Stan Musial would know how Brandi Chastain feels. The great St. Louis Cardinal slugger went through his final decades honored by a huge statue outside the ball park, which, alas, did not at all capture his unique corkscrew, crouching batting style. Musial hated it, but being a get-along kind of guy, he smiled and said very little in public. The latest abomination is a plaque for Brandi Chastain, the great soccer player who converted the game-winning penalty kick in the final of the 1999 Women’s World Cup. Chastain’s team nickname was “Hollywood,” given by teammate and locker-room leader Julie Foudy. Asked to fill out a team questionnaire, Foudy came to the question: Favorite Actress? She wrote: “Brandi Chastain.” Brandi has panache. She showed it upon making the championship shot in 1999, and, just like Cristiano Ronaldo and all the guys, she ripped off her jersey – in the center of the Rose Bowl – revealing an industrial-strength sports bra and just a few more inches of herself, an athlete at the peak. Chastain was a terrific full-field player, a footballer, smart and competitive. She was recently voted into the Bay Area Sports Hall of Fame and honored with a plaque depicting, well, somebody named Ellsworth or Percy who won a club championship in golf or tennis back in the 1920’s. “Brandi Chastain is one of the most beautiful athletes I’ve ever covered. How this became her plaque is a freaking embarrassment,” tweeted Ann Killion of the San Francisco Chronicle. The plaque will apparently be re-done. Chastain was gracious about it, as reported by Victor Mather in The New York Times. (Check out the links with other examples of wretched sports iconography.) Musial, who died in 2013, generally took the high road about the statue by Carl Mose. I wrote about it in my biography of Musial, and my late friend, Bryan Burwell, sports columnist of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, gave his art critique in 2010:
http://www.stltoday.com/sports/baseball/professional/musial-statue-must-go/article_72b0bf1e-952f-582c-b52b-0b8ffe984b0f.html Stan the Man did like a much smaller statue by Harry Weber, part of a series of St. Louis ball players outside the ball park, including Cool Papa Bell, immortal Negro League star. This one captures Musial’s energy in his follow-through. Even on a plaque, Brandi Chastain deserves to look like herself and not Mickey Rooney or Jimmy Carter. I’m not an artist, but how hard is that? NB: The Reply/Comments section seems to be out. I cannot add a comment from here. The company had this problem a month ago and took a week to fix -- or give out information. I don't have the patience to deal with their tech department right now. Anybody with my email who has a comment, please be in touch. GV Check out the colorful outfits. Listen to the music. Pay attention to the message of inclusivity.
I am speaking here of the international flavor of the FA Cup Final on Saturday from sunny Wembley. Chelsea – owned by a Russian, coached by an Italian – beat Manchester United -- owned by an American and coached by a Portuguese – by a 1-0 score -- on a penalty kick by a Belgian. The FA Cup is one of the more romantic club championships in the world (even as FIFA threatens to pollute football with an extravagant quadrennial club tournament.) Talk about democracy: the FA Cup tournament began last summer with amateurs and semi-professionals and other back-benchers but competition eventually produced two finalists from the top third of the Premier League, or as they say at Windsor, la crème de la crème. The FA final was held after the royal marriage had taken place earlier, so that one great event did not intrude upon the other. (Anybody go to both?) The wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, an American actress of biracial background, was a blend of royal tradition with a warm sermon by an American clergyman quoting Martin Luther King, plus that old English cathedral favorite, “Stand By Me,” written by Ben E. King, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. The queen's chaplain, born in Jamaica, and a 19-year-old cellist from Nottingham but clearly also of African descent, added to the new feeling of inclusion. The buzz of the wedding inspired Lourdes, a friend in Manhattan, to prepare a veddy English tea for the big event. And in Deepest Pennsylvania, a group of women donned millinery in the murky dawn to watch the great event. Not everybody was charmed. I checked in with a favorite relly, Jen From Islington, to see if she was watching. “Nah,” she wrote back. But then she checked a few photos on line and was inspired to write: “Underwhelmed by it all. Esp. since I learned they invited 1800 of the wretched of the earth to Windsor to watch but failed to provide them with a packed lunch. If you are having a party, have a party, I