 Bucky Dent Returned to the Scene On the morning after, what are your reactions to the wild-card game Tuesday evening? (I notice one of our regulars, in the Comments section, is celebrating the 6-2 loss by the Brooklyn Dodgers' old tormentors.) * * * "Red Sox-Yankees: As good as it gets." I heard myself – steadfast Brooklyn/ Mets/National League fan – uttering those words when the Red Sox and Yankees wound up in Tuesday’s wild-card game. It really is baseball’s classic matchup -- between two teams that have never been mine. I’m old enough to remember being at Jones Beach, middle of last century, and hearing stereophonic portable radios blaring Joe DiMaggio drubbing Ted Williams, over and over again, an endless summer of Mel Allen, blaring from blanket to blanket. When I became a sportswriter, I rooted (unofficially, of course) for the underdog Red Sox but there was always a Bucky Dent or an Aaron Boone. I have never been a Red Sox fan, per se, but I loved the city of Boston from my first trip there in 1962, and I used to think maybe someday we’d live there. And Fenway Park – the wall, the deep right-field stands, the skyline, the immediacy of that great city. A ball park, a city, worth rooting for. I was rooting for the Red Sox on Oct. 5, 1978, when the two historic teams met in a one-game playoff. We had driven our oldest child to visit a college in the Northeast, and while she and my wife were taking a tour, I sat in the car and listened to Russell Earl Dent morph into Bucky Freaking Dent. Who doesn’t remember those autumnal mood swings that baseball does so well? This past week has aggravated the angst for aging fans of the Boys of Summer. We remember Oct. 3, 1951, when Bobby Thomson of the New York Giants drilled a home run into the left-field stands of the Polo Grounds and into collective memory of Brooklyn Dodger fans. I remember coming home from junior high and hearing the terrible deed—and wandered outside to pick a fight with a much larger Yankee fan in the neighborhood. A friend asks: why fight Bluto? That was the point. Being a Brooklyn Dodger fan was masochistic, by definition. My pal Jerry Rosenthal was a Brooklyn kid. When Thomson smote Ralph Branca, Jerry recalls, he cried for two days. (When Jerry played ball in the minors, his hitting coach was Pafko-at-the-Wall. They talked lovingly about Brooklyn.) Talk about memory. George Hirsch, one of the founders of the New York City Marathon, wrote about his memories – how he and some buddies came down from suburban New Rochelle to watch the game. Hirsch wrote about it for the New York Times last Sunday, and he also appeared on CBS Saturday morning: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/30/nyregion/70-years-later-bobby-thomsons-homer-still-hurts.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMprziU_xok The Dodgers and Giants formed the great baseball rivalry, but that was then, in a different New York. Those two teams moved to California and broke a lot of hearts, including mine. To be sure, they remained rivals. I was in the press box in Candlestick Park in 1965, when Juan Marichal clubbed John Roseboro over the head at home plate – as ugly as it gets. Then there's this: the Yankees and Red Sox never left town. Gotta give them that. In 2004, the Yankees drubbed the Sox, 19-8, for a third straight victory in the AL series. I will never forget being in that tiny Red Sox clubhouse and hearing Johnny Damon say (and I am writing from recall): “If I am not mistaken, we won four straight games eight times this season.” His point was: they could do it again. And they did, beating the Yankees four straight and then the Cardinals four straight in the World Series for their first championship since Babe Ruth and 1918. The Red Sox’ four straight victories over the Yankees in 2004 is now part of their rivalry – payback, as good as it gets. There, I said it again.  Johnny Damon, 2004: "If I'm not mistaken..." My Buckner/Mookie column is back in The New York Times today, nearly 33 years after I wrote it….and rewrote it….in a manic press box on a hectic Sunday morning.
