1962: a good time for sharp dressers. That’s what’s funny about them, besides the fact that they are…well, funny in the first place. Then, for a long time, it was Nivea. First it was Lubriderm, what my father rubbed briskly between his palms and extended in glistening offering. He once got my brother a job as a bouncer. He makes a request. That is what he means when he says that an article of clothing is “flattering.“ That is where his maxim extolling the turtleneck acquires its Euclidean certainty. It is about isolation, the turtleneck is; it is about essences and first causes; it is about the body and the face, and that’s all it’s about; and when worn by Lou Junod, it is about Lou Junod. My father took the Vikings and laid 17. Did the NFL exist to give people an excuse to bet, or did betting exist to give people an excuse to watch the NFL? It was illegal, and it ruined him. “Dad, what’s the best you’ve ever looked?“ I ask him that night at dinner. by Tom Junod. The impossible victory that Broadway Joe guaranteed for the Jets in Super Bowl III? I was wearing a beige glen-plaid suit—beautiful—and a shirt with a white collar, with a silk grenadine tie and a set of nice cuff links, and Joel’s wife said, ‘Joel, I never saw anything like it. They work, my father’s fashion tips. “Let me deal to him,“ Dean says (or maybe, preferably, “Let me deal to him“), and for the next twenty minutes that’s what he does—Dean Martin deals cards to Lou Junod. My father was a man of many vices and an untold number of secrets. He was sitting in bed, and I was sitting on the floor. Over his heart dangles a set of gold dog tags—his name is on them—and on his left pinkie is a gold ring of diamond and black onyx. By Tom Junod Photograph by Dan Winters . “She’s weakening, my son,“ my father says. But ultimately she had no choice but to include herself in my father's life as a player, having been excluded from his other life as ... well, a player. Charlie was also the last bookie my father ever had, because every so often they had differences not of opinion but of fact -- because every so often he would tell my father that he hadn't bet a game my father thought he'd won or that he lost a game he thought he hadn't bet. Charlie always won. And besides, I had a little glow, and I was wearing white to the face, and I left the cuffs of my shirt unbuttoned in order to show them off, and I have to admit that I looked pretty fucking good. From award-winning writing and photography to binge-ready videos to electric live events, GQ meets millions of modern men where they live, creating the moments that create conversations. “Good, good,“ he said. It couldn't have been against the NFL, because the NFL was in on it -- that's what my father said. They met in our house, when the phones started ringing. She fretted, wringing her hands the way she did when she sat as a passenger in the car and my father, often in anger, started speeding. That’s really my father’s first fashion tip, come to think of it: that everything you wear has to add up, that everything has to make sense and absolutely f’ing signify. And I used to feel so good, I couldn’t believe it—and that was enough to satisfy me. He always came back, to tell us what he had seen and what he had found out. And whatever aspirations I had of being theatrical, of being in show business, I was—I was.“. He played the stock market instead, an industry in which the touts and the bookmakers are fused into a corporate entity. Because you can’t wear a turtleneck all the time, or even a lot of the time—that’s the tragedy of the turtlenecks—but you can always wear white to the face. I don’t absolutely f’ing live it, is what I’m trying to say. He has won two National Magazine Awards, a James Beard Award and the June Biedler Award for Cancer Writing. Why? The better you look, the more money you make. Your mother doesn’t like her, you know. But my father "liked the sports section in the News," which meant that he liked the attention it gave to the needs of gamblers. Anderson's path to the Super Bowl, Van Valkenburg: The Patriots' myth of the underdog. Nobody’s ever been able to tell me….“, Irony? And when he went to see Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis one night at the Copa and Dino passed the microphone around to patrons and asked them to sing a verse, my father was prepared: He took the microphone in hand and sang to such effect that Dean Martin had to take it back. And as for my teeth…well, I was sick a lot when I was a kid and ran a lot of fevers and took a lot of medicines, and so it’s like someone lit a Magic Snake in my mouth—my teeth are an efflorescence of sulfur and carbon and ash. In November and December, when he went out on the road for weeks at a time to make a living selling handbags, he always ended his trip in Miami and stayed for a few extra days at the Fontainebleau or the Jockey Club, so that when he finally came home he would come home—and this is another of his Eskimo words—“black.