BrokenCowboy: Sports Views with a West Coast Bias

An Interview with Richard Bradley

It is certainly the most famous game from the most famous rivalry in baseball history. Any sports fan can tell you that Bucky Dent earned a "special" middle name when he launched an improbable home run on a crisp October afternoon in Boston, and most would also tell you that the story ended with more sorrow for the Red Sox and another World Series championship for the Yankees. Richard Bradley's recent book, The Greatest Game: The Yankees, the Red Sox, and the Playoff of '78, not only tells the story we know but also digs beneath the service to give us what we don't. (Click here for an excerpt.) Bradley interviewed dozens of players, coaches, and other personnel connected with both teams in order to give a complete picture of the game and all that led up to it.

He reminds us that although the Yankees made an historic comeback, the Red Sox (who won ninety-nine games, afterall) didn't collapse. We meet Bob Lemon, the mild baseball lifer who replaced Billy Martin, the volatile alcoholic who nearly piloted a championship team into the ground. And, of course, we're reintroduced to George Steinbrenner when he was at the peak of his manipulative powers, nothing like the mild patriarch (relatively speaking, at least) that he's become today.

Perhaps most interesting, though, are the players. Bradley intertwines two separate narratives throughout the length of the book, one following the season from spring training to its eventual conclusion, the other detailing each at bat of the playoff game. As he tells these two stories, Bradley includes brief biographical sketches of the key players on both sides. We read about Reggie Jackson's struggles with Martin's caustic, dictatorial style, and Carl Yastrzemski's desperate search for a championship. Jim Rice's MVP season is balanced nicely against Ron Guidry's Cy Young campaign. Most compellingly, Carlton Fisk's polished athleticism stands as a stark contrast against Thurman Munson's scruffy competitiveness.

The Red Sox and the Yankees, it seems, could not have been more different in 1978, and so it makes perfect sense that these two opposites would have come together to produce one of the most memorable games of the past half century. Bradley's book captures the rivalry, the season, and the game perfectly. It appeals to fans of both teams, as well as baseball fans in general, and whether they were born after the game was played or were sitting in the stands that afternoon, readers will revel in the details Bradley uncovers.

Recently Bradley was generous enough to spend part of his morning talking with me about his book. Check it out...

BrokenCowboy:
Previously you had written about JFK, Jr., and Harvard University. Whatever led you to write about something as mundane as a baseball game?

Richard Bradley
(Laughing) Well, I guess first of all, I didn’t consider it mundane – it’d be tough to write a book about something that you felt that way about because books are so hard, even when you love your subject. But what I found when I was writing about John Kennedy and the importance of the Kennedy mythology in the American culture and also about Harvard University was that really what I was writing about turned out to be American icons. Institutions, people, that are sort of a central part of the collection of ideals and myths that we think of when we think of America, and baseball is obviously very much a part of that. So while in some ways the subjects seemed very different, I thought that in another way it’s really just a different angle of looking at the things that we think define the United States.

BC:
You mentioned how difficult it is to write a book, and I was interested in your process for this one. When did you begin your research and what was that experience like?

RB:
Well, I guess I began with the idea for the book in early 2006. I had just come off this book Harvard Rules, about the last president of Harvard University, and as I said baseball seemed a natural progression. I also wanted to write about something that would be timely and something that I felt was a central part of the sport’s iconography: a famous game, a famous homerun, a remarkable era, a great rivalry. This Yankees-Red Sox game, which really capped a very intense period in the rivalry between the two teams in the 1970s, absolutely fit that description. So I wrote a proposal for the book, sold it, which is a pretty standard thing that writers have to do, and I began reaching out to the clubs, the Red Sox and Yankees. I found that the Red Sox were terrific, and quite easy to work with. The Yankees were a little more difficult because their attitude towards the media, I think, since Mr. Steinbrenner took over has been a little… How can I put it?

BC:
Suspicious?

RB:
Less pro-active. And also at the time, of course, and currently, George Steinbrenner has been ill. So I got the feeling that a number of things were moving slowly in the organization because there was a little bit of a leadership vacuum. So to get to the Yankees players, I wound up really going through their agents. And then I spoke with the players, as many of them as I could. I couldn’t get all of them, but I got most of them. And after that I tried to speak to as many of the people surrounding the game as possible: umpires, observers, people in the organizations, baseball historians, that sort of thing. Then in early 2007 I started to write, and I finished the manuscript in the fall of 2007.

BC:
Talking a little bit about the game, I was about a month shy of my ninth birthday when this game was played. Even though I remember watching it very clearly, I certainly had no idea of its historical significance. What was your experience? Did you understand what was happening? Do you remember what was going on?

RB:
Well, my experience was sort of different in that at the time I didn’t actually get to see the game. I was stuck in school. I was at a school where we really didn’t get out until 4:30, we didn’t get home until a little bit after five. So I missed it, pretty much, and I’d never seen it until a couple of years ago when I made a point of looking it up, which isn’t easy to do actually. Tapes of games from that era are harder to find than you would think. And when I watched the game I realized that although of course it’s justly famous for Bucky Dent’s unexpected homerun that really turned the momentum of the game, there were so many subplots and dramas in every inning of that game that people had forgotten a little bit about. So I grew more and more curious about it.

