The face was weathered, etched by a lifetime of carrying a very heavy weight. The gait was slightly awkward; he’d lost his left leg below the knee in 2003, a casualty of diabetes. But on this night last winter, as fans clustered around him at Fred Biletnikoff’s anti-drug foundation dinner in a hotel ballroom south of Oakland, Jack Tatum was not wearing the expression of an assassin. “You never make a tackle with a smile on your face,” Woody Hayes had told him back at Ohio State, but on this night, his smile was wide, and open, and welcoming. The graying dreadlocks that swooped all the way down to his waist — hair that spoke of a 61-year-old man who had always lived by no rules but his own — swayed as he turned to accommodate each new autograph-seeker,

The hair had always been part of The Assassin’s signature. In the Seventies, as the most storied and feared member of the Raiders’ fabled defensive backfield – “The Soul Patrol” — Tatum had sported a fearsome Afro and a Fu Manchu and a menacing glare as he bore down on opposing receivers the way a tractor-trailer might bear down on a squirrel on a rural highway. A three-time Pro Bowler, he was the hardest-hitting safety the game has ever known, A Sports Illustrated poll named him one of the top five defensive backs of all time. NFL.com named him the sixth “most-feared tackler of all time.”

Mike Siani, a Raider receiver of the time, puts him in the top two: “Pound for pound, he was the toughest football player I’ve ever seen. The only guy I could ever compare him to is Butkus.” “When Jack hit someone, it was a different sound,” linebacker Phil Villapiano told me. “There was a different sound between everyone else‘s hits and Jack Tatum’s hits.“

I introduced myself, and told him I was writing a book about his Super-Bowl winning Raiders of 1976: the last team of the old era, when you could be an outlaw and a rebel and a partier, and still play championship football. “Cool,” he said. “Call me.” I did, and left a few messages. But his health was failing. I didn’t want to press. I knew that, 32 years after the Darryl Stingley play, the hit for which he’ll forever be known, he was still reluctant to give interviews.

Then, one day, Tatum called me back, and we talked about the many unknown sides to the man. Of his grandfather’s farm in North Carolina: “If I hadn’t played football, I’d’ve probably been a farmer,” he told me. “I just liked the peace and serenity.” Of his other nickname on the Raiders – The Reverend – because, off the field, he was so contemplative and quiet. “Both my dad and grandfather were quiet and reflective guys, but they were real men,” he said. Clearly, in Tatum’s mind, the two were not mutually exclusive concepts,

“He was quick to smile, and so relaxed,” Raider fullback Mark van Eeghen told me. “Quick to giggle and laugh. Then he’d put the helmet on, and, Jesus, the switch that would turn on.”

“I wanted them to know that I was in control of the field from the middle to the hashmarks,” Tatum told me. “If you wanted to play in that area, you had to pay. You had to pay me. But you can’t be off the field what people see on the field. That’s a whole different world … It was a different person when you take the field.”

And, finally, we talked about Darryl Stingley. It had been a meaningless exhibition game in August of 1978, in Oakland: Steve Grogan’s pass had sailed high and behind the receiver, out of reach. As the two neared each other, Tatum lowered his head off to the left, so as to avoid a head-to-head hit; Tatum’s tackles had always been torso-to-torso, mano-a-mano. He had never been a head-hunter. But Stingley lowered his head, and it collided with Tatum’s right shoulder. Two of his vertebrae fractured, instantly rendering him a quadraplegic.

“My shoulder pad hit him,” Tatum told me, reluctant but willing to discuss the play. “It wasn’t head to head. And, yes, it was legal.” It was a horrid confluence of events, just tragic physics. After the game, Tatum went to the hospital to visit Stingley but was denied admission: “When I got there they told me only the family was allowed to come that day,” Tatum told me.

Up until his death in 2007, Stingley never professed any anger at Tatum. “For me to go on and adapt to a new way of life,” Stingley, who would die of complications from the injury, said in 1983, “I had to forgive him. I don’t harbor any ill feelings toward him. In my heart I forgave Jack Tatum a long time ago.”

It’s a sentiment worth following, for the Assassin disappeared years ago. The Reverend devoted his final years to the Jack Tatum Fund for Youthful Diabetes. The legacy should encompass more than the ferocity. It should speak of the farmer, too.

Cracked king crab legs on ice with assorted sauces? Strip loin with cilantro pesto and spring green beans? Or maybe a customized omelette, with only the freshest of farmers-market ingredients? I was paralyzed by indecision. So I finally opted for a plate of sushi, featuring a crab roll that rivaled any I had ever tasted. My friend went for the strip loin. Then both of us opted for crisp, sugary wafers topped with chocolate mousse for dessert.

Then we walked down the private stairway from the dining room, past the potted palm tree, and took our seats for the baseball game. They were exquisitely comfortable seats, a few rows behind the Yankee dugout. Immediately, a smiling waiter appeared out of nowhere and took my next order: shrimp cocktail.

Well, why not indulge? It all came free with the ticket. I was experiencing my first trip, and likely my last, to the Legends Suites seats of Yankee Stadium, courtesy of the friend of a friend who couldn’t be at the park that day, to use his season tickets, which, I’m guessing, cost him something in the neighborhood of the Gross National Product of the Ivory Coast.

The waiter re-appeared, pleasantly inconspicuously, every inning or so. His service was impeccable. Some time around the fifth inning, I darted back into the free-snack area, where free piles of childhood candies beckoned to the children of my fellow privileged patrons like some Willy Wonka dream come true. I snatched some Twizzlers to take back to my seat.

The game? Right — the game. Well, as I remember, the Yankees hit several home runs and pummeled the Houston Astros unmercifully. A-Rod made a great stab, as usual, at third. But the rest of the details are rather fuzzy. Because somehow it didn’t feel like being at a baseball game, no matter how close I was to the field – close enough to see Derek Jeter, waving a bat in the on-deck circle, checking out the very pretty lady a few seats away from me as she returned from a snack run (I think she’d grabbed some Good N Plenty.) Close enough to see Rodriguez warming up, waving that bat like a club, so that Astro pitcher Wandy Rodriguez was already flinching before A-Rod even approached the plate.

It was like watching baseball from the emperor’s suite at the Coliseum. A decline-and-fall-of-the-Roman-Empire vibe hovered all around me. I kept looking over my shoulder, to check out the regular fans, in embarrassment, wondering whether they were staring darts at my back in envy or disdain, or at the four men in front of me, wearing baseball hats with financial-institution logos on the crowns, who spent most of the day talking about tennis and boats.

I’m not really complaining, mind you. If modern baseball salaries requires teams to create stadiums at taxpayers’ expense where the class system rivals the heyday of the Boston Brahmins, then so be it. If you have to pay top dollar to get an Alex Rodriguez, I’m all for it. But as I wandered out after the game toward the subway – finally mingling with actual baseball fans — I didn’t feel as if I’d seen a baseball game. I mean, I know the game had been out there, and the Yankees were getting a lot of hits, and 45,000 fans in regular baseball seats were enjoying themselves, because I could hear their roars. But in my padded, servanted shell, nibbling my free Twizzlers, attended by my waiter-butler, I felt as if I were secreted in some bubble, or as if I was watching the players through some invisible, shimmering aura. I kept waiting for the feel of a baseball game to seep through. It never did. The way sitting in a opera box seals you off from the opera, Only with free tuna sashimi thrown in.

As I headed up the stairs to the 4 train, I felt full, but I didn’t feel satisfied.

So a few days later I went looking for some baseball, and found it in my own backyard. In Torrington. The team is called the Titans. A five-dollar ticket gets you as close to the field as a Legends Suite ticket. The Titans are college kids. They play in the Atlantic Collegiate Baseball League, whose players hail from everywhere from Notre Dame and Cal-Fullerton to local community colleges. And they play very good baseball.

