Читать книгу Eye to Eye - Julie K. Rubini - Страница 10

TWO

DRIVE

I was born a size 6X. I was always tall. Growing up, my dad often told us, “stand up straight, shoulders back. That way people think you are older than you are.”

—Christine Brennan¹

CHRISTINE WAS the first child born to a collegiate athlete who had a tryout with the Chicago Bears football team and a woman who swam Lake Michigan in the summers and played softball and basketball in high school. Her mother, Betty Brennan, worked at home and had a passion for recording life in journals and diaries. Her father, Jim Brennan, was a businessman who loved politics.² Either the news or sports constantly blared from their radio or the black-and-white television in their family room.

Christine was destined to grow up to write about either politics or sports.

Jim Brennan was born in Chicago in 1926. During the Great Depression in the 1930s, eight-year-old Jim sold magazines to help his family put food on the table. He threw shot put on the track and field team and played tackle for the football team in high school. Jim received a football scholarship to Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. He only played for one season as a lineman before he signed up to serve in the army.

Jim and Betty Brennan on their wedding day

Courtesy of Christine Brennan

His stint with the army took him to Europe, where he served after World War II. Jim rose to the rank of sergeant, then made his way back home to Chicago. He studied at the University of Chicago before starting his career in business.³

He met a bright fellow Chicagoan who attended Loyola Business College. Betty Anderson worked for Illinois Bell, a telephone company, managing clerks, employees who help with administrative tasks like typing letters and answering phone calls. The two connected at a church singles party on a Sunday night. Betty described the day she first laid eyes on Jim as the “best day of my life.”⁴

They married in 1955 and moved to Toledo, Ohio, several years later. An opportunity had presented itself. A forklift truck business had opened in Toledo. Jim wanted to be an independent business owner, and this was his chance. Christine’s father sold, leased, rented, and repaired forklift trucks. The business eventually was named Brennan Industrial Truck Company, Inc. As the company grew, so did Jim and Betty’s family.

Christine with her younger sister, Kate, and her mom

Courtesy of Christine Brennan

Christine made her appearance in the Brennan lineup on May 14, 1958.

The Brennan team eventually grew to include Christine’s younger siblings: Kate, born in November 1959; Jim, in June 1962; and Amy, who arrived in August 1967.

When Christine was just four years old, the World Series of 1962 was being battled between the New York Yankees and the San Francisco Giants. The young family gathered around their black-and-white television to take in the action. Lawrence Peter “Yogi” Berra was the star catcher for the New York Yankees. Yogi was quick and a great handler of pitchers.

Yogi Bear was a favorite cartoon show of little Christine’s. Although “Yogi” Berra didn’t get his nickname from the cartoon, the names sounded alike to this four-year-old.

As the first game of the New York Yankees broadcast on the Brennans’ television, Christine announced to her parents, “Yogi Bear is going to catch. When he gets the ball, he’ll steal it, as he does the picnic baskets.”⁵

Christine didn’t recall this story, but her mother did. Betty kept a baby book for Christine and recorded the whole incident.

At the age of five, Christine wasn’t interested in playing with Barbie dolls as her sister Kate did. Instead, she grabbed her father’s old baseball glove to play catch with him. And instead of discouraging her, Jim taught his daughter how to throw properly, throwing hard with the motion from behind her right ear. Neither seemed to mind that most dads didn’t play sports with their daughters back then.

Several years later, after playing catch all the time with her dad, and hanging with the neighborhood boys playing ball, Christine asked for her own baseball mitt.

Fun with Kate

Courtesy of Christine Brennan

On her eighth birthday, she got her wish. Her dad proudly presented her with a new store-bought Rawlings mitt. Christine held it to her face, inhaling its fresh, leathery smell, just as she saw her friends who were boys do. Baseball smelled like this, she thought.

On the palm of the mitt was a signature, in script. Tony Cloninger was the name on her glove. Christine didn’t know who he was. She looked through the sports section of the newspaper to learn about him. She discovered that Tony Cloninger was a right-handed pitcher for the Atlanta Braves. That same year Tony gained fame not for any ball he threw, but for hitting two grand slams in one game against the San Francisco Giants. Two grand slams in one game! And she had his signature right on her glove.⁶

Betty also gave Christine a diary to write in when she was ten years old. Her first entry in the blue-and-green floral print book with the unused lock was dated January 1, 1969.

It read, “Woke up late after staying up last night to wait for the New Year. After lunch, went to the Sports Arena to ice skate. After that, watched the Rose Bowl and Orange Bowl. In the Rose Bowl, Ohio State won over USC, 27–16. In the Orange Bowl, Penn State won over Kansas, 15–14.”⁷

When she was ten years old, Christine was given a diary by her mother.

