Blog Archives

Girl at the bus stop in the Bronx last night. She was hardly wearing anything. I’m not a father but I felt, for a brief moment, what a father, or mother, must feel like when they see their daughter start to grow up too fast, too soon.

Word to Chi-Town.

Brian Gordon is a converted outfielder who has spent 15 seasons in the minors. That’s a long time. Today, he makes his first big league start.

This is a cool thing.

Alex Rodriguez gets the day off:

1. Nick Swisher RF
2. Curtis Granderson CF
3. Mark Teixeira 1B
4. Robinson Cano 2B
5. Andruw Jones LF
6. Jorge Posada DH
7. Russell Martin C
8. Eduardo Nunez SS
9. Ramiro Pena 3B

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: Nina Papiorek]

“Still Life, 1951” by Giorgio Morandi

Yes, please.

Smitten Kitchen wins again.

The wife shops inside, the husband waits patiently outside. The marriage works.

Head-nodder…

Last night at the Stadium: Exterior and Interior.

The wife and I had a fine time in the Todd Drew box seats. Highlights included a beautiful slide home by Alex Rodriguez, Francisco Cervelli’s tag at the plate (and Curtis Granderson’s throw), Mark Teixeira’s nifty, unassisted double play (oh, yeah, and two more homers), a long home run by Robbie Cano, a high homer by Eddie Nunez and the delightful surprise of the night–a line drive home run by Ramiro Pena.

Ready (or not) for prime time…

1. Swisher RF
2. Granderson CF
3. Teixeira 1B
4. Rodriguez DH
5. Cano 2B
6. Jones LF
7. Nunez SS
8. Cervelli C
9. Pena 3B

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: NYC 3 by Tubes]

HE’S BRESLIN AND YOU’RE NOT

By John Schulian

The Evening Sun didn’t have the biggest staff in the world, so a lot of us had to do double duty. For me, that frequently meant coming in at 6 or 7 in the morning to work re-write for the first edition before they turned me loose on the world. It was great experience because when I was under the gun, I had to force myself to write fast. You know, a news story 700 to 1,000 words long in 20 minutes or less, and you had to get the facts right from the reporters in the field who were calling them in.

Just as often, I’d be the one out on the street, hoping I’d be able to get back to the office in time to write the story myself. I’d get a call from an assistant city editor at 4:30 in the morning to get over to a rowhouse fire in West Baltimore that killed a couple of kids, and by the time I got there, I could hear their mother or grandmother screaming “My babies, my babies!” from two blocks away. Or it would be a shantytown fire in a speck on the map called Principio Furnace, with more dead babies. Or a bunch of volunteer firemen who drowned while trying to rescue somebody in a hellacious rainstorm. Or maybe just two motorcycle gangs that shot each other to pieces.

The story that still haunts me was about a town out in Western Maryland called Friendsville.  Population 600 and six of its boys had been killed in Vietnam. I went out there to talk to the families of the first five casualties and wait for the body of the sixth to come home. I got a number for what I guess is best described as Friendsville’s general store, talked with the woman who ran it, and she wound up saying she’d have everybody ready to talk to me. And she did. If you want an example of small-town trust and graciousness, there it was. But the story was still a painful one to report because I knew I was opening old wounds for everybody I interviewed. The people I remember best were a couple my parents’ age, which is to say well into their 60s. They lived in a stone house on a dirt road outside town, just the two of them and the photos of the boy they’d lost in the war, their only child. All I could think of was how I could have been that dead boy instead, and my parents the ones stumbling around under the weight of their loss. Somehow I made it through the interview without crying, but as soon as I got in my car, I bawled like a baby-–for them, for my folks and me, for all the dead soldiers in that godforsaken war.

I wish I could tell you I turned Friendsville into a great story, but I didn’t. I didn’t have the chops yet. I wrote it in, I think, 1971, and I was still trying on styles for size, still pretending I was somebody different every time I sat down at the typewriter. When David Israel and Mike Lupica burst onto the scene a few years later, I was struck by how fully-formed they were as writers, and they were kids. To read them was to think they never suffered from self-doubt or indecision. Tony Kornheiser was that way, too, an absolute joy to read seemingly from Day One. I had days when I was good, I suppose, but mostly I was a work in progress.

