"So Sorry"

Sports Fiction magazine was a fiction pulp begun in 1938 by Louis Silberkleit’s Columbia Publications, a low-rent publisher even in the world of cheap fiction in the twentieth century. The magazine never really caught on and the neglect it suffered at the hands of its owners is evident when viewing its publishing history: only 43 issues of the magazine are known to have been published between 1938 and 1951, and even that’s questionable. It rarely published the same number of issues in any given year, and it shut down completely between 1944 and 1946. I only own one issue of Sports Fiction and just looking at it one can see all the corners that were cut in putting it together: second-rate artwork, messy, uneven printing, sleazy ads -- the kind one never sees in a Popular or Street and Smith publication -- and authors even pulp aficionados might have trouble recognizing.

John D MacDonald wrote three stories that appeared in Sports Fiction, all dating from his early years as a writer, years he was living in Clinton, New York (1947 and 48). The first was a boxing story, the third is unknown to me (at least by the title: “They Never Quit” -- probably a team sport) and the middle one was about golf. These were years when MacDonald was happy to get anything published, by any paying publisher, so he may not have cared where these tales ended up. And given Columbia’s reputation, he was probably paid the rock-bottom rate of a penny a word.

But there’s something about this middle tale -- titled “So Sorry” and appearing in the magazine’s July 1948 issue -- that transcends its sports setting and the cheap magazine it appeared in. Yes, it’s about a golf tournament and the competition between several disparate personalities, told by a non-participating bystander, but the real subject MacDonald deals with here is racism.

MacDonald had done this before in a sports pulp, and for another Columbia title no less (Super Sports), in 1947 with his “Big John Fights Again,” a boxing story featuring a black boxer. I own this magazine (it’s somewhere in the house) but I’ve never written about it. John Dinan, in his excellent 1998 study Sports in the Pulp Magazines, has, and here is what he had to say:

MacDonald’s boxing story in the December 1947 Super Sports was also as good a piece of fiction as one will find in the pulp mags. MacDonald uses terse first-person style to advantage in describing the dark underside of the world of boxing as the story moves toward the BIG fight. “Big John Fights Again” is a story reminiscent of The Harder They Fall and Requiem for a Heavyweight, told from the reporter’s point of view and with a bit of a twist -- the fighter is black. Not wanting to fight, Big John tells the reporter he’s afraid of what might happen to him. The reporter naïvely responds: “That’s nonsense; people don’t do that.” Big John responds: “Maybe not to white folks,” and proceeds to enlighten the reporter on some hard facts about prejudice.

One has to wonder, was Columbia the only place MacDonald could sell stories with this kind of subject matter? Were they rejected by others before ending up with this publisher?

The setting is the Southland Open, a big, nationally coverd golf tournament played at the Upland Club, in an unnamed city and state. The story is told in the first person by Dave Able, a representative of the Miramar Sporting Equipment company of Los Angeles. Dave isn't there to play golf, he's there to sign golfers to endorsement contracts, always hoping to find a little-known golfer who suddenly breaks big. He's been around the game for a long time and knows many of the regular players.

For readers who don't know the rules of golf tournaments (read: me) MacDonald dutifully explains it all in a long paragraph: Following a qualifying round where the player must score 80 or less, the tournament is played for three days: two days of eighteen holes, the third for thirty-six. Each player plays against one other player, a process chosen by lots. At the end of the first day the high fifty percent of the group are eliminated. The same process is followed for the second day, usually leaving around twenty survivors. After the first eighteen holes on the morning of the third day, only eight players are still standing to play the final afternoon round. First money is $7,500 (around $75,000 in today's money), second place takes $1,750, and so on.

The story opens with Dave attending a get-together in a suite at the Upland Club. Four of the golfers who will play in the tournament are there and Dave briefly introduces each one to the reader.

You know them all. Mart Snyder is a thin, dark, expressionless man with ulcers. He's been on the circuit for thirteen years now and in spite of his dead pan, he's always tied in knots. Harry Crebson is the big blonde guy who started to knock them dead just after he got out of the army. He has freckles and a grin. Hal Lovelord is a Canadian who has a vague expression, a dim wispy mustache and a deadly eye on the putting green. Jimmy Ratchelder is, of course, the plump pink little guy with the shrewd grey eyes who has made more out of tournament golf than any man in the last twenty years. It's a business to Jimmy -- pure and simple... It was practically an even money bet that one of the four in the room would knock off the $7500 they give you for being best man.

There ostensibly to commiserate with a fifth golfer who failed to make the qualifying round that day (and who’s drunk and asleep on a couch), Dave finds the four in what sounds like a serious discussion. An unknown golfer qualified that day with a score (63) that broke the club’s course record. Are they worried about a young upstart who could possibly beat them all in the tournament? Yes, but only to a point. The real problem, at least with Snyder and, especially, Ratchelder, has less to do with how he plays and more to do with who he is.

He’s a Japanese American.

The boys were talking about Tommy Suragachi of Oregon... The press hadn't noticed Tommy, a slim, nervous acting boy, until he had banged out that miracle round of sixty-three... Then the press had picked him up. He had played golf before the war and had been a caddy. He served with the infantry in Italy during the war. He had brought himself and his clubs to the tournament on a bus. He was being staked by a whole bunch of Japanese farmers on the West Coast who had kicked in a little bit apiece. Apparently it was a very little bit because Tommy Sonagachi was living in a down-at-the-heels tourist cabin a mile and a quarter from the course.

Based on MacDonald's physical description of Ratchelder he's clearly the bad guy of the story, and he doesn't disappoint.

"You men better think about the game and what it means to the country... Golf is one of our biggest national games. It will hurt the game and hurt us if a Jap wins a big tournament like this one. It may be that some of the private clubs that have tournaments now will cancel them if they find they've got to put a Jap in the club...If this Sura-something wins they'll have a national holiday in Japan. What the hell was the use of licking them if we've got to make heroes out of them?"

The three others are in varying degrees of disinterest on the subject. Big, freckled Harry Crebson laughs it off, pointing out that “Japs” were pretty handy to have around when he fought in Italy. Snyder and Lovelord emphasize the fact that it is highly unlikely that a young player could win the tournament and that all they have to do to prevent Sonagachi from winning is for them to play their best. But Ratchelder is adamant. He even suggests that the four of them quit the tournament in protest, but Snyder points out that it would only make a martyr of the young man.

