Tennis, Bagel, and the Melting Pot
COTTLE, THOMAS J.
leimi/, Bagel/, one) the Melting Pot Thomas J.Cottle There used to be a story about two Jewish men meeting after not having seen each other in years. After the embraces and the usual questions...
...Beguiled his opponent...
...in some communities, probably, an outright paranoid...
...We felt his victories and defeats, his arthritis and blisters, and of course his gorgeous dignity when he refused to pitch on Yom Kippur with the Dodgers in the thick of a pennant fight...
...Well, if you have to be, be like Greenberg...
...no enduring Middle East crises, endless labor disputes, interminable political negotiations...
...After the embraces and the usual questions about family and work, one says to the other, "So tell me, Moishe, are you still Jewish...
...we ask, "Meaning what...
...Why reserve so strange a verb for a Solomon, rather than for Rodney Laver, or Stanley Smith or Guillermo Vilas or Manuel g Santana...
...I love the sports pages...
...I liked him yesterday when he hit a double but now I don't like him...
...Clearly, my uncle was telling mc...
...There is a verb, to waffle...
...No white person I had ever read about in the sports pages had his skin glisten...
...It isn't even particularly pleasing in sound...
...Sandy Koufax was the one who proved that Jews could be both intellectual and physical...
...I was asked by an uncle when I was small and on my way to becoming one...
...As an image, it makes little sense...
...In fact, the cereal and the sports pages are interchangeable...
...The whole world has been transformed into a beautiful melting pot, a colossal tennis casserole...
...clobber, even beat, but nobody beguiles...
...Now, this might be news for those who read neither the Bible nor the sports pages, but to me...
...But no...
...A Jew in athletics doesn't fit the American pattern...
...It is not paranoid to recognize them...
...I read the passage again...
...But let no one be fooled, we used to tell each other...
...And Jewish...
...But the fact remains that "bageling" is a call word, a warning signal, a statement that a Jew has won, not a man, not a great tennis player, a Jew...
...The United Nations lives...
...That Harold Solomon bagels his opponent is a public announcement, value free, of course, that Solomon is a Jew...
...Even with all the money that can be made, Jews aren't meant to deal with the ineffable, the playful and capricious...
...It is foolish to debate the question of whether or not anti-Semitism exists in the United States...
...Fair enough, I thought when I got older, I'm willing to be in the stew if everybody else is too...
...Beware of those who are different from the self-defined mainstream of the culture...
...The age-old issues of inclusion-exclusion, superiority-inferiority persist...
...No one in this part of the newspaper beguiles anyone...
...I hate Jones...
...it is carried to children from the outside, although the teachers, ironically, are often the people who care most about the children...
...If Koufax had been around back then I'd have had a perfect defense...
...Tt doesn't happen...
...but there is no verb, to bagel...
...A movie star, an athlete, an intellectual who's rich...
...athletics isn't the place for Jews, but if that's where God is mistakenly sending you...
...Perhaps Jews are taught not to go into athletics, not because of the physical danger and lack of intellectual content, but because athletics represent, somehow, an unreal world, unreal fare...
...Everyone learned about it in school, and every time it was mentioned I conjured up the same fantasy: everybody in America, all races, creeds and religions, became, in my mind, different ingredients for a giant stew...
...A Jew in sports remains an incongruity, an uncomfortable and temporary inclusion, a trespass...
...It was an error...
...Nevertheless, breakfast with the sports pages is a gorgeous ritual...
...Just thought you might be interested...
...He went to college and everything...
...I like Cooper...
...I like the way he wears his uniform...
...for breakfast while reading the New Statesman and passages from Spinoza...
...When that man's curve spun down and away like a book falling off a table, dogs in the neighborhood whimpered and crawled away, like half the batters Koufax faced...
...Their victories cut into our national pride and unrelenting need to be the best at everything, but at least foreign players will soon disappear, for there must be some restrictions on their work visas...
...Where has it been written that Stan Smith "white-breaded" his opponent, or that some player "rosaried" his opponent...
...Second, he had performed miraculously well before thousands of people...
