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Of George and Peter, from S.L. Price in SI, 1998, generously excerpted below (full article here):
Oh, Brother
Peter Vecsey, NBC's combative and widely reviled NBA pundit, couldn't be more different from his big brother, George, the contemplative and widely respected New York Times columnist. And they hardly speak to each other
Imagine the surprise. You are an NBA executive, coach or player, and after a few years you've just about reconciled yourself to the fact that you'll always have that glowering mug shot of Peter Vecsey in the Post watching your every move. Then, one day you're Joe Barry Carroll, notoriously lax center for the Warriors. Vecsey has labeled you Joe Barely Cares. You're going through the motions in a layup line in Madison Square Garden, and you hear a rich, classic Noo Yawk voice. "Hey, Joe Barry!" Vecsey, standing next to a man with an Abe Lincoln beard, is waving you over to the press table. "Meet my brother George, he's a sportswriter with the Times."
You stop, you blink, you wait for someone to explain the gag. But no one's laughing. Honest Abe is still there. And all you can say is, "There's two of you motherf——-s?"
Yes and no. For to say merely that there are two New York sportswriters named Vecsey is like saying the Port Authority Bus Terminal and the Statue of Liberty both attract tourists. George, 58, succeeded the Times's legendary columnist Red Smith and has been writing eloquent essays for the paper's million-plus share of the nation's Range Rover-driving, plugged-in, self-reverential elite since 1982. His subtle criticisms come off like a series of paper cuts—annoying, painful but never lethal. He has never destroyed anyone. Peter, 54, has a weekly audience of millions between the Post and NBC, and his slash-and-burn style embodies the excesses of his newspaper. "He writes the way he plays basketball," says Buffalo News columnist Jerry Sullivan. "You come away with bruises."
Last Dec. 5, both Vecseys reacted to the Sprewell affair in typical fashion. Peter quickly dispensed with Sprewell, saying he was not worth the money in his contract, and then delivered some body blows to Warriors owner Chris Cohan and coach P.J. Carlesimo: [Cohan] gave crazy money to a crazy player and gave absolute power to someone who only knows how to abase it and the people under him. It's like the Iran-Iraq war all over again. You were hoping they'd both lose. George, viewing the scene from his usual Olympian distance, mocked Sprewell, the league and Stern in prose so airy that the victims could be forgiven for not realizing they'd been hit: It is not good to throttle your coach, or anybody else for that matter. It's downright bad form, particularly in a league trying to sell a lot of television space and sneakers and tickets costing up to four figures. But more important, there is the health and safety and emotional well-being of the throttled person....
Ask a colleague of the Vecseys about Peter, and he's likely to mention the media basketball game during the 1989 NBA Finals in which Peter bloodied the face of a fellow reporter with one punch. Ask about George, and the colleague might mention bumping into him on his way to a Polish film festival. The Vecseys are the id and superego of New York sports journalism, one serving up tabloid fury, the other serving as the voice of proportion and reason. "I think I am the Post," Peter says. "I identify with it, people identify me with it. But my brother? I came to him about 10 years ago and said, 'George, the Post would love to hire you as the columnist. You could probably double what you're making.' No, he said, not interested. He is the Times. I thought we could've tore it up together. His personality would've come out, the real personality.
"He would've been a changed person. But he's an elitist, and maybe that would've been taking too much of a chance. My life has been one risk-taking adventure after another. I've made mistakes, hurt myself, quit things—and he's always been in the comfort zone. Never took a chance that I can remember."
The New York sports community has long grown used to such snide comments between the brothers, but that hasn't eased curiosity over their differences. George and Peter have now gotten the faces they deserve, and they are the same face—beneath very different disguises. Pair George's Old Testament visage with Peter's slick, hair-plugged persona, and it's like the setup of some bad joke: So this Amish farmer is sitting next to Hugh Hefner....
