What? No…. Grantland Rice would never have written weird stuff like that: His prose was spare & lean; his descriptions came straight from the gut… and on the rare and ill-advised occasions when he wanted to do a “Think Piece,” he called on the analytical powers of his medulla. Like all great sportswriters, Rice understood that his world might go all to pieces if he ever dared to doubt that his eyes were wired straight to his lower brain—a sort of de facto lobotomy, which enables the grinning victim to operate entirely on the level of Sensory Perception….
Green grass, hot sun, sharp cleats in the turf, thundering cheers from the crowd, the menacing scowl on the face of a $30,000-a-year pulling guard as he leans around the corner on a Lombardi-style power sweep and cracks a sharp plastic shoulder into the line-backer’s groin….
Ah yes, the simple life: Back to the roots, the basics—first a Mousetrap, then a Crackback & a Buttonhook off a fake triple-reverse Fly Pattern, and finally The Bomb….
Indeed. There is a dangerous kind of simple-minded Power/Precision worship at the root of the massive fascination with pro football in this country, and sportswriters are mainly responsible for it. With a few rare exceptions like Bob Lypsyte of the New York Times and Torn Quinn of the (now-defunct) Washington Daily News, sportswriters are a kind of rude and brainless subculture of fascist drunks whose only real function is to publicize & sell whatever the sports editor sends them out to cover….
Which is a nice way to make a living, because it keeps a man busy and requires no thought at all. The two keys to success as a sportswriter are: (1) A blind willingness to believe anything you’re told by the coaches, flacks, hustlers, and other “official spokesmen” for the team-owners who provide the free booze… and: (2) A Roget’s Thesaurus, in order to avoid using the same verbs and adjectives twice in the same paragraph.
Even a sports editor, for instance, might notice something wrong with a lead that said: “The precision-jackhammer attack of the Miami Dolphins stomped the balls off the Washington Redskins today by stomping and hammering with one precise jackthrust after another up the middle, mixed with pinpoint-precision passes into the flat and numerous hammer-jack stomps around both ends….”
Right. And there was the genius of Grantland Rice. He carried a pocket thesaurus, so that “The thundering hoofbeats of the Four Horsemen” never echoed more than once in the same paragraph, and the “Granite-grey sky” in his lead was a “cold dark dusk” in the last lonely line of his heart-rending, nerve-ripping stories….
There was a time, about ten years ago, when I could write like Grantland Rice. Not necessarily because I believed all that sporty bullshit, but because sportswriting was the only thing I could do that anybody was willing to pay for. And none of the people I wrote about seemed to give a hoot in hell what kind of lunatic gibberish I wrote about them, just as long as it moved. They wanted Action, Color, Speed, Violence…. At one point, in Florida, I was writing variations on the same demented themes for three competing papers at the same time, under three different names. I was a sports columnist for one paper in the morning, sports editor for another in the afternoon, and at night I worked for a pro wrestling promoter, writing incredibly twisted “press releases” that I would plant, the next day, in both papers.
It was a wonderful gig, in retrospect, and at times I wish I could go back to it—just punch a big hatpin through my frontal lobes and maybe regain that happy lost innocence that enabled me to write, without the slightest twinge of conscience, things like: “The entire Fort Walton Beach police force is gripped in a state of fear this week; all leaves have been cancelled and Chief Bloor is said to be drilling his men for an Emergency Alert situation on Friday and Saturday night—because those are the nights when ‘Kazika, The Mad Jap,’ a 440-pound sadist from the vile slums of Hiroshima, is scheduled to make his first—and no doubt his last—appearance in Fish-head Auditorium. Local wrestling impresario Lionel Olay is known to have spoken privately with Chief Bloor, urging him to have ‘every available officer’ on duty at ringside this weekend, because of the Mad Jap’s legendary temper and his invariably savage reaction to racial insults. Last week, in Detroit, Kazika ran amok and tore the spleens out of three ringside spectators, one of whom allegedly called him a ‘yellow devil.’”
