Vic Ziegel: writer, raconteur, New Yorker

AMERICA AT LARGE:ON AN early March afternoon in 1970 at the Lion's Head, Al Koblin, an off-duty barman who would later become the pub's part-owner, stumbled through the front door and interrupted a baseball conversation with what, considering the terrified look on his face, seemed a strange question: "Quick! Does anybody know if Vic Ziegel is in town?"

Since Vic was a sports columnist for the Post who spent at least half his waking days on the road, it was a question the cat in the kitchen had a 50-50 chance of answering correctly, but down at the end of the bar one of the regulars quickly consulted his newspaper and said: “Well, he was home when he wrote this yesterday.”

“Well, boys, start praying,” said Koblin, who told us that on his way over he’d just passed 11th Street, and that while the cops and firefighters had the whole block roped off, the house where Vic lived appeared to have been blown to smithereens in what the police assumed to have been a gas explosion.

Over the next several hours the details trickled in. The explosion turned out to have been an industrial accident at a townhouse that was doubling as a bomb-making factory for the Weather Underground, three members of which had been killed when, their munitions expertise having been found wanting, the four-story building was reduced to a pile of dust.

And while it had not been the result of a gas leak, it had immediately spawned one, igniting a conflagration that quickly spread to nearby residences, including the one, next door, where Vic Ziegel resided.

When he appeared at the bar that evening, shaken but otherwise none the worse for wear, Vic recalled the frightening moment when a fireman had burst through his door and ordered him to evacuate the premises because “the whole block could go up any minute”.

Pretty much everything he owned was in that apartment, said Ziegel, who had to make a split-second decision about what to take with him.

“I had five seconds to decide what was important enough to save,” said Vic. “So I grabbed the notebook in which I’d recorded every movie I’d seen since 1947, tucked it under my coat, and followed the fireman out the door.”

In the end his apartment was spared, and so was Ziegel, who would live another 40 years until he succumbed, at 72, to cancer last week. I was in Dublin when I got the news. The next night another old Lion’s Head habitué, Tom Paxton, and I hoisted one in Victor’s memory.

He was the king of raconteurs in a saloon where the competition often consisted of Pete Hamill, Joel Oppenheimer, Dennis Duggan, Frank and Malachy McCourt, Tom, Paddy, and Liam Clancy, and Joe Flaherty, and in a newspaper town whose sports departments boasted the likes of Red Smith, Jimmy Cannon, Larry Merchant and Leonard Shecter, he was the guy most apt to be quoted by the fellow on the next barstool, the most imitated by his peers.

“Vic put himself on an island with maybe Red Smith and Jim Murray among American sports columnists, an island with maybe Mark Twain and Nathanial West among American humorists,” wrote his closest friend, Michael Katz, who had known Ziegel since they were City College classmates 50-odd years ago.

He was a charter member of the new breed of sportswriter Cannon dubbed "the Chipmunks" as a columnist with the liberal-era Postof the late 1960s, and – after an extended hiatus working for New York magazine, Rolling Stoneand an ill-conceived fling as a television writer – he returned for Act II of his newspaper career, serving as a columnist, sports editor and eminence gris with the Daily News.

Given the devastating wit that made his saloon conversation the stuff of legend, the impression was created that his columns were the product of that same spontaneity; but Ziegel was a laborious craftsman who often agonised over every comma, and was often the last guy to vacate a press box.

“Sports is thrilling, fascinating, exhilarating, and happens out of town often enough to accomplish wonderful things with an expense account,” he wrote. “Most of my columns are written in press boxes, with the stranger in the next chair typing a lot quicker.”

Or, as he described the process on another occasion: “On those days I write (in the office) and the ax of a deadline isn’t about to drop immediately, when you might think I have words enough and time, it suddenly becomes important to play chicken with the blade. So I shmooze with the guys in the office, go downstairs for another cup of cardboard coffee, call home, anybody’s home, until I have finally arrived at the moment I dread: the sports editor standing over me and saying, ‘Where is it?’ (This is what you answer, kids. You say five minutes. And not to worry. If you miss once, nothing happens. If you miss too many times, they make you sports editor.)”

When they did, in fact, make him sports editor, one of his first acts was to poach Katz away from the Times.

Some years earlier, in 1981, Katz had been honoured by the Boxing Writers Association of America with the Nat Fleischer Award for outstanding boxing journalism.

“I pointed out,” recalled Katz, “that I was not even the best boxing writer in my own house. (The Katzes lived in apartment 4A, the Ziegels in 6A.) Vic finally got the Fleischer a couple of years later.”

Having grown homesick on one of his protracted trips abroad, Vic once phoned the Lion’s Head and instructed the barman to simply lay the receiver on the bar so he could listen to some authentic New York saloon talk.

He was a New Yorker through and through. He had grown up in the shadow of Yankee Stadium but was a lifelong Giants fan and detested all things pin-striped. Balding from an early age, he blamed his friar’s tonsure on his yarmulke-wearing boyhood. “It covered up all my follicles,” he claimed.

He was at the helm of the Daily Newswhen the story broke that a couple of Yankee players had been apprehended for publicly urinating in Kansas City. The story ran under a Ziegel-created banner headline labelling the perpetrators the "Whiz Kids". For a time he wrote a handicapping column under the pseudonym "Longshot Larry". He also wrote a physical-fitness spoof column called "Dear Flabby", and at the height of the marathoning boom wrote The Non-Runners Book, which he dedicated to Calvin Coolidge, whose enduring quotation was, "I do not choose to run".

An inveterate plunger (Red Smith dubbed him “Bet-a-Million Ziegel” after watching him in action at a Manila cockfight), Ziegel once did a story on baseball’s most celebrated gambler, Pete Rose, who winkingly confessed that when he deliberately dropped the names of specific commodities into his interviews, he was often rewarded with unsolicited gifts of the product thus plugged.

Ziegel, naturally, wrote that he found this practice reprehensible. But the concluding words of that day’s column were, “Remy Martin, Remy Martin, Remy Martin . . .”