"Besides," Snyder continued, "the public might take the wrong slant on it. They wouldn't realize that we were doing it to help the game. They might think we were doing it because we were prejudiced or something. I'm not prejudiced against him."

"Neither am I," Ratchelder said. "I just don't think that a Jap ought to be given a chance to win the Southland Open or any other major tournament. Maybe they should be allowed to play in some of the small city tournaments on the public courses."

Crebson winked at me and said, "Well, to hear that you boys aren't prejudiced sure makes me happy. It surely does!"

The party breaks up with Ratchelder adamant about finding a way to “get to” Suragachi in order to rattle him .

Able drives over to the motel where Suragachi is staying and finds a very nervous young man. Naturally uptight, he bemoans his chances of winning and reveals that he is well aware of the racism he is the victim of.

"I saw the way Mr. Ratchelder looked at me today. And Mr. Snyder. You can tell when people look at you like that. I've gotten used to it out on the Coast. They hate all of us out there. Most of them do."

Able manages to sign Suragachi to an endorsement contract, provided he does well in the tournament.

Of course all four of the seasoned golfers make it to the final round, along with Suragachi, who plays spectacularly despite his obvious case of nerves. And, also of course, in the final round he is paired with none other than Ratchelder, giving the older golfer his perfect opportunity to rattle his opponent with an small act of racism that the observing crowd picks up on and imitates…

“So Sorry” works well on both the level of a sports story and as a tale of prejudice, although it would be too much to ascribe any real greatness to it. Its unusual characteristics and the fact that a heavy subject is dealt with in a cheap pulp magazine story is not completely out of the ordinary. Yet the fact that the editor of Sports Fiction made a special mention of the story’s connection to “Big John Fights Again” on the title page indicates that they knew they had something a bit different in their magazine and wanted readers to know it. I wonder how many other MacDonald stories like this are out there, a serious step up from the average penny-a-word tale, unread since their publication and mouldering away as time slowly destroys them.

“So Sorry” has never been anthologized or republished.

"The Glory Punch"

John D MacDonald wrote short stories featuring many different sports during his early days as a pulp writer. For some of them he had to use his fertile imagination alone to conjure up a sense of the game. He certainly never climbed a mountain, or drove race cars, or battled the bulls in the arena. I can find no reference to him ever playing football -- at least in high school or in college -- or baseball, or certainly hockey, although he must have played a bit of the first two sports. But he did enjoy golf, and tennis, bowling, fishing and, believe it or not, boxing.

It was during his first stint in college, at the University of Pennsylvania, around 1933. He was a self-described “grotesque,” standing 6’2” and weighing a mere 137 pounds. He entered an amateur boxing tournament sponsored by the college, where the prize was “a gold watch, redeemable for $10 or $15.” The match was over almost before it began. He recalled years later that his opponent was so muscular that “he looked as if he were wearing his armpits on top of his shoulders.” He made short work of the future author, “dismantling [me] as if taking down a rail fence.” That was it for MacDonald’s boxing career.

But he wrote stories about boxing, and the detail that he provides in these tales indicates that he vividly recalled all the nuances of the sport. From “The Gentle Killer,” to “Half-Past Eternity,” from “Big John Fights Again” to “Hell’s Belter,” his obvious mastery of what went on in the ring informed these pulp tales and made them come alive. Of course, MacDonald was more interested in the human drama and the world which surrounded boxing -- any sport he wrote about, really -- and he focused each story around a protagonist’s struggle: with doubt, with fading skills, with the corrupt, dark underside of the sport. Most of the time it worked wonderfully.

Not so with “The Glory Punch,” I’m sorry to say. It wallows way too long in the minute details of a fifteen round fight and frames the protagonist’s dilemma and struggle around a backstory and device so old that it had whiskers on it, even back in the immediate post-war era. It was published in the July 1949 issue of Fifteen Sports Stories, that notable issue that featured four JDM tales in it -- the most ever in a pulp, or any kind of magazine. It’s probably the weakest of the four, and pales terribly against the author’s “Blue Water Fury,” one of his best stories of any kind.

Our hero is Harvey Westa, a successful boxer known popularly as "The Doctor," for reasons that MacDonald never bothers to explain. But at age 33 he senses that his talents might be waning, a concern that troubles him because of recent travails with his personal life.

Things had gone a little sour. The club had died of snow-blindness and that had taken a cut of the roll and it had also taken two of the annuities cashed in to meet the obligations. Then the court had been too generous with Mag. An additional two hundred a month for her and the kids. Joe had booked an exhibition tour... He needed the cash from the tour. Needed it badly.

But before Harvey can embark on the tour -- which will feature opponents he knows he can handle -- he has to go fifteen rounds with Buddy Mace. And he's not so sure about Mace. He’s one of “the strong boys,” heavily muscled with shoulders that amaze even Harvey, with a punch like an anvil. He’ll need to utilize all of the skills he’s learned over his career in order to avoid too many of Mace’s hard punches. If he loses against this boxer, the tour will be cancelled and there will be no money from it.

The story opens the day before the big match as Harvey talks with his trainer of seven years, Joe Klees, over a lunch of cheese blintzes. Klees is concerned about the strength of Harvey’s opponent Mace, but Harvey keeps his own doubts to himself. He’s just returned from a visit with his kids, and it leads to the following exchange.

"The little guy was showing me the right hook he's been working on. He starts it way back in left field and I showed him how to shorten it up. He told me his mom won't let him practice. After the fight I can have them for two whole days."

"How's my girl?"

"Cute like a bug. She kept saying 'Where's Joey? Where's Joey?' I promised her the four of us would do the zoo day after tomorrow.”

"You turn 'em back to Mag?"

"In the hotel lobby. She shook hands with me and gave me the frozen puss. Nice to see you, Hahvee. I trust the children were well behaved."

"Jesus, Harv. A woman like that. It had to be a woman like that."

"Mag's okay. Lots of people don't get along."

"Who could get along with her?"

"Break it off, Joe." The soft rasp had turned cool.

They get up to leave the cafe, and who just happens to be in the same place, at a big table with a lot of his noisy friends? Buddy Mace, of course. Mace has to say something to amuse the crowd he is with.