BC:
You mentioned that you spoke to a lot of players and people connected with the game. Even though we’re talking about a game that was played thirty years ago, I’m guessing that the people you spoke with didn’t have any trouble recalling its details. Were you surprised by how vivid some of the memories were?

RB:
Actually I was surprised at how faulty some of the memories were. I think this is something that happens with iconic events. At some point, say, a faulty memory might get introduced into the conversation, people misremember things just a little bit, and then they repeat it over and over again until it becomes established fact, at least in their own minds. I’ll give you an example. I went down to Florida to meet with Bucky Dent, and I was talking to him about his home run which he hit on a 1-1 count. Remember, this is one of the most famous home runs in the history of the game, far and away the most famous thing that Bucky Dent ever did on the playing field, and Bucky thought – and was adamant – that he had hit that home run with two strikes on him. He said that, and my ears kind of perked up, and I interjected and said, “Actually, no, there weren’t two strikes.” And he said, “Oh, yeah there were.” And I felt kinda bad, because…

BC:
Because you had seen the tape.

RB:
Who am I to say to Bucky Dent what the count was? But in fact, I’d always wondered because the first pitch of that at bat was arguably a strike and a check swing by Dent. And I’ve always wondered if on some level in his memory he didn’t sort of think that maybe that had been a strike, and maybe he remembered it that way.

BC:
That’s interesting. I interviewed Jonathan Eig a year ago or so, off of his Jackie Robinson book, and he mentioned some of the things. He was dealing with a season that was fifty years ago, but still he mentioned that there were certain stories that have just become a part of folklore, almost. The famous image of Pee Wee Reese putting his arm around Jackie Robinson to support him the face of an abusive Cincinnati crowd, and he couldn’t find any record of that actually happening. Just as you said, stories have been told, and they’ve become fact.

RB:
And what happens, I think, when you try to convince people otherwise, is that oftentimes they don’t believe you, and sometimes they actually can get irritated at you because the memory is something that’s become important to them, emotionally significant to them. So for you to come in and say actually it didn’t happen that way, people aren’t always happy to hear it. So what you have to do, I think, is try to check with as many other sources, whether documentary or through interviewing people, and eventually it’s kind of like filling in a puzzle. Eventually you start to get a sense of what may have really happened.

BC:
Right.

RB:
I’ll give you another example. After the second pitch of Dent’s at bat, Dent swung and fouled a ball off his instep and fell to the ground. He had to be treated by trainer Gene Moniyhan. Mike Torrez and a number of folks thought that the time in between when Dent hit his ankle and stepped in for the next pitch was really long, something like five minutes. Torrez said to me, “One of my great regrets is that I didn’t take any warm-up pitches during those five minutes.” Don Zimmer said the same thing. I timed that interval, over and over again. It was about a minute and twenty seconds, but they were all convinced that it was four times as long. It may have seemed like four times as long, but it wasn’t.

BC:
I assume at point in an important game, time kind of slows down. You probably lose reference a little bit.

RB:
Exactly.

BC:
I loved how you chose to construct your narrative by weaving your game description into a review of the entire season, but I think my favorite parts of the book were the short player profiles that were scattered throughout. Were there any particular players that stood out for you as you were researching and writing?

RB:
Well, the Yankees were a team full of characters, but the guy who I found the most fascinating is unfortunately a guy that I wasn’t able to speak with. Thurman Munson. Even when I was a kid – and in my personal life I’m a Yankee fan; the book is pretty neutral, I think – I thought Munson was sort of a fascinating character because he was such a curmudgeon with the press. But when you spoke to his teammates a very different side of him became clear. A guy who was warm and funny and surprisingly vulnerable.

BC:
And writing poetry! I couldn’t believe he was writing poetry!

RB:
(Laughing) Thurman Munson writing poetry – you just don’t see it! And he was a guy who, for very complicated reasons, I think, and some of them having to do with a father who was really a jerk, Munson felt that he had to have this very thick skin. Bucky Dent told me that one of his favorite images of Munson is of Munson wearing what was apparently his favorite t-shirt, which was a Yosemite Sam t-shirt showing him with guns blazing and the caption, “Ise Hates Baseball!” Of course Munson didn’t hate baseball at all. He loved baseball. It was all he ever did, but he wasn’t gonna say that. So on the Yankees, I think, Thurman Munson. Catfish Hunter was a fascinating guy. I wish I’d have been able to talk with him as well. Unfortunately he died of ALS about twenty years ago. He was a veteran player who had a really great wit and great insight into the team. Lou Piniella I did get to talk with a little bit, also a very thoughtful guy who hides it a little bit behind a sharp edge…

BC:
He hides it pretty well, I think.

RB:
Yeah, but you can tell that there’s a real intelligence there. On the Red Sox there were several complicated personalities. Jim Rice, an African-American player with a lot of pride who felt, and I think justifiably, that race was a real issue for him, particularly as a guy was sort of slotted to be the next in the Ted Williams-Carl Yastrzemski line. A very tough position to be in, especially for an African-American man from South Carolina.

BC:
In Boston.

