October 1964 (25 page)

In years past the press corps had been remarkably reverential, and the most important sportswriters tended to reflect the views of management as well as to sanitize accounts of tensions that existed on teams. Later there was much talk about the good old days, when the writers and the players had gotten on better, but the truth was that even in the good old days, the players often hated the writers. By the sixties those tensions were steadily exacerbated by a new and very different kind of media approach, one decidedly less reverential toward athletes. Some of that had been obvious during the Maris ordeal, but it was becoming clear that that was no mere fluke. The changes taking place were driven by two distinct forces, first by the coming of television, and second by the rise of an increasingly iconoclastic and eventually confrontational press corps.

The impact of television on the sports scene was already immense. Fifteen years earlier baseball had been a radio game; now it was a television game, and teams played not so much in cities as in markets. The Milwaukee Braves, once enormously successful after their move from Boston, were already completing negotiations to go to Atlanta, where they would have a market all to themselves, instead of sharing the greater Chicago market with two Chicago teams. Television was making the sport ever more an instrument of big-time entertainment, and it was also changing the nature of fame for the players. Because of television, not only were the stars recognizable now, but so were the backup players. Greater celebrity led, almost certainly, to greater ancillary money, all of this gradually undermining the traditional hold of management over ballplayers based on salary. Television was making other sports as popular as baseball, and it was creating a different kind of athlete; within the year the New York Jets, an upstart team in an upstart league (but an upstart league with a network television contract) would sign a quarterback out of Alabama named Joe Namath for more than $400,000 a year, based on the belief of the team’s owner, a former agent and promoter named Sonny Werblin, that Namath had precisely what Roger Maris lacked: star quality. At Namath’s signing there was a press conference befitting the size of the contract. Lou Effrat of the
Times,
one of the more senior sportswriters, asked Namath what would happen if after all this promotion and furor he did not make the grade as a pro quarterback. “I’ll make it,” Namath said quietly and confidently, and there was an immediate sense that Werblin had bet on the right man.

If television was creating the athlete as star, it was also applying pressure on the press corps for a new kind of story. Newspapers were going out of business in the late fifties and the early sixties in New York under the pressure created by the rise of network and local television as a more dramatic and accessible alternative. Not only were a number of tabloids dying, but so was a great paper like the
Herald Tribune.
That meant that the competition among the surviving papers, particularly the surviving tabloids, had become fierce. The
New York Post
was the prototype of an afternoon paper trying to survive in those days. Still liberal, and still trying to get by despite an ever weaker advertising base, it relied heavily on liberal columnists in the front of the paper and boasted an exceptional sports page. Though by the early sixties the great Jimmy Cannon had departed, the paper still had Milton Gross, Maury Allen, and, for a time, all the Leonards (Leonard Shecter, Leonard Lewin, and Leonard Koppett), as well as Vic Ziegel. The
Post
gave its writers a free hand, but it had to, since so few papers in the country paid so poorly. Larry Merchant, summoned from a Philadelphia tabloid to go to work for the
Post,
had to take a pay cut in order to do so. In the past the beat reporters covering such teams as the Yankees had tended to be men in their fifties and their sixties and had held the beat much as Supreme Court justices held their jobs, until death did them part. Now that was changing, spurred by changes in society, and by the harsher demands of more travel and late games on the West Coast, a new generation of younger reporters was taking over. They were called the Chipmunks, a name given them by one of their own heroes, Jimmy Cannon (who was not at all sure that he wanted to be one of their heroes). Cannon had come into the press box one day and had seen them all gathered and, it seemed to him, chirping together. Because one of them had teeth that protruded, he called them the Chipmunks.

