BrokenCowboy: Sports Views with a West Coast Bias

Remembering David Halberstam

On Monday afternoon we lost David Halberstam, one of this generation's greatest writers. The seventy-three-year-old Halberstam was killed in a car accident in Menlo Park, California, shortly after speaking to a group of journalism students at UC Berkeley.

Halberstam was an accomplished journalist (he won the Pulitzer Prize for his groundbreaking reporting from the front lines of the Vietnam War), but I grew to love him as a sports writer. He brought an historian's perspective to the world of sports, highlighting issues ranging from civil rights to the globalization and commercialization of America's sporting culture. My words could not do justice to Mr. Halberstam's talent as a writer, so instead I'll drop a few lines from three of my favorite Halberstam books:

[DiMaggio] was the perfect Hemingway hero, for Hemingway in his novels romanticized the man who exhibited grace under pressure, who withheld any emotion lest it soil the purer statement of his deeds. DiMaggio was that kind of hero; his grace and skill were always on display, his emotions always concealed. This stoic grace was not achieved without a terrible price: DiMaggio was a man wound tight. He suffered from insominia and ulcers. When he sat and watched the game he chain-smoked and drank endless cups of coffee. He was ever conscious of his obligation to play well. Late in his career, when his legs were bothering him and the Yankees had a comfortable lead in a pennant race, a friend of his, columnist Jimmy Cannon, asked him why he played so hard -- the games, after all, no longer meant so much. "Because there might be somebody out there who's never seen me play before," he answered.

Summer of '49

There was a certain gallantry to Mickey Mantle as he pressed forward in the twilight of his career. By the start of the 1964 season he had already hit more than 400 home runs, and he appeared to be on his way to a .300 career average. He was the man who carried the team, and yet he played now in constant pain, reaching for physical skills that were no longer there. However, in some remarkable way, the athlete within continued to rebel against the pain and refused to accept the limits set by his body. Again and again he endangered himself. Watching him tape himself every day -- for the ritual of taping his legs had been going on for so long that he could do it himself -- his teammates were in awe of him. "He is," his teammate Clete Boyer once said, "the only baseball player I know who is a bigger hero to his teammates than he is to the fans."

October 1964

...suddenly Bryon Russell was the loneliest man on the planet, out there isolated one-on-one with Michael Jeffrey Jordan. Jordan let the clock run down, from about fifteen seconds to about eight. Then, when Russell made a quick reach at the ball, Jordan started his drive, moving to his right as if to go to the basket. Russell bit, going for the drive, and Jordan suddenly pulled up, giving Russell a light little tap on the ass with his left hand just to make sure the fake worked... Russell was already sprawling to his left as Jordan stopped, squared up, and shot...

There was a remarkable photo of that moment in ESPN magazine taken by the photographer Fernando Medina. It is in color, covers two full pages, and shows Russell struggling to regain position, Jordan at the peak of his jump, the ball high up on its arc and about to descend, and the clock showing 6.6 seconds left in the game. What is remarkable about the photograph is the view it offers of so many Utah fans. Though the ball has not yet reached the basket, the game appears over to them. They know it is going in. The anguish -- the certitude of defeat -- is on their faces, as if the arrow has already pierced their skin and is entering their hearts.

Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made

An Interview with Jonathan Eig

Just in time for the sixtieth anniversary of Jackie Robinson's first appearance with the Brooklyn Dodgers, Jonathan Eig has recently released Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson's First Season, a book which features a new look at Robinson's historic rookie campaign. (Click here to read an excerpt, and here for my review.) Last week he was nice enough to meet me at Starbucks in between an appearance on the Tavis Smiley show and a book signing at a local L.A. bookstore. (The lineup makes perfect sabermetric sense, by the way. Smiley's on-base percentage is much higher than mine, but my slugging can't be denied.) Anyway, here's the interview. Enjoy.

BrokenCowboy
I wanted to start out with this. When I was growing up I was a huge baseball fan, and I learned about baseball history -- and just American history, I think -- by reading biographies. And so as a young black boy growing up, Jackie Robinson’s story obviously had some special appeal to me. So I was curious -- what drew you to the story? What about Jackie Robinson’s story really touched you or made you want to pursue this?

Jonathan Eig
It wasn’t the baseball at all, it was the history. Like you, I learned about prohibition by learning about Babe Ruth, right? All I read was baseball stuff, so what little history I absorbed was through the baseball books. I think I can relate to that. And with Jackie Robinson’s story, I just became really curious about what it was like in ‘47, what that particular year was like. Because I knew all the stories about him, I knew all the myths. I knew all about his career with the Dodgers and the World Series, but as I got older what really got me going was thinking about this friendship with Pee Wee Reese. It’s probably what sparked the idea for me. When I realized that they weren’t such good friends in ‘47, that Jackie was really alone for that first year -- later on it got easier -- for that first year he was all alone. I wondered what it was like -- where did he live that year? I didn’t know any of that stuff, so I just became really fascinated by that.

BC
Obviously there have been a lot of books written about Jackie Robinson. What inspired you to do another one? I know that your angle here is a little bit different, but what made you think you could bring something new to the picture that we have of Jackie Robinson?

Eig
It was a challenge, there has been so much written. But I felt like lately over the years we’ve tended to mythologize him, and I felt like it was time for somebody to sort of scrape the barnacles off the story and look for the truth, just get at the bones of it. I felt like if you just focused on a really tight time period, on one year, you could really get beyond the baloney and find out just what happened. Just stick to the facts. And I was also intrigued by the fact that, you know, Rachel Robinson was still around, and she wasn’t going to be forever. She cooperated on a biography ten years ago, and it was a good biography, very good, but nobody had ever tried to force their way into that apartment with her and ask what their life was like as newlyweds, and I thought if I could get her to open up I might have a shot at doing something different.

Excerpt from Opening Day by Jonathan Eig

There have been countless articles and books written about Jackie Robinson over the past sixty years, but none with the focus of Jonathan Eig's new release, Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson's First Season. Eig's thoroughly researched book chronicles Robinson's rookie year, covering the drama both on and off the field. I hope you enjoy this excerpt from the book's Prologue.

April 10, 1947

The telephone rang like an alarm, waking Jackie Robinson from deep sleep.

"Hello," he mumbled.

It was early morning in Manhattan. Robinson was alone in room 1169 of the McAlpin Hotel, across the street from Macy's. He had been on edge all week, his stomach in knots. As he listened to the voice on the other end of the phone, he was poised to embark on a journey -- one that would test his courage, shake the game of baseball to its roots, and forever change the face of the nation. Throughout history, heroic quests have often been launched on grand orders. "The object of your mission is to explore the Missouri River . . . ," wrote Thomas Jefferson to Meriwether Lewis. "The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!" General Dwight David Eisenhower exhorted his troops before the D-Day invasion. But the commanding words that sent Robinson on his way this cool, gray morning were uttered by a humble secretary.

Come to Brooklyn, she said.

Crossing the Line

There are few Americans who cannot tell you at least something about Jackie Robinson. His story has become ingrained into our cultural awareness through countless books, magazine articles, and songs detailing his heroic integration of the National League and his subsequent brilliant career. There are statues of his likeness, schools and streets bearing his name, and a plaque in baseball's Hall of Fame. He has been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal, and there are plans for a Jackie Robinson Museum in New York City. He slides home triumphantly on a 33¢ stamp, and he even starred in a movie about his life. Thirty-five years after his death, Jackie Robinson is everywhere.

As we commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of Robinson's debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers, it wouldn't seem that there would be a need for another book. Thankfully for baseball fans everywhere, Jonathan Eig thought otherwise. Only two years after producing his award-winning Lou Gehrig biography, Luckiest Man, Eig returns with another outstanding effort in Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson's First Season. It should be added to your reading list right now.

As suggested by the title, Eig's angle here is to focus on that historic season stretching across the spring, summer, and fall of 1947. By narrowing the view to this pivotal campaign, Eig reminds us of what we already know about Robinson while shedding light on aspects of the story that haven't been told, skillfully integrating the narrative of the baseball season with stories reflecting the social importance of Branch Rickey's "Great Experiment."

The author's stated ambition is to demythologize the story of Robinson's struggle, and he clearly achieves this goal. More importantly, however, he gives us a more detailed picture of the man before he became a legend. Leaning heavily on newspaper reports of the day and interviews with Robinson's wife Rachel and others who experienced the events of 1947 firsthand, Eig tells the story from a fresh perspective, free of the weight of the past sixty years.

Certain stories which we have come to take for granted might have been exaggerated -- or even concocted. Most notably, teammate Pee Wee Reese's famous embrace, meant to show support for Jackie in the face of abusive fans in Cincinnati, doesn't seem to have happened, at least not in 1947. Also, the threatened league-wide boycott which was rumored in the early days of the season appears to have been all smoke and no fire.

