A friend of mine introduced me to the writing of Pat Jordan. As a sports fan and avid reader of Sports Illustrated, I'm sure I had read his stuff before without being aware, as he wrote at SI for years in the seventies and early eighties. But after diving into a newly published collection of some of his best work, The Best Sports Writing of Pat Jordan
Recently Pat was kind enough to spend part of his morning talking to me about a host of subjects including his failed baseball career, an early interview with Roger Clemens, his experience with Ricky Williams, the controversial running back, and lots of other stuff. It's a long and winding road -- enjoy!
Behind The Book:
I wanted to start by asking you about some of your earliest baseball memories. Mine are crystal clear. I was obsessed with baseball from a young age, so when my parents took me to Tiger Stadium when I was seven years old to see Mark Fidrych pitch, it was about the coolest thing in the world.
Pat Jordan:
The Bird! He was one of the coolest guys.
BC:
A month later when we were on a family vacation to New York City my parents asked me what I wanted to do one day, and I chose Yankee Stadium. I remember everything about that game – Catfish started, Chambliss hit a homerun to beat the Royals, and Sparky closed it out. More than thirty years later, I’m still a die-hard Yankee fan because of that day at the Stadium.
PJ:
You gotta go to Yankee Stadium, you gotta go to Fenway Park, and you gotta go to Wrigley Field. Those are the three stadiums that you have to see if you’re a baseball fan.
BTB:
I’ve been two of those three. I still need to make it to Fenway.
PJ:
Oh, Fenway’s great. It’s like going to a little cubby-hole, you know? The press box is up this rickety old stairway. I’ve got a fear of heights, and you’ve gotta climb up these rickety stairs, and there’s no railing, and you’re looking out over the right hand side all the way down to the street. The last time I was there it was like a Quonset hut with a little tin roof.
BTB:
And they keep building those stands that stick farther and farther out.
PJ:
I know. They’ll be across the street pretty soon.
BTB:
So what was your first game like?
PJ:
I was about seven or eight. My brother was going to Georgetown Law in Washington, DC. It was in the early fifties. It was a Yankees-Senators game, and after the game they allowed the people to walk onto the field to try to get autographs. The Yankees were just running off the field, and I had a torn piece of paper or something, but I was too embarrassed to ask one of the Yankees. But my brother, who was a very big guy, he was like 6’5”, grabs Phil Rizzuto and sticks the paper under his nose and says, “Will you sign it for the kid, Phil?” Phil gave him a big smile and signed a piece of paper that I never saw again. That was my first remembrance. I was always a Yankee fan. In Connecticut, if you’re south of Hartford, you’re a Yankee fan. If you’re Hartford or east or north, you’re a Red Sox fan. So we were always Yankee fans. Plus, the Yankees had all Italians in the fifties. You had DiMaggio, Crosetti, Lazzeri, Raschi, Berra… As Italian immigrants – even my grandmother, who could barely speak English, knew the great DiMaggio. They were a sign that our immigrants were making it in an American game.
BTB::
That reminds me of something that came up in Jonathan Eig’s recent book on Jackie Robinson. One thing that he mentioned that I wasn’t aware of growing up in my era, was the strong ethnic identities, like you mentioned, that different teams would have.
PJ:
Oh, very big. The Red Sox were Irish, the Yankees were Italian, the Midwest teams were German and Polish, and then when Jackie came along the Dodgers were always identified with black fans because he was their first hero, you know. And after Jackie they weren’t reticent about signing Joe Black, Don Newcombe, Roy Campanella… I’ll tell you a funny story about Campanella. When I was a kid, my parents and my uncles would watch the Yankees-Dodgers World Series. My two uncles were arguing about who was a better catcher, Campanella or Berra. And so my father intercepted and said, “What difference does it make, they’re both Italians!” But then when Campanella struck out, then he wasn’t Italian anymore, he was black. But when he hit a home run he was a paisan. So they got it both ways with Campanella. But that’s how ethnic it was when I grew up. Today Campanella is noted as one of the early black ballplayers, but in my family, no, no. He was Italian.
