View from the Press Box
78One of the more common emails I get in my day job will go a little something like this:
“Oh yeah, like you know. When was the last time you bought a ticket to a game? When was the last time you paid for parking? When was the last time you sat in crummy seats? You sit up there in the press box feeding your fat face, drinking beer on the ballclub’s dime, you have no idea what it’s like to be a fan who has to pay eight bucks for a beer, has to wait in long lines to go to the bathroom, has to get stuck in two hours of traffic after the game. How dare you tell us anything. And so on. And so on. I’m only a representative email, sort of like a composite character in a movie.”
I understand the sentiment. I do. It irritates me a little because it makes the assumptions people often make — that because I’m a sportswriter I get all sorts of free tickets (I don’t) and that when I bring my family to games I get free admission and valet parking and all sorts of special favors (we don’t get any of that) and that I get all sorts of free food in the press box (I don’t) and that I’m drinking free beer while writing my columns (understandable mistake, but no) and that I get police escorts in and out of stadiums or something. We as a family are about to go to see the Tampa Bay Rays play the Royals in St. Pete, and it’s going to cost us a fortune like always because tickets, as everyone knows, ain’t cheap (not even in St. Pete) and Katie, the youngest, will demand a different food group every half inning, and Elizabeth, the oldest, will want equal treatment, and Margo will remember having funnel cakes* when she was younger and she will just have to have ‘em and, yeah, we have the same fan stories as everyone else.
*Another new word: Pixifood. This is the kind of food that tastes absolutely delicious when you are young but is shockingly disgusting when you become an adult. It is named, of course, after Pixie Sticks, which I recall tasting a bit like heaven when I was 9 and now, I realize, is like pouring sugar down your throat. The idea alone makes me a bit ill. I don’t know if funnel cakes are a pixifood. I think Cookie Crisp cereal is a pixifood (but Cocoa Pebbles holds up quite nicely). I think Chef Boyardee’s mini ravioli may be a pixifood. I lived on that stuff and a few weeks ago I had some for the first time in years, it was gross, tasted like rolled up mud balls or something.**
**And I need a ruling: Is Kentucky Fried Chicken a pixifood or has the quality just gone way down? I can remember a time when absolutely nothing on earth tasted better than a Kentucky Fried Chicken drumstick. Now, um, not so much.
But I understand the assumptions … believe me, sportswriting is a good life. I travel all over the world to watch sporting events. I stay in nice hotels, and I get good seats to some of the biggest events in the world. I’m given more than reasonable access to the players, athletes, decision makers and so on. I really am, after more than 20 years in this crazy business, still in awe of what I get to do. But there’s a a whole lot of stuff I don’t get to do, and wouldn’t want to do, and so on.
And it’s worth pointing out that the press box experience is, uh, a little bit different than people might expect. Let me tell you about the most emotional baseball game I ever saw. It happened in 2001, of course, about a month and a half after 9/11. Every American has his or her own personal connection to 9/11, of course, and mine involved my daughter, Elizabeth, who was born on August 30th of that year. So she was 12 days old when planes hit buildings, and I can remember looking at her sleeping in her crib and wondering what kind of world she was coming into. Moms and Dads out there will remember those tenuous first few weeks, when you’re crazy with sleeplessness, when you’re trying to do everything right but have no idea what to do, when every hiccup and tummy ache seems like a national emergency, when every cry seems a signal that you’re drowning. Then in the middle of our little life story, a small army of zealots with boxcutters murdered thousands, and shattered our nation’s sense of balance and made us wonder what this new Millennium would really be like.
That emotion was still raw and exposed and pained on Halloween when the New York Yankees and Arizona Diamondbacks played Game 4 of the World Series. We had all gone down to Ground Zero — or as close as we could get — and we saw that it was still smoking. We all agreed that New York felt somber and a bit gloomy — the buzz and energy and edge that the city takes on during World Series was noticeably gone. Cab drivers weren’t talking about Tino. People on street corners weren’t selling photos of Paul O’Neill. Deli barkers weren’t screaming about Joe’s decision. Anyway, that’s the way it seemed. The funeral wasn’t over yet.
And the game began … I had what we sometimes called a “pushbutton” deadline. That means that the minute the game ended, I had to push the button to send my column. One thing I have noticed about sportswriters on television and in the movies … they never seem to have the sort of nightmarish deadlines that we have in real life. I realize that’s not an especially interesting part of sportswriting*, but it is without question the most consequential and material part of being a sportswriter. The job most days is not to write the best and most intensely interesting story. The job most days is to write the best and most intensely interesting story in the 20 minutes you have once the game ends.
*I say that deadlines are not especially interesting, but the stories of sportswriters freaking out on deadline are actually quite entertaining. There have been a few sportswriters through the years who have thrown their computers/telerams/typewriters out windows when, for some reason, they blew deadline. I had a deadline issue last year involving a spilled Coca Cola, an unhappy computer and a cell phone out of range. You probably don’t want to know.
So, I had a pushbutton deadline on the Yankees-Diamondbacks, and you might recall that game was close all night, which is exactly what you DO NOT want on a pushbutton deadline. You want a sense of what will happen, you want one team to score seven runs in the first inning, you want a direction to take the column since you are writing it as the action is happening. I was typing madly throughout so I don’t recall too much about the game. I remember Shane Spencer hit a home run early (third inning, I see) and that gave the Yankees a lead. And then I guess Mark Grace hit a home run to tie the game, and it went like that for a while — Schilling and El Duque matching eggs. And then, finally, the breakthrough, the Diamondbacks scored two runs in the eighth, and the game was OVER.
This was it. Byung-Hyun Kim struck out the side in the eighth, and my column was easy. It as done. The Yankees were dead. This loss would put them down three games to one, and that meant the series was over. I didn’t think the Yankees could beat the Diamondbacks three straight — two in Arizona — no way. Unit would pitch one of those games for sure. Schilling would be available. The Yankees were done, the dynasty was over (the Yankees, you will recall, had won three straight World Series) and I started writing the obituary.
Now at this point I should mention that experienced sportswriter — that is, sportswriters smarter than me — have a little trick they use when on a pushbutton deadline. They write what I like to call the adjustable column. That is they write a column that leans one way but, in case of emergency, glass can be broken, verbs can be reversed, adjectives can be turned and so on. I did none of these things, of course. The ultra-rich Yankees finally going down — and to a team in only its fourth year of existence — deserved something more than an adjustable column. It deserved the works. And so I wrote it, the Yankees is dead, it’s been a nice run, the Diamondbacks had too much pitching, hell, I don’t remember it all but I know it was confident and unwavering and Kim got Jeter out on a bunt, he struck out Bernie, man on, two outs in the ninth and I was about to send the thing …
And you know what happened. Tino hit the home run. Yankee Stadium went nuts, I guess, though I don’t remember that. Here’s what I remember: Staring at my screen at all these little words I had written, words that now might as well be in Pig Latin, words that now looked like the code in the Matrix, words that could not possibly be more worthless. I remember that feeling … like my head was about to explode. I remember looking to see if I had left any adjustable sentences in the column (“The Yankees are NOT dead?”). I remember going into a few seconds of sheer panic. I had no column. Nothing. If the Yankees won the game (and of course they would win now) I had absolutely nothing to send to the paper.*
*I’ve had nightmares like this … seriously. A lot of sportswriter friends have had nightmares like this — deadline hits, and you have a blank screen and no idea what to write and no clue what to do. I think this is the sportswriter version of the go to work in your underwear dream.
So … what to do? Well, of course I started a new file and just began typing madly, something, anything, whatever thought came to mind, not unlike this blog I suppose. It was sheer stream of consciousness, nothing but typing, and when Derek Jeter hit his home run with two outs in the bottom of the 10th (off poor Kim, who must have done something to really tick off Bob Brenly), I had some sort of mishmash of words. My phone was ringing — SEND THAT COLUMN — so I sent it without even reading it.
And it was about that time that I looked around the stadium and noticed that no one was leaving. Instead, everyone in Yankee Stadium was standing, and they were all singing “New York, New York“ with Frank Sinatra. And when the record ended, it started up again, and still nobody left, still everyone stood at their seats and sang with Ol’ Blue Eyes, these little town blues, are melting away, and it was probably the most emotional thing I’ve ever been a part of as a sportswriter. It was all there — New York at midnight, Ground Zero still on our minds, a home run in the 10th inning, Sinatra singing, ”I want to be a part of it.“ I had another ten minutes or so to write what we call a write-thru — that is a column that they will put in the latest edition. A postgame press conference was on a television near my work station in the right field seats. I listened to a few words, wrote down a quote or two, then I went back to my column and read it and added a few things.