RB:
In Boston, exactly. And also, I think, Carl Yastremski, whom I did get to speak with after quite a lot of work. He very rarely gives interviews. Yaz is someone who went through different phases with the Red Sox in his twenty-three year career with them. He was not always beloved by the fans, and was not a simple team leader. Playing that long for one team, he went through phases of different roles that he played with the team. He was not a rah-rah kind of guy by any means, but he was passionate and intense and incredibly committed to what happened on the field. I spoke with Yaz about that game where he hit a home run and drove in two runs, but also made the last out in a situation where he had the opportunity to win the game for the Red Sox. There was no question that this still bothered him. He felt at the time that this was really his last best chance to get into and win a World Series, that the Red Sox team probably wouldn’t be able to hold together in the following years. For a guy who spent that long in baseball, this was pretty deep stuff. So I think Yaz is a fascinating character as well.

BC:
I wanted to ask you about what the rivalry was like back then. Nowadays you often hear that the rivalry means a lot more to the fans than the players on the field. In fact, there was a big controversy when Joba Chamberlain sent a good luck text to Clay Buchholz before a game not too long ago. Would something like that have happened in 1978?

RB:
Unthinkable back then. For different reasons. Free agency and the way that players were moving around had not totally sunk in. So for somebody like Mike Torrez to go from the Yankees to the Red Sox was really, really a big deal. And for Torrez to do as he did in the off-season, to make remarks degrading the quality of the Yankees and suggesting that they wouldn’t be as good in ’78 as they had been in ’77 was something that really pissed off the Yankees. I think the rivalry was more personal, it was definitely more physical than it has become. I think in the current rivalry the fact that the Red Sox have been so successful in the past few years has sort of taken some of the anger out of it. Even back, I can’t remember what year it was, when Don Zimmer got flipped by…

BC:
2003, by Pedro.

RB:
Those emotions were pretty high at that point. But that seems to have leveled off in terms of the relationships between the players. Back then these two teams really didn’t like each other. In particular, I think, the great personal rivalry was between Thurman Munson and Carlton Fisk, who were in some ways very similar, and in some ways very different. Very similar in their approach to the game, their complete devotion to it. Very different in the sense that Munson had a tough self-image. Very hyper-critical, kind of an odd-looking guy, didn’t look like a natural athlete. Brian Doyle, from the Yankees, told me that Thurman Munson, when you saw him in the locker room and you would never have thought that this guy was an amazing athlete. And Munson was pretty self-conscious about that, whereas Fisk was this good-looking guy, tall, kind of rugged-looking, square-jawed. And the Yankees thought that Fisk was a little taken with himself. Marty Appel, who had been the Yankees P.R. guy for a while during that period said to me that when Fisk hit that home run in the 1975 Series where he waved it fair and jumped up and down the line, the Yankee players didn’t actually like that. They thought that was a little bit of showboating, a little sort of self-love. And part of the reason they felt that way, I think, was they just didn’t like Fisk.

BC:
I guess you can’t really discuss that game without looking at the season that led up to it. First of all, how crazy was Billy Martin, and how much of an impact did the switch to Bob Lemon have on the Yankees?

RB:
Well, every one of the Yankees I spoke with I asked about the importance of that switch, and every single one of them said, “We would never have made it to that playoff game against Boston if Billy Martin had still been the manager.” Martin had a trajectory that he followed with pretty much every team he managed, which was great success over the first couple of years followed by increasing volatility in his relations with players and management. A cycle of self-destructive behavior. With the Yankees, 1978 was the downside of that cycle for Martin. It was not helped by the fact that Martin’s drinking was really out of control. Billy Martin was an alcoholic. There’s no way that if he were managing today that he would not be packed off to a rehab clinic to dry up. At the time, people didn’t do that kind of thing. But Martin drank so much that it fueled irrational and volatile behavior. And also, to be fair, he was in a very delicate situation. George Steinbrenner has never been an easy man to work for, but back then he was really at the height of his mind games with the manager and his players. Steinbrenner was a guy who wasn’t averse to manipulating Martin and trying to suggest lots of little ways in which Martin might lose his job. And of course, the job of being Yankees manager meant more to Billy Martin than anything else in his life. He had been a Yankee player, of course, and he’d been traded after some alleged misbehavior after a night on the town with Mickey Mantle. That trade had devastated Martin and effectively brought an end to his playing career, although he kicked around the majors for a few years after that. Coming back to the Yankees was salvation for him. Unfortunately his personality and his drinking combined to cost him that salvation, at least for that year. He would come back of course, but it was never quite the same.

BC:
And what about Ron Guidry? I was so caught up in his season that even living outside of Chicago at that time as an eight-year-old, I actually dressed up as Ron Guidry for Halloween that year. Just how dominant was he?

RB:
Ridiculously dominant. Out of control dominant. Ron Guidry went 25-3 on the season, and in fact, a couple of his losses were games that he probably should have won, except that a ball was misplayed or something fluky happened. His ERA was 1.74. He won his first 13 games of the season. He won games after… something like nine or ten of his games came after consecutive Yankee losses, so essentially the Yankees could not go into any three-game losing streak when Ron Guidry was in the order. There’s just no question that without Guidry this was a team that would never have gone as far as it did.

BC:
So even though the focus now is on the Yankee comeback and eventual win, people sometimes forget how good that Red Sox team was. Isn’t that right?