BTB:
That’s funny. As far as that strong ethnic identity, you mentioned that you followed the Yankees in large part because they were Italian like you, not just because of where you lived. How much of that went on, where people said, “I’m Irish so I like the Red Sox.”?
PJ:
Oh, that was very common. The Red Sox had Williams, McDermott… Boston was an Irish city ruled by Irish politicians. Italians, and people don’t know this, this is going back into a history that you wouldn’t be aware of. Italians were not prejudiced. My mother and father, when I was a kid, they never questioned any girls I brought home. It was always a Polish girl, a black girl, anything. Except – I could never bring home the hated Irish. The Italians and the Irish hated each other. It was all social because the Irish came first and the Italians came after them. And plus the Italians didn’t look American, number one, and number two, they didn’t speak the language. So they were wops – without papers. The ethnic resentment went back to the simple fact that during Prohibition my grandmother had a variety store and she sold bootleg wine out of the back room, and the Irish cop on the beat made her give him five dollars a week in tributes to keep the bootleg wine operation going. So that’s why they hated the Irish, because the Irish held ‘em up for five bucks a week to sell their wine. But that was the only prejudice I ever grew up with in my Italian house. Our ancestry goes back to Italy, where the original name was DiMenna, which in English is diamond. My Uncle Ben was Benjamin Diamond, and there’s Jewish history in our family, and I’m sure black history. As my mother said, when Hannibal came over the Alps he dallied with the Italian girls. So I never grew up with any form of prejudice except the hated Irish. So when I married my second wife whose last name is Ryan, my mother – who’s about eighty – she calls up and says, “What kind of name is Ryan for an Italian wife?” And comes flying down to Florida to check my wife out! Those were interesting times. I was talking with a friend the other day about how ethnic my generation was. We always referred to each other by ethnic names: I was the guinea, Richie Belzer was the Jew, Richie O’Connor was the Mick. We used those terms. Today to be politically correct you can’t, but I still do.
BTB:
My love of baseball, a lot of it came from reading about these old players, especially old Yankees. And you can’t imagine, like DiMaggio being called the Big Dago, you can’t imagine a player in the press being referred to like that now.
PJ:
Oh, of course not. But you know when my father grew up in the twenties he couldn’t get a job because the signs on the doors said “Help Wanted – No Italians Need Apply.” So in their own way they were the blacks of the twenties in terms of immigrants. And people sometimes think that I’m Irish because of my name, Patrick Michael Jordan, but it’s Pascuali Michaeli Jordano. That was my father’s name, but he changed it on the day I was born. He had it legally changed so that I would be born an American, he said. He didn’t want me to have the stigma of being Italian. Today I wouldn’t mind being Patty Jordano. That’s a nice name.
BTB:
So you obviously played the game early on. How important was playing as you were growing up?
PJ:
It was the focal point of our neighborhood. I was born in an Italian ghetto, but I moved when I was five to a little suburb in Fairfield, and everybody met at the park. Now the park had a swing set, a tennis court, and two baseball diamonds. One was a little league, and one was a major league – major league dimensions. Basically every kid woke up, had breakfast, got on his bike, and went up there. The non-athletic kids hung out at the swing set – the shooty shoots and all that. And the kids who were into baseball, we played pick-up games. So that’s where my friendships were made. One of my friends who died when he was forty-six, he was the oldest kid, the first kid I ever met up at the park, his name was Doug Holmquist. He played with the Houston Astros, and he eventually became a coach under Billy Martin for the Yankees. Doug and I, the first time we went up there we were just five years old and we had a catch together. And that was my oldest friend until he died. We had to pick up sides, and I was always lousy so they always put me in right field. One day when I was about eight years old a station wagon pulls up. A guy gets out and he starts pulling out these big canvas bags with bats and balls, and everyone goes running, except for me. I didn’t know what was up. And one of the kids yells out, “It’s the Little League coach, stupid!” I didn’t know what Little League was. So he goes to the mound and he says, “I’m the Little League coach and I wanna see who wants to try out.” Naturally everybody raises their hands. “We’re gonna try out by position. So if you want to play a position, raise your hand.” The first position he calls is pitcher, and I was so excited that I raised my hand.
