Monthly Archives: March 2011

Say it ain’t so…

[Photo Credit: Radaris, Nabok]

I had dinner at my aunt and uncle’s on the Upper West Side a few weeks ago and we got to talking about Morris, the deli counter man at the old Daitch Shopwell that used to be on Broadway. They loved Morris and the little old ladies who would visit him. This is what they overheard, back when.

Old Lady: Is the potato salad fresh?

Morris: Yes, we made it today.

Old Lady: It looks like yesterday.

Morris: Lady, you’re from yesterday.

Old Lady: How’s the roast beef?

Morris: It’s gorgeous.

Old Lady: Give me a half of a quarter pound of baloney.

Morris: You’re having a party?


Here’s Roger Angell on Duke Snider:

I still feel that I owe him. I saw him play plenty of times, but carry only a fragmented memory of him in action: rounded shoulders, and that thick face tilting while the finish of his big, left-side stroke starts him up the baseline, his gaze fixed on the rising (and often departing) ball. A first-class center fielder, who eagerly closed the angle on line drives. Great arm. Good guy, terrific smile. Hall of Famer. Something smug in me used to relish him, even while I rooted against him. Growing up in Manhattan, I was a Giants fan first of all, a huge Yankees booster in the other league, and caught the Dodgers pretty much only when they played at the Polo Grounds. Which is to say a Willie Mays fan first and always; an awestruck admirer of Mickey Mantle when he succeeded Joe DiMaggio in center for the Yankees, in 1952, and aware of Snider, of course, over there in Ebbets Field: the third-best, or—since he overlapped Joe D.’s tenure by three seasons—maybe the fourth-best fabulous center-field slugger in town but a guaranteed superstar as well. If Snider was great, how much better did that make my guys? I met the Duke once or twice, long after he’d left the game—he was gone before I started writing about baseball—and wanted to apologize for patronizing him in my fan’s heart. He didn’t mind; he was a self-punisher, not a self-aggrandizer, and I don’t think he worried about status.

And click below for and excellent profile on Snider by Dick Young from “Inside Sports.”

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Here’s George Kimball on Sly Stallone and “Rocky”:

If Ali remains the most recognizable boxing figure of the 20th century, Rocky Balboa, at least in the public consciousness, probably ranks a close second.

Stallone had drawn his inspiration for Rocky, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture that year (the defeated competition included All The President’s Men, Network, and Taxi Driver) from a real-life title fight in Cleveland a year earlier, when a journeyman heavyweight named Chuck Wepner lasted until the 15th round against the great Ali. Wepner, who was known for reasons devoid of irony as “The Bayonne Bleeder,” was even credited with a ninth-round knockdown.

On the evening of that bout, The Bayonne Bleeder presented his wife with a filmy blue negligee and instructed her to wear it later that night when, he promised, “you’re gonna be sleeping with the heavyweight champion of the world.”

Much later that night, having been taken first to a hospital to have his face stitched back together, Wepner stumbled back to his hotel room, to find his wife sitting up in bed wearing the filmy blue negligee.

“Well,” Mrs. Wepner asked her husband, “is he coming up here, or do I have to go to his room?”

ESPN writer Howard Bryant was arrested last weekend for allegedly physically assaulting his wife in public. The story was covered on the home page of ESPN.com:

“I am so sad today,” Bryant said [in a statement]. “I am sad today because this attack on me by the Massachusetts State Police and the Buckland Police has made it necessary for me to defend untrue allegations and repair my reputation when one conversation with either Veronique or with me would have diffused the entire situation. Instead, the police chose aggression first over dialogue, threatened to taser me whenever I tried to speak, and all in front of my 6-year-old son.

“As a result, I have to defend a charge that I attacked both the woman I love and the police when nothing could be further from the truth.”

“This is all so unfair,” Veronique Bryant said. “There was no investigation. The police made assumptions about my husband that weren’t true. I was never abused or in fear of Howard on that day or any other day. I wasn’t running from him or trying to get away from him. The police weren’t listening to me and they attacked him with violence with our 6-year-old watching.”

Here is Bryant’s laywer, Buz Eisenberg:

Eisenberg, being interviewed on WHMP’s 9 O’Clock Show with Bill Newman and Monte Belmonte, said Bryant was singled out by witnesses and by police simply because he was black and in Buckland. With Buckland being 96.5 percent white, according to the US Census, Bryant naturally stood out no matter what he did, Eisenberg said.

Even before the police came, Bryant could feel people staring at him on Main Street, Eisenberg said.

Eisenberg did not deny that Bryant and his wife argued on Main Street but he denied that the argument ever became physical. Witnesses told police they saw Bryant put his hands around her neck, which Eisenberg and the Bryants have disputed.