Poor Bill Buckner has passed at 69 and the Times paid him the honor of an obituary by Daniel E. Slotnik and a salute by Tyler Kepner and the NYT also resurrected my column through the glories of digital memory. Having my column back “in print” is also an honor, bringing back memories of that crazy World Series. It recalls a time before the Web when papers had flotillas of sports columnists who were expected to be at major events and be able to type fast, with instant wisdom, for the next deadline for readers who would wonder what daily columnists like Daley or Lipsyte or Smith or Anderson or Berkow (later Rhoden, Araton, Roberts) thought. This is, as I like to call it, ancient history.* It seems like yesterday, that Saturday night in the press box. I had written a column for the early Sunday paper (in fact, the bulk of the print run) based on my meandering through New England on Friday, after the fifth game in Boston. My “early” column was written to make sense, no matter what transpired in the game late Saturday night. I was not predicting, merely musing. So I wrote about how, with a 3-2 lead, the Boston sports radio was squawking and gargling and screaming including how Bill Buckner’s ankles were shot and manager John McNamara should get Dave Stapleton in for defense – tortured Cassandras who saw the truth about to fall on their heads. I wrote my early column about Boston’s feeling of doom, even with a lead in the Series. I tied it to lingering Calvinist New England gloom, and the historically unfortunate sale of Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1918, but at no point in my column did I refer to any “Curse of the Bambino.” The Red Sox had a lead on Saturday night and I can still see their players edging up the dugout steps, eager to celebrate, and the scoreboard briefly showed a message of congratulations to the visitors, but then the flower pot of history fell off the upper-story window ledge onto Boston’s head and, the assembled journalists commenced pecking away on our rudimentary computers, rewriting whatever we had written about Boston finally exorcising the ghosts of failures past.-xx Now there was a new failure. The great Dave Anderson compared the Mookie/Buckner moment to Bobby Thomson’s 1951 home run off Ralph Branca – Dave knew those guys. I wrote the version in the NYT today and then a dozen or so Times reporters began breathing again. A novice news reporter, in the press box to help out, remarked that he was impressed by how fast we had rewritten our stories. Joe Vecchione, our sports editor who was supervising us in the press box, drily said (sounding like Clint Eastwood in the subsequent movie “The Unforgiven”) “We do it every day, kid.” And you know what? We did do it every day, kid. It was a different world, including journalistically. The seventh game was postponed when the miasma of rain settled over New York, but the teams resumed Monday night and the Mets rallied (people forget that) to beat the Sox to win the World Series and the legion of Times reporters wrapped it up. The headline on my column was “Babe Ruth Curse Strikes Again.” Please note: I am not that smart or inventive to pull that concept out of the dank air. Over the decades, people had laid the failures by the Sox upon the sale of Ruth. In October of 1986, this was not new news, was not instant insight. Eighteen years later, my esteemed colleague Dan Shaughnessy, wrote a book about various Red Sox failures (including Bucky Freaking Dent and Aaron Freaking Boone.) The title was “The Curse of the Bambino,” and the phrase is all Dan’s. How The Sox have become overlords of the American League is a 21st-Century story of talented ownership, management and players. The club stages magnificent ceremonies to honor the past, even the failures. Bill Buckner was a gracious and familiar presence at baseball gatherings, as the obituary and Kepner’s column describe. The rising tide of Red Sox success floated Buckner’s rowboat. He deserved more decades, more salutes, as a superb player who had a bad moment. *- Talk about ancient history. Sports Illustrated was just sold to some other company. It was once a giant that advanced marvelous writing and reporter. I gave up my subscription soon after I retired in 2011 -- didn’t even know it had gone biweekly. xx- A day or so later, the great Vin Scully -- who had just made the marvelous call of the final play as heard in the video above -- was quoted as saying he had been surprised to hear New York sportswriters cheering in the press box. With all due respect, we were not cheering; we were gasping – oy! – at the Mookie-Buckner turn of events, and how we now had to re-write our earlier gems, which were poised to go out to the waiting world. (Deconstructing the legend of "The Curse.") https://www.nytimes.com/1986/10/28/sports/sports-of-the-times-babe-ruth-curse-strikes-again.html https://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/24/sports/baseball/a-myth-that-should-not-be-perpetuated.html https://ourgame.mlblogs.com/the-curse-of-the-bambino-f7b2b83b6e76 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_World_Series  David Price: The face of redemption Monday Morning: My wife