Dig this fascinating look at Senegalese Wrestling by John B. Thompson over at SB Nation’s Longform site.

[Photo Credit: Christing O;  Hippolyte Photography]

Another good one from the late, great Joe Flaherty. This one from the summer of 1968. It appears in the fine collection, Chez Joey.

“Can the Mets Survive Respectability?”

By Joe Flaherty

If in a moment of campy whimsy Susan Sontag and Salvador Dali decided to have a love affair and conceive a child without sin, he would be destined to grow up and become a New York Met. In a dastardly age when we are accused of genocide at home and abroad, the Mets remain as innocent as a feather boa or a Busby Berkeley musical.

Admittedly, baseball, in Red Smith’s phrase, is still a game played by little boys, but it also is a serious business. One has only to remember the fabled exodus of Walter O’Malley’s Dodgers from loving Brooklyn to lush Los Angeles. The shacks of Mexican peasants were torn down to erect (as the Hollywood press agents call it) O’Malley’s Taj Mahal of sports arenas. And when his edifice was complete, it was discovered that there wasn’t a water fountain in the place. O’Malley in his countinghouse realized soda pop cost money and water was for nothing. So those poor bronzed blond darlings of Southern California, those objects of adoration of all the Humbert Humberts among us, were being subjected in that land of wheat germ and blackstrap molasses to sugary cavities. But these devious machinations have nothing to do with the Mets.

In their six-year history (1968 is their seventh) the Mets not only gave away water but a torrent of ball games as well. Their pitching staff had the marksmanship of Sergeant York-they hit every damn bat in sight. Their batters were as aggressive as flower children, and their baserunners circled the pads as though Mack Sennett and Richard Lester were coaching on first and third. The Mets’ defense was so feeble it could make Nasser feel like a Prussian general. Yet they were loved.

In six years they finished last in the National League standings five times and next to last once. Their unbelievable dramatic ninth-place finish in 1966 (28½ games behind the pennant-winning Dodgers) was relegated to a freak of nature when in 1967 they returned to form and finished last, 40½ games behind the World Champion St. Louis Cardinals.

But these were the innocent years. What could be expected of a club that paid $125,000 for Don Zimmer and Lee Walls and $75,000 for the likes of Ray Daviault and John De Merit? And who gave a hell about winning when their manager of three-and-one-half years, Casey Stengel, could combine jabberwocky and Finnegans Wake and convert tragedy into comedy? After Stengel’s heady reign, the Mets went into their Eisenhower years. Under Wes Westrum, the ex-Giant catcher, the Met fans mistook boredom for serious stewardship. For nearly three seasons the Mets slept.

But precociousness is a fragile commodity. What is adorable in adolescence is contemptible in adults. 1968 was the year the Mets were supposed to grow up. And the reason for their maturity was the hiring of Gil Hodges as manager. The feeling was that Hodges, the gentle giant, the solid man who was adored as the Brooklyn Dodgers’ first baseman for ten years, would bring stability to the Mets.

New York was always a National League town. The aristocratic Yankees are only tolerated here; the real action was always the Giants and the Dodgers. And Hodges was the embodiment of the golden years, the late forties and early fifties of the Dodgers. He was so unique as an individual he was never even jeered by the enemy Giant fans. In a borough that canonized the image of the “regular guy” Gil Hodges was a saint.

One remembers the elegance he brought to playing first base. His massive hands seemed to span the right side of the Dodger infield, making it impenetrable. And who could forget the 370 home runs-or, as Red Barber called them, “Old Goldies”? Then there was the human saga, the 1952 World Series in which Hodges batted 0 for 21, and on a Sunday every church in Brooklyn offered up prayers that Gil would end his slump. Indeed, Hodges always seemed to be a character in a morality play. One recalls the great confrontation between Hodges and Giant pitcher Sal “The Barber” Maglie. The blue-eyed Hodges at bat, who always had trouble hitting the curve ball, looking like Billy Budd facing the swarthy, unshaven Maglie as Claggart doing the unmentionable to the instrument of our national pastime-spitting on it-magnificently curving the hero to his death, while the faithful of Flatbush hissed the hairy villain. Even now Hodges says with a self-deprecating smile: “Sal would have to make a terrible mistake for me just to hit the ball.”

Hodges, who also was one of the original Mets, retired from active ball in 1963 because of a crippling knee injury. In 1963 he became manager of the last place Washington Senators of the American League. Within five years as the Senators’ manager Hodges raised the club from the cellar in 1963 to a respectable tie for sixth place in 1967. Then in ’68 the Mets summoned Hodges home, though in a way he had never left since he has lived on Bedford Avenue with his wife and four children (a boy and three girls) since 1948.

But for those looking for the Met image to change drastically the spring season didn’t offer much hope. The Mets compiled their worst loss record ever, and the zany stories were still getting into the press. Ron Swoboda, the team slugger and the sibling with the Chinese stepfather, was reported to heed a call from nature during an exhibition game and missed his turn at bat-once again, the Mets were caught with their pants down. Then there was the story of relief pitcher Hal Reniff urging Phil Linz, infielder and owner of the East Side swing spot Mr. Laffs, to come to spring training for a tryout. In typical Met fashion Reniff had a horrible spring and was cut, and Linz, playing brilliantly, made the team. In fact, Linz was so impressive that Daily News sportswriter. Dick Young was moved to write that Linz was one of the best prospects in spring training. Linz, upon reading the accolade, was moved to comment: “I know that’s not right.”

But these stories, which were the substance of Stengel’s existence, don’t amuse Hodges. Sitting in his office at Shea Stadium, Hodges solemnly said: “I used to enjoy Met stories as much as anyone else, but I don’t appreciate them anymore. We have to get away from the image of being a funny club.” But the old image didn’t have any major revision during the first two weeks of the season. The Mets blew their opening game to the Giants in the ninth inning and managed to lose six one-run ball games in their first twelve games through spotty relief pitching and horrendous fielding. In fact, if to err is human, to be a Met is divine. In the first seventeen games the Amazin’ Ones made nineteen miscues.

But loving the Mets is not a rational thing; it’s more like life with a drunken husband. He curses you, abuses you, beats you, and then every so often the lousy bastard does something so spectacular that passion overrules reason and your bed of nails once more becomes the arena of conjugal bliss. So it was with the Mets as they staggered home from their road trip, like Hickey the salesman, to their opener at Shea.

All the regular hoopla was present: marching bands, flags flapping everywhere, and a horseshoe wreath wishing Gil good luck. Then, in one loving swoop, all was forgiven. The current ace of Hodges’ staff, twenty-five-year-old Jerry Koosman, not only struck out the Giants, but struck out Willie Mays with the bases loaded. But such treats are rare. The same weekend the Mets threw away a doubleheader to the Dodgers, and Hodges sat in his office, his massive hand shaking, holding a filter cigarette, unable to talk to the reporters. He seemed to be suffering the frustration of so many talented participants who are now relegated to the sidelines to manage the ineptitude of others. The best he could mutter was “We’re beating ourselves, and that can be corrected.” When one looked at the pale blue eyes vacuous and washy, the face from our boyhood now lined and looking prematurely haggard, one thought of John Lindsay after managing a couple of tough summer seasons in this city.

But after a day off, Hodges looked refreshed at a Tuesday morning batting practice. Here one catches the real essence of Hodges. Essentially, Gil Hodges is a father. Young ballplayers treat him with respect but not awe. His jokes are mild-not clever, not cutting, just a touch of chastisement in them. He was hitting ground balls to first baseman Art Shamsky, taking particular glee when he drove one by him. Shamsky sheepishly smiled at the past master of the position he was trying to conquer, and then Hodges, grinning broadly, would hit him an easy grounder to make him look good. Hodges’ coach, Yogi Berra, was pitching batting practice. Berra is the only man alive who can make a baseball uniform look like a zoot suit. His low-slung pants seem pegged, his hat slouches over his eyes be-bop fashion, and his bouncy walk evokes the street corner. Tommie Agee stepped into the batting cage, and Hodges stopped smiling. Hodges traded away .300 hitter Tommy Davis and pitcher Jack Fisher to obtain the White Sox center fielder. Agee, who was suffering a terrific batting slump, couldn’t even hit the ball in practice. Hodges eyed him intently, looking for some flaw in the swing that might bring Agee around. When asked about the wisdom of giving up the Mets’ only .300 hitter for Agee (who later went on to tie the Mets’ record for most hitless times at bat—0 for 34), Hodges in his usual gracious manner said: “Certainly I’ll take credit for the trade. Tommie will come along just fine.”

But all is not bleak for Hodges and his Mets this year. Relaxed in his office after practice, he talked about the positive side of the Mets. “Our pitching is our strong suit,” he said. “These young boys are fine.” Indeed, the Mets do have a fine young staff in Koosman, Tom Seaver, who won 16 games last year, and Nolan Ryan, whose speed has been compared to that of Koufax and Feller. And Ron Swoboda is off to the finest start of his career. But there are the others, the nameless mediocrities who fill out the roster. Hodges has set a goal of winning 70 games this year and perhaps playing .500 ball next year. “These boys have it in them. They’re fine boys.”

Fine boys. The phrase is slightly square for a paid athlete. But then Hodges is slightly square. But then again baseball, like Hodges, is square—but in a nice sort of way. It is a game that is meant to be played under God’s sunshine, as Phil Wrigley used to say. Unlike football, it has no snob appeal. It’s a game for kids, cabdrivers pulling long night shifts, and the old Jewish men who stand on Flatbush Avenue outside Garfield’s Cafeteria. It’s a beer drinker’s game, where the fans do corny things like sing fight songs and take seventh inning stretches. And Gil Hodges fits perfectly into this milieu.

For all his size (6 feet 2, 210 pounds), one could never picture Hodges in pro football where everyone uses war game parlance as if they were bastard sons of Robert McNamara. Or where the season ticket holders are the ad boys with their plaid-covered flasks holding their Ambassador Twelve, snobbishly talking about “Z-outs” and “zig-ins,” as if they were talking about Kama Sutra positions instead of a ball game. Hodges seems content to settle for the glitter of Abner Doubleday’s diamond.

But one wonders if his team should be the Mets. One remembers the hand shaking, the soft drink on the desk, the pale face, and the hesitant speech. Then one thinks of Stengel, booze in hand, regaling sportswriters with sidesplitting tales of his clowns’ ineptitude. Hodges can’t play the buffoon; he takes his “boys” seriously. This may be the sadness of his homecoming. The Mets still look like a team to be run by a tipsy Falstaff rather than a sober, brooding, fatherly Lear.

May 27, 1968

Dig this Life photo gallery of “The Fight of the Century.” 

Props to the New York Observer for reprinting this 1998-Woody Allen piece about the Knicks:

I am always asked to write about basketball. People labor under the mistaken impression that, since I attend the Knicks games and have done so regularly for over 25 years, I’ve learned something or that I have insights and observations that are worth listening to, but they are wrong. I have only opinions and feelings based on nothing much but emotions, and I have gripes and theories, often crackpot. Mostly, I sit quietly at the Garden hoping for a close game, hating the blowouts, even if it’s the Knicks on top, enjoying the fans, marveling at the dancers and barely tolerating the endless insipid promotional stunts during timeouts. (If you’ve ever seen out-of-shape men and women shooting endless air balls from the foul line or frantic physical specimens racing across the floor trying to load, carry and push luggage racks as they compete, you get the idea.)

When asked why it is so important that the Knicks win, since at the end of the game or even the season nothing in life is affected one way or the other, I can only answer that basketball or baseball or any sport is as dearly important as life itself. After all, why is it such a big deal to work and love and strive and have children and then die and decompose into eternal nothingness? (By now, the person who asked me why the Knicks winning is important is sorry.)

To me, it’s clear that the playoffs or 61 home runs, a no-hitter, the Preakness, the Jets, or human existence can all be much ado about nothing, or they can all have a totally satisfying, thrilling-to-the-marrow quality. In short, putting the ball into the hoop is of immense significance to me by personal choice and my life is more fun because of it.

It’s getting late early in Philadelphia. Here’s Jonah Keri on the Phillies:

They’ve already turned over more than half the lineup, handing starting roles to much younger players. But none of those players are premium prospects. Moreover, the team’s trio of infield stars, the ones who’ve been the face of Phillies baseball for nearly a decade, are still around, fighting injuries and Father Time as they desperately try to keep the Phillies relevant in a division that’s left them behind. Then you’ve got the starting rotation’s three aces and the fire-breathing closer, all making big bucks, all hugely attractive gets for many other teams were they to become available. Four months from now, if Philly appears on its way to another mediocre season, should the team cash in their biggest trade chips for younger players who could help build a winning team for 2014 and beyond?