And that was my sportswriting experience. The next night the Yankees again tied the game with a two-run homer off Kim in the ninth, but this time I made no assumptions. And of course, in Game 7, the Diamondbacks improbably scored two off Mariano in the ninth and I never saw that coming and went through a mini-version of the Kim Panic. It’s probably fair to say that the greatest World Series since 1975 (did I mention I’m writing this book …) looked different from the press box.
Anyway, people sometimes ask me if I was at that game in New York when Derek Jeter hit the home run. I say I was there. They say, ”That must have been incredible.“ And I want to tell them this story, about how I really didn’t see much of the game, how I wrote three different columns, how I spent most of the night with my writing adrenaline roaring and my heart occasionally stopping and panic breaking out every now and again. But I also know that they are right. It was incredible.
* * *
I’ve added the column I wrote off Game 4 — not because it’s good but because I know that one of you people would look it up anyway. Here it is, the final version with all the mistakes and missed opportunities:
NEW YORK - That’s the game I fell in love with. Sometimes, you have to wonder about baseball. You wonder about a game where some cities have a chance when others don’t. You wonder about the game when people whisper seriously about killing off some teams, Sopranos-style, and meanwhile the kids are off playing video games. You wonder if time has just passed baseball by.
And then, Wednesday night at Yankee Stadium happens. The Yankees beat the Diamondbacks 4-3 in 10 innings. And that was the best baseball game I ever saw. That’s all. Baseball will never be as violent and exhilarating as football. It will never have the up-and-down fever of basketball or hockey. It can never take you on a tension ride like a great heavyweight championship fight.
But none of those sports can take you through as many emotions as that enchanted game on Halloween under a full moon.
Wednesday night began with Curt Schilling. He was pitching on three days’ rest. Everybody made a big deal out of that because, the last few years, pitchers throwing on short rest in the postseason have bombed. Maybe it’s a sign of the times. In olden days, pitchers used to throw every day. Now, even great pitchers like Greg Maddux and Roger Clemens flail helplessly when they don’t get their four days of rest.
People said Arizona manager Bob Brenly was throwing away the World Series by pitching Schilling.
But Schilling is an old-time pitcher. That’s what people refused to see. He’s all heart. Got that from his dad, an old army man, and his wife, who is beating skin cancer, and his son, named Gehrig, for a man who played in 2,130 straight games and died too young.
He pitched his guts out. It was mesmerizing. People kept waiting for him to fade. They kept waiting for him to run down. He never did. Schilling threw seven innings, and the only run he gave up was a little cheapie home run by Shane Spencer down the right-field line.
That was it. Yankee Stadium shook. People screamed whatever they could at Schilling. He would not relent. In the sixth, Yankees third baseman Scott Brosius led off with a double. The Yankees could not hit another ball out of the infield against Schilling. The seventh, the Yankees got their first two runners on. Schilling immediately got the double-play grounder. He struck out Dave Justice and left the field to boos of respect.
“What a horse,” Yankees manager Joe Torre would say. “He’s unbelievable.”
Everything was unbelievable. The stadium was so loud. Spencer made an incredible throw from left field to get Tony Womack at the plate. New York’s El Duque - Orlando Hernandez - kept getting in trouble and kept working out of it, magically sometimes, and he would walk off the field to the song “Duke of Earl.” Arizona’s reliever Byung-Hyun Kim came out of the bullpen and struck out the first three Yankees he faced. It was guts on display.
Every soul in Yankee Stadium sang “God Bless America,” during the seventh-inning stretch.
And then, the magical ninth inning, the moment pulled right from “The Natural.” For posterity, we’ll note that Paul O’Neill was on first base, there were two outs, the Yankees were down two runs, and Tino Martinez wandered to the plate hoping only to hit a home run. He had nothing else on his mind. He wanted to see a fastball in the heart of the plate, and he would swing as hard as he could. Managers can make baseball sound really complicated. But sometimes, it’s that simple.
“I was hoping I would see something right down the middle,” Martinez would say.
The first pitch by Kim went right down the middle. Martinez swung as hard as he could. The ball soared deep to center field. At first, Arizona’s Steve Finley thought he had a shot. He ran to the wall. He was going to leap. But there was no point. The ball was gone.
Yankee Stadium has been through everything. But it’s hard to believe the place was ever as loud as it was that instant. Usually, you can hear people in the stadium screaming, but after Tino’s blast you could only hear one incredibly loud cheer. It was so loud, so impossibly loud, that you would not have expected people to have anything left for Derek Jeter’s game-winning home run in the 10th inning.
But they did.
Jeter ran around the bases to the same kind of cheer. The Yankees won. And after the cheering stopped, people did not want to leave. They always play Sinatra’s “New York, New York,” after Yankees victories, and usually by the second time through, the stadium is almost empty. Wednesday, they played it six times. And still people wouldn’t leave. Nobody wanted the night to end.
You know, during the incredible sixth game of the 1975 World Series, the story goes that Pete Rose turned to Carlton Fisk and said, “Isn’t this great?” And sometime during Tom Watson’s amazing duel with Jack Nicklaus at Turnberry in ‘77, Watson said, “This is what it’s all about.”
After this classic, nobody wanted to leave. The Series is tied. The Yankees are back. Baseball is back. Everybody just wanted to stay at Yankee Stadium, stay and sing “These little town blues are melting away” with Old Blue Eyes. And they did.
Until finally a man came out with a megaphone.
“Do me a favor,” he said in a hard accent that came from the heart of the Bronx. “Go home.”
Hot Dog Link
I don’t often link to stories on the Internet here because, for one thing, I usually find those stories months and years and decades after everyone else. Then I say to my wife something like, “Hey, did you see this Jay Leno memo to America about being more positive?” And she will say, “That was debunked like TWO YEARS AGO, what have you been doing the last two years anyway?” And I’ll say, “Uh, writing blog posts about Duane Kuiper and my biggest newspaper screw-ups? And watching High School Musical 295 times?”
Anyway, I don’t often link to stories, but then again, it isn’t often that we have a big story on the Internet written by one of our own. Not trying to out anybody, but what the heck, our own Oddibe Kerfeld, who has been a brilliant reader of ours pretty much from the beginning, writes on Baseball Musings about his and a friend’s quest to find Bob Wood, author of the seminal “Dodger Dogs and Fenway Franks.” Fun stuff.
In the meantime, I realize that I’m late on Banny Log, and I have to get a post up about our Hall of Fame first class. But I’m in Florida this week trying desperately to get book work done, so I ask for your patience. And hey, I did get rid of that cross-hatch pattern on the comments, didn’t I? Huh? A little love, please? I’m working on trying getting a print option on the posts and on number the comments and a few other things but, alas, I’m also very stupid so this could take years.
How did I miss this?
Well, I probably missed it because there were roughly 10 million Tim Russert tributes in the days after he died, and honestly after a while they all started to run together — he was a Bills fan, great guy, a Bills fan, a modest person who couldn’t believe all the success he had, a Washington Nationals season ticket holder, a question asker, a good friend, a Bills fan, a decent man, a hopeful guy who believed in family and faith, a Bills fan and so on and so on and so on.
And after a while, sure, maybe I turned off to it all. I liked and admired Tim Russert a lot, I will miss seeing him on Meet The Press and around the election, but there’s only so much you can hear about anyone.
Then weeks later, I finally saw this. I’m sure all of you have already seen it — I’m never up on my You Tube or anything else. But I have seen it now. And it makes me think that nothing else needs to be said.
Stupidest Statistic Ever
OK, you know how Mark Twain popularized the phrase, “There are three kinds of lies: Lies, damned lies and statistics?”*
*The quote, apparently, was first spoken by the famed British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, but nobody would have ever heard of it unless Twain mentioned it. Here’s a tip I think I have mentioned before: Anytime you want to make one of your quotes a little more popular, you should attribute it to:
[print_this]
1. Mark Twain.
2. Abraham Lincoln.
3. The Bible.
4. Satchel Paige or Dizzy Dean.
5. A Bob Dylan song.
That should cover any and every situation.
I can’t stand that quote. Well, that’s not exactly true, it’s a good quote. I can’t stand the way people use it every time they come across a statistic they don’t like or one that casts a little doubt on their own assured view. People tend to use that quote because they are unable to find giant ball-peen hammers.
