Posted on 10/12/2010 5:13:00 PM PDT by BluesDuke
Maury Allen, the longtime New York Post sportswriter, who lost his battle with lymphoma 3 October, had the peculiar fortune of priviness to and then shying away from breaking the story of the no-questions-asked weirdest and most troubling trade in baseball history.
The traders, in essence, were Suzanne Kekich and Marilyn Peterson. Wives, respectively, of Yankee pitchers Mike Kekich and Fritz Peterson. Allen himself had had a serious whiff of trade wind in July 1972, on a Yankee off day, when he hosted a little house party and among the guests were the Petersons and the Kekiches, the latter present at Fritz Peterson's request.
To provide a little background, Peterson had become Allen's best friend among Yankee players, after Peterson's buddy Jim Bouton---by then reduced to mopup relief and spot starts, after several seasons' arm trouble---was allowed to escape to the nascent Seattle Pilots (the gestating Milwaukee Brewers) in the 1968-69 American League expansion draft. Kekich---by Allen's description somewhat aloof and somewhat self-promoting, with a taste for adventurism (he liked to sky-dive, scuba-dive, fly gliders, and ride high-powered motorcycles in his off-duty time)---wasn't someone to whom Allen felt he could get close, though he forged a close friendship with Peterson.
What surprised Allen and a lot of partygoers (including Miracle Met Ron Swoboda) was the wives. Marilyn Peterson, whose trademark to that point was an habtiual blonde wig over her long, light brown hair, showed up sans wig but with flowing long hair, looking girlish and innocent, begging not to become the center of attention she became, anyway. Suzanne Kekich, athletically sexy and strikingly brunette, seemed in Allen's recollection to hanker for the spotlight from the moment she appeared.
The party went hitchless otherwise. Allen and his wife, Janet, cleaned up the aftermath, during which Allen spotted something through a closing curtain: both the Petersons and the Kekiches were still outside the house, talking with apparent severity, an hour after the party dismissed.
The following January, boy did Peterson have a story for Allen to tell: that previous July night, the two couples were talking particulars of the trade soon to be heard around the world---Peterson had moved out of his home and into Marilyn Peterson's, while Kekich had moved out of his and into Suzanne Kekiches. They had been living under terms of the trade since October 1972.
"We wanted you to write it," Peterson told Allen soberly enough, "because you won't make it sound dirty."
Allen's style included a remarkable knack for making things look anything but dirty. He was perhaps the last of the New York sportswriting breed of the early 1960s who came to be known as the Chipmunks, reporters who dug in, dug deep, dug up a few more details of game play and game life among ballplayers than hit the press customarily to that point; a similar school had cropped up in Philadelphia and was festering in Boston (where the baseball press wasn't exactly renowned for subtlety in the first place).
More personal, more literary, far less subtle or logrolling, Allen was probably the breed's most sober practitioner. He could have been given the scoop on John F. Kennedy's rapacious sex life and somehow written it unsalaciously.
Hard evidence? Smoke out a copy of Bo: Pitching and Wooing, Allen's 1975 biography of Bo Belinsky, perhaps baseball's most original and unapologetic playboy athlete in the early 1960s. A longtime minor league rake before he showed up as a Los Angeles Angels rookie in 1962, Belinsky parlayed a rookie no-hitter (his fourth straight major league win) into a Hollywood nightlife dazzling in its companionships. His wild ride crashed two years later, when he brawled with Los Angeles sportswriter Braven Dyer in his hotel room.
Belinsky was purged from the Angels in August 1964, even though he led the team in earned run average at the time of the purge. He went from there to wandering from the Phillies to the Astros to the Pirates to the Cardinals to the Reds, his fame dissipating into a few pleasant memories and a lot of tacky jokes, his career ending as a little-used Reds spare part in early 1970 (after he'd busted it to make the team in the first place), his life spiraling (by the time Allen wrote it up) into a wintry Chicago apartment, a bid to reconcile his first marriage (to a former Playboy Playmate of the Year), and a job running his little daughter's Day Care center.