He also disputes charges by the Massachusetts State Police that he resisted arrest.

He said the witnesses, who he said were a group of 14- and 15-year-olds, watching the scene from Buckland Pizza overreacted and called police.

“What they saw was an African-American man and a Caucasian woman. It probably never entered their minds that they were married,” he said.

I got an e-mail from a friend the other day who happens to be black. He wrote:

What gets me is that E#$% chose to list this story on their front page, while others who have worked for them and were accused of or involved with similar issues were buried in the site so you had to do a search for their story. They have so many blatant double standards, it’s a wonder they don’t get kicked in the nuts with big lawsuits on a regular basis or are targeted by rights groups. Even if you don’t like the guy, the way they chose to trumpet this over others who have done similar or worse things is out of line.

In regard to what happened, that’s not surprising. Someone has it in for him; where can a professional brotha go without getting f***** with these days?

I know Howard Bryant, not well, but I consider him a friend professionally. I believe him and stand by him.

The light continues to change. The Sun is high in the sky now when I get off the subway and walk a few blocks east to my office building. People shield their eyes as they move. It is winter cold today but the spring is near.

Down in Floriday, A.J. Burnett pitched yesterday and showed off his new delivery.

Three weeks into Yankees Spring Training, and we’ve learned this: New York is a Basketball town. Alex has written about this, and I remember Sweeny Murti talking about covering the Yankees while the Knicks made their run to the 1994 Finals. It’s true. The Knicks are the sleeping giant, and now with Carmelo Anthony, they will own the back pages unless something either major or catastrophic happens in Yankeeland.

This is actually a good thing, because Spring Training for the Yankees is basically a time suck. While it’s great to see baseball — hell, grass — after being battered with snow and sub-freezing temperatures for the better part of the last two months, doesn’t seem as cool when the biggest questions year after year are who the 5th man in the rotation will be, and who the 24th and 25th man on the roster will be.

Obvious storylines have been played up like they’re original concepts. For example:

* Derek Jeter reported to spring training and in his press conference intent to prove that last year was an anomaly and that the man who is above statistics is actually going to try to enjoy the moment when he reaches 3,000 hits this summer. In a year or two, he might need a position change.

Snore.

(more…)

Fight fans as well as movie fans will enjoy this—George Kimball’s wonderful piece about Budd Schulberg’s memorial service back in the fall of 2009.

“On the Waterfron,” for which Budd received the Academy Award, might not have been in the strictest sense a “boxing movie,” but Marlon Brando’s character Terry Malloy is the ex-pug who “coulda been a contender,” and at Budd’s insistence, a trio of charter members of the Bum of the Month Club — Two-Ton Tony Galento, Tami Mauriello, and Abe Simon — were cast as burly longshoremen in the film. One highlight of the program was the telecast of the 1954 Oscar ceremony, when, after director Elia Kazan and Brando had already won their statuettes, Bob Hope and Brando opened the ‘Best Screenplay’ envelope and summoned Budd from the audience to receive his. (And let history record that he didn’t even try to look surprised. He knew what he’d done.)

Pete Hamill recalled having first met Budd at the 1962 Sonny Liston-Floyd Patterson fight in Chicago, an occasion far more memorable for the press room cast publicist Harold Conrad had assembled than for the barely two minutes of action in the ring. “You’d look in one direction and there would be Norman Mailer and A.J. Liebling,” recalled Hamill, then just in his second year as a newspaperman, “and you’d look the other way and there would be Nelson Algren and James Baldwin and Budd Schulberg.”

(Liebling, recounting the same scene in the New Yorker, wrote that “the press gatherings before this fight sometimes resembled those highly intellectual pour-parlers on some Mediterranean island; placed before typewriters, the accumulated novelists could have produced a copy of the Paris Review in forty-two minutes.”)

Hamill also recalled that on the evening of June 6, 1968, he and his brother Brian had driven across Los Angeles to pick up Budd in their rental car, and driven from there to the Ambassador Hotel, where Robert F. Kennedy would be speaking once the returns were in from that day’s California primary. Budd, said Hamill, remembered the hotel from his youth as the scene of some memorable Hollywood debauchery. Both Hamill and Schulberg were waiting in the kitchen that night when Sirhan Sirhan shot Kennedy. Hours later, once the east coast deadlines had passed, everyone reconnoitered, still battered by the shocking assassination. Everyone was grieving, but Schulberg made it his particular point that night to console Hamill, who he knew had lost a close personal friend.

They don’t make ’em like Budd anymore. Hell, they don’t make ’em like Kimball anymore either.

