George Sauer's Secret

Joseph Mitchell, author of Joe Gould's Secret

One of the great writers on my shelf is Joseph Mitchell, specifically his collection of nonfiction, Up in the Old Hotel. At first, I read him because my mother told me to, which is why I started reading everything I read as a boy. She was the first trusted librarian I ever had, and my teachers were sometimes frustrated to know that the stories that they recommended to me were not worth reading if Mom didn't like them. So naturally I read Joseph Mitchell. But his writing didn't come easily to me at first. To the modern reader, Mitchell is like an evening meal in Paris to an American tourist. The American notices that while he is scarfing it all down so that he can then move on to the next thing and then the next thing, everyone else around him is just savoring the time amid talk, bites, smoke and more talk, without ever checking their email or another's Facebook status.

In his short piece "Mr. Hunter's Grave," Mitchell writes,

"Invariably, for some reason I don't know and don't want to know, after I have spent an hour or so in one of these cemeteries, looking at gravestone designs and reading inscriptions and identifying wild flowers and scaring rabbits out of the weeds and reflecting on the end that awaits me and awaits us all, my spirits life, I become quite cheerful, and then I go for a long walk."

A lot of his work reads like that, and it requires re-reading because he begins and then stops and puts things parenthetically and stumbles into another idea, picks up the old one again and proceeds, while allowing us a little insight into the brittle nature of the narrator's sense of well-being, even as he becomes, as he says, quite cheerful.

Joe Gould

His most famous piece is Joe Gould's Secret, a work of greatness that is not so much a tale of a strange loner but is instead Mitchell's final study of the entire network of the city's "cranks and the misfits and the would-bes and never-wills and the God-knows-whats." Joe Gould is the greatest of those misfits that Mitchell loved to write about. He was a roaming, vagabond, half-genius, half-madman that all the artists of early 20th century Greenwich Village bohemia knew about; his nude portrait was done by the painter Alice Neel, who gave him three phalluses.

Joe Gould worked his whole life, from his graduation from Harvard, all the way through his days of wandering around New York, on the Oral History, a massive work-in-progress that was composed of tens of thousands of conversations from memory that he had documented through the years.

It's terrible to reveal endings, so I won't too much. But Joe Gould did have a secret, and suffice to say that his secret was, in some ways, that he had no secret at all. 

I felt like mentioning him a few weeks back when I wrote about former Jets wide receiver George Sauer, who died in June from heart failure after struggling with Alzheimer's, but I didn't want to presume so much as to connect the hypergraphic Gould with Sauer's searching soul. But while I was away on vacation recently, my mother sent me a clipping of Jack Williams' article in the Times about George Sauer's legacy of unfinished writing. Mom didn't send me the link to the article, as I do here, but she still lives in a world where a person cuts out an article out of a paper newspaper and sends it through the US mail to another person who receives it a few days later. Sometimes I miss that more patient and gradual world.

George Sauer, who quit the Jets and football altogether in 1970 after posting consistently great seasons at wide receiver, became in early retirement a full-time writer, a profession that must have seemed infinitely exciting to a still young man who, at a time of growing individual freedom of expression, felt that he needed to tell his story. I'm so grateful for Williams' work in tracking down the truth of George Sauer's mysteries, though like many real-life riddles, the story is more sad than engaging. In his effort to spend the rest of his life trying to write the story about his life, the life of a football player, the secrets of things he had discovered in the world, the strange odyssey of his experiences growing up the son of a football star himself, he managed to complete very little of the actual novel he wanted to write:

"By the late 1990s, George Sauer Jr. was living in Sioux Falls, S.D., working at the Sunshine Food Stores stacking shelves by day and writing his novel by night.

"'George would talk about how he would go home and write, but, you know what, I would never see any of his writing,' said Mike Dhaemers, 55, who was Sauer’s supervisor. Dhaemers remembered him as being friendly, intelligent and interesting, but a private person. He was so private that he worked in the store for more than a year before anyone there discovered he was a former football player."

A co-worker at the store is quoted as saying, 

“'He was, without a doubt, the most intelligent and talented man I’ve ever known,' Knutson said. “'He knew and understood things from medicine and nuclear physics to classical and popular music to Saturday morning cartoons and ’50s and ’60s TV sitcoms. He was Curious George in the flesh.'”

Yet the work never materialized, nor did a single sense of place for George Sauer. He married four times and apparently struggled through life in trying to find a place to feel at home. One of his ex-wives is quoted as saying that he never saw his life as anything else but as a novelist, while adding that Sauer "had problems I couldn't solve." 