Throughout my time at the Evening Sun, Jimmy Breslin was my greatest influence, just as he had been since the day before I went in the Army. I’d ordered his classic collection “The World of Jimmy Breslin” as soon as I’d returned from grad school, but it didn’t show up until 36 hours before I became Uncle Sam’s property. I sat down and read the book from cover to cover, swept away by Breslin’s great characters–Marvin the Torch, Fat Thomas, Sam Silverware–and touched in a deeper, more profound way by his column about the man who dug JFK’s grave. When I put the book down, I told myself that if I lived through whatever the Army had in store for me, I wanted to come home and write just the way Breslin did. And I tried mightily when I worked in Baltimore. Of course I wasn’t the only young buck who worshipped Breslin. You could see his influence on hot young newspaper writers everywhere, whether they were on the city desk or in sports:  Lupica in New York, Israel in Washington, Bob Greene in Chicago. And the hell of it was, they were all better at imitating Breslin than I was.

Click here for the complete “From Ali to Xena” archives.

A nice idea for lunch, eh?

[Photo found through the Tumblr grapevine]

Latin Jazz King:

Drawing I did of my father, 1983

My father was an incorrigible name dropper. He called famous actors and directors by their first names, suggesting an intimacy that didn’t always exist. He had met a lot of celebrities when he worked as a unit production manager on The Tonight Show. One chance encounter with Richard Pryor and he was “Richie” forever. Dad reached the heights of chutzpah when he went to the theater with a friend one night and spotted the actress Gwen Verdon. He walked down to her, introduced himself, and kissed her on the cheek as if they’d known each other for years. Ms. Verdon was delighted. Dad’s friend was amazed.

I remember watching “12 Angry Men” with the old man when I was a kid. “It’s almost as good as the original,” he said, referring to the TV production. “You see how exciting a movie can be even if it takes place in one room?”

I was captivated and by the end, I felt intelligent, finally on the right side of the line that separates boys and men. It was directed by “Sidney,” Sidney Lumet. They had crossed paths once; Dad had wanted to turn “Fail Safe” into a movie, a project that Lumet eventually directed. The old man admired Lumet not just because he was a fellow New Yorker but also because they shared a similar aesthetic, a love of the theater and actors. Dad was an avid theatergoer starting in his early teens through his mid thirties when he became an independent documentary producer. He revered Lumet’s quick and efficient approach to shooting a movie.

“Sidney always comes in under budget and has it in his contract that he keeps the difference,” he told me, raising his eyebrows. “Now, that is a smart man.”

The Old Man with Senator Sam Ervin

Not long after my mother kicked him out, Dad saw “The Verdict” and raved about the performance Lumet got out of Paul Newman as a lawyer who became an alcoholic when he got screwed over, then sobered up when the chance for redemption arose. His clients got justice, he got back his self-respect, and I got squat because I was 11 and Dad said that was too young to watch the movie. The closest I got was the commercials on TV. Everything looked dark brown, courtrooms and bars alike, and Newman seemed so frail I didn’t even notice his famous blue eyes.

Dad holed up on his own in Weehawken, across the Hudson, after his next girlfriend gave him the boot as well. There were two things that he liked about New Jersey: the view of New York City from his bedroom window, and that the liquor store down the block opened before noon on Sundays.

I remember visiting him without my brother or sister one time in January 1983, shortly after “The Verdict” came out. It was a late Saturday afternoon, almost dark, and the sun reflected off the tall buildings overlooking 12th Avenue. The old man was lying on his bed in his underwear and t-shirt smoking a Pall Mall. The heating pipes clanged. The windows were sealed shut around the edges by duct tape but still rattled when it got windy. A glass of vodka sat next to the ashtray on his night table. I used to fantasize about emptying his Smirnoff bottle in the kitchen sink and filling it back up with water. But I never had the nerve.

