With great fear and trembling – no, this is not about the Republican primaries – I watched the American soccer team play Guatemala Tuesday night.
The Yanks had to win – 3 points in the standings – to retain hope of qualifying for the dreaded Hex, the final six-team round of qualifying for the 2018 World Cup. I love the queasy feeling before U.S. qualifying matches – like I used to feel watching the Sopranos, knowing something horrible was going to happen before the hour was up. What is wrong with American soccer? The reputable ESPN commentators were working over that perennial question in the pre-game. I could tell them – the youth programs, aimed at affluent families, with Coach standing on the sideline yelling, “Don’t get fancy, just pass the ball.” Kids get the improvisation drilled out of their psyches before puberty, leaving Latinos, playing for love, in a field, on their day off, making Ronaldo and Messi and Drogba moves. That’s what’s wrong. For all that, the U.S. is not doing badly, having qualified for seven consecutive World Cups, the seventh longest active streak. However, the Yanks had lost, 2-0, in Guatemala four nights earlier, raising the specter of the pitiful giant, being tormented. How can the U.S. lose in Guatemala, my basketball and baseball pals ask. Easy. Everything is different, on the road, in any continent. Even with the gonifs who run FIFA, there is realistic suspense, knowing that strange things happen on their own, no help needed from fixers. Still, because we are relatively new to this sport, we act as if we are the only nation to get the staggers. It’s a wonder anybody qualifies. I was in Milan on a dank night in November of 1993, when Italy needed at least a draw with Portugal to qualify for the World Cup in the Stati Uniti. The ansia was as thick as the marshy miasma as Italy staggered in a scoreless match, until the 83rd minute when Dino Baggio put in a deflection. Addio, ansia. Wise Kasey Keller kept referring to some USA revivals Tuesday evening, but the main theme seemed to be that Our Lads just cannot play, and besides, Juergen Klinsmann cannot put players in the right positions to win. There he went,juggling keepers, bringing in Zusi from off the squad. Whacky Juergen. Gloom and doom lasted all of 12 minutes until Clint Dempsey, playing the role of Dino Baggio in this performance, pounced on a ball and found a corner of the net. Cross-sport note: My long-time pal, Stanley the Rebounder, was watching in his home, and decided that Dempsey had the hard eyes of a schoolyard basketball shark. True. Clint plays like a poor boy. May his tribe increase. The U.S. clobbered Guatemala, 4-0, and is now in great shape, at least until the U.S. falters in the Copa America Centenario this summer, or stumbles at St.Vincent-Grenadines in early September. That could happen. But for the moment, our national sense of entitlement is fulfilled. Generally, I ascribe to the Dumpster Theory of Life. When we pass, our kids will toss all that stuff into a gigantic bin. But just as a gesture to downsizing, we were making pretensions of cleaning out the attic – something, anything.
How about those National Geographics? They’ve been up in the attic for five years, maybe 10. The Web says nobody wants Geographics, not for money, not for free. Try an old-age home, the Comments say. Wait, this is an old-age home, technically. I went to the attic and put them in doubled-up shopping bags, flecking off the dust and grit. A few on the top were damp from a long-patched drip near the chimney. Ninety-nine per cent were in fine shape. I could hear the voices of the writers and the editors and, yes, the subjects – the Uighurs of China, the Zulus of Africa, the clog-dancers of Appalachia, the explorers of outer space: “Look at us. We were important then. We are important now. Get us out of the attic, to somebody who appreciates us." I lugged the magazines, 20 or so to a bag, down to the second floor. (The movable wooden stairway with its sturdy steel housing is itself a relic, from the great builder, Walter Uhl, in the mid-30’s, when homes were made to last.) I began my exploration of ancient history, chronologically: A few dozen older issues we had collected from a library sale on the North Fork of Long Island.