The Chipmunks (who liked being called Chipmunks) gloried in the fact that they were part of the new breed. Not only were they younger than their predecessors, they were generally better educated, definitely more iconoclastic, certainly more egocentric, and probably less grateful to be covering the great New York Yankees. Leonard Koppett, a traditionalist who worked for the
Post
and then went to the
Times,
thought that the Chipmunks were different in one additional way: the older writers had written for their readers. The best of them all, Dick Young, was the most irreverent of baseball writers when he was younger, and widely admired by his peers as the best baseball beat writer who ever lived. He was considered brilliant because he had an unerring instinct for exactly what the fans wanted to know each day. By contrast, Koppett thought, the Chipmunks often wrote for each other, admiring each other’s leads and different takes on stories. There were other differences. They did not go to Toots Shor’s and drink with the ballplayers and managers as their predecessors had, which was a major change, one dictated by the endless night games and harder road trips. They often drank wine instead of whiskey. They were more likely to hang out on the road at nightclubs like the hungry I, where Mort Sahl was playing; when they were in New York, they were to be found at the Lion’s Head, a bar in Greenwich Village, where novelists and poets gathered. Nor did they necessarily intend to spend their whole lives covering baseball. The older reporters had regarded their jobs as the best ones on the paper, and they thought of themselves, consciously or unconsciously, as an extension of the team. Once, in a Detroit-Yankee game, Al Kaline of the Tigers made a great running catch to rob Roger Maris of a home run, and the next time up Maris drove the ball much deeper, some four hundred feet into the bullpen, far over Kaline’s head. One of the old guard stood in the press box, shaking his fist at Kaline. “Let’s see you try and catch that, you son of a bitch!” he thundered down at the Detroit right fielder. The Chipmunks looked on with contempt.

The Chipmunks deliberately put distance between themselves and the players. They found Mantle intriguing but difficult, an occasionally brooding, occasionally joyous figure who clearly did not value what they did. Told by the more senior figures how exceptional a man DiMaggio was, they were often puzzled when they found him to be unusually suspicious and uncommunicative. “For a time,” reflected Maury Allen, one of the most talented men of that era, and an early Chipmunk, “I was puzzled because I had heard how wonderful DiMaggio was, and I always found him unpleasant, and for a long time I thought it was my fault, and then gradually I found out that the older writers felt much the same way, but that they were afraid to admit it because it would reflect badly on them.” One of the Chipmunks, Stan Isaacs of
Newsday,
arrived on the field as a young reporter when DiMaggio, by then a coach in spring training, was instructing for the Yankees, and he went over to interview him. DiMaggio seemed irritated by this impertinence, and later Isaacs was told by Joe Trimble, a more senior figure on the
Daily News,
“You don’t just go over and talk to Joe—you wait for him to give you a signal that he’s ready to talk.”

Stan Isaacs, knowing of Ralph Houk’s complete fidelity to the Yankees and their cause, once asked him if he wore the Yankee logo on his pajamas. If a young reporter from a small newspaper came to a postgame interview with Houk and Houk did not like his questions, he would look at the traditionalists and roll his eyes to try to diminish the young man, but Stan Isaacs, Maury Allen, and Leonard Shecter would just repeat the questions. Of Isaacs, it was said that he asked the definitive Chipmunk question after the seventh game of the 1962 World Series. Ralph Terry, the winning pitcher, was being interviewed in the locker room by a bunch of reporters when he took a long-distance phone call. He spoke over the phone for a few minutes and then returned to the reporters. Who called? one of them asked. My wife, he said. What was she doing? the reporter asked. Feeding our baby, he answered. “Breast or bottle?” Isaacs asked.