When I saw George Sauer interviewed, talking about his unfinished novel at the tail end of the DVD that accompanies the Namath NFL biography, I thought instantly about Joe Gould. There's some part of us that seems to always know that when a person has a lofty ambition we know that the enterprise will not come to be. Joseph Mitchell had enough interest in Joe Gould's Oral History to believe in its authenticity and that it would come into being someday, but what he encountered in Joe Gould were problems that he too could not understand or even solve, though Mitchell did try. What's more, having come to understand Joe Gould's actual secret, Joseph Mitchell published his last profile of him in 1964, but then never published a single story ever again before his death in 1996. He himself contracted writer's block, one almost seems to think by mere proximity to his subject. 

Still, part of me also believed that someday I would read George Sauer's book and that I would be drawn into the interior world of this mysterious figure who was my first football hero. I knew though from experience how difficult it is to write anything worth reading, not because no one will think it worth the time, but because the tale to tell is never quite the right fit from the thought to the page. Writing gives us life lessons, regardless of whether or not it is written with that intention, and so we feel there's a deep responsibility in the act. Writing reveals aspects of life that the eye, ear and our conversation cannot.

But not everything can be written as it seems it be in the mind. Life remains a constant mystery, as it has been to everyone before us and everyone to come. So the story goes unfinished for now, but it will be written someday, because it must be written someday, because all the works published in the world happen to get done somehow. You know in your heart you have what Whitman calls a verse to contribute to the powerful play of life, and it will get done someday. And maybe it will. But often, it does not.

The worst part is that Sauer was in a race against time. According to Williams, Alzheimer's ran in Sauer's family; it killed his father, and it was eventually responsible for his own death, so perhaps many of the assumptions - mine own, included - about football's role in his demise were just that. (It seems cheap and easy to reprint the piece of poetry Sauer wrote about living with the legacy of a disease that kills your mind, but read the little piece at the link to Williams' story about his father that describes how "his broken brain rattles mine.")

Namath and Sauer, in glasses

Last month when I wrote about George Sauer, I mentioned the photograph of him shaking hands with Willie Brown after a hard-fought contest on a bitter cold day in the AFL Championship of 1968. This time, I look at the photo at right, from the Times that accompanied Jack Williams' article, and I see something else. It's apparently "three weeks" before Super Bowl III, and there's Namath, sitting next to his indispensible wide receiver. Sauer wears what looks like thick glasses, looking not at all like a football player. 

It's easy to read into a picture things that don't exist at all; we describe the story that we think we see. So it looks to me like Namath wears his usual sheepish expression, while Sauer stares off into something else. Maybe they're looking at film. Maybe they're listening to Weeb. You wonder what is going through Sauer's mind, as the Jets prepare for the franchise's greatest adventure. Perhaps Sauer is preparing for his own, knowing that a win will not only secure the Super Bowl, but also his freedom from playing the game he's been obligated to play out of tradition and respect for his father. It's a game that currently stands in the way of his dreams of being himself and of telling the tales he needs to tell. But I'm probably imagining things. The picture is just that, and maybe that's enough. But it's impossible not to try to write the untold stories, even if one risks encountering the possibility that those stories will never get written. The thing is to try, as George Sauer did.

NY Jets #83 - George Sauer, RIP

George Sauer #83

The poster of George Sauer #83 in my childhood bedroom was one of the first objects over which I can remember ruminating. Mom hung it there to introduce me to football, the sport of boys and men. George Sauer is therefore the first football player I remember, and my first New York Jet. It's a 1969 Sports Illustrated poster, but the picture was taken during the 1968 season, during the Jets' 21-13 loss to Denver.

The picture is a strange amalgam of different aspects of life at Shea Stadium. It's taken from the ground level, and Sauer is catching a Namath pass somewhere in midfield. He's a lone figure on a hazy autumn day, except for Drake Garrett (#23), a rookie Denver defender arriving too late for the catch. In the background, looking off to their left, two Jets cheerleaders sit, waiting for something to cheer for. Bob Cleveland's bandstand directly behind them is adorned with green bunting. Above the band is a framed structure that was used to amplify the sound on the field, and through its rafters one can make out the image of a warehouse near Flushing Bay. The field is brown and green as a leftover from the New York Mets' season. Sauer's eye is on the pass, and he's puffing his cheeks.

Since I had the leisure of time to stare up at the poster from the vantage of either my crib or my first bed, I tried to understand the single moment captured there. How close were the band members to the field? What did they sound like? What were the girls looking at? Maybe I was using it to understand life as I had lived it so far. As a measure of what kind of sense the infant mind makes of things, I looked at George Sauer's outstretched fingers and wondered why he had mashed potatoes on his right hand. Mashed potatoes are exactly the kind of thing that children eat, and so often food ends up on a little child's hand. Mashed potatoes stick rather well to your hands.

