The Sports Illustrated cover that was one of the dozens I tacked to my basement bedroom wall. The date of the issue was September 25, 1967, my 11th birthday.
On Friday I wrote about Michael Farber’s foreword for my sportswriting memoir which will land next fall, thanks to the folks at ECW. (Working title: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Hockey Scribe.) Hopefully I’ll be around to read it. If that sounds at all dark, well, it was that kind of week.
The matter of mortality popped up because I’ve been editing the aforementioned lifestory and twisting myself into knots with rewrites of the opening chapter.
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The conventional wisdom in publishing holds that the first five pages of a book either hooks readers or leaves them cold—in the latter case, they never make it to page 6, never mind to the tome’s end. I haven’t seen the data on that, but I have every reason to believe it’s true. If the first-five-pages rule wouldn’t have undermined Hemingway’s confidence, it would have only been on account of a multi-book deal in hand and hard liquor.
Even with a book deal in hand, my happy situation with A Portrait, a compelling opening is still a concern. The fact that the sample provided to online sellers (i.e., Amazon, Apple’s bookstore, Kindle) inevitably draws on the opening chapter just adds weight.
I feel like I’ve pored over Chapter One too many times to be truly productive. I’ve rewritten and reworked passages unnecessarily, added details that are nothing close to enhancement nor improvement.
The one passage I was working on last week focused on my boyhood obsession with Sports Illustrated, the once great weekly that was at its peak in my youth and adolescence when I’d read and worshipped the likes of Frank DeFord, Dan Jenkins, Bud Shrake, Gilbert Rogin and Mark Kram among the super-talents on staff.
In my Audible memoir, How to Succeed in Sportswriting (without Really Trying), I laid out in brief detail my devotion to SI, but I wanted to dive more deeply in A Portrait. Here are a couple of paragraphs from the draft I’m working on—I wouldn’t label it an excerpt or preview from the book because I have no idea if it will make the cut. I’m at the stage when I wonder if they’re really worth the trouble (which I realize isn’t necessarily the encouragement my SubStack subscribers are looking for).
And by Grade 5, I was nose down in back issues of Sports Illustrated. My mother picked up two boxes of them at a lawn sale, and after I’d read and re-read them often enough to commit passages to memory, she started giving me loose change every week to buy the latest copy at the corner store. Other kids on the playground would provide whispered auto-narration of their imagined heroics, as if Foster Hewitt were running the play-by-ply: “Frank Mahovlich beats Lapierriere, winds up for that big slapshot … he scores.” When I would drop back to pass in a touch football game, my under-my-breath commentary was cribbed from SI’s Dan Jenkins profile of Joe Namath. “Stoop-shouldered and sinisterly handsome, Broadway Joe slouches against the wall of the saloon, a filter cigarette in his teeth, collar open, perfectly happy and self-assured, gazing through the uneven darkness to sort out the winners from the losers … TOUCHDOWN.”
The walls of my basement bedroom were both a gallery of SI covers and a cyclorama of my preoccupied consciousness. With my left ear on my pillow, I had a perpendicular view of the cover from the July 10, 1967 issue, Muhammad Ali with his arms aloft, his gloves brushing against the SI banner, and contenders for his vacated title lining the bottom of the page, George Chuvalo, Ernie Terrell, Karl Mildenberger and a young Joe Frazier—it occurred to me that my prone position gave me the same view of a celebrating Ali that Sonny Liston had in Lewiston or Cleveland Williams at the Astrodome.
I wasn’t parochial about the selection of athletes whom I’d tack up. I ran the range of sports: Bart Starr from the dynastic Packers; Yaz from the Impossible Dream Red Sox; Rick Barry of upstart San Francisco Warriors; Bobby Hull of the ever-thwarted Black Hawks; Jim Ryun who was setting world records in the mile barely out of his teens in Kansas; and scores more. I had my standards though—I stuck to baseball, football, basketball and hockey with boxing and track and field in the mix. Those mounted on my walls would be drawn from sports I was invested in--no golf, no skiing, no figure skating, no horse racing. SI’s selection of cover subjects were overwhelmingly male, white and American and foreigners were cast as novelties and caricatures. Memorable for me was the September 25, 1967 issue (the date my eleventh birthday) which featured Nino Benvenuti, the great middleweight champion from Trieste, behind a heaping bowl of spaghetti and meatballs. If my walls were something less than diverse, pin it on those names at the top of the SI masthead, the ones with corner offices in the Time-Life Building.
Sigh.
From there I go from sweet to ridiculous, with an anecdote about a SI profile of former heavyweight boxer Lou Nova, a sweetly turned bit of journalism that sent me to Sick Children’s Hospital for three weeks. The bare bones: Nova, an avid yoga proponent, was flogging an apparatus that alleviated pressure on the neck in the performance of headstands; in fourth grade, I decided to see how much pressure a neck could take in the headstand and self-inverted for a period of two hours while watching syndicated sitcoms in our living room. My neck was fine, but my inner ears were ruined by saturation of blood and thus I lost any ability to stand or even sit up. The Sick Kids’ doctors got me right, but my parents left unfiled perfectly good lawsuit that against Nova and his SI biographer Mark Kram.
Yeah, I hear you, maybe a bit too much detail. Whether all of this or even any at all makes the cut, I don’t know.
When I was typing the line about Nino Benvenuti’s I googled his name, just to make sure that I had remembered the SI cover correctly. I hadn’t held on to a copy, so I hadn’t seen it in 50 years. I landed on the image that I dropped in at the top of the SubStack. I also landed on a series of obituaries for Benvenuti that were published that day. As a sample, here’s a link to the piece that landed in the New York Times.
