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AP sports editor's dad can't hear, but cheers on U-M | freep.com | Detroit Free Press
The father starts down the street in a march, slowly gathering momentum. In and through the crowd he weaves, darting along the sidewalk, oblivious to the drunken chants, the buzzing anticipation.
Leaves are falling on Larry Lage’s street at the moment, orange and red and settling around a throng of maize and blue. It’s a familiar scene for Big Larry; you might argue it’s a ritual: Every year, on eight Saturdays in the fall, Lage wakes up, spends a few hours squeezing the cars of fellow Michigan football fans onto every inch of his front and back lawns, then heads East.
By this time of the year, when enough foliage has dropped off the trees, Lage can spot Michigan Stadium looming over the rooftops from his front yard. From there, the walk to the stadium takes three or four minutes, depending on the density of the pedestrian mob that floods his street.
When Lage arrives, he snakes through the south entrance, cuts through the masses on the concourse, and queues up at Section 19. Once inside, as the field of green opens up below, he hikes the half-dozen rows to the seats he has held for nearly four decades.
If sport is the market where Lage has lived much of his life, then U-M football is his currency. The exchange of data and stories about players and coaches gave him entry into a world that wasn’t designed for him.
He is deaf. But he doesn’t need to hear in order to watch and understand a game. In high school, when a teacher turned her back to the class, Lage had no shot. But at Michigan Stadium, the view is never impeded.
Lage passed his passion on to his son, also named Larry. His son could hear. Still, Big Larry didn’t want Little Larry to miss out on all the nonverbal subtleties in life, so he taught him to study small physical details, to decipher body language, to notice things that so many in the hearing world take for granted.
In all the years the father has been watching his beloved Wolverines, he has never heard the crowd roar or the marching band belt out “The Victors.” His moments of bliss occur when 110,000 people shake the concrete under his feet, sending vibrations up into his chest, and on the handful of Saturdays each fall when his son is perched above in the press box, watching — and writing — about the game he taught him to love.
Bridging two worlds via sports
Little Larry had warned me about his father's comfort in pessimism, at least when it came to Michigan football. So it was no surprise when Big Larry turned to me with little more than a minute left in the first quarter and disgustedly mouthed: "Over."
What had wrought such a soul-crushing response so early in a mid-October game against the Iowa Hawkeyes? One touchdown, which merely tied the score at seven.
On a beautiful, cloudless afternoon in Ann Arbor, surrounded by some 110,000 mostly rabid fans, Big Larry had gone to the dark side. Something his son had learned to avoid long ago, though that wasn't easy.
Little Larry grew up just like his father had, in the shadow of the stadium, marching down the sidewalk on Saturdays in the fall. His love and loyalty to U-M football were built upon childhood awe. Then Little Larry went off to college. In East Lansing. Where he eventually got the job as Michigan State University's mascot, Sparty.
"The whole thing was very confusing," Little Larry told me recently.
His father and his youth were on one side, his foray into adulthood on the other. Fortunately for him, that tension eased up as he made his way into journalism, where cheering in the press box is grounds for removal.
After spending the first quarter wedged next to Big Larry in Section 19, I made my way up to the press box to watch the second quarter with his son, the Associated Press chief sports editor for Michigan, a position he's held the last 10 years.
While the father rose and fell with every play, dismissively waving his arms or thrusting his fists in elation, the son quietly sat before his computer, charting the flow the game, sending out Twitter feeds, keeping detailed notes every time the ball was snapped. He showed little emotion, except for a general cheeriness that comes from watching games for a living.
His vision is the primary text sent out on wires. So while others in the press box may have been focusing on Michigan's defensive struggles as the Hawkeyes built a 21-7 lead, Lage had to think about what the game meant to the larger sporting world.
How does he do that now, having grown up roughly 10 houses away from his perch in the press box?
"I don't get high or low," Lage explained. "Even when I go to a game as a fan, I don't cheer."
Despite his repressed fandom, Little Larry, 37, and Big Larry, 66, still relate to each other through sports. Though even now, after all these years, they still speak different languages.
Childhood illness
The father wasn't born deaf. He got sick as a toddler. The son recalled his paternal grandmother later saying that if penicillin had been available, his father would be hearing today.
The father shrugged his shoulders.
He tells this one instead: "Thirteen months old. High fever. Nerves. Went to hospital. Tried to go through my nose. To fix. Mom thought I was fine. When 2, went to hospital. Chime in ear. Mom was so upset."
Big Larry's parents didn't fully understand the needs of a deaf child. But neither did much of the surrounding culture. This was the mid-'40s, and there were few advocacy groups and fewer translators. His parents didn't want him to sign anyway.
