So, when I read of Andy Bathgate's passing a week or so ago, I learned from the obituary that he was once on the cover of Sports Illustrated in 1959. No date was given. It has always been a weekly magazine.
Sports Illustrated did not make it into our home at the time. We did get Life, and Reader's Digest, but not SI. The magazine was, and still is a product of Time-Life. SI was started on August 16, 1954. Since I had such success at obtaining a 1967 New Yorker hard copy from an Internet search, I tried the same for the cover story on Bathgate.
Bingo-bango. Several people were selling copies of the January 12, 1959 edition. A range of prices and conditions were offered. A $7.50 asking price, plus $3.00 shipping did not seem beyond the pale of what I could afford. After all, I've spent somewhat more for neckties that I no longer wear.
And it arrived neatly wrapped and protected in plastic, with cardboard backing. No rips, or dog-eared pages. Pristine I guess the grading would be. The cover, aside from the image of Andy tells us the price is 25 cents, and the annual subscription rate is $7.50 The mailing label was to Bill Howvet, 358 Morehead, Chadron, Nebraska. No zone, and certainly no zip. America's heartland. MapQuest puts this place in the very upper left of Nebraska, just south of the South Dakota border, and not too far east of Wyoming. If it was God's country then, it still is.
The issue is thin. Not too filled with ads, and certainly containing no babes in swimsuits with sand on their shoulders with behinds protected by dental floss. The magazine almost has a New Yorker magazine feel and look to it. There is a cartoon by Interlandi; there is a section which closely resembles 'Talk of the Town,' and 'Shouts and Murmurs.'
There are color photos, but of no great quality. Most pictures are black and white. The ads are poised a bit for snob appeal, even Budweiser's. What distinguishes them from today is that there is ad copy, words, a narrative that accompanies the pitch. The back page color Bud ad shows a comely wife, or girl friend, pouring a tall frosty cold one for her man who is in a button-down white dress shirt and tie, relaxing with a newspaper and a bag of chips after what surely was a hard day at the office. The 'Mad Men' look. The guy could be Jon Hamm. The copy goes: "NEXT TIME you're drinking beer, look at the label. Does it list the ingredients? The Budweiser label does." We're getting close to hearing Ed McMahon's baritone tells us about "smooth taste, and drinkability."
Vitalis hair tonic contributes an ad, as does The RCA Victor Popular Album Club, which can get you started with a '5-Album Set of Swing Classics for only $3.98.' Who are the five? Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington and Artie Shaw. Certainly titans of their musical age. I wonder if the guy on the mailing label, Bill Howvet bought into this.
Contents? Stories on Russian Hockey, tennis, basketball, Davis Cup tennis, picture gallery photos, Andy Bathgate, 'A Long Cold Road to Fame,' Charles Goren on Ladies Bridge, A recipe, A Fashion Designer, and a Fox Hunt in Ireland.
The 'faces in the crowd' section, which is still around today I think, gives us Glenn Davis, who was already well known for world and Olympic 400 meter hurdle records, and who has just been awarded the James E. Sullivan award by the A.A.U. for amateur sports excellence, and Shelby Lyman, of Harvard, who was the top collegiate chess player who led Harvard to a second place finish in Cleveland behind the University of Chicago for a chess championship. Shelby, as some of us might remember, gave us near move-by-move analysis during the Bobby Fischer/Boris Spassky chess match from Reykjavik in Iceland in 1972. That match was televised live on New York's public television station, Channel 13. We would watch it in the Blarney Stone after work. I wonder if he'll be involved when the World Chess Championship comes to New York this November. Deja vu all over again.
And now the Bathgate story, proving you are never too old to learn something new. The article's writer, Kenneth Rudeen mentions that Bathgate doesn't score as often at home, the Old Madison Square Garden, as he does on the road. "On the larger rinks he has more freedom to do what comes naturally, and he takes advantage if it; he scored 14 of his 21 first-half season goals in games out of town."
I never knew the Old Garden wasn't 200 feet regulation: 60 feet blue line to goal line, offensive/defensive zones, ten feet behind each net, and 60 feet in the neutral zone, by 85 feet wide. It was 186' by 86'. I always knew Boston Garden was smaller. When they held indoor track meets at the Old Boston Garden the best they could squeeze in was a 55-yard dash I believe, and not what was the standard indoor dash of the time, 60 yards.
The cover photo shows Bathgate in his home Rangers uniform, with the A, for alternate Captain nearly hidden by his pose. I guess in 1959, he hadn't yet been made the captain. The narrative is basic, but well-written, giving us a sense of what it's like to be a boy in post-depression, pre-war West Kildonan, a suburb of Winnipeg in icy Manitoba. Twenty-five degrees below zero Fahrenheit was pretty much the winter norm, and was the temperature when 12 year-old Andy and his buddies walked the five miles at 4:30 in the morning to get to play indoors (unheated) in a Winnipeg ice arena.
And as we might make fun of curling (at least I do) that sport was a rival for a young boy's attention growing up when Andy did. He complained that a lot of his friends were taking up curling so they could play in heated arenas. Pussies.
In Stephen Smith's seminal book on Hockey, 'Puckstruck' he describes some early New York American players playing at the Old Garden in the mid 1920s who complained of the heat in the
building. They couldn't stand it. They were fainting. They got Tex Richard, the boxing promoter who built the Garden, to finally lower the indoor temperature to 55 degrees. Tex wouldn't go any lower. He said the customers would freeze to death.