“ In January and February, he would dress in ski pants and a winter coat, cover himself with a blanket and sit for hours on the white marble steps that led to the front door of our house on Long Island—steps that were built with their reflective qualities in mind—with a foil reflector in his gloved hands and his oiled face ablaze with winter light. Two years after my wedding, my parents sold their house on Long Island and moved down to Florida. It was, in fact, about the only thing in his life that wasn't secret, and for that I'll always be grateful to the great god of gambling, which despite its hunger and bloody fangs gave us point spreads and football Sundays together. It eliminates odors. Who will turn out to be the gangster behind the gangsters? That he lost tens of thousands of dollars in the process didn't really matter as much to me as my role in trying to help him win. Can she keep her eyes of my father? It’s gone now, that house—it’s a goner. “That’s right, that’s right,“ my father says. That’s the most amazing thing about listening to my father’s stories of his coming of age—the sheer aspiration in them, and how easily it was shared and passed around; the way so many of them begin with my father and one of his rivals squaring off for a fight over a girl and end with the two of them recognizing each other before they ever come to blows and then going off somewhere to talk about clothes, of all things, and about style, and about class, and to argue over who was the better dresser, Fred Astaire or Cary Grant or Walter Pidgeon. Erich Hartmann / Magnum; Gary Hershorn / Getty Everything Is Different Now. To clean your navel, just dip the Q-Tip into the witch hazel and then swab the Q-Tip around your navel. He goes to a coffee shop, and Dean is there, and Dean recognizes him—a nod. Jesus, if I’d had teeth like yours…“. But we could talk about it. She’s the kind of woman that men like and women don’t.“. Sinatra shakes his head. Jesus Christ! “Hey,“ Dino said, his voice whittled down to a point of low warning. Will you listen to your old man for once? During today's episode of the ITV show, an … My father was, in fact, an inept gambler, but he never blamed me for his losses, at least not out loud, and I never rooted for any team but the teams on which he'd put money. He sang in Paris. Tom Junod 1962: Even the freaking president is a sharp dresser, and he’s just about the same age as my father, and as for him, as for Lou Junod, well, he’s still coming on, and if he looks, in this picture, slightly dangerous, in his own proud display, I also have no doubts that on this resplendent day he was one of the most beautiful men in the world. The hole stayed in the door for years, a mysterious mandala, until the day they finally had to move out of the house. One of the only aspects of Jerry Vogel's storyline in the movie that does have a shred of truth is when Jerry is on his deathbed and Rogers asks him to pray for him. And yet…I want to know, and that is why one weekend late last summer I wound up staying with my father in a hotel room that smelled of salt water and mildew, with his bag of toiletries spilling out on the bed and a puddle of baby oil shimmering in my palm: for the blessing of his instruction, for the privilege of his secrets. I can’t stand long sleeves. “But Dad, who is going to smell my navel?“, “You’re going off to college, son. Do they have a pool? By making nothing but legal bets for the last 20 years of his life, he probably avoided having his legs broken. ", It should have been an easy question. And that was the thing: Nobody knew, not even the Jimmy the Greek. I never did it—or, rather, I did it that one time and never again. My parents threw an annual Super Bowl party, to which they invited friends who had never placed a bet. It’s just the two of them, two men wearing suits and shirts with French cuffs at twelve o’clock noon, in the middle of the freaking desert, and somewhere along the line it must occur to them—well, at the very least, it occurs to my dad—that they are men who very easily could have lived each other’s lives…which is why my father always told me never to ask for autographs (“They should be asking for your autograph“)…and which, I suppose, is why, thirty-eight years later, when I was about to interview John Travolta, this was my father’s advice: “Where are you staying? You’re a man now, and you sweat, and sweat can collect in your navel and produce an odor that is very…offensive.“ Then: “This is witch hazel. The AFL's last stand as an independent entity in Super Bowl IV, in which Hank Stram's Chiefs portended the NFL's glorious future? © 2021 Condé Nast. "He's a tout." The Little Club, the Harwyn Club…Not for money—as far as I know, my father never made a dime from his voice—but to put himself across. He is retired, and has been for nearly ten years. This is an article of faith and, as we shall see, the underpinning of a whole system of belief. They were cohesive and complementary; they spoke in a single voice; they were his manifesto. Now he was 77, and I was 38, and we were sharing a room in a hotel near the ocean. My father had to pay him no matter what -- no matter what -- a requirement made clear when he visited my father's office and my brother asked: "What happens if someone doesn't pay?" Jalen Ramsey: The man, the mouth, the legend. Make sure to splash some cologne on your privates—that’s another thing. He is about five-ten and a half, or in his words, “six foot in shoes.