SPORTS
John Hall - Chapter Ten Knock-Knock, Who’s There?
by John Hall
having a martini together in some dark cor- ner at a class reunion, - combined to inspire the hottest pile of hate mail I ever got One thing definitely not in common,
J
Mickey the Mob Guy, never touched a drop all his life. As a matter of fact, I liked him jail record or no and in and out of prison or whatever, and that’s what got me into trou- ble on one particular occasion with a certain portion of my readers.. It was in 1975 shortly after the book
Mickey wrote with John Peer Nugent (“In My Own Words”) had finally been judged by the courts OK to be allowed out in public. Don Fraser, the onetime boxing publicist
turned promoter, got us together for dinner at the Gay ‘90s restaurant in West L.A. It was a fascinating evening. Mickey
never held anything back at any time in any company, and I found him especially charm- ing. So did all the busboys and waiters who followed him everywhere brushing his coat, opening the door for him at the men’s room, bringing him extra white linen napkins every few minutes and showering him with atten- tion of every sort. He, of course, tipped his way in and out
of the restaurant with a steady stream of 10 spots. He talked of his fondness for boxing and how he wished he’d been good enough to make that his career and he spoke of his affection for newspaper people and how he never hurt anybody other than those who deserved to be hurt I wrote some of those things in my L.A.
Times sports column and pointed out how generous he was with the “little” guys, and
ane Fonda, Mickey Cohen and Arnold Palmer - not exactly a trio that have much in common or you might find
that he had no regrets and was not ashamed of his fetish for constantly wiping and clean- ing his hands and that he was proud of his book which told it all, the good and the bad, including the obvious fact that he’d idolized Al Capone, Lucky Luciano and Bugsy Siegel. It was a pretty hot column, I thought,
while maybe making him out to be too much of a hero at least that one night with all the idolizing busboys in the restaurant. What maybe! Wham-bam-pow! I heard
from about every cop in the LAPD and quite a few others at what a dunce I was to fall for his con. I got lists of where many of the bod- ies were buried and of the many innocents who had suffered at his whims. It was before email, and all the sizzling letters came with a stamp. Lucky for the readers, they were still only 3 cents at that time. Upshot by near unanimous decision was
that I deserved to be locked up in the same cell with Mickey and have the key tossed away forever. Just about the same deal with Jane, who
disgraced herself in 1968 visiting Hanoi and posing for photographs with the enemy sit- ting on an aircraft gun in her opposition to America’s part in the Vietnam war. She did several radio broadcasts calling the Ameri- cans war criminals and urging their immedi- ate withdrawal from the action. Well, so time went by. She’s reinvented
herself maybe a dozen times from her sex goddess start as Barbarella for first husband Roger Vadim, appearing to be quite a differ- ent person once again after her marriage to Ted Turner in the ‘80s. When I saw her on TV sitting in the
owner’s box behind first base rooting for Ted’s Atlanta Braves in the World Series, I
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wrote that she appeared to be the All Ameri- can babe once again, that she had apologized many times for her misguided antiwar demonstrations and especially the pose on the aircraft gun, and that it was time to for- give and forget. Besides, I said, she still looked too good
in a skirt to stay mad at her. Yeah, sure, double wham-bam-pow.
