Wednesday, December 15, 2004
I love a good holiday story especially when it involves fisticuffs or a reasonable facsimile . . .
How Tough Can Christmas Be?
by Kit Kiefer
Guy decides to be melancholy for Christmas, not a lot you can do about it. Maybe it’s his kids all grown up so there’s no more fun in opening train sets and Lincoln Logs. Maybe it’s him all grown up and no more of that fun left for him, just socks and what he knows is coming because he wrote the list and she always follows the list. It’s thinking of time passing and missing his own mom and dad maybe, just too many good times that were so he’s not too sure about the are.
Company tries a little to spread the cheer, but not too hard. It’s in the magazine business not the Christmas business, though the old guy that owns the company likes to walk the halls wishing Good Christmas to all. We wish him Good Christmas back and mean it. He’s the grandpa always slipping you oranges and hazelnuts, even if you don’t like hazelnuts.
For Christmas the company puts up trees, about as tall as your head, in every spare corner of every department, all put up and decorated by company people. Some trees have wrapped boxes underneath, and some wrapped boxes have real presents inside. Those are back in Typesetting and Production, where the local ladies find it quite a wonderful thing to draw names and buy presents and stick them under their department trees, and then make little luncheon parties of things made with crescent dough and cream cheese, recipes they get from someone called The Pampered Chef. They turn their chairs around from their monitors and light tables to lunch on veggie pizza and shrimp dip and eat and talk for a few minutes, open their presents, let go a little squeal about who had their name and whose name they had, and then turn their chairs back around to their monitors and light tables. Only the dirty dishes show that anything different happened that noon. Ladies talk about it for months.
Back in Sales, though, the party never stops and the chairs never turn back to the desks when it’s been a good year for baseball cards. Happy advertisers send food and drink. One year a freshly minted millionaire sends a packing crate, size of a small refrigerator, packed with booze – all sorts, two-liter bottle of wine cooler to a fifth of Chivas. Sales and Editorial had a little party that spring. That’s the one where Duke and his family arrive just in time for the buffet, pull chairs up to the buffet table and tuck right in. Liquor doesn’t cast any spell on them.
Guy can still get melancholy about Christmas in the middle of all this, though, and this year it’s JT’s turn. JT doesn’t sell ads for sports but sits close enough to those that do that he talks their talk, enough to pinch-hit when the regular sports ad guys are at lunch or at shows or just plain grouchy. JT is getting to be about mid-‘40s, used to play basketball and baseball real good but doesn’t any more, has a wife lives in Green Bay and no kids. He spends weeks in Iola and weekends in Green Bay, which is a tough way to live as far as the weeks in Iola go. Somehow the being in Iola for the weeks before Christmas got him this year and he got the melancholies. He’d laugh at Dukisms – like you couldn’t – but practically anything else just left him long-faced and sad, like Jack Benny without the punch lines.
We tried to perk up JT about the same way the company tried to get us all in the Christmas spirit, about as effectively. Just a little smile and then back to doing paperwork, not even wanting to talk to anyone on the phone unless they called. Sales guy starts doing that you know he’s in the dumps.
It happens that the Christmas JT gets the holiday blues is also the Christmas the Green Bay Packer All-Stars play a basketball exhibition in Iola day before Christmas Eve. Packers always scrape together a team of players to play basketball around the state in winter raising money for whatever local charity brings them to town, but usually not as early as day before Christmas Eve. The Packers are still usually playing by then. People doing the scheduling must have seen the writing on the wall, because the regular season ended two days before and the Packers were out of the playoffs by October.
Way these exhibitions work is that the local charity gets a team together to play the Packers. Packers almost always win, though sometimes you get a hotshot wants to show Packers a thing or two about basketball, and he goes off for fifty-something. Nothing you can do about the hotshots, though people don’t come to see hotshots, not even local hotshots. They come to see whether Packers can play basketball or not. It’s split about fifty-fifty between the can-plays and the can-nots. Big guys are usually just big. Little guys can jump out of the gym but like to shoot those 30-footers that make a nice dinner-bell sound when they bang off the rim. Not a lot of offense between those two groups, but it’s usually enough to beat the local Lions club, who happened to sponsor the exhibition in Iola two days before Christmas.
Even though JT lives in Green Bay really he belongs to the Iola Lions, which is not a real young organization. Give you an idea of how young, about half the Lions are also Sons of Norway, and Sons of Norway don’t take anyone under 70. Don’t know what JT sees in that bunch. Long and short of it is that JT winds up on the team that’s playing the Packers, and since he’s tallest of the bunch he’s the starting center.