"There goes the champ."

Harv turned and walked back to the [table]. The crowd there was silent, expectant. Harv smiled sadly down at the square, ruddy face of Buddy Mace. Mace tried to stare him down.

"Look, kid," Harv said in his gently rasping voice, "take good care of yourself between now and tomorrow night. Get lots of sleep. I don't want it to look too easy. You know what I mean."

Mace flushed and tried to struggle up, saying, "Why you broken-down --"

Harv turned and walked away.

The next day is fight day, and as Harv looks at Mace across the ring he notices how strong the younger man looked. "Strong and fast, with a punch in either hand..." The fight begins.

And it seems to never end, for both the fighters and the reader. In the first round Harv manages to get a few good blows in and dodges just as many. In the clinch, however, Mace manages to land two blows to Harv's kidneys. "It was like being stabbed with a hot silver knife." The second round is much the same, but this time Mace manages a blow high on the head over the left ear. "The power of it frightened [Harv].” In the third Harv was slow in the clinch and again Mace landed a powerful blow to the side. And by the end of three, even though Harv had technically won all the rounds, he was feeling it and worry started to creep in. "Back in the corner Harv knew that he was no longer breathing right. Mace's sledge-work on his sides had taken its toll."

Joe advises Harv to “ride out” the next two rounds, to play defense and avoid any hits in order for him to get his strength back. The strategy works well in the fourth, but in the fifth Mace lands another powerful blow to his side. The younger man seemed to be getting stronger and faster…

Enough… you get the picture, and you can probably guess how it ends, right down to the moment Harv, barely conscious, figures out how to end it. It’s like something out of the pulps of the earliest part of the last century and, unfortunately, you can see it coming a mile away. Still, the writing is typical MacDonald of the period, crisp and descriptive in its minimalist way. Worth reading once for the few moments of insightful characterization of a successful man on the downward slope of his career.

“The Glory Punch” is the only John D MacDonald story in this particular issue of Fifteen Sports Stories that appears under the author’s name. The other three were disguised under “house names,” bylines that especially productive pulp authors used when more than one of their stories appeared in the same issue of a magazine. I’ve always wondered how it was decided which story got which name. Did MacDonald have any input on the process? Probably not, as he certainly must have recognized the vast superiority of his story “Blue Water Fury” and would have preferred that it be graced with his name rather than one of the other entries. He liked it so much that he included it his first short story anthology, 1966’s End of the Tiger and Other Stories under a new title, "The Big Blue". It was the only pulp story included in the anthology but it certainly held its own among other gems like “Hangover,” “Looie Follows Me,” “The Bear Trap” and “The Trap of Solid Gold.”

"Double Double"

John D MacDonald had original short stories published in more than 70 different magazines over the course of his writing career. Many of these periodicals employed fiction editors who were clearly enamored of his work and his ability to help sell copies of their magazines. The record holder is Cosmopolitan, which published 36 different issues containing MacDonald’s work, from almost the beginning of his career (May 1947) to his entry onto the best seller lists in 1975. Dime Detective actually published more JDM stories -- 38 -- but three of those appeared under one of his pseudonyms alongside stories credited to him in name, so the issue count is 35. MacDonald is well represented in many other titles of the era like This Week (27), Detective Tales (26), New Detective (17), Bluebook (13), and Doc Savage (13).

Then there are the one-shots, the magazines where his work only appeared once, then never again. Some titles are curious -- publications where one would think he would have been better represented -- like Detective Book Magazine, Mammoth Mystery, Planet Stories and Thrilling Detective. Others are not surprising: Dime Western, Fifteen Western Tales and 10 Story Western (MacDonald wasn’t much of a western writer); Woman’s Home Companion, Family Circle, The American Legion Magazine, and that strangest title of all, The Sign, a religious magazine published for Catholics.

Among those one-shots is Golf Magazine, a publication that one doesn’t usually associate with fiction, sports-related or otherwise. But back in its early days, before fiction was pushed out of magazines by articles of non-fiction, Golf usually carried one work of fiction per issue, at least in 1961, the year I own copies of nearly the entire run. Most of these pieces are labeled “Humor,” which was, I suppose, an excuse for their inclusion -- heaven forbid if a golfer should stumble across anything serious while looking for tips on how to improve their swing. Begun in 1959 and published by the Universal Publishing and Distribution Company, Golf probably began containing some fiction and, like many other magazines during the 1960’s, gradually phased it out. John D MacDonald’s single effort for the magazine appeared in its June 1961 issue, between the publication of two of his paperback original novels, Where is Janice Gantry? and One Monday We Killed Them All. It is listed under the HUMOR heading in the table of contents, clocks in at a tight 2,000 words, and was titled “Double Double.”

MacDonald was a sports enthusiast -- that is obvious from his writing, where he had over 29 stories or novellas published in the now-forgotten sports pulps of the last century, with titles like 15 Sports Stories, Sports Novels, Super Sports and Sports Fiction. He also participated: he was an avid fisherman, he boxed in college and he played golf, a sport he gave up on because it was too time consuming. He wrote expertly about those sports, and also wrote well about auto racing, baseball, tennis, football, hockey, bowling, and even bull-fighting.

As I wrote in a previous post on one of those sports pulp stories, “The problem with sports stories is that if you, the reader, have no interest in the particular sport being written about, your involvement in and understanding of the story can be rather limited. This is especially true of the kinds of tales written for the sports pulps. They revel in the minutia of the competition, lovingly detailing each small nuance, and they assume a reciprocal love and general understanding on the part of the reader. Most of these stories are from the simple ‘against-all-odds’ template and are usually interchangeable with a few small adjustments here and there. My own interest in golf is negligible. My playing days are twenty-five years behind me and as for watching it on television, well... let's just say that there are better ways to waste one's time.”

