The Road Warrior is one of my favorite action movies. Mad Max is creepy as hell, too. The thing about the first two Mad Max movies is that for all the unrelenting action, and despite the fantastic premise, it’s all rooted in credibility. I always felt that part of Miller’s achievement was to make you believe you are there–with these guys coming after you. They are a comic book–and the third movie went someplace that didn’t really appeal to me)–but realistic in a strange way; that’s what made them so frightening and effective. (The second movie also has some nice comedic touches).
Plus, I liked Max’s dog.
The new one looks pumped up with the action and pyrotechnics. I hope that same sense of urgency and credibility exist.
Mad Mad: Fury Road is supposed to be dope. Think I’ll have to cart my ass to the theater for this one.
She was a teenage model in Italy, came to New York City at eighteen, and left for Los Angeles when her knees gave out for good; there she was discovered by her first manager, who was in line at the bank where she was trying—loudly and without success—to cash her last New York modeling-job check to keep her room at the Farmer’s Daughter, formerly an L. A. fleabag. But Theron came up hard in a hard country, on a hard continent.
“On the street where I was raised—75 percent of the people who lived on that street are not alive anymore. For no reason. For nothing. Life means nothing. In my formative years, I was in an environment that was filled with turmoil—political turmoil—in a world that was incredibly unsafe. And still is. In the early nineties, we were number one in homicide in the world. In HIV/AIDS, we’re still number one. We were number one in carjacking; I think we’re now number three. It became a place where the value of life—there was no value of life.
“You can’t oversimplify it; it comes from a very real place. It’s sad, because the people are good. They’re good people, and they’re resilient people, more than anywhere else in the world that I’ve ever come across. There’s something about South African flesh—we get up and we move forward, and we sometimes don’t take a moment for a little bit of self-awareness or self-pity. We’re such beasts at having to survive—I have the utmost respect for that, but it’s not the healthiest way to go through life. We’ve become a generation in South Africa that is driven by very valid anger, but the cost is coming at such a high level—and that’s a painful thing to watch. A lot of my emotional drive comes purely from the fact that I was born on that continent, and that I was raised there, and that it was different. I have a very strong relationship with Africa, one that’s built on lots of love and massive pain.”
Here’s a keeper from Scott Raab. “The Hit King,” originally published in GQ back in 1997 and reprinted here with the author’s permission.
If you grew up in Cleveland, rooting ten, twenty, thirty years for what was then the most drab and futile team in baseball, you loathed Pete Rose for at least three reasons. You despised him for his skill and for his frenzy to win. You scorned him for being born, reared and revered in Cincinnati, a fussy, gooberous river burg, half Kraut, half hillbilly, buried so far downstate that it essentially was, and is, the capital of north Kentucky. Above all you hated him for July 14, 1970, when he scored the winning run in that year’s All-Star Game by maiming the Tribe’s finest rookie in decades, a toothy, well-muscled 23-year-old catcher named Ray Fosse. Fosse was planted a stride or two up the third-base line, blocking the plate; Rose wracked him knee to shoulder at full speed. Bruised, Rose missed three games. Fosse dislocated his entire career.
I didn’t care that this was not a cheap shot, that it was just the way the game is played. I didn’t care that Rose and Fosse had huddled at Rose’s home the night before—the game was in Cincy that year—talking baseball until 3 A.M., or that they kept in touch for years thereafter. I watched season after season as Ray Fosse fought to find his stroke, fought and failed, while Rose and his team became the Big Red Machine. I never forgave Pete Rose.
I never forgave Pete Rose, but on August 1, 1978, I discovered that I had ceased merely to loathe him. Having hit safely in forty-four games straight—second only to DiMaggio’s untouchable fifty-six in 1941—Rose went hitless that summer night. Feeling strangely bereft, I opened The Baseball Encyclopedia to DiMaggio’s name and saw that in ’41 he had been 26, in the heart of his glory. Rose was already a wondrous, ageless 37, and I understood then that this brick-bodied motherfucker would dog me forever. Without quite knowing it, I had come to regard him with that same mixture of emotion inspired in cave dwellers by earthquake and eclipse: terror, awe, powerlessness, and surrender. Beyond explanation or entreaty, he simply was and always could be. Even when he stopped playing, in 1986—he was the Reds’ player-manager then—Rose refused to officially retire, and I fully expected him to climb out of the dugout at any moment, bat in hand.
He never did. In 1989 Rose was tossed out on his ear, eighty-sixed like a drunk who had pissed on the jukebox. I took no pleasure from it, not even relief; whether he bet illegally or bet on baseball or bet on his own team, he was railroaded, denied due process in a vermin-infested, star-chamber investigation. I felt only wariness, certain he would sue and come back, until the almighty IRS, a force beyond even nature, pinched him for failing to report racetrack winnings and income from memorabilia sales. Pete Rose was finally done for. Before his sentencing, he read a statement asking for the court’s mercy—he’d paid the government, plus penalties and interest—his voice choked and quaking, too shamed to lift his head from the page. The judge, a Reds fan, gave him five months, plus a $50,000 fine to cover the cost of his upkeep in the federal prison in—I scarcely could believe it—Marion, Illinois. Ray Fosse’s hometown.
If you’re a Cleveland Indians fan, that’s how it goes: no justice, only irony.
“Lemme tell ya, I love Joe DiMaggio,” Pete Rose says, chugging coffee at four in the afternoon. We’re at a table near the back bar of the Pete Rose Ballpark Cafe. He’s 56, rock hard and proud of it. His jeans are light blue and jock tight; his white ribbed cotton pullover is tucked in at the waist; he has a thick gold chain around one wrist and a battered Rolex around the other. His hair is short, receding—he keeps a ball cap on his head—and bottle-brown. His pugish brow and nose have thickened; the whole face has grown a bit heavier, more coarse; but his eyes, flat brown, still burn, and his voice is the same tough-guy bark. “I went to Vietnam in 1967 just so I could meet Joe DiMaggio. They asked me to go on a goodwill trip. Joe and me went south; the other three guys went north. We had to carry cards that said we were colonels, because if we got captured and we didn’t have a card, we’d be considered spies. I was in awe of this guy. I mean, this guy was one of my heroes. I couldn’t believe I’m ridin’ in helicopters with Joe DiMaggio.”
I try to picture them—the 26-year-old hick, crew-cut and knot-faced, five whole seasons in the Bigs under his belt, and the Yankee Clipper, 53 then, an authentic pinstriped deity, silvering, aquiline, regal—squatting flank to flank in a Huey, skimming treetops, skirting enemy fire, Colonel Charlie Hustle’s incessant chatter ack–acking above the roar of the chopper and the bullets’ whine and the Phrygian silence of Colonel Joltin’ Joe.
Then Pete Rose says this: “I gave Joe DiMaggio a shower one night. I gotta be the only guy in the world ever to give Joe DiMaggio a shower.”
Say WHAT? It is as if an unearthed Hemingway letter recounted a lazy afternoon in Paris when Papa gave Scott Fitzgerald a foot rub.
“We’re down in the Mekong Delta. And it’s . . . it’s . . . it’s a jungle. It’s hot. I mean, it’s so goddamn hot ya can’t sleep. All you can hear goin’ off is boom-BOOM, boom-boom-BOOM. It’s a war out there. And we’re tryin’ to sleep. And Joe says, ‘I can’t sleep.’ He says, ‘I gotta take a shower.'”
Just then a paunchy white-haired man in a beige zippered jacket wanders over to the table, clutching a photo. Rose takes it from him without a glance, signs it, and hands it back. “Thanks, buddy,” Rose says.
The man stands gaping at the glossy in his hands, perplexed. “What’s that number there, uh, forty-two fifty-six?” he asks finally.
