Entrapment and Other Writings

  Jackson couldn’t read or write, but his wife protected him. When Grabiner assured her that the contract he offered guaranteed Jackson $9,000 a season for three seasons, she wanted to know whether it contained a ten-day clause: the clause that entitled an owner to fire a player with ten days of notice. This protected the owner from having to support a player who’d been seriously injured. It didn’t do much for the player. Grabiner assured her his contract contained no such clause; but he did not show it to her.

  Instead he maneuvered Jackson out of the house, put the contract up against the house’s wall, and handed Jackson a pen.

  Jackson signed. The contract contained a ten-day clause.

  I traded Jake three Heinie Grohs for one Buck Weaver. Weaver was the third baseman whom sportswriters had nicknamed “Error-a-Day Weaver” when he’d first come to the White Sox from Pennsylvania mining country. His hitting was as weak as his fielding.

  Kid Gleason, Comiskey’s manager, had made a .300 hitter of Weaver by switching him at the plate. He had developed him into the finest-fielding third baseman in either league.

  Buck Weaver had a habit of grinning while inching up on a batter, which so unnerved Ty Cobb that he refused to bunt against Weaver. Weaver was a joyous boy, all heart and hard-trying, who guarded the spiked sand around third like a territorial animal.

  He was one of eight players who met with the gamblers. Then he dropped out of the conspiracy. His only guilt was that he possessed guilty knowledge. At the trial he was denied the right to take the stand and defend himself.

  He took no money. Nonetheless, he was banned from professional baseball by Landis, an enraptured Puritan. The judge’s statement read:

  “Regardless of the verdict of juries, no player who throws a ball game, no player that promises to throw a ball game, no player who sits in conference with a bunch of crooked gamblers discussing ways and means of throwing a ball game, and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever play professional baseball.”

  Weaver was the sort of man who could wear a pitcher down by fouling pitch after pitch until the pitcher blew sky high; but he was not the kind of man who would inform. He was outlawed because he did not.

  “Landis wanted me to tell him something I didn’t know,” he explained to Jim Farrell in his last interview, in 1954. “I didn’t have any evidence. A murderer,” he added, “serves his sentence and is let out. I got life. I never threw a ball game in my life. All I knew was win. That’s all I know.”

  Fourteen thousand fans signed a petition requesting that Weaver be reinstated.

  Year after year, long after his playing days had passed, Buck Weaver tried for reinstatement, to prove his honesty. Year after year his petitions were turned down.

  He wound up coaching a girl’s softball team, and died of a heart attack on the street, in 1956, on Chicago’s South Side.

  Arnold Rothstein, a multimillionaire gambler who never gambled on anything until the fix was in, walked into the Green Room of the Ansonia Hotel, in New York City, a few minutes before the opening game of the 1919 Series began in Cincinnati.

  Tokens, representing the players, would be moved, by telegraphic report, on the big green diamond-shaped chart suspended on the wall. The chairs were all filled. Rothstein didn’t care. He had no intention of watching the full nine innings anyhow. Arnold didn’t care for the game.

  He had left his instruction—indirectly—to Cicotte: “If you hit the first man up, in the first inning, with a pitched ball, I’ll know the fix is in.” Cicotte had found $10,000 beneath his pillow the night before, in the Sinton Hotel in Cincinnati.

  Cicotte’s first pitch was a called strike right across the plate. His second hit Rath between the shoulder blades. Before Rath had reached first base, Rothstein had left the hotel on his way to do some heavy betting against the White Sox. His betting would not be on individual games, but on the Series. He was not a man to take chances.

  It was a 1–1 ball game until the fourth inning. Then, fielding an easy grounder off the bat of Larry Kopf, with a man on first, Cicotte turned too slowly and threw too high to Risberg on second, so that Kopf was safe at first. Greasy Neale singled, and Ivy Wingo did the same, scoring Kopf. Then Cicotte fed a ball to Dutch Ruether, a weak hitter, that Ruether smashed for three bases, bringing in Neale and Wingo. Final score: Reds 9, White Sox 1.