By 1963, we were subscribing, leaving the Geographics around, to make our children, present and future, curious about the world out there. In August 1966, shortly after my wife and I made our first Europe on $5 a Day trip to Europe, there arrived an issue with “900 Years Ago: The Norman Conquest. The Bayeux Tapestry, Complete in Color.” We saved it, of course, and in April of 1975 we took all three children to France for a month, riding the Métro and glorying in the baguettes (trés crustillant) and driving out to Normandy in a wheezing old Citroen a friend had lent me. The August, 1966, Geographic came with us and we consulted the 46 pages that explained every figure of the Bayeux Tapestry as we walked alongside it. Now the same edition of the Geographic was in my hand, bringing back memories. We could not part with these heirlooms. I painted a cabinet dark blue and soon filled it with Geographics -- May 1928 in the upper left corner, all the way to 1992, lower right. Then we put the last 15 years in a hall shelf. (We cut the subscription when our grandchildren began thumbing through smartphones instead of pages.) The National Geographic endures, bless its earnest heart. Our “collection” – approximately 600 editions – is home. I am poking through the Bayeux Tapestry, thinking of Galette Bretonne and the coast at Omaha Beach. The Dumpster can wait. This is an essay I have been dreading since September when Yogi Berra passed and I called up his good friend (and perhaps even his publicist-inventor) Joe Garagiola to see how he was doing.
Garagiola, who died Wednesday at 90, always called back, to tell stories, illuminate, maybe even heighten legends. I’ve known about him since the 1946 World Series, when I was 7 and he was a brash 20-year-old rookie for the home-town Cardinals who out-talked the superstars, Stan Musial and Ted Williams. Even the writers of the time, who did not make a practice of working the locker rooms for quotes, could not miss the ebullient kid. And when Garagiola split a finger in the epic seventh game (when Enos Slaughter scored from first on a looped hit to left) Garagiola ran around the Cards’ clubhouse waving his bandaged finger and shouting, “Hey, I’m out for the season! I’m out for the season!” He was rehearsing for his later career as baseball everyman on NBC. You can read two wonderful tributes by Richard Sandomir and by Richard Goldstein in Thursday’s Times. This one is strictly personal. Joe was always a wonderful source – not a social friend but somebody I really liked and trusted. He was fair, even about a broken friendship with Musial. Garagiola even invented himself, including the rep that he was a bad ball player. Fact was, he had been good enough to be stashed by the devious Branch Rickey as an under-age prospect in the Cardinals’ farm system, shining shoes and taking batting practice to evade the scouts until he came of age. Let the record note that Garagiola hit .316 and drove in four runs in the 1946 World Series before, like many catchers, he got hurt. Later he accumulated the insights of a backup catcher, inventing himself – and maybe even his pal, Lawrence Peter Berra, from the Italian neighborhood, The Hill, who signed with the Yankees. Without baseball, they both could have been laboring in the brickworks or producing toasted ravioli on The Hill. Garagiola and Musial used to drive for hours from the St. Louis region, talking to fans for a few bucks. They agreed they both had mike fright. Musial, who was shy and had a bit of a stutter, was afraid they would hand him the microphone. Garagiola was afraid they wouldn’t. Garagiola’s road to the radio booth is well told in the Times. I got to know him in the mid-60’s when he went to work for the miserable Yankees, enlightening spare time by imitating Joe Pepitone’s protests of a called third strike, hairpiece slipping, arms waving. Garagiola gave Pepitone’s gesture an operatic feel, calling it the “Ma Che Fai?” (What are you doing?) Joe was always there for color and background. I once edited a quite lovely anthology called “The Way It Was” about great sports events and I chose the 1946 World Series (which I consider the greatest World Series, ever) for my own chapter. Joe was working for the Today Show, getting up in the dark, but at a more civilized hour he had time for me in his office at NBC. His stories make that chapter hum – the postwar hopefulness, the talent, the veterans, the fun. In his later decades, Garagiola became an even greater man – helping create a charity for destitute players (B.A.T.) and lobbying against chewing tobacco, which had disfigured and killed some