Maybe the bigger question is this: If the Phillies do reach that point, could they go through with it — tearing down the most dominant collection of players the team has seen in 30-plus years?

More baseball. Dig this piece by the most-talented Rich Cohen. It originally appeared in Harper’s (August, 2001), and is featured here with the author’s permission.

“Down and Out at Wrigley Field”

By Rich Cohen

When the Chicago Cubs last won a World Series, the automobile was still a new and untrusted invention and the electric light was not yet twenty years old. In the years since the fifth game of that series, most of the European monarchies have collapsed, two world wars have been fought, Communism has risen and fallen, and disco has come and gone and come again. Losing year after year, sometimes in the last weeks of the season, more often in the middle of August, the Cubs have become a symbol of futility, the blind, never-ending hope of a hopeless people. Before his death, Jack Brickhouse, the great Cubs play-by-play man, excused the team by saying, “Everyone is entitled to a bad century.”

For the Cubs, the current season has thus far played out like a dream. The team collected twelve straight victories in May and early June, a feat it had not accomplished since 1936—a year in which, incidentally, the Cubs did not reach the World Series. Despite the fact that such stretches come along once every five or six years in the manner of a remission that, for a time, masks the true direction of the disease, even the most cynical of fans clings, in a secret place hidden beneath the heckles and beer, to the belief in eventual victory. But if 2001 is indeed the breakthrough year, if the new century indeed ushers in a rebirth of the franchise, these rooters will lose a treasure more valuable than any World Series ring: they will lose an enduring, dependable, neatly mystical relationship with loss.

Last August, hoping to discover the secret of this relationship, I checked into a hotel just off Michigan Avenue on the North Side of Chicago and prepared to “cover” the Cubs. The team had just come off a winning streak that had left them a few games below .500 and a half dozen games behind the division leading St. Louis Cardinals, whom, in a few days, they would face at Wrigley Field. In other words, I had arrived at that most heartbreaking moment of any Cubs year: the false spring.

I went for walks along Rush Street, in and out of the bars. At Harry Caray’s on Kinzie and Dearborn, watching the Cubs on television, I heard a big guy in a SHUT UP AND DRINK YOUR BEER T-shirt refer to a towering Sammy Sosa home run as a “God Ball.” He then picked a fight with an old man in a Brewers hat, saying, “Look at your boys! In last place! We are in a solid third! All we got to do is sweep this series, sweep the next series, and go from there.”

On State Street, I ran into a friend who had just returned from New York, where he had made his first visit to Yankee Stadium. The Yankees were great, of course, but he thought the stadium a disgrace. No one familiar with Cub fans would find this judgment at all unusual: the prevailing aesthetic is, of necessity, beauty above victory. Anyone else might argue that Yankee Stadium, no matter how monstrous, is a treasure. Why? Because winning has made it beautiful. On the other hand, Wrigley Field, no matter how picturesque, might be considered an eyesore, because losing has made it ugly. The true Cub fan believes the opposite. My friend said, ”I’ll tell you what, kid, that stadium, it sure made me appreciate what we got right here at Wrigley Field.”

Wrigley Field is a trim configuration of red brick and steel. Built in 1914, it was first home to the Chicago Whales of the old Federal League. By the time the Cubs moved here in 1916, they had already won their last World Series. Over the years, with the destruction of most other early twentieth century ballparks, Wrigley has emerged as a lone witness to the glorious dead ball era. After generations of artificial turf and multipurpose stadiums, a new generation of architects has come to emulate Wrigley, building snug downtown parks in Baltimore, Cleveland, and Houston. For the most part, though, these stadiums are mere approximations, with none of the mood, or feeling, or grime, of the real thing, none of that terrible history. Wrigley Field is, after all, where, in the 1932 World Series, Babe Ruth supposedly called his shot, pointing two fingers at center field, then hitting a home run into those very seats.

When I went to the games as a kid, I sat in the bleachers, home of the sport’s most rabid fans. For a bleacher bum, it was a signal achievement to so incense an enemy outfielder that he climbed the wall in an attempt to get at you. I was at a game in which Omar Moreno of the Pirates started that climb only to be pummeled and covered in beer. Of course, such a climb was made possible by that most famous feature of Wrigley: the ivy, the lush green ivy, which softens all that red brick.

Now, here is the disturbing part: that ivy, that beloved, ticket-selling ivy, is a direct outgrowth of management’s realization that the Cubs might never again win a World Series. In 1931, when chewing gum magnate William Wrigley died, he left the team to his son, P. K Wrigley, who refused to waste company resources on baseball; he decided that fans must instead be given a reason other than player competence to go to the park. “The fun … the sunshine, the relaxation. Our idea is to get the public to go see a ball game, win or lose,” said P.K., who then told a young Bill Veeck, who would later become one of the greatest impresarios in the history of baseball, to plant the ivy. It was his way of selling the fans the sunshine.

I grew up in the Chicago suburbs, about fifteen miles up Lake Michigan from Wrigley Field. In the summers, if I was not at the beach, or shopping for records at one of the stores uptown, or scanning the radio for my all-time favorite song, “Rhinestone Cowboy,” I was riding the public bus to Evanston, where I caught the elevated train, which threaded its way through a private world of red brick and fire escapes down to the ballpark. On the way I often read the sports section of the Chicago Tribune, or else a book about Cubs history. In school we studied the heroes and gods of antiquity, but for me the Cubs supplied a far handier mythology: the great teams of the eighties (the 1880s), The Cubs, a chatter member of professional baseball, known first as the White Stockings, and then, in succession, as the Orphans, the Colts, and the Cubs, played in the Congress Street Grounds, the “nicest park in America,” with 2,000 grandstand seats and velvet-curtained luxury boxes. Championships were won in 1880, 1881, 1882, 1885, and 1886. These were the teams of the legendary Cap Anson, who first devised the strategy wherein players run out of position to back up other players and, in another first, called for the banning of black athletes from the game.

In his autobiography, Anson wrote of an early minority hire:

Clarence was a little darkey that I had met sometime before while in Philadelphia. . . . I had togged him out in a suit of navy blue with brass burtons, at my own expense, and had engaged him as a mascot. He was an ungrateful little rascal…

There was Mike Kelly, a hard-drinking Irishman from the West Side, the first catcher to communicate with the pitcher in a secret code of often comical hand signals. There was Billy “The Evangelist” Sunday, who, before scaring sinners with his fiery prophecies of hell, was a speedy, base-stealing outfielder. In 1906, behind the awesome double-play combination of Tinkers to Evers to Chance, the team posted the best record in major league history, winning 116 games. After each victory, the players went drinking at Biggio Brothers Saloon on Polk and Lincoln Streets. In later years came Grover Cleveland Alexander, a once great pitcher who came back from the First World War shell-shocked. When Alexander fell into seizures on the mound, the infielders would shield him from view. In the biopic, Alexander was played by Ronald Reagan, who himself, as a young man, had called play-by-play for the Cubs.

William Wrigley took control of the Cubs in 1921 and fielded pennant-winning teams in ’32, ’35, and ’38. These teams boasted such superstars as Kiki Cuyler, Hack Wilson, Billy Jurges, Babe Herman, and Rogers Hornsby. In 1932, ]urges was shot in a hotel room by a jilted lover in a black veil, an episode borrowed by Bernard Malamud for his novel The Natural.

In 1929, Hornsby batted for a .380 average with 149 RBIs. Hack Wilson, a squat alcoholic of a power hitter, still holds the record for most runs batted in (190) during a single season. After retirement, Hack became a drifter. In 1948, when he died, his body went unclaimed for three days. Nineteen years earlier, in 1929, when the Cubs had lost the World Series, Wilson told a train of badgering reporters, “Let me alone now, fellows. I haven’t anything to say except that I am heartbroken and that we did get some awful breaks.”

In 1953 the club signed its first black superstar, Ernie Banks, a Hall of Famer who encouraged hope in the fans, beginning each season with a little poem, such as, “The Cubs will come alive in sixty-five,” or, ‘The Cubs will be heavenly in sixty-sevenly.” In my own childhood there were the Reuschel brothers, fat, mustachioed, glasses-wearing screwballers who, to me, looked like the newspaper’s photos of John Wayne Gacy.

On my baseball card, the Reuschels, Rick and Paul, are pictured over the words BIG LEAGUE BROTHERS. In this era, due to years of futility—the team had not even been in the postseason since 1945—a certain ugliness grew up between fans and management, peaking in 1983, when, during a postgame press conference, skipper Lee Elia attacked the bleacher bums, saying:

Eighty-five percent of the people in this country work The other fifteen percent come here and boo my players. They oughta go out and get a fucking job and find out what it’s like to go out and earn a fucking living. Eighty-five percent of the fucking world is working. The other fifteen percent come out here. A fucking playground for the cocksuckers.

CUBS 7, CARDINALS 3

Each day the Cubs lineup was posted, with slight variation, in the clubhouse. It was a collection of found parts, as is often the case: Damon Buford, a center fielder, who came in a trade from Boston; Joe Girardi, a born-again Christian from Peoria, Illinois, who started with the Cubs a decade ago and had returned to finish his career in Chicago; Mark Grace, the blond-haired, goateed first baseman, who before and after each game smoked a cigarette at his locker; Willie Greene, a third baseman from Milledgeville, Georgia, by way of the Toronto Blue Jays; Ricky Gutierrez, an edgy, error-prone shortstop, a free agent from the Houston Astros; Chad Meyers, a twenty-five-year-old infielder who looked like a sitcom sidekick on the WB (a Cubs fan from Nebraska, Meyers was, as a kid, certain the Cubs were always “just about to win it”); Brant Brown, an outfielder who, in 1998, had dropped a routine fly ball that almost kept the team out of that year’s postseason play.

At three o’clock, only the pitchers were in uniform, among them Kerry Wood, a lank, sullen-faced Texan who was once thought to be the savior of the team. In 1998, at twenty, in only his fifth start, Wood struck out twenty batters, tying a major-league record. A few months later he blew out his pitching arm; he was still recovering from the surgery. In his locker he had mounted a Big Mouth Billy Bass, the talking mechanical fish, which, on occasion, he let answer the press queries: “I run on batteries, don’t need no gas, I’m the Big Mouth Billy Bass.”

Sammy Sosa, the great star of the Cubs, showed up shouting, a man of entrances. Although the players in the clubhouse were listening to Pearl Jam, Sosa plugged in his radio and began playing salsa music, the sound of his native Dominican Republic. Someone turned up the Pearl Jam. Sosa turned up the salsa. For a moment, the sunny Caribbean faced off against the once grungy Pacific Northwest. Sosa closed his eyes and started to dance. Today, and each day, it ended with the Pearl Jam turned down and turned off. It was not hard to tell how Sosa’s teammates felt about this.

Standing in front of his locker, Sosa took several practice swings, which, like his body, were short and compact. In 1998 he had kept pace with Mark McGwire in a contest to break the single-season home-run record. Sosa had finished four homers behind McGwire. There are those who called Sosa a hot dog, error-prone, strikeout-prone, a one-way player who padded his statistics with meaningless late-game long balls. Earlier in the season, when the front office threatened to trade Sosa, there had been a tremendous uproar from the fans, who, in exchange for all that losing, expect at least one superstar. After a loss in which Sosa homered with the bases empty and struck out with the bases full, I asked him if he changed his approach depending on the situation—shortened his swing, stepped up in the box. He said, “I just hit the ball as hard as I can.”

By five o’clock the reporters had gathered in the clubhouse. They stood in a tight little knot like boys at a high school dance, waiting for some sign from a pretty girl across the floor. Now and then, one of these reporters would plunge in with his tape recorder; depending on whether he was welcomed or rebuffed, the reporter would return saying, “Wow, what a regular guy!” or, “Can you believe how much money those dumb fucks make?”

To reach the field we followed the clatter of cleats through a dank tunnel into the dugout. At eye level the grass, which in the middle of the season was already parched, stretched away to the power alleys. The bench was crowded with that gaggle of former players, broadcasters, and hangers-on that make up the courtier class of the national game. A few hundred fans had gathered for batting practice. They shouted, “Sammy! Sammy! Sammy!” I found myself in a conversation with Joe Girardi. In the clubhouse, I had seen Girardi, and everyone else, naked, and I was struck by his body, which seemed to me old-fashioned, a body from the Great Depression: thick torso and heavy arms, social realism, a WPA poster. He had spent the previous four seasons in New York, where he won three World Series. How could he now play for a team that never wins, has never won, and, it seems to many of us, never will win?