Person 1: It’s a shame Tony Pena Jr. isn’t hititng because, I swear, this year he has gotten to like every ball. He must have made a million plays. He just has incredible range.
Person 2: Actually he has not made a million plays; he has the second lowest range factor in baseball.
Person 1: What does that mean?
Person 2: It means for whatever reason he has gotten to fewer balls than any regular shortstop except Julio Lugo.
Person 1: Well, you know what they say about lies and statistics.
Person 2: Yeah, but its not a lie … Pena really is averaging only 3.86 putouts and assists per nine innings. Now, this could be because the Royals have a fly ball staff — Pena’s zone rating is good. But no, purely speaking about made plays, Pena ranks really low — actually, Mike Aviles in limited time has a higher range factor …
Person 1: (Pulls out ball-peen hammer and whacks Person 2 in the head).
No, it isn’t statistics that people consider lies — I’ve mentioned here pretty often that anti-statitics baseball people will often bring up a players batting average or RBI total to prove their point. No, it’s the WAY people use statistics that people will consider lies.
For instance, last night I heard what might be the single stupidest statistic ever. This guy from Michigan was trying to explain just how important his state is for the Democrats this upcoming Presidential election. And Michigan IS important, no doubt, it is a true swing state (voted five times for Republicans, five times for Dems the last 10 elections), and it has 17 electoral votes, and it is important. But the guy wasn’t satisfied with that.
So here’s what he said: “No Democrat has won the White House without winning Michigan since 1952, with the exception of Jimmy Carter in 1976 when he lost to Michigan’s favored son Gerald Ford.”
Wow, no Democrat in 56 years, which the exception of Jimmy Carter when he lost to Michigan favored son Gerald Ford, has taken the White House without Michigan. Wow. Now, right off the top, you can see how stupid the statistic is — generally speaking when you have to throw in an exception that is longer than the actual premise, you have yourself a stupid stat. But this is one of those great stupid stats that just keep getting dumber the more you think about it.
Let’s start with the basics: How many times has a Democrat actually WON the White House since 1952. The answer — five.
1960: John Kennedy.
1964: Lyndon Johnson
1976: Jimmy Carter
1992: Bill Clinton
1996: Bill Clinton.
So, even though the guy’s trying to make it sound semi-impressive — No Democrat since 1952 — we’re really only talking about five guys. And the guy tells you right up front that Michigan only voted for four of them. So now we’re already down to a pretty useless statistic.
Then you can point out that at no point has Michigan made the actual difference in the election. Michigan definitely played a role in 1960, the close race between Kennedy and Nixon, but if Kennedy had lost Michigan and everything else remained the same he still wins the Presidency. In 1964, LBJ crushed Barry Goldwater by 434 electoral votes, one of the more underrated butt kickings in the history of American elections.* So Michigan didn’t really play any role in that election. Clinton won his two election by more than 200 electoral votes.
*It’s stunning to me that Lyndon Johnson got more than 61% of the popular vote. Think about that. I realize the country was still recovering from the Kennedy Assassination — but 61.1% is the highest percentage since 1820. Now THAT’S a statistic.
Then, finally, you take it to the next level: How many times did Michigan vote Democrat and the guy STILL LOST. Well, Michigan voted for John Kerry in 2004. Michigan went for Al Gore in 2000. Michigan went for Hubert Humphrey in 1968. Of course, all three of those guys lost. That means of the seven times Michigan has voted Donkey since 1952, four have won, and three have lost. What kind of record is that?
It’s like Mark Twain always said. Nobody has ever won the White House without winning Michigan and a bunch of other states — or just the bunch of other states. Actually, maybe that was Dizzy Dean.
A Magic Trick: Go Negative
Years ago, a friend of mine taught me this great and very involved card trick. The trick has three acts, there’s a mathematical quirk in the middle, a little bit of card physics and finally, my favorite part, a little misdirection. I can’t go into specifics because my father taught me years ago that a magician, even a bad one, never reveals secrets, plus I may one day see you and want to show you this trick. It’s really all I have. But I can tell you that the best part of magic — at least the little magic I know — is when you can use a person’s own preconceived notions to pull off a trick.
For instance: Select a number from 1 to 11. OK? Got it in your head. OK think about it hard, think about it, think about it, OK something’s coming to me now, something is coming — hey, do you still have the number in your head? — OK, yes, I can see it now, I can feel it now, think about that number, yes, it’s coming to me … OK, your number is seven.* Isn’t that amazing? You want to know how I did that, don’t you? Well, it’s an illusion! It’s magic!
*If your number is not seven, this trick may not seem quite so amazing. Was it a three? Nine?
OK, sorry, I went off the deep end there for a minute. It’s Las Vegas. There’s magic everywhere here. David Copperfield. Lance Burton. Penn & Teller. Pete Rose. It’s amazing. Bette Midler gets people to spend big money to see her perform here. I mean, seriously, that’s magical. There are like 284 different Cirque du Soleil shows here — and it only takes one to freak me out. It must be magic.
There’s so much magic around, so many illusions, so much misdirection … it can make you wonder. Why do slots make so much money? I remember once passing a billboard that boasted a certain casino’s slots had “97% payoff.” That sounded good to me. Then my friend Ed, who is much smarter about these things, said: “Great, why don’t you just go into the casino and give them 3% of your money.” And that’s right. The billboard was BRAGGING about taking less of your money than other casinos. But there are no secrets. Everybody understands on an intellectual level that slot machines don’t pay. They take. They take a lot. They take so much that owners can build more slot machines, which take even more, so that owners can build more slot machines and indoor Gondolas, and they take even more …
It’s like the taxi driver said to me the very first time I came to Las Vegas: “No matter what you’re doing in this town, be sure to take a look around and remember that losers built everything you see.”
We all know that … so why do people keep on playing the slots? Stupidity? Yes. The edgy hope of winning? Yes. Mostly, I think, it’s misdirection … this slot machine has a Wheel of Fortune wheel on top, and this slot machine just paid off 1,000 quarters, and this slot machine has seven paylines, and isn’t this chair comfortable, and don’t you want a free drink, and hey here’s as small payoff, and listen to all those bells, and yes, you won a little, that was easy wasn’t it? That was thrilling, wasn’t it? Put another $20 in. Sure. Another $50. Sure. You’ll get lucky for sure this time.
Misdirection. It’s very useful. On Wednesday, for instance, I was watching the Royals and White Sox play. And at one point, I announced, “Oh oh, watch this pitch.” And on the very next pitch — the next pitch, I tell ya — Jim Thome hit a 884,372 foot home run to center field. I mean it was a MAMMOTH blast, and everybody in the room looked at me with wonder. Unfortunately for me the only people in the room were my two little daughters, and they looked at me in wonder because they wanted some of my ice cream … but if they had been older and cared about baseball it would have been really impressive.
How did I do it? Easy. Thome is still a masher when he connects. Young Luke Hochevar, who will occasionally leave his pitches up, was pitching. And there was a 2-0 count. Anyone can predict that upcoming calamity*. I always tell people — if you want to look smart at a baseball game, if you want to impress your friends, just say “Oh oh, watch this pitch,” anytime a good hitter has a 2-0 or 3-1 count. There’s a good chance that the batter will crush the ball. Always look for those 2-0 and 3-1 pitches.
But here’s the best part — the misdirection part — I never said what I thought would happen. I just said, “Oh oh, watch this pitch.” Sure, that SEEMS to mean that I think Thome’s about to hit a blast. But it does not have to mean that at all. if Thome pops it up or grounds out there, hey, I can just say, “Yep, I thought he’d be overanxious.” If Thome takes the pitch for a ball, I can say, “Yep, Luke doesn’t want to mess with him.” It’s a can’t miss trick.
*Just as anyone could have predicted that Paul Konerko was going to hit a home run off of Jimmy Gobble to end that game — Konerko ALWAYS homers off of Gobble. I think he’s now 5-for-6 with four homers against Gobble.
There’s another bit of misdirection that you can use in sports, one that works very well for a lot of people around the country. You can go negative. This is something I’ve learned over the years of trying to be a fairly positive sportswriter — the negative guys are right a whole lot more often. Well, it just goes to figure. If a new coach or manager gets hired for some loser organization, you can say: “Oh boy, that’s a terrible hire, that won’t work.” Most of the time, you will be right, it won’t work. If a team is picked by lots of people to, say, win the World Series or Super Bowl, you can say: “Oh, I’ll bet they won’t win the World Series or Super Bowl.” Most of the time you will be right — teams predicted to win it all rarely do. You can say, “I’ll bet Chipper doesn’t hit .400,” or “I’ll bet the Patriots don’t go undefeated” or “I’ll bet Tiger doesn’t win the Grand Slam” and you’re going to be right almost every time … it’s misdirection. The odds are very, very much in your favor, even though it may not look that way.