“That’s my prison number,” says Rose, poker-faced. Then he returns to the Mekong. “The way you take a shower, you got this big bamboo thing up here, like a pocket.” Rose cups his thick, square hands, lifting his forearms above his head. They are massive, tight as tree trunks, covered with dark hair. “You gotta get up on a chair, and you gotta feed the water. Then you pull a string, and the water comes through. So I’m the feeder; Joe’s takin’ the shower. I’m up on the thing feedin’ the water, and he’s takin’ a shower. Joe DiMaggio.”
Rose grins like a schoolboy. He pushes his cap, black leather with a gator-skin bill, back on his head and clasps his hands behind his neck. A large gold pin dangles from the center of the crown of the cap, formed of two letters: HK, for “Hit King.” I eye those oaken arms and see Ray Fosse somersaulting backward and coming to rest facedown in the dirt, his left shoulder torn from its socket.
“Joe was the most humble guy I ever seen. We got to sit in a meeting of fighter pilots who were goin’ on a mission over North Vietnam. Now you imagine Joe DiMaggio walkin’ in. ‘Hi, I’m Joe DiMaggio, old broken-down ballplayer,’ he used to say. And Joe goes up, and he gets the chalk, and—you know the bombs on the fighter planes? Joe writes ‘Fuck Ho’ on one. And this one guy came back [after the mission] and told Joe, ‘I got an ammunition dump with that thing.’ Joe was happy as he could be. ‘Fuck Ho,‘” Rose repeats, snorting at the memory, shaking his head with delight.
Truly, it is almost more exquisite than I can bear to hear Rose tell about the great DiMaggio in Vietnam. Just then, though, something happens to Pete Rose, something visible and ugly. His face, from brow to chin, turns hard; his eyes go cold; his lips, shrunk to a miser’s frown, barely part as he speaks. “Joe DiMaggio don’t sell bats,” he says, biting off the name. “They’re forty-nine ninety-five. That’s $4,995. Joe thinks everybody’s tryin’ to fuck him.”
Ray Fosse hit .307 in 1970, .307 with good power, and never again came close. He played out his enfeebled string, built a pension, found a broadcast job. DiMaggio, wealthy and still worshiped, is an ice-hearted, reclusive old man. Something worse happened to Pete Rose. Something odd and slow and subtle, something that swallowed him up and took him drifting down into nothingness, into a pale nearly beyond remembrance. Go figure. Had Rose simply croaked or grown doddering, we might have pondered how this brash hayseed colossus bestrode and embodied, like Elvis or Ali, an entire era, spoke with his rough art to the soul of a nation. Instead people hear the name, pause, and say, “Oh, sure. Hasn’t he got a restaurant somewhere?”
The Pete Rose Ballpark Cafe looks like any other edifice in Boca Raton, Florida, which is to say that it has a blank exterior of pinkish tan stucco. To find it, you should know that it is joined to the side of a tannish pink Holiday Inn, whose clover green marquee is one of a very few clues that the entire length of Glades Road from the freeway to the turnpike is not simply a palm-dotted, lizard-infested, pinkish tan strip mall erected to service the needs of an army of frosted-blonde women wielding scarlet talons, silver Lexi, and platinum Visas.
You may be tempted to order the Hall of Fame Chicken Scallopini. Don’t. Irony is no substitute for flair in the kitchen. Stick with a burger.
Your chef is Dave Rose, Pete’s younger brother. Except for Dave’s stringy, shoulder-length hair, the basketball-sized gut beneath his grease-spattered apron, and the slack derangement of his eyes, he and Pete look much alike. Something happened to Dave Rose, too: Vietnam. He didn’t go with DiMaggio.
The staff wears tags with their hometowns printed under their names. Everyone is young, trim, female, and from New York or New Jersey. Pete’s customers are more typical Boca dwellers: fat old men from New York or New Jersey. Pete’s afternoon routine is coffee, the sports page, and banter with the staff about fellatio technique, but today he’s also doing business with Marty. Hoarse, fat, and fiftyish, Marty hails from Boca via New York’s Upper West Side. His business is marketing sports memorabilia.
“I’m gonna throw out a name,” Marty says, “a very, very dear friend of mine. I’ve got very few friends. Marv Shapiro. Dr. Marv Shapiro.”
“Marv Shapiro,” Rose says. “I don’t know who that is.”
“Marv Shapiro is an ear, nose, and throat guy. He has, and I’ve seen it, your jersey from when you broke Cobb’s record.”
Rose shakes his head.
“No?” Marty rasps, his eyes wide. “He swears he paid you twenty-five grand for it. No?”
“I said I was gonna use three jerseys,” says Rose. “I only used one. I used that one right over there. Marge Schott’s got one. I gave one to Barry Halpern for that Ty Cobb bust up there. Did he say he got it from me?”
“Yeah, and he’s not a bullshitter. Great guy. Tremendous guy. Very successful guy.”
“He might be a great guy,” Rose tells Marty, “but he’s a goddamn liar.”
Marty sighs, crestfallen, searching for the right tone, the right words. When he speaks, his voice is heavy with sorrow. “The fraud that is running rampant in this business is perpetuated daily,” he says.
While I wonder if Marge Schott and Barry Halpern know that Rose snookered them—an unworn game jersey is not a game jersey—Marty recovers nicely. “My idea,” he tells Rose, “is to put out something that you authorize. I’ll do all the promoting. I’ll go to every show. It won’t interfere with you at all. To me it would be a privilege to work with you.”
Rose sips the coffee. “I think you could really sell bats with ‘Charlie Hustle,'” he muses. “I’ve never signed ‘Charlie Hustle’ on a bat.” Marty beams at me, radiant, and begins squeaking with joy. “Ooooh, that coy little, sly little fox. He’s Charlie Hustle. They call me ‘Marty Hustle.’ Ooooh. When—not if —he gets put into the Hall of Fame? Right to the moon. He knows it, too. Ooooh, is he good. And he’s young; he could be signing for the next thirty years.”
At the Pete Rose Ballpark Cafe Gift Shop, a signed copy of the black Mizuno that Rose used in the later years of his career goes for only $250. For $75 less, you can get a copy of his old Louisville Slugger. Take it from Pete, though: “I wouldn’t even look at that Louisville. I broke the record with a black Mizuno.”
The record. Rose mentions it often, just as he adds it as a coda to his signature: “4256,” more career hits than anyone in the history of baseball. He harps on this because he knows that despite “4256” he never reached the Yahwehvian stature of Mays and Mantle and, yes, DiMaggio; unbeloved, he was not even, like the demigods Clemente and Kaline, much admired. Not only did Rose lack the supple arrogance of grace, the titanic strength and propulsive speed, even the innocent exuberance of an aw-shucks kid—he had none of the stuff that drops jaws and warms hearts—but also, and crucially, the little boy inside Pete Rose came off as a runtish bully, the outer man as an imperious lout.
What made Rose a great player was an invincible physique coupled with a monomaniacal fervor unseen since the demise of the baseball god most closely linked to him, the shiv-wielding madman whose record Rose chased for twenty-three years: Ty Cobb. Rose grew so obsessed with Cobb that he named his second son, Tyler, for him, and on the night Rose broke the record in 1985, he saw Cobb above the stadium lights, sitting in the clouds. Dead since 1961, Cobb has no bats to hawk, but a huge copper bust of him sits rooted upon a waist-high railing just past the Ballpark Cafe’s hostess station, where the Georgia Peach glares out from eternal captivity into the cafe’s enormous, glassed-in game room. Like Rose, Cobb departed the game not long after he was investigated by the league for wagering on the team he played for and managed. No finding was announced; he simply retired and was in the first group of players voted into baseball’s Hall of Fame at its inception in 1936.