“When I was in third grade, I wrote an essay about how I would play for the Cubs,” Girardi said. “Ten times a summer, I drove with my father from Peoria just to see the games.” Back then, his favorite players were Ron Santo, a third baseman who, as a broadcaster, still travels with the team, and Jose Cardenal, remembered mostly for his vertiginous Afro, on top of which, the cherry on the ice cream sundae, perched his cap. Cardenal is credited with the worst excuse ever given for missing a game: he once told his manager he could not play because his eyelid was stuck open. “When I left the Cubs that first time, I was crushed,” said Girardi. “I had always wanted to be a Cubbie.”

I asked why the team never wins.

“The Yankees have a hundred-million-dollar payroll. Our club is sixty million. And there is also all the money spent on the minor leagues and free agents, signing kids from the Dominican, from Puerto Rico. But it’s more than that. In New York, you go into spring training expecting to get to the World Series. You feel it when you walk in the clubhouse—the pictures of all those Yankee greats, the monuments. There is something special about putting on the pinstripes. In Chicago, they hope for a good season, maybe the playoffs.”

“But they have pictures here at Wrigley Field,” I said. “The Cub greats, Hack Wilson, Kiki Cuyler.”

“Yeah, but just think about those pictures,” he said. “Still shots, each player by himself. In Yankee Stadium, it’s group shots, the team celebrating on the mound, in the clubhouse, the champagne, winning it all. Here you won’t see that.”

When Girardi went to take batting practice, I wandered out onto the field. The players chirped and fluttered around the cage like birds; players from the Cubs and players from the Cardinals met one another with backslaps and hugs. “In our day, there was no fraternizing,” Ron Santo told me. “You never saw one team up watching the other team hit. Never saw a guy hugging the other guy. You walked across the white lines, money was not the criteria. Winning was.” Sosa greeted every Latin player on the Cardinals, then wandered over to the seats, the crowd bubbling before him like surf. He spotted two friends from the Dominican and led them out onto the field. They were potbellied, sleepy-eyed, with slow, sad smiles; one wore a silk shirt decorated with naked girls, fast cars, tropical sunsets.

I walked over to a circle of beat reporters, three of them: a young banana-shaped one; a middle-aged, balding, red-haired one; and an old stately one with no hair at all. I said hello. Without a word, each turned his back on me. It took me some time to realize that these reporters, who after each game filed stories for the Tribune, the Sun-Times, and a third paper I had never heard of, were actually participants in the Cubs’ perpetual loss and naturally took a pride in the project that made it necessary to resent someone like myself, who had come aboard the Titanic to snap a few shots before shoving off. Of course, that ship was at least heading toward a conclusion, a climax. The Cubs, on the other hand, were and are forever adrift.

The only friend I made among the press was a kid entirely untouched by the stinking heartbreak of history. His name was Nick, and he was on summer break from Drake University in Iowa. He had landed a part-rime job writing about the Cubs for his hometown newspaper in Oak Park. A few times a week Nick went to the clubhouse and, without the least hesitation, pulled aside his favorite players. Before this game, he had talked to some of the Cardinals, even to Will Clark, rumored to be the crankiest man in the league.

Nick said, “Can I ask you some questions, Mr. Clark?”

Mr. Clark said, “Get the fuck away from me, kid.”

Nick told me that Mr. Clark had stunk of beer.

Nick led me up to the press box, high above home plate. As we talked, I could see the lake, blue and crowded with sailboats, beyond the apartment buildings. The game was a sellout, standing room only, men and women at the back of the bleachers in sketchy outline. To some, this remained the best explanation for the Cubs’ woes: if a team with a losing record sold 40,000 tickets on a Monday night and drew, win or lose, 2 million fans a year, while the White Sox, in first place on the South Side of the city, could not even sell out on a Saturday afternoon, what was the incentive? Why should the Tribune Company, which owns the Cubs, spend millions to build a winning team if, all these years later, the fans were still willing to pay for sunshine? “We hear a lot of that,” Kevin Tapani, a Cubs pitcher, told me. “But I don’t know of any player that says, ‘We’ve got a sold-out crowd, let’s lose.”

Of course, Tapani, at thirty-six, was precisely the sort of player a team might go after if it was not determined to win; that is to say, yes, Tapani tried to win, but perhaps, at this point in his career, he was no longer good enough to win consistently. And yet the Cubs did spend money. Not so much as the Dodgers or the Orioles but more than some successful teams (the Kansas City Royals, the Oakland A’s), and they traded for players and hired managers who had won elsewhere. A Cubs fan therefore learns to distrust the easy answers and to accept each moment, each game, for what it is, not for where it is leading, which is nowhere. A victory, any victory, is a victory. Like tonight, for example, with a warm breeze off the Lake, and the sun going down (ah, that beautiful Cubs sunshine), and the team at last stirring to life. Jeff Huson, a journeyman third baseman, with teeth as small and perfect as white Chiclets, drove a ball down the left field line, scoring the winning runs. And then we were following the ramps down to the clubhouse, where the players, having already changed into Nike shower sandals and gym shorts, ate fried chicken off Styrofoam plates and watched SportsCenter on ESPN. There was music, there was clowning. Cubs win! Cubs win!

CARDINALS 4, CUBS 2

Three hours before the first pitch, Carol Slezak, a columnist fur the Sun-Times, was in the dugout, looking for a story. Baseball is a world of men, and so it was strange and pleasing to see a woman on the field. Some of the older Latin coaches commented on Slezak’s eyes, her legs. “You are making me uncomfortable,” she said. “Stop it.”

A year ago, Slezak had written a column about Sosa’s music, how it had become an irritating and never-ending soundtrack. Sosa and Glenallen Hill (since traded) had pulled her aside and yelled at her. “Do you know how angry Sammy’s teammates are at you?” Hill said. “They love Sammy.”

“Do you want to hear what Sammy’s teammates say about his music,” asked Slezak

Sammy told her, “Fuck my teammates.”

Today, Carol was in a pregame panic. Her deadline was a few hours away and she had yet to find a subject. Players suggested she write about the heat. “I have a policy,” she said. “No stories about weather.” Mark Grace greeted her in a large way and sat at the end of the bench, determined to help. Each generation, there is one Cub who seems, for fans, to stand for the team. For the last several years that had been Grace. Previously, it had been Ryne Sandberg, Bill Buckner, Rick Monday, Ernie Banks. One of the great things about baseball is that, by setting these players, whose careers overlap, in a time line, you can link yourself clear back to Mike Kelly and Johnny Evers. After suggesting several stories, which Carol dismissed, Grace said, “What about the heat?”

Grace took off his hat, rubbed his scalp. A few weeks earlier, several Cubs had shaved their heads in a gesture of solidarity. Grace was lucky; he looked good. Some of the other guys had emerged knotty-skulled, or bug-eyed, or jug-eared. Grace talked about being thirty-six. In the minor leagues, the Cubs were developing Hee Seop Choi, a Korean power-hitting first baseman, to take his position. To a player like Grace, this was what the end must look like—a husky nobody from the minors with no feel for the game.

Mark Grace was the classic Cub playing in a pointless doubleheader on an August afternoon with the wind blowing in and nothing on the line but a flutter at the bottom of the standings. Only a player like Grace, who got the joke of being a Cub(1) and still reveled in it, could possibly explain to me how and why it was that each Cub season began and ended in futility.

I asked him if there was any thrill to being the spoiler, stopping some other team from making the playoffs often the only role left for the Cubs. “No, I don’t rake a whole lot of pleasure in it,” he said. “But the last thing you want is somebody clinching on your turf, mobbing, pouring bubbly on your field,”

Sosa emerged from the tunnel and shouted, “I just took a big shit. It feels good when you take your big shit.”

The temperature at game time was 91 degrees. In the fifth inning, the umpire left the game due to heat exhaustion. I asked Carol Slezak if the players were upset after such a loss, and she said, “They pretend to be.” The next day, in the Sun-Times, I read her story about how exceptionally hot it was at the game.

CARDINALS 5, CUBS 1

Even after a player retires from the Cubs, he remains a hero in Chicago, a god in the pantheon of loss. For players traded to the team this is a consolation. The smart ones, who understand a thing or two about history, must know that they will never be part of a dynasty here. Kevin Tapani remembers when he learned of his trade to the team: “Everyone around here tells you the history and says, ‘Now you are a part of it. You’re one of the lovable losers.’ And so you think, ‘Well, I was not a loser to start with, I did not come here to lose, I will not carry on like a loser.'” Some deluded Cubs even speak of being part of the team that at last breaks the streak. But fans—some of us, anyway, who know the truth—pity the talented young prospect who, having won in Little League, high school, and everywhere else, finds himself on the Cubs. Hope you enjoyed the ride, friend. Because, barring a trade, your winning days are over. In return such a player, if he is good enough to make an impression, is given the city. Chicago loves its Cubs as it loves no other athletes. The Cubs personify Chicago’s striving, the pride that locals take in even the smallest construction, the sense that the rest of the country, especially New York City, is giving us the high hat.

This love was in evidence a few minutes before yet another afternoon game against the Cardinals, as Ryne Sandberg, who for twelve seasons was the star of the Cubs, wandered across the infield to shouts and cheers. In 1994, Sandberg, the highest-paid player in the game, had returned millions of dollars and gone into early retirement, saying he wasn’t happy with his performance. He came back in ’96, found that he had lost his swing, and retired again. It was like watching someone grow old in public. He was now an instructor with the team. On the field, he wore prefaded jeans and a button-down shirt and moved with the stiffness one expects in a retired athlete, his glossy, handsome face turning red in the sun.

For every Cub fan, there is a season, an inning, an at bat, when all hope is lost, when, at long last, he becomes disillusioned and realizes with dread certainty that no matter how good its prospects the team will never win. “The better they look,” my father(2) had warned, “the bigger the heartbreak.” For some, hope was lost in 1969, when, after decades of loss, the management fielded an uncharacteristic collection of future Hall of Famers and all-stars. By September 1 the team was in first place by eight games. After each victory, Ron Santo, the third baseman, would jump up and click his heels. A song that year had the fans singing, “Hey hey, holy mackerel, no doubt about it, the Cubs are on their way!” By mid-September they had been overtaken by the expansion New York Mets, who went on to sweep the World Series. “The Mets were not a team you worried about,” Santo told me. “It was divine intervention. God just lived in New York that year.”

For some, hope was lost in 1989, when the Cubs, with Mark Grace at first base, were swept in the playoffs by the San Francisco Giants. For some it was in 1998, with Sosa hitting all those homers and the team still looking pathetic in the playoffs. For me it was 1984 and the collapse of the great team anchored by Ryne Sandberg, who that year won the National League MVP. In 1981 the Wrigley family had sold the franchise to the Tribune Company, filling the loyalists with hope. Whereas the Wrigleys had refused to spend top dollar on talent, often trading away their best prospects and, what’s worse, evincing a kind of country club racism, for years signing no black players and then signing only a few, the Tribune Company was a cash rich empire. For the first time in years real money was spent on the Cubs. A new general manager was brought in, and soon he had built the first team I ever really cared about. That team had Lee Smith, the fire-throwing relief pitcher, and Rick Sutcliffe, the red-headed ace, and Harry Caray, the great broadcaster, the true visage of the Cubs, who told you not what players were averaging but what they should be averaging were the world a decent place. “He’s really up around .400,” Harry would say. “He’s hit the ball well, but at people.” Harry said that the Cubs infield was not only the most competent in the game but by far the best looking: “Sandberg: classical good looks. Bowa: scrappy, sinewy, and sexy. Cey: just look at that guy! Durham: what woman would not love Bull Durham?”

The team won the National League East by six-and-a-half games. In August several Cubs, including Sutcliffe and Durham, released a country song that my brother called “a crime—an idiotic, stupid, jinx-inducing crime.” The song went like this: “As sure as there’s ivy on the center field wall, the men in blue are gonna win it all.” And: “We’re on top and looking down and picking up more steam.” And: “There’s been lots of talk about no lights in Wrigley Park, we don’t care, if we make it there, we’ll play in the dark.”

The Cubs at that time were the only professional team without lights, a fact that, from time to time, was suggested as a reason for their woes. When the team played night games on the road, so went the reasoning, they were out of sorts, up past their bedtime. In 1984 the commissioner of baseball was more concerned with the fact that no night games at Wrigley meant the league would be robbed of prime time TV revenue. As a result, the Cubs, in a great miscarriage of justice, were stripped of their home-field advantage, which, in the best-of-five playoff, proved crucial. I skipped school to attend the first game, which the Cubs won in a blowout. I followed game two at school, checking the score between classes on TV: another victory. The Cubs then went to San Diego, where they had to win only one of the next three games to clinch a trip to the World Series. In each game the Cubs went into the seventh inning with the lead. In each game they choked. The final blow came with a home run by Steve Garvey, the square-jawed Padres first baseman at the end of his career. The footage of the ensuing trot, Garvey pumping his fist, suggested everything that is wrong with the world.

