commissioner says you guys can’t stay here. You’ll have to leave,” said the security guy. He was trying to be polite. Galloway (who was even then preparing himself for his future as the top-rated radio talk show host in Texas) was deeply disturbed by the mandate to vacate the rooftop. “Well, I have a message for the city commissioner. Can you deliver it for me?” said Galloway.

  “What’s that?”

  “Tell the city commissioner that he can kiss my dick.”

  After the game, we were confronted by the commissioner himself. “I got your message,” he told Galloway. “I checked and found out that you guys are who you claim to be. But you don’t look like any sportswriters I’ve ever seen before.”

  Harold McKinney, now blissful from the contents of the bag beneath my bed back at the Surf Rider, looked at the commissioner and said, “Sir, that’s the finest compliment I’ve received in my life.”

  Chapter 3

  It is with some regret that I must report that based upon the thoughts, philosophies and deeds of those associated with the Texas Rangers baseball organization, the essential points of the current militant feminist manifesto can be deemed correct.

  A spring training conversation with Harold McKinney in 1973 illustrates this point. McKinney was perplexed. Separated from his wife, McKinney had been seeing, so to speak, a woman in Fort Worth whom he had promised to fly to Florida for a week’s holiday.

  Harold was also enjoying cordial interchange with a trio of Canucks named, coincidentally, Debbie, Debbie and Debbie. He was having serious second thoughts about making good on his invitation to bring the woman in Fort Worth—call her Debbie, too—to Pompano.

  “She’s been calling twice a day, wanting to know where in the hell the plane ticket is,” McKinney said. “I think I’ll just tell her that I’m working too hard down here and that she can’t come.” He rationalized this decision with the announcement that “she [the Fort Worth friend] is so screwed up she’s been taking shock treatments for depression. She says the treatments are supposed to erase all this traumatic stuff from her brain. So now they’ve zapped her about ten times and she still remembers all the bad stuff but can’t remember her own name. The problem with getting laid these days is that you have to deal with all those goddamn women.”

  He was telling this saga not only to me but also to two elderly French Canadian couples who were sharing our table at a Benihana restaurant on Sunrise Boulevard and the Intracoastal Canal in Fort Lauderdale. They listened to Harold rave on, nodding sympathetically while obviously making a mental note that, henceforth, the Benihana would be a place to avoid.

  McKinney here defined the root cause of the Great American Neurosis. Men, at least most of the ones under the age of fifty, have but one purpose in mind when it comes to establishing relationships with the other gender. Women like to articulate their hopes, fears, frustrations, inner joys and deeper aspirations, and the men simply don’t care. Oh, there does exist a limited percentage who might be attentive to some aspect of the female persona other than the size of her tits. The ones in this category generally also have a major crush on Julio Iglesias.

  The hormone testosterone sustains man’s obsession with all things sociopathic. Testosterone not only compels men to abuse women, emotionally and otherwise, but also serves as the diabolical ingredient that causes the male species to drive recklessly, join patriot militia clans, talk baseball and shoot deer.

  Card-carrying members of the Rangers American League fraternity would naturally dabble in these types of pursuits. Happily, they were so preoccupied with the “talking baseball” category that not much time was available for the other stuff that often causes bloodshed.

  Whitey Herzog was sure talking a lot of baseball during the course of that lovely azure South Florida spring of 1973, but not with a great deal of relish. Of all the public personalities that I have encountered during a “career” in journalism, I never dealt with anybody who was as unafraid of telling the truth as Whitey Herzog.

  The whole purpose of spring training, other than to get the players’ livers in shape for the extended season to come, traditionally has been to inflate the media with artificially optimistic hype and outrageous propaganda regarding the prospects of the hometown team. “Now that old Spud Jones had that cataract surgery, I wouldn’t be surprised if he hit .450.” That’s the kind of spring training rhetoric that sells those season ticket packages back home. Under more conventional circumstances, Herzog might have been willing to do that. But this season he apparently felt that it was his obligation as a responsible citizen to alert the public back in North Texas that something dreadful was about to happen. Poor Whitey was trying to cry out a warning, like somebody shouting to the captain of the Hindenburg to turn on the “No Smokin
g” sign.

  As a player, Whitey experienced considerable exposure to teams of the Rangers’ ilk. He’d spent time with the old Kansas City A’s, a team that consistently lingered near the rear of the pack. It was with KC that Herzog proudly claimed to be “the first and only player to hit into an all-Cuban triple play—Camilo Pascual to Jose Valdivelso to Julio Becquer.” Herzog additionally served time with the original Washington Senators. But he had also briefly savored the bouquet of life as a utility player with the New York Yankees—the Yankees of Casey Stengel’s empire of gold. Herzog, the most accomplished storyteller that I ever encountered in the entire spectrum of sport and second only to John Forsythe in all categories of public life, offered a ceaseless barrage of tales from another time. Typical was his recollection of a road trip with the Yankees when general manager George Weiss got on an elevator and encountered relief pitcher Ryne Duren, a lover of the grape, barely able to stand. According to Herzog, Weiss stiffened and said, “Drunk again.” To which Duren grinned a crooked grin, slapped Weiss on the back and said, “Oh yeah? Me too.”

  Sadly for Whitey, the thrilling days of yesterday had been replaced by the unfunnier realities of the day. His first baseman, Mike Epstein, hit a grand-slam homerun in an exhibition game against the Orioles. Herzog’s response: “That’ll look great in the box scores you guys send back to Texas. But tell the readers that in this rinky-dink little Pompano ballpark, the wind blows every lousy pop up over the rightfield fence. Back in Texas, that ball Epstein hit wouldn’t have carried past the pitcher’s mound.”

  The manager’s direst concerns involved the pitching staff and he offered these evaluations: The “ace” of the group, Dick Bosman, now in the twilight of a mediocre career, was capable of producing seven decent innings every other start. Of the remaining four, Pete Broberg and Don Stanhouse had good arms but didn’t know how to pitch. The other two, Mike Paul and Rich Hand, knew how to pitch but had arms like worn-out rubber bands. Paul told me that he so loved the great American game “that when they finally run me out of the major leagues, I’ll go pitch in the Mexican League.” One year later, Paul did just that.