The Titans play in an intimate place called Fuessenich Park, capacity 1500, named for the late Frederick Fuessinich, a formerly prominent citizen in a formerly prominent mill town. The Naugatuck River runs beyond left field, in front of an old, condemned factory that harkens to the days when the game left the farms and came into the cities, the days when company teams played intense, entertaining baseball. Fuessinch Field feels like baseball.

Before the game, the Titans mingle with the fans on the field. The night I went to see them play, Ralph Dieguez, a Cuban-American from Post University in Waterbury, was lobbing a tennis ball back and forth with a couple of little kids near the first-base line while the rest of his teammates signed autographs for kids whose awe-stricken expressions at the men in the uniforms immediately made me realize what was missing from my Yankee Stadium experience: the feeling of community. The essence of baseball is the bond between fan and player. I envied the fans in the Yankee Stadium bleachers that day who were bonding with Nick Swisher out in right field. And with each other. But in the Legends Suites, you’re not allowed to mingle. You’re sealed off, literally and figuratively. A guard protects the Legends Suites section from the plebeians.

At Fuessenich Park everyone talks to everyone else. They don’t serve you food at your seats, so you get to stand in line at the concession stand, and talk to the people in front and in back of you while you wait for some of the best French fries you’ll ever eat and little kids holding ice cream chase each other in circles around you as you breathe in the fried-oil scent of a baseball park.

And here’s the coolest thing of all about our neighborhood team: the team and the community are one and the same. The Titans are owned by the community, and all of the gate receipts go to a different nonprofit organization at each of the 21 home games. On the night I saw the Titans play their arch rivals, the North Jersey Eagles – 15 batters have been clocked by pitches in their first six games — Falls Village Child Care took home my five dollars.

This revolutionary franchise model is the brainchild of a New Haven man named Ray Orzechowski and his two partners. Ray’s a professor of multi-media journalism at Quinnipiac College. After the old Torrington Twisters relocated to New Bedford this summer, Orzechowski and his friends, convinced that you could run a baseball team by selling memberships to the team, immediately looked to fill the void at the old ballpark. The Titans are supported by 500 members who paid $100 each for their season membership. The members literally own their team. They even get voting rights in club policies. They voted in Gregg Hunt, the manager. They voted the team name, and the team colors.

Orzechowski calls the Titan model “the democratization of sports.” I call it baseball the way it’s meant to be played: close enough to touch, with a full moon rising through sunset clouds beyond the right-field fence. With no waiters at your seat. Close enough to see the sharp break of a curveball – and hear the shouts of a bench-clearing brawl, which is the way my game ended, after a double play in the bottom of the ninth sealed the Eagles’ 3-1 win.

But as I walked to my car, in front of the stolid 19^th century armory that sits next to the park, I wasn’t dismayed by the outcome. The local baseball future is bright indeed. The Titans are in first place in their division, and have just announced that they’ll be hosting the Canadian national team in an exhibition in a few weeks.

I’ll be there. And I’ll bring my own Twizzlers.

It should have been front-page news. It wasn’t, and I don’t know why, because it was the scariest story I’d heard in a long, long time. It was the announcement last month from a private school in Massachusetts called Cushing Academy that the school was selling off or giving away its entire library of 20,000 volumes. The whole collection will be digitalized. The words in the books won’t disappear, I guess, if the system crashes. They’ll just go back to where they came from. Into the clouds.
I don’t use the word “cloud” randomly, by the way. These days, internet visionaries refer to something called “cloud computing” – defined as “the ability to snatch data from anywhere off the web” — from anywhere, using your phone, your laptop, your IPod, your BlackBerry. I think the phrase “cloud computing” is supposed to be a good thing. But to me, clouds have the connotation of fuzziness, of being ephemeral. Turn off your library computer at Cushing, with a click, and the words will disappear into the clouds, waiting for someone to retrieve them. If anyone wants to. Which seems less and less likely.
Book sales of even the bestselling authors are way down. And those bestsellers themselves? The wholesale stores that also sell groceries and lawn furniture and high-def TVs are now selling best-selling books for virtually nothing, They’re just product. And if they don’t turn a profit, they’ll disappear from the CostCo shelves like any product that people don’t want, like chocolate-covered Cheez Doodles
The printed word, it seems, is finally, literally disappearing. I’m watchning it happen up close. A couple of weeks ago in my hometown, I recently had the occasion to attend a short-story reading, part of a regular routine wherein some friends and acquaintances gather to preserve both the age-old tradition of storytelling from books and the convivial drinking of fermented grapes.
The reader on this particular day was a classmate of mine from a university that we both attended many decades ago. He is an educated, erudite man who knows his way around literature, and he used to be an actor. So I was really looking forward to his performance that day, and I was not alone. Sitting by my side was another regular in our little group, the actor Nat Benchley. grandson of Robert Benchley, the Algonquin Roundtable humorist Robert Benchley. As in the Dorothy Parker Algonquin Roundtable of eighty years ago: a group of people who gained fame by sitting around a Manhattan hotel and drinking and gossiping but mostly used to write books and stories and newspaper articles, back when the written word still mattered. It couln d’t happen now; blogging is a solo enterprise.
Anyway: Dan settled into his chair, next to a table piled high with the books we like to read from for our story readings, and brought out….his Kindle. A Kindle, for you Luddites out there, is a “wireless reading device.” Dan dialed up his story, and as Benchley and I exchanged glances, Dan began to read Not by turning pages from a leather-bound volume balanced in his hand; by holding the Kindle in his left hand, like a cellphone, and punching up the pages with the fingers of his right hand. It looked like a guy reading a grocery list from a notepad, checking off items.
Now, I’m sure that the story Dan read that day was a good story. But I can’t, for the life of me, remember what it was about, or who wrote it. John Cheever? Margaret Atwood? F. Scott Fitzgerald? I can’t recall. Maybe if there’d been a cover or a spine for me to look at, the story would have stayed in my head. But I doubt it. Subconsciously, I think that as Dan read the words, and then finished, and clicked off his Kindle, I relegated those words to the clouds. They disappeared. They had no weight. They had no substance. Because they were electronic, somehow, they had less meaning. Another Kindle-wielding friend of mine swears to me that people are reading more now that we have Kindles, but my question is, if that’s even true, what exactly are they reading? Dickens or People magazine?
Now, before you call me just another old guy crying wolf, you should know that I learned about the Cushing library apocalypse not from some grouch telling me about how everything was better in the bygone days, but in conversation with a former student of mine, a 17-year-old girl who is now in 12th grade – and she’s appalled by the Cushing library disappearance. She’s a good writer, and maybe she’ll be a writer someday. She’d like to write words bound in a book, with pages. But the odds grow slimmer that Amanda’s words will appear in book bound with leather and paste.
Hey, I’m all for technological revolutions. Electricity works for me. But usually these cultural adaptations are a little more gradual. When it comes to the printed word, which began on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates when someone around 3000 BC took a reed from the banks of a river and cut it sideways and stamped the shape into river clay, five millennia of tradition is unraveling in a couple of decades — and the stakes are very high. You could even, if you were a truly dire pessimist, say that the words disappearing into the clouds signals the end of civilization, because ancient civilization historians don’t date the beginning of civilization to the first towns, or the first artwork, or the first music. They date it to the invention of the written word. So what do we call the end of the written word? Just another technological transition?
They weren’t literature, those first words and symbols, by the way. They were record-keeping receipts. Maybe they were recording a transaction involving one city’s wheat for another’s beer, since one of the first symbols ever translated in ancient Sumerian stood for an alcoholic beverage. But there’s no doubt those first symbols were stamped into clay so they could be permanent – the last word, so to speak. So that if someone said, “Hey, I didn’t give you 500 jars of beer last Tuesday, I gave you 1,000, you owe me more money,” someone else could day, “No, it was 500. I wrote it down, see?” End of discussion.
It took a few centuries for the written word to produce the first recorded literature, a fanciful epic about a Sumerian king named Gilgamesh that includes all the good stuff: sex, violence, a hero, a quest for knowledge. It took a lot more thousands of years for you to actually turn pages, of course, but even the earliest scrolls had this in common with the books that are disappearing: you held them in your hands. Back then, you didn’t scroll a computer screen; you unwound an actual scroll. Kind of funny how that original word, “scroll,” survives – even when the words we scroll don’t actually exist at all; they’re just pixels.
You can find the Epic of Gilgamesh at a library today, by the way, just as long as you don’t go to Cushing Academy library. But what you can’t find is the love of the written word, the way I found that love expressed at another recent short-story reading in my club.
Remember that table piled high with books? One of them was a forty-year old collection of the short stories of a French writer named Guy deMaupassant. I was about to read one out loud. But first I saw an inscription in the front of the book, It read, in perfectly penned letters, “To Mary: With love and best wishes for a happy holiday season and an especially joyous new year. Also, best wishes for many enjoyable hours of reading a great master in the field – the short story; and in his specialty – describing much of human nature, its funs and its foibles. Love, Loftin, Roseline and Gina. Noel 1962.”
I don’t know who Loftin, Roseline and Gina were, but I do know that if you told them in 1962 that one of our human foibles was that we’d turn our backs on the book within the next half century, they wouldn’t have believed it. After all: where, exactly, can you inscribe a Kindle?