BTB:
And how old were you then?
PJ:
Eight. At that time Little League was eight to twelve. There was no minor league, just all major league Little League. So I raised my hand at eight, I had never pitched before, they put me on the mound, aimed me toward the plate, I threw a couple of pitches, and everybody’s eyes bugged out. I had been playing right field all this time, and I didn’t know I had an arm. So eventually I made the Little League. I was the first guy in the history of Little League to make the major leagues at the age of eight years old. I never pitched, but I was playing with twelve-year-old kids, you know. So I got a uniform and there was a little publicity about “eight year old makes major league Little League” and all.
BTB:
Do you still remember that first uniform?
PJ:
Oh, yeah. You know why? Because we had a Memorial Day parade. Memorial Day opened the Little League season, and we all had our uniforms and marched in a parade down through the center of town. It was Smirnoff’s Market. Smirnoff’s Market Little League. Plus the idea that you’re a member of a team. That was something. You were part of something. That was fun. And by the time I was ten I was really good. When I was ten I was pitching shutouts.
BTB:
I played Little League baseball growing up, and I have a lot of those same memories. I remember getting my first jersey. It was number eight, and immediately I thought of Joe Morgan, one of my favorite players, so that was a pretty cool thing.
PJ:
Oh, Joe. I like Joe.
BTB:
But the sad thing is that I was not a talent. I’ll never forget what it was like being cut from my high school teams in the ninth and tenth grades. Up until then, foolishly, I always assumed that I’d be a major league baseball player.
PJ:
We all did.
BTB:
Your playing career lasted a lot longer than that, but it still ended earlier than you would’ve liked. What was the end like for you?
PJ:
Oh, it was very traumatic.
BTB:
Did you have any regrets then or now?
PJ:
I did then, but not now. Someone asked me what I would’ve been. I said I would’ve continued on the road to becoming an asshole that not even José Canseco could approach. I was so single-focused about baseball all my life that I was not a very social kid. All I cared about was pitching. I didn’t care about friendships anymore once I became a star, it was just pitching a baseball. And since I had unlimited success very early, when it was cut off at the age of twenty-one I was stunned. What do I do? I had gone to college one semester a year before I went to spring training just to placate my parents, but I had no interest in anything but baseball. It was very traumatic. I couldn’t even look at a box score for about five or six years, partly because most of the guys I played with were going to the big leagues and becoming stars: Joe Torre, Phil Niekro, Ron Hunt, Tony Cloninger. All these guys were in the big leagues, and I couldn’t even look at a box score. It was rough, but it was the best thing. It was like a traumatic amputation, you know? Sometimes it’s the only way to make somebody get well. I think if I had lingered on into the minor leagues until twenty-eight, say, as a triple A player and not quite get called up or maybe get called up for a cup of coffee and spend a month or two and then get sent back down again… I think it would’ve been a thousand times worse. I was forced at twenty-one to say, okay, what are you gonna do now? It wasn’t too late. At twenty-eight it would’ve been late.
BTB:
So how did you go from pitching to writing? If someone had told you at age fifteen that you’d grow up to be a writer, how shocked would you have been?
