SNAPSHOTS FROM THEGARDEN by Joan Murray
Because my father worked uniformed security at Madison Square Garden, I unofficially got in free from the early ’50s through the early ’70s, and here is what I found:
The Spinning Lights
I must have been five when I first stepped inside, following my father because he knew the way. He was taking me to “The Garden” – though it didn’t look like any “garden” I’d ever seen. It was huge and mysterious, sort of like church, but bigger and not boring. And it was better than heaven since I could see it with my eyes. I’m sure my mother was there, and I must have been aware there were other people too – I would have stepped across their feet on the way to my seat. Yet when I picture that first time, it was quiet and dark, as if no one else was there.
But then a single light appeared on the far side of the arena and began to spin. And in an instant, thousands of other lights appeared and began spinning too. No faces, no voices. Only small rectangular flashlights on thin plastic cords, spinning and spinning as if life itself depended on it. All the grown‑ups seem to have disappeared, and without a word, the rest of us began aiming our lights at each other: you shining on me, me shining on you, to say the best thing anyone in the dark can ever hear: You’re not alone. I’m here too.
Maybe something was going on in the arena below. Maybe the management wanted us to believe that the reason for all our spinning was to make sure that whoever was down there – say, an acrobat or a skater – wouldn’t fall. Maybe they had arranged it to add excitement and audience participation, as if our spinning were a magic trick, like clapping our hands so a fairy wouldn’t die. But we knew in our guts that whatever force we were creating was much bigger than that.
Sitting so close together and spinning with all that frenzy in the dark, I’m sure some kids must have whacked each other, yet I don’t remember anyone wailing. I think we were feeling like God must have felt on the final night of creation. Our arms were tired, our mouths were dry, we would have loved to stop and rest, but we were hypnotized by the whirling of the light, and along the way, we had become light itself, shining out of ourselves and onto each other.
Yet when the houselights suddenly came up, we stopped – all of us stopped cold – and we didn’t talk about it after. All we did was take our flashlights home and hang them on our bedposts, and when we noticed them a month or two later, they’d be dead. But our spinning was never about the flashlights. It was about coming together like a thousand birds in flight. And nothing that came later that night could be better than that. Yet when they dimmed the houselights again, all they said was, “Sit back and enjoy the show.”
The Final Girl
Every year she’d be back – like robins, or thunder, or the leaves turning color. And when it was winter, we’d go down to The Garden to see her again: the girl who couldn’t catch up.
The Ice Capades came gliding into town with a predictable array of wonders: Big-name stars from the Winter Olympics thrilling us with flip jumps and double axels. And pairs skaters, skimming over the dark frozen surface within their own mobile spotlights. And Freddie Trinkler, “the funniest man on ice,” tickling us with his Chaplinesque tricks and pratfalls.
There was also a troupe of teenage girls with lovely faces and curvy shapes, all of them confident, skilled skaters – except for one. What they performed was a Busby Berkeley-type routine that began with four girls racing from the four corners of the arena, to link arms at the center and begin to spin – slowly at first, then a little faster, and faster still, until the next four came streaking across the ice to grab another girl’s hand and link up at the center.
And as each new group of four linked up, another four would appear to take up the charge until we could see that an X was forming – its four arms getting longer and longer, and the distance between them growing farther and farther, and the speed of the thing going faster and faster until they seemed to be headed for disaster. But my worst fears were reserved for the last four girls: What if that girl misses her connection and slams into the boards? What if that one can’t stop her momentum and flies into the stands? Yet, one by one, they made it – except for the final girl.