I was thinking about this today as slot machine bells echoed in my ears and people were emailing me to ask what I think about the Royals draft pick selection of Eric Hosmer. Now, I can be very honest with you here because we’re all friends … I don’t know squat about Eric Hosmer. I just went to our Web site to make sure his first name REALLY IS Eric (it is). I’m supposed to be working on this book (did I mention …) and I’ve tried hard to not keep up with stuff like the amateur draft. OK, yes, I do know a little more than squat about Hosmer … I guess I do know he’s a high school first baseman from Florida who has been compared a lot to Casey Kotchman* but many scouts expect him to hit with more power at a younger age.
*I actually went to see Casey Kotchman in high school with the ruling Royals brain trust … I guess that was seven years ago. He hit a foul ball that went over a light tower, which seemed pretty impressive to me. The Royals took Colt Griffin instead because he threw 100 mph once. This probably tells you just about everything you need to know about why the Royals have lost a billion games this decade.
Point is, I have absolutely no idea how good Eric Hosmer will be. No idea. Between 1989 and 1998, men who make it their business to know picked the following players with the third pick in the amateur draft:
1989: Roger Salkeld
1990: Mike Lieberthal
1991: Dave McCarty
1992: B.J. Wallace.
1993: Brian Anderson (the funny one)
1994: Dustin Hermanson
1995: Jose Cruz
1996: Braden Looper
1997: Troy Glaus
1998: Corey Patterson.
So there you have it. You might get Troy Glaus. You might get B.J. Wallace. You might get something in between (or you might get Corey Patterson, who is sort of on his own track). I’ve talked to scouts … they generally seem to think highly of Hosmer, though there are some doubts. There have to be some doubts. He’s only 18.
So I don’t know what will happen. But here’s the thing: My heart tells me that Hosmer will be great. Scouts like him. He’s got a great swing, a great body, great high school numbers, all that. He’s an advanced htter … those guys have the best shot of making it through the minors quickly. My heart says: Hosmer was a great pick. I tend to write with my heart, which is one reason why I’m so often wrong.
If I want to look smart, though, if I want to play the magic game, I would tell you right now that Hosmer will be a no-doubt bust. And I will almost certainly be right. It’s misdirection again. Players are almost NEVER as good as you hope on the day you draft them. Some become all-out, never-make-it-to-the-big-league busts. Some make it to the big leagues but never play regularly. Some make it to the big leagues and do play regularly but they don’t become stars. Some will make an occasional All-Star team and have solid careers. And the smallest percentage become stars.
And here’s the thing: Right now, at this very moment, on draft day, the only satisfying conclusion to Eric Hosmer’s career would be for him to become a 40-homer star for the Kansas City Royals. And what are the odds that happens? Not good. That’s no knock on Hosmer … that’s just the reality of Major League Baseball.
And this is the enduring challenge of being a fan and an optimist. It’s more fun to be positive. But the negative happens a lot more often. The slot machines just don’t pay off most of the time.
The media. Ugh.
We do try to keep political talk to minimum here, but I think in honor of Barack Obama’s historic “Yes I can declare victory and isn’t Hill a peach” Confettisburg Address on Tuesday, in honor of Hillary Clinton’s fun and delusional “I don’t care about math and stats, I’m not going anywhere,” speech, in honor of John McCain’s surprisingly grumpy (and lime green), “Hey you kids get out of my yard,” Louisiana chat … in honor of all that, I do want to make one point about us mainstream media types.
Sometimes, we really do say incredibly, incredibly stupid things.
I know, that’s a pretty controversial statement — specifically the word “Sometimes.” But …
Take David Brooks. Please. He is a columnist at the New York Times and free agent TV guy who, best I can tell, is all about real folk, authentic folk, middle class folk, red state folk, NASCAR folk, minivan folk, factory folk, American Idol voting folk, July 4th barbecue in the backyard folk and so on. There are things I like about Brooks, including his willingness to be somewhat unpredictable and take stands on both sides. Those are generally the political people I like, the ones who refuse to be shoved to one side or the other.
Brooks does generally lean right, and he like many commentators has bought into the concept that Barack Obama is too elitist and not at all like the real and authentic folk. I have to say up front that I find this whole elitist talk sickeningly absurd. The man is RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT. Of course he thinks he’s elite. He’s not trying to become captain of our bowling team. Of course he thinks he’s elite, and so does McCain, Hill, Bob Barr*, Lyndon LaRouche, Ross Perot, Dennis Kucinich, Tracy Flick and anyone else who has the audacity to believe that he/she should be the President. Please. How in the hell can someone raise hundreds of millions of dollars and travel non-stop around the country to tell people again and again why he is the right choice — the only choice — to become the world’s most powerful person and NOT BE ELITIST? Ripping a presidential candidate for being elitist to me is like ripping your heart surgeon for being a perfectionist.
*Bob is the Libertarian candidate, of course, and in addition to the many talents I’m certain he has, his name sounds like Babar when you say it quickly. I love Babar.
But, I suspect, that by “elitist,” Brooks and others mean that Obama is out of touch and cannot appreciate the problems, concerns and state of real Americans. It’s a tag — that sadly is more or less what Presidential Politics have become. Tags. Obama is elitist. McCain is old (and grumpy … see above). Hill is, well, you know. W is a nincompoop. Al invented the Internet. Bill is, you know, it depends on what is is. I believe with all my heart that there really are many, many hard-working, thoughtful, brilliant, impassioned, meticulous and exact reporters and commentators in the mainstream media, but somehow with all the noise, the ones we hear are the ones shouting “elitist” in crowded movie theaters.
Back to Brooks. He went on TV the other day to continue explaining why he thinks those authentic folk from all over America just won’t connect with Obama. And here’s what Brooks said: “Obama’s problem is he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who could go into an Applebee’s salad bar, and people think he fits in naturally there.”
Um. Yeah. Look, anyone can make a mistake. But I’m pretty sure that if you are bringing up an Applebee’s salad bar to make a point about someone being elitist, you should find out from one of your authentic friends that Applebee’s doesn’t have a salad bar. That’s Ruby Tuesday’s. Or Sizzler. Or Ponderosa (all you can eat — beef and chicken in the buffet too). Nice effort, though. Make us all look good.
But it goes beyond that. Applebee’s represents precisely the opposite of what Brooks is talking about. Like, Applebee’s used to have this really good salad with apples in it. They took it off the menu. Why? So they could bring in that stinking “name chef” Tyler Florence. Then suddenly they put all these Florence-infused, elitist things on the menu — Penne Rosa with sweet Italian Sausage, crispy brick chicken with warm spinach salad, bruschetta burgers — dammit! And, oh yeah, Applebee’s ain’t cheap. And the brick chicken sucked, by the way.
Sometimes the media really ticks me off.
The Best Italian Food I Never Had
So, I started to write this blog post on my six weeks as a radio talk show host. And then I got off on this long tangent about my friend, Miami columnist Dan Le Batard. It is, in fact, SO long, that I’m posting it as a separate deal. I’ll get that radio thing done at some point. Also, more baseball coming. And hey … no kidding, BUY THE BOOK! (please?) It’s still $5.99. You guys have pushed it all the way to No. 393 on Amazon. We’re trying to get it into the Top 100. It’s a quest. Can’t everyone in the blog world see the worthy cause here?
* * *
OK, so, I HAVE to tell you my Dan Le Batard story. I’ve been friends with Dan for quite a few years now, respect the heck out of him, wish him well while he takes some time off to find himself and all that. But … yeah, so this was at the Super Bowl in Miami — that’s 2007, right? I’m eating in this cool little restaurant in South Beach, and there’s Dan. And he says to me, “OK, do you want to eat the best Italian food you’ve ever eaten in your entire life?”
Now, seriously, you don’t say something like that to someone like me. This is like saying, “OK, would you like to find the six fingered man?” to Inigo Montoya. This is like saying, “Hey, how would you like two decent starting pitchers?” to a Texas Rangers fan. This is like saying, “OK, how would you like a good acting part again” to Robert DeNiro. It’s almost cruel.