...They're Jewish, you know...
...Moishe answers smartly...
...The accounts of a baseball game are really a codification of our childhood emotional reactions to the players, particularly players like Koufax: "In the sixth inning Cooper hit a home run with a man on...
...and most recently BARRED FROM SCHOOL, published 'ast month by New Republic Books...
...When everyone was in the pot, God reached down with an enormous ladle and stirred us all up into a wonderful slop...
...And when Jews and blacks and foreigners win, as they do in tennis (as opposed to golf in America, which has stayed a far more exclusive preserve) it is a sign, some people fear, that society is changing too rapidly...
...Any major tournament is an international affair...
...And what a gorgeous punim.,~ someone would have said...
...With all our so-called enlightenment, we remain at an age where certain groups of people are perceived as a sub-species...
...I deeply resented the use of the word "bageling...
...He'd have broken the record if he wasn't a Jew...
...Koufax afraid of dogs...
...Players' national origins are cited continually, to the point of monotony...
...For the writer, however, the man's feats were not nearly as scintillating as his race...
...Now, the melting pot has been upended, and the era is characterized by ethnic, racial and religious differentiation, if not downright purity...
...Granted, too, I'm overly sensitive...
...a phrase, flat as a pancake...
...Both have recognizable tastes which linger only momentarily, then pass on...
...someone remarks about the new family in the neighborhood...
...Even more, many receive nicknames, most of them "cute," which are at the level of grade school nomenclature...
...Of course...
...Smack in the middle of an account of scores in a tennis tournament, I read that Harold Solomon beguiled his opponent 6-2, 6-1...
...And when that happens Longwood and Forest Hills no doubt will be turned into rest homes or cemeteries...
...I nodded...
...But even with you, America continues to say to its Jewish athletes, what are you guys doing here...
...I still read the Times and I'm still afraid of dogs...
...This man Solomon might be good, but a be-guiler...
...Indeed, it's one of those gratuitous reminders about people that we continue to pass on to one another...
...Granted, the verb "bageling" may have been overlooked or misread by millions of readers...
...Opportunity structures are becoming too available to too many people...
...That's another way of saying that the game, which I adore, represents a part of affluent culture, a part where exclu-siveness and exclusion are valued...
...I could consume the newspaper and read the cereal box and experience no ill effects...
...The line read: "Solomon bageled his opponent, 6-2, 6-1...
...Not only that, it actually sounds rather good, just as it did in sixth grade when I wrote sports stories for the school newspaper and saw myself willing to be slopped into the pot...
...I mean, do you still feel Jewish...
...It had to be an error...
...I must confess that my own breakfast routine includes reading the newspaper...
...It's the perfect response...
...we are sensitive to them because we have heard and seen them all our lives...
...At eight o'clock in the morning with one hand holding the sports page and the other feeding the face with puffed air, people wham, slam, destroy, wreck, edge, outlast, zip...
...you're the ideal my childhood, adolescence and adulthood never could attain...
...Fifteen or twenty nations may be represented, and the quality of play and competition is utterly superb...
...Glistening bodies," "dark strangers," women as "chicks" and "broads" are all part of the same fabric...
...The intellectual fare of the stories of baseball, tennis, football, matches perfectly the nutritional value of the cereal I eat...
...If we're Jewish, we may want to know that in a land of over 220 million of them, there is a landzperson huddling in the next block...
...Once, Americans actually believed in the concept of a melting pot...
...We all know the slogans of the stereotypic thinking: Solomon wins today, but tomorrow he'll own the tennis courts...
...Yet despite the manifest presence of all these nationalities on American tennis grounds, the newspaper accounts make me believe that many people resent the new inclusiveness of tennis...
...And God only knows a little skin glistening might help the spirit of some of us pale folks...
...If Jews themselves contribute to anti-Semitism, and all groups probably contribute to the attitudes held about them, it is mainly because excluded groups, oppressed groups, respond to exclusion and oppression in terms of their involvements with excluded and excluding groups...
...How we loved his overpowering strength and shrewdness...
...obviously it does...