Another erroneous
childhood observation

The fingers of Sauer's right hand are splayed out, ready for the pass, and his thumb is pointed upward in front of a flash of his white striped sleeve just behind it. As a little boy, I read the whole arrangement of sights, shapes and colors wrong, in much the way that children see reality all wrong when they first look at it. I swore he had mashed potatoes on that hand, something he had to shake off in order to do something else. I understood that. Rather than be an introduction to the world of men, the image was a way of seeing world as I was trying to understand it, which I suppose is what being a sports fan has always been for me. And I was a fan of George Sauer before I was a fan of anything else. He was on my wall, after all.

***

George Sauer and Willie Brown
in the 1968 AFL Championship

I'm working on the Infinite Jets book, and my plan was to leave wide receiver George Sauer for last. But George Sauer died of a heart attack last week after struggling with Alzheimer's disease. Suddenly the blog entry I've been planning to write for so long has become more important to write than any other. Sauer is one of the great mysteries of a great game.

Two Texans - Don Maynard and George Sauer - were the primary core of Namath's passing offense. Maynard was fast and sinewy. Sauer was graceful and fluid. The Times' obituary includes a photograph of Sauer (right) looking as if he is bobbling a pass while being covered by the great Willie Brown of Oakland, probably during the 1968 AFL Title Game. Sauer was one of the most feared receivers of his time. He was already well on his way to becoming a legend. But as many people have already pointed out in similar obituaries, George Sauer had a different plan, one over which he had been ruminating for some time before finally making the decision in 1971 to leave the NFL for good, and with it, the violent world of boys and men.

***

There's a DVD that accompanies the NFL book on Namath's life, which I own of course, and it's filled with the usual highlights of Namath's career - the great, soaring pass to Maynard in the 1968 opener against the Chiefs; the pass to Maynard to set up the winning touchdown against Oakland in the AFL Title Game. There's also his pass to George Sauer over Lenny Lyles' head in Super Bowl III which Sauer catches with a leap in the air to set up the winning field goal. The real find is at the end of the disk, a five-minute feature on Sauer that includes an interview with him. What happened to George Sauer?

The crucial thing is that he was George Sauer, Jr. He was the great son of a great University of Nebraska player from Waco, Texas - George Sauer, Sr. Born into the world of football, Sauer, Jr. felt he had no choice but to meet the expectations of the man who shaped his life. Sauer's story reads like a heavy-handed allegory out of a 1950's movie. He was given a scholarship to the University of Texas from the moment he was born - literally. Andy Barall at Fifth Down discusses this unique story, one that could never happen today:

Sauer was offered a football scholarship to the University of Texas on the day he was born. His father, George Sr., had played for the Longhorns’ coach, Dana X. Bible, at the University of Nebraska in the early ’30s....When Sauer (George, Jr.) finally decided to go to Texas, his mother showed him the letter they received from Bible all those years before. “As for George Jr.,” it read, “don’t worry. I’ve got a uniform reserved for him here (in) 1961.” “It was as though something was driving me from behind to do those things,” Sauer said.  

So he played for Darryl Royal's University of Texas squad, just as he was destined to. He had to have wondered, as many children do, if his own decisions were really just a product of his parent's expectations and designs, or if there was indeed something else inside of him, unformed, longing to come alive? Then, a few years afterwards, his father, a manager of player personnel for the New York Jets, made sure that that George the younger would play for the franchise, and so George, Jr. left Texas before his senior year and he became a Jet. He went on to be named AFL All-Pro four times.

Where does one's sense of obligation to one's parents begin and end? Sauer says that he shook hands with his father in the locker room in Miami after Super Bowl III and knew that he had fulfilled every one of his expectations, and now he hoped free himself from the life of football. It took two more seasons. It's interesting to note that after George Sr. left the Jets front office to briefly become the General Manager of the Boston Patriots, George Sauer, Jr. then left football for good the following year. As he says on the DVD segment, the original letter from Dana Bible about a scholarship at birth had stayed in his mind so long that it was eventually the thing that convinced him to abandon football altogether. From now on, he would be the captain of his own fate.

When he did leave in 1971, he wrote the following in explanation, which resonates now:

"Pro football does not do what it claims to do...It claims to teach self-discipline and responsibility, which is its most obvious contradiction. There is little real freedom. Instead the system – the power structure of the coaches and the people who run the game – works to mold you into something they can manipulate."

Obviously he echoed many of the same ideas of young people the late 60's and early 70's. But every person who trains idealistically for something will ultimately have a realization where he sees how things "really work." The most popular literary theme students always know by the time they reach me is "illusion vs. reality." If you think about it, that motif could apply to any story worth telling.