Broadcaster Dick Schaap said that the Vecseys are as much alike as the Thurmonds—Nate and Strom. Former Times sports editor Joe Vecchione, who made George a columnist, bragged vis-à-vis the Post, "We've got Abel, and they've got Cain." For years, Knicks staffers referred to the two brothers simply as Good and Evil. Bob Costas once demanded of Peter, "How could you and George have sprung from the same womb?"
This is, of course, the unanswerable question of many clans. Explain Jimmy and Billy Carter, or the brothers Kaczynski. When Thomas Wolfe wrote, "There is something sad and terrifying about big families," he captured the perplexed expressions that can be seen across America come Thanksgiving, the angry thrill of sharing blood with absolute strangers. Often, children in such families escape by rejecting parents or siblings or just running hard in different directions. Peter and George did the latter. The odd tiling is that when they stopped running, they were in the same city at the same job—and they barely recognized each other.
"I'm vain, he's not," Peter says. "I care about the way I look, the way I dress, the cars I drive. I'm materialistic. He's not. He's much more erudite, much more versatile. He could bore you to death on any number of issues. I can bore you to death on only one."
After George ended a decade-long hiatus in straight news and returned to sportswriting in 1980, Peter helped him, introduced him around, caught him up. But over the years they saw less and less of each other. In May 1997, during a Heat-Knicks playoff game at the Garden, George and Peter provided a rare sight: the two of them eating a pregame meal. "Together?" George says. There they sat for 15 minutes, side by side, chewing. Neither said a word. Despite their shared interests, people wonder what they have to talk about.
"Nothing," says Laura Vecsey, George's 36-year-old daughter, a sports columnist for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. "I don't think either has any interest in what the other one does."
They almost never read each other's work, though Peter makes an exception when George hammers New York Yankees principal owner George Steinbrenner, whom he has described as "sick" and "a blowhard and a bully." George once wrote, "There is always an invisible calliope playing wherever George Steinbrenner roams. The biggest show on earth. Jojo the Dogface Boy. Barnum's elephant, Jumbo. Hurry, hurry, check out the sideshow!" For Peter, reading that is like stepping back to an adolescence in which his brother wielded sarcasm like a razor.
Chris Vecsey, the youngest of the five Vecsey siblings and a professor of religion at Colgate, says he can recall many affectionate moments between himself and his two brothers, but never between George and Peter. George, asked why he and Peter are not close, goes silent for long seconds before finally saying, "Parliamo idiomi molto differenti, e viviamo in paesi differenti." Then he translates from the Italian, softly: "We speak very different languages, and we live in different places."
It's an awkward moment, but it soon passes. George insists on being helpful; he knows a story on two brothers wouldn't be complete without a visit to the family home, and, of course, "You haven't met our mother," he says. "She's a formidable old lady. She's a part of this." So George leads the way into a nursing home near his old high school in Queens, signs in and wheels his 87-year-old mother, May, to a quiet place where she can talk. For 39 years May has struggled with multiple sclerosis, and now she sits in a white cardigan and saggy knee-high stockings. Her eyes are bright. George sits across a table from her, guiding May to remember her life and her dead husband.
When talk turns to Peter and George, she speaks of their writing and says George's is more her speed, although "it sometimes seems pointless." No, she hasn't read anything of Peter's lately. She says Peter was always a bad boy, never took school seriously. "But if you want a good friend, Peter's the one to turn to," May says, and at this George blinks. His face stays blank, as if he has heard this so often that it has become meaningless. But she isn't looking at him. She speaks as if he isn't there. "My love at the moment is Peter," she says.
