Don’t ask me how I was anointed with the captaincy of the Von Humboldt elementary school 1948-49 basketball team. Any possible explanation long ago made its jailbreak through a crumbling cell wall of my memory.
- Forward Robert Iwonski, five-four in his dirty-stockinged feet–but five-seven if you counted his formidable Russian brush, a stand of immovably Brylcreemed hair, each filament ascending in perfect perpendicularity to his aircraft-carrier-flat cranium, as if snapped to military attention.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
You might describe the site of the Humboldt Park-area elementary school basketball tournament–the second floor of the Deborah Boys Club at Division and Western–as a toy court. Originally constructed as a small boxing gym, it later doubled as a paltry, pitiable basketball court. That this makeshift’s length and width were about two-thirds the size of a regulation court, we could manage well enough. But owing to the low-slung ceiling, the baskets rose to the pitiless, scrawny height of nine feet. Unless we altered our customary school-yard loops into near line drives, the basketball would wallop the ornate ceiling and bang ingloriously onto the varnished floor, yards away from the intended target. Hitting the ceiling with a shot happened often enough so that nobody’s emotional state hit the ceiling as a consequence. The player nearest the ball would simply rescue it and continue playing as if the shot had been batted away by a ten-foot-tall center. (Now that I think of it, it may have been the repeated low trajectory that was Shelly Goodman’s athletic undoing, hurtling him unwittingly into bad shooting habits and permanently blighting his game, hitherto so dependent on the mortar shell’s arc of his school-yard shot. Poor Shelly Goodman, shrunk by the shrunken dimensions of the Deborah Boys Club gym into a wretched 13-year-old has-been.)
The gym also hosted the annual Deborah Boys’ Club Golden Gloves boxing tournament, where my timorous, trembly figure had been shoved into a ring by what is today called peer group pressure but was then known as shame over being called “chicken” by your buddies. In the game between Fear of Shame and Fear of a Punch or Two in the Nose, our working-class culture dictated that the latter get trumped. And so, in my 11th and 12th years on this planet, I bobbed, weaved, ducked, dodged, bounced, ran, jabbed occasionally, and prayed profusely for an eternity of six boxing minutes each year, roundly losing–by the unanimous decree of the judges–all six rounds. Naturally, after each match I wore the masks of, first, sullen outrage, then, abject despondency, each mask shrouding the surge of euphoric relief I felt over having placated my friends without being forced to advance in the tournament, thus to endure another six minutes in that squared-off torture chamber of rope, canvas, and the sweat of fear.
Scanning the schedule and noting that our showdown with–and the tortuously reasonable prospect of triumph over–Saint Aloysius lay an achingly short four weeks away, I grasped that it now fell upon me, the captain of our capsizing fellowship, to consider what countermeasures could be seized in order to thwart the menace of the amply muscled, eagle-beaked, seismic-tempered, universally reviled terrorist Big Stashu and his swaggering gang of four. The 2-2 Saint Aloysius team, you see, wasn’t nearly as tough to beat on the court as it was tough on the street. And our craven little quintet, though clearly demonstrating spunk on the court, stunk on the street.
Our deaf-mute next-door neighbor, former prizefighter Joe Hertzberg, held longtime reign as a neighborhood hero. In today’s more sensitive society it seems impossible to believe that he had fought–in the 1920s and ’30s–under the name “Dummy Jordan,” the sobriquet doled out to him by a boxing promoter with the apathy of an Ellis Island official and the sensitivity of a urinal. With such disdain stabbed into him by the boxing establishment it’s not hard to figure out why Joe had been denied so much as one title shot, despite the fact that for years he had been ranked as the number one contender for the lightweight title of the world. Anyway, Joe, who had yielded two daughters as his only issue, viewed me (the progeny of a deaf marriage) as a kind of surrogate son and so took me on as his earnest–but failing–boxing student. During the course of my lessons he would frequently allude to his own paradigm of good boxing and clean living, Joe Louis. So, via the revered Joe Hertzberg, another favorable imprint of black people was stamped into my moral registry.
“Hi,” he returned agreeably.