And so ends another summer of empty lawns. They were green lawns, they were well-mown lawns, but they were empty lawns: Another whole baseball season, come and gone, when I didn’t see a single kid playing catch with his dad at dusk, or on a Saturday morning. With his brother. With his sister. I didn’t even see any kids tossing a baseball in the air by themselves.
And it’s not just the lawns that are empty. It’s the school baseball fields. It’s the community recreational fields. It’s the perfectly laid-out Little-League fields. It’s all the places where you used to see kids with bats and balls and gloves. They’re empty.
By the way: I’m not the only one who’s noticed that America’s pastime seems to be heading increasingly into the past, by the way. One of the experts is asking the same question. One of the kids who used to spend his evenings tossing a front-lawn baseball.
“Where are the kids who used to be hitting fly balls?” Jim Bouton asked me the other day. “Where are the kids playing running bases?” And if Jim Bouton is worried, I’m definitely worried.
If you’re a fan of the game when it was truly the nation’s pastime, you know Jim Bouton. In his playing days with the Yankees in the Sixties, he was known as Bulldog, for his unrelenting ability to come right at you, start after start. He threw so hard his that would fall off his head. In 1963, he won 20 games and made the all-star team. He’s also known for writing one of the greatest baseball books ever, Ball Four.
Now Bouton is seventy. He looks about thirty years younger. The lines on his face all point to a smile. He has the face of a guy who’s eternally playing childhood baseball. In fact, the former Yankee is working on a memoir about his childhood.
But the look on his face on the day I met him was a worried one.
“The only time you ever see kids on a baseball field,” Bouton told me, “is when a van pulls up to the field, and all the kids pile out, already in their uniforms, ready for the game. But the fields are empty the rest of the time.”
So what’s going on? Is the disappearance of summer evening neighborhood baseball a canary in the coal mine? Is it like the bats and the frogs disappearing, only signaling a cultural shift instead of a climatic one?
I do know this: attendance in baseball parks from coast to coast is down. In the major leagues, this is understandable. A big-league ticket costs big bucks, and big bucks are in short supply these days. But more worrisome is that the minor leagues are suffering, too. And the minors were supposed to be our baseball refuge. They had a resurgence a decade ago: cheap tickets, good baseball. But even in the heartland, the pulse is now weakening. If minor-league attendance is down, I’m worried.
Even attendance at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown is down. If you’re a baseball optimist, you can chalk it up to bad weather in upstate New York this summer. If you’re a realist, though, you can sense the fading of the game that once captured our dreams, at the level where it can’t afford to be fading: with the next generations. With the kids who no longer want to replace their schoolbags with a baseball glove as soon as they step off the bus.
So where are they? Where are the kids on the lawn? The easy answer is that they’re playing video games, and it’s true, of course. Maybe they’re playing a videogame
called MLB 09: The Show. We can only hope.
“Where are the kids on the lawn?” I asked a friend the other day. “They’re inside playing videogames,” he said, as if that answered it all. But the video games are a symptom, not a cause. The video games are there for a lot of reasons: start with the disconnections in families in a society where both parents work because the middle class has disappeared. Then consider how much the passive television screen took the outdoors out of our lives. Put a video console in a kid’s hands today, and he’s instantly at home.
But there’s something else at work here: the videogames, where everything is slambang and speedy, are slices of the kids’ generation’s pace: a world where instant is the speed they’re used to. Instant texts, instant messages, instant reality, instant gratification. Watch a kid play a videogame. Or play one yourself, and you’ll see what I’m talking about: 95 percent of the games, whether they’re war games or race-car games, or any games, move fast. And the action movies they watch cut from scene to scene in half a second.
The trouble, of course, is that each of us has only so much attention; if you slice it a dozen ways at the same time, then the gratification you’re getting is diluted, and shallow. You’re in such a hurry that the real emotional payoff becomes irrelevant, or lost.
And baseball is a long-term-payoff. A real-life 1-0 game stretched over nine innings –for me, the best kind of baseball game, with tension at every turn, with every baserunner leading off first, hoping to find a way home — is out of their reality. Baseball moves slowly. In real time. The time we used to keep. When something new didn’t have to happen every second. When life moved slowly enough for us to smell the popcorn, which is what the old stadiums always smelled like.
Now: to be fair, we can blame Major League Baseball for this, too, because baseball games have created a new kind of time: they’ve become ridiculously slow. Watch a game from the nineteen sixties or seventies – a game that probably lasted an hour and forty-five minutes — and you’ll notice that batters never stepped out of the box between pitches. Today, on every pitch, they step out of the box, adjust their wristbands, their batting gloves, but mostly they just linger for the cameras in vanity. And we can blame ourselves here, too, we can chalk up all of the strutting to our modern star culture, where everyone wants to be looked at, and we seem to be fascinated by them. If baseball really wanted to put more fans in the seats, it could cut 45 minutes out of every game by insisting that batters stay in the box and just play the damned game.
But then you’d have to tell men making millions of dollars that it isn’t them we want to see, it’s the game. And that would be a lie. Time was, the appeal of the game was the team, not the player. Time was, guys were proud to be part of a team first, and proud of themselves second.
But that’s all water under the bridge. We can’t peel back time. Or change its pace. We can’t convince kids that instant-everything isn’t the way to go. Their phones and keyboards tell them otherwise. And we can’t force baseball’s union to peel back salaries, lessen the burden of the price of a day at the ballpark, give each and every kid a chance to spend endless summer days at the new stadiums, watching the pros up close. We can’t tell the athletes that it isn’t all about them. Because today, it always is.
But what we can do is give our kids a chance to taste what baseball is all about. There’s a reason they teach history in their schools. Why not let them feel it? We can take the time to put aside a few minutes to bring out the baseball gloves, so they can feel how amazing it is when a baseball sinks its way into the leather webbing of a glove. To know that time spent throwing a baseball back and forth isn’t wasted time. It’s time passing the way it’s supposed to be passed. Accompanied by the sound the crickets singing when a summer sun sets,
Oh, and by the way: running bases? That was a game that every kid used to play. All you needed was three kids, two gloves, a baseball and a couple of sweatshirts to use as bases. The idea was to try and run between the two bases guarded by your friends without getting tagged out. My friends and I used to play for hours. Back when an hour was something you wanted to last forever.