Those who served in Vietnam and had been eyewitnesses to her visits to prison camps overwhelmed me with bitter protests. “Once a traitor, always a traitor,” was the
theme. “Hanoi Jane should never be for- given,” echoed dozens. One former prisoner of war said he’d ac-
tually been present when she visited and ac- cused the Americans of being professional killers and demanded, “Aren’t you sorry you bombed babies?” Certainly, they wanted Jane and me
locked up in the same cell-presumably the same one with Mickey Cohen. Still, many more have since forgiven and
forgotten, and I hope we can all march on to- gether to better things. Jane has fumbled quite a few things over the years, but she’s a gamer and keeps charging back with new personalities and outlooks. At least one nice thing no matter what ... She’s still a babe. It was an entirely different deal with
Arnold Palmer. Nobody has ever been mad at Arnold himself. It was just me, myself and I this time after I wrote it was the “outrage of the decade” when Associated Press named Arnold the Athlete of the Decade for the ‘60s. I ripped golf in general for being a walk
in the park compared to games and contests in which athletes bump and bruise each other on every play Sandy Koufax had such a magnificent
decade in the ‘60s pitching for the Dodgers and Bill Russell was even more impressive leading the Boston Celtics to nine NBA cham- pionships from 1960 through 1969. Johnny Unitas of the Baltimore Colts, Jim
Brown of the Cleveland Browns and Bart Starr of the Green Bay Packers also had out- standing decades. I thought Russell stood tall above all, and
I really poured it on golf, saying “golf is a fun game. It is harmless. The only suffering is in the mind. There are times when the pressure is intense. It requires poise and a certain amount of coordination. But as a competitive sport it lacks all the other requisites and in- gredients of athletics.” OK, get me back into the cell with Jane
andMickey. Pete Houghton of Fargo, SD, said it about
the same as 122 others who wrote protest letters and hoisted me up the flag pole. “Arnold Palmer did it by himself,” he
wrote. “There was no one to pinch hit for him when he needed a par on the final hole. He did it himself. Professional golfers are not pampered. Baseball players are hard to find when a light mist makes the grass wet. How often has Bill Russell had to allow for the wind on a hook shot? The silence which sur- rounds a golfer is more deafening than any stadium crowd. A four-foot putt can’t be made on a broken play. If golfers lose, they can’t blame anyone else. They don’t have an offensive line to depend on.” Maybe so. Whichever, I’ve been mostly
ducking the golf crowd since the column appeared on Feb. 4, 1970. No matter, in Boston at least they still think I have half a brain. I’ve always been a Palmer fan, as I said, but I think Bill Russell was not only the Athlete the Decade for the ‘60s but the Athlete of the Century in a photo finish with Sandy, Willie Mays and Jim Brown My favorite of all knock-knocks came
from Steve Prefontaine, ever the toast of Oregon, one America’s greatest distance runner from 2,000 to 10,000 meters. The letter from Pre came just three months be- fore he was killed in a car crash in 1975 Our relationship started when Will
Kern, director of special events for the L.A. Times, (when the paper sponsored such things as special events), got me to join Pre, then 1,500-meter record holder Filbert Bayi of Tanzania and mile record holder John Walker of New Zealand for dinner to talk about the “Miracle Mile” that was to be fea- tured in the Times Indoor Games set for Fri- day Feb. 7, 1975, at Inglewood’s then still “Fabulous Forum.” It was one of the great nights at dinner.
Pre and Walker were both world champ tracksters and beer drinkers, classic exam- ple of guys who both train hard and play hard. I did a Thursday column on the meet,
mostly featuring Pre with the conclusion he had a much greater sense of humor than most people realized and that he was to- tally likeable despite his reputation for being a loud and brassy pop-off In the column, I predicted both Pre
and Walker would blaze by the favored Bayi to win the Miracle Mile Alas, Pre blazed to the front with two
laps to go, but faded to last in the field as Bayi kicked home first A few days later, a letter postmarked
Eugene, OR arrived in the mail. Pre’s name in a bold red scrawl was in the top left cor- ner of the envelope How nice, I thought. He must be writ-
ing to thank me for the nice things I’d writ- ten about him and maybe even apologizing for his poor performance and explaining what went wrong at the Forum I opened the envelope with enthusi-
asm and appreciation. So out tumbled a clipping of my column with my errant pre- diction outlined in red ink And the handwritten personal note
said, “John, next time leave the predictions to the experts, you ignorant asshole-Steve Prefontane.” I was slightly shocked at first, then re-
alized it was typical of his sense of humor, laughing at both himself and me. He wasn’t upset about anything. He enjoyed a good laugh too much to do much brooding His premature death on May 30, 1975,
was a sad loss to so many of us. He was just 24, back in top shape getting ready for the 1976 Olympics in Montreal The note laughing at my prediction
skills remains one of my foremost treas- ures, a lasting memo between Pre and me, a reminder that we should spend less time taking ourselves so seriously and a lot more time laughing at ourselves That’s Steve Prefontaine’s legacy to me, and I thank him always for it.b
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