“ He is wearing a leather windbreaker, unzipped, and a pair of beige pants, which he calls “camel,“ and a ribbed turtleneck, tight to his body and pale yellow. You never want to risk turning them off with an offensive odor.“. But, no—there is no single instant, and when my father answers my question it is without hesitation: “The best I ever looked? All rights reserved. Charlie's answer was unsmiling and definitive. Who was the gangster behind the gangster? My father wanted to live outside it, though within the borders of family. He is about 43 years old, and, by God, he is glistening, for he is in his prime, and all the elements are in place. Take a look at the one man whose jacket sleeves cover his shirt cuffs, like the sleeves of a cassock. He is wearing a suit of midnight blue, single-breasted, with a silver tie and a handkerchief in the pocket (I’ve never heard him call it a “pocket square“), which he does not fold into regimental points but rather simply “throws in there,“ so that what shows is just “a puff.“ He is undoubtedly wearing bikini underwear, for anybody who wears bor shorts is “a square“ or “a farmer,“ as in, “What are you, a farmer?“; and he is undoubtedly wearing socks, or “hose,“ that go “over the calf, knee-high,“ for if there’s anything he hates more than long sleeves on a suit jacket, it’s “ankle socks,“ because “I can’t stand to see someone sitting down with their ankles showing—their white ankles and their black socks.“ His shirt has French cuffs, of course, and he’s showing plenty of them—“at least an inch“—and he looks sharp… and by sharp I mean avid, by sharp I mean almost feral, by sharp I mean that if this were not a Bar Mitzvah but rather a meeting of the Five Families, when the schnorrer in the long sleeves and the bor shorts and the ankle socks would be the guy fingered for a rubout, and the guy showing plenty of cuff would be the man commissioned for the kill. Now take a look at my father, holding in one pinkie-ringed hand a drink and a cigarette. I knew it was against the law. “Look at you, you son of a bitch,“ my father said when I walked into the bar. A burn is such a powerful thing that my father went to great lengths to make sure the sun shined on him, all year round, and turned the world into his personal solarium. He has nothing else now, except his family, which has become everything to him, while I have this, this urge not to sing but to somehow speak and tell…except that of course in the end writing is the same as wearing clothes: You do it to have some say over how you look to the world, and you wind up revealing precisely what you’ve hidden, and more than you will ever know. There were always secrets. ONCE UPON A TIME, a little boy loved a stuffed animal whose name was Old Rabbit. He gambled because he liked, as he always told me, "a little action, a little interest," and because life lacked savor without "a little larceny." "He doesn't know any more than you and me.". The ocean took it away, years ago, and now wind and sand blow through where it used to be, straight to the sea. He worked for what my father called "the Syndicate," perhaps out of concern that "the Mafia" would scare me and my mother. When the switch was horizontal, the phone belonged to us -- calls came in and went out on "our" number, the one listed in the phone book. Like I owned it, you know? But he can’t keep his eyes off her, that’s for sure; and at one point, he dips his chin, and as he scrutinizes her he strikes a pose of suave regard. Keown: C.J. So he was big from the start, Big Lou, but that’s all he was, and so he had to just keep getting bigger—for my father, it was celebrity or bust. He not only looked the part, with his pinkie ring and French cuffs and blue dress shirts white at the collar, he played it, cultivating an air of danger. They called all week long, and on Saturdays and Sundays they called all day long, proffering exotic parlays and teasers. He sang his way through World War II, with an army big band, in a revue called “For Men Only,“ after he was twice wounded. But he lost precisely what he was out to win, which was everything, or everything but my mother, who stayed with him to the bitter end. He was just a fan of betting. Gray or brown.“, “You do? Was betting on games quasi-legal or quasi-illegal? He is a writer, known for A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019), Anyone (2004) and 9/11: The Falling Man (2006). He snores, with his fingers folded on top of his navel, and I take off my shoes and walk down to the ocean, in my blazer and khakis, under a black seam that splits the spangled sky and vaults out into the ocean forever. Who the hell knows why you fall in love, but I can tell you that several love stories began that day: between America and the NFL, between my father and gambling, between me and football, and between me and my father. For 10 years, from the time I first watched "Uncle Vince" coach the Packers to the time I graduated high school, that was my employment, with a workweek that started when the paperboy dropped the Daily News in our mailbox on Monday mornings. When he told the bookies "20 dollars on the Dolphins," he was betting $200. I looked so good, I never wanted to go to bed.