Something far worse happened to Pete Rose. The agreement reached in 1989 with Commissioner Bartlett Giamatti—six months of inquisition had yielded a 2,000-page report based mainly upon the sworn word of two felons—stated plainly that there was no finding that Rose had bet on baseball games and that he could seek reinstatement in a year without prejudice. But at Giamatti’s press conference announcing the agreement, he was asked if he thought that Rose had bet on baseball. “Personally,” Giamatti replied, “yes.”
Rose, gagged by edict of the commissioner throughout the entire ordeal, unable to defend himself, forbidden to question his accusers, saw this on television in his lawyer’s office in Cincinnati and nearly shat his pants. He had spent a million and a half in lawyers’ fees negotiating the agreement Giamatti had just trashed the day after it was signed. The IRS was sniffing at his door. His career was kaput; his endorsements were gone. He was fucked, and he knew it.
Something worse than all of that—something closely resembling justice—happened to Bart Giamatti, ex-president of Yale, wooed from the Ivy League to reign over baseball, qualified for the job only by having had the sort of love affair with the game unique to fey, pristine intellectuals. “Reconfigure your life,” the commissioner told Rose at their last meeting, sending Rose out from the only life he had ever known. Then, after his press conference, Giamatti repaired to Martha’s Vineyard for a week of rest and recovery, nodded off in a hammock, and never woke up.
Rose has yet to apply for reinstatement. Giamatti was replaced by his pudgy steward, Fay Vincent, whom Rose blames for keeping him off the Hall of Fame ballot. “That lying son of a bitch,” Rose calls him. Vincent was ousted by a club owners’ uprising in 1992; the chair has been empty ever since, the game itself nearly consumed by its cannibal kings. Meanwhile, Rose wanders through his horse-hide diaspora, Kafka in cleats. He may buy a ticket to see a game, but visiting old mates in the broadcast booth is off-limits. When a Cincinnati bakery designed a poster to commemorate the Big Red Machine’s last championship, baseball informed it that an action photo of Rose was verboten. A group pose including him was okey-dokey.
I phoned the offices of Major League Baseball to ask what happened and what might happen to Pete Rose; my calls were not returned. I phoned Rose’s former lawyer, who negotiated the Giamatti agreement; he had his secretary call back to say that he wasn’t interested in talking. I also tried Rose’s current attorney. He rang back and answered all my questions, each with the same words: “No comment.”
I ask Rose what Bart Giamatti had meant by telling him to re-configure his life.
“He never said. I assume that means be very selective of the people that I’m hangin’ around with, and no more illegal gambling.” He still bets, he says, but only at the track. He lives in Boca; his second wife, Carol, and their two children live in Los Angeles. Rose says he gets out to see them as often as he can. “I talk to my kids every day,” he says in an aggrieved tone, as if he feels accused of yet another crime. “You have to do what you have to do.”
Weeknights he does the syndicated, two-hour “Pete Rose Show” from a radio studio adjacent to the kitchen. Rose’s on-air partner—Rose is neither glib nor focused enough to work alone—joins in on a phone hookup from Vegas. There is much talk of point spreads and odds, and a total of three phone calls are taken during the entire show. Through the Plexiglas window, customers gape and take snapshots of Rose yapping into the mike. In the booth, I can smell the potatoes frying, then hot cheese, as brother Dave weaves his culinary magic.
During one five-minute break for ads and a news update, Rose signs five dozen baseballs. While a producer and Rose’s fan-club president open the boxes for him, he autographs the sixty balls in four and one-half minutes, digitally timed.
“I can’t read this one,” the producer says, winking at me.
“They’re all the same,” says Rose, pen gripped tightly, hunched in concentration, unsmiling, not looking up. After signing each ball with a smooth stroke that seems to be one careful, continuous motion, he rolls it away, down the table, toward me. The tail of each final e in Pete lifts to cross the t before it. Each curlicued R flows into the combined os in an almost floral kiss. He’s absolutely right: they are all the same.
Late January in West Texas beneath a warm, high, blue noon sky, and the place is blasted, bleak. It’s the land, skillet flat and dust brown, punctured by bobbing, creaking, sucking metal; it’s the enormous, yellowing Space for Rent placards pleading from every oil tower and the ground-floor windows of every bank and most of the other buildings on the twenty-mile stretch from downtown Midland to the Ector County Coliseum in Odessa; it’s the late-morning Saturday caravan of pickups moving sluglike down the road, each with its own wizened, check-shirted driver, lip bulging with either a pinch of snuff or a mouth tumor, each with his ten-gallon hat pulled down to his furled eyebrows. One weekend a month, sometimes more, Pete Rose hits the road for a card show. Today he’s here.
Except that it turns out to be a boat show, not a card show, and the Ector County Coliseum is not a coliseum at all but a beehive of separate metal outbuildings surrounded by a chain-link fence. The main edifice, which might pass for a coliseum to people whose entire lives are spent dangling from oil rigs, is filled with gap-toothed salesmen fondly stroking big-ticket water vessels that seem exactly as useful here in the Permian Basin as a Psalter in hell.
Chaperoned by two skinny Odessa cops, his eyes shaded by the bill of his “Hit King” cap, shod in off-white ostrich-skin half boots and sporting a diamond-dusted Piaget on his meaty wrist, Rose sits behind a long table on a small wooden stage in Barn G. Behind him hangs a huge poster, blue with silver stars and marked with the cramped John Hancock of Dallas Cowboys defensive-tackle emeritus Jethro Pugh, yesterday’s big draw. Ed “Too Tall” Jones was scheduled earlier this morning, but he didn’t show. Former Cowboys safety Cliff Harris is due in two hours.
Rose is not grinning. “You don’t have one guy charging money for an autograph and two or three other guys signing for free,” he crabs. “I’m not used to doing shows where I don’t sell out. The only way you don’t sell me out is if you fuck it up.”
The West Texas Marine Dealers Association has indeed fucked it up. It has paid Rose $18,000 for 1,000 autographs—below his standard twenty grand but enough to get him here—and it’s charging the public only fifteen bucks per signature, five less, Rose says, than his own floor. So it has guaranteed itself a $3,000 loss, minimum, undercut the value of the only meal ticket Pete Rose has left, and just for humiliation’s sake, it is trotting out these retired Dallas Cowboys—each of whom, however obscure, is the local equivalent of the Lubavitcher rebbe—into the same barn where the “Hit King” is enthroned.
About fifty people wait behind a roped-off set of stairs for Rose to begin signing; in addition to the $5 admission fee at the main building, they’ve forked over the extra $15 at a small booth marked by a spray of balloons near the entrance and received a hand-numbered slip of paper good for one Pete Rose autograph. First in line is a woman cradling the generic bat she has brought for a colleague dying of cancer. Rose’s policy is name only, no personalization, but he adds “To Don, Good Luck” above his signature. He offers the boys his hand to squeeze, calls all the men “buddy” and lets folks snap his photo as they please. He seems downright cheerful now, until he realizes that the policeman flanking him isn’t collecting the $15 slips.
“You gotta keep the tickets, buddy,” Rose instructs in deliberately calm, measured tones, as if speaking to a toddler, “or they’ll get back in line again.”
The officer peers at him with knitted brow, and vacant eves. “Oh, raaht,” he says, finally, flushing. “Raaahht.”
With the first rush of business over, Rose is alone onstage with two hours left to sit, visited occasionally by a few treasure hunters and, just as often, by men his age or older, their faces weather-lined and boyishly shy, who want only to shake his hand and speak their awkward piece.
“When you gonna make your comeback?” asks one, a rangy gent in newly pressed Levi’s.
“This is my comeback.” Rose, seeing nothing to sign, looks down at the table.
“But when they gon’ putcha in the Hall of Fame, Pete?’
“I’m waitin’.” “Well, we are, too.” “It’s not up to me,” Rose reminds him. “Yeah, ah know.”
