Wait! That’s Not Brandi Chastain!

5/27/2018

Left: Game-show host? Ex-president? Male grass-court singles champ from 1927? Center: the very real Brandi Chastain.

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.)

This is the statue Musial hated. I took this photo in 2009 -- and a real-live cardinal perched on the Man's bat.

The real Musial stance. All-Star Game, 1952. St. Louis pal Yogi catching. Musial struck out twice.

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

Stan the Man liked this one, and would pose for photos and even play his harmonica.

George Vecsey

5/29/2018 05:33:37 pm

If you read this, it means Weebly fixed its site....again...finally., GV

Mendel

5/30/2018 01:08:58 am

Welcome back, George.

bruce

5/30/2018 01:36:37 am

george,

i hope you're not paying them much.

lost my incredible comment tgat i sent you a few days ago about this piece.

it was, people are telling me, the best comment that's been made in the history of the universe.

or any of the parallel universes.

sad.

bruce

Alan Rubin link

5/30/2018 02:00:34 pm

I met Brandi a few years ago at the then NSCAA soccer coach’s convention, now called USC (United Soccer Coaches). The Saturday morning woman soccer coach's breakfast were always interesting. At each of the ones that I attended, Tony DiCicco made sure I met any of his players from the 1999 team.

Julie Fondy was the speaker at one of them. What a bright and engaging group.

Although Tony died just about a year ago, he is still having an impact upon coaches and players.

Comments are closed.

QUOTES
More and More, I Talk to the Dead--Margaret Renkl

NASHVILLE — After my mother died so suddenly — laughing at a rerun of “JAG” at 10 p.m., dying of a hemorrhagic stroke by dawn — I dreamed about her night after night. In every dream she was willfully, outrageously alive, unaware of the grief her death had caused. In every dream relief poured through me like a flash flood. Oh, thank God!
Then I would wake into keening grief all over again.
Years earlier, when my father learned he had advanced esophageal cancer, his doctor told him he had perhaps six months to live. He lived far longer than that, though I never thought of it as “living” once I learned how little time he really had. For six months my father was dying, and then he kept dying for two years more. I was still working and raising a family, but running beneath the thin soil of my own life was a river of death. My father’s dying governed my days.
After he died, I wept and kept weeping, but I rarely dreamed about my father the way I would dream about my mother nearly a decade later. Even in the midst of calamitous grief, I understood the difference: My father’s long illness had given me time to work death into the daily patterns of my life. My mother’s sudden death had obliterated any illusion that daily patterns are trustworthy.
Years have passed now, and it’s the ordinariness of grief itself that governs my days. The very air around me thrums with absence. I grieve the beloved high-school teacher I lost the summer after graduation and the beloved college professor who was my friend for more than two decades. I grieve the father I lost nearly 20 years ago and the father-in-law I lost during the pandemic. I grieve the great-grandmother who died my junior year of college and the grandmother who lived until I was deep into my 40s.
Some of those I grieve are people I didn’t even know. How can John Prine be gone? I hear his haunting last song, “I Remember Everything,” and I still can’t quite believe that John Prine is gone.
-----
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/30/opinion/death-grief-memory.html
Jan. 30, 2023

Wait! That’s Not Brandi Chastain!

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