It was a third-rate chant for a third-rate player, but in the Mets’ first season, it didn’t take much to make the fans cheer. The team was on its way to 120 losses—a baseball record that stands to this day—but with the Dodgers and Giants five years gone, New York was desperate for something to scream about. Throneberry’s Mets were more than lovable losers—they were spectacular. “Name one loyal American,” writes Jimmy Breslin, in Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game? (Ivan R. Dee, 128 pp., $12.95) “who can say he does not love a team which loses 120 games in one season.” Published 50 years ago this week, this beautiful little book remains the ur-text for Metsian blundering. Here is the franchise’s origin story, writ in Mr. Breslin’s trademark barroom prose and cast with enough devils, heroes and clowns to fill out a pantomime of Faust. They are gamblers, toughs and crusty baseball lifers whom Mr. Breslin rallies in opposition to “the era of the businessman in sports,” when America’s postwar success led to a “dry and agonizing” focus on the bottom line.

Even in 1963, Mr. Breslin’s style was a throwback, a nostalgic echo of sportswriters who were chomping cigars and torturing metaphors before he was born. His New York is deliberately larger-than-life, as though he is trying to mold the modern city into a Damon Runyon story, and his prose is sweet enough to make the ’62 debacle an American epic.

As villains, we have Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley and his henchman Horace Stoneham, of the Giants—a pair of “arrogant, money-hungry people with a sense of loyalty only to the bank account.” They are in league with Major League Baseball itself, whose evil plan calls for New York to be a one-team monopoly, boosting Yankee revenue and dooming Giants and Dodgers fans to an eternity of pinstriped baseball.

Standing in their way is the brashly brilliant William A. Shea, a lawyer with a bookie for a father-in-law and “the square jaw of a guy who knows how to punch back.” He starts punching as soon as the Dodgers leave town, threatening to form a rival independent league unless the MLB approves a replacement for the lost teams. Commissioner Ford Frick, a “grey-haired jellyfish,” caves. New York can have the Mets.

To run the team, Shea recruits ex-Yankee GM George Weiss, “a finicky perfectionist” who “raises hell” when his employees are slack. To manage, Casey Stengel, the crinkly-faced doubletalker who led the Yanks to 10 pennants before they gave him the boot. And to sign the checks, Joan Whitney Payson, the finest owner the team would ever have.

A sporting millionaire, Mrs. Payson has an abiding love for dirty jokes, nightclubs and the Giants. In Mr. Breslin’s telling, she “could be the best person to come into baseball in our time,” and she falls into that irresistible stereotype of the old-
money millionaire who’s too rich to let anyone stop her fun.

At the dawn of the ’62 season, the uniforms are gleaming, the manager is optimistic and Robert Moses is building a shiny new stadium in Queens. But the Mets play in the Polo Grounds—the tumbledown shack on Coogan’s Bluff that served Mrs. Payson’s beloved Giants for so many years. The stadium is a dump; the team fits in perfectly.

Lest the expansion team show them up, the National League allows the Mets nothing but fading stars and minor league refuse. Marvelous Marv is among the best of the bunch. The team loses its first nine games, and it keeps that spectacular pace up for most of the season, playing “a brand of baseball which has not been seen in the Big Leagues in over twenty-five years.” Twenty-five years takes us back to Mr. Breslin’s childhood, which he recalls as an innocent time when players were mean, gamblers ruled the ballpark and entertainment was king. He yearns for it, and so do we.

These young Mets lose every way possible. They can’t hit, they can’t field and their pitching staff gives up more home runs than anyone ever has before. They are failures—world-class failures!—and in Mr. Breslin’s world, the schnook is king.

You see, the Mets are losers, just like nearly everybody else in life. This is a team for the cab driver who gets held up and the guy who loses out on a promotion because he didn’t maneuver himself to lunch with the boss enough. It is the team for every guy who has to get out of bed in the morning and go to work for short money on a job he does not like. And it is the team for every woman who looks up ten years later and sees her husband eating dinner in a T-shirt and wonders how the hell she ever let this guy talk her into getting married. The Yankees? Who does well enough to root for them, Laurence Rockefeller?

Over decades of mediocrity, Mets fans have been sustained by the idea that there’s nobility in rooting for a bum team. Lately, that fantasy is beginning to crack. The team’s owners have not recovered from Bernie Madoff’s parting shot, and their desperate efforts to stave off bankruptcy have resulted in a major league team that would do very well in the minors. Bud Selig will never force his friend Fred Wilpon to sell—just as in 1962, baseball’s commissioner is a jellyfish—so the Flushing faithful are stuck paying sky-high prices for bargain-basement baseball. Those who keep watching are divided into two camps: Panglossian optimists and raving conspiracy theorists. The atmosphere in Citi Field is bitter, and there are times one fears the unthinkable has happened—that it has stopped being fun to watch the Mets lose.

If Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game? is the Mets’ bible, what counsel does it offer in this dark April?

“The Mets lose an awful lot?” asks Mr. Breslin. “Listen, mister. Think a little bit. When was the last time you won anything out of life?”

editorial@observer.com

Etan Patz's mother, Julie (holding her youngest son), and his father, Stan (far right), organizing a search effort in the days after the child's disappearance. (Photo by Allen Arpadi)

On May 25, 1979—the first day his mother allowed him to walk to the bus stop alone—6-year-old Etan Patz went missing just blocks from his parents’ Soho loft. The case roused the fears of the nation and changed the way parents raised their children. In the days and months after, the full force of the New York press was trained on the family. The case became as much of a media phenomenon as a police investigation.

Despite thousands of man hours on the part of law enforcement, and the identification of at least one suspect in 1990—a convicted child molester named José Ramos, currently in prison in Pennsylvania on other charges—no arrests have been made in the Patz case. Last week, the FBI and NYPD excavated a basement on Prince Street, just one block from the Patzes’ apartment, and once again the media descended on the family. Law enforcement officials are analyzing a stain they found, but so far they have “nothing conclusive.”

On the slim chance that Etan would find his way home, the Patzes have never moved or changed their telephone number, and each time a possible development arises, a new onslaught of reporters arrives at their door. In the 33 years since the disappearance, the Patzes have lived with the media as a fact of their life. We talked to reporters and editors who covered the case in its first year.

George Goodman, then a reporter for The New York Times, now at work on a biography of Sonny Rollins: It was a beautiful spring afternoon on Spring Street. And nobody really knew the distress that the Patz family was going through.

John Miller, then a reporter at Channel 5 News, now a senior correspondent at CBS News: What I remember that day was walking up the couple of flights to get to the Patzes’ apartment and walking in and seeing the pandemonium inside. The police had set it up like a command post. They were stringing telephone wires to bring in extra lines so that the Patzes’ line would be free in case there was a call from the kidnappers. They had 300 cops there, and they were doing a grid search of the neighborhood, every apartment every backyard, every basement.

Alan Tannenbaum, then the chief photographer and photo of the Soho Weekly News, now a photojournalist at Polaris Images: It was a big shock that something would happen in that neighborhood, which was kind of a quiet neighborhood not known for having a lot of kids. And then he just disappeared so quickly and without any trace at all, so that was pretty mind blowing.

Jerry Schmetterer, then the police bureau chief of the Daily News, now a spokesman for the Brooklyn district attorney’s office: Soho back then wasn’t like it is now. It was an artsy neighborhood. Etan’s father was a photographer. It had galleries, but it wasn’t the trendy, chic place that it has been over the last 10 years or so. It was a little meaner and there were still areas of warehouses and printing companies. The Apple store wouldn’t have opened down there.

Tannenbaum: There was a law called Artists in Residence, and a lot of these loft buildings had signs on the outside that said “AIR. floor five,” things like that. So the firemen would know there were people living there, if there was a fire.

Miller: I met Julie Patz that day and I said, "Tell me what happened." And she said, “He walked to school, and I stood out on the fire escape and I watched him walk all the way to the corner where the bus stop was, and that was the last I saw of him.” I asked her would you step outside on the balcony and point in that direction and show me how you watched, ’cause I was thinking, it’s a television story, we’re going to have to make it visual. So we had the cameraman shoot her on the balcony kind of looking in the direction she was looking.

