Maury Allen: Beat Years

The year was 1947. The place was the shrine in Brooklyn called Ebbets Field. The time was 3 a.m.

As I sat on that cement street corner at Bedford Avenue and Sullivan Place, wrapped in an old Army blanker, holding a brown bag of two salami sandwiches and an apple close to my chest, I was as close to heaven as a boy could get.

Rex Barney would start against the Yankees that day in the World Series and by the time I got to my bleacher seat many hours later, my eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep.

Joe DiMaggio of the hated Yankees would hit a homer and I would feel the anguish for days afterward.

I clung to that ticket receipt for many years, carrying it with me to combat in Korea some years later, to small newspaper offices in Indiana and Pennsylvania, to the hushed halls of Time Inc. and Sports Illustrated magazine and finally, in the early 1960s, to the New York Post.

The kid from Brooklyn, fanatic about Jackie and Pee Wee, Duke and Oisk, Carl and Campy, had made it big.

I remember covering my first game with the Mets and staring over at the giants of my trade, Jimmy Cannon, whose columns I read faithfully a few years earlier in the Pacific Stars and Stripes, Dan Parker, Dick Young, Joe Trimble, Joe King, Harold Rosenthal, Dan Daniel, Barney Kremenko, Milton, Gross, and the exalted Red Smith.

Soon I was traveling with a new team called the Mets, staying up late in hotel bars with Casey Stengel, arguing about Ron Hunt with Young, working next to Gross on one of his sensitive days, breaking bread with Snider and Don Zimmer, Roger Craig, the saintly Gil Hodges and all the others of my youth who were passing through the team in those early years.

Baseball had been more to me than God and religion. It had been life itself, dying a thousand deaths when Bobby Thomson connected, bleeding for Ralphie, cheering uncontrollably in a barracks in Japan when Elston Howard rolled out to Pee Wee for the final 1955 out and that championship season at last, clipping pictures and saving cards.

Now in the 1960s I was one of them, sitting next to Gil one day and talking about his frustrating Series, listening to Duke complain about a smart aleck kid first baseman named Kranepool, and over all watching the antics of the beloved Stengel.

Baseball writing is more than words on paper. It is the love of the game, the fraternalism of the press box, the joys of ribald humor, the sharing of secret dreams, the emotional high of the big scoop when a player trusts that you can handle this urgent message with dignified behavior.

For a year or two I watched the giants work. I said little. I observed. I saw these names I had read in the pages of the News, the Times, the Post, the Journal American, the Telegram, the Tribune as great teachers. All were generous with advice and time.

Soon I was becoming established. Others came to me for information about Rod Kanehl and Graig Anderson, asked my opinions of Marvelous Marv, congratulated me on a scoop about Larry Bearnarth.

The old names passed the scene and the Mets won in 1969 as the Yankees faded. Then the Yankees came back with Bill and Reggie and Goose and the rest, and the Mets struggled.

I flew to Los Angeles and San Francisco and Cincinnati and Dallas for big games. I ate in the finest restaurants. I lived in luxury hotels. I drank in whirling hotel bars with $100 a night hookers asking for my favors. I bought breakfast and actually picked up the tab for kids named Nolan Ryan and Jerry Koosman, Ron Blomberg and Ron Swoboda, Fritz Peterson and Tom Seaver.

The Mets won again in 1986. It didn’t matter much to me then. It had only become a job. The thrill was gone. I had grown older and the players had grown richer. The stories about contracts, free agency and salary arbitration and agents bored me to tears. The 25-year-olds who respectfully called me Mr. Allen when I was 35 years old, now yelled obscenities at me across a locker room.

Baseball writing lost its romance as it lost many of its best practitioners. Wise guy journalism became the style of the 1980s, knocking everything and everyone, exporting the game of baseball and the game of life before their powder was dry. Women sportswriters paraded through locker rooms. Radio “foofs” thrust microphones into every locker and ripped off the questions of the writers for a sound bite.

The travel was wearisome. The games were too long. The politics of the papers was too much.

I resigned from the Post in 1988. I now write a new column and an occasional sports column for the Gannett Newspapers out of Westchester. Nobody tells me to bleep myself anymore.

Television is now king, of course, but there are occasional stories I read that still sing to me. I thank the writer if I see him or offer a note to them from far away.

The thrill isn’t completely gone. I never miss an installation in Cooperstown. I still get breathless when Pee Wee walks up to me, grins, sticks out his hand and says, “Hi, Maury.”

How could a grown man with gray hair tell a little Colonel from Kentucky that he still loves him?