Now that my playing days are more than 30 years behind me, one would think I’d need a refresher course in the game to understand “Double Double,” but that was not the case. Golf only plays a secondary role in the story -- the real focus of “Double Double” is betting on golf. For that a refresher wouldn’t do, because I never bet when I played, due to the fact that I was only slightly better than terrible and I would have ended up in penury. For that I had to do some real research, and although I didn’t come across anything referencing a game called double double, I did discover that it is a variation on the skins game, where players bet each other a specific amount for each hole. The lowest number of strokes wins the bet. In case of a tie the amount of the bet is added to the bet on the next hole. In double double, that addition of the previous bet is replaced by doubling the bet. If the bet is $1 and there is a tie, the pot on the next hole is $2, another tie and it is $4 for the next hole, and so on. Once I understood this quantum physics I was able to enjoy the story for what it was: a typically entertaining John D MacDonald short story.

The reader also needs to know how to play Nassau, but that’s fairly straightforward: it’s three bets in one: low score on the front nine, low score on the back nine and low score over the full 18.

The tale is told as a monologue, one voice throughout, an unnamed narrator speaking to his friend and fellow golfer Joe. He is setting up a foursome and he names the group: him, Joe, Ray and Chet Howell.

Now wait a minute. I know what you’ve said about never playing golf with Chet Howell again, but I tell you things are different. Certainly a guy can change. Even Chet.

Chet Howell is a MacDonald “type,” a figure we’ve seen before in stories like “Built for Speed,” “The Killer,” and “Blue Water Fury,” a big, beefy, muscular bully who is ultra-competitive, and with a mean streak that appears when he is not winning. Chet has pissed off not only Joe but another golf player in this group of friends, Johnny Garsik. Garsik was so peeved by Chet’s “riding” that he simply didn’t show up for the last scheduled outing. That left a hole in the foursome and the starter filled it with a single, a “stringy old guy" named Jonah Brewster.

… he looked to be about a hundred and ten, and like the sun had dried him out to old leather. He had a ratty canvas bag, a red baseball hat, a couple of dingy golf balls, and honest to God, Joe, he only had four clubs, a putter, an eight-iron, a four-iron and a three-wood. They didn’t match and he could have sold them anyplace for two bits each.

A rather pathetic title page

They team up, Chet and the protagonist versus Ray and Brewster, and agree to play Nassau. Brewster seems hesitant but agrees to a dollar. Chet powers a mighty drive on the first hole, prompting Brewster to remark, “My, goodness, Mr. Howell, you drive like the professionals.” Chet sticks out his chest and replies, “Call me Chet.” But Brewster’s first drive is anything but shabby. “It happened so fast I almost didn’t see it… he had a funny-looking swing with a loop at the top, and he used that old three-wood , and he belted it out there right down the middle and about a hundred seventy-five yards… ‘Pretty lucky,’ he said. And he cackled.” He manages to get down in par, while Chet “rimmed the hole for a bogey.”
On the second hole Brewster’s game quickly falls apart. “He chopped and scuffed and shanked and hacked his way down the fairway and got down in thirteen.” But Ray manages to par, while Chet bogies again. Brewster recovers nicely on the third hole, scoring a birdie two, outscoring Chet once again.

Chet’s face looked sort of red and swollen. You know how he gets. So he started storming and stomping around, saying, “Let’s make it interesting, boys. Let’s get some side bets riding on this thing.” With the side bets working, Chet started leaning pretty heavy. You know how he gets. Always trying to rattle you. It’s like he was kidding, but there was a mean edge to it. He likes to win.

And win he does, but against Ray and the protagonist, not Brewster, who continues to play erratically but always manages to tie Chet. On the tenth tee Chet makes a suggestion to the old man.

“Look at the money you’re throwing away, old man. You win a lot of holes. Make some side bets and maybe you win enough to buy another golf club, old man.

Jonah Brewster looks at Chet in a kinda uncertain way and says, “Well now, I’ve gambled some with my son-in-law. For ten cents a hole, double-double on carryovers.”

“Let’s play with dollars, old man.”

“Well now, I’ve been pretty lucky today. Double-double on the carryovers, Mr. Howell?”

“You’ve got yourself a sucker, old man. Hit the ball.”

They resume play and, of course, tie the next hole. Then the next, and the next, and the next…

“Double Double” reads like one of those old sports pulp entries that MacDonald may have submitted only to be rejected, then dusted it off years later and revised. It’s engaging, fun to read (once the mechanics of the plot are understood) and the ending is more of a surprise than I thought it would be. The editors of the magazine didn’t do much to present it, however: it begins in the back of the issue among the ads and its title page contains a single inside column, a third of the width of the page. There are no accompanying illustration. The author does get a nice credit on the last page along with two other writers.

As far as I can tell, “Double Double” has never been reprinted.

"Salute to Courage"

I do not hunt. We do not kill snakes. Dorothy carries housebound bugs into the great outdoors for release but is pure hell on a clothes moth. We trap whitefoot mice in our Adirondack camp and hate doing it. We both enjoy sports fishing. And we are both aficionados of the bull ring. Were the horses unpadded, we wouldn’t be. I am not interested in arguing these inconsistencies with anyone.

-- John D MacDonald, The House Guests, 1965

John D MacDonald’s long love affair with the sacrificial ritual of bullfighting began with the family’s first stay in Mexico, starting in late 1948 and ending in the summer of 1949. And while this period of his life was likely the first chance he had to witness the spectacle first hand, he probably  held romantic notions toward it through his adulation of the works of Ernest Hemingway, whose Death in the Afternoon and The Sun Also Rises both reveal that particular author’s own respect for the sport. While living in Cuernavaca during those early years of his writing career MacDonald and wife Dorothy traveled to Mexico City several times to witness toreo in the newly built Plaza de Toros, then (and still) the largest bullring in the world. One of the books in JDM’s personal library was Rex Smith’s 1957 study Biography of the Bulls: An Anthology of Spanish Bullfighting, which ended up as part of the author’s estate sale. A bullfighter is a peripheral character in his 1952 novel The Damned and several of his other novels contain references to the special qualities of the matador, including The Empty Trap, A Tan and Sandy Silence, A Deadly Shade of Gold and Bright Orange for the Shroud.

MacDonald wrote at least two short stories about bullfighting. The first was titled “Tank-Town Matador” and it appeared in the July 1949 issue of Argosy. The second appeared in one of the sports pulps, the April 1951 issue of Fifteen Sports Stories. MacDonald called it “The Lonely Journey,” but the FSS editors changed the title to “Salute to Courage.”