“Kazika,” as I recall, was a big, half-bright Cuban who once played third-string tackle for Florida State University in Tallahassee, about 100 miles away—but on the fish-head circuit he had no trouble passing for a dangerous Jap strangler, and I soon learned that pro wrestling fans don’t give a fuck anyway.
Ah, memories, memories… and here we go again, back on the same old trip: digressions, tangents, crude flashbacks…. When the ’72 presidential campaign ended I planned to give up this kind of thing….
But what the hell? Why not? It’s almost dawn in San Francisco now, the parking lot outside this building is flooded about three inches deep with another drenching rain, and I’ve been here all night drinking coffee & Wild Turkey, smoking short Jamaican cigars and getting more & more wired on the Allman Brothers’ “Mountain Jam,” howling out of four big speakers hung in all four corners of the room.
Where is the MDA? With the windows wide open and the curtains blowing into the room and the booze and the coffee and the smoke and the music beating heavy in my ears, I feel the first rising edge of a hunger for something with a bit of the crank in it.
Where is Mankiewicz tonight?
Sleeping peacefully?
No… probably not. After two years on The Edge, involuntary retirement is a hard thing to cope with. I tried it for a while, in Woody Creek, but three weeks without even a hint of crisis left me so nervous that I began gobbling speed and babbling distractedly about running for the U.S. Senate in ’74. Finally, on the verge of desperation, I took the bush-plane over to Denver for a visit with Gary Hart, McGovern’s ex-campaign manager, telling him I couldn’t actually put him on the payroll right now, but that I was counting on him to organize Denver for me.
He smiled crookedly but refused to commit himself… and later that night I heard, from an extremely reliable source, that Hart was planning to run for the Senate himself in 1974.
Why? I wondered. Was it some kind of subliminal, un-focused need to take vengeance on the press?
On me? The first journalist in Christendom to go on record comparing Nixon to Adolph Hitler?
Was Gary so blinded with bile that he would actually run against me in the Primary? Would he risk splitting the “Three A’s” vote and maybe sink us both?
I spent about twenty-four hours thinking about it, then flew to Los Angles to cover the Super Bowl—but the first person I ran into down there was Ed Muskie. He was wandering around in the vortex of a big party on the main deck of the Queen Mary, telling anybody who would listen that he was having a hell of a hard time deciding whether he was for the Dolphins or the Redskins. I introduced myself as Peter Sheridan, “a friend of Donald Segretti’s.” “We met on the ‘Sunshine Special’ in Florida,” I said. “I was out of my head….” But his brain was too clouded to pick up on it… so I went up to the crow’s nest and split a cap of black acid with John Chancellor.
He was reluctant to bet on the game, even when I offered to take Miami with no points. A week earlier I’d been locked into the idea that the Redskins would win easily—but when Nixon came out for them and George Allen began televising his prayer meetings I decided that any team with both God and Nixon on their side was fucked from the start.
So I began betting heavily on Miami—which worked out nicely, on paper, but some of my heaviest bets were with cocaine addicts, and they are known to be very bad risks when it comes to paying off. Most coke freaks have already blown their memories by years of over-indulgence on marijuana, and by the time they get serious about coke they have a hard time remembering what day it is, much less what kind of ill-considered bets they might or might not have made yesterday.
Consequently—although I won all my bets—I made no money.
The game itself was hopelessly dull—like all the other Super Bowls—and by half time Miami was so clearly in command that I decided to watch the rest of the drill on TV at Cardoso’s Hollywood Classic/Day of the Locust-style apartment behind the Troubadour… but it was impossible to keep a fix on it there, because everybody in the room was so stoned that they kept asking each other things like “How did Miami get the ball? Did we miss a kick? Who’s ahead now? Jesus, how did they get 14 points? How many points is… ah… touchdown?”