I mean, seriously, the best Italian food of my life? Look: I’ve long thought that there are two kinds of people in this world: There are people who go to eat on vacation. And there are people who go on vacation to eat. I am very much the second guy. Hey, I’m fine for a few minutes with the sound of the waves crashing into the shore, fine going up high in the Eiffel Tower, or looking at cannons at Fort Niagara or snorkeling or spending a preposterous amount of money to see a Broadway show or waiting in line to actually meet the Disney Princesses or whatever it is that this vacation brings. I’m fine with all that stuff, really.
But I GO on vacation to eat. I went with my wife to London and Paris three or for years ago, best vacation of our lives, and this is how I remember the experience:
1. We ate at a restaurant owned by Michael Caine. It wasn’t very good. I ate a lot.
2. We ate at Rules … the oldest restaurant in London. Margo ordered the kidney pie because it sounded traditional and it wasn’t at all what she thought it would be. I ordered something British. I ate a lot.
3. We sat down on a doorstep on the Champs Elysees with a box of macaroons bought from the bakery Laduree. When we got up, we had no more macaroons in the box. It was one of the six greatest experiences of my life — certainly behind the wedding day and the birth of my two daughters and Duane Kuiper’s home run, but ahead of just about everything else.
4. We bought ice cream at some nondescript looking ice cream place in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, and I got a chocolate cone, and I don’t know if it was the location or what but it’s pretty close to the best ice cream cone I’ve ever had.
5. We went to this great Indian restaurant … ate a lot.
6. We went to this Chinese restaurant sort of hidden away … ate a lot.
And so on. Any time my wife brings up that vacation, she will say something like, “Oh remember the Ceremony of the Keys at the Tower of London,” and I’ll say, “Absolutely, I had the pasta at that one restaurant right before that, and it was really good, it was just at some plain only pasta house but I thought the sauce was homemade though the salad wasn’t much and …” Then she says, “You know what was great about the Louvre, when we went to the … ” I’ll say, “well, not the cafeteria, because I thought the sandwich I had there was pretty dry …”
in other words, when Lebby asked me if I wanted to eat the best Italian food of my life, my first thought was, “OK, who do I have to kill? Is it someone I know? Because if it’s someone I don’t know, then yes, for the best pasta of my life, absolutely, I’m ready to do what has to be done, but if it’s someone I do know, then no, I’m not killing someone I KNOW just for Italian food, you know, unless they have a really good chocolate dessert too.” I managed to compose myself and say, well, yes, I would like to eat the best Italian food of my life, absolutely.
So he said: I’ll call you tomorrow. There’s this place. It’s impossible to get into. It’s kind of far away. But I know people there. I’ll have to call the guy for you special. But I’m telling you it will be great. It’s like, you know, a connected place. It’s incredible.”
A connected place. This made the whole thing sound even better. I was about to go to a far away to a crowded Italian place inhabited by Mafia types. That sounded to me like a place where I really might get the best Italian food of my life, a place that made sauce as good as Paulie and Vinnie and Henry Hill’s sauce in jail. I was so excited I could hardly sleep, man. This was going to be AMAZING. Once I went to Chicago with a friend, and we went to an Italian restaurant that looked really good — this is absolutely true, or at least it is how I remember it — and we walked up to the door, and it was like 7 p.m. And the guy at the door said, “We’re closed.” Closed? At 7 p.m.? And I looked inside … there was one guy eating in the whole restaurant. One guy. The door guy then pointed to another restaurant and then (I might have imagined this part, but I believe this is true) gave us money to leave. I’ve always wanted to go back to that restaurant … I can only imagine what the Chicken Parm or Manicotti tastes like in that place. And I’ve imagined it a lot.
So, this was going to make up for the missed restaurant in Chicago. Dan did call me up the next day, and he said that I was in — me and a couple of friends — and then he had very specific directions about what we had to do to get in. That only made it better. He said that we had to ask for some guy (can’t remember the name, let’s call him Brian) and that Brian would take care of us and that at the end — this was very important — we had to slip 100 bucks to Brian.
Man, was I excited now. The best Italian restaurant in the world. A place where we had to tip a guy a c-note just to get a table. Are you kidding me? I didn’t eat all day because I was just ready to eat some serious Italian food. And then we headed out. Dan warned us before we left that this place would not look like much from the outside — it’s in a strip mall — but he told us not to be fooled. He was guaranteeing Italian food like no place else.
This place was pretty far. It was like 45 minutes away from where we were staying, maybe an hour. And we got to the place, well, Dan was right. It was one of those strip malls. We drove up, and we were like — come on. You’re telling me the best Italian food in the world is in a Florida strip mall?* Is this possible?
*I have another friend who is convinced the best Chinese food in the world is in a Houston strip mall. Maybe the problem is I don’t have the right friends.
Then we noticed there were people standing outside this restaurant. LOTS of people standing outside this restaurant. There was a Depression Era bread line snaking up to this restaurant. And this chill came over me — Yes! We found it! THE BEST ITALIAN FOOD OF MY LIFE WAS MOMENTS AWAY. We had to park a pretty long way off, and we started walking to the place, and I could already taste that food, I mean, seriously, there’s Sinatra music playing in my head, and my stomach is already growling instructions, “Start off with a Caesar’s Salad, you have to do that, and then, you know, maybe some Calimari, and oh, I’ll bet that bread will be amazing and …” All because of my friend Dan!
OK, so I have now described the restaurant to pretty precisely the way Dan described it to me. You have an image in your mind of what it looks like, right? It’s a Mafia joint with the best Italian food in the world, right? What’s your image? Are you imagining a dark place, dark wood, a little bit of red velvet, maybe some tapestries on the wall, some candles going, a couple of fading photographs of Venice, personalized photo on the wall from Joe DiMaggio (“Food’s great! Signed: The Clipper). I mean this is precisely what I was imagining.
Um. No.
How to describe the place? OK, think about the loudest bar you’ve ever walked into. OK? You with me? I mean the loudest bar, one that’s so loud the light fixtures are shaking, and the organs in your chest are thumping, a flock of birds fly away in terror, ear doctors are on call outside to treat busted ear drums. OK? You envisioning that? Great. Now double it. OK? So, we’re now at Black Sabbath concert levels, only you are actually inside Tony lommi’s guitar. Right? You with me? OK, double it again.
That should get you pretty close to half the volume of this place. Wow. Airplanes could land in this place and no one would notice. Dick Vitale could call the action and no one would hear him. Garbage trucks could collide inside and no one would detect it for days. And it was very much a BAR. And not just any BAR but a MIAMI BAR. Put it this way: We walked in just as they were projecting scenes from “Pulp Fiction” on the wall. Music was pounding and then suddenly it would STOP and the dialogue from the movie would break hard into the music whenever Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta started killing people. Seriously. Now, look, I’m reasonably fine with the incredibly loud bar scene … when I know I’m going to an incredibly loud bar. But, you know, when I think I’m going to Louis’ Restaurant in the Bronx, when I’m hoping to go to the bathroom only to see Michael’s untraceable gun … it’s pretty jarring to walk into a Crocket and Tubbs scene. You belong to the city, indeed.
Well, fine. It was a bit surprising. And yes, I’ll admit it, I mentally gave up on this being the best Italian food I’ve ever had. I mean, seriously, what are the odds that I’m going to get an Osso Bucco from heaven while they’re showing the ear-cutting scene from Resevoir Dogs on the wall behind us. Still, I’m thinking it will be GOOD Italian food. Dan had never steered me wrong before (though, I was now realizing, Dan had never steered me right before either … he had never steered me at all).
So, next step, I have to find this guy, Brian. It takes about 20 minutes of jumping up and down and screaming at everyone before he notices us … then I smoothly drop Dan’s name (DAN LE BATARD SENT US .. NO DAAAAAN LE BA … YOU KNOW THE SPORTS … NO NOT DAN MARINO … LE BATARD!). He said something like, “OK, wait here, I’ll get you in.” Of course, it might have been, “Wooger, Mooger, Life’s A Booger,” I mean, we couldn’t hear a thing.
Still, we waited. And we waited. And we waited. This how much I wanted that food. I’m not exactly sure how long we waited — an hour and a half maybe — but I can tell you that at some point the noise just started popping my brain cells. They say that one way you can torture and break a prisoner is to play really, really loud and random music at him for a long period of time. Well if I someone had asked me for any national security secrets at that moment, I would have spilled it. My head was throbbing. I kept getting shoved around by people trying to get to … I don’t know where they were going. There was nowhere to go. There were no open tables. There was no place to stand. And did I mention it was loud.
And MAN were my two friends getting ticked off now.
