Tom Scoccatag:www.tomscocca.com,2008-02-01://12010-02-27T19:07:14ZMovable Type Personal 4.1Pete Hamill on Willie Mays: The Say What? Kidtag:www.tomscocca.com,2010://1.1682010-02-27T18:44:57Z2010-02-27T19:07:14ZTom
writes in the New York Times Book Review, "but not to sentimentality, which is always a lie about the past."
This is Pete Hamill's fake apology for the first few hundred words of his review of Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend, by James S. Hirsch, in which the reviewer blathers on and on about the Brooklyn Dodgers, a team Willie Mays did not play for, and about his own childhood in the most authentic borough of the most authentic city at the most authentic moment in the whole history of humankind:
My father took me to my first ballgame at Ebbets Field in 1946. I went with my own friends one June day in 1947, just before my 12th birthday, and saw Jackie Robinson in his first brave season, saw him get hit by a pitch, then steal second, then drive the pitcher nuts with his jittery feints, and then score on a single. And heard the gigantic roar from all the Brooklyn tribes. Bed-Stuy was joined at last with Bensonhurst and Park Slope, Flatbush and Bay Ridge.
(Jackie Robinson, it might be noted, was also not Willie Mays.)
"Dem Bums"? Check. Bitterness at the loss of the Dodgers? Check. But eventually, Hamill does turn to the New York Giants outfielder who is the subject of the book he is supposed to be reviewing. And there, even by his own forgiving standard, lying sentimentality carries the day:
Above all, the story of Willie Mays reminds us of a time when the only performance-enhancing drug was joy.
Really, Pete Hamill? Really? If you were a 12-year-old boy in 1947, then math says that you can't possibly be a 12-year-old boy anymore. Luckily, in the intervening decades, people invented the Internet. Try Googling "Willie Mays" and "red juice." ]]>
Domestic Theater: Facilitated Communicationtag:www.tomscocca.com,2010://1.1672010-02-21T19:20:59Z2010-02-21T19:36:25ZTom
Dramatis personae:
CHILD, aged two years, eight months
MOTHER
FATHER [A bedrooom, in early afternoon, with blinds drawn. The CHILD lies on a bed, holding a blanket, almost but not quite still. The MOTHER sits on the couch by the window, reading a newspaper.]
[The door opposite the couch opens slightly. The FATHER sticks his head through the opening.]
FATHER (in a whisper): What kind of tea do you want?
CHILD (suddenly sitting upright, also in a whisper): What kind of tea do you want, Mommy?
James Madison was a little man, the guide said in the parlor of Montpelier, and he was "well-known for his risque antidotes." Malapropisms aside, the Madison tour was the most informative and energetic of the weekend's tours--an acknowledgment of or compensation for Montpelier's odd status: while Mount Vernon and Monticello have been shrines to their illustrious owners for more than a century, Montpelier was a private DuPont mansion till the 1980s.
It was 2003 before the Montpelier Foundation decided to restore the building to the way it had been when Madison owned it, which meant getting rid of all subsequent additions. When the work was finished in 2008, the house was half the size it had been, the exterior had been stripped of a 150-year-old coat of stucco, and the inside was bare.
Touring the new-old building feels less like stepping back in time (or stepping into a museum exhibit) than like walking through a real-estate open house--less retrospective than prospective. This air of absence makes the fourth president seem more mythic than his taller, more thoroughly enshrined fellow Virginians.
The walls in the parlor are plain splotchy plaster; a new batch of wallpaper, the flocked red-velvet chosen by Dolley Madison, is supposed to be manufactured in France this coming summer. Paintings or reproductions of paintings fill some of the wall space, among them a bare-breasted Mary Magdalene recognizable from the parlor at Monticello. The Magdalene now at Jefferson's house, the guide said, is Madison's original, while Madison's house has to make do with a copy.
A near-empty room upstairs, on the front of the house, has a corner fireplace and a single bookcase with adjustable shelves, built by slave carpenters. This was Madison's father's library, where the younger Madison drafted up a plan for a government with three branches and a bicameral legislature.
