Ron Morehouse

Ron Morehouse: Not your ordinary minor league pitcher

May 19, 1989

 

            Last Spring the brass in Anaheim was drooling over the potential of the 6-5, 195-pound hardball pitcher down in Palm Springs. That was before he hurt his shoulder in midseason.

            Now, a year later in Midland, Texas, Ron Morehouse is taking those first steps on the road back.

            It may take all summer and there are bound to be some rough nights, such as what amounted to his 1989 debut against Arkansas when the Travelers tagged him for four first-inning runs.

            No matter how rough it gets, you still have to pull for Morehouse.

            After all, how many pitchers do you know who were born in Rugby, S.D.? Or who attended South Dakota State University?

            What we are talking about is someone who has been close to and a part of one of football’s great round robin series, one that drives the nation’s most knowledgeable forecasters bananas and anyone trying to figure out the matchups dizzy.

            Where else is there a rivalry to match it…South Dakota State vs. North Dakota, South Dakota vs. North Dakota State, then North Dakota vs.…..uh, er , now where was I? And, by the way, what state claims Dakota State? And if there is a Northern State, South Dakota, there has to be a Southern State, North Dakota?

            How many opportunities do you get to look at the workings of a Swiss watch or the under-belly of a diesel locomotive?

            You can bet this was a chance of a lifetime and this was one reporter who wasn’t going to let it get away...

            “Rich, how come the Bison and Fighting Sioux are always better than the Coyotes and Jackrabbits?

            “Riche. I know there’s a lot of tradition involved when those old rivals square off, how come the guys from Fargo and Grand Forks always get the best of the teams from Brookings and Vermillion?”

            Instead of bristling with the hoped for indignation, the 24-year-old pitcher accepted reality and the consistent success of UND and NSDU in Division, what, I, II, 1-A?... year after year.

            “They pay their players and import them from Minnesota. We can’t afford to pay ‘em so all of our players come from South Dakota,” Morehouse explained.

            The writer wasn’t so impolite as to remind Rich that he was from Watertown, Minn..

            Football is one thing, but can you imagine what it’s like playing baseball in South Dakota in the spring. Try, if you will to image the biting bone chilling  winds. And then ground thaw and the totally essential mud room Mom or the Mrs. could bring swift punishment if  by passed. Fact is, you couldn’t get in the house otherwise.

            That’s one reason the team heads out of state for 10 days or so. “Morehouse relates, “One year we came down to Texas to play and I remember we stopped for gas, filled up and presented the South Dakota State University credit card for payment.

            “The attendant looked at it and handed it back. He said they didn’t take credit cards from out of the country.”

            The writer tried to seem sympathetic, but wondered why they just didn’t show the attendant their passports. That would have solved everything.

Pat Culpepper's Terrror at Soumds in the Night

Pat Culpepper’s agonizing nightmare comes to an end

 

            Now that it’s over maybe Pat Culpepper can get a decent night’s sleep.

            Unless you were there, you can’t imagine the agony endured during those long weeks of anguished anxiety. It was enough to drive a church goin’ man to drink,  and if he were a drinking man, to church.

            In fact, now he can look back on it and laugh-just don’t  say “boo” while he’s  laughing –maybe he’ll write a book about the experience. And who know, it might be bought by the movies.

You’ve heard of the Amityville Horror. This was worse. It wasn’t a figment of someone’s imagination. It was for real,  It made that other business, the accusations of UIL rules violations, seem a welcome relief. …well, maybe that’s stretching a point, but at least the UIL wouldn’t come in the middle of the night and clutch its victim out of his cot and whisk him off to the graveyard.
            It all came to light,  pardon  the pun, one night when a sportswriter passed Memorial

Stadium Field house around 1 a.m. and noticed that it was lit up like downtown Las Vegas. The immediate reaction was , “Geez, don’t these people know  there’ an energy crisis, going off and leaving all those light on.”

            What the writer didn’t know was that for Midland High’s new football coach, Pat Culpepper, it was serving as a temporary home.

            “The wife and children are back in Galesburg., Ill., selling the old house and I’m living here (in the field house) while looking for a new house,” Pat explained.

            He added in a whisper, “It’s scary. I didn’t know a place could have so many noises at night.

            Pat heard so many strange sounds in the night, he might have suspected the ghosts of Wahoo, Johnny Branson, Bill Worley, Tom Brahaney,  Aycock,  Knox Nunnally, Larry Cooper, Ross Montgomery, Mark Lyons, Phillip Ward, James Zachary, and other long gone Bulldogs of the past….except ain’t none of could qualify for their ghostmanships yet, since they are still among the rest of us mortals.