In debunking these myths, however, Eig does nothing to diminish the enduring power of Robinson's legacy. Instead, he actually strengthens it by detailing the enormous breadth of Robinson's influence, even in the early days of his career, and this is where the book shines. We have always known that as great a ballplayer as Robinson was (1949 NL MVP, 1955 World Series Champion, baseball Hall of Famer), his social and historical significance is much greater. Eig emphasizes this by telling the stories of individuals whose view of the world changed by watching Jackie's struggle. There was the white high school student who would eventually question the absence of black students at Stanford University, the black prisoner who would become one of the nation's most contraversial civil rights leaders, and the factory owner who saw Robinson's arrival in Brooklyn as a signal that he should integrate his business as well.

As triumphant as Jackie's rookie season was, Eig reminds us that he was far from the only hero. Branch Rickey took a considerable financial and social risk in pushing for integration, and Rachel Robinson was the rock that Jackie needed during his difficult year. The black press, especially Wendell Smith, served as shepherds for the entire integration process.

Jackie Robinson touched people then, and continues to be an icon today, almost fifty years after he hung up his cleats for the last time. So when you're finished reading stories this week about Major League Baseball's various tributes to Jackie Robinson, do yourself a favor and check out this book. You owe it to yourself -- and to Jackie -- to see where it all began, back when 42 was just another number.

The Greatest Mismatch in Sports

Fried Twinkies, Buckle Bunnies, & Bull Riders : A Year Inside the Professional Bull Riders Tour, by Josh Peter

If you watch enough television and switch channels often enough, there's a good chance that you've come across something called the Professional Bull Riders tour. If you're like me, you put the remote down for a while, at least long enough to watch a bull toss a cowboy into the air like a ragdoll. As you sit safely on the couch, perhaps having skipped your usual Sunday round of golf because your ankle is still a bit sore from when you stepped on your son's toy car while walking through a dark hallway on your way to get a midnight snack, you can't help but wonder what these cowboys are thinking. What is it that would possess a man to climb aboard the back of a two-thousand pound animal with four stomping hooves and a set of goring horns?

In his recent book on the PBR tour, Josh Peter has all the answers. By spending the entire 2004 season jumping from one event to the next and getting to know the riders as well as the sport, Peter comes up with a well-writen book that simultaneously serves as a primer for novices (like me) and an insider's guide for fans. (No need to take my word for it -- here's an incredibly cool video excerpt that you should check out.)

He includes enough history and background information to provide context for the events of the season he chronicles, but the strength of the book lies in the personalities of the bullriders. Though it might be tempting to lump the riders together and view them all as daredevils, Peter makes it clear that these men are athletes no different from any you might find in the NFL or on the PGA tour.

We meet men like Adriano Moraes, the Brazilian rider who came to the United States with nothing and became a world champion; Justin McBride, who couldn't seem to parlay his prodigious talent into a championship; Jody Newberry, the painfully honest cowboy who found controversy in last month's PBR Finals; and dozens more. While the idea of hanging onto a spinning bull with one hand might seem a bit more extreme than swinging a nine-iron, it quickly becomes clear that great athletes -- and these riders certainly are great athletes -- are fairly similar regardless of their sport. There are some who allow outside influences to waste their natural abilities while others achieve success through an obsessive attention to detail that borders on psychosis, but somehow they've all arrived at the top of their profession.

Before reading this book I certainly never expected that I would take in interest in bull riding, but Peter's book is compelling enough that I've got a two-hour show just on the bulls waiting for me on my TiVo right now. So if all you want is to find out what makes a bull rider tick, or even if you're a fan looking for behind the scenes material on your favorite sport, this book is definitely for you. I promise you won't be disappointed.

And what about the fried twinkies? The buckle bunnies? You'll have to read the book to get answers to those questions...

An Interview with Charley Rosen

Charley Rosen is the chief NBA writer for FoxSports.com. His most recent book, The Pivotal Season: How the 1971-72 Los Angeles Lakers Changed the NBA, chronicles one of the most remarkable teams in NBA history.

Last week, in between the fourth and fifth game of this year's championship series, he was generous enough to talk to me about his book and several issues confronting today's NBA. Enjoy...

BrokenCowboy
The first NBA games I remember watching were in the Magic Johnson/Larry Bird era, so I’ve grown up during a time when the NBA and its stars have dominated not only sports, but pop culture as well. One of the things that struck in reading The Pivotal Season was how totally different things were during the time you were writing about. Can you expand on that a bit?

Charley Rosen
Oh, sure. What happened shortly after the Lakers won in that pivotal season, the NBA took a nosedive because of drugs. Guys were dying. Johnny High, the appropriately named Johnny High -- actually I coached him for a while in the CBA -- got involved with some drug dealers, and his demise was kind of suspicious. Guys were getting suspended.

There was resentment among the fans that so many of the players were black. At one point the Knicks had twelve black players a couple times in the early to mid 70’s, and they were referred to in some circles as the Niggerbockers. And the fan base was white. The corporate fan base, the advertisers, everything was white.

And drugs, drugs, drugs. This guy was suspended, that guy was suspended. Jabbar was busted for having pot on him. There were several other superstars who were also caught by the NBA and told, “Straighten yourself out, we’ve got the goods on you, but you’re too big. Go dry out over the summer.” And Jabbar, they let him slide... There were a lot of guys who were just doing huge amounts of coke. And the NBA tried to hide it. They set up Michael Ray Richardson. They set him up so that he’d get his third strike and kicked him out of the league. They thought that would scare people, but it really didn’t work. It was such a negative feeling. Attendance was down, and people were just down on the game.

And David Stern, as soon as Magic and Bird came in the league, he changed the focus. Instead of focusing on the game, on the team, he changed the whole focus to the superstars, the individuals. And the whole NBA publicity machine then was regeared, and it was the individual that you sell. I mean, that did happen with Mikan, because then they had no choice, just to start the league. You know, the famous sign on the marquee at Madison Square Garden: Mikan vs. the Knicks. But that kind of changed. And that created a lot of problems, because then if everybody’s a superstar, then nobody’s a superstar. Then guys who were promoted as being superstars were getting superstar money.

That’s when the whole thing got out of control. The salary business got out of control, and guys, even marginal players making five, six million dollars a year, and guys started believing their own press clippings, believing the publicity and got into the whole situation of thinking they could do whatever they want and get away with it, which for the most part happened. So it’s a whole different thing. And then, it becomes even more difficult to create a team game, to have superstars -- “Hey, I’m a superstar, look at how much money I’m getting, look at the publicity I’m getting, look at my endorsements, I’m a superstar. Why should I play a team game?” Like Elvin Hayes told Tex Winter, “I’m an all-star. Don’t expect me to pass. It’s like asking Babe Ruth to bunt.” So the whole thing’s changed. In a way, it was a purer game back in those days.

BrokenCowboy
A lot of those problems that you mentioned we still see in the league today. There’s obviously a preponderance of black players, a white fan base, there are drug issues that have been maybe not as big of an issue in the media as it was three or four years ago, but how is league able to survive these things now, whereas before it doesn’t seem like it was?

Charley Rosen
Well, Michael Jordan made it acceptable for a black man to be an icon. And the thing that really did it were those commercials that he did with Spike Lee. You remember those commercials?

BrokenCowboy
Yeah, Mars Blackmon.

Charley Rosen
Mars Blackmon. That changed it around. It brought it into your living room. You look at this guy and say he’s alright. Ha ha ha, hey Spike Lee, that’s funny, let’s go out and buy his sneakers. That made it acceptable. He was the first black player who was big enough for that to happen, so now black players are acceptable. As far as the drugs, guys just chilled it. They chilled it, they were really careful about it, they just didn’t take as many chances. Although, when I was in the CBA, players were randomly tested for cocaine and heroine and drugs like that, and a coach who shall be nameless, who played in the NBA and was a major college coach, was coaching the other team, and his name came up and he came over to me and said, “Charley, take the test for me. I can arrange it, switch it around, they need a coach. I had a party last night.”

BrokenCowboy
Is that just a function, do you think, of the time, the 70s and 80s as compared to now, supposedly people are more careful with things like that?

Charley Rosen
Yeah, I think so. But still, what’s causing it? Are you interested in that?

BrokenCowboy
It seems like it’s probably not any different than what is given today. You’ve got all these superstars who are making all kinds of money. Is it as simple as that, or is there something else?

Charley Rosen
No, you’re playing the game... Playing basketball at that level, is such a... it’s a thrill! Your chops are up, you’re competitive, you’re alert, you’re playing at top speed and making multiple decisions, one right after the other while you’re running. It’s not like a baseball or football game where you come together and make a decision and then do it. You’re doing all of this on the run, on the run, on the run. And the competitive edge is so high, and so sharp, and so enjoyable, it’s such a thrill. The game’s over -- and you don’t want to let it go.

BrokenCowboy
That’s interesting. I’ve talked with people about what you’re saying. That everyone’s had that experience where you’re at a game someplace, and you’re the best one on the floor. And we’ve kind of wondered what it would be like if you’re, say, Michael Jordan, and you know that any floor you go to, you’re gonna be the best one on the floor. And you have this thrill, so it would be hard to, I guess what you’re saying, to duplicate that in the rest of your life.

