Two years after wearing my cowboy getup to school, I donned an outfit of a different sort. It was a Saturday morning in September, and I was getting ready for my first organized athletic event: a grade-school football league game. First I pulled shoulder pads over my undershirt; then I put on my number 15 blue and white football shirt; then my football pants with knee pads; then my sneakers; then my football helmet. Looking in the mirror, I could hardly find myself in all that armor.
I was a nervous fifth grader. Most of the players would be sixth graders, so I did not protest when my mother offered to go with me. We walked down George to the dead end and along the dirt path to the park. The field was swarming with kids from the six public grade schools in town, and none of them looked like me. No helmets, no shoulder pads—just T-shirts and jeans (which we called dungarees). The only thing we had in common was sneakers.
What had I expected? I had known this was two-hand touch football.
I was mortified. I dared not approach my team, Hartranft Elementary. My mother and I stood at a distance, watching the game in awkward silence. I prayed no one would recognize me.
Officially, then, my athletic career began a week later, when I arrived dressed like everybody else, and without a mother in tow.
My cowboy boots, spurs still attached, grew dusty on the floor of my bedroom closet. The twin white holsters and golden guns hung over one of the maple posts at the foot of my bed. As the years went by, the red toy bullets disappeared one by one, until only empty ammo loops were left.
I had given up cowboys for quarterbacks, horses for stitched horsehide. No longer were my seasons summer, fall, winter, and spring but baseball, football, and basketball. I was a sports nut.
Sports had taken their hold on me, even at age 6. I’m getting the autograph of Gil Dodds, a mile-run champion (and minister).
Perhaps it was inevitable. Not long after I belted my last ball over the landlady’s fence on Marshall Street, my father had begun taking me to Norristown High School games, basketball at first, then football and track and field. He was a ticket collector for football games, scorekeeper for basketball, and would hold those jobs for over fifty years. The world of sports had simply been waiting for me to grow into it.
We took our sports seriously, my friends and I, getting up games to fill every spare moment. Lunchtime at school, for example. We had an hour and a half, as I recall, since Hartranft had no cafeteria and all students went home to eat. I ran the three blocks to my house, wolfed down my lunch, and ran back, leaving me with an hour and fifteen minutes to play basketball on the playground. It’s a wonder the teacher didn’t pass out deodorant when afternoon lessons began.
We played wherever we could: alleys, streets, playgrounds, the park, even living rooms. But there was one special place. My old friend Roger Adelman, in a letter to me, describes it perfectly:
“This field was unique. We played baseball there, but it really wasn’t set up for baseball. There wasn’t a right field, since what would have been right field was occupied by the stand of spear weeds which, for some mystic reason, no one would (or could) cut down (although it was burned down several times by Bill Zollers, the neighborhood firebug). So all players had to bat right-handed—or promise not to pull the ball to right field. The outfield—left and center—was full of weeds and rough spots but was playable. The infield was in good shape because Johnny Rizzuto and I mowed the grass regularly. We also marked the foul lines with white ashes from the coal-burning furnaces in our houses.
“Left field was a special place. The boundary of deep left field was the dump. If you hit one into the dump in the air, you got a home run. If the ball took one bounce into the dump, you got a double. If it rolled in, you got a single. Only qualified players were assigned to left field: fast enough to stop those bouncers and rollers from going into the dump, brave enough to run right up to the edge of the dump and snag a liner headed into it (I have a memory of Pickles Noblett taking a header into the dump after a valiant try to stop a home run), and daring enough to go down into the dump to dig out a ball that ended up there. The dump had its own mystique—not to mention rats—and I am sure that, to this day, there are still a few hardballs there.”
I envied my playmates their nicknames. Besides Pickles Noblett, there were Boogie Batson, Yock Doyle, Booper O’Hara, and Buffalo Morris. My own nickname was Spit—their choice, not mine.
For my money, the best player of all was Jerry Fox. He was several years older than I, and a dead-end legend. He was not very fast, but he did not have to be, for he was magically elusive. This talent came most prominently into play in street football. Sometimes he would just stand there, the ball cradled in his arm, one foot on the bumper of a parked car, daring us to tag him. We reached for his arm—it was gone; for his stomach—gone. Each body part was under separate control, free to move in all directions. It was like trying to tag an eel. If Jerry Fox were a letter of the alphabet, he would have been an S. He was untouchable. His nickname said it all: “The Pro.”
Summers gave us time to gorge on sports. On a typical summer day I dropped my baseball glove into the chrome-plated basket of my bicycle and pedaled out the dirt path to the Little League field at the park. Other guys came from other directions. The rest of the day went like this: Play baseball until lunch, pedal home to eat, pedal back to the park (this time with basketball in bike basket), play basketball at park court until dinner, pedal home to eat, return for more basketball until dark.
Next day: Do it again.
I’m in the back row (with a cap), a finalist in a foul-shooting contest in the park (age 12, 1953). On my right is Dennis Magee, whose last name I gave to a character called Maniac.