THROUGH THE WINDOWS OF MY MIND

BY ALAN GOLDFARB

When I was a boy growing up in Brooklyn, I spent half my life — or so it seemed — at Ebbets Field. Someone asked me the other day, how many games did I attend? I earnestly tried to remember. It was probably 10 games a season, some of which were doubleheaders (yes they played two games, in those days, usually on Sundays. See: Ernie Banks). So, I started adding it up. I was astonished to realize, that perhaps I’d gone to only 70 games. It seemed like a million.

As an 8-year-old, I had become a baseball fan at the end of the 1950 season. I saw on our 10-inch black and white Dumont television set, Dick Sisler hit a home run. It barely cleared the fence down in the leftfield corner. But it came in a playoff game against the Dodgers, and it gave Sisler’s Philadelphia Phillies the National League pennant.

The following season, I went to my first major league game. On a Passover Week train trip to visit my Uncle Jack in Cleveland, I saw the Indians play the Detroit Tigers at the old cavernous Cleveland Municipal Stadium. The park seemed extra big that day — especially to the amazed first-game eyes of a 9-year-old — because it was the second game of the ’51 season. The day before, the Tribe opened to a crowd of more than 80,000 as Bob Feller went up against the Bengals. The next day, Cleveland Municipal more resembled a typical day now at Olympic Stadium in Montreal.

I remember nothing about the game, except that Uncle Jack — who I just knew would get us box seats because I thought he had a lot of money — could only muster up lower reserved. But he redeemed himself by buying me the shiniest white baseball I’d ever seen, which had been autographed by all the Indians players. I cherished that ball for all of three months and stupidly lost it in the bushes that summer while using it in a Catskill Mountains bungalow colony softball game. (I sometimes imagine that in another century, archeologists will dig up that ball and under a microscope, being only able to discern the word “Luke” on it, they’ll determine that it must be of some religious significance.)

All of this is a circuitous way of telling you that for years I was under the impression that I had rooted with all my passion my entire childhood for the Brooklyn Dodgers. When in fact, my first love affair lasted a mere seven years. From the ’51 season when I officially enrolled in the Brooklyn Dodger fan club, until that miserable stinking dark abysmal day at the end of the season of 1957 when my love left for the coast, I had spent only seven years with her. When I think about it now, as I descend into old age, it seemed forever. But seven years to a 15-year-old, is nearly half a lifetime. When put that way, to be in love for half of one’s life, is a fortunate thing.

Now, as an adult, and as a writer, my interest in rooting for a favorite team, is a concept, which now seems trivial when one considers the vicissitudes of everyday adult life. It’s sad really, for what have we left to cheer these days? One could root I suppose, for a country to topple its enemies. Or one could cheer when someone else declares that the recession is over, or that the siege of an ancient cathedral has come to a climax. But it’s not the same thing, is it?

Sadly, the realities of living have supplanted the things that made one curious and joyful as a youth. For instance, I remember clearly, the times when I’d leave Ebbets to catch the subway home, I’d invariably walk past the clouded-over windows of the Dodgers’ clubhouse. The louvered windows were at street level and always ajar to allow the steam of the shower room to escape. I’d always stop at the windows. Although I wasn’t able to see down inside, the hissing of the showers conjured up wonderful images.

I just knew that Jackie and Pee Wee were showering after the game they had just won. They would talk about the game and then Pee Wee would ask Robby to join him for dinner, with their respective wives, of course. Hodges and Furillo were toweling off and the Skoonje would tell Hodges that he was going out to some Italian restaurant that night where he was planning to eat, what else? Scungilli.

Years later, when I became a sportswriter, I couldn’t believe my good fortune at being allowed access to the inner sanctum of the clubhouse. Even though the shower room is off-limits to the media, while waiting around for players to emerge from showering, I would often drift back to those windows on the ground floor at Ebbets Field.

But it’s difficult today, to imagine someone such as Rickey Henderson, who has been with so many teams, asking some rookie to join him for dinner. Henderson, it is said, can’t even remember the names of his teammates.

But I remember the names of many of the ballplayers of my boyhood. I remember Dick Sisler breaking my heart a year before Bobby Thomson was to shatter it again. I remember the ball Uncle Jack bought for me, and I recall the sound of hot running water hissing behind windows I can now see through.