asked, “Well, what are you going to do now?” La guerre est finie. Well, I said, family, friends, chores, read a book, get to sleep earlier. The better team won, of course. That is what experts seemed to be saying about the Red Sox weeks ago, and it was obvious throughout. Who doesn’t like redemption? I’ve witnessed two great Dodger pitchers, Don Newcombe and Bob Welch, both of whom I got to know, not win a World Series game, and that is no fun. It wasn’t fun trying to pick between Clayton Kershaw and David Price, two left-handers in search of redemption, but I have never met Kershaw and I did encounter Price during the 2008 post-season when he was a thoughtful kid out of Vanderbilt, coming on for the Rays. So, in a way, I was rooting. His redemption was magnificent, on the tube, Sunday night. So was post-season baseball because it allowed me to purge more of the Mets out of my tormented system. Better baseball. One play exemplifies: In the third desperate game, the Dodgers’ versatile Cody Bellinger, son of a former Yankee, wearing my good friend Bob Welch’s old No. 35, and wearing it well, was in center field, trying to avert what would be a devastating run. Fly ball to medium center field. Bellinger backed up with those long legs of his and took a running start inward toward the descending ball, caught it and heaved it on a fly near home, just in time to cut off a runner trying to score from third. https://www.sbnation.com/mlb/2018/10/27/18031312/world-series-dodgers-cody-bellinger-throw-ian-kinsler-home Just the way the game ought to be taught. But after watching the Mets (except when the brittle Juan Lagares could play center) I forgot how people like Bradley, Jr., and Betts and Bellinger and Hernández and all the rest could play center field. So a dose of much better baseball sends us off to the winter. Early Monday morning, I had time and brain width to read two stirring obituaries, one on the playwright Ntozake Shange and one on the contemplative monk, the Rev. Thomas Keating, both exquisitely written. (My Appalachian pal, Randolph, now occasionally commenting on this little therapy web site, had sent me the link with a comment: “I feel a sadness. He was such a good man. He really understood that religion was secondary and he tried to bridge the gap between Christianity, Buddhism and all religions: we are all humans....” Randy The two obits: what a start to the off-season. And don’t forget to vote next week. EARLIER WORLD SERIES ARTICLES:
Date shake -- or Necco wafers? This was the cryptic note from my older daughter, a recovering newspaper columnist, just like her dad. Knowing that she is also a poet (a good one), I knew this was a simile or allegory or symbol, one of those things. I got it. Southern California vs. Boston. The World Series matchup. Sweet tooth and clashing baseball instincts. This was before the first two games in chilly, quivering Fenway Park. On a clean slate, this Met fan pondered the two delicacies -- the sweet, freeze-your-brain specialty of Southern California or the traditional New England circular treat that fits right on your tongue. (The chocolate one!) I flashed upon the great post-season games that Laura Vecsey and I covered. https://www.georgevecsey.com/home/my-favorite-columnist-and-her-baseball-career Laura would place a fresh Necco package on my press-box table -- straight from the New England factory. (The company has since gone down, but an Ohio company seems to have rescued it.) thetakeout.com/necco-wafers-and-sweetheart-candies-saved-from-dusty-ex-1829300533 But then I thought about being a young baseball reporter in the mid-60s, night games in Anaheim, mornings driving out to Laguna Beach, swimming with the seals, (ruining my skin for decades later) and then searching the coastal highway for a utilitarian shack producing that thick substance laced with bits of chewy dates. The Beach Boys on the car radio. A date shake in my hand. No brainer. I vote for date shakes. The World Series is a different flavor altogether. The Mets are a distant horrible memory. I watch the three Boston outfielders and the Dodger center fielders, changing by the inning, all running down shots into the alleys. Good baseball, so rich, so filling, making the masochistic Mets fillings in my teeth ache. I have to choose? Normally, I'd be partial to the team of my childhood, Brooklyn Dodgers, and even in the 80s I was doing a book with Bob Welch and became friendly with Al Campanis and renewed my admiration for Don Newcombe, still with them. But it's a different age. I don't like rent-a-star Manny Machado, even with that magnificent arm and all the other skills. As a guy with a formerly red beard, now trimmed tight, I think Justin Turner's beard is, well, over the top. All I'm saying is, not my team. I have never rooted for the Red Sox (well, maybe when they played the Yankees in the 70s), and I still do not, but I love Fenway Park and I love Boston, deeply love visiting there. And David Price was such a nice young guy in 2008 with Tampa Bay, not long from Vanderbilt, smart, open. I have been happy that he finally won a post-season game and now has won a World Series game. That isn't rooting. It's just appreciation. None