think. Don’t have a pay-as-you-go bar, or make people kick in for the cake. But then, I am a republican. xxJ.” At the very least, the royals may be catching up with soccer, which has gone international in recent generations, with the old dump-and-chase English style made irrelevant by ball skills and intricate passing and devastating marksmanship, as performed in the Premier League by some of the greatest players from around the world. (The influx of world-level players does not seem to rub off on English players, who have qualified for the upcoming World Cup – better than some nations I could mention -- but are not likely to be around long.) (On the official Chelsea roster, 21 of 27 players are from outside England; on the official Man U roster, 19 of 27 are registered with other national federations.) Presumably, this international flavor will continue after the implementation of Brexit diminishes the quality of life -- and probably football -- in Great Britain. Somebody has to make Britain great again. On FA Cup final Saturday, Harry and Meghan did their bit. Nothing is sillier than naming a state bird or a state tree – unless it is naming a state sport. The legislators of California --bless their hearts -- are currently debating the proper official state sport for the fifth largest economy in the world. The favorite in the polling makes me happy, makes me warm, makes me want to sing harmony. I could say they should nominate all the sports Jackie Robinson played for UCLA – that is to say, all four of them. (Have you ever seen a video of Jackie Robinson sweeping around the end? He was Bo Jackson and Walter Payton and Gale Sayers, wrapped into one. Baseball was his fourth best sport, everybody agreed.) However, California legislators are leaning toward surfing. I heard this on NPR the other night, and they included just a bar or two by the Beach Boys, which made me realize that surfing is exactly right as the state sport. All those land sports are wonderful, but surfing is the sport, the recreation, the life style, that made California the state that makes me wonder why everybody, I mean everybody, didn’t just move there. (To be sure, in the old days, thousands of frozen Americans would begin packing for the Golden State on Jan. 2, after watching the Rose Bowl game on New Year's Day.) Nobody had to go in the water, dig their toes into a surfboard. I have never touched a surfboard, even on land, butI have watched men and women, a different breed, agile and lithe sea creatures, performing acrobatics off the beaches from San Diego to the Bay Area (where they wisely wear wet suits.) Surfing is what you could do -- or watch -- if you reached the western fringe of mainland America. It was waiting out there. I came of age, well, with the election of John F. Kennedy and hopes for the New York Mets, and on the radio there were the Beach Boys, with those high harmonies, singing about the beach and first love and Little Deuce Coupes. On my first business trip to LA in 1962, I went to Chavez Ravine to cover baseball, but I saw cars bearing surfboards, heading west. The Beach Boys were on the car radio. California was being invented or discovered. Later, on mornings before night games in LA or Anaheim, I went body-surfing (with seals) at Laguna Beach, stopped for date shakes on the Pacific Highway, and one time watched a fellow sportswriter frolic in the cold surf off Dana Point. And one night in Chicago in 1966, I went with another colleague to see the classic, very un-Chicago documentary, “The Endless Summer” by Bruce Brown. Surfing was the culture of California, even with all kinds of good and bad and momentous things happening in People’s Park in Berkeley and the Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco and Watts in LA, with Sandy Koufax and Kareem and Magic Johnson and Joe Montana and Landon Donovan and all the rest, playing those ball sports. Surfing was the backdrop for the promised land. (Some people are proposing skateboarding as the state sport; my rebuttal is, no, skateboarding is merely surfing on hard surfaces.) Surfing still echoes on the beaches and strangled freeways and hills and valleys. Brian Wilson, who somehow survived, brought the sound of the Beach Boys and the sport of surfing forward by half a century with his 2008 album, the symphony/poem called “That Lucky Old Sun.” At 25 I turned out the light Cause I couldn’t handle the glare in my tired eyes But now I’m back, drawing shades of kind blue skies. (From “Going Home,” By Brian Wilson and Scott Bennett, from the album, That Lucky Old Sun) . With all due respect to Jackie Robinson, the legislators ought to vote for surfing -- and get on with the business of the fifth largest economy in the world. Uncle Harold took us on great drives around coastal Maine – the beaches, the woods, the little towns.