players. When I was writing the Stan Musial biography in 2007-8, Joe talked, off the record, about the friendship gone bad over a mutual investment in a bowling alley, run by surrogates. The ultimate headline in the Post-Dispatch was: “Stan and Joe: Business Splits Old Friends.” I don’t believe they ever spoke again. For my Musial biography, Garagiola – way off the record -- told me sweet stories about Musial, their car rides, their early days when it all was good. His loving insights enrich my book. I sent him a copy and one day after a siege of bad health he rang me and, nearly sobbing, thanked me for being fair to him – “and to Stan.” That was Joe Garagiola – emotional, perceptive and fair. When he didn’t call back about Yogi, I knew it was bad. My mother’s Irish-Belgian relatives lived on Rue Sans Souci before the war -- the Second World War, that is. That is where her aunt and her two cousins, whom she knew well, hid Scottish soldiers hiding from the Nazis, allowing them to recuperate and later escape. For that, her cousin Florrie died in Bergen-Belsen and her cousin Leopold died right after the war, weakened from his imprisonment. That branch of the family died out but there is a monument to the Belgian Résistance in the same Ixelles section where my mother’s family lived. Florrie’s name is on the monument to resisters who helped keep Brussels an international city of culture and labor and hope. Brussels was the first European city my wife and I visited – the Grand-Place, the great art museum, Europe, like going home, for the first time. I flew into Brussels again in 2004, for the start of the Tour de France in Liège, and bought David Walsh’s book, in French, about the doping methods of Lance Armstrong (which Lance denied, of course.) Brussels is the code name for the European Union, where many languages are spoken, where laws and systems are regulated. I once met a farmer in southwest France who spat out the word Brussels because of the agricultural absurdities imposed by bureaucrats in that distant city. Belgium’s monarchy committed colonialist sins and abuses once upon a time -- and Jacques Brel razzed the ways of his home town -- but in this age, even with talk of separatism, Brussels is at least a symbol of order. Refugees from failed societies have found their way to some of the great cities in the world where I have been lucky enough to visit, even live – New York, Boston, Madrid, London, Paris, Istanbul. Now Brussels has joined that list. As somebody who often took his children to work, I can relate to Adam Laroche, who “retired” from baseball the other day.
Laroche quit the Chicago White Sox after being told by his general manager to “dial it back” about bringing his 14-year-old son to workouts and the clubhouse every day during spring training. He has been getting support from current and former teammates, who insist baseball is a “family game.” It must be – Laroche’s father and brother have also played in the majors. Drake Laroche quite likely has great third-generation genes. It’s good to encourage people to enter the family business. I took all three of our kids on assignments with me. One of the proudest moments in my career was in 2000 during the Yankees’ playoff series in Seattle. While chatting with Bernie Williams, I looked around the clubhouse and saw our daughter, Laura, then a columnist in Seattle, chatting with her old friend, Tino Martinez, and I saw my son, David, then working for a web site, chatting with Paul O’Neill. (Our third child, Corinna, a lawyer, has also worked in and around journalism much of her career.) Still, it’s tricky, bringing children into a clubhouse. The Griffey family discovered that in 1983 when Ken Griffey Sr. brought his two sons to Yankee Stadium. Billy Martin, who had his mood swings, became angry with a small knot of players’ sons romping in the narrow hallways of the old Yankee Stadium and had a staff member tell the boys to vanish. Junior, who was around 13 at the time, never denied his grudge against the Yankees. His Seussian smile when he scored the winning run in the epic 1995 series with the Yankees undoubtedly came from sheer joy, not from old feuds, but still….During his free-agent days, he never entertained offers from the Yankees, even though Billy was long gone. Is baseball a family game? More than it used to be. I don’t recall sons visiting the cramped clubhouse in the old Stadium when Mickey Mantle was conducting replays of his other night games. Clubhouses were often more Rabelaisian than today. Much of that mercifully disappeared after female reporters made their long-deserved arrival and