We’ve had a lot here from the eminent and brilliantly profane Pat Jordan … but then we sort of got off track with the swear-off and everything else. I’ve never had a chance to publish the entire interview.
So here you go. Some of this has been published already, but let’s just give you the whole thing. You already know Pat Jordan. He’s an author, journalist, conservative, Miami Hurricanes fan, one-time flame throwing pitcher. He’s written 13 books, all good, though “A False Spring” is the acknowledged classic, much to Pat’s irritation. His stepdaughter Meg Ryan is a story all her own. His collection, The Best Sports Writing of Pat Jordan (edited by friend Alex Belth) is fabulous, of course.
From the story “King Rat,” 1992.
The White Rat tells jokes. Sexist jokes about the spinster and the foul-mouthed parrot. Racist jokes about the black dude in the elevator. Redneck jokes about the gay cowboy in the bar. He sits there, in the dugout, chewing tobacco, spitting into a plastic bottle, talking. He is surrounded by younger baseball players. They look down at him and smile. He is sixty-years old, a pugnacious-looking man from another time and place. He has a bristly, rust-colored crewcut; a bullet-shaped head; a jutting jaw; a big hard belly; and, curiously, a child’s bottled up energy. He rocks back and forth as he talks. He reaches out to touch a player on the arm, the shoulder, anywhere, just to make contact, to draw them closer. “And so,” he says, “this cowboy looks up from the bar and says, ‘Moo moo, Buckaroo!” The players laugh, shake their heads, “That’s funny, Rat.” Then they trot off to batting practice.
* * *
I hate the start of interviews. I find myself asking some absurdly obvious question — “How’s the season going so far” — just to get into things. Sometimes, this works. More of often it doesn’t. But it’s not like I can change. You seem a lot more direct. How do you like to begin interviews?
It depends on the kind of piece I’m doing. If it’s a profile I’ll want to get to know the person so I’ll talk about myself, find something that we have in common. For example, John Kruk was a legendary beer drinker. When I first met him in Bristol, Connecticut, I had just stopped drinking two or three months before. But I told my wife, Susan, “I’m going to have to go out drinking with this guy if he goes out drinking.” So John and I go out to a Mexican restaurant. So I go, “You want a drink, John?” And he says, “No, I gave up drinking.” I said, “You did? Me too.” And we started talking about how we both gave up drinking.
OK, now that awkward moment is out of the way … let’s start with Jose Canseco. I really did love the Canseco story. I loved it because to me it got us readers close to Canseco without even getting us anywhere near the guy. In your mind is there anything Canseco himself could have said that would have made the story more intimate?
Speaking to Jose would have made the story less interesting. Most of the time, athletes’ responses make a story duller, but magazines insist on having athletes talk, say, about their view of the greenhouse effect, which they think is where you go to buy a corsage for your latest girlfriend. In a small way, the Jose story was like my version of Gay Talese’s great Esquire piece “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.” Talese couldn’t get a one-on-one with Sinatra but hung around him and his entourage long enough that he got an ever better story than if he had spoken to Sinatra. I recently re-read that story, and the entire “Fame and Obscurity” collection, and am still amazed by what a wonderful reporter Talese was. I do think he was too easy on Sinatra and DiMaggio though. He was hard on Plimpton instead. Actually, in reading Talese, and W.C. Heinz lately, I didn’t realize how hard I am in comparison at times.
For that matter, it seems that mainstream sportswriting can get overly obsessed with quotes and access and the often inane cliches that people utter about themselves. Do you see it that way?
Today writers look for the pull quote — “Jose claims Deadspin writer was on deca durabolin when he wrote Chasing Jose” — and not the fuller story. People aren’t just the sum of their outrageous quotes. There’s more subtlety involved but writers are either too lazy or too ill-equipped to search it out.
I saw an interview with you and Alex where you both talked about preferring “A Nice Tuesday” to “A False Spring,” in part because it felt more authentic. I completely agree. I think A Nice Tuesday feels more complete and real and true, you know? But A False Spring is so much fun.
“A False Spring” was a good book, but “A Nice Tuesday” was better, fuller, more mature, with more edges and nuance, which can be attributed to the writer’s maturity. Any writer’s life makes a better story once it has played out longer. But it was also less of a baseball book and some of the critics didn’t like all of the stuff about my dogs. They wanted ant to be “A False Spring” redux. but I was no longer that person. “A False Spring” was all of a piece, about a career of failure in the minor leagues. It was very structured and ordered. “A Nice Tuesday” was more open to mystery, to where life takes you—my dogs, for instance.
Do people prefer to read about youth and invulnerability then they do about the tender and bittersweet way people get old?
I like to read about older people talking about their youth. At that point, they have a deeper understanding of it, and their old age, too.
