It was brick cold last night when I got off the subway, walked down the stairs to Broadway and then headed up the block to the bus stop. I kept my head down, my nose tucked into my scarf, as the wind cut through me. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a woman with a cup in her hand standing outside of Dunkin Donuts.
Actually, I didn’t register her at all, just the outline of her form as I heard her say, “Can you spare a dollar?”
Walking quickly next to me, an older woman bundled in a winter coat, laughed and said, “The nerve, asking for a dollar.”
I look at her and nodded, not sure I liked where she was going.
But she continued, “I remember when they used to say, ‘Can you spare some change?’ Now, it’s so specific.”
I said, “Spare a dollar thirty-five and a cup of coffee.”
I never knew when, but I always knew this day would come. It’s time for me to talk about the past and to confirm what people have suspected. I used steroids during my playing career and I apologize. I remember trying steroids very briefly in the 1989/1990 off season and then after I was injured in 1993, I used steroids again. I used them on occasion throughout the ’90s, including during the 1998 season.
I wish I had never touched steroids. It was foolish and it was a mistake. I truly apologize. Looking back, I wish I had never played during the steroid era.
Levine was a man of high intelligence, wide reading, and solid artistic training. He composed, shaded, and drew with the eye of a practiced painter. But more than that, he had great psychological insight into his subjects.
The wife and I were on our way home Saturday night, riding the IRT back uptown to the Bronx. Two young, heavy-set women sat across from us with a stroller in front of them. One of the women drank a can of orange soda and played with her infant son; the boy gripped her fat fingers and laughed. The other woman tapped her cell phone and complained about how long it was going to take for them to get ready–showered and dressed–to go out.
“It’s nine o’clock, you gunna take forever to get your ass in gear. I don’t even know what I’m going to wear.”
The women chattered along–giggling and talking loudly like teenagers–and the child became restless.
“What are you bothering me for?” the mother said to him. “Why do you keep saying, ‘Papi’? Your father isn’t here. Papi, Papi, Papi. I’m here. He’s not here. You want me to call him so you can talk to him? I brought you into this world, why you need to always bother me? I’m the boss. You do as I say.”
The Mrs and I were tucked into the two seats at the end of the car. We were distracted by the mother, our conversation halted. Finally, Emily turned to me and said, “Can we move?” I had been thinking about changing our seats for several stops. At 168th street, we moved to the next car.
It’s not about being judgemental it’s about comfort. If you can do something about it, why expose yourself to something that makes you uncomfortable, anxious or upset? Yeah, when I’m aware of it–and both Emily and I are exceedingly sensitive to this kind of thing–I don’t think, I just move.
I took the wife to see Jeff Bridges last night and he was unassuming and releaxed, tall and handsome, with the best head of hair this side of Ted Berg, and a winning, high-pitched, nerdy laugh. He talked about the anxiety some roles carry because they are so rich that “you don’t want to blow it. It’s like being a wide receiver and running a long route and the ball is thrown and you can see it and you’ve got it in your sights…” And you don’t want to blow it. Bridges said that was how he felt with the roll of Bad Blake in his new movie, Crazy Heart.
I was curious to know what movies he felt like he did drop the ball, where he didn’t achieve what he was looking for. I would have also liked to know more about his relationship with his brother, Beau. I asked him about the difference between being a stage actor and a film actor and he talked about his experience on the movie version of The Iceman Cometh, but he didn’t say why he has avoided the stage.
Bridges spoke lovingly about his parents and how they encouraged their kids to become actors. He said, “Acting is advanced pretending.” He also said that he goes out of his way to turn down work because of how much time it takes him away from his personal life and his family. He mentioned that he’d been away from home for 11 of the last 14 months, and that generally, by the end of a picture, he’s exhausted and just wants to return to being himself.
He did speak about how he approaches a role. First, by reading the script, and not only his character’s scenes but the entire script to know how the other characters feel about his character. Then he draws on his own experience and mostly friends, picking and choosing nuances. He said that for Starman, where he plays an alien who inhabits a human body, he leaned on a dancer friend who had very specific and articulated body language. He talked about learning how to imitate human gestures, and suddenly sat up and crossed his legs in a rigid manner. It was uncanny. In that brief moment, he was that alien again. It was subtle, just a slight physical gesture, but he had changed.
I received a VHS tape of the NFL Film’s Crunch Course production as a bonus for subscribing to Sports Illustrated. It was the last time I subscribed to the magazine, must have been ’86 or ’87. Back then, I loved professional football as much, if not more, than I loved baseball. And while my devotion to the NFL would not last much longer, the Crunch Course tape endures. It explains what attracted me to the game–violence. Glorious, cinematic, hyperbolic, violence.
