Best Served Cold: Essays

By Roger Zotti

Roger Zottis latest collection of essays, Best Served Cold, is mostly a true book with some stretchers, as Mark Twains Huck Finn says about Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In part one, Zotti focuses on sports, while in part two hes concerned with books and movies. Agree or disagree with his views, its certain that Best Served Cold is an entertaining and informative mix of concise and inventive writings.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 25, 2017
• ISBN: 9781524587703

Roger Zotti

A longtime boxing fan, Roger Zotti and his wife live in Preston, Connecticut, along with their creative dog. He taught in a Connecticut prison for twenty years, retiring in 1993.He is a regular contributor to the International Boxing Research Organization Journal and the Resident. Roger Zotti graduated from eastern Connecticut College in 1966. In 1971, he received his master's degree from Wesleyan University.

Book preview

PART ONE

SPORTS

I want you all to line up in alphabetical order, according to your size.

Casey Stengel

The man who has no imagination has no wings.

Muhammad Ali

No. 9

There were many players who believed that Howe was the dirtiest player in the NHL. But by no stretch of the imagination was he a goon. He was a smooth-as-silk skater, a DiMaggio on the ice, effortless, it seemed.

Gerald Eskenazi, sports journalist

As a nineteen-year-old rookie with the Chicago Blackhawks during the 1959–60 season, Stan Mikita, the first Czechoslovakian-born National Hockey League player, had the reputation of high-sticking opponents. In a game against the Detroit Red Wings, he high-sticked the player who wore number 9 during his entire twenty-six-year hockey career: Gordie Howe. Mistake. Even Mikita’s teammates told him it wasn’t a smart thing to do, but Mikita shrugged off their admonitions.

Everything in its time, right?

Howe didn’t seek revenge the next time the Red Wings played Chicago. He waited three more games—then struck. Stan and I were left alone at the end of the ice, he wrote in Mr. Hockey: My Story, his absorbing autobiography. He might have forgotten about the high-stick, but I hadn’t. I glided up next to him, pulled my hand out of my glove real fast, and popped him right between the eyes. He went down … His teammates had to carry him to the bench … the first person he saw when he came to was Denis DeJordy, Chicago’s backup goaltender. Stan asked him what happened. Denis just said, ‘Number 9.’

Mikita, who played twenty-one seasons in the National Hockey League, was a victim of Howe’s code. To my way of thinking, Howe wrote, it was just payback. If someone took a run at me, he better be able to accept what happened in return.

Mikita, seventy-six, played from 1958 to 1980 with the Blackhawks. In 1961 he and the Hawks won the Stanley Cup. In 1967 and 1968, he won the Hart Trophy as the NHL’s most valuable player, and in ’64, ’65, ’67, and ’68, the Art Ross Trophy as the league’s leading scorer. He played in 1,394 games with the Blackhawks and is the team’s leading all-time scorer with 541 goals and 946 assists. He was an All-Star eight times.

When he began his career, Mikita was one of NHL’s nastiest players, but later he changed his ways after his daughter expressed displeasure with his on-ice antics. In ’67 and ’68, he was awarded the Lady Byng Trophy for sportsmanship and gentlemanly play, one of the few players to win the honor twice since it was first awarded in 1925 to the Ottawa Senators’ Frank Nighbor.

In 2015, Mikita’s wife Jill informed the press that her husband was suffering from Lewy body dementia, the second most common form of dementia after Alzheimer’s.

Kudos for Bobby

Bobby Baun, who had a twenty-year NHL career, mostly with the Toronto Maple Leafs, was Howe’s teammate in Detroit during the 1968–69 season. Dining with Howe one evening, Baun, one of the first presidents of the NHL Players’ Association, called him a dumb SOB.

I told him I had reasons enough of my own to agree with that statement, but I wanted to know his, Howe said.

Baun told Howe he was hugely underpaid, and that as one of the NHL’s premier players, perhaps its best, he was worth much more than his yearly $45,000.

Clearly, this had been going on for years, meaning I’d left lord knows how much money on the table, Howe wrote. The next time Howe met with Detroit president Bruce Norris, he asked for a raise to $100,000. When he agreed to it straightaway, I immediately knew that everything Bobby was telling me was on the mark. In retrospect, I should have asked for $150,000.