She was just a girl like me, only ten years older and a lot prettier, trying desperately to grab another girl’s hand. How could the management put her through that every year? Didn’t they know by now she wasn’t up to it? It never occurred to me that they gave her the “clean‑up spot” deliberately, because she was the slowest girl and would add anxiety and suspense to our excitement. And it never-ever occurred to me that she might be the fastest girl of all and was in on the management’s ruse. But how could that be, if she were just a girl like me? No, she had to be in genuine peril. So I kept pushing away the thought that she would make it in the end. Just the way she did last year, and the year before that. And when she finally caught hold of another girl’s hand, and slipped her arm around the other girl’s back, and began her first rotation, I cheered myself silly. Just the way I’d do the next year, and the year after that.
The Gods of Mayhem
I knew other kids loved them, but as I watched them throwing things, breaking things, and whacking each other, I didn’t laugh. For me, The Garden was a place of mysteries, thrills, and daring feats. But clowns were about mayhem. They were irrational, uncontrollable, and unashamedly violent. If I’d been caught doing the things they did, I’d have been smacked. And why should I be impressed if twenty of them could squeeze into a car and ride around for thirty seconds and pour out again to cause trouble for someone, even if it was only a clown policeman?
Did that mean I was a sappy kid? No, I was a savvy little street kid, who distrusted people who might mess with me. Yet if I had been sappy, I probably would have loved Emmet Kelly, the sad-eyed tramp clown who was a Ringling superstar. Every day when I’d go out to play in the parks near Yankee Stadium, my mother would say, “Stay away from the tramps!” Yet the people at The Garden couldn’t get enough of Emmet Kelly, especially his trick of trying to sweep a spotlight off the floor. To me, it wasn’t funny – it was like laughing at a chained dog who couldn’t reach its bowl. I think what people enjoyed most was feeling sorry for him, which probably made them feel better about themselves. Maybe that’s why the tramp clown is such an enduring character.
But when I was small, I didn’t think clowns were “playing characters.” I believed they were a separate ethnic group, and if two clowns married, their children would be clowns. Yet I knew a kid clown might be born accidentally into an ordinary family – the way Groucho Marx had a brother who was a clown. It didn’t take me long to realize that clowns weren’t “real,” yet I continued to believe that women clowns were women. But when I reached adolescence, my father told me that the women clowns were men who liked to dress as women, and in the circus, they could wear dresses and wigs, and high-heeled shoes. It seemed weird and sort of sad that they had to go through all the trouble of acting like clowns, just so they could dress like women, and then go home and act like ordinary men.
The Serene Grotesques
The circus at The Garden didn’t have a “freak show.” What it had was a “sideshow”: an animal menagerie with a showcase of human oddities, and each spring, I’d ask my mother if we could go inside. “When you’re older,” she’d say. And one year I was older – so old, in fact, that my mother didn’t need to go to The Garden with me. I was ten and took the subway with my best friend, Kathy, and we met my father there.
My father was already on duty as a Special Cop in The Garden’s uniformed security force, which handled crowd and safety issues. I felt so proud to see him in his uniform, looking like a real cop, except he had no gun. Nowadays, the Specials wear blazers to convey a mellow, upscale atmosphere – and their families no longer get in free. But back then, my father would lead us to a section of the arena where a red-jacketed usher would show us to our seats. Either they were seats that hadn’t sold, or whose corporate ticket holders typically were no-shows. My father would tip the usher and leave for his post – just before the lights would dim and the show would begin. And after the show, he would take us home.
But that particular night, before anything else, Kathy and I would get to see the sideshow. We’d been picturing the kind of freaks we knew from the Ripley’s Believe It or Not feature in the Sunday funnies: people like the Turtle Girl, the Mule-Faced Woman, and Schlitzie the Pinhead. But by the time Kathy and I arrived, the most cruelly exploitative human attractions (the ones that linger in your mind in a mixture of fascination, pity and revulsion) were no longer there.
As a result, most of the human attractions we saw were voluntary oddities: people who abused themselves for money. They were freaky people, but not freaks in the old congenital ways, and we could stare at them freely, unlike the disabled people on the streets, whom our mothers told us not to offend by staring. So, at our leisure, we studied the Tattooed Man as he sat on his platform with his skin so covered by birds and animals, he himself was essentially invisible. Yet the most entertaining part of our encounter was what Kathy and I whispered to each other – things like, “Does he have it on his penis too?”