RB:
Oh, I think they do, and the worst culprits tend to be Red Sox fans themselves, because they focus so much on the loss and that October playoff game and on Bucky Dent’s home run that they forget that this was a team that won 99 games and that was astonishingly good, really a great team. If a couple of things had gone differently on that October day, the Red Sox would have been the team to win that game, and all the players on both teams were convinced that the Yankees and the Red Sox were the best teams in baseball, and that whoever won that playoff game would go on to win the World Series, which turned out to be true when the Yankees beat the Dodgers. But they were equally certain that if the Red Sox had won that game, that they would have gone on to win the World Series as well, and I think that’s probably true.

BC:
Well, all of this leads us to Bucky Dent. I loved your three-page description of his home run, something that probably took about thirty seconds in real time. Can you talk about that a little bit and some of the peripheral things that were going on?

RB:
What I tried to do in describing Dent’s home run was to show what that looked like…

BC:
From every point of view.

RB:
Every point of view that I could, really, at least in terms of the players. Because I think when you watch a game like this on TV, what do you see? You see, at that time, really one camera following the ball. The production values of that game were substantially lower than they would be for a game of similar import played today. So you got to see, back in 1978, Dent’s swing, and you sort of saw the ball as it headed out, and you couldn’t even completely see the ball as it barely skimmed the top of the Green Monster. What I wanted to do is sort of present that even in a way that you wouldn’t get to see it even if you were in the stands that day. Because when you’re watching a ball that may be a home run, you’re following the flight of the ball. So I talked to a lot of the other players about what they were looking at, to see what players judge when they’re in a situation like that. And one of the things that quite a few of them said, was that they were actually watching Yastrzemski. Yaz, for them, was the best measure of whether or not that ball was going to go out. Because after all, nobody played the Green Monster better than Carl Yastrzemski, ever. So for, I don’t know, half a second, three-quarters of a second, something like that, as Yaz was running, he looked confident. He looked he was either going to catch the ball, or that it was going to bounce off the Green Monster and he’d do what he usually did, which was hold a ball like that for a single. Instead, there’s a moment where Yaz, his knees just sort of bend and his body just kind of crumples. You see it. It’s shock. It’s like he’s been punched in the stomach. Player after player said they saw that, and they knew that Bucky Dent had hit a home run.

BC:
And I think that image of Yaz buckling like you said, is as iconic as Fisk waving his home run.

RB:
Yeah.

BC:
Because as you’re describing it, I can see it vividly in my mind.

RB:
It was a remarkable, tangible expression of disbelief. Yastrzemski said to me, in fact I think that’s the word he used, he said, “I just couldn’t believe that Bucky Dent had hit a home run.” And in that sense, I think what he felt was what hundreds of thousands of people across New England felt.

BC:
It seems like their recent championships have softened the hearts of the Red Sox and their fans, as evidenced by their recent love-in with Bill Buckner. Is there any chance that they might also forgive Dent, or will he always just be Bucky Fucking Dent?

RB:
(Laughing) I think he’s always going to be Bucky Effing Dent for them. The people who were really affected by that, it took them twenty-five years, right? At least Bill Buckner was one of their own, and look, the Red Sox still had a seventh game, right? So it wasn’t completely Buckner’s fault. With Bucky Dent, they were mad at Bucky Dent for twenty-five years or so until the Red Sox won a World Series, so the people who were there at the time, I don’t think they can really turn around and say all is forgiven. And for people who weren’t there at the time and didn’t really feel it so strongly, it doesn’t really matter as much. The truth is it’s kind of fun now to get mad at Bucky Dent. But it wasn’t at the time. And of course, you know, the great story about how he got that nickname is that after the game Don Zimmer was driving home, still in a state of shock. Thinking about the game, he got so overwhelmed that he pulled off to the side of the world and just kept muttering to himself… Am I allowed to say this?

BC:
You’re allowed to say it.

RB:
Zimmer just kept shaking his head and saying, “Bucky Fucking Dent. Bucky Fucking Dent.”

An Interview with Pat Jordan

Recently a friend of mine introduced me to the writing of Pat Jordan. As a sports fan and avid reader of Sports Illustrated, I'm sure I had read his stuff before without being aware, as I wrote at SI for years in the seventies and early eighties. But after diving into a newly published collection of some of his best work, The Best Sports Writing of Pat Jordan, I couldn't imagine it had taken me so long to find him. Jordan's style is reminiscent of an older generation of journalism. Most journalists today seem intent on using their writing to set bonfires which will further illuminate their own pseudo celebrity. Jordan, however, steers clear of the easy targets and the pieces which fall from the sky already written. Instead, he delves deep into his subjects and produces profiles which, to paraphrase him, give a better picture of his subject that the reader will ever get anywhere else. He succeeds.

Recently Pat was kind enough to spend part of his morning talking to me about a host of subjects including his failed baseball career, an early interview with Roger Clemens, his experience with Ricky Williams, the controversial running back, and lots of other stuff. It's a long and winding road -- enjoy!

BrokenCowboy
I wanted to start by asking you about some of your earliest baseball memories. Mine are crystal clear. I was obsessed with baseball from a young age, so when my parents took me to Tiger Stadium when I was seven years old to see Mark Fidrych pitch, it was about the coolest thing in the world.