ARIZONA 11, CUBS 2
ARIZONA 11, CUBS 3
ARIZONA 5, CUBS 4

Sooner or later every Cubs fan, if he is at all reflective, comes to realize that if the Cubs were somehow to cast off the past and win, they would no longer be the Cubs. There is a thrill in victory, yes, but there is a certainty in defeat, and is losing not, in the end, more righteous than winning? Sure, the team might enjoy the arrogance of victory for a season or two, or three, or however long it lasted, but it would thereby destroy the more interesting part of its identity. It would become just another club that won not long ago and is now not so good and not so bad. The first shall be the last and the last shall be the first. But what of those in the middle?

Since 1908, ninety-two teams have had hard luck, like the Red Sox, who have not won the World Series in eighty-three years, but the Red Sox have often gone deep into the Series. Perhaps there is more of a sting to the near miss, but the deep pain, the good stuff, is only to be had by never even coming close. If one must lose, it may as well be spectacularly, as was the case with the series I saw in Arizona. Everything went wrong. Every play was botched. Every player stank. If this were a movie I would title it, simply, Three Days in August.

The Diamondbacks play in a kind of terrarium, a vast biosphere in the center of Phoenix with a retractable roof and seats running clear up to the great glass panels. It was well over 100 degrees out there in the desert, but inside it is always a brisk 72; there is even a kind of autumn crispness in the air. Each player’s equipment had been hung in lockers on the far side of the clubhouse. Unfortunately, Sosa’s locker was at some distance from an electrical outlet, and thus he could not plug in his radio. A work crew was brought in to run an extension cord across the floor, which a pitcher proceeded to trip on.

Across the room sat a table with a pile of magazines, on top of which was a Sports Illustrated Where Are They Now? issue that showed William “Refrigerator” Perry, a lineman for the Bears, once a famous athlete in Chicago, in a hard hat and work clothes, over the words, “Bricklayer, Aiken, South Carolina.” The Cubs walked by this magazine as if it had nothing to do with them. They watched, on DVD, the scene in Fast Times at Ridgemont High in which Judge Reinhold, caught masturbating in the bathroom, says, “Doesn’t anyone around here knock?” Sosa made the jerk-off motion—a locker-room gesture so basic and true it was like a revelation.

In the dugout, Mark Grace was talking with Joe Garagiola, himself a former catcher and now the vice president and general manager of the Diamondbacks. Grace told Garagiola that he considered himself a throwback, an old-fashioned player, demonstrated by the fact that, among other things, he did not wear batting gloves, saying he prefers “the feel of the wood.” Since he was a rookie, he said, the big change in the game had been pitchers, who no longer intimidated in the same way. If, as a young Cub, he had come to the plate following a home run, he could have expected the next pitch to be a fastball at his back, “between the one and the seven.” Now, Grace said, pitchers were so nervous about getting tossed from a game that “the best ball to hit is the one right after the home run.” The following night, after Sammy Sosa’s long home run off Randy Johnson, the next pitch is a fastball, to Grace, “between the one and the seven.”

HOUSTON 5, CUBS 4
HOUSTON 10, CUBS 7

With each loss, the clubhouse grew noticeably darker. There was no music during the losing streak, no chatter. Only the sound of Sosa talking with reporters about his most recent home run—a moon shot that kissed the outer glass of Enron Field before falling back into the seats. With each home run, you could see the chasm widening between Sammy and his teammates. “I never really watch the ball,” Sosa said. “I put my head down and run the bases. But I know I got that one good.” In the locker room, Tim Worrell, a pitcher who gave up a homer that meant a lot more than Sammy’s, sat with his head in his hands. A coach, stationed before a VCR, with two empty beer cans at his side, watched the home run, freezing the frame just prior to the disaster: Worrell in his follow-through, the ball hanging like a pigeon over the plate. The coach took notes, rewound, lived through the terrible moment again, then hit fast-forward: the batter, with lickety-split cartoon speed, dashed around the bases to score.

I think I wanted to travel with the Cubs and see them suffer in return for all of the suffering they have caused me. But being on the road with the team in a true slump—well, I guess I had no idea how awful it would be: the stillness of the clubhouses, the eyes on the floor, the jumpiness. Mark Grace saying, “”I’m 0 for this road trip, and that really sucks,” and after every game the manager, Don Baylor—why does a manager wear cleats?—making his statement to the press, the general of an army in perpetual retreat: “Defensively, we’ve gone from the bottom to second in the league.” Or, “That was a home run people can talk about for years. … Unfortunately, it comes as part of another loss.” It was hard to imagine how the Cubs would ever win another game.

Eventually I put the problem to the man charged, hopelessly, with fixing it. “What this club has always done is lose,” Baylor told me. “So even if you have to change the players, you need to find a way to switch the mind-set. You have to find winning players who will talk about winning and not about how the organization has never won.”

GENERAL MANAGER’S OFFICE

One afternoon in Chicago I met with Andy MacPhail, the president and general manager of the Cubs, in his office at Wrigley Field. MacPhail, who won two World Series with the Minnesota Twins, descends from baseball royalty. His grandfather Larry MacPhail, the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, helped pioneer night baseball in the major leagues. His father, Lee MacPhail, was the general manager of the Yankees and the Orioles and the president of the American League. For Andy, a neatly dressed middle-aged man with blond hair and wire-rimmed glasses, turning the Cubs around is perhaps the only way he can outdo his father and grandfather, both members of baseball’s Hall of Fame. “The Cubs have not been good enough at bringing players through the system,” he told me. “Other clubs have done it better. You don’t have to look further than the Yankees, who’ve been going to the World Series ad nauseam in the nineties. People think it’s the payroll, but look at Bernie Williams, Derek Jeter, Andy Pettitte, Mariano Rivera—all of them come from the Yankees system. That’s what we need to do, and I’m confident that we’re doing it. We’re going to have our share of players coming up. I can see them in the pipeline.”

I asked if there wasn’t something greater at play with the Cubs. A corporation-wide funk, a mental or emotional block, a culture of loss.

“To be honest, I have been trying to figure that one out myself,” he said, “and here is what I realized: through different ownerships, managers, general managers, players, equipment managers, the one constant has been the ballpark, the vagaries of playing in Wrigley Field. In Minnesota, in the dome, we had AstroTurf, 70 degrees, and no wind, every day. You could customize your team to the environment where you played. You can’t do that here. One day the wind is howling straight in from the lake; the next day it’s howling straight out. You really have to be good all the way around.”

“What about the Cubs teams that were good but still lost?” I asked. “How do you explain ’69 and ’84?”

“I don’t think that there is a curse, if that’s what you mean.”

In 1945, when the Cubs last went to the World Series, the owner of the Billy Goat Tavern, not allowed to bring his goat into the park, is said to have hexed the team—a curse some fans say explains ’69 and ’84, and all the rest of it.

I told MacPhail what Ron Santo had told me on the road. “Once you win it, and establish that you are a winning club, it becomes easier,” said Santo, who in his playing career never won anything. “When you have won and somebody comes to this organization, they cannot look back and say, ‘Well, we haven’t won since 1908, or even been there since 1945.'”

“I hate to disagree with a Cub legend,” said MacPhail, “but I can’t get into the occult. My problem is wins and losses, supply and demand. Do you really think Bill Buckner or Leon Durham was thinking about 1969? I don’t think it’s in the players’ minds. I do think it is popular with fans to have teams that represent futility. They like to have lovable losers. Even in the years where we were pretty good, they are slow to recognize it, or believe it, or want to believe it. Now, I find that personally repugnant, and I am going to die trying to change it.”

CUBS 15, HOUSTON 5

When it happens, it happens fast. One moment the Cubs cannot string together two hits, or turn a double play, or steal a base. The next minute they are driving the ball all over the field, sliding into clouds of dirt, racing around the bases. The beat reporters typed furiously into their laptops, adjectives flying everywhere. A pressbox announcer said that the fifteen runs scored by the Cubs ties their season record set in May in a game against Montreal, which the Cubs lost 16–15. In the clubhouse after the game, it was V-E Day all over again, music cranked up, players goofing in the showers. There were whoops, shouts, backslaps. In the aftershock of a high ten, I was racked by a memory that filled me with shame: In the sixth grade I was on a hockey team, the Winnetka Warriors, that had started the season 0 and 13. In our fourteenth game we beat a team from up north. Afterward, as the two teams stood side by side, we started to sing, “We are the Champions!” The other team, who knew they had lost to the biggest losers in the league, waited until we reached the line, “No time for losers.” That’s when the brawl broke out. I fought for my team, of course, but I was ashamed doing it. And that’s pretty much how I felt watching the locker room parry after the Cubs beat the Astros. There was something self-deceiving in the whole crummy display.

At night when I can’t sleep, I sometimes think back on my travels with the Cubs, and it is always the same image that first comes to mind: I was in the clubhouse in Arizona after another defeat. The room was somber, the players dressing quickly in front of their lockers. Several reporters had gathered around Mark Grace, who had caught that Randy Johnson fastball between the shoulder blades—retaliation for Sosa’s long home run; Grace had staggered and collapsed.

As Grace buttoned his shirt, one of the reporters said, “Looked like Johnson didn’t have his best stuff out there.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Grace. “The one that hit me felt pretty good.” You could already see the bruise. It was red and blue, and within it was a darker bruise left by the stitches on the ball. Over the next several days, this wound would develop like a photograph of yet another painful season for the Chicago Cubs.

Footnotes…

(1) At the end of the season, Grace would leave Chicago; unwanted, he would sign a two-year contract with the Arizona Diamondbacks. At the press conference he would say, “I know we play [the Cubs] nine times this year, and I want to kick their butt nine times. … I gave my heart and soul for thirteen years to the Chicago Cubs.” Cub greats have often met a dubious end. In my era, Bill Buckner was traded to Boston at the end of his career, where, in game six of the 1986 World Series, he let a routine grounder hop between his legs, costing the Red Sox their first championship since 1918. This inevitably leads to Mike Royko’s Cubs theorem: If you want to determine the outcome of any particular baseball game, simply calculate which ream has more ex-Cubs. That’s your loser. There are exceptions to this rule—players who go on to win Cy Young Awards and pennants elsewhere but these usually result from awful deals. The worst trade in ream history sent twenty-four-year-old Lou Brock to St. Louis, where he would rewrite the record books, in exchange for thirty-seven-year-old Ernie Broglio, a warhorse of a pitcher who would retire a year later.

(2) A New Yorker, my father had urged me to follow the Dodgers or the Yankees, the teams he had watched as a kid. He worried that in cheering for the Cubs I would come to accept losing as the natural condition of things and so ruin my life.

[Boom Box painting by Tim Sours]

Dimelo, a Banter regular, pointed out this article on Dr. James Andrews by Dennis Manoloff in the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

PD: The best advice you would give parents of a young athlete?

J.A.: The first thing I would tell them is, their kid needs at least two months off each year to recover from a specific sport. Preferably, three to four months. Example: youth baseball. For at least two months, preferably three to four months, they don’t need to do any kind of overhead throwing, any kind of overhead sport, and let the body recover in order to avoid overuse situations. That’s why we’re seeing so many Tommy John procedures, which is an adult operation designed for professionals. In my practice now, 30 to 40 percent of the ones I’m doing are on high-schoolers, even down to ages 12 or 13. They’re already coming in with torn ligaments.

Give them time off to recover. Please. Give them time to recover.

PD: What are your thoughts on youngsters throwing curveballs?

J.A.: Throwing a curveball has a neuromuscular-control dynamic. In other words, it takes a lot of natural ability at a young age to throw that pitch. It’s a complicated pitch. If you throw it with good mechanics, it doesn’t have any greater force on your shoulder than throwing other pitches, but you’ve got to throw it correctly. It’s misleading to say it’s OK to throw the curveball with good mechanics because the rub is, most kids don’t throw it with good mechanics. My rule of thumb is, don’t throw the curveball until you can shave, until your bone structure has matured and you have the neuromuscular control to be able to throw the pitch properly.

PD: What advice would you give pitchers, in general?

J.A.: 1. Use proper mechanics. The No. 1 problem in any specific sport is improper mechanics.

2. Don’t play year-round.

3. Avoid the radar gun at a young age. Don’t try to overthrow. A lot of kids are 13 years old and checking the radar gun. That’s going to get you in trouble. The radar gun makes you want to throw harder than you are capable of throwing.

