Eating a bowl full of chili from the pot that always was simmering, likely 24 hours a day to render that burnt/seasoned taste, I put the spoon down long enough to cheer.
America’s hockey team was battling toward what we hoped
would be a Gold Medal in the Olympics.
Not Sunday. Forty-six years ago, to the day.
It was February 22, 1980, and I was a sports editor covering the Gold Medal battle from a wobbly, blond-Formica-topped table at Jumper’s on Madison Street in Clarksville, Tennessee, just at the intersection with Golf Club Lane.
Mason
Rudolph Golf Course -- named for a great man and a friend of mine -- was just down the street. Later in my Clarksville years,
enough beer might find me on those links with my best pals, Rob Dollar and
Jerry Manley as well as with the scheming and lovable Tony Durr and a fat guy
we loved named StrawBilly Fields. But that’s not for this day’s writing. StrawBilly’s
thinned out a lot. Tony’s dead. Jerry’s forgetful and Rob and I talk online
almost daily. Never about golf, though. Mostly about dead newspapers and a
growing list of similarly deceased friends. And rosebuds.
I was recalling that night at Jumper’s Sunday when I watched
the fine matchup between Americans and Canadians – all NHL superstars, as opposed
to the college boys of 1980. Those
college boys, from back when Olympic athletes, though often well-paid, were
amateurs, took down the mean and nasty Russians.
Sunday, 46 years later, the USA defeated our friendly
neighbors, Canada, in a fierce and bloody overtime battle, likely made all the
nastier because of the crazy annexation babble. Their slashing sticks and punches made it clear they don't care to be our 51st state.
Announcer Al Michaels christened the 1980 event “The Miracle
on Ice” as he peed all over himself at the reality of being the guy on the microphone for this
unlikeliest of events. Nah, he didn’t pee on himself, but he sure sounded like something
was happening in that region. He “made” his half-century career when the last puck
went between the Russian pipes.
No, I wasn’t at Lake Placid, covering this miraculous event. But I’d chosen the next best place. Jumper's.
A rough approximation of what I looked like when I would go to Jumper's
Jumper’s really was called “Poor Man’s Country Club,”
perhaps a sneering reference to the real country club where as far as I know my
pal O.J. Simpson was the first guy to break the color barrier.
I was with him then. The Black wait staff all seemed excited
to see the Juice. The white business execs hosting him were peeing and drooling
to get their photos made with him. During our hours together over the years, I
constantly had to remind Orenthal to stop playing with knives and be kind to women. That is another story and may be found in a
book I wrote with my cohort Rob Dollar: When Newspapers Mattered (a laugh-filled
and ultimately bitter look at lives in newspapering, a profession that was
dying as we wrote it.)
But this little tale isn’t about that. It’s about that night
in 1980 in the cramped bar across from Clarksville Memorial Hospital
(long-since blown up to make way for a newer, suburban hospital, with more on the way.) I liked that
hospital. I had a groin cyst removed
there, ending something of a scare. And when my dear mentor Max Moss was in the
hospital for treatment of a heart condition, I visited every day after my 5
a.m.-2 p.m. “shift” ended.
I always took him a copy of the day’s Leaf-Chronicle
newspaper, and we talked about it while we smoked cigarettes and drank Coke. Hospitals were a bit less-restrictive back
then. As far as I know, you have to even leave the hospital campus – parking lot
and all – to grab a smoke now.
I wouldn’t know, as I quit smoking in 2000 because my little
girl, Emily, 7, kept hollering out the window of her bedroom: “Daddy, stop
using those fire sticks.” I never smoked
in the house, but I fired them up when I was in the backyard with Buddy, my
Chocolate Lab/German Shepherd mix. While
he wandered the fence line and looked for animals to kill, I watched and
enjoyed the gentle nicotine lift. But I followed Emily’s advice.
Well, this is not about Buddy, who I miss daily, nor about
Emily, who lives with her kids in California, and who I miss most times.
It’s about me and old Max, sitting in the hospital, firing
up smokes and laughing our asses off. Well, it’s not really about that. It’s
about the night 46 years ago when I was a young sports editor covering the
biggest of international sports stories from a tidy (I’m being nice) corner bar
in Clarksville.
Max just slipped in there because his heart difficulty was
not deadly, but the docs did recommend he step away from the odd hours and
travel and greasy meals of a sports editor.
He did. He became opinion editor of the newspaper. And I was promoted to
sports editor.
I don’t know when that exactly was, probably two or three
years before I covered the great Olympic upset of the goddamned Russians from
that wobbly table at Jumper’s.
One of the things I prided myself on doing in my newspapering
career was that I tried to get the voice, the hopes and dreams, the fears and disappointments, the experiences
of the regular guy/gal in my writing. I’m
the only guy I know who was demoted by a newspaper (not The Leaf-Chronicle)
for writing about Black people. “That’s
not our demographic,” I was told. There’s
a lot more to that story, but again it can be found in the book noted above.