Charley Rosen
Right, yes. The spotlight’s on you, millions of people are watching you. Hey, you’re the center of attraction. And then the game is over, and you don’t have a game for another two days, and you can’t go to sleep anyway. You haven’t eaten -- you had your pregame meal, which is usually a light meal around two o’clock, three o’clock. You’re really hungry, and everybody goes out, you go night clubbing. You know guys in the city who take you to places, you take them to places when they play in your city, everybody knows everybody, and there’s women... And still you want to keep that peak going, you don’t wanna just flop -- you can’t flop. You’re still buzzing, your mind is buzzing, your emotions are buzzing. You can’t just turn a switch and flip it off. It feels good, it’s a rush. Man, it’s a rush! Even coaching in a game like that is an incredible rush, you’re right there, in the here and now -- it’s tremendous. You can’t come down, and you don’t want to come down, so you snort a couple of lines, and you’re still there. That’s why it’s done. That’s one of the reasons why it’s done. A main reason, a big reason. But guys have just cooled down. It’s just not worth it.

BrokenCowboy
So what was it about this ‘71-’72 season, aside from just the record, what was it that interested you that led you to write this book?

Charley Rosen
They were like a mystery team. Because they played out in California, and the media center was still in New York, still on the East Coast, so nobody knew what was happening out there. You rarely saw them on television. I mentioned in the book, even a playoff game was on delayed tape. They played some auto, NASCAR race, that was also on delayed tape. Nobody really knew who they were or what were they all about. What’s so great about them? They were a rumor on the East Coast.

You read about the game in the afternoon newspapers, never in the morning newspapers. There was no SportsCenter, nothing like that. Once in a while they had a Sunday afternoon game, but the late games were never on. So nobody knew these guys. Nobody knew what was going on out there. I mean, I grew up a fanatical basketball fan, and I didn’t know what was going on. I knew the personalities involved.

And how did Chamberlain play like that? I was intrigued by that also. How did Sharman, who was a tough guy, but how did he get Chamberlain to play like Russell? Sharman, coming from the Celtics, Russell was the touchstone of how championship centers are supposed to play. How did he get Chamberlain to play like his arch rival, his archenemy, Russell?

And the whole California thing. When I was coaching in the CBA, we had a draft, we had a six-round draft, while the NBA only had two rounds. We were drafting guys who ten years before would’ve been NBA draft picks. Our first round drafts were like third round NBA drafts. So I spent a lot of time looking at films, going to Chicago pre-draft camp, doing this, doing that, and watching games on television, focusing on scouting and scouting and scouting. So I got into this whole scouting world, speaking to NBA scouts, and it was axiomatic. You don’t draft guys who learned how to play or grew up playing in California or Los Angeles. You don’t do it. They’re a different breed. It’s different out there, it’s bullshit basketball. Except for UCLA, but we’re talking about how guys translated to the pros. Guys just don’t have it. As I say in the book, they want to be out on the beach where the sun is shining. They don’t want to come indoors and play. They don’t play hard. They take short cuts. They won’t knock you down. And to a degree, it was true. I saw it was true.

BrokenCowboy
There’s still a little bit of that hanging on.

Charley Rosen
I bet it is.

BrokenCowboy
And one thing that we hear out here...

Charley Rosen
And where are you?

BrokenCowboy
I’m in Long Beach, which is just south of Los Angeles. But there’s a strong theory that high school players from Orange County are too soft, for all of those things that you’re saying, that the competition is too soft, that there are too many other things that they’re doing. And there’s a list of players that people usually mention, guys like Cherokee Parks or Chris Burgess, some of these guys that come out of Orange County and don’t really amount to anything.

Charley Rosen
So there was that. You know, Gail Goodrich is from out there, Sharman is from out there, Erickson is a Californian, and there’s this whole California mode of playing basketball. The L.A. Lakers had been to the finals seven times, they’d never won, and it was like, why now? And they always had the reputation of being glitzy, emotional basketball -- a collection of superstars -- Elgin Baylor, Chamberlain, and West, and whoever else they had out there -- a collection of superstars who couldn’t win. It was the epitome of what was wrong with the NBA. And the Knicks were genius. Red Holzman was a genius. They were the most intelligent team ever. The Bucks were the greatest team ever. How did it turn around? How did all of the sudden glitz, how did that transmute into real gold? So that was another draw for me, just to investigate this unknown territory. At least unknown in the East.

BrokenCowboy
Probably the only thing that I knew about this team was that they had this record 33-game winning streak. So there are two things that I wondered about as I was reading. First, what was the media coverage like? You addressed that a little bit in the book, how it kind of built towards the end, but I can’t imagine how huge a streak like that would be nowadays. And second, what’s the historical significance of a streak like that? Do you think we’ll ever see something like that again?

Charley Rosen
I don’t think so. I think there are too many teams. There are more teams now than there were then, which means that the travelling is more hectic, although they did play more back-to-back games in those days.

BrokenCowboy
And even back-to-back-back! I couldn’t imagine that!

Charley Rosen
Back-to-back-to-back! They played playoff back-to-back games! They’d play Saturday night in New York and Sunday afternoon in Boston and vice-versa. Yeah, there were some expansion teams, maybe four or five of those wins were against expansion teams, but there are teams today that are not expansion teams that are awful -- Charlotte, Atlanta. I think that one of the reasons that it kind of happened was that they were under the radar. Nowadays, a team wins like fifteen games in a row, bam, it’s big news, it’s all over, and all the sudden it’s pressure. The pressure mounts, it mounts early, early, early. I think these guys were kind of immune to pressure anyway. Once they got up into the twenties, there was still pressure, but still not as much as today. Not nearly as much as today. I think that’s one record that will never be broken.

BrokenCowboy
And what about their overall season? How does their 69-win season compare to Chicago’s 72-wins from ‘96? Probably your answer’s gonna be pretty similar.

Charley Rosen
Well, they claim that they could’ve won more games, had they known it was such a big deal. That Sharman rested guys to prepare for the playoffs, not that they cruised, but there were a couple games -- Houston they lost, they lost a game against Cleveland, their chops weren’t really up for it, because they didn’t have a goal. They had clinched already. As much as Sharman drove them, they still didn’t have a carrot. It’s like Oscar Robertson says. He had that one season where he averaged a triple double...

BrokenCowboy
He didn’t know it would be a big deal.

Charley Rosen
He said if was a big deal I would’ve done it more. Again, that’s just media focus, media attention.

BrokenCowboy
I remember Mickey Mantle said the same thing when there was all that hype about Jose Canseco’s 40-40 season, he said pretty much the same thing, he could’ve done it a few times.

Charley Rosen
Well, he couldn’t have done it, because his knees were so bad that they didn’t want him running. They didn’t want him sliding on that dirt. I saw a lot of guys, I saw Joe DiMaggio, and when Mantle came up he was like 3.1 one down to first base batting lefty, he was like incredible. But they had to save him.

BrokenCowboy
An important part of the Lakers’ success hinged on Wilt Chamberlain’s battles with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. What was that matchup like, and how does it compare to something we might see today? There’s not a whole lot out there, maybe Shaquille O’Neal vs. Ben Wallace or Yao Ming or something like that.

Charley Rosen
It’s different. Nobody’s like Chamberlain, and nobody’s like Jabbar. So imagine a quick, athletic Yao Ming. Able to jump, able to move laterally, quick off the ground, better hands, with a dreadnought shot -- the sky hook. Jabbar was an athlete. Is Yao Ming an athlete? I don’t know if he’s an athlete. He’s athletic, but he’s not an athlete. If Jabbar would’ve been 6’8”, he still would’ve been a great player. He would’ve done other things. There was nobody really like him, and there’s nobody like Chamberlain. I mean, the closest comparison that everybody draws is Shaq, but Chamberlain was quicker than Shaq. He was quicker off the floor, he was a better rebounder. He didn’t have quite the sheer mass, but he was just as strong. Shaq had more stuff, he could do more things. He had a better drop step, he could shoot lefty, he could spin, he could do this, he could do that. Chamberlain had only two or three things. Fadeaway jump shot from the left box, finger roll from the right box, and offensive rebound. Chamberlain was much quicker up and down the court. Chamberlain was a better athlete than Shaq, but he was thirty-five years old, and he was really at the end of his career. It was a battle of titans, there’s nothing like it. You can’t compare Wallace, he’s like 6’7”. Even Shaq and Yao Ming doesn’t even come close. The level of competition between those two, between Jabbar and Chamberlain, is ten cuts above.

BrokenCowboy
It seems like nowadays, in today’s league, for instance Wallace wouldn’t even be guarding O’Neal. It seems like they shy away from those one-on-one competitions.

