A Writer's Life Read online

  I have actually never known very tall people to be obsequious. Such individuals may be shy, or, as I saw Patrick Shields on occasion, reserved. But because of their stature they are rarely challenged, I think, because shorter people—even those who might be known as Napoleonic bullies in their offices—tend to modify their behavior, to become less assertive when facing men who hover over them, as Patrick Shields did every night at Le Club, casually conversing with CEOs, real estate moguls, corporate lawyers, and other people who might own a percentage of a basketball team but whose view of tall men was usually limited to what they saw from luxury boxes or courtside seats in Madison Square Garden. And yet this was close enough for them to note that there surely were advantages to size and reach, and they could observe as well how aggressive tall men can be in action—as, for example, the Knicks player Latrell Sprewell, whose acceptance years later by the local fans all but smothered the notoriety he had earned after choking the coach of the West Coast team on which he had previously played.

  I am certainly not hinting here that there was anything threatening or ill-tempered about the demeanor of Patrick Shields. I am merely suggesting that his being very tall was perhaps a factor in his capacity to be both beholden to and independent from the men who paid his salary at Le Club. Whether his height, along with his general efficiency and geniality, was entirely responsible for his apparent sense of security at Le Club, I do not really know, but my impression nonetheless was that he was very comfortable with the membership, and it is certain that they sometimes invited him as a single man to dinner parties in their homes, and also provided him with tickets to sporting events and even passes allowing him access to their boxes. One individual who did this, somewhat to my surprise, was the owner of the New York Yankees, George Steinbrenner.

  Patrick Shields never concealed his ongoing affection for the Red Sox after he had moved to New York, and among the board members of Le Club who were aware of this was the Yankees owner, who was known in the media for his indifference to people with opinions other than his own. As a tabloid cartoon subject, Steinbrenner was sometimes portrayed as an antedated, barrel-chested Prussian military officer with a square-jawed scowling face partly hidden under a large spiked helmet. But since acquiring the Yankees from CBS in November 1973 (after the team had finished fourth for three straight seasons), he immediately put his considerable wealth and win-at-any-cost attitude into the organization and saw it improve within the next eight years to five first-place finishes, three trips to the World Series, and two world titles.

  Among those who regularly watched these winning seasons from Steinbrenner’s box was Patrick Shields, who often showed his gratitude for Steinbrenner’s largesse by walking into Yankee Stadium wearing one of his Armani suits and a Red Sox baseball cap. I know this is true because I often accompanied him, having also gotten my name on Steinbrenner’s list after Shields had introduced us and had expounded upon my lifetime devotion to the Yankee franchise. Much as I appreciated Shields’s efforts in laying the foundation for what would become my enduring and amiable acquaintanceship with the boss of the Yankees, I must also say that I quietly worried about Shields’s choice in headgear each time we entered the owner’s luxurious box. While at first everyone appeared to be amused by it, including Steinbrenner, and while it was eventually ignored—or accepted as one might accept a touch of eccentricity or dishabille from an otherwise elegant and reputable individual—I always believed that unless Patrick Shields (no matter how tall he was) soon began wearing a more appropriate chapeau to Yankee Stadium, the two of us would unavoidably end up in the bleachers.

  The six-foot-one-inch Steinbrenner was in essence taller than anybody in our midst. And as he had already demonstrated in the way he ran his team—by haggling over tiny matters in big contracts, by impulsively rotating his managers (he would hire and fire Billy Martin no fewer than four times within a dozen years), and by insisting that his players trim their beards and have close-cropped hair and definitely eschew such Afrobouffant styles as a few black outfielders had tried to contain within their Yankee caps—he cared deeply about many things that were not always rational, reasonable, or predictable. But saying this is saying nothing that will explain why the reputedly tyrannical boss of the Yankees would continue for years to welcome a Red Sox idolizer into his private box in the Stadium; in fact, the relationship between them would rapidly develop into a warm and openly expressed bond of fraternalism. My guess is that Steinbrenner privately respected Shields’s stubborn and stalwart allegiance to the Boston team that in Patrick’s mind represented (no less than the Celtics or the Kennedy family that he also adored) the hub and soul of the immigrant Irish work ethic and Catholic suffering. Absolute loyalty in good and bad times had been one of the mandates of Steinbrenner’s military school upbringing; and even when he himself deviated from such principles, for example, in his dealings with ex-Yankee players who became his managers—Yogi Berra refused to speak to him for fourteen years because, after being told that his managerial job was secure, he was inexplicably fired by Steinbrenner and learned of it through secondary sources—the Yankees’ owner was nonetheless capable of being enamored with and affected by manifestations of loyalty when he saw them demonstrated by such adherents as Patrick Shields. It is perhaps true as well that in condoning Shields’s fidelity to the Red Sox, the Yankees owner was able to refute the media’s image of him as an intolerant martinet. On the other hand, Steinbrenner’s affiliation with Shields might also be comparable to that of a missionary man seeking to reform an infidel, for he presented Shields with gifts that might have been proffered in the hope of Shields’s conversion, such as a Yankee uniform that was tailored to fit, and also pregame passes that allowed Shields into the Yankee clubhouse and dugout, and along the fringes of the field and behind the batting cage, where he was free to converse with the players. As a result, Shields became friendly with many of them, so much so that he admitted he favored them over all other players except those on the Red Sox team. At the same time, he pressed Steinbrenner to allow him to demonstrate his presumed talent as an Irish tenor by selecting him to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” one night before a game in the Stadium.

