Splat
THROW THE BOOK AT HIM
Muhammad Ali recorded another KO last night. While I was watching the Presidential election coverage with my heart in my throat, I spotted a camelback cricket making his tentative way across the living room carpet. Also known as hopping spiders, they are what football coaches look for in flankers—quick and fast, with great peripheral vision and amazing leaping ability. If you try to stomp on them or swat them, they’ll laugh at you.
They come out at this time of the year, and needless to say, we hate them. Years of experience has taught us to get high above them and drop a coffee table book. So I surreptitiously slid The Best of Sports Illustrated off my pile of sports picture books. The cover is a 1965 photograph by Neil Leifer of Ali standing and yelling over the body of Sonny Liston, who is splayed out on the canvas… like a dead bug.
Years ago, when I was working for The Fort Lauderdale News, I knew Ali a little. Boxing was one of my beats, and I would occasionally go down to the 5th Street Gym on Miami Beach to watch him work out. Whenever he saw me, he would howl like a wolf and smile. That was about the extent of our relationship.
I sidled over to the area of the rug where the cricket was grazing, raised the book over my head, and dropped it on my foe. I did not stand over the book and yell like Ali—years of experience have taught me that you cannot assume anything with hopping spiders. So I turned over the book and… yes! There it was, flattened on the ass of Yogi Berra, who’s on the back cover, jumping into the arms of Don Larsen after the pitcher’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series. I wiped it off with more Lysol wipes than were necessary.
I was about to return Ali to the top of the pile when I noticed the coffee table book that had been underneath his. It was the Sports Illustrated Golf Book. So while we were waiting for votes to come in from Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and Pennsylvanis, I started leafing through it.
There, on page 144, was a piece by Michael Bamberger entitled “The Trump Tour.” Written in 2007, Bamberger recounted a memorable round he played with The Donald at the Trump National Golf Club in Briarcliff Manor, NY. “…Trump was waiting in the XXL clubhouse in a red golf hat with the gold logo of his club on the front and one of those Little League adjustable straps, with the holes and the little plastic pegs, in the back.”
Talk about hazards…
One of the players in their fivesome was a scratch golfer named Louis Rinaldi, a paving contractor who had done the cart paths. “Trump made him a member of the club and gave him a locker in the same row as those of Trump, Bill Clinton, Rudy Giuliani and Joe Torre.” Bamberger’s assessment of Trump the golfer was that “he could maybe break 80.”
I looked back up at the television screen and watched Steve Kornacki write some numbers on his electoral vote scorecard. There was nothing in the story written 13 years ago about Presidential ambitions, but Bamberger does describe this interesting scene at the turn: “He slipped into the clubhouse for a few minutes, where a foot-high stack of tax documents awaited him. He signed a few of them with his distinctive, thick up-and-down signature and said, ‘Golf is a small part of my business. One, two percent. But you know why I spend so much time on it? Because I do what I want…”
Upon which I put the book back on the pile, then picked up the Ali book, raised it over my head, and dropped it on Trump. I hoped he was done with his trip across the rug of history.
-30-
