This Clown Not Laughing Inside : Patkin’s Looks May Be Funny to Others, but Not to Him

ASHEVILLE, N.C. — The summer night air is thick with sweat and Southern accents. McCormick Field, tired after 66 years, creaks under the weight of 4,000 people.

Some have come to take advantage of “Thirsty Thursday,” when a 24-ounce beer costs a buck. Others have come to chat with their neighbors while holding their children by their shirttails. Still others have come to watch a baseball game between the Class A Asheville Tourists and the Charleston (W.Va.) Wheelers.

Then there is this 70-year-old man wearing a saggy face and baggy baseball uniform. He has come to entertain.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, introducing the clown . . . “

The end of the sentence comes out garbled over the scratchy public address system and Max Patkin, the clown prince of baseball , is greeted by only a few cheers and mostly stares as he runs from the third base dugout to his position in the first base coaching box.

He mimics the fielders during an infield drill. He spits on himself. He throws dirt on himself. He lies across first base. He yells out a barely audible joke about chicken cacciatore.

Some people are laughing. Most are still just staring.

Patkin stops.

“Make ‘em laugh, damn it,” he whispers. “Make ‘em laugh.”

Max Patkin has been doing this for 45 years, about 80 shows a year, a total of about 3,500 shows. A ton of dirt has been thrown on his face, gallons of water have been spit like a geyser from his mouth, 10,000 bad jokes have been told, and children have laughed a million laughs.

But what makes baseball clown Max Patkin proudest is that he has never failed to show up for work.

He jumped off a burning plane after it landed in Fayetteville, Ark., to make a date. He once took a cab 300 miles on a flat tire through the middle of Mexico to make a date.

He has performed even when he was so sick others could not bear to stand near him.

“It was in Monterrey, Mexico, 20 years ago, and I had Montezuma’s revenge,” Patkin remembered. “All of a sudden, the guy on first base steals second. No big deal, but then the first baseman steals second. And the umpire steals second.

“I’m standing there all alone when I realize I’ve had an accident in my pants.”

But he finished the show. He always finishes the show.

He has been cursed by minor league managers who won’t let him dress in their clubhouses, victimized by players who rub analgesic balm in his athletic supporter, and yet Max Patkin has always been there at the end.

And now, as he nears the end of the time when he is still physically able to perform, Patkin is still here. He is in the midst of doing 60 shows this summer, in minor league ballparks from central Florida to central Canada, from Burlington to Billings.

He still wears a uniform he wore 30 years ago. He still washes his cap by hand so it won’t shrink.

And by that part of America he still touches, he has not been forgotten.

“We had an autograph session with him this year, and the line stretched from here to the freeway,” said Stan Naccarato, president of the Tacoma (Wash.) Tigers. “The man is an institution within himself.”

Added Larry Schmittou, who owns teams in Nashville and Huntsville, Ala.: “The man is like the Globetrotters. He is part of history.”

Now, if Max Patkin would only believe that. In becoming part of history, baseball’s clown has been disillusioned by it.

His act was never easy, but never has it been as hard as lately. People don’t laugh at old men with a handful of teeth anymore, they laugh at chickens. People don’t like vaudeville, they like scoreboard videos.

Patkin is wondering these days if their laughter has ever been worth his pain.

“Once I quit, who is going to give a damn?” he said in an interview earlier this summer near his Philadelphia area home. “Really now, who gives a damn about a baseball clown?

“People will think about me and say, ‘He used to be a funny.’ And that’s it. That’s my story. Used to be funny. Big deal.”

The crowd at Asheville comes alive. Not because of Max, but because their team has scored three runs while he is coaching first base in the bottom of the third inning.

As is his custom, he will move to the third base coaching box in the bottom of the fourth inning, then back to first base in the fifth.

But he is not thinking ahead. Struggling with a distracted crowd, he is taking it one joke at a time.

“Hey kids,” he shouts to the children while sticking out his neck and scrunching his lips up underneath his big nose. “You better be good, or you’ll look like this .”

He then opens his mouth to show his one prominent bottom tooth. Most of the rest of his mouth is empty, as two years ago he refused to replace a set of bad dentures.