Goodman: She was just gulping coffee. And I think she might’ve been smoking cigarettes. It’s like every reporter feels when they’re going out to do a story like that. You ask people how they feel. It’s an intrusion in a way and you feel very self-conscious asking them questions that they’ve answered already for a dozen times.

Allen Arpadi, then a photographer for the Soho Weekly News, now a retired photography professor: When I went to the apartment, there were some—let’s call them friends of the family—as well. And I asked somebody a kind of religious question: "Can you have a funeral?" And I remember a guy saying "No, you need a body to bury."

Julie Patz, on the Today show, two years after her son Etan's disappearance.

Selwyn Raab, then a reporter for The New York Times, now, an author and investigative reporter: They invited me up to their apartment. There was no difficulty on their part. You have to be sensitive. When I did interviews, regardless if they were organized crime figures, or they were police officers, or they were parents with problems or victims, you’re always sensitive to their feelings. Listen, you’re not dealing with some politician.

Schmetterer: I can only speak for myself that I never liked doing those kind of interviews, and as a police reporter you’re often calling up people and saying how did you feel when you found out your kid was killed? It was tough. You’re dealing with two people who are naturally upset. They’re a nervous wreck, and they’d rather not be talking to you. These two people recognized the importance of talking to the press. They recognized the value of the publicity that may help find him.

Raab: My thinking at the time was to make sure the story didn’t disappear, even though you know it’s a million-to-one chance that somebody would see. The perverts probably didn’t read The New York Times, but somebody might’ve seen something in that neighborhood, and I still think so.

Miller: Are they available for an interview on the first day, the second day, during the first week? Yeah. After that, they kind of withdrew, on the idea that doing more interviews wasn’t really moving the ball forward. They were then, and they remain today, extraordinarily self-possessed and dignified people, who never got bitten by the media bug. To them, this was always a family tragedy and a missing child.

Anna Quindlen, then a reporter at The New York Times; now an author: A couple of days in, it became clear that it was going to be a big deal, but I don’t think any of us saw it as as big a story as it became. I think early days you think it’s going to resolve itself.

Murray Weiss, then a reporter at the Daily News; now a columnist and the criminal justice editor at DNAinfo.com: The cops went looking, and after a very short period of time it was like, “Oh my God, nobody knows where he is,” and, “Oh my God, is this the worst nightmare kind of concept?” Then it became, “Yes, it is.” The police very quickly ramped up their investigation. It went from a bunch of detectives and cops on searches, to dozens and hundreds. It became a Son of Sam kind of a scale and very rapidly.

Schmetterer: I think that the editors recognized all the different elements in this story. This was a big story almost from the first minute it broke. So you didn’t have to create anything or blow things out of proportion. This story had every element of tabloid journalism, but The New York Times and everyone else covered it just as heavily, because you had this wonderful little kid. You had the very cooperative and intelligent parents. They had the neighborhood that knew the kid, and he was kind of a beloved character.

Quindlen: All the pieces of the Etan case you could see in your mind’s eye. You could see him leaving, and his mother looking out the window. And the bus stop so close and all that. And it was as though he just was gone.

Raab: I mean, it’s a hell of a story. Anyone who doesn’t see that as a great story, especially after it’s early stages, shouldn’t be in journalism. I mean it’s simple, if you don’t know a story then sit down.

Jimmy Breslin, then a columnist at the Daily News; now an author: I didn’t write about it. Do you know how many fucking kids die in Brooklyn and Queens?

David Hershkovits, then a reporter at the Soho Weekly News; now co-editor and publisher of Paper magazine: I read that Philip Glass had said that The New York Times had a policy of not covering anything below 14th Street.

Weiss: Right from the get-go there was an enormous competition between all the papers. There’s always civility and cordiality, but underneath it is a brutal competition that goes on. All the newspapers were fighting to find out what each newspaper had or find out what the cops were doing or their leads.

Schmetterer: That was a time where the police and the press had pretty good relations, but they didn’t really know anything. They were canvassing the neighborhood and they were looking everywhere. One of the things I remember most about this were how many cops were in the street looking under garbage cans, opening up the dumpsters, going into alleys and basements. I mean you could walk up to them and get their observations.

Miller: The thing to do was to stay on it, to stay connected to it, because if you didn’t, you were likely to miss an important development as a reporter.

Schmetterer: It was a time when the News and the Post were engaged in real tabloid battle.

Sam Roberts, then the city editor at the Daily News; now the urban affairs correspondent at The New York Times: I think the News had a much better sense of the city. Murdoch came in very aggressively, but with a large number of people who didn’t know the city particularly well. They made some sort of glaring mistakes early on. I remember one story, during the David Berkowitz case. One of the mothers of the one of the victims was interviewed and it said she was sitting on her veranda in Brooklyn. Someone at the News, I think it was Jimmy Breslin, said, “A Jew hasn’t sat on a veranda in 2000 years.” But they were very aggressive.

Steve Dunleavy, then a reporter at the New York Post; now retired: I don’t know that you’d say it was the dream story for a new New York Post. It was a horror story for the New York Post.

Raab: The Times did respectable stories. Even if the tabloids might have feasted on it, for us it was still a great story. Nobody had any problems, I had no problems with the Times editor.

Goodman: The paper then was the paper of record, so a story like that was a very important story. The paper wanted to be on top of it, wanted to have everything, and then anything the tabloids would have, you had to have at least that much in your story.

Schmetterer: One of the things that helped drive the story was that he—the father Stan—had these excellent photographs of Etan.

Miller: You had this clear-eyed, blonde-haired boy, with this impish grin who would mug for the camera in different ways, and a father who had hundreds of high-quality photographs. It was something that was very organized for television and the newspapers because of the imagery.

Quindlen: The photograph. There’s probably no little boy who’s ever been photographed in history who is as alive in the frame as that child is in those photographs.

Miller: With most missing kids what you got was a blurry picture from a Kodak Instamatic of the the boy or the girl of them in the middle of a family photo.

Goodman: I’m a black guy, but still a picture of a child at that age and so vulnerable would make anybody feel, you know, anybody would react that way, but they wouldn’t be the same pictures of a kid in tough shape. But it was a lost white kid, and that’s a big deal. In the ideal world it would be different, but this was a kid that looked like he could be in the movies, so he had a certain photogenic appeal no one could deny.

Schmetterer: At the Daily News, the brilliance of the editor, Dick Oliver, came up with the idea of doing a column called Have You Seen This Person? And I started writing that column. It was a weekly column, and I wrote it for about five years, until I left the News. And I found, helped find, 123 people.

Arpadi: Then it slowly ebbed. I remember when the milk carton came out with Etan’s image on it, it was already old news.

Miller: You knew there was something bad happening, but you also had a sense that it would have a logical ending. That there would be word from the kidnappers, that there would be a ransom. That there would be a body found. That there would be an ending within sight... that weekend, the next week, the week after that.

Hershkovits: There was nothing really to report, you know. There were no leads.

Goodman: That was the really scary aspect, that it just went on and on. I don’t think anybody had a sense that it could go on for so long without any leads that panned out.

Dunleavy: There were many, many rumors, but no real breaks, you know. It was so, it was so tragic, but more than tragic it was just an absolute mystery. There’s not much to say except that we were as baffled as the cops. And if the cops are baffled, who’s that make us?

Miller: It’s been a tough and frustrating case from a reporting standpoint. Also, the personal attachment to it. Every reporter who works hard on a story, especially if you’ve been on it for a long time, you expect it to have a beginning, a middle and an end. The Etan Patz case seems to just have a middle.

Quindlen: More than any story I’ve ever covered, this was one where I didn’t feel so much like a reporter. We’re used to walking away from things. You know, you write your 800 words and you go on with your life. This story has stayed with me my entire life. In part because we’re used to writing stories that have endings to them.

Tannenbaum: I wasn’t there and I haven’t staked out their doorstep, but apparently [last week] Mrs. Patz berated the journalists and yelled at them twice, calling them low-life scum.