Like Rose, he has nowhere to go, nothing to do. Later he will climb behind the wheel of his pickup and plod home. For now he is content to stand a spell in front of Pete Rose and shift his cud from cheek to cheek. Rose fiddles with his pens, lining them up on the table, capping and uncapping them.
‘Well, so long, Pete,” the guy says after a long silence, ‘jest ain’t a Hall of Fame ‘thout you innit.” He heads slowly toward the stairs.
Rose turns to me. “People receive me, don’t they?” he asks. He sounds tired, plaintive. I have no idea what he means.
“People receive me, don’t they?” he repeats.
“Yes, I suppose they do.”
“Not only here, but where you been. They recognize me.”
They do the only justice left to him now, these old men who share the obliquity of their love in return for the singles and doubles he stroked back in 1965. Sitting in a tin shed with his silly cap, his $40,000 watch and gold bracelet, his police armada, his plane ticket back to Boca in his leather satchel, he can’t grasp the irony, although his eyes betray the sadness of it.
What happened to Pete Rose his 4,256 hits can’t undo; they can’t shake his naked craving for assurance, not only that he still exists but that he will never not exist. Whatever befell him, I can imagine nothing worse: to grow old 2,500 miles from wife and children, hungry for the passing love of strangers.
With an hour to go, he has signed exactly 227 autographs, and a marine dealers’ rep starts to haul up cases of balls and stacks of pictures for him to ink. They have paid him his fee, and, by God, they are going to get their 1,000 Pete Rose signatures.
Studio City, California. Here Pete’s wife, Carol, lives with 12-year-old Tyler and 7-year-old Cara. It is a fine house on a high-priced hill two turns off Ventura Boulevard, but nothing grand. The living room is enormous and completely devoid of furnishings. There is a pool out back, of course: this is L.A., where everyone outside of Compton and Pacoima has a pool out back. The most impressive thing about the Rose home is its landlord, Alex Trebek, who lives next door. “When something breaks, Alex comes over in work clothes and a Jeopardy! cap to fix it himself. Pete says Alex Trebek’s mother also lives on the block, in the house on the other side of Alex.
We are gathered before a sixty-inch television to view tapes of the golden-tressed Cara, a fetching and adorable survivor of the Jon-Benet Ramsey pageant circuit. Cara is a pro now: guest shots on Ellen, an Amtrak commercial, agent, acting coach, voice coach, fax machine on the kitchen counter to receive her scripts. She sits next to me on the ivory leather couch as we watch footage of her as a rouged and lipsticked 4-year-old Miss Tiny Tots contestant, slowly, slowly, slowly doing full splits in her silver spangles and white leotard. Her lush chestnut tresses frame a small, satin apple of a face; she has a sweet, easy smile and dewy, knowing angel’s eyes. She is, in short, terrifying. She is not jailbait; she is castration bait, Depo-Provera bait, short-eyes-gets-eviscerated-in-the-shower bait.
Snub-nosed, spike-haired Tyler also acts, and he plays catcher on his Little League team. He has a ring from Cooperstown, where his team won some kind of tournament. “He beat me there.” Pete says. “Can you believe that?” He sounds more miffed than proud.
As for Carol, she is tawny haired and leather booted, her spandex workout clothes packed top and bottom by the hand of God himself. She doesn’t scare me; I am drinking her in and wondering what happened to Pete Rose that makes him want to live 2,500 miles away in Boca Raton.
After the children go to bed, Pete inserts a tape of himself on Larry King Live. It is every bit as incisive and interesting as any of Larry King’s oeuvre. In the final segment, Tyler and Cara appear at Pete’s side, which, he tells me now, was the whole point of his appearance. “That helps me,” he says, “when people see my kids, how talented they are and how down-to-earth they are and how nice they are. And how confident they are.”
They are all that and more, and I silently forecast harrowing futures for them both. What happened to Pete Rose—his life and dreams, his present and future, all mortgaged to the past—is happening to his children, who haven’t lived his cursed, infamous life yet are the means of its redemption in his eyes. Like most of us, he does not, cannot, see the brutal, common imprisonment of legacy. His own father was a bank clerk who played semipro football into his forties and drove Pete to focus every fiber of self on making the major leagues. Pete’s own first-born son, Pete Junior, 27, has labored in the minor leagues for the past nine seasons in four different organizations without giving anyone reason to offer him a single at-bat in the majors. What happens to us, all of us, is, first of all, what happened to our fathers.
He bet, bet big, bet often, bet illegally, partnered with steroid-crazed gym rats, coke dealers, and ratfuck scum. Down $34,000 on college hoops in the winter of ’86, he left town on business; his runner switched bookies while Rose was away. A snafu ensued over the debt and its payoff, followed by a rebuffed blackmail threat directed at Rose—and that, according to Rose, is how the whole thing blew up. A runner took his tale—that Rose had bet on baseball, on his own team—to Sports Illustrated and to a new scholar-commissioner who wanted to earn his spurs.
Rose says he never bet on baseball—not on the Reds, not on any team. Did he? I don’t fucking know; no one will ever know. Which is why he must be presumed innocent until proved otherwise in a court of law where his accusers aren’t also his judge and jury; precisely why he has no burden of proof to meet. Rose could have taken another route, tested Giamatti’s mettle and the strength of his case and the power of his office; instead he signed the agreement. It was all he could hope for, he says now: no finding that he bet on the game and a shot at reinstatement.
“Three days later, the son of a bitch dies,” Rose growls. “The son of a bitch dies, and everybody forgets all about the agreement.”
Even if you don’t believe him, don’t love baseball, don’t like Pete Rose, it’s a sour thing to hear him say that he goes to Cooperstown each summer on the weekend of induction to sign autographs for the pilgrims on Friday and Saturday and skips town before the ceremonies on Sunday. Even if you don’t believe in justice, it’s agony to hear him tell about the halfway house—he spent three months there after the five in Marion—where he bunked with paroled rapists and murderers and found himself taunted and pushed around, even by the house staff. They even stole his clothes.
“I kept my mouth shut,” he says, each word a drop of lye. “I didn’t complain. I didn’t bitch. But I shouldn’ta went. It was wrong.”
It was wrong, what happened to Pete Rose. But there is no justice, only irony. Which brings us, finally, to what happened to young Fosse.
“I started to go headfirst,” Rose begins, rising from his chair, coming at me, big and fit and strong, the cask of his chest and his arms hewn of oak, “but he had home plate blocked. So I’m comin’ in from third base, and this is home plate, and I’m comin’ this way, and he’s standin’ like this”—he turns and crouches, Fosse was waiting for the throw, his legs astride the base line. “Now why in the hell am I gonna slide into home plate? My knee hit his shoulder, here. If I go headfirst, I’m gonna break both my collarbones. People don’t know that. All they know is they think I ruined his career.”
Ach. Something happened to Pete Rose, a man as hard as a spear of boned ash: he gambled and lost, came to bat more often than anyone in baseball history, and never once connected with another human being. He has a restaurant somewhere.
SR: Out of all the different performing arts, stand-up to me is by far the most fascinating — the idea of one human being standing up and the audience saying, “Okay, kill me.” And you have lived that life for years.
SS: I can’t believe how much time has passed. The first time I did stand-up I was 17, and I was really a stand-up once I was 19 in New York, and now I’m 41, and I still feel like I haven’t found myself onstage. Earlier in my career, I was really tight, really together, and knew who I was and I was confident. I kind of feel in between now.
SR: Is that because you’re taking on other jobs and not doing as much stand-up?
