From The Sports Desk

[Sancho]

Yeah, this website has had its ups and downs over the years. The mod’s have done a nice job of keeping the discourse civil, but the number of active people has fallen off a cliff. Anyway when the site drops offline like that I think - whoop, there it goes, off to the cyber graveyard in the sky, never to be heard from again, and we all shuffle over Goodreads or something.

I heard that Slim Pickens was a late addition to the cast, but I didn’t know why. The story I heard was that they got him over to the studio in England as soon as they could after hiring him because they’d already started filming. Kubrick had never met him and really didn’t know anything about him. Well Slim shows up and saunters onto the set wearing cowboy boots, Wranglers, a western shirt, and a Stetson. Kubrick takes one look at him and thinks he’s a method actor. He says to him something like - good, good, you’ve read the part and are getting into character. One of Kubrick’s assistants leans over and says - no, Mr Kubrick, that’s just how he dresses.

[bounty]

ive tried a few times, alas unsuccessfully, to get the powers that be to address the current state of affairs.

yes, the special features dvd had that same story about slim pickens.

I recently read fight club. there is a lot to that book that could be tied to competitive athletics. I also just watched a movie that had a relevant quote in it (from memory, I might be botching it a bit), "where to the man when the mission is over?"

haven't peeked at Nancy and tonya yet but I mean to. still plenty of chapters to go though in andy Roddick beat me with a frying pan.

which one sounds the most appealing?

would sumo wrestlers make great nfl lineman?

could any celebrities play in the pros?

does a six-fingered pitcher have an unfair advantage?

or maybe all three!

[Sancho]

Talk about serendipity! Last week’s New Yorker had an article by one of my favorite writers — Elizabeth Kolbert. The article was all about the creepy crawly things (caterpillars and such) and the people who study them. Here’s her description of one such scientist:

Wagner is an entomologist who teaches at the University of Connecticut. He has close-cropped silvery hair and a square jaw and bears a passing resemblance to George*C. Scott playing General Buck Turgidson.

I liked that she didn’t feel the need to explain who General Buck Turgidson was. She just expected us to know. Good article by the way. I ought to lift a few quotes from it and revive the nature-writing thread.

So hey, Sportsfans, speaking of old movies and books, I just reread The Great Santini by Pat Conroy. The last time I read that book I was in high school, which was —ahem— some time ago.

If you’re not familiar with the book or the movie here’s the basic rundown: Bull Meecham (aka The Great Santini) is a Marine Corps F-8 fighter pilot nearing the end of his career. He’s an alcoholic, and he’s a though guy who’s physically and mentally abusive with his kids and his wife, but he does have a certain raw charm about him, and also he’s a good leader. Bull Meecham has a few verbal tics. He calls everybody “Sportsfans” or “Jocko” or “Hogs.”

To his children: “Line up for inspection, Hogs, and quit yer belly aching.”

Anyway his wife is Lillian, a real looker with the affected manners of a genteel southern lady. His oldest son is Ben who is about to graduate high school and has borne the brunt of his father’s abuse. A year younger than Ben is Mary Anne, a wicked smart but plain girl. There’s a couple of younger kids, (Matt and Karen) but they don’t play too big a part in the story.

So towards the end of the book Mary Anne is all dolled up for the Prom. She’s going with her brother Ben oddly enough. It took a lot of coaxing by her family to get her to go. Here’s the scene:

The dress was blue with white ruffles at the shoulders and Marry Anne made her way down the stairs cautiously, afraid of tripping. She had borrowed a string of pearls from Lillian and a pair of long white gloves from Paige Hedgepath. She was not wearing her glasses and she held tightly to the bannister during her descent.

“You look absolutely stunning, sugah,” Lillian said.

“I didn’t know you were so stacked, sportsfans,” Bull crowed.

“Hush, Bull,” Lillian admonished, “before God or somebody hears you.”

“How sicko can you get?” Mary Anne said, but she blushed with a forbidden pleasure at the compliment. …

I suppose that scene doesn’t have a lot to do with sports, except that The Great Santini does call his daughter “sportsfans.” There are, however, a few excellent basketball scenes of Ben playing on the high school team.

So let’s hear the rest, bounty, inquiring sportsfans want to know.

[Sancho]

Ohtani started Trout off with an eighty-eight-mile-per-hour slider that slipped below the strike zone for ball one. Then came heat: a hundred-mile-an-hour fastball, which Trout swung at and whiffed. A second fastball missed the zone; ball two. Trout swung at a high fastball—also clocked at a hundred m.p.h.—for strike two. The fifth pitch, a ball, reached a hundred and two. The count was full. Having faced four fastballs, Trout might have been looking for a fifth. Or perhaps he was expecting the switch to an off-speed pitch—it might not have mattered. Ohtani threw a beauty, a slider that swerved from inside to out. Trout swung early. Japan had won.