Miller: They’ve been extraordinarily patient, for a longer time than many of those reporters have been alive. When that patience frays, it’s usually fairly reasonable. Nobody who’s covered this case has as much experience with this case as they have. This is all remarkable to all of us, because we think of it as development in the Etan Patz case, potentially, but they’ve been through this before, there have been other basements dug up, other garages, other fields, other close calls. The reporters who are coming in in the last 10 years or the last 15 years or the last week, have seen a part of it. But the Patzes, because they lived it, they never miss one of these. It’s not like they were off covering something else when the third one or the fifth one happened. They’ve been through all of them.

bgallagher@observer.com

Patrick Breslin. (Illustration: Joao Maio Pinto)

The Commercial Observer: What’s your strategy going into the International Council of Shopping Centers conference this week?

Mr. Breslin: I’m going to be checking out, and going after with vengeance, all of my competitors’ customers.  It’s a little facetious, but I’m going to go, and the first three or four hours on Monday gives me a pretty good idea of the pulse and whether it’s an upbeat or it’s a status quo, a par line, or if it’s downbeat.

Since 2008 the mood at ICSC has gotten increasingly positive yet never exuberant.

No, and I honestly think that the positiveness—you have to stay positive where all the tell-tale signs are not positive. You also try to keep upbeat.  You try to keep the landlords upbeat.  You try to keep the tenants upbeat.  Tenant numbers and sales numbers are—you know, numbers are numbers. They’re meant not to lie.

Will there be a larger focus on foreign retailers this year?

Normally around here, we never paid attention to what was going on on the other side of the oceans around the world because it never affected us much. But all of a sudden the global economy versus local economy is beginning to factor in at a significant pace and a significant amount, as well.

You came to Studley this September as executive vice president of retail, and until now Studley hadn’t focused on the retail sector. That must be daunting.

Yeah. It is daunting, but the one thing I’ll say here that—in all the other places I’ve worked, in all the time that I’ve worked added up, referrals from investment sales brokers and capital markets brokers and office brokers, I’ve had more opportunities to talk with global retail players referred from in-house from different areas of the real estate business, but I’ve had more referrals and meetings with retailers in the last 90 days than I could probably add up in the previous 25 years.

What do you attribute that to?

I attribute it to the type of clients that we represent on the office space side, and, specifically, in the retail side we’ve represented some pretty large retailers.  We just completed representing—it’s public information now—the office brokers in here just represented J. Crew in the renewal of their corporate headquarters in Vornado’s building down on Aster Place and Broadway. This was done in the last 90 days or so, 120 days.

Over the next six to 12 months, what goals have you set for the retail division?

I’d like to add on some new tenants. We’re in the process of doing a lot of pitches—pitches locally, pitches regionally, pitches nationally and pitches globally.

I went to Europe two weeks ago and spent some time with some of our counterparts in Paris and in Italy and managed to meet some of the significant luxury brand people in Europe and some of the middle of the road brands, as well.  It’s well received.  Our partners in Europe are very well versed and really good at what they do.  They represent retailers on that side of the ocean like here.

So at least one of the goals is to actually find a European retailer and bring them over?

Yeah. We’re looking, and I’ll tell you we’re looking at South American retailers, Central American retailers, European, etc. We’re dealing with companies from Asia who are high-end pastry and coffee shops and tea shops from Asia.

Is it a point of pride for a retail broker to be the first to bring someone into this market?

Mr. Breslin: Yeah, it’s kind of a little feather in the cap type of thing. A landlord will give it extra attention. The landlords here are quite different than a lot of landlords.  Even mom and pop landlords here are getting quite sophisticated about who the tenant is.

How does Studley differ from Grubb & Ellis or CBRE, two firms at which you’ve worked?

Here it’s literally baking a cake from scratch with all the ingredients. You put all the ingredients in and you come out with the type of cake you want. All of the people here at Studley are behind it 100 percent. I’ve had numerous discussions with them about what they can do to make it better. They say we really want to become a first-rate division of this company because we’re very successful in all our other divisions. We just want this to morph and come into the fold and be successful. So with the upper management and the senior management here, and the owners of the company behind it, it’s an exciting thing. Also, it’s a private company.  Private versus public, to me these days, is a godsend.

The Commercial Observer: After 9/11, when CNN lost its antennas at World Trade Center, you got it a new lease at 1 Chase Plaza in 72 hours. How do you do a deal—any deal— in 72 hours?

Mr. Breslin: There was a guy I know who is specifically an antenna and cell tower consultant. I’ve know him a very, very long time. The way it happened is I ran into him on the street. We were talking. 'Hey, what are you up to these days?' He says I’m representing some companies that lost broadcast antennas in the World Trade Center. I don’t know if, in his package, CNN was the only one that piggy-backed onto that tower, but CNN was the player.
Those CNN antennas eventually ended up at 1 Chase Plaza.

How did that happen?

I was representing Chase Bank in retail with some other folks. I had a very, very good relationship with a really senior guy at Chase Bank. The reason why Chase played into it so precisely and quickly was they had the tallest building in downtown Manhattan after the World Trade Centers came down. So it was pretty natural. In the meantime, I had a friend who was pretty instrumental in steering most of the red tape through the city and through Chase because big corporations have a lot of red tape. But he understood what it was for and what the need was. We put together the deal in a matter of days. There were all kinds of security issues with Chase. They never wanted anybody on their property.
As a retail broker, you must be on the lookout for the next new neighborhood.

What are you seeing in terms of the new, exciting, vibrant neighborhood for retail in Manhattan?

The Upper East Side—86th Street between Second and Lexington avenues—has evolved upward very quickly with those two developments that went on on 86th, the one on the corner of Third and the one on the corner of Lex, where H & M is and those guys. You just got a Shake Shack in there and La Fontaine, the French soap and perfume company, just opened a store up there.

Wait a second—in other words, the new hip neighborhood is the Upper East Side?

It’s sad to say or scary to say, but if you go up and stand outside the Shake Shack on a Saturday or Sunday around 12:00, the line is astronomical.  It’s unbelievable.

Your father, [columnist, novelist and author] Jimmy Breslin, is famously opinionated. Does he have any insight into the commercial real estate market in the city?  Does he ever talk about it?

He jokes around. I remember once he said something to me. It was like one of the presidents’ birthdays—like Washington’s or Lincoln’s or something like that. I was married at the time and he called on that Monday and everything is closed. He said, ‘What are you doing?’  I said, ‘I’m working.’ He goes, ‘Oh, yeah, you’re greedy.’ It stuck me kind of like a thorn and a joke at the same time because my father, he called me once, and I was in Europe or somewhere. I was in Austria. He goes, ‘Yeah, you go all over the world, and I can’t get off of Broadway.’ But the greedy thing on President’s Day was the one that struck me as pretty funny.

jsederstrom@observer.com

As in: 40 years ago, 1969. Richard Nixon had been elected president with bullet-headed, venom-spouting know-nothing Spiro Agnew as his vice president; the war in Vietnam was in full throttle; New York had lost its Senator Robert F. Kennedy; America’s cities were on the precipice of destruction; New York itself was churning as the white working class rose up, black communities roiled and city services creaked to a halt. The impossibly handsome mayor, blue-eyed, crooked-toothed WASP Republican John Lindsay, who had been elected as the white knight of urban politics in 1965, was running for reelection and had lost his primary to Senator John Marchi of Staten Island. He was suddenly a man without a party line.

The New York Yankees were playing without Mickey Mantle for the first time since 1950.

New York City, exhausted, filthy, hot, wheezing, broke and worn out, had gone from being the greatest city of winners in the world to looking like a grimy city of losers. The next mayor of New York was about to be an angry tough conservative Democrat with a pencil moustache named Mario Procaccino, who was pictured on the cover of Time leading the white working class as they stormed the Bastille of New York power.

And then history sneezed. For one weird, hot summer, events became a mad spasm in New York City.

There was, of course, the fact that man was about to drop his first boot on the moon. There was the massive, naked, muddy majesty of Woodstock, which was a cultural shock to the American consciousness.

But mostly the story of New York City in 1969 was the mysterious convergence of two weird partners: the scampy New York Mets and the aristocratic prep-schooled, Yale-educated, baseball-innocent mayor, John Lindsay. 