As you no doubt expected, Brian disappeared. Gone baby gone. Well, hey — it had to be expected a hot Miami bar/restaurant (I guess) the Friday night before the Super Bowl, supermodels and pro football players were rushing in, I’m thinking that three shlubby sportswriters with a letter of transit from Dan Le Batard were pretty low on the priority list … in retrospect maybe we were supposed to tip Brian the $100 BEFORE he sat us down. Well, hell, I don’t know how to do that stuff. A tip won’t get you very far at Denny’s. Whatever, finally, we just had to go. There would be no unprecedented Italian food, not on this night. As we were leaving, we ran into Brian in the parking lot. I started to go up to him to say that we were leaving. He saw me coming and immediately walked off in another direction.
That was it. Dan called the next day to ask how it went. What can you say about that expeirence? I’m sure I’ll forgive him someday. No, really. Someday. I will tell you that nght, me and my two friends (who, I’m sure, have not forgiven me) ate at some fried fish place where the shrimp, lobster, mahi mahi and paper plates all taste precisely the same. It was depressing and greasy and our eardrums were bleeding. Anyway, I ate a lot.
I really didn’t need that stew …
For fun … here’s my greatest day in sportswriting:
So, this was at the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney. I mentioned here earlier that the Olympics are like nothing else in sports journalism. You become entirely and inexplicably consumed by the Games, especially at the Summer Olympics where there are always about twenty different things going on at once. It really is hard to explain the absurd enormity being in the middle of it all. From home, I always thought, the Olympics seemed pretty big. But when you are there, diving is like the World Series, water polo is like the Super Bowl, rhythmic gymnastics is like the Masters. Yes, from afar these are still diving, water polo and rhythmic gymnastics … but there, at the heart of it, you are blinded to perspective. You are bumping shoulders with reporters and fans from pretty much every country in the world. You are surrounded by sellout crowds, including many people who may have actually paid a scalper a lot of money to see that day’s beach volleyball match. You are talking only to athletes who have DEDICATED THEIR ENTIRE LIVES to be their for that one moment. You are also pretty much shut off from pennant races and NFL training camps and golf majors and presidential news and anything else that might be distracting. You are living, breathing, drinking, sleeping Olympics. It is everything.*
*I’ve always thought that after three weeks of Olympic immersion, reporters would blindly kill after being shown the Queen of Diamonds.
So, with that background, it was the day of the gold medal baseball game. Tommy Lasorda was manager of that team, you might recall. I wanted to go somewhere else. It wasn’t personal. We had someone going to the game, and I had already written about Lasorda and that team, and anyway — I don’t like baseball at the Olympics. I don’t like tennis at the Olympics. For a while they were trying to add golf — I’m glad they didn’t. I like it when the Olympics are CLEARLY the most important event in your sport.
So, I was looking for something cool to write about — this is a big thing at the Olympics. The thing is so vast that most of the time when something cool happens, you are 10 miles away watching something decidedly uncool like the ancient Pocket Hercules failing to lift weight*.
*OK, quickly, have to tell this Olympic story. So in 1996, in Atlanta, I saw the great weightlifter Pocket Hercules win a gold medal in front of a wild crowd and it was one of the cooler sports moments of my life. I’m not going to go into that except to say that for the next four years, I kept telling my buddy Vac how great this Pocket Hercules story was. I mean I PEPPERED him with Pocket Hercules teasers. “Oh man, you should have been there.” So in 2000, Vac basically went to the Olympics for one reason only — he was GOING TO SEE Pocket Hercules lift weights.
So we go to the event and … well, it’s not the same Pocket Hercules. Now, the guy’s out of shape, uninterested, going through the motions, sort of like a weight-lifting version of Roger Dorn . If I remember right, he did not have a single successful lift. And the everlasting image from that Olympics was not the cheering crowd or the triumphant Hercules holding an impossible amount of weight over his head. No, it was a fat Pocket Hercules smoking cigarettes in the parking lot outside after he was disqualified. “Yeah,” Vac said. “Great story.” I don’t believe he has ever forgiven.
Anyway, while everyone else was heading for baseball, my friend, the impossibly cool Chuck Culpepper, told me about the unbeatable Russian wrestler. It seems there was this Russian wrestler who had never lost a an Olympic match. Ever. He had won like three Gold Medals already and, if I’m remembering correctly, he had not given up a single point in years.
Now, as someone raised on the power of Ivan Koloff and who had seen Rocky IV at least 12 times,, I was of course drawn to the story. What could be better? An unbeatable Russian wrestler. This guy was so good, there were many scalpers outside the arena. He was so good, the president of the IOC was there to give him some sort of special Olympic medal. He was apparently a very big deal in those countries that don’t have baseball, and so I thought he could make a great story.
We showed up in the arena, and like I say, it was absolutely packed. And it was loud. It was like Boston Garden hockey crowd loud. Now, I should say at this point that I did not understand the rules of Greco Roman wrestling them … and I think this should be pretty easy to believe because I don’t understand the rules of Greco Roman wrestling NOW. I just watched this Russian guy grapple with this other guy for a few seconds, and I guess it was impressive enough, though no one seemed to be reaching for a metal chair. And then suddenly, without warning, everyone in the crowd all at once shouted “OOOOOOOOH!”
“What the heck just happened?” I asked Chuck.
“I have no idea,” Chuck said.
“Something happened,” I said.
Then we looked up at the scoreboard. It turned out the other guy, whoever he was, had gotten a point. I didn’t know how he got the point then. I don’t really know how he got the point now. Apparently he broke a hold or something. Whatever — even I understood this was a big deal. The Russian had not given up a point in forever. I thought I heard the Rocky trainer saying, “You see? He’s not a machine! He’s a man!” So, I now expected the Russian to pick up this poser, fold him up into one of those paper fortune tellers* and be done with it.
*Remember those things — those little origami crafts girls in school would do, and then they would move it around with their fingers, ask you to pick a color, then a number, and then tell your fortune was “You’re ugly.” Or maybe that was just in my school.
Only … that didn’t happen. The Russian couldn’t budge this guy. And the crowd sensed that something magical was happening. They were getting louder and louder, and the clock was draining, and the Russian was trying to move this kid but nothing was happening. and the sound roared even higher, and people started stomping and clapping and going crazy, and the score was still 1-0 unknown guy, and the clock kept going down, and then I saw what to this day is one of the most emotional sports things I’ve ever seen in my life. I saw Jeter hit the homer after midnight. I saw the Rams tackle a receiver at the 1 as the Super Bowl expired. I saw Tiger Woods chip into a sunlight spot at the 16th in Augusta and watched the ball roll backward, stop for an early curtain call, and then drop into the hole. I saw a young girl land on one leg to help America win a gold medal. I saw Mario Chalmers make a three-point jump shot to tie the national championship game in the final seconds. I saw a journeyman from Japan throw a perfect game (for eight innings — then the closer finished it off) to clinch the Japan Series.
I’m not sure I ever saw anything quite like this: With the clock running out, the great Russian wrestler bowed his head and held out his hand in defeat.
Mayhem. Madness. Insanity. I turned to Chuck and asked. “What the heck did we just see?” But he couldn’t even hear me. It was that loud. Chuck and I started working our way through the crowd and to the press room, and we kept just looking at each other in sheer disbelief. This American — it turned out he was an American — had beaten the unbeatable Russian. It was like all the Rocky movies combined into one. Of course, at the time we knew NOTHING about the American — just his name. Rulon Gardner. But that was enough. What a story.
So we got into the press room, sat in the front row, and Chuck whispered to me, “This is amazing. I hope this guy’s a good story.” Then Rulon Gardner walked up on the podium, and he turned to the guy running the show, and he said: “Wow, this is pretty cool. I’ve never done a press conference before.”
Chuck and I looked at each other. Holy cow. This thing was getting better.
The first question came, and it was something like: “So, did you think you had it in you to beat the great and unbeatable Russian?”
And Rulon Gardner said: “Well, when I was growing, I used to wrestle cows on our dairy farm …”
Um. Yeah, Guy wrestled cows. Seriously, sportswriters, you DREAM of moments like this. I mean that literally. You go to sleep after having interviewed another boring golfer who started playing because his Dad was a member of the local country club or some bland pitcher who was the star of his high school team, got drafted high, got paid a sweet signing bonus, played two years in the minors and then got called to the show — and you DREAM about an American farm kid who wrestled cows and ended up winning a gold medal by beating an invincible Russian.
“He mumbled something in Russian at the end,” Rulon said. “I think it was ‘I give up.’”