Allen managed to write Belinsky's rakish story with dignity even through the laughs, even through some exposures of baseball's seedier operating practises, even through some of his more salacious episodes. It is a pity that Allen couldn't have gotten to write an update addressing the rest of Belinsky's peripatetic life---the marriage ending, a second marriage likewise broken, hitting rock bottom as an alcoholic, resurrecting himself first as an alcohol counselor in Hawaii and then a car promoter in Las Vegas, before his death of cancer-related heart failure in 2001, a year before his former Angels finally won a World Series.
However well Fritz Peterson thought of Allen's likeliness to write even such a bizarre story as the Peterson-Kekich trade, Allen by his own admission (in All Roads Lead to October: Boss Steinbrenner's 25-Year Reign Over the New York Yankees) couldn't bring himself to do it. He tried and failed to convince Peterson that the story should be kept strictly between the two swapped couples. Then, he excused himself by going to spring training with the Mets, instead, convincing Peterson to give the story to UPI reporter Milton Richman.
When New York Daily News columnist Dick Young wasn't ripping both pitchers new ones, Commissioner Bowie Kuhn was hauling the two pitchers into his offices to "discuss" the trade. "Why? Nobody knew," Allen eventually wrote, wryly. "Maybe he considered it public adultery, and baseball, of course, had never had any experience with adultery."
And the Yankees had never had any such experience, of course. If you didn't count that this time the participants wanted to take it public as it was happening.
Babe Ruth's passion for entertaining hookers in his hotel suites or their brothels were good for laughs around a sporting press he had wrapped around his fat pinkie who weren't about to write them up. Joe DiMaggio's passion for Hollywood or Broadway starlets could be written about without the intimate details, considering he wasn't even close to the only baseball player with an wink for such starlets who were willing to wink back. Just about every Yankee on earth, and every sportswriter on their trail, was only too willing to cover for Mickey Mantle's and Joe Pepitone's sexual hyperactivity.
Pepitone pulled the covers off his own self only after his career ended, in his self-lacerating memoir Joe, You Coulda Made Us Proud . . . two years after the Peterson-Kekich swap, and four after Jim Bouton's Ball Four made clear enough that baseball players' lives didn't begin with the first pitch or end with the final out. (Jim Brosnan only revealed the particular details of their game lives in The Long Season and Pennant Race, though Brosnan's revelations were considered somewhat jarring in 1959 and 1961.)
Somewhere in between Ball Four and Joe, You Coulda Made Us Proud, Allen wrote a dignified biography of Joe DiMaggio (Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio? The Story of America's Last Hero), one that would be criticised in years to come for having left a lot of DiMaggio's sadder and sometimes seedier sides unexamined. He would also come to write a sober history of the Steinbrenner Yankees (All Roads Lead to October), an affectionate if unflinching pair of books about the 1969 Miracle Mets (The Amazing Mets and the two-decades-on followup, After the Miracle), and no-compromise biographies of both Jackie Robinson and the Dodger outfielder who once launched a petition to keep him from coming up to the parent club, Dixie Walker.
Somewhere also between Bouton's and Pepitone's revelations, Allen also finally did write the article Fritz Peterson had hoped he'd write and perhaps no few among the morally self-righteous feared, a dignified examination for the Ladies' Home Journal, allowing that there was a certain indignity about the whole thing. He let each trading partner tell his or her side of the story as matter-of-factly as they might have described a shared meal.
The story as Allen wrote it included a fact often forgotten amidst the maelstrom. Without once suggesting the deal was smart, wise, or moral ("We may have to call off Family Day," then Yankee president Lee MacPhail said at one point during the hysteria), Allen made a point of letting one and all see that the children involved stayed with their mothers. And, that Marilyn Peterson (whose inability to rekindle her husband's sexual interest in his sexually eager wife, for suspicion that his interest turned toward the less sexual [it was said] Suzanne Kekich, may have provoked the trade inadvertently in the first place) was the most reluctant trading partner in what proved, really, a husband swap.