Charley Rosen
Well the rules are different also. Back in those days you couldn’t double team. You could have guards dig in, kind of dig in and reach, but you couldn’t just out and out double team anybody. They had these illegal defense rules that were much more stringent, and they were afraid of zone defenses. They thought that zone defenses would negate big men, nobody would be able to drive to the hoop, and every game would just be an outside shooting contest. So there was more room for big men to operate in those days. Now you can double team, you can jam the lane, you can zone, and there’s not as much room. Big guys only have one dribble, whereas those guys could just kind of dick around and do what they wanted. Jabbar would’ve been great anyway, because he could just catch, one dribble, and go up with that sky hook, and nobody could get to it. He also had that left, that bar out there, right in your face, and you just couldn’t get close to him. What could you do against him? You tried to push him off his spot, and you tried to control his left hip when he turned, but that didn’t do much good.

BrokenCowboy
Most NBA fans probably know about Wilt Chamberlain, Jerry West, Gail Goodrich and the streak, etc., but I bet that very few of them could name their head coach. Tell me about Bill Sharman. He wasn’t just rolling out the balls, was he?

Charley Rosen
No. I said he was the best head coach nobody ever heard of, and then he was elected to the Hall of Fame as a coach. He was already there as a player. He was a low-key guy. A lot of coaches today are media figures. They’re out there, they’re personalities. Phil Jackson. Larry Brown. They’re out there. Sharman had played with the Celtics when Cousy was a star and Russell was a star, and Sharman just did his job. Hit his jump shot, played underrated defense, and was just kind of quiet about it. And he wasn’t the kind of guy who had to be the star, like Hubie Brown has to be the star when he’s coaching. George Karl has to be the star, a lot of guys have to be the star. He would just do things quietly, do things in the background, like the way he did with Chamberlain. Ask him questions until Chamberlain came up with the right answer, and say, “Wilt that’s a great idea.”

BrokenCowboy
I loved that part of the book where you’re talking about that. It almost seemed like that season wouldn’t have been possible if he hadn’t been able to convince Wilt to change his game completely, accepting that his main role on the team should be as a rebounder and defender instead of the dominant scoring threat he had been throughout his career. Right?

Charley RosenAnd the big thing was getting him to make the outlet pass. Because with Philadelphia he’d rebound and do this, and do that, and wait for the guards to come back. It was like, “Hey, nobody’s taking a shot until I’m down there and ensconced in the pivot.” But here it was get the ball, boom, whip, let ‘em run, let ‘em score, “I’ll stay in the backcourt and save myself.” Which is also a function of being thirty-five years old. So Sharman did a lot of subtle things that people didn’t know about. And his whole shoot around was a major development. It just made the game better. It raised the level of game preparation, which made the game sharper, made the players focus more, and it enable coaches to make more subtle adjustments during the game. Without the shootaround, yeah, you’d make adjustments in the game, but with the shootaround, and part of the shootaround was having the scouting report and walking through the other team’s offense, the other team’s defense. If you just depended on the practice sessions to do that, you’d maybe have time to do that one in every four games because of travel. Yet you were able to do that everyday. So the adjustments that the opposing coaches were making during the game, Sharman had already made those in the shootaround.

BrokenCowboy
One thing I liked in the book, you quoted one of his opposing coaches, I don’t remember who it was, but he was saying that he was hoping the Lakers wouldn’t win, because he knew if they did that everybody was gonna have to be doing these crazy shootarounds.

Charley Rosen
(Laughing) Yeah, I think Cotton Fitzsimmons said that.

BrokenCowboy
That was another thing -- I had no idea, you just kind of accept that everyone has these shootarounds, that’s how it’s always been, so that was interesting to learn where that came from.

Charley Rosen
The guys was prophetic. And he had an incredible focus on detail. He talked about deflections. Nowadays, almost all teams when they chart the games, deflections is one of the things that they chart. With his plusses and minuses, for deflections and stuff like that, he just focused on really small things. He got deeper into the game than any other coach. Deeper into the game. And he was able to do that in his first year with that team. Auerbach could do that, ‘cause he coached the same guys for ten years. Then it’s easy to do. But the first year with that team? He was able to get to that level of sophistication, and make those adjustments, and have them be cognizant of doing these small things? That’s remarkable. And the reason, as I said in the book, that nobody ever heard of all it, was because of his problems with his vocal cords. Vocal cord, actually, one was removed, as you know, so he hasn’t been interviewed, and nobody’s paid any attention to him. And he’s not the kind of guy to blow his own horn anyway.

BrokenCowboy
As I was reading the book, I couldn’t look at that situation with Wilt without thinking about Shaquille O’Neal and the Lakers. Even though the general public and media have been happy to blame Kobe Bryant for the demise of the Lakers, I always felt that if Shaq had been honest enough to accept his declining skills and been willing to focus on defense and rebounding, even though that hadn’t been his strength throughout his career, that he and Kobe might’ve won a few more rings together. Does that make any sense to you?

Charley Rosen
He can’t play defense, and he can’t rebound.

BrokenCowboy
Do you think this is something that he can’t do, or that he hasn’t wanted to do?

Charley Rosen
He can’t do it. His lateral movement isn’t quick enough for him to be a real force on defense. He doesn’t get off the floor quick enough for him to be a real good rebounder. He’s like a two-space rebounder. Rodman was like a five-space rebounder. You know what that term means?

BrokenCowboy
As far as how many body spaces he’s taking up.

Charley Rosen
Right. Rodman’s a five-, six-space rebounder. Chamberlain was a three- or four-space rebounder. You say that, oh, the guy can only rebound in a telephone booth. Well, Shaq’s like that. Smaller guys with quicker bounce have always been able to beat him to the top, beat him to rebounds. Asking him to do those things, yes, he could probably have done a better job, but he could never excel, could never have excelled at that. And the structure of the triangle, when the ball is positioned in the low post, that’s the situation that puts the defense at the greatest risk, because the balls close to the basket. Because whoever has the ball is one dribble away from a layup or a hook shot or something easy. So that’s why you want to play inside out. Get the ball in there, now the defense has to really change and stretch itself, and contort itself into alignments that aren’t basically sound, and that you can take advantage of. Even with the Bulls, he had these big ass, huge, monster centers. He had Cartwright and Longley. You’d get the ball into them, they were great targets, you couldn’t move them off their spot, they were too big to front, and you could always get the ball into them and run the triangle that way. So with Shaq, I mean, there he is. There he was. How could you not center the offense around someone like that? Plus, Shaq bought into the program. Shaq said, “Oh yeah, what a great offense. Let’s do it.” And Kobe never did. Michael was sure comfortable in the triangle, and excelled in the triangle, and Kobe never did. You know, I could talk about that for hours. Freedom, without structure, is chaos. And that’s what Kobe wants. With structure, freedom then becomes creativeness. And there’s plenty of room in the triangle for freedom.

BrokenCowboy
When we first spoke last week, I planned on asking you if thought the rumors about Phil Jackson’s possible return to LA made any sense. Now that it’s actually happened, it still doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. What do you make of it? You’re talking about these issues that Kobe has, have you seen anything to indicate he might have matured a little bit, or learned?

Charley Rosen
Well, Phil and I are coming from two different directions there. First of all there’s the whole issue of why is Phil coming back -- to anywhere. He’s coming back because he’s do damned competitive in everything he does, and there’s no other place where he can exorcise that competitive nature that he has. He tried. He did a motorcycle tour in New Zealand, and you don’t know what’s coming across the next bend in the road, and riding a motorcycle in strange places really has to keep you in the here and now, but who are you fighting against? Not fighting, who are you competing against? And he also has an affinity for activities which are group slash goal oriented. And talking to CEO’s doesn’t satisfy that. And it’s basketball. It’s his gift. It’s his gift. When I was out there in early April he was telling me he doesn’t watch many games, he doesn’t know what’s going on. He’d ask me is this kid any good, is that kid any good. He’d watch his Lakers when he could because he just wanted to see how the guys were doing. And he doesn’t care, he doesn’t care, and I said, “Yeah, wait till the playoffs start.” And then you’re gonna start to itch. Then your jones will start to itch, because the playoffs are a coach’s dream, because you’re watching tapes, and you’re getting deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper into the game.

BrokenCowboy
A lot more coaching, a lot more adjusting.

Charley Rosen
A lot more coaching. It’s more challenging. You have to go to your third option, your fourth option. You’ve gotta change this, you’ve gotta tweak this, you’ve gotta change the angle of this pick, you’ve gotta adjust, and re-adjust, and re-re-adjust, and it’s a situation that doesn’t happen in the regular season. It’s delicious. I said, “Wait till playoffs start, and your attitude will change.” And I’m sure that happened. So what about Kobe. The common ground that they share, is that they’re both...

BrokenCowboy
Ultra-competitive.