Howe had been lied to by past president Jack Adams and Norris, and it hurt. The team liked to talk about how the organization was like a family, Howe said, but in that moment it sure didn’t feel like one.

Veteran hockey referee Vern Buffey once said of Howe: You’re working a game and you see a player go down. You know Howe did it. But how can you prove it?

Howe began his extraordinary NHL career in 1946–47 with Detroit, and retired in 1970–71. He won the league’s most valuable player and the Art Ross Trophy as its leading scorer six times, and was an All-Star twenty-three times.

From 1973–74 to 1976–77, he skated for the World Hockey Association Houston Aeros, alongside his two sons, Mark and Marty, an achievement unmatched in any sport! Then he joined the New England Whalers for two seasons. During his six seasons in the WHA, he scored 174 goals and had 334 assists.

In 1980–81, New England joined the NHL as the Hartford Whalers, and Howe was back in hockey’s best league for one season. When he retired, at age fifty-two, he had scored 801 NHL goals and amassed 1,049 assists.

He played in his sixth decade in 1997, age sixty-nine, when the Detroit Vipers of the International Hockey League signed him to a one-shift contract.

During Howe’s careers in the NHL and WHA, he accrued more than two thousand penalty minutes, a handful of which, he wryly admitted in Mr. Hockey, I probably even deserved.

Tough I

When roller derby was America’s most popular blue-collar sport, W. C. Heinz wrote a column about one of its greatest, toughest, and most memorable skaters, Midge Toughie Brasuhn.

She was twenty-five years old when Heinz’s piece, Rumpus in the Living Room, first appeared in the March 23, 1949 issue of New York Sun. Later it was published in The Top of His Game, a compilation of Heinz’s columns edited by Bill Littlefield.

Born in in St. Paul, Minnesota, Toughie was two inches shy of five feet and weighed 120 pounds. Married twice, she had a four-year-old son by her first marriage. As a youngster, she was a tomboy and fought with other girls.

‘I had to fight for everything,’ she told Heinz. ‘I was an ice skater first, and I was always the smallest in my class. When I began to get as big as the other girls in that class, they moved me up into a higher class, so I had a fight on my hands there.’

Though she likes watching professional boxing on television, when she battles opposing skaters, Heinz wrote, she doesn’t lead with her left hand: ‘No, I’m strictly a roundhouse swinger,’ she said, ‘but I don’t care. I’m not interested in fighting. Everyone makes so much of my fighting, but I’m interested in skating, and the fighting just happens when I’m standing up for my rights.’

If your next child she was a girl, Heinz asked, would you want her to become a skater?

‘Well, I think a girl should be feminine,’ Toughie replied. ‘I mean everyone has always called me Toughie since I was a little kid. I don’t think that’s the way a girl should grow up … Of course, a girl should have some spunk. I’d want my daughter to be spunky.’

Tough II

Gillette Blues Blades sponsored the Friday Night Fights, and on December 29, 1950, at Madison Square Garden, nationally ranked Eugene Silent Hairston demolished San Jose’s J. T. Ross. Standing 6’1½, four inches taller than the hearing-impaired Hairston, and outweighing him by several pounds, Ross, keeping his distance and using his reach, did well in the first round.

In the second session, reality struck: Hairston’s right cross followed by a left hook to Ross’s chin sent him to the canvas, and after struggling to his feet, he managed to stand toe-to-toe exchanging punches with the highly regarded prospect from the Bronx.

The end for Ross came in round three. Hairston leaped to the attack and pressed his foe steadily about the ring until the opening was presented for a right to the jaw, James P. Dawson of the New York Times wrote. Ross toppled and stretched full length on the canvas near a neutral corner. Referee Mark Conn signaled the mismatch was over.

Ross never fought again. Smart decision.

Hairston went on to battle such notables as Paddy Young, Kid Gavilan, Paul Pender, Rocky Castellani, Laurent Dauthuille, Walter Cartier, Robert Villemain, Jake LaMotta, Bobo Olson, and Charley Humez. He compiled a 45-13-5 (KO 24/KO by 3) record and retired in 1952.

On the Hairston-Ross undercard, Hartford’s Vic Cardell, a smooth boxing welterweight, earned a unanimous decision over Jimmy Herring of Ozone Park, Long Island. Also, Chicago’s Danny Bang Bang