Like Washington and Jefferson, Madison married a widow. He had no children of his own; over the course of his life, he secretly spent $40,000 to pay off the gambling debts of his alcoholic stepson.
Downstairs is Madison's study, where he spent his final year, too crippled by arthritis to go up to his bedchamber. A life-cast of the elderly Madison, rendered as a bust in Roman garb, stands by the window, frowning over the room. When he was dying in the summer of 1836, the guide said, doctors offered to prolong things so he could die on a Fourth of July, as Jefferson, John Adams, and James Monroe had died. He declined the opportunity and stopped breathing on June 28, with a smile on his face.
Madison's final scene was witnessed by Paul Jennings, an enslaved servant, who recounted it in a memoir published in 1865. (All three presidential-estate tours favored the adjectival "enslaved" construction, as in "his enslaved butler," over the noun "slave.") After James Madison's death, Dolley Madison sold Jennings. He was then bought for $120 by Daniel Webster and freed, after which Jennings worked for Webster and paid back the sale price in installments over the course of 15 months.
Later in life, Jennings wrote, he often visited Dolley Madison--living by then in a "state of absolute poverty"--and "occasionally gave her small sums from my own pocket."
Every visitors' center at a presidential estate has two core functions: to sell tickets and to block the view of the house for people who have not bought tickets. Just down the Thomas Jefferson Parkway from Monticello is Ash Lawn-Highland, the home of James Monroe. The last little turnoff on the way is called James Monroe Parkway. Admission to the fifth president's house is $10, and Monticello has already consumed the morning and half the afternoon, with James Madison's Montpelier still waiting on the way home. In place of a guidebook, there is a one-sheet. Hello and farewell, President Monroe!
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Presidents' Weekend: Monticello, Feb. 14tag:www.tomscocca.com,2010://1.1632010-02-15T19:05:05Z2010-02-15T20:07:30ZTom
The Great Emancipator's home being out of automobile range, we settled for the Great Non-Emancipator (b. April 13). The very first thing you get, on going inside Monticello, is kind of a perfect metaphor for Thomas Jefferson. He had a complicated clock built through the wall over the front door, with an hour hand showing on the porch side, then a full clock face on the inner hall. From that inner clock, a set of weights and cables spans the room, slowly descending to mark the progress of the days of the week, down a wall marked SUNDAY MONDAY TUESDAY WEDNESDAY THURSDAY FRIDAY--
And then the weights pass through a hole in the floor, down into one of the provisioning cellars, where he had to put SATURDAY because the rig ran out of room.
So paint ABOLITION on the cellar wall, too, and your American Sphinx seems more familiar than mysterious. He meant to do something about slavery, but he was broke, and the farm wasn't covering his debts, and there was always a silk bedspread or a simultaneous-writing machine to buy from the Continent, and he never got around to being able to follow through. Write the Declaration of Independence, but let other people take up arms against the Crown, then try to spare Virginia from paying an equal share of the war debt. Run for president on the principle of a limited central government, then spend $15 million on the Louisiana Purchase. Denounce the despotism of slave ownership while light-skinned children with familiar features run around the plantation. What would America be, or what would it have been, without good intentions?
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Presidents' Weekend: Mount Vernon, Feb. 13tag:www.tomscocca.com,2010://1.1622010-02-15T18:38:33Z2010-02-15T19:03:20ZTom
The walkways at Mount Vernon are unpaved, in fidelity to the conditions of George Washington's time. The dirt is a sandy mix reminiscent of a racetrack, with good enough drainage to be merely sloppy instead of pure muck. Pavement might have taken less effort.
We were too late to get the Presidents' Weekend breakfast of hoecakes with a Washington impersonator.
Washington's taste in decoration was gaudy and self-conscious, including a room with expensive verdigris-green paint and agricultural emblems carved in the woodwork and marble. Martha Washington, who was in charge of decorating their bedroom, had much simpler and better taste. After his death--you can see his bed, in which he expired--she abandoned the room and used a bedroom in the attic.
The slave quarters next to the greenhouse, which were the nicer slave quarters, didn't look so uncomfortable till one realized that two-thirds of the bunks were missing. Otherwise it would have been too dark and crowded to see into the room.