of this fits my Mets, need-to-suffer, pathology. Plus, my agent is a fervent Red Sox fan. I always want her to be happy. But in the scenario posted by my older daughter, I would choose a date shake -- Beach Boys on the radio -- coastal highway -- anytime. Enjoy the rest of the series. THEN THERE'S THIS: It took a health walk on Friday with my head-set – listening to one of my all-time top-ten CDs, Ry Cooder’s epic “Chavez Ravine” -- to make me question my knee-jerk feelings about this World Series. The album is a highly pointed look at the “acquisition” of the land for the Dodgers’ home park since 1962. As a Brooklyn fan, I hated the Dodgers’ move (and Walter O’Malley.) But the first time I saw the transplanted Dodgers in their pastel playpen, 1964, on a gorgeous spring evening, I shook my head and thought, “Hmmm.” As a Queens-Brooklyn guy, I could understand, if not forgive. Ry Cooder’s masterpiece talks about the people who lived in the ravine, and the establishment’s “UFO” that warned them to evacuate their homes. He wrote songs about the campesinos who lived there, but also the truck drivers and urban planners and red-scare politicians who were part of it. And after all the disruption, Cooder presents a sweet song about the ghosts who inhabit the ball park: 2nd base, right over there. I see grandma in her rocking chair Watching linens flapping in the breeze, And all the fellows choosing up their teams…. The man parks cars outside the ball park and he concludes, “Yes, I’m a baseball man myself.” I love that album. Play it all the time. (check out the beautiful Costa Rican poem, “Soy Luz y Sombra” at the end.) So my question for the day, after my health walk: is, isn’t that beautiful and enduring place, even with its brutal beginnings, a worthy bookend to Boston and Fenway? Friday Night's Marathon: Yes, I Went the Distance
Well, with a brief excursion to watch Burt Reynolds flirt with a blonde and out-drive Ned Beatty in "White Lightning." It had to be done. These post-season games, with their commercial breaks, make me crave a moonshiner in a car chase. Action. Plus, I find the network broadcast to be hopelessly saccharine after a season of Gary, Ron, Keith, Howie and Josh on Mets broadcasts. I'm sorry. I am reminded of Mario Cuomo's description of Walter Mondale's candidacy in 1984: "Polenta." (Look it up.) Mario laid the observation off on his mom. Nice going. The Fox crew deserves credit for stamina, as does the umpiring crew. The game got better and better as the hours went on, and any fan had to wonder when position players would start pitching. All the front-office-driven analytics mandating pitching changes (and locked-in power arc swings) run through entire pitching staffs in extra innings. Then Nate Eovaldi performed one of the great World Series relief performances -- 6 innings, 3 hits, 5 strikeouts, one game-ending home run by Max Muncy. His work should be a wakeup call to managers and general managers and analytics geeks everywhere that pitchers can still go multiple innings, getting into a routine, learning as much about the hitters as the hitters are learning about them. The game lasted 7 hours and 20 minutes, took 18 innings, and became an instant classic. I am wondering if some of our friends in far-flung time zones like Israel, Italy, Rio, Japan, etc. were watching or following on the web. That game will blend right into Saturday's game, with the depletion of pitching staffs -- and stresses and strains on players' bodies -- having a major impact. Rest up, you all.  Casals, King, Navratilova, Collins, KIaussen, Adams, 2015. Photo by Ed Goldman No sport carries a sense of community like tennis. Even with gigantic prize money and swollen retinues of today, the sport remains somewhat a caravan of gypsies familiar to each other, even though their occupations vary – players, coaches, hitting partners, significant others, moms and dads, agents and publicists, plus the specialists who cover the sport: the peripatetic photographers plus the scribblers and babblers, as Bud Collins called himself and his colleagues. Arthur Worth Collins, Jr., was the center of one sport, more than any other journalist has ever been. In his half century on the beat, tennis has been a movable feast, seeking warm spots year round – Monaco in April, Wimbledon in late June, Australia in January – jet-lagged regulars taking the rays during a desultory early-round match in some tune-up event. Collins could doze in the sun with the best of them, as recalled by Bill Littlefield of WBUR radio, who spoke at the memorial service for Collins in historic Trinity Church on Copley Square in Boston last Friday. Littlefield talked about Collins the writer – often overlooked amidst his garish pants and equally garish vocabulary – who could describe the sound of tennis balls being “punished,” yet make it a soft, pleasurable backdrop to life itself, like a heartbeat. Collins was the heart of the sport for decades, back to the late 60s when he shifted from a general sports reporter who recognized the special ones, Muhammad Ali and Bill Russell and Billie Jean King, becoming a tennis maven. He brought people together at events around the world, said