            “They didn’t tell me about all the noises,” Pat related with a noticeable shiver. “”They told me that all the fans in the building were shut off for the winter. So how come, huh, that they all went on at once in the middle of the night?”

            Luckily, the track was handy and midnight isn’t a bad time to do your jogging, if you are wide awake.

            “And then there’s Doc Dodson’s ice machine. Every so often , when it’s absolutely dark, it drops a load It sounds like a body falling.”

            But it’s over now. The Culpeppers have been reunited in Midland and Pat can think about writing that book on long winter nights. Just, one thing, it’s a good bet he’s gonna do it in the living room …tv on and the family watching…and maybe some company over to bury those sounds in the night; a church going man to drink and if he was a drinking man to church.

            But it’s past history now and th  tense,suspenseful wait for  the other shoe to drop is over.

Pistol Pete Reiser

Pete Reiser, promise of might have been

 

            It was always a surprise each year when I’d see Pete Reiser at spring training in Arizona and he remembered who I was. It was our intention to grill him intensively about the hectic summer of 1941  when the long  awaited “next year” finally came in Brooklyn

            But something always got in the way. Then last spring he wasn’t there and  now he’s gone for good.

            Pete died of a respiratory illness, the story said this week, but he left a Hall of Fame career on the concrete walls of National League parks many years before. Pete had a penchant for running into immovable objects in pursuit of uncatchable fly balls. You couldn’t convince the guy.

            They said if it hadn’t been for that, he would have been a cinch for the Hall of Fame... But, of course, if he hadn’t played the game with reckless abandon, he wouldn’t have been Pete Reiser.

            They talk about the area of great centerfielders in New York when Mickey Mantle played for the Yankees, Willie Mays for the Giants and Duke Snider for the Dodgers. Some contend even today such discussions have been academic, if Pete hadn’t run into so many walls. Those who saw him say he was Pete Rose and Mickey Mantle all in one.

            Pete, who signed for a $100 bonus after being freed from bondage with the Cardinals by Commissioner Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis, was carried off the field on a stretcher a dozen times, mishaps which broke both ankles, a collarbone, and resulted in numerous concussions.

            Even with these mishaps, he managed 10 seasons in the major leagues. But none of those years compared to the first one, which he somehow managed to avoid without challenging a wall. In those day barriers weren’t padded and warning tracks were few, if any.

            In 1941, Reiser broke in with a .343 batting average and led the Dodgers to its first pennant since 1920. To Brooklyn fans, that seemed like an eternity, but they always consoled themselves with “wait until next year.”

            It was an exciting, explosive year for Reiser   who played for the George Steinbrenner-Billy Martin love/hate relationship of the day, Dodger General Manager Larry M cPhail and Manager Leo Durocher.

            Durocher was brash and irreverent. MacPhail was temperamental and volatile and innovative .He brought night ball to the major leagues while at Cincinnati, but showed earlier promise for imagination when he attempted to kidnap the Kaiser at the end of WW1. Reiser’s style of play seemed to be a reflection of the two. One year he stole home seven times, which a record that, I think, still stands.

            Typical of the controversy that swirled around the 1941 Dodgers came when the pennant was clinched in Boston. The team steamed back to New York by train for the victory parade. It was supposed to stop at the 125^th Street station in the Bronx , pick up MacPhail for the festivities downtown.

            Durocher apparently didn’t know. At any rate, he ordered “No Stops”and a fuming MacPhail was left on the station platform as the victory express roared by.

            Of course, he fired Leo on the spot. And hired him back the next day.

            Pete’s association should have lasted longer, but there were those walls.

            Pete talked like he played, If you didn’t know him, he was gruff and brusque, but the love and attention he showed for his daughter, who was what they called today a gifted child, gave him away.

           

Two Ton Tony Galento

This is a test.

Tony Galento

 

     If you are old enough, you probably remember the pictures of "Two Ton" Tony Galento, back in the 1930s, hoisting a stein of beer from behind the bar of his Orange, N.J., tavern.

     The accompanying taglines usually announced that Galento was in serious training for his next bout. The photo was accompanied by the quote, "I'll moider the bum." More often than not, Tony did just that.

     Visiting in Midland, Tony, now 57, perhaps mellowed a bit, looks fit enough to step back in the ring today. He weighs 220 to 225. For his title bout with Joe Louis, he weighed 244 and for his fight with Max Baer, he weighed 257.