...It cannot be helped...
...In the sports pages somebody wins, somebody loses, and that's that...
...Boston 3 — Chicago 5, fartig...
...On a particular Saturday afternoon, an Ivy League football team was led to a surprising and significant victory by a black quarterback...
...If we're Christian, we may want to know that an insidious foreigner has just invaded our community...
...It's just more comfortable to think of Jews sitting at their breakfast tables reading the financial pages of the Times and living in fear that at any moment a dog may leap through the kitchen window...
...There are settled results to be found here...
...Perhaps, I thought, it's anti-Semitism...
...People, in other words, caught on to the scheme and realized just how serious were the losses of unique character and culture, as well as of personal freedom, that the melting pot demanded...
...Yesterday's win or loss belong to history, as Rice Krispies are immutable...
...You want to be a ball player...
...they may even multiply...
...Third, he apparently possessed a unique physical trait which allowed his skin to glisten...
...Solomon's "bageling]' of his opponent is a reminder of the ambivalence in which certain men and women are held...
...Then Jones struck out...
...It is still an anomaly to sports writers that Jews run around in shorts and sneakers swatting a ball on a tennis court — with success...
...A FAMILY ALBUM...
...The ritual is important because it's calming, ordered, restful...
...First, he was an athlete-scholar...
...It actually sounded pretty good, too...
...He ate them The author, a regular contribute to this magazine, is affiliated tne Children's Defense Fund o* ihe Washington Research Project His books include BLACK CHILDREN, WHITE DREAMS...
...If he gets a hit tomorrow maybe I'll like him, I don't know, I'll see...
...A young Polish player hadn't been in this country a month before he was called "the Polish sausage...
...But the Jewish winners will stay around...
...Koufax did it as much with his head and heart as he did with his arm...
...Three different times the word "black" was used, and in a feature story, the same newsman described entering the jubilant locker room and seeing the quarterback's "glistening black body" emerge from the shower...
...After glancing at the headlines...
...Italian players are "pizza kings," and God help those players who are writers and poets as well as athletes...
...then be the best...
...He is good...
...Koufax...
...Everywhere the warning signs of ethnicity, religion, race, flash on...
...In the morning, over cereal, the real tensions of the world fall on center court and the big questions are whether Jaime Fillol can beat Bjorn Borg, and if the doubles team of Jimmy Connors and Hie Nastase can stand up to the team of Brian Gottfried and Manuel Santana...
...Nothing, nothing," the other person demurs...
...It's a lesson in dealing with world events that for the moment belong to everybody, as well as with the unchangeable character of these events...
...To me, it's equivalent to another sports account I read years ago, in the same newspaper actually...
...Ruminations about tennis and Jewish athletes were hardly on my mind the other morning at breakfast when my ritual was jarred by a single word, a misplaced verb, surely, that rocked my reading and eating...
...When I read about today's great tennis tournaments and the competitors from all over the world, the old melting pot idea from sixth grade returns...
...Self-hatred isn't inborn...
...No way...
...He's no good...
...In recent years, however, tennis has opened up considerably...
...Athletes may be gods, but they're also parents — when they perform badly, one feels deceived, personally robbed...
...I also like the sports pages because the writers emotions are the very ones I experienced in junior high school and am not allowed any more because they're "unsophisticated...
...Look at Sandy," I would have told my parents...
...who as a kid chose to believe that Phil Cavaretta, Hal Newhouser and Stan Musial were Jewish, the verb "bagel-ing" isn't clever...
...I turn at once to the sports pages...
...I remember at that moment envying the athlete for at least three reasons...
...it is not so...
...Either way, the announcer of Jews cannot go wrong...
...If Solomon really bagels his opposition, we're still outside, others are being warned of our effort to break in, the doors — open though they may be to glamorous, jet-setty foreigners — are still loxed to us...
...It's better perhaps, in some people's minds, that Argentinians, Australians or Hungarians win tournaments...
...No one needs to be reminded that Jews did not invent the game of tennis or even watch over it during its early years of development...
Vol. 1 • April 1976 • No. 9