4. Be very careful with showcases. I call them “show-off” cases because kids go there Saturday after throwing the football on Friday. They jump on a mound and overthrow because scouts are there. The next thing you know, the shoulder or elbow gets injured.

Andrew’s new book, Any Given Monday, is out now.

Dig this cool Life photo gallery of Dodger spring training, 1948.

Over at SB Nation’s Longform, the talented Michael Mooney asks: What Happened to Jai Alai:

Looking at the rows and rows of seats, you can imagine a different time. There were thousands of people every night, men in dark suits and hats packed shoulder to shoulder. They’d be waving programs, downing brown booze, smoking cigarettes from cigarette cases or, better still, puffing thick cigars that would fill the room with pungent smoke and give the air just below the giant ceiling lights a ghostly blue haze. As the men on the court used oblong baskets to hurl a goatskin ball over and over against a granite wall, the men in the crowd would be hollering and belly laughing and slapping each other on the back. There was a time when the audience at the Miami Jai Alai fronton was so loud, the players on the court could barely hear their own thoughts.

Now though, the seats are almost all empty. On this clear-skied, 85-degree Tuesday afternoon in mid-winter, there are more players in uniform than spectators in the crowd. On the other side of the building, in the freshly renovated casino, there are plenty of people at the poker tables and parked in front of the more than 1,000 flashing slot machines. But in this massive auditorium, once the epicenter of the gambling action, it’s dead.

With every throw, you can hear the ball—in jai alai, the pelota—crash against the wall with a thunderous, echoing boom. You can hear the scoreboard beeping, and it sounds like the entire building is on life support. What was once a five-star restaurant at the top of the grandstand, the Courtview Club, is almost always dark and vacant now. The skyboxes, once bustling with young women offering cocktail service, now gather dust year-round. Same for the sectioned-off rows that once comprised the sizable press box. Even the players’ names, they once sounded so exotic and intriguing. Now they just seem … foreign.

[Photo Credit: Benherst; Flickeriver]

Steph Curry was The Man last night. But the Knicks still won.

[Photo Credit: David Sunberg]

Chris Jones on J.P. Arencibia catching R.A. Dickey without wearing a cup.

[Photo Credit: Washington Post]

Check out this archive of clips over at MLB.com. Loads of fun. Have at it.

[Photo Via It’s a Long Season]

Over at Longform, check out Noah Davis’s Shep Messing profile.

Charlie Pierce has a nice piece on the Knicks over at Grantland. A reminder that reading about sports can be, you know, fun:

By this time in the NBA season, every team, good and bad, needs a healthy dose of ridiculous in its game to keep the fans interested and the snark flowing until such time as the playoffs begin and everybody has to get grimly serious about the whole business. (Back in the day, there was never a better time to cover the Larry Bird–era Celtics than during the trackless days of mid-February and early March. Those teams had Bird and McHale — and, earlier, Cedric Maxwell — as snarkmasters supreme and, eventually, they had Bill Walton come aboard as a dartboard. It was open-mic night four times a week.) Right now, and much to his dismay, New York Knick Jason Kidd is the element of ridiculousness that’s adding a certain je ne sais clang to what is, at the moment, the best team not only in your Atlantic Division, but also in your five boroughs.

Kidd is in a slump. No, check that. Kidd is in a morass. No, check that. Kidd is in the Great Grimpen Mire and we may never see him again. Jason Kidd, who already has a plaque gathering dust as it waits for him in Springfield, has missed 34 of 41 3-point attempts, including six Sunday night, in a closer-than-it-should-have-been, sparing–you–from–watching–Seth MacFarlane 99-93 win over the Philadelphia 76ers. He has missed them long and he has missed them short. He has barely missed them and he has missed them by a time zone or two. Anne Hathaway had as good a chance of hitting a 3-point shot Sunday night as Jason Kidd did. But what’s interesting is that this amazing pile of statistical roadkill likely will not even matter in two months. The Knicks didn’t sign Kidd to hit 3-pointers in February. They signed him to hit Carmelo Anthony in the eyeball with a pass at a critical moment of a game in June. And, if he is a step slow at that, too, and he is, he is still being paid a handsome $9 million or so for three or four passes that people will remember long after the sound of The Bells of St. Mary’s fades.

[Photo Credit: Joe Camporeale/USA Today]

More baseball. This here beaut by Pete Richmond was a “Main Event” takeout for The National Sports Daily back on August 30, 1990. It appears here with the author’s permission.

“The Sports Fan”

By Peter Richmond

The first time I called Bill Murray to see if he wanted to watch some Cubs games he insisted on reading me the Recipe of the Month from the Cubs newsletter, which was Ryne and Cindy Sandberg’s recipe for Chicken Parmesan. It didn’t sound particularly appetizing. We never found out what it tasted like, even though we did end up in Chicago, and we did end up eating a lot. We just never ate any of Ryne and Cindy Sandberg’s Chicken Parmesan. We did eat Diana Ditka’s chicken, which wasn’t anything special, especially after Bill picked up this kid who wanted an autograph and lowered his head until it was a few inches from the mashed potatoes. We also ate lamb chops with an orange sauce at a cocktail party for some of the Cubs in a men’s store that sold ties for $200, but there was nowhere to put the bones except in the pockets of the silk jackets. We also had eggs Benedict with fresh tomato slices, and some pretty good swordfish, but the most appetizing dish by far was the fruit bowl that looked like a Dutch still life in Mick Fleetwood’s hotel suite on the forty first floor. Unfortunately, he never offered us any, even though Bill was polite enough to read aloud from the unpublished science fiction manuscript written by Mick’s dad, the late Wing Commander Fleetwood of the RAF, at 3 A.M., while the rest of Fleetwood Mac drank pear brandy down at the bar.

And, of course, we ate Polish Sausages. We ate a lot of Polish sausages. In fact, the first thing Bill said when he reached our seats behind home plate in Wrigley Field during the national anthem for a 7:35 start against the Expos was, “I brought you a Polish,” and he held up a brown paper bag. He was wearing a baseball cap with the insignia of the Salt Lake Trappers on the crest. He was wearing baggy bluejeans and a black Adidas jacket with Cyrillic writing on it. Holding the bag in his left hand and his ticket stub in the right, with the brim of the cap pulled down, Bill had moved through the crowd without causing a ripple. He seems to fit in Wrigley Field the way something fits in your glove compartment that’s always there, where it belongs.

“Beer?” said the vendor who always brings her coldest case to where Bill’s sitting.

“That’s what we’re here for,” Bill said. He was right. We drank Old Style, and kept score, and talked about the 1957 Braves. The day they clinched the pennant, Bill’s dad—a lumber salesman, father of nine—drove the family up to Milwaukee and they cruised the streets in celebration, even though they were Cubs fans. He can still recite their starting lineup.

Since then, Bill has spent a lot of time in baseball parks. He had two at bats with the Grays Harbor Loggers. Now he owns part of the Trappers, the Charleston (S.C.) Rainbows, the Williamsport (Pa.) Bills and the Pompano Beach (Fla.) Miracle, which he recently visited on Gaelic night, and when he was presented with a baked potato, plain, he ate it so as not to offend his hosts.

But you’re likely to see him just about anywhere. Last autumn, for instance, in the middle of a pennant race, he leaned over the lip of the Cubs dugout in Shea Stadium in the late innings and
tried to hand a Heineken and some Cajun fries to Rick Sutcliffe, who pitches for the Cubs. Sutcliffe tried not to panic. His manager, Don Zimmer, had turned the color of a cherry tomato. “At least take the fries,” Bill said, hanging upside down. Sutcliffe didn’t even take the fries. Bill ate them. The Cubs won the division.

Bill had remembered to put everything on the Polish dogs, including jalapeños and celery salt. The girl at the Polish place on Waveland Avenue invariably gives him the best Polishes on the grill. Bill isn’t very comfortable with being treated specially, but a good Polish and a cold Old Style are two of the perks he’d be foolish to spurn, especially considering all of the drawbacks to trying to watch a Cubs game if you’re Bill, which are considerable. In Wrigley Field, for instance, he is seldom granted more than four seconds to himself, which grows quickly annoying to a man who is far more than a casual fan. (How many people do you know who know that Lloyd McLendon once hit five home runs in five at bats in Little League?)

“Are you Bill Murray or a lookalike?” said a doughy man in the bottom of the second as he walked in front of our seats. Marvel Wynne had just singled. “Are you Duffy Dougherty?” said Bill. He was trying to watch Wynne’s lead off first.

Then a guy with maximum security prison tattoos came up and said, “I know I shouldn’t bother you, so I’m going to. Bill looked at him the wav you’d look at a dead fish on the beach. The man left.

Another man came over and shoved a program in his face. “If I miss one pitch, I’m going to kill you,” Bill said. The man laughed. “I mean it,” Bill said. The man left.

“Hey Bill, l think it’s great how you support Chicago sports,” said someone else.

“I can’t do anything else,” Bill said.

Mostly Bill didn’t seem to mind, if it was between innings. When a teenage girl skipped in front of us and almost kicked over our beers, he said, “Hey, get those big feet outta here,” and when she turned around, blushing, he smiled, and she smiled back and sort of melted right there into a pink puddle. Another girl leaned over in the middle of an inning and he signed her program in mock exasperation.

“I’m only doing this because I like the way you look,” he said. She laughed. He was telling the truth. In fact, he was in a particularly good mood. A few days earlier he’d taken batting practice with the Trappers and put a few on the track, and the day before, the Miracle had taken part in the amateur draft and had picked up a couple of definite prospects. Also, Dwight Smith hit a home run in the fifth, and now Wynne hit one in the sixth—”He hit it!” Bill said, shooting to his feet, watching the arc of the ball over the ivy. But he regretted having made himself so conspicuous, for the Expos soon knocked Shawn Boskie out and took a considerable lead, and the crowd started paying more attention to Bill than to the Cubs. A woman tried to pass him a love note on an All-Star ballot, and a man handed him a cellular telephone and said loudly, “Talk to my wife.” Bill did. Faceless fans kept sending us beers, even though he kept refusing them. “You can’t get too relaxed in a military situation,” he said, and he was right: we were under siege.

“Dogs and cats, living together!” wailed someone a few rows back.

“This Ghostbusters thing is not going to go away until someone kills themselves with one of the toys,” Bill said.

In the middle innings, Mark Grace, who was suffering through a terrible slump, walked into the on-deck circle. Bill stood up and shouted “I can swing that bat!” so loudly that Grace had to turn around to see what kind of demented loon was sitting in the fifth row, and when he saw it was Bill, he couldn’t keep himself from smiling, all the while motioning frantically for him to sit back down before everyone got in trouble. I think Bill was trying to help him out of the slump, but he grounded to first base.

Finally, Nelson Santovenia hit a home run for the Expos.

“Nelson Santovenia?” Bill said softly.

It was all over but the shouting, of which there was a lot, so we ducked out a side door and went downtown for dinner.

As we drove down Lake Shore Drive in my rented Geo, Bill said, “The Cubs seemed sort of cranky.”

They had, too.

We found a restaurant that had the White Sox-Angels game from Anaheim on the television. As we found a table, Sammy Sosa threw an Angel out at the plate. It was a good sign. Bill never likes to stray too far from baseball. He keeps close tabs on the game and has many interesting theories about sports in general. One is his Civic Metropolitan Trauma Theory, whereby cities undergoing disasters and strife are likelier to be blessed with sports championships. It is not statistically verifiable, however.

Also, his theory about the National League East this year is that the team that eats the most protein will win. “That bodes well for the Mets,” he says, “because in New York, they eat their own, whereas in Pittsburgh they eat pure anthracite.”

Bill ordered the swordfish. I had the crab.

“You mind if I smoke?” he asked me. Your mother would like Bill. He has these manners. “Manners are the only thing left,” Bill said to me.

We tried to watch the White Sox game but people kept appearing from the dimness. The closer they got to the table, the more they all took on the look of subjects in a Diane Arbus photograph, or a Fellini film cast by Woody Allen.

“I want to talk to you about this idea I have for a theme restaurant—you and Belushi,” said a man waving a cigar the size of the Graf Zeppelin. (This is a recurring theme; in Pompano Beach, a woman who wanted Bill to ride on her Harley asked him. “How’s Belushi?” “He’s dead,” said Bill. “Yeah, I know,” she said, shaking her head.)

The man with the cigar kept trying to buy us drinks, although Bill was just drinking La Croix water, because it’s bottled in La Cross, Wisconsin, and they just turned it into French to sell it. Bill will drink anything made in Wisconsin.