The high cheek bones of Andy that someone on Twitter commented on were of course not caused by starving, as I facetiously suggested in a prior posting, but were caused by the fact that from an early age he had no upper teeth of his own anymore.
When I started to follow hockey in the early 60s, I used to hear stories of the Junior system in Canada that took boys who were no longer in school, and basically used them to develop into minor and major league NHL players. I had always heard that the western Canada brand of Junior hockey was particularly rough for some reason. The article confirms this by telling us that Andy's first shift in a Junior game saw him take a stiff check into the boards, giving him the knee injury that would follow him around for his whole career. Dr. Kazuo Yanagisawa operated on Bathgate's knee in 1952. Dr Yanagisawa name would remain in the news as the team physician for decades.
And just like Phil Esposito practiced deflecting shots against his goaltender brother Tony, Andy practiced taking long shots against a boyhood playmate from 70 feet out, as each shot pucks at each other standing in goal. They purposely shot high at each other so as to avoid breaking each other's sticks in stopping the puck and also perhaps breaking their ankles as they stopped the shot with their boots.
Kenneth Rudeen beautifully describes a slap shot Bathgate took from the neutral zone, a full 15 feet outside the blue line, making it a 75 foot shot, that rose and caught Montreal's goalie Jacques Plante completely by surprise and went in. A goaltender getting beat from anything that far out has to be embarrassed. (Plante developed a weakness for high shots, and the Rangers took advantage of this when Plante was in goal for playoff game for the Bruins in the early 70s.)
And it is likely that kind of embarrassment that Plante kept in his mind when he once tripped Bathgate so blatantly that Andy crashed heavily into the boards, nearly suffering serious injury, and that Bathgate remembered, and with his sniper ability to shoot high, avenged the trip as he purposely aimed high at the then unmasked Plante at the game I was at in November 1959, that caught Plante flush on the face, forcing him to skate off for stitches and come back 20 minutes later with the mask on that became part of a goaltender's standard equipment. Hockey. The origin of bad blood.
I'd love to know where the "modest apartment on the outskirts of Queens" Bathgate was reported to live in with his wife on his $15,000 a year Ranger salary was. (See, no one could afford to live in Manhattan, even then.) I grew up in Flushing, Queens, and would love to know what was considered by a reporter to be the "outskirts." The NYT has always referred to Queens as an outer borough, which of course has always made my laugh.
It is funny to read that prior to Bathgate joining the Rangers, "they were staggering around in the depths of the NHL." It is funny to read that a six-team league, employing 120 players, had depths. I remember looking at NHL standings in the paper and now can say there are 'In Memoriams' taken out on the daily obituary page that are longer than the space that league standing took in a sports edition. The Ranger and the Bruins were usually each trying to stay out of the cursed cellar.
The absolute bonus to being able to browse through an issue, either digitally, or hard copy in this case, is to find another story on hockey, this time a story placed before the Bathgate story on the visit of the Russian National Team to the United States to play games against assembled American amateurs.
There is an italicized preamble to the Robert H. Boyle story, 'Red Icemen Come, See and Conquer.' The lay of the land is explained that the U. S. team is composed of post-collegiate players, generally all from Minnesota. and the Soviet team, which even then, was composed of the cream of their state-sponsored crop. Well known American amateurs with experience in international competition were generally not part of the U.S. team because of the demands of a four month preparation period and the $10 a day they were going to get for room and board. They had regular jobs, and needed to support their families. They were amateurs, a term not recognized or understood these days.
There is a black and white photo of the first game played in the tour at the Old Garden, showing the star, hammer and sickle Russian flag flying next to the 48-star American flag. Alaska and Hawaii weren't states then. The Garden looks smoky, as it always did, since cigarette smoking was not banned anywhere, and only suggested as something you shouldn't do in bed, since you might set yourself on fire, as some people did when they fell sleep with a lit butt.
I can see now that the neutral zone is smaller than the offensive/defensive zones. There is a good size, perhaps capacity crowd there, which would have been in the vicinity of 15,000 plus people. There is a photo of fur-hatted Russians walking past the Dayton department store in Minneapolis, and a photo of a shirtless 34 year-old captain of the Russian team, defenseman Nikolai Sologubov. Nikolai is a red Army veteran of WW II who was wounded by a German booby trap at the battle of Leningrad. The shirtless photo of him shows the tattoo he sports on his right shoulder, a somewhat crude outline of what might be meant to be a golden-haired beauty, but who, by today's standards looks a bit masculine, like Caitlin (Bruce) Jenner. The eye of the beholder.
The first game at the Garden is described, and takes place after a New Year's Eve game the Soviets watched between the Rangers and Bruins, whose "players tried to chop one another up with their sticks." That was not the Soviet style then, or now. The Soviets were checked heavily, and were, according to Boyle, sluggish, caused by unaccustomed heat in the Garden. (There's that heat thing again.) They were unexpectedly tied, 5-5. They did show off what we now know as their passing skill, playing tick-tack-toe with the puck and perhaps passing it 6-7 times before taking a shot, generally from in close, and with the goaltender wildly out of position. They always played a game of 'hide the pea' with the puck. Marsh Nyman, coach of the U. S. Nationals says of the Russians, "they're a precise team, they play chess on you."
The next two games in Minnesota were eventual routs, with the Soviets winning by 8-3 and 7-1. Anyone who watched Team Canada's start against the Russians in 1972 should be able to recall those early games in the series as resembling what was written in 1959.
Deja vu all over again.
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