  Steinbrenner responded with what he thought was an even better idea: He would (and did) rent Town Hall for a single evening in order to sponsor Patrick Shields’s debut as a concert soloist. All the tickets were issued gratis to Shields’s friends from Le Club and elsewhere in the city; and one of Steinbrenner’s corporate colleagues, whose sister was a nun, enlarged the size of the audience by having busloads of parochial school students transported to the hall in midtown Manhattan. Before the program and during it, Patrick Shields received generous rounds of applause, which testified less to Shields’s skills as a singer, which were barely evident, than to the persuasive Citizen Kane-like response of George Steinbrenner and the rest of the claque in the front rows. Later that night at Elaine’s restaurant uptown, a few of the diners who had gone to the concert were ridiculing it in voices loud enough to be heard across the room by the restaurant’s ample-figured proprietress, Elaine Kaufman, who had also been to Town Hall.

  “That show tonight was a goddamned disaster,” said one of the men at the table.

  “Shields can’t sing a lick.” another man agreed, adding, “Steinbrenner was a damned fool to get himself mixed up in this thing.…”

  “Will you guys knock it off?” Elaine Kaufman shouted from her bar stool. “Patrick at least had the balls to get up there and give it a shot. That’s a lot more than any of you guys would have done.”

  A framed photograph of Patrick Shields, wearing his Yankee uniform, hung on the wall near the front of her restaurant, and she and he were close friends at this time, often going to the games and sitting together in Steinbrenner’s box—except on those occasions when the Red Sox were in town and Shields preferred watching alone (as Steinbrenner had arranged) in a single seat behind the Boston dugout. Shields sometimes flew up to Boston to see the Red Sox in Fenwa
y Park when his work schedule permitted, but he was too ill with the flu to watch the September 1978 play-off game in which the visiting Yankees triumphed over the Red Sox primarily because a New York shortstop named Bucky Dent (a .243 hitter who in 1978 had only five home runs) managed to hit one of these during the late innings of this important game, a “fluky little denty poke,” as Shields would describe it while watching it on television at Le Club, that nevertheless rose loftily along the left-field foul line and landed beyond the playing area to ultimately decide the contest in the Yankees’ favor and terminate the season for Boston.

  “Oh, George,” said Shields to Steinbrenner after the latter had returned from Boston, “how could you have done this to me? You have all those sluggers, all that high-priced talent! And you break my heart with Bucky Dent!”

  These Yankees of 1978 would move on to play in the World Series and defeat the Los Angeles Dodgers, as they had the year before. But when the two teams next met in the World Series of 1981 (the Yankees failed to qualify in 1979 and 1980), the Dodgers would retaliate, winning four of six games. After that, the Yankees would flounder through many years of ineptitude and vanishing managers and Steinbrenner’s ranting and raving, which would not cease until the Yankee team of 1996, managed by Joe Torre, finally produced another world champion.

  During these many years, I continued to go to the Stadium with Elaine Kaufman but often without Patrick Shields, who during the latter 1980s began to complain of his diminished energy and enthusiasm for the game. But what he did not tell us was that he was slowly dying. He was dying of what we did not know about his private life, his nighttime life as he had lived it after he had closed Le Club at 4:00 a.m. and welcomed into his apartment the young men with whom he shared his cocaine and affections.

  A woman who was Patrick Shields’s longtime secretary and confidante, and who knew for more than two years that he was suffering from AIDS, said that he seemed to be very pleased by the fact that he had so long and convincingly presented himself as “straight” to all the people he associated with in Steinbrenner’s box and Le Club and to the women whom he escorted back to their homes at night before his dawn life began. In his final will and testament, Patrick Shields left all of his possessions, including his Red Sox cap, to the last of his lovers, a young fashion model who had been born in Puerto Rico and was known in the New York garment industry and the discos as “Romeo.”

  2

  THE YANKEES THAT I HAD BEEN WATCHING PLAY THE METS ON television on this July afternoon in 1999 were not playing like the world champions they had been the year before, when the team had won 114 games and swept the San Diego Padres in the World Series. On this particular Saturday, with the Yanks leading the Mets 6-4 going into the bottom of the seventh inning, a Yankee relief pitcher named Ramiro Mendoza gave up a double to the Mets’ Rickey Henderson and then, following a walk to John Olerud, Mets catcher Mike Piazza whacked a 2-1 pitch over Shea Stadium’s left-field wall and suddenly the Yankees were behind, 7-6. While I shook my head, the television set resounded with the cheering of Mets fans and there on the screen was the picture of the burly Piazza rounding the bases with his fists clenched.

