ATTACKING THE STACK

               Two weeks into our collective house arrest the search for diversion becomes more urgent. “Live” sports have vanished and how many “Chopped” or “Shark Tank” reruns can one watch?  Reading is a logical outlet but in Scottsdale, AZ, where I live, the libraries are closed and trips to the local Barnes & Noble, which is observing reduced hours, are chancy. Who knows who else has browsed the books we might browse there? Such is the state of dread in Coronavirus USA.

               Luckily for me I have my own library, consisting mainly of sports books. Not to brag but I consider it world-class, with close to 500 volumes. Most of them were accumulated in my years with the WSJ, where I was a frequent sports-book reviewer as well as a reporter and columnist. As such, I was the recipient of much publisher largess.      

               Back in the day, a fair-sized library was useful to a journalist for reference purposes. No more in this computer age, where a few taps in a Google box can summon up just about any stat or other fact. It makes me sad to think that compendiums like The Baseball Encyclopedia, all 1,700 pages of it, have been reduced to electronic blips. The last edition of that noble publication came out in 1996.

               Literature, however, lives on, albeit tenuously, and my library contains numerous examples of that. I received far more books than I could read at any given time, so many wound up in a “for-later” stack. Alas, “later” easily becomes “never,” and if nothing else the current siege finally has allowed me to reduce that daunting pile.

One baseball biography I just got around to is “THE LAST YANKEE; THE TURBULENT LIFE OF BILLY MARTIN,” by the estimable David Falkner, published in 1992. To say that the subject’s life was turbulent was an understatement; Martin scraped and brawled through an 11-season playing career and another 17 years as a manager, leaving a trail of black eyes, fat lips and empty liquor bottles in his wake. Victories, too: his teams—and not just the Yankees, he managed four others —won, sometimes against the odds.

That Martin had a baseball career at all was remarkable, Falkner writes. At 5-foot-10 and about 160 pounds he was small for a big-leaguer, and was neither fleet afoot nor slick with the glove. His lifetime batting average was .257, below par for his time. He compensated with his aggressive play and tactical feel for the game, things he would pass along to his teammates and men he managed. With the Yankees in the glorious 1950s he was a special favorite of his manager, Casey Stengel, who saw him as a kindred spirit-- a “holler guy” in the diamond idiom.

That was fortunate because Martin’s after-hours habits didn’t endear him to many managerial types. He was, said teammate Phil Rizzuto, a great road roommate because he never spent much time in his room. Martin’s drinking and hair-trigger temper kept him in trouble with the Yankee brass and eventually led to his 1957 dismissal from the team after a celebrated brawl at the Copacabana night club in New York.

His carousing continued as a manager, keeping him in dutch with his bosses even while his players responded to his take-no-prisoners brand of leadership. He was “the greatest manager I ever saw from the first pitch to the last. It was the time from the last pitch to the first the next day that got him into trouble,” said Roy Eisenhardt, president of the Oakland A’s during Martin’s managerial tenue there (1980-82).

Drinking contributed to difficulties in Martin’s off-field life, which included four marriages. It led to his death at age 61 in 1989 when the pickup truck in which he was riding (driving?) spun off an icy road in rural upstate New York after he’d spent a day in the bars with a friend. Falkner concludes that we won’t see his like again, for better or worse.

“DAYS OF GRACE: A MEMOIR,” by Arthur Ashe, Jr., and Arnold Rampersad, concerns a quite-different sort of athlete. Ashe was a tennis star of the 1960s and ‘70s, the first African-American or black-male player to occupy the top echelon of his country-club sport. The book’s title has a sad double meaning; it was written just before Ashe’s 1993 death from AIDS contracted from a blood transfusion, at age 50, and the word “grace” best described his journey through life.

Ashe was a gentleman and a scholar, as his post-tennis authorship of the three-volume work “A Road to Glory,” about African-Americans in sport, attested. His swan’s song touched many other facets of American life and is unsparing as well as enlightened. He was especially hard on the emphasis on sports in the black community, eclipsing just about all other forms of endeavor. It’s an observation that’s as pertinent now as it was when he made it.

Ashe also was unsparing in his assessment of race in American culture. Despite his success, wealth and social acceptance, he confessed that race, not illness (besides AIDS he’d had two heart attacks) had been his heaviest burden. He wrote, “When I find myself in a new public situation, I count. I always count… the number or black or brown faces present…”

Anything A.J. Liebling wrote is fun to read, and that goes double for “A NEUTRAL CORNER,” a collection of some of his boxing essays written between 1952 and 1963, the year of his death. Most of them first appeared in the New Yorker magazine, where he worked for 25 years. Liebling wasn’t a sportswriter, he was a writer who sometimes wrote about sports, mainly boxing and horse racing. He did so with great erudition; what other writer could quote Ibn Khaldun, a medieval Tunisian historian, and Harlem’s Father Divine in abutting paragraphs? And he was funny—his pieces had a laugh in every graf if you had the vocabulary to appreciate it.

Liebling found in boxing a treasure trove of characters, not only the fighters but also their promoters, managers, trainers, cut men and sparring partners. Not without irony he called the sport “the sweet science” whose intellectual home was the battered old Stillman’s Gym on Manhattan’s West Side, which he dubbed the University of Eighth Avenue. “The sign on the building says ‘Training Here Daily,’ and in smaller letters ‘Boxing Instruction—See Jack Curley.’ This is the university’s nearest approach to a printed catalogue,” he wrote. “Doctor Lou Stillman, the president, knew when he put out his sign in 1921 that an elaborate plant does not make a great educational institution. In the great schools of the Middle Ages scholars came to sharpen their wits by mutual disputation. Prizefighters do likewise.”

Liebling admired craft in a fighter and bemoaned the sport’s post-World War II decline. His beau ideal was the ageless veteran Archie Moore, whom he called “a virtuoso of anachronistic perfection in an age when boxers in general are hurried along like artificially ripened tomatoes, and with similarly unsatisfactory results.” He liked but did not admire the erstwhile heavyweight champ Floyd Patterson, whom he said was “either a good fighter among mediocrities or a mediocrity among incompetents.” He caught Muhammad Ali while he was still Cassius Clay, approving of the fighter’s “flashy, sleight-of-hand style” while finding his poetry wanting. Nobody ever said that of Liebling’s prose.