A lot of the best stories in Ball Four are not the clever things Jim Bouton says (and he says several), but instead Bouton as reporter, re-telling the stories others tell him. Here are a few paragraphs that illustrate that point nicely.
In the bullpen tonight Jim Pagliaroni was telling us how Ted Williams, when he was still playing, would psyche himself up for a game during batting practice, usually early practice before the fans or reporters got there.
He'd go into the cage, wave his bat at the pitcher and start screaming at the top of his voice, "My name is Ted fucking Williams and I'm the greatest hitter in baseball."
He'd swing and hit a line drive.
"Jesus H. Christ himself couldn't get me out."
And he'd hit another.
Then he'd say, "Here comes Jim Bunning, Jim fucking Bunning and that little shit slider of his."
Wham!
"He doesn't really think he's gonna get me out with that shit."
Gene Colan, an artist born in the Bronx who became best known for his work for Marvel and DC comics, has died at the age of 84. The writer Clifford Meth has devoted a blog to Colan's work where original drawings are for sale. The proceeds went to Mr. Colan's care in his final days and works sold now will be the start of a scholarship in his name.
Colan worked on a lot of titles, as did all of the artists back then. I was amazed at how much work these guys did every month and missing few deadlines. In later years, Colan admitted to abusing amphetamines to keep up with the schedule.
He worked on some titles I didn't regularly read, like Iron Man and Captain America, but he was also the artist on Daredevil, Howard the Duck and others.
When he started, Stan Lee told him what he told all the new artists. Draw like Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko or John Romita or some other established artist. Colan refused, saying wasn't physically capable of doing that. He got to work in his own style and it worked very well for him.
Some of my favorite work of his was in Dr. Strange. There was another artist coming up in the late 1960s named Barry Windsor-Smith, who drew very intricately but much too slowly. There were several titles that Smith was supposed to draw, but because of missed deadlines, other artists would be forced to fill in. As I became obsessed with Windsor-Smith's work, I considered it a letdown when someone else had to fill in for him on an issue, but over the years I came to appreciate Colan's work on its own merits and stopped wondering what a story would have looked like if Barry Windsor-Smith had just been fast enough. Colan's work with the inker Tom Palmer was especially remarkable.
Best wishes to the friends and family of Gene Colan, from a formerly fickle fan.
Muhammad Ali's butt met the canvas only three times in his career.
The last (and easily least) was when the grotesquely out-matched Chuck Wepner stepped on Ali's foot and hit him at the same time. The referee missed it, so it counts to this day as a knockdown instead of a trip or slip. Besides this act of clumsiness or cleverness, Wepner has two other claims to fame: he is the model for Rocky Balboa, a third rate club fighter facing the greatest champion of the last half century, and his wonderfully and horribly accurate nickname The Bayonne Bleeder.
The second time Ali was knocked down was by Smokin' Joe Frazier in the first of their three epic fights, the one Frazier deservedly won on the biggest stage in boxing, Madison Square Garden, following the biggest hoopla for a boxing match in this country from then until now.
The first time he took a seat involuntarily in his career, Muhammad Ali was still Cassius Clay, and the brash kid from Kentucky had traveled all the way to London, England to meet the British Commonwealth champion Henry Cooper, later to be known as Sir Henry Cooper. Clay was already running his mouth as he would throughout his career, and in the pre-fight lead-in called Cooper "a bum". Cooper said he put lead weights in his shoes to make it to the heavyweight limit of 175 pounds that night, and no one disagrees that Clay was both taller and heavier than Cooper.
Clay was also a once in a lifetime athlete, a natural 200+ pounder with the speed of a man 50 pounds lighter. Cooper could not believe how deftly the bigger, younger fighter kept away from his blows, but at the end of the fourth, Cassius Clay met 'Enery's 'Ammer, the nickname the British sportswriters gave Cooper's vicious left hook. Clay got lucky and the ropes kept his noggin from bouncing on the ring floor, else he might have been out for the count.
The story gets better. Between rounds, Angelo Dundee, Clay's trainer, put smelling salts under his fighter's nose, which isn't legal. He also saw a small tear in Clay's glove and made it bigger, so the ref gave him some extra time to repair the glove. Cooper claims it was an extra two minutes, "all the time a fit man needs". In any case, Clay was ready to go the next round and opened cuts on Cooper's face that forced the fight to be stopped in Clay's favor with Cooper ahead on all cards.