Immediately after the game I received an urgent call from my attorney who claimed to be having a terminal drug experience in his private bungalow at the Chateau Marmont… but by the time I got there he had finished the whole jar.
Later, when the big rain started, I got heavily into the gin and read the Sunday papers. On page 39 of California Living magazine I found a hand-lettered ad from the McDonald’s Hamburger Corporation, one of Nixon’s big contributors in the ’72 presidential campaign:
PRESS ON, it said. NOTHING IN THE WORLD CAN TAKE THE PLACE OF PERSISTENCE. TALENT WILL NOT: NOTHING IS MORE COMMON THAN UNSUCCESSFUL MEN WITH TALENT. GENIUS WILL NOT: UNREWARDED GENIUS IS ALMOST A PROVERB. EDUCATION ALONE WILL NOT: THE WORLD IS FULL OF EDUCATED DERELICTS. PERSISTENCE AND DETERMINATION ALONE ARE OMNIPOTENT.
I read it several times before I grasped the full meaning. Then, when it came to me, I called Mankiewicz immediately.
“Keep your own counsel,” he said. “Don’t draw any conclusions from anything you see or hear.”
I hung up and drank some more gin. Then I put a Dolly Parton album on the tape machine and watched the trees outside my balcony getting lashed around in the wind. Around midnight, when the rain stopped I put on my special Miami Beach nightshirt and walked several blocks down La Cienega Boulevard to the Loser’s Club.
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1. Hoover died in the spring of 1972. Figures released later in the year showed that the national crime rate declined for the first time in the last decade.
1. As it turned out, another rabid Redskins fan that year was Richard Nixon, despite his political differences with the management. His unsolicited advice to Coach George Allen resulted in a disastrous interception ending the Redskins’ last hopes for a come-from-behind victory in the 1971 playoffs. They lost—the final score was 24 to 20. Two weeks later Nixon announced he was backing Miami against Dallas in the Super Bowl. This time he went so far as to send in a play which once again backfired disastrously. Miami lost 24 to 3. The Nixon jinx continued to plague the Redskins again in the 1973 Super Bowl, despite quarterback Bill Kilmer’s widely-quoted statement that this time he would just as soon do without the President’s tactical advice. The Redskins were three-point favorites against the Dolphins this time around, but with Nixon on their side they got blown out of the stadium and wound up on the sick end of a deceptively one-sided 14 to 7 defeat.
1. Hersh now denies that this is exactly what he said. “I was mad as hell when I quit the McCarthy campaign,” he explains. “I might have said almost anything.”
2. This shoddy estimate was subjected to sudden and almost universal revision immediately after Truman’s death shortly after the 1972 election. Whether or not this had any direct connection with the recent Nixon landslide is a matter of speculation but facing the prospect of Four More Years in the Nixon/Agnew doldrums, a lot of people suddenly decided that Truman looked pretty good, if only in retrospect.
3. In the summer of 1972 Dallas traded Duane Thomas to the Boston Patriots where he lasted less than a week. The Boston management sent him back to Dallas, citing mysterious “physical problems.” Dallas then traded Thomas to the San Diego Chargers, but that didn’t work either. After a long salary dispute and widespread speculation on the meaning of his increasingly bizarre public behavior, Thomas dropped out of sight and watched the entire 1972 pro football season on TV at his home in Texas.
1. Both the New Hampshire and Florida primaries were scheduled for early March so sometime in late February I left McGovern up in New Hampshire and went down to Florida to check on Muskie and Lindsay. Lindsay had just made a strong showing in the Arizona delegate-selection caucuses, running even with Muskie and beating McGovern almost 2 to 1. All he needed in Florida was 20 percent of the Democratic vote—which seemed entirely possible at the time. A Lindsay “win” in Florida would have changed the race entirely. There were twelve candidates in the primary and in February the wizards were saying that no one of them could hope to poll more than 25 or 30 percent of the vote. Muskie was still a front-runner and George Wallace had only recently decided to enter the race as a Democrat, rather than as an American Independent. McGovern was running out of money and had already decided to cut his losses in Florida and go for broke in Wisconsin several weeks later. So if Lindsay had made a strong showing in Florida—even running second or close third to Muskie—he would probably have crippled McGovern’s image as a candidate of the Democratic Left. When I arrived in Miami, the consensus of the local pols was that the Democratic primary would probably come down to a relatively close race between Muskie and Lindsay, with Humphrey and Wallace splitting the right-wing vote and McGovern grappling for the booby prize with Shirley Chisholm.