The New York Mets, managed by the former Brooklyn Dodgers all-star first baseman Gil Hodges, began winning games, led by their two young starting pitchers, Tom Seaver and Jerry Koosman. And John V. Lindsay began to gain in the polls as the New York tradition of white limousine liberals, working-class voters and the black community began to assert itself.

“Locally, the city is being torn apart,” said Jay Kriegel, then a driven, black-spectacled aide to Mayor Lindsay in his City Hall Camelot. “Conflicts are raging. You go through a transit strike, three teachers’ strikes, the teamsters are opening up drawbridges so people can’t cross them by day. It was crazy!”

“I was chief of staff to Senator Jacob Javits and I knew John Lindsay from a few meetings at state caucuses,” said Richard Aurelio, Mr. Lindsay’s campaign manager that year. “He asked me, I guess, in the spring of ’69 to run his campaign. He showed me the polls, which had him at a very low margin.”

Mr. Aurelio immediately recommended that he forgo running from the Republican primary—he felt there wasn’t a chance he could win. But the base of Mr. Lindsay’s home district—the so-called Silk Stocking 17th Congressional District—insisted he run. He lost to John Marchi.

“Primary night when it was announced Marchi had won, it was one of the most dispiriting nights in my life,” said Sid Davidoff, the deputy campaign manager. “We had come in there as the first Republican mayor in forever and then we lost that primary.”

“The polls asked: What do you most dislike about John Lindsay?” said Mr. Aurelio. And the polls said “he was too preferential to the blacks, to minorities. That struck me as being just as something we could turn around. My experience in New York was that New Yorkers had a social conscience, and this to me seemed a little bit bizarre and atypical of the real New York that I knew. And so I agreed to take it on.”

“I thought there had to be three elements to our campaign:

“One he had to acknowledge mistakes in his first term in a way to humble himself; we had to bring him down to size,” he said. “You know, he was a huge in a kind of high-class elegant way and he was tall, handsome. We had to bring him down to size and show a little bit of humbleness.”

“One of the knocks on Lindsay was that he was an elitist and a tall guy in a suit who was out of touch with us,” said Ken Auletta, the New Yorker writer who was then a speechwriter for Democrat Howard Samuels. “Then he was in this ad where he appeared facing the camera, which was unusual then, with his sleeves rolled up, and he apologized and he was talking about the mistakes he made. It was a very compelling ad.”

“Two, his campaign had to be based on confronting the hostile neighborhoods, not his base,” said Mr. Aurelio. “We weren’t going to spend any time at rallies where he was going to be cheered. We were going to go to the boroughs where most of the hostility occurred. We were going to confront the people in Queens who were angry about the snowstorm and the Brooklyn Jewish neighborhoods that were angry about the decentralization ideas and his preference for the black neighborhoods. We needed to prick their conscience.

“Three, was his willingness to come out against Vietnam, which was unpopular in New York.”

But most of all, John Lindsay benefited from his competition.

There was Mario Procaccino, the Akim Tamiroff look-alike, a Bronx-native who was the city comptroller.

“The setup encouraged me the day after the primary,” said Mr. Aurelio. “We were essentially running against two conservatives. We had Procaccino and Marchi, two Italians, and they were kind of splitting the Italian-American vote and they were splitting the conservative vote, and splitting the anti-Lindsay vote. Procaccino … was linked to the old Democratic organizations and the so-called Democratic bosses, which were gradually losing their power. Marchi was a clear conservative and endorsed by Bill Buckley and that crowd.”

“Procaccino didn’t fit the occasion!” said Jimmy Breslin, the journalist who wrote New York magazine’s epochal piece “Is Lindsay Too Tall to Be Mayor?” that summer. “He’s your mayor? That fucking midget Procaccino would have said something crazy.”

“Procaccino was a funny-looking man and he was a total joke,” said Ronnie Eldridge, now married to Mr. Breslin, and a point person in recruiting Democrats to Mr. Lindsay’s campaign in the summer of 1969.

“Procaccino was a blustery guy and he had an attitude about other Democrats: fuck ’em,” said Mr. Auletta. “He didn’t reach out to Democrats. He was short, but he was also a very small man. Lindsay immediately had the sympathy of Democrats everywhere.”

One of those Democrats was Mr. Auletta’s boss, Howard Samuels. Mr. Samuels, along with a handful of others, like future Congresswoman Bella Abzug, defected to support Mr. Lindsay. Meanwhile, Mr. Aurielo secured Alex Rose, the man who ran the Liberal Party—the still-powerful vessel of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New York—to give their nomination to Mr. Lindsay.

“We had Democratic support, even though there weren’t a lot of them, and we scheduled their endorsements on almost a daily basis,” said Mr. Aurelio. “You got the impression that they were all supporting him even though there were 20 to 30 figures who backed him.”

“Somebody asked Frank Hogan”—the almost-permanent district attorney of New York—“at Gracie Mansion, at some freakin’ meeting, about John Lindsay,” said Jimmy Breslin, “and he said in the parking lot that Lindsay was the best mayor for the law enforcement we’ve had. Hogan’s name at that time was priceless. He was the big name in law enforcement in fucking America for crying out loud!

“It shut up a lot of people at once. Anybody that thought he was the limp-wristed John Lindsay, who won’t protect you from the blacks, the crimes, this and that, it shut everybody up.”

Then Golda Meir visited. The American-raised Israeli had become prime minister on St. Patrick’s Day and was a New York folk hero in the greatest Jewish city in the world. “The event that meant most to me was when Golda Meir came to New York City,” said Mr. Kriegel. “She is the pope for the Jewish community.”

Mr. Lindsay and his staff knew that she was set to come to the city. She would be coming in the early fall, right after Yom Kippur, and he wanted to plan a Sukkoth.

“Golda Meir is coming, we should build a sukkah and welcome Golda Meir to a state dinner run by John Lindsay,” said Mr. Davidoff. “So I’m looking at John Lindsay, this big WASP, and I’ve got to go and explain a sukkah to John and Mary Lindsay. Mary was very formal in a lot of ways, but when it came to stuff like that, she was like a diplomat’s wife. She understood that a state dinner should be at Lincoln Center.”

The Lindsay people understood that the Jewish middle-class Brooklyn and Queens base that felt so alienated by Mr. Lindsay, could be turned around. They would throw a lavish dinner for Golda Meir and it would be hosted by Mr. Lindsay. But Mr. Davidoff knew that if it were indoors at Lincoln Center, significant Jewish leaders wouldn’t come. So they planned a lavish affair in the parking lot behind the Brooklyn Museum.

“Every prominent and influential Jew from New York was there,” said Mr. Aurelio.

More than 2,000 people were invited to the event; Mr. Lindsay walked in wearing a yarmulke. He stood right next to her.

“There were thousands and thousands of people outside the Brooklyn Museum that night,” said Mr. Davidoff. “Afterwards, the sukkah was available for the public, and we put out a booklet explaining the sukkah … and we had John Lindsay write the prologue.” 

Ms. Meir was up on the dais and did everything but endorse John Lindsay. “They didn’t say it, but they didn’t have to say it,” said Mr. Davidoff.

A few days after she spoke, the Mets would play their first playoff game.

THE METS WERE born in 1962, the laughably disastrous team that tickled the broken heart of New York National League baseball after the Dodgers and Giants moved west in the late 1950s. They lost and lost and lost.

“Being traded to the Mets in those days was not a good option,” said Al Weis, a Mets utility infielder who became a hero of the ’69 series. “I was with the White Sox and we were always in contention. The Mets were a last-place club.”

“In ’69, I thought we would take the next step forward,” said Ron Swoboda, the Mets right-fielder. “I thought we’d be a little better than we were in ’68 … around .500, a little above, a little below.”

And for the most part that’s how the Mets played for most of the year, around the .500 mark. But on June 15, the Mets brought in a veteran first baseman.

“Donn Clendenon was a lawyer who engineered a deal that got him traded for the Mets,” said Ron Swoboda. “He physically engineered the deal. There weren’t many baseball players who were lawyers! The Pirates were trying to trade him to the Expos, and he told them that ‘I’ll give you a couple teams I’ll go to, but one of ’em ain’t the Expos; otherwise, I’ll go be a lawyer.’ And they believed him and traded him to us.