After the fight, Clay took back all the unkind things he said about the plucky British bomber and the two men were fast friends ever after.
Once Clay beat Sonny Liston, became the champion and Muhammad Ali all on the same night, he decided to give Henry Cooper another chance. Older and wiser, Ali used his superior size and reach to jab Cooper's face and once again open cuts. This time, he didn't play around. One encounter with 'Enery's 'Ammer was enough. Ali later said Cooper hit him so hard "my ancestors in Africa felt it".
Ali fought several times in Europe, most notably against the Brit Brian London and the German and European champ, the southpaw Karl Mildenberger, but that first fight against Cooper truly stands out.
I have only once heard a discouraging word about the great Henry Cooper, and I only heard since he died yesterday. He never gave the Canadian heavyweight George Chuvalo a shot at the Commonwealth championship. The two fighters were about the same age and it would have been a great contrast in styles. Cooper was known for getting cut easily, the weakness Clay/Ali exploited twice, but he had one of the most feared punches in the game. Chuvalo was not as powerful, but he was as tough as a cheap piece of meat fried on a railroad tie. Some clever Trevor at the time said that if they still let heavyweights fight for 55 rounds like they did back in Jack Johnson's time, George Chuvalo would have been the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world.
Let me call this a quibble. The travel costs would have been a lot for either Chuvalo or Cooper, and neither had the name recognition of an Ali or Joe Frazier.
I come to praise Cooper as others bury him. I write this post because a horrible cowardly villain died yesterday and the press can't stop talking about him. A brave and honest man, beloved in his nation to this day also died, dead from a broken heart at the recent loss of several loved ones.
Best wishes to the friends and family of Sir Henry Cooper, from a fan.
George Blanda has died at the age of 83. He was a quarterback and kicker. When he retired after 26 seasons of football in the 1970s, he held many records, including most points scored and most interceptions thrown. The only record that is still his is most seasons played.
All the stats pale in comparison to what he did in 1970 at the age of 43, coming off the bench in mid-season when Oakland Raiders starting QB Daryle LaMonica was injured. Blanda lead his team to win five games in a row, several in such heroic fashion an author would be considered a hack to invent the tales.
He wasn't written off at the age of 43. He was written off at the age of 33. In 1960, when he left the NFL to join the fledgling AFL, he was considered a has-been. He lead the Houston Oilers to the first two championships in the new league, but in the mid 1960s, they gave up on him and the Raiders picked up his contract for the waiver price of $100. Everybody agreed he was still a reliable place-kicker, but his arm wasn't as strong and he had slowed down considerably. In 1970 when the call came, Blanda wasn't just older than everyone on the team, he was nine years older than head coach John Madden and two years older than the owner Al Davis.
He won games with his arm. He won them as a kicker. LaMonica returned from his injury, but Madden put Blanda in the game late to run the two minute offense. This is nearly unprecedented in football. When a QB is replaced late in a game, it is a strong vote of no confidence and the man replaced might as well asked to be traded. It wasn't lack of faith in LaMonica, but a crazy faith that gripped the entire Bay Area sports scene that we were seeing something no one had seen before and no one might ever see again. My dad is not a sports watcher, but he told me to tell him when Blanda entered the game. For those five weeks, Blanda never disappointed. He was a miracle worker.
The story does not end with final glory. On January 3, 1971, the Bay Area fans who had seen such promise in the entire 1970 season were hit with the Raiders losing to the Colts and the 49ers losing to the Cowboys. Neither team played for the Super Bowl that year, but that in no way diminishes what George Blanda's name means in the pantheon of Bay Area sports heroes.
A lot of great players have been quarterback for the Raiders and 49ers. Frankie Albert, Y.A. Tittle, Daryle LaMonica, John Brodie, Ken Stabler, Jim Plunkett, Joe Montana, Steve Young. Some held the Super Bowl trophy over their heads, Montana four times. But there's a special place for George Blanda in our hearts that is about so much more than just championships. We saw something when he was on the field that no one had seen before or since. We will likely never see his kind again.
Best wishes to the family and friends of George Blanda, from a fan.
We often hear the critics of the current administration talking about "taking our country back", which implies that the people running it today don't deserve it, despite winning in a landslide. There is also an implication that the country does NOT belong to the winners of the election, that the REAL America got gypped in 2008 just because their guy got about 10 million less votes than That Guy and missed getting an electoral majority by 97 electors.