2. The Boohoo incident haunted me throughout the campaign. First it got me barred from the Muskie camp, then—when investigations of the Watergate Scandal revealed that Nixon staffers had hired people to systematically sabotage the primary campaigns of almost all the serious Democratic contenders—the ex-Muskie lieutenants cited the Boohoo incident as a prime example of CREEP’s dirty work. Ranking Muskie lieutenants told congressional investigators that Sheridan and I had conspired with Donald Segretti and other unnamed saboteurs to humiliate Muskie in the Florida primary. The accusation came as a welcome flash of humor at a time when I was severely depressed at the prospect of another four years with Nixon. This also reinforced my contempt for the waterheads who ran Big Ed’s campaign like a gang of junkies trying to send a rocket to the moon to check out rumors that the craters were full of smack.
3. Contrary to all predictions and polls except McGovern’s, Muskie finished with less than 50 percent of the vote, pulling roughly 46 percent, while McGovern came in with exactly 37.5 percent, a difference of less than ten points. Muskie never recovered from the pyrrhic victory.
1. I had a talk with Mankiewicz about this shortly after the Wisconsin primary. I don’t recall what town we were in, but it might have been Columbus—or maybe Cleveland. It was sometime after midnight in a ratty hotel room and my memory of the conversation is hazy, due to massive ingestion of booze, fatback, and forty cc’s of adrenochrome. In any case the Bobby Kennedy voice tapes were never used again. By mid-May, however, when it was obvious that Hubert Humphrey was the only remaining obstacle between George and the nomination, there were other Kennedy voices supporting McGovern. The whole clan was actively campaigning for him and even Teddy was saying that he would do everything he could for George except run on the same ticket with him.
2. Actually Muskie’s win in Illinois was not that convincing. As expected, he won a clear majority of the delegates at the state Democratic convention but all it did was give him a breather between his disasters in Florida and Wisconsin.
3. Both Muskie and his wife had been stewing privately for months over a Newsweek story—quoting Women’s Wear Daily—to the effect that Mrs. Muskie drank heavily and told dirty jokes in the press box. Stout insisted, however, that Mrs. Muskie mashed the cake in his face as “a joke.” Others at the party saw it differently: Some took it as a tip-off that Muskie knew it was all over.
4. McGovern scored a clean sweep in Massachusetts, running virtually unopposed. Muskie was on the ballot in that state,
but several weeks before the primary he decided to abandon Massachusetts to McGovern—who would have won easily anyway—and concentrate all of his resources on a last-ditch effort in Pennsylvania. This also failed: He finished in an unimpressive tie with McGovern for third place. Humphrey kept his hopes alive by winning handily in Pennsylvania; Wallace finished a strong second and McGovern’s predictable defeat did little to slow his momentum. His staff wizards had long since decided that there was no hope of winning Pennsylvania anyway so they had assigned it a low priority. For Muskie however it was the spike that sealed the coffin. The day after the Pennsylvania primary vote he announced he was quitting the race.
1. McGovern won. See page 184 for details.
2. At this point in the campaign I was recovering from a severe case of Hutchinson’s disease. For a period of sixteen consecutive days I fed myself intravenously. It was during that period that I completed this comparative analysis of the Ohio and Nebraska primaries.
3. Boyle is no longer the President of the United Mine Workers. He was defeated in a bitterly contested special election in November of 1972 by a reform movement headed by Yablonski’s sons.