PJ:
I had no idea. I had never read a book. What happened was when I came back from baseball I worked all these menial jobs. I was a construction worker. I worked for a Lithuanian mason. I carried mortar and bricks up a scaffold while he built a chimney, stuff like that. I wanted to go to college, so I wanted to get a night job. I was playing semi-pro basketball at night for this guy who was a sports editor of the local newspaper. I was getting paid fifty bucks a game. I had a wife and a baby. So I was complaining to him one night, I said, geez, I need a night job so I can go to school. Because when I went to school they didn’t even have night courses, you had to go full time. So he says, “I’ll give you a job at the sports section of the newspaper.” I told him I didn’t know anything about writing, but he said, “Well, you know sports.” So I got the job for sixty-five dollars a week, I worked from six to two in the morning, then went to school from eight-thirty to three. He would let me do my homework from midnight to two because the paper was put to bed at midnight but we had to wait until the paper came up and I had to go down to the linetype room and read the paper to make sure there were no mistakes. So between midnight and two I did my homework. In those days all the guys had a bottle of bourbon on their desk, they smoked cigars – both things that I do to this day. And my only job the first couple of weeks was to read the race results to the local bookie, Clyde. And that’s all I did. Then after a while I would write the headlines for the local high school games: “Tigers Rip Rams, Smith Hits 20”. Two lines, and I had to make sure they fit in a certain number of characters. And that’s all I did. And I’d sit there at the typewriter and I would write it out longhand on a piece of paper, and then type it with one finger. Tiger. Hunt around… T. Hunt around… I. So you couldn’t have started at a lower level than I did. You know what I mean? Guys go to journalism school and all that, but you couldn’t start any lower than I did. Little by little then I’d write the high school results, then I wrote a couple profiles and somebody mentioned one of them: “You know, that was a terrific story.” And that was the first time I’d gotten any ego feedback since I left baseball. I liked the ego gratification when somebody’d recognize me downtown and say he’d read my story. So I went to see this old guy, an old sportswriter who was a real drunk. He was always whacked by eight o’clock at night. I said, “Johnny, you know I’m thinking I might like to be a writer.” He looks at me with bleary eyes, with a cigarette hanging from his lips, and he says, “Pat, I owe everything I am in my life to this business.” And I got so depressed that I quit that week. This is my future? And so I quit and became a school teacher, high school English at an all girls high school.
BTB:
I teach 8th grade English.
PJ:
Oh, you do? Okay. That was the second-best job I ever had. I loved teaching. I just like writing more.
BTB:
I’m wondering how your playing experience affected your writing. You mentioned how bitter the end was for you; how do you think that affected your perception of the game? For instance, if I were covering a game it would be hard for me. As difficult as this is to admit, even at thirty-eight years old, it would be hard for me to talk to Derek Jeter, for instance.
PJ:
Not me. I pitched against Hank Aaron. Fuck Derek Jeter.
BTB:
Right, that’s what I’m saying. So how do you think your experience affects your point of view? Are you able to be more objective?
PJ:
I never romanticize them. A friend of mine said he was shocked that I’m not a fan. I sent him a story I wrote once about Tom Seaver. It was about the first World Series that they won, and I put a TK in there. I wrote, “When the Mets won the World Series in 19TK…” And my buddy called up and said, “Every fan knows when the Mets won the World Series.” I said, I don’t. I never approached it as, oh, I’m in a major league locker room. I was in a major league locker room when I was seventeen years old in Yankee Stadium with Mickey Mantle when I was trying out for the Yankees. I took one look at Mantle and you know what my first though was? I’m bigger than he is. They said he was six feet, but he was like five-ten, and I towered over him. I was six-one or something. I thought I should’ve been up there. Not that I put these guys down, but I never romanticized the idea that I’m talking to, say, Derek Jeter or Mariano Rivera. Like if I were talking to Mariano Rivera, the first thing I’d talk about would be his cut fastball and I’d show him how I used to hold my slider. And then I’d say, “Well how do you hold it differently? Because a slider breaks more than your cut fastball.” You know what I mean? I’d be interested in his talent, but it would never be like, oh my god, I’m talking to a major league ball player. Friends will say to me today, I’ve got tickets to the Marlins game, they’re playing the Mets, you want to go? I say why? They say, it’s a major league game, I got a friend who can get us into the locker room. What do I want to go into a locker room for? I was in a locker room with Hank Aaron and Warren Spahn. I ran wind sprints with Spahnnie and Burdette in 1959. I pitched against Hank Aaron in spring training in 1960. So I never had that kind of rosey-eyed view of professional athletes, but I always admired guys for their talent.
BTB:
So do you think that objectivity has made you a better writer?