Pat Jordan:
The Bird! He was one of the coolest guys.

BC:
A month later when we were on a family vacation to New York City my parents asked me what I wanted to do one day, and I chose Yankee Stadium. I remember everything about that game – Catfish started, Chambliss hit a homerun to beat the Royals, and Sparky closed it out. More than thirty years later, I’m still a die-hard Yankee fan because of that day at the Stadium.

PJ:
You gotta go to Yankee Stadium, you gotta go to Fenway Park, and you gotta go to Wrigley Field. Those are the three stadiums that you have to see if you’re a baseball fan.

BC:
I’ve been two of those three. I still need to make it to Fenway.

PJ:
Oh, Fenway’s great. It’s like going to a little cubby-hole, you know? The press box is up this rickety old stairway. I’ve got a fear of heights, and you’ve gotta climb up these rickety stairs, and there’s no railing, and you’re looking out over the right hand side all the way down to the street. The last time I was there it was like a Quonset hut with a little tin roof.

BC:
And they keep building those stands that stick farther and farther out.

PJ:
I know. They’ll be across the street pretty soon.

BC:
So what was your first game like?

PJ:
I was about seven or eight. My brother was going to Georgetown Law in Washington, DC. It was in the early fifties. It was a Yankees-Senators game, and after the game they allowed the people to walk onto the field to try to get autographs. The Yankees were just running off the field, and I had a torn piece of paper or something, but I was too embarrassed to ask one of the Yankees. But my brother, who was a very big guy, he was like 6’5”, grabs Phil Rizzuto and sticks the paper under his nose and says, “Will you sign it for the kid, Phil?” Phil gave him a big smile and signed a piece of paper that I never saw again. That was my first remembrance. I was always a Yankee fan. In Connecticut, if you’re south of Hartford, you’re a Yankee fan. If you’re Hartford or east or north, you’re a Red Sox fan. So we were always Yankee fans. Plus, the Yankees had all Italians in the fifties. You had DiMaggio, Crosetti, Lazzeri, Raschi, Berra… As Italian immigrants – even my grandmother, who could barely speak English, knew the great DiMaggio. They were a sign that our immigrants were making it in an American game.

BC:
That reminds me of something that came up in Jonathan Eig’s recent book on Jackie Robinson. One thing that he mentioned that I wasn’t aware of growing up in my era, was the strong ethnic identities, like you mentioned, that different teams would have.

PJ:
Oh, very big. The Red Sox were Irish, the Yankees were Italian, the Midwest teams were German and Polish, and then when Jackie came along the Dodgers were always identified with black fans because he was their first hero, you know. And after Jackie they weren’t reticent about signing Joe Black, Don Newcombe, Roy Campanella… I’ll tell you a funny story about Campanella. When I was a kid, my parents and my uncles would watch the Yankees-Dodgers World Series. My two uncles were arguing about who was a better catcher, Campanella or Berra. And so my father intercepted and said, “What difference does it make, they’re both Italians!” But then when Campanella struck out, then he wasn’t Italian anymore, he was black. But when he hit a home run he was a paisan. So they got it both ways with Campanella. But that’s how ethnic it was when I grew up. Today Campanella is noted as one of the early black ballplayers, but in my family, no, no. He was Italian.

BC:
That’s funny. As far as that strong ethnic identity, you mentioned that you followed the Yankees in large part because they were Italian like you, not just because of where you lived. How much of that went on, where people said, “I’m Irish so I like the Red Sox.”?

PJ:
Oh, that was very common. The Red Sox had Williams, McDermott… Boston was an Irish city ruled by Irish politicians. Italians, and people don’t know this, this is going back into a history that you wouldn’t be aware of. Italians were not prejudiced. My mother and father, when I was a kid, they never questioned any girls I brought home. It was always a Polish girl, a black girl, anything. Except – I could never bring home the hated Irish. The Italians and the Irish hated each other. It was all social because the Irish came first and the Italians came after them. And plus the Italians didn’t look American, number one, and number two, they didn’t speak the language. So they were wops – without papers. The ethnic resentment went back to the simple fact that during Prohibition my grandmother had a variety store and she sold bootleg wine out of the back room, and the Irish cop on the beat made her give him five dollars a week in tributes to keep the bootleg wine operation going. So that’s why they hated the Irish, because the Irish held ‘em up for five bucks a week to sell their wine. But that was the only prejudice I ever grew up with in my Italian house. Our ancestry goes back to Italy, where the original name was DiMenna, which in English is diamond. My Uncle Ben was Benjamin Diamond, and there’s Jewish history in our family, and I’m sure black history. As my mother said, when Hannibal came over the Alps he dallied with the Italian girls. So I never grew up with any form of prejudice except the hated Irish. So when I married my second wife whose last name is Ryan, my mother – who’s about eighty – she calls up and says, “What kind of name is Ryan for an Italian wife?” And comes flying down to Florida to check my wife out! Those were interesting times. I was talking with a friend the other day about how ethnic my generation was. We always referred to each other by ethnic names: I was the guinea, Richie Belzer was the Jew, Richie O’Connor was the Mick. We used those terms. Today to be politically correct you can’t, but I still do.