In anticipation of the playoffs this weekend, here’s the entire show, in five segments.
Most of us writers weren’t exactly the cool kids in school. We stunk at sports, failed at dating and rarely — if ever — got invited to the good parties. While our peers were making out with the cheerleaders, we were debating among ourselves whether the Yankees were wise to have traded Jerry Mumphrey to Houston for Omar Moreno (And I don’t care what Chris Katechis said — it was a horrible deal). Point is, even the eternally powerless crave power. In the world of baseball, few wands wield greater oomph than that of the BBWAA Hall vote.
And yet, after spending so many of my years itching to earn that elusive BBWAA Gold Card status, I can honestly say that I would rather work as Bieber’s “swagger coach” (frighteningly, he has one) than cast a vote for the Baseball Hall of Fame.
And then there is this from Olney (to read the entire story you have to subscribe to ESPN insider):
First and foremost, it’s a clear conflict of interest. As a writer, I should be reporting on the news and not making it. It’s Journalism 101 (I assume, since I was a history major). It’s not my place, as a reporter, to determine whether Andre Dawson is inducted into the Hall of Fame, no more than it would be for a Capitol Hill reporter to cast a vote on health-care legislation while reporting on it.
…The most important reason why the writers should not be voting is that it has become increasingly evident that the voters, as a group, don’t really have a clear understanding of what the standards for the Hall of Fame are, particularly in this time, as the ballot gains more and more players touched by the steroids issue.
Some (not many) don’t vote for any candidate in their first year on the ballot, although the rules say they can. Some don’t vote for candidates because they didn’t like them personally, or because they
didn’t like how they played.
…The Hall of Fame should form its own committee that determines who gets a plaque. The plaques should include information, written in neutral language, about feats and achievements, and about bans and
suspensions and admissions.
Olney concludes that the process is not likely to change because of the heated debates that the Hall of Fame voting stirs every year. And really, when do you ever hear the same kind of enthusiasm about the Football or Basketball Hall of Fame? Heck, I enjoy arguing about the Hall even if I know it is an excercise in the absurd.
For Bridges, the starting point for his career came fairly early — as an infant, he appeared in “The Company She Keeps” (1951), and the glare of klieg lights would be a constant part of his upbringing. By age 9, he was sharing the screen with his father, Lloyd, and brother, Beau, on television and the family business came naturally. Robert Duvall, a costar in “Crazy Heart” and one of the film’s producers, said Bridges has become one of the premier actors of his generation, and he did so with the unhurried air of a surfer strolling the packed sand of Zuma.
“There’s the Actors Studio in New York, everybody sitting around talking about Stanislavski, but that’s not Jeff,” [co-star, Robert] Duvall said. “This is a guy off the beaches of L.A. He learned from his father, that was his mentor, and he always seems so loose and relaxed — but he’s always prepared, and he brings so many surprises, like good actors do.”
Sticking with mid-90s underground Hip Hop, this tune will always stick with me. I remember first hearing it on late-night college radio–the NYU show (with Mr. Mayhem & DJ Riz), and the Stretch and Bob Show–a perfect groove record:
The Hall of Fame announcement comes at 2 p.m. today. My guess is that Roberto Alomar will make it in. After that, I’ve no idea, though I figure Barry Larkin, Andre Dawson and Bert Blyeleven will all receive considerable support.
Update:Dawson is in. Bert gets 74.2 percent of the vote, Alomar, 73. C’mon.
Even in light of Holliday’s new contract, the Cardinals have very few contractual commitments in the coming years. The only other Cardinal guaranteed more than $1 million beyond 2011 is Kyle Lohse, who will earn just under $12 million in 2012, the final year of his ill-conceived four-year extension, the handiwork of current GM John Mozeliak. Aces Adam Wainwright and Chris Carpenter and All-Star catcher Yadier Molina all have club options for 2012 (for $9 million, $15 million, and $7 million, respectively) with Wainwright having an additional $12 million option for 2013. If all three stay healthy, the Cardinals are unlikely to find better bargains on the open market, but if the team picks up all three options, they’ll have roughly $60 million committed to five players in 2012, and with Pujols a potential $30 million player, they could surpass their 2009 payroll on just six players. That means the Cardinals are either going to have to significantly increase their payroll, pinch pennies everywhere other than first base and left field, or bid goodbye to Pujols after 2011 if not before.