SS: I’m doing a lot of stand-up, but not like when you’re living in New York and you can do three sets a night and it’s your life, and you sleep all day and you wake up and you eat with a bunch of other comics and then get ready for the night. I’m doing it a couple times a week at least, but I’m still just finding myself, you know? I don’t think I’ll ever feel done. I’ve realized that being beholden to some sort of character you found success in just makes you a caricature of yourself. I feel bad naming names because it’s not their fault, but there are great, famous ’80s comedians — Dice comes to mind — who found wild success and now still go on the road, and they want to kill and they want to give the audience what they want because that’s inherently a comedian’s desire. So he puts on the jacket, you know? To not grow and change and be so different from 20 years ago, to still be in that place because you’re afraid? It gives the audience what they want, what they’re expecting, but it’s not current. I wish those comics would take the chance to be who they are now onstage. You have to be willing to disappoint the audience for a while.
I don’t expect this series to be settled in fewer than six games. Both teams are strong and fast and athletic. I’m pulling for OKC big time–though I wouldn’t mind seeing James continue his fine play–but think Miami has a strong chance to win it.
Pressed, I’ll give it to OCK in seven. But it could go either way.
SR: Your Second City teacher/mentor Del Close is a guy I’ve never read enough about. What was it that made him so influential?
BM: Well, he was a guy who had great knowledge of the craft of improvisation. And he lived life in a very rich manner, to excess sometimes. He had a whole lot of brain stuck inside of his skull. Beyond being gifted, he really engaged in life. He earned a lot. He made more of himself than he was given. Came out of Manhattan, Kansas, and ended up hanging out with the Beats. He was incredibly gracious to your talent and always tried to further it. He got people to perform beyond their expectations. He really believed that anyone could do it if they were present and showed respect. There was a whole lot of respect.
SR: Sounds like a great teacher.
BM: He taught lots and lots of people very effectively. He taught people to commit. Like: “Don’t walk out there with one hand in your pocket unless there’s somethin’ in there you’re going to bring out.” You gotta commit. You’ve gotta go out there and improvise and you’ve gotta be completely unafraid to die. You’ve got to be able to take a chance to die. And you have to die lots. You have to die all the time. You’re goin’ out there with just a whisper of an idea. The fear will make you clench up. That’s the fear of dying. When you start and the first few lines don’t grab and people are going like, “What’s this? I’m not laughing and I’m not interested,” then you just put your arms out like this and open way up and that allows your stuff to go out. Otherwise it’s just stuck inside you.
…SR: Did you and Bruce Willis get along on the set of Moonrise Kingdom?
BM: I got along great with Bruce Willis. He’s different, though. He’s rolled as a movie star for a long time, so it’s a little different for him coming into Wes Anderson’s world, where no one gets movie-star treatment. Life really does change when you go on one of Wes’s films — you gotta sit back and relax. But Bruce absolutely delivered. He was really game. It was like, Let’s play. Sometimes you get people that don’t want to play — they just want to perform, to act. He’s a movie star, I’ve been a movie star — we don’t have to take this so seriously. So we’d play. We’d goof up a take just for the fuck of it. He delivers one of the biggest laughs of any movie I’ve ever been in. And it really took a movie star to do it. The casting of Bruce was perfect. This movie is really funny. This movie’s gonna be big. Big.
“The Whore of Akron” is a funny, personal, and moving story, a must-read. Scott and I chatted recently about writing, the book, and LeBron James.
Dig in.
BB: You’ve been writing for decades yet “The Whore of Akron” is your first book. Before we get to that, I’d like to talk about your career. Loved the piece you wrote on your blog a few months ago where you talked about what it takes to be a writer. About endurance being a talent.
SR: I talk to people half your age who start whining that they don’t have time to write and I say, ‘Don’t worry about it — you’re obviously not a writer.’ They don’t like hearing that. They actually think they’re entitled to some kind of pity, self- and otherwise. It’s the weirdest thing in the world to me, not because I think I have any big answers but if you really find yourself saying, ‘I don’t have time to write,’ and you’re not feeding four mouths…It’s not like I knew Ray Carver, but from what I know about him the reason he wrote short stories is, first he wasn’t ever sober, but he also had two screaming youngsters and so he’d write in his car. Either you find a way or you find something else that seems more doable. But endurance is a talent.
BB: This blog, Bronx Banter, helped me fight a sense of entitlement. I set it up in such a way that I was forced to show up every day.
SR: And anyone who doesn’t think that’s a huge part of it is deluding themselves.
BB: Showing up every day.
SR: Yes. Putting one foot in front of the other. It took me decades to learn this. And that’s fine. If you don’t learn that, it doesn’t matter how talented you are, because without this talent, of endurance, what difference does it make? Nobody finds you at the soda fountain; it almost never happens. And the journalists it does happen to, like Stephen Glass, Ruth Shalit, Jayson Blair — these are people who, after early success, couldn’t follow through. They didn’t have the chops. They made shit up and committed career suicide.
BB: Is there a difference between talent and intelligence?
SR: Certainly intelligence is a tool, a crucial tool. You have to take in large amounts of material, including human material, and construct some sort of narrative. That requires focus and intelligence. But if you are missing endurance, again, it doesn’t matter how intelligent you might be. In the wake of the LeBron book, I’ve dealt with so-called journalists who have told me, ‘I don’t have time to transcribe a tape so I’m going to send you questions via e-mail.’ They say, “You have until Friday,” and so I say, “Then you have until Friday to transcribe a fucking tape.” I’ve also heard, “I don’t have trustworthy recording equipment.” Then you’re not a real journalist, so don’t waste my fucking time.
BB: When did you start writing pieces for magazines?
SR: I started at GQ in ’92 and got my first contract in ’93. David Granger was a GQ feature editor then. Granger was my big break because he was the one editor in New York who was willing to assign long stories to writers who hadn’t already published long pieces in magazines in New York. So Granger was exactly the right guy at exactly the right time for me. I was still selling columns for $40 to a weekly—when they wanted them—and I was almost 41 when I signed that first contract with GQ. I was never a newspaper guy, I was a creative writing guy.
BB: And you had written fiction at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, right?
SR: I’d published fiction. I had a literary agent. But I wasn’t prolific and wasn’t some young Phillip Roth or William Faulkner. I was a solid fiction writer with problems. Lifestyle problems. And it turns out I needed the structure that a relationship with an editor provides.
BB: And early on with Granger was he doing macro editing with you or micro stuff like line edits?
SR: Alex, if you need line-editing help you don’t ever get a contract. I mean, seriously. If the relationship with the editor is based on line editing—
BB: –You’re screwed.
SR: You don’t even get there. Why would a guy like Granger waste his time with that stuff? I hate to sound grandiose, but at that level it’s about relationship, and envisioning stories, about building trust that you’ll deliver the goods and you won’t fuck the editor in terms of expense account bullshit. It’s business, basically. But it’s also has a strong therapeutic connection in terms of the mentor-mentee relationship for me. Not because I was wet behind the ears but because I didn’t understand what the whole process was.
BB: If part of what you have know to be writing for a major magazine is how to maintain expense accounts and the business end of things, how were you able to do that when you were so fucked up on booze and drugs at the time?
SR: I’m trying to put this the right way…
BB: Is it a matter of being what they call a functioning alcoholic?
SR:Look at your dad. People can do enormous harm to themselves, those who depend on them, and their careers and still function at a really high level. I was a high-hopes-but-low-expectations guy. When you grew up the way I grew up, when you come out of Cleveland State, there weren’t high expectations. I got into Iowa when I was in my thirties and I knew it was really important. I didn’t into the program at Stamford and I didn’t get into the program at Irvine so when I got into Iowa I went in with a strong sense of affirmation and ambition. It never occurred to me that I’d be a magazine writer. I just wanted to compete against the kids that went to school with me. They weren’t from Cleveland State. They’d gone to Sarah Lawrence or Yale.
BB: You were older than a lot of your classmates but did you have an inferiority complex?