When he got to school, he quickly fell behind. Without signing, he relied on reading lips, facial expressions, body language and gestures. When a teacher turned their back, he was completely lost. Between reading lips and managing to spy other kids' work, he cobbled enough information together to keep moving up.
"He was functionally illiterate," said his daughter, Marian Lage, who is a professional translator and the parent to two deaf children herself. "That's where sports came in. The communication is about the rules."
It's also about the body. Big Larry compensated for his hearing loss by reading the physical world around him and honing his own movement in it. Blessed with good hand-eye coordination, the father excelled at football and baseball and eventually bowling and golf. Not only did he find the experience of playing liberating, he discovered a connection in watching, too.
Sports then, became his principal language. Think about it this way, said Marian: "Three-quarters of communication happens through the body."
When her father tried communicating in that 25% where the rest of the world operated, he often got frustrated.
"There was a lot of misunderstanding," she said. "But there is no misunderstanding his knowledge of football."
So by the time he left high school, he could play and relate through games, but was unable to sign and had little chance of attending college. He found work in a tool-and-die-shop in Ann Arbor and settled in. He also began learning sign language.
As it happened, sports led him to his wife, whom he met on a blind date at a bowling alley, set up by mutual friends. Rita Presta was born deaf.
"In a cave in Italy," she likes to say.
Her family immigrated to Chicago, which is where she met Big Larry at the bowling alley. For the next two years, he drove from Ann Arbor every week courting her. Once they married, she moved to Michigan.
Marian and Little Larry grew up in the deaf community and the hearing community. Marian threw herself into bridging those worlds through signing. Larry melded them through sports. His father took him to games and taught him to throw a baseball and helped him to follow teams through newspapers.
"We used to race outside to the edge of the driveway every weekend morning to fight for the sports section," recalled little Larry.
They read about sports. They watched sports. The argued sports. They played sports.
The son, just like the father, enjoyed an All-County-type career as a football player. The son, however, didn't get the hand-eye precision for golf and bowling.
Big Larry once rolled a 300. He's rolled a 299, 297 and 294. Four times he's posted 290. His success on the lanes occasionally got his name in the old Ann Arbor News, where writers noted the talented bowler was unable to hear his pins smash.
The father used to point to his name in those articles and tell his son: "That is your name!"
To which the son would respond: "No, that's you."
Proud papa
Big Larry took out a second mortgage on his house to help send little Larry to college, even though the son chose the archrival of the father's favorite team. Big Larry was proud anyway, though he won't wear any green and white.
Because Little Larry grew up with games frequently on television, he decided he wanted to become a broadcaster. In high school, he called football games for community access television. After graduating from MSU, he called women's basketball games for Spartan radio for two years. He immersed himself into the MSU sports culture, arriving at news conferences, picking the brains of other reporters.
"I mailed out 25 TV tapes all over country trying to get a job," he said. "Failed. Failed. Failed. Failed."
One day at a news conference in which former football coach George Perles announced he was going to sue the school, Lage ran into Lansing State Journal columnist Jack Ebling.
"I told him he should come to the State Journal and try to be a stringer," Ebling recalled. "I always thought he was an aggressive reporter. That he asked great questions."
He got $25 a story. Freelance turned into a full-time job and in 2000 the AP hired him.
"He is the perfect AP sports editor," said Ebling. "He can multi-task, which is what that job is all about."
Little Larry is responsible for covering the four major pro teams in Detroit, along with football and basketball at U-M and MSU. Though broadcasting was his first love, he discovered his personality was suited to building relationships, to reading body language, to writing short, smart, informative stories about a myriad of subjects at a moment's notice.
Besides, his dad gets to read him, and point out his son's byline to his friends, and carry his business card with the AP logo. A card he once pulled out at a Tigers game and handed to a stranger in the stands. Little Larry was up in the press box working when his cell phone rang.
The stranger was on the other line, telling him his father wanted him to look down and wave.
The son did, despite his annoyance.
"I was on deadline," Little Larry said, smiling at the memory.
Deadline pressure can fray nerves, but the son knew his father was just bragging, as parents do, as Little Larry did himself when he told me a story about his own daughter, Elle Sophia.
"She was 9 months old. She was sick, had a high fever," he said.
He couldn't help her. Finally, he asked his little girl a rhetorical question: "L, what's wrong?"
She used her hand to make the sign for a bottle.
"'Oh my God,' I thought. I gave her milk and she was happy. I started crying."
A baby not anywhere near old enough to speak had used her grandparent's language to communicate, a language the son had been teaching her. "They can't speak, but they are thinking things," he said.
Something he learned in a house in the shadow of a stadium. Something he was now passing on himself, at his own home, and in press boxes around southeastern Michigan.