To us, there was nothing entertaining about the fire-eater or the sword-swallower. We believed their intention was to make us gag, and we refused to give them the satisfaction of seeing us stare at them for long. So we quickly moved on to check out the Fat Lady. Back then, kind people used to say that obesity was due to a “glandular condition,” but my modestly plump mother said her own condition was due to Hershey’s Kisses. We therefore had no sympathy for the Fat Lady, but saw her as a selfish, supersize glutton – an impression underscored by her being seated beside the Human Skeleton, who looked dangerously in need of something to eat. Yet as we studied his knobby physique, we began to wonder if he was starving himself for the money.
But the Tallest Man was different from the rest. As young as we were, we understood he had a disease that had made him go higher and higher like a runaway balloon. All he could do was stand tall and smile, as if to say his towering body wasn’t a problem. But I knew better and decided what to do with the “spending money” my mother had given me: I put my quarter in his money box, and took a ring from his other one. Then he reached down to shake my hand. It was so unsettling, not just because his hand was so enormous, but because shaking hands was such a grown‑up thing to do. But I reached up anyway, hoping he’d let go quickly. I already knew I’d never wear his ring – it was way too big, even for my father’s big toe. But the ring wasn’t for wearing. It was a souvenir so I wouldn’t forget him. As if I could.
Yet the most unforgettable person we saw that day was a normal-size woman with platinum hair like Marilyn Monroe’s. She was standing on a platform in a sparkly white leotard that was molded to show off her breasts and her crotch. It was the kind of costume you might see on a woman riding an elephant, but this woman was handling snakes. We weren’t interested in the snakes or what she was doing with them, because when we looked up, what we saw was blood dripping from her crotch. We were ten years old and we had heard about this phenomenon, and here it was – right before our eyes in the sideshow.
The Animals of Eden
Maybe kids from Long Island and New Jersey got excited by the sideshow’s exotic animals, but living in the Bronx with a world-famous zoo, Kathy and I had seen so many that we raced by them without a glance. That left us a chunk of time before the circus would begin, and by chance, we noticed a roped-off area at the rear of the exhibit space, and slipped inside. It was narrow, dark and empty, yet smelled appallingly of animal waste, but as we ventured deeper, we came face to face with an animal: a solitary black panther resting on straw in a wagon cage. It showed no menace, not even interest, as we stood before it, staring. It lay panting with its head erect and looked so noble yet pitiful it mesmerized me then, and haunts me still.
We had no idea why the panther had been left there, and later during the show, we looked for it in vain when a spotted leopard and four tigers entered the caged center ring to be tamed. How else could a leopard learn how to sit up like an obedient dog? How else would a tiger know how to leap through a ring of fire? But it wasn’t the animals we were meant to admire, it was the tamer: Wasn’t he brave, with his gun and his chair, or cracking his whip in the air – to remind the beasts that if they didn’t obey him, he might have to strike them, even though he loved them?
The circus also had exotic humans who did breathtaking tricks – like the aerialist who dangled from the rafters by her teeth; and the human cannonball who blasted across three rings; and the juggler who rode a unicycle on a rope as he kicked up and caught a dozen cups and saucers on his head! But not one of those performers had to be whipped or painstakingly trained like the animals in the rings below them. I naively believed that a bear riding a bicycle, or a seal giving a serenade on bicycle horns, had to be enjoying it. I never considered the tedious, if not torturous, hours that perfected those tricks – or how the animals must have hated doing such unnatural things. All of it for my pleasure.