  My telephone was also ringing. Hoping that my wife, who was upstairs, would interrupt her reading to answer it, I let it ring. Finally I picked it up. It was my tennis partner, who was supposed to be coming by in a taxi that would take us to our doubles game in Central Park, but now he was saying that it had been canceled. He had injured his right ankle earlier in the afternoon in a fall on Lexington Avenue while on an errand with his wife, he said, adding that he had called two or three times to tell me this but my phone had constantly been busy. (I later learned that my wife had been communicating enthusiastically and at length on the bedroom extension with a literary agent in Connecticut who represented the author whose manuscript the two of us had slept with the night before.)

  I was unhappy about not playing tennis, for I had been looking forward to getting a workout and practicing my service toss at a higher elevation. The slow-moving slugfest between the Yankees and Mets had already dragged on for nearly four hours, with no relief in sight from either team’s bullpen. All three of the Mets relievers who had worked in the eighth and ninth innings had put men on base, while the Yankees had added two runs to retake the lead, 8-7—which remained the score as the Mets came to bat in the bottom of the ninth. One of the announcers said that the Yankees’ fourth pitcher of the afternoon would be Mariano Rivera. He was perhaps the best reliever in baseball, and I was confident that he would soon be blinding the Mets’ batters with his speed and would surely secure the victory.

  As Rivera made his way to the mound to begin his warm-up pitches, and as the television channel began to inundate its audience with commercials, I impatiently switched to another channel to see what the Chinese and American soccer women were up to in the Rose Bowl, and how the United States’ comely star, Mia Hamm, was doing in her quest to live up to the current media hype, which virtually equated her athleticism with that of Michael Jordan. While up to now, as I already suggested, I had no more passion for women’s soccer than tiddlywinks, I had recently read a few sports page articles about Hamm and her teammates; on television, in an often-repeated Gatorade commercial, she was shown getting the better of Michael Jordan in various indoor and outdoor sports activities, all of them accompanied by the musical refrain “Anything you can do, I can do better.”

  In addition, this China-USA World Cup finale was being staged subliminally not only as the international Super Bowl of women’s soccer but as a face-off between the daughters of two contentious nations presently at odds over a number of governmental grievances. It is often the case that athletes become unwittingly conscripted to the military and political interests of their nations, being called upon to transform a sports arena atmospherically into a battlefield and to help propagandize a cause by winning a game—and this was particularly so this summer with regard to the young women of the Chinese national soccer team.

  In early May an American war plane had bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade while participating in the NATO anti-Serbian offensive in Yugoslavia, causing heavy casualties, three deaths, and a cost in damage and property losses of $28 million. Although the United States government claimed that the raid was accidental, an unintended target selected from an outdated map, the disbelieving Chinese immediately reacted by attacking the American embassy in Beijing with rocks and Molotov cocktails, causing a fire and more than $2 million in damages. Preceding this, and continuing concurrently, were charges and countercharges between the two nations concerning such matters as spying, human rights violations, copyright infringement, imperialism, intransigence, ignorance of the truth as each government saw it, and an animus tinged on both sides with what each believed was hypocrisy: an accusing finger from the West pointing to the plight of the Falun Gong spiritualists and the Dalai Lama, and Communist threats to the security of the Taiwanese; while an accusing finger from Beijing cited the U.S. government’s destruction of the Branch Davidians, the nation’s long history of prejudice and oppression against minorities, beginning with the Native Americans, and its prolonged boycott that had brought suffering to ordinary people in Cuba.

  What all this portended for China’s soccer women was either more pressure on them to defeat the Americans during their scheduled visit to the United States or maybe the nullification of their opportunity to compete in the United States if China’s Party rulers decided to cancel their trip as a political gesture of ill will. Surely this was not wanted by the American sponsors of the 1999 Women’s World Cup. This event took place every four years in different countries—it was like the Olympics, but never held during the same year—and in 1999 the host country was the United States. It had invited teams representing sixteen nations out of a total of more than sixty soccer-playing nations with well-organized programs, all sixteen invitees having previously demonstrated their superiority by advancing through qualifying rounds in their areas of the world.
In the United States they would be involved for three weeks in a thirty-two-match tournament held in various American stadiums on the East Coast, in the Midwest, and in the far West—for example, at Giants Stadium in the New Jersey Meadowlands; at Soldier Field in Chicago; at Spartan Stadium in San Jose—and from these contests would emerge two teams with the best records and the right to face each other for the title in Pasadena’s Rose Bowl.

  Even before the games had begun, it was generally agreed by most sportswriters and the aficionados of women’s soccer that the two best teams in the competition were from China and the United States; and while the promoters of the tournament privately welcomed the political tension between these countries as a potential boon to the World Cup’s television ratings and the ticket sales in the eight stadiums chosen as game sites, the absence of the Chinese was nervously anticipated. This presaged not only reduced profits and media interest but also a missed opportunity to showcase the superior talent of Asian women who were eager to compete and who at the same time shared the promoters’ aspirations to lift women’s soccer to a higher level of global marketability, wanting to attract through intense rivalries more financial support from governments, industries, and businesses (especially businesses that manufactured products for women), and also to appeal to greater numbers of emotionally involved fans (including more soccer moms and schoolgirls) who would identify with and support this game as a celebration of female agility, endurance, power, and aggressiveness.