25 Years Ago in Bonac Sports: 07.27.17
July 30, 1992
“This is the real Artists-Writers game, it’s more sincere,” said Christopher Blake, a 32-year-old Boston architect, who had come to Maidstone Park Saturday for the annual Maidstoners-Max’s Kansas City softball game and feast.
Billy Hofmann, who with Dan Christensen founded the Maidstoners when Wolfie’s Tavern was The Birches, and who was a charter member of the 1950s and ’60s Greenwich Village softball team that, to hear him tell it, vanquished all comers, was inclined to agree.
The now-defunct Max’s, one of several clubs owned by Mickey Ruskin, played its games on a field at New York University that has since fallen victim to the atomic age, said Hofmann.
“A building with no windows, N.Y.U.’s nuke lab, is on the spot now — if there were secretaries inside, they’d demand windows.”
. . . “The original team, which began playing for the Cedar Tavern [the Abstract Expressionists’ watering hole] had guys like LeRoi Jones, John Chamberlain, Joe Oppenheimer, Fielding Dawson,” said Larry Hillenberg, who sported a Max’s Kansas City T-shirt that advertised steak, lobsters, and chickpeas.
. . . The Maidstoners routed Max’s team 10-1. “We might have done better,” Christensen said, “if Mike [Buchicchio, the relief pitcher] had arrived earlier. He was five minutes and 10 runs late.”
“It took me an hour and 20 minutes to get here from Hampton Bays,” Buchicchio sighed.
. . . Solidarity is what the Maidstoners say they are about. When their acting coach Pete Durst’s young son, Peter Jr., was injured recently in a bicycle accident, Durst’s mates rallied around, buying the youth a new bike and helmet. In addition, Pancho Mendez and Arturo Calderon dedicated a Wednesday evening men’s soccer league playoff game to him, retiring a jersey in his honor, and plan to present Peter with World Cup tickets at a Hispanic tournament in Montauk later this summer.
. . . Hillenberg, who roped a couple of hits, said, “I was listening to the radio once and Tony Oliva, I think it was — at least he was Hispanic and a former batting champion — said that once you’re set you shouldn’t move, and that when the ball comes you should throw the barrel of your bat at it. It works!”