The tours invariably ended near Oak Grove Cemetery in his home town of Bath. “Why don’t we just drive in,” he would suggest. We would park on the narrow lane and walk to the single tombstone for his wife Barbara and their son Roger. Harold’s name was waiting for the date of his death. Roger had died in a car accident near home, after surviving a bullet and malaria in Vietnam. Barbara had lived a long and active life, caring for others, although wracked by bone disease and later diabetes. Harold often talked about her in the present tense, as in “Barbara and I take this road to Boothbay Harbor for the fried fish.” My wife, his niece, and I started visiting Harold Grundy after Barbara passed in 2014. We fell in love with that part of Maine, and at my own advanced age I found myself a new hero, as he casually told stories about surviving combat in the Pacific and building electronic surveillance outposts in Greenland and Guantánamo Bay. But he was wearing down, and it took a village of loved ones to usher him through pain and confusion before he passed on Jan. 4. People in cold climates cannot bury their dead in mid-winter. Harold, stubborn by nature, modest from his Quaker background, precise from his construction career, specified no ceremony, no fuss, for his burial. His two faithful surrogate children, Ace and Cookie, now living in Arizona and Connecticut, arranged for a no-frills burial on May 11. Eric came in from Florida. My wife and I were asked to represent the family, scattered and getting on in years. A few locals heard about the burial, and then a few others, and they got to the cemetery, some using walkers and canes to reach the casket, with the American flag neatly folded on top. The sun was bright, the breeze was chilly, and the funeral director read a few prayers -- as quick and simple as Harold had mandated. A very fit military guy in a red flannel shirt, who had worked with Harold at the surveillance base in Cutler, Me., stood at attention and whispered to me: “Best man I ever met.” Later, eight of us met at a tavern alongside the glistening Kennebec River. We toasted the family, and told a few stories. Ace told how Barbara and Harold used to take him along on so many family outings when he was a kid. And Ace told how Harold approached the mathematical challenge of building basement stairs: “He wasn’t telling me what to do. He was teaching me.” People smiled as they recalled how Harold always had fresh pies and pungent chowders on the stove for company. My wife, the oldest of her generation, remembered a Christmas right after the war, when three young couples were sharing a small house on the Connecticut shore, and how she witnessed Uncle Harold using a tiny saw on a wooden bowl. On Christmas morning, she found a beautiful bed for her doll’s house. Harold always made things. He and Barbara used to peddle his home-made toys at flea markets in the region, and later his friend Eric made a thriving web business out of wooden objects. Nobody wanted to leave the lunch. Cookie, so loyal and capable, who did the paperwork for Barbara and Harold for decades, proposed that our little community meet again next year. We went our separate ways, knowing that Harold was up on the hill at Oak Grove Cemetery, with Barbara and Roger. * * * I’ve written about Harold and Barbara and Maine: https://www.georgevecsey.com/home/farewell-to-harold-grundy-of-the-greatest-generation https://www.georgevecsey.com/home/sometimes-a-good-idea-actually-works-out https://www.georgevecsey.com/home/dredging-the-river-in-1941-for-a-destroyer-in-2016 We are learning that the National Football League provides equal-opportunity fairness.
