Aficionado of Failure

By Peter Stoler

CHASE THE GAME

by Pat Jordan

Dodd, Mead; 216 pages; $8.95

To consider sport a metaphor for life is sad. To think of sport as life itself is tragic. None succumb to this delusion more readily than ghetto youth, for whom athletics is both a means of escape and an opportunity for approval. And none have described the process better than Pat Jordan. His own decline as a professional pitcher was recollected in the poignant autobiography A False Spring. Four years ater, he turns from the diamond to the court to watch basketball players yield to the pressures of ambition, and to the damning testimony of their skills.

Chase the Game focuses on three high-spirited adolescents from the decaying slums of Bridgeport, Conn. Walter Luckett, who made the cover of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED while just out of high school, is a gifted black who feels more at ease with whites and plays a cool, deliberate white man's game. Cousins Frank Oleynick and Barry McLeod are whites who feel most comfortable with blacks. All three are players of great promise. None keeps the promise.

The first to fail is Luckett. At Ohio University he finds himself unable to live up to the oversized Bridgeport reputation. "He was the fast gun in town," writes Jordan, "grown tired of proving himself, trying to sustain his image by bluster instead of performance." Drafted by the Detroit Pistons after a round of mishandled negotiations, the disillusioned Luckett boots his chance and gets cut from the team. Oleynick stars at Seattle University, then slides into angry oblivion after a season with the SuperSonics. McLeod, the only one of the three to finish college, is robbed of his chance at glory when a recruiting violation costs Centenary College its opportunity to try for a national championship. McLeod is drafted but fails to make the Chicago Bulls. Having risen too far too fast, all three athletes plummet back to daily life and weekend pickup games, a lot sadder, and a little wiser, in the ghetto where it all began.

Paced like a playoff, Chase the Game derives much of its immediacy from the life and language of men coming to painful maturity. Its power comes from the Ditter conclusion that skill on the playing field is not synonymous with character. There have been scores of books on the superstars of every sport; success Breeds fans. Failure has only a few aficionados, and Jordan is one of the finest. In Auden's phrase, he sings of human unsuccess, and in the song turns case his tories on the defeated into a kind of triumph.

--Peter Stoler

Clad in his normal working garb of jeans, sneakers and a T shirt stenciled with the name of a local gym, Pat Jordan looks like the jocks he writes about. The similarity is purely deliberate. Jordan, son of Pasquale Giordano, went through a disastrous season as a professional baseball player and never quite got over it. At 38, he stays in shape by compulsively pumping iron twice a day. He keeps his psyche in trim by reminiscing with cronies in bars. "I make my social contacts there," says Jordan. "Writing is lonely. You have to get out and talk to someone."

For Jordan, both the loneliness and the boozy camaraderie are a way of life. Returning to his native Fairfield, Conn., after his career with the Milwaukee Braves fizzled, Jordan supported himself and his wife Carol by teaching at a local girls' school. But he also wrote, and, in 1969, sold his first piece, a short story, to Ingenue. Says he: "It was great. I got a check made out to Miss Pat Jordan."

Encouraged, Jordan turned to the typewriter, determined to make a sale before the $3,000 in his savings account forced him to return to teaching. In 1970, just before the money ran out, his first article was sold to SPORTS ILLUSTRATED; since then he has handled dozens of magazine assignments and produced four other books including A False Spring, among the best books ever written about baseball--or, for that matter, about growing up. "I had to write that book," Jordan says. "It was my way of coming to terms with myself and what happened to me. Once I did it, I knew that there was no going back."

Jordan, who is "making enough to keep everyone in groceries," has no intention of going back, Jim Bouton-style, to baseball, and no regrets about the directions his life has taken. A father of five, he writes steadily away in a rented office in Fairfield, pecking out as few as five pages of finished copy a week. Says he: "I'm the world's slowest writer. I write each sentence three times before I go on to another." But Jordan, who admits that he failed as a pitcher because, among other reasons, he was "always trying to gel fast balls by heavy hitters," cannot speed up. There is no reason why he should. In the sportswriters' league, he can go a long way on style and control.

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