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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
Josh Rubin
5/28/2019 10:25:10 am
Great column, George! I remember reading it then.
Mendel
5/28/2019 11:41:36 am
Re-watching and re-listening I am struck by the amount of silent time elapsed between "and the Mets win it" and "if one picture is worth a thousand words." Almost two full minutes for Vin to compose his sentences. And for viewers to relish the moment. Today, those 100 seconds would be saturated with 100 tweets. Ancient history.
Altenir Silva
5/28/2019 12:18:25 pm
Dear George,
George Vecsey
5/28/2019 12:34:11 pm
Josh in NYC, Mendel in Israel, Altenir in Rio: thanks to all. 5/28/2019 03:57:25 pm
The art of the batter working the pitcher seems to be a lost one. Luis Aparicio of the White Sox was a master at fouling off pitches. 5/28/2019 01:09:25 pm
All those foul balls, I'd forgotten about those. I also thought McNamara should've lifted Buckner for a defensive replacement because of Buckner's kneed. As a Sox fan, it was a Series I'll never forget. Thank you for revisiting this slice of history. 5/28/2019 01:50:45 pm
Great reflection, George. We all know Bill Buckner was an under appreciated ball player and yet a class act. His return to Fenway in 2008 (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8LGeZhR6c0) amid an adoring crowd must have been an extraordinary moment of redemption--not for Buckner, as he did not need it. But for the many hard core Sawx fans who had previously failed to appreciate his humble and gracious humanity.
George Vecsey
5/29/2019 08:57:52 am
Harvey: thank you. 5/28/2019 04:31:45 pm
Bruce Schoenfeld’s Sunday May 26 NYT’s Magazine Section article “Goal Oriented” is an enlightening read. It details in depth with how Liverpool’s data analyst Ian Gram, and his three co-data guru’s, helped Liverpool come within one point of winning the English Premier League championship.
Andy Tansey
5/28/2019 09:18:58 pm
Alan, Henry is just another reason to say, "Come on you, Spurs!" for whom both Friedel and Keller wore mitts.
George Vecsey
5/29/2019 09:03:26 am
Andy: I tried to keep it all hidden when I was working for the NYT. It wasn't hard to figure out that I was a Mets fan but I tried to see life through the eyes and hearts of Cub fans, Red Sox fans, SF Giants fans -- even Yankee fans. They've got to live, too, you know. Plus, I had Yankee fans like the late, great Big Al Taxerman on my case, word by word. One snide word from me and Big Al was on it. GV 5/30/2019 02:32:13 pm
I also follow the Spurs. Brad Friedel and Kasey Keller were among my favorites. I think that Brad was the first U.S. keeper to play en the EPL.
Randolph
5/28/2019 04:48:59 pm
George, 5/30/2019 02:32:13 pm
George,
George Vecsey
5/30/2019 06:07:59 pm
John, were you working there that night? Newsday had a Sunday paper by then, right? We were emoting when the game turned around....Deadlines, not rooting. Thanks for noticing...GV
george
5/30/2019 05:16:31 pm
george,
Ed Martin
6/1/2019 11:21:26 am
I remember reading the column with joy on “The morning after.” (Disclosure—I read the account in every paper I could find, like most NY fans.). To make the event more sacred I saw all the home playoff games and series with one or the other sons. Only “Serious” games I ever saw. After those game six “miracles” we suffered through being behind in game seven- remember I was a Brooklyn Dodger fan before “Next Year” so I did not count on happy endings. And then, from behind...!!! I still have the 1986 cap, cheap material version. Thanks for the memories! Comments are closed.
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QUOTES
Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online. The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal…. After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness. The progress stems mostly from three factors: First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot. Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.) Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year. “Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.” That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.” That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data. One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines. Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks. Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths. The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions. Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately Republican and white. Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.) *** From the great Maureen Dowd: As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop. But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels." --- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing. *** "Putting out the paper," we called it. Much more than nostalgia. ---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html Categories
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