AMERICA AT LARGE:ON A scorching Saturday afternoon in June 51 years ago, Tommy Bolt was waltzing his way to a wire-to-wire, four-shot victory in the US Open, and in that day's final round he was trailed around Southern Hills by a small coterie of writers that included his Texas homeboys Dan Jenkins and Bud Shrake and a profusely sweating 28-year-old sportswriter from New York named Jimmy Breslin.
Often described as Tommy (Thunder) Bolt, the soon-to-be- winner was as renowned as much for his displays of temper as for his golf game (Jimmy Demaret once said “Bolt’s putter has spent more time in the air than Lindbergh”), and Breslin had pinned his hopes on witnessing one of them.
“He don’t throw a club, there’s no story,” he muttered. But with Bolt leaving his closest pursuer, Gary Player, in the dust, that seemed unlikely. Running out of holes, Breslin at one point huffed and puffed to catch up with Bolt as he walked up a fairway.
“You need to throw a club,” he told the US Open leader. “Maybe just a little one, something you don’t need.”
“Ain’t this something,” said Bolt as he turned to Jenkins and Shrake. “Old Tom’s gonna win hisself the United States Open Championship and I got idiots with me!”
In recalling the episode years later, Jenkins would say of Breslin, “his knowledge of golf was roughly equal to my knowledge of Queens Boulevard”.
A man whose public image is that of the tough, street-smart, big-city newspaperman would understandably discourage the notion that he knew his way around a golf course, but the truth is that, even before embarking on what was celebrated three nights ago as a 60-year career in journalism, Breslin had spent several summers working as a caddie on Long Island.
If 2009 has seemed at times an endless series of funerals, wakes and memorial masses, Monday night’s tribute was refreshingly unique: Pete Hamill, who served as master of ceremonies, described it as “a memorial service without a corpse”.
When the decision was taken to expand what had been conceived as an event for New York University journalism students to an audience that included the public at large, the 500 tickets were snapped up in 15 minutes. Onstage, more than a dozen journalistic luminaries were arrayed in a row of chairs that made them, said Hamill, “look like the John Gotti jury”.
As their tributes were offered, the 79-year-old guest of honour squirmed uncomfortably in the only cushioned chair on the stage.
Celebrated as a man who could simultaneously enjoy the confidence of politicians, cops and mobsters, Breslin, who once wrote a biography of Damon Runyon, would out-Runyon Runyon as the creator of an alternate urban universe populated by Fat Thomas, Marvin the Torch and Klein the Lawyer.
He famously covered the funeral of John F Kennedy by interviewing the man who had dug the grave, and in the late 1970s his fame was such that, until his eventual apprehension as the Son of Sam killer, mass murderer David Berkowitz initiated a very public correspondence.
But those of us of a certain age can recall that Breslin’s early days in this business were spent in the sports department.
Several years before he hit the best-seller list with The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, he had authored a baseball classic, Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?, in which he hilariously chronicled the beginnings of the New York Mets.
From the sports pages of the Journal-Americanhe matriculated to the old Herald-Tribune, which almost concomitantly with his arrival established a Sunday magazine section it called "New York". Breslin was its columnist.
“He brought the approach, the sensibility, the technique and the voice of a sportswriter to what almost immediately became a ‘must-read’ column,” remembered Hamill. “It had never been done before, but it opened doors for a lot of guys in this town, including me, because every newspaper in New York was looking for its own version of a Jimmy Breslin column.”
Monday night the New York Times' Jim Dwyer recalled what would become the classic Breslin style as he read a column about an Alabama schoolgirl penned during Breslin's coverage of the 1960s Civil Rights campaign. During this same era, after the discovery of the shallow grave in which the Mississippi Ku Klux Klan had buried civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, Mickey Schwerner and John Chaney, Breslin was there to cover Goodman's New York funeral: "The first funeral for Andrew Goodman was at night and it was a lot of work. To begin with they had to kill him."
Author and Miami Heraldcolumnist Carl Hiaasen recalled a Fort Lauderdale rendezvous with a Breslin source called Seymour the Pirate, who, it was hoped, might be able to shed some light on a mysterious explosion that had blown up the car of a Florida mobster, reputed to be the designated heir to the late Meyer Lansky, in his own driveway. After grilling Seymour, Breslin arrived at an independent conclusion that they key to the botched assassination lay in the failure of the mobster's guard-dogs to intervene.
“Jimmy, please,” pleaded Seymour the Pirate, who, after all, had a reputation to uphold, “You’re gonna write a story blaming this on dogs, and you’re gonna quote me?”
But Breslin was sticking to his guns. “Those dogs,” he said, “was yellow.”
Another Timesscribe, Mary Ann Giordano, recalled her apprehension in revealing to Breslin that one of her sons had decided to enter politics.
“There’s only one way to prepare him for a career in politics,” Breslin told her. “You have to wake him up every morning and insult him.”
He lost his first wife and a daughter to cancer even before he himself underwent surgery a decade ago for a brain tumour. On the eve of his operation, Daily Newscolumnist Michael Daly recalled Monday night, he dropped by Breslin's home.
“Jimmy,” Breslin’s wife announced, “Michael came by to say hello.”
“He came,” Breslin corrected her from two rooms away, “to say goodbye.”
Although Monday night's pre-euologists were almost all younger, an exception was the piece de resistance of the evening. In limning the residents of his native Queens, Breslin so often appropriated the title of Tony Bennett's Boulevard of Broken Dreamsthat Hamill was inspired to invite the old crooner to close the tribute by singing it. Bennett was so encouraged by the response of the audience that he wound up singing three songs – but he forgot to sing Boulevard of Broken Dreams.
When he finally pulled himself out of the easy chair, Breslin seemed ill at ease.
“If I was drinking at the bar with you I could tell a lot of lies and maybe be charming,” he said, “but Jimmy Breslin is a fraud, and I can prove it.”
He thereupon launched into a reading of his latest novel-in- progress. There was nothing fraudulent about it.