It’s flatly inconceivable that the Cardinals would sacrifice their ability to keep Pujols, who is not only the face of the franchise but the best player in the game and one of the ten greatest hitters of all time, for Holliday, a solid all-around player but one who comes with significant questions about his true level of production given the effects of his home ballparks prior to his arrival in St. Louis. The most likely scenario, really the only one that makes sense, is an increase in payroll. Even with young players such as Colby Rasmus, Brendan Ryan, and David Freese in the starting lineup, with more than $40 million annually committed to just two players, the Cardinals will be hard pressed to field a balanced team and keep team payroll under $100 million.
For more on Mitchell, let me share the following from Peter Guralnick’s seminal study of southern soul music, Sweet Soul Music.
[Mitchell] had mastered the technology of recording, developed his own distinctive bass sound (a Willie Mitchell production is immediately recognizable for its “bottom”), and found in the eight-track, tube-amplified Ampex recorder that Hi already possessed machinery in which he could place an almost mystical belief.
…It has been said that Green in later years would spend more than a hundred hours on a vocal part, putting together, note by burbling note, each little comment and countercomment to elegantly stated melody, and while “Let’s Stay Together” appears to have been assembled a little more spontaneously than that, it conveys the same decorative filigree, the same sort of layered elegance with which Willie Mitchell and Al Green would soon take soul music–real, unabashed, wholehearted soul music–to quiet, luxuriantly appointed places it had never seen before.
“Well, you see, after we had done ‘Tired of Being Alone’ and ‘I Can’t Get Next to You,’ I said, ‘Al, look, we got to soften you up some.’ I said, ‘You got to whisper. You got to cut the lighter music. The melody has got to be good. You got to sing it soft. If we can get the dynamic bottom on it and make some sense with pretty changes, then we going to be there.’ He said, ‘Man, I can’t sing that way. That’s too soft. That ain’t going to sound like no man singing.’ We had the damnedest fights, but I think ‘Let’s Stay Together’ really sold him that I had the right direction for him musically, ’cause, see, all the things I told him turned out to be true. Like ‘Let’s Stay Together’ he didn’t like at all, but when we put it out, it was gold in two weeks. So we softened and softened and softened.
Here’s a little something from Mitchell that will be familiar to the hip hop heads out there:
We’ll never see the likes of Randy Johnson again. The image of this enormous man, who resembled a pre-historic serpant on the mound, hair flying, limbs flailing, as if backed by the wailing guitars of Satan’s house band, will be impossible to erase from our collective memory. He was one of the greatest starting pitchers I’ve ever seen in his prime–along with Pedro Martinez, Roger Clemens, and Greg Maddux–as well as one of the most viscerally intimidating. He was downright frightening, almost to the point of being comic. But he wasn’t a fool, and it was hard to laugh too tough when he was stuffing up the Yankees’ asses, first with Seattle and then Arizona. That he was able to harness all of his moving parts, his wildness–both physical and emotional–and become an all-time great pitcher is one of the great feats of the past twenty-five years.
One of a kind, as they say. With an all-time moniker: The Big Unit. I don’t know if many fans will exactly miss him, but nobody is sure to forget him.
In many ways, I am my father’s son. once, in my 60s, I told my father, in his 90s, that I was not much like him. “How so?” he asked. I said, “I never gamble.” He laughed, a dismissive laugh, and said, “You? A freelance writer for 40 years?” He was right. He had taught me how to con people early in my life. I used that knowledge in my late 20s to hustle pool like him. I wore construction clothes at lunchtime. I conned my marks into spotting me the eight and nine in nine ball, and if I lost I always went to the men’s room, climbed out a window, and left without paying. A lesson from the old man. “Always check the men’s-room window before you play,” he said. “Because even if you lose, you’re not gonna pay.” Years later, when I became a writer, I conned editors into giving me assignments. “You got to find out what they want,” he said, “then give it to them. Tell them anything they want to hear to get the assignment, then write it the way you want.”
He taught me so many things that became a part of my life, that determined how I lived my life. He taught me that only a fool believes in perfect justice. “There’s no such thing as an accident,” he said. “You’re supposed to know the other guy always runs the stop sign.” He taught me that a man never quits no matter how defeated he feels, that a man always has to have the courage of his suffering. And most important, he taught me that “there are only three vices in this world, kid: broads, booze, and gambling, and if you’re gonna do it right, pick one and stick to it.” I was in my 20s, with a wife and three kids, and there wasn’t much room in my life for vice. Years later, however, I had more than a passing acquaintance with one of those, and it wasn’t booze or gambling.
But in the one way that really mattered, to me anyway, I was not much like Dad at all. I never had his purity of understanding of the true nature of money. That has always shamed me. I have been burdened, conflicted, cursed, you might say, by my own fearful need to hoard money to forestall that looming disaster always around the bend, the foreclosed house from my youth.