SR: You could say that but I don’t think I’m the most accurate judge of that. I know I was very nervous but it wasn’t skittish nervous it was more like I knew what a tremendous opportunity I had. I don’t think I ever operate out of the sense of mastery or security but I don’t know anybody else who does either. I don’t think of it as an inferiority complex. I don’t think that I ever looked at writing for Granger as anything less than a total miracle. That doesn’t imply an inferiority complex; I think it implies a firm grasp of what was going on. All of a sudden you meet a guy who wants you to write in your own voice and wants you to do the kinds of stories that don’t feel safe to most magazine editors and it was like, “Wow, this is the greatest thing in the world.” People ask me if I still write fiction. Of course not. I work really hard at trying to be good at writing what I’m writing. If fiction were that important to me I’d find time to do it. I think fiction is harder and I don’t mean that what I’m doing is easy; to me, it’s not. But writing fiction you have to supply almost everything and the payoff is not so good both in terms of numbers of readers and money. I’ve always looked at meeting Granger and what followed as being beyond my wildest dreams. So things like fudging expense accounts to make a few hundred dollars more seemed absurd to me. No matter how far gone I might have been in terms of my lifestyle, I wasn’t that stupid and greedy.
BB: So when did the idea for this book—
SR: Yeah, I thought we were going to talk about the book.
BB: I know you started working on it during LeBron’s final year with the Cavaliers.
SR: I started after they lost to Orlando in the Eastern Conference Finals. For many years at Esquire I wrote a column, didn’t even have my name on it, where I answered questions, general questions. A guy wrote in and asked, “Is it illegal to flip off a cop or just stupid?” Turned out this guy worked for the Cavs. I wasn’t thinking about doing a book when I got the e-mail; I was thinking maybe this guy could get me tickets. I reached out to him—I was going to do his question anyway because it was good for the column—but it was clear after a couple of games in the Orlando series that it wasn’t going to end well for the Cavs. And that was the Cavs team that I really thought could and would go all the way. I got really bummed out. But I figured that they’re going into the next season with Lebron in his walk year, the coach and the general manager in their walk years, with an owner who doesn’t mind paying the luxury tax — it was all or nothing and I thought it would make a fascinating book. They ended up winning 61 games that year. They’d won 66 the year before. They lost in the second round to the Celtics and then Lebron declared free agency.
BB: So you didn’t know that the book would extend into the following season?
SR: No, no, I was looking to write the happy book.
BB: And was part of that happy book your experiences as a Clevelander and Jew?
SR: Not at all. That wasn’t even part of it after Lebron’s decision to go to Miami. Honestly. I don’t know what I’m going to do when I sit down and start writing. I don’t plan things out. I don’t go in blind, of course. But with the Cavs, after the Decision, after the book deal, I thought that the book would be full of interviews, a collection of a lot of Cleveland voices, and that’d be the spine of the book. I wasn’t thinking of that in a hard and fast way but I had whole lists of people to talk to.
BB: Like the wonderful scene of you in the black barbershop.
SR: Well, I needed a black guy to talk with about LeBron and race. And I asked some prominent black guys. I didn’t know Jimmy Israel very well but we were Facebook friends. I knew I couldn’t avoid the subject of race. That didn’t feel honest to me. But the other black writers I asked didn’t know me; some of them didn’t bother to reply and the ones who did said no. I realized, from talking to the guys who did turn me down, that what I was asking of them was essentially unfair. They didn’t know me. I offered them editorial control but the title of the book was already “The Whore of Akron.” As one guy put it to me, “You’re basically asking me to participate in a witch hunt.” That was a legitimate objection. Jimmy’s a Cleveland guy, a great writer, and he taught me a lot.
BB: So in the course of Lebron’s first season in Miami, you’re down there, writing about what’s going on for Esquire, you’re tweeting about what’s going on, were you also writing the book?
SR: I started going to Miami in September of 2010 and started writing the book a few months later, in January 2011. It was not clear to me at that point where the book would be going. I had a deadline and I needed to start getting stuff down but I hadn’t figured anything out at that point.
BB: When did you figure out the structure of the book, where you go back-and-forth between what’s doing with Lebron and the memoir stuff develop?
SR: It was organic. It’s not as conscious as it might seem. In addition to working on the book I also had a big 9/11 piece for Esquire closing in the summer. So I had to de-stress about the book. I don’t often use inspirational slogans but I did use one while I was writing the book. It came from Bob Wickman, the fat closer the Indians had for a couple of years. He said, “You gotta trust your stuff.”
BB: That’s like in “Tender Mercies” the Robert Duvall character says, “Sing it like you feel it.”
SR: That’s right. By the time July rolled around I took a place in the city and moved in for a month. I would go to the HarperCollins office in the morning and revise the manuscript starting at the beginning using the notes I got from my editors, David Hirshey and Barry Harbaugh. Then I would go back to the place I was staying at and work on the ending. Part of me looks at what I do as a plumber. A tradesman with a craft. And at some point in the process an editor realizes that you know what you’re doing. Structurally. So their notes were extensive and important but there weren’t structural issues. There were tonal and practical ones. There were points where I would start pontificating, especially about racial aspects of the story, and there were whole swaths of material that just had to go. I never had a problem with that. I’m really coachable as long as I trust the editor.
BB: One of the first reactions I had when I was reading was to a couple of jokes about Art Modell. Where you had these rim-shot putdown jokes. And I wondered if that was going to be what the book was, more and more outrageous gags.
SR: That’s a legitimate concern.
BB: I didn’t know if you would end up humping one note but then it didn’t go that way. You talk about tone. Did you have sensitivity that on some level you were coming across as being outrageous and not to overdo that at the risk of maybe losing some of the readers?
SR: I’m not sure. I know I lost a few people. Mostly, it’s been well-received but there are certainly people who thought—whether it was the Modell stuff or the Lebron stuff—that it was overdone. I wasn’t hyper-conscious of it. I’m not that conscious of readers. I’m conscious of editors; I want to please them. But it’s an internal process. It’s just a subject—Cleveland sports—about which I feel the kind of passion that I don’t really feel about almost anything. I don’t mean my family. But my relationship to those teams defines me in the same way that being a Jew defines me or being a man defines me. It’s at a profound level. I remember doing a piece on David Cone in the late ‘90s, fun guy, smart guy, and he told me—not that he was the first guy to say it—that “You’ve got to learn to take a few miles an hour off the fastball.” If you try to throw harder in a pressure situation it backfires. You want to change speeds. So I’m conscious of that, not in particular relation to the book but in general.
BB: You reminded me of Mel Brooks in the book. I mean that in the best way.
SR: Even if you meant it in the worst way I’d be honored by that comparison.
BB:I was never offended by your outrage. I accepted it, like I do with Mel Brooks. This is what it is, it’s over-the-top. This is the shtick. And for all of the outrageousness there is also a sense of restraint in this book. And it made me wonder if you would have been able to do that, 15 or 20 years ago.
SR: I couldn’t have done it. It goes back to David Hirshey, my senior editor at HarperCollins. Nobody was excited about the prospect of the Happy LeBron Book unless I could deliver the impossible, which was access to Lebron. Once that season ended with the loss to the Celtics, I said to my wife, “That was a fun year at sports fantasy camp, I spent a few grand, but I had a great time. There ain’t going to be any book, and I’m okay with that.”
I was more upset that Lebron left. So I was blogging the countdown to free agency for Esquire.com and Deadspin was also running it simultaneously. Then Hirshey got in touch with my agent, David Black. I’d never met Hirshey but he was willing to give a book deal to a guy who’d never written a book, wasn’t going to get access to the subject of the book, and was writing these venomous blog posts about LeBron. How many book editors would do that? I was at the right place at the right time. Again.
BB: Well, if you’re not going to get access you’re the perfect guy to do a story because you don’t give a shit. Was there any time during the process that you were afraid that LeBron, or one of his people was going to walk up to you and punch you in the face?