So Chuck and I were dizzy when we left that press conference. It was flat incredible. The kid was funny and charming and modest and he had wrestled cows. The story could not get any better. And then we walked out, and we ran into this woman, and it turns out that she was Rulon Gardner’s mother. So we asked her when she knew that her son had a chance to be an Olympic champion. And she told us that she knew when, at a very young age, she saw Rulon carry four milk buckets at one time.
Our cup runneth over. The Mom turned out to be as great as Rulon — she invited Chuck and me up to her part of Wyoming to go fishing because, “that’s where Wilford Brimley fishes — you know, the Quaker Oats guy?” This was the story that just did not stop giving. We said good bye, and we raced back to our chairs, and sat behind our computers, and we looked at each other, and Chuck said, “How the heck do we even write this? It’s too great.”
I said, “Hold on, I need to find out a little bit about Rulon’s town … see if they’re excited back home.” There was obviously a huge time difference … it was morning, I guess, back in Wyoming. Rulon, as I recall, was from a place called Afton, Wyoming, so I called an Afton radio station to find out what the mood was like. And here’s what happened — the DJ picked up the phone, but he did not answer it. Instead, he put it down right next to him. He was on the air and could not talk.
And here’s what I heard him say: “OK, well, it’s time for the birthdays. Happy birthday to Steve Johnson over there on Coventry Road, he’s 41 today. Way to go Steve. Happy birthday to little Timmy Wilkins, can you believe he’s already 11 …”
And then, suddenly: “We’re going to have to dispense with the birthdays. We have some breaking news …”
I wobbled back to Chuck. He said, “What did you find out?” I said: “You wouldn’t even believe it. We have wandered into the middle of Bedford Falls.”
And then it really was time to write. It was impossible. We had too much stuff. We had too much GREAT stuff. This guy was like a character out of Yankee Doodle Dandy. It couldn’t be real. Chuck and I were laughing and trying to write and laughing more … never had a story like it in our lives. People often ask me how I handle writer’s block — well knock on wood, thank my lucky stars, I’ve never had it. My thought about writer’s block is basically that my Dad worked in a factory almost his whole life, and he never had “factory block.” Sometimes the words don’t come as easily as others, but you do what you have to do.
But this wasn’t writer’s block. This was a writer’s overdose. I had no idea how to sum up a Wyoming farm boy who wrestled cows in a small town where a disc jockey reads the morning birthdays near Wilford Brimley’s fishing pond and grew up to defeat the indestructible Russian in perhaps the greatest Olympic upset going back to the days when Greeks ran naked through the …
“Excuse me,” a man said to me.
Oh boy. Who was this guy? “Yes,” I said. “Can I help you.”
“I was looking for the Gardner party,” he said. “Do you happen to know where they went?”
“Yes,” I said. “I think they went to celebrate at the Hard Rock Cafe.”
“Oh,” he said. “I have to catch up with them. I’m Rulon’s father.”
Oh oh. No. Not the father. I really, really don’t need to talk to the father right now. Why is it that when dealing with the deliberately boring athletes that fill the sports pages on a regular basis, I’ve never had a father just walk up to me.
“Well sir,” I said. “You must be very proud.”
“Oh, absolutely,” he said. “I’m just so happy to be here. I didn’t think were going to make it.”
No. Don’t ask him. Just point him toward the Hard Rock …
“Really,” I said. “Why’s that?”
“Well,” he said. “You know, we don’t really have a lot of money. So in order to raise enough money to get here I had to sell my world famous sausage stew at the Lincoln County Fair.”
And that broke it. That’s when my head exploded. The father then started telling us about someone who saved him in Korea, but I wasn’t even listening anymore. I couldn’t hear anymore. It was like being in the chocolate factory and having to eat your way out. In the end, it was a match between two men I had never heard of before, in a sport with rules I did not understand, in a place 9,000 miles away, the other side of the world. And I’ll never cover anything like it.
“Can you believe this?” Chuck said to me as we hysterically tried to finish up our stories.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” I said. “I really didn’t need that stew.”
Heinz and Blogs
We have a post coming up at some point here, but first I did want to post this comment from Kevin in case you missed it in the comment section because I think it makes a really good point:
I respect your work very, very much, but your previous comment that if W.C. Heinz were 25 years old today he’d be writing a blog is wrong on about 13 different levels. Heinz would most likely be writing long narrative stories about the Iraq war, ala George Packer to Steven Coll. He was a reporter’s reporter, one who loved dialog, and felt there was a lot more truth to be unearthed in observing and recording history than there was commenting about it. He would have had a lot of outlets for his work beyond just the Internet. All due respect, but those who knew Heinz found your statement to be quite the reach.
I have nothing at all to argue with Kevin’s major point because I believe it is dead on … Heinz was indeed a reporter’s reporter But I do have one disagreement — and it makes me think I wasn’t as clear as I should have been about this whole thing with Heinz and blogs.
So let me make my point again: I never was suggesting that Heinz would be writing blogs about firing coaches or that he would be printing photos of quarterbacks in hot tubs or spewing some off the top opinion about Roger Clemens or having silly polls about regular or peanut M&Ms. And I was also never suggestion that he would ONLY write blogs. So let me be clear: He would not. Absolutely not. He would, from what I know about him, despise and avoid that goofy stuff (well, maybe not the M&Ms poll — he might have been a big peanut M&Ms guy).
Let me repeat it one more time: Heinz was a master reporter and a brilliant writer, and there’s no doubt in my mind that if he was 25 years old today he would be a master reporter and brilliant writer. I don’t want there to be even the slightest crack here: I don’t think W.C. Heinz would be any less the man, the reporter or the gentleman in today’s world.
My point is: Why wouldn’t he write a blog? And it makes me think, once again, that some people miss the point that a blog can be ANYTHING. Maybe it’s the name: Blog. Maybe people see that name and cannot get beyond a certain image. But a blog really can be whatever the author want s it to be. It can be long, narrative stories about the Iraq war. It can be haunting and poetic reporting about the horrors of Darfur. It can (and is) absolutely anything.
My point is taken right from Kevin’s comment: George Packer writes a blog. Steve Coll, I believe, is now director of the New America Foundation, a nonprofit policy institute which, of course has a blog. And for that matter, Andrew Sullivan writes a blog, Laura Rozen writes a blog, James Wolcott writes a blog (and he mentioned me!), Malcolm Gladwell writes a blog, and so on and so on and so on.
People from everywhere who love writing are drawn to the blogosphere — and how can you not be? It’s unlimited space. It’s an open canvas. Some of it is lousy. Some of it is brilliant. That’s just the way it goes with open canvases.
I have no doubt that even in today’s crazy world of newspaper layoffs and magazine downsizing that a 25-year-old W.C. Heinz would write for magazines and newspapers and books and all that. But I honestly do not get why anyone who knows, loves, respects, admires Heinz would take insult to the notion that one of the really fine writers of the 20th century would take advantage of the Internet too. It’s a big, blog world out there.
A few weekend thoughts …
1. On W.C. Heinz: The classy and wonderful sportswriter writer Steve Wulf (who, among many other things, co-wrote Buck O’Neil’s autobiography “I Was Right On Time”) wrote in to confirm my theory that Heinz absolutely would be a prominent blogger in today’s new world.
He wrote: “Heck, in (Heinz’s) day, with multiple editions and lots of friendly competition, newspapers were the blog equivalents.”
This is really a great point, and one that just gets overlooked. There have always been blogs. What do we think Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” was? He wasn’t working for any mainstream media — there really wasn’t a mainstream media. It was a blog written long before the Internet. It was a published as a pamphlet and published anonymously — and James Chalmers (playing the role of Revolutionary Buzz) called him a “political quack.” You could certainly argue that Paine’s blog, more than any single work, spurred the Colonies to break from England.
What do we think Martin Luther’s “95 Theses“ was? A blog. Of course. There was no WordPress for him to post, so he nailed the 95 Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenburg. The door, he found, was a better operating system than Vista.
It isn’t that I miss what people don’t like about the blogosphere. I get it. There are some dirty words out there. There are some rather embarrassing photographs*. There are some nasty and unfair rips out there. Hey, I would love to see the tone lighten up a bit. I would love to see people enjoy sports more and scream less. But that’s not the blogosphere. That’s just America. It’s been that way for a long time. In 1975, people vented by throwing whiskey bottles at players and fighting on 10 cent beer night. Now, they write angry blogs. I think that’s an improvement.