While encouraging male athletes to ruin their brains, one club has also put female cheerleaders in danger by shuttling them out of the country, confiscating their passports, and telling them to get naked around wealthy creeps. Just about all sports are corrupt – from so-called “college” basketball and football to gymnastics to the National Hockey League. I’m not even getting into the steroid era of baseball. The N.F.L. is the most popular sport in the U.S. as well as the most pompous, overlooking the fact that in recent years former athletes have been shooting themselves in the chest to preserve their brains for the autopsy that will confirm the trauma. Now, my colleague Juliet Macur has written a grim and comprehensive article about the expectations of the Washington football team (that goes by a racist nickname.) Under owner Daniel Snyder, the cheerleaders were expected to do more than the traditional NFL duties of performing while network camera-wielders wriggle on the ground for the so-called “honey shot.” (One TV production guy became famous for encouraging up-close-and-personal glimpses of cheerleaders.) The Washington cheerleaders were encouraged to take evening cruises on the Potomac as part of their “job” (for which they receive minimal compensation, unless you want to count photo shoots observed by leering rich guys with yachts.) In Macur’s excellent article, the female overseer of the cheerleaders expressed shock, shock, that some of her charges felt used by these experiences. In fairness to the N.F.L., the league has been busy lately, dealing with evidence of brain damage – over 100 former players, by recent count. The league had third-and-long defensive specialists and snapping specialists for punting but for many years, for its neurological expertise, the N.F.L. relied on a doctor who, well, knew nothing about brains. But don’t worry, the owners are vigilant about something: they are all over the kneeling demonstrations by some players during the national anthem. In other recent sporting developments, it turns out that the sainted Karolyis, Bela and Martha, had a glimmer of the widespread abuse by the now-convicted gymnastics doctor in Michigan. Martha Karolyi heard about it years ago but, in classic boarding-school in-loco-parentis tradition, she did nothing to warn the girls and their parents. After all, she and Bela had to keep the production line humming at their gymnastics ranch in deepest Texas. Then there is the National Hockey League, which traditionally tolerated the unofficial but very real job of “goon” – a player paid to fight opponents. To its credit, the league has cut back on mass brawls that were common a generation ago, but too late to help Jeff Parker, a former enforcer who died last year at 53 and was diagnosed, posthumously, as having C.T.E., or chronic traumatic encephalopathy. The N.H.L. seems to be taking its medical advice from the long-time avoidance tactics of the N.F.L. At least the N.H.L. does not stoop to confiscating passports from cheerleaders ferried out of the country. Enough of this sordid business. It’s time for a truly clean sport: Coming up next month – from Russia! – the FIFA World Cup. Ever since that White House Correspondents dinner Saturday night, I have not trusted my negative reactions.
I wanted to make sure I did not have a male-double-standard reaction to a female comedian who talked dirty about the disturbed man in the White House. She, after all, did not say anything that my wife and I have not shouted at the tube in the last two years. But there is a huge difference between insults hurled in a darkened tv den….or incessant breaking-news yammering on cable news….or kvetching on my own little therapy web site…or even actual news reported by my friend Michael S. Schmidt and other stars at the New York Times and Washington Post….and a raunchy televised monologue in a huge room filled with DC types. So despite judgments by my wife….and Masha Gessen in The New Yorker….that the speech was righteous and prophetic, I am reminded why the Times, my former employer, does not participate in the annual dinner. The Times also does not let its staff vote for awards – sports, entertainment, anything – because, as I understand it, the Times’ job is to report news rather than make news with a quirky vote for the Baseball Hall of Fame or something else trivial. The Times has been way ahead of the curve on ducking the dinner, which may have been a grand old Washington custom when (male) swamp-dwellers smoked cigars and chuckled at musty jokes about Franklin Pierce’s golf game, or whatever. I know scholarships and awards are involved, but the dinner (without the pulchritude of the Oscar show) was mean. Then again, I didn’t think Steven Colbert’s 2006 riff on President George W. Bush was funny. (I don’t think Colbert is funny, or Bill Maher, and I thought Louis C.K. was rancid when I caught him on tv once or twice. I love Letterman and Chris Rock and Wanda Sykes and Tina Fey but there are too many comedians. I know this sounds stuffy.) The point is, there is a disturbed man in the White House, courtesy of angry people with racial bias and rich guys and evangelicals and frauds like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell. This is serious business. Hiring a comedian for shock value does not help. You should hear the stuff my wife and I shout at Sarah Huckabee Sanders in our den, as she pours self-righteous contempt on journalism, and facts, and reality. She was sent by the chicken-heart President to take the insults Saturday, and she reacted with stoic dignity, for once. If you ask me, we need to listen to dead-serious people like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, neither of whom has ever been described as a comedian. The country needs Robert Mueller to do his job, and federal prosecutors, and lawyers, and journalists, and refreshing younger candidates, and journalists. The dinner needs to evolve if not expire. No more comedians. No more yuks. This is serious business. The correspondents should say: We are better than that. |
Categories
All
|