  The brightest cookie on the White Sox pitching staff was Lefty Williams. He was a Southerner, in his mid-twenties, who kept mental book on every player in the league. He’d won twenty-three games for Comiskey in 1919. He pitched with great deliberation, studying his man head to toe before every throw. He could cut the outside corner at the knees or break a curve below a batter’s chin. He’d often complete a ball game without giving a single walk.

  With the score 0–0 in the fourth inning of the second game, Rath got a base on balls off him and got into scoring position on a sacrifice bunt. Groh walked and Roush singled to center; Rath scored and Groh slid safely into third. Williams gave Duncan a base on balls and Kopf slammed a triple into deep left. Final score: Reds 4, White Sox 2.

  The players had been assured, before the Series began, that they would have $100,000 to divide among themselves if they went along with the gamblers. Cicotte had been paid $10,000, Jackson $5,000, and Williams $5,000 by the time the third game was to be played.

  An ex-pitcher named Burns, acting as go-between between gamblers and players, distributing Rothstein money, asked one Abe Attell for the balance. Attell, at the moment, was preoccupied, with two other gamblers, in counting and packaging their winnings off the first two games. Every corner and crevice of the room was stacked with greenbacks. Attell flat refused to pay off the players.

  Burns became so enraged he started to go for Attell, who’d been featherweight champion of the world. The two assistants stepped between, spoke urgently to Attell, until he finally handed $10,000 to Burns and said, “That’s enough for them bums—that’s all they get.”

  Burns, now awestruck by Attell’s demonstration of consummate stupidity combined with unlimited arrogance, picked up the money. He had to wonder how in God’s name he was going to explain to the players. Not to mention how he was going to get his own cut. “Tell them bums to win the third game,” Attell called after him. “It’ll be better for the odds.”

  Were the players scapegoats? That’s putting it too lightly. Worse, far worse. They were as solid a group of horse’s asses as were ever tricked into playing crooked in any sport on earth.

  With a single exception: Weaver.

  Weaver sat in on the first session with the gamblers, with seven other players, and made the only decision, later, that made good common sense:

  “Take everything they offer us. Then we go out and whip Cincinnati four straight. What do we care about them? As much as they care about us.”

  He batted .324 for the Series and played errorlessly.

  James T. Farrell, who saw Dick Kerr pitch the third game, describes Kerr as “small and frail.” Because of his lack of height and heft, Kerr was twenty-six before he got into the majors. He’d won thirteen in his rookie season of 1919 and had lost seven.

  The feeling of the players behind him was that, if they couldn’t win behind veterans like Cicotte and Williams, why give support to a busher?

  Kerr didn’t require their support. The Reds could hit nothing off him but feeble infield grounders. “His curve ball dropped, that day, with startling suddenness,” Eliot Asinof assures us, “all his pitches had eyes. Perfectly placed, perfectly timed.” Everything that Schalk asked for, he delivered. Final score: White Sox 3, Reds 0.

  Roush came to bat in the fifth inning of the fourth game, with the score 0–0, and tapped a slow grounder to Cicotte, who knocked it down, then threw wildly to Gandil, who let it get away. The runner went to second. Kopf lined a single to left and Jackson rifled a perfect throw to the plate that didn’t get there. Cicotte got a glove in its way and deflected it. Two runs, two hits, two errors by the pitcher. Final
score: Reds 2, White Sox 0.

  Again, in the sixth inning of the fifth game, neither side had scored. Eller popped a fly ball between Jackson and Felsch, and Felsch picked it up but threw badly to Risberg, who let the ball roll away from him. Final score: Reds 5, White Sox 0.

  The players had finally caught on that they were being played for a group of idiots. Risberg and Gandil had waited, together, for one Sport Sullivan, also handling Rothstein money; but Sullivan had not shown up. He was using Rothstein money to make his own bets.

  Nothing was said between the players, but all understood that the fix was off. After the Reds had scored four runs, in the sixth game, Jackson slashed a single to center; Felsch followed with a hit on which Jackson scored from first. Schalk drove a single to left scoring Felsch. With the score tied 4–4 in the tenth inning, Weaver opened with a double, Jackson advanced him to third with a single, and Gandil singled, bringing in Weaver. Final score: White Sox 5, Reds 4.