Then another man left his woman friend at the bar to sidle up to Bill and introduce himself as a producer. He had something to do with the camera angles at Wrigley Field. About ten minutes later, when she realized that the man had no intention of summoning her, the woman sidled over, too. She was dressed in a black leotard top, and she had black hair and dark eyes and very white skin. She told us she didn’t like baseball as much as she liked hockey, which she said she liked because the athletes beat each other up. Bill and I exchanged glances.

“Are you out on the coast most of the time?” said the producer. “Yeah,” Bill said, “the East Coast.”

“Really?” said the man.

“I like the air,” Bill said.

“Yeah, but what about the females on the West Coast?” the man said, and he actually winked like Eric Idle used to in Monty Python skits.

“Well, I like to talk to the women I meet,” Bill said. The man didn’t get it. Bill was trying to watch the White Sox Angels game.

“Did you know,” he finally said to the man, “that one out of ten people comes from California? Is that frightening, or what?” The man left. Another one took his place, a much older man. “I used to know Georg’e Raft,” he said.

“I dated George Raft,” Bill said.

A woman came over to tell Bill that he didn’t seem very animated.

“I’m emotionally down because the Cubs lost,” he said. “If they’d won I’d be out ripping the antennas off cars.”

A woman came over with a glass full of clear liquor. Her eyes swam in her head the way the ice cubes swam in her glass. It apparently hadn’t been her first drink. She said she worked for the Illinois secretary of state.

“You look like the kind of person I could go on a kill spree with,” Bill said. “Knock over a few gas stations, kill a few people.” She did, too.

“Listen—I’ve struggled, darling,” she said as if she were on stage. People tend to approach Bill as if they were auditioning for really bad parts in life.

As we left the restaurant, the cigar man tried to pay the check.

Bill wouldn’t let him. As we left the guy was yelling, “Hey! Hey! Hey!” as if we’d insulted him or something.

On the street, a man in a wheelchair told Bill he’d been shot in the back because he refused to join a street gang. He asked Bill for enough money to stay in the Y. He had an upper body like Lawrence Taylor’s.

“I gotta think you could be applying yourself more, Roger,” Bill said, and Roger didn’t seem to disagree. Then Bill gave him more than enough money to stay for a night at the Y, and said that he hoped he wouldn’t see him back at the same spot on the street later that night. “I mean it,” Bill said, and judging from the expression on Roger’s face, I don’t imagine he’s returned to the spot yet.

Back at the bar in Bill’s hotel, Fleetwood Mac had a bodyguard named Roman who looked as if he’d sprung from the cellar of David Lynch’s imagination. He had a smile like he was being
shocked by electrodes. Bill asked the bartender for an aquavit. Everyone in Fleetwood Mac immediately asked for an aquavit. They were wearing a lot of silver jewelry and black clothes. Every few minutes one of them invited Bill to accompany them on their jet the next night to Columbus, Ohio. Bill smiled politely a lot. Mick Fleetwood drank everyone’s aquavit before they could, and kept saying profound things in an elegant voice. Then he invited Bill up to his suite to listen to his late father’s poetry. Bill could tell it meant a lot to Mick, so he agreed. Besides which, the band’s conversation had reached the level of chatter between tree slugs.

The poetry was pretty good. It was on a cassette. There were a couple of dozen beers arranged on ice in a huge silver bowl, like shrimp cocktails, only they were beer bottles. Mick offered us beers but none of the fruit.

Bill had an 8:30 radio appearance the next morning, so we left at 3: 15. As Mick saw us to the door, he asked me what he’d said that I’d written down on the corner of my Cubs program while we were at the bar, and so I read it.

“The English, the English,” I quoted. “The English are the hushpuppy brigade continuing to trample the world in disgrace.”

“You’re the only one who has that,” Mick Fleetwood said, nodding, with a smile. He’s right. I am.

Down on Michigan Avenue, Bill and I were the only people on the street. A very warm wind was buffeting the buildings. For some reason, it carried the scent of newly mowed grass, We agreed to meet on the same corner the next morning. Mike Harkey was starting for the Cubs, and we had good seats again.

On the radio show, someone from Elgin called in to ask him about his movie. Among other things, Elgin houses the Elgin Mental Health Center.

“Did you escape?” Bill said, “Are you one of those guys who climbs the sidewalk and kills people in his car?” The man didn’t laugh. The radio host asked Bill about the Cubs.

“I think they need a few laughs,” Bill said.

I met him on the street corner. He had a white T-shirt and a blue sweater under his arm. The cabdriver said he’d had a bad day. Bill asked him if he was the kind of cabdriver who said he’d had a bad day to get a big tip. The man insisted he’d had a bad day. Bill gave him grief most of the way. When we reached Wrigley, Bill tipped him $20 and told the man to spend it on an activity that family newspapers are reluctant to talk about, although it’s legal between consenting adults in most states.

Then we got more Polish sausage on Waveland Avenue.

A girl in a tank top with a Felix the Cat tattoo on the back of her left shoulder tried to sell him a Bart Simpson T-shirt. We were both feeling the effects of not getting much sleep, and the girl asked him why he was so crabby. I think he resisted the impulse to plant her upside down in one of the bushes. Instead he said, “That’s a nice tattoo. I bet you got one somewhere else.” If she did, she didn’t show us.

The Cubs had given us good seats again, but the team wasn’t playing any better. Our vendor wasn’t working, and the beer was never cold. In the top of the sixth the Expos scored three runs. A woman from a television network who had an anchor apprentice smile asked him to come watch her team play softball that weekend.

“Well,” Bill said, “maybe I’ll come by and insult you.”

“That’d be great,” she said.

A teenage girl asked him for an autograph.

“This girl smells really nice,” he said to me.

“Thank you,” she said. “You’re very sweet.”

“She really smelled good,” he said after she left. Another one took her place. She said her name was Jennifer.

“Jennifer, you’re a total babe,” he said. “Now go on. Get out of here.”

To a lot of people who kept coming up, he said, “You don’t understand. There’s a baseball game going on.” Once he said, “Hey! There’s a two-and-one count here!”

It was a strange game that afternoon, error-filled and back-and-forth. Bill likes games with errors. “A rally of a double and an error and another double, that’s somehow more exciting to me,” he said. “That’s the real game. Human error.”

In the bottom of the eighth it was tied. Bill had to do Siskel live in twenty minutes, back downtown. We decided to stay anyway. But then Jerry Goff hit a home run for the Expos in the top of
the ninth.

“Jerry Goff?” Bill said softly.

We found a cab and Bill said to the driver, “Can you get us to the CBS studios in eight minutes?”

“Sure,” the driver said, and I think he thought he was in a movie. He screeched the tires and missed a baby carriage by a foot and a half. We headed down Lake Shore Drive like one of those cars in a video driving game. The driver literally screeched up to the curb at CBS. A woman was holding the doors open, looking at her watch. Bill said, “Excuse me,” and ducked into the men’s room. He came out a moment later wearing the clean T-shirt and the blue sweater. He’d stuck his head under the sink and combed all his hair straight back. Siskel was wearing clothes that looked like he’d stepped out of a Brooks Brothers catalogue six minutes ago. The anchor people segued into Siskel and Bill.

“Bill Murray’s movies,” Siskel said, by way of introducing Bill, “average one hundred million dollars gross,” as if it had anything to do with anything. Bill didn’t get animated until Siskel asked him about the Cubs. When Siskel asked him how the studio had come to let him direct his latest film, Bill said. “Sometimes when it’s three-and-oh, they let you swing away.”

Outside the studio, back on the street, Bill’s studio’s publicist had produced a limousine the size of a stretch DC-9. He’d been trying to get Bill to ride in limos for two~days. This time Bill acquiesced, as a favor to the publicist, who belongs to the age when publicists knew how to publicize, but liked nothing more than making their stars feel like stars. He’d say things to Bill like, “Need anything? Plane tickets? Money?” And Bill~would say, “No thanks.” In the back of the limo, the publicist had Paris on the car phone, and so Bill talked to Paris for a minute. There were crystal glasses in the bar, but there wasn’t any time to use them because the hotel was about six blocks from the CBS studio. In fact, the limo was so big we probably could have gotten in one end at the studio and gotten out the other at the hotel without the car actually moving.

Bill’s hotel room was on the forty-fourth floor, facing north. You could see Greenland. A basketball sat in a window sill, looking north up the shore of the lake like someone pining away for something.

Bill changed into a purple shirt and blue jeans and we crossed the street to the cocktail party introducing the Chicago Cubs calendar. Jerome Walton was wearing enough jewelry to anchor a Japanese supertanker. We took some vodka-and-tonics off the trays that kept arriving on the arms of tuxedoed young men, and lamb chops with orange sauce. I put my bones in mv pocket, in
their napkins.

Mark Grace introduced Bill to a guy with long hair and a cowboy hat. He was the lead singer of a band called Restless Heart. They are apparently very big in white baseball circles. The Cubs all seemed relieved to have Bill to talk to, instead of having to talk to the other guests at the party, who clearly did their shopping at this store, but were not acting as cool as you’re supposed to act when your shirt costs $190. They clotted around Bill so that eventually he had to stand behind the sales counter. A man in a $6,000 suit—I’d guess—asked him what his plans were.

“I’m supposed to be making a movie in the fall,” Bill said, “but I’m going to try and get out of it.”

“Oh,” the man said, and went to look for the bar, which was up near the neckties.

We took a cab to Ditka’s. At a stoplight we stopped next to a Mercedes painted the color of mold, driven by a woman in dark glasses with a scarf over her hair. Bill leaned out the window.

“Nice color!” he said. “Hey, I’ll bet $10 you just quit smoking and drinking!”

When the light changed, she didn’t move. She looked as if someone had just hit her with a cattle prod.

We joined Grace and Sutcliffe and Steve Wilson and the lead singer of Restless Heart at a table in the Hall of Fame Room, where a man played lounge songs on an electric piano with a plaque that read “Myles Green at The Piano.” Myles was exactly like the lounge singers Bill used to imitate, and by the size of his smile when he recognized Bill, you’d have thought he sensed the irony of it all, but judging by the music he played, he apparently didn’t.

There were about thirty-five televisions up on the walls, all showing a Giants Cardinals game. Every time Will Clark came up, Mark Grace watched very intently. The Cubs asked Bill about his movies.

Bill steered the conversation back to baseball. He told them they’d probably turn it around on the West Coast trip.

“I’m going to give you guys a joke book,” Bill said. He was convinced they weren’t having enough fun this year. He was right. “We need it,” Grace said.

“We need something,” Sutcliffe said.

Bill ordered Diana Ditka’s chicken. It had a sauce with a lot of peas in it. When the kid showed up asking for an autograph, Bill shot out of his chair, grabbed the kid by the lapels of his shirt, picked him up two feet in the air and lowered him onto the table a few inches from Diana Ditka’s peas, and shook him in mock anger. The kid was laughing. Bill let him up and signed the autograph. Then, just when the kid thought he was safe, Bill grabbed him and did it again. The Cubs were more or less falling out of their chairs.

I think Bill was doing it for the Cubs, so they’d start winning.

Then a woman with white-blonde hair in a black leather skirt, black halter top, exposed midriff, and a lot of S&M jewelry came over and handed Bill a piece of paper to sign.

He wrote, “Judy: Don’t Let Them Behead Us. Bill.”

“What does it say?” she said, peering at it closely. He read it aloud. She left.

On the walk back to the hotel, Bill found a baseball hat with elephants on it in the window of a tie store. He wanted to buy it for Jerome Walton, but the place was closed. It started to rain and we ducked into a piano bar in the lobby of a nice hotel. We each had a Pernod and water. No one recognized him. The pianist was much better than Myles, but since he hadn’t pasted a plaque with his name to the piano, we never found out who it was.

Back at Bill’s hotel, no one was in the bar. Fleetwood Mac had gone to Columbus, but Bill’s family had arrived in the RV. It was one of the great trades of all time.

At breakfast the next morning, Bill’ son Homer brought a baseball to the table and tried to cut it with a knife and fork while we were waiting for the eggs to come. Homer is a catcher. He once started a triple play with the bases loaded by grabbing a bunt, stepping on home, and throwing to first, where the first baseman threw on to third. He’s such a catcher that the thing he loves most is blocking the plate and getting run into and holding on to the ball, and he’s only eight. Luke, who is five, had the glove he’d given Bill for Father’s Day. It was a beautiful glove. They were all en route to a vacation. But there was one more Cubs game to go to.

We took the Geo to Wrigley, up Lake Shore Drive, past picnics and beachgoers, and got a good parking place in the lot across the street. Before the game Bill hung out with Zimmer in his office while Grace got bubble gum for Homer and Luke. In the Cubs weight room, Sutcliffe told us Cubs stories. Sutcliffe asked where the seats were, and Bill said,”Up among the weird and the damned.”

