Everyone Needs a Mentor; Lud was Mine

By JOSEPH TINTLE

Anyone who aspires to make it in a particular field of work ought to seek out a mentor. Even if you are that kind of person who says, “I can do this on my own,” it’s still better to have someone in your corner who can offer you suggestions to make your transition smoother.

For me that person was Lud Shabazian. He was sports editor emeritus at The Dispatch newspaper in Union City, N.J., where I met him in 1976. He had just stepped down as sports editor within the year and turned over the responsibilities to Bob O’Connor, fifty years his junior.

Lud, a Union City native, not only held the top sports title since 1920, he also was the newspaper’s cartoonist and columnist. He knew everyone from Babe Ruth to Jack Dempsey and Mickey Mantle to Muhammad Ali. He was a walking sports encyclopedia and today he is in New Jersey Boxing Hall of Fame. So who better to ask questions of in times of need.

I didn’t court Lud as a mentor. In fact, it just happened. He saw my knowledge of athletes past and present was deeper than the average Joe. So we talked. Lud liked to hold these conversations at a coffee shop a half block away where he’d buy me a donut and a cup of coffee. What was amusing was how Lud just couldn’t get over the price of coffee in 1976. It might have been 35 cents, but that was six times more than the nickel cup in his day.

Often he’d bring a copy of the sports section, open to the page where my article appeared, and commence criticizing.  Now true criticism offers positive as well as negative commentary, so Lud started with the positive. And a lot of it was. Anything negative had to do with niggling points of details but that, he told me, was what made the difference between a great article and a good article. I took copious mental notes.

When I look back at these pieces today I agree with every point he once made. I even recall particular scenes at the coffee shop where he corrected me on certain points. But I notice something else 40 years later: Lud could have been a lot tougher on me. I see things now that make me wince, and I’m sure Lud winced too. I think he reasoned that I’d figure certain things out by myself. Sure, he called me out on some of them, but not all of them. I guess he just didn’t want to beat me up too much.

These sessions also took place at his house in Ridgefield, New Jersey. I’d go up at 10 a.m. and we’d start talking sports and writing. Our discussions lasted till noon and Lud’s wife, Joey, prepared us lunch and the three of us continued our chat.

I don’t think Joey was much of a sports enthusiast by nature, but after being married to Lud for so long, she picked up a lot and was right with us as we traversed the sports landscape.

How into reading was Lud? His house was filled with thousands of books — and not just sports titles. Visitors often stumbled over earmarked books written by James Joyce, William Shakespeare, Ernest Hemingway, Charles Dickens, Arthur Miller, and Truman Capote. Books of all genres were piled along the walls in his bedroom, then they swept down the hallway, and found their way into small bunches on the stairway. The living room was clear. The kitchen too. After all, Joey had to lay claim to a piece of the house.

But as one headed down the basement steps, the view that greeted visitors was a scene out of the television show “Hoarders.” Book, books, books, everywhere! On the floor, on shelves, intermittently on the washer and dryer. Lud even added a classic touch never seen anywhere: He had strung clotheslines throughout the basement and there he hung the first drafts of major sports stories he had written during the 1920s and 30s. He thought that would keep them safe from those “book bugs” that chew paper.

“Hey, take that one down,” he said pointing to a clothesline one day. “That’s my cartoon of the fight at Boyle’s Thirty Acres.” And damn if if wasn’t the Jack Dempsey-Georges Carpentier fight from July 2, 1921, in Jersey City.

When sportswriters die there is an odd tradition that other sportswriters knock on their doors, gain access from their widows, then rampage though the houses scooping up books. Lud always told me that I was welcome to do so too, but when he died in July 1990 I just couldn’t do it. It seemed crude. After April 1978, I headed off to graduate school and eventually returned to sports and developed as a writer on my own. But the suggestions Lud offered me early on resounded throughout the years. They still do.

As a teacher these days, when I edit a student’s essay, I do so in the spirit of Lud Shabazian: I accent the positive, I point out the negative, but I always encourage. Always.

Just like Lud.

Welcome to the Land of Wonderful Characters

By JOSEPH TINTLE

If you ever go to Hudson County in New Jersey, any place in Hudson County, you’ll sense it is different from anywhere you’ve ever been. The people here are a little off.

You can mention that to them and they won’t take offense. They’ll just smile. They know.

For starters, in Union City, N.J., people don’t park their cars on the street, they park them half on the sidewalk, half on the street.

That was my introduction to this town in September 1976 as I parked my 1972 Oldsmobile Cutless Supreme outside the offices of The Dispatch. I arrived to have an interview with Bob O’Connor, the sports editor of the 50,000 daily newspaper. Entering the back door, I boarded an elevator, and took it to the second floor.

The doors opened slowly to reveal a sports department that looked like a scene out of The Front Page.

