18 Holes with Bing by Nathaniel Crosby

Author:Nathaniel Crosby
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-04-06T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

PIRATES, PUGILISTS, HORSES, AND HUNTING

Generally, sports formed the centerpiece of my father’s life. The singing and acting? They paid for this entertainer’s entertainment, which after golf included, in no order, baseball, horse racing, boxing, hunting, fishing, football, hockey, and tennis. Even hockey and tennis.

On the hockey front, he was a shareholder in the Seals, a National Hockey League expansion team in the sixties. The partnership included brothers Mickey and Barry Van Gerbig, the latter known as the Baron and the man who succeeded George Coleman as the president of Seminole. The brothers owned 50 percent of the team, and a large group that included Dad and Coleman owned the other half.

It was expensive running an NHL expansion franchise and the team frequently was running out of money. So the Van Gerbigs and team president Bill Torrey, another of Dad’s friends and the man responsible for assembling the New York Islanders’ four Stanley Cup champions, put together a capital call at the Top of the Mark at the renowned Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco. Everyone was having a great time, when Dad sidled up next to the piano and sang for a solid two hours. He finally tired and announced that he was heading home, which unexpectedly was a signal to the potential investors that the evening was over. They left before the capital request was made. Compounding that error, the Van Gerbigs and Torrey were left with a $10,000 bill for the evening.

On the tennis front, Dad attended Wimbledon and played at the California Tennis Club in San Francisco. The great San Francisco Chronicle gossip columnist Herb Caen recounted an afternoon in 1970 when my father was playing doubles on Court Number One at the California Tennis Club, “hitting every ball on the sweet spot, never double-faulting, always serving to the opponent’s backhand and returning everything so his partner could make the eventual putaway.” Naturally, as word spread that he was there, a group of about fifty kids gathered to watch. Afterward, a ten-year-old boy asked him to sign four slips of paper.

“What are you going to do, trade these for one Sinatra?” my dad asked jokingly.

“No,” the boy replied, without missing a beat, “eight Sinatras.”

Dad’s interest in sports was rooted in his childhood in Spokane, Washington. “I can remember, in that long twilight up in the Northwest, we played kick the can or duck on the rock or baseball or handball until it finally got dark about 8:30 or 9:00, and our folks would come to get us,” he told Sports Illustrated. “We lived across the street from a Jesuit college [Gonzaga] in Spokane. The priests encouraged us youngsters to use the baseball diamonds, the handball courts, and the football field. As a kid, I played everything.”

This was the arena in which he was most at peace, anything to do with sports and its people.

And this was the life into which I was born. Imagine, a kid in love with sports, whose father shared his passion that

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