Nice. In case you missed it, the World Baseball Classic finished up this week. The above description is of the game-ending at-bat between the pitcher, Shohei Ohtani for Japan, and the batter, Mike Trout for the USA. Ohtani and Trout are currently the star players for MLB’s Los Angeles Angels. It’s from the New Yorker daily article by Louisa Thomas:

A SPECTACULAR AT-BAT THAT ENDED THE WORLD BASEBALL CLASSIC
One moment, between Shohei Ohtani and Mike Trout, made baseball feel, once again, like the most dramatic, joyful sport that there is.

[tailor STATELY]

Great for baseball I thought I read somewhere a before the game that "wouldn't it be great if Ohtani was pitching and Trout was the last at bat with the game on the line?"... quite prophetic.

Ta ! (short for tarradiddle),
tailor

[Sancho]

It really was a magnificent moment. I didn’t watch the game. I just started hearing the buzz after the game. A coworker of mine said, “wow, did you see Shotime strike out Mike Trout in the World Baseball Classic?” I said, “Tha wut?”

About 15 or so years ago I found myself on a 24-hour layover at a Radisson near Narita Airport (outside of Tokyo). There was a little league park near the hotel, so wandered over to watch the kids play. Gotta tell ya, I was impressed. Those kids were killing it. They knew the game and were serious about it, and so were their coaches. I remember thinking, these Japanese kids would destroy the average American Little League team. The last one those games I watched (to see my nephew play) I had to laugh. At one point the right fielder had his glove affixed hat-like on his head whilst he picked his nose, and the center fielder was way out on the edge of the field watering the flowers. I don’t remember what the left fielder was doing, probable checking his phone.

[bounty]

extra torturously slow internet lately, hope to take care of it soon...

[bounty]

be back later for actual conversation, quick post for now (from an old article I have):

"Tonya Harding, celebrated and scorned after the notorious January 6, 1994, attack on Nancy Kerrigan, was not merely a great, if flawed,
skater. For a brief moment, Tonya had a shot at being the champion in an infinitely more ruthless sport: class climbing. Tonya is now the stuff of
the occasional newspaper paragraph, sitcom joke, or novelty television show like “Celebrity Boxing,” but she was once the feature player in a much discussed morality play about two subjects Americans are preternaturally skilled at interpreting and policing: celebrity and class mobility.
As her continued, if somewhat shop-worn celebrity proves, Tonya remains somethingof a puzzle, partially, I think, because although her commitment to success is unwavering (this is doubtful based on other sources), her commitment to upward mobility, to which success is almost
always linked, has been lukewarm at best. Although she enjoyed—and still seems to enjoy—money and publicity, Tonya, a working-class woman, seems stubborn about some crucial elements of public relations. Unabashed about telling the media that she wanted to enjoy a better standard of living, she was less forthcoming about the obligatory expression that she would like to enjoy a better style of living. That is to say that even when she told the press that what she saw in the future after the Olympics were “dollar signs,” she never took the trouble to narratively convert those dollar signs into other kinds of signs—signs of a hard-won middle-class lifestyle. If she wanted an
SUV, it was to go four-wheeling, not to go to Pottery Barn.

"Tonya might have been a more sympathetic public figure had she ever shown herself willing to learn the occulted ways of the clan of the middle class, but curiously, she did not. It would be easy to argue that Tonya simply did not know what to do or say to make herself appealing to a general audience, but this is not the case. Interviews show Tonya to be quite aware of how her background would be read and interpreted. Even more acutely, Tonya has always been aware that she does not conform to standard scripts about how good girls who want to succeed ought to act. Aware of the existence of cultural scripts governing class and gender, she has been especially attuned to her difference from the class and familial background that the general public, mistakenly or not, attributes to figure skaters."

[Sancho]

Yeech! Been falling down on my duties on this thread — too much work to be done in the springtime on my little farm. I love this time of year. The sun is back. The buds are budding. And baseball IS BACK.

That said, this post isn’t about sports writing, but maybe just a personal tale of fandom. So the other day I was at my neighborhood Costco. For anybody who’s unfamiliar with Costco, it’s one of those big-box warehouse stores, the kind of place where you can’t buy a quart jar of mayonnaise but you can buy a 5 gallon tub of the stuff - cheap. They don’t have a huge variety, but they do have a broad variety, and what they’ve got — you need. You can fill up your gas tank, pick up dinner, clothe yourself, get some rain gutters for your house, and get a flu shot all at the same place. They know what you need and when you need it. In the fall they’ll have a table piled high with one or two styles of flannel shirts, and within a couple of weeks everybody in my neighborhood will have the same shirt. If somebody’s wearing last year’s Costco shirt, we’ll make some discreet inquiries to insure they haven’t fallen on hard times.