PJ:
Oh, absolutely. I carry it over into everything I write about. It’s not cynical, I always think it’s realistic. Like I’ve done Hollywood actors – Tom Selleck, and all these different actors. I’m always interested in their professions and their personalities, but I don’t think they’re better than anybody. George Plimpton used to think… George always did the stars, and I always did the failures. George was never an athlete, he always romanticized…
BTB:
He always wanted to be an athlete.
PJ:
Yeah, he wanted to be. That’s why he did all those imitation roles: how I almost pitched, how I almost boxed, how I almost played golf. He always thought there was some kind of mystical grace about them, you know. They were blessed like we weren’t. One day Roger Angell saw two pitchers talking. He said to me, “Look at that Pat. You and I will never know what mystical thing they’re talking about in terms of baseball.” I said, “I know what they’re talking about, Roger. They’re talking about a steak and a piece of ass they had last night.” That’s what they’re talking about because that’s what they talk about. And George used to think that Hank Aaron had this mystical grace that made him this great hitter. I said, no he didn’t. Hank has unbelievable quick wrists. He can wait on a pitch longer than anybody else, so he could wait on a curve ball until it broke and then rip it over third. That was his mystical grace. Without those wrists he’d be a .240 hitter. Ted Williams had fantastic eyes. That was his mystical grace. God blessed him with, what, 20/10 vision or something? He could pick up the spin on a curve ball the minute it left the pitcher’s hand and the rest of the batters couldn’t. So I tend to see them more realistically. I think.
BTB:
Well, it definitely comes across in your writing. I’ve been reading through your recent collection, the one that Alex Belth edited for you, and I’ve been loving it. What strikes me the most is how different your stuff is from what’s typically out there now. There are two things that I love – first, the depth and length of your profiles. Obviously, if you pick up Sports Illustrated you’ll never see anything like that.
PJ:
No, and I wrote for Sports Illustrated in the seventies and I used to write 8,000 words.
BTB:
The other thing is the fact that you insert yourself into each piece. You’re definitely a part of what you write, something you never see in most journalism today.
PJ:
I’ll do it when it pops up, where it’s important. I try not to do it too much, but there will be times, like with Tom Seaver obviously. But that was really a dual piece about me being a failure and Seaver being a success. But yeah, a lot of times I’ll do it when I know something about the sport, like I know pitching. Like with the Ankiel piece, Rick Ankiel. Since what happened to him happened to me.
BTB:
I thought that was a pretty poignant one.
PJ:
As a matter of fact a guy from the St. Louis Dispatch interviewed me recently about the Ankiel piece. I felt for the kid because I had gone through that. I tried to help him but he never called. I told him I’d work out with him, throw with him, but I don’t think the Cardinals would’ve let him.
BTB:
That piece was written during the off-season before he really melted down, is that correct?
PJ:
It was the off-season, but right after he melted down in the playoffs, and he just never got back.
BTB:
But I think even at the time, I wasn’t following it that closely, but I felt like, oh, this is a young kid, he had a bad couple of outings, but he’ll probably be fine.
PJ:
No, I knew it. I knew it then. I saw it when I watched him pitch in the playoffs and World Series. I knew exactly what was happening to him. I knew it was a hard thing to get out of, very few guys have ever gotten out of that.
BTB:
Were you surprised that Ankiel’s been able to come back?
PJ:
No, he was an athlete. But he hasn’t come back. I mean, he’s a hitter. It’s like me becoming a writer. You say, well, you’re a baseball failure but you came back as a writer. Yeah, but they don’t have anything to do with each other. Hitting the ball is nothing like pitching. Hitting is fairly instinctive. You have to react in one one-hundredth of a second, whereas pitching is deliberate. You’ve gotta think. And that’s what fucks you up. You’re on the mound thinking, and that’s how pitchers get screwed up and batters don’t.