Charley Rosen
Ferociously competitive. They both want to win. Phil knows how to do it, Kobe really doesn’t. He doesn’t know how to take that competitive edge and turn it into a winning situation. So they have that -- they both want to win. And you would think that to some degree, Kobe has learned that, okay, we can’t win within my rules, having a coach like Rudy T who let me do whatever I wanted. And all the other stuff that’s happened. He’s no longer the golden boy like he was two years ago. I was saying this three years ago, when I was writing for ESPN, how this kid was selfish and that all these things would come out, and people would send me infected e-mails, cursing me, screaming at me when I did a couple of talk shows, and now everybody knows. Okay, now has that changed Kobe? Phil thinks it may have, and Phil is counting on the fact that what happened every year in the five years that he was there, he fought with Kobe, fought with Kobe, fought with Kobe, but in the stretch run Kobe was kind of, “Okay, I’ll play the triangle.” He agreed to kind of go through all that. Even last year. I think that may be selective history, selective memory. And also it’s true that, yeah, Kobe is selfish, and he’s an egomaniac, and he’s impulsive, and he’s arrogant, and he’s this, this, this... but there’s something about him that is appealing. He is a nice kid. And deep down in there there is, at least there used to be, this kind of effervescent quality about him that’s very appealing. And it’s there. It’s kind of hidden and locked away, but it’s still there. Plus, Phil respects his talent. Is he the best player in the NBA? Phil thinks so. He’s a clutch player, too, not afraid to make the clutch shots. And when he’s into it, he’s just as good a defensive player as he is an offensive player. He is a Jordanesque type player, which you can’t say about anyone else in the game today. So I think Phil thinks there’s enough there for them to connect. I don’t think so. I don’t trust this kid. I think this kid is a bullshitter.

BrokenCowboy
I think one thing that might help him put it together is I think that he at least has a sense of his place in history. And I think that he has to look at where things are now, and if he just kind of descends into mediocrity, then he’ll always be Scottie Pippen.

Charley Rosen
But that was one of the problems, that Phil was restraining him. This is in the beginning. That the triangle was stifling his creativity, it was gonna keep his scoring average down, which was gonna keep him out of the Hall of Fame. And yeah, okay, things are different without Shaq, for better or for worse. There’s not another dominating player, dominating personality, even though Shaq deferred to him. Shaq said many times during their streak, “Kobe’s the best player in the league, he’s the man.” That may not have been true, but he said that publicly, he made an issue of saying that. Okay so Shaq isn’t there, so the chemistry’s changed a little bit, which is more appealing to Kobe, but besides that Kobe had a big problem with the triangle. He said it was boring. Michael Jordan said it was a white man’s offense. It was a pass offense, it’s not a dribble offense. It’s a jump shooting offense, which it is. And Kobe didn’t like it for that reason, and he resisted.

BrokenCowboy
So I guess then, the question will be, he’s got these two conflicting needs: one to be the central focus, the huge scorer, and the other two win. Which one of these will overcome the other?

Charley Rosen
Right, and he wants to be a leader and no one wants to follow him. That’s part of it, too.

BrokenCowboy
Well, it’ll be interesting.

Charley Rosen
The drama continues, no matter what happens.

BrokenCowboy
Just when you thought the drama was starting to settle down, it just keeps on amping up. Finally, to bring things back to your book, the subtitle of your book is “How the 1971-72 Los Angeles Lakers Changed the NBA.” What, then, thirty-some odd years later, what is the lasting legacy of this team?

Charley Rosen
Well, it changed the demographics. Look at this, the Lakers haven’t won a championship in two years, and we’re talking about the Lakers. LA became the center of the basketball universe. It was the first glimmering of what was possible, that yes, this is real basketball that’s played out here. They lit the torch, and Magic and his crew ran with it and started a blaze. It gave credibility to Hollywood basketball. And it also showed that you can take superstars and make a team out of superstars. That is possible. Those two things, I think, are the biggest. We tend to overlook that now, because it was so long ago, and we take those things for granted. Or maybe we don’t take for granted the fact that you can turn superstars into a team. Maybe that’s still a lesson that still has to be learned.

BrokenCowboy
I think probably, because when the Pistons won last year, that was the biggest story -- they won as a team. They didn’t necessarily have superstars, but this was still, for the first time in a long time, a team that won as a team.

Charley Rosen
Well, yeah... yes. Malone and Payton were bogus. Bogus players.

BrokenCowboy
Why do you say that?

Charley Rosen
Because Malone was a loser. He was always a loser. His defense was highly overrated. He could play stationary defense. He’d give a guy a big bang when he posted up. He had no lateral movement, he never did. He would choke in the clutch all the time. I mean, look what happened against Chicago when he played them. He lost the ballgame for them. Michael stole the ball, and it was the game. It’s interesting, the Bulls played them in two consecutive championship series. They double-teamed Malone maybe three times a game. Their philosophy was, “this guy is a choker, he’s not gonna beat us.” And they played, I think a total of twelve games, was it? He beat ‘em in two games. Superstars are supposed to do more than that. The best power forward in the history of the NBA is supposed to win more than one out of six games. He never understood the triangle, he never went with the triangle, never committed himself to the triangle, and he’s a bullshit guy also. You know he’s a family man and everything, it’s all bullshit. It’s all bullshit. Read the book I did with Darryl Dawkins and find out what Malone really was like.

And Payton’s idea of basketball was give me the ball and let me do what I want. And run a low pick and roll for me on the left side, half way between the baseline and the foul line, and let me go. Post me up four, five, six, seven times, and I’ll be great. Let me just roam around in the passing lanes, I don’t have to guard anybody, I’ll just roam around, and I’ll make a bunch of steals, and they’ll call me the glove. It’s always astounded me. Why did he want to play in LA? He knew that they played the triangle. He played against them, what? A hundred times in his career?

BrokenCowboy
That bothered me a lot when he came here.

Charley Rosen
When he was with Seattle they played the Bulls in the championship round. He knew. What did they think they were gonna run when he got there? That they would change everything because of him? He never bought the triangle. So there you have Malone, who doesn’t understand the triangle, doesn’t know what the hell is going on, doesn’t know whether to shit or go blind out there. You have Payton who resists the triangle, and here’s Kobe who doesn’t want to play the triangle. So that gives Kobe an excuse to fire away. “Hey, these guys aren’t doing it, you know. Shit, man, I’ll do it.” The amazing thing was that they beat San Antonio, basically the same San Antonio team, which was a real eye opener, that they could do that.

BrokenCowboy
Well, they had a little divine intervention, I think, in that series.

Charley Rosen
Well, you know what Branch Rickey used to say. “Luck is the residue of design.” Phil called that play for Fisher because he was left-handed, and his left hand was on the baseline. There are reasons things happen. The year before, Horry’s shot goes in...

BrokenCowboy
And that changes everything...

Charley Rosen
... and they win. And last year his shot missed. A ball is in, a ball is missed. No, it’s a function of the whole thing that’s going on. There’s a reason why the ball went in, there’s a reason why he missed the next one.

An Interview with Tom Stanton, Part II

Tom Stanton is the author of several baseball books, including The Final Season, an award-winning account of the last 81 games played at Tiger Stadium. (Click here for my review.) Last week he was generous enough to talk with me for a while about several subjects -- Tiger Stadium, fathers and sons, the financial disparity in the game, Barry Bonds, and Hank Aaron. I've broken our conversation into two parts; this is part two. Enjoy.

BrokenCowboy
So your book centers on the emotions connected with Tiger Stadium. I was wondering, now five years later, what do you feel when you walk into Comerica Park?

Tom Stanton
I don’t say anything disparaging about Comerica. It’s a nice place to watch a ballgame, but it’s still a fact that most of my memories are at the place a mile down the road. And as I tell in the book, there’s a spot in Comerica where you can go up behind the first base, left field stands and look off in the horizon and still see the light standards on Tiger Stadium about a mile away, and it’s a very melancholy feeling when I go to the ballpark, because I always go up that area and I’ll take a look at the old ballpark. If I’m down there often I’ll drive past the old ballpark. The new ballpark is a good place to watch ballgames. The view is much less obstructed, in the upper deck you’re further from the action. One of the things people dislike is that there were a lot of obstructed view seats, and that’s because there were these huge columns that held up the upper deck, which was right on top of the action. In the new ballpark the upper deck is further back from the action, but they don’t have as many obstructed view seats. So I miss that closeness to the field itself that you had at the ballpark, and it’s almost a metaphor for what’s happened to baseball in a broader sense. There is more of a distance between players and fans, not just in terms of physical distance, but I think psychologically and emotionally. You see that in a lot of respects. I mean, ballplayers used to have hangouts. I know in Detroit ballplayers used to go to Lindell A.C. Bar after ballgames. For a lot of reasons, probably litigation being one of them, they don’t socialize with fans in that same way. You have the physical distance on the field, and Tiger Stadium, old ballparks, players after the game used to have to come out of the clubhouse and walk through the tunnels to get to their cars. Now they can avoid the fans entirely if they want to. And you have the differential in the wages, too. Ballplayers have always made more money than the fans who watched the games, but the multiples now are just so astronomic it’s just difficult for fans to relate.