In the bliss of my ignorance, I especially loved the elephants who paraded into the arena with Vegas-style showgirls on their backs. I loved how they stood on their hind legs and rested their forelegs on each other, and how they sat up on stools and touched their foreheads to the floor, and how the last little elephant had to hurry to catch its mother’s tail. (Just like that girl in the Ice Capades!) I never wondered why they didn’t do those things out in the wild. I didn’t know about the bullhooks, electric prods, and chains – which were always kept from sight. After all, this was the circus, where everything was wondrous, lighthearted, and innocent.
The Manly Wrangle
For those who enjoyed violence directed toward animals, the rodeo was the place, and each year, Kathy and I went to The Garden to get our fill. There was no mistaking the nature of the spectacle: it was about dominance – and the casual brutality that often goes along with it. This was the age of cowboys and Indians, lawmen and outlaws, white hats and black hats, and the rodeo animals’ job was to stand in for all the bad guys. They were also meant to pander to our sense of creaturely superiority, and titillate our collective appetite for cruelty – just as the animals in the Roman Coliseum once had done.
On the face of it, the rodeo was a choreographed assault on animals, yet it was carefully promoted as an athletic contest. Its violence came camouflaged beneath a veneer of down-home masculinity and patriotic trumpery, which were enormously popular in the post-war years. It also served to display the workaday skills of the drovers who labored for America’s burgeoning beef cattle industry in the steak-loving fifties. But, as was typical for many spectacles in those days, no manly business could get underway until there’d been a parade of glamorous women. To Kathy and me, the women ushering in the rodeo looked almost too wholesome as they trotted in on horseback, wearing modest fringed skirts and flower-tooled boots, and carrying the Stars and Stripes to remind us how great it was to be Americans.
Yet as soon as they trotted off, the rugged, rawboned cowboys came forward in their dented hats and sexy leather chaps – and the savage competitions could begin. For starters, there was Bareback Bronc Riding – where flailing men grasped the withers of outraged stallions who kicked and bucked till they threw them to the ground. And Steer Wrestling – where riders chased down runaway steers, grabbed them around their necks and rubbed their faces in the dust. And Calf Roping – where cowboys lassoed panicked young calves, tied three of their legs together, and anchored them to the pommels of their saddles. What a Wild West adrenaline rush!
And because none of those bucking or panicking creatures “belonged” to the rodeo – in the same way the elephants, tigers, and bears, belonged to the circus – no one had to worry about them. They were brought in for the event by stock contractors who had no concerns about their pain or panic – unless they weren’t showing enough of it. Back then there was no PETA to prick our consciences. Back then, as the theme song of the old cattle-drover TV show, Rawhide, used to say: “Don’t try to understand ‘em. Just rope, and throw, and brand ’em.”
The Exquisite Game
Since my attendance at The Garden was free, I could indulge any curiosity, and when Kathy and I turned twelve, we decided to give hockey a try. My father obliged us by pre-arranging our seats, and the game proved so thrilling, we were hooked by the end of the first period. This was back when no player in the NHL wore a helmet, and Gump Worsley, the indefatigable Rangers goalie, didn’t wear a mask – a fact underscored by his many scars and missing teeth. But we weren’t there to eyeball Gump in the way we might have scoped a hunky Henrik Lundqvist. What attracted us was the way he played the game. And the game itself was exquisite.
Before each game, we’d get revved up by belting out “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and if the Maple Leafs or the Canadiens were in the house, we’d do “O Canada” too – humming it with gusto since we didn’t know the words. During that patriotic ritual, both teams would be lined up on the ice, and as soon as the singing was done, they’d skate off to their positions, or their respective benches – except for our Gump who’d already be standing in his crease, waiting to stop the puck, which would drop any second.
The puck itself wasn’t easy to see, being a round black disk the size of a hamburger bun, but the more you watched it – watched for it, I mean – the better you got at spotting it. At rest, it was the least compelling thing in the arena, yet it was the object of all the wondrous motion: The raw, rapid speed of the serpentine skating. The synchronized leaps when the lines changed on the fly. The sudden full-engine thrusts of the breakaways. And the unstoppable blasts of the pucks shot at our goal – until Gump stopped them cold with a contortionist save. Sometimes the flow would be punctuated by slashing, tripping, hooking, or high-sticking. Or holding, headbutting, clipping, or cross-checking. Then the gloves would come off, and the linesmen would converge, and the brawlers would be banished to the penalty box.