BC:
My love of baseball, a lot of it came from reading about these old players, especially old Yankees. And you can’t imagine, like DiMaggio being called the Big Dago, you can’t imagine a player in the press being referred to like that now.

PJ:
Oh, of course not. But you know when my father grew up in the twenties he couldn’t get a job because the signs on the doors said “Help Wanted – No Italians Need Apply.” So in their own way they were the blacks of the twenties in terms of immigrants. And people sometimes think that I’m Irish because of my name, Patrick Michael Jordan, but it’s Pascuali Michaeli Jordano. That was my father’s name, but he changed it on the day I was born. He had it legally changed so that I would be born an American, he said. He didn’t want me to have the stigma of being Italian. Today I wouldn’t mind being Patty Jordano. That’s a nice name.

BC:
So you obviously played the game early on. How important was playing as you were growing up?

PJ:
It was the focal point of our neighborhood. I was born in an Italian ghetto, but I moved when I was five to a little suburb in Fairfield, and everybody met at the park. Now the park had a swing set, a tennis court, and two baseball diamonds. One was a little league, and one was a major league – major league dimensions. Basically every kid woke up, had breakfast, got on his bike, and went up there. The non-athletic kids hung out at the swing set – the shooty shoots and all that. And the kids who were into baseball, we played pick-up games. So that’s where my friendships were made. One of my friends who died when he was forty-six, he was the oldest kid, the first kid I ever met up at the park, his name was Doug Holmquist. He played with the Houston Astros, and he eventually became a coach under Billy Martin for the Yankees. Doug and I, the first time we went up there we were just five years old and we had a catch together. And that was my oldest friend until he died. We had to pick up sides, and I was always lousy so they always put me in right field. One day when I was about eight years old a station wagon pulls up. A guy gets out and he starts pulling out these big canvas bags with bats and balls, and everyone goes running, except for me. I didn’t know what was up. And one of the kids yells out, “It’s the Little League coach, stupid!” I didn’t know what Little League was. So he goes to the mound and he says, “I’m the Little League coach and I wanna see who wants to try out.” Naturally everybody raises their hands. “We’re gonna try out by position. So if you want to play a position, raise your hand.” The first position he calls is pitcher, and I was so excited that I raised my hand.

BC:
And how old were you then?

PJ:
Eight. At that time Little League was eight to twelve. There was no minor league, just all major league Little League. So I raised my hand at eight, I had never pitched before, they put me on the mound, aimed me toward the plate, I threw a couple of pitches, and everybody’s eyes bugged out. I had been playing right field all this time, and I didn’t know I had an arm. So eventually I made the Little League. I was the first guy in the history of Little League to make the major leagues at the age of eight years old. I never pitched, but I was playing with twelve-year-old kids, you know. So I got a uniform and there was a little publicity about “eight year old makes major league Little League” and all.

BC:
Do you still remember that first uniform?

PJ:
Oh, yeah. You know why? Because we had a Memorial Day parade. Memorial Day opened the Little League season, and we all had our uniforms and marched in a parade down through the center of town. It was Smirnoff’s Market. Smirnoff’s Market Little League. Plus the idea that you’re a member of a team. That was something. You were part of something. That was fun. And by the time I was ten I was really good. When I was ten I was pitching shutouts.

BC:
I played Little League baseball growing up, and I have a lot of those same memories. I remember getting my first jersey. It was number eight, and immediately I thought of Joe Morgan, one of my favorite players, so that was a pretty cool thing.

PJ:
Oh, Joe. I like Joe.

BC:
But the sad thing is that I was not a talent. I’ll never forget what it was like being cut from my high school teams in the ninth and tenth grades. Up until then, foolishly, I always assumed that I’d be a major league baseball player.

PJ:
We all did.

BC:
Your playing career lasted a lot longer than that, but it still ended earlier than you would’ve liked. What was the end like for you?

PJ:
Oh, it was very traumatic.

BC:
Did you have any regrets then or now?

PJ:
I did then, but not now. Someone asked me what I would’ve been. I said I would’ve continued on the road to becoming an asshole that not even José Canseco could approach. I was so single-focused about baseball all my life that I was not a very social kid. All I cared about was pitching. I didn’t care about friendships anymore once I became a star, it was just pitching a baseball. And since I had unlimited success very early, when it was cut off at the age of twenty-one I was stunned. What do I do? I had gone to college one semester a year before I went to spring training just to placate my parents, but I had no interest in anything but baseball. It was very traumatic. I couldn’t even look at a box score for about five or six years, partly because most of the guys I played with were going to the big leagues and becoming stars: Joe Torre, Phil Niekro, Ron Hunt, Tony Cloninger. All these guys were in the big leagues, and I couldn’t even look at a box score. It was rough, but it was the best thing. It was like a traumatic amputation, you know? Sometimes it’s the only way to make somebody get well. I think if I had lingered on into the minor leagues until twenty-eight, say, as a triple A player and not quite get called up or maybe get called up for a cup of coffee and spend a month or two and then get sent back down again… I think it would’ve been a thousand times worse. I was forced at twenty-one to say, okay, what are you gonna do now? It wasn’t too late. At twenty-eight it would’ve been late.