But very few people leave their work at the peak of their success with such discontent. A former colleague of mine said he left teaching because he hated the "politics" involved, as if education were supposed to be apolitical. I also happened to notice he wasn't particularly good at teaching. George Sauer was a particularly good wide receiver. More than once Don Maynard has said that he believed that George Sauer was a better receiver than he was, and it's not crazy to believe, if his career had lasted into the 70's, that Sauer would have ended up in the Hall of Fame.

But the other thing to remember about George Sauer is that he was a writer and a poet who was expected to play a game that has little use for for truth and beauty. In the DVD segment, Sauer says (in a voice that's feathered with a gentle Texas drawl) that in retirement he was laboring over a novel, one that would convey his sense of the contradictions between the promise and reality of football. I thought about how at first he must have been eager to finally bring into a work of fiction the truth about a game that had shaped his life, but not his soul.

I wonder how he felt when North Dallas Forty was published. If fiction is a retelling of fact - as it apparently was for Peter Gent of the Cowboys - then the author is compelled to relive something true to his life, and that may have been complicated for him. The Times obituary quotes John Dockery as saying that Sauer "walked away from money, from everything, because it was too painful for him." To encapsulate that pain into a work of fiction must have been a great challenge.

The novel never materialized into print that I know of, though according to the Times, Sauer wrote "several novels, plays and literary reviews." I would give anything to find something of his in print. I think how often my wife has nudged me to write what she feels would almost certainly be a bestselling novel about being a public school teacher in a time of enormous flux in the profession, and I dismiss the idea every time. First of all, it wouldn't be a bestseller. Secondly I've actually tried to write it - more times than I'd like to admit - but it never gets done.

The one novel I've ever written - unpublished, naturally - was about the city of St. Louis in 1965. As long as you don't mind the research, it's easy to write about something you've never experienced. But even through the props of fiction, it's particularly painful to bring to the surface words, thoughts and deeds that all are emblematic of your own conflicts between illusion and reality. I always wondered if Sauer felt that way, or whether it was just the vast difficulty of writing a novel that made it (if it was) a struggle for him.

In the wake of it, Sauer's life after football leaves us with lots of questions. The Times mentions that he was married "several times," but he doesn't appear to have had any children. According to Bob Wolfley in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel the Wisconsin-born Sauer became an assistant coach for Oberlin College's football team in 1973 (which is a little like being a Unitarian chaplain at the Air Force Academy, though Oberlin might have just been the right place for his kind of football). He received no pay for this position.

His Wikipedia page mentions that he lived in "St. Paul," by which we assume Minnesota and that he worked as a textbook designer. Yet he died in Westerville, in the center of Ohio. He did actually briefly return to the very same sport he called a "grotesque business" in 1974 when he played for the WFL New York Stars at old Downing Stadium, wearing #9, for whatever reason. Evan Weiner mentions on Dave Pear's Blog that news of Sauer's death and struggles with Alzheimer's comes just as players are returning to training camps, seeking to impress their coaches even at the risk of their own lives. Yet we have no indication that Sauer's disease was brought on by the hits he received in football.

***

By the time I was five, Sauer was replaced on my wall by a poster of John Riggins, who was then replaced by Wesley Walker in 1980. George Sauer, the poster, was dispensed into the bins of garbage accompanying our transitions from one age to another, from Queens, to the Island, or maybe from the Island to the little town 30 miles north of the city we moved to by the time the Jets finally made it back into the playoffs in 1981.

After I first watched the five minute George Sauer segment on the Namath DVD, I immediately went on eBay and bought another copy of the Sports Illustrated poster that I once kept in my room as a little boy. When the new version of the old poster arrived at my place in Philadelphia, I hung it up on the wall in my classroom, alongside the pictures of famous writers from many ages past. When students ask about him, I tell them that the player in the picture was someone unique, a football player who was also a writer. One student recently said that it wasn't that unique and that Tim Tebow had recently published a book. I just shook my head. I'm more than happy to explain the difference.

But the picture that stays with me is the one to the left, of George Sauer and Willie Brown, the same men in the picture above, bidding farewell and good luck to each other at the end of the AFL Title Game. Sauer believed that the game of football did not engender a sense of comradery or brotherhood but rather demanded a dehumanizing conformity from its players. So this is the image I like to think of when I imagine George Sauer. At the end a bitterly fought AFL Title matchup, he and the man who has been covering him all game now greet each other as colleagues and equals. There still lingers in this picture a sense that the men who play a violent game have more in common with each other than not. According to Wolfley, when Sauer left the Jets in 1971, Weeb Ewbank bemoaned, "He will be missed very much, both as George Sauer the player and George Sauer the person." As an Infinite Jet, we honor him as both, too.