Interview/George Kimball: From golf with Michael Jordan to being married by George Foreman, from nude saunas with Joe DiMaggio to drinking sessions with Hunter S Thompson, from living in JFK's former home to friendship with Muhammad Ali - legendary American sports writer George Kimball guides Keith Duggan through some parts of his amazingly colourful life
When George Kimball was young, his post was sent to The Lion's Head on Sheridan Square in Manhattan's Grenwich Village, and for years the now-vanished drinking house provided the address on his passport. Persuading Kimball, who has lived in a bewildering variety of international and American locations, to pinpoint precisely where "home" means to him is no easy task.
But when he talks about the rambunctious days when the 1960s were flipping toward the bloody, restless 1970s and The Lion's Head was a bohemian hang-out of newspaper people, musicians, novelists, waiter/writers, waiter/actors and plain old eccentrics, it sounds as if that pub - and those years of agitation and possibility - gave him as great a sense of belonging as any of his more conventional addresses.
"It had this very evocative feel, you know, walls covered in dust jackets of books by many writers who drank in there and just a great gang of people," he remembers.
We met in the apartment he shares with his wife, Marge, in an impressive turn-of-the-(20th)-century Manhattan brownstone, with a dauntingly narrow staircase opening into an airy, two-storey apartment, the white walls decorated in memorabilia, all alcoves and unexpected turns and brightness, even on a charcoal and moody autumn noontime.
"It was an eatery and there were periods when the food was quite good and others when it was f**king inedible. Once the dinner crowd was gone, musicians would come in and sit around the dining tables and these sing-songs would go on all night, but apart from that, it was just a great place to drink and talk. But it was not at all pretentious. That was the appeal."
Having retired last year from the Boston Herald after 25 years writing a nationally acclaimed column and having been then diagnosed with oesphageal cancer, Kimball continues to live carpe diem, speaking of his illness with disarming ease and resolute calm while talking animatedly of his plans for whatever months and years are ahead.
When he was diagnosed with cancer, the most immediate casualty might have been the beloved Lucky Strike cigarettes that have journeyed with Kimball through decades of cutting-edge sports writing. But after he quizzed his consultant, Kimball discovered persisting with the habit - though deeply unfashionable and perhaps even perverse - would negligibly decrease his chances of recovery. So having agreed to sit down for a pow-wow about his working life, he smoked with impunity at a breakfast table laid out with fresh coffee, muffins and apple turnovers.
And like many committed smokers, Kimball has a wonderfully mellow voice that would make you want to listen even if he hadn't lived the kind of life that makes most of us wonder if we are living at all. The reason those roaring nights at The Lion's Head came so readily to him was that just a week earlier he and Marge had attended what was a reunion of that place and period in what is now The Kettle of Fish. And although Jessica Lange did not show up to relive her days as a cocktail waitress and Lion's Head cognoscenti Malachy McCourt and Pete Hamill were, as New Yorkers put it, "out of town", the return of so many of the patrons of the early 1970s produced, to Kimball's surprise, an automatic sense that the old fizz of ideas and fun was still there.
"Yeah, I mean, it was like a typical night at The Lion's Head. Even the no-smoking shit did not bother you because you would go out on the pavement and the conversation might be even better. And Marge and I wondered how the place ever closed if it did so well. Mismanagement, I guess, is the answer. And we wondered why can't we do this every night.
"But, of course, the thing was scheduled to begin at eight. And it didn't kick off until 10. And I kept saying, 'Hey, don't they realise we are all old? Don't they know this is our bedtime?'"
And through plumes of smoke and rain bucketing down on to the roof decking behind him, Kimball laughs at time's joke. His, the classic baby-boomer generation and self-appointed guardians of America's future, were supposed to be the gang that did not get old, and as he talks about a quarter-century covering world title fights and Boston's Red Sox, Bruins and Celtics, it seems like a good bet that Kimball never hit the hay before 2am throughout the 1980s - if he managed to catch any sleep at all.
Born in 1943 in California, he attributes the wanderlust of his adult years to a childhood that was both strict and privileged as the family followed George E Kimball the Second, a colonel in the US Army, on postings in Europe, the South China Seas and throughout the US.
Kimball was not overtly rebellious, but the discipline and order inculcated by his father led to a yearning for some kind of lifestyle that would facilitate the very opposite of that rigid structure.