Those not familiar with the standard fare of the sports pulps may think nothing of a story about bullfighting appearing in the pages of one of these periodicals, but it was in fact a great rarity. In John Dinan’s excellent 1998 book on sports pulps (Sports in the Pulp Magazines), he categorizes the kinds of sports written about in one of the seminal sports titles, Street and Smith’s Sport Story Magazine. He tabulated 478 stories about baseball over the magazine’s 20-year run, 363 with boxing as background, 259 about football and 117 about tennis. There are multiple instances of sports such as car racing, bowling, swimming, bicycle racing, lacrosse and even ski jumping serving as the subject matter for the contents of this pulp, but not one story about bullfighting. In a check of my own modest collection of sports pulps, bullfighting also comes up a blank. After all, it is questionable that most of the readership for these kinds of pulps would have had any interest in the unique, specialized artform of the corrida de toros. In fact, most latinos don’t consider it a sport, but more of an artform, an aesthetic and emotional experience that, when conducted by a superior matador, is a transformative experience. In 1932 Hemingway wrote, “Bullfighting is not a sport. It was never supposed to be. It is a tragedy. A very great tragedy. The tragedy is the death of the bull. It is played in three definite acts.”

MacDonald certainly felt this way, and it explains how an author with strong interests in conservation and ecology could embrace the form.

“Salute to Courage” is a coming-of-age story, more interesting in its observations of  the details of a young man’s first bullfight than it is in narrative or characterization. Its plot is obvious and its conclusion foregone, but mood and a sense of anticipation and fear are well imagined and executed. And it comes close to relaying a sense of the torero and the capture it has on its audience.

Seventeen year old Augustin Galvez lives with his family in an adobe hut near a small village eleven miles outside the city of Oaxaca. He awakens one Sunday morning and finds the hut is empty, his sister Rosalinda down at a nearby stream, his parents and three other siblings at early Mass. He begins to run toward his sister but quickly slows his pace as he remembers that this is a special day, one requiring great dignity. As he walks he sees the rest of his family approaching up the dirt road, his younger brothers and sisters oddly shy toward him. "Yesterday Augustin had been a familiar one with whom they could romp and play. Today all had changed. Today Augustin Galvez would enter the bullring at Oaxaca."

Augustin’s father had once been a matador, fighting under the name Banderillero, and he fought alongside the immortal Ramon Gaona before being gored in the leg by a great black Miura bull. As the family reaches Augustin he father takes him aside.

"It has been many years, eh? Perhaps it is all a selfishness on my part. To have a son do what I could not do. I had a certain skill with the banderillas, no more. My son, you have fought well the calves at the tientas. You have grace. I do not know if you have courage. I have taught you how to know the bulls, how to watch for their faults and virtues. But knowledge is nothing without courage. Today we will learn."

Father and son take the bus to to the city and are met by the Señor  Pimental, whose son Peralta is also fighting today, a young prodigy who has developed a following after killing three bulls in previous matches. There is a third matador on the bill, Vizcainas, another young novillero (novice) who Señor Pimental refers to as "a clown." Augustin is told that everyone coming today are here to see his son, but there is a small contingent of fans from Augustin’s village as well.

Vizcainas is the first to fight and Pimental’s description of him is borne out. The novillero’s passes are fluid but he works too far from the bull to elicit any excitement from the crowd. When the final portion of the fight, the faena, begins, it is apparent just how bad Vizcainas is.

It was a miserable faena, combining an inept torero with an unstable animal. All he could do was chop the beast to the left and to right with the small cape, without grace, without great danger, without any poetry. He went in soon to kill and he tried to thrust the sword and run away at the same time. He killed miserably in the fifth attempt and left the ring with an enormous chorus of whistles and catcalls.

Then it is Peralta’s turn, and Augustin sees why he has become popular with the crowd so quickly.

He was a puro fanatico, with passes that were too fast, too jerky, too unpractical -- yet working close to the animal every second, gaining tremendous emotion through the almost visible flare of his dedicated personality. It was only in the kill that he had grace... The sword sank cleanly. The animal went three paces and dropped.

Now it is Augustin’s turn and he feels what little courage he may have had quickly escaping him.

[He] wished that at that moment he could drop dead. He wanted some grotesque force to reverse the plaza clock so that the hands would begin to turn backward. He could not see the animal clearly as it came out. It seemed supernaturally fast.

Augustin’s performance makes Vizcainas look like a pro, as he seems unable to control his feet, stepping away from the charging bull with every pass. His eyes filled with tears at his inability to control his fear, and the crowd is merciless.

[They] screamed at him, calling clown and coward. The feet danced blithely, endlessly, gayly, always taking him back from the horns as the animal charged. Seat cushions rained down on him. One struck him in the small of the back, almost thrusting him forward on to the horns, and the crowd chanted a sardonic, "Olé!"

His kill is equally inept, chasing the veering bull around the ring until the creature is too exhausted to move.

Augustin leaves the ring and goes to his father, whose face is “the color of wax” and whose effort to smile reassuringly painful.

"The next one will be better, Augustin, my son."

"Papa, can I not go home? Can I not let someone take my second bull?"

This does not please his father and it is up to Augustin to do better the second time around.

As one can read from the excerpts above, MacDonald employs an almost affected style for “Salute to Courage,” a third person limited narration that has the sound of a Spanish translation. A common device, MacDonald has a special talent for employing this narrative technique for all of his people, and it works especially well in the multi-character books such as The Damned and Please Write for Details, both of which have sections inside the heads of Spanish speaking individuals.

There are a couple of very nice passages in other JDM novels containing references to the special qualities of the matador. In The Empty Trap Lloyd Wescott, while recuperating in the isolated Mexican village where he has been nursed him back to health, ruminates on the special qualities of the Mexican people, made unique by the combinations of the blood of the European Spanish and the American Aztecs.

Two bloods, and a code of blood. The sand of Mexico had quickly soaked up the steaming blood of honor for many years. A land of pride and of quick violence without mercy. Also a land of sullenness and the glorification of death. A land where they ate candy skulls, where brass marched in the funerals of children, where fireworks exploded under church pews on Christmas morning, a land where a baker from Monterrey, a bullfighter of neither nerve, grace nor talent, can finally achieve his goal of performing in the Plaza Mexico and filling its fifty-five thousand seats by a public proclamation of his intention to permit his first bull to kill him.