Most of the time he’d make me entertain myself on the other side of the apartment, in the room without a view of the city. He didn’t want me reading comic books but I did anyway. Or I’d trace the movie ads from the Sunday paper. “The Verdict” was nominated for five Oscars including best actor and best picture. The movie ad showed Newman in a rumpled white shirt, tie loosened, his eyes half closed looking down. The light from a window washed over his face. He looked defeated. The text above read: “Frank Galvin Has One Last Chance at a Big Case.” I traced the movie poster and then drew it freehand. I felt the seriousness of the title “The Verdict.” I didn’t know what that term meant and didn’t ask.

Now I was content to sit next to Dad on his bed and look out the window at the orange light bouncing off the New York skyline. The view reminded us of how far we were from where we wanted to be.

There was a small black-and-white TV on the chest at the foot of the bed. An episode of M*A*S*H, the old man’s favorite show, ended. The familiar and mournful theme song, “Suicide is Painless” filled the room. Dad was talking about his girlfriend. He didn’t seem too bothered by their breakup. Leaving Manhattan was the bigger issue. With Mom, he was devastated. He still believed she was foolish to divorce him and was convinced that one day she’d come to her senses and have him back

Soon enough Dad returned to the subject of Sidney  because Lumet directed the Saturday Afternoon Movie. “He always comes in under budget, do you know why? Because Sidney is not stupid, that’s why.”

“Dog Day Afternoon” was on TV: an Al Pacino movie for grown-ups, but Dad let me watch it with him anyway. Maybe the vodka he was drinking softened his resolve. I knew enough not to question why. Pacino—Dad called him “Al”—played Sonny, a little guy who robbed a bank in Brooklyn. The movie was about what happened in the inside of the bank with Sonny and the hostages. It was tense but parts were funny and I laughed when Dad laughed.

During a commercial break, I saw that his eyes were closed. I studied him. His stomach inflated and deflated in short, hard spurts. Dad was forty-five, almost six years removed from a heart attack, and his deep, uneven breathing worried me. He flexed his right foot and his big toe cracked so I knew he wasn’t asleep. Maybe he was meditating. He opened his eyes and smiled at me, put his hand over mine and looked back at the TV. When he took it away, it was to reach for another cigarette. I stared at the movie until I heard him start to snore. So I slipped out of bed, moving like a cat on the branch of a tree, and butted out his cigarette in the ashtray sitting on a table covered with burn marks. Then I climbed back into bed, careful not to rouse him. I wasn’t sure what was going to happen to the old man. He didn’t have a job and wasn’t in show business anymore. If only he would quit drinking.

I checked to see the progress of the light on the skyscrapers during the commercials. The orange glow began to fade as the sun set, turning softer, then pink as the sky darkened to a purplish blue. I thought of what Dad said when Channel Five ran the same public service announcement every night: “It’s 10:00 p.m. Do you know where your children are?” He’d say, “No, I don’t know where they are. I know they are not with me and that makes me very sad.” He told me so himself.

In “Dog Day Afternoon,” things were only getting worse for Al. It was nighttime in Brooklyn in the middle of summer and the air conditioning in the bank was turned off. The cops brought his boyfriend, Leon, to speak with him on the phone. Al was robbing the bank so he could afford a sex-change operation for the guy. That made sense to me. It was the right thing to do.

At last, the cops agreed to give him an airplane to escape. I imagined what the inside of the plane looked like and where they were going to go. But when they got to the airport, the FBI nailed him, the hostages were freed, and the movie was over.

I put my hands behind my head, lay back and looked at a water stain on the ceiling. I thought about Al, pushed onto the hood of the car at the airport, the loud sounds of planes taking off and landing in the background. His eyes looked like they were going to bug out of his head and he was on his way to jail which didn’t seem fair even though he was a criminal. Then I imagined Paul Newman. I was happy the old man had let me be a grown-up with him for a little while.

The white lights of Manhattan were twinkling on the other side of the Hudson when he woke up and refreshed his drink. I didn’t want to say anything stupid so I kept my mouth shut. Another cigarette smoldered in the ashtray. He picked up the New York Times crossword puzzle and said,  “Good old Sidney. He never left New York.”

