C.C. goes first. Be curious to see if the Yanks and O’s pick up where they left off last season. Man, they had some spirited games last year.
1. Gardner CF
2. Cano 2B
3. Youkilis 3B
4. Hafner DH
5. Wells LF
6. Suzuki RF
7. Nunez SS
8. Overbay 1B
9. Cervelli C
Never mind the raindrops:
Let’s Go Yank-ees!
[Photo Credit: Hermann Hirsch]
S”long, Mr. Winters.
Over at SB Nation’s Longform, check out Flinder Boyd’s piece on Chris Copeland:
An hour and a half before the Knicks-Pistons game in London’s O2 arena this past January, Chris Copeland was already shooting around, sweat dripping off his practice jersey, and the squeak of his sneakers echoing off the nearly empty seats. I was in town for the week to analyze the game for the BBC and looked forward to catching up with my old teammate.
Aside from the rare, brief phone conversation, the last time I spoke to Chris Copeland was more than five years ago. He was stuffing whatever clothes he had into a duffle bag in a rundown hotel outside of Santiago de Compostela. We were briefly teammates in Spain before management decided he wasn’t good enough to play for even the lowest of second division teams and suddenly terminated his contract. I still remember his sense of failure and how the fear of the unknown reduced him to an anxious child.
Even at 6’8 it was sometimes easy to forget Copeland played professional basketball. He’s friendly and unassuming, and his round, vibrant face and long lanky arms covered in a layer of baby fat often made him seem younger than he was. When I knew him, there was nothing in his game, at least visibly, to suggest he could ever, even in the most outlandish of clichéd fairy-tale stories, end up playing for the New York Knicks. Yet here he was, a 29-year-old NBA rookie coming off a 22-point master-class performance four nights earlier against New Orleans and in the starting line-up against the Pistons in London. “I can’t explain it,” he said. “It’s just what I always dreamed about it.” Sure, I thought. Every boy who has ever picked up a ball dreams of playing in the NBA, but to make it at his age, with a limited basketball pedigree, after spending the last few years in the roundball backwaters of northern Europe, is not only unheard of, but virtually impossible.
Yanks finish their visit to Cleveland tonight.
Brett Gardner CF
Robinson Cano 2B
Kevin Youkilis 3B
Travis Hafner DH
Vernon Wells LF
Ichiro Suzuki RF
Eduardo Nunez SS
Lyle Overbay 1B
Francisco Cervelli C
Never mind the dampness:
Let’s Go Yank-ees!
[Photo Credit: Sorin Petculescu]
Here’s Glenn Stout on Race, Jackie Robinson and the Red Sox:
At approximately 10:30 in the morning on Monday, April 16, 1945, Boston city Councilman Isadore Muchnick and sportswriter Wendell Smith and three African-American baseball players from the Negro leagues arrived at Boston’s Fenway Park. One month earlier the Red Sox reluctantly agreed to hold a tryout for African American ballplayers. Shortstop Jackie Robinson of the Kansas City Monarchs, second baseman Marvin Williams of the Philadelphia Stars and outfielder Sam Jethroe of the Cleveland Buckeyes came to Boston nearly a week earlier in anticipation of the tryout.
The audition of the three players took a little over one year to arrange and lasted only ninety minutes. Yet the fallout from that day echoes through Red Sox history almost to the present as an example of the institutional racism practiced by the ballclub under the tenure of Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey. Only in the last few seasons, at the conclusion of the Yawkey era, did the ballclub begin to shed a reputation for racism that many trace to that April morning.
Still shrouded by significant misconceptions and errors of fact, that day deserves examination. Not only do the facts of the tryout deserve explication, but the manner in which both the press and the ballclub reacted to the episode and portrayed it since then is telling. By calling into question the details of the event the defenders of Yawkey and the Red Sox attempted to use it to absolve the ballclub, the owner, and by extension, the city of Boston for any racial liability, perverting the significance of the tryout.
“I believe that Jack is one of the best actors in Hollywood, perhaps on a par with the greatest stars of the past like Spencer Tracy and James Cagney. I should think that he is on almost everyone’s first-choice list for any role which suits him. His work is always interesting, clearly conceived and has the X-factor, magic. Jack is particularly suited for roles which require intelligence. He is an intelligent and literate man, and these are qualities almost impossible to act. In The Shining, you believe he’s a writer, failed or otherwise.” -Stanley Kubrick
I think Kubrick is right. It’s one of the differences between Nicholson and Robert De Niro. I’ve never believed De Niro when he played cerebral guys, like in The Last Tycoon or True Confessions. I always get the sense that when he tries to play brainy guys De Niro is exposed as a mook. But Nicholson, or Robert Duvall, or Gene Hackman, for that matter, can play a certain kind of brainy intelligence convincingly.
I said as much to our pal Matt Blankmon in an e-mail and he replied:
I think DeNiro connects more to Brando and Dean – that emotional physicality. You can buy him as a streetwise guy, a clever guy, but not bookish or cerebral. I don’t know about Duvall as a brainy guy – he’s another guy I feel more as wise, but not intellectual – Tom Hagen, but not Michael Corleone. Nicholson is a guy who just comes across as smart and that’s part of his energy, even when he’s playing a mook like in The Last Detail. The connection to Cagney is apt–Nicholson, however, wouldn’t have been a very good Travis Bickle. I think Paul Newman always projected a certain braininess on screen, so much so that I had trouble buying him as a dumb guy in Pocket Money.
And speaking of The Passenger, what Kubrick is talking about is why you have no problem accepting Jack as a semi-famous world-traveling journalist.
Interestingly – how often has William Hurt played a guy who looks and seems smart, but then is actually kinda dumb? He’s very easy to buy as a scientist in Altered States, but he’s so well suited as the superficially, seemingly brainy guys in Broadcast News and Body Heat who are actually not so smart.
Good points by Matt, especially how all intelligence isn’t the same. And De Niro doesn’t lack intelligence just not the same brand that Nicholson has.
It was warm again yesterday but by the time I got off the subway in the Bronx in the evening it was cool. Felt like spring “for reals,” as the kids say.
Something was stirring in the air and just before I arrived home the sky was dark and the wind kicked-up and it was exciting–a spring storm.
This morning gives sun but the ground is still wet, especially the dirt where the flowers are starting to bloom.
Sweet.
Ivan Nova, take two. After winning the first couple of games in Cleveland it’d be a drag if the Yanks left with a split, so here’s hoping they win tonight or tomorrow.
Brett Gardner CF
Robinson Cano 2B
Kevin Youkilis 3B
Travis Hafner DH
Vernon Wells LF
Brennan Boesch RF
Eduardo Nunez SS
Lyle Overbay 1B
Chris Stewart C
Never mind getting a swell-head:
Let’s Go Yank-ees!
[Photo Via: This Isn’t Happiness]
There is a good story by John Le Carre in this week’s New Yorker (subscription required). It’s about the making of his novel The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. The piece centers on the tense relationship between the film’s director, Martin Ritt, a left-wing Jew who’d been blacklisted, and its star, Richard Burton, the larger-than-life Welshman.
Here’s my favorite part:
In one of the few conversations of substance that I had with Burton during our short spree together, he almost boasted of how much he despised the showman in himself; how he wished he had “done a Paul Scofield,” by which he meant eschew the big-screen heroics and the big-screen money and acept only acting parts of real artistic substance. And Ritt would have agree with him wholeheartedly.
But that didn’t let Burton off the hook. To the eye of the puritanical, committed, connubial leftist and activist, Burton came too close to everything Ritt instinctively condemned. In a 1986 interview, he has a line that says it all: “I don’t have a lot of respect for talent. Talent is genetic. It’s a gift. It’s what you do with the gift that counts.” It was bad enough to put profit before art, or sex before family, or flaunt your wealth and your woman, or ostentatiously soak yourself in liquor, or strut that world like a god while the masses cry out for justice. But to waste your talent was a sin against gods and men. And the greater the talent–and Burton’s talents were legion and extraordinary–the greater, in Ritt’s view, the sin.
Love Ritt’s take on talent. But Le Carre doesn’t think Burton was a wasted talent. He concludes the article:
Richard Burton was a literate, serious artist, a self-educated polymath with appetites and flaws that in one way or another we all share. If he was the prisoner of his own weaknesses, the dah of rectifying Welsh puritanism in him was not a hundred miles from Ritt’s. He was irreverent, mischievous, generous-hearted but necessarily manipulative. For the very celebrated, being manipulative goes with the territory. I never knew him in his quieter hours, but I wish I had. He was a superb Alex Leamas, and in a different year his performance might have earned him an Oscar, the prize that eluded him all his life. The film was grim and black-and-white. That wasn’t what we we wearing in 1965.
If either the director of his actor had been less, perhaps the film also would have been less. I suppose that, at the time, I felt more protective of the podgy, stalwart, and embittered Ritt than of the flamboyant and unpredictable Burton. A director carries the whole burden of the film on his back, and that includes the idiosyncrasies of his star. Sometimes I had the feeling that Burton was going out of his way to belittle Ritt, but in the end I guess they were pretty evenly matched. And Ritt surely had the last word. He was a brilliant and impassioned director whose righteous anger could never be stilled.
Here’s a disturbing 2010 Vanity Fair story by Mark Bowden–“The Case of the Vanishing Blonde”:
From the start, it was a bad case.
A battered 21-year-old woman with long blond curls was discovered facedown in the weeds, naked, at the western edge of Miami, where the neat grid of outer suburbia butts up against the high grass and black mud of the Everglades. It was early on a winter morning in 2005. A local power-company worker was driving by the empty lots of an unbuilt cul-de-sac when he saw her.
And much to his surprise, she was alive. She was still unconscious when the police airlifted her to Jackson Memorial Hospital. When she woke up in its trauma center, she could remember little about what had happened to her, but her body told an ugly tale. She had been raped, badly beaten, and left for dead. There was severe head trauma; she had suffered brain-rattling blows. Semen was recovered from inside her. The bones around her right eye were shattered. She was terrified and confused. She bent English to her native Ukrainian grammar and syntax, dropping pronouns and inverting standard sentence structure, which made her hard to understand. And one of the first things she asked for on waking was her lawyer. That was unusual.
[Photo Credit: Amanda Friedman]
Check out this long piece on the D.O.C. by Alex Pappademas in Playboy.
Who the hell is the D.O.C.? It’s been nearly 25 years since the rapper released his astoundingly great debut album, No One Can Do It Better. It was produced by Dr. Dre when Dre was churning out hot product at an ironic-in-retrospect pace: In a single year Dre made the D.O.C.’s album, as well as N.W.A’s Straight Outta Compton and N.W.A co-founder Eazy-E’s solo debut, Eazy-Duz-It. The D.O.C. was a cocky, charismatic young rapper with a knotty, complex flow—his delivery had more bob-and-weave than your average West Coast rapper’s, and he reminded people of East Coast guys like Rakim. The kid with the golden voice, he called himself. Within three months he’d sold half a million records—until injuries to his vocal cords sustained in a car accident rendered him barely able to speak and totally unable to rap.
After that, the D.O.C. was a living ghost. He made two would-be comeback albums, but his real career existed behind the scenes. It became an open secret that he’d ghostwritten rhymes for Dre on The Chronic and 1999’s 2001 and polished lines for Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle. The D.O.C. was a fixer, a problem solver, a hip-hop Winston Wolf. Once a breakout star, he now existed in hip-hop as a legend in the background of other people’s rhymes. Dre shouted him out (“Like my nigga D.O.C., no one can do it better”) at the end of “Nuthin’ but a G Thang,” the first single from The Chronic. More than 10 years later, so did Brooklyn-born Jay-Z on “Public Service Announcement”—“HOV, not D.O.C./But similar to the letters, no one can do it better.”
On the way to lunch this afternoon I spotted a shiny new Frito Lay delivery truck, adorned with navy blue pinstripes and a giant interlocking NY on the back door. I tried to maneuver to get a picture for tonight, but a baked potato cart was blocking the good stuff. Ah well, I thought, the Yanks probably won’t hit enough to warrant a score truck picture anyway.
If you didn’t see the game and are reading this for the first time on Wednesday morning, the good news is you had two hits last night and one of them was a homer that went about 420 feet. The Yankees reached .500 with a 14-1 victory over the Indians with an offensive explosion that overshadowed a second fine performance from Andy Pettitte.
The hit parade featured every Yankee starter but Hafner. They pounded out five homers (Cano, Ichiro, Youkilis, Boesch and Overbay) and six doubles. Around those bases the Yankees shall roam.
Speaking of parades, this weekend was the opening ceremony for the Inwood Little League. It’s over-the-top in all the right ways and the kids felt 100 feet tall walking up Broadway.
Google maps tells me the parade route was 1.25 miles. If I asked my kids to walk a quarter mile to get an ice cream soda and meet Spiderman, they’d fall down on their knees in tears accusing me of child abuse. They did this walk without complaint with pants drooping down around their ankles, hats falling over their eyes and carrying a banner designed specifically to make them trip over like the Keystone Cops.
If there are further notable items from our family’s first foray into organized baseball, I’ll let you know.
It’s Old Man Andy tonight in Cleveland.
Brett Gardner CF
Robinson Cano 2B
Kevin Youkilis 3B
Travis Hafner DH
Vernon Wells LF
Ichiro Suzuki RF
Eduardo Nunez SS
Lyle Overbay 1B
Francisco Cervelli C
Never mind the winning streak:
Let’s Go Yank-ees!