SR: That was one of my mother’s concerns. But that’s really movie-script stuff. Can you imagine what the results would have been? Obviously, it could have, and still could, potentially happen, I suppose. But: please do. I truly don’t give a shit. It has nothing to do with courage. I grew up reading National Lampoon magazine and they were brutal. And Hunter Thompson was filing for Rolling Stone and he was brutal. I didn’t think of either as role models, I just thought of them as great reads. A lot of my attitude toward LeBron or the media relations at the NBA or the Heat was like, “Fuck you, I don’t give a shit.”
BB: So you didn’t feel any shame or have any reservations about calling the guy out as a scumbag?
SR: I understand that if you’re working for a newspaper and you’re on a beat and you’re tweeting something like that a guy you’re going to get fired. I get that. I had to dial it back because I wasn’t thinking about the reflection on Esquire. It’s not as I didn’t make my share of mistakes, but they didn’t involve plagiarism or putting off the record stuff on the record. Professional breaches by today’s standards, yes. Ethical breaches? No. And we’re not talking about weapons of mass destruction or climate change or the corner grocery selling tainted meat. It’s a fucking basketball player. There were some people who thought I was stalking him because their understanding of reporting is that dim. I don’t cheer in the press box. I don’t get in a beat guy’s way. Ever. I’m very aware of protocol. And also very aware that if a magazine or book writer comes off like if he’s a big shot, he’s an asshole. I consciously try to avoid those kinds of behaviors.
BB: Is there ever point where your persona as the outraged Cleveland sports fan becomes a put-on?
SR: No. Isn’t that weird? A lot of the stuff that got taken out of the book was removed because it was violent. You know, stuff like seeing LeBron at media day and wanting to fracture his skull with one of the folding chairs. I’m the guy who wrote the book; I’m not just the guy in the book. There is a difference. But it’s only germane when you’re talking to another writer; it has nothing to do with putting on that costume of the outraged Cleveland fan. I am a totally outraged Cleveland fan.
BB: And yet you do put it in perspective.
SR: When you get a certain age, you realize that when you are feeling that inflamed by something outside of you, there’s something inside you going on. The other part is I had a lot of people call me a hater. That’s a very popular word now. How could I not be a monster if I was wishing a career-ending injury on a fine young athlete? There are a lot of answers to that. But I took the question seriously and tried to figure it out in the book.
I talked to Dwayne Wade on Media Day for a fashion spread in Esquire. And afterward I saw LeBron at the podium with Wade and Chris Bosh and responded viscerally to that, and then went to a family bar mitzvah and wondered, “Why am I so furious, why does it get to this level with me?” Part of what I realized—and it didn’t crystallize until I was doing the writing—was that at a fairly young age I shut down in terms of family. I didn’t like my people, I didn’t trust my people. I was angry and I felt abandoned. Nobody was paying attention to my pain, and on and on and on. Cleveland was a great city then. I wasn’t a sinkhole of despair, it wasn’t a joke. The Browns, in particular, were very good. They weren’t quite the Yankees, but from the late ‘40s through the mid ‘60s, they were a paragon of consistency and excellence. The city and those teams replaced my family in my heart.
BB: You also tap into something that goes on with every fan. When I watch the Yanks play the Red Sox, and I’m heated, I want each hitter to line a ball of Josh Beckett’s leg and send him to the hospital, even though I know that’s completely irrational.
SR: If you want to call yourself a fan by my standards, of course you felt that, even if you never wrote it. I don’t think it’s unique to Philly, Cleveland or New York. I’ve been in stadiums elsewhere where the home fans cheer their own player getting hurt because they just don’t want to see him fucking up on the field anymore.
BB: As far as realizing that at a point if you are getting that enraged over a sporting event do you feel, well, this is just the way I am or do you say, I don’t need to be this way anymore?
SR: There is a real chasm between intellect and emotion. Thinking or realizing something isn’t the same as actuating it. But the fans I understand the least are the people who don’t have a team to get worked up about. I get it, but I don’t get it. Why do they bother? It’s the other side of the insanity of being over-committed. I’d prefer the self-destruction to not caring much about a team.
BB: I like the quote you used from Viktor Frankl. That sums up why you do root for a team. Because something can happen. And you having a hope for it happening means you are alive — not necessarily the victory.
SR: I would like the victory, Alex. It’s like at the end of “The Unforgiven” when Clint Eastwood tells Little Bill, “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.” Apparently not.
BB: Talk to me about “Dayenu” for a second because I’ve been singing the song in my head for days now.
SR: It’s one of those things where the repetition and melody of it can transport you. You sing praise to God that if he had merely freed you from Pharaoh’s bondage that would have been enough. If the Cleveland Indians of 1954 had set the record that stood until the Yankees of 1998—they won 111 out of 154 games and then lost 4 straight to the Giants in the World Series—and won the Series, it would have been awful enough. The Drive. The Shot. The Fumble. The Browns moving. Each would have been bad enough alone. Each of the Cleveland franchises have built teams that were good enough, at least in paper, to win a championship. Any of those happening would have been heartbreak enough. Which is the inversion of the Dayenu thing.
BB: The other thing that occurred to me as the book went on is that it wasn’t just a tirade against LeBron, it wasn’t flip, but a very moral book in a lot of ways.
SR: I totally agree with you, but it came as a big surprise to me. And I’m not trying to be coy. I didn’t know where it was going. I think it’s an odd book. It’s like a Swiss Army Knife kind of book.
BB: It sounded like you even had pity for LeBron.
SR: I do have pity for the guy and it’s not disingenuous. There’s a certain point between fathers and sons when things are nice. I had that with my dad before my parents split up. You think all is right with the world because you’re in the presence of this all-powerful, all-knowing guy. I was old enough to feel that with my father. LeBron had none of that. Nothing. And that’s something to really feel pity for. Because you can miss the shit out of that and it can hurt a lot, but LeBron never even got that. Everyone remembers when LeBron said they weren’t only going to win seven or eight rings but in the same clip he also talked about how easy it was going to be, so easy that Pat Riley could come back and play point guard. Dwayne Wade is sitting next to him, looking sideways at him and Wade was not smiling. Have you ever heard any athlete in any sport or anyone in any profession talk about easy it was to get to the top? It’s insane. Most of us, even poor black guys without dads, have at least had someone in our life saying, “You are going to have to work for every fucking thing you get. I don’t care how good you are. You’re going to have to be a whole lot more than just good.” Maybe James gets it now. But that piece really seems to be missing in him.
BB: Did you have an awareness of being critical of yourself if you were going to be critical of James?
SR: It’s not conscious. I’m not paragon of 12-step sobriety, but part of trying to live a more honest life is self-examination and not just throwing stones at other people.
BB: Cause then you would come across as a hater. If you were only ragging on him.
SR: Of course.
BB: Another thing I liked is that you didn’t over-examine some of the game action, which came as a relief. That stuff can be deadly to read.
SR: And to write, Alex.
BB: By the end of the book, the fact that your boy gets sick is more important so as a reader, the book shifts to you as much as it is about James.
SR: I care deeply about what I do, about putting one word after another, and I think it’s a miracle that the book turned out as well as it did, or that I had such a good time with it. With a magazine piece, I usually want to keep tinkering with it, change the lede over and over, but I didn’t have the time here. So it’s a fucking miracle. I’m not a big fan of my stuff. I rarely go back and read my stuff, because I see places where I needed to do better work. I haven’t had time to go back and read the book, but I knew that when I was writing it that it was going to be good. I was happy with it because there was no way that I could have spent six more months on it and made it better. I only would have made it worse. Despite the weirdness of dealing with interviews and publicists and trying to sell copies, the feeling is still great and I’ve never felt anything like it.