I called the bar Jumper’s instead of Poor Man’s Country
Club, because that’s what the old-timers called it. The first time I went in there, oh, in 1974
or so, Jumper, a former Vaudeville entertainer, was the one who pulled my beer
from the tap. He also ladled me – gratis -- a bowl of the chili that, as far as
I know cooked – with fresh ingredients added to the pot, as desired -- from
1974 until I dropped in for a last bowl, a pickled egg and a draft in 1988,
when I was leaving Clarksville for new challenges and heartache.
After Jumper, who liked to tell tall tales, kicked it, I
called it Poor Man’s most of the time, especially when the newer owners unlocked
the door for me and my staff, Prep guru Ricky G. Moore and Larry Schmidt (my
assistant sports editor) at 1 a.m. on Sundays, after the blue laws said alcohol
sales and bars had to shut down. We'd drink until 3. Sometimes I'd encounter a cop on the way home, but he'd just follow my car to make sure I made it to my parking lot.
I should mention that I was “the contact” for my buddy Jerry
and his then-wife Gloria to use if something was wrong with their toddler son,
John, at daycare or if the two of them were running late for pickup time. I liked that. I’d pick John up at the daycare
and take him with me to Jumper’s. I’d set him up on the bar and share my deepest
secrets with him as I forced myself to choke down icy, cold draft beer. I didn’t offer him any. He was a good boy. He
may have had a mouthful or two of the chili, though. The Manleys also asked me if I'd be John's guardian if they died. I agreed, but always have been glad they didn't die.
I’m getting sort of afield here, but what else you gotta do?
As sports editor, mostly I covered the Governors at Austin
Peay State University (I was the first sports editor to actually cover the women’s
games and not just the men’s). I also covered a wide variety of local sports,
from Little League to the Commanding General’s Golf Tournament at Fort
Campbell. Hung out with Henry Aaron and
O.J. Drove golf carts and drank beer with local linksters like Larry Schmidt, Rob
Long and Freddy Wyatt. Or maybe I found a long-forgotten Major League ball player,
like Hod Lisenbee, who struck out Babe Ruth. Or Kent Greenfield, who was Robert
Penn Warren’s best childhood pal. Kent drank himself out of baseball and after drying out raised
hunting dogs in nearby Guthrie, Kentucky, when I knew him.
Robert Penn, who then lived in Vermont, received clippings
of some of my columns and was a fan of my writing.
Oh yeah, I also befriended, as much as a smalltown journalist could, Muhammad Ali. Another story.
My sports staff and I worked
long hours, and Larry and I smoked around the clock. Ricky G. made do with a pair
of massive and greasy cheeseburgers and a couple of chocolate shakes at
dinnertime and beer and cold cheese grits and apple pie at closing time. Except Sunday mornings, when he drank beer at Jumper's.
It has been said that a half-century ago, if you wanted to gamble on football games, the folks at the bar might have been able to help you find the pink "card." I can't testify to that, as Max Moss usually brought the card to the newspaper office each week. We just looked at it, as none of us engaged in illegal $2 gambling.
Back to February 22, 1980.
I wrote a daily sports column, and knew I’d want to write something about
the biggest event in the world – the hockey game between the U.S. and the Red
Menace – for the next day’s newspaper.
Wizard, a college friend who was staying in my apartment for
a few weeks until I told him to go, was interested in the game as well.
Actually, he was a pretty good guy who traveled around the country with me in
my 1965 Falcon in the summer of 1973. Just had a shitty personality and I was
trying hard to make new friends. Also, he was a blockade in my mostly unsuccessful
romantic campaigns. Something of an asshole, too.
My television was a small, black-and-white with a 9-inch
screen. Not the best for watching sprawling world events.
Since Jumper’s was less than a mile away from my apartment
and had a color TV on the wall – this was long before the arrival of sports
bars that serve expensive, tongue-singingly bad food and $8 beer where 100 TVs surround you.
Jumper’s was a small place with a single TV where they
served bad food and beer. And I liked it.
I liked beer a lot back then, too, so it was a perfect place
to watch the game.
I actually sketched out the column for the next day in my
reporter’s notebook, complete with quotes from the bartender and anyone else
who sneaked away from their families long enough to watch the miracle.
So, I do consider myself patriotic up to a point. I really was proud of my country’s “amateur” athletes after The Miracle on Ice.
I was delighted by the millionaires who lost
their teeth Sunday in the Gold Medal triumph.
I was more delighted, though, by the opportunity to mentally revisit
Jumper’s. Although I really would pass on the chili this time.
By the way, that historic bar’s still there and transformed, better than ever. Last time I drove by,
they had potted ferns as decorations. They probably don’t use that old,
well-aged chili anymore. And if you
called it “Jumper’s” they’d think you were nuts and send you to the dandy
suburban hospital out by the interstate, where my friend Scott Shelton
died. That’s another story, and his dad,
Bill, always lectured me about my smoking.
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