And Travis McGee, contemplating the possible life of an aging kept man with super-rich widow Jillian Brent-Archer in A Tan and Sandy Silence, engages in an imaginary conversation with Papa Hemingway and realizes that his time on this planet could quickly come to an end.

If I don't grasp the opportunity, somebody will find some quick and dirty way to let the sea air through my skull.

I'm overdue. That's what Meyer says, and that's what my gut says in a slow cold coil of tingling viscera. Overdue, and scared, and not ready for the end of it yet. The old bullfighters who have known the famous rings and famous breeds despise the little country corridas, because they know that if they do not quit, that is where they will die -- and the bull that hooks their steaming guts out onto the sand will be a poor animal without class or distinction or style.

“Salute to Courage” has, to the best of my knowledge, been reprinted only once, in the October 1952 issue of the Australian men’s magazine Cavalcade. That is the version I own and must assume that it is identical to the original in Fifteen Sports Stories.

Illustration from the Cavalcade reprint

"Bye, Bye, Backfield!"

If there is a pecking order among the different kinds of pulp magazines that flourished and then died in the last century, sports pulps would have to be pretty close to the bottom. Not that they weren’t popular in their day, they were, but if we are to judge popularity by the sheer number of different titles published, sports pulps (specifically all-sports pulps) rank below every other major type of pulp magazine. This makes sense, after all, because the sports pulps had to compete with the real thing, not only as played by real sportsmen but in the daily reportage of games in newspapers everywhere. But between 1923 and 1949 over fifty different all-sports pulp magazines were born, titles as inclusive as All-American Sports, New Sports Magazine, Sports Short Stories, or as specific as Big Baseball Stories, Basketball Stories or even Rodeo Romances (two different kinds of pulps in one, I suppose). By 1957 all but two of them, Super Sports and Ten-Story Sports,  had died, and those two gave up the ghost early that year.

John D MacDonald wrote for the sports pulps, a fact that surprised me when I first learned of it, and it still surprises people unfamiliar with his early writing career. Next to his mystery stories and his science fiction stories, nothing matches the quantity of sports short stories he wrote. And depending on how expansive the definition of sports one accepts, that number comes very close to his science fiction output. He wrote 29 stories that appeared in sports pulps, plus at least a dozen or more that were published in other kinds of magazines, both pulp of slick. The first JDM sports story to be published was “Coward in the Game,” and it was included in the November 25, 1946 issue of Short Stories. His first sports pulp appearance came in March 1947 with “That Old Gray Train,” but not before he had a second sports story appear in the January 4, 1947 issue of Liberty (“Hole in None”). That title is actually a fantasy tale, which allows it to appear in lists of both MacDonald’s sports stories as well as his science fiction tales. In fact, there are sports in all kinds of JDM writing, from mysteries (“The Deadly Game of Darts”) to sf (“Half-Past Eternity”) to even his novels. There’s tennis in Contrary Pleasure, Murder in the Wind and Bright Orange for the Shroud, and of course Travis McGee once played football.

MacDonald himself was an avid fisherman, and he counted boxing and golf among the sports he played and participated in at one time in his life. He wrote expertly about those fields, and also wrote well about auto racing, baseball, tennis, football, hockey, bowling, and even bull-fighting. JDM bibliographer Walter Shine once wrote, "... his sports writings ranged through so many fields as to suggest a multiplicity of writers, rather than a single one. The technical knowledge in each seems to be that of a seasoned student of the sport -- rather than an occasional onlooker ... Whatever he, or we, may now feel about the quality of the fiction, any of us would be hard put to fault the sports expertise he showed."

But who remembers this? I wrote back in 2009: “MacDonald's sports stories remain the least anthologized of all his fiction, with the possible exception of the mainstream work he produced later in his career for slicks like Good Housekeeping, Redbook and the Saturday Evening Post. Unlike the mystery and science fiction fields, there doesn't seem to be a subculture of fanatics and collectors clamoring for the re-publication of stories with titles like ‘Buzz-Saw Belter’ or ‘Fight, Scrub, Fight!’”

Or “Bye, Bye, Backfield.”

The story appeared in the July 1949 issue of Fifteen Sports Stories under one of MacDonald’s house names, John Wade Farrell, and it’s probably a story JDM was later glad was not identified as his. It’s not bad, just mediocre, a college football story about a new head coach coming in an upsetting a lot of apple carts. For the football fan it is full of technical details about plays, formations and tactics, but for the reader of fiction there’s little ground here that hasn’t been covered by hundreds of other writers in thousands of other stories.

The backfield in question is the offensive backfield of Mideastern, a mid-Atlantic college that could be a stand-in for any number of universities, but here probably one in New York or Pennsylvania. The team is down in Florida during an Easter Vacation break, training for the next season. This backfield for Mideastern consists of fullback Charlie Western, two halfbacks, Bus Milligan and Sancho Sanchinelli, and quarterback  Hal McKeever, who is also the first-person narrator. They are a unit that has been together since before college, on a service team, and were recruited together to play for Mideastern. And they have been very successful. The previous season they "smashed the Ivy League, broke the hearts of our two Big Ten guests and piled up a lopsided score in the bowl game." Every coach this backfield has had has made attempts to try out other players for those three positions, but no one has ever taken one. That’s because McKeever manages to make every tryout look bad by flubbing their timing. “Why should he break it up,” Bus asked. "We're a winning combo. This is our last season coming up. We're the inner circle..."

Enter a new coach.

[He was] a mountainous person named Bunny Hale, a recent fullback from the [pro] Burros. About twenty-nine years old, one of those boys who go to so small a school that they never make a clipping until a smart pro team grabs them and turns them loose on the publicized kids from the bigger outfits. With the Burros he had made a three-year average of 5.1 yards every time they handed him the ball. Maintaining such an average against outfits like the Packers is akin to consistently throwing rocks through a concrete wall.

After Hale is introduced at the first team meeting, he speaks to the troops about his initial impressions.

"I've been watching movies of you people. For a college team, you do good. Timing okay, fundamentals fair... The line has holes this season, but I think we can plug them. You have a lot of power in the backfield. You run too many off the T and not enough single and double wing. You could have added another three touchdowns to the season total last year by forgetting that T within the five-yard line and punching Western over from a single-wing, unbalanced line either way."