Courtesy of Christine Brennan

Christine made a promise to herself that she was going to write in it every day. And she did. Even if one day meant that she wrote, “Nothing happened today.” And then she turned the page and wrote for the next day’s entry, “Nothing happened today either.”⁸

The days may have seemed uneventful to young Christine, but there was a lot happening around her. And she was the drive behind a lot of the action.

Christine couldn’t wait to grab the sports section from the Toledo Times, Toledo Blade, and Detroit Free Press that arrived daily at the Brennan home on Barrington Drive. She read all the sports articles, for local as well as national teams.

When she was eleven years old, she’d sit by the radio in the family room, curl up on the sofa, and listen to the Toledo Mud Hens games broadcast from WCWA 1230 AM. With a scorebook her father had given her and a wrinkled and worn copy of the Blade’s special preseason section featuring the Mud Hens roster, she’d record the game.⁹

Her young imagination got the best of her as she listened to those games, especially the games on the road. Christine sat close to the radio, taking in every sound of those games being played in cities like Syracuse, New York, and Richmond, Virginia. She’d hear the crack of the bat and the crowd cheers, and even thought she heard a man selling hot dogs in the stands.

Christine’s father broke the news gently to her that some of the games weren’t being broadcast live. They were recreations of the actual game. The announcer sat in the radio studio and produced the appropriate sounds as he read the game plays over a ticker. Once she learned this, although she was disappointed, it brought a whole new perspective to this dedicated fan. Christine listened even more closely to the broadcast to determine if the game was live or “fake.” Often the soundtrack of crowd noises, which sounded the same regardless of the play, was the giveaway to Christine.¹⁰

As best as she could, she tried to imagine those games over that little radio. The announcer did not describe the other team’s members, what they looked like, or what numbers they wore. If it weren’t for her worn and crinkled preseason special section on the Mud Hens, she wouldn’t know what her team members looked like, or what number they wore. It was a lesson she carried with her later in life.

And Christine began to practice the lesson in her own sports reports. Christine may have been the youngest sportswriter when she started using her mom’s Olympia typewriter to crank out her previews of the “Major League Game of the Week” to be shown on NBC on television.

Christine typed up several paragraphs on each game. She placed a piece of copy paper behind the round cylinder of the typewriter, pressed on the appropriate letter keys, and the metal “hammers” instantly printed a letter image on the paper. There was no room for error in typing, so Christine had to be precise.

She had an assistant, her seven-year-old brother, Jim. He’d provide her with all the player statistics she needed from the Blade. Then she distributed her stories to her dedicated followers: her family members. Christine’s first sports writings had a grand circulation of six people.¹¹

USA Today, the newspaper that Christine now writes her sports column for, has print circulation of over nine hundred thousand people, per day.¹²

She had to start somewhere.

Christine was hooked on Mud Hens baseball—so much so that she asked her dad if they could go to see the home games, live, from the stadium just twenty minutes from their home. Her dad bought season tickets along the first baseline.

The Mud Hens stadium at the Lucas County Recreation Center was an old horseracing track. The clubhouse, where the team prepared for a game, was separate from the field. Players coming from the locker room and making their way into the baseball park had to walk through an outside corridor. Fans hung out in the space, hoping to get autographs from their favorite players.

The first time Christine and her family went, she asked her dad if they could line up to meet the players as well. He gave his blessing, and soon Christine and her younger siblings zoomed around the players, chasing after all the names she had memorized from her time spent listening to the games on the radio. It was a thrill for them all.¹³

Christine got the bug to watch even more sporting events live, and her dad was happy to fuel her passion. The family went to one or two Detroit Tigers games a year. That’s all it took to get Christine and her younger brother, Jim, addicted to following the Tigers. The legendary Ernie Harwell broadcast the games on Detroit’s powerhouse radio station, WJR. Many summer nights Jim fell asleep to the sounds of the Tigers games coming to them from Oakland or Anaheim, California, starting at 7 p.m. Pacific Time Zone. It was 10 o’clock Toledo time. Christine often crossed the hall and shut his radio off after Jim had fallen asleep, and her parents did the same for her after she had.¹⁴

The Brennans on a family bike ride: (left to right) Christine, Jim, Kate, Amy, and their dad, Jim

Courtesy of Christine Brennan

Since they lived nearly in the shadow of the University of Toledo clock tower, the family began taking in the Rockets’ football games. Her dad bought season tickets, near the forty-yard line behind the visiting team’s bench.

“Dad was the Pied Piper with season tickets,” Christine said.¹⁵ Whenever and wherever her father went for a sports contest, Christine and her younger sister and brother were sure to follow.

Along with going to sporting events and school, Christine was still faithfully recording significant events both in her little world and in the big world outside in her diary. And something pretty important was going on with the Brennan family. They moved to the beautiful community of Ottawa Hills, just miles away from their home on Barrington Drive. Although they were further from the Rockets stadium, they still went to each home game.