“When he walked in, everything changed,” said Mr. Swoboda. “He was a veteran thumper, a real hitter. He rode everyone in the clubhouse, he could get everyone in the clubhouse. … He was to me the missing link. When he came in here, everything changed.”

The Mets surged in the summer. They had Tom Seaver, the Mets Franchise, who had a career-high 25 wins; Jerry Koosman became one of the most sure-handed No. 2 men in baseball. And Gil Hodges, the manager, was a cool hand who, like Joe Torre  now, had universal respect.

“Gil was a very good manager, an honest manager, I’ll tell ya,” said Yogi Berra, who was the Mets first base coach in 1969. “When we started in spring training and we were doing signs, I said to Gil, ‘Want me to help them teach the signs?’ He said, ‘No, if they don’t know the signs by now, they get fined. And if you give them the signs, I’ll fine you.’ But everyone appreciated it, I’ll tell you. He did a great job and he was a good manager.”

When September rolled around, the Mets had a two-game series with the Cubs at Shea, and they were trailing by 2.5 games. People began to say that the Mets had magic.

“Everything didn’t come to a head until the latter part of the season,” said Al Weis. “We were plodding along winning a few ball games, and then all of a sudden we got into a hot streak.”

“The turning point was when we played the Cubs right there at the end,” said Wayne Garrett, the Mets red-headed rookie third baseman. “It was a series that really meant something. That’s when we really played well.”

They also had Black Magic. During one of the games, a black cat came out from the stands at Shea, circled the Cubs’ third baseman, Ron Santo, walked in front of the Cubs dugout, and then ran back underneath the stands. The Mets never looked back and took the division.

“There were cats all over that stadium,” said Mr. Garrett, the Mets rookie third baseman. “It was a freak accident. It happened to be a black cat, too! There were probably a few rats underneath that stadium, a few cats. They would come out on the field once in a while. They would come out momentarily and run back underneath he seats. It happened half a dozen times.”

The New York Mets clinched the division, swept the Braves and went to the World Series. The city was in disbelief.

Above all, there was the one magical moment that symbolized the Miracle Mets. In Game 4, with the Mets leading the heavily favored Orioles two games to one, the Mets had their ace in the hole: Tom Seaver. And, after a rough start in Game 1, he was brilliant again. Through eight innings, he was pitching a shutout. But there was trouble in the ninth.

There were runners at the corners. The Orioles’ superstar Frank Robinson was at third, and the Orioles tank of a man, Boog Powell, was at first. This was before the days of bringing in the closer; it was the era when the starter, an ace, was his own stopper. And the Mets were coming dangerously close to disaster. If the Orioles could bring home two runs, they would take the lead, the Mets momentum would be dead, and they wouldn’t be able to clinch the Series at Shea Stadium.

With late-afternoon shadows eating up home plate, Tom Seaver delivered a beautiful pitch to Brooks Robinson. It was a two-seam fastball, and it sank hard. But Robinson, always known for his glove, was a man who knew how to hit in the clutch. He hit a screaming liner to right center field. It was hit with such laser-beam precision, it looked like it could go into the gap, and if Mets center fielder Tommie Agee didn’t cut it off, it could score Boog Powell. 

Worse, it was going in the direction of Ron Swoboda, a solid hitter who was a mess in the outfield. He went in the wrong direction. Balls bounced over his head. He’d twist his body left and right, head pivoting and twirling like a screw top. Robinson hit his liner to right.

For years, Swoboda had been practicing fly balls. He was learning when a ball was hit and you couldn’t judge it, you waited a second. He learned which way to put out his glove, and which way to turn his head.

He cleared his mind, he conjured up nothing, he didn’t think, he reacted.

“I just broke immediately and I had a great jump on it,” said Mr. Swoboda. “When he hit it I said, ‘Oh shit! I got nothing to do but to run after this one.’ You want to intercept the ball at the earliest point. I realized I’m going to have to lunge at this sucker and it hit right in the web of the glove, which is the best place. I made a perfect break, I never stopped, I never faltered and I caught it back-end, fully laid out and kept rolling and I came up and threw into the infield.”

All who saw it agreed: one of the great catches ever. By the time Swoboda wound up, his cap fell off, and he got the ball into the infield, Frank Robinson tagged up and had scored the tying run. But it didn’t matter. Anyone who saw that play knew the Mets were going to win the game.

By the time the bottom of the 10th inning rolled around, the Mets had it won, and the next day, Cleon Jones fell to one knee and then bedlam broke loose. The New York Mets were the World Champions of baseball.

“I was running in clear space, and I was never sure I was going to get there,” said Mr. Swoboda. “I dove at it. It was clearly an example of your reach exceeding your normal capabilities—your reach exceeding your wildest dreams. Wasn’t that true of 1969 in every way?”

“I’ve seen replays of Cleon dancing up and down and all the players jumping up and down, but I got into that dugout and the clubhouse as fast I could,” said Al Weis. “Most of the players got off that field fast.”

“Anytime you win, boy, there’s commotion, I’ll tell you,” said Yogi Berra.

JOHN LINDSAY was dumbfounded.

“John Lindsay knew nothing about baseball, and he didn’t like it,” said Richard Reeves, the biographer and author of the forthcoming history of the Berlin Airlift, who was the New York Times City Hall bureau chief in 1969. “Literally at the end of each inning, he’d pop out of his seat and ask, ‘Is this over?’ And then he had to be pulled back down.”

“In one of those playoff games, he said, ‘If the game stays tied, then what happens? Who wins?’” said Shelly Brosoff, a member of the mayor’s staff who was sitting with him at Shea Stadium.

“He was crew in college, his twin brother was a boxer, and baseball was not his game of choice,” said Mr. Davidoff.

As Shea Stadium’s field was mobbed with delirious Mets fans, Mr. Brosoff guided Mr. Lindsay from their seats behind the dugout, onto the warning track, into the clubhouse.

Mr. Lindsay didn’t look much different from former Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, who was standing inside the Mets clubhouse with his arms crossed and a stoic, somewhat bewildered look on his face. Mayor Lindsay didn’t know what to do.

“Tom Seaver was sitting on a stool and guys were around all around him and Champagne was flying everywhere,” said Mr. Brosoff.

“I gave the mayor a bottle of Champagne and I said to him, ‘You see that guy on the stool?’—he didn’t know anybody, he wasn’t a baseball fan—and I said,  ‘See that guy over there? Go over there and pour this bottle of champagne on his head.’

“He looked at me and said, ‘Shelly are you crazy?’ I said, ‘No, no, go over there and pour on its head! Go and do it!’

Then Champagne was everywhere, and suddenly the tall dry mayor was in the middle of the wet Mets melee.

“It wasn’t something that was totally spontaneous,” said Mr. Aurelio, the campaign manager. “In the locker room, we kind of urged them to soak Lindsay. Here’s this patrician-type guy who some people, some of the ethnics, had turned against in the city, and now these white ethnics suddenly are seeing him being doused with Champagne over his face.”

Suddenly John V. Lindsay was a man of the people, a baseball fan, drenched in Queens, beloved in Brooklyn, the cross-cultural political phenomenon that he had been when elected in 1965. 

“I remember John Lindsay was in political trouble and he had this complete embrace of the team,” said Mr. Swoboda, the Mets right fielder. “He came in the clubhouse and he had himself doused in Champagne and he used all of it for the campaign: ‘The Mets can do it, I can do it! The Mets are an underdog, I am, too!’

“He even had guys on the team doing commercials and doing personal appearances for him. He totally used that whole event as a trigger for a campaign that was in big trouble.”

Then the Mets had a ticker-tape parade, the first time it happened for a World Series champion.

“It was touch-and-go until the last three or four weeks of the campaign,” said Mr. Aurelio. “In October, after the Mets victory, in the three weeks before the election, we felt the momentum going our way. Up until then, while I was hopeful and optimistic, I thought I was prepared to lose by a small margin.”

“I don’t know if he picks up a single vote for being at Shea and being in the locker room with Champagne,” said Mr. Kriegel. “This is a city that is very beaten down and just endlessly consumed in racial conflict and tension and recrimination. What the Mets do is create some sense across the city of a breath of fresh air, they feel good, a relaxer. It relieves the tension. It cuts it like a knife.”