The following day the practices begin, and all morning Hale tries out new possible members of the backfield, and every one is mistimed by one of the group. But Hale persists, and it isn’t until late in the day when he puts the four together to show what they can do. Only now, Hale has suited up himself and will play defensive fullback. He manages to embarrass them on every play, to the point that they begin arguing and blaming each other. When the insults get bad enough, McKeever has to be held down as he tries to throw a punch at his fullback…

Of course the professional Bunny Hale knows what he is doing and things eventually work out once the insular backfield is shown the selfish error of their ways. There’s really little going on in “Bye, Bye, Backfield” that isn’t predictable or ho-hum. MacDonald’s prose is sharp and professional, and his descriptive powers used to create scene and character in a few, beautifully chosen words is on display, but the plot he uses is definitely thread-worn, even for 1949.

“Bye, Bye, Backfield” was one of four John D MacDonald stories to be published in this particular issue of Fifteen Sports Stories, the most to appear in a single issue of a magazine, pulp or otherwise. And one of those four stories was “Blue Water Fury,” one of the author’s very, very best short stories, so good he included it in his 1966 anthology End of the Tiger and Other Stories under the new title “The Big Blue”. It was the only pulp story included there. So I suppose he can be forgiven for coming up a bit short with “Bye, Bye, Backfield”.

The story has never been reprinted.

"The Gentle Killer"

Back in 1981 when I was still in my twenties, John D MacDonald was still alive and writing, the JDM Bibliophile was being published twice a year, and Walter and Jean Shine had just published the most comprehensive bibliography of MacDonald’s writings to date. It was a major achievement, unmatched in its scholarship and abundance of new information. It is still the most important bibliographic work ever done on the work of JDM.

But The Bibliography wasn’t a perfect work, nor was it complete. There were omissions, mis-identified stories, a few typos, and works that could not be located. The latter problem was addressed on page 108 in an addendum listing ten stories that, according to MacDonald’s own records, had been sold but whose publication could not be verified. The majority of these titles were written and sold when the MacDonald family was living in Mexico in 1948 and 1949, and nearly all of them ended up in the pulps. The list included the story’s title, the publisher who paid for it and the beginning of the story’s first sentence.

Several months later Walter Shine issued a call for help in his JDM Bibliophile column. He needed someone within close proximity to the Library of Congress in Washington, DC to head down there and spend several days going through the library’s vast collection of pulp magazines in an effort to try and find any or all of these missing stories. I had a letter in the mail to Walter before the end of the day.

Walter had arranged for the library to have close to 40 boxes of specific pulp magazines transferred from their annex in Landover, Maryland to the Periodical Reading Room in the Adams Building in DC. Once they were there I showed up in my barely-running 1965 VW Beetle and began systematically going through the table of contents of every single pulp they had supplied. It took me several long days to complete the project and in the end I was not able to locate any of the missing stories. I wrote a long, dissapointed letter to Walter outlining all of my efforts, detailing everything I had canvassed and offering my services for anything else he needed me to do. It began an epistolary friendship between us which lasted for many years. Walter even forwarded a copy of my letter to JDM himself, who responded favorably, calling my letter “extraordinary” and writing “As I read it I kept hoping he would come up with something that is still missing.”

Fast forward to 2015, almost 35 years later, and another one of the stories has finally been located.

I say “another one” because, of that list of ten missing stories, several were located by others in subsequent years. One, which had been sold to Bluebook, ended up appearing in the magazine’s bastard step-child Bluebook for Men. One which was sold to Argosy somehow ended up being published in an early issue of Cavalier. But in the end there were six stories that were still missing in action. Until now.

A few weeks back I was looking around on eBay and came across an offering that at first made no sense to me. Some seller was trying to unload an issue of All Sports, an obscure (to me) pulp that was published by Columbia Publications. It was the November 1948 issue and was advertised as containing “The Gentile Killer” by John D MacDonald.

Well. After I finished laughing out loud I began searching my memory for any JDM story about David and Goliath, or perhaps a modern day spy story featuring a Mossad assassin. But the state of Israel had only just been founded by November 1948 and I didn’t recall MacDonald ever dabbling in biblical fiction. No, I soon realized that this must be one of the missing stories, correctly titled “The Gentle Killer.” I could scarcely believe my luck, and despite having an opening bid far in excess of one I would usually entertain, I bit the bullet and placed my offer. I won it, I now own it and I have read it. Walter Shine, wherever he is, is surely smiling.

The opening sentence, which was supplied to me during my long-ago search, has stuck in my memory all these years, its ringing vernacular singing like urban poetry.

We had hacked up the Cleveland purse, the short end of it, and a week later, after bailing out the convertible and paying the back alimony to Myrna, the leech, and catching up on my rent and adding a few necessary numbers to the wardrobe, I was down to a slim fifty bucks; the next bout for the Tailor was set up for three weeks ahead, and there was my other bum, Jo Zamatchi, eating off me while his busted hand knitted.

The first person narrator is one Danny Watson, a boxing manager and “the Tailor” is Tailor Rowe, one of Danny’s boxers. His next two sentences are as equally evocative of the boxing world’s milieu.

As a direct consequence, I was giving the Beach the jaunty ‘hello’ and making like I had an in on the sweepstakes which is standard procedure when you feel the wolf fangs, but usually fools nobody at all, at all. Every time I thought of the fifty bucks it seemed smaller and it seemed like every time I turned around there was fat Barney Gowdy clinging to my lapels and breathing in my face, indirectly advising me of what he had had for lunch.

Barney is a bookie and opportunist, a character who “had been pitching pennies at the cracks in the boxfighting profession ever since the days of John L.” He’s been trying to corner Danny for weeks in order to present a proposition to him. A fellow manager named Whitey Burd lost the rights to a boxer he owned to Barney in a poker game. Barney isn’t a manager and has no interest in owning this or any other fighter. He can’t sell the contract outright without attracting the unwanted attention of the IRS, and since this boxer is an “up-and-comer” his value in the black market is limited. His proposition: He and Danny trade fighters. Danny gets a younger contender with good chances and a longer career while Barney gets rights he can more readily sell. Danny asks for 24 hours to think it over.

