Mauch Kicks Pair of Deadly Habits--Smoking and Smoldering

It has been a most successful spring training for Gene Mauch. He has kicked two addictive and deadly habits--smoking cigarettes and managing California Angels.

Mauch has given up smoking and smoldering.

His mere presence in Palm Springs constitutes the sports comeback of the year, considering that two weeks ago Gene Mauch was a dead man. I really thought he was. Here is a guy who has sucked in enough smoke and stress the last four decades to kill 10 men. Early this spring, Mauch was sick and exhausted and not breathing too well, and the Angels had yet to blow their first game. Even though he loathes doctors, Mauch checked himself into a hospital for extensive tests.

I’m no medical expert, but this had the look of a battle the Little General might lose to the Surgeon General. The feeling was that the chances of Mauch walking out of that hospital with a clean bill of health were as thin as those trendy cigarettes made for women.

I asked Mauch last Thursday if, going into the hospital, he had a feeling he would be given the very worst news.

“Never entered my mind,” he said. “I wasn’t hurting, I just didn’t feel good. I thought, ‘Well, let’s find out if this is something you (Mauch) can fix (by quitting smoking).’ ”

Didn’t his doctors fear the worst?

“He (Dr. Jules Rasinski) knew I had cancer,” Mauch said. “That’s the very first thing they did, was wheel in the chest X-ray machine.”

Then Mauch admitted he “wouldn’t have been surprised (to be told he had cancer). I walked out of there feeling like I’m one lucky fella.”

Mauch is a man who has beaten some amazing odds in his career. He managed 26 seasons without winning a league title. And he smoked 26 zillion cigarettes and lived to tell about it.

I read somewhere that Mauch smoked as many as 70 cigarettes a day. Allowing a man six smokeless hours sleep, he must consume a cigarette every 15 minutes of every waking hour to achieve his quota of 70. I asked Mauch about that figure.

“That’s just a number I threw out,” he said. “If I played 27 holes of golf and 3 to 5 hours of bridge, I would smoke more than that.”

Some guys get tennis elbow. Mauch was in danger of developing Zippo thumb. Or much worse.

One day Mauch was playing golf with three nonsmokers, one of whom had had surgery for larynx cancer as a result of heavy smoking.

“I shot a three-under on the front nine and I lit a cigarette on every tee and every green,” Mauch said. “On the 10th tee, one guy said, ‘I read in some journal that in the business world, cigarette smokers tend to be more effective than nonsmokers.’ And the guy with the larynx said, ‘Yeah, but not for long.’ ”

Ominous? Not to Gene the smoking machine.

“I pay attention to what I want to pay attention to, I guess,” he said.

This time, he is paying attention to his lungs and to his heart. He knew he couldn’t cheat lung cancer much longer so he quit cool turkey, currently weaning himself on three or four cigarettes a week.

And he probably realized how tough it would be to remain a nonsmoker as long as he was managing, especially managing the Angels, who would drive a bat boy to smoking.

“I quit for 31 days once, in 1961,” Mauch said. “On the 32nd day, I got on a plane to go to spring training. It was an old DC-6, and you had a little table in front of you. The stewardess threw one of those miniature packs of Pall Malls on the table. When the no-smoking sign went off, those four cigarettes were gone before we got to cruising altitude.”

In 26 years of managing, Gene Mauch never got to cruising altitude. He had a lot of bad teams and a few decent teams and even a couple real good teams, maybe even an overmanaged team or two, but he never once had a lucky team. Yet he has left a big mark on the game, he is already a part of baseball lore. A sport is made memorable by performances and personalties, and Mauch’s personality is original and distinctive.

Gene Mauch is spareribs and Marlboros. When he managed the Philadelphia Phillies, after one particularly galling loss Mauch hurled a tub of spareribs around the clubhouse, and several players quietly wore their dinner home. The Marlboros he puffed incessantly, sometimes during games, in the privacy of the dugout tunnel or behind the bat rack, an Indian chief sending out smoke signals.

They were the symbols of his intensity, the spareribs and the cigarettes. I’ve never met anyone in baseball as baseball as Gene Mauch. Even now that he is a civilian, if you drilled a tiny hole in the top of his head and peeked inside, you would see a baseball game in progress. Talk to Roger Craig or Sparky Anderson long enough and they’ll convince you that baseball is just a game. Watch Mauch for five minutes--before a game, during a game, after a loss--and you will be quickly dissuaded of that notion.

His intense concentration, his depth of feeling for baseball, his militaristic bearing, even his chain-smoking and his sore losing, lended an aura to the game.

“You can’t write about me,” Mauch told me once when I tried to ask him questions about himself, his least favorite topic of conversation. “I’ve seen the stuff you write. You write light stuff. There’s nothing light about me.”

Now maybe there is.