It's not easy to find families like this anymore, not in newspapers anyway. The Vecseys are an ink-for-blood cliché. May was pregnant with George when she and Big George, the society editor and the sports editor, respectively, of the Long Island Press, helped organize the local chapter of the Newspaper Guild and took to the picket lines in 1938, braving billy clubs and marking the scabs. Journalism, Laura Vecsey says, is "the family disease," and its symptoms can be extreme. Once, while working for the Albany (N.Y.) Times Union and facing a stiff deadline at the Garden, Laura says, she asked Peter if a much-rumored trade was about to go through, and Peter wouldn't answer. Peter denies this, but he admits that he has no use for reporters who share scoops. "It's competition," he says. "I don't give it up." Two years ago, after Peter created a stir during the NBA Finals by questioning, in a radio interview, the heart of Seattle SuperSonics swingman Nate McMillan, Laura buried in her column a veiled but obvious slap at her uncle.
Big George would've been pleased. Newspapers became the family business when newspapers mattered most, and 50 years later the Vecseys are at the top of the profession, stirring things up, telling people in Queens and Manhattan—hell, the whole country—how to think. The New York Times! The New York Post! What could be better for a man who, after working seven days a week on two jobs at the Daily News and the Associated Press, would come home every morning with several papers, talking about Dick Young and Jimmy Cannon—a man who'd never finished college, a man whose confidence had been hollowed out by fear?
Once, Big George went into a candy store to buy a Baby Ruth bar. The clerk had only Tootsie Rolls. Big George punched him. His temper was legendary, but it grew out of weakness: Big George was a small man, an adopted kid saddled with the knowledge of a double desertion, first by his biological parents and then by his adoptive father. When he reached middle age, his childhood demons took the form of loan sharks and McCarthy-era informants. The entire house would hear him scream in his sleep because the bad guys were coming. Sometimes it was no dream.
But that was later. The early key to Big George was that he wasn't supposed to be a mere deskman working the rim, editing the stars' copy. No, he had always attacked books with the oasis thirst of a self-taught man; he stocked his shelves at home with Wolfe and Eugene O'Neill and read all the history he could lay his hands on. Unlike May, a magna cum laude graduate of the College of New Rochelle, Big George didn't have a college degree, but he was smart and had views and at 35 was the sports editor of the Press. Why shouldn't he have dreamed of running the sports department of a big New York paper someday?
But then came the '38 strike, and Big George was a devoted union man. Management offered him $5 extra per week to cross the picket line, and he refused; the guy who accepted, his assistant, ended up running the sports section of the Press and living in a big house. Big George was not rehired after the strike. He worked odd jobs, but newspapering is a nasty drug. In the early '40s he hooked on with the Daily News as a deskman, and for the rest of his career that's what he was, at the News and the AP in Manhattan. He wrote radio copy, edited stories and went home.
"He was one of the best newspapermen—and one of the best men—I knew," says Bill Gallo, the longtime cartoonist and former associate sports editor of the News. "He should've been sports editor of the News, but he got there too old. He would've made a hell of a sports editor. It was his kind of paper."
Little George, the oldest Vecsey child, got the full benefit of his parents' youthful energy and bookish interests, and he took the most direct shot of his mother's high-minded, Catholic ambition. She never worked again after he was born, for soon there were four more kids—Liz, Peter, Janet and Chris. But May remained the family's propelling force. "George was always her shining light," says Liz Vecsey Gembecki. "We were always told how bright he was, his IQ." All the kids were pushed to do better, be better, and when they disappointed Mom, she let them know it. Even now, George says, it scares him to see how much he is like May.
"He has very high standards, and he holds other people to them," Chris Vecsey says. "Pete—no matter what he says about players—isn't holding them to any standard. He's always looking for a good line. But George has a self-imposed integrity, like my mother, and at times it makes them hard to be with."
Big George got Little George his first job, answering phones at the AP as a teenager, and at that point the boy began to distance himself from the family. Little George had gorged himself on Wolfe, on books about breaking loose of the loving family prison to become a great writer, and he grew increasingly aloof as he fed his mind at Hofstra and then at Newsday on Long Island, where he got his career break covering major league baseball for Jack Mann's cocky, irreverent sports section—at age 20. By then George had also left May's beloved Catholic Church and fallen for a strong-willed, arty Protestant girl named Marianne, whom he would marry. May never forgave him. Her shining light went out, and as for George's wife.... "My mom just cut her dead," George says.