*You know, I keep hearing people rip Will over at Deadspin for running those photos of quarterback Matt Leinart in the hot tub. Look, this is worth a much longer discussion about privacy and good taste and all that but in this context … give me a very small break. People have been running these sorts of photos before Internet Founder Al Gore was even BORN. This is not a new Internet thing. Do I need to see any more photos in magazines and papers of a messed-up Britney Spears? There have been tabloids, sure, but newspapers have created entire pages dedicated to photos of people partying. Of all people, John Salley made this point when he talked about Joe Namath. Well, papers CONSTANTLY ran photos of Joe Namath partying, right?
Now with cell phone cameras and everything — you’re always on Candid Camera, people. It’s reality, folks. You’re famous, you’re out, people will take your photograph and put it on the Internet. Here’s a weird thing: Every so often someone will write something about me, and they will run a photo of me, and I will have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA where they got it. These photos have not been of me in a hot tub, and I think we all can be thankful for that.
2. I hate the Internet: I see a couple of you — dammit, I thought you people were my FRIENDS — went back to find the horrendous, embarrassing, humiliating article I wrote for The Charlotte Observer about the Bob Costas game. See, this is why the Internet sucks. Nothing ever disappears.
So, fine. Here it is. My first big article ever for the Observer. I was 21. Mock away. Friend. Feh.*
*It turns out it was not gymnast Kurt Thomas, but gymnast Bart Conner who was there. I apologize to whichever one of them I offended.
By Joe Posnanski
Staff Writer
Without any stars, a little bit of nostalgia came to Salisbury.
They came to watch and play baseball, celebrities and children, college players and legends. A game in a busy grandstand in an old-time park with wooden benches and brick dugouts; a tiny radio booth - maybe big enough to hold three people - behind home plate, and a scoreboard with cardboard numbers in right field.
It was NBC sportscaster Bob Costas`s team, the Washington Senators, against Catawba College. On the Senators, a celebrity team, N.C. State basketball coach Jim Valvano played shortstop, NBC football analyst Paul McGuire was at third. NBC Sports executive producer Michael Weisman played first. Olympic gymnast Bart Conner was in the outfield, along with comedian Robert Klein, basketball analyst Bucky Waters and David Letterman writer Jeff Martin. From the building near right field, Mickey Mantle limped toward the plate. He didn`t look like the Mickey Mantle who played with the New York Yankees. He walked slowly, deliberate in each step. He smiled for the fans as they stood and applauded, but he couldn`t do much more. The fans didn`t want more. Willie Mays and Catfish Hunter were scheduled to appear but didn`t make it. The fans didn`t seem to mind.
Mickey Mantle was in Salisbury.
“Hey, that looks like Tom Watson,“ a fan yelled, pointing at a reporter.
For a day in Salisbury, everyone looked like a star.
* * *
The players met at the Holiday Inn in Salisbury a few hours before game time.
It is a basic Holiday Inn - small rooms, a swimming pool, pink flowers and green bushes.
It`s a modest hotel in a small town. To get to the Holiday Inn, you get off I-85 and turn right on Holiday Inn Road. From the swimming pool, you can see the highway, where many more cars pass than stop and take a look at Salisbury. “I just have a nice feeling about Salisbury,“ Costas said. “It just seems to have a Southern hospitality, a gentle charm.“
Two years ago, Costas, who was in Salisbury to pick up his award as sportscaster of the year, saw the baseball field on the Catawba campus and told Catawba coach Jim DeHart he`d like to play there. DeHart told him to get up a team. Costas did.
Last year, he brought in a group of celebrities, including comedian Joe Piscopo, and former major-leaguers like Jim Kaat and Al Hrabosky, and played the Catawba team.
So he did it again this year. He had hoped to play with Mays and Mantle and Hunter, but one by one, he watched them become no-shows. It hurt him; baseball is special to Costas.
Still, the team played. He named his team the Senators after the old Washington Senators of the American League. He handed out uniforms at the Holiday Inn, white with Senators scripted across the front in red letters. He put shoeblack below his eyes and put on four batting gloves.
“I don`t know about our pitching,“ Costas said after learning Hunter wouldn`t play. “I suppose we just want to last the game, and end it by nightfall.“ He smiled and looked over to his team. McGuire played catch with a beer in his right hand.
Valvano was talking to some players. “If I don`t play shortstop,“ he screamed, “I don`t play.“
Klein was laughing about how badly the team would lose. Others concentrated on the food, the swimming pool and the uniforms, which were so hard to put on. “Mickey Mantle looked at this team and said, Are you kidding, this is what I have to work with?` “ McGuire said.
Mantle sat in the dugout during the game, wearing his old No. 7 from Yankees days, signing autographs for a line of people that seemed to go on forever.
“How does it feel to put on the old uniform Mick?“
“It don`t fit anymore,“ Mantle said. “It`s kind of embarrassing.“
* * *
Mantle was the hero of so many. The long, quick strides, the power from both sides of the plate. He was Costas`s hero, Klein`s hero, Valvano`s hero. In his old uniform, the pinstripes, the Yankees hat, you could almost see the old black-and-white highlights, the old magic. Almost.
“I`m rarely speechless,“ Valvano said, sitting next to Mantle. “I`m speechless now.“
Now Mantle sat in the dugout, tired, old - unable to play in the game the young enjoy. Mantle was supposed to be designated hitter. He wasn`t. No reason was given to the fans, but as he gingerly walked to his place during introductions, they knew he wouldn`t play. They had to know.
Still the game went on. It was too nice a day not to play baseball.
Without the stars of the past, the field was filled with laugh-makers and kids grown up. McGuire, a former NFL player, hit a short pop-up to the pitcher then charged out to the mound and knocked the pitcher down before he could catch it. Valvano kicked dirt at the umpire`s leg after a close call. Costas let his 2-year-old son, Brian Michael Kirby - as in the Twins` Puckett - hit during the game.
But beneath it all was baseball, the highlights Costas dreamed as a child. This was his game. He once said baseball was the surest sign of God`s existence because “Man could not have created something so perfect.“ Now he went into the old ballpark and played.
There were moments. Conner drilled a double down the left-field line. Valvano made several tough plays at shortstop. Weisman made a diving catch in foul ground.
And sometimes, between the laughs and the pranks, the game brought out dreams long forgotten.
“The last time I played organized baseball was 30 years ago,“ Klein said as he practiced his batting swing. “It was in Police Athletic League in New York. I was 14 or 15. God, it`s been a long time.“
The Catawba pitchers weren`t throwing hard - taking it easy on the celebrities, but the Senators still found the ball hard to follow. Catawba would win 9-5.
But as the game went into the late afternoon and fans started leaving, Valvano grabbed a tough grounder and threw out a Catawba runner and Costas slapped him on the back and McGuire cheered.
Costas worked his way into the on-deck circle with the bases loaded, hoping, just hoping, for a chance to knock in some runs. His eyes lit up with hope. Perhaps he remembered running out to the car as a child and listening through static to old Yankees games. He took some hard practice swings.
And Mickey Mantle slowly limped off the field.
3. Ugh. I cannot believe I just posted that. What I won’t do for my brilliant readers.
4. Facebook: So here’s a good idea … if you create a Facebook entry, don’t mention that on your blog unless you want 549 people to immediately email you and ask to be your friend. I don’t even know HOW to confirm all these friendships. And I don’t know the etiquette of friends on Facebook (do you just take in everyone?) And I don’t know what being a friend on Facebook means (can you ask a Facebook friend to lend you money or bail you out of jail or what?).
But hey, it’s always good to have more friends, right? I should just make the qualifier: If you buy my current book, and promise to buy The Machine (you don’t have to promise in blood — a DNA sample will suffice), you can be my Facebook Friend forever.
5. Moderation: Someone asked if moderate comments here. I want to make this point: Mostly, no, I do not. I have erased probably five comments since starting this thing because they seemed libelous or too mean (I may have erased a couple more thinking they were spam … man, this site gets a lot of spam).
I want to say this because, frankly, this blog has definitely given me a very different view of the Internet than some might offer on certain HBO shows. That is … the commenting on here never seems to drop below testy (that’s usually over Jim Rice), and is mostly funny, thoughtful, well-written, well-spoken. It really is something. People tell me this all the time.
I mean this. I would love to say that it’s just because my writing draws the most thoughtful and brilliant sports fans in this great country — and I’m sure you would agree. But more, I think it says that the nastiness some people are constantly complaining about is really the vast, vast, vast minority on the blogosphere.
At least that’s what I think.
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