AMERICA AT LARGE / George Kimball: Shortly after his inauguration as the 40th President of the United States, Ronald Reagan paid the traditional courtesy call to the office of the Speaker of the House. As Tip O'Neill showed the newly-elected leader of the free world about the premises, Reagan expressed his admiration for a handsome antique desk.
O'Neill replied that his desk had once belonged to Grover Cleveland. "Oh," Reagan brightened, "I once played him in the movies."
The stunned O'Neill took a moment to digest this, and then explained to Reagan that in the film to which he was referring (1952's The Winning Team) he had actually played a baseball player called Grover Cleveland Alexander, who was named after the 19th-century president and former owner of the desk in question.
"I knew then," Tip revealed later, "that the nation was in trouble."
When Ronald Wilson Reagan's death was announced on Saturday afternoon, 120,139 had gathered at New York's Belmont Park for what turned out to be premature celebration of Smarty Jones' anticipated victory in the Belmont Stakes. Although the 93-year-old Reagan's passing was hardly unanticipated, its revelation was accompanied by a stunned silence that would be matched a few hours later when 36 to 1 longshot Birdstone upset the favourite, extending the Triple Crown drought to 26 years.
Reagan, who will be buried tomorrow, ran track in his youth and was a swimmer good enough to earn a job as a lifeguard, but he was not, by his own admission, much of a baseball player, despite his enduring love for that sport.
"I was usually the last boy chosen for my side," he once recalled of his early days in pickup games. But he was athletically gifted enough to be a model pupil when he was coached by Hall of Fame pitcher (and, later, Yankees' manager) Bob Lemon for his role in The Winning Team.
"He was very graceful and easy to teach," recalled Lemon. "I had this little quirk in my own motion where I did a little hop after I released the ball so I would be in position to field a ball hit back at me. By the time they started shooting the movie, Reagan was doing exactly the same thing."
In one of Reagan's earlier roles he portrayed the star-crossed Notre Dame halfback George Gipp, whose dramatic deathbed scene would follow the future President for the rest of his life. The dying player whispers to Pat O'Brien, playing the legendary coach Knute Rockne: "Some time, Rock, when the team is up against it, when things are wrong and the breaks are beating the boys, tell them to go in there with all they've got and win just one for the Gipper. I don't know where I'll be then, Rock, but I'll know about it, and I'll be happy."
Eight years later, Rockne famously recalled Gipp's final words in a half-time speech, inspiring his team to a come-from-behind win over Army which served as the film's climactic moment. And "winning one for the Gipper" became a rallying cry of Reagan's political campaigns.
Hefting a football during a 1988 Rose Garden ceremony honouring the Super Bowl champions, Reagan startled his guests by ordering Washington Redskins wide receiver Ricky Sanders to run a pass pattern. The 77-year-old President proceeded to hit Sanders with a perfectly-thrown spiral.
In his early years, long before he became a matinee idol, one of Reagan's first jobs had been as a sportscaster, recreating Chicago Cubs games for a radio station in Des Moines, Iowa. This would have been long before the era of network radio feeds. Reagan and a colleague would sit in the studio and "announce" the game from a pitch-by-pitch transcription that came across the telegraph wire. One fateful afternoon in 1934 Reagan was broadcasting a Cubs game against the St Louis Cardinals. The score was tied 0-0 in the ninth inning when the telegraph wire went dead. Reagan already had a pitch in mid-delivery when this mishap occurred, so he ad-libbed by announcing that the batter, Billy Jurges, had fouled the pitch off. "I had Jurges hit another foul," recalled Reagan in his memoirs.
"Then I had him foul one that only missed being a home run by a foot. I had him foul one back in the stands and took up some time describing the two lads that got in a fight over the ball. I kept on having him foul balls until I was setting a record for a ball player hitting successive foul balls and I was getting more than a little scared. Just then my operator started typing. When he passed me the paper I started to giggle - it said: 'Jurges popped out on the first ball pitched.'" The summer after he left the presidency, Reagan sat in with Vin Scully on the telecast of the 1989 Major League All-Star game and acquitted himself admirably.
Reagan didn't get elected just because his predecessor, Jimmy Carter, engineered a controversial boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics (we were upset that the Russians had invaded Afghanistan to put down the Taliban uprising, remember?), but he did inherit the fruits of that action. The 1984 Los Angeles Games, which came on his watch and over whose opening ceremonies he presided, turned out to be a travesty, with half the world staying away in retaliation for America's misguided boycott four years earlier.
Ironically, the former actor, who rose to political prominence on the coattails of red-baiting McCarthyism, wound up presiding over the meltdown of the Cold War. He delighted in relating the possibly apocryphal tale of a conversation with Mikhail Gorbachev, in which he told the Soviet Premier: "In America, people can stand outside the White House and shout 'Ronald Reagan is a bum!' Gorbachev, according to Reagan, replied "Is the same in Russia. Anyone can stand outside the Kremlin and shout 'Ronald Reagan is a bum'."