BTB:
I suppose this is completely natural, but when you started, you were viewed as a part of the new school of journalists who were breaking all the rules, and now you’re a throwback. I was wondering what your perspective is on the changing face of sports reporting. I mentioned earlier that I’m a Yankee fan. When I want to read about my team, to learn about a trade they’ve made or a player who’s hurt, I don’t go to mainstream sources anymore. I go to Bronx Banter, a blog started byAlex Belth, the guy who edited your collection. It seems that sites like this have changed the way sports – especially baseball – is reported.
PJ:
You know why? Because the bloggers don’t have to get in the clubhouse. The beat reporters are trapped, because if they write too many negative stories they’re persona non grata in the clubhouse. Freelance writers like me, I can go into a clubhouse, write a story about Roger Clemens, leave, and the Yankees ban me from the clubhouse. So what? It’s cost me one story over the years, an assignment I had when they wouldn’t let me in the clubhouse.
BTB:
And it seems like you’ve kind of embraced this new trend. I loved your recent piece on José Canseco, for instance, that was featured at Deadspin.com.
PJ:
See now, I’ve always been writing like that. It’s just that the mainstream press ran some of those stories, but rarely. It’s getting rarer and rarer. The kind of pieces I do, which are pretty hard-hitting, they don’t run that many of them anymore. ESPN doesn’t, Sports Illustrated doesn’t. They run all these puff pieces.
BTB:
I guess I couldn’t imagine reading that Canseco piece in any magazine.
PJ:
I sent it to every magazine in America. They all rejected it. Every magazine. Sports Illustrated wanted to buy it, but the managing editor wouldn’t buy it. The other magazines wouldn’t buy it because I didn’t talk to Canseco, they wanted quotes from him. Which is such ridiculously inane bullshit because most ballplayers don’t have anything to say. My perceptions are more valuable to a magazine than any sports figure’s quotes, but once again what magazines are looking for are the pull quotes. For example, José Canseco writes Vindicated. There are three pull quotes in there: Alex was after my wife, I shot up Ordóñez with drugs, and Roger Clemens never did take drugs. That’s it. And that’s the basis for the book. The same thing with magazine articles, like the John Rocker story that ran in SI years ago? I read the story. There was no story except for Rocker’s crazy quote.
BTB:
The subway quote.
PJ:
Right. I write stories. I’m not looking for pull quotes. If I get a quote that’s really dynamic, I’ll run it. I certainly won’t hide it, but I’m not really looking for it. If I do a story on Derek Jeter, I want you to know Derek Jeter in a way no other writer will ever be able to let you know who Derek Jeter is as a person, that’s my goal. I just did a long piece on Ricky Williams, and it’s gonna be in Playboy probably in the fall. I spent a lot of time with Ricky, and I think I nailed Ricky more than anybody who has ever written a story about him ever has or will.
BTB:
That’s interesting, because I think most people see him as a total mystery.
PJ:
He’s not a mystery, he’s easy.
BTB:
What’s your perception? When he was in college, aside from this great talent, the biggest image I had of him was that he was this great kid. He won the Doak Walker Award, so he went to meet Doak Walker and started this friendship. It seemed like he was pretty down to earth, and then suddenly he gets overwhelmed by the NFL and the media attention and he turns into something else.
PJ:
He’s alright, he’s a good kid. The best way I can describe Ricky is there was a girl hanging around a bar when I was in my twenties, a college girl. A real attractive girl. Guys would talk to her for a couple minutes and then they’d vanish, they wouldn’t have anything to do with her. Finally I said to my bartender, “You know, she’s a good looking head. How come nobody’s hitting on her?” He says, “She thinks she’s a mystery that the rest of us should unravel, and after talking to her for ten minutes most people figure they don’t wanna waste their time.” That’s the best way I could describe Ricky. He wants the world to think he’s a mystery they should unravel, and he’s really not. His drugs were less about drugs than it was about ego and being a mysterious counter culture guy. He works pretty hard at it. That’s my take on Ricky. I liked him, I liked his girlfriend. You ever meet those guys who are trying to be deeper than they are?
BTB:
Yeah.
PJ:
That’s what he’s trying to do.
