(Not That You Asked) (15 page)

I understood, even as an eight-year-old, that the A’s sometimes lost. What the A’s did
not
do was lose in the clutch. And thus it was clear to me, as I settled in before Game Three, that the A’s were merely pretending to suck. This pattern of “pretend sucking” continued deep into the game, which I was watching (for reasons that escape me) at my grandparents’ house. From time to time, my grandpa would stick his head in the doorway and offer me a mournful glance. He was a forsaken fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers and viewed the garish dominance of the A’s as the inevitable result of my generation’s moral degeneracy.

In the eighth, down two runs, Oakland finally woke from its slumber, putting men on first and third with Joe Rudi coming to the plate. The Sox went to the pen and extracted their closer, a right-hander with the absurd and villainous name Dick Drago. It was perfectly clear to me what would happen next: Rudi would pull a double down the line. I could see the ball’s sweet humming path through the night, the cloud of chalk kicked up along the left field line; I could hear the crowd’s grateful thunder. And then, quite abruptly, the ball was bounding to the shortstop and the Sox were turning a double play and Rudi was hurling his helmet to the ground and something inside me, some very early notion of faith, shattered.

AS AN ADULT,
I have often found myself in the position of having to explain to women with whom I hope to sleep why I take such a maniacal interest in the Oakland A’s. For years, it was my habit to trot out the story of the A’s golden years, how they seduced me—poor depressed child that I was—with those three sensational campaigns. But the origins of my obsession reside in that first massacre at the hands of the Sox. What characterizes the true fan isn’t the easy pleasure of rooting for a winner, but the struggle imposed by loss.

There were, of course, plenty of rational reasons the team lost. Catfish Hunter had defected to the Yanks, the A’s bats had gone dead, and so forth. But the true fan is unmoved by rational analysis, and least of all the mercy implied by disappointment. We live in a kingdom of shame and recrimination. Those who defeat us are to be despised. And those who defeat us before defeat seems possible, who pop the cherry of our omnipotence, become sworn enemies for life.

Was this a healthy psychological posture to assume? I would say no. My father made some effort to explain, in the face of my banshee rage, that flying to Boston and murdering the Red Sox would not actually solve anything. But I had trouble focusing on his lecture, what with my still beating heart torn from my chest.

The next year, the team shipped Fingers and Rudi to Boston. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn (acting on orders transmitted from my still beating heart) voided the deals. But the damage had been done. The franchise went into a swoon that presaged and outlasted my tortuous passage into adolescence. The A’s were now losers, like me. And the Red Sox were to blame.

I MUST HAVE SPENT
a thousand summer afternoons in my room, listening to Bill King narrate the drubbings subsequently endured by the A’s. My weapon of choice was an ancient silver Panasonic weighing at least twenty pounds, with speakers that popped like fat-back. The A’s fan base amounted to shut-ins, the criminally insane, and me. They drew fewer than thirty-eight hundred per game during the 1979 campaign (54–108), and I myself was perhaps the only person on the planet who tuned in to the broadcast of a July laugher that drew, if memory serves, 937 lost souls to the vast concrete bowl known as the Oakland Alameda Coliseum.

Against all reason, I found reasons to root. That season it was the rookie center fielder Dwayne Murphy, who set his cap at a rakish angle atop his Afro, from which perch it would inevitably tumble as he dashed toward the gap to flag down one of the many drives surrendered by the team’s pitching staff. Murphy was a lefty, like me, and a specialist at the drag bunt. I nearly wept the first time I saw him perform this elegant bit of legerdemain. He lowered his bat across the plate and drew it back just before contact. For a moment, he seemed to have caught the ball on the sweet spot, before gently pushing it between the mound and first base. Murphy himself was halfway down the line before anyone discerned the con. The drag bunt struck me as emblematic of those years: a way of improvising something from nothing, turning a gesture of weakness into strength, of locating redemption in the gaps.
³

The next year, Rickey Henderson joined Murphy in the outfield. The adjective
electrifying
is shamefully abused in the sporting arena, but it does apply to the young Henderson. He looked like no other ballplayer alive: short and squat and endowed with a massive, rippled complex of muscles best described as the National Republic of Rickey Henderson’s Thighs. I spent hours studying his batting stance, an osteoporotic crouch in which his legs cocked inward at the knee, creating a strike zone the approximate size of a Chiclet. He walked about 75 percent of his at-bats, and once on base he took over a game.

Henderson’s steals were spectacular for their audacity—everyone knew he was going—and their improbable physics. The mechanics worked like so: About halfway between first and second, Henderson (now moving at the speed of sound) launched himself into a headfirst dive, covering the remaining yardage Superman style, crash-landing on his chest at the same moment his gloved hands hit the edge of the bag, bouncing in such a manner that his body slid across the top of the bag, decelerating by means of the resulting friction, then elegantly hooking the tongues of his cleats along that same front edge to keep from sliding into left field. As a thought experiment, I often speculated how far into left field Henderson would have traveled without this ingenious braking system. My general estimate placed him somewhere around the warning track.

AND WHAT OF
my own derring-do on the diamond? For behind every fan there lives some private history of athletic ignominy. Mine began on the sun-baked ball field of Terman Middle School where, as a shrimpazoid eight-year-old, I showed up with my Reggie Jackson autographed Rawlings for a Saturday afternoon tryout. Along one side of the grass stood the coaches who would draft us, former jocks to a man, with round, scarred knees and beer guts cinched into golf shirts. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Exhibit A: the Little League Meat Market.