Yet none of those things would have had their full lit-fuse power without the integral sounds of the game: the ice shards spraying from the racing blades; the sticks striking, sometimes breaking; the ref’s shrill whistle to stop the play; the thud of the puck ricocheting off the boards; and the arena concussing from two burly guys colliding. Oh, and let’s not forget the organ launching its rousing call, and all of us shouting in response: Da-da-dum-da-dum: CHARGE! Da-da-dum-da-dum: CHARGE! louder and louder in our effort to score a goal.
And when we did – when we finally “lit the lamp” – a red light would begin to flash above the net, and a siren-like horn would sound, and the whole place would erupt in joyous pandemonium. Not like on TV – which is never more than a spectator sport – but there in The Garden, where we’d reached our goal together: the center and the wingers and the organ player, and the vigilant defenders (especially our Gump), and every fan in the arena – with a two-girl assist from Kathy and me.
The Bounding Leaps
Like most American kids, I had a full-blown adolescent rebellion, during which I became moody, surly, and uncivil. At its low point, I abandoned the things of my childhood, including my beloved stuffed animals and dozens of souvenirs from my visits to The Garden, and I declared to my parents that I’d never again see a circus, ice show, or rodeo. I wasn’t abandoning The Garden – I was only looking for more sophisticated fare.
With that in mind, when Kathy and I were thirteen, we decided to see the Bolshoi Ballet on their first-ever U. S. tour. Although Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had terrified most Americans by saying, “We will bury you,” Kathy and I were braver than most, and we wouldn’t be cowed by enemies in tutus. The only thing we had to fear, we reasoned, was boredom. So we were in no way prepared to be enthralled – not only by the amazing athleticism and the ravishing music (we’d never before heard Tchaikovsky), but also by the well of emotion that rose in us. We both were moved to actual tears by the poignancy of the dying swan, which was the highlight of the “Highlights Program” we saw that day. Another thing that surprised us – startled us, in fact – were the loud thumps of the pointe shoes as the dancers landed from their leaps. These ballerinas didn’t float on air; they were an unchecked force that conquered us. And because so many other Americans came out to see them too – whether eager for culture or détente – their tour turned out to be a Cold War triumph for the Soviet Union.
Later that year, in my continuing quest for grown-up fare, I went to my first Knicks game. I had just been chosen for my eighth-grade girls’ basketball team and I was hoping to pick up some moves. Kathy, being five-foot two, hadn’t made the team, but I asked her to go with me anyway. As we watched the Knicks play, we barely recognized the game we called “basketball.” Back then, the so‑called “Girls’ Game” confined players to half the court: forwards on one side, guards on the other – and no girl was allowed to dribble more than twice. Yet there, before our eyes, the Knicks and their opponents flew like a single swarm of bees from one end of the court to the other – moving so quickly we could barely make out all the layups, jump shots, and alley-oops – never mind the fake-outs, rebounds, and turnovers. It was a thunderous, run-and- gun game with squealing sneakers and landing thumps (much louder than the Bolshoi ballerinas). And even though I didn’t pick up any moves from the Knicks (that would have been like watching a NASCAR race to learn how to ride a bike), I think I may have picked up a bit of their energy – since my eighth-grade team won the city championship that year.
When I told my father how much we enjoyed the Knicks, he suggested we catch the Harlem Globetrotters the next time their tour came to The Garden. The moment we saw them, we loved everything about them: the bold, bright, Uncle Sam cut of their jib; their sassy whistling theme song, “Sweet Georgia Brown,” and their finger-spinning tricks and impossible sinks, which, along with their hijinks and trickery, led to the inevitable defeat of their willingly hard-luck opponents, the Washington Generals.