“, We have the best table in the house, at the restaurant located within the Dune Deck, which is named after its chef, Starr Boggs, and which, by the way, is excellent—or, in my father’s appraisal, elegant. He poured the oil into his hands and whisked them together, with a sigh of friction, and applied the oil to his face. He didn't go looking because he didn't, as he explained to me, "have the money." He has a fresh burn, and he is wearing a shirt with a high collar. Lou Junod: He was determined to make his mark, and God, he did, and now, as I walk into my life I walk into his, into the gift he gave me, his first and final fashion tip: the knowledge that a man doesn’t belong to anyone. A star, yes—that’s what my father was, because that’s what he wanted to be…that’s all he wanted to be. “Too tough,“ he whispers, softly and hoarsely, before leaving the stage. Irony is for women, because for them clothes are all about play, all about tease and preamble—because for them dressing is all about undressing. You don’t have to do it every day; just once a week or so.“ He demonstrated the technique on himself, then handed me my own Q-Tip. He wears his ’90s-era black turtleneck, he turns his head just so when asking a particularly penetrating question of a … Now it was baby oil. There was a yellow phone on the nightstand with a little toggle switch that gave it two numbers. And it worked. My father’s stardom was unusual in that he didn’t have to do anything to be a star, even though being a star was what he worked at, every day. I have a sense of style, I guess, but it is not like my father’s—it is not earned, and consequently it is not unwavering, nor inerrant, nor overbearing, nor constructed of equal parts maxim and stricture; it is not certain. Who did I like? Although snow falls heavily behind him, he has a very dark tan, and his face shines with steadfast lubrication. The racetrack listings would already be marked up, subject to my father's blocky exegesis. Navy blue shoes.“) As for the rest…as for everything else…not what I know of him—that’s harder, of course, because, well, why do you wear clothes in the first place, if not to cover up? He is wearing a polo shirt and khaki shorts and Nike sneakers and white socks. That he belongs to his secrets. He always told me what I needed to know about the world…and the world told me what I needed to know about him—that, yes, indeed, he owned it. So we learned to lose together. No education to speak of, and no religion worth naming; no father (his father was a briny, bingeing drunk, and whenever any of us mentioned him, whenever any of us used the words “your father,“ Dad was quick to correct us: “I had no father“); not even any history (to this day, I have no idea when my father’s forebears came to this country or who they were or where they came from). People will think I’m crazy, but I mean it. Then, for a long time, it was Nivea. My father had the Colts minus-18. Then, for a long time, I idolized him, until I realized, not very long ago, that I have spent my entire life moving toward him. I watched every Super Bowl from I to XIV with my parents. I was, like, 8 years old, or something, so I had no choice but to put my face in his shiny hands. You should forget that natural stuff and try to get a little sun whenever you can. “I didn’t have any money; I didn’t have any brains—all I had was my looks and my charisma.“ Yes, that’s right: His fashion tips worked because they had to work—because he had nothing else. He is the recipient of two National Magazine Awards from the American Society of Magazine Editors. Which is what my father did. But the little box of agate type, with its strange cuneiform flourishes -- "home team in CAPS" -- was all mine, and I would stare at it like a scholar until my father asked, "Who do you like? The worst is when they’re worn with tudos. The "underworld" was supposed to stand for everything that was wrong with America. My father was declamatory in the cause of turtlenecks, and as often as possible he wore them himself. The house was the only asset they had left, and my father had to live the rest of his life on the proceeds of the sale, including investments. But it was not an easy question, given all that hinged on the answer. I have never seen him pale or even sallow. "So bet the paper," he'd say, and we'd laugh. "I hate those teasers." 1. “Particularly if you’re tan. Irony is no answer, because in my father’s view a man is not allowed irony in the wearing of clothes. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been in a place like this—with a crowd like this.