[Photo Credit: Boston.com]

“The Cellist,” by Paul Gauguin (1894)

Starting this Friday, BAM is hosting a major Catherine Deneuve retrospective. Don’t sleep.

Deneuve will also be at the Paris Theater tomorrow night to talk about her recent movie, “Potiche.”

Pass the peas like they used to say…

I love peas, even though the wife says they don’t count as vegetables (“too carby”). But they are another sign that spring is near even though the frozen petite peas are great year round. Head on over to Saveur and check out 16 recipes for young green peas.

And even if you don’t dig peas, bounce to this:

[Photo Credit: Adventures in Shaw]

It’s been an eventful offseason for the Yankees’ various relationships with Scott Boras. First he picked up Robinson Cano as a client – in time for Cano’s first really big payday. Then it was reported that Nick Swisher had switched to Boras, but that turned out not to be true (he actually went with Dan Lozano). And today Mark Teixeira told reporters that he’s dropping the man. From Marc Carig in the Star Ledger:

“Now that the contract is over with, I don’t want to be ‘Scott Boras client,'” he said. “I want to be Mark Teixeira, baseball player, helping this team win championships.”

Teixeira has contemplated a switch for more than a year, even hiring another agency to handle his off-field charitable efforts. Though their business association has ended, Teixeira said Boras will continue to collect his percentage of the first baseman’s salary.

“Scott did a great job getting me my contract,” Teixeira said. “I wanted to be in New York from the beginning, and everything that I’ve asked for has come through so far. And from here on out, there’s no reason to worry about the contract. It’s all about winning championships and helping out the community.”

Given how Alex Rodriguez’s relationship with Boras went, it seems that while Boras is clearly the most effective agent in the game for getting big money contracts, he’s not particularly sensitive to his clients’ other desires.

Now, a ton of baseball players talk about “helping out the community” and then just set up an unspectacular charitable foundation on the side and leave it at that, but the Yankees at the moment have a few players who seem to take it very seriously (most notably Sabathia, Granderson, and Swisher), and maybe Teixeira is really serious about doing a lot in that area. He’s such a carefully bland guy in interviews that’s it’s hard to get a sense of what he’s actually like, or what he really cares about – but I can’t write him off as entirely dull because on the field, he often reacts to opponents like a real red-ass. And it takes some guts to fire Scott Boras, I’d imagine. Anyway, another footnote in the Boras saga – one day, though maybe not til well after he’s retired, there’ll be a fascinating book written about that guy.

Jeff Pearlman has a nice piece on Jay Horwitz, the vice-president of media relations for the Mets:

Jay Horwitz is, self admittedly, “a little bit of a schlump.” He’s wrinkled, he’s baggy, he’s disheveled. His glasses are slightly crooked. His head is a bit large for his shoulders. He talks with a thick New York accent. He’s lost or broken at least 10 BlackBerries over the past couple of years, including two that plopped into the toilet.

…when right-hander Anthony Young lost 27 straight decisions between May 6, 1992, and July 24, 1993, Horwitz saw each pitch; when Kenny Rogers walked Andruw Jones with the bases loaded in the bottom of the 11th inning of Game 6 of the 1999 NLCS, Horwitz charted the at-bat; when such unspeakably heinous busts as Vince Coleman and Kaz Matsui wore the blue, orange and white, Horwitz stood by their sides, believing—as he always does—that the Mets would be OK. “Jay is an optimist by nature,” says Bobby Bonilla, the former Mets slugger who credits Horwitz with helping him survive a rocky (to be polite) Big Apple run. “He sees the good, even when there isn’t much.”

[Photo Credit: N.Y. Daily News]

George King on the improved fielding of Jesus Montero:

[David] Robertson’s eyes widened when asked about Montero, who went 0-for-3 and is 1-for-6 in two games.

“I first saw him when I signed here and it’s amazing how much better he has gotten,” Robertson said. “He sets up good, blocks balls in the dirt and stays down. He looks good.”

…“I like Montero, I think he is going to be a big-time player,” a scout said. “I know he is big (6-foot-4, 225 pounds), but he will be fine. All he has to do is just keep on catching.”

The Yanks played an exhibition game agaisnt the Pirates this afternoon. Chad Jennings has the tips; Michael Baron’s got the flix.

Here’s more from Jennings, on Phil Hughes.

“Woman with a Pearl Necklace,”  By Mary Cassatt (1879)

Hey, you movie lovers, do yourself a favor and head on over to Self-Styled Siren and peep For the Love of Film (Noir) Blogathon.

Francisco Liriano Hot Plate Special.

Jay Jaffe thinks that Joba for Liriano could be win-win.