With the world and love to distract him, George never saw—didn't want to see—all the clues his father dropped about his gambling problem. Big George worked constantly, but in the '50s and early '60s the family never had any money. Husky-voiced men kept calling the house. Little George didn't link that with the ongoing game of gin in the AP locker room or with the fact that Charlie Morey, Big George's boss, was so sad to see him go home. Big George, Morey says, laughing, was one of his "pigeons."
"I'll tell you why George was so bad," Morey says. "When he played gin rummy, he was either mad or scared—mad because he was losing money and scared that he was going to lose more. You can't play any card game like that."
But Peter knew what young George refused to see. In 1960, while Little George was covering baseball for Newsday, Big George got Peter, a junior in high school, a job at the Daily News. Aside from brief stints at Hofstra and in the merchant marine and then a two-year Army hitch, Peter lived in the three-story house on 188th Street in Jamaica, Queens, with his parents and little brother and two sisters and went to work at the News with Pop. He was there when Big George began his desperate slide, remortgaging the house and taking out usurious loans. Peter was there, a 17-year-old, when loan sharks trailed Big George home, and the sounds of Pop's cries filtered through the windows. "They beat the crap out of him, right in front of our house," Peter says. "I went out and talked to them. I knew they wouldn't hurt me. I was young and thought I could kick everybody's ass, and they thought that was funny. I stood up for the guy, and he obviously loved that.
"I am my father. No doubt about it. He got such a kick out of me because I was him, and he was me."
George isn't so convinced of this. His father's literary interests and radical politics were all but lost on the hoops-centric Peter. But there's no doubt that Big George was a tabloid man, with an ego-lancing humor and a grittiness that the rarefied Times never reflected. In Little George, Pop instilled the love of newspapers and baseball. He knew enough not to guide the boy with a heavy hand. But when Peter started writing at the News, Big George was different. He looked out for his son, checking his grammar, correcting his tortured spelling, proofreading everything. "Pete was his best creation," George says. "And he worshiped my father."
Little George didn't. By 1962 Big George had started going to Gamblers Anonymous, but his first son held him in contempt wanted nothing to do with healing. He got himself into trouble? He can get himself out. It wasn't until much later, when Little George spent a week in an addiction treatment center while re searching his 1982 book on pitcher Bob Welch, that he understood how cold he'd been. He apologized to his father, who waved his absolution and let it go. But how do you get back 19 years? A few years ago, Little George went to pick up his own son, David then a 24-year-old reporter, at the same AP building where his father had gotten him his first job. He walked into an office and fell his skin go cold: There was his son where Big George had once been, looking out the window at Rockefeller Center. Fifty years disappeared. Quietly, George wept.
By 1984 Pop was struggling. George would hang back in the press box while his father tried vainly to square the numbers in the box score, snapped at deskmen on the phone, began to die of a blood disorder. There was a nice Thanksgiving dinner with the whole family in the old house and that night George tucked his father in and kissed him on the cheek. "Leave the papers by the bed," Big George said. "Maybe I'll read them later."
He didn't wake up. The next day readers turned to Peter's column in the Post and saw a first: Nothing about frauds or incompetents, nothing about the Knicks or the scoop du jour. Instead, Peter wrote a lovely appreciation of Big George, "the nicest thing he's ever written," Little George says. It read, in part:
If he could die with newspapers or his breath and ink smudges on his hands, then the natural progression for me to write about him. No one is more responsible for my success that my father.
George didn't write about his dad'; passing for the Times. Peter's column "caught the humanity of my father," George says, and he knew that there was nothing more to be written.