On a tree-filled state university campus, amid the song of crickets in the bushes, and the notes of a distant bell-tower, and the sound of cleats tearing through grass, and the slaps of leather footballs against hands, I found the face of the National Football League this week.
Despite what the endless providers of sports news would have us believe, the face of the NFL does not belong to Michael Vick, recently of Leavenworth, or Plaxico Burress, heading for a jail cell of his own, or Brett Favre, who imprisons the fans and the cameras with his own endless soap opera. No, the face of professional belongs to Leger Douzable: a smiley, buoyant 305-pound 23-year-old defensive lineman from Tampa, the son of a worker for the local electric company. You’ve never heard of Leger Douzable, and possibly never will again. But right now, he is in uniform for the New York Giants, and like a thousand other borderline names playing the game in training camps under broiling suns from sea to shining sea, with no promise of a job or a paycheck or a living, he is in heaven. And as long as an NFL football team can still be seen from a few yards away, amid the scents and songs of summer, then so am I.
Summer-morning training-camp football is pure football, free of television, free of blaring stadium rock anthems, free of the jabber of self-serious talking heads babbling endlessly. Training-camp football is not a game played by millionaired entertainers. It’s a game played by eighty sweating guys who, like Leger Douzable, like to play their sport. In the summer, away from the lights, under a summer sun, they play it every day. And when they do, it really does feel like they’re playing.
“I had a dream when I was a little kid,” Leger Douzable told me, happily pausing on his way into Albany’s utilitarian college cafeteria for lunch. “I wanted to play in the NFL,” he said. “People told me, `You know hard that is?’ I said, `I don’t care. `I’m going to be there.’ This is the game I love,” he said.
For now, he’s playing that game, and is very happy to be doing so. And that happiness is infectious. Leger Douzable makes this game a game again.
On this day, the man who has been nicknamed Douzy was wearing a post-practice pair of gold University of Central Florida practice shorts, and a black tee shirt emblazoned with the legend, “Be The Change.” This was the slogan of the African American Student Union at Central Florida two years ago, when Douzable was an officer in that college union. In his case, that slogan, Be The Change, is still appropriate today, in a couple of ways.
To start with, if this large man makes this team, it will signify change indeed, for the odds are virtually insurmountable. The Giants are young Douzable’s second professional team. He was dropped from the Minnesota Vikings’ practice squad last year. His future is very much uncertain. But for the next few weeks, until the next cut, he will be playing the game he loves wearing Giant blue, on a quiet upstate New York college practice field, surrounded by fathers and sons and mothers and daughters who have come to Albany not just to glimpse the superstars, but to watch the ritual — the whole sea of faces, some recognizable, some anonymous — in an up-close, simple football practice, with its distinct rhythms, its athletic choreography, its balletic one-on-one drills.
August football practice is a special kind of theater. And that’s where’s Leger Douzable and his teammates are agents of another kind of change. Like the other eighty players in camp, he is, at least for a couple of weeks, turning a corporate, overproduced sport back into something you can smell and hear and taste and touch. Something personal. Something very, very close to its roots.
So it seems very fitting that, over on the next field, the University of Albany football team, the Great Danes, are also practicing in their garish purple and yellow uniforms. There are no doubt a few starry-eyed Leger Douzables among them. The Albany Great Danes are not all that different from the Giants – except, of course, in the quality of their play. But at some point in their past – playing in Pee Wee Leagues, in junior high – they were all Leger Douzables. Only at training camp at a faceless state university could it feel completely natural to have the two teams side by side, reminding us that there’s a game buried somewhere beneath the glitter. That underneath the frosting of the big game is nothing but a sport, played by big, smiling kids.
I think we need that reminder. The National Football League is becoming more distant from the feel of the sport itself. As its ratings climb and its prime-time presence expands, as the commentators ordain themselves as geniuses, the game is being eaten up by the show. More and more, the focus is on the athletes as celebrities, the game as spectacle – and business. Which is why a professional football training camp is an extraordinary thing in an age of overkill and pedestal worship. Training camp is the last place – the only place – where the game still reigns supreme. Where on the field, boys who have become men can be boys again and, in the little bleachers to the side of the field, fans can be just fans, instead of goonish players in a prime-time network entertainment show.
That morning Giant practice featured one special play. There were a lot of good plays, a lot of exciting plays that day. But this one was special on all sides of the ball. Eli Manning faded back and threw a lovely, arcing spiral all the way down the field. David Tyree, a veteran who once had a great moment but is now, too, struggling to make the team, reached up and caught the ball over his head, in stride, for a touchdown. And that was cool enough.
But what was even cooler was the fans’ response: not raucous screams or chants, not beery high-fives. No, the small crowd applauded, loudly, enthusiastically. It was more than an expression delight. It was an expression of thanks. It was almost…well, polite. It sounded like the bond between a team and its fans – a healthy, nurturing bond. Not a crazed one. The applause of normal, everyday people who were appreciative of the chance to see the team without frill. Playing the sport, not the show.
That civility didn’t end on the field. Back near the cafeteria, virtually all of the players signed autographs, one by one, and when they did so, superstar, rookie and also-rans alike, they were people interacting with people, and to a man, they really seemed to enjoy it. But no one as much as Leger Douzable. It so happens that, a few days earlier, late at night, on the very last play of a preseason game against the Carolina Panthers, in a stadium that was largely empty, Douzy turned a game around. He beat his man and hit the quarterback’s arm. The ball popped up and landed in the hands of another Giant rookie named Tommie Hill, who ran it in for the winning touchdown.
It was the kind of play that every kid dreams of making. It’s on tape, too. Tape that the other 31 teams will watch. So that if the Giants decide that Leger Douzable is expendable, and turn him loose, maybe another team will pick him up.
“I take each opportunity I see,” he told me, “and I go with it.”
August football, free admission, summer-morning men and boys at play. That’s the opportunity. If you want to be reminded that football can still be a game, you should take that opportunity. Leger Douzable would appreciate it.

A few days ago, I happened to be talking to a guy named Fred Biletnikoff. Fred used to be very good at catching footballs for the Oakland Raiders in the Sixties and Seventies. Then, he had a little help at it. Fred always had this stuff called Stick Um on his hands. It was orange, and gooey — and very, very sticky. Before games Fred used to smear big globs of it onto his jersey and his socks, and he’d keep rubbing it on his hands during the game. “It was mostly psychological,” Fred told me. “Although sometimes the stick um would help. Sometimes it would help a great deal.”

There were some disadvantages to Fred’s potion, though. Sometimes his hands would get covered in dirt and grass, and in the huddle, his teammates would have to pluck his fingers clean. Sometimes, they even had to pry his fingers apart. And needless to say, his teammates didn’t like to shake Fred’s hand or hug him after a victory. You needed paint remover to get the stuff off.

Fred wasn’t fast, and he wasn’t big, but he caught enough footballs to be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. But Fred wasn’t the only Hall-of-Fame Oakland Raider looking for a competitive edge wherever he could find it back then. Gene Upshaw, an offensive lineman, used to wrap each of his arms with three rolls of tape, over pads and pieces of cardboard, then run hot water over his arms so the tape would harden like a cast. When Gene was blocking, he was basically blocking with two clubs.

