Joe Girardi, his team, and Yankee fans everywhere are living the Artie Fufkin Dream this morning: Kick My Ass, Please.
This one hurts but the season isn’t over yet and self-pity won’t get us anywhere. CC goes at 4, and there is hope. Let’s not act like those so-called fans who fled from the Stadium early the past two nights. Win or lose, rain or shine, we’ll be here, root-root-rootin’ for the home team.
Cervelli gets the start.
Keith Olbermann reviewed Jane Leavy’s Mantle book in the New York Times Book Review over the weekend. He liked it:
Leavy comes as close as perhaps anyone ever has to answering “What makes Mantle Mantle?” She transcends the familiarity of the subject, cuts through both the hero worship and the backlash of pedestal-wrecking in the late 20th century, treats evenly his belated sobriety and the controversial liver transplant (doomed mid-surgery by an oncologist’s discovery that the cancer had spread), and handles his infidelity with dispassion. Sophocles could have easily worked with a story like Mantle’s — the prominent figure, gifted and beloved, through his own flaws wasteful, given clarity too late to avoid his fate. Leavy spares us the classical tragedy even as she avoids the morality play. “The Last Boy” is something new in the history of the histories of the Mick. It is hard fact, reported by someone greatly skilled at that craft, assembled into an atypical biography by someone equally skilled at doing that, and presented so that the reader and not the author draws nearly all the conclusions.
A week from today the season could be over or the Yanks could be getting ready to play in another Whirled Serious.
We’re lucky to even have another week to look forward to, and starting tomorrow night, Cliff Lee vs. Andy Pettitte…it should be lively.
In the meantime, enjoy a lovely, cool fall day in New York. Those of us with Cablevision are shut-out of the first game, but the Jets are on at 4.
Let’s Go Sun-Day.
First things first…
Dig this most classic National Lampoon bit from the ’70s featuring Bill Murray and Christopher Guest.
01 I went out of my nut. I fell on my bum.
ss
Dig this most awesome new book by photographer Lyle Owerko.
While we’re at it, how about a word from Uncle L:
The New Yorker’s recent compilation, The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from the New Yorker, is a fine and handsome collection but it is does not contain a single piece by John Lardner, which begs the question: Is Lardner the most neglected great sports writer of all-time?
Sure, Jimmy Cannon is overlooked these days and he was a legend during his time; Joe H. Palmer was on his way to a PHD in English Literature when he became a full-time chronicler of horse racing–which he did as well as anyone ever has–but he died young and his name is lost; and Lenny Shecter was a funny, irascible talent, the patron saint of cynicism and snarki, and he’s sadly known as just the “co-writer” of “Ball Four.” Shecter also died young.
Over at SI.com, I’ve got an appreciation of a new collection of Lardner’s best sportswriting:
John Lardner was painting a prose portrait of a legendary con man when he wrote: “On a small scale, Titanic Thompson is an American legend. I say on a small scale, because an overpowering majority of the public has never heard of him. That is the way Titanic likes it. He is a professional gambler. He has sometimes been called the gambler’s gambler.”
Lardner might well have been writing about himself, although calling him a writer’s writer is too limiting, not to mention entirely inadequate. In a career that spanned three decades, the ’30s through the ’50s, he wrote for The New Yorker about everything from movies and TV, to the invasions of Normandy and Iwo Jima. But it was as a sports columnist for Newsweek that Lardner left his deepest footprint, and he underscored it with long, brilliant pieces for magazines like True and Sport. His trademark, as Stan Isaacs, the former Newsday sports columnist recently pointed out, was a “droll touch — precise, detached.”
“Time has a way of dimming the memory and achievements of writers who wrote, essentially, for the moment, as writers writing for journals must do,” Ira Berkow, the longtime columnist of the New York Times, told me recently. “But the best shouldn’t be lost in the haze of history and John Lardner was a brilliant writer — which means, in my view, that he was insightful, irreverent, wry and a master of English prose.”
Al Silverman, who ran Sport magazine in the Sixties, edited Lardner’s once-a-month sports column in True for a year-and-a-half in the early ’50s. “We never did meet but talked over the phone about his piece every month,” said Silverman. “I don’t remember ever saying, ‘You made a little grammatical error here, John.’ Always it was me saying, ‘Another great one, John.’ And they all were wonderful.”
In the epilogue to a posthumous collection “The World of John Lardner” (1961), his friend Roger Kahn wrote, “Although most perceptive sports writers accepted him as matchless, sports writing was not the craft of John Lardner. Nor was it profile writing, nor column writing. After the painstaking business of reportage, his craft was purely writing: writing the English sentence, fusing sound and meaning, matching the precision of the word with the rhythm of the phrase. It is a pursuit which is unfailing demanding, and Lardner met it with unfailing mastery.”
Do yourself a favor and pick up the new Lardner collection. You won’t be sorry.
[Drawings by Walt Kelly]
The Daily News has two excerpts from Jane Leavy’s new Mantle bio: here and here.
Must-read for Yankee fans.
Game Two, that is. I think this is a good call. Whadda ya say?
Dig the origins of 10 Food Phrases over at cool site called Mental Floss:
Sowing Your Wild Oats: Avena fatua, a species of grass in the oat genus, has been referred to as “wild oats” by the English for centuries. Though it’s thought to be the precursor of cultivated oats, farmers have long hated it because it is useless as a cereal crop and hard to separate from cultivated oats and remove from fields. Literally sowing wild oats, then, is a useless endeavor, and the phrase is figuratively applied to people engaging idle pastimes. There’s also a sexual connotation in that a young man sowing his wild oats is spreading seed without purpose.The saying is first recorded in English in 1542, by Protestant clergyman Thomas Becon.
A Piece of Cake: The earliest appearance I can find is in Ogden Nash’s Primrose Path in 1936, and the phrase seems to have descended from the earlier “cakewalk.” This second term originates with a 19th-century African American tradition where slaves or freedmen at social gatherings or parties would walk in a procession in pairs around a cake and the most graceful pair would win the cake as a prize (this may also be the origin of “takes the cake”). Although the cakewalk contest demanded some skill and grace, the phrase was eventually adopted as boxing slang and flipped to connote an easily-won fight.
My old man used to drink at The Ginger Man, a restaurant near Lincoln Center. The place was named after the play based on J.P. Donleavy’s novel. Patrick O’Neal, one of the owners, had stared in the short-lived play. The novel, was reissued not long ago, and over at The Daily Beast, Allen Barra calls it “the funniest novel in the English language since Evelyn Waugh.”
I loved the Star Wars movies as a kid, not as much as an adult. That said, this looks bitchin‘.
…I would just like to point out that:
Puppies. Are they cute or what?!
You know who loves puppies (probably)? Mariano Rivera. He is a talented closer.
Tomorrow’s post will tackle either the true meaning of abortion in America today… or why I like pretty flowers. Haven’t decided yet.
Master Class in Session…