most ball players of normal I.Q. made the major discovery that one large well-placed towel could solve most privacy issues. Plus, the newer clubhouses in New York and elsewhere have inner sanctums where players can shower, and get stuff off their minds. But is it a good idea to have sons -- let’s say sons for the sake of discussion -- wandering around the clubhouse and field all the time during spring training? My feeling is that players do have the right to bond, talk baseball, hash things out, even cuss at each other. And I do mean cuss. In 1980, I brought my 10-year-old son to an exhibition in Bradenton, Fla., home of the champion “we-are-fam-a-lee” Pittsburgh Pirates. My friend Bill Robinson, after his rough Yankee days, was having hard-earned success in his later years. Mary Robinson invited us all over for dinner that night. But before that, Bill invited Dave into the clubhouse, after most of the players had showered and dressed. Dave had been in a clubhouse or two and knew about players. As we sat around Bill’s locker, there was a loud noise from the shower area. Two of the biggest stars – no names mentioned – emerged from the showers, still wet, wearing nothing but very large and shiny bling, not fighting but conducting a philosophical discussion, using words Dave had surely heard before but never in such imaginative pairings and repetition and volume. Bill was a family guy. In his measured voice he said, “Uh, David, maybe you better wait outside.” Times have changed. Clubhouses are larger, more accommodating to a family presence. But as my late friend Bill Robinson knew, sometimes it may also be good for children to wait outside. Sometimes you witness history -- but it looks just like a basketball game.
That’s what happened with me, 50 years ago, when I covered the final weekend of the NCAA tournament. Nobody called it March Madness back then. It was merely the semifinals and the finals. The final was between the all-white University of Kentucky team and Texas Western, which usually played seven men, all of them African-American, or Negroes, the name of the time. Everybody knew it was a big deal – nothing like the March on Washington in 1963 or anti-war protests in that tumultuous decade. This was a game, a final. Nobody dug out details to prove it was the first all-white vs. all-black final, although everybody sort of knew it. There was no hubbub on the Web. Actually, there was no Web. Get this: the N.C.A.A. final Saturday afternoon was shown on tape delay that evening. I was there, a young reporter for Newsday, driving down to Florida to cover spring training, and my boss suggested stopping off in Maryland to cover the games. Of all the papers in the land, “we” at Newsday (transient reporters switch their “we” just as ballplayers do) were probably the most socially conscious sports department in the country, writing about race and gender and money and politics. Before the final, our perceptive columnist, Stan Isaacs, wrote of Texas Western: “All of the first seven are Negroes. That shouldn’t be significant one way or another, except that many people make it noteworthy with snickers about the ethnic makeup of the team.” In the University of Maryland field house there was no overt tension – just black players coming out physically, setting a tone. Our professional code said no rooting whatsoever, but I must have been emotionally involved in the game. I come from a liberal New York family that idolized Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt and Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson. My dad called home from his newspaper office in 1947 to tell us our Brooklyn Dodgers had officially elevated Jackie Robinson. Yet the stories from opening day hardly mentioned that Robinson was the first black player in the major leagues since the 19th Century. Imagine how that event would be covered today. Fans and reporters watched Texas Western block and defend and rebound, winning the national championship by a 72-65 score. And afterward I wrote that six of the seven Texas Western players were from up north –suggesting they were unafraid, had a point to make. “All seven players who got into Saturday’s final game are Negroes,” I wrote. “They play well together and Kentucky did not seem ready for the way they play.” I watched for details of the upset – handshakes, politeness, all around. Kentucky’s Pat Riley (from upstate New York) and Louie Dampier (from Indianapolis) visited the winners’ locker and congratulated them. I recall how Adolph Rupp, the fabled coach of Kentucky, unpopular with us in New York, exuded respect, chirping that Texas