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Goodbye to ’08, Welcome to ’09…c’mon in, the water’s fine.

Clint Eastwood is a throwback in the best possible sense. He is a product of the old Hollywood and he works–a pro’s pro.  Like John Huston, he’s one of the rare directors who continue to make good movies late into their career. 

In his latest film, the winning and often subtle melodrama, Gran Torino, Eastwood pulls off a neat trick. He plays a variation of his Dirty Harry persona without lapsing into camp. He knows the audience is aware that they are looking at Eastwood the Icon, but like an old fashioned movies star (Spency Tracy or Bogart come to mind), he doesn’t let that trip him up. He’s able to play off his previous tough guy roles with a great deal of humor but without sacrificing the credibility of this character or the movie. He’s completely believable and authentic.

And I don’t think I’ve ever seen Eastwood ever look more physically relaxed as an actor. He moves with sure, unhurried confidence. I used to find his acting empty and hollow.  I never got the joke, or if I did, never really appreciated it. But now there is a complexity and warmth to his acting.  The grunts and mumbles are used to great effect.

Gran Torino isn’t as heavy or somber as Mystic River though it is often a sad, melancholy film.  But I think it is more satisfying.  Eastwood’s direction is fresh–I wouldn’t say playful exactly, but it is loose.   There is nothing stodgy about it.  In fact, there is a quiet joy about the filmmaking here. Almost everything is underplayed. There are a few missteps–some of the actors seem to be amateurs and they come up short in a few scattered scenes (though on the whole they are endearing), and Eastwood himself sings over the final credits, and sounds vaguely like Fozzie Bear–but they are minor.

I expected to enjoy Gran Torino but I wound up liking it even more than that. It’s not a big movie, but it is an fine entertainment, made with a sly sense of humor and an open heart.  This is Eastwood at the top of his game.

Billy and George:

 
Billy gets in another cheap gag:

By Mark Lamster

In the summer after my junior year at college I got a job working in the records department of HIP, the health insurance agency. In a basement office with no windows, I’d review double-entry ledgers for typographical errors, a tedious process I considered beneath my dignity. It was depressing work, my colleagues were unfriendly, and the most humiliating part of it was that I was just short of incompetent. I didn’t care, and it showed. Then I came home to a message from the New York Yankees. I was going to The Show.

As a budding sports journalist, I’d written to Yankees Magazine, offering my services as an intern. A spot had opened, and the next week I reported for duty at the Stadium, over-eager in khakis and a blazer. The office was in the dingy stadium basement: frayed carpet, no windows. My primary task was to proofread box scores and stat tables for the team’s minor league affiliates—these went in the back of the magazine. Not much of an improvement from HIP, and the climate was no better. The secretary spent her days endlessly defending the integrity of Milli Vanilli, recently revealed to be a fraud, while playing their hit record on a boombox.

This was 1990, and things were bleak for the Yanks. Bucky Dent had been cashiered in favor of Stump Merrill, but the team was still heading for 67 losses and a seventh-place finish. The magazine’s basement office, out of sight and out of mind, was actually a blessing. No one wanted to be upstairs, on the executive level. The Boss’s comings were unpredictable, and the staff lived in a perpetual state of fear for his arrival. It was said that he’d fire employees on a whim, and for no reason other than appearing in his siteline. The place was terrorized—joyless, somber, tense. I’d never experienced anything like it. In my entire time working there, I met one player, Luis Polonia, which tells you everything you need to know about those Yankees. The highlight of my tenure was an elevator ride with Bobby Murcer. He wore white pants and a green plaid jacket—a joyfully loud ensemble—and it a priority to greet every employee with his Oklahoma drawl. He was the anti-Boss.

There was actually one perk to the job. It came with a Yankee ID, and with that I had free entry to as many games as I could stand. I could sit just about anywhere as well; the good seats were rarely occupied, and with a flash of the badge I was clear to do as I pleased. I rarely sat in those good seats. I preferred the bleachers out in right field, where I’d been a regular for years, along with my closest high school friends.

The play on the field was grim, but the bleachers were always a party, and the reason was Melle Mel, the founding genius behind Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. These were the days before “Roll Call,” before the “Bleacher Creatures” became a self-professed institution. Mel was the unquestioned leader of the gang, and was usually accompanied by Busy Bee, a lesser light of the hip-hop stage. The two knew how to get a crowd working; the bleachers were just another club. They usually arrived in about the third inning, rarely sober, often stoned. (I don’t think I’m telling tales out of school here.) I remember them flying especially high one evening, and then returning home after the game to catch the last few minutes of Johnny Carson. On comes a PSA featuring Mel, “Don’t Do It.”

Mel’s signature was a dead-on impersonation of Stevie Wonder doing “I Just Called to Say I Love You,” which he’d sing waving his head to-and-fro while standing in the ass-contoured blue plastic seats that were removed about a decade ago, in favor of benches. (More fannies, more dollars.) Mel wore a ring with his name on it that stretched across his entire hand; it was a real danger during high fives. Whenever games got close in the late innings—this was known as “Toenail Time” for some inexplicable reason—he’d demand the entire bleachers stop drinking and pay full attention.

Mel gave the bleachers a bit of celebrity cache, but what really made his presence special was the sense he gave us that we were all—ghetto rappers, lunchpail types, old timers, Hispanics, even us privileged kids from Manhattan—a part of something uniquely New York, united in our devotion to the Yankees. He was a “star,” and had a magnetic charisma, but he was inclusive. One night Busy came in with copies of his new album, passed them out to the crowd, and invited everyone to his set that night at the Paladium. I wish we had gone, though I suspect we would never have made it past the velvet rope.

I spent years of my life out in those bleachers. My friends and I developed our own traditions. After the game we’d take the 4 train back to Eighty-sixth Street and, after a win, go for “victory donuts” at the shop on the corner of Lex. It wasn’t always so fun. In 1988, after Steinbrenner had picked a fight with Don Mattingly over his haircut, I found myself on the back page of Newsday, sitting below a group of regulars holding up letters that spelled “TRADE GEORGE.” We despised him, and though I’m no longer the despising kind, I can’t say I’ve forgotten or forgiven his many trespasses and disgraces. Eventually, of course, Steinbrenner did himself in, and for conspiring against Dave Winfield, always Mel’s favorite. And that was a new dawn for the Stadium, and the team.

By the mid nineties, my friends and I stopped visiting the bleachers with regularity. Schedules intruded, girlfriends, lives. When we did go to the ballpark, and we still went often, we opted for better seats. The bleachers changed. The “Creatures” had begun to consider themselves an attraction, justifiably. With that new fame came unpleasant questions about authenticity, who was a true regular. Mel stopped showing up.

We were still fans, still true, and we got our ultimate reward in 1996. My greatest memory of Yankee Stadium comes from that year, and it wasn’t even at the stadium. I watched the last game of the World Series that year with my future wife in her tiny studio apartment on Eighty-seventh Street and First Avenue. The joy of that game’s final moment, Charlie Hays clutching that last pop—the ultimate exaltation.

I had planned with my friends that, in the case of a win, we’d all meet up for one last victory donut. But somehow we found out that the Yanks would be holding their victory party that night at Cronies, a sports bar on Eighty-Seventh and Third, just a couple of avenues away. By the time we all met there the entire block was shut down and barricaded, fans were cheering and passing around champagne, and the players were arriving by limo—Derek, Tino, Jim Leyritz in a ten-gallon hat. For years, we had been trekking out to the Bronx to cheer on our team. Now, after the win we had all longed for, they came home to us.

Mark Lamster is author of Spalding’s World Tour and cofounder of YFSF.

This is an artistic re-creation of life as a Jets fan. 

Lucy is the Jets, Charlie Brown is a Jets fan.

Thud.  Is Lucy really worth hating (I vote, yes)?  Or is Charlie Brown just a schmuck?

It always cracks me up when I read columns about how buying championships, as the Yankees appear to do doing again this winter, is a losing cause. Sure, it doesn’t always work, we know that (and thank goodness, because it keeps things interesting). But facts are facts: since the start of free agency in 1977, no team has spent more money on players than the Yankees have; no team has won more pennants or more championships. So while no team can ever fool themselves that they can pre-arrange success (as George Steinbrenner was accused of believing in the Eighties), the Yankees aggresiveness in the free agency market hasn’t always back fired either.

Do you think they should bring Pettitte back? The word this past week is that it’s now unlikely that he’ll return. Would you rather go Hughes-Chamberlain or still have a veteran like Pettitte in there?

Here’s some classic TV theme songs from the Seventies for you:

Sanford and Son:

Barney Miller:

The Jeffersons:

Fat Albert:

And my favorite, Taxi:

The Classic Routine.

I was at the final game at Yankee Stadium and wrote a bonus piece for SI.com on what the night was like for Ray Negron:

It was just before one o’clock in the morning on Sept. 22, but the scoreboard clock was frozen at 12:21. The last game at Yankee Stadium was over, Sinatra had finally stopped singing New York, New York, and organist Ed Alstrom was playing Goodnight, Sweetheart. The home team had won 7-3 in a game that meant nothing in the standings but everything in a deeper, gut-felt way. The Yankees would not be going to the postseason for the first time since 1993, yet they had drawn 4.3 million fans, including another capacity-plus 54,640 on this night. And now, as the last of them drifted out of the ballpark, it felt like closing night for a hit Broadway show.

Now it was just the clean-up crew swinging into action and a select group of others clinging to the night — players and their families, reporters, radio and TV personalities, cameramen, front office workers, the grounds crew and cops, lots of cops. People hugged and slapped hands and talked and laughed. Players scooped up dirt and grass and put them in paper cups and Ziploc bags. Grown men had their pictures taken at home plate, on the mound and sliding into second. It was like Never-Never Land — everyone was a child. Why would anyone want to go home, knowing they were the last precious few to soak in the Stadium? They stayed, stuck between history and the wrecking ball, until the head of security announced that it was time to leave.

Ray Negron was out on the field, right where he belonged, with the players and sportswriters. Ray had seen them all — from DiMaggio and Mantle to Reggie and A-Rod. He was there when they came to play at the Stadium and he was still there when they left.

I received an e-mail from Todd Drew’s wife yesterday afternoon. She said that Todd made it through surgery just fine. Talk about a Christmas present. For those who might have missed it, Todd, part of the Banter writing team, has a rare kind of stomach cancer. He’s going to be laid up in the hospital over the holidays but he appears to be doing well. I’m a head on over there later today and drop off a care package of books and articles (and today’s papers!) for when he’s ready to read again.

I know I can speak for Cliff, but I’ll be bold and speak for the entire Bronx Banter crew, in sending love and the best holiday cheer to Todd and his wife and their entire family. This is great news. I will keep you posted. Any thoughts you have, leave ’em in the comments section below and I’ll make sure to print them out and give them to Todd.

It is cold and now dark in New York but there is plenty of heat being generated by the afternoon news that Mark Teixeira has agreed to an eight-year deal with the Yankees.  My friend Rich Lederer, an Angels fan, called me from the golf course in California.  He was not happy.  He practically yelled on the phone he was so irritated.

How can you root for a team that has such an uneven financial advantage?  How is that fun?  Where’s the competition in that? 

“I hope they lose every single game,” Pat Jordan said to me when I called with the news a few hours later.  Both men, incidentally, are Republican, but they are also both rebellious, outsiders, self-made men.  They aren’t the kind that get off rooting for US Steel.

Yet here I am, a New York Liberal, and yet US Steel, that’s my team.  I used to have guilt about it, for years it worried me.  Then I grew up.  What’s the use feeling guilty?  You have accept what is.  Professional baseball isn’t a game.  The Yankees are out to win, every year, forever.  Isn’t that why Ban Johnson created the Highlanders in the first place?  They will spend whatever it they have to spend.  They pay a big luxury tax in return.  They might offend everything you stand for.  So be it.  I get it.

I like being a Yankee fan.  If Yankee fans are cursed by anthing, it is the teams’ ruthless ambition and unyielding arrogance.  The curse for a rational-minded Yankee fan is that you are rooting for the front-runner, the bullies. And if you are overly neurotic you will question what that says about your moral fiber.  So, we listen to other fans ridicule our team as something less-than-wholesome, something corrupt. 

As far as curses go, it’s not so bad.   After all, being a Yankee fan also means knowing, feeling in your bones, that you’ll see your team win again, and probably some time soon.  Which is not to say that it will happen, but Yankee fans feel as if it should, and, inevitably, that it will happen.  Being a Yankee fan also means wishing for, and often getting, big, fat, expensive Christmas presents like a CC or a Teixeira.  Sometimes, the toy doesn’t make it out the box before it breaks–Don Gullet, Jose Contreras, Carl Pavano.    

But you can’t predict the future and for the moment, all you can say is that you feel pretty warm in a cold, hard world.

All I want for Christmas is…

EVERYTHING.

According to Buster Olney at ESPN, Mark Teixeira is going to be a Yankee.

Snow and then rain has covered New York since Friday morning and I’ve been home sick since Thursday. Yesterday, Em and I went off to get our new kitten, Mo Green. Into the country snow. The senior cat in our crib, the Divine Mrs. Tashi, is none too thrilled, as you can imagine. And Mo is just as cute as he is wild.

Still not feeling too well, I slept on the couch, next to a little box we’d set up for Mo, last night. From 3-5 am he was a wild man. Ah, the joys of parenthood. I’ll have a picture of the little bugger up in the coming days.

I did catch the CC, AJ press conference the other day and came away amped about next season for the first time. I think CC has an easy personality, he’s got some charm. What’s not to like? Then, the fan in me, tore loose as I realized that the Yankees’ best starting pitcher is a six-foot-seven brother. I mean, his size alone is unique, but how many good black starting pitchers have the Yankees ever had? Al Downing, Rudy May, Doc Gooden. It’s not that many. Which isn’t to say that race is a reason to like or dislike a guy. I’m just noting the facts. I wonder how many city kids that normally don’t care about baseball will be wearing 52 jerseys next year.

CC is a new-age pitching version of Darryl Dawkins “Chocolate Thunder.”

I thought it was fascinating to hear Brian Cashman disclose that last winter the Yankees were either going to deal Hughes, et al to the Twins for Johan Santana, or they were going to wait and hope to nab Sabathia this winter in the free-agent market. They rolled the dice, got the situation they wanted, and then signed their man. That is satisfying.

I was almost even more impressed by Burnett. Now, he’s a guy that I’ve loved rooting against for years. The charge against him–he’s all talent, no polish, a million dollar arm with a ten cent head–was something I could never see past, even when he shut the Yankees down time and time again. But in the press conference, and then later to reporters, Burnett attributed much of his injury history to arrogance. He loved his “stuff” so much, he said, that he’d try and throw every pitch 98 miles an hour. If you got it, flaunt it, was his motto. He didn’t know how to prepare, physcially or mentally, for a long season. But he remembers making the playoffs in ’03 and not being able to pitch.

Burnett gave Roy Halladay a lot of credit with turning him into a pitcher not just a chucker. He sounded like a guy who has finally figured it out for himself. Now whether or not he’ll continue to harness his gift (and if he does, he has the best pure stuff of anyone on the staff), or will he be hurt all the time and continue to be uneven? Time will only tell. But for me, it’s going to be easy to pull for him, at least at the outset, than I had imagined.

Burnett was almost deferential to Joe Girardi, the Yankee manager, who told reporters that CC and AJ were his Chirstmas presents this year. “No, I’m sure I’ll get a few gifts,” he added so as not to offend his wife. He went on to say that he is aware that the Yankees’ playoff run came to an end on his watch and he was eager to start a new streak. You could see how geeked he was with the new talent he’s got to work with and who can blame him?

When it’s all said and done, provided everyone is healthy, the Yankees 2009 starting pitching staff is going to look like a red, hot, shiny muscle car. Will it run like a GTO or an Edsel, that’s the question.

To a good pitcher, a great character, a true survivor, and a strong, caring man.

Rest in Peace, Doc Ellis.

I’ve run this before, but here is my favorite Doc Ellis story. From Doc Ellis in the Country of Baseball by Donald Hall.

In spring training 1974, Dock Ellis, felt that his Pirates had begun to loss some aggressiveness.

“You are scared of Cincinnati. That’s what I told my teammates. Every time we play Cincinnati, the hitters are on their ass.”

In 1970, ’71, and ’72, he says, the rest of the league was afraid of the Pirates. “They say, ‘Here come the big bad Pirates. They’re going to kick our ass!’ Like they give up. That’s what our team was starting to do. Cincinatti will bullshit with us and kick our ass and laugh at us. They’re the only team that talk about us like a dog. Whenever we play that team, everybody socializes with them.” In the past the roles had been revered. “When they ran over to us, we knew they were afraid of us. When I saw our team doing it, right then I say, ‘We gunna get down. We gonna do the do. I’m going to hit these motherfuckers.'”

Sure enough, on May 1st, the Reds came to Pittsburgh and Dock Ellis was pitching.

He told catcher Manny Sanguillen in the pre-game meeting, “Don’t even give me no signal. Just try and catch the ball. If you can’t catch it, forget it.”

Taking his usual warm-up pitches, Dock noticed Pete Rose standing at one side of the batter’s box, leaning on his bat, studying his delivery. On his next-to-last warm-up, Dock let fly at Rose and almost hit him.

A distant early warning.

In fact, he had considered not hitting Pete Rose at all. He and Rose are friends, but of course friendship, as the commissioner of baseball would insist, must never prevent even-handed treatment. No, Dock had considered not hitting Pete Rose because Rose would take it so well. “He’s going to charge first base, and make it look like nothing.” Having weighed the whole matter, Dock decided to hit him anyway.

“The first pitch to Pete Rose was directly toward his head,” as Dock expresses it, “not actually to hit him, ” but as “the message, to let him know that he was going to get hit. More or less to press his lips. I knew if I could get close to the head that I could get them in the body. Because they’re looking to protect their head, they’ll give me the body.” The next pitch was behind him. “the next one, I hit him in the side.”

Pete Rose’s response was even more devastating than Dock had anticipated. He smiled. Then he picked the ball up, where it had falled beside him, and gently, underhanded, tossed it back to Dock. Then he lit for first as if trying out fro the Olympics.

As Dock says, with huge approval, “You have to be good, to be a hot dog.”

As Rose bent down to pick up the ball, he had exchanged a word with Joe Morgan who was batting next. Morgan taunted Rose, “He doesn’t like you anyway. You’re a white guy.”

Dock hit Morgan in the kidneys with his first pitch.

By this time, both benches were agog. It was Mayday on May Day. The Pirates realized that Dock was doing what he said he would do. The Reds were watching him do it. “I looked over on the bench, they were all with their eyes wide and their mouths wide open, like, ‘I don’t believe it!’

“The next batter was [Dan] Driessen. I threw a ball to him. High and inside. The next one, I hit him in the back.”

Bases loaded, no outs. Tony Perez, Cincinnati first baseman, came to bat. He did not dig in. “There was no way I could hit him. He was running. The first one I threw behind him, over his head, up against the screen, but it came back off the glass, and they didn’t advance. I threw behind him because he was backing up, but then he stepped in front of the ball. The next three pitches, he was running. I walked him.” A run came in. “The next hitter was Johnny Bench. I tried to deck him twice. I threw at his jaw, and he moved. I threw at the back of his head, and he moved.”

With two balls and no strikes on Johnny Bench—eleven pitches gone: three hit batsmen, one walk, one run, and now two balls—[manager, Danny] Murtaugh approached the mound. “He came out as if to say, ‘What’s wrong? Can’t find the plate?'” Dock was suspicious that his manager really knew what he was doing. “No,” said Dock, “I must have Blass-itis.” (It was genuine wildness not throwing at batters—that had destroyed Steve Blass the year before.)

“He looked at me hard,” Dock remembers. “He said, ‘I’m going to bring another guy in.’ So I just walked off the mound.”

My favorite Doc moment as a Yankee came shortly before he was traded in 1977. He left the clubhouse when George Steinbrenner came down to address the troops one day. “I’m not going to listen to that High School Charley shit.”

Nope, they don’t make ’em like that anymore.

Joe Posnanski has an entertaining re-cap of the winter meetings in the latest issue of Sports Illustrated:

The king of this year’s baseball winter meetings in Las Vegas is an 81-year-old scout for the Kansas City Royals named Art Stewart. He is barely 5’7″, and he never played at a level higher than semipro in Chicago, but he’s the Sinatra of the baseball bat pack, the chairman of the hoard, the guy behind the guy behind the guy. He has been coming to the winter meetings for 45 years, going back to his scouting days with the New York Yankees, back when he signed the outfielder Norm Siebern by throwing in a working stove for Norm’s mother. Art knows everybody, and everybody knows Art, and he will admit that the game has changed, the money has changed, even the baseball people have changed. But there’s one thing that hasn’t changed, one rule that never changes, and it is this: The secret to the winter meetings is to stand on your own piece of carpet.

“Don’t stand on the bare floor,” he says. “You have to protect your feet.”

You laugh? Don’t laugh. See, it’s midnight at the Bellagio, and what’s happening? All those people who did not find their place on the carpet, all of those eager baseball men who have spent the last five or six hours downing drinks and recalling ballplayers who haven’t played in 20 years and proposing deals and standing on the marble floors, well, now their feet hurt. Look at them shifting back and forth. “They’re dropping like flies,” is how Art puts it, and he adds that over his many years, he’s seen countless good guys make bad baseball trades simply because their feet hurt.

“There are tricks to the trade,” Art says. “You bet. Tricks to the trade.”

Man, it must feel good to feel needed, huh? Take Mark Teixeira. I think he’s an excellent player and he’s going to get a ridiculous contract before all is said and done this off-season. I don’t know if he is a great player, but he certainly is good.  And boy, is he ever wanted.

Over at SI.com, Lee Jenkins writes about why the Angels need to sign Teixeira while at Fox, Ken Rosenthal writes that if the Yankees really want to stick it to Boston, they’ll sign Teixeria, dollars and years be damned.

One thing for sure, if the Red Sox do sign him, I think the Yankees will bring Manny Ramirez, baggage, bat and all to the BX.

My wife is a photographer. 

Recently, she started her own website: bluepearprints.com, featuring a lovely selection of originally composed and designed photo note cards.

And now, she’s got a holiday sale cookin.

Peep, don’t sleep.

Looking for that ideal last-minute holiday gift for the sports fan in your life?  Look no further than The Best American Sportswriting of 2008, edited by Bill Nack, who is one of the finest sports writers we have.  

Nack is a first-rate reporter, a dedicated craftsman, and a true storyteller.  He came up with Newsday in the late Sixties and wrote about horse racing.  His experience in the field culminated in the seminal book, Secretariat: The Making of a Champion.  In 1979, Nack joined Sports Illustrated where he excelled at the bonus, or take-out piece, writing beautifully about Willie Shoemaker, Keith Hernandez, Rick Pitino, Bobby Fischer, Rocky Marciano, and, of course, Secretariat, to name just a few. (Nack’s best work is compiled in the stellar collection, My Turf.)  

Nack now works for ESPN.com.  Roger Ebert, who has been friends with Nack since they went to college together, wrote a wonderful essay about his friend last week.  If you love words, and care about language, you must check this out.  It could be the highlight of your week. 

I recently caught up with Bill recently to chat about The Best American Sports Writing 2008.

Bronx Banter: As a writer, how do you approach a project like this?

Bill Nack: I just look for the stuff that I liked the most. The stuff that I thought was the best written and best told stories. I read 70-80 stories that Glenn Stout sent me. I got it down to 35-40 and then it became really tough to pair it down. The last ten were very difficult.

BB: Did you work with Glenn or alone?

BN:  I did it on my own. There were a couple of pieces that I had questions about but not many. He left it up to me totally. I trusted him to give me what he thought were the 70 best and after that I felt it was up to me to find the ones that I thought were the best. And occasionally, I’d call him up and say, “What do you think of this one?” Some to me were slam dunks, in fact most of them were. Jeanne Marie Laskas, SL Price. The only problem that I had was in trying to get a mix–of traditional sports with obscure sports. And I was very conscious of the mix.

BB: Did you also want to mix-up bonus pieces and newspaper stuff?

BN: Yeah I did actually. I wanted to make sure there was an adequate representation of newspaper columns which are a dying species. And when I read Rick Telander’s piece on Doug Atkins that was a no-brainer. Same thing on Rick Reilly’s piece. The piece on Bo Jackson, by Joe Posnanski, that was kind of a column, that to me was an easy one. That raised a problem because I wondered if we should have two Bo Jackson stories in one book. And I really liked the ESPN.com piece by Michael Weinreb. I loved both of them. And what I liked about them together is that they were completely different takes on the same guy. I think I did consult with Glenn on that one. I said, “Do you mind if we have two Bo Jackson stories?” And he said, “No, no, they are both very different.”

BB:  I actually like having them back-to-back for just that reason.

BN:  The one thing that I noticed in the first batch of stories that Glenn sent me was that there was no humor. It was very serious. The poor woman who was lost in the wilderness and saved by her dog, the Terry Fox run across Canada, the world’s tallest tree, Scott Price’s piece on the poor coach who died from a foul ball.  And I looked at it and thought, “God, some of this stuff is really gloomy.” I happened to be a subscriber to Golf Digest and Dan Jenkins is a regular contributor. I started looking through my old issues and ran across Dan’s piece about trying to play golf as you grow old. I started laughing as I read it, because he’s one of the funniest writers that’s ever written about sports. I finished it and thought this has got to go in there. So that’s the one humorous piece that I found. I also liked it because I’m 67 and play golf. And there are a lot of older men who still play, so I thought it had a wider appeal. It was not just funny, which I needed, but it was something that a lot of guys could relate to. You don’t have to be 67, all you have to do is be 50.

BB: Was there a sense with the Tom Boswell column on Clemens and the Hank Aaron story that you wanted to get in pieces that were timely?

BN: Oh, definitely. I did think of that. I thought people would like Tom Boswell’s piece because it is a comment on Clemens.

BB: I thought the Aaron piece was phenomenal.

BN: I showed some of the pieces around before I made my final choices. Some people loved the Tommy Craggs thing and other people said, “You can’t put this in there. Who is this guy?” I just laughed. But they were bent out-of-shape because Craggs is criticizing the press in his piece. Who is this guy to criticize the press? I said, “I have no idea and I don’t care who he is.” I thought he had a very interesting, sharp take. And when I read it I thought, you know there is a lot of truth in this. I might not agree with everything, but I thought there was a lot of truth in it. I had friends in the piece that he criticized but I ran it anyway.

BB: The collection has some good young talent, like Wright Thompson, who has made the series several times now.

BN: I thought that was a terrific piece he did on Beijing. Really well done. Almost personal in a way. He didn’t just write a piece. He got you into it with vivid imagery. I’ve never met Wright Thompson, I’ve only read a little bit by him but I thought, this is really good. I didn’t know anything about him, but like Tommy, I liked his work and was happy to put it in this book. If you want to know the bottom line, I didn’t consider personalities, I didn’t consider names, I just put in people who contributed to making this the best possible anthology I could put together.

(more…)

Enough is never enough.

According to George King in today’s New York Post:

According to several baseball officials, the YankeesNew York Yankees remain in the Mark Teixeira hunt. But the same connected voices insist if the Yankees don’t land the switch-hitting first baseman, they will turn their money toward controversial slugger Manny Ramirez.

“If they can’t get Teixeira, they are right there on Manny,” an official with knowledge of the Yankees’ plan said yesterday.

…Only fools count out the Yankees when it comes to free agents.