But on this day, the crowd was soft and comfortable, and it was a fine day for a baseball game. Someone gave Bill a Twizzler and didn’t ask for anything in return, and he took it. All afternoon, Luke’s green eyes lit up the whole ballpark, and after he saw everyone asking Bill for autographs, he handed his baseball to Bill, and Bill signed it “Dad” and gave it back to him, and Luke tucked it into the pocket of his glove.

Bill’s putting the kid in Diana Ditka’s peas to make the Cubs laugh had worked, because on this afternoon, Grace broke out of his slump, and Sandberg hit two home runs—two!—and Jeff Pico won easily. The vendor with the nice smile was back, and all of her beer was cold enough to freeze the roof of your mouth.

In the seventh, Larry Walker hit a home run for the Expos.

Bill said, “Larry Walker?” in a soft voice.

But the Cubs won easily.

Outside in the parking lot we made plans to see the Miracle. Then he went on vacation and I went to Wyoming. On the plane I read a magazine with Bill on the cover. At the beginning of the story about Bill, the writer said that Bill seems like the kind of guy you think you can go to baseball games with, but you can’t.

He was wrong. You can. You should try. Really. For one thing, you get the coldest beers.

Over at SB Nation’s Longform, here’s Pat Jordan’s latest–The Pain and Pleasure of Spring Training:

That spring, I was assigned to the Boise club in the Class C Pioneer League. It might not have seemed like much of a jump from my Class D stint in McCook, Neb., the previous year, but Boise was one of the Braves’ elite minor league teams for its top prospects, especially pitchers. The Braves stacked Boise with so many great hitters that it was impossible for Boise pitchers to have losing records, even if their earned run averages were above five per game. The Braves thought that young pitchers needed confidence in their ability to win games and a stint at Boise would give it to them.

I threw well that spring, maybe 95-98 mph (there were no radar guns then) with a devastating overhand curveball that my teammates called “the unfair one.” I coasted through the first half of spring training with great anticipation for the start of the season, until one day, during a stint pitching batting practice, when my arm felt weak. I knew it was just a spring training sore arm, nothing serious, and it just needed rest, but I was too foolish to tell my manager, a redneck Southerner named Billy Smith. I wasn’t able to put much on the ball during my batting practice and my teammates complained to my catcher, Joe Torre. Torre kept shouting at me to throw harder, but I couldn’t. Finally, after one pitch, he walked halfway out to the mound and fired the ball at me. When he turned back around, I fired the ball at his head. It hit his mask, sent it spinning off his head, and the next instant we were both wrestling in the red dirt until our teammates pulled us apart.

The next morning I was assigned to a Class D team, Quad Cities, in the Midwest League. Billy Smith had told the Braves’ farm director, John Mullen, he didn’t want “no red-ass guinea” on his team. When I heard that, I wondered why I was the “red-ass guinea” and not Torre.

Let’s stick with baseball now that spring training has begun. Here’s a wonderful Mickey Mantle profile by Diane K. Shah. The story originally appeared in New York Magazine (April 21, 1980) and is reprinted here with the author’s permission.

“Where Have You Gone, Mickey Mantle?”

By Diane K. Shah

I’m in a taxi, trying to get to Yankee Stadium. I’m late and I’ve got my uniform on. But when I get there the guard won’t let me in. He doesn’t recognize me. So I find this hole in the fence and I’m trying to crawl through it, you know? But I can only get my head in. I can see Billy and Whitey and Yogi and Casey. And I can hear the announcer: “Now batting … number 7 … Mickey Mantle.” But I can’t get through the hole. That’s when I wake up. My palms are all sweaty.

July 1979: Mickey Mantle, almost 48, is sitting in Billy Martin’s office on Old Timer’s Day at Yankee Stadium. He is wearing his number 7 uniform and looks much the same as always. The broad shoulders, the thick neck, the sun-faded blue eyes. But the stomach is soft with middle age, and the face has aged too quickly, from either all those summers in the sun or all the nights on the town, to belong beneath the bill of a baseball cap.

“You ever have dreams like that, Billy?” Mantle asks.

Martin, sitting behind his manager’s desk poring over a record book, looks up at Mantle through his reading glasses. “All I ever dream is that I just got fired,” he says and breaks up laughing.

But Mantle wants to be serious. “You know that song by Roy Clark, ‘Yesterday When I Was Young’? Well, that’s what they’re going to play at my funeral. Every time I hear it I could just cry.”

March 20, 1980: Anheuser Busch today unveils a new advertising campaign for its Natural Light beer, involving “the greatest defection since Solzhenitsyn” and “the most radical breakthrough in beer marketing in years.” The campaign features five famous ex-athletes, including three—Mickey Mantle, “Smokin'” Joe Frazier, and Nick Buoniconti—who previously appeared in commercials for Miller Lite. Mantle has taken a break from his Yankee spring training batting instructor job to attend the press conference.

Speaking for the three defectors, Buoniconti says, “Even though the new commercials are lighthearted spoofs, Mickey, Joe, and I are serious about this. This wasn’t just a case of an advertiser offering us a bunch of money. We each did a comparison taste test and preferred the taste of naturally brewed Natural Light. We signed sworn affidavits to that effect.”

Perhaps it is the fate of all great athletes to leave their arenas too soon and to reflect forever more on what was—and what might have been. Mantle was 36 when his career ran out on him. It is that age that still gnaws at Mantle today. “All I’d ever known was baseball,” he says. “And there I was, 36, not even in the prime of my life, and I was through. That’s what keeps hurting.”

For nearly two decades Mickey Charles Mantle was one of the dominant baseball players of his time. There was his power, from both sides of the plate, and those frightening swings that could rattle a stadium. Ten times he smashed home runs right- and left-handed in the same game, a record that stands today. His most famous home run was the tape-measure shot out of Washington’s old Griffith Stadium in 1953 that wound up—was it possible?—565 feet from home. He was a legendary outfielder, his speed—3.2 seconds from home to first—made him one of baseball’s best drag bunters, and his arm was strong and sure.

But always there was the tape.

In his first season, during the 1951 World Series, he tore the cartilage in his right knee when he caught his spikes on a drainage cap in right-center trying not to crash into Joe DiMaggio. After that, despite four operations and the yards of bandage he methodically wrapped around it, the weakened joint could never keep up with the powerful body. Going easy on the right leg, he injured the left. His ailments, one after another, grabbed as much space in the papers as his triumphs.

It was this dramatic interplay of brute strength and fragility, excessive in Mantle’s case, that fueled the Mantle legend and made him a hero to a generation. Even his teammates idolized him—six named sons after him. Like many of the small town boys who came to play baseball in the fifties, Mantle lived only for the game. Other than golf and hunting, he had no outside interests. Money seemed secondary. Once, in 1958, he tried to hold out on his contract. But shortly after spring training started, he spotted a newspaper story that said if he didn’t report to camp right away he would be traded. “I was there the next day,” says Mantle. “Being traded from the Yankees would have killed me.”

In the end, though, his legend proved larger than his legacy. He played at his peak only a few of those eighteen seasons, the ones when his legs held up, and the giant records eluded him. He did not get 3,000 hits (he had 2,415) or 2,000 RBI’s (1,509), and his main goal, a .300 lifetime batting average, slipped away from him in his disappointing final four years, when his average plunged ten points to .298. Finally, in the spring of 1969, his legs would not come around. He called a news conference at the Yankees’ Fort Lauderdale training camp, announced he was finished, and headed unhappily home to Dallas.

But what exactly had become of the great Yankee slugger? How had this athletic superstar, who attained so much success at such a young age, made the transition into real life? Emotionally, he always knew it would be difficult. But financially . . . well, he had half a dozen money-making schemes all lined up. Long ago, he outlined his hope for the future: “I just want to get rich and play golf every day.”

The Longview Mall in Longview, Texas, has barely shaken awake at nine o’clock on a muggy Saturday morning. Everywhere there are signs: APPEARANCE—MICKEY MANTLE. Inside, in a small business office, half a dozen local reporters are sitting around a conference table studying the “Official Mickey Mantle Agenda.”

Mantle is delayed on the 140-mile drive from Dallas by a sudden downpour. When he finally appears in the doorway, 50 minutes late, he apologizes, smiles weakly, and slouches into a chair. He is wearing tan slacks, a pastel plaid shirt, and the look of a man who has been railroaded into coming to a party he didn’t want to attend. He hikes his left ankle onto his right knee and looks gloomily around the room. “Aren’t you supposed to ask me questions?” he says.

The questions are the same ones he’s heard a zillion times. What was his biggest thrill? Wouldn’t he like to manage? Doesn’t he wish he could be playing at today’s high salaries?

You can see Mantle is trying to do his best. He answers every question politely, and when he finishes, if no one jumps in with another one, he continues belaboring it.

“We were going to give you some pictures to look at ahead or time to help you, but …”

“Pictures,” says Mantle, “0f what?” Mantle, it seems, has no idea what his appearance at the mall entails, only that it will take four hours and pay him $2,500. As he’s being escorted from the press conference, Mary LaTourneau, the mall’s marketing director, tries to explain about the look-alike contest. There will be two: one for children, one for middle-aged men.

Suddenly, Mande stops cold in the hallway. “You mean.” he says incredulously, “I’m supposed to pick out some guy who looks like me?”

“The thing is,” Mary says apotogetically, “only one man entered.”

Before a small crowd of several dozen curious shoppers. Mantle lumbers onto a makeshift stage and comes face to face with his look-alike. The man, a 43-year-old dime store manager from nearby Marshall, Texas, is wearing pastel green slacks and a face wreathed in smiles. He’s overweight, his ears stick out, and if he resembles anyone, it’s a middle-aged Howdy Doody.

“Congratulations,” mumbles Mickey, at a loss.

“I used to play ball in high school with your twin brothers,” the pleased man gushes.

Mantle hands him a letter from the mall telling him where to collect his $100 reward, then he looks around helplessly. Below him are the upturned faces of a dozen youngsters who are participating in the other look-alike contest. “Pick out the one who most looks like you did at that age,” someone prompts him.

Mantle turns and studies them. He hesitates before a blond, freckle-faced boy of eleven. “Best I can remember,” he drawls. “Stanley here looks like me.”

Stanley Woods, shy and as embarrassed as Mantle is, collects the ballplayer’s autograph and then scampers off to join his aunt, a large, fat woman with a ponytail and a white T-shirt. “I used to be married to a pitcher for the White Sox,” she sings happily, “but he died.” Then, patting Stanley’s head, she says, “I just knew he would win. He looks exactly like Mickey did. I just know it.”

Judging look-alike contests at shopping malls is not what Mantle intended to do with his life. But that’s the way it’s worked out.

He still lives in Dallas, where he is a vice-president of Reserve Life Insurance Company. He shows up at company “victory” dinners, where agents who have sold a lot of policies get to rub his elbow over cocktails. In addition, he does a week-or-two-long “informal golfing excursion” each year with Allied Chemical. and in the spring George Steinbrenner pays him to throw out baseballs at Yankee farm club openers. He also makes appearances. These, his TV commercials, and his Reserve contract pay him more than the Yankees did—$150,000 to $200,000 a year.

He knows he should not complain. In fact, he is genuinely flattered that people even remember him. Last year, a New Jersey housewife paid Mantle an appearance fee to show up at her husband’s fortieth birthday party. When Mantle arrived, the man, once an avid fan, burst into tears. Mantle was moved by this, and when he got home he impulsively shipped the man the uniform the Yankees had given him when they retired his number.

Nevertheless, after all these years, Mantle still finds himself dreading public occasions. When Gerald Ford invited him to the White House for a state dinner honoring the president of France, Mantle’s response was to throw out the invitation. “Why do they want me there?” he kept complaining as the White House barraged him with phone calls. “I don’t know anything about politics.” As it turned out, Mantle was seated at the president’s table, his wife beside Vice President Rockefeller. Ford talked golf with Mantle; Rocky inquired endlessly about the Mantle boys. “They were so elated that they had such a good time,” says his attorney, Roy True, who had urged Mantle to attend, “that the next day they hopped a plane to Las Vegas as a sort of dessert.”

Now, driving to Oak Forest Country Club for lunch, Mande says little. He is being escorted by three cheerful young women from the shopping mall who are polite but out of their element. To them, Mantle is a celebrity whose name rings a distant bell.

Mary is reminded of an anecdote. “I heard a story about you,” she begins, “from a guy who parks cars at another country club in town!”

Mantle jerks his head around. “What was it?”

“Well, I don’t think I can tell.”