BC
You mentioned the obstructed view seats. I grew up in Detroit for my first eight years of life, and the first baseball game I attended was at the stadium there. Mark Fidrych was pitching. It was the game that he came out after two thirds of an inning, and it was pretty much the end of the road for him. It was in ‘77, and I remember spending the rest of the game pouting -- I was seven years old -- just being so devastated, because I had been looking forward to this game all summer. But anyway, we go back from time to time for family reunions, and maybe ten years ago I bought tickets to a game -- we had an afternoon free -- and it said on the ticket “OBSTRUCTED VIEW” and I had no idea what this meant. When I got to my seat, there was a girder directly in front of my feet, I had one foot on either side, it was out in left field. It was an interesting way to watch a game. I always think of that when I think of Tiger Stadium and hear “obstructed view.”

TS
(Laughing) It was a fact of life there. In fact they estimated that, one of the officials told me that probably two thirds of the seats were obstructed in some way. But most of the time it wasn’t an issue. They didn’t sell enough tickets, you could just kind of move somewhere else. But that’s a classic moment.

BC
Can you imagine one of your grandchildren attending all 81 games of Comerica’s final season in say, 2099, and writing of the emotional significance of the place? Do you think that a modern park can collect that kind of nostalgia, or is history the only thing that’s necessary for that?

TS
I think a modern park can collect that kind of nostalgia, however I don’t think any of the modern parks are gonna be around eighty years from now. When you look at the chronology of ballparks, right now we just have three that existed before 1925, and all the others have been built since 1960. We have this huge gap in there, and even those that were built in the sixties are now disappearing and replaced by other ones. I suspect it’ll be the same for Comerica and the other ballparks, that they’re not going to be around in thirty to forty years, from teams moving around or from something new happening which forces a change in construction. It was the lack of suites that largely did away with a lot of the old ballparks. I think certainly you can collect the memories wherever people share that game over generations, but I’m not sure those places will exist for generations.

BC
That’s probably true, I agree with you.

TS
I mean, I don’t know. I probably sound too much like a curmudgeon, but we’ll see I guess. It’s just that given the history of those that existed in the sixties and the fact that many of them are gone already... but wherever you make memories, wherever you have fond memories, you always have an emotional attachment to those places. But I do think it’s different where you have a place where you can go that you know Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb played there, because baseball is so much about its history and its tradition and its heritage that I think it’s imperative that they keep the ballparks, the old ballparks that exist, Fenway, Yankee Stadium, and Wrigley Field.

BC
So what’s the latest you’ve heard about any plans for Tiger Stadium? And if the decision were up to you, aside from moving the Tigers back, what would you do with that site?

TS
You know, other than moving the Tigers back, there’s not a whole lot that you can do with an old ballpark that will allow it to be sustained financially. There aren’t a whole lot of uses for a place that seats 50,000 people and shaped as a ballpark. There were some grandiose plans for a while of doing a combination of retail and Tiger Museum and condos throughout the outfield and turning it into like a community and having the ball field be a national park. But Detroit has a lot of economic and development problems as it is, and doing something that grand, it just kind of smells as if it would fail. I don’t think that the city office officials want to do a whole lot with the place. I think what will probably happen is over time there will be a lot of plans floated that will get shot down and eventually the place is just going to be demolished. Because there’s just not a whole lot you can do with a big hulking ballpark. I mean, you’ve been to the place. It’s just kind of planted there right in the neighborhood. The most recent thing was the city was talking that they wanted it demolished to make room for something like a Home Depot, which is, Detroit has so much vacant land, it seems kind of silly that they’d need to have that spot. In Detroit, I don’t want to come down too hard on the city, because there’s some great new developments -- Ford Field and Comerica and different areas that are coming back -- but there are still a lot of old empty skyscrapers that are simply vacant or a huge train depot down the street from Tiger Stadium. And I think it would be worse if Tiger Stadium just kind of deteriorated and rotted away as the train depot has. I guess my preference would be that it come down if that’s what its future is.

BC
You talk a little bit in the book about the current state of baseball, and the division between baseball’s haves and have nots, a gap which only seems to have gotten much wider since 1999. Is the playing field too skewed right now? I mean I don’t know how you could answer that question except for one way, but...

TS
It is. I find myself rooting each year for the Minnesota Twins or the Oakland A’s or some of the teams that don’t have the huge payrolls, and I don’t know if the solution that they’ve developed is really going to accommodate it. You know, the luxury tax, sharing revenue over a certain point. It is, and I say that from the perspective of a Tiger fan whose just experienced losing seasons for most of the decade, decade and a half. It’s been a long time since we’ve had a winning season here, but now our owner is shelling out some bucks, last year for Rodríguez, this year for Magglio. I’m hoping personally their situation turns around, but it’s hard to envision a bright future for a lot of these small market teams. I’m not sure how financially they do compete, and whether the solution baseball has come upon is really going to solve the problem.

BC
Earlier you talked about your passion for the game. Pitchers and catchers report in about a week. When I was a kid, I remember waiting all winter long for that -- it was almost like Christmas for me. Do you still look forward to baseball in the spring? Do you still have that same passion you had when you were younger?

TS
I still look forward to baseball in the spring, but the passion is, it’s very different. I mean, I lived and died for baseball as a kid, and it sounds like you did too. You’re right -- I waited, just anticipated spring training arriving, and the daily news reports that you were getting, and just devoured the stuff and lived for it, but it’s a little different now. I still have the passion for the game, and this year I might actually go down to spring training, which I’ve never experienced that, but it’s different. It’s only natural, I think, that it’s different once you’re out of those childhood years because you come to see the ballplayers, I think, as more human than when you’re a kid. When it’s spring training and you’re a kid, it’s as if your cultural gods are reawakening, your life is spring forth again. But it’s a little bit different. I have children now who are in high school and one in college, so your perspective on what’s important kind of changes.

BC
I have one more question about the Tigers. Even though they missed on some of the bigger free agents, they still had a fairly nice off-season. I was wondering, is there excitement in Detroit about this team coming up in ‘05?

TS
Well, it started last year, I think, with the signing of Pudge. That brought a huge amount of excitement here. I can’t say the latest signings have done proportionately the same, but there certainly is a general sense that the Tigers are now moving in the right direction, that they’re going to be more competitive, and it’s nice to see the owner of the team take more of an interest. You’re probably a big sports fan, so I’m sure you know that Mike Illitch, who owns the Tigers, also owns the Detroit Red Wings, and for years one of the complaints baseball fans have had here is that...

BC
He ignored the Tigers.

TS
He ignored the Tigers at the expense of the Red Wings, which I don’t really think is the case, but his philosophy kind of is that he wants them to get to a competitive point and then he’ll start investing money. But what had happened is the team two years ago was just so dismal that it totally embarrassed the man. I mean, he was a baseball player who actually made it to the minor leagues. It was so devastating the way the team performed that he knew he had to do something, and so he’s been taking steps to make us more competitive, and people are enthused and excited about it. And some of the enthusiasm comes from the fact that we’re going to be hosting the All-Star game this year, which has spurred ticket sales because they’ve tied the All-Star tickets into the season ticket packages. So there is more enthusiasm. We didn’t have any Red Wings hockey this year, so I think that helped too.

BC
Right now I’m about half way through your most recent book, Hank Aaron and the Home Run that Changed America, and it’s impossible to read that without thinking about the chase we’ll see this season and next. The cultural significance is obviously not there, but when Barry hits #756, assuming that he does, will it mean anything to you individually or to America in general?

TS
It’s gonna be different, because all the interviews I’ve done, all the fans I’ve spoken with since my book came out, it’s obvious that people kind of view Bonds as a different animal than Aaron, and view his record in a different light, especially given the accusations of steroid use. I don’t know what the significance is going to be. I mean, it will be different, because you don’t have a black man playing in the South surpassing the greatest white sports legend of all time. It’s an African-American man passing the record of another African-American man, and their contrast is somewhat in their style of play but also in terms of personality they’re very different figures. So it won’t resonate in the same way. I think it’ll be a glorious moment, hopefully, for sports when it happens for baseball, and people will celebrate it. There’ll be a lot of attention. But I think even as Bonds was approaching Mays’ record, he got more attention than Aaron, not when Aaron surpassed Ruth’s record, but through much of that 1973 season when he was closing in on it. The media world has changed substantially since then, so we’re gonna be inundated with the fact that he’s caught and surpassed Aaron, if in fact that happens. I think there’ll be a lot of attention as he passes Ruth, partly because of some of the things that Bonds has said about that being an important goal to him.

BC
Right, and a bigger goal.

TS
Yeah, a bigger goal, you’re right. I don’t have any sour feelings about Bonds doing it. Most of my feelings, it’s kind of a nostalgia thing. One of my uncles, when Aaron was pursuing Ruth’s record, and he had seen Ruth play at Navin Field, he said, “Well, he may pass Babe Ruth, but he’s never gonna be a Babe Ruth.” And I find myself kind of thinking the same thing. You have your own biased outlook which ties to your own childhood. Bonds may break the record, but in my heart he’s never gonna be Hank Aaron, which is natural, I guess.