  The White Sox got a run in the first inning of the seventh game, another in the third, and the Reds began making errors. In the fifth inning Jackson crashed a hard double to left, scoring two men. Final score, Cicotte pitching: White Sox 4, Reds 1.

  To Arnold Rothstein, any man of talent who worked for peanuts was a dumb brute. He didn’t like dealing with dumb brutes. Now, with the games standing 4–3 and the White Sox playing like themselves, he became genuinely frightened.* He’d bet over $100,000 on the Series, and Rothstein did not lose lightly.

  The fix, apparently, had come unglued. He called in Sport Sullivan.

  Their talk was quiet. Rothstein revealed neither anger nor anxiety. He was, in fact, cordial.

  It wasn’t until after he had left that the full impact of what Rothstein had been saying struck Sullivan: if the White Sox won the Series, Sullivan could not live.

  Sullivan suppressed his inner panic and phoned the number of The Man in the Bowler Hat in Chicago.

  The Bowler Hat’s trade was murder.

  “Does Williams have children?” he asked Sullivan. No. “Is he married?” Yes.

  “Good enough. Send five hundred. Will make contact upon receipt.”

  Lefty Williams and his wife were confronted, the evening before the eighth game, in the entrance to their hotel, by a man in a bowler hat. He was smoking a cigar and asked for a private conversation. Mrs. Williams excused herself.

  She did not know, and may never have known, that the conversation centered on her.

  When the man in the hat informed Williams that he was to lose, the following day, Williams turned away. An iron grip on his shoulder turned him back.

  It was no longer a question of money, the Hat assured Williams. It was a matter of his wife. She could get hurt. She could get hurt bad.

  Williams stood enraged, wanting to strike out. Yet he was afraid. He was deadly afraid of this Hat.

  Not only was he going to lose, The Hat told Williams, but he was going to lose in the first inning. Or else.

  Then he walked away.

  Williams put his first pitch over for a strike, the next afternoon, on the Reds’ lead-off man, Rath. Rath took a cut at his second pitch and fouled it. Then he popped out to Risberg.

  Daubert, the second batter, singled. Williams put two strikes across on Groh; then Groh singled sharply to right.

  Edd Roush, the Reds’ heaviest hitter, came into the batter’s box. Gleason signaled to the bench for James and Wilkinson to start warming up. Schalk walked out to the mound to talk to Williams.

  Roush smashed Williams’s first pitch to right, Daubert scored easily, and Groh stopped at third. Schalk was now bellowing at Williams and shaking his fist.

  Christy Mathewson, in the press box, observed to a sportswriter that, so far, Williams had thrown nothing except fast balls.

  Duncan, following Roush at the plate, sent a screaming foul into the left-field seats. Williams’s next pitch went high and wide of the plate. Schalk had to leap desperately to prevent a wild pitch. Duncan then singled to left, Groh and Duncan scoring easily.

  Gleason shouted something at Williams, but Williams ignored him. He threw hard to Kopf for a strike. “Nothing but fast balls,” Mathewson repeated.

  Gleason called to Bill James to replace Williams. James let in one more run. The Reds had gotten four hits, on fifteen pitches by Williams, and three runs.

  In the eighth, with the score 10–1 against them, the Sox put on a four-run rally.

  Final score: Reds 10, White Sox 5.

  So long, Swede Risberg.

  No rumors of the fix had yet reached us by midsummer of 1920. The White Sox were still white. Swede Risberg was still my favorite player. I began to walk pigeon-toed because Risberg was pigeon-toed. I did this for a full year before my mother asked me why I was walking “like that.” I couldn’t explain. I still walk like that.

  Chicago, New York, and Cleveland were in a triple tie for first place in August of 1920, when the Yankees came to town. Neither Jake Somerhaus nor I had ever seen a major-league ball game. We rode the el out to Comiskey Park to see Cicotte pitch against Babe Ruth. Carl Mays, the submarine-ball pitcher, was going for New York.