“There was anger, a lot of anger,” said Mr. Davidoff. “The snowstorm, the teacher’s strike, the claim that Lindsay was giving away the city to minorities, there was decentralization—how many things do you have to go through! And with the Mets the city felt better, and when there’s a better feeling about the city, there’s a better feeling about the mayor.”

“The city went from being anti- this tall, handsome, WASP, debonair patrician,” said Mr. Aurelio, “into seeing him as a guy that was fighting the bosses and was attracting Democrats and fighting the radical right and who was fighting against the Nixon Vietnam policies and his insensitivity to the plight of the city,” said Mr. Aurelio. “And then with the Mets, it just was this dramatic change. A lot of it we were lucky to have happen to us, and a lot of if we inspired ourselves in clever ways. It was a lot of things coming together in a way that created the perfect comeback campaign.”

“Everything came together for that one shining moment,” said Mr. Reeves. “It was our Camelot. It all came together. And even with all that union and racial stuff, the Mets pulled those people together, and to a lesser extent, the Jets and the Knicks. It pulled together for that moment. The fact is Lindsay was a lousy mayor and the recession began in 1970, and Ford told the city to drop dead and then people abandoned the city. It was this kind of peak.”

So attention, Mayor Bloomberg, Governor Paterson, Fred Wilpon and the Steinbrenner Boys: Don’t worry about the banks and Tim Geithner, pay no attention to the subways and the Fed. Give us a little magic. It doesn’t need to last forever. Just a few innings. For this summer and for this fall, if you want to save your butts, give us a few wins.

We’ll love you for a month or two.

jkoblin@observer.com

6 p.m. The Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis at The New School will host a discussion with Professor Robert Shiller to discuss his upcoming book, Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy and Why it Matters for Global Capitalism.  In Tishman Auditorium, 66 West 12th Street.

6:30 p.m. Savoy Restaurant kicks off "celebration of cassoulet," 70 Prince Street.

6:30 p.m. Jimmy Breslin shares passages from his work during dinner at BAMcafe. Brooklyn Academy of Music, 30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn.

7:15 p.m. MoMa celebrates "Documentary Fortnight" with The Moth: Stories from Behind the Scenes of Nonfiction Film. The Moth presents five story tellers who are either documentary subjects or filmmakers themselves. At 11 West 53rd Street.

7:30 p.m. Theater Resources Unlimited and Back Stage host the panel, "Pitch Perfect: How to Present Your Projects and What a Producer Should Be Looking For." At The Players Theatre, 115 MacDougal Street.

7:30 p.m. Opening night for Gotham Chamber Opera's presentation of Joseph Haydn's "L'isola Disabitata." At 899 Tenth Avenue. 

8 p.m. 3rd Ward hosts Drink N' Draw, an art party. B.Y.O.  drawing implements for evening featuring "alcohol and beautiful models." At 195 Morgan Avenue, between Meadow and Stagg Streets, in Brooklyn.   

10 p.m. The second-annual installment of Dr. Dre Day--his 44th Birthday: Featuring Nick Hook, Egg Foo Young, Cosmo Baker, Project Matt, and Dances With White Girls. Also promises of a live re-enactment of "The $20 Sack Pyramid." At Santos Party House, 100 Lafayette Street.

My colleague Dana Rubinstein recently profiled Sheffield developer Kent Swig.

It starts with a kiss. In the opening lines of Jimmy Breslin’s The Good Rat, the consummate mob reporter is practicing his smooching in the mirror: “If you kiss,” he says, “it is a real sign that you’re in the outfit.” And if you’re kissing the cheeks he’s kissed, you’d better get it right.

The bulk of this book—Mr. Breslin’s 17th—focuses on the 2006 case of The United States v. Stephen Caracappa and Louis Eppolito, two NYPD detectives accused of moonlighting for the Lucchese crime family. It’s “the first great mob trial of the century,” and the lead character is Bensonhurst’s Burton Kaplan, a lifelong crook and deputy (albeit unmade—he’s Jewish, after all) to Anthony “Gaspipe” Casso, a Lucchese underboss. Mr. Kaplan, 72 and with “a morgue full of answers,” has turned informant, hoping to shave a few years from the 18 he has left to serve on a drug conviction. Despite a lifetime of shunning and shooting stool pigeons, Mr. Kaplan knows it’s now or never for him, and he’s always been one step ahead of the average wiseguy anyway; “he was in crime as a business, not an underworld dodge played on street corners and alleys,” writes Mr. Breslin. “Gangsters can’t do what he did, because it requires effort and thought.”

Large swaths of court transcripts are reprinted here in Q&A format: Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Henoch shoots questions at Mr. Kaplan, whose answers are both plain and fantastical. “Rather than tell the tale myself,” the author explains, “I let Burton Kaplan do the honor, since often he tells it better than even the greatest writer could.” Mr. Kaplan deadpans through a life of crime, putting the screws to his former associates as he rattles off their felonies like he’s reading a grocery list.

With decades of secrets buried like bodies in a parking lot, it’s a thrill to read Mr. Kaplan’s testimony, and the author’s fascination with La Cosa Nostra is certainly contagious. At times, the minutiae of courtroom questioning can be trying, but Mr. Breslin doesn’t let it get too far before interrupting with backstory on peripheral characters, history lessons about the Mafia families and tales of mob decadence. Whether it’s Bonanno boss Tony Café shaking hands with Police Commissioner Ray Kelly at Bamonte’s in Williamsburg (“[It] appears to be an out-of-the-way place, but it is on Broadway in the world of New York people who know what they are eating”) or a racehorse drinking from a bucket of ice water at Pep McGuire’s (“the greatest bar in the history of the city”), there’s a sharkskin-suit charm to Mr. Breslin’s underworld.

“I stand on Queens Boulevard in front of what was once Pep McGuire’s, and I recall nights and crimes,” the author laments, “and I am certain that I hold memories possessed by virtually no one else alive.”

As the transcripts and tales intertwine, a picture of stunning corruption emerges. Messrs. Caracappa and Eppolito weren’t just crooked cops; they were mediocre mobsters who could scarcely shoot straight. Mr. Breslin shows no sympathy for the bad boys in blue, describing Mr. Eppolito as having “the shoulders of a goat” and “the sorrowful eyes of a cow.” Slumped in their chairs, they get no compassion from the reader, either. In this world, if you’re going to be bad, you’ve got to do it with panache. Indeed, both are guilty of what the author calls “the most serious of all felonies, being a bore.”

Luckily for the reader, Mr. Breslin is incapable of committing such a crime. Whether Mr. Kaplan is spelling out how a treasury bill scam went down or the author himself is accompanying John Gotti to his Bergin Hunt and Fish Club on 101st Avenue, there’s no shortage of wonder on hand.

Completely sure of what he’s doing, the author knows how to hook a reader. “In my years in the newspaper business,” he says, “the Mafia comes down to one thing: circulation.” And, with that lesson in mind, The Good Rat is splashed with enough guns, gore and gangsters to move truckloads of copies.

Adam Rathe is associate editor of the arts and entertainment section of The Brooklyn Paper. He can be reached at books@observer.com.

"Even if you had a source saying Michael Bloomberg said he is running, the best thing you have is a source saying that Bloomberg has said he is running," the former Newsday columnist told me yesterday.

"That doesn’t necessarily mean he is actually going to do it," added Levy, who is now the head of Hofstra's Center for Suburban Studies.

He recalled another New Yorker who flirted with running for president:

"I get a call from Mario Cuomo as the engines are warming up on the tarmac, heading out to New Hampshire. As was his wont in those days, he would call reporters he was comfortable with and he would read them copies of his speeches. So, he reads me the speech for [announcing a bid], and the speech against [running]. When you were covering him, you always knew that he did this. He would tell you one way, and if you weren’t careful, you would jump to the wrong conclusion.

"And I said, 'what are you going to do,' and he says, ‘I haven’t made up my mind yet,‘ and I said, 'O.K.'