Nino Benvenuti had made it to the ripe old age of 87, a long run by any standards, but especially so what A.J. Liebling labelled The Sweet Science. The mortality rate among boxers is bleak and the prospects of quality of life after hanging up the gloves is even more despairing. I’ve made it out to the International Boxing Hall of Fame and listened to the ten bells tolled to honor those who wouldn’t be make it out the event anymore.
I’ve written on this SubStack about interviewing Bobby Chacon, who couldn’t form a sentence or much more than a mumbled word when he was being honored by the IBHOF. For him there’d be a wave to the crowd, but no acceptance speech.
BOBBY CHACON won’t speak. He can’t. Julian Eget will likely speak for him. They have been friends for 35 years, since the Schoolboy was a teenager running with gangs in Pacoima, California, committing crimes, doing drugs. Eget was there with Chacon when he went from street fighter to boxer, at the behest of his childhood sweetheart Valerie Ginn. Eget stayed with Chacon when he became biggest draw in Los Angeles, boxing’s hottest scene back in the 70s. And Eget remained loyal when Chacon’s star went cold and dark, when he landed in jail and lost all his ring fortune, when he plunged into psychosis.
“Julian’s the one who looks after Bobby now because Bobby can’t look after himself,” says Don Fraser, a promoter back in Chacon’s heyday. “Bobby doesn’t try to speak often because people don’t understand him. Julian does though.” This day Chacon and Eget went through their ritual. They went to the Spaghetti Factory, a decidedly modest L.A. establishment, for lunch with a bunch of boxing old-timers. After trading stories—others telling them, Chacon just listening-- they went to the gym to watch a few current stars work out. And then Eget took Chacon home.
“Bobby’s still a beautiful person,” Eget says. “When he’s with the other fighters from his day he’s so happy. He’ll just give one of them a hug, right out of the blue, because that’s what he can do to express what he thinks. No words, just a hug. Five minutes after we leave, it’s gone from his memory. Same at the gym. We watched [featherweight champion] Manny Pacquiao work out today. Bobby was so excited. Afterward he gave Manny a hug. And there are a hundred hugs all over the gym. He forgets that we were at the gym on our way home. But everybody in that gym remembers what a great fighter he was.”
Later in the piece, I noted:
If a requisite for tragedy were foreknowledge then Bobby Chacon would qualify as a tragic hero. He seemed to sense what was ahead, that all this would not end well.
Before he was brutally beaten by Ray (Boom Boom) Mancini, Chacon had said that he’d know when to get out of the game.
“If I start slurring my speech or if I can’t remember things I’ll get out,” he said in a 1984 interview. “I’m in this to make money. I’m too old to love boxing.”
Nino Benvenuti wasn’t a casualty—in fact, he was a prosperous businessman, restauranteur, media commentator, actor and politician in various career turns. For a long stretch later in life, he did volunteer work with lepers at a Catholic Church outreach. His many charitable interests included financially helping out fellow fighters including Griffith and Carlos Monzon, who had dethroned him as champion and beaten him half to death in doing so. When Monzon was up on murder charges years later, Benvenuti was in his corner when his former cornermen became scarce. Damn, I wish Benvenuti had been at one of the IBHOF events I attended—what a life he lived and the stories he could tell.
But for Barry McGuigan and George Chuvalo, all the boxers mentioned above have shuffled off this mortal coil. (Did The Greatest Ali-shuffle off this mortal coil?) So it goes and not just in boxing alone—Yaz and Jim Ryun are with us, but Bart Starr and Bobby Hull are gone. Likewise, all the SI writers I’ve mentioned also hit their ultimate deadlines.
Nonetheless, the passing of Nino Benvenuti landed hard and not just because of the timing, his mention in my memoir..
Benvenuti didn’t just have an honored place on my bedroom walls. He was also the first world champion that I ever saw fight in person, back in ‘68. In days of yore, the champs would take on non-title fights at less than the championship distance of 15 rounds just as a money grab, so Benvenuti booked a 10-rounder against a journeyman/non-contender Art Hernandez at Maple Leaf Gardens. Promoters looked to cash in on Toronto’s large Italian population and of the 12,000 who came out to MLG I was one of a dozen or so mangiacakes in attendance. I stood out like a non-paisano at Johnny Lombardi’s Island picnic (a reference only Torontonians of a certain vintage will get).
Here's the brief write-up that appeared in Boxing Illustrated.
It wasn’t until I started putting this together that I realized another great was in the room at the Gardens that night back in ’68, the least likely media commentator of all time. For reasons unknown, the folks with the broadcast rights to the fight recruited Sonny Liston to do colour on the fight.
I’ll offer subscribers the account of a meeting between Liston and Dick Beddoes, my boyhood hero among the scribes, as it appeared in the Globe. And Mail below the paywall.
Otherwise, to Nino and the rest, arrivederci!
From the Globe and Mail, Dick Beddoes’s column from September 17, 1968
The Sutton Place Hotel has had some celebrated blowups in its time, and now there has been another one. Charles Liston went up the other night after a reporter ignited the old felon’s short-fused disposition.
They were sitting around the press suite, profanely amiable, boxers in boxing writers, wreaking great havoc among the beverages and yammering about tonight's non title tiff between Nino Benvenuti, the middleweight champion, and Arthur Hernandez, his earnest adversary from Nebraska.
Mr. Liston, known as Sonny, is here as the expert on the closed circuit telecast, presumably hired to advise Harold Kelly, the blow-by-blow announcer, on the difference between a left hook and a button hook. He looked, in a word, fit: white turtleneck sweater fashionably rolled up to his jowls, black suit neatly nipped in at the waist.
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