The father starts down the street in a march, slowly gathering momentum. In and through the crowd he weaves, darting along the sidewalk, oblivious to the drunken chants, the buzzing anticipation.
Leaves are falling on Larry Lage’s street at the moment, orange and red and settling around a throng of maize and blue. It’s a familiar scene for Big Larry; you might argue it’s a ritual: Every year, on eight Saturdays in the fall, Lage wakes up, spends a few hours squeezing the cars of fellow Michigan football fans onto every inch of his front and back lawns, then heads East.
By this time of the year, when enough foliage has dropped off the trees, Lage can spot Michigan Stadium looming over the rooftops from his front yard. From there, the walk to the stadium takes three or four minutes, depending on the density of the pedestrian mob that floods his street.
When Lage arrives, he snakes through the south entrance, cuts through the masses on the concourse, and queues up at Section 19. Once inside, as the field of green opens up below, he hikes the half-dozen rows to the seats he has held for nearly four decades.
If sport is the market where Lage has lived much of his life, then U-M football is his currency. The exchange of data and stories about players and coaches gave him entry into a world that wasn’t designed for him.
He is deaf. But he doesn’t need to hear in order to watch and understand a game. In high school, when a teacher turned her back to the class, Lage had no shot. But at Michigan Stadium, the view is never impeded.
Lage passed his passion on to his son, also named Larry. His son could hear. Still, Big Larry didn’t want Little Larry to miss out on all the nonverbal subtleties in life, so he taught him to study small physical details, to decipher body language, to notice things that so many in the hearing world take for granted.
In all the years the father has been watching his beloved Wolverines, he has never heard the crowd roar or the marching band belt out “The Victors.” His moments of bliss occur when 110,000 people shake the concrete under his feet, sending vibrations up into his chest, and on the handful of Saturdays each fall when his son is perched above in the press box, watching — and writing — about the game he taught him to love.
Bridging two worlds via sports
Little Larry had warned me about his father's comfort in pessimism, at least when it came to Michigan football. So it was no surprise when Big Larry turned to me with little more than a minute left in the first quarter and disgustedly mouthed: "Over."
What had wrought such a soul-crushing response so early in a mid-October game against the Iowa Hawkeyes? One touchdown, which merely tied the score at seven.
On a beautiful, cloudless afternoon in Ann Arbor, surrounded by some 110,000 mostly rabid fans, Big Larry had gone to the dark side. Something his son had learned to avoid long ago, though that wasn't easy.
Little Larry grew up just like his father had, in the shadow of the stadium, marching down the sidewalk on Saturdays in the fall. His love and loyalty to U-M football were built upon childhood awe. Then Little Larry went off to college. In East Lansing. Where he eventually got the job as Michigan State University's mascot, Sparty.
"The whole thing was very confusing," Little Larry told me recently.
His father and his youth were on one side, his foray into adulthood on the other. Fortunately for him, that tension eased up as he made his way into journalism, where cheering in the press box is grounds for removal.
After spending the first quarter wedged next to Big Larry in Section 19, I made my way up to the press box to watch the second quarter with his son, the Associated Press chief sports editor for Michigan, a position he's held the last 10 years.
While the father rose and fell with every play, dismissively waving his arms or thrusting his fists in elation, the son quietly sat before his computer, charting the flow the game, sending out Twitter feeds, keeping detailed notes every time the ball was snapped. He showed little emotion, except for a general cheeriness that comes from watching games for a living.
His vision is the primary text sent out on wires. So while others in the press box may have been focusing on Michigan's defensive struggles as the Hawkeyes built a 21-7 lead, Lage had to think about what the game meant to the larger sporting world.
How does he do that now, having grown up roughly 10 houses away from his perch in the press box?
"I don't get high or low," Lage explained. "Even when I go to a game as a fan, I don't cheer."
Despite his repressed fandom, Little Larry, 37, and Big Larry, 66, still relate to each other through sports. Though even now, after all these years, they still speak different languages.
Childhood illness
The father wasn't born deaf. He got sick as a toddler. The son recalled his paternal grandmother later saying that if penicillin had been available, his father would be hearing today.
The father shrugged his shoulders.
He tells this one instead: "Thirteen months old. High fever. Nerves. Went to hospital. Tried to go through my nose. To fix. Mom thought I was fine. When 2, went to hospital. Chime in ear. Mom was so upset."
Big Larry's parents didn't fully understand the needs of a deaf child. But neither did much of the surrounding culture. This was the mid-'40s, and there were few advocacy groups and fewer translators. His parents didn't want him to sign anyway.