JT playing center doesn’t bring out the crowds except those from the company, like Whitey and O’Strowski, who follow pro wrestling and these fixed carnage events. Still, day before Christmas Eve there’s not much else to do, so nearly everyone from town still left in town comes out to the high-school gym to watch the Lions Club play the Packers. Doesn’t even matter that the Packers aren’t really Packers, not the stars anyway but the backups and the waiver-wire types. It’s good enough for when and where.
Teams warming up, guys running layup drills you don’t see much, but when they introduce the Lions Club players Whitey says, “Check out JT. He’s got blood in his eyes.” Sure enough; whether it’s Christmas blues working their way up to the surface or knowing it’s his last shot at glory on the court or what, but JT comes running out on the court like a bull, snorting superheated steam out his nostrils. He’s playing for real even if nobody else is. JT gets like this sometimes first week of softball season, but by sixth inning he’s pulled a hamstring and he’s himself again. Seeing him like this on a basketball court scares couple guys that know him. They’re not sure what to expect, other than a hamstring pull.
JT loses the opening tip but hustles back down on D, and when one of these little Packer guys clangs off a shot JT boxes out his guy – big tackle off the taxi squad, never did much all year but lift weights and get yelled at – about 20 feet away from the basket, boxes him out hard, throws his butt into the tackle’s legs, grabs the rebound and sticks an elbow out either side of the ball. He spins around the elbows and ball, doesn’t hit anybody thank God, and passes the ball upcourt. The big tackle he boxed out just stands there staring. No one put that much body on him all football season, now he’s in an exhibition basketball game in Iola of all places and he’s getting the butt series from the starting center for the Lions Club. He doesn’t get it.
It takes about three or four times down the court for the big tackle to get it that JT is damned serious about the whole thing, so then this tackle gets serious too. Calls for the ball, backs down JT, bowls him over, bangs the ball in the basket no foul called, points, talks some. This happens couple times down the court and then it’s JT’s turn to get steamed. He starts pushing hard back at this tackle in a way you shouldn’t, first to a 280-pound Green Bay Packer and second in a just-for-fun game, so one of the other Lions takes him aside, reads him the Lions’ oath or something and gets JT to settle down. Gives him a different guy to guard, too, guy who likes to play 30 feet out from the basket where JT doesn’t care as much about muscling up and boxing out. Still has blood in his eyes, though. Whitey can see the blood in his eyes.
Game goes on pretty good, people enjoying the show, Lions playing okay for a team where JT is the youngest player and the star center, when one of the Packers launches a shot. JT sees it going up from the other side and comes storming into the lane on an angle for the rebound. Ball bounces off the rim to his side and he grabs it – doesn’t jump in the air really, but grabs it and hangs on like he did before, with the elbows pointing out. JT swings the elbows around again and his time there’s something in his way, namely the head of the big tackle who had stumbled a little going for the ball so his head isn’t a full head above JT’s any more but is right at elbow level. JT just nails him, sounds like a hammer hitting a watermelon. It is, as Whitey says later, a beautiful shot, a glorious blow to the head. If angels swung elbows that’s how they’d hit. Tackle goes down like a water buffalo, just a big whump! like he was shot by Ernest Hemingway, and he’s out flat.
Tackle doesn’t stay out more than a minute, and when he gets up now he’s the one with blood in his eyes, and all he wants is to put some real blood in the eyes of the guy who owns the elbows. Not appreciating the beauty of the head shot at all. Not a good thing to happen in a charity game two days before Christmas in Iola versus the Lions Club, though Whitey and O’Strowsky are up in the stands bouncing up and down on their hands thinking they got their money’s worth.
Fight, such as it is, doesn’t last long. The old Sons of Norway Lions, these wiry geezers, come bouncing out of the front row and make sort of a human Norwegian shield around JT, then Duke comes bouncing down from the stands and gets between JT and the tackle, and when Duke’s in the middle you can’t reach over to the other side. Duke and a couple of the older Lions convince JT and the tackle it would be better for the game if each of them didn’t play any more, and if you can believe it JT’s okay with that. He’s more than okay. He’s wearing a smile that’d bust his face apart, smile he hasn’t shown in months. In fact, at halftime he comes up to where O’Strowsky and Duke and Whitey and Mort are sitting, and he’s bubbling, just bubbling over. “How about that!” he gushes. “How about that! ‘Merry Christmas to all, and to all lights out.’ Lights out! Wasn’t that something – something, I mean the way he went down?”
Whitey smiles that sly smile of his and says, “Beautiful. You laid him out beautiful, JT. If his season wasn’t over as of Sunday it’s over now. He’ll be happy to go back playing football.”
“That’s just what I was thinking,” JT carries on. “What’s football after a shot like that, huh? What’s football?”
Guy gets melancholy about Christmas, but it never seems to last. Something happens. Something always happens. Christmas blues are gone. Bring on the holidays! If the holidays give him any trouble, give ‘em an elbow to the temple and bang! If JT can flatten a Packer, how tough can Christmas be?