1959 happened to be the year Wilt Chamberlain was on the Trotters’ roster – before he signed with the Warriors and launched his brilliant NBA career. He had joined the Trotters specifically to play an exhibition round in the Soviet Union to further the cause of détente. Given his standout stature and legendary leaping rebounds, I think I would have noticed him, yet I don’t remember seeing him at all. In that fun-filled, tongue-in‑cheek atmosphere, the most riveting figure for me was Globetrotters’ captain Meadowlark Lemon. His signature no-look passes and half-court hook shots displayed phenomenal athletic skills, yet what delighted me most were his zany antics – which could have eclipsed any clown in the circus.
The Naked Expulsion
Each spring when the Daily News showed the elephants parading to The Garden from the Queens Midtown tunnel, I’d feel a moment of nostalgia for the circus. Yes, I had sworn off the circus during my adolescent rebellion, and after that, I’d become so busy with things like boys, there was no room in my consciousness for anything else. But when I turned seventeen, and my younger brother turned six, my mother decided he was old enough to see a circus, and I was the one who should take him. The only good thing about it, so far as I could see, was that I could invite my new boyfriend, a handsome college junior, to go with me.
We met my father at The Garden’s employees’ entrance and followed him to a prearranged meeting with an usher who supervised a section beside center ring, and who knew which corporate ticket holders never used their seats. After my father tipped him and left, I started into the best row I’d ever set foot in, threading my way between the seated strangers’ feet. I held my brother’s hand – I could tell that he was nervous, and that my boyfriend felt awkward, but I was Sacagawea to their Lewis and Clark. I’d been doing this successfully for years, and not surprisingly, we made it to our seats right before the lights dimmed and the ringmaster in his glittering red coat began to say, “Ladies and gentlemen and children of all ages.”
But suddenly a flashlight strafed us from the aisle, and the same accommodating usher, who’d taken such pleasure in offering us those fantastic seats, was signaling us to get up and get out. Three people were standing behind him: a man, a woman, and a girl about ten – and the usher had their tickets in his hand. Tickets? There was no arguing with tickets. Only, “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” as we pushed our way past the same seated people, now doubly annoyed since we were blocking their view of the show.
Who were those people who had come to take our seats? Probably not the ticket holders. Maybe their doorman or nanny. Whoever they were, I’d known my whole life they might appear anytime I was at The Garden. Yet fate had stayed their arrival until I was there with my new boyfriend. He and I went back up the stairs in our nakedness, shame, and loss – like Adam and Eve being expelled from the original Garden. Thank goodness, my little brother was too young to feel the weight of everyone’s eyes on us.
The usher caught up with us before we’d gone too far. He was full of apologies as he took us to three other empty seats, two sections above where we’d just been. Luckily, my boyfriend didn’t mind too much (he married me sixteen months later). He and I might have called it a night, but my little brother had never seen a circus, so we sat down, one on each side of him, and watched the clowns along with him (he loved them, the way most children do), but we each kept an eye on the aisle, in case the usher might come back.
The End of Paradise
I was still in high school when President Kennedy came to The Garden to deliver his nationally televised “Health Care Speech” (you can see my father standing guard in the crowd shot). It should have been thrilling to hear our charismatic president make the case for universal health care, yet few people paid any attention. But three months later, when Kennedy returned to The Garden to be entertained by Marilyn Monroe, singing “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” in a sultry voice and a see-through dress, everyone paid attention – and many were scandalized.
Yet from what I’d seen there my whole life, The Garden was always dishing up sex – even at the most innocent events: Picture the Vegas-style show girls riding widespread astride the elephants. And the slinky bare-assed contortionists bending over in their thongy leotards. And the splayed-hand, pubic-bone lifts during the pairs’ events at the Ice Capades. Not to mention the long naked legs of the hoopsters in their short-shorts. And the swaggering cowboys in skin-tight jeans, their zippers highlighted by leather chaps. Were people missing any of that?
