Gosh, I wish you’d been there. You’d have been more than welcome. I was seated with two of the most gracious men in New York sports, both with unrequited dreams, having never won it all despite coming so close as to be cruel.
It was a charity event a bunch of years ago at Langan’s, the late lamented Midtown pub owned and operated by the equally gracious Des O’Brien. I sat with Ralph Branca – I’d already designated him as a replacement for my deceased father as they looked, sounded and glared alike – and Rod Gilbert. And the stories flowed in fluid rhythm with the potato juice, aka vodka.
Though known as “Rocky” to so many of his many friends, I called him “Regret,” as there so often seemed a day-after hangover attached to an evening-into-night with Gilbert. He laughed when I called him that. Perhaps the feeling was mutual.
I’d sing him customized Sinatra: “Regrets? We had a few, in fact a few too many.”
We were doing what we did, this time in front of a stand-up audience – we swapped bad jokes, Gilbert’s tethered to punchlines he’d butcher in his French Canadian-New York accent, then insist on starting it over, which genuinely was the funny part.
Gilbert told only two kinds of jokes: Vulgar jokes and dirty jokes. The laughs came in his relentless but feckless efforts to not include the punchlines somewhere in the middle.
His comedic imbalance was such that he once asked me to “Tell the one that ends with …”.
So I shot him a stare, palms up, a what-the-hey signal that he’d just blown the joke. Gilbert contemplated his error, then brightened. “Tell it anyway,” he said.
That brought down the house, the funniest line of the night. Clean, too.
These weren’t sessions for kids, but Gilbert was great to kids, in my case from age 12, when I first “met” him.
From the Schaefer Circle of Sports exhibit at the 1964-65 World’s Fair in Queens, Gilbert, Harry Howell and Rangers’ coach Red Sullivan signed autographs.
I was already a fan of the sorrow-filled Rangers from those Saturday Channel 9 Schaefer Beer-sponsored telecasts narrated by Win Elliot, and Gilbert cemented his status with this kid with a nice smile and a legible signature. I forever had two seasonal No. 7’s – Mickey Mantle and Rod Gilbert.
Two years later, my mutually hockey-happy pal Marc Ackerman – not many kids we grew up with were into hockey – and I were in the city to attend a Sunday night Ranger game on our 50-cents-per-ticket student G.O. cards, entitling us to sit in the last rows of the Old Garden to see half the ice through a haze of cigar and cigarette smoke.
Back then, two kids could travel, sans parents, from Staten Island to Manhattan or Yankee Stadium, provided we took our vow to “not bother anyone,” as opposed to placing ourselves in unsupervised modern urban peril.
We arrived early, plenty of time to kill. What should we do?
For some fantasy-inspired reason we decided to walk to old St. Clare’s hospital to visit Rod Gilbert, who had undergone his second spinal fusion surgery, as if he needed to see us.
Sure, we’d just walk right in. We knew we had no shot, but it would only cost us time, all we could spare to spend.
At the entry desk we asked for “Mr. Gilbert’s” room, were told its number, then, shooting each other nervous looks of knowing we’d already gone too far, we headed up.
And there, lying in a bed in a small, single-patient room, was Rod Gilbert. We asked to enter and we introduced ourselves. I think he was smitten by our audacity, maybe even happy for some company, thus welcomed us in.
We didn’t wear out that welcome. We wished him a speedy recovery, professed our love of the Rangers – and dislike of those dirty, rotten Bruins the Rangers annually battled for last place – thanked him then left.
All the way out and every step of the way to The Garden we asked each other, “Did that really just happen?”
I hadn’t spoken with Marc Ackerman in years, but yesterday morning, the day before his 70th birthday, I called him. After I identified myself, the first words he said were “Rod Gilbert.”