By the time he arrived at the University of Kansas with no clear calling in life, the nascent Vietnam War draft riots consumed his energies and ideas and he spent most of the mid-1960s participating in and helping organise rallies and protests.
The first of several career arrests occurred in Lawrence, Kansas. The arresting officer was a one-man institution named Rex Johnson, an old-fashioned law-enforcer with a withered arm and a low tolerance for beatnik students. In 1970, a few years after his maiden arrest, Kimball got his name on the ballot paper as the Democratic nominee and ran against Johnson using the slogan, "Douglas County Needs a Two-Fisted Sheriff".
"I got about 2,000 votes of about 16,000 cast. Though if everyone who has claimed in the last 35 years to have voted for me actually did, I would have won. But Rex Johnson is still alive and I gather he has mellowed out a lot. Someone did a story revisiting that time not so long ago and when they asked Johnson about that election, he said, 'Well, he's not the worst sonofabitch that ever ran against me'."
That stunt was partly for theatre, but the passionate anti-war stance and the constant instinct to agitate against right-wing policy, against authority, was genuine. It was also embarrassing for Kimball's father, a significant player in the US Army.
"He was pretty displeased about it," the son admits now. "But a couple of things helped calm that down. One is that my younger brother Tim had actually gone to Vietnam and came back nearly as committed against the war as I was. And my father never talked much about this, but he ended up doing a second tour as the military attaché to the American embassy in Laos, basically a spy. And I don't know what he got involved in, but there were goings-on that he did not like. And he lost all his enthusiasm for the war. He became very disenchanted.
"In later years, we would play golf and talk baseball, but never talked about it. I guess he would have preferred I had not been arrested and compiled a huge FBI file and it probably had an effect on his career. He hoped to wind up a general and that didn't happen. If he blamed us for that, he never said so."
When not involved in the sway and heat of the counter-cultural movement, Kimball was compelled by the vague knowledge that he "was always going to write something and not work the nine-to-five beat".
At college, the eminent poet Edward Dorn took an interest in his ability, and though Kimball has always loved the form, he stopped because he realised he "was merely writing very good Ed Dorn poems". He even penned an erotic novel for commercial benefit, gleefully producing a bound hardback cover of Only Skin Deep from a stacked library with the triumphant introduction: "And this is the dirty one."
And - probably because he took on all-comers as he found them - his entrance into the world of American journalism seems to have been precipitated by an extraordinarily influential group of people. In the early 1970s Hunter S Thompson wrote him a letter (which is included in Thompson's Fear and Loathing in America) explaining he was urging Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone to solicit longer pieces from Kimball, mainly out of belief in Kimball's talent, but also so he could prove to the magazine editor there was another somebody out there "as demonstrably f****d-up as I am".
Regular Rolling Stone pieces followed and an acquaintance with John Landau (later to become Bruce Springsteen's producer) led to features on literature, music and sport for the Boston Phoenix and a Pulitzer nomination in 1973.
He was 36 years old by the time the Boston Herald swooped and made him a columnist, boxing to become his speciality. It was - and remains - almost unheard of for a US newspaper to bring in a columnist "cold" - and it was not a universally popular decision in the sports department.
"Guys were very resentful at first. Understandably. Tim Horgan, the senior columnist I displaced, and I eventually became friends, but it took time. I mean, there were guys who spent a whole career there who felt they had paid their dues."
By 1986, Kimball had won the Nat Fleishcher award, the highest accolade for boxing writing. He was a seasoned survivor in the nocturnal, trans-American nomadic lifestyle that consumes US sportswriters, chasing the Red Sox and the Celtics and Patriots on night flights across the Great Plains and regularly checking in to the megawatt neon of Vegas for a heavyweight fight during that late, magical period before boxing cannoned towards oblivion.
He was in Candlestick Park for the 1989 earthquake in San Francisco. He was ringside in London for the Alan Minter-Marvin Hagler fight that precipitated a riot and in Madison Square Garden the night the Riddick Bowe-Andrew Golota bout kicked off another melee. He watched the late decline of Ali, wincing as Ken Norton took him apart in New York, and recalls "sitting beside Red Smith at the old Boston Garden to watch Ali-Holmes on closed-circuit television".