BC
Finally, I was just wondering if you were working on anything right now, if you have any other projects in mind, baseball or non-baseball.

TS
Yeah, the Aaron book comes out in soft cover in a couple weeks, so I’ll be doing some promotion for that. I edited through the University of Michigan a kind of what’s called a Detroit Tigers Reader. It’s some of the best writing on the Tigers over the past hundred years. It was a real joy to that. And my agent’s shopping a variety of proposals, so we’ll see which one comes to fruition. Both are tied to baseball in some way, though. One of them is much broader than baseball, and a different one involves Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth and the friendship that developed later in life that a lot of people aren’t aware of, so we’ll see. I’m not sure at this stage. I’m guessing that you’re a writer? But I don’t know that...

BC
Actually I’m a school teacher. I enjoy writing an awful lot, and it’s something that maybe I’d like to pursue someday.

TS
When you do nonfiction books, and you have an editor, you usually develop a proposal for the book before you write the book. The idea that you better be sure that somebody’s gonna buy it before you go to the trouble of writing it. So we’re shopping one proposal, the Ruth and Cobb one, and I’m developing a back-up one in case that one doesn’t get the kind of offer we want. And I’ll just kind of take it from there. I’m sure there will be more books. I feel very blessed to be able to do what I’m doing, which is write about a sport I love and have the freedom to do it at home.

BC
That’s great -- whatever it is that ends up coming out, I look forward to it.

TS
Well thank you, I appreciate that.

BC
Well thank you very much for your time. Are you going to be having a book tour with the paper back?

TS
Probably not, because you usually do that with hardcover. Probably a radio interview tour. I don’t imagine making it out to the west coast, but if I do I’ll look you up.

Part I | Part II

An Interview with Tom Stanton, Part I

Tom Stanton is the author of several baseball books, including The Final Season, an award-winning account of the last 81 games played at Tiger Stadium. (Click here for my review.) Last week he was generous enough to talk with me for a while about several subjects -- Tiger Stadium, fathers and sons, the financial disparity in the game, Barry Bonds, and Hank Aaron. I've broken our conversation into two parts; this is part one. Enjoy.

BrokenCowboy
First of all, I wanted to tell you that I really enjoyed your book an awful lot, and the biggest question that I had as I was reading it, and you address this obviously in the book, but can you talk about how you decided to attend all 81 games? And did you know right away that you wanted to turn the experience into a book, or did that kind of occur later in the process?

Tom Stanton
Just before I get into that, just so you’re aware, The Final Season is the first of three baseball books I have, so there have been two others that have come since then, The Road to Cooperstown, and just this last year Hank Aaron and the Home Run that Changed America. But with the Final Season, it was the fulfillment of a childhood dream. I was a baseball-obsessed kid growing up in Detroit, and somehow I got myself on the Detroit Tigers’ mailing list and each winter when I was a boy I’d receive these beautiful brochures talking about full-season ticket packages, and I vowed someday when I was smarter than my father that I would buy one of those packages and go to every home game. Lo and behold the years have a way of rolling past, and we were approaching Tiger Stadium’s final season and I still hadn’t fulfilled that, so I decided to take a year to do that. Yeah, I thought from the outset that I would be doing a book -- at least that’s the alibi I gave family and my wife as I fulfilled this mid-life crisis in my wife’s view, and went to all these games. So that was the ambition, to write a book while satisfying this compelling need to be there in that last year.

BC
One of my favorite aspects of your book is the idea that a place like a ballpark can hold such incredible emotional significance for so many people. What was it like for you to walk into Tiger Stadium on any given day?

TS
In my case, four generations of my family had been going to that ballpark, first when it was Navin Field back in the era of Ty Cobb, then as Briggs Stadium, and then as Tiger Stadium. My grandfather, who had immigrated to America from Poland, learned about the country through baseball. He used to see Sam Crawford and Harry Heilemann and others play. And so whenever I’d walk into Tiger Stadium, you’d feel the ghosts of history kind of swirling around you. You couldn’t go to the place without hearing your uncles tell the stories they had told in your childhood of running up and down the ramps that still existed there, of going to ballgames with their father. The love of the game has been passed down through generations by my family from father to son, and that’s not unique, that happens with lots of people. I think that’s why so many people feel emotional bonds to these green cathedrals.

BC
Yeah, I agree with you completely. There’s something almost tangible that you feel, you know, when you walk into these parks. I agree.

TS
You have your own memories, and then you have kind of your inherited memories, and it’s just a very rich experience. I think people who don’t share that passion for the game, you know, they probably struggle to understand it, but it’s about more than just a place, it’s about so many other things. In my case, as I mentioned in the book, my grandfather died before I was born, and the family home that my father grew up in was burned down and demolished years later, so the ballpark became the only place really, the only physical place where I could go to to connect with this grandfather that I knew only through stories. It was the only place that really still existed. And so it’s a very dear emotional connection there.

BC
I loved all of the characters that you introduced throughout this eighty-one game journey. Some of them were obvious -- Ernie Harwell, for example. And some, like Alice Cooper, were surprizing. But most interesting, I think, were the fans you interviewed who had their own individual stories, and I was wondering, how did you find all of these people? Did you simply approach people who seemed like they were making some sort of a pilgrimage like you were? What was that process?

TS
Yeah, some of it just came about naturally. When you go to every game, you start to see some of the same people, and just get to know some people. The workers, in particular. Nancy Griffin, the African-American vendor out in the outfield. You just get to know people -- ushers, hot dog vendors. Others, though, sometimes it was just a matter of who I was sitting around on that day, or who I was observing. People’s reactions to what was taking place might draw me to them. It was kind of serendipitous in most cases.

BC
That’s how it felt, that’s how it came across in the book.

TS
Yeah, in retrospect I think probably editors would’ve preferred if you knew specifically going in what the poignant stories were gonna be so you could chart those throughout, but it was more of a discovery experience for me, so I didn’t go there knowing... except in a few cases, like when I checked on Ernie Harwell and Al Kaline, except for those cases, it was just who I stumbled upon.

BC
You just mentioned Al Kaline. I wanted to ask you about him, because I enjoyed that section. I was wondering if you could talk about what he meant to you as a boy, and then what it was like interviewing your hero so many years later?

TS
Yeah, it’s still a very memorable experience for me. But if you grew up in Detroit like I did in the sixties and early seventies and you were a baseball fan, Al Kaline was your baseball god. There was really nobody who approached him, not just in terms of skill but just in terms of what he meant to the city. In my case, on a very personal level, this sounds silly to people who haven’t had similar experiences, but there was a lot of turmoil in my life, my mother was very ill for much of my childhood, in hospitals with brain surgeries, and there was a lot of dissension in the late sixties, early seventies relating it, a few changes in our culture and society, and Al Kaline was this one constant who never seemed to change. So he was kind of a stabilizing figure, which sounds odd when you don’t really know the person, but that’s the role I think heroes can play. It’s hard to put your finger on it, but it’s there in the way that they inspire you and affect you. So Kaline had that impact on me, and here I am many years later, no longer a child, I’m in my late thirties at that stage when I’m going to Tiger Stadium, and I do have press access to the field. And I’d notice Kaline throughout the season, I mean he was obviously the first thing I would notice on the field, your hero’s out there. And the other ballplayers treated him with reverence, these young guys. I say in the book they kind of gathered around him as if he were the flame on a cold winter’s night.

BC
I enjoyed that, it was almost comforting. Sometimes you hear stories about older players who walk on the field and aren’t noticed by the current players. I was glad to see that he still had that iconic status.

TS
He did. I mean even though some of those guys weren’t even born when he retired. But he had that, and often Kaline would be on the field before the gates opened, before the fans came in, and having press access I would be there, and you would see him just kind of standing aside the dugout staring out into right field, and you could only wonder what was going through his mind, and he’d disappear before the fans got there and just kind of go into the dugout and the clubhouse. I was on the field one time I couldn’t muster up the courage to talk to the guy. I’ve interviewed people who are more famous than Al Kaline, but instantly when you’re interviewing your hero, or you’re approaching him, you’re that eleven- or twelve-year-old kid. It took me some weeks to get up to the point where I felt comfortable doing that. It sounds silly, especially to my journalistic friends, to say something like that...

BC
It makes perfect sense to me, it makes perfect sense.

TS
Yeah, you’re just kind of plunged back into those old emotions. You’re not on equal footing with your hero. And he’s kind of a shy guy, an aloof guy, and so he’s not real easy to warm up to, as I noted, and we didn’t become best friends or anything, but he did warm up a bit when we started talking about fathers. It’s the one thing I think a lot of ballplayers and ballplaying fans have in common is kind of the role their fathers played in their love of the game. So it was a memorable experience for me. I’m going to be honored later this year by this organization that does a Detroit Celebrity of the Year and a Detroit Sports Media Person of the Year, and Kaline’s supposed to be the Sports Celebrity of the Year at the same time, so I’m kind of excited about that.