  By the time we got there, that Sunday morning, bleacher seats had been sold out two hours before game time. A crowd, predominantly black, was milling around the bleacher walls, which were still of wood.

  We followed a throng onto a rooftop a block from the park, and saw the first half of the first inning, in which Cicotte struck out Ruth. We also saw that the cops were beginning to have trouble with the mob pressing the bleacher walls. They were riding here and there, striking blindly at heads, but fans were already beginning to clamber over the walls. We headed for them; by the time we got there it was a small-scale riot. Somebody gave me a boost and over the wall I went into the park.

  I didn’t run. I joined the fans sitting on the grass behind the left fielder.

  Some left fielder.

  He was Shoeless Joe Jackson.

  I saw him.

  I was almost close enough to touch him.

  He hit over .400, had the greatest throwing arm in baseball, and he could run. What’s so important about learning to read and write after that?

  In later years I saw Grover Cleveland Alexander and Jack Johnson in Hubert’s Museum. But that was after they had had their day. This was the living man in his prime. I’ll never see his like again.

  In the seventh inning, Cicotte struck out Ruth again and shut the Yankees out, 3–0.

  Our love of the game was not shaken by the exposure that followed. But we stopped pitching baseball cards and took to shooting dice. The men whose pictures we had cherished were no longer gods.

  Jake Somerhaus went to the University of Wisconsin on a scholarship and pitched winning ball there for four seasons. He never grew heavy enough, however, to make the majors.

  Once I was walking with a young woman, who turned to me and said, “You’re favoring your leg. Does it hurt?”

  “It’s an old injury,” I said.

  “How did it happen?”

  “A big Swede hurt it when I was a kid.” I invented a story to gain sympathy—“The Swede was a hard guy.”

  * After World War One, America was so baseball wild that the commissioner, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, agreed to extend the World Series from a best-of-seven to a best-of-nine contest. In 1922, the game went back to a seven-game Series.

  Interview

  This collection concludes with a 1957 interview conducted by Robert A. Perlongo. As the best mid-1950s conversation with Nelson Algren (aside from the readily available Paris Review interview of 1955), this selection opens a small window on Algren’s thoughts about the writer’s job as he saw it—“to accuse, to play the wasp”—the sort of people about whom he writes, literary critics, the church (“the church does gently what the police do roughly”), and America as it appeared in the pages of Life magazine. The interview thus helps readers understand Algren’s state of mind as he wrestled with Entrapment and paid the rent with
work for magazines.

  INTERVIEW WITH NELSON ALGREN

  The interview took place Thursday, April 4, 1957, in Champaign, Illinois.

  INT: Do you agree with most critics that The Man with the Golden Arm is your best work?

  ALG: I suppose I do; though, in lots of ways, the new one [A Walk on the Wild Side] has more vitality.

  Would you change anything in The Man with the Golden Arm if you could rewrite it?

  Certain things. For one thing, I wouldn’t have had Frankie Machine commit suicide. A more tragic ending would have been for him to go into isolation—cut himself off from people—as many addicts do.

  What did you think of the movie version of your book?

  The book, after all, was a tragedy. There is no easy solution to the problems I wrote about. I didn’t recognize any of the people in the movie as the people I had in the book. The names were the same, but that was all. That ending was just ridiculous, though. But then, I wrote the book before I saw Kim Novak. Who knows?

  What did you think of the way they had Frankie Machine kick the habit?

  You mean that business where Kim Novak goes around gathering up all the silverware?

  Yes, that part.

  You know, when an addict’s sick like that, he becomes almost totally helpless. He couldn’t hurt anybody even if he wanted to. It’s hard work for a guy like that just to tie his shoelaces. Yet they gave the impression that a sick addict becomes some sort of raving, foaming-at-the-mouth monster.

  Do you think there’s been anything lately, in the movies or on the stage, that treats narcoticism in a true manner?

  There certainly hasn’t been much. Jack Kirkland, I thought, did a nice job with the play version of my book. But the play didn’t make it. The movie made all the dough.