The first Chipmunks were Isaacs and Leonard Shecter. Shecter started covering the Yankees in 1958; it was a hard assignment at first, and he had felt very much the outsider, isolated by the older reporters, who would not let him in on the stories they shared—such as the fact that George Weiss had put private detectives on his players, and a gumshoe had followed Bobby Richardson and Tony Kubek instead of the carousers. Then, on the train coming back from the game in Kansas City in which they had clinched the pennant, there was a more serious incident: Ryne Duren, the relief pitcher who had been drinking, squashed Ralph Houk’s cigar in his face, and Houk, then a coach and the manager-in-waiting, swatted Duren with the back of his hand, cutting him near the eye with his World Series ring. Shecter had asked the veteran writers what they were going to do with the story, and they said they were not going to do anything with it. By chance he got off the train at the next stop, and in a phone call to his editor, Ike Gellis, he mentioned what happened. Gellis, in turn, mentioned it to Paul Sann, the operative editor of the paper, and the
Post
not only went with the story but greatly overplayed it. The small incident was described as a vast, ugly brawl. (Years later Shecter asked Gellis what he would have done if he had been the reporter on the train, and Gellis answered candidly that he had pondered the same question and decided he would have given it a pass.) That turned Shecter, already an outsider, into something worse: a leper. For much of the rest of that season when he was on the team train, he carried with him the new novel by Jerome Weidman,
The Enemy Camp.
The next year Shecter spent an evening with Jerome Holtzman, the distinguished Chicago sportswriter, and poured out his unhappiness about how much the players hated him and how lonely his assignment was. To Holtzman it was a stunning confession, because while there had always been incidents between players and writers in the past, there was a new and frightening dimension to what Shecter was saying. A few years later, when the Yankees clinched yet another pennant, one of the few players on the team who liked Shecter warned him to stay out of the locker room because some of the Yankee players were out to get him. What had made the isolation bearable, he later told his colleagues, was the fact that he had waited for so long to get a beat. He had been a desk man working inside the paper for more than fifteen years, and every time he asked to go out and cover a story he was told he was too valuable to the paper as a desk man. Now, finally unleashed on a beat, he could bear the loneliness.

It was a volatile time in America, with a dramatically changing consciousness about race and the beginning of an unwinnable war in Vietnam. Many of the Chipmunks not only reflected the greater alienation of young journalists, they were determined to bring the issues of the real world into the closed world of sports. They wanted to know how the baseball players reacted not just to the daily games but to the larger issues being posed by society. They were determined not to do what Red Smith thought his old friend Grantland Rice had done—go around godding up the ballplayers. Their hero was not Rice, the role model to the previous generation, but A. J. Liebling, the famed press critic of
The New Yorker,
who wrote wonderfully about food and boxing, and who railed against those aspects of the press that they themselves were rebelling against. They judged some athletes not just on how they played ball but on how they dealt with social issues, which did not endear them to many of the players.

Gradually, as other young reporters arrived, Shecter felt less isolated. At the 1960 World Series, a group including Larry Merchant, Isaacs, and Shechter got together and pulled a famed Chipmunk stunt. Irritated by a writer named Joe Reichler of the AP, who they thought was the inventor of endless trades that never took place, they decided to invent a trade for him, making it at once both outlandish and yet credible. The Giants always seemed to be on the verge of trading a pitcher named Johnny Antonelli. But to which team and for what player would he be traded? Since the Giants at the time were looking for a manager, what about Yogi Berra for Antonelli, with the idea that Yogi would become the player-manager of the Giants as well? That seemed perfect—it was just ludicrous and improbable enough to be true, the idea of Berra as a manager funny enough to make an ideal prank. So they went their disparate ways putting out the rumor, and though, to their great annoyance, Reichler did not bite, a number of other writers did. Needless to say, floating a false rumor did not please the older writers, and the lines between the generations were drawn that much more sharply.

Jimmy Cannon, whom the Chipmunks admired, was not entirely appreciative of them; he thought they were too noisy and they did not always focus on the subject at hand, which was baseball. Once he came in and found them all talking about football when below them a baseball game was unfolding. He was very disturbed about their transgression: “Baseball, gentlemen! Baseball!” Cannon was considered a talented writer, and a very funny man, and it was he who had said of Howard Cosell that if he were a sport he would be a roller derby. Hearing that the summer house of one colleague, Gene Ward, whom he did not consider a very good writer, had burned down and that arson was suspected, Cannon muttered, “Probably a professor of English.” Yet those were not easy days for Cannon; he had given up drinking and was fighting terrible loneliness. He was not as close to the younger athletes as he had been with those like DiMaggio. As one of the most elegant writers in sports, he seemed to suffer from the fact that in 1956 the Pulitzer Prize had been bestowed upon Arthur Daley of
The New York Times,
widely regarded by his colleagues as an affable man but perhaps the most pedestrian writer of the period. Cannon was wont, late at night, to slip into prolonged soliloquies on the injustice of Arthur Daley’s winning the Pulitzer Prize. “It was stealing,” he would say.