Arnold Hano Quotes

I’m the luckiest fan in the history of the world. When I was a copy boy at the Daily News, I was sitting in the Ebbets Field press box when that ball got away from Mickey Owen. I won a limerick contest and I sat in right field and watched pitch his perfect game. Now, I had to be smart to write the limerick, but Larsen had been bombed in the previous outing in that Series, he could’ve been bombed again. It could’ve been an 11–9 ballgame.

Jim Thompson. Dead 14 years next month. The Academy Awards are upon us, and as I write this, I do not know what's been nominated for what. But I have a hunch this is the year of Thompson. I believe somebody famous will stand there to thank God and Swifty Lazar, if you can tell the difference, and then with a stifled sob, add a special thanks to Jim Thompson. And people will stand and cheer his name. I only hope Alberta is right, and that Jimmy hears the applause. But I doubt it. Jim Thompson stories seldom have happy endings.

When he died, he held fourteen baseball records, a little man with a bashful smile, a silken swing, baseball's legendary nice guy. His death was the worst that could have happened to baseball, but his playing career had been the best.

Alfie was an organizer. He would telephone the other kids a week before that first practice session (which he euphemistically called spring training), and he would knock on their doors the morning of, and they would look out the windows and say, "Hey, it's snowing," and he would say, "It's not snowing all that hard. See you in a half-hour." So we would gather our tired, cold bodies together, throw on our baseball clothes—old shirts, old pants, sneakers, old baseball gloves—and grab a couple of bats and scuffed-up balls, and we would pile onto the subway and ride to Van Cortland Park. We would run to make sure we'd be first to claim a ball field. Of course we were first. Nobody else was that crazy. My brother would direct practice for a couple of hours, batting practice, catching fungoes, fielding, practicing our curves and drops on the sidelines, fingers aching from contact with batted or thrown baseballs. We threw ourselves across that hard bone of a field so we would be ready when the spring suns finally thawed the ground at our feet. If the still-awake dreams of hunting lions in Africa were the peak moments of my night life, those frozen ball fields of February were the highlights of my days.

He wanted to win so badly it killed him. But before it killed him, it elevated the game of baseball, at the Polo Grounds, to a grim spectacle of play-war. The analogy fits McGraw. He reminds you more of a battlefield general than he does a sportsman, and if he reminds you of a general, it would be a man who combined the fury of a Patton and the spectacular, yet knowledgeable, flair of MacArthur. Perhaps this desire to win occasionally overflowed its normal limits and became an obsession; perhaps the grimness darkened the sport at times. This was his weakness, for McGraw was not infallible; McGraw was not perfect. Perfection is lifeless, mechanical, uncaring. McGraw was never uncaring. If he was anything, he was a man who cared.

Nor was my attendance at the Polo Grounds limited to baseball games. I sat in the lower left field stands to watch the championship professional football game between the undefeated Chicago Bears led by Bronc Nagurski and the New York Giants. Because the field was so icy slick—the temperature dipped to four degrees above zero that Sunday afternoon—the Giants' owner Wellington Mara had a minion at halftime break into Manhattan College's gymnasium and steal the school's basketball sneakers. Clad in sneakers and suddenly able to keep from sliding all over the joint, the Giants turned a 13-3 deficit into a 30-13 victory. All this despite an advisory to his teammates from a former Chicago linebacker named George Halas, "Step on their toes! Step on their toes!"

Is there a solution? Probably not. Yet there is a glimmer of hope, and on my last days here, I offer it to you, gratis. Incorporate every township and village in the county. Take them out of the county's jurisdiction. Give the county supervisors nothing to do. They do it so well; why deprive them?

She snorted. My wife has three ways of showing disapproval. She harangues loud and long when she is not very sure of her position. Or she may be entirely silent when she is terribly sure. This is usually an act of kindness on her part, as though she were dealing with a dumb animal. Or, lastly, she may snort. This means, I have at last learned, that she disagrees, that she thinks I am a dumb animal, and by God, kindness can go just so far.