University of Toledo’s undefeated quarterback Chuck Ealey

The University of Toledo

While her mom stayed home with little Amy, Christine and her dad, sister Kate, and brother, Jim, witnessed the magic of the 1969–71 seasons in the Rockets Glass Bowl. With each Rockets score, a Civil War-era cannon shot off from one of the two huge stone towers at the end of the stadium. Under the guidance of quarterback Chuck Ealey, the team scored a lot. And each time the cannon shot off, much to the fans’ delight.

The Rockets went undefeated, for all three seasons—thirty-five games in a row, leading to three straight Mid-American Conference championships and three successive winning appearances in the Tangerine Bowl, now called the Citrus Bowl.

“Every ounce of me was being poured into that team, and they never, ever disappointed me,” Christine said.¹⁶

Chuck Ealey and University of Toledo coach Frank Lauterbur receive their medals at the 1969 Tangerine Bowl.

The University of Toledo

A small package sat under the Brennan Christmas tree in 1971. It was for Christine. As she tore off the wrappings, she couldn’t believe her eyes. In the box were two tickets to the Toledo Rockets versus the Richmond Spiders at the Tangerine Bowl, in Orlando, Florida, on December 28. Christine and her dad were going to see Chuck Ealey and her beloved Rockets play in the Bowl game!¹⁷

The Rockets won handily, 28–3, led by quarterback Chuck Ealey. It was an exciting victory for Toledo. It also capped a career that opened Christine’s young eyes to the injustice and discrimination happening in the National Football League at the time.

Christine credits Chuck Ealey and the University of Toledo Rockets’ glorious, undefeated seasons as the reason she ultimately chose to become a sportswriter.

Despite being named First Team All-American by Football News, Second Team All-American by United Press International, and Third Team All-American by Associated Press and in the running for the Heisman Trophy, Chuck Ealey was not drafted to play in the National Football League in 1972.

“Seventeen rounds, 442 players, and Chuck Ealey is not picked. It makes me sad to this day, quite frankly,” Christine said.¹⁸

Christine’s dad tried to explain to her that most NFL teams didn’t believe black athletes were considered smart enough to lead a team. A childhood friend of Chuck’s who went on to play as an outfielder in Major League Baseball, Larry Hisle, said that National Football League owners and coaches apparently felt that, “intellectually, minority quarterbacks didn’t have what it took to be able to run the team.”¹⁹

Since Chuck was not destined to play as a quarterback for the National Football League, Chuck’s sports agent reached out to the Canadian Football League. The Hamilton, Ontario, Tiger Cats drafted Chuck. Chuck moved to Canada to play for the team, as quarterback.

That first year, his rookie season, Chuck led the team to the Grey Cup, the equivalent of the Super Bowl in the United States. Not only did he lead the team to the game, the Tiger Cats won the Grey Cup. Chuck was named Rookie of the Year and the Grey Cup MVP.

. . .

AFRICAN AMERICAN QUARTERBACKS IN THE NFL

THERE ARE thirty-two teams in the National Football League. In 2017 there were nine black starting quarterbacks. That is just over a quarter of the teams. Progress is being made, though, as in the late 1960s and early 1970s there often was just one African American starting in the position of quarterback in the whole league.

Marlin Briscoe was drafted by the Denver Broncos in 1968, but as a defensive back. He became the first black quarterback to start in a game when he was shifted to quarterback midseason that same year. Many black collegiate quarterbacks opted to play in different positions, simply to have the opportunity to play for the NFL. Chuck Ealey was not one of them; he only wanted to play as quarterback. Several African American quarterbacks opted to do just as Chuck did and played in the quarterback position in the Canadian Football League.

There are a number of up-and-coming black quarterbacks who will be available for the NFL draft in the near future.

. . .

Christine played a number of sports while growing up. Due to her height, in the sixth grade a group of boys nicknamed her “Frankie.”

Courtesy of Christine Brennan

Chuck is still a hero in the eyes of the University of Toledo fans. He was recently voted as the number one player among the university’s All-Century team in honor of the football program’s one-hundred-year history.

Just as the Rockets were racking up wins, Christine was chalking up some gains herself. She was growing, taller and taller. She was just eleven years old and was already 5 feet 3-1/2 inches tall and weighed 110 pounds. And she gained a hurtful nickname that year from some of her sixth-grade classmates. “The boys at school have called me Frankie (short for Frankenstein) for some time,” she wrote in her diary.²⁰

Christine not only kept growing as she entered high school, she also developed the thick skin that served her well later in life.

DID YOU KNOW?

Despite his incredibly successful collegiate career, Chuck Ealey is not a member of the College Football Hall of Fame.