Mantle looks uneasy. “It can’t be that bad,” he says hopefully.

“Well … er, he said you went outside and … I can’t.”

By now the slugger is turning red. “Come on,” he says, “what’d I do?”

Taking a deep breath, Mary blurts, “You used the bushes for a toilet.”

That afternoon’s activity consists of two autographing sessions—one, for an hour, at Dillard’s department store, the other at J. C. Penney. The local radio men cover Mantle’s arrival at Penney like a papal visit. “He’s entering the housewares department … he’s climbing onto the platform….”

The lines stretch from housewares into bedspreads and sheets, past shower curtains and gift wrappings, along the cafeteria, beyond the credit desk—all the way to the rest rooms at the back of the store. Dan Whyte, a retired Marine who nearly had his head shot off in Vietnam, has been anxiously awaiting Mantle’s visit all week. A native of the Bronx, he has brought with him a yellowed scrapbook filled with pictures of the Yankees of yore. There are several of the early Mantle, who looks about fifteen years old in his baggy pinstriped uniform. “Mantle,” gushes Whyte, “is like the John Wayne of baseball. Still looks good, doesn’t he? Too bad about his knees. He would have made a good marine.”

At last, Whyte’s moment comes. He steps up to the platform and thrusts his scrapbook under Mantle’s nose. Mantle starts to sign “Mickey Mantle”—for his hand is too tired now to pen “Best Wishes”—but Whyte is trying to flip through the pages, to show him. Mantle stares blankly, smiles, and reaches for the next piece of paper.

“I guess he was kind of busy,” sighs Whyte.

At three o’clock, with the lines still stretching, Mantle is escorted from the platform, visibly tired now, his official engagement over. He walks out into the heat of the parking lot and climbs into his 1976 Cadillac Eldorado.

On the ride back to Dallas, he says, “I think about baseball all the time. I think about how I didn’t finish with a .300 batting average. I think about what it would have been like if I’d played in a different ball park. It was 480 to center, you know, and I lost a lot of home runs. And my legs. My right knee hurt almost every day. I really do believe I would be way up at the top of everything if I hadn’t been injured. When I was healthy, I really believe I was the best of anyone I ever saw play.

“But,” he adds dolefully, “you have to go by the records.”

Mantle switches on his C.B. to see if there are any Smokies ahead. Then he says, “My biggest regret is not being able to play at least five more years. The Yankees wanted me to. But it was embarrassing to me to screw up like I did. I couldn’t hit worth a shit.

“It was all I lived for, to play ball,” he says. “I used to like to play so much that I loved to take infield practice. I couldn’t walt to go to the ball park. I hated it when we got rained out.”

Then, fearing perhaps that he’s left the wrong impression, he adds, “Look, it’s not that I’m not happy now. I am. But to be 25 years old and rounding the bases, the hero of the Yankees…”

Times have changed, so has his life, but Mantle, it seems, has not. From age 3, when his father first put a bat in his hands, until age 36, he was consumed by baseball. The hope of being the greatest ballplayer still runs through his dreams. By day, he makes a living off the dream. By night, he tries to recapture it.

He drops me off and heads for home—the end of another road trip.

“Mickey and I were in New York on a business deal in the spring of 1969,” said Roy True. “We were sharing a suite at the St. Moritz. One morning I woke up and found him wrapped in a towel, standing in front of some French doors that opened onto a balcony. I said, ‘What are you doing?’

“‘Just looking out at the city.’ he said. ‘It’s some city.’

“‘Yes, it is,” I told him.

“‘And that son of a bitch used to be mine,’ said Mantle, ‘all mine.'”

Mantle’s transition into the appearance business came largely at the hands of Roy True. Mantle first approached the Dallas attorney ten years ago on a Florida land deal, but it quickly became apparent to True that Mantle was hardly going to galvanize Wall Street. “Mickey is not a businessman,” says True. “He hates meetings. He isn’t interested in the ongoing process.He just wants to know the results.”

Before True came along, the results had been abysmal. His first big “deal” came the very day he arrived at Yankee Stadium when a fast-talking stranger “grabbed me and said he could make a million dollars for me in five years. All I had to do was give him half of everything I made for ten years,” Mantle recalls. “A million dollars is a lot when you’re making $7,500. I signed right away.”

Legally, Mantle was not old enough to sign a contract, so he got out of it. But he never did learn to distrust strangers. Even at the end of his career he was boasting about an investment that would make him rich for life. He bought 12,500 shares of stock at $10 each. Years later he sold them at $4.

True figured Mantle had better start promoting himself. Mantle balked. “The problem was he felt he didn’t have anything to contribute,” says True. “So I talked strong and long to him. Once he found out that people were interested in what he had to say, he gained the confidence that he was something other than a ballplayer.”

True came up with the Mickey Mantle speaking format—twenty minutes of baseball yams followed by Q and A—and set the Mickey Mantle fee, now $3,000. He books Mickey only into cities that are easy to reach. Still, Mantle becomes anxious before an appearance, worrying that his sponsors will want him to have tea with Aunt Tillie or something, and that if he refuses, “people will think I’m an ass.” Thus, True devised the official Mickey Mantle itinerary—pay for it and stick to it.

On Monday, I arrive at Roy True’s law offices right on time for my interview with Mantle and am surprised to find the ballplayer already there. He is wearing tan slacks and a yellow knit shirt, nicely dressed as always. We go into the law library, and again he seems uncomfortable. He sits in his chair, clutching a batch or letters, fidgeting like a well-behaved child who has been made to say a few polite words to grown-ups. As Mantle talks, I begin to understand: He was, and remains, a modest man who worked hard at the game he loved, wanting to excel through sheer competitiveness, never quite comprehending the acclaim that came with it.

“Coming out of Commerce, Oklahoma, which is 2,000 people, and going to New York when you’re nineteen would be tough on anyone,” he says. “But after my first spring training they started writing that I was going to be the next Joe DiMaggio. In a way I was lucky, I had time to grow with my fame. It wasn’t until 1956 that I did what the papers said I should do, and by then I was used to the attention and it didn’t bother me.”

“Do you miss the limelight now?”

“No, I don’t think it ever meant much to me. People come up to me and they say, ‘You remember that home run you hit in Boston in 1954?’ And I don’t. And they begin to describe this particular home run, inch by inch. It was like they were talking about someone else. It’s hard for me to remember what it was like then, or how I felt. Even now I’m not very conscious of being Mickey Mantle.”

Mantle is still fidgeting—though he has finally put the letters down—alternately scratching his enormous biceps, stretching, and yawning.

Outside of baseball, the continuing obsessions of his life are his children and his golf. Of his four boys—Mickey Jr., 26; David, 24; Billy, 21; and Danny, 19—the two youngest still live at home. And though Mantle brightens when speaking of his kids, he is oddly elusive about what they do. One close friend confides, “Mickey thinks the boys would be more active participants in the traditional sense of working men if they hadn’t been brought up the way they were. He always let them know he would take care of everything. He feels it’s his fault they haven’t really shown the ambition to pick something out and go get it.”

Of golf Mantle talks a blue streak. Every day he is in Dallas, save Mondays, when his club is dosed, he plays eighteen holes at Preston Trails, “where they don’t allow women—even as waitresses,” he says with delight. “Before they started building houses out there, we used to play naked.”

“Golf,” continues Mantle, “is the only thing I can still do. I can’t play racquetball or tennis or even ride a bike. And I have this need to compete. What bothers me is that my knee is getting worse, and when I’m 55 I may not be able to play at all. Then I don’t know what I’ll do.” His eyes looks sad.

“Don’t you still hunt and fish?” I ask.

“Yeah.”

“What do you hunt?”

For the first time Mantle grins. ” Puss,”‘ he say.

But the old devilishness simply is not there, and after a moment that smile fades and a more subdued Mantle reflects, “The one thing I would have done different in my life was to take better care of myself while I was playing. I really burned the candle at both ends. And it caught up with me.”

Suddenly he stands up. “Let’s drive by the house,” he says. “You can meet Merlyn.” He is out the door in a flash. The interview is over. The jailer has released him.

The Mantles’ four bedroom beige house sprawls on an acre of emerald green lawn in an upper-clan section of North Dallas. Its two wings wrap around a sparkling turquoise swimming pool that looks like it hasn’t been used for some time.

Merlyn Mantle, a tiny platinum blonde with large blue eyes is in the den talking to Joe Warren, a regional sales manager for Reserve Life, who had dropped by with two box of baseballs for Mantle to autograph. Mutely, Mickey carries the boxes to an easy chair. Balancing the boxes on his knees, he begins scrawling his name.

As Warren is speaking, Merlyn turns and says softly to her husband. “Do you want your glasses?”

“No,” mumbles Mantle in embarrassment, and keeps writing.

Later I am led through a spotless white kitchen to the back of the house, where, stuck on like an appendage, the trophy room is. It is an awesome treasure trove or memorabilia, every square inch of wall crammed with the mementos of Mantle’s extraordinary achichievments. Encased behind glass are an enormous sterling tape measure honoring his longest blast, a solid silver bat denoting his American League batting titles, the big, jeweled Hickock Belt for athlete of the year. Trophies that do not fit into the credenza spill out into the far comers of the room. One wall crawls with magazine covers of Mantle. Another holds a framed swatch of the number-7 pinstripe.

Throughout Merlyn’s tour, Mantle stands impassively in the doorway. He rarely comes into the room anymore, he says, and seems uninterested in it.

“When Mickey first retired,” Merlyn says, “I thought it was really great—he’d be home all the time. But he isn’t.”

“The last three months I haven’t been home hardly at all,” Mantle concedes. “That promotion I did for Cameron Wholesalers? I went to twenty cities all over Texas. They had this deal called Mickey Mantle Grand Slam Specials. You buy 50 doors and get one free”—he laughs—”or something like that.”

“Do you enjoy these appearances?” I ask.

“No,” says Mantle quietly. “It’s just a monetary thing. It doesn’t do anything for my ego. If somebody gave me $2 million I wouldn’t do another one.” Then, not wanting to sound ungrateful, he adds. “Really, I don’t mind it, though. It makes me feel good that people want me to come.”

It is only quarter to twelve, but itchy as ever, Mantle suggests we go out and eat lunch.

At the restaurant, the Mantles pick at their food and apologize that it is not very good. Mickey notes that he weighs 205 pounds—not much over his playing weight. “But it’s shifting,” he says with a small, sad smile.

Then abruptly he puts down his fork. “I just hate getting old,” he blurts.

Merlyn Mantle nods and looks away.

It is, sadly, the wrong note to end on. But perhaps that’s how it must be. “Mickey comes to me from time to time and says this guy or that guy wants to write a book about him,” says Roy True.”And I tell Mickey it’s not time. And Mickey says, ‘Well, what are we waiting for?’

“And I tell him,” says Roy True, “I’m waiting until we can have a happy ending.”

Ted Berg is now at USA Today and he’s  still funny.

Nice piece on Larry Merchant by Stan Hochman:

When Merchant was 50 years younger, he was sports editor of the Philadelphia Daily News. He was taking names and kicking ass, surrounded by a posse he had hired, hard-driving guys with similar inclinations.

He’d yanked me out of San Bernardino, Calif., and told me where to park near Connie Mack Stadium so I’d find my hubcaps intact after games. And then he told me what we owed our readers.

“Inform ’em, entertain ’em, and every so often surprise ’em,” Merchant said. He wrote incisive essays about pro football. He called his column “Fun and Games” as a stark contrast to life and death. And he’d open his occasional notes columns with “Some questions answered, some answers questioned.”

Merchant informed, entertained, shocked. We were tabloid and proud of it. Not that everyone loved our swagger, our persistence.

There was that night in 1962 on the Phillies’ charter flight, Merchant in an aisle seat, typing away. The catcher, Sammy White, peered over Larry’s shoulder, unhappy with what he read.

“He yanked at the copy paper,” Merchant recalled, “and it stuck. He wound up throwing my Olivetti [typewriter] down the aisle. I went to get it and some of the keys were twisted and some vital parts scattered.

“That night, I dictated a story that said it was the best throw he’d made all season. About a month later, the Phillies sent me an invoice, paying for a replacement and indicating it had been deducted from White’s salary.”

When I worked as an intern on Ken Burns’ Baseball documentary I had the occasion to drive to New Hampshire one day with him. Just the two of us. I played him a few songs I wanted him to hear–from the Pharcyde, I think it was–and then he said, “I want to play you something special.”

He put a cassette in the tape deck and turned me on to Marvin Gaye’s version of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” performed thirty years ago at the NBA All-Star game.

Over at Grantland, Pete Croatto explains why it stands alone.