Western was well coached, played hard, deserved to win. Rumor says he raged, used racial words in his own locker room, but Riley, perhaps being loyal to his old coach, has told me that Rupp was sportsmanlike that day. Four years later, I moved to Kentucky as a regional news reporter for The New York Times. By then, Rupp had used black walk-on players; I drove to Lexington to do a story about his first black scholarship player. I remember Rupp’s jovial chirping at me – “How does a feller from New York like our little part of the world?” He had gone with the times, like Bear Bryant and other coaches. (Confession: I became hooked on UK from living there; when Duke’s Christian Laettner took his killer shot in 1992, I instinctively jerked my head in blatant body English, to no avail.) Over 50 years, Texas Western-UK has come to have epic meaning. (The winning school is now named University of Texas, El Paso.) Thirty years after the game, I wrote a reprise for The Times. Recently, the surviving players have been talking about it leading up to the actual anniversary on March 19. So much has come from that low-key day in Maryland in 1966 – players like Kareem Abdul Jabbar and Michael Jordan, coaches like John Thompson and Nolan Richardson, maybe even a cool former Harvard Law Review president with his lefty moves on the White House court. If reporters like me typed gingerly that day -- if whites did not overtly sulk and blacks did not overtly exult – chalk it up to the unspoken understanding that this was only a game, in a time of more momentous events all around us. There are many things wrong with Donald Trump. Many things. But whether his family name was changed is not one of them.
Every day something bad comes out about Trump – his faux “university,” his ludicrous litany of products real and discontinued, and worst of all, the public events where Trump’s people sucker-punch protestors who just happen to have dark skin. Apparently, he lied about consulting police before cancelling his rally in Chicago Friday night. Trump is, to use his own fourth-grade word selection, a nasty, nasty guy. (When he says “dude” it's a code word for blacks.) I was calling some of Trump’s sucker-punch supporters Brown Shirts long before I heard that his family name may have been altered a generation or three ago. Brown Shirts do not depend on a discarded name from the other side. Now it turns out that the Trump family from a posh section of Jamaica Estates, Queens, may have been named Drumpf back in Germany. Trump, typically, has been known to claim he had Swedish origins. Well, who believes him on anything? Into the mix comes a British comedian selling ball caps (at cost) that say “Make Donald Drumpf Again” – a twist on Trump’s subliminally racist slogan. The first lot of ball caps sold out. I don’t find John Oliver funny. I came upon him in 2014 when he was goofing on the American interest in the soccer World Cup, those silly people. This was after a quarter century of American involvement in the great event, with pubs and television ratings flourishing during the World Cup in Brazil. But Oliver yukked it up, giving me the impression he has a tin ear about the country where he makes a considerable living. (I gather, to his credit, he is also having fun with the scandals of FIFA, the world soccer body.) Fact is, the basic act of changing a name, legally or otherwise, is part of the American experience, part of assimilation. Changing names is as American as apple strudel. Some people changed their names to make them sound more American. But I grew up a yooge half mile away from Trump’s posh enclave, and I knew German-Americans up the block who kept their name – and their vestigial accents, harder to shed – shortly after the War, with no need to hide their life’s journey. My soccer captain at Jamaica High spoke German before he spoke English, he told me the other day. Nowadays, the newer waves, the Garcias and the Patels, do not change their names; we have moved on. We also change pronunciations. The Hungarian-American family that adopted my father had long since anglicized their pronunciation to VES-see, but as a tour guide in Budapest once lectured me, my surname is quite familiar there, and is pronounced VAY-chay. (Bud Collins was the only person who called me VAY-chay. Bud knew that stuff.) What’s in a name? Donald Trump is a creep, a dangerous creep. If his family changed its name, a comedian sniggering about it on the tube does not help the dialogue. Until last fall, Bob Welch and C.C. Sabathia had one thing in common – the Cy Young Award, as the best pitcher in his league one year.