Found in a doorway last weekend in SoHo.

Jack Mann appreciation continues with three pieces by his colleagues. Please enjoy these memories of Mann from John Schulian, Tom Callahan and Dave McKenna.

Unvarnished Mann

By John Schulian

In the world according to Jack Mann, if a ballplayer dragged his private parts over the post-game spread while reaching for the mustard, a sports writer damn well better file it away for future use. Maybe he wouldn’t be able to re-create the scene for a family newspaper, but he could certainly offer some well-crafted hints. In fact Jack insisted on it when he was a visionary sports editor at Newsday because he would have done no less were he writing the story himself. He was, after all, a slave to the truth no matter how discomfiting.

Not everybody appreciated it. To this day, there are those who recoil at the sound of his name before recovering to rail profanely about his parentage, fondness for the grape, and well-worn mean streak. Jack was, in his time, the most complicated and divisive figure in sportswriting this side of Mark Kram and Dick Young. You either loved him or hated him, and if you loved him, there were still going to be times when you wondered why the hell he did some of the things he did.

Of course the legend occasionally got in the way of the facts. Jack may have thrown a tray of type out a window at the Washington Daily News, for instance, or it may have been his boss, Dave Burgin, who did the honors. God knows they were both capable of it in the days when they were making the sports section in that abysmal tabloid the liveliest reading in town. Or maybe the incident never happened at all.

What I can guarantee did happen was Jack’s constant and very public humiliation of Shirley Povich, the icon who anchored the Washington Post’s sports page for 70 years. Shirley was every bit as gracious and gentlemanly as Red Smith, and a fine writer, too, but by the early 1970s, his reportorial legs were gone and his column showed it. He covered more and more games by watching them on TV. Even the Redskins, who become more important than the White House during the NFL season, couldn’t get him off his couch. Jack smelled blood and went for the kill, parodying Shirley’s style (“The way it came across on Channel 9”) and sneeringly referring to the Post by its advertising slogan (“Over at ‘Quoted, Honored and Consulted’”).

It was not for nothing then that the Post never hired Jack full-time after the Daily News and his subsequent employer, the Washington Star, went belly up. To tell the truth, I was surprised he got so much as a freelance assignment at the Post, but when Casey Stengel died, there was that byline – Jack Mann – on the front of the next day’s sports page. I doubt the old Professor got a better sendoff. And there would be more pieces by Jack, not a lot of them but enough to keep his name alive. I still wonder how hard George Solomon, who was then settling into his job as the Post’s sports editor, had to fight for Jack. But they had worked together at the Daily News, and George understood just how good Jack was.

To read his prose was to get a sense of the man at the typewriter. It was blunt, no-nonsense, and it could, on certain occasions, feel like a punch in the mouth. And yet, while lyricism wasn’t his game, he wove enough literary allusions into his work to let readers in on the fact that he knew Hester Prynne wasn’t a baseball Annie from Boston.

(more…)

“Women are beautiful. They are really beautiful.” –Bill Cosby.

Men are not subtle when we check out women. We stare. Most of us are developed enough not to drool.  Some start yapping and there is a fine line between appreciating a woman’s beauty and being a pig. Women are cool, though. You know a woman has checked you out when you catch them just looking away. That’s not usually the case when they look at each other. Then, they are thorough, eye-balling one another from head-to-toe, deliberately, sometimes with admiration, other times with envy or god knows what else.

They are really  beautiful.

Yanks vs Rangers tonight in the Bronx.

Cliff has the preview and we root:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: Andrew C Ko]

Is Derek Jeter headed for the disabled list? That’s a good possibility. Via Twitter, here’s Joel Sherman: “More hints Jeter to DL: My colleague, George King, says Ramiro Pena is at Stadium.” With the Yanks headed to the National League this weekend, makes sense, no?

[Photo Credit: N.Y. Daily News]

A movie and a meal over at Food 52.

The King of the Delta Blues.