“If you don’t brush your teeth, they will look like this!” he shouts to the children.

When he still gets little response, he screams, “What a crowd! I had more people in my bed last night.”

The children giggle. Their parents shake their heads.

“I saw him five or six years ago, and just had to come back when I heard he was here,” said John Stallings, a football coach who brought two carloads of friends from nearby Burnsville, N.C. “He’s still great . . . but it looks like he’s aged some.”

Max Patkin likes to say that it started during the war, in 1944, when he faced Joe DiMaggio while pitching for a Navy team in Honolulu.

“He hit a home run off me, and I followed him around the bases,” Patkin recalled. “I don’t know why, I just did. I was just a ham.

“Soon, admirals were coming out and asking when that goofy guy would be pitching again.”

Truthfully, though, he admits it probably started the day he looked in a mirror and realized he looked, um, different.

“I know how I look,” he said. “I knew that because of my appearance, I was getting laughed at even when I wasn’t trying to be funny.

“On the field I make myself more grotesque than I am, but I know how it is. I finally figured, the man upstairs makes you a certain way, that’s the way it is supposed to be. Maybe the reason I was made this way was, I supposed to make people laugh.”

Said Ron McKee, Asheville general manager: “Max is so ugly, people love him.”

It was with this understanding of his public perception that Patkin, a frustrated pitcher who never made it above the middle minor leagues, made his debut as a clown coach for owner Bill Veeck’s Cleveland Indians in 1946. In his first game, he set fire to Hank Greenberg’s shoes. He has been fooling players and fans ever since.

Fooling most everyone, in fact, except himself. Because from the start, Patkin was uncomfortable with the difference between laughed with and laughed at .

So uncertain of which applied to him in his early years, Patkin grew depressed. One day in 1951, he put his head in an oven and turned on the gas.

“Feeling that I could not make a living in sports except through my funny appearance, I got depressed, nearly had a nervous breakdown,” he said. “Then one day I could not go on . . . until I smelled the gas--and it smelled terrible. It terrified me. I pulled out. I decided to give my life another try.”

Patkin still gets depressed from time to time as he lies in Ramada Inn or Days Inn or Holiday Inn beds on weekday afternoons in small-town America, waiting to perform at yet another tiny ballpark. He hopes the audience won’t notice how these days, he must pause to catch his breath. He hopes the audience will be kind.

“You know, I am really very sensitive about the way I look,” he said. “I’ll be walking down the street and somebody will call me ugly and I will shoot back with, ‘I make a living looking this way. What’s your excuse?’

“But it’s not funny. I never have gotten the woman I want. I take a lot of abuse. It’s not funny.”

He thought he had the woman he wanted once, about 30 years ago, and married her. But he said that after he caught her cheating on him, she sneaked up and hit him over the head with a hammer, fracturing his skull. Thirteen years ago, they were divorced.

“You know what the darndest thing about that hammer incident was?” he asked. “A couple of weeks later, I attended this testimonial dinner for Tommy Lasorda. The emcee, Joe Garagiola, looked at me sitting on the dais with my head bandaged. He announced to everybody that my wife had just tried to kill me by hitting me over the head with a hammer.

“And you know what? Everybody laughed. They thought it was a joke.”

Patkin is sweating through his old uniform and Montreal Expos cap, which he wears sideways, as he moves into the third base coaching box for the bottom of the fourth inning in Asheville.

It is a quick inning, but he moves quickly. He blows kisses to the women in the stands. He calls time out and kisses the batter. He spits on himself again. He throws more dirt on his uniform.

Then it is time for his nightly jitterbug dance. With the poor public address system, few can hear the music of “Rock Around the Clock.” But the 70-year-old man dances anyway, twisting his feet into the ground and gyrating his double-jointed body as if he didn’t care if anyone was watching. Or wasn’t watching.

“Because of the bad speakers, that whole part of my act was blown,” Patkin said later, shaking his head. “But, hell. Did you see the children who watched me? Did you see their faces?”

Patkin gets $1,500 a game. That does not sound like much compared to the $5,000-$10,000 commanded nightly by one of major league baseball’s top attractions, the Chicken.