No one wondered whether Fred or Gene should be kept out of the Hall of Fame because of their extracurricular tactics. It wasn’t like they were hiding what they were doing, and what they were doing was legal. The only cheating the old Raiders did was during their annual air-hockey tournament at the end of training camp in an inland California country town called Santa Rosa. At the air-hockey tournament, cheating was encouraged, as was the copious consumption of alcoholic beverages. The entire team played in the tournament. The winner was honored in a parade, along with the parade queen, who was usually selected from the ranks of the cocktail waitresses who’d made the Raiders’ long training-camp summers bearable.

Writing a book about the old Oakland Raiders has made me more than a little nostalgic these days, because lately things have gotten a little stickier when it comes to athletes trying to find the extra competitive edge. In the last few months, both Manny Ramirez and Alex Rodriguez, arguably the two best hitters in baseball, have admitted using steroids, joining the growing list of superheroes with asterisks next to their names. And somewhere down the road, their names are going to be on that hall of fame ballot.
Should they be inducted? No way. They were cheating.

So how did we get from Stick Um to steroids? Or, to put it another way, how did we get to such widespread cheating, wherein a superstar like Ramirez willingly and selfishly risks a 50-game suspension, which hurts his team a whole lot more than it hurts him? I think it has something to do with the loss of the notion of the team. Of being accountable to others. To something bigger than you. This book about the old Oakland Raiders is the third book I’ve written about championship teams from the past. And the more old athletes I talk with, the more I’m convinced that modern cheating has something to do with how teams aren’t really teams any more. How the loss of the concept of team breeds selfish players, and that selfish players are likelier to cheat.

Four or five decades ago, your teammates were your family, and the locker room was your home. The old Baltimore Orioles, the old New York Giants, the old Raiders, they all loved to hang around the locker room, for hours after a game, and when they finally left, they often left together. In the Raiders’ case, there was the mandatory weekly Camaraderie Night at Big Al’s Cactus Room in downtown Oakland.

These days, athletes can’t get out of the locker room quickly enough. The other night, I heard a Met announcer say he’d run into a player riding the elevator up from the locker room – fifteen minutes after the end of the game. It was the pitcher who’d just closed out a game. Picked up a save. And was out of there. Had better things to do than hang in a locker room.

On the Red Sox, Manny was never much of a team guy. And according to Selena Roberts’ book about A-Rod, in Texas Rodriguez was so consumed with individual achievement that he used to tip off opposing players about what pitches were coming, in meaningless games, so as to get the same treatment from the opposing player, so as to pad his own stats. If it’s true, it’s hard to imagine someone having less disregard for his own team.

Of course, the pursuit of the insane money doesn’t help, either. Back in the day, there wasn’t any. Money. The championship New York football Giants of the late ’50s made less money than the men who drove the subways that the players rode downtown to the taverns on East 52d Street where they knew they could get free drinks. The championship Yankees of the early Sixties earned about as much as the fans who watched them in Yankee Stadium. Rookies on the 1972 Oakland Raiders made about $20,000. Most of the Raiders held offseason jobs. One was a cropduster. He used to buzz training camp in a biplane.

Then, for reasons that still elude me, the stakes changed. Greed got good, the middle class began to disappear and the “Me” decade cycled in. When television went cable and ESPN acquired the power to anoint individual athletes as superheroes, we bought into it, and began to pay them the salaries of gods. The NBA marketed Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, not the Bulls and the Lakers. Baseball marketed the bloated home run hitters, not the teams. It was Joe Montana who was the driving force of the 49er dynasty, not the 49ers themselves.

And when individual superstars became more important than teams, individual stats became more important than winning. Players went from putting sticky stuff on their hands to poisoning their livers for an extra ten home runs. Maybe, in a way, the steroid guys were just first cousins to the bankers who packaged and traded those derivatives – all of them citizens in a short-cut culture that had lost its moral bearings in pursuit of the quick buck, big fame and individual stardom.

It’s the grand old game that takes the real hit here, of course – just when it can least afford it, what with overpriced new stadiums and overpriced empty seats that smack of greed and disregard for the average fan. A sport that has always marketed itself as a pastime desperately needs its past to be clean. It has to find a way for us to believe in the numbers again.

I’m not optimistic. It’s still acting as if none of the cheating ever happened. One night a few weeks ago, the Mets’ Gary Sheffield hit his 500th career home run, and the announcers gushed unapologetically about the milestone. They gave no hint of how hollow a celebration they were having, at how meaningless that number really is, in Sheffield’s case.

Fred Biletnikoff’s four catches in Super Bowl XI in 1976, the ones that earned him the title of the game’s most valuable player? Those numbers had some meaning. But for me, Fred’s actions after that game carried more weight for me than the numbers. He was so overwhelmed with emotion, he broke out crying in the locker room. Because his Raiders had finally won a title they’d come so close to for years. And because he’d been the one who’d been privileged to get them there.

Of course, he didn’t get too many hugs. And he was also smoking his postgame cigarette. It was probably stuck to his fingers.

A couple of Sunday mornings ago I scanned the front page of the New York Times and noticed immediately that something was strange and different: There were three stories that made me smile, and feel optimistic about the future. This was way beyond the usual quota of smiley stories on the Times’ front page, which, these days, generally ranges from zero to the occasional one.

There was a triumphant tale about a soccer team made up of New York City homeless men who’d banded together to beat a team of bankers. They’re part of a national homeless soccer league. It was the ultimate feel-good saga: the story of a group of men finding self-esteem through sport, through teamwork. Another revolved around a series of interviews with African-American citizens across the nation. It suggested that, for the first time, African-Americans are beginning to feel optimistic about race relations in America. The third took a look at President Obama’s teaching days as a way of predicting his Supreme Court judge nominee, and suggested that he or she might be someone who isn’t defined by past ideological stances – just someone who happens to be really good at their job.

There was something about reading these stories on a printed page that no blog or website account could ever make me feel. They were well-written. They were well-edited. They were well-researched. They felt as if they had weight. Of course, the cynic in me had to wonder: as the newspaper industry seems to be collapsing before our very eyes, were the Times’ editors consciously trying to accentuate the positive, in the hopes of keeping the Times alive? Maybe the editor’s story selection just reflected that we’re feeling optimistic. I do know this: for me, reading about that optimism in a newspaper made it realer than if I’d read it on my laptop between e-mails.

It’s been a good couple of very good weeks for the struggling – okay, failing — newspaper business. Last week, Senator John Kerry convened Senate hearings on the future of journalism, just about the time that the Times Corporation announced that The Boston Globe would apparently survive – for now, anyway. And the president himself declared, at the White House correspondents’ dinner, “A government without newspapers is not an option for America.” And in Maryland, congressman Benjamin Cardin introduced the Newspaper Revitalization Act.

Less noticed was a one-day think tank in Washington last week called “The Future of Context.” And while the name of the conference was typically New Media – what does “the future of context” mean, exactly? — a passel of distinguished journalists did us all a service by gathering to not only examine the future of how we’re going to get the news, but discuss where newspapers have gone wrong. And they have. The print media is hardly blameless for its shaky status.

Like the men in Detroit who ignored the warning signs and continued to build mechanically and socially obsolete cars, the news corporations turned their backs on the internet back when they could have seized the new information technology for their own. Hindsight is 20-20, of course, but it’s not like they couldn’t have seen the new media coming. Hearst, Knight-Ridder, Gannett – they were all at the nexus of the information flow, for half a century. They sneered at the internet, and their pride resulted in a huge and humbling fall.

But the recent flurry of debate is a very good sign. There’s some real passion out there. As a veteran of five different newspapers, from the very small to the very large, I’d like to think it signals a beginning, not an end. At least we’re talking about ways to save this dinosaur, and give it a chance to evolve and adapt.

