Thinking About Jeter While Watching Shakespeare -7

2/4/2014

Actor, above. Captain, right.

A good actor always knows his cues. The last loads of Super Bowl schleppers were being hauled back to civilization when Derek Jeter entered, stage right.

Jeter took batting practice on the field in Tampa Monday and said he was fine. Of course, he says that when he has broken bones.

Funny thing. I was thinking of Jeter last Thursday while watching the current London production of Coriolanus, in our favorite movie house in Kew Gardens, Queens.

It seemed to me that the star, Tom Hiddleston, resembled the Yankee captain: A star. A distant star. But a star, nonetheless.

Probably not a good recommendation for the production, if your mind wanders like that. Hiddleston is popular with young audiences. (The Queens audience skewed decades younger than usual for the mid-week production, live from the UK.)

We saw Ian McKellan play Coriolanus at the National Theatre in 1984, for goodness' sakes. McKellan was 45, an aging and properly arrogant soldier-survivor. Hiddleston looks like a star shortstop.

With my mind wandering from this pop version of Shakespeare, I found myself hoping Jeter has one more good year left in him. This is no fun, even for somebody emphatically not a Yankee fan, to watch the wheels fall off one of the signature players of our time.

Jeter has started the rallies, clapping his hands as he reached second base, standing up, staring back at the dugout, as if saying, “Next!”

He retrieved a wayward baseball and retired a knucklehead who did not bother to slide. (One of my favorite columns:)

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/26/sports/sports-of-the-times-slide-jeremy-slide-slide.html

Jeter has also played an extremely dependable shortstop.

He is the Yankee captain. He doesn’t give much of himself away, but he represents the team. Coriolanus would respect him.

Is it too much to ask that Derek Jeter be healthy and productive for one more season, clapping his hands at second base and retiring knuckleheads?

Plus, he knows his theatre. Football exits, stage left. The captain walks out on the field.

Gene Palumbo

2/5/2014 03:16:17 am

You can see Jeter's incredible play - the one George refers to in his column - here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqqOZoMnscE

The play is at 1:37:50; the replays go up to 1:40.35.

George Vecsey

2/5/2014 03:54:57 am

Gene, thanks. Do you think it is possible that in this infinite universe some day we will click on that video and the poor knucklehead will slide? GV

Gene Palumbo

2/12/2014 07:52:16 pm

George has a column in today’s (Tuesday, Feb. 12) Times: “Jeter’s retirement announcement hits the right note.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/13/sports/baseball/jeters-retirement-announcement-hits-the-right-note.html

Gene Palumbo

2/12/2014 08:08:29 pm

Sorry, got the date wrong. It's Wednesday, Feb. 13. But the link is right.

Hansen Alexander

2/19/2014 02:37:40 am

George, I think Jeter is the one athlete that you just "didn't get." He reminds me of Nick Sabin. Behind the official sounding rhetoric, he has actually always said a lot. I know it sounds counter to journalistic logic, but I believe you have to take Jeter literally. Of course, I've never talked to the man in my life, naturally qualifying myself as an expert in the matter.

Hansen Alexander

2/19/2014 02:42:28 am

PS George: I'm a little concerned that you finished the World Cup book so quickly. Are you confident that you were at your best powers of description in discussing important amd dramatic goals you've witnessed? You've written about them in columns with Hemingway like powers of description, and I always want a man to be writing at his best.

Comments are closed.

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

Thinking About Jeter While Watching Shakespeare -7

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