Let the record show that Fritz Peterson and Suzanne Kekich remain married to this day, raising four children of their own in the interim as well as hers with Mike Kekich. Let the record show further that Mike Kekich and Marilyn Peterson lasted about as long as either pitcher's career lasted following the swap. (Peterson ended up having the more respectable career; he'd been a 20-game winner in 1970 and retired with a 3.30 earned run average, a 1.19 WHIP, and---yes, you can look it up---the all-time lowest earned run average in the now-former Yankee Stadium.)
The former Mrs. Peterson, who once told Allen she wanted only a man who wanted her for her, found precisely that in due course, meeting and marrying a New Jersey physician with whom she settled comfortably enough.
Peterson eventually became a casino boat operator and, in due course, an evangelist. ("I cannot condone gambling now because of my religious beliefs, but those days were fun," he once said of his casino work.) He also got himself busted for DUI once, in 1995, prompting his wife to clip a photograph of him leaving a Chicago calaboose, framing it and hanging it in plain sight to remind him of his foolishness.
Kekich left baseball with a 4.59 lifetime ERA, a losing record, and recollections of precocious talent compromised by inconsistency. He eventually decided medical school wasn't for him and, after remarrying himself, became an insurance adjustor.
The Peterson-Kekich trade compromised Allen's friendship with Peterson to a certain extent over the years. But nothing could sunder Allen's reputation as a dignified Chipmunk. He wasn't the most memorable of prose stylists. He wasn't as punchy as Dick Young, as earthily elegant as Jimmy Breslin (from Breslin's days as a sportswriter), or as elegantly wry as Red Smith.
But for telling a story with dignity and sobriety, no matter how strange the story (and there was no shortage of strange to come from the Steinbrenner Yankees), it was as if---should your story be extraterrestrial, transdimensional, or just plain troublesome---you sort of hoped Maury Allen would tell it for you.
He grew up a Dodger fan in Brooklyn. As a teenager, he wept and refused to come out for dinner after Bobby Thomson sent Ralph Branca's second fastball into the left field seats. He died a day before the anniversary of that game, set, and pennant-winning bomb, just months after Thomson went to his reward.
Maybe Thomson greeted Allen with a hug and an apology.
Art Buchwald was uglier.
I didn’t know Mr. Allen died.
I’ve read too many of his columns to even begin to count.
RIP
I did a double take on that bit of info. :)
Me, I thought Aaaaaaaaaaalllllllllllvinnnnnnnnnnn! was the first Chipmunk . . . ;)
I didn’t know Mr. Allen died.So did I. As well as those of Red Smith. Grew up reading them both. Read the Allen books I mentioned in the article, too.I’ve read too many of his columns to even begin to count.
RIP
He was one of the good ones.
He died of the same illness that claimed his friend and book subject Roger Maris, incidentally . . .
"Peterson had moved out of his home and into Marilyn Peterson's, while Kekich had moved out of his and into Suzanne Kekiches."Imagine the double take Maury Allen did when he got that fateful phone call from Fritz Peterson . . .I did a double take on that bit of info. :)
That was exactly my reaction to reading the headline.
Can you give a reader’s digest on the above? Otherwise I’ll stroll on by.
It depends on what you want condensed. (If it’s soup, see Mr. Campbell. ;) )
Well as I thought for a moment, I note that this seems to be a very New York sort of article.
Wow, I was just about to ping you to this thread when I did a quick looksee in case you were already pinged. What a great story, very nicely written.
Good work!
So prescient ... you can't make this stuff up.
Wow, I was just about to ping you to this thread when I did a quick looksee in case you were already pinged. What a great story, very nicely written. Good work!Thank you! ;) I actually almost missed the boat---I wasn't aware of Allen's death until this afternoon, and whipped this one out quickly . . .
Well as I thought for a moment, I note that this seems to be a very New York sort of article.Well, since a) I am a native New Yorker (though I haven't lived there since 1994); and, b) Mr. Allen was a New York sportwriter, I can't see how this could have come out to be, say, a very Chicago or San Francisco or Boston or Detroit or Philadelphia kind of article . . . ;)
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