A fall classic: baseball, bocci and Joe D

Sporting News, The, Oct 4, 1993 by Pat Jordan

Whenever it's World Series time, I think of my old man, lying in bed with a cold, sniffing into a Kleenex, shouting out to my mother in the kitchen, "Flo, get the line on Philly!" My mother, cradling the phone between her shoulder and her ear, would be writing out on a paper napkin that day's betting line on the Series she was getting from my father's bookie.

My old man's retired now, at 83, but still he likes to keep his hand in it: a game of nine ball every now and then at a dingy pool hall smelling of stale urine and baby powder in the rundown part of the city where he still lives, or maybe a trip to Atlantic City where he'll shoot craps for eight hours straight. He used to play bocci for money, but he doesn't have the stamina anymore. "It's a young man's game," he says.

I remember when he was a young man, though, and I was a child sitting on a park bench with my mother, while my father played bocci with the other Italian-American immigrants, like us, then living in the Italian section of the city. Everyone fell silent when my father raised the lumpy, wooden ball before his eyes. He held it there, palms up, close to his chest as if it were a precious offering. My mother and I shaded our eyes with the flat of our hands and watched. My father's eyes narrowed as he looked over the ball in his hands to the smaller object ball a few yards away in the dirt. The other men, dark forms, smoking crooked Toscano cigars, watched him, too. My father's shoulders were slightly hunched forward, his knees flexed, his feet in pointy black shoes, pressed primly together. He looked both prissy and menacing. He took a step forward, his hands parted, the ball swinging down past his hip, and then up again behind him. His upper body was poised forward, his hands - one empty, one holding the ball - outstretched behind him so that he looked like a speed skater straining toward the finish line. He held this delicate pose for an excruciating minute, his narrowed eyes glaring at the object ball. Then the ball moved down past my father's hip, his body low to the ground now, and he released the ball with a gentle push, like a father urging his child toward his first step. The ball wobbled over the bumpy ground. My father and the other men walked alongside of it, talking to it, twisting their bodies this way and that, as if willing the ball's path. A few feet from the object ball it slowed, seemed to die. My father crouched low, squatting, and talked to the bah in Italian until it picked up life, lurched forward over a bump and nestled against the object ball. The other men slapped crumpled dollar bills into my father's hand.

Bocci was the only sport my father ever played, and yet, my mother used to kid him that in his own way he was an athlete. "It takes stamina to shoot craps all night long," she'd say. And she'd add that our family crest was a pair of dice, a deck of cards and crossed pool cues on a field of green felt. For as long as I can remember, my father has been a gambling man. Never a bookie.

"Bookies are businessmen," he'd say, with scorn. "I was a gambler. A free lance." In his later years, mostly my father liked to bet on baseball, basketball and football games. Baseball was his favorite sport by far, though. And the World Series was his favorite betting series. Baseball, he said, was our family sport.

I remember the day I realized just how important baseball was in our lives. I was about 5 and had just begun my own love affair with baseball, which was encouraged by my mother. She loved the Yankees.

DiMaggio. Rizzuto, Crosetti. Raschi. Berra. My father loved the Yankees, too, but for him they were less a team he, as an Italian-American, could point to with ethnic pride than a team he could confidently lay 9-to-5 on.

On this warm Sunday in the fall, my father invited three of my "aunts" and "uncles" to our back yard for a cookout. Those two facts alone would have been sufficient to etch that moment forever in my memory for none of those "aunts" and "uncles" were actually my aunts and uncles - they were my father's gambling cronies - and furthermore, my father was not a cookout kind of dad.

My father and my uncles stood around the outdoor grill under the shade of a maple tree and sipped scotch while they made nervous small talk and listened to a Yankees-Red Sox game on the radio propped on the kitchen windowsill. They all fell silent when Yogi Berra, the Yankees' squat, homely, manly catcher came to bat. Suddenly a friendly argument flared up among my uncles, all of them short, dark, Italian-Americans, in shimmering, sharkskin suits. They argued over who was a better catcher, Berra, or the Dodgers' Roy Campanella. My father mediated. "What difference does it make?" he said. "They're both Italians." They all nodded gravely to this truth.

"But not always," said my uncle the card sharp, who taught me, at 5, how to palm the ace of spades. He told a story about the time he took his father, an old Sicilian who knew little about the game of baseball, to a Dodgers-Giants game. My uncle pointed out to his father the Dodgers' Italian catcher, who was half black and half Italian, when Campanella came to bat. The old Sicilian immediately began to root for Campanella. "Come on, Paisano!" he shouted as Campanella took another strike. When Campanella finally struck out, the old Sicilian threw up his hands in disgust. "Mellanzana!" he, shouted, an Italian slang word for black. My father and my uncles all laughed.