Now they have something else – rehab. Near the end of last season, Sabathia sought out a treatment center to face the addiction to alcohol that he was ready to acknowledge. “I started reading a lot while I was in rehab,” Sabathia wrote on March 7 in the Players Tribune website. “The first book I read was called Five O’Clock Comes Early. It’s by a former major league pitcher named Bob Welch, and it hit so incredibly close to home. Bob became a professional when he was only 21 years old and dealt with a lot of the same anxieties that I had felt, so he’d turn to alcohol for confidence. He ended up checking into a rehab facility, and when he came out on the other side of treatment he was a changed man. He ended up going on to have a great career after he got help.” Riley Welch read Sabathia’s story and alerted me. Riley is a ball player himself, a college and minor-league pitcher, now coaching pitchers in Honolulu. He’s always been proud of his dad, who died suddenly in 2014 at the age of 57. “It brings my family and me great pleasure and joy to see that now, almost thirty years after Five O'Clock Comes Early's initial release date, it is still helping someone live a healthier life,” Riley wrote to me. “I’m very proud that the book was able to provide inspiration for someone during a rough period in his life.” In 1980-82, before Riley was born, I helped Bob write his book, when his rehab was still raw and he needed to reinforce it every day – to verbalize that he was choosing not to drink when the guys were getting hammered in the back room of the clubhouse. Over the years, I’ve received dozens of letters from readers – almost always men – who said they were staying sober – that day – because of what they learned from Bob. I don't know if C.C. Sabathia knew Bob Welch. Bob won the Cy Young in 1990 with Oakland; Sabathia won his in 2007 with the Yankees. But baseball is a fraternity with frequent lodge meetings, and Sabathia grew up in the Bay Area, Bob’s long-time home, so maybe they did know each other. More importantly, Sabathia is taking an example from a pitcher who saved his career, his life, when he was just getting started. I can only imagine Bob’s enthusiasm when he heard that a colleague had taken the big step. Bob’s book was reissued in electronic form last year, with a new chapter I wrote after Bob’s passing. C.C. Sabathia’s testimony reminds Riley Welch that his dad is with us, with lessons to teach anybody with “the problem.” Riley added: “I know my father would be proud of C.C. for getting help when he needed it.” * * * Riley also enclosed a recent story by Barry Bloom, about how Bob Melvin, the Oakland manager, has put the bench commemorating Bob in a prominent spot at the spring ballpark. http://m.mlb.com/news/article/166395958/as-bob-melvin-appreciates-bob-welch-memorial This was at the United States Open five or six years ago. I was sitting outdoors with a couple I knew from the Deep South, tennis fans who had spent a lot of money to be in New York for a few days.
Bud Collins hove into sight, moving fast, sweater thrown jauntily over his shoulders, couple of his books he had been pushing in one hand, and wearing a dazzling pair of pants, made from material he had discovered in some haberdashery or curtain emporium in Mumbai or London or wherever. My friends brightened at this dazzling sight and looked to me to see if I could slow him down. Bud absolutely screeched to a halt to greet the couple, tennis fans, his people. I made the introductions, he chatted, picked up on their charming accent, tossed off a quickie memory of their home town, and then he was off, down the lane, moving fast. “He’s probably due on the air in 30 seconds,” I said. They were in awe. Bud Collins was the core of tennis, the man who brought it to their town via his pioneering multisyllabic imaginative narrative of tennis, the men and the women. He came up with nicknames: the mysterious computer rankings ("Medusa"), a love-love blanking ("bagel job"), the dominant German star Steffi Graf ("Fraulein Forehand"), the ultra-composed Chris Evert ("The Ice Maiden") and the powerful Venus and Serena Williams ("Sisters Sledgehammer"). (List from John Jeansonne of Newsday.) Bud gave life and form and history to tennis. I cannot think of any single journalist/broadcaster/historian that embodied any sport as much as Bud. He was tennis, roaming the earth, the warm places, where players cavorted on red clay or grass or synthetic stuff. Bud followed the sun, bringing his glittering wardrobe