There’s something primal and permanent about words when they’re written down and you can hold them in your hand. It’s not coincidence that the first civilization, in the river valleys between the Tigris and the Euphrates, produced the first writing. In the 5,000 years that have since passed, civilization and the written word – the word you can hold in your hand, on a tablet, on a page – have been synonymous. If we ever get to the point where we completely replace the printed daily news with words we can erase with a single keyboard click on a MacBook, I think we’ll have lost something more than news. I think we’ll have lost sight of how important it is to know what’s going on around us, and to be thinking about it. The news – and the commentary, and the analysis –will feel, somehow, slighter.

But the more I think about why we have to save the newspapers it, the more I think there’s something else we can’t lose: teamwork. What’s special about being a newspaper writer isn’t seeing your name in the byline, or seeing your picture above a column. That’s fleeting. I learned that the day I wrote my first column for the extinct New Haven Journal-Courier. One day, there was my picture, next to my words. The next day, I was walking next to a shut-down New Haven factory when I saw my picture, at my feet, on a yellowed day-old page blowing down the street. So much for ego.

No, what’s important about the newspaper news is the team. Working in a newspaper newsroom, where you’re surrounded by writers and editors who are counting on you to get the story, and get it right, is like being in a locker room, or backstage when you’re in the cast of a play: everyone counts on you to do your part. And so you do. Because you’re part of something bigger than you.

I’m not saying that bloggers and webmagazines can’t get us the news. If you know how to search the web, you know how to find the news. If you can put it together quickly, with attitude, at your kitchen table, in front of your TV, you’ll have a place in the new media. But you’ll do it alone. And that’s no fun.

So while we’re at it – let’s get serious here – do website reporters get to celebrate after they break their stories, at some divey bar, with the team that helped make it happen? Surrounded by other reporters, and editors, and cops, and other low-lifes? If the papers go down, so will a lot of pride in telling the truth. And a lot of great celebrations that go with it.

Three decades ago, when I was a late-night copy editor in the sports department at the Washington Post, I was mostly responsible for getting the late boxscores from the coast, and writing the headlines on late-night wire stories. At the end of the night I used to drink at a place called the Post Pub with a really cute girl who was a late-night copy editor in the financial section. After we closed our sections, we’d leave the newsroom about one or two in the morning, walking through the lobby, where, through the glass walls, we could see the huge presses rolling out the next edition. We could even smell the hot ink.

Then we’d walk a few blocks to the Post Pub, have a few beers, and talk about the day, about the news, surrounded by other reporters and writers. All of them still buzzing with energy: the energy of being in the newsroom that day, that night. That week. Of having done the work. Of knowing that there was something permanent, at least for a day, about what we did. Knowing that even if all we did was compile box scores or edit wire copy on the day’s stock-market activity, we did good.

That really cute girl and I have been married almost thirty years now. Our son learned to read by looking at the big sports headlines on the back page of the New York Daily News. But he never reads a newspaper now. He gets all of his news from Fark.com. He sees no need to get information to hold in his hands. But then, he takes information for granted. He thinks it’s all just words. Ephemeral words. Words with no context.

I think it’s his loss. I hope it doesn’t become everyone’s. I still believe we need words that you can hold in your hand. Words that have weight.

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The poison-ivy on the fingers of my right hand a few weeks ago was a welcome sign; the little blisters told me that it is spring, and I am playing golf again. This is an annual rite, and I celebrate it: every year, as the fairways thaw and the flags re-appear like perennial flowers and I resume foraging for lost balls in the woods, my mottled skin tells me that I am back in my Shangri-la. I am playing bad golf again.
I’m a terrible golfer. My backswing looks like some flickering, spasmodic image you’d have seen on a wind-up nickelodeon machine in 1905, and my putts are routinely directed wide of the hole as if by reverse magnetic force. But my terrible scores don’t spoil the game, because I play the game of golf for one reason, and one reason alone: to escape the world, its daily demands, its relentless clock, its Twittering. When I sling that bag over my shoulder, I’m looking for nothing but a stroll suspended in time. That time has gloriously come again.
I know what you’re thinking, if you, too play golf: he’s lying. No one likes to see his drive bend into a forest overrun with poisonous plants. No one likes to see his approach shot make only a token effort at actually approaching the hole. No one is happy with consistent double bogeys. And, of course, I would like to be better. For a non-athlete, a great hole of golf is a singular thing; you’ve performed an athletic feat as well as the men who get paid the equivalent of the gross national product of Lesotho to do the same thing, and your clothes aren’t as tacky. I remember the two birdies I’ve shot in the eight years I’ve played the game as distinctly as I remember cutting the umbilical cords on my two children, two decades ago.
But now I don’t let the score get in the way of the joy I get from the game. And trust me on this: you, too, would be at peace with a severely flawed golf game if you’d been lucky enough to be visited by the golf gods, as I was, on a day in May, two springs back.
It happened on the fifth hole at Hotchkiss — a lovely, hilly, course that winds its way around the campus of the prep school of the same name. The fifth hole looks as if it should be the easiest par-3 in the history of the game: 140 yards, sloping straight downhill. The huge green, fronted by a thin strand of sand, beckons like some enormous, comfortable throw rug. From the tee box it seems as if you could spray your shot anywhere, and this green would still gather the ball in. This is, of course, a grand illusion.
I was playing by myself that day, as I sometimes like to do. Writing is a solitary game, and sometimes the perfect break from the slavery of a keyboard is a solitary ramble with a golf bag. On this day, it had been raining on and off for a couple of days, and a slight drizzle creased a fine, cool, foggy mist as I hiked up the hill toward the fifth tee box. I had the whole course to myself. I’d played the first four holes decently, and for some reason unknown to me then – but perfectly clear now — I’d decided to record my round on a scorecard that day, which I seldom do.
I gazed out at the distant lake, the shifting fog clouds, and then I teed the ball a little higher than usual, to make sure I’d get the ball in the air, keep it from rocketing off at a right angle, so that I might have a chance at bogey, to keep my good round going. I swung my seven-iron. When I looked up, I saw the ball describing an abnormally high parabola through the gray sky. My shot was not only straight, it even seemed to have the right distance. I fantasized for a second: would I be close enough to the hole for a legitimate birdie putt?
I watched the ball descend through the mist until I lost sight of it against a backdrop of trees. Then I heard the distant but delightfully unmistakable sound of a golf ball plonking onto a green. And now my eye caught the ball, through the mist, just briefly: it looked to have hit just a few feet behind the cup. Then I lost it again. A fraction of second later, I heard a distant “clank.”
A clank? Like a ball hitting a flagstick? That can’t be bad, I thought. If the ball hit the flagstick, on a slow, sopping green, how far away could it have bounded? On the other hand, I thought, what if…? But the thought of an ace seemed absurd. I shouldered the bag, walked down the hill, wondering. What if? The closer I got to the green, the more excited I grew. I could see no ball.
But when I approached the cup, my heart sank for a second: there was no sign of white in the perfect round hole. But wait! The cup was full to the top of murky brown water, and there, bobbing just beneath its surface, was my ball. And I felt…nothing but a vague disbelief. The possibility of ever shooting a hole-in-one had never, ever crossed my mind. It simply did no compute.
I found my ball’s plug mark about six feet behind the hole; it had apparently backspun right into the cup. I took my scorecard out of my back pocket and – were my hands trembling? – scrawled a “1” with the little pencil on the soggy scorecard.
In a daze, I went on to shoot 25 over the last four holes. Four straight double bogeys. I was a mental mess. Instead of doing a two-step down the fairways, I was slogging, hitting desultory shots, I was laden with guilt. My fluky ace had left me feeling the way a kid who’s stolen a candy bar from the drugstore can’t enjoy it. After all, if my ball hadn’t hit the flag, it probably would have backspun another thirty feet. This ace had involved a whole lot of luck. I hadn’t really earned it. How can a guy who’s too embarrassed to figure out his handicap shoot a hole in one?
Back home, I thumb-tacked my scorecard to the bulletin board. But I couldn’t look at it. I was not worthy. And over the next few months, the guilt just worsened – especially when I played with a friend, a very good lifelong golfer, and a very sweet guy. When I’d mentioned my ace when we reached the fifth, I’d seen his face cloud over. “I’ve never gotten a hole-in-one,” he said. I felt terrible.
So I decided to stop mentioning my ace – except to my philosophical Irish golfing buddy Michael, an even-headed native of County Clare, who, having served as my psychotherapeutic sounding board ever since I’d told him about my guilt-ridden hole in one, finally set my head on straight one day last summer.
“Look: The whole stupid game is luck,” he said, after sinking an improbably long putt. “If you hit a drive into a tree and it bounces back into the fairway, you don’t question that, right? If a great drive finds its way into the sand, you don’t question that, right? The golf gods give, the golf gods taketh away. And aces? Show me a single ace that didn’t need some luck, at some point. You shot a hole in one. The golf gods were smiling on you that day. Enjoy it.”
He was right, of course. And as I gave it further thought, my cloud of guilt began to lift. It so happened that, on the day I hit my hole-in-one, I was also teaching a history course about ancient Greece. And the plot of most Greek plays invariably involved a mortal being dealt a stroke of fate by a god. The drama in those great works of art didn’t involve the action of the gods. It involved the mortals’ reaction to it.
In my case, the gift was to stop stressing over a mis-hit iron and start really enjoying the walk I’m taking while I’m pausing to hit a small white ball.
Now my idea of the perfect golf hole is the one I played at Hotchkiss last summer, as the sun was setting, and I found myself, in a few short minutes playing the long downhill eighth, in the company of a tortoise, and then a rabbit, and then a woodchuck, and finally, a fawn. The perfect foursome.
Now my idea of the perfect round of golf is pulling off the highway at the sight of a weathered billboard reading “Maple Oaks Public Course, Exit 43,” and pulling the clubs from the trunk, and walking 18 with a retired grocer from Indiana, swapping stories and listening to the silence, neither of us keeping score. And my ultimate golf fantasy is to play 30 municipal courses in 30 states in 30 days, from Maine to Washington. I have the road map already laid out. I’m still looking for the VW Microbus van to sleep in on that ultimate pilgrimage of pleasure. And when I take it, I will be happy to stroll the bald fairways and rocky greens, following my ball wherever it might take me.
These days, I even allow myself to glance at my tacked-up scorecard, and savor that amazing little pencil-scrawled “1.” And I proudly tell the story of my ace in mixed company (guys who’ve gotten one, guys who haven’t.)
Maybe it was supernatural. Maybe the golf gods, watching me hack and duff my way through round after round, knowing I’ll probably never break 95 in my life, decided to give me one moment to savor. Or maybe it was pure, blind luck, although that’s not too shabby either. The great baseball manager Earl Weaver used to say You Make Your Luck, and who am I to argue with Earl Weaver?
Either way, I am finally at peace with my ace. Because any way you slice it, it was a hell of a shot.

