game. I’ll bet ex-Bills QB Jack Kemp was more afraid of Russert than he ever was of Buck Buchanan.
While the Bills skidded to another sub-.500 record this season, I contented myself with Larry Felser’s The Birth of the New NFL: How the 1966 NFL/AFL Merger Transformed Pro Football (Lyons Press). Felser was present at the creation, covering the formation of the American Football League in 1960 for the Buffalo Courier-Express, though I suppose his greatest distinction came in marrying Beverly, who defeated my mother in the Elba Onion Queen pageant of 1957. I don’t know if mom has forgiven her yet.
Those beautiful old AFL names—Houston Antwine, Gloster Richardson, Cookie Gilchrist—evoke the dawn of my football consciousness in that antediluvian age of the tie game, the straight-ahead kicker, and the white cornerback. Felser was there and he took notes. The AFL was a spirited underdog but it was no pastoral dream: the San Diego, nee Los Angeles, Chargers were named after owner Barron Hilton’s hotel chain’s credit-card operation. What a loathsome derivation!
But consider Felser’s take on the cartoonish villain Al Davis, owner of the Oakland Raiders. Davis, as commissioner of the AFL, hired ex-Buffalo Evening News sportswriter Jack Horrigan as his PR man. When Horrigan was diagnosed with leukemia, writes Felser, “Davis, a Jew, bought a votive candle in a Catholic religious supply store. Back in his office, he lit the candle as a devotion, a prayer in flame—a Catholic custom. When the office was about to close that evening, a cleaning lady informed him it was against building policy to leave a burning candle unattended. Davis took off his coat and stayed the night.”
That doesn’t make up for yanking the team out of Oakland for thirteen years, but Al can’t be all bad.
Pro football today is nigh unwatchable due to the chronic TV timeouts which interrupt the flow of the game and remind the assembled just who is boss. After scores or changes of possession the twenty-two behemoths on the field wait meekly for a spindly TV semaphorist to give the referees the signal to resume play. What would happen if the players defied the Great God Television and just started playing? There would be consequences, I imagine.
Mauling women, popping loudmouths in bars, shooting steroids: these things the mansters of the gridiron will do, but disobey television—never.
The major-college game is just as compromised, though the exigencies of recruiting give most teams a regional accent. My football preferences are outré: I am a Catholic peacenik whose favorite teams were Brigham Young and Army before the University of Buffalo Bulls staggered into Division I in 1999. UB had the worst program in college football until Turner Gill, a devout Christian gentleman and miracle worker, came to town three years ago. Gill vitalized the team with local products James Starks of Niagara Falls and Buffalo’s own Naaman Roosevelt, so that the Bulls of Buffalo are, in some sense, representative of Buffalo. This year UB played in a postseason game for the first time ever—the unfortunately named International Bowl in Toronto.
Bulls fans expected a bittersweet end: Gill would leave town at season’s conclusion, lured by a fat contract from a football factory. No one—well, almost no one—would have blamed him. In America, people are expected to move for money. Loyalty is penury. Immobility is for suckers and losers.
But Turner Gill is staying. Passed over for the Auburn job—reportedly for the stupid racist reason that the coach, who is black, has a white wife—Gill is casting down his bucket where he is, at least for now.
Stay is such an underrated word.
A Fan’s Notes
The American Conservative, 2013
I am writing this on a sunny and fragrant June morning, sitting in the bleachers off the Little League field on which I played all those summers ago. My Little League coach, Larry Lee, died last week, and it is a Kauffman family habit (not an eccentricity!) to revisit places associated with the recently deceased.
I can see myself out there at shortstop for the Cubs in the National League playoff game. Bottom of the sixth, tie game, bases loaded, grounder hit my way, I field it cleanly, throw home . . . and into the dirt, skipping it past the catcher. Game over, season over, Little League career over. Shucks.
Pretty much every male relative of mine—father, brother, cousin, uncles—was all-league in baseball or football, but as for me, well, they also serve who only sit and watch from the bench. I’m a quinquagenarian now, rather to my astonishment, and I still bring out the glove to toss the ball with our daughter, who humors the old man with a game of backyard catch in the high grass.
I don’t hold, however, with my Upstate landsman Frederick Exley’s morose conclusion that “it was my destiny—unlike my father, whose fate it was to hear the roar of the crowd—to sit in the stands with most men and acclaim others. It was my fate, my destiny, my end, to be a fan.” (Exley’s books belie any such shrinking violetism.)
This is the seventy-fifth year since professional baseball came to Batavia, and we are among the last of the train-whistle towns in the low minors. I sit in these bleachers, too, with friends and apparitions, conducting decades-long conversations and hearing ghostly echoes.
Even in the bushes, alas, those ghostly echoes can get lost in the din.
Each batter has his own “walk-up music,” which means that every time a home team lad strides to the plate we are treated to a ten-second snatch of his favorite song. Year in and year out, the boys’ collective taste is execrable. I’ve yet to hear, say, X or Neil Young, though what I really long for is the sound of silence.
Conversation is the casualty in the empire of noise. I am vice president of the team but I can’t get the damned decibelage turned down. John Nance Garner was right about the impuissance of VPs.
In minor-league baseball, the place, and not the players, is the thing. This place is: My old friend Donny Rock, the groundskeeper, lining the basepaths. Grande dame Catherine Roth, now ninety-two, refusing to stand for the vapid “God Bless America,” which since 9/11 has afflicted our ears during the seventh-inning stretch. My mom, who has lived her entire life in our Snow Belt county, putting on her jacket when the temperature dips below eighty. Yappy Yapperton, countless sheets to the wind, yelling inanities from the beer deck. (Scratch that: Yappy is either dead or in prison today.)
The boys of summer come and go; I prefer life in the bleachers. A fair number of big leaguers have passed this way, and I follow them in the box scores. Especially Phillies’ stars Ryan Howard and Chase Utley, who were, in successive years, very kind to our daughter during the Muckdogs v. Muckpuppies games. (These tilts required the boys to come to the park the Saturday morn after a Friday night game and presumed revelry. The guys who showed—Utley, Howard, and some very good-natured Latin American players—were saints.)
As for the majors: yawn.
Several years ago I had a free afternoon while visiting DC and thought I’d take in my first Nationals’ game. The Metro ride to the stadium, with its passengerial cargo of black and white ball-capped fans, was a rare and heartening sight in our segregated capital city.
As I neared the ticket booth I hesitated. Did I really want to spend three hours fidgeting through interminable TV timeouts, which make between-innings breaks and coaches’ trips to the mound foretastes of eternity? Nah. So attending a Nats’ game remains on my list of Things to Do in DC Before I Die (along with visiting the Frederick Douglass home and the gravesites of Gore Vidal and Clover Adams at Rock Creek Cemetery).
Back in the bleachers I think of William Cullen Bryant’s poetical wish that he die “in flowery June/When brooks sent up a cheerful tune.” Bryant got his wish. It’s the little