When he got to school, he quickly fell behind. Without signing, he relied on reading lips, facial expressions, body language and gestures. When a teacher turned their back, he was completely lost. Between reading lips and managing to spy other kids' work, he cobbled enough information together to keep moving up.
"He was functionally illiterate," said his daughter, Marian Lage, who is a professional translator and the parent to two deaf children herself. "That's where sports came in. The communication is about the rules."
It's also about the body. Big Larry compensated for his hearing loss by reading the physical world around him and honing his own movement in it. Blessed with good hand-eye coordination, the father excelled at football and baseball and eventually bowling and golf. Not only did he find the experience of playing liberating, he discovered a connection in watching, too.
Sports then, became his principal language. Think about it this way, said Marian: "Three-quarters of communication happens through the body."
When her father tried communicating in that 25% where the rest of the world operated, he often got frustrated.
"There was a lot of misunderstanding," she said. "But there is no misunderstanding his knowledge of football."
So by the time he left high school, he could play and relate through games, but was unable to sign and had little chance of attending college. He found work in a tool-and-die-shop in Ann Arbor and settled in. He also began learning sign language.
As it happened, sports led him to his wife, whom he met on a blind date at a bowling alley, set up by mutual friends. Rita Presta was born deaf.
"In a cave in Italy," she likes to say.
Her family immigrated to Chicago, which is where she met Big Larry at the bowling alley. For the next two years, he drove from Ann Arbor every week courting her. Once they married, she moved to Michigan.
Marian and Little Larry grew up in the deaf community and the hearing community. Marian threw herself into bridging those worlds through signing. Larry melded them through sports. His father took him to games and taught him to throw a baseball and helped him to follow teams through newspapers.
"We used to race outside to the edge of the driveway every weekend morning to fight for the sports section," recalled little Larry.
They read about sports. They watched sports. The argued sports. They played sports.
The son, just like the father, enjoyed an All-County-type career as a football player. The son, however, didn't get the hand-eye precision for golf and bowling.
Big Larry once rolled a 300. He's rolled a 299, 297 and 294. Four times he's posted 290. His success on the lanes occasionally got his name in the old Ann Arbor News, where writers noted the talented bowler was unable to hear his pins smash.
The father used to point to his name in those articles and tell his son: "That is your name!"
To which the son would respond: "No, that's you."
Proud papa
Big Larry took out a second mortgage on his house to help send little Larry to college, even though the son chose the archrival of the father's favorite team. Big Larry was proud anyway, though he won't wear any green and white.
Because Little Larry grew up with games frequently on television, he decided he wanted to become a broadcaster. In high school, he called football games for community access television. After graduating from MSU, he called women's basketball games for Spartan radio for two years. He immersed himself into the MSU sports culture, arriving at news conferences, picking the brains of other reporters.
"I mailed out 25 TV tapes all over country trying to get a job," he said. "Failed. Failed. Failed. Failed."
One day at a news conference in which former football coach George Perles announced he was going to sue the school, Lage ran into Lansing State Journal columnist Jack Ebling.
"I told him he should come to the State Journal and try to be a stringer," Ebling recalled. "I always thought he was an aggressive reporter. That he asked great questions."
He got $25 a story. Freelance turned into a full-time job and in 2000 the AP hired him.
"He is the perfect AP sports editor," said Ebling. "He can multi-task, which is what that job is all about."
Little Larry is responsible for covering the four major pro teams in Detroit, along with football and basketball at U-M and MSU. Though broadcasting was his first love, he discovered his personality was suited to building relationships, to reading body language, to writing short, smart, informative stories about a myriad of subjects at a moment's notice.
Besides, his dad gets to read him, and point out his son's byline to his friends, and carry his business card with the AP logo. A card he once pulled out at a Tigers game and handed to a stranger in the stands. Little Larry was up in the press box working when his cell phone rang.
The stranger was on the other line, telling him his father wanted him to look down and wave.
The son did, despite his annoyance.
"I was on deadline," Little Larry said, smiling at the memory.
Deadline pressure can fray nerves, but the son knew his father was just bragging, as parents do, as Little Larry did himself when he told me a story about his own daughter, Elle Sophia.
"She was 9 months old. She was sick, had a high fever," he said.
He couldn't help her. Finally, he asked his little girl a rhetorical question: "L, what's wrong?"
She used her hand to make the sign for a bottle.
"'Oh my God,' I thought. I gave her milk and she was happy. I started crying."
A baby not anywhere near old enough to speak had used her grandparent's language to communicate, a language the son had been teaching her. "They can't speak, but they are thinking things," he said.
Something he learned in a house in the shadow of a stadium. Something he was now passing on himself, at his own home, and in press boxes around southeastern Michigan.