How Tough Can Christmas Be?
by Kit Kiefer
Guy decides to be melancholy for Christmas, not a lot you can do about it. Maybe it’s his kids all grown up so there’s no more fun in opening train sets and Lincoln Logs. Maybe it’s him all grown up and no more of that fun left for him, just socks and what he knows is coming because he wrote the list and she always follows the list. It’s thinking of time passing and missing his own mom and dad maybe, just too many good times that were so he’s not too sure about the are.
Company tries a little to spread the cheer, but not too hard. It’s in the magazine business not the Christmas business, though the old guy that owns the company likes to walk the halls wishing Good Christmas to all. We wish him Good Christmas back and mean it. He’s the grandpa always slipping you oranges and hazelnuts, even if you don’t like hazelnuts.
For Christmas the company puts up trees, about as tall as your head, in every spare corner of every department, all put up and decorated by company people. Some trees have wrapped boxes underneath, and some wrapped boxes have real presents inside. Those are back in Typesetting and Production, where the local ladies find it quite a wonderful thing to draw names and buy presents and stick them under their department trees, and then make little luncheon parties of things made with crescent dough and cream cheese, recipes they get from someone called The Pampered Chef. They turn their chairs around from their monitors and light tables to lunch on veggie pizza and shrimp dip and eat and talk for a few minutes, open their presents, let go a little squeal about who had their name and whose name they had, and then turn their chairs back around to their monitors and light tables. Only the dirty dishes show that anything different happened that noon. Ladies talk about it for months.
Back in Sales, though, the party never stops and the chairs never turn back to the desks when it’s been a good year for baseball cards. Happy advertisers send food and drink. One year a freshly minted millionaire sends a packing crate, size of a small refrigerator, packed with booze – all sorts, two-liter bottle of wine cooler to a fifth of Chivas. Sales and Editorial had a little party that spring. That’s the one where Duke and his family arrive just in time for the buffet, pull chairs up to the buffet table and tuck right in. Liquor doesn’t cast any spell on them.
Guy can still get melancholy about Christmas in the middle of all this, though, and this year it’s JT’s turn. JT doesn’t sell ads for sports but sits close enough to those that do that he talks their talk, enough to pinch-hit when the regular sports ad guys are at lunch or at shows or just plain grouchy. JT is getting to be about mid-‘40s, used to play basketball and baseball real good but doesn’t any more, has a wife lives in Green Bay and no kids. He spends weeks in Iola and weekends in Green Bay, which is a tough way to live as far as the weeks in Iola go. Somehow the being in Iola for the weeks before Christmas got him this year and he got the melancholies. He’d laugh at Dukisms – like you couldn’t – but practically anything else just left him long-faced and sad, like Jack Benny without the punch lines.
We tried to perk up JT about the same way the company tried to get us all in the Christmas spirit, about as effectively. Just a little smile and then back to doing paperwork, not even wanting to talk to anyone on the phone unless they called. Sales guy starts doing that you know he’s in the dumps.
It happens that the Christmas JT gets the holiday blues is also the Christmas the Green Bay Packer All-Stars play a basketball exhibition in Iola day before Christmas Eve. Packers always scrape together a team of players to play basketball around the state in winter raising money for whatever local charity brings them to town, but usually not as early as day before Christmas Eve. The Packers are still usually playing by then. People doing the scheduling must have seen the writing on the wall, because the regular season ended two days before and the Packers were out of the playoffs by October.
Way these exhibitions work is that the local charity gets a team together to play the Packers. Packers almost always win, though sometimes you get a hotshot wants to show Packers a thing or two about basketball, and he goes off for fifty-something. Nothing you can do about the hotshots, though people don’t come to see hotshots, not even local hotshots. They come to see whether Packers can play basketball or not. It’s split about fifty-fifty between the can-plays and the can-nots. Big guys are usually just big. Little guys can jump out of the gym but like to shoot those 30-footers that make a nice dinner-bell sound when they bang off the rim. Not a lot of offense between those two groups, but it’s usually enough to beat the local Lions club, who happened to sponsor the exhibition in Iola two days before Christmas.
Even though JT lives in Green Bay really he belongs to the Iola Lions, which is not a real young organization. Give you an idea of how young, about half the Lions are also Sons of Norway, and Sons of Norway don’t take anyone under 70. Don’t know what JT sees in that bunch. Long and short of it is that JT winds up on the team that’s playing the Packers, and since he’s tallest of the bunch he’s the starting center.
JT playing center doesn’t bring out the crowds except those from the company, like Whitey and O’Strowski, who follow pro wrestling and these fixed carnage events. Still, day before Christmas Eve there’s not much else to do, so nearly everyone from town still left in town comes out to the high-school gym to watch the Lions Club play the Packers. Doesn’t even matter that the Packers aren’t really Packers, not the stars anyway but the backups and the waiver-wire types. It’s good enough for when and where.