Inexplicably, I wound up drafted directly into “the majors,” a league composed of kids up to twelve years old. There should have been some rule forbidding this, a ban, for instance, on boys who still sucked their thumbs. But there wasn’t. Big Jeff Wilkins, coach of Round Table Pizza, decided I was going to be a star, once he could find a pair of pants small enough to fit me.

This dream died rather quickly, thanks to Kathy Schindler, the league’s only female player. Schindler was, to put it delicately, pubescent. She stood nearly six feet, wore two batting gloves, and, on occasion, spat. I was—just a reminder—an eight-year-old who still sucked his thumb. We had no business interacting. The only reason we were forced to interact is because I was playing second base at the precise moment Schindler (having been walked yet again by our terrified pitcher) broke for second.

I took the throw from home in plenty of time, but forgot I had to tag the runner. On came Schindler—blotting out the field of play, the sun, the sky above—and plowed into me, spikes up. The umpire threw his arms out and yelled
Safe
! “You gotta tag her, son,” he murmured to me.

Coach Wilkins came roaring out of the dugout. He was perpetually sunburned, with a neck that belonged in the Fat Neck Hall of Fame.

“Do you understand what just happened?” he said.

“I forgot the tag.”

“Is this a play we went over in practice?”

I nodded.

“And?”

I glanced down at my stirrup socks, puddled idiotically around my cleats. My spit had turned to paste. “I should have remembered.”

“And who was counting on you to remember?”

“You.”

The band of flesh that joined Coach Wilkins’s cheeks to his neck flushed. “No, Almond. Not me.
Your team.
Your team was counting on you.” He gestured grandly to my teammates, who were watching my humiliation with great satisfaction.

“Because what did we say, at the beginning of the season?”

For half a minute, I wandered the small corral of my mind for an answer. But it was all sheep shit up there.

Coach Wilkins glanced toward the stands and tried to shape his massive face into an expression of distress. He was experiencing something like ecstasy. This was one of the few pleasures granted the Little League coach: the right to publicly mock children under the guise of nurturing them. It stood as the sole reward for the hours spent lugging equipment bags, devising lineups, extending advice to children who, frankly, not only would fail as players, but would be lucky to escape major injury in the course of their woeful, stunted careers.

“There is no
I
in ‘team,’” Coach Wilkins said. “Didn’t we say that?”

“I guess,” I said.

“No guess about it!” Wilkins roared. His rage was by now operatic. “There is no
I
in ‘team.’ Spell it out.”

“T-E-A-M.”

“How many
I
’s in that word?”

“None,” I said cautiously.

“You sure? You want to count again?”

I shook my head.

“That’s right,” he said. “None.”

THUS BEGAN MY
inexorable transition from failed jock to full-time jock sniffer, a transition ratified by my decision to apply for an internship as a sports reporter with my hometown newspaper following my sophomore year in college. Soon after, I received a letter on
Peninsula Times Tribune
stationery, informing me I had been hired for $60 per week.

“What do
you
want?” the editor said, when I showed up in June.

“I’m your intern.”

“Already got an intern,” he said.

This was a fair introduction to the world of sports journalism.

There are a good many bitter people on earth—I like to think of myself as one of them—but there are not many people quite so bitter as sports reporters. (Picture a locker room full of dorks. Now picture them tussling over a bag of Cheetos.) As the subintern, I had no desk. My first real assignment was an interview with Billie Jean King.
⁴
By August the editor, tired of tripping over me, dispatched me to cover an A’s game. Why not? Everyone else was on vacation, and the team was awful.

I entered the press box woozy with the honor. A tray of free hot dogs had been set out for us credentialed reporters, but I was too frightened to eat even one. I sat in the back row scribbling notes furiously while the beat reporters discussed how many weeks it would be before the new manager, Tony LaRussa, took his own life.

After the game, I followed the veterans down to LaRussa’s office, where he sat behind his desk, a grown man in a rumpled uniform, muttering glum assessments.

Someone mentioned the bullpen.

LaRussa shrugged. He speculated that his newest relief pitcher—whose disastrous outing had just lost the game—might have arm trouble. (For reasons involving personal safety, specifically mine, I shall refer to this player simply as Pitcher X.)

When LaRussa was done, we were released to the main locker room, and here I found it difficult to concentrate. I was surrounded by naked A’s, many of them my boyhood heroes, all of them much larger than they appeared on TV, their great penises bouncing as they strutted from the showers. Here was Carney Lansford, all-star third baseman, looking oddly bookish in spectacles. The mountainous Dave Kingman, moisturizing all eight feet of himself. And José Canseco, not yet bloated by steroids, a vainglorious rookie attending with much product to his
Tiger Beat
coiffure.
Autographs,
I thought.
I could get so many fucking autographs.

But I was a reporter (remember!) so I hovered with the other supplicants. An elaborate code of rules prevailed in the locker room, developed to inoculate all parties against the inherent homoperversity of the ritual. You didn’t interview a player while he was naked. You didn’t look at their bodies. You waited quietly for them to complete what the French might call their
toilette.
Above all, you did not ask any questions that might offend, which reduced discourse to a safe zone of cliché (
tough loss, just keep battling, 110 percent,
ibid.).

I was unaware of this last restriction, and so I marched up to Pitcher X—thinking it vaguely odd that no other reporters wanted to talk to him—and asked him about the health of his arm.

X’s face (a natively sweet-looking face) twisted. “
What?
”

“Your arm,” I said. “I just wondered—”

“You saying something’s wrong with my arm?”

“No,” I said. “
I’m
not saying that.”

X took a step toward me. “So who’s saying that?”

“The manager,” I stammered.

“Now you talking to the manager about me?”

X took another step toward me. I was obliged to take a step back ward. The other reporters had noticed what was developing and gone silent. A headline briefly flashed before me: