I don’t know if girls ever did this but boys usually have specific cars they love. My cousin dug any Volvo, though I suspect he just liked to say the word.
I had a few cars that I loved–Cadillacs, cause I dug the tail lights; Mustangs, and Citroens. What about you?
Andy Pettitte pitched well but last night it was too much Garza and not enough gluten as the Rangers beat the Yanks, 3-1.
Moving on.
[Photo Credit: Jim Cowsert/AP; Brad Loper/Dallas Morning News]
You have to marvel at how silly it all is, don’t you? These are reportedly grown men we’re talking about. But when money and ego are in the mix, adults act like children, don’t they?
Meanwhile, Matt Garza makes his first start for the Rangers tonight against Andy Pettitte who is trying to get his act together.
Never mind the hubbub:
Let’s Go Yank-ees!
[Image Via: ]
New York sportswriting legend Dick Young was a lot of different things. Among them, for reasons laid out in this classic Ross Wetzsteon profile, he was a man one could easily imagine having a great time filing his column from the depths of Hell. Warren Leight and Charlie Rubin ran with the conceit in this parody, which originally appeared in The Village Voice on Jan. 17, 1989. It appears here with the authors’ permission.
NEWS ITEM: Young dies in September ’87
When I first arrived here, I took one look at the place and I felt. . . well, let down.
I figured Heaven should be a playground filled with stickball-playing kids and ringo-levio shouts and all the cold ones you could drink, served up by Pete Sheehy, the great Yankee clubhouse guy. Gofer.
I looked around.
OK, maybe I wasn’t expecting a marching band, but at least St. Peter, or an angel. . . a telegram. Something. I mean, I paid my dues, I made my deadlines, I never pretended I wasHemingway. Not to sound greedy but I was due a final reward.
Then I saw this place—the so-called “Heaven.” Ha! This is Heaven? I said to myself. This is this man’s pie-in-the-sky? In the first place, the sports page doesn’t have any West Coast scores. Ever. Instead we get the Broadway Show League scores. Updated inning by inning. Day and night. And the food is worse than half the clubhouse spreads I spent a lifetime loading up on.
Great, I think to myself, they ruined Brooklyn, they killed the Bronx, and they even let Heaven go to hell. Figures. It’s all over, I said to my pal Toots Shor—”Heaven ain’t what it used to be.”
I had to shout this, to get it over the goddamn disco music, but when he hears me he lifts his Bud Light (which is the only beer you can get here) and he says, “Dick, this ain’t Heaven. . . It’s Hell.”
Then Toots tells the bartender—who looks a lot like Roy Cohn, by the way—what I said, about Heaven not being what it used to be. And my line makes the rounds all the way to the back.
Everyone’s laughing so much I order another Bud Light and Roy says, “Sorry pal, it’s a two-beer-a-night limit.”
That’s when it hit me. It wasn’t the case of Heaven going to seed. It wasn’t like the bureaucracy and the bleeding hearts and the milquetoasts had ruined a good thing. It wasn’t that way at all.
Someone up in the sky had goofed, and I was in the Other Place.
NEWS ITEM: Young gets shaft
That night I wandered the streets—which all smell like the tunnel that connects the 1 Train to Port Authority—and I saw the place with new eyes. Maybe I even shed a tear.
The place was filled with tons of my old pals, sure, but cigarettes cost a deuce, and women wear pants and running shoes.
This wasn’t Heaven all right.
This was Hell.
Hell. Me, Dick Young, in Hell. Well, I knew it was a mistake, of course, and I knew I’d get out so I didn’t indulge myself in whiny self-pity a la Tom Seaver, but I will say this:
I’m not impressed.
This is Hell? This rundown gyp joint is hell? Like Hell it is.
I’ve seen Hell.
I’ve seen it in Washington Heights as a little boy sleeping on a fire escape at night in the days when poor people had too much dignity to demand air-conditioned housing projects.
This, this is like some great ultimate civil service honky-tonk on a sweaty summer night. But Hell?
Tell that to some reporter who walked his beat and earned an honest buck and only switched papers toward the end which anyone would’ve done if they had a chance.
The Hell with all the guff he took for it.
The only people who called this Hell are crybaby ballplayers pulling seven figures to play a little boys’ game half as well as real men played it in ’40s—baseball when the halvah was green.
NEWS ITEM: Young not bitter
No, I’m not. Mainly because I’m pretty convinced I’m going to be Called Up any day now.
Bitter? Why, I bet the more time I spend Heaven, the more I’ll actually look back fondly on this miscarriage of justice. That’s right.
Remember, My Generation was never opposed to getting a bit of seasoning in the minors. We were willing to lose the war in Africa in order to win the one in Spain. I mean in Europe. When I reminded myself of that, the rest came easy. Hell? Think of it as the Mexican League with better whores and better pitching.
And if Ted Williams could play three seasons in Triple A, I could make it through a couple of months with the head of a lizard.
Well, around the first of the year, what they do down here if you’re not going Up is they come around and tell you who’s going to win the Super Bowl, pennant races, Series, heavyweight bouts—they just spoil everything for you.
Evil One, I’ve got to hand it to you: it’s sportswriters’ Hell all right.
Which is what happened to me last year, in ’88.
First thought: get the scoop to all my loyal ex-readers on Earth. That way, they’d be as bored with sports as I was.
But then I realized I was being Tested.
Sure. If I took my disappointments out on my loyal ex-readers, if I gave away the winners to innocent people, then I belong in Hell.
So far, my strategy’s paid off. It’s mid-January, and I haven’t heard a peep. Fans, I think I’m Going Up to the place where you never have to change a ribbon.
NEWS ITEM: Some bitterness is justifiable
Yeah, I’ve got a beef.
Turns out the way you get into Heaven is a lot like the way you make it to the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. There’s a ballot, your name has to appear on 75% of the total ballots cast, and the whole deal is politics. A bunch of jocks vote you In, and a lot of them never even saw me write.
Guess the Scooter knows the feeling. He’s been cheated out of Cooperstown for too long. Another tough break, Phil, is I’ve heard talk that there might be another “Election” in your future. I’m not saying what I’ve heard—it’s all gossip, Phil—but don’t let the phrase “abominations of perdition” scare you. It sounds a whole lot worse than it is.
Besides, Scooter, you’ll play yourself out of the Minors. Just like I did . . . Wait a minute, knock at the door. . . .
Brewers and Padres in the Series, 49ers in the Bowl, Tyson KO over Bruno, Montana Genius in the derby, Cleveland in baskets, Calgary in hockey, and I hate everybody.
HELLHOUSE CONFIDENTIAL
When Bill Buckner dies, word is they’re going to toss him the key to the Pearly Gates. All he has to do is catch it, and he’s in. Tell me that’s not sick. . . . Remember when 54,633 Shea fans stood and cheered Keith Hernandez the day he returned from admitting drug addiction in Pittsburgh court? Four years later, not a single one of those fans is dead. This is fair? . . . You keep seeing things in Heaven that just shouldn’t be. Distasteful things. If I tell you that Paradise is filled with detox clinics and OTB offices, am I breaking your heart? . . . Plus, Casey Stengelwalks around Heaven buck naked. Can’t wait to see LeRoy Nieman paint that. . . . Like to see how any of these NBA druggies would stack up against City College’s starting five back in the days when Jews took set shots. . . . Never, never expected the Brooklyn Dodgers would play all their home games in Hell.
Bumped into Thurman, who told me the true story of how Ellie Howard died. Ellie had run up some questionable expenses while doing an out-of-town speaking engagement for the Yanks. He’d brought his wife along for the night in a Kentucky motel and then they phoned their kids and stayed on about 10 minutes. Boss George wanted to dock Ellie’s paycheck the extra $16.60, they had a row, but when Ellie collapsed, George knew the incident had gone far enough. Next day, he cut the motel bill and the phone bill into little pieces and sprinkled them over the future Hall-of-Famer’s open coffin. Even in death, fans, you hear stories of generous things Steinbrenner does quietly for so many people.
Memo to Bobby O.: your fingertip is in Heaven.
How many kids will drink themselves to death because Ring Lardner did it and he ended up with Wings?. . . Sad, sad, sad. . . . Make sense of this: seems all those sick kids Babe visited in the hospital and promised to swat a HR for? Well, apparently they all died on the operating table and went straight to Hell. . . . Mark Jackson and Rod Strickland are good players, but they’re no Bob Cousy. . . . Crybabies are upset that Syracuse didn’t cancel their ballgame the night Flight 103 went down. Hey, I didn’t see any pro teams take the night off when I died, and they all knew me a helluva lot better than anyone knew those spoiled kids. In my America, when a 19-year-old kid went to Europe, it was to shoot Nazis, not snapshots. . . . Don’t know what this means, but you get better reception on Sportschannel in Hell then you did in Manhattan. And another funny thing about hell—it takes less time to get cable guys here than it did in Midtown.
Regards to Frank Bruno from Benny “Kid” Paret. Frank, Benny says no reason to rush the fight.
Well, I finally met Hitler. I told him, “Adolph, let’s drop the formalities. You’re racist scum. But in a pickup basketball game, you’re not a bad ‘sixth man’ coming off the bench.” Sort of likeJohn Havlicek, Celts fans. I once asked Hondo for an interview and he said, “Soon’s I come back from the john.” He never came back. So what happens? 20 years later he winds up in the same sentence with Hitler. Stuck-up jocks, take note.
Can’t stomach reason source gave me why Israeli athletes murdered at ’72 Olympics aren’t in Heaven. Apparently, “they don’t believe in it.”. . . Just so no one gets the wrong idea, Hitler’s favorite sports writer is Red Smith. . . . Nothing against Reggie Otero, fine Cuban coach with Cincy Reds in ’60s, but he died October 21 and just reported to Heaven the other day. Claimed he had “visa problems.” Typical. After all these years, can’t Latins think up a better hustle to excuse chronic ethnic lateness? Another one I love is, “Oh, the death squads were torturing my mother.”. . . I always think, “At least in your country, government pays attentionto the elderly.”. . . Some Guys Never Get A Break Dept.: Wally Pipp is in Purgatory.
Memo to Joey D.: Marilyn is sick of your weekly roses. Give it a rest.
Somebody want to tell me how a guy like Gastineau had the guts to do the right thing and stand up to his union stooges but then he turned around and folds like an accordion when some skirt cracks the whip?. . . Unimpeachable source swears to me that Steinbrenner sold his soul last year, before the season began. And the Yankees still finished fifth. Thurman, I mean the source, says that’s all the shipbuilder’s soul would fetch. . . . Walter O’Malley on difference between fans in Heaven and Hell: “The hellsters are your real fans. Beautiful example. The drowning of Yankee pitcher John Candelaria’s son. In Heaven the first thing they say is ‘Terrible tragedy.’ But in Hell you hear, ‘Gee, what was Candy’s record last season?'” Too true. . . . Another source tells me that part of Steinbrenner’s problem is that he already sold his soul once before to get Dave Collins. . . . If the swelling in Carl Lewis’s head has gone down, he may be interested to know that lots of “brothers” down here can outrun him. And that’s with a color TV on their shoulder.
Remember a few years ago when some jerk threw a snowball at the 49ers placekicker, indisputably depriving Niners of sure win over Browns? I met the culprit yesterday. Long, greasy hair. Pale. Advertising slogan on his T-shirt—natch. And checking into Heaven. I said, “Wow, kid. Didn’t you have something to answer for?” He laughed. “You mean that snowball thing? I pleaded that down to a P.I. [public intoxication] and did 60 hours in Purgatory. Cake, man. Piece of.” . . . All I can say is, the tragedy of America’s limp-wristed court system that punishes innocents but lets crooks off scott free, seems to extend a lot further than I thought.
Movement growing to hold cancelled 1980 Olympics in Hell. Catch is, all those kid jocks have to die first. A lot of blank spaces in the record books would be wiped out, but tell that to a bunch of selfish kids who could do the right thing and commit suicide—but that would mean thinking about something bigger than themselves, wouldn’t it?
The Hindenburg is a fixture at football games in Hell.
Don’t ask me how, America, but not only did Jackie Robinson make it to Heaven—he still won’t talk to me. Still hates the press, that guy, maybe because I told him once, “Why don’t you be the first Negro to own up to your own words and not scream you were misquoted?” Ah, wait’ll Pee Wee Reese dies. You could bet he won’t capitulate to this Heaven/Hell business. He’ll stick out his hand in plain view of everyone and say, “Dick, I don’t judge a man by the color of his flames. It’s great to see you.”. . . Wonder how Pee Wee’s feeling?
Howcum Dept.: Yesterday I see 200 Iranians walk right through the Pearly Gates, but Ty Cobb’s still non grata going on 30 years just because he never quit the Klan. . . . What are you supposed to do—hold a man’s whole life against him?. . . ’92 Olympic preview: Florence Griffith Joyner may walk off with three or four gold medals in track and field. She may win some, too. . . . Remember great line in It’s a Wonderful Life: “Every time a bell rings it means an angel got his wings”? Well, in Hell, every time “La Bamba” plays, Johnny Weismuller is forced to swim a monkey across the River Styx on his back. . . . Only nice point about Heaven was first told me by Nellie Fox. He said, “There’s Mexican food everywhere, and it doesn’t go right through you.”. . . You hear that a lot.
Mike Tyson’s a great fighter but he’s no Marciano. . . Here’s a guy who thinks an actress likes him for who he is, and then when he wakes up and smells the horsespit, he picks Don King to straighten out his finances. With judgment like that someday the Powers That Be will put him in charge of deciding who gets into Heaven, and who goes south. But I’m not bitter.
Memo to Wade Boggs: It’s always better to pay for it on a one-shot basis than to run up a tab.
Could go either way: Milk-shake drinker Steve Garvey should be a sure shot for Heaven, except for old scandal where his wife was walking around naked and it didn’t sex him up. . . . OK, this bugs me, and I’m not the only one: every Sunday, all the guys in Heaven line up on their clouds and spit down on us cheap-seaters in Hell. It just rains down what we used to call, in the Depression, flamoozy. Can’t believe that Our Almighty turns His back on this behavior. Look. God, I didn’t pound out 4000 words a week to end up treated like some jerk who wears a Cards cap to Shea. . . . I’ll tell you the kind of place Heaven is. Horses can talk, but they’ve got nothing to say. . . . Worst offender has to be Man O’ War, who actually told me, “The race is to the swift.” Then quickly added, “I don’t need no press. I don’t need no negativity.”
Big Daddy Lipscomb (heroin OD, 1963) was being fitted for a size 74 pair of wings the other day. Had the gall to tell me, “Geez, I love bein’ in Heaven.” Yeah, you should’ve seen it when itworked. . . . Old timers here tell me that when Lily Tomlin had her team in the Broadway Show League, the players thought that every time they got to third base, they scored. . . . I don’t get that.
Daily sight of Vince Lombardi currying favor with St. Peter tarnishes great coach’s image. Yesterday I heard him saying, “You know that expression of mine, ‘Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing?’ Well, there’s not a lot of logic in it, is there? If winning’s everything, then there’s nothing else it can be, right, so it has to be the only thing. Jeez, St. Pete, I bet a lot of young men were led astray by me. Can I come in now?” Terrific. The greatest coach in the history of football fumbling words like a Carter Administration puppet. . . . Blind item: What overrated sportswriter named Angell may not be?
Danny Kaye: Name one dive Greg Louganis can’t do.
Babe: The Muff Dive.
The guys down here crack me up. . . . Mick’s gonna love it.
I’m going to miss Willie Randolph—a class Yankee in the quiet-but-proud Roy Whitetradition (although he was no Bobby Richardson). . . . Memo to Dick Nixon: try to catch as many games as you possibly can this year. Especially early in the season. . . . Memo to Billy Martin: see previous memo. . . . I asked a guy who’d know if there was any clue you could use to determine in advance if a guy’s going to the Good Place or the Not Really All That Bad a Place. His answer: if a guy’s got H-E-Double Hockey Sticks in his name, that’s a big hint. So fuck you, Howie cosELL. Same goes for you too, micHaEL Lupica. Jeez, it’s great being dead.
THE POSTMAN DOESN’T KNOCK AS OFTEN AS HE USED TO
Dear Mr. Young,
The broad asks if she can visit, I figure I can get lucky, I get shot, Malamud writes the novel, my career is never the same, Malamud’s takes off. I send Malamud a letter saying I’m entitled to a little cash off the top, he sends it back with my spelling corrected.
OK. Now I’m mad but I wait till ’64. Malamud’s teaching creative writing at Bennington, beatnik students tell me how to find his office. I storm in. William Styron is there. I say I obviously have the wrong office. Styron says, “How?” I say, I was going to kill Bernard Malamud but I chose the wrong door.
Styron gets a novel out of it.
Did these kinds of things just happen to me?
Sincerely,
Eddie Waitkus
(ex-Cubs, Phils, O’s
d. 1972)
Dear Dick,
The Mets are great!
I want to die!
The Giants will rebound!
I want to die!
The Yanks are ready to hit the throttle.
I got the lid off the bottle.
The liberals were too rough on Meese,
I know where daddy keeps his piece.
I’m going to blow my brains to Paris.
Next Stop: Hell, and Roger Maris!
Pace, age 6
I don’t usually publish poetry, but the kid’s got spunk.
Dear Dick,
I am a big fan of yours. I almost had a career in professional basketball. I always wanted to meet you. About a month ago I tried to look you up. That’s one of the nice things about Heaven, is the chance to meet all the heroes I looked up to growing up as a child.
I was very shocked when they told me where you were.
How could this be?
Could it be that no matter how hard a basketball player tried to get his act together you kept calling him a druggie? Or even after another one had lost his life n a tragic accident that wasn’t his fault because some white Celtics fans slipped him five grams anyway? Swear to G – d.
Anyway, that’s all water under the syringe.
I was sad that I couldn’t meet you, but then I figured I can still read you. They have a great library system up here. Except when I asked for some of your back columns, they told me none were “available.” Not one word you wrote, in 50 years, was immortalized here. Can you believe it? That hurt when I heard that, man. That really hurt.
Your fan,
Len Bias
Warren Leight and Charlie Rubin are veteran screenwriters.
[Featured Image by Gary Larson]
Head on over to Kottke and check out the two videos on the making of a Steinway grand piano.
Typical Phil Hughes performance. His boys stake him to a 3-0 lead, he holds the Rangers scoreless through 5 innings and then in the 6th…poof. Granted, it was Boone Logan, not Hughes that gave up the big home run, but it was Hughes that couldn’t get the final out of the inning. Either way, the Rangers took a 4-3 lead and that looked to be plenty, particularly in the 9th inning with their closer Joe Nathan on the mound.
“Honey, they’re going to win,” said The Wife.
“They’re losing,” says I.
“What will you give me if they win?” she said?
“What will you give me if they lose?”
“Nothing”
“Right,” I said.
Now for the stranger things part. Vernon Welles walked with 1 out, and took second on a wild pitch in the middle of a long, impressive at bat by Eduardo Nunez. That wild pitch was critical because it drew the outfield in which enabled Nunez’s fly ball to center field to get over Craig Gentry’s head, good for a triple. Brent Lillibridge made like the hero next and looped a 1-0 slider into left for the go ahead base hit.
The Rangers went down like lambs against The Great Mariano in the 9th to the tune of a couple of strikeouts and a ground ball to short.
Final Score: Yanks 5, Rangers 4.
The Wife is always right (unless she’s wrong).
It was an unexpected and pleasing win for the Yanks. And despite the lousy outcome, the home crowd was treated to a handful of terrific plays in the filed–diving catches by Nelson Cruz, and Brett Gardner, and two beautiful stops at third base by Jurickson Profar.
My favorite fielding play, however, was when Robinson Cano fielded a ball behind second base and, still moving toward left field, half-turned and side-armed the ball to first. It was as if he flipped it but you can’t flip a ball that far, with that much on it. It was my favorite play because it showed off just how special this Cano is. We watch these guys because they are the best in the world, because they do things we can’t do. That’s what Cano does at second base sometimes–making it look so fluid that it appears easy.
[Photo Credit: Lm Otero/AP]
Lil’ Sori: The Return? Just as Alex is about to get shitcanned? Oh, I can see the columns that will be written (wait–too late).
In the meantime, it’s Phil “Chuck and Duck” Hughes.
Never mind the nonsense:
Let’s Go Yank-ees!
[Photo Credit: Richard Beaven via MPD]
Here’s a treat from Ross Wetzsteon. Originally published in the Aug. 1, 1985, issue of Sport magazine, it is reprinted here with permission of the author’s widow, Laura Ross.
Idols grow old like everybody else. Dick Young was once the patron saint, the most respected sportswriter in America, the one who changed all the rules, the guy who brought street smarts into the sports pages. He’s still the dean of American sportswriters, the most widely read and highly paid sports columnist in the country—and yet it’s not easy to find a colleague who has a good word to say about him.
When you finish reading one of his columns in the New York Post, they say, you have to take out your handkerchief and wipe the spittle off your face. “Young Ideas,” the title of his column, is “the greatest misnomer since Charley Winner.” As a baseball and football writer “he used to hang out with the players, but now all he does is suck up to the millionaire owners.” As a boxing writer “he would have no problem picking out Larry Holmes at a DAR convention.” “His values are sick and corrupt,” says a former New York Times sportswriter. And yet after saying all this—and adding that his “My America” tirades would embarrass Jerry Falwell, that his cranky obsessions are ruining his column into a one-man vigilante gang—even his sternest critics are unanimous in conceding that “the son of a bitch was still the best day-to-day writer who ever lived.” “The younger writers all loathe him,” says a veteran who’s worked with him more than 40 years, “but the thing they still have to learn from us old-timers is that you can only hate Dick Young 90 percent of the time.”
It’s partly a matter of generational style. Sitting in the front row of the press box at the World Series, the Super Bowl, the championship fight, bobbing his head up and down like a belligerent bantam, rapidly clawing out notes in his lefthanded scrawl, Dick Young, even at 67, looks like he should be in a Thirties B movie—the only thing missing is a snap-brim fedora with his press card jauntily stuck in the band. Dick Young belongs to the days when sportswriters banged out their stories on carriage-snapping typewriters, a cigarette dangling from their lips, a shot glass of bourbon at their side.
But it is his confrontational style that’s made him so many enemies. You’re drawn in by his lean, breezy, rat-tat-tat, three-dot prose, and then you realize what he’s saying (a litany of Genghis Khan causes, from anti-unionism to Red-baiting to good ol’ capital punishment), and even more clearly the tone in which he’s saying it (not just caustic but downright churlish; not just opinionated but out-and-out ranting). Is it any wonder that colleagues who began their careers by imitating his street-smart stance, his wiseass skepticism, now regard him as a doddering fossil?
People who’ve been reading Dick Young for only 10 years or so remember little more than his vicious vendettas (almost single-handedly driving Tom Seaver out of New York), or his ethnic insensitivities (advising his Spanish-speaking readers to leave their spray cans at home when visiting the reopened Yankee Stadium), or his hit-and-run blind items (“I’ve heard a rumor why the Johnny Benches split up,” he once wrote, “and I’ll never believe it”—end of item), or his mad-dog savaging of “druggies” (he could understand an athlete wanting a little on the side, he commented on the Edwin Moses prostitute/drug bust, but using those controlled substances was unforgivable). Dick Young is not a writer Hallmark would hire.
And yet if you go back more than 10 years, there’s another side to Dick Young. In the evolution of sportswriting from adolescent mythologizing to tell-it-like-it-is honesty, Dick Young was arguably the single most important transitional figure. There’s a better way to describe the arc of Dick Young’s career than to say he was a street-smart kid who rose to patron saint who degenerated into crotchety old man. And that’s to say that while his politics may be as reactionary as Louis XIV’s, his professional role has been as radical as Robespierre’s. What his detractors fail to understand is that there are many battles they don’t have to fight because Dick Young has already fought them—and won.
“What good can you say about a writer,” snips a columnist for a national newsweekly, “who thinks his greatest contribution to the English language is the word ‘horsespit’?” Well, one thing you can say is that when Dick Young began covering the Brooklyn Dodgers in the mid-Forties, baseball writing was characterized by a different kind of horsespit. One New York daily would lead off its story, “The mighty bats and nimble gloves of the visitors from St. Louis yesterday vanquished. . . .” But Dick Young was writing, “This story belongs on page three with the other axe murders.” When he’d begin his stories with fabled leads like “It was so cold out there today even the brass monkey stayed home,” he singlehandedly replaced the pompous poetry of the press box with the cynical poetry of the streets. “It may not seem that innovative today,” says Vic Ziegel, executive sports editor of New York’s Daily News, “but at the time we felt like people must have felt in the Twenties when they first heard Louis Armstrong.”
“How you going to deal with a guy whose enemies list makes Nixon look like Gandhi,” asks another young sportswriter. Well, one way you can deal with him is to remember that when Dick Young first began covering baseball, sportswriters were shameless shills for their teams, keeping the players at a heroic distance, settling for phonily alliterative nicknames like Joltin’ Joe or the Splendid Splinter. So when Young brought his cut ‘n’ slash opinions into his coverage, writing “it was a typical 400-foot Gene Hermanski drive, 200 feet up and 200 feet down,” readers were shocked. Mythic figures, bullspit; Dick Young drank in the same bars as these guys. If we take the warts-and-all closeups of today for granted, we’re neglecting to give him credit.
Dick Young, they say, has broken so many stories because he’s a mouthpiece of management. Come again? When Dick Young first began covering baseball, writers routinely showed up in the press box five minutes before the game and only visited the lockerroom if the press box toilet was broken. “I had to stop by the clubhouse at 11:00 one morning,” says a colleague from those day, “and Dick Young was already there, sitting on his haunches beside the trainer and a ballplayer, taking notes. That was the first time I ever saw a writer in the lockerroom at anytime, so don’t tell me he got handouts from the front office.”
Then they say Dick Young is contemptuous of his colleagues, a competitive son of a bitch who’ll knee you in the gut for a beat. But his critics don’t know this story—it’s never been printed until now. Joe Trimble, Dick Young’s colleague at the Daily News, is sitting at his typewriter in the press box at Yankee Stadium, staring at a blank piece of paper. An hour ago Don Larsen pitched a perfect game in the World Series and now the press room downtown is freaking out—where’s Joe Trimble’s story? “I’m blank,” Joe Trimble says to Dick Young in a cold-sweat panic. “I can’t write a word.” Dick Young calmly rolls a piece of paper in his own typewriter, types out a sentence, takes out the paper and hands it to Joe Trimble. “The imperfect man pitched a perfect game.” Forty-five minutes later, Joe Trimble’s story is finished, it’s the best story of his career, he wins awards for that story—and Dick Young never says a word.
Brash, vulgar, pushy—that’s yet another count in the indictment. But hey, the man is a reporter, not a hired gun. Dick Young walks into the press conference where it will be announced that Doug Flutie has signed with the USFL. He sees a row of chairs occupied by TV people, celebrities, Donald Trump favorites and flunkies, sees the newspapermen standing three and four deep at the back. So he walks up the steps to the stage, sits down on a wall in front of the podium and takes out his notepad. Donald Trump’s security goons politely ask him to move. Choosing his words with the care if not the vocabulary of Flaubert, he informs them that this is a press conference, that he’s press and goddamned if he’s going to budge. They find him a chair near the podium. Christie Brinkley may be there to get her picture in the paper, but Dick Young is there to get his story.
“Gimme a beer,” says Dick Young. “Whadda ya wanna know?”
Some of your younger colleagues think. . .
“Shit, those young guys. They don’t work hard enough, they don’t work the phones, they don’t have any respect for themselves as professionals. I remember when the New York Times started giving days off in spring training! They’re in Florida, for Christ’s sake, and they want a day off! Me? I only write five columns a week these days. Piece of cake.”
Mike Lupica of the New York Daily News says. . .
“Mike Lupica? He’s a newspaper version of a spoiled-brat ballplayer,” Dick Young snaps. “He writes bullshit based on his lack of experience.”
Dick Young’s not an off-the-record guy. Skipping all over the place, talking just like his Friday column, “Clubhouse Confidential,” a sentence, three dots, on to something else, three dots, on to something else. Next question?
Murray Chass of the New York Times? “He’d sell his soul for access.” Maury Allen of the New York Post? “Careless with facts and quotes.” Jim Murray of the Los Angeles Times? “Just a gagster.” Dick Young is the same with nearly all his colleagues. Not angry, not even sarcastic, just matter-of-fact rat-tat-tat. Next question.
Howard Cosell? “Howie the Shill? A fraud. An ass. A pompous ass. Those are the good things I can say about him. Now what about the other side?” Dick Young leans back in his chair and grins from sideburn to sideburn. He’s feeling almost benevolent. Lucky you didn’t catch him in a bad mood. “Cosell gets more and more obnoxious over the years, but people who say I go after him too much don’t realize that I’ve never written a whole column about him. He’s not worth it. Just a little shot here and there.”
(For his part, Howard Cosell declined to comment, but he once told an interviewer, “He’s a sick, troubled person. He’s a hate merchant, crazed, who’s been writing trash and abuses the First Amendment.”)
You were saying how you used to steal papers when you. . .
“Not steal, borrow,” says Dick Young sharply. “We used to borrow paper from the candy store, check out the box scores, then put them back.” A law-and-order kid. “I had a wonderful childhood. Sure, my parents were divorced when I was three, but it pisses me off when I hear about some guy who sobs his way to the electric chair because he came from ‘a broken home.’ Icame from a broken home, and I always felt I was one of the luckiest guys alive.”
Dick Young’s mother was an American Jew of German descent, his father a Russian Jew. From age 6 to 12, he was boarded out with an Italian Catholic family. Talking about growing up in Washington Heights (a lower-middle-class neighborhood in upper Manhattan), about getting an 87.5 average in high school (“and a better education than lots of colleges give you these days”), about playing stickball in the streets (“I was one of the best around”), about going to the old Madison Square Garden or the Polo Grounds (“I was always a Giants fan”), he’ll sometimes go three sentences in a row without bursting into an angry denunciation of the hoods and druggies who’ve desecrated his idyllic past. The Depression Thirties? Idyllic? There’s no nostalgia quite as proud as that of a man who survived hard times.
After graduating from high school, Dick Young went to California to stay with his father, a cameraman in Hollywood. Didn’t work out. Los Angeles Junior College; kicked out when he couldn’t afford the non-resident fee. Joined the CCC; shipped to upstate New York, helped build a state park, still proud of that. Heard the Daily News was hiring, $15 a week. Hitchhiked to New York, turned out they wanted college graduates. Said he’d go to college at night. Took classes at NYU, worked his way up at the News. Finally, after five years, covered his first game, at the Polo Grounds, then given his first beat, the ’46 Dodgers, and before long another big promotion, this time to patron saint.
“I didn’t even want to be a sportswriter,” he says. “I wanted to be a hot-shot newspaperman like Walter Winchell. I wanted to be a stop-the-presses guy, competing with the other paper for the scoop and for the girl. I didn’t go for that fancy writing—still don’t. Some guys think they can fool sports fans with, quote, good writing, unquote, but the fan knows when he’s being bullshitted by a cute line. If you’ve got the story you report it, if you don’t you write it. A newspaper isn’t like a book, for Christ’s sake. When you’re through with it you throw it out and buy a new one.”
Dick Young writes over 4,000 words a week—which adds up to nearly 10 million words in his career, 100 books or so, give or take a War and Peace. For nearly four decades Dick Young wasthe Daily News, the most popular feature in the country’s largest-selling newspaper—a survey once showed that he was singlehandedly responsible for over 50,000 sales a day. But then, in 1981, rumors began to circulate that the Daily News might fold, and suddenly there’s Dick Young, the man who chastised Tom Seaver (“Be a man and honor your contract”) breaking hiscontract and jumping to the New York Post. Hypocrisy was the kindest word they used. Loyalty. Horsespit.
“People think they see an analogy, right?” Dick Young uses the word scornfully, like an epithet. Suddenly his anger seems less genial. “Just for openers,” he says, “there’s a helluva difference between a guy who works 45 years for an organization and a guy who works five years. And as for the money, the difference wasn’t that great. I only got a raise from $115,000, to $125,000 [he makes $155,000 now]. My dream situation was to work for 50 years at the News and then have a goodbye party when I reached 69. But there I was, 63½ years old, they’re talking about closing down the world’s greatest newspaper and how many places will give a job to a guy 63½ years old?”
A lot of people feel Dick Young has lost his pop in the Post, that the Goetz-for-President tabloid has encouraged his pugnacity at the expense of his populism, turning him into a knee-jerk Neanderthal. Drugs, for instance.
“Nothing is as bad as drugs,” Dick Young says furiously. “Nothing. I get so angry when I see our country threatened by drugs. Ballclubs used to punish a guy for the slightest moral deficiency, but nowadays they welcome him back with open arms. I’ll get out of this business before I’ll beg a druggie to talk to me.”
Where does this rage come from, a bad experience? “Me? I only take one aspirin, for Christ’s sake.” The Dick Young segue—even in his fury he retains his humor. “I even gave up Camels—that was the closest thing to heroin in my time.”
Race? That’s a bit more complicated. Dick Young was one of Jackie Robinson’s earliest champions, but according to one of his colleagues on the Dodgers beat he once confided, “I can never forget he’s black” (to which Robinson responded, “I never want him to”), and was always closer to the nonmilitant Roy Campanella.
“I was all for Jackie,” says Dick Young, “but he thought everything that happened to him was because of his color. Racism was sometimes a crutch for Jackie. I can understand it, but that doesn’t make it right. And don’t give me any crap, racism is a two-edged sword. Blacks are as racist as anyone these days‚ maybe more so.”
This isn’t the kind of speech that’s going to win Dick Young any Brotherhood of Man awards. But while this kind of insensitivity appalls his white colleagues, his “I won’t bullshit you” stance has won him the grudging respect of many black athletes. Take Ali, for example.
“I was down on Ali at first,” Dick Young admits. “I felt he was exploited by the Muslims. He was a commercial racist, he didn’t hate white people, he just pretended he did in order to sell tickets. Anyway, one day Bundini Brown came over to me and said, ‘You guys should talk,’ and I said, ‘I’d be glad to.’ We had long discussions after that—politics, religion, everything. I still disagree with him, but we respect each other now. In his dressing room after his last fight, down in the Bahamas, we even kissed each other on the lips.”
Okay, that answers the question: Does Dick Young ever change his mind about anything? Still, one wonders if Ali really belongs in Dick Young’s America. “My America,” he calls it, President Young addressing his constituency, a land of afternoon ballgames, hardworking newspapermen, respect for Mom—and electric chairs.
“I know it bugs people. That’s why I do it. I use ‘My America’ almost facetiously now, just to needle people. But look, I was brought up in the greatest country in the world. To me, patriotism isn’t a matter of flag-waving but of the work ethic and respect for authority—those are the values I was brought up on.”
In Dick Young’s America, drugs are evil, unions are ruining sports and black athletes use racism as a “crutch.” But it’s revealing that he’d even suggest he’s only kidding. Dick Young’s politics are in the grand old tradition of American populism, of the little guy, of the boys in the bar, of the blue-collar, of the hardhat—of democratic bigotry.
“To me, there’s no such thing as a liberal or a conservative. It’s only this case, this case, this case—whose side deserves to be attacked at a particular time.” In Dick Young’s defense, it has to be pointed out that he’s led the fight for access to lockerrooms for women sportswriters. “They’re just doing their jobs,” he says, “they deserve to be treated like professionals. Why do the so-called liberals always lay claim to what’s right?”
Wiseass, sarcastic, swaggering—with a gutter wit, a toe-to-toe combativeness and most of all a tabloid cynicism that’s been elevated to the status of a political philosophy—never forget, Dick Young comes from the Thirties of The Front Page, not Norman Rockwell; he grew up in the Depression of Our Gang, not Eleanor Roosevelt. At times he seems less interested in changing your mind than in getting your goat.
“Today’s writers don’t have enough guts,” he says. “They let themselves be pushed around. The players give them all that crap and they accept it”—it’s hard to tell who ticks him off the most, the players or the press. “They even have ropes around the batting cage in spring training! Jesus Christ, how’m I supposed to do my job?” Three dots later and he’s off on druggies again, then three dots and he’s after the goddamned unions, then three dots and he’s dumping on a lazy colleague or a spoiled-brat player or even his own paper. “‘Today is Friday, the Post learned exclusively’—what the hell’s happened to our profession?”
When you read this stuff in his column you’re reminded of the obstinate dogmatism of the self-educated, but when you hear it it almost has a certain. . . charm. Even in his most vitriolic tirades there is a spark of wit, a flash of style. Dick Young may be the most opinionated, abusive, foul-mouthed bastard in an opinionated, abusive, foul-mouthed business, but still. . .
At the press conference after the first Ali-Frazier fight, Ali went into one of his harangues, berating the judges’ decision and announcing that be was going to organize a nationwide vote to let the people decide who won the fight. Everyone’s furiously scribbling notes when Dick Young’s voice suddenly pipes up. “You’ll lose,” he tells Ali. “Most of the brothers are in the slam and are ineligible to vote.” The reporters are aghast. Ali is speechless. But then suddenly he leans back and roars with laughter, the reporters join in and the harangue is history.
So what if he sometimes dresses like a cross between a senile hippy and a linoleum salesman—plaid pants, Day-Glo jackets, even, for a time in the Seventies, a medallion on his chest with a Miami Beach sport shirt open to his waist. What really keeps him young is the sharp one-sentence comeback, the snappy put-down. Dick Young, an embittered old man? No way. He’s still a brash, cocksure, pugnacious, candy-store kid who happens to be 67 years old.
In the meantime, the beat goes on—”in the sweatshop conditions of his Florida spring training camp,” Dick Young will write on a typical day, “where he works two-to-three hours a day and spends the rest of the time around the pool or on the golf course, Kent Tekulve has warned the plantation owners of baseball that the players are running out of patience. They aren’t going to put up with their terrible lives much longer. ‘We don’t want a strike, but if our backs are to the wall we’ll do it’ . . . a wall that most people wouldn’t mind being backed up against . . . . The players want to strike? Let ’em.”
“A repugnant person,” says a writer who used to be on Dick Young’s staff at the Daily News.“He’d always try to graft his sensibility onto your work. At the Montreal Olympics, for instance, he’d even change my leads, adding phrases like ‘the dreaded Russians and their Red sisters. . .’ He somehow managed to be both corny and vile at the same time!”
Dick Young’s going to retire a year from January—at 69—50 years on the beat, the last of the great tabloid newspapermen. “Me and my wife, we own a piece of sand in Arizona. I like to cook, raise flowers. I think l’ll even try a novel.” A novel? “Sure, I’ll keep writing my crap as long as someone is willing to pay for it. The same stuff, only I’ll fictionalize it!’ Dick Young breaks into a malicious smile. “All those bastards, they’ll have a helluva time trying to figure out who the hell I’m talking about! Hah, I’d love to see their faces!”
Ross Wetzsteon was a journalist, critic, and editor in New York City for 35 years. From 1966 until his death in 1998, he worked at the the Village Voice as a contributor and editor, and for several years as its editor-in-chief. During his tenure at the Voice, Wetzsteon oversaw coverage of everything from politics to sports, but his abiding interest was the theater. For 28 years, he was the chairman of the Village Voice Obie Committee, responsible for bestowing awards for excellence on Off- and Off-Off Broadway artists and writers. Wetzsteon also contributed articles to New York Magazine, Men’s Journal, Playboy, The New York Times,Inside Sports, Conde Nast Traveler, Mademoiselle, and many other publications. He edited several anthologies, including The Obie Winners in 1980 and The Best of Off Broadway in 1984. He also wrote the preface to a collection of playwright Sam Shepard’s works, Fool for Love and Other Plays, and he was the author of Republic of Dreams: Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia, 1910-1960. He died in 1998.
Alan Taylor’s In Focus is a great site–bookmark it, folks.
Here’s a gallery of the Rotten Apple back in the Seventies.
Late night of travel+Yu Darvish+a Gluten-free offense=3 hits. That’s what the Yanks mustered tonight, spoiling a perfectly nice outing from Ivan Nova–who has really looked good, hasn’t he?
Final Score: Rangers 3, Yanks 0.
So, with the Braun news out of the way, figure for the news cycle to reset and then the inevitable Alex Rodriguez suspension to follow in the coming days, right?
Cause it won’t be pretty. According to T.J. Quinn: “Sources tell @OTLonESPN evidence on A-Rod far beyond evidence v Braun. Charges expected to include accusation he interfered w investigation.”
[Photo Credit: James B. Knight]
Ryan Braun’s suspended for the rest of the season.
(Alex Rodriguez your life is calling.)
Meanwhile, the Yanks are in Texas for four games.
Brett Gardner CF
Ichiro Suzuki RF
Robinson Cano 2B
Lyle Overbay 1B
Vernon Wells LF
Travis Hafner DH
Eduardo Nunez SS
Chris Stewart C
Luis Cruz 3B
Yu vs. Nova.
Never mind the funny stuff:
Let’s Go Yank-ees!
[Image by Jackson Patterson via This Isn’t Happiness]
Rest in Peace, Dennis Farina.
I love this scene from Out of Sight, starting at 0:45 in this clip…
Here’s a 2009 interview with Farina at the A.V. Club:
AVC: What do you think makes Elmore Leonard’s work special and so adaptable for movies?
DF: First of all, they’re usually short. I read somewhere that if a book is over 250 pages, it’s iffy for movies. That sounds very pedestrian, I guess. But I think people like that. That’s one of the reasons they’re good sellers, because they’re not 700 pages long. And he writes very clearly and very distinctly and very succinctly. I think everyone can identify with his characters.
AVC: When you’re reading the script for an Out Of Sight or Get Shorty and you see the character you’re going to play, can you tell right away what you’re going to do with that character? Does it jump off the page?
DF: With Get Shorty, I read the book as a matter of course because I’m a big Elmore Leonard fan. I remember saying to myself, “Boy, I would sure like to play Ray Bones.” As luck would have it, I don’t know how long afterwards, I got a call to go to a table reading in L.A. I got a call from Danny DeVito’s office. They wanted me to read Ray Bones. About six months later I was doing the movie. I thought he was the most honest guy in the whole story. He wanted his money, and that was it. There was no pretense. He wasn’t trying to make a movie. He wasn’t trying to be anything else. He was a gangster who wanted his money. I thought he was funny, but I don’t think he thought he was funny. He thinks he’s very serious and that he should be taken seriously, but no one else took him seriously.
Lefty’s career has been notable for a series of blown chances, especially at the US Open. But yesterday, he played a round of golf for which he’ll always be remembered.
Chris Jones delivers a good one for ESPN the Magazine:
Tomohiro Anraku’s last moments of invisibility. Outside Japan, at least, he has been that ultra-rarity — the unseen sensation, a real-life Sidd Finch, his story so impossible that he’s been spoken about only in whispers or exclamations.
He is out there somewhere on this all-dirt field; he is one of these few dozen possible boys. But on this overcast Saturday morning in June, before the start of the first of two exhibition games in Akashi City, the greatest teenage pitcher in Japan — the best since Yu Darvish — and one of the top 16-year-old prospects in the world — as can’t miss as Stephen Strasburg — continues hiding in plain sight. Saibi High School isn’t wearing numbers on its white uniforms today. These boys never wear names. And from a distance, as they practice their drills with alarming precision, looking less like ballplayers and more like a marching band, like toy soldiers, any single one of them disappears into the lockstep crowd. An arm like Anraku’s, this inhuman appendage, must look different. It must have scales, or talons, or somehow drag across the earth, leaving fissures in its wake. But for now his arm is just another arm, and Anraku is just another player, his otherworldliness lost in this army of Japanese ordinary.
Masanori Joko, Saibi’s 66-year-old manager, stands like a general on a hill overlooking the field. “Is Anraku the one with the shaved head?” someone asks him, and he smiles. “They all have shaved heads,” he says through an interpreter, before he offers his only description: “He is the tallest one.”
There he is. That must be him. He is the tallest one by several inches, more than six feet tall, with a cap perched high on his head and a red glove on his left hand. His back is so broad, his shirt — the only one its size on this entire team — rides up his long arms. He has thick legs and a surprisingly American ass, and when his feet dig into the dirt, he ripples like a sprinter. He runs with another, much smaller boy into rightfield, the pair lost in the same cloud of dust, where they wait for a coach to hit a ball their way. When a pop fly settles into Anraku’s glove, his arm is put on display for the first time: He throws a one-hopper to the plate. A murmur rolls through the crowd. This is a good sign.
[Photo Credit: Uroty]
Mugged, mugging. I remember hearing those words all the time growing up. Always aware that it could happen, that it would happen. When it did, getting mugged didn’t mean you’d be killed, just that someone would take your shit.
That is mind, here’s David Freeman’s 1970 New York magazine story, “Mugging as a Way of Life”:
Twelve years ago, when the moon was made of paper and a pleasant old man was the President, Hector Diaz moved with his mother, his grandmother and a platoon of assorted relatives from the slums of North San Juan to El Barrio in the slums of North Manhattan. None of the Diazes spoke English and there were 10 people in three rooms, but the rooms were big, the plumbing was inside and the older Diazes took strength in little Hector, who was 9 and had eyes the color of ripe olives and who seemed to learn English faster than he grew. On Hector’s 11th birthday the family moved to Simpson Street in the South Bronx and Hector moved to the streets, where along with more English he learned the ways of the IRT and of airplane glue.
Two years ago Hector moved from Simpson Street to Avenue C on the Lower East Side, where he changed his ecstasy from glue to red wine in brown paper bags and then to heroin in glassine envelopes. Hector is still the only Diaz who can speak English and his eyes still look like olives, but green ones now, stuffed with red pimento. The Diazes, or what’s left of them, still live on Simpson Street and Hector visits them occasionally. But Hector spends his days on the streets of the Lower East Side, where he and a friend named Louise share their nights in burnt-out buildings and support themselves by mugging their neighbors.
For a time, in the fifties, the streets that run east of Avenue A to the river and below Houston Street to the Brooklyn Bridge on New York’s Lower East Side were almost a shrine, praised as the breeding ground of armies of doctors and lawyers all of whom looked like Harry Golden. Praising the tenements of their youth (“Sure it was tough, but we had love and desire . . .”), Lower East Side alumni sounded like Nixon talking about his astronauts. Today the incipient Jewish judges are gone, and the hippies of a few years ago are mostly gone, departed for communes or the suburbs. The streets and the buildings, exhausted from generations of bright, aggressive youngsters followed by stoned hippies, look tired, as if they need a rest after 65 years of social ferment. Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall are gone; the streets are lined with garbage now—human and automotive—and the people are mostly Puerto Rican. The billboards are in Spanish and in every store window a red sign screams “How do you know you don’t have V.D.?/ ¿Cómo sabe Ud. que no tiene enfermedad venérea?” The old-law tenements are crumbling, collapsing, burnt-out hulks. Their windows are covered with tin and plywood and their roofs are ripped away so that the sunlight floods into the upper stories like shrapnel.
[Photo Credit: Steven Siegel]
So C.C. did in fact pick up where he left off. Staked to a tidy 3-0 lead, he promptly screwed the pooch and gave it away.
“I suck,” he said after the game. “I wish I had an excuse or something. … It’s embarrassing. I’ll just try to get through it. Figure something out and try to stop hurting this team and (start) helping.”
Soon, it was 7-3 and that figured to be that. But the Yanks crawled back in it and tied the score, 7-7. Then, the game stretched on, the Yanks left a ton of runners on base, and when it went into extra innings any thoughts of a good night’s sleep went with it. The Yanks got some impressive bullpen pitching, David Robertson got out of a bases loaded jam, and were jobbed by a bad call in the 11th. The longer it went, the more you knew it wasn’t going to end well.
And it didn’t when Mike Napoli hit his second homer of the game, this one a solo shot, to end it in the 11th.
Final Score: Red Sox 8, Yankees 7.
Kind of felt like this:
Alex Rodriguez was due to join the Yankees in Texas tomorrow but he’s back in New York having an MRI on the current old-man ailment for the Yanks–quad troubles.
Meantime, it’s C.C. who will try to pick it in the second half…dammit. C’mon, C.C., you’re our MAN.
Brett Gardner CF
Ichiro Suzuki RF
Robinson Cano 2B
Lyle Overbay 1B
Vernon Wells LF
Travis Hafner DH
Eduardo Nunez SS
Chris Stewart C
Luis Cruz 3B
Never mind the Game of the Week:
Let’s Go Yank-ees!
[Picture by Quint Buchholz via This Isn’t Happiness]