McGraw was an improviser, a teacher. He brought much to the game that keeps baseball fresh and suspenseful today—the hit-and-run play, the steal, the squeeze play, the uses of the bunt and the defenses against it. He helped turn the game into a thing of fluid beauty, infielders charging the plate or roaming far from their bases, outfielders moving with each pitch, racing in for base hits before them, backing each other in the outfield, entering the infield itself on rundown plays. Yet when the game changed radically, with the introduction of the livelier baseball, McGraw naturally shifted to a power emphasis, founding his team about such men as George Kelly, Bill Terry, Mel Ott. He knew, too, that the old pitching style of permitting a man to hit a deadened ball because it would then be caught in the big fields had to be changed, and his staffs led the league year after year in strikeouts, in earned-runs.

Jim was a big sheepdog of a man, 6-feet-4, 250 pounds, softhearted, soft-spoken. I never heard him use a dirty word; I never heard him tell a salacious story. Yet his novels are full of such words and stories; he seemed to have a need to dig deeply into the dark depraved nature of man. Nobody did it better. But then, anything he did, he did better. Two years ago, crippled by strokes, he appeared in a film, "Farewell, My Lovely," playing the cuckolded judge. When his wife in the film, played by Charlotte Rampling, carries on with Robert Mitchum in front of him, there is a look on his face that is part bewilderment, part despair and all forgiveness. He was that way, turning up the dark corners of the soul with love and forgiveness.

Mantle played ball almost under a shroud of depression, because he always thought he was going to die an early death. But Mays probably thinks he's going to live forever. Mantle acted like a man who was doomed. Mays never did, even though he played long beyond his ability. I talked to Willie after the 1973 World Series, in which he looked terrible. I said, "What were you doing out there, Willie?" "Oh, I was having fun!" he told me. Mantle never had fun. Mays, on the other hand, seemed to be inoculated from all the pressure. He simply went beyond the usual frames of reference. If I were writing this, I'd say that he went beyond the usual frames of reverence. That's the way we all felt, and I think it was true for not only the press, but also for managers and other players. And this bled into the other pages of the newspaper.

The huge church is burrowed into ancient mountains. By elevator you rise up through the mountain to the foot of a giant cross that soars nearly 500 feet into an intense blue sky, its arms spreading 300 feet. The four Evangelists who crouched at the base are 28 feet high, carved out of stone. All Spain comes to the Valley of the Fallen for its moment of meditation. It is a wondrous work, but it never lets you forget that it marks one of man's most ghastly works—war. But war—like all pain—is soon forgotten. New generations are born. And in you see families together, voluble, chattering, touching each other, husbands, wives, children. They smile at each other, and at you. And you smile back. For that is the true Madrid. It embraces you. It loves you. Soon, you love it back.

All the great people and great things in life are failures. It is in doing what we cannot do but must try to do that humans rise to their exalted fulfillment. Maglie had tried to do with an old man’s arm and back what a young man might not have been able to do as well. Of such failures is greatness made.

So we went to see Babe Ruth pitch the last game of the 1933 season. The Senators had already clinched the pennant, the Giants had clinched in the other league, so this was just a nothing game. I thought maybe he’d make an appearance, pitch an inning or two or three – he pitched a complete game. He hadn’t pitched a complete game since 1930, and then he pitched a complete game. And before that he had pitched two four-inning stints for the Yankees, so he pitched four times. So he pitched a complete game, he gave up twelve hits, it was not a great pitching performance, but the Yankees won, 7-5. He didn’t strike out a soul. Years later I saw him on Broadway. I went up to him and said, “Hi, Babe.” He said, “Hi, kid.” That’s the way he treated everybody. I said, “You know, I saw you pitch your last game at the Stadium.” This was maybe eight years later or so. I said, “How come you didn’t strike out anybody?” And he said, “I wanted those other eight guys to earn their money!” And that was Ruth.

Jim Dilley, the father of the Laguna Greenbelt, used to take roses to the secretaries of the county Board of Supervisors when he'd go to do battle over open space with the secretaries' bosses. Jim Dilley was a nice man, kind and gentle. He smoked a pipe. His eyes twinkled as though he knew a joke the rest of us didn't. But he's dead, and the Board is still alive, and that is a joke on us of monstrous proportions. I'm not nice, kind or gentle. The Board keeps rubber-stamping building permits, and this is my goodbye to these shores. After 36 years, my wife and I will soon leave Orange County for Costa Rica, to join the Peace Corps, and that, too, is a joke. We traipse off to bring peace to Costa Rica, which hasn't had an army since 1948.