Anyway I was wheeling my cart up to the checkout lane and notice that the guy running the register is sort of smirking in my general direction. I think it’s Costco’s policy for the checkers to try to engage the customers with chit-chat. He’s still looking at me when I get to the front of the line and he says, “Would you have picked this lane if you knew I grew up in San Diego and I’m a diehard Padres fan?” It was at that moment I realized I was wearing a beat up San Francisco Giants ball cap. I said, “Uhhh, maybe we can compromise and root for The Dodgers.” A look of pure, unabashed horror crossed his face and he said, something like — NOOOOOOOOO!

[bounty]

is there "bad blood" between giants and padres fans? seems like the distance is far enough apart where it wouldn't really be an issue, although maybe still fun to joke about in line at the store.

are their any teams in the league that rise to a yankees/red sox level of animosity?

I was perusing the tv schedule a few weeks ago and saw the "world baseball classic" listed, went to the channel and alas something else was on. the biggest news I had heard from the event was a Cuban player defecting. I haven't followed the story to see if he succeeded.

its interesting that there were mlb players in the event. one would think their teams would say "no way!"

on that point---I suppose much like the first robin of the year in the northeast is a harbinger of spring, espn had its first mlb game on a few days ago.

I just re-read the chapter "would sumo wrestlers make great nfl linemen?"

whaddya think? (the most interesting part of the chapter was actually demographics)

[tailor STATELY]

re: Tanya/Kerrigan - A sports aberration if there ever was one.

re: is there "bad blood" between giants and padres fans? - prolly only in S.D. fan's mind. S.D. baseball is a 1969 invention in search of validation (just guessing). However I'm always conflicted when the Yankees play the Giants/A's. Yankees fan first as a child in Seattle (Mantle/Maris era), then Giants/A's fan after family relocating to the SF Bay Area.

re: Sumos - would they even pass the physical ? Combines ? 100° F workouts would be murder.

Ta ! (short for tarradiddle),
tailor

[Sancho]

Hah, I doubt many rivalries rise to Yankees-Red Sox level of animosity. And I don’t really think there’s “bad blood” between the Giants and Padres so much as they’re just natural enemies, both teams being in the NL West. In that exchange with the Costco checker I picked The Dodgers because they are NL West as well and geographically between San Fran and San Diego. If he’d’a been an Angels fan and I had an As hat on it wouldn’t have worked because there isn’t another AL West team in California between Anaheim and Oakland.

So let’s hear about the Sumo wrestlers. I’m thinking a nose guard playing his own game on his own turf would make short work of the ichiban wrestler.

[bounty]

its interesting in the sandlot how the kids were ostensibly dodgers fans (maybe benny was the only real one) but they all revered babe ruth.

I started paying attention to professional sports in the late 60s and started my baseball card collecting then too. I remember the advent of the padres and the pilots---and being from ny, the miracle mets! although I confess, I liked the orioles too.

i'll try to drag the sumo explanation out for at least a few posts in order to hopefully build some anticipation...

I mentioned "demographics"---the author made the point of that since we don't pay too much attention here in the states to sumo, we might be surprised that the wrestlers who have achieved "Yokozuna" status are "treated like gods." there are only about 70 of them in a 900 strong field of participants. they are "extremely well-paid and have a huge following in japan..." The argument being that the best of the sumo wrestlers have no incentive to try their hand at American football. the rest of the wrestlers are working for room and board and probably don't have the necessary athleticism.

there was a lot interesting in the chapter and one of the things was that the best sumo wrestlers often aren't Japanese, but rather, Mongolian. but since the sport is centered in japan, they limit the amount of foreigners who can compete in the ranks. even then, "almost one in three wrestlers in the top division [are Mongolian]…"

the author arranged to have two Mongolian sumo wrestlers have a "tryout" with "gene miranda, a veteran arena league coach currently with the los angeles avengers."

[Sancho]

Giants had a good day on Saturday eh Tailor? It was a real cliffhanger with the Yankees in the bottom of the ninth.

[tailor STATELY]

As usual I missed the game on the telly (busy and no sports package)... a split with the Yankees about as good a feeling there is for me re: both "home" teams

Ta ! (short for tarradiddle),
tailor