Lance Mannion: The strippers and their coach

Back when we lived in the Fort Wayne, the blonde played on a women's softball team sponsored by the paper she worked for. They had a pretty good team. For some reason the blonde and her pal Ellen were the only two women from the news side who signed up. The rest of the team was drawn from women who worked on the loading dock and in the press room and circulation delivering papers. There were a lot of strong arms and powerful bats.

They also knew how to put away the beer after a game. Very important skill in softball.

One of the teams in their league was sponsored by a local strip joint.

Sorry to report, the title of this post is false advertising. None of the dancers played for the team.

The games were played in the evenings, about the time the girls were starting work, and early on Saturday mornings not long enough after the club closed for the night for them to get a good night's sleep and still make batting practice.

Their roster was made up of the women who worked at the club as cocktail waitresses and bartenders plus the girlfriends and wives of male employees and regular customers. Probably a few regular customers as well.

There are women who appreciate a well-done dance with a firepole, after all.

Strip clubs being what they are, the cocktail waitresses were not hired just for their ability to get an order straight and the bartenders didn't owe their jobs solely to their talents as ace mixologists.

They were a good-looking team.

They were also a good team. They beat the blonde's team, twice.

But they were the only team in the league that did not have a player-manager.

Their manager was a guy.

He was a nasty piece of work. Mean, foul-tempered, foul-mouthed, loud, belligerent, hyper-competitive.

He was not a poet when it came to employing four-letter words. He swore at opposing players and insulted them in the most unimaginatively employed crude language going, and he didn't treat his own players with much more civility.

He screamed at the crowds, even people rooting for his team, he tried to intimidate the umps---he wore a hunting knife on his belt and rested his hand on it during arguments---and I'm pretty sure that once when he was coaching first base he tried to trip one of the blonde's teammates as she rounded the bag and headed for second on a clean double.

And he was ugly.

Toad ugly.

And short.

And fat.

I'm talking, five-foot five at best and two hundred and fifty pounds.

Grooming wasn't one of his virtues either. Barbers, razors, soap, and laundry detergent were as strangers to his person.

Looking at him, you couldn't help but feel as Gussie Finke-Nottle felt watching Spode eat asparagus.

It altered your conception of man as Nature's last word.

Like I said, they beat the blonde's team both times they played, not that you could tell his team had won by his post-game demeanor either time. I'd have hated to have been around him when he lost.

The first game, the husband of one of the other player's on the blonde's team and I were sitting close to the field, within earshot of the strip club's bench, and during one of their at bats, the manager launched into one of his tirades and started screaming at his own players about what slackers they were and how they needed to get up there and get some hits.

The disgust and contempt his players felt for him were pretty clear. When he lumbered away to take up his position as first base coach one of his players spat after him.

The guy next to me said, "Well, you know the old saying."

"What's that?" I said.

"If you can't fuck 'em, coach 'em."

Don't know why (he says innocently), but something I wrote in this morning's post reminded me of this.

April 2021