“ Yes, my father is part of the crowd again, part of the crowd of hustlers and jostlers and guys coming on, of cigar smokers and martini drinkers and a woman in a silvery blue cocktail dress who is, in my father’s estimation, “stacked“…and so the lessons never stop. “Those are the most beautiful teeth I’ve ever seen in a man.“ He has also been known to ask, flat out, upon first meeting someone, “Are those your teeth? It was a choice about where and how to live in relation to the law, moral and otherwise. Tom Junod (born April 9, 1958) is an American journalist. Mention the word turtleneck to any of my college roommates and they will say “the most flattering thing a man can wear.“ Mouth the phrase “the most flattering thing a man can wear“ and they will say “the turtleneck.“ This is because my father was born to proselytize, and when he and my mother visited my college and took me and my friends out to dinner, he sought to convert to his cause not only me—as he has as long as I’ve been alive—but them as well. Our seats are in the back of the bus, and so we have to wait a long time before we can get out. I am a son who has squandered his inheritance, you see; I am incomplete in my knowledge and practice of matters hygienic and sartorial. He never told me, however, that that power can be measured by the number of secrets a man knows and keeps, and that when it became my time to make the world heed my step, I would want to know his secrets, for the paradoxical purpose of safekeeping and promulgation. Still, many life events were condensed in the film. I wish my father were alive to answer that last question, but he died 12 years ago, flat broke. Tom Junod profiles Mr. Rodgers. “What do they mean?“ he asks of earrings. The NFL was supposed to stand for everything that was right. And when my father, perhaps during one of those ill-fated Super Bowls, responded to a disastrous pass-interference call by putting his fist through the door to our den, she refused to have it fixed. My father bet long shots, my mother favorites; my father played poker and blackjack, my mother the slot machines; my father believed that he was cursed and my mother believed that she had the power to curse him. But that arrangement has been dissolved by no less august an authority than the Supreme Court, and the league will one day earn a portion of its revenue from an activity it has tried to keep at arm's length. It was that gambling provided them the only place where they complemented each other, and their passions, such as they were, existed in perfect balance. The better you look, the more money you make. I felt like a celebrity every day of my life. Anytime my father wears a turtleneck, he is advancing a cause, and the cause is himself. I would come to the kitchen table for breakfast and he would hand me a stub of a pencil and open the paper before me to the Latest Line. The turtleneck is the most flattering thing a man can wear because it strips a man down to himself—because it forces a man to project himself. Every Monday morning, the newspaper published the "Latest Line," and it kept publishing it throughout the week. “ ‘All or Nothing at All,’ “ he says. The Hero of Goodall Park When a car careened onto a baseball field in Sanford, Maine, during a Babe Ruth game in 2018, it set in motion a true-crime mystery 50 years in the making. “How about a bit of the Lube?“ he’d say when I walked into his bathroom. He never bet another football game after moving down to Florida. And because when you wear white to the face, the light is always shining on you…As it is right now, at the Dune Deck—the sun is shining on my father. His desperation is what survived him; when I cleaned out his apartment after he was gone, there was a paper trail of stocks of which I'd never heard and, spilling out of the drawers of the dresser in his bedroom, a thick mulch of lottery tickets, like the end of a ticker-tape parade. Not a lot of women do. I don’t know, because for the remainder of the meal my back stays to her. "Then I'll show you how to live." He wanted to get away with something, and until he ran out of cash, he did -- he made people think he was a gangster when really he was just a mark. And it gave him a way of talking to me, well, without making me cry. This is in Tom Junod’s writing here, too. The calls came to my parents' bedroom. He wasn't asking about my allegiances, except perhaps my allegiances to him. He did not come up in the current culture of corporate individualism, so he could not let himself off the hook by wearing some fucking T-shirt that says NIKE on the front or CHICAGO BULLS; he has never been able to understand the utility of dressing, intentionally, like a slob, nor to discern what preference a heterosexual man is advertising when he wears an earring. For about thirty seconds. Illustration by Max-o-matic. But he didn't have to win in order to do that. He lands the Rogers interview because no … Early life. And then he stopped watching football altogether, because as it turned out, he wasn't really a football fan at all. He exuded danger