The Best Source Is Always The Horse's Mouth

Yes, Willie Horton really did quit the Tigers for a couple of days.

And to hear Herb Brown tell it, bagels and lox diplomacy never happened when he coached the Pistons.

Yes, Earl Cureton said, Isiah Thomas brought him out of retirement in Toronto to help babysit the kid players.

No, Bob Page says, he was never banned from the Silverdome press box. But he was kicked out of Billy Martin's office once.

And Jim Northrup swears Curt Flood wouldn't have caught his triple in the '68 World Series even if he hadn't tripped over his own feet in center field.

I know these things to be true, because I practiced a technique that I believe they teach you in Journalism 101: I asked them.

Wayne Gretzky knew of his wife's involvement in Rick Tocchet's alleged gambling ring because he was wiretapped talking about it, according to that always convenient source who speaks on the condition of anonymity. Mike Martz's hiring as Lions offensive coordinator was a done deal the week of the Super Bowl, because a source close to the situation said so. And Dewey was to defeat Truman in the 1948 presidential election, because someone who passed himself off as reliable whispered into a Chicago newspaper's ear.

But I have yet to find a better source than the mouth of the horse.


NOT from the horse's mouth


It's funny how the people who want to talk the most are the ones who know the least. Television shows are filled with those types. So are the bylines of sports columns in newspapers throughout America. Talk radio is positively crawling with them.

But the ones who know best, who possess the truth in their brain's microprocessor, are hardly ever on the record. Lots of times it's because they won't talk. Other times it's because they're never asked, because our fine journalists are busy tracking down their Deep Throat knockoffs.

My questions to the folks leading off this column might not have been Pulitzer Prize material, but they were mine and I was curious about certain things so I asked, to get the real skinny. And then I knew, and now you know -- so you too can sleep well tonight.

I had heard that Tigers legend Horton got so frustrated and angry with his own performance, the treatment from the fans, and the team's play that he briefly quit the team and dropped out of sight for a day or so. This was sometime in the mid 1960's.

"Yeah, that's true," Horton told me when I hit him cold with it. It was before a taping of Bob Zahari's "The Sportsdesk" back in the early 90's, when I worked downriver as a local cable TV producer/director. "Yeah, I got really mad and walked out," Horton said.

Did he rip his uniform off and toss it in the trash can, as I had read?

"No," Horton said with a chuckle. "Nothing that dramatic."

Fine.

Horton quit, but no jersey-ripping


I had always been led to believe that Pistons coach Herb Brown, circa 1976-77, experiencing a great deal of difficulty with his petulant point guard Kevin Porter, resorted to an attempt by team General Manager Oscar Feldman at brokering peace. This attempt involved a brunch at Feldman's house, attended by Brown and Porter. Bagels and lox were supposedly on the menu, a new kind of diplomacy.

So, what about it, Herb? I started an interview with Brown with the bagels and lox question a couple of years ago.

"No, I don't remember that," Herb Brown told me over the telephone after a pregnant pause. "I might have been over to Oscar's house once with my kids, but..."

I was incredulous. I was certain this was not some sort of Pistons urban legend. Jerry Green, one of my idols, had even written about it in a book.

"That never happened, as far as I'm concerned," Brown said. Then he said, without context, "Kevin Porter....yeah....."

Okey-dokey.

When Isiah Thomas was done as a player and decided to be a bull in a china shop as a basketball executive, his first NBA front office gig was running the Toronto Raptors. In the 1996-97 season, Thomas called upon two of his former teammates and ex-University of Detroit Titans -- the very retired John Long and the recently retired Earl Cureton -- to lace up the sneakers once more. Long was past 40 years old. Cureton wasn't far behind him. Long hadn't been in the NBA for several years at that point. Cureton was maybe a season and a half done as a player. The scuttlebutt, not confirmed, was that the two veterans were called upon because the Raptors rookie coach, Darrell Walker (another former Piston), needed help in the discipline department with his young team.

"Is this true?," I asked Cureton in another one of those phone conversations. This was shortly after he signed with the Raptors. "Are you guys there in a babysitting capacity?"

I gave Earl Cureton his first job as a basketball analyst, back in the days of Barden Cablevision, when I was the program director. I hired Cureton to provide analysis during our telecasts of Titans basketball from Calihan Hall. So I figured the least he could do was answer my questions honestly. And he did.

"Yeah...Isiah thinks Darrell needs some help, especially at the end of the bench," Cureton told me. "You've got 20, 21 year-old millionaires, and Isiah wants John and me to keep tabs on them and keep them in line.

"Plus," he added with a smile in his voice, "we can still play a little bit."

The former Titan/Piston players didn't last very long -- maybe a couple of months -- as Isiah Thomas' glorified hall monitors. But that's absolutely why they were hired, more so than their waning basketball playing skills.

Cureton: benchwarmer/babysitter

End of discussion.

I hadn't seen Bob Page, the old channel 7 and radio sports broadcaster, in about 15 years when I ran into him at the Super Bowl XL Media Party at the Fox Theatre January 31. It was fortuitous that I saw him, because I had a question that was bothering me, deep down from within.

"Weren't you kicked out of the Silverdome's press box?," I asked Page, now mostly retired in Florida and New York. There was some commotion about Bob Page's criticism of the Lions in general, but specifically about how he felt the team's presentation of the play-by-play to its media denizens in the press box was slanted toward the guys in Honolulu Blue and Silver. This was in the mid-to-late 80's.

He was beside himself. "WHAT? No...but I was kicked out of Billy Martin's office once."

"Who wasn't?", I said.

But another mystery solved.

Northrup: a bone to pick -- but not with me

Back in 1998, Jim Northrup was perturbed. Not with me, but with people in general.

"Everyone thinks the only reason Curt Flood didn't catch my triple was because he stumbled," Northrup complained to me when he hosted a sports collectibles show on Comcast Cable with writer Jim Hawkins. It was Northrup's hit that broke open Game 7 of the 1968 World Series and enabled the Tigers to complete their comeback from a 1-3 Series hole. And it is widely believed that it was Cardinals centerfielder Flood's lack of good footwork that prevented him from catching Northrup's drive to deep right centerfield in the seventh inning.

Hogwash, says Northrup. "I hit that ball so far and on such a line that Flood could never have caught it, whether he stumbled or not," he told me, as if I was the one who was contradicting him.

"I believe you," I assured him.

So there.

You see? All you have to do is ask -- the best source of them all. The horse is the source of course, of course.