BTB:
Focusing on your book, I wanted to talk about a couple of the pieces that really stayed with me. First has to be Clemens. I gotta say that reading that piece now in light of what’s happened over the past six months, was on the one hand revealing, but also not surprising, if that makes any sense.
PJ:
Yeah. The drug thing didn’t come up then.
BTB:
Right, this was written long ago.
PJ:
But I was confused by one thing that I never put in the story. I work out hard. I’m sixty-seven, but I go to the gym every morning and I lift weights and I can bury guys half my age. I do physical stuff. And what I was shocked at was, Clemens wasn’t lifting heavy weights or anything, I was shocked at the amount of time that he worked out throughout a day. He was constantly working out. And as I’ve gotten older I’ve learned it’s not the strength that goes, it’s the energy level. I can do what I did when I was thirty, I just can’t do it as long – that’s what my wife says anyway! So anyway, I was saying, how the hell does he maintain his energy? The thing I thought is he eats a ton of food. So I thought maybe that’s it, because I’m always dieting because I don’t want to get heavy. Maybe all those calories he ingests gives him the energy. But then I did a story for Playboy on HGH. I went to an anti-aging convention in Vegas, did a lot of research on it, talked to doctors and everything. Where most people have missed the boat on HGH and testosterone, they keep talking about steroids and HGH as if they’re interchangeable, but they’re not. Steroids give you strength and muscle; HGH gives you energy. HGH was originally devised to use for people who had aged prematurely and had lost their energy. It also increases your libido, and it does cosmetic stuff too. It’s almost like a fountain of youth drug – it makes you look younger, gets rid of wrinkles, grows hair, all that. But it doesn’t give you increased strength, it gives you increased energy. Now what does a starting pitcher need more than anything?
BTB:
Stamina.
PJ:
Right, he needs energy. A relief pitcher doesn’t need it. They had talked to [Eric] Gagné, who has taken testosterone. Well that makes perfect sense. If he’s only gonna pitch an inning or an inning and a half, he needs to be strong. But if he was gonna pitch eight innings in ninety degree heat, then he needs that kind of energy. So the possibility that Clemens was taking HGH, once I did my research on it, became very real to me. I figured, sure, if he’s gonna take any drug it’s gonna be HGH.
BTB:
So what do you think of the circus that ensued over these last few months?
PJ:
With Clemens? I followed like everybody else. Clemens does what he knows how to do, which is to be a pit bull and dig in and throw harder. Like Clinton: deny, deny, deny, delay, delay, delay. He’s hoping that sooner or later it’ll evaporate because there’s no concrete proof. It’s him against McNamee. Until they come up with blood on a vial with HGH and steroids in it that’s got Roger’s DNA, it’s gonna be difficult for anybody to convict him.
BTB:
You said it was Clemens vs. McNamee, and watching that whole thing I felt like I was watching a high school wannabe who’s kissing up to the homecoming king.
PJ:
That’s exactly what I felt when I wrote the story. McNamee was playing this fatherly figure to Clemens telling him he could eat a potato but he couldn’t put butter on it. And I was like, who the fuck is this guy dictating to Clemens what kind of workout he should do. Clemens was so beholden to him. I cannot imagine Clemens doing anything that McNamee didn’t instigate or help him with.
BTB:
I wanted to ask you about one more before I let you go, and that was the piece on Toe Nash. It was actually the first one I read, because I knew about the myth – the little things that Peter Gammons would drop in his columns or on ESPN about this kid who walked out of the sugar cane fields and is hitting five hundred foot home runs, and then he just kind of disappeared and I had no idea what had happened.
PJ:
That’s going back to your question about sports writing today. I investigated it, Gammons never even went to New Orleans, never saw Toe Nash, never talked to anybody except the scout who signed him.
BTB:
To be honest with you, I almost wish that I hadn’t read that story, as good as it was. I felt like I needed to take a shower after I finished it.
PJ:
Well, you should have, because he’s a bad kid.
BTB:
Well, my question is, what’s your reaction to the Toe Nash saga, and more generally, are you ever surprised by what you find when you scratch beneath the surface like this?