BC:
So how did you go from pitching to writing? If someone had told you at age fifteen that you’d grow up to be a writer, how shocked would you have been?

PJ:
I had no idea. I had never read a book. What happened was when I came back from baseball I worked all these menial jobs. I was a construction worker. I worked for a Lithuanian mason. I carried mortar and bricks up a scaffold while he built a chimney, stuff like that. I wanted to go to college, so I wanted to get a night job. I was playing semi-pro basketball at night for this guy who was a sports editor of the local newspaper. I was getting paid fifty bucks a game. I had a wife and a baby. So I was complaining to him one night, I said, geez, I need a night job so I can go to school. Because when I went to school they didn’t even have night courses, you had to go full time. So he says, “I’ll give you a job at the sports section of the newspaper.” I told him I didn’t know anything about writing, but he said, “Well, you know sports.” So I got the job for sixty-five dollars a week, I worked from six to two in the morning, then went to school from eight-thirty to three. He would let me do my homework from midnight to two because the paper was put to bed at midnight but we had to wait until the paper came up and I had to go down to the linetype room and read the paper to make sure there were no mistakes. So between midnight and two I did my homework. In those days all the guys had a bottle of bourbon on their desk, they smoked cigars – both things that I do to this day. And my only job the first couple of weeks was to read the race results to the local bookie, Clyde. And that’s all I did. Then after a while I would write the headlines for the local high school games: “Tigers Rip Rams, Smith Hits 20”. Two lines, and I had to make sure they fit in a certain number of characters. And that’s all I did. And I’d sit there at the typewriter and I would write it out longhand on a piece of paper, and then type it with one finger. Tiger. Hunt around… T. Hunt around… I. So you couldn’t have started at a lower level than I did. You know what I mean? Guys go to journalism school and all that, but you couldn’t start any lower than I did. Little by little then I’d write the high school results, then I wrote a couple profiles and somebody mentioned one of them: “You know, that was a terrific story.” And that was the first time I’d gotten any ego feedback since I left baseball. I liked the ego gratification when somebody’d recognize me downtown and say he’d read my story. So I went to see this old guy, an old sportswriter who was a real drunk. He was always whacked by eight o’clock at night. I said, “Johnny, you know I’m thinking I might like to be a writer.” He looks at me with bleary eyes, with a cigarette hanging from his lips, and he says, “Pat, I owe everything I am in my life to this business.” And I got so depressed that I quit that week. This is my future? And so I quit and became a school teacher, high school English at an all girls high school.

BC:
I teach 8th grade English.

PJ:
Oh, you do? Okay. That was the second-best job I ever had. I loved teaching. I just like writing more.

BC:
I’m wondering how your playing experience affected your writing. You mentioned how bitter the end was for you; how do you think that affected your perception of the game? For instance, if I were covering a game it would be hard for me. As difficult as this is to admit, even at thirty-eight years old, it would be hard for me to talk to Derek Jeter, for instance.

PJ:
Not me. I pitched against Hank Aaron. Fuck Derek Jeter.

BC:
Right, that’s what I’m saying. So how do you think your experience affects your point of view? Are you able to be more objective?

PJ:
I never romanticize them. A friend of mine said he was shocked that I’m not a fan. I sent him a story I wrote once about Tom Seaver. It was about the first World Series that they won, and I put a TK in there. I wrote, “When the Mets won the World Series in 19TK…” And my buddy called up and said, “Every fan knows when the Mets won the World Series.” I said, I don’t. I never approached it as, oh, I’m in a major league locker room. I was in a major league locker room when I was seventeen years old in Yankee Stadium with Mickey Mantle when I was trying out for the Yankees. I took one look at Mantle and you know what my first though was? I’m bigger than he is. They said he was six feet, but he was like five-ten, and I towered over him. I was six-one or something. I thought I should’ve been up there. Not that I put these guys down, but I never romanticized the idea that I’m talking to, say, Derek Jeter or Mariano Rivera. Like if I were talking to Mariano Rivera, the first thing I’d talk about would be his cut fastball and I’d show him how I used to hold my slider. And then I’d say, “Well how do you hold it differently? Because a slider breaks more than your cut fastball.” You know what I mean? I’d be interested in his talent, but it would never be like, oh my god, I’m talking to a major league ball player. Friends will say to me today, I’ve got tickets to the Marlins game, they’re playing the Mets, you want to go? I say why? They say, it’s a major league game, I got a friend who can get us into the locker room. What do I want to go into a locker room for? I was in a locker room with Hank Aaron and Warren Spahn. I ran wind sprints with Spahnnie and Burdette in 1959. I pitched against Hank Aaron in spring training in 1960. So I never had that kind of rosey-eyed view of professional athletes, but I always admired guys for their talent.

BC:
So do you think that objectivity has made you a better writer?

PJ:
Oh, absolutely. I carry it over into everything I write about. It’s not cynical, I always think it’s realistic. Like I’ve done Hollywood actors – Tom Selleck, and all these different actors. I’m always interested in their professions and their personalities, but I don’t think they’re better than anybody. George Plimpton used to think… George always did the stars, and I always did the failures. George was never an athlete, he always romanticized…

BC:
He always wanted to be an athlete.