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A few years ago, escaping a blizzard in western New York, I got off the highway in a small city named Salamanca, and took refuge in a railroad depot that had been turned into a museum. Salamanca was once a vibrant hub of four different railroads, and its museum was a lovely old wooden building, built in 1912, full of the usual nostalgic memorabilia: sepia photographs of mustachioed railroad engineers posing proudly, steam engines pulling into town shrouded by clouds of coal smoke, conductors’ caps. The usual ghosts.

But the thing that caught my eye on that dead-of-winter night was a century-old railroad timetable mounted on the wall, a timetable for a long-vanished railroad called the Buffalo, Rochester and Pittsburgh. Back then, the timetable told me, to get from Pittsburgh to Buffalo, then a vibrant, thrumming city, you had to pass through 74 towns and villages along the way, including Springsville, and Ashford, and Johnsonburg, and Mount Jewett. And Salamanca, with its tree-lined lined neighborhoods, its ornate red-brick bank buildings, the canal that served to move the harvested local hardwood.

And I found myself imagining what it would have been like to be a passenger on that train. I imagined the train stopping in all of those villages, once vibrant, now rendered as afterthoughts by the interstate highways, and by the jets that travel invisible lanes through the sky. I imagined looking out the window and seeing all of those town squares. Bandstands. Gazebos. Courthouses. Shops and stores. I imagined people from each of those towns boarding the train. I imagined meeting them, and asking them about their lives, and telling them about mine.

And that’s why this past April 15 was a really good day for America. On that day, during a speech in Washington, the president of the United States announced plans for an American high-speed rail system. It’s still a vision. But now it has a beginning. And if our trains do come back, something else comes back: we’ll be back on the ground again. With each other.
The dry political facts are these: Barack Obama is asking congress to find $8 billion to build high-speed rail between our cities in a dozen different corridors: Portland Maine to Charlotte North Carolina. Portland Oregon to Seattle Washington. LA to San Francisco. Miami to Jacksonville. Yes, $8 billion is a whole lot less than the $250 billion China has committed to its own rails – a country that is a quarter-century ahead of us, train-wise – but it’s a start. Truth is, just about everyone is ahead of us. Forty years ago, just as France and Japan were inventing high-speed trains, we gave up on our trains entirely.

Today, just about every industrialized nation, from Asia to Europe, links its cities by high-speed rail. China has trains that travel at 330 miles per hour. Mag-lev trains. That’s magnetic levitation. It sounds like fantasy. It’s real.

Last year I had a conversation with a former CEO of Amtrak named David Gunn who was fired by the Bush administration. He told me, “Our national transportation system is breaking down. We’re in a deep, deep hole.” But now, and maybe not too late, the new administration sees how much money can be saved, and how much infrastructure can be built, and how many jobs can be created, by following the model of the rest of the world. And all of that is cool. That we can save money and energy. That we can move people from city to city at a fraction of the cost we pay now, for highway pavement, for extra gates at choked airports.

But the real advantage will be in the story told by that old timetable. When we start moving by trains again, we’ll start seeing America again, village by village, town by town. Which means, if you want to connect a couple of radical dots, we’ll start being a little more of a democracy founded on what it was supposed to be founded on: knowing that we are a nation that’s made up of a patchwork quilt of towns, linked village by village. That we are a people in common.
Did you ever look down from an airplane at night, as it crossed the country, and marvel at those thousands of lights, those millions of lights, each one belonging to a house, a family, a story, a life? So many neighbors. So many fellow countrymen. But so distant. So untouchable. So easy to ignore.

Think of the last cross-country flight you took. How many people did you meet from any of those places six miles beneath you? How many people did you even talk to, as you traveled 3,000 miles over a hundred thousand villages? Think of the last time you hustled between two cities on the interstate. Who did you meet on your journey? The guy you paid for your gas? unless you used your ATM card at the pump. The woman handing you the quarter-pounder through the drive-through window. Did you ask her where she was from? How she was doing? What mattered to her? How things are going in her own home town?

High-speed trains won’t stop in all of those towns. In thirty years, the Dallas to Kansas City high-speed train won’t stop in Muskogee, Oklahoma, or Emporia, Kansas. The Miami to Jacksonville bullet train won’t pause to take on folks from Samsula or Port St. John. But out the windows, America will be rolling by. It’ll be there, to feel, and to see. To remind us of how all of those millions of lights are touchable, and real.