Let’s talk a little bit about your start as a writer. The thing that interests me is that most young, star athletes, at least in my experience, do not seem to have the sort of introspection and heightened sense of experience that you might expect from writers. I get the sense that this is because the experiences in their lives are already so heightened, that it would be like turning up the sound on a Metallica concert or something. When were you first drawn to words and stories and why do you think you were, at least as far as I can tell, different than other star athletes?
I had a scattered attention span as a kid, which was death for an athlete, but a gift for a writer. As for sensitivity, well, I got fired from every job I ever had when I had to work with people. Being a writer, alone, constitutionally is the only job I can do.
What was the first story you wrote?
It was a short story for Ingenue magazine based on my experiences as a teacher at an all-girls catholic high school. I got a check made out to Miss Pat Jordan which was a compliment since i told the story through the eyes of a 16 year old girl. The first sports piece was on Muhammad Ali that I sold to Lew Eskin at Boxing Illustrated. After I left baseball, or baseball left me, as I used to say, I wanted to write a book about my minor league career. At first I wanted to write a book out of spite, about how the Braves had done me wrong. That changed over time, but it is what gave me the idea to write in the first place.
I started small, writing for a local newspaper. I wrote a couple of funny columns about my experiences playing minor league baseball in McCook, Nebraska and I bundled them together and sent them to Al Silverman at Sport. He told me to put them together into what we call “a string of pearls.” String of Pearls means that the columns were only connected tangentially, like, “I remember one day this happened, and another day this happened.” There wasn’t an organized story. It was like the Ten Funniest Moments of my minor league career. Sent it to him, and he bought it. I was shocked. He never ran it, but said, “You’re a pitcher, maybe we’ll have you do a story on a pitcher.”
My first major piece was in ’69, for True on Phil Niekro, whom I’d played with in the minor leagues. After that piece, the editor said he’d give me four stories a year at $2,500 a pop. That’s ten grand. I was making $8,800 as a school teacher, so I quit my job. Then in June I went to the editor’s office and he was gone. Nobody at the magazine knew anything about me. I had no money, only $3,000 in the bank. Then Al Silverman called me back, I don’t know, maybe six months after we first spoke, and said, “I want you to go to Montreal and do a story on Jim Maloney, the Cincinnati Reds’pitcher.” I didn’t know how to get on the plane, practically. This was a period, in the late sixties, when people didn’t fly regularly. Flying was still a little bit novel unless you were a business man. I said, “What hotel should I stay at?” He said, “I don’t know. The team is staying at the Queen Elizabeth.” I couldn’t get in the Queen Elizabeth but right next door was a Hotel Champlain. I was really disappointed because I wanted to be where the Reds were. I get to Montreal and the Queen Elizabeth is this old, rundown mausoleum of a hotel with a coffee shop. And the Hotel Champlain was a new skyscraper. The maids in the room were gorgeous. I’m in a fantasy world. I got a note on the pillow when I came back to the room one morning in lilac ink in French. I thought the maid was interested in me. So I brought it down to a cab driver and asked him what it said and he said, “If Monsieur wants his laundry done, leave it out in the hallway.”
Your first book, which I have just read, is called “Black Coach.” It’s really terrific. Can you talk about that?
When I got my first book contract it was so I could ostensibly write “A False Spring.” I gave them “Suitors of Spring,” a collection of my early Sports Illustrated pieces on pitchers, and then was assigned to do “Black Coach,” too, which I wrote before “A False Spring.” “Black Coach” was the first time I ever attempted anything that long. It was reporting-heavy book about a black coach becoming head football coach in an all white school in North Carolina in the late sixties, early seventies. There was lots of below the surface tension but no cross burnings. Ironically, another writer turned the idea down because there was no conflict, i.e. cross burnings.
Another favorite story of mine was your story about Meg Ryan, who is of course the daughter of your wife Susan. They have, over the years, had a strained relationship. How difficult was it for you to write that piece?
Easy. Meg was trashing my wife, her mother, in the press every week. This was after she had become “America’s Sweeheart.” She and her mother had a falling out because her mother was concerned that Meg’s fiancé at the time was a cokehead, which he was. Meg, who was in high school when her parents split, went on and on to the media about how her mother had abandoned her. It became so painful for my wife that I wrote the story to stop Meg, to let her know that her mother, through me, could fight back.
There’s a lot of personal feeling in your work. I think all writers think about where they fit in the story, of where they do not fit. Do you think about these things specifically or do you write and let these things work themselves out?
