My good friend of 30 years has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Not much that he can do about this, beyond hoping for some major medical breakthrough, and nothing, really, that I can do. So let’s go to a ballgame.
I meet my friend, Bill Malinowski, at his home in Rhode Island. He will drive his Acura wagon the hour to Fenway Park for a night game of no importance. I will drive back, because having ALS is exhausting. These days, he’s usually asleep by 9.
The diagnosis this spring only confirmed what he suspected. A superior athlete — marathoner, swimmer, biker — who chronicled his every mile in the chase after fitness, he knew his body. Now the body he so carefully nurtured had betrayed him in some cosmic bait-and-switch.
Cry. Curse the fates. Monitor the research. Keep working out as best he can for as long as he can. Keep his head clear as best he can for as long as he can. At least there’s baseball tonight.
Bill walks to his car as if the pebbles and tree roots conspire to trip him. Gingerly he steps, wearing red linen shorts and a black brace on a weakening left leg that once helped to power him through 15 marathons, three triathlons and scores of road races.
Let’s go.
“Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis” usually precedes “also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.” It helps the less clinically minded to summon to memory Gehrig’s iconic farewell speech in 1939, his head bowed, half-smiling to himself at the dark joke played on the durable Iron Horse. Dead within two years, at 37, the New York Yankees great had called himself the luckiest man in the world.
Bill loathes the Yankees.
The word “loathes” does not quite convey the depths of his tribal hatred. A Boston Red Sox guy to the marrow, he roots against the Yankees with a negative-force vigor that has sustained him through this trying summer. His wife, Mary Murphy, says he sometimes wakes at night to check the Yankees score. A Yankees loss eases the approaching morning.
We head north on Interstate 95, two old friends, both 57 years old. With coffee hot in the cup holders, Springsteen low on satellite radio and not a cloud in the early-autumn, late-afternoon sky, we talk about everything and nothing, as we have so many times before. Only now even talk about nothing takes work, this disease named after a Yankee thinning his voice, requiring exertion for every word he utters.
“It’s challenging to talk,” he says, and I can hear it.
This is why we text now more than talk on the phone, our virtual conversations a mash-up of medical reports and baseball.
May 4: “Doc says I have ALS.”
May 20: “Great joy! The Skanks have lost 8 of 11 & the Sox are pitching well.”
June 2: “I despise A-Fraud. The ultimate jerk.”
June 18: “I despise the Yankees, the most hated team in pro sports.”
June 28: “Just got a leg brace on Thursday @ Mass General. It helps stabilize my walking.”
July 27: “Just took the Detroit series!”
Sept. 8: “I can go with you to a night game...Just scheduled an appointment at Johns Hopkins...”
A veteran reporter at The Providence Journal, Bill has long been an authority on Rhode Island’s expansive underbelly, with sources on both sides of the law and an expertise in gangs, guns, organized crime and municipal corruption. Last year, the New England Society of Newspaper Editors named him a “master reporter."
But the intense curiosity that drove his professional success has waned. He has little interest now in a state once described to me as a reporter’s theme park. Of the few subjects he cares about, baseball sits at the very top.
“Why?” I ask as Bill drives below the speed limit in the interstate’s middle lane, oblivious to the red-faced truck driver passing on the right, shouting epithets.
“It’s just where I grew up,” he answers.
He means, in part, that he grew up in southeastern Connecticut, at a time when everyone knew Walt Dropo, the Moose from Moosup, who once played for the beloved Red Sox, and big John Ellis, from New London, who once played for the dreaded Yankees. Bill was a batboy for Ellis’ American Legion team; played winter basketball with Bill Dawley, a future All-Star pitcher; occasionally ran across Roger LaFrancois, whose major league career, one year as a backup Red Sox catcher, would end with a .400 batting average (4 for 10!).
Bill’s baseball devotion developed on the streets, not at home. His mother was always working the night shift as a hospital nurse, and his father was always reliving World War II.
Active in the Polish resistance, Mieczyslaw Malinowski spent more than four years in Nazi prisons and labor camps, had his teeth knocked out with a rifle butt and was once ordered to dig his own grave. Battling tuberculosis when he immigrated, he was sent to a sanitarium in Norwich, where he later found work as a porter
No war movies allowed on the television, no “Hogan’s Heroes” canned laughter. The inadvertent slam of a door echoed like gunfire in his father’s ears, enraging him, leaving his wife and three children to tiptoe about their modest house in Norwich. The war-scarred immigrant never spoke of the past and rarely spoke in the present — but made it clear that he considered most U.S. pastimes to be frivolous, including baseball. What is this baseball?
Bill wound up excelling at another frivolous endeavor — basketball — and was good enough to play at Connecticut College. But the Red Sox remained his true passion: Tony Conigliaro and Rico Petrocelli and big George Scott; Fred Lynn and Dwight Evans and Jim Rice; and the constant, Yaz.
By the time I met Bill, in 1987, he had mostly recovered from the 1986 World Series, in which his Sox lost to the New York Mets for reasons that go well beyond a ball rolling through Bill Buckner’s bandy legs. We were both reporters at The Providence Journal, and our friendship developed over shared interests in wiseguys, wisecracks and baseball.
Over the years, we shared many family vacations, including a few in the Adirondacks, where Bill continued to maintain and strengthen his body: 6 feet 3 and 225 lean pounds, with massive shoulders. Every morning he took a six- to 10-mile run, and every afternoon he swam a mile — often with me beside him, lazily kayaking, as he sliced the lake water with rhythmic precision.
Last fall, the runs became harder, the easy breathing a labored wheeze. He was covering the murder trial of a former New England Patriots football player, Aaron Hernandez, a fairly routine court assignment that by day’s end left him spent.
“I reached a point where I couldn’t run, I couldn’t swim, I couldn’t bike outside,” he says, eyes trained on the road ahead. He became one of about 6,400 people in the United States who will be found this year to have ALS.
He says he cannot help wondering about the whys and hows of it all. Given the research into a possible link between ALS and concussions, how could he not focus on that horrific collision on the basketball court at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology?
Playing for Connecticut College, Bill and an MIT player collided head-on while chasing a loose ball and bam — lights out for several minutes. “A violent hit,” he says, so bad that his dazed opponent air-balled the free throw. And Bill stayed in the game.
Was that it? A concussion nearly 40 years ago? All he knows is that some people at Massachusetts General told him they see ALS among former soccer players. More soccer than football, in fact.
We keep driving, Bill, me and this, as K.T. Tunstall sings “Feel It All” on the radio. “It does make you wonder,” he says after a while. “How does this happen?”
Bill is losing weight — 13 pounds since June — because it is harder to swallow now, and ALS tends to affect taste. He has also stopped taking the prescribed medication, Riluzole, because the constant nausea did not seem worth the minimal benefits. Sustenance comes instead in a book-and-movie project he’s working on about the Rhode Island underworld, which has attracted the interest of some big names.
And, of course, there is still exercise: every morning to the local YMCA, riding a stationary bike and lifting weights, then recording the workout in his journal. This is his way of fighting back, mile by mile, pound by pound.
“Trying to push past it,” he says.
We ease into downtown Boston. Bill notes how much gas prices have fallen. Says his leg brace is bugging him. Notes that the song on the radio, “Shut Up and Dance,” is by Walk the Moon, a band that played during the All-Star festivities this year.
Baseball.
That beacon of Fenway, the Citgo sign, rises into view like a red-white-and-blue moon. We find a garage beside the park and pay the outrageous $40, figuring the closer the better. Still, Bill needs to balance himself against parked cars as he walks. Crowds of people, thin and overweight, young and old, rush past him to the Yawkey Way finish line.
Our excellent seats are beside the Red Sox dugout, compliments of a friend with an indirect connection to Pete Frates, a former Boston College baseball player with ALS who began last year’s charity rave, the ice bucket challenge. Johns Hopkins — where Bill has an appointment this month — has credited the charity with helping to underwrite a recent study that provides a deeper understanding of the protein clumps associated with ALS.
Tonight’s game means nothing. Both the visitors, the Tampa Bay Rays, and the Red Sox are more than a dozen games out of first place. Still, Bill is looking forward to it, almost as much as he is to rooted hard against the Yankees in the playoffs.
He disappears for a few minutes, then comes back down the concrete steps, carefully, with a massive vanilla ice cream cone in his hands. Lots of calories and easy to swallow.
It will be a long night. We will not return to Bill’s house until after midnight, and he will be wiped out. Then, in the early morning, he will rise before I do, drive to the Y and lift more weights to forestall what seems inevitable.
For now, though, there is baseball. Meaningless, late-season baseball, the innings blending one into the next in a game without a clock. The Red Sox are losing, and the scoreboard in left says the Yankees are winning.
That’s all right. Bill finds hope in the young Red Sox ballplayers out there. Brock Holt, Mookie Betts, Blake Swihart. And this kid, Jackie Bradley Jr., who just hit a meaningless single in the bottom of the eighth.
The hell with the Yankees. Next year, he says. Next year.
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