Ball Four (RosettaBooks Sports Classics) (57 page)

When it came time to pitch I almost forgot who I really was. The scouts were getting excited by the fact that I had excellent control over six pitches including a knuckleball. My undoing came when they called me over for another look. “You’ve got surprisingly good stuff for a young kid, Lawson,” they said. “What year were you born?” I knew I was supposed to be twenty-one but I hadn’t memorized the year of my birth. Not being able to subtract quickly under pressure I blurted out the first date that came to my mind and seemed reasonable. 1961. This indicated I was twelve years old.

After WABC let me go I worked for WCBS from 1973 to 1975 and again briefly in 1979. There I had the privilege of working with top newsmen like Jim Jensen, Rolland Smith, and Dave Marash, who’s now with Geraldo over on ABC’s 20/20.

I also had a lot of respect for our intrepid consumer reporter John Stossel who exposed rip-offs in the marketplace. I particularly remember one of John’s rip-off stories that never got on the air. John was doing an exposé on the fast food industry and one Sunday he bought a pizza for $400. The reason it cost $400 was not because of restaurant business practices but because of television labor practices. John needed a pizza for a prop but because of union rules he couldn’t get it himself. A set decorator had to get it. Then a prop man had to hold it. Then a stagehand had to give it to him. By the time they figured out the overtime and holiday pay, it came to something like $400. Of course, if John had tried to expose the cost of the television pizza he might have had to finish his story in a suddenly darkened newsroom.

In my six years as a sportscaster I discovered a few things about television news. I learned that the integrity of the programs comes basically from the reporters. They have to battle constantly to cover stories of substance, against management’s impulse to go for sensation and high ratings. I remember when Stossel was offered a job by a competing station, he asked how much his researchers would be paid. “Researchers?” asked the station manager. “What do you need them for?”

In television, the news tends to be whatever happens that’s visual in the vicinity of the station when a camera crew is available. If a senator or a congressman dies, it might rate 30 seconds on the news. But if a camera crew happens to catch some anonymous person jumping off the World Trade Center, you’ll see all 110 floors plus the splat for at least two minutes worth.

Controversy is also a big seller, although when it involves a local team it can put the station management in a bind. How can you have controversy yet maintain good relations with the teams? Usually, they try to do both.

Take the Thurman Munson incident a few years ago. I was covering spring training for WCBS in New York and an interview with the Yankee captain seemed logical. When Munson brushed me off, I couldn’t tell if it was me, my book (which was then eight years old), or the fact that he didn’t like reporters. Players and teams will often resort to this form of censorship: “You will say or write what we like or we won’t cooperate with you.” (One year the Yankees barred me from spring training so I did an interview with my old roommate Fritz Peterson through a wire fence.)

On the grounds that a professional athlete has some obligation to cooperate with reporters who speak for the fans who pay the salaries, I thought Munson should have to explain himself. When I approached him a second time with the cameras rolling, Munson grabbed the microphone and suggested I perform a physical impossibility. If Munson’s response had been out of character I would not have allowed it to go on the air. In fact, it was rare television: A ballplayer had been caught in the act of being himself.

The station’s response to all this was very interesting. The first thing they did was privately apologize to Munson and the Yankees. The second thing they did was to send the piece out on the network feed. This confirms Newton’s (or somebody’s) Law that every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

Several months later, however, the station had no ambivalence about how to handle Munson’s untimely death. They embraced it with a fervor reserved for heads of state. In fact there seemed to be a contest among the media to see who could out-eulogize the other. The
New York Post
won the newspaper competition (single day) by promoting Munson death stories on pages 1, 4, 5, 21, 66, 67, 70, 71, and 72.

When I heard of Munson’s death, I got a sick feeling in my stomach. Besides the fact that no one likes to hear of someone’s death, I was particularly uncomfortable because our only meeting had been unpleasant and I wished it had been otherwise. I said this on the air and talked about what a great hustling ballplayer Munson had been. Although I said nothing negative, I couldn’t bring myself to say things about Thurman Munson the man that I didn’t believe were true.

Because I didn’t weep openly for Munson as some of my colleagues in the media were doing, I was considered disrespectful by the WCBS management. I told the news director that, aside from my differences with Munson, I objected to indiscriminate hero-making. To which he replied, “So what’s wrong with doing that?” All I could think of to say at the time was that it was dishonest.

But beyond that there is an even greater danger in the deification of athletes who are ordinary men aside from their ability to star on a ballfield. And it is this: It diminishes that which is truly valuable. Contrast the media’s handling of the Munson death with the way they cover the death of someone like Margaret Mead, say, or a Nobel Prize winner and you get an idea of how the media tells us what’s important.

That spring and summer of ’79 I wasn’t happy with WCBS and they weren’t happy with me. I was in the middle of the aftershock of the breakup of my marriage and the pain of dealing with the kids. My disorientation showed on the air. The light touch I used to have was missing too much of the time. Things I used to laugh about in the past now frustrated me, like when I’d be doing the ball scores and they’d flash up a picture of Golda Meir.

And they tried to save money on the damnedest things. There weren’t enough tape machines to edit all the news stories and the promos, so they’d sacrifice the news. Then there was the great typewriter shortage. Every day there would be eight to ten broken typewriters lined up waiting to be fixed, and everybody had to scramble for the few that worked. Producer John Reilly said they should have a fulltime repairman sleeping on a cot in the newsroom. They probably didn’t want to spend for the cot.

I prefer to remember the old days at WCBS when General Manager Tom Leahy and News Director Ed Joyce ran a really professional operation that also happened to get the highest ratings. Sad to say, Leahy and Joyce are no longer there, having been replaced by two guys from out of town, which seems to be the latest trend in New York television. Stations are hiring anybody who’s not a New Yorker. Even the reporters, who ought to know the city, are being imported from places like Texas and Ohio. An assignment editor will tell a reporter to hurry out and cover a fire in the Bronx and two minutes later the reporter will come running back into the newsroom screaming, “Where’s the Bronx?”

