Literary Notes: Jerry Izenberg and More (Book Reviews by Thomas Hauser)

Literary Notes: Jerry Izenberg and More (Book Reviews by Thomas Hauser)

Long after he retired from baseball, Ted Williams (possibly the greatest hitter who ever lived) was stopped by a security guard and asked for identification as he entered Fenway Park in Boston. Williams (the story goes) responded disdainfully, “I may be old. And I may be fat. But I’m still Ted Williams.”

Jerry Izenberg (the dean of American sportswiters) will be 92 in September. He may be old. His legs might not carry him around the playing fields as surely as they once did. But he’s still Jerry Izenberg. And he can still write. Baseball, Nazis & Nedick’s Hot Dogs: Growing Up Jewish in the 1930s in Newark  (published by The Sager Group) is his latest book.

Izenberg’s father was born in Lithuania and came to the United States at age seven. Baseball was his first real connection to America. “I became an American the first time I hit a baseball,” Harry Izenberg later reminisced. He dropped out of school in fourth grade after his father died and economic necessity required that he get a job. Later, he played minor league baseball before finding work in a dye factory.

When Jerry married, his father’s wedding gift to him and his bride was an American flag.

Jerry inherited his father’s passion for baseball. Harry Izenberg was an avid New York Giants fan. Detroit Tigers slugger Hank Greenberg (mixed metaphor coming up) was a patron saint in the Izenberg home, as he was for many Jewish fans. But Jerry didn’t inherit his father’s athletic genes. He was a lousy baseball player as a kid and didn’t improve with age.

He was also a “problem child,” both in and out of school. Money was scarce but Harry and Sadye Izenberg felt that a change in direction was necessary to save their son. With the help of an aunt, they pieced together the funds to send Jerry to a four-year military academy in Virginia.

“This is not a punishment or a test,” Jerry’s father told him. “It’s simply what you make of it. You need to understand the way life works. You can’t even think of breaking the rules until you understand what the rules are. You can’t do things only because you want to do them. It’s time you learned how to be responsible. It won’t be easy but you need to do it.”

Jerry had been Bar Mitzvahed at age thirteen, but religion was never at the core of his life. “My father,” he notes, “defended his religion more than he practiced it.” So yes, Jerry knew that his father’s family had left Eastern Europe to escape the threat of pogroms. He knew about Hitler, although the full horror of The Holocaust had yet to be revealed.

At the military academy, anti-semitism was a reality. Not deadly but akin to a hundred tiny paper cuts. At one point, Jerry was struggling with his studies and asked the commandant if he could have an extra hour after “lights out” to work on his homework.

“Why is it the Jewish boys always want an extra piece of pie?” the commandant responded.

Military academy was followed by college at Rutgers-Newark. Jerry began writing about sports. The book ends with his induction into the United States Army on November 6, 1952.

Baseball, Nazis & Nedick’s Hot Dogs is an entertaining memoir. The stories flow smoothly and evocatively. More than any of Izenberg’s previous books, this one comes from the heart. His first thirteen books are on a shelf in my library. Number fourteen is a welcome addition.

****

Glyn Rhodes was an average club fighter; a British super-lightweight who compiled a 33-27-5 (20 KOs, 14 KOs by) ring record between 1979 and 1993. After retiring as an active combatant, he turned to training fighters. Beyond Good and Evil (written with Mark Turley and published by Pitch) is his story.

Rhodes was a classic opponent. He had eight fights abroad and lost all of them. He fought five men who became British champions. Other ring adversaries claimed European, Commonwealth, and French titles. Eamonn Loughran (who decisioned Rhodes in 1991) later won the World Boxing Organization welterweight crown.

“I occupied a little niche and was known to be erratic,” Rhodes acknowledges. “A guy who could give anyone a battle on my day, but also someone who could not be relied on to turn in a good performance.”

Brendan Ingle trained and managed Rhodes for much of the fighter’s ring career. Rhodes acknowledges the contributions that Ingle made on his behalf but paints a portrait of his mentor as a snake who often cajoled him into the ring without adequate time to prepare. On one occasion, Ingle put him in a fight on short notice pursuant to a “special arrangement.”

“I was to make it look good, go the distance, and help pad out the card,” Rhodes writes.

“We’re all in it together,” Ingle told him.

Except the opponent went for the knockout.

There are places where Beyond Good and Evil is repetitious and moves slowly. There are too many descriptions of fights that mattered to the people who were involved but won’t matter much to readers.

That said; there are places where Rhodes’s story is worth reading. This is particularly true when he recounts Scott Westgarth’s tragic death from a subdural hematoma suffered in a fight that he won on points with Rhodes in his corner.

After Westgarth died, Rhodes went into psychotherapy to deal with a lifetime of pain. What he learned about himself in the journey of self-exploration that followed is worth repeating:

“I saw and acknowledged that boxing had done me harm in a lot of ways. Boxing can be a harmful thing. Anyone that denies that just isn’t dealing with reality. What’s hard to acknowledge for people in and around the sport is that you can’t change or dilute that harm because it’s built into boxing and the culture which surrounds it. Turning up to a gym and getting punched in the face every day changes the way you see the world. It changes your relationship with violence. Some people want to condemn boxing. I get that. Others want to glorify it, which I can understand too. I don’t do either. I accept the lot because you can’t make boxing safe without destroying what makes it special. It’s not part of regular society, so people who live only in that world don’t understand it. But those who have laced on a pair of gloves, even if only for a spar, they know.”

Thomas Hauser’s email address is thomashauserwriter@gmail.com. His most recent book – In the Inner Sanctum: Behind the Scenes at Big Fights – was published by the University of Arkansas Press. In 2004, the Boxing Writers Association of America honored Hauser with the Nat Fleischer Award for career excellence in boxing journalism. In 2019, Hauser was selected for boxing’s highest honor – induction into the International Boxing Hall of Fame.

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