A fair question to be asked when they want to take "their country back" is, exactly how far back? There is a nostalgia for the good old days felt by a lot of people who weren't there during the good old days or who have very bad memories.
Let me be honest and say I'm old enough to have been there. Let me be immodest and say my memory is much better than most.
Many people decry the crudeness of our society, and I would not argue that point. My point is that we have gained in freedom and made a more just society, but that did not come without a cost. I am glad to live in a country where you can't be arrested for buying or selling a copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover or Tropic of Cancer. When I was a boy, there were places where that was against the law.
Censorship against the written word had been going on for a very long time, but when I was a kid the battle went from print to performance. While some of the Beat Poets were harassed by the law, one of the first performers known to the general public as a threat to the public morals for having a dirty mouth was Lenny Bruce. He had been a comic for quite a while, working in burlesque houses and nightclubs. There are old recordings of his act on TV, and his stuff was both clean and stale, the usual uninspired collection of mother-in-law jokes. But his nightclub act began to extend into what we now call observational humor, with lots of observations about sex where using dirty words was close to mandatory. Swearing in a nightclub act wasn't completely unheard of, but most "blue" comics told dirty jokes with a minimum of actual obscenities. Bruce crossed that line, and did so frequently. All around the country, police departments and district attorneys decided that he had to be arrested if he said those things in a nightclub, as though he had a bullhorn and was swearing in front of a schoolhouse or church. He was first arrested in 1961 in San Francisco, the first of many arrests around the country. He would not compromise on his act, hoping to be the vanguard, but he did not have the strength for it. He was tried for obscenity and lost in 1964. He died in 1966, ruined by drugs and a well-founded feeling of persecution.
If I may use a religious comparison sure to offend, Bruce was John the Baptist, paving the way for the one who would come. That young man actually was in the audience one night when Bruce was arrested. He told the police he did not believe in government-issued IDs, a position that should endear him to many Tea Party stalwarts. He was arrested and taken to jail with Bruce in the same vehicle. His name was George Carlin.
Carlin was actually still a clean-cut kid whose act was perfectly acceptable to Ed Sullivan when Bruce was still alive, but within a few years he took a left turn, started dressing like a hippie and letting his beard and hair grow. It was six years after Bruce died that Carlin was arrested yet again, this time for performing live in Milwaukee one of his most famous routines, The Seven Words You Can't Say On Television. Here is the famous preamble to that clarion call to freedom.
"There are seven words you can't say on television: Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker and Tits. Those are the heavy seven. Those are the ones that'll infect your soul, curve your spine and keep the country from winning the war."
Between 1964 and 1972, America underwent massive changes. In the earlier trial in New York, a three judge panel threw the book at Lenny Bruce and sentenced him to jail time in a workhouse. He was still free on bail with the conviction being appealed when he died. In 1972 in Milwaukee, the judge at the Carlin case decided his work was indecent but Carlin had the right to say it as long as he caused no public disturbance.
Carlin's comedy album also changed the airwaves. A father was listening with his son to Pacifica radio's WBAI in New York when the Seven Words skit was broadcast over the air. The man sued and the case went to the Supreme Court. The 5-4 decision was that routine was "indecent but not obscene" and the F.C.C. had the right to ban it at hours when children would be likely to listen. This meant that late night radio could be much more free.
It is true that the world has become more crass because of this, but free speech is meaningless if no one takes offense. If entertainment offends you, don't watch or don't listen. For me, American False Idol is a disgusting obscenity even if no one says anything more coarse than "Gosh!" On the other hand, I like it when Peggy Olson on Mad Men says "chickenshit" and means it.
Some localities still try to block stuff, but the Internet is hard to control. The greatest song of the Summer of 2010 is currently available only on The You Tubes, Cee Lo Green's infectiously catchy and upbeat new tune called Fuck You!
This is because liberals stood up for free speech when conservatives tried as hard as they could to deny it. When these self-professed rodeo clowns say they love the constitution, it's a still a pretty good bet that they don't.
In the bullpen tonight Jim Pagliaroni was telling us how Ted Williams, when he was still playing, would psyche himself up for a game during batting practice, usually early practice before the fans or reporters got there.