And here’s what I wonder; here’s another dot to connect: Is it possible that the last time we had a true middle class was just before we found a way to span the coasts in a matter of hours at 34,000 feet? Or drive from city to city in motorized pods? Is it remotely possible that when we stopped moving from town to town to get anywhere, and we started leapfrogging over all of the towns that made up our national quilt, that we lost something of what made us a nation of folks who cared about their neighbors? Not their real neighbors, but the people over the next mountain range, the people down the prairie road, the people in the next town over?

I spend a lot of time thinking about the people I’ve met on trains. Trains from New York City to my home in Dutchess County. Trains from Chicago to Los Angeles. I think about a trip on the California Zephyr. That’s an Amtrak train between Chicago and San Francisco. It wasn’t the amber waves of grain in Nebraska, or the aspen trees just west of Denver, or the elk who nosed up to the train as it wound its way through the mountains that made the trip so meaningful. It was the bar car, and the dining car, where I shared drinks and meals and stories with a tire salesman, and an ex-convict, and a teacher, and a guy between jobs. They all had stories. Joys. Troubles. Villages.

Putting us back on the ground will re-remind us of the people we once were. And when we share each others’ stories again, we’ll be able to step back, get out of the little cubes of ourselves.
Maybe I should just settle for the practical, obvious advantages to high-speed intercity rail: the energy saved, the time saved, the jobs created. But I’m holding out for something more. I’m holding out for a day when, on my way to somewhere new, I can be reminded of where I came from.

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The platform of the northbound 161st IRT station provides an odd view these days, as the Yankees prepare to move into their spotless new stadium just a few feet from the tracks, with its gilt-lettered Decline-and-Fall sense of imperiousness, its arched retro façade vainly trying to evoke the grandeur of the original empire. But the sight of a new athletic palace in a time when excess signifies nothing but ugliness isn’t what’s so startling; that’s long been the Yankee way. No, it’s the sight of the old one, still standing, in the new one’s literal shadow, and well past its allotted time.
I knew that it hadn’t been razed, of course. I just wasn’t ready, as I stepped off the train for a late-afternoon sneak peek at the new one, for the old one’s striking sense of decay and almost-overnight obsolescence. Darkened, discarded, the building seems hunched, ashamed: a flaking relic that evokes visions of the municipal future of Alan Weisman’s World Without Us, when an indifferent nature will quickly reclaim all that we’ve built. Brushstrokes of rust stain the support beams on the back of the old center-field scoreboard. Down below, on the corner of 157th and River Avenue, rectangular cement boxes full of dead plants have been half-stripped of their brick facades. Beyond the old right-field bleachers, mud seeps up through the stones embedded in the plaza, seemingly ready to swamp the whole walkway. The blue awning above the ticket offices next to Gate 4 is torn, and ripples in the wind.
Yankee Stadium was hardly an architectural landmark, of course, once it been renovated in the mid-Seventies. The columns had been removed, the classic upper-deck façing had been incongruously slapped up on the signage beyond the outfield, and a phallic baseball-bat sculpture in front of the river entrance had risen like a piece of bad pop art. Design-wise, the “new” old stadium felt like a mutant. A classic ’57 Plymouth, say, with its fins and grill removed, trying to be a Toyota.
But the building deserves a better fate than this: to be held up as a shell of its former, glorious self, its decline visible and obvious for the fans about to file by the millions into the coliseum across the street. By now, the old place should long ago have been physically erased from this plane, and enjoying life in the Valhalla of dead stadia, with the disappeared motley-but-loveable Shea and storied Comiskey, alongside the shades of the multi-use monstrosities and the elegant old parks alike, all of them eternally trading happy tales of glory days gone by.
Instead, the old stadium still sits among us, as if in a coma, drained of a century’s worth of delirious energy, unable to rant against the injustice of having been abandoned for no good reason other than ego and dollars that no longer exist. As it beckoned my eye away from its Invasion-of-the-Body-snatchers pod-like doppelganger, the old place seemed to ask not for retribution, or even sympathy, but memories.
But the faces and names started to blur; rosters blended and mingled. In the last thirty years, the spasmodic fits of the owner have made virtually every season an unpredictable, insubstantial shifting of the sands. Reggie’s three home runs in one game of the 1978 Series stand out, of course, and Jeter’s tumble into the stands against the Red Sox a few years ago, and dozens of others feats of athletic and emotional glory. But those aren’t memories of a stadium. They’re memories of baseball players.
The building itself seemed to ask for an homage. And so, on that recent gray afternoon, I thanked the ballpark for the days when it stood tallest and proudest: the late Sixties, when there were so few of us nestled in its welcoming shell, and the columned stadium assured us that, despite the terrible baseball being played on the field, we were at home. When the DiNoto’s Bread sign stood out like a beacon of light, reassuring us few solitary thousand souls folded into the arms of its upper deck that we had a family.

Stand on the south end of the downtown side of the elevated platform now, and you can see white paint covering the top two stories on the back of 845 Gerard Avenue, a six-story, yellow-brick apartment building. For decades, beneath that paint, the back upper brick walls of 845 Gerard displayed a brightly painted legend: “Buy DiNoto’s Bread,” in yellow lettering atop of a field of red, green and white. The DiNoto’s sign didn’t glow or blink. I can’t imagine it sold the DiNotos much bread. I certainly don’t remember seeing any bakeries in the warren of bars and souvenir shops under the tracks.
But it wasn’t a commercial sign to me. It was a beacon of greeting that signified the compact between our odd band of faithful and the house where we’d assembled and the strange, exotic borough we’d assembled in. As I sat alone, up in that sunny or night-tinged stratosphere, a teenager in refuge from places where I’d never belonged — the Upper East Side, boarding schools – the panoramic view of the Bronx hypnotized me. And as the team struggled far beneath me, as Horace Clarke botched another grounder and Dooley Womack surrendered another long home run, the DiNoto’s sign spoke of — promised — a Shangri-la somewhere out beyond the park: a true neighborhood, where people did belong, had roots. Led real lives. Had real families.
Sometimes, in the middle of another 13-1 loss to the Orioles, I would wonder about the stories of the other solitary men and boys who sat up there with me. I would wonder what had drawn them here. Did they, too, feel as if they’d found a place they belonged? But I didn’t wonder too much. I was just glad to be there, in my house, where, win or loss, the DiNoto sign was always there, beckoning, assuring. I could almost smell the bread baking, wherever it was being baked, wherever it was being sold.
In later years, as a sportswriter, I went to hundreds of Yankee games. I cared about few. It was a job. I sat in the press box, and if the DiNoto’s sign was still there, I didn’t notice it. I was being paid to watch baseball, and when the game was over, to scurry down to the stadium’s basement to interview mercenaries. As a worker, I found myself as far from that upper deck as I could have possibly been.
When did the sign disappear? I can’t say for sure. All I remember is that one night a decade ago, I went to a game as a fan, with a friend, and sat in a lower-level box seat on a night when Darryl Strawberry hit a home run into a lightning-laced sky. That night, I noticed that the DiNoto’s sign had been painted over. The DiNotos were gone from my old house. That was the night when I knew that the relationship between me and my team, long eroding, had finally been severed.
Now I have my own house, and I have raised my own son, now in his twenties. I never took him to the stadium. I probably should have. But when he was growing up in the nineties, the stadium was not a home, just a ballpark full of false idols, packed to the rafters with screaming, beery strangers. Not family. I took him to football games. It was easier. Giant Stadium was never a house, just a stage. He’s a Giant fan now.
Perhaps, in some other dimension, in some other timeless time, in some other Valhalla, I will be privileged to break bread at the DiNoto family’s table. But on that gray afternoon, the colors of the vanished sign still glowed far more brightly than the gilded letters across the avenue, and more than brightly enough to welcome me home.