He first visits the Tailor, who is home and indulging in his off-ring hobby, magic tricks. When he presents the idea Tailor says “Okay by me, Danny.” When Danny asks if he is sore at him Tailor looks at him blankly.

“Should I be? All I care is I got somebody who gets me fights. I figure I got maybe two more years, maybe three, before I get out. I’ll see you around, won’t I. Hey, watch this one. See here? I got a coin. A quarter. I hold it tight in my fist and I pass the other hand over it like this…”

He then goes to the other fighter, a young man named Spencer Leslie. He immediately likes the looks of the man, noticing his “thick, square hands with strong bones… He was one of those boys with a small head set close against his shoulders, a big chest, no hips at all and a springy way of walking… He had a snub nose, a nice grin, and cold grey eyes.” (One of these days I’m going to catalog every JDM character who has gray -- or grey -- eyes. It will be a very long list.) Danny notices that the table in the center of the room is covered with books and there’s a slide rule on one of them. When Danny asks what all of the books are for, Spencer replies that he is studying mechanical engineering, and that he had gone to college after the war to study it but was unable to concentrate and got tossed out. Now he studies on his own.

When Danny broaches the subject of the tradeoff, Spencer is fine with it, and when Danny asks if he really likes boxing, we get the following exchange:

Spencer: “That’s a toughie, Mr. Watson. I hate it until I get into the ring and get a glove in my face. The the only thing I want to do it drop the other guy; I hate him until I hear that ten count and then he’s just another guy.”

Danny: “That’s a good way to be, Spencer. If you haven’t got that, you never make much of a fighter. The press boys call it the killer instinct.”

Spencer: (Grinning) “That’s a harsh word.”

The deal is accepted and the fights begin. The duo travels from Toledo to Detroit to Chicago to Memphis, with Spencer winning every match. By the time they return to New York the press is “screaming about the boy,” and Spencer has earned so much money that Danny “nearly needed a suitcase to carry the dough in.” He gets out from under his alimony obligation by making a lump sum settlement with ex-wife Myrna, buys “eight or nine” new suits, pays the IRS and is still able to put several hundred into his checking account. “All was well with the world.”

Then he runs into Whitey, the manager who previously owned Spencer. When Danny commiserates that it “sure was tough losing that boy,” Whitey grins at him “in a nasty way” and tells Danny that he has been lucky. He reveals that the poker game loss was fabricated and that he paid Barney “five bills” to set up the smokescreen and broker the trade. Whitey now owns the Tailor. Danny asks Whitey what is wrong with Spencer and is told, “Why don’t you ask him, sucker? Or maybe you could try to fix him up to train at Stayman’s Gym.”

Whitey says no more, and when Danny asks Ike Stayman if he could arrange for Spencer to train at his gym, he is rebuffed. “You keep that crazy man away from here.” Danny is left to ask Spencer himself about this mysterious problem…

 “The Gentle Killer” is a solid, representative example of MacDonald’s work of the period, a seven and a half page story told with crisp, direct prose and a realistic first person narration that practically rings in the ear. Its evocation of the period and, especially, the marginal world of boxing, boxers, their managers and other hangers-on, is expertly done by a writer who had evidently studied this world well. Unfortunately the tale is marred by a glib ending that practically comes out of left field (if I may mix metaphors -- and sports) and was also representative of a lot of the author’s pulp work. Still, the overall work is commendable and well worth reading.

MacDonald was well represented in the sports pulps of the postwar period, and if we add up all of them their totals are only eclipsed by his mystery and science fiction efforts, at least if we go by the type of pulp magazine they appeared in. His work appeared 26 times in various sports pulps from 1947 to 1952, and the fact that they are obscure, even in the world of obscure JDM short fiction, owes less to the quality of those stories than to the nearly ephemeral quality of the sports pulp magazine. With the possible exception of the love pulps, the sports pulps are one of the most ignored and least collected of pulp fiction magazines. John Dinan, in his excellent 1998 study Sports in the Pulp Magazines, points out that virtually none of the fiction historians -- pulp or sports -- have given any attention to this category of work. In his preface he notes that Ron Goulart in his Cheap Thrills “devotes a paragraph to the subject,” Andy McCue in his Baseball by the Books: A History and Complete Bibliography of Baseball Fiction “devotes not a word to pulp sports fiction in spite of the claim of ‘completeness,’” and Michael Oriard’s American Sports Fiction, 1868-1980 provided only “a few pages” to the sports pulps. He goes on to say,

If all this is not enough to demonstrate the absence of research into the sports pulps, one has only to look into the world of current-day collectors or researchers and their interests. What are their interests? The hero pulps, the rare titles (like Strange Suicide Stories or Civil War Stories), the outré weird menace or horror pulps, detective pulps with some of the big-name writers (Chandler, Woolrich, Hammett, MacDonald, et al.), or the early works of writers who later would earn a larger reputation than could be provided by writing for the pulps (like Louis L’Amour). Certainly not the sports pulps.

If All Sports magazine seems like an obscure pulp -- and it certainly did to me -- note that, according to Dinan, Columbia Publications produced an estimated 130 issues of the title from May 1940 to February 1951. The Adventure House Guide to the Pulps, published two years after Dinan’s work, expands that range from October 1939 to September 1951 but admit that they don’t really know when the magazine began or ended. For a magazine to be popular enough to have lasted for over 130 issues and to have become completely forgotten by all but a handful of collectors, well… that’s the history of sports pulp magazines in a nutshell.

When I discovered this title I was understandably elated. I had plans, after posting this essay, to contact both the University of Florida, where the John D MacDonald collection is housed (and where “The Gentle Killer” is still listed as appearing in an “unknown publication”), as well as the online database Fiction Mags Index, one of the most comprehensive collections of magazine contents anywhere, put together by volunteers who have indexed most of their magazine collections for posterity. I was astounded to find that this issue of All Sports had already been documented, by one Monte Herridge, who had listed the “missing” story in his entry of the issue. My chance at celebrity had been thwarted! Well, at least it’s out there. And thanks to my tech buddy J.J. Walters, it is now included in my now completely comprehensive JDM short story list, which you can access under the Trap of Solid Gold Resources in the right hand column of this blog.