but not crookedness. My mouth is forever in the shadows, and so it is no surprise to me, when we go back to our room at the hotel, my father and I, and lie together on his bed, staring at a ceiling slovenly with unsealed seams, that my father says, as he has said so many times before, “Do you mind if I ask you a question? As Junod himself writes in a recent piece for the Atlantic, “I did not get into a fistfight with my father at my sister’s wedding. He chased down men when they cut him off in traffic and got into fistfights well into his 70s, his anger an eclipse you couldn't help but look at even though you knew it would strike you blind. He told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “I idolized him.I wanted to be him." He bet the Dolphins when they lost to the Cowboys and the Redskins when they lost to the Dolphins, enamored with George Allen's "Over the Hill Gang." My father sold handbags and made a lot of money doing so. He scared me often to tears, and football gave me a way of talking to him without crying. They work, or they worked, for him, for my father. “How would you like a little…Nivea?“ he’d ask, with his brown hands singing. He was courteous and solicitous and generous, setting me up with tickets for concerts and football games and sending a check for my wedding. He has two major complaints, each of which is long-standing: one, that he is “shrinking,“ and two, that he is losing his hair, or rather, losing his hair at a race in excess of the rate at which he was losing his hair when he first started complaining about losing his hair, which was at the very least thirty-five years ago. I remember one day I met [a fellow salesman, named Joel] with his wife. Classic reads from a master feature writer. My father was a man of many vices and an untold number of secrets. You’re in the entertainment business now, son—the better you look, the more money you make. “I didn’t grow up with any of the disadvantages,“ my father says at the Dune Deck. Subscribe today! Football was always a game made for gambling; now gambling will be made for the game, and that will count as both a rebirth and an ending. But what I remember, what I can't forget, was the losing. “There’s an actress over there, and I forget her name. The only excuse for a man to grow a beard is if he has a weak chin or acne—that’s what I know from my father. "Dad, who's Jimmy the Greek?" What are you waiting for? It’s something that stuck with Junod and became a constant nugget of wisdom to remember when he became a father. Tom Junod Before joining ESPN as a senior writer, Junod wrote for Esquire and GQ. “My God,“ my father says, “what teeth! I don’t put it on every time I anoint myself with toilet water or stretch a sock to my knee or squeeze into a pair of black bikini underwear. This is a Q-Tip. 5. He never really stopped singing, either, even when he came home, to my mother, to Brooklyn and then Long Island, and then to us—he used to sing at clubs in New York, at closing time. “Where is he?“ he is saying, theatrically, with a habit of elaborate enunciation that lingers lovingly upon every consonant. But I believe that for the first time he had to borrow money to pay his gambling debts -- and that for the first time he got scared. And he made it his, by virtue of what he put in it—his lotions, his sprays, his unguents, his astringents, his cleansers, his emollients, his creams, his gels, his deodorants, his perfume (yes, he used perfume, my father did, as his scent—Jean Naté eau de cologne—for he was, and is, as he will be the first to tell you, a pioneer, as well as a fine-smelling man), his soaps, his shampoos and his collection of black fine-tooth Ace combs, which for years I thought were custom-made, since that was his, Lou Junod’s, nickname in the Army: Ace. This is axiomatic, inflexible and enduring. "Oh, I hate those parlays," she'd say. I dedicated myself to football in an effort to reconcile myself to him, and to reconcile him to the rest of my family. My parents were ambitious people, my father especially, whose entire life was devoted to rising above, but his ambitions were defeated long before death finished them off, and so when he died, he came back to where he started, but he didn't come back home, because there was no home to come back to. It was his "business phone," he said, and there were two kinds of calls announced by its distinctive chirping ring. As we celebrate fifty years of GQ, we look back at some of the greatest writing the magazine has published. “Is that her? 2013 BEST + BRIGHTEST: SECOND ACTS Patient Zero DECEMBER 2013 By TOM JUNOD, MARK WARREN. They also saw my mother trying to placate the gods of chance by hexing players with what she called "giving them the horns." Every day of my life. People thought my father was a gangster; I thought NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle was the gangster because he wore the same kind of shirts my father did and sported the same varnished tan. People figured he had "connections," and he did -- his connections called our house, like old friends.