BC
Wow, that’s really cool. Another thing that you kind of addressed in the book is the fact that there are whispers about replacing Fenway Park, and George Steinbrenner occasionally makes noises about building a new stadium for the Yankees, but it doesn’t look like either of those two fields seems to be going anywhere. Meanwhile, Wrigley Field has achieved landmark status in Chicago and is probably more important to the city than the Cubs are. Tiger Stadium certainly belongs in that group except for the fact that it’s empty right now. Why do you think that is?

TS
I struggled with that question for much of that season, and still do. I guess it’s... Tiger Stadium never took hold nationally in the same way that Wrigley or Fenway or Yankee Stadium did. I think partly it’s because of the type of town Detroit is. It’s very much a working man’s town, it’s an industrial city, very blue collar. And Tiger Stadium wasn’t celebrated in baseball literature in the same way. There was something that I had to come to grasps with -- why our ballpark and not the others? I adore Fenway and Wrigley, I haven’t been to Yankee Stadium still, although I’ll be there this year, and I’m sure that’ll be pleasurable too, and I want for those places to persevere, but you wonder why Tiger Stadium wasn’t on that equal footing. I think if you go to the place, it has a different feel from Fenway or Wrigley, but it very much has that spirit about it. I think it was just a matter of for some reason it just wasn’t held in the same esteem even though it was every bit as old as Fenway. I mean, it opened on the same day.

BC
One thing that surprized me as I opened up the book and started reading is that his book was as much about you and your family as it was about Tiger Stadium, and obviously, as you explained, the two are kind of intertwined. Did that surprize you at all the way the book ended up, or is that how you always envisioned it?

TS
No, it wasn’t as I envisioned it originally. The book changed over time. When I started I thought it would be a little bit of my own experiences and more of telling the history of the park through the fans that shared the game their through many decades. But as I got into it and started absorbing the experience, it was obvious to me why I was there, very personal reasons, and that started coming through in what I was writing. I’m happy that the book turned out that way, but it was at the encouragement of editors that my agent was approaching who were saying in the early drafts that the strength of the book was really the family stories and that personal connection. I was freed at that point to focus more so on that, which is something you kind of want permission for because it feels a little bit self-indulgent. But in the end it doesn’t come off that way I don’t think, because a lot of baseball fans can relate to that and the story resonates, and when people read your work, especially something personal such as that, they’re not necessarily just seeing you in it, the author, they’re picturing themselves in that story because they’ve had similar experiences and can in many cases see their own family, grandparents and fathers, in those tales.

BC
A two-part question I wanted to ask you. Did you learn a lot about your family through this, and what was your family’s reaction to the finished product?

TS
I knew a lot about my family history prior to this anyway, but you couldn’t help but learn a lot more. It strengthened my family, it was a good experience. You know, some families perhaps would object to having their dysfunctional aspects advertised to the world, particularly in the case where my father had not seen a couple of his brothers for a long time, but it brought that uncle back into our lives in one way, and so that result was something very beautiful. I think I was very close to my father as it was, but it made us even closer, and it created a bond that was even stronger than what we had started. You know, it was positive all the way around. It was a beautiful experience for me personally, and for my family.

BC
You mentioned this a couple of times. I wanted to see if you could elaborate on it a little bit. Much is made about the importance of fathers and sons within the framework of baseball. You write about the bond you shared with your father through baseball, and several of the subjects in your book -- Al Kaline, Brian Moehler, for example -- speak of this as well. Can you talk about that for a minute? What is it exactly about fathers and sons and baseball?

TS
A lot of writers have been pondering that for a long time... It’s not easy to put your finger on. But the bond seems greater, in my case certainly it is, with baseball than it is with other sports. I don’t think it’s always just a matter of being a sport. But I think some of it is... one of the things that people who don’t like baseball complain about is that it’s a slow game. There’s not continuous action on the field, and you have these dead periods of time when you’re watching. But one of the beautiful parts of that is it allows you to kind of have a relationship within the game with the people you’re experiencing it with, and in many of our cases the people we experience it with are family originally, in the early years. So I think our relationships are more tied to the sport in that sense, that you develop a very personal bond with the sport, or in my case with my father, watching those games either in front of the television or at the ballpark itself. It’s not continuous action, you have a chance to talk, whether or not it’s a... it’s not a contrived thing where you’re setting out to do that, but it just happens naturally. You’ve got your father talking about his childhood experiences, and the guys he rooted for, Greenberg and Gehringer in my dad’s case, and then you kind of pass this love on for the game, and share this passion for it, and I think that can’t help but create that bond and sort of reinforce it. And then you have the catches in the backyard, which... when you’re playing catch with your dad in the backyard it’s different from maybe having a game of one-on-one basketball in the driveway. It’s not a competitive thing, in any sense. It’s just connecting with that ball going back and forth between you, and so I guess there are a lot of reasons. I’m not being very coherent or enlightening, but I do think it has to do with the pace of the game and the fact that it’s been around a lot longer than many games, and so consequently you have the ability to have these family stories that go back generations are shared and then retold.

BC
I think there’s a lot to that, especially the pace of the game. So much of what I know about baseball came from listening to Vin Scully talk between pitches about things that happened fifty years ago in Brooklyn, so I think there’s a lot to that.

TS
Yeah, that’s a good point.

Part I | Part II

The Final Season, by Tom Stanton

On July 12, 1977, my parents took me to Tiger Stadium to watch my first major league baseball game. The Tigers were playing the expansion Toronto Blue Jays, but the main attraction was Mark Fidrych. "The Bird" had taken baseball by storm the previous year, captivating fans and baffling hitters with his quirky mound behavior. He was named the American League's Rookie of the Year in 1976, and the future seemed bright.

Injuries had delayed the start of his sophomore season until May, but he pitched well through the early weeks of the summer of '77, and everything appeared to be headed in the right direction. I was seven years old that summer, obsessed with baseball, and the idea of going to my first baseball game with Fidrych on the mound was almost too much to bear. Sadly, that night was the beginning of the end for Fidrych. He faced only three batters before he was forced to leave with an injury, and I spent the rest of the night pouting as the Tigers held on to beat the Blue Jays 2-1. Fidrych would not pitch again that season, and he only appeared in sixteen more games over the next three years before retiring. He never again reached the heights he had enjoyed during his rookie season.

This is only one of the thousands of histories which played out in front of the Detroit faithful from 1912 to 1999. When Tiger Stadium was closed in the final year of baseball's first modern century, an era ended. By my count, no fewer than 142 of the 260 members of Baseball's Hall of Fame played in the ballpark at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull, a list that ranges from Cobb, Ruth, and Greenberg to Molitor, Eckersley, and Boggs. Of its contemporaries, only Fenway Park and Wrigley Field remain in service.

But a stadium is more than just a place to watch and play baseball games. For many of us, ballparks and arenas take on the aura of sacred ground, places whose value is measured in more than just the grass on the field or the girders supporting the grandstands. Author Tom Stanton explores this phenomenon in his award-winning book The Final Season.

In April of 1999, as the Tigers prepared to play their final season in Tiger Stadium, Stanton began a quest to attend and document all eighty-one of their home games. His book is a chronicle of that six-month journey, a touching farewell to an historic place.

Stanton's book received the 2001 Casey Award for the best baseball book of the year, but this is about much more than baseball. Both the culture of Detroit as well as the intracacies of Stanton's family tree are skillfully woven into sections detailing the recent and distant history of the stadium. His daily game logs barely mention what happens on the field; instead he relates the stories and memories of countless fans, players, broadcasters, and park employees as they face the closing of a major chapter in their lives.

But this book's greatest strength reveals itself through the central narrative as Stanton explains the critical role the park played in four generations of his family. Stanton grew up going to games at Tiger Stadium, just as his grandfather and father had before him, and his three sons accompanied him to many of these final games, albeit with the diminished enthusiasm typical of their generation.

In the book's preface he writes, "I could never go to Tiger Stadium without feeling the ghosts of history about me, without imagining my grandpa walking the same dank, dark concourse that ran beneath the stands." That sentence essentially sums up the entire book. There are certain places so ripe with memories, so thick with nostalgia, that to return to them is to immerse yourself in yesterday. For some these places are childhood homes or college campuses; for others they are ball fields.

If you have a place like that, a place which comes rushing forward in perfect detail as you close your eyes, a place which sends tingles down your spine or tears to your eyes, you'll surely find yourself in this book. I certainly did.

"A Gift," by Michael Chabon

Michael Chabon is one of my favorite authors. For those who aren't familiar, his most recent novel is Summerland, a baseball fantasy aimed at adolescent readers but nostalgically enjoyable for those of us who still wish we were little boys, dreaming major league dreams. Before that, Chabon won the Pultizer Prize for his brilliant novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and he's since penned the story that became Spider-Man 2.

While browsing his website tonight, I came across a short item that he wrote for the New York Times Magazine about fourteen years ago, a story called "The Gift." It's about a five minute read, and it's well worth your time. Enjoy.