Teams warming up, guys running layup drills you don’t see much, but when they introduce the Lions Club players Whitey says, “Check out JT. He’s got blood in his eyes.” Sure enough; whether it’s Christmas blues working their way up to the surface or knowing it’s his last shot at glory on the court or what, but JT comes running out on the court like a bull, snorting superheated steam out his nostrils. He’s playing for real even if nobody else is. JT gets like this sometimes first week of softball season, but by sixth inning he’s pulled a hamstring and he’s himself again. Seeing him like this on a basketball court scares couple guys that know him. They’re not sure what to expect, other than a hamstring pull.
JT loses the opening tip but hustles back down on D, and when one of these little Packer guys clangs off a shot JT boxes out his guy – big tackle off the taxi squad, never did much all year but lift weights and get yelled at – about 20 feet away from the basket, boxes him out hard, throws his butt into the tackle’s legs, grabs the rebound and sticks an elbow out either side of the ball. He spins around the elbows and ball, doesn’t hit anybody thank God, and passes the ball upcourt. The big tackle he boxed out just stands there staring. No one put that much body on him all football season, now he’s in an exhibition basketball game in Iola of all places and he’s getting the butt series from the starting center for the Lions Club. He doesn’t get it.
It takes about three or four times down the court for the big tackle to get it that JT is damned serious about the whole thing, so then this tackle gets serious too. Calls for the ball, backs down JT, bowls him over, bangs the ball in the basket no foul called, points, talks some. This happens couple times down the court and then it’s JT’s turn to get steamed. He starts pushing hard back at this tackle in a way you shouldn’t, first to a 280-pound Green Bay Packer and second in a just-for-fun game, so one of the other Lions takes him aside, reads him the Lions’ oath or something and gets JT to settle down. Gives him a different guy to guard, too, guy who likes to play 30 feet out from the basket where JT doesn’t care as much about muscling up and boxing out. Still has blood in his eyes, though. Whitey can see the blood in his eyes.
Game goes on pretty good, people enjoying the show, Lions playing okay for a team where JT is the youngest player and the star center, when one of the Packers launches a shot. JT sees it going up from the other side and comes storming into the lane on an angle for the rebound. Ball bounces off the rim to his side and he grabs it – doesn’t jump in the air really, but grabs it and hangs on like he did before, with the elbows pointing out. JT swings the elbows around again and his time there’s something in his way, namely the head of the big tackle who had stumbled a little going for the ball so his head isn’t a full head above JT’s any more but is right at elbow level. JT just nails him, sounds like a hammer hitting a watermelon. It is, as Whitey says later, a beautiful shot, a glorious blow to the head. If angels swung elbows that’s how they’d hit. Tackle goes down like a water buffalo, just a big whump! like he was shot by Ernest Hemingway, and he’s out flat.
Tackle doesn’t stay out more than a minute, and when he gets up now he’s the one with blood in his eyes, and all he wants is to put some real blood in the eyes of the guy who owns the elbows. Not appreciating the beauty of the head shot at all. Not a good thing to happen in a charity game two days before Christmas in Iola versus the Lions Club, though Whitey and O’Strowsky are up in the stands bouncing up and down on their hands thinking they got their money’s worth.
Fight, such as it is, doesn’t last long. The old Sons of Norway Lions, these wiry geezers, come bouncing out of the front row and make sort of a human Norwegian shield around JT, then Duke comes bouncing down from the stands and gets between JT and the tackle, and when Duke’s in the middle you can’t reach over to the other side. Duke and a couple of the older Lions convince JT and the tackle it would be better for the game if each of them didn’t play any more, and if you can believe it JT’s okay with that. He’s more than okay. He’s wearing a smile that’d bust his face apart, smile he hasn’t shown in months. In fact, at halftime he comes up to where O’Strowsky and Duke and Whitey and Mort are sitting, and he’s bubbling, just bubbling over. “How about that!” he gushes. “How about that! ‘Merry Christmas to all, and to all lights out.’ Lights out! Wasn’t that something – something, I mean the way he went down?”
Whitey smiles that sly smile of his and says, “Beautiful. You laid him out beautiful, JT. If his season wasn’t over as of Sunday it’s over now. He’ll be happy to go back playing football.”
“That’s just what I was thinking,” JT carries on. “What’s football after a shot like that, huh? What’s football?”
Guy gets melancholy about Christmas, but it never seems to last. Something happens. Something always happens. Christmas blues are gone. Bring on the holidays! If the holidays give him any trouble, give ‘em an elbow to the temple and bang! If JT can flatten a Packer, how tough can Christmas be?