In Atlantic City in 1980, he was having a drink with the boxing writer Mike Katz in a wintry establishment when the proprietor informed them a special guest would like to meet them. Upstairs, sitting around a plain table drinking tea and amaretto was a boxing man of their acquaintance and the great Joe DiMaggio. The baseball legend quizzed the boxing experts earnestly about their predictions. Asked if the encounter intimidated him, Kimball shrugs, "Well, not really, because I had been sitting with Joe DiMaggio butt naked in a sauna a few years before that."
His career - and a personality that has never been overly impressed by celebrity - took him to genuinely friendly terms with Ali. Among the mementos in his apartment are two wonderful photographs taken in the early 1980s, when Ali still shone with the last vestiges of his startling freshness and beauty, his great arms cuddling Kimball's two children, Teddy and Darcy.
His years in Boston brought him into contact with both ends of the Irish-American spectrum, from the notorious, grizzly hoodlum Whitey Bolger to the Kennedy dynasty. Throughout the 1980s, he lived at 122 Bowdoin Street on Beacon Hill - the address on JFK's licence when he was assassinated. The Kennedys had kept an apartment there since the 1940s and Kimball became friendly with Joe Kennedy jnr.
We speak of Teddy Kennedy's doomed bid for the Democratic nomination in 1980 and his unforgettable concession speech that included the "And may it be said of us, both in dark passages and in bright days" valedictory and is maturing into one of the great American political oratories. You enquire if Kennedy wrote the address himself and Kimball looks so embarrassed that you have check to ascertain he hadn't scribbled it.
"No, no," he protests. "Thing was, right after that broadcast, a friend called me up shouting 'I could tell you wrote that f*****g thing.' And I didn't. But I did work with his campaign team for a couple of months and I was there when that speech was drafted."
He has played golf with Michael Jordan. He remains friends with Sugar Ray Leonard and when he and Marge married a few years back, George Foreman performed the ceremony.
Like Zelig, Kimball is the guy in the background of every historic photograph. Although you are pretty certain he didn't feature on the cover of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Heart Club, after a few hours of sitting with him, you find yourself wanting to check just to make sure. He tailed the rise of Larry Bird's charismatic, blue-collar Celtics basketball team and watched the Red Sox blow the 1986 World Series when a ball a child would have caught somehow jinked through the legs of poor Bill Buckner.
And through all that, he was fortunate enough to have become a sportswriter of influence in the waning days when American sports reportage was the dominant voice of the medium, when there was still some semblance of respect between the athletes and those who wrote about them and before 1,000 camera angles dissected every play until all mystery had ceased.
"It will never happen again," he says of the fraternity that existed between the stars and those who, as Jimmy Cannon put it, "godded 'em up" through newspaper ink. "We have become some kind of pond scum to 'em now. It was partly the money. When I started covering baseball games, I wasn't making a lot of money. But neither were the players. So you end up in a strange city and you go buy one another beers.
"Probably the closest friendship I had was with Bill Lee. He was a left-handed pitcher for the Sox known as 'The Spaceman'. He was light years ahead of his time, a counter-cultural icon before people knew what that was. For instance, during the bussing issue in Boston, when the schools were desegregated, Bill just spoke off the cuff about it, saying that Judge Garrity, who had ordered the desegregation, was the only one who could stand up with any guts. Bill had a lifestyle.
"And a lot of players in the league liked to smoke weed then but the Sox had this whole coterie - The Buffalo Head Gang, they called it. And we all hung out and I guess there were a lot of illegal substances taken in those days and every town had a jazz place or two you could go to and unwind. And then the coverage of sports just exploded and a lot of stuff became fair game. The whole performance-enhancing drugs issue meant that athletes got cautious and mistrustful. And I guess a new generation of journalists arrived who weren't guys who would go smoke a joint with a player but would rather turn him in if they got the chance."
Boozing went with the territory and allowances were made for that culture that would seem absurd today. There was a famous story of a Boston writer who ended up in Las Vegas and "got so f****d up that he filed a report on an ice hockey game that he wasn't even at. And he wasn't fired," marvels Kimball.
Another episode involved a sportswriter named Jack Welch, who at a fight in Vegas passed out at ringside before the fighting began. The veteran was blissfully comatose throughout the event and, in the confusion, colleagues filed three separate stories to his bemused sports desk.
Kimball admits he drank hard and the culture probably contributed to at least some of the incidents that led to overnight jailhouse sojourns but he was always controlled enough to wait until after the sport was over. Others had no such discipline, the most celebrated freefall into a fugue state being executed by Hunter Thompson.