BB: Probably because you don’t hate yourself.
SR: No, I don’t. And it’s funny how it all came together. If LeBron declares free agency the way every other star declares free agency there’s no book deal. It’s a strange series of events — amazing, really.
BB: He stays in Cleveland you don’t write the book that you wrote, you don’t write a loving tribute to Cleveland sports fans or write about yourself. So in a way, LeBron is the gift that keeps giving.
SR: That’s absolutely true. Irony can be cheapened in all kinds of ways but in this way it was kind of pure.
BB: I have to ask because this interview will appear on a Yankee-related site. You wrote an Esquire story on Alex Rodriguez that is famous for causing a rift between Rodriguez and Derek Jeter. How is Lebron different from A Rod?
SR: Alex is a much more self-aware, savvy guy compared to LeBron. As brilliant as Alex was at an early age, he was not anointed the Chosen One by Sports Illustrated when he was sixteen. He didn’t have Michael Jordan flying him to camp when he was a teenager. If you look at Alex’s post-season numbers career-wise they are in line with his regular season numbers. I think it’s perfectly fair, especially as a Yankees fan, to point the finger at him. He’s fair game. But I’ve never seen an athlete of Alex or LeBron’s caliber do what LeBron did last year in the Finals. James single-handedly cost the Heat the title last year. Before the games, there was LeBron giving the pre-game speech to his team after tweeting about how he couldn’t sleep. It’s so different from anything A-Rod has ever done. And LeBron’s performance was bizarre. In an elimination game, he was throwing passes to Mario Chalmers and Juan Howard. He’s the most unstoppable force in the game, but the Mavericks were totally inside his head. Being the Clevelander I am, I kept expecting LeBron to realize that he’s playing with Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh—who played very well—and I was sure the Heat were going to wake up and smack the Mavericks down. I was amazed that even with Nowitzki shooting horribly in Game 6, the Mavericks looked nothing other than supremely confident. The Heat never looked like anything but scared rabbits.
BB: Well, as a true Clevelander, even if it didn’t happen last year don’t you think that whether it is this year or next year, eventually LeBron will get his act together and he’ll win that championship?
SR: That’s one of those head or heart questions. Eventually, sure, he’s young enough. But he’s also got a lot of miles on him. And I don’t think he truly cares and I know he doesn’t work as hard as he says he does. Kobe Bryant does. I remember sitting with Shaq once and he told me about how obsessive Kobe was about working. And Shaq admits that he himself was never that way. Kobe is willing to work relentlessly. That certainly was true of Michael, too. I think Alex Rodriguez is fanatical too. He’s driven. But I don’t think that helps him come playoff time. But LeBron is better at talking about this stuff than actually doing it.
BB: LeBron is having a great year so far. Do you think he’s turned the corner, learned something since last year? Or is that something that can only be answered come June?
SR: What corner? He’s a two-time league MVP, and he should’ve won it again last season. He’s the best pure basketball player I’ve ever seen, an other-worldly talent, and he has become a complete head case in the post-season. He always had an issue with managing pressure when he was on the Cavs, and he’s fallen apart as a crunch-time player if the other team doesn’t just fold up and surrender. And everyone in the NBA knows it now. We won’t find out until June if LeBron has found a heart.
Anyone, especially in his or her twenties, saying ‘I have no time to write’ because of a job or anything else is full of crap. Writers write. If you can’t find time to write, don’t worry about becoming a writer. You’re not a writer. You’ll never be a writer. Find something else that lights you up.
Same with reading. Anybody who has no time to read isn’t a writer. All the work necessary to learn how to write boils down to reading and writing. This is not subtle or nuanced advice, obviously. I stress it here because of how often I talk to people who seem to think there’s a shortcut. I know no shortcuts. Luck counts, yes. Connections, too. But luck and connections won’t help if you’re not a good enough writer to take advantage of them.
The other factor is endurance. Endurance is a talent. Without endurance, I don’t think other talents mean much, not in a profession as uncertain as writing. Almost without exception, the chances to earn money and recognition come slow. If they do come quick, endurance is still required to build a career. The few writers I know who found relatively early success and kept it going weren’t just good writers; they worked even harder after making their bones.
When he was twelve-years-old, Scott Raab saw the Cleveland Browns win the championship game. He was there, in person. No Cleveland team has won a title since, and Raab’s new book, “The Whore of Akron: One Man’s Search for the Soul of Lebron James,” is partly about being a Jew and a Clevelander and it is about noble suffering.
This is a good bit:
I know: it’s only a game. But what a game. The Colts were 7-point favorites, on the road. Coached by thirty-four-year-old Don Shula–drafted by the Browns after going to college in Cleveland–they boasted the league’s best offense, with six future Hall of Famers, led by Johnny U at quarterback–and the NFL’s best defense. But Unitas threw two picks into the wind. Dr. Ryan tossed three TDs, and Jim Brown gained 114 yards. The Browns won, 27-0.
The official attendance that day was 79, 544, and not one of them would’ve believed that he’d never live to see another Cleveland team win a championship.
The Cuyahoga River catching fire?
Maybe.
Fish by the thousands washing up dead on Lake Erie’s shore?
Possible.
Cleveland a national joke?
Not bloody likely.
But the notion that generation after generation of Cleveland fans could be born and grown old and die without celebrating a title?
Get the fuck outta here.
I was there. I saw it happen. It gave me an abiding sense of faith–in my town and its teams–that will never fade, that no amount of hurt and heartbreak can destroy. All those fucking Yankees fans are absolutely right. Flags fly forever. Forever.
It turns out the Heat have printed three covers of tonight’s program — one with Wade, one with Bosh, one with James. I take one of each.
On his cover, LeBron glares into the camera, head lowered, eyes hooded, tight-lipped, his thick white headband riding ever higher on his forehead as his hairline approaches oblivion. He stands with his hands on his hips, with his shoulders thrust forward, the visual embodiment of his summertime tweet:
“Don’t think for one min that I haven’t been taking mental notes of everyone taking shots at me this summer. And I mean everyone!”
He’s ready to wreak havoc upon the NBA. No prisoners. Blood on the hardwood. Mano a mano. If your name’s on Bron-Bron’s list, you’re going down hard as a motherfucker.
That’s the pose. I think back to a game his rookie season, against the Indiana Pacers, when NBA tough guy Ron Artest was mugging James as he fought for position to take an inbounds pass. Artest had an arm across LeBron’s upper chest and neck and a leg planted between James’s knees bowing him forward. Paul Silas was coaching the Cavs, and Silas came up off the bench screaming — first at the nearest referee for not calling a foul on Artest, and then at LeBron for letting Artest unman him.
James has grown stronger and smarter over his seven seasons in the league, but he still tries to finesse defenders like Artest. His game has never hungered for a battle, much less marked him as the cruel-eyed enforcer who glares out from the program’s cover.
I admire Wright Thompson for many reasons, chiefly his talents as a reporter and his ambition as a bonus piece writer, but his most recent article is a bloated and self-important piece on James’ return to Cleveland. It brings out Thompson’s worst quality, all too often, he WRITES FOR THE AGES, and in the process he gets in the way of the story.
This Blog would like to state for the record how tired it has become of the city of Cleveland, and its basketball team, and its basketball fans, and anything to do with how all of the above had their poor widdle hearts broken last summer when a player decided that seven years was long enough for anyone to play basketball in Cleveland. (And no more bellyaching about The Decision, either. Had The Decision gone the other way, and had he announced that he was staying, nobody in Cleveland would have been clutching their pearly about the good taste of it all.) This also goes for everyone else in every other city — including this one — who has been wailing the Ich bin ein Clevelander blues all season. Not one of you really cares about Cleveland or its basketball fans. Do not assume everyone in your audience is as dumb as a rock.