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Silver Spring, Feb. 2tag:www.tomscocca.com,2010://1.1572010-02-03T19:45:58Z2010-02-03T19:50:53ZTom]]>
From King Favre: Act V, Scene vtag:www.tomscocca.com,2010://1.1562010-01-25T20:01:52Z2010-01-25T22:16:45ZTom
Clear turf I see, and the sticks beyond. Were I
But four-and-twenty still, e'en six-and-thirty, there would my legs churn on!
The pump--the tuck--the sprint! Bring up your safeties, if you would
For safety's all I disregard. But I am heavy-legged now,
Sprain-wrack'd and hobbled, by th' impediment of age.
Too old to chance the run, and yet--
Too old? Too old for chance? Nay, chance
Shall be my last companion,
Till turf and Favre change places, and I lie
Below the grass. Roll right!
Now the defenders roll right too
And I reverse myself, the green for purple, end for beginning--
Reverse! What legs dare not, the arm will dare,
What Prudence whispers, Bravery shouts down.
Too old? I shall vex age, reverse the flow,
And throw against the grain. I am decided.
Cares of age, away! I am
The man I ever was: I throw, I throw. I throw! [He throws.]]]>
Steroids Cause Memory Impairmenttag:www.tomscocca.com,2010://1.1552010-01-14T20:15:28Z2010-01-14T21:40:41ZTom
rest is history.
Or it would be history, if people would tell it straight. Via Romenesko, veteran sportswriter Dave Kindred offers his all-too-typical account of why sportswriters didn't talk about steroids while Mark McGwire was slugging all those home runs:
If any sportswriter suggested during that season that McGwire used steroids, I can not find a record of it. Without Wilstein's reporting, in fact, McGwire likely would have reached 70 home runs without a hint of performance enhancement being written. A Nexis search of The Washington Post and The New York Times shows 53 mentions of "steroids" in McGwire-related stories, but none of those makes a direct connection of the man and the PEDs.
Why did sportswriters not connect the dots?
To start an explanation -- as silly as it now sounds -- those were simpler times.
They were days before BALCO.
[...]
Before BALCO, we were gullible, the media, the public, baseball fans everywhere. Whatever we knew about steroids, we knew in connection with football and track, not baseball. And now came this great home run chase - ". . . .the story was so darn good, you know?" We dared not blink lest we miss another astonishment. Who, then, would turn away to shout, "Are you people blind? Don't you see STEROIDS blinking on McGwire's forehead?"
Funny, that's not how I recall it. Here's what some other guy had to say about McGwire's heroism in August of 1999--not quite during the 1998 season, but while McGwire was still America's home-run darling, and long before Balco:
A few weeks ago, he announced that he'd quit using the anabolic steroid --er, "nutritional supplement"--androstenedione. But if Mark McGwire is a drug-free athlete, Wallis Simpson was a virgin when she brought the former King Edward VIII to the altar.
McGwire is what people in the bodybuilding business refer to, accurately, as a "freak." He is bloated and deformed beyond normal human dimensions. His condition is usually ascribed to strength training--as if some free-weight routine could make his cheek muscles swell up like a pair of grapefruits. If he is not abusing steroids, then he is suffering from a pathological endocrine condition.
Does anyone remember the Chinese women's swim team of the early '90s? At the 1992 Olympics and the 1994 world championships, China's female swimmers scandalized the sports world by showing up with 24-inch necks and linebacker shoulders, and they smashed a bunch of records. Everyone knew they were cheating, because their bodies and their performances were too abnormal to explain any other way.
Last year McGwire hit almost 15 percent more home runs than anyone ever had before. He looks like The Thing from the Fantastic Four comics. He admits to using an anabolic steroid. He's done everything to taint his accomplishments short of injecting himself with bovine growth hormone between at-bats.
(I also wrote that all-around players better than McGwire included Doug Glanville. Can't win 'em all!)]]>
California, December 2009 (6)tag:www.tomscocca.com,2010://1.1542010-01-02T19:04:27Z2010-01-02T19:07:57ZTom]]>
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