"Pete scooped him," Chris Vecsey says. "George wasn't too happy about that, as I recall." |
***
Ever quick to tee off on others for any transgression, Peter has blurred the line between journalist and subject so often that at times the line has disappeared. A decent player at Archbishop Molloy High in Queens, Vecsey not only covered Julius Erving for the News when Dr. J was with the Nets but also coached and played with Erving for four years on a team in the renowned Rucker League in Harlem. Erving was Peter's best man when he married his current wife, Joan. Peter knew all the New York playground legends, hung out at team parties, put up Earl Manigault in his apartment one summer when Manigault was hiding from drug dealers.
Such access helped Peter build his strong network of sources, but it also gave him a ready pool of clients when, banished to covering high school sports for the News after his tiff with Young in '76, he began recruiting pro players to endorse Pony sneakers. "I was actually out there signing players to contracts—M.L. Carr, Darryl Dawkins, World B. Free," he says. "They got $1,000 a year. That was my job." It created a thin line for him to walk: Though Vecsey didn't cover the NBA that year and ended the arrangement when he joined the Post in 1977, he ended up covering people with whom he had once had business ties. It is precisely such gray areas that deny him the respect George is accorded.
"My father used to get [free] stuff from the Yankees every year, and he would put it in a box and send it back or donate it to charity," Laura says of Little George. "He was saying, 'I cannot, in my conscience, be a part of it. It will compromise whatever I do.' "
But by the time Peter started hanging out in Harlem, George's career had veered off into places Pop could only have imagined. In 1968 he'd finally gotten his pass into Manhattan when the Times hired him. "And the sons of bitches lied to me," George says. He had been led to believe that he would be sent to the Mexico City Olympics that year, but he wasn't. In 1970 George left sports on an elevated track: He spent two years covering poverty and mine collapses in Appalachia, then came back to New York to cover Long Island for four years, then gave four years to covering religion. While raising a family he also started a cottage industry when he wrote Loretta Lynn's best-selling autobiography, Coal Miner's Daughter. He became the unlikely chronicler of country divas, following up with a best-seller on Barbara Mandrell and a book on Lorrie Morgan. (He would also write a book about coal miners, autobiographies with Welch and Martina Navratilova, and last year's autobiography with Chinese dissident Harry Wu.) After 12 years the Times lured George back to fun and games, and he was stunned by sport's crass new world.
"The first days I was back in a locker room," George says, "I'd see the same faces, of my friends and colleagues and baseball writers, and now they were just older and more sour, and I'd say, 'What the f—-? What have I done?' It was a different business from the one I'd left: There were agents and Steinbrenner and constant news to keep up with. You now had to cover sports as a business rather than just games, and part of me had a self-hatred: Why'd you come back?"
Peter never had second thoughts about devoting his life to writing about basketball. He loved the game Little George taught him when they were kids—how to go to your left, how to shoot, how to box out with your butt—and he loved everything around it: the seamy agents, the confused but magical players, the infighting. By the time George hit his stride as a columnist in the early '80s, his younger brother had become established, had been blasted by Del Harris at the Finals, had become Peter Vecsey.
By then Young had come over to the Post and was writing rants against all the bad things sports had become, but he tried to patch things up with Peter by telling him he was the future of the paper. "Yeah?" Peter replied. "F—-you, Dick." A week after Peter wrote his tribute to Big George, Young approached him while he was on the phone. "He comes over and says, 'Your dad was a great guy,' " Peter says, and suddenly he looks away. Tears pool up in his eyes and spill down his nose. After a moment he turns back and says, voice shaking, "I could've killed him. God. I mean, this is a guy he worked with for 30, 40 years! How he shrugged it off.... I wanted to put that phone around his neck. Great guy?"