Maybe out-of-town news directors figure they’ll get less lip from reporters who don’t know enough to argue about which stories they should cover. Or the news could be getting like baseball, where players on another team’s roster always look better than your own.

I remember when stations used to groom their own talent. Before they became television reporters, Geraldo Rivera was a lawyer for the Young Lords and Melba Tolliver was a nurse. They would be the first to admit that, beyond a halfway decent face and an inquiring mind, television doesn’t require much skill. Before my first night on the air I was told by the News Director to come in a day early to get some practice. But when I showed up, a story was breaking and instead of practicing I had to go cover it. I protested that I didn’t even know how to hold a microphone. “Don’t worry about a thing,” they told me. “Just make sure the station logo is facing the camera.”

Being on television led to some wonderful opportunities. Possibly because of my expertise at handling microphones, I was elected as a delegate to the Democratic Convention in 1972 in Miami. I was vice chairman of the New Jersey delegation, which meant that I was in charge of going out for cheeseburgers during the floor debates. You may have seen me on television at four o’clock in the morning announcing that the great and sovereign state of New Jersey, boycotter of non-union lettuce, was casting its votes for George McGovern.

And I got to meet a lot of interesting people. Like Elliott Gould. He called me one time at three o’clock in the morning to tell me I was going to be in a movie with him called
The Long Goodbye
, directed by Robert Altman and I should catch the next plane to California. As a method of being discovered it sure beats sitting at a drug store soda fountain in a tight-fitting sweater.

My audition consisted of shaking hands with Altman at the airport. He took one look at me and said I would be perfect for the part of a playboy killer. I didn’t know whether to take that as a compliment or not. Altman must be a great judge of talent because Vincent Canby of
The New York Times
said I was “excellent.” The entire movie got good reviews. Elliott Gould is such a good actor that in the middle of our first scene together he was being so natural I asked if the cameras were rolling. The answer was yes.

It’s true what they say about Altman being easy to work with. He told me not to worry about the script, I could say anything that came to mind, as long as I said the few lines that were necessary to carry the story along. Still, out of fear, I had memorized the script. I think Elliott knew this and decided to have some fun with me. Just before they rolled the cameras for my first scene he came over and asked, very seriously, “Did you get the script changes?”

THE SITCOM

And then there was that sitcom adventure I mentioned earlier, with my co-creators Marvin Kitman and Vic Ziegel. I spent a year-and-a-half working on that project and my sides still hurt from laughing so much. Not at the scripts, of course, but at the whole process of making a prime time network television show.

In the spring of 1975 Marvin and Vic and I submitted an idea to the CBS network for a half-hour situation comedy based on
Ball Four
. We had written an 89-page proposal (called a “treatment”) which described the show, sketched a few characters, and outlined possible episodes. First we listed a few disadvantages to our idea: It contained no lawyers, doctors, policewomen, or animals. Then we listed all the advantages: A locker room is a freewheeling place where anything goes, offering more flexibility than a living room or a class room. It’s like an army barracks where people expect put-down humor, ethnic jokes, gross sarcasm, and insults. The partial nudity and male cheesecake potential should attract a large female audience. Players from every ethnic group, economic level, and educational background are thrown together naturally in an occupation which causes constant tension. And, the best part of all, if an actor demands a bigger contract, he can simply be traded.

We figured CBS would buy our idea and when the show became a big hit we’d get royalty checks for the rest of our lives. Instead, the CBS programming executives told us they would buy our idea only if we wrote the pilot script. We protested that we’d never written a script before, we were just creators. We wanted them to go out and hire professionals who really knew how to write scripts. They told us we could probably write a script as well as most people in television. Unfortunately, they were right.

Because we were new at script writing, they explained the rules. Every story has to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, they said. “And a tag,” said Marvin, the television critic. There has to be a problem which gets stated in the first 30 seconds (so the viewer gets absorbed before he switches the channel). Then the hero (there has to be a hero) solves the problem after a climax which must have a happy ending (because viewers don’t like sad endings). “All day long they lose,” said a network vice president, “and when they watch television they want to win.”

Scriptwriting is not easy. The story line, the character development, and the jokes all have to come out of somebody’s mouth. In spite of our inexperience the three of us wrote a “wonderful” script. “We love it,” the network executives said. “It just needs a little rewrite.” It turned out they “loved” our script so much we only had to change 98 percent of it.

In television land no script is ever good enough the first time. Or the second, third, or fourth time. The script always needs “a little rewrite.” This process continues until you run out of time. I remember that even the night they shot the pilot they wanted us to change one more line. We said that since it was the only line that remained from the original script, we wanted to leave it in for sentimental reasons.

It’s hard to get upset by this process, because the programming executives are always so nice about it. You’re on their team and they’re rooting very hard for you. And they do the same thing to every writer. Television executives would want to rewrite
Gone With The Wind
. If they had
The Old Man and The Sea
, they’d say to the author, “Ernie, we love it. But the part about the fish is boring. And the man is too old. He should have a girlfriend.”

The writing is crucial since “if it ain’t on the page, it ain’t on the stage,” as they say. The problem with the writing is that there are half a dozen executives supervising the project and a line that one executive likes, another one won’t. They always pop their heads in from time to time to see how you’re coming. It’s like writing by committee, and the committee is out to lunch.

Writing sessions consist of a bunch of fairly funny men sitting around bouncing lines off one another—very few of which may actually be usable in the script. The funniest guy in our group was sportswriter Vic Ziegel. Unfortunately, all his hilarious lines had to do with things like the wallpaper or ordering lunch.