Free Sam's Legacy by Jay Neugeboren

kid Alcindor, all seven-foot-three-and-a-quarter inches of him, was showing a lot of class, and you could still get a good point spread there. There were others: Monty Stratton—Jimmy Stewart played him in the movie—who’d shot his leg off in a hunting accident and had returned to pitch for the Indians, and Lou Brissie, who’d pitched hand grenades into Jap bunkers and had come back to pitch for the Red Sox with a leg made out of steel plate, and a guy named Bert Shepard, with a wooden leg, who’d pitched in one game for the Senators in 1945. And others: Herb Score, hit in the eye by a line drive; Eddie Waitkus, shot by a love-crazed girl in his hotel room; and the immortal Lou Gehrig, the Iron Man, playing his heart out, building the longest consecutive game-playing string in history, and knowing he had a fatal sickness all the time. His disease had been like muscular dystrophy, only different—Flo had given Sam the technical term several times. Ezzard Charles, the former heavyweight champion, had the same thing; Sam had seen him in a wheelchair, during last year’s telethon.
    â€œI consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.” That was what Gehrig had said when they’d given him a farewell at Yankee Stadium—Sam had heard it on a recording—and he would have given anything to have been alive then, to have been there, to have seen Lou and Babe Ruth hugging each other. There wasn’t a dry eye in the stadium, since every fan had known just what Lou knew when he had said what he did. Sure. That was what it was all about.
    Sam left the apartment. Down the corridor, on the other side of the banister, the door was cracked open and the little girl—Muriel—was staring at Sam with her large brown eyes. That was a bitch, being brought up by your grandmother. When he’d first moved in, before Muriel was born, Sam had said hello a few times to the grandmother, Mrs. Reardon, but she’d only grunted. Thin as a rail, bent over, one hand on her back, the other always hiding something, as if… Sam started down the stairs. He’d seen Muriel’s mother coming in at two or three in the morning: a first-class floozy, with thick make-up, high heels four inches from the floor, a huge pair of knockers, orange-red hair. The word was that she was working steady now, living with a small-time gangster in the Pigtown section. Sure. Things were rough all over—even the subways were in a hole.
    Okay, too: Ben had had it rough—he granted that—working his guts out for over thirty years, wearing out the seat of his pants driving a hack around Brooklyn and Queens. The guy had been made for better things, that was what Sam believed: with his voice, and his intelligence…and then, at the end, selling his medallion and sinking all his money into that stupid school…. Well, maybe it hadn’t been stupid—Sam had honestly thought it might work out, a fifty-fifty chance. Ben had been able to get bit parts now and then on radio programs, and during the war he’d given his time free, announcing. As far as Sam could tell—he tried to be honest with himself about it—he never, even now, resented the money he’d put into the school: Ace Broadcasting School, Ben Berman, Executive Director . Even with the way things had worked out—Ben falling sick, and the hospital, and having to move out of the Linden Boulevard place, and the bankruptcy—his father had had a right—that was the word—he’d had a right to that school.
    Only a madman could drive a hack in New York. His father had said something about mystery— that , in Sam’s opinion, was the true mystery: how Ben had rung up fares for over thirty years without winding up in the funny house. Sure. Even though he’d had only eight months at the school before the ceiling fell in, Sam knew the eight months had meant a lot to his father.
    When he’d