Cross Peter and, in his mind, you are done. "He carries grudges, he exacts his revenge," Costas says. "Get on his s—list, and you stay there a long time." |
***
George in person is different from George in print. Though soft-spoken and personable, he has been known to fly into a red-faced rage at incompetent officials, to feud with a fellow columnist, to snap like Big George in search of a Baby Ruth. Ask him about former baseball commissioner Bart Giamatti, and it's as if you'd asked Solzhenitsyn about the Gulag; the writer who needled Giamatti for having a "viola da gamba" voice now calls him "a prancing a———."
But work at another paper, one that would allow him to rip at will? No. There are few things in this world George loathes as much as the tabloids. He needs the constraints of the Times, because he knows the alternative all too well. He speaks of the Johnny Cash song The Beast in Me. "Do you lock the beast in the closet as much as you can? I believe you do. If we all let the beast out too often...." He doesn't finish the thought, but it's clear. Let the beast loose, and you risk a world of what George, in his column, recently called "sniggering Page Six Australian-language demi-journalism." You risk a world of rage and rumor and plummeting standards—the world of screaming headlines that top the stories in the pages of Rupert Murdoch's New York Post.
Every family's story ends in mystery. There's no predicting what will hold it together, never a good explanation for what pulled it apart. For years, everything seemed to run on rails: Christmas at Little George's home and Thanksgiving at Liz's. George and Peter might not talk much: different languages, different places. But everybody muddled along, breaking bread and handing out gifts. Then things started to turn; Big George died, and the two sisters moved out of New York, and Peter got busy with television. "It's amazing," Peter says. "One person dies and everyone just...goes."
Three years ago one of the nieces had a wedding in Orlando, and all five of Big George and May's kids got together there. "That was a happy time," says Janet Vecsey O'Rourke, George and Peter's youngest sister. "Everybody danced, and we were a family. Things have gone downhill since."
Last year May began falling down, alone and helpless in the tall white house on 188th Street. She needed constant care. This was the time, most agreed, for clear-eyed, dispassionate thinking, George-like thinking. Four of the five kids made the wrenching decision to place her in the nursing home. May hated the idea. Peter opposed it, too, but with his traveling for TV he couldn't offer an alternative. The other three siblings lived far away, so it fell to George to make the regular visits. Often, when he goes to the home, May ignores him.
Understand: "She loved George, idolized him, but when he started to slip away in high school.... Well, now she never gives him a break," Liz says. "No matter what he says, she bristles up, and no matter what she says, he bristles up. It's been like this for 40 years."
Peter has been her one ally. He has wanted May out of the nursing home and back in the house, has fought his brothers and sisters on it, and the tension has fractured family relations. "It hurts Peter so much to see her unhappy," says Janet. "But he's not being realistic. She needs a million things every day." But just as Peter was with Big George, so he is with May. Last Christmas she became very sick, and Peter was the only one who would get in the shower and hold her and wash her. He was the one who, when everyone else was preparing to let May die, needed to keep her alive.
"We all thought she'd had a good life," Liz says, "but Pete saw things differently: 'Get her a private-duty nurse. I'll pay for it.' He wanted to pull her through, and the rest of us wanted to let her go.
"If you need anything, Pete does it with gentleness and tears in his eyes. But he isn't consistent. The rest of the family has a saying: Peter will come in on a white horse, but he'll do none of the daily dirty work. It's just once or twice a year: Look out! Peter's here!"
In April came signs of a thaw. George and Peter spoke briefly about working together to plan May's future. One day Peter took May out of the nursing home, back to the house where they all had grown up. For four hours she was home, where she could look out the window and see where the neighbors once tended victory gardens and raised chickens. This was the place where the family had heard the news that FDR had died and that Jackie Robinson had joined the Dodgers, where May had listened to the opera singers next door practicing scales in the afternoon. "It was absolutely great," Peter says. "She never thought she'd get back there. She was rearranging stuff. We ate. I told her, 'Now that we know we can, we can do this all the time.' It was a great day."
As it was with Big George, so it will be with May. When she dies and becomes the story, it must be a Post exclusive. She wants a nice tribute, and she's told Peter to write it. |
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