PJ:
Yeah. You have perceptions when you go in to do a story, everybody does. And you’re always surprised: sometimes delighted, sometimes disappointed. I went to do a story on Bo Belinsky, who I thought I was an idiot. I went to do him, I thought he was the best guy I had met. I love Bo. I thought Tom Selleck was a good guy from what I’d read about him, and then I went there and he was a wimpy guy and I was really disappointed. Marilyn Chambers, the porn actress, I thought she was just another dumb bimbo, she was a great girl. We still get Christmas cards from her. So she likes to have sex in front of a camera, so what? She’s still a great girl. Toe Nash, I had no feelings about it one way or another. As a matter of fact it wasn’t even my idea. I had a researcher in Kansas City who’s a friend, the guy I dedicated the book to, Mike Sharpe. He sent me the ESPN story. He says, Pat, you should do a story on this guy. I originally did it for the New York Times, but they didn’t run it. So I got the assignment, I go to the story. I didn’t know anything. I got names of everybody. I wanted to see Toe Nash. I got his scout, who got me Hot Rod Williams, and Hot Rod Williams got me the father, and the father got me into the jail to talk to Toe Nash. Then I got the arresting officer, I got the prosecutor, I got the defense attorney, I got the probation officer. I was going up and down between New Orleans and Baton Rouge for five days, then I went back two other times. So I did a lot of reporting on that, and that’s the picture I got. That’s the picture I got of Nash. And then the final thing is I got the girl that he supposedly raped, and I got medical reports about the girl from the district attorney. Even his defense attorney didn’t like him. The idea that nobody knew about Toe Nash's past when they signed him was ridiculous. Everybody knew about him, every team. The Pittsburgh Pirates passed on him because of his bad reputation. So no, it didn't bother me, that was the story. I don’t care where the story goes. It could’ve been the myth, it could’ve been true. This whole myth of sugar cane, he couldn’t cut Hot Rod’s lawn for more than two days without quitting because he didn’t like the work. The idea that he was cutting sugar cane and that’s how he got his muscles, well I saw the guy and he didn’t have a muscle on his body. He was fat. He was big, but he was fat. I’m sure he might have been a talent, but the idea that he just appeared one day, well he had been playing in that sugar cane league, which was not one of these horseshit leagues, they had a beautiful stadium that Hot Rod Williams built with his own money. Gammons never left his office doing that story. Gammons and the Reynolds brothers were cutting up that pie. They were gonna do a movie, The Myth of Toe Nash.
BTB:
And Gammons was involved in that too?
PJ:
Oh, yeah. Gammons and Reynolds were gonna promote this guy to do a movie, a Disney movie, you know. The natural coming out the sugar cane field. A whole lot of people had a lot of things invested in that story. Not after I finished.
BTB:
Well, it still might be an interesting movie.
PJ:
It might be now. You can begin with the myth and how everybody blew it up and then go back and track it down. I’m sorry I ruined if for you, Hank!
BTB:
That’s alright.
PJ:
See, that’s one of those instances where I wasn’t starry-eyed going in.
BTB:
Right. But like I said, I don’t know that I’d thought of him in, I don’t know how long it’s been, five years? And I picked up the book and I’m skimming through the table of contents and I see Toe Nash. I wonder what happened to him? And there you go.
PJ:
Shit, I still keep in touch with the probation officer. He tells me that Toe’s still in and out of jail every week.
BTB:
From what I read it doesn’t surprise me. Hey, I’ve got one last question for you. I’m wondering if there’s anybody out there that you’re dying to profile.
PJ:
Martina Navratilova.
BTB:
Yeah?
PJ:
My favorite. I would love to do Martina. I admire her, I think she’s great. I interviewed her recently for a nothing story for AARP, just a little workout story you know. She was turning fifty. She was every bit as interesting as I thought she would be, and she’s the one I would love to do. She escaped me. I can’t seem to sell it to anybody.
BTB:
I’m sure people would be interested. I’d be interested in reading it.
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