But suddenly, the times were a-changing – and three months after singing her seductive song, Marilyn Monroe, “the sex symbol of our era,” was dead. And three months after that, Mr. Kennedy, “the world icon of sexy glamor,” was assassinated. That same year, New York’s gorgeous Beaux-Arts Penn Station was razed so a new Garden could be built in its place. The new Garden (which disappointed everyone by resembling an oversized college athletic center) was where my father began working in 1968.
Right away, the new Garden began hosting events for humanitarian causes, starting with the Soul Together concert, featuring, among others, Aretha Franklin and Sonny & Cher to benefit a brand-new charity: The Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Foundation – just two months after Dr. King was assassinated. Major benefit events that followed included the 1970 Winter Festival for Peace, where Harry Belafonte and Judy Collins performed (and where Jimi Hendrix had a prophetic drug meltdown on stage); and the 1971 Concert for Bangladesh, organized by George Harrison and Ravi Shankar to aid six million refugees fleeing war, starvation and genocide; and the 1972 One-to‑One concerts put together by John Lennon to benefit six thousand developmentally disabled children, who’d been removed from the scandalously abusive Willowbrook State School.
Yet for me, the most memorable concert at The Garden during those consciousness-raising years was a solo performance by Joan Baez in 1969. While my mother babysat our son, my husband and I joined an overflow crowd to hear our beloved protest diva sing. She began her program by admonishing the Specials on duty (my father among them) not to remove the many young people who were sitting on the stairs. Then she moved me to tears by speaking about her husband, then in prison for draft evasion, before launching into a soul-piercing rendition of “I Shall Be Released.” It felt transcendent to join all those other young people in our belief that we could change the world. It was almost as thrilling as spinning my little flashlight there two dozen years before. But this time I didn’t need my father’s help to get seats. In Joan’s egalitarian spirit, all tickets had been priced at two dollars.
But the following year, I turned to my father again, asking if he could arrange two seats for a sporting event. “You’ve got to be kidding,” was his reply, and I understood why: The event was the final game of the 1970 NBA finals – and that night in overtime, the Knicks won their first NBA championship. In 1971, I made a similar request, this time hoping to see “The Fight of the Century.” Again, my father had to disappoint me. That bout pitted the undefeated Muhammed Ali against the undefeated Joe Frazier for the World Heavyweight Championship. Ali, whom I admired for his anti-war politics and his witty poetry, had been stripped of the title four years earlier for refusing the draft. Now, with his conviction overturned by the Supreme Court, he was free to fight again. According to my father, Ali “looked pretty rusty” when he stepped into the ring. And when he lost to Frazier by decision after fifteen rounds, many anti-war activists, myself among them, blamed his defeat on Vietnam era warmongering.
Despite my activism and other activities, such as college teaching, I returned to my roots the following spring to see one final circus at The Garden. This time, it was to take my son, then six, to see his first one. My father was working that night, and, during his break, came by to see us in our seats, where he was tickled to see his grandson laughing madly at the clowns.
Later in the seventies, I moved upstate, and The Garden became a place I wander in my dreams. Sometimes I’m being swept along amid a noisy throng; sometimes I’m peering down from the highest tier, trying to see the rings; sometimes I’m walking down a darkened walkway, looking for someone I’m supposed to meet there. My father kept working security until 1985 when he was 77 (he died a month after he retired). That year, he was still on duty for Madonna’s Virgin Tour and U2’s Fire Tour, but he was gone before Kiss’s Asylum Tour arrived. So after all those years of standing guard and keeping the peace – and getting his daughter the occasional seat to quicken her pulse and enhance her education – he slipped away from The Garden with a parting gift of mercy.
Joan Murray is the author of five books of poetry. In addition to Alaska Quarterly Review, her personal essays, fiction, and poetry have appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and The Sun.