In his America at Large column on these pages, Kimball has written with acerbic humour and elegiac hindsight about the histrionic and heedless behaviour of the cult hero. (No passage hints at the anarchic behaviour of the day as slyly as one random night at Superbowl VIII, when Thompson began cutting up a sheet of paper with a Swiss army knife and then, as Kimball writes, carefully "depositing the resultant bits of confetti into his drink. When Leigh Montville, then of the Boston Globe asked what he was doing, I replied, correctly, 'blotter acid'. Montville groaned. Hunter was supposed to be our designated driver that night.")
Thompson's death, through a self-inflicted gunshot wound last year, was popularly portrayed as the true-to-self conclusion of a remorselessly dangerous and uncompromisingly nuts existence. But Kimball sighs as he thumbs through a hardback collection of Thompson's when asked if he was surprised by the suicide of the guy who was always up for the party. "I was. I was. The thing with Hunter was not that he did extraordinary amounts of drugs, but that he did them all the time. Like, at a Superbowl press conference he would be tripping. And he didn't go around boasting about it, but people could tell. I think he created this monster he felt obliged to live up to. And he always got into trouble. People did beat the shit out of him quite regularly.
"I hadn't seen him for quite a few months, but I was surprised. And they had this private gathering at the Hotel Jerome and then the big event where they shot him out of the rocket and Johnny Depp paid for the whole thing. And I had no desire to be part of that. It was a big circus. I think the fact that his writing was deteriorating was part of the reason and he was in a lot of physical pain too, which a lot of people did not know about."
Out of the blue, in 1991, Kimball stopped drinking, leaving a restaurant in Denver and deciding that was that. "Didn't even know it was my last beer. And I had drunk my share of whiskey too. It was time. As Malachy McCourt says when someone offers him a drink, 'No thank you, I've had enough'."
The 1990s raced on; the glittering sports events got even brighter. They knocked the ramshackle Boston Garden, which remains Kimball's favourite venue. "Just wonderful. That smell of old beer and 30-year-old cigars and elephant shit. You could walk in there blindfold and know where you are. Mind you, Fenway Park has the same distinctive smell."
He watched Ali become older and develop the giveaway shakes and other luminaries fade. He kept hammering out those elegant, formal columns, kept smoking and noticed his younger colleagues stayed out late less and less.
Aand on it raced until retirement and illness, those twin rogues, tapped him on the shoulder last year. The day arrived when his picture was no longer in the Boston Herald.
"I had been worried that because the whole game and the public image that goes with this sort of defined who I was would be hard to overcome," he concedes. "You know, it was strange suddenly not being in the daily paper and not out hobnobbing with these guys. And it was a pleasant surprise to discover I felt great about that."
The early-morning work habits persist - including his weekly column for this newspaper, which as recently as August included arguably the perfect newspaper column, sports or otherwise, headed The True Tale of the Original Contender. He writes every morning and roams Manhattan with Marge when there is music or a play worth seeing - although he leaves the vampire hours to the younger generation. If he has a worry, it is about his children and the country they are about to inherit, which seems much more troubled and grave and dour than the America of his youth.
"It was a much better time to be young then," he says, wistful for the only time. "Oh God, I have no doubt. I sit around and watch my kids and in a lot of ways, they wish they had been around then, in the 1960s. Because however much we were lashing out then, there was always this confidence and belief that we were on the right track. People felt we were just troublemakers and agitators, but subsequent events proved us right.
"And I remember saying even back then, I spent three years in Germany as a teenager and never met anyone who had been a Nazi. And I said then that 20 years from now, you are not going to find anyone who will say they supported this war. And apologists for Vietnam are few and far between."
His dear wish, beyond writing projects yet to be realised, is that he gets to see his kids a little further set on the road to life. They are both young adults now and George talks of them with pride, not least of the volunteer work they have undertaken with relief agencies, which suggests they have at least inherited some of the altruistic ideals he has carried from that fading period of peace and love.
"Guess so," he breathes. "Mind you, Teddy is just back from volunteer work in New Delhi, where they had to send him home because they found some pot in his room. So I guess that is not all he inherited."
George Kimball laughs happily about this as sheets of rain pour steadily across New York. And then he lights up.