Lesley Visser, once a Globe sports writer, now a broadcaster, who recalled how Collins could write a column and simultaneously answer questions from colleagues, always ending with some version of “ciao” in their native tongues. (He addressed me as “VAY-chay,” which is how real Hungarians pronounce my name. Three Italian insiders – Gianni Clerici, Ubaldo Scanagatta and Rino Tommasi – in turn called him “Collini.”) Collins, in failing health for years, passed on March 4 at 86, and his wife and protector and caretaker for two decades, Anita Ruthling Klaussen, spent three months preparing a ceremony -- on his birthday -- that was both elaborate and parochial in that most hamish of great American cities. The service was both stately Episcopalian and randy jock. In the pews were familiar faces, and forehands, of Rod Laver, Stan Smith, Todd Martin and Pam Shriver, as well as tennis officials from around the world, and journalists who knew Collins both as friend and source (oh, and by the way, a very accomplished "hacker" in the tennis sense of the word.) Two great champions spoke. Chris Evert recalled being a monosyllabic 16-year-old, feeling the kindness of Collins, and later, when she lost seven Wimbledon finals to a rival whose name she did not need to pronounce, Collins was always at courtside, doing a worldwide live interview “in those silly pants,” but with a kind smile that showed he understood the pain of being second on that day of days. Billie Jean King, wearing a pink blazer in tribute to the people who died in Orlando a week earlier, captured the day, for me, because she was once again Mother Freedom – nickname courtesy of Collins – and like Evert she remembered being interviewed by Collins at 16 and finding she could talk to him. King's talk was disciplined, smart and passionate. She remembered Ali once telling her that people had to always be ready for the moment. She found that trait in Collins, always in tune to the colors and tones and spins and bounces of that day, living in the moment, working hard, enjoying himself. The congregation was elderly, many people moving slower than they used to. Hundreds of them came from a world where everybody followed the sun, hearing the brassy notes from the Pied Piper who was at the core of their world for so long, and so well.  Billie Jean King/ Photo by Edward Goldman  Trinity Church, reflected in John Hancock Building/ Photo by Marianne Vecsey Let me see if I have this right.
The people wearing jackets with FBI and ATF on them, the ones who supplemented the admirable Boston and Massachusetts officers, are part of top-heavy federal government? The brainy public officials, current or retired, who went on television, glowing with expertise and assurance, are a drain on our tax dollars? The men and women driving off into the Boston night, to the sounds of applause and cheers from the crowds lining the roads, are the ones who are going to come and take guns away from the so-called good guys? The 50 states could all put up web sites like the FBI's, with its photos of the two suspects? Just asking.  It’s everybody’s neighborhood, actually. Boston is one of the greatest iconic American cities, source of so much history and character in a growing nation.
Not being a Yankee fan, I never bought into the obscenities, the hard feelings, the rivalry. There’s no place like Fenway or the old Boston Garden, for that matter, or the Marathon. People who ran it talk with awe about striding down Boylston. Years ago, I drove my young son up on Patriots' Day; we left at 4 AM and actually bought tickets and sat behind right field and watched Fred Lynn's game-ending home run get larger and larger as it flew into the next section. Then we walked down to Boylston and watched the early wave of finishers. That day will make a Boston fan out of anybody. Boston is the place to send children for college; it’s the great young-person’s city in America. (Our three all got a visit to Boston to visit colleges, but somehow resisted.) Boston sends strong people out in the world. In New York, we hear the accents of Michael Bloomberg and Suzyn Waldman. Never lose them, kids. And Boston keeps strong people. Two people I care about could easily have been near the finish line on Monday; in past years they would have been. I needed message assurance that they were all right, and they were. Now we have so many more people to care about. One other thing: In recent years, my wife and I have made glorious trips to Boston, usually staying a block or two from Boylston and wandering down to the T station to catch a movie in Cambridge or visit one of the art museums. Often we stop in at the Bangkok Blue Thai restaurant at 755 Boylston, consistently good, feels like home. The last time we were in there, a couple of workers were planning to take one of those bargain buses to Manhattan for a day of sight-seeing. We gave tips on the best way to see our city. To me, Boston and New York are linked far beyond cheapo bus lines or the shuttle or Amtrak, or some baseball rivalry. Boston is the great city where we have never quite lived. I’ve tried calling and e-mailing Bangkok Blue in hopes that everybody is all right. No answer, so far. |