     "But I had been sick before both fights and wasn't in top shape."

     Galento's visit Saturday was in connection with the Midland Aerie of the Fraternal Order of Elks Jimmy Durante Children's Fund Benefit dance.

    

     Galento recalls his fight against Louis June 28, 1939. "He banged me up pretty good, but I shoulda beat him."

     He explains, "I fought a stupid fight. The New York Athletic Commission threatened to hold my purse and bar me from fighting in New York if I used any rough tactics. I shoulda ignored them, like I always had before."

 

     The result was a fourth round knockout of Tony, who was badly cut up during the fight, but not before he decked Louis with one of his famed left hooks.

      "Even then I might have beaten him, but the ref kept shoving me to a neutral corner while keeping an eye on Louis to make sure he was okay."

     At 5-8 or 5-9, Galento was considerably shorter than most of his opponents, but that didn't prove any handicap.

     Tony demonstrated how he came in low, hooking his left to the bread basket, looping his right to the head and finally hooking his left behind the neck to make sure his victim was in the right place when the top of his head came up with skin-splitting effect.

     "I carried my hands at my sides because my water soaked gloves were heavy, but when I brought them up, it was like swinging a block of concrete.

    

     Galento said whenever he missed a left hook, the karate chop to the throat on my way back was even more effective. "Sure they’d warn me and take the round away from me, but the other guy was scared to death by the time he came out for the next round."

 

     Against Baer, he missed a left hook as Max ducked inside. The blow landed on the back of Baer's head and Tony broke two knuckles.

      In one of his early fights against a fellow named Gallagher, the New Jersey fighter, sometimes referred to as "Beer Barrel Tony", recalled how he landed a sense-robbing hook.

     "When I hit them, they fell forward. This bum's head hit my eye on his way to the canvas, opening a cut that took 14 stitches to close. The ref looked at my eye. 'You can't continue with a cut like that.' 'I can't continue', I shouted, 'What about the guy on the floor. He ain't moving.'"

     He fought Lou Nova in Philadelphia, one of the bloodiest fights of all time. He finally stopped the Yoga ex football player from UCLA in the fourteenth round.

     "Most of the blood was his and it dripped all over me, so it looked like I was cut pretty good, too. I'll say one thing about Lou, he was one guy I couldn't bamboozle. I beat a lot of guys before I ever got in the ring by just talking loud and tough. At the weigh in with Nova, I reached over and yanked some hair out of his chest and he wanted to fight right there."

     Since quitting the ring, Galento has made a bundle as a wrestler and wrestling ref. He took to the stage as Big Julie in "Guys and Dolls" starring Sam Levene and Vivian Blaine. His movies include "On the Waterfront" with Marlon Brando, Lee J.  Cobb and Eva Maria Saint. He has appeared on the Mike Wallace and Jack Paar tv shows.

    

      Tony is a non-stop, cigar-chomping talker. Every few minutes, he stops long enough to light one of his 25-cent cigars and cuss because the thing won't stay lit, not realizing he has been talking so long that he hasn't taken a puff the last 10 minutes.

 

     He's got quicker moves than Gale Sayers in a broken field when it comes to switching subjects from the fight game to his prohibition days experiences.

     "The only way to beat Louis or Clay is to keep on top of them all the time," he analyzes. "You gotta be an offensive  fighter. It's the only way." Tony didn't specifically define his interpretation of "offensive."

     "I once knocked out a guy in two seconds, but they called it a four-second knockout. When the bell rang, he had his back to the ring, flexing his arms on the ropes. I got across the ring and, as he turned around, caught him right behind the jaw with a left hook. He was out. Now, I ask you, how long does it take a guy to turn around, two seconds or four seconds?"

     "I owe a lot to newspapermen. They've done a lot for me in the last 30 years, although I was never champion. I drop them cards from wherever I go. I like to do that. People remember you then.

     "Say, by the way, where's that newspaper man you said was coming over to talk to me," he asked.

     Someone said, "Tony, you've been talking to him for an hour."

     The newspaperman, bewildered by the most confusing talkathon in history, finally got in a question during the brief look of surprise. “Did you ever meet Casey Stengel," thinking to himself, "What a match."

     "Yea, I met 'em all, Babe Ruth, Casey Stengel," he said it nonchalantly, like he'd verbally "murder the bum."

 

     Apparently, Tony knew to whom he was talking that day. Every once in a while, he'd send me a post card from Italy or some place. I felt honored, but he didn't need to do it so I wouldn't forget him. Tony wasn't someone you'd ever forget.