"He calls up Jimmy Breslin, who is not used to covering Mario Cuomo, and reads Jimmy the speech as if he was running for president. And Breslin gets so excited he says, ‘I gotta go, I gotta go,’ and hangs up on Cuomo. And he [Breslin] goes up and writes a column that Mario Cuomo is running for president, quoting from his speech. And he was of course wrong.

"So, how do you know? You never know."

It was an accident, but that didn’t count for much when the woman’s hair started to sizzle and Mailer and his friend Jimmy Breslin started pounding her over the head in an attempt to put out the flame.

“Hundreds of people were looking,” Mr. Breslin said. “Looking at the two drunks beating up the poor woman. They were thinking, ‘Look at them, the drunks. All the rumors are true.’”

Mr. Breslin, the legendary columnist and author, sounded exasperated as he told this story on Monday afternoon.

“People don’t understand the fact that Norman was a lovely gentleman!” he shouted. “They think he was some crazed creature of the night! He wasn’t. There wasn’t that much of that stuff. The whole thing was sitting and writing.”

Mailer was 84 when he died at Mt. Sinai Hospital on Saturday morning. Before that he lived a big, loud life, which he spent asking questions, accumulating bruises and setting all kinds of people’s hair on fire.

In July 1963, he had a piece published in Esquire called “Some Children of the Goddess,” in which he said exactly what he thought of his American contemporaries in the literary world. John Updike reminded him of “stale garlic,” he wrote, and William Styron was a “fat spoiled rich boy.” James Baldwin was trash and J.D. Salinger was, too. Mailer was better, was the basic idea. He was the champ. Fittingly, around this time, the illustrator David Levine did a drawing in which Mailer was dressed as a boxer, his little body in a crouch and his gloves at his face.

According to the journalist Gay Talese, one of Mailer’s closest friends at the time of his death, Mailer was proud of this drawing, and he had Mr. Levine’s original sketch mounted on cardboard. One day, Mailer packed the drawing carefully in tissue and brought it to New Jersey so he could show it to his friend, the Puerto Rican prizefighter José Torres. Mr. Torres had just finished working out and was lying in bed when Mailer walked into his room and handed him the drawing. A few people were in there talking, Mr. Talese among them.

“Look at this,” Mailer said.

“Torres took this David Levine thing from Mailer and he looked at it and he said nothing,” Mr. Talese said in an interview. “And then what he did, José Torres, he was holding it with both hands, and he looked at Mailer, and he starts to bend the goddamn thing … bending it back and forth and back and forth as if he’s gonna snap it. And he’s looking at Mailer, waiting for Mailer to say, ‘Don’t do that!’”

Mailer looked stunned but he stared intently back, according to Mr. Talese, as Mr. Torres searched his face for fear: “He was toying with him, looking for some sign of Mailer’s trepidation. … It looked to me as though Mailer didn’t know what to do. This wasn’t Gore Vidal! He was really facing down a fighter.”

It was funny, Mr. Talese said, to see the fearsome, fearless Norman Mailer so dumbstruck in the presence of true might. And so it was a relief for everyone when Mr. Torres broke the gaze, flashed his friend a broad smile and handed him his drawing back.

That’s how a lot of Mailer stories seem to go: open with blood lust, peak somewhere in the neighborhood of confrontation and end tenderly with a giggle or a wink.

Mr. Talese has another story like that. This one takes place in early fall 1962, when he and Mailer were both in Chicago to cover the historic Sonny Liston vs. Floyd Patterson fight at Comiskey Park.

The night before the big match, Mailer participated in a debate against National Review editor William F. Buckley, an event billed as a showdown between “a conservative and a hipster” about the nature of the right in America. Thousands of people came to watch, and Mr. Talese wrote an article about it for The New York Times.

In his piece, Mr. Talese called the Mailer-Buckley face-off a draw, and he didn’t think much of it after he filed his report.

The following evening, Mr. Talese was sitting in a hotel talking to some sportswriters over drinks. He saw Mailer walking toward him from across the room.

“He’s looking at me and he’s getting closer and closer and he’s not smiling,” Mr. Talese recalled. “And he’s just looking at me, staring at me. And then he comes over and says, ‘What the fuck do you mean, “draw”? I looked at his face and thought, This guy is serious!”

That was when Mr. Talese, who was wearing a tan summer suit made of either gabardine or silk—he doesn’t remember which—noticed that Mailer was carrying a drink, from the looks of it some kind of whiskey or bourbon. Mr. Talese knew as soon as he saw it that this drink would end up on his clothes if he did not do something immediately to defuse the situation.

“I remember thinking, I’m in trouble here. Because if he throws a drink at me, first of all my suit’s going to be ruined with this bastard; second of all, it’s going to be a scene,” Mr. Talese said. “I looked at him and I felt suddenly that I had to stop that drink from coming at me. … I just felt like, I can’t let this happen—it’s going to be humiliating for me. Here’s this lunatic writer, this brilliant fuckup of a guy, this kamikaze, this loose cannon called Norman Mailer, and I looked at him as though I was fucking Don Corleone … and I just said, ‘Norman Mailer, do not throw that drink at me.’”

This made Mailer smile and laugh. “I wasn’t gonna throw a drink at you!” he said. “I just wish you hadn’t said it was a draw.”

And that was the end of it. Just as it had to be, really, because for all that famous recklessness and brutality, Mailer’s pugnacity was playful, more an expression of his stylistic sensibility than a genuine threat to the people around him.

Mailer wasn’t really a fighter at heart, in other words. But he liked playing one because it forced him to test his limits.

Sometimes this ended badly for him. Ringside at Cotto vs. Mosley at Madison Square Garden this past Saturday night, legendary boxing writer and filmmaker Budd Schulberg recalled that Mailer once pulled a head butt on the dean of British sports journalism, Hugh McIlvanney, who retaliated by decking him handily in the jaw.

“Norman went rolling back onto a table of food,” Mr. Schulberg said. “It was a huge mess.”

According to author Sidney Offit, who served on the board of the PEN American Center when Mailer was president of the organization during 1984-1986, that sort of thing only happened when Mailer was around a lot of people. If you got him on his own, Mr. Offit said, he was usually quite gentle and calm.

“He was an absolutely endearing and engaging and supportive friend, one on one, but by the time five people were there, he was making speeches and startling everybody,” Mr. Offit said. “By the time eight people were there he was juggling and swallowing swords and doing a high-wire act.”

Indeed, Mailer was a bold and dedicated performer. Never was that clearer than in 1971, when at age 48 Mailer put on shorts and gloves and got into the ring with Mr. Torres on the set of The Dick Cavett Show. According to Mr. Breslin, Mailer threw all his punches with his eyes closed.

Mailer didn’t care who saw him lose, and that was just as true in his writing as it was in his life. He hid nothing from anyone, letting the whole world watch as he grappled tumultuously with his unwieldy curiosities about evil, God, power, sex and consciousness.

“He was willing to take large risks and make himself look silly,” said novelist William Kennedy, who was a close friend of Mailer’s at the time of his death. “And these large risks were very imaginative leaps into the unknown. He made something out of his fanciful ideas and that was the direction he was always trying to go in, which was to do something that had never been done before.”

A mad scientist who wasn’t afraid to experiment on himself, Mailer did so publicly with gusto and muscle and never worried about looking ridiculous if there was something he really wanted to try.

And so he tried to do a lot of things, like follow his best-selling debut novel The Naked and the Dead with a book about an anti-Stalinist libertarian-anarchist from Brooklyn. And run for mayor of New York City in 1969 (with Mr. Breslin as his running mate) because he thought New York City should secede from the state. And write a book from the perspective of Marilyn Monroe. And make movies and direct plays even though he didn’t really know how. And help start a new weekly newspaper in New York because he thought the dailies were not doing their jobs.

There was often nothing glamorous or graceful in Mailer’s efforts, and though his failures were never out of plain sight, he was never discouraged from tackling his next project with seriousness and imagination. In effect he stood before his critics naked, fundamentally vulnerable despite all his machismo and arrogance.

In so doing he practiced a singular approach to intellectual inquiry—a form of New Journalism more radical and more ambitious than anyone else had dared to try. Whereas Tom Wolfe and Truman Capote had simply applied the mechanical conventions of fiction to the telling of true stories, Mailer went further, all but becoming a fictional character in his own right and hurling himself against the world he was trying to figure out to spectacular, revelatory effect.