PJ:
Yeah, he wanted to be. That’s why he did all those imitation roles: how I almost pitched, how I almost boxed, how I almost played golf. He always thought there was some kind of mystical grace about them, you know. They were blessed like we weren’t. One day Roger Angell saw two pitchers talking. He said to me, “Look at that Pat. You and I will never know what mystical thing they’re talking about in terms of baseball.” I said, “I know what they’re talking about, Roger. They’re talking about a steak and a piece of ass they had last night.” That’s what they’re talking about because that’s what they talk about. And George used to think that Hank Aaron had this mystical grace that made him this great hitter. I said, no he didn’t. Hank has unbelievable quick wrists. He can wait on a pitch longer than anybody else, so he could wait on a curve ball until it broke and then rip it over third. That was his mystical grace. Without those wrists he’d be a .240 hitter. Ted Williams had fantastic eyes. That was his mystical grace. God blessed him with, what, 20/10 vision or something? He could pick up the spin on a curve ball the minute it left the pitcher’s hand and the rest of the batters couldn’t. So I tend to see them more realistically. I think.

BC:
Well, it definitely comes across in your writing. I’ve been reading through your recent collection, the one that Alex Belth edited for you, and I’ve been loving it. What strikes me the most is how different your stuff is from what’s typically out there now. There are two things that I love – first, the depth and length of your profiles. Obviously, if you pick up Sports Illustrated you’ll never see anything like that.

PJ:
No, and I wrote for Sports Illustrated in the seventies and I used to write 8,000 words.

BC:
The other thing is the fact that you insert yourself into each piece. You’re definitely a part of what you write, something you never see in most journalism today.

PJ:
I’ll do it when it pops up, where it’s important. I try not to do it too much, but there will be times, like with Tom Seaver obviously. But that was really a dual piece about me being a failure and Seaver being a success. But yeah, a lot of times I’ll do it when I know something about the sport, like I know pitching. Like with the Ankiel piece, Rick Ankiel. Since what happened to him happened to me.

BC:
I thought that was a pretty poignant one.

PJ:
As a matter of fact a guy from the St. Louis Dispatch interviewed me recently about the Ankiel piece. I felt for the kid because I had gone through that. I tried to help him but he never called. I told him I’d work out with him, throw with him, but I don’t think the Cardinals would’ve let him.

BC:
That piece was written during the off-season before he really melted down, is that correct?

PJ:
It was the off-season, but right after he melted down in the playoffs, and he just never got back.

BC:
But I think even at the time, I wasn’t following it that closely, but I felt like, oh, this is a young kid, he had a bad couple of outings, but he’ll probably be fine.

PJ:
No, I knew it. I knew it then. I saw it when I watched him pitch in the playoffs and World Series. I knew exactly what was happening to him. I knew it was a hard thing to get out of, very few guys have ever gotten out of that.

BC:
Were you surprised that Ankiel’s been able to come back?

PJ:
No, he was an athlete. But he hasn’t come back. I mean, he’s a hitter. It’s like me becoming a writer. You say, well, you’re a baseball failure but you came back as a writer. Yeah, but they don’t have anything to do with each other. Hitting the ball is nothing like pitching. Hitting is fairly instinctive. You have to react in one one-hundredth of a second, whereas pitching is deliberate. You’ve gotta think. And that’s what fucks you up. You’re on the mound thinking, and that’s how pitchers get screwed up and batters don’t.

BC:
I suppose this is completely natural, but when you started, you were viewed as a part of the new school of journalists who were breaking all the rules, and now you’re a throwback. I was wondering what your perspective is on the changing face of sports reporting. I mentioned earlier that I’m a Yankee fan. When I want to read about my team, to learn about a trade they’ve made or a player who’s hurt, I don’t go to mainstream sources anymore. I go to Bronx Banter, a blog started by Alex Belth, the guy who edited your collection. It seems that sites like this have changed the way sports – especially baseball – is reported.

PJ:
You know why? Because the bloggers don’t have to get in the clubhouse. The beat reporters are trapped, because if they write too many negative stories they’re persona non grata in the clubhouse. Freelance writers like me, I can go into a clubhouse, write a story about Roger Clemens, leave, and the Yankees ban me from the clubhouse. So what? It’s cost me one story over the years, an assignment I had when they wouldn’t let me in the clubhouse.

BC:
And it seems like you’ve kind of embraced this new trend. I loved your recent piece on José Canseco, for instance, that was featured at Deadspin.com.

PJ:
See now, I’ve always been writing like that. It’s just that the mainstream press ran some of those stories, but rarely. It’s getting rarer and rarer. The kind of pieces I do, which are pretty hard-hitting, they don’t run that many of them anymore. ESPN doesn’t, Sports Illustrated doesn’t. They run all these puff pieces.

BC:
I guess I couldn’t imagine reading that Canseco piece in any magazine.

PJ:
I sent it to every magazine in America. They all rejected it. Every magazine. Sports Illustrated wanted to buy it, but the managing editor wouldn’t buy it. The other magazines wouldn’t buy it because I didn’t talk to Canseco, they wanted quotes from him. Which is such ridiculously inane bullshit because most ballplayers don’t have anything to say. My perceptions are more valuable to a magazine than any sports figure’s quotes, but once again what magazines are looking for are the pull quotes. For example, José Canseco writes