Old steel desks were covered with newspapers and stained with newspaper ink. Files were scattered. The floor looked like it hadn’t been swept for days.

I stepped out, made a left turn for 10 feet, and encountered the surliest human being in my life. He sat at a desk gripping a cup of coffee. His clothes were rumpled and his face looked like a clenched fist. His eyes were heavy lidded and his head was balding. Then he rose to greet me. Sort of. At a little over four-feet tall, he had a gnome-like appearance.

“What do you want?” he demanded to know.

“I’m here for an interview with Bob O’Connor.”

“You look like a loser to me,” he said, “but okay he’s over there in the corner.”

Meet Max Frome, the newspaper’s one-man welcoming committee.

Bob O’Connor, by contrast, was 25, bright eyed, and had just been appointed to replace Lud Shabazian, who had been sports editor since 1920.

Within an hour I had my first full-time job in journalism and stayed at the paper for 18 months.

The sports staff consisted of good men who knew their stuff. Mike Spina was our lead writer. He covered the New York Yankees and local basketball. Anything you wanted to know, Mike was your turn-to guy. Jack Fehr was our track and field expert, boxing too, and he could pound out copy quickly as he sucked down cigarette after cigarette.

Dom Alagia was a generalist in sports. Often he’d guide me during my early days as a writer. If my terminology weren’t on the mark, Dom let me know in a gentlemanly fashion how to fix it and back to my desk I went to make the adjustment. Greg Hochstein was a whiz at high school and college basketball. He eventually became a pharmacist. Kevin Kennedy was the assistant sports editor and a calming influence on the staff.

Our two copy boys were Billy Waldy and Richie D’Andrea. They were 16 and 14, respectively, and they stripped the AP and UPI newswires throughout the night.

And to round things out was Lud Shabazian, sports editor emeritus, columnist, and cartoonist. His sports career spanned more than 55 years. If you wanted an anecdote about Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, or Jack Dempsey, you asked Lud. He knew them personally.

Those were the final days of journalism before computers marked an end to clanking Remington typewriters and the ink-stained wretches in the print shop.

But the local sports characters we covered were alive and well.

For instance, there was a gentleman who called himself “Turk.” He was involved in an over-40 basketball league and boy was he competitive. During one game our staff covered, he got upset with a referees’ call and stomped off the court at an outdoor park. Spying a flock of pigeons, he leaped toward the pile and grabbed one.

Turk turned and approached the referee. He then bit off the pigeon’s head, spat it on the court, and chased the referee out of the park, flailing blood everywhere.

A week later, a journalist from city-side was sitting in the sports department as we regaled him with the story.

“That could never happen,” the reporter said.

No sooner had he uttered those words than the elevator door outside sports opened and there stood Turk. He had arrived to report that evening’s scores from the over-40 basketball league.

“Turk,” said Jack Fehr, “tell this guy you really bit off the head of a pigeon because you were upset with one of the ref’s calls.”

“I did,” Turk replied, glaring at the newside reporter. “What about it?”

Then there was Frank.

Frank was a copy editor and every half an hour or so he’d get up, leave the other editors at the news desk, and go to the bathroom. Not to go to the bathroom, but to wash his hands. Anyone inside when he was there will tell you that he’d wash his hands over and over for at least ten minutes. Then he dried up, turned, and backed out of the bathroom — hands upraised — never touching the doorknob, as if he had just scrubbed up for surgery. He returned to the city desk where he promptly got ink all over himself. Frank repeated this act several times nightly for his entire career.

Perhaps the greatest character of all was Chuck Wepner. He was a heavyweight fighter from Bayonne, N.J., who somehow landed a championship bout with Muhammad Ali in 1975. Give Chuck this, he reached the 15th round before Ali knocked him down and the fight was stopped.

Wepner was the inspiration for the film “Rocky” and ESPN produced a documentary on his life based on the manuscript that I had written. It is called “The Real Rocky.”

To speak with Wepner back then one got an earful of wild tales from his nights with the broads to his days in the jailhouse for his involvement with drugs.

But an even stranger tale was the night he and several friends went to a tavern in Staten Island called Joe’s Question Mark. According to Chuck, he and several friends were sitting at the bar and one of his buddies kept insisting that a Latin customer was insulting the fighter. Chuck thought his friend was kidding, but when he eventually realized there was truth behind his statement, he rose to confront the guy. The man took off and Chuck caught him, dragging the poor guy into a nearby men’s room.

Once inside, Wepner lifted the man, who was half his size, flipped him upside-down and started kicking in the bathroom stalls.

“I was going to give him a whirlybird,” Wepner recalled.

When Chuck found an unflushed toilet filled with urine and excrement, he plunged the man’s head beneath the surface then flushed.”

That’s a whirlybird — Hudson County style.