“His brain was so big compared to what we were used to in journalism,” Mr. Kennedy said. “He just brought a consciousness of the cosmos to whatever he was writing on. … You didn’t think of what he was doing as just a fictional device or something to bring structural or stylistic newness to a story. He was bringing a mind, and his mind was so fertile and his language was so rich and evocative and provocative, it just made for spectacular reading.”

The columnist hadn't seen the first purported exit-poll results, which had Senator John Kerry surging to victory by unimagined margins (60-40 in Pennsylvania?). Nor would he be watching when that bulletin was knocked down within half an hour.

Instead, Mr. Breslin was listening to Jimmy Breslin. In his morning Newsday column, he had declared that his prediction of a sweeping Kerry victory-first offered in May-still stood. "I am so sure," Mr. Breslin wrote, "that I am not even going to bother to watch the results tonight."

It was also, Mr. Breslin wrote, his last regular column. The proudly old-line newspaperman, who'd gotten his start at the Herald-Tribune , was walking away from Newsday . His latest contract extension had expired, he said on the phone, and he wants to work on longer projects.

That put Mr. Breslin two up on the rest of the press. Nobody else dared to name a winner, and nobody was free to walk away. All the months of coverage, the column-miles of analysis, the days logged on Southwest Airlines to Cleveland and Fort Lauderdale …. By Tuesday morning, it had yielded nothing.

"Down to the Wire, Deeply Divided," The Wall Street Journal proclaimed, over a vote-proportioned electoral map split roughly 2:2:1 among Bush red, Kerry blue and we-have-no-idea white. On Slate , whose poll-tracking project refused to count any state as undecided, a Monday-morning surge for Kerry had receded to leave the final predicted count at 269-269.

Throwing the deliberations open to outsiders didn't make things any decipherable. The New York Post gave a full page to readers' letters: 10 for Bush, 7 for Kerry. The New York Times brought in a panel of bloggers to discuss the election on its Op-Ed page: Three were for Kerry, three were for Bush and two were against the media.

"If I weren't busy writing about it, I'd probably just have a drink and forget about it," The Journal 's Web watcher, James Taranto, said Monday night.

Mr. Breslin had opted to do just that, minus the drink. He took a morning swim, he said, then voted. "I went in there radiating," he said. "I looked great, I guess."

Now, he was going to think about writing a book about Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey, for Viking, and a play about a man who survived the World Trade Center attacks. And he was going to stay in. "I should be out celebrating my insight, my genius with a ton of whiskey tonight," Mr. Breslin said, ruefully. "But I can't handle the hangovers."

The rest of the press, though, did have to keep working-even if its Tuesday stories had nothing to say, and its Wednesday ones would be pre-empted by TV. The press needed to know.

So enter the bloggers again, and the Web publications. ERROR 404: CANNOT FIND SERVER. Hang on …. There: the bloggers. The Web publications.

This was the equalizer. You could give the online folks convention passes. You could write 5,000-word profiles of them. But what they really needed was Election Day.

There were hours to fill before anyone would know the answer to the Big Question: Mr. Kerry, Mr. Bush or (please … no!) another grinding recount. But that left dozens of Little Big Questions out there-a whole list of them, scribbled in pencil in the margins of that 269-269 preliminary map.

"Can Bush get 45 to 50 percent of the vote in Dubuque County?" ABC News' morning online tip sheet, The Note, asked. Other critically tiny questions: "How well Bush does among women in the suburbs of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh …. Kerry's [margins] in Palm Beach County (high 50s or low 50s?)."

And The Note had a round of tiny answers, too. Maine would be "[m]ostly cloudy with a chance of rain this afternoon. Highs in the upper 40s. North winds 5 to 10 mph." And Pensacola? Pensacola is "Cloudy. Showers and thunderstorms likely. Lows around 70. Southeast winds 10 to 15 mph."

Yes, it would all be worthless in 12 hours. But how much more reporting would be worthless in 24 hours, or 36? How much of it would be worthless in a week? Six months? A year?

Perhaps this was the reason the old media had been glaring so intently at the blogs all along: In the long run, we're all ephemeral. In the meantime, who could get the hottest ephemera?

Through the morning and past lunchtime, the leader in blogland was not some pajama-clad revolutionary but The New Republic . Recognizing that the day's facts would be turning over fast, the weekly commentary magazine rounded up 30-odd stringers, in 16 key states, to create a minute-by-minute breaking-news operation.

The New Republic auxiliaries were paid $50 each, plus a free New Republic Online subscription, for the day's activities. Their regular employers ranged in industry standing from the Miami Herald to various local weeklies. Their dispatches included weather reports (New Mexico: "the sky is clear"), background on local races (South Carolina: "conventional wisdom is that [Republican Jim] DeMint has not quite managed to grab defeat from the jaws of victory"), and, as the day went on, a steady stream of polling-place anecdotes.

At one Cincinnati polling place, a stringer wrote, workers are telling voters, "Check your chads." In Philadelphia, a MoveOn staffer offered to fetch some "bling" for TNR 's stringer. "[S]he returned with a faux gold-plated necklace whose cursive letters spelled 'Kerry.' Apparently it had been an act of spontaneous endorsement by an ordinary American who had dropped off dozens of the necklaces at MoveOn's office."

Editor Peter Beinart said that the magazine had figured readers would be "desperate for any sliver of information" on Election Day. By late afternoon, as the glazed-eyed public kept hammering on their "refresh" buttons, the slivers added up to more than 10,000 words and were still accumulating. The idea, Mr. Beinart said, was to provide "great value for a short period of time."

"Every hour from now on," Mr. Beinart said in mid-afternoon, "the utility of the information starts to decrease."

Mainly, that was because the exit polls were starting to leak out. At 2:50 p.m., Slate 's Jack Shafer posted a teaser story explaining the online magazine's plan to flout journalistic tradition-as it had in the past-and publish the exit poll results when it could get them. That alone caused the magazine's server to stall out immediately.

Soon thereafter, a string of numbers appeared at the top of the Drudge Report, showing Mr. Kerry ahead in at least seven battleground states, including that unexpected 20 percent bulge in Pennsylvania. Those numbers then disappeared, but not before they'd showed up elsewhere on the Web.

At the National Review Online , where three blogs had been posting turnout bulletins and mulling over campaign rumors-"[T]here's no question that inside the Kerry camp at least some people think their man has already lost"-the episode triggered a spasm of anxiety. "Do not , again, do not take any exit-poll reports too seriously," one poster pleaded. "JUST GET OUT THE VOTE. Exit polls not always reliable, ESPECIALLY early ones." Liberal blogs then picked up on the National Review 's moment of panic, which led to a fit of debate at the National Review about whether the response had been too panicky.

Meanwhile, the information kept coming. At 3:15, Mr. Shafer brought out his first batch of exit poll readings-less dramatic than Matt Drudge's batch, but still showing Mr. Kerry ahead. "KERRY LEADS" Slate proclaimed, before dialing the headline back to "Early Exit: A Squeaker."

Mr. Drudge, for his part, was interpreting the result as "Kerry in striking distance-with small 1% lead-in Florida and Ohio." That claim, however, picked up caveat after caveat as the minutes went by: Al Gore had led Florida by 3 points in 2000 exit polls …. Exit polls had showed the 2000 race tied in Colorado …. The Drudge Report did not, however, stop posting exit-poll updates.

It was the 2000 exit polls, especially Florida's, that had led to the downfall of the entire election-reporting system. Four years later, there isn't even any settled theory of why the polls went wrong-whether they betrayed some underlying pro-Democratic assumptions, or simply reflected the fact that a lot more people had tried to vote for Al Gore in Florida.

As the polls started to close, and the hands of the nation lifted off computer mice and reached for the TV remote, Mr. Shafer's last update was headed "Mucho flattering to Kerry," while Mr. Drudge's page declared that things were "TIGHTENING."

Then, as television took over, the ever-ingenuous Mr. Drudge adopted a new banner. "ENOUGH OF THE MEDIA EXITS," his report declared in red capital letters. "LETS COUNT THE PEOPLE'S VOTES!"