with him. His defining moment was at Wimbledon one year when Martina had just beaten Chris (no last names needed in Bud’s world) in the finals, and Bud was working for NBC. He stood there with his microphone, and Evert dutifully trudged over for the mandatory interview and she looked him up (ruddy face, frilly shirt) and down (pants looking like watermelons or cherries) and then, before he could launch into his introduction, she said drily, “Nice pants, Bud.” Over worldwide TV. Bud also played tennis. Back at the dear old West Side Tennis Club in the mid-70’s, I saw him scampering around a celebrity doubles court, barefoot. He coached the sport at Brandeis years ago. Bud was the memory of the sport, always willing to answer a question when we all were on deadline. He had once taken a spot of tea with people who had won Wimbledon decades earlier. Lefty or righty? Personable or dour? Bud would fill you in. Bud has been winding down the last few years, in front of our eyes, Father Courage trekking to the Open with the help of his indomitable wife, the photographer Anita Ruthling Klaussen. Last year the United States Tennis Association named the media center for Bud and Bud got there, in a wheelchair, wearing nice pants. Billie Jean King recalled Bud's respect for women’s tennis. I recalled how, when I broke in, Bud was covering all sports for the Boston Globe, in the avant-garde of the Chipmunks, the youngish reporters who respected not only Muhammad Ali’s chosen name but also his importance. Before he was a tennis maven, Bud was a versatile journalist. One thing I noticed that day was the women players who chose to show up for the ceremony. Bud perked up when he spied Katrina Adams, the president of the USTA, and called her a “Wildcat,” a reference to her college, Northwestern. He could see Billie Jean, of course, and also Martina and Rosie and Tracy, faces in the adoring crowd. (Harvey Araton, the Times’s resident voice of sports memory, wrote a sweet column that day.) Since then, people have been keeping in touch, via Anita. Billie Jean King dropped in one day when she was in Boston. Mary Carillo stayed in touch. So did Lesley Visser and Cindy Shmerler, a tennis authority herself, who recalls a couple of high points of her wedding -- playing tennis with Bud in the morning, dancing cheek-to-cheek with him at the reception. . Bud passed today – Friday morning. There will be longer, fuller obituaries, and details of a memorial in Boston around what would have been Bud’s 87th birthday, June 17. I just want to thank Bud for stopping and chatting with that couple from the Deep South, and for personifying his sport. Nice pants, Bud. It’s early March. It’s New York. It rained overnight and now it’s getting windy. The baseball games are starting down south. I found myself humming “Waters of March,” sung by Susannah McCorkle, with her English lyrics: “It’s the promise of life/ It’s the joy in your heart.” But wait: when Antonio Carlos Jobim wrote that song, in Portuguese, he was talking about March in Brazil, in the Southern Hemisphere. I checked with my friend Altenir Silva, film-writer, who lives in Rio, not far from the Tom Jobim statue. Altenir said the Portuguese lyrics mean, “It’s the rest of a bush in the morning light,” and he added, “Yes, March is a rainy month in Brazil.” Turns out, Jobim was caught in a major rainstorm, in the interior, far from the beaches of Ipanema. Apparently, McCorkle wrote the English version around 1993, giving it a northern take. She was a linguist, who sang in English, Portuguese and Italian, and a writer, published in magazines and working on a memoir when she committed suicide on May 19, 2001 at the age of 55. Her obituary was lovingly written by Leon Wieseltier in the June 4, 2001, edition of The New Yorker. McCorkle’s version of “Waters of March,” with terrific guitar backup by Howard Alden, survives her, as recorded music does. My friend Altenir followed up by sending me a version by Elis Regina, probably the most popular Brazilian pop singer when she died on Jan., 19, 1982, at 36, of an overdose. This sadness from both hemispheres is diluted by the music they left behind, the music of water, the rush of life, the little things we see and hear and feel, the things we take for granted: -- “a stick, a stone.” “É pau, é pedra.” McCorkle could have added a stanza about spring training. A bat, a ball, a glove, a cap. “It’s the promise of life/ It’s the joy in your heart.” |
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