But comparing Patkin to the Chicken is like comparing grass fields to artificial turf. And Patkin is vocal about the difference.

“I think the Chicken is a little bit of an ass,” Patkin said. “I remember in Louisville one year, they invited both of us to the same game. I thought we would alternate innings, but the Chicken said I could only work the seventh inning, or he was leaving.

“The management had to give in to him, and by the time I got out there, the home team was losing, 8-1, and nobody was watching. The Chicken is just nasty.”

The biggest difference between the Chicken and Patkin is that because Patkin’s show involves actual game situations, he has not worked a major league game in 10 years.

“There is too much at stake for them to worry about me coaching third base during a big inning,” Patkin said, slipping into another story. “I remember the time in Toronto, I was working a big game between the Blue Jays and Baltimore. With Jim Palmer pitching against John Mayberry of Toronto in the second inning, I yelled out, ‘Fastball! Fastball!’ from the third base coaching box. Just a joke.

“But that dumb Palmer, he still throws a fastball! Mayberry hit a homer and Toronto won and I’ll never forget how Palmer just stared at me.”

Of course, if Patkin had remained a major league act, he might have become as sterile as today’s mascots, and thus deprived of adding to his rich and unusual history. He certainly would not have had as many good stories, such as being Lasorda’s roommate.

“I was working a Spokane game when Tommy was managing there, and he let me stay in his room that night,” Patkin remembered. “But he told me, if his team lost, I could not talk the whole night. And sure enough, they lost. So we go home and he doesn’t let me talk for two hours and I’m getting all itchy.

“Finally he says, ‘OK, I’ll let you say one thing.’ I say, ‘Tommy, you’re a no-good SOB.’ ”

It is the bottom of the fifth inning, Patkin’s final appearance on the Asheville field, and he makes it his best.

Standing in the first-base coaching box, he actually drops his pants. He covers his brightly colored undershorts with dirt. Then, having taken a big swig of water from a soda can, he begins spouting the water in the air. High spouts, and lots of them. It is the feat that, to this day, makes his fans wonder.

“That water thing always amazed me,” Dodger catcher Mike Scioscia said. “I don’t think any of us ever figured out how he did it.”

After the inning, he goes into his grand finale. He runs to home plate, crawls between the catcher’s legs, grabs a bat, holds it at the wrong end, swings at a practice pitch, hits a grounder, runs to third base, gets tagged out and then thrown out of the game by a laughing umpire.

By now, the beers have been set aside, the socializing has stopped, and the crowd is roaring. Patkin leaves the field to a standing ovation.

Patkin has had an operation for a herniated disk. He has bone spurs on his feet. He has refused to undergo an operation for torn cartilage in his knee. He carries a blood-pressure card in his wallet, next to the index cards that remind him of his schedule.

This is a clown’s life?

He lives with his brother, Edward, in a condominium at King of Prussia, Pa. They have two dogs and a cat. The dogs are so old, they can no longer control their bladders, so one room is completely papered for them.

Neighbors complain about the smell, but Patkin ignores them.

“I know it stinks,” he said. “But how can you get rid of something you have had for 13 years?”

Minor league officials often ask him if he is planning to retire.

“I’ve had him here 11 straight years because he keeps telling me that every year is his last,” Asheville’s McKee said with a laugh.

Patkin retirement threat has been just that, but he wonders.

“I’m getting older, my moves aren’t what they used to be,” he said. “I don’t care about the money, I want to be funny. And I worry, are they still liking me?”

A couple of years ago his career was given a second life by an appearance in the move “Bull Durham.” Baseball’s minor league officials have since crowned him, “The King of Baseball,” in a corny ceremony annually honoring an individual’s contributions.

The pleasures of such achievements, though, have been dimmed by the constant travel and pressures. Just last summer, the manager of the team in Boise, Ida., team would not let Patkin dress in the clubhouse, and would not let his players help him. Patkin cursed him throughout his performance.

“When my dance is over, if people are not laughing at me, oh, that would be terrible,” Patkin said. “That’s why, when I go out there and things are bad, I just keep telling myself, ‘Make ‘em laugh, damn it! Make ‘em laugh!’ ”