I let the story and the act of writing bring out any personal stuff of mine that might relate to the subject. I don’t interject my personal stuff into the story unless it makes sense. Which doesn’t mean I don’t have a personal take. My writing style is understated, I want to let the story tell itself and not get in the way of that, but I always have a take on what I’m writing about. Years ago, I was at lunch with Pat Ryan and Ray Cave, my editors at Sports Illustrated. They used to take me to lunch and I’d have too many bloody Mary’s and start pontificating about who knows what. One time, Pat Ryan got pissed with me, “Why do you always have to be right?” And Ray said, “It’s not that, it’s just that Pat is a moralist.” Which isn’t strictly a “right” or “wrong” thing. I don’t know exactly how to describe it, but when I do a subject, I have a basic feeling, a judgement, if you will, if the person is a good person or not. And again, it’s not “good” in the sense that they are pious or anything like that. It’s more about whether or not the subject is an authentic person. Because I can admire someone even if I don’t share their same values, so long as they aren’t a phony. I can’t tolerate phonies.
I guess it comes down to a confidence issue. Are you a confident writer?
Now, maybe. I’ve been doing this for so long that I am a confident craftsman. If I give a piece to Alex to take a look at before I send it to my editor, I’ll ask him something specific. Like in the case of the Canseco piece, I gave it to Al and asked, “Tell me if it’s funny.” That’s all I wanted to know. I don’t need help with line-editing so to speak at this point. But still, I’m terrified of that blank piece of paper and that first sentence. It takes me days sometimes to get that first sentence. I’m obsessive in how I approach each story—reading clips on the subject, then writing out my questions, then doing the interviews, and then transcribing them, organizing the quotes and my other notes, musings, into themes, creating outlines, revising the outlines, before I ever start to actually write. Once I get that first sentence then the writing takes on a life of its own.
Here’s an odd question: Do you have your wife read your stories after you finish them? I do that.
My wife doesn’t read my stories, necessarily, but sometimes I’ll read a scene to her while I’m writing and ask what she thinks. Or a sentence, or an image. But by now I pretty much know whether what I’m doing is good or not. If it isn’t I can’t go on until I unravel it. Susie used to come with me when I went to do a story. All the time in the mid, late eighties, before we got dogs. You know, I’d be in a hotel for a week and it’d be like a vacation for her, fun. And since Susie is an actress she was able to give me insights into that profession that would help me when I approached an actor for a profile. Cause what did I know about acting, I was a jock. She’d tell me, so-and-so has a hard time with comedy, so I might mention that in a question, “It’s been said that you have a hard time with comedy,” to see what kind of reaction I’ll get.
Susie was with me at Cyndi Garvey’s house the day she spilled her guts about her marriage. In the car when we left, Susan and I were going back-and-forth, we were both charged up. Here’s the other thing with Susie. If she’s gone with me on the interview, when I’m writing the story, she will add things to it that I might have missed. I’ll tell her, “I’m writing the scene where we’re in the house with Steve and Cyndi,” and she’ll say, “Well, did you write about the Leroy Neiman paintings?” And I’ll say, “Oh shit, I forgot them.” She’s a second set of eyes.
What was the experience like for you and Alex putting all these stories together for the book?
Great experience. Al’s a great reader. There were some stories I remembered as being great and when Al didn’t like them I re-read them and most often found he was right. Then, there were some he liked and I didn’t and when I re-read them I found they were better than I’d remembered. Sometimes as a writer, you remember a story based on how much you enjoyed writing it which doesn’t necessarily make it a great story, and vice versa. I’m an egomaniac but I’m not overly sensitive when it comes to criticism of my work. You have to have the skin of a rhino in this business. I don’t take that stuff personally.
You wrote a very insightful piece on Roger Clemens for my friend Rich at the beginning of this whole Clemens-McNamee massacre. Has it surprised you at all the way Roger has handled all this?
No. That’s the only way Roger knows how to deal with things. Dig in like a pitt bull. That’s they way he pitched. No change ups just throw harder and harder.
And one of the great questions seems to be how this whole steroid thing will shake out — how people will remember this era in baseball. What do you think?
I don’t care. I’m not and never have been a fan of any sport. just ask Alex. I watch sports as a jock not as a fan. The only team I care about is University of Miami, college football.
OK, a few quick questions:
Mantle or Mays?
Mantle, though Mays was a better all around player.
Do you listen to music when you write? What music do you listen to in general?
Only the music in my head: Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps, Ersel Hickey. The radio in the car when I’m driving across alligator alley is tuned to 102.7 FM, oldies, nothing after 1960. That’s the only time I listen to music.
I love the different ways you imagine Canseco writing his “Vindicated” masterpiece. How do you write? (I was reading that Gay Talese writes a single sentence, puts it on a board, stares at it for hours, moves around the words, reworks the sentence, stares at THAT for hours and so on. Seems like this might make things tough on deadline).
I write on typewriter on yellow second sheets. I bought the last seven cartons of yellow second sheets available in the country, and have them stored in my attic. It’s enough to last me the rest of my lifetime. One of my old editors called me a troglodyte. I take it as a complement. I use scissors, cut and paste, corrective pencils, white out, and even yellow white out for the second sheets, and that white out isn’t even made anymore. I do what Talese does but on paper. I’ll re-write first sentence on a sheet 20 times till it’s right, then cut it out and paste it following the next sentence. I use a lot of glue.
Why won’t Tom Seaver concede you threw harder than him?
Jealous.
You write so well about your comeback in “A Nice Tuesday.” Was it hard to let go of your career? Did that help?
It was hard at 21. Now, it’s not so hard. What was hard was discovering I fucked up my own career, God’s gift. I hope God isn’t still mad at me for that. Which is why when I became a writer I was determined to be as methodical, disciplined and orderly as possible. I was determined not to squander the talent I had at writing magazine profiles. Not only that but in writing about people about learning how to engage them and be empathetic, I became a nicer person, less egocentric.
Alex came up with a list of essential baseball books. What are your five essential books — not baseball, just books? Not including your own, of course.
True Confessions. Exiles by Michael Arlen, Fame and Obscurity by Talese, anything by Hemmingway, most things by Elmore Leonard.
Hillary or Barack?
Neither. McCain. Am an NRA member. Nuff said.
Yankees or Red Sox this year? I ask that knowing that you are a Yankees guy.
Red Sox. I’m no longer a Yankee fan. Too much money and too little thought spent on building that club.
Is there any must-watch TV for you?
Been watching the John Adams saga. Love that. Sense and Sensibility. I watch all kinds of British Crime Serials, Foils War, House of Eliot. I saw the four seasons of Hustle which I thought was a lot of fun. I watch Lifetime. Take Home Chef with Curtis Stone. And then MSNBC for news, especially with anything that has Tucker Carlson on it.
I’m at Augusta now … you wrote a wonderful story about a couple of young golfing prodigies, the Howard sisters. What do you think about golf?
I think it’s pool on a big table.
Sports or Hollywood?
Neither. It depends entirely on the person. People are fun, like Marilyn Chambers, the ex-porn star, and Bob Miles, a deceased neo Nazi, and some are boring like Jose and Clemens. I’m more drawn to people who are not celebrities, athletes or actors. Car runners in Florida; coal miners in West Virginia; a 911 dispatcher in Portland, Maine, a female bodyguard. I did the St. Paul Saints in the mid-nineties. Mike Veeck always interested me, partly because his father—whom I had never met—wrote something nice about “A False Spring” in one of his books. So I wanted to do the St. Paul Saints, heard funny things about them. I love minor league stories because nobody wants to do them. Mike wanted to meet me. So I go out there, get my press pass and I never went to see Mike, I just hung around the Stadium that first night ‘cause I didn’t want a guided tour. I wanted to see what was going on myself. So I hung around, sat in different sections, talked to people, and then the next day I went to Mike. He said, “Pat, where were you I was looking for you?” ‘Cause he didn’t know what I looked like. I said, “Oh, I just wanted to check it out myself.” He said, “You’re the only guy who ever came and did that. They all come to me, ask me 20 questions and then leave.” I said, “Well, the story is not only about you it’s about what’s going on here.”
So I’m still writing the story a few months later. I had to call up Veeck to check a couple of facts and I see in the paper, in The Miami Herald, that Veeck has invited Charlie Sheen, the actor, to pitch for him. I call Veeck up and kiddingly, I said to him, “What’s the story, you invite that fucking actor to pitch for you? I’ll get in shape and I’ll pitch for you.” He said, “Okay, get in shape, I’ll pitch you.” So I hang up and Susan says, “What’s wrong? Your face looks white.” I said, “I just told Veeck I was going to pitch for him next summer.” She says, “You put your foot in your mouth, but it’s not my business.”
I was 56-years old. I hadn’t thrown a baseball in thirty-thirty-five years. Oh, I had a catch here and there with my ten-year old son, but I mean THROW a baseball. So I go to the park. I’m standing on the mound and the first pitch I throw, I fall down. I couldn’t even stand upright. So I had to get closer to the plate, start with lobbing the ball. To make a long story short, it took me six months to get in pitching shape. By the time I was ready to pitch for Veeck, he had hired a girl to pitch for him. I called him up and told him I was ready to pitch and he said, “I can’t. I’ve got a girl pitching for me. If I have an old man too, it’ll be a freak show.” It was a freak show anyway, but I guess a woman and an old man was over the top even for him.
So he sends me to Miles Wolff of the Northern League. Great guy. Real baseball fan. Miles hooked me up with another team in Waterbury, Connecticut and I went and pitched an inning for them. Did well, and wrote a book about it called “A Nice Tuesday.” All because of my involvement with Mike Veeck.
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