Richard Ford - The Sportswriter

Plenty of times I’ve seen writers, famous novelists and essayists, even poets, with names you’d recognize and whose work I admire, drift through these offices on one high-priced assignment or other. I have seen the anxious, weaselly lonely looks in their eyes, seen them sit at the desk we give them in a far cubicle, put their feet up and start at once to talk in loud, jokey, bluff, inviting voices, trying like everything to feel like members of the staff, holding court, acting like good guys, ready to give advice or offer opinions on anything anybody wants to know. In other words, having the time of their lives.

And who could blame them? Writers — all writers — need to belong. Only for real writers, unfortunately, their club is a club with just one member.

The Pigskin Preview boys are at odds over the talents of a big Polack from Iowa State who has speed and heart, versus a venomous-looking black cornerback from a small Baptist college in Georgia, who’s tiger quick and blessed with natural talent. Big cigars wag from clenched fingers. Piles of print-out rap sheets are scattered around. All eyes are on the screen as the black boy — referred to as Tyrone the Murderer — in a blue and orange #19 delivers a blow to a spindly white wide-out that would put most people right onto a respirator. Both players, however, bounce up like toys and Tyrone pats the white boy on the butt as they trot back to their huddles.

“Son of a bitch, The Murderer was on that play,” a junior man from someplace like Williams shouts. “The bastard started late, missed his key, and still delivered like a fucking freight train.” Eddie Frieder, the managing editor, teeth clenching a cigarette, and wearing a Red Sox cap, raises his brows and nods, then goes back to making computations. He’s in charge here, but you’d never know. Agreement ripples among the other younger men, though it’s clear there’s still division. Two men express uneasiness with The Murderer’s friendly pat on the backside. They suspect the pros might translate it into an impure competitive instinct, while others think it’s a mark of good character on The Murderer’s part. “This guy’s no higher than eight in round two,” they seem to agree.

“What do you think, Frank?” Eddie looks up at the door where I’m half-hidden, wanting not to be singled out.

All eyes see me — a smiling, slender, slightly flushed man in a madras shirt and chinos. A couple of young guys put down pencils and stare. I’m not a pigskin prognosticator; Eddie, in fact, knows I don’t even like football, though I’ll probably end up rewriting a lot of what gets done here and putting together a sidebar about The Murderer’s lifelong fear of inheriting his dad’s fatal alcoholism (that can take a notch out of one’s competitive instinct).

“I hear good things about this Hawaiian kid, from Arkansas A&M,” I say. “He runs a four-five and likes contact.”

“Gone already!” four people shout at once. Heads shake. Eyes blink. Everyone returns to his rap sheet. Someone rerolls The Murderer’s murderous tackle, and people scribble, which reminds me again that I have found out nothing in Detroit for use here. “Denver’s got him on a player-to-be-named with Miami. He can’t miss,” Eddie Frieder says officially, then looks at his notes.

“Here’s our next millionaire, Mike,” someone cracks.

“You’re the experts,” I say. “I just got in from Altoona.” I wave to Eddie, then slip away down the row of cubicles to my own.

My desk. My typewriter. My video console. My rolodex. My extra shirt hung on the modular wall. My phone with three lines. My tight window-view into the city’s darkness. My pictures: Paul and Clary under an umbrella and smiling during a Mets’ rain delay. X and Clary wearing Six Flags T-shirts, taken on our front steps six months before our divorce (X looks happy, progressive in spirit). Ralph on a birthday pony in our backyard looking bored. A taped-up glossy of Herb Wallagher in his Detroit helmet, beside another of Herb in a suit of clothes, in his wheelchair on the lawn in Walled Lake. He is smiling in the second, glasses cleaned, hair combed — beatific. In the first he is simply an athlete.

My plan of attack is to write on a legal pad the very first things that come into my head — sentences, phrases, a concept, a balancing word or detail. When I was writing seriously I used to sit for hours over a sentence — usually one I hadn’t written yet, and usually without the first idea of what I was trying to say. (That should’ve been a clue to me.) But the moment I started writing sports, I found out it really didn’t matter that much what the sentence looked like, or even if it made sense, since somebody else — Rhonda Matuzak, for instance — was going to have it the way she liked it before it went into print. I got into the habit of putting down whatever occurred to me, and before long the truth of most things turned out to be waiting just over the edge of worried thought, and eventually I could write with practically no editing at all. If I ever write another short story I’m going to use the same technique; the way I would if I were writing about an American hockey player who becomes a skid-row drunk, rehabilitates himself at AA, scores forty goals and wins the Stanley Cup as the captain and conscience of the Quebec Nordiques.

In the case of Herb Wallagher I write: Possibilities Limited .

I think for a moment, then, about the first trip I ever made to New York. It was 1967. The fall. Mindy Levinson and I drove all night from Ann Arbor in one of my fraternity brother’s cars so I could attend a law school interview at NYU. (There was a brief period when I got out of the Marines, when I wanted more than anything to be a lawyer and work for the FBI.) Mindy and I stayed — as man and wife — in the old Albert Pick on Lexington Avenue, rode the IRT to Greenwich Village, bought a brass wedding ring to make things look legal and spent the rest of our time in bed woogling around in each other’s businesses and watching sports on TV. Early the very next morning I took a taxi to Washington Square and attended my interview. I sat and talked amiably with a studious-looking fellow I’m now sure was only a senior work-study student, but who impressed me as a young and eccentric Constitutional genius. I didn’t know the answers to any of the questions he asked me, nor, in fact, had I ever even thought of anything like the questions he had in mind. Later that day Mindy and I checked out of the hotel, drove across the George Washington Bridge, down the Turnpike and back to Ann Arbor, with me feeling I’d done a better than fair job answering the questions that should’ve been important but weren’t even asked, and that I would end up editing the law review.

Naturally I wasn’t even admitted to NYU, nor to any other of the law schools I applied to. And today I can’t walk through Washington Square without thinking of that time with minor regret and longing. What might’ve happened, is what I usually think. How would life be different? And my feeling is, given the swarming, unforeseeable nature of the world, things could’ve turned out exactly as they have, give or take a couple of small matters: Divorce. Children. Changes in careers. Life in a town like Haddam. In this there is something consoling, though I don’t mind saying there is also something eerie.

I go back again to Herb and write: Herb Wallagher doesn’t play ball anymore .

I think, then, of the people I might possibly call at this hour. 10:45 P.M. I could call Providence again. Possibly X, though activities at her house made me think she is already on her way to the Poconos or elsewhere. I could call Mindy Levinson in New Hampshire. I could call Vicki at her parents’. I could call my mother-in-law in Mission Viejo, where it’s only a quarter till eight, with the sun barely behind Catalina on an Easter ocean. I could call Clarice Wallagher, since it’s possible she’s up late most nights, wondering what’s happened to her life. All of these people would talk to me, I know for a fact. But I am almost certain none of them would particularly want to.