Wow, I wish you had been there. You would have been more than welcome. I sat down with two of the kindest men in New York sports, both with unmatched dreams, without ever having won it despite being so close as to be cruel.
A lot of years ago it was a charity event at Langan’s, the late unfortunate Midtown pub, owned and run by the equally friendly Des O’Brien. I sat down with Ralph Branca (I had already designated him as a replacement for my late father while they looked, sounded, and looked alike) and with Rod Gilbert. And the stories flowed at a fluid pace with the potato juice, also known as vodka.
Although so many of his friends knew him as “Rocky,” I called him “Regret,” as he often looked like a hangover a day after an evening night with Gilbert. He laughed when I called him that. Maybe the feeling was mutual.
Sinatra would sing to him in person: “Are you sorry? We had a few, in fact a few too many. ”
We were doing what we were doing, this time in front of a stand-up audience: we changed jokes, those of Gilbert tied to the punchlines he would butcher with his French Canadian-New York accent, and then insist on starting again, which really was the fun part.
Gilbert only told two types of jokes: vulgar jokes and dirty jokes. Laughter ensued in his relentless but brazen efforts not to include punches somewhere in the middle.
His comic imbalance was such that he once asked me to “Tell what ends with …”.
So I shot him a fixed gaze, palms up, a signal that made the joke explode. Gilbert contemplated his mistake, then rejoiced. “Say it anyway,” he said.
This brought down the house, the funniest line of the night. Cleanliness, too.
They weren’t sessions for kids, but Gilbert was great for kids, in my case from the age of 12, when I first “met” him.
Since the Schaefer Circle of Sports exhibition at the 1964-65 Queens World’s Fair, Gilbert, Harry Howell and Rangers coach Red Sullivan have signed autographs.
He was already a fan of the Rangers full of sadness of those TV designs sponsored by Saturday Channel 9 Schaefer Beer narrated by Win Elliot and Gilbert consolidated his condition with this guy with a nice smile and a readable signature. I always had two season 7s: Mickey Mantle and Rod Gilbert.
Two years later, my friend Marc Ackerman, happy with mutual hockey, there weren’t many kids we grew up with, he did hockey, and I was in town to attend a Sunday Ranger game at the night with our GO cards for 50 cents per ticket. which entitles us to sit in the back rows of the old garden to see half the ice through a mist of cigarette smoke.
At the time, two children could travel, without parents, from Staten Island to Manhattan or Yankee Stadium, as long as we took the vow to “not disturb anyone,” instead of placing ourselves in unsupervised modern urban danger.
We arrived early, with plenty of time to kill. What should we do?
For some fantasy-inspired reason, we decided to walk to the old Santa Clara Hospital to visit Rod Gilbert, who had undergone his second spinal fusion surgery, as if he had to see us.
Of course, we would just go in. We knew we didn’t have any shots, but it would only cost us time, all we could spend.
At the front desk we asked “Mr. In Gilbert’s room, their number was indicated to them, and then, casting nervous glances at us knowing that we had already gone too far, we headed upstairs.
And there, lying on a bed in a small room for a single patient, was Rod Gilbert. We asked to enter and introduced ourselves. I think our audacity hurt him, maybe even happy for some company, and so he welcomed us.
We didn’t wear out that welcome. We wish him a speedy recovery, we declared to him that we loved the Rangers and that he disliked those dirty, rotten Bruins the Rangers who fought every year for last place.
All the way out and every step of the way to the garden we wondered, “Really, did this really happen?”
I hadn’t spoken to Marc Ackerman in years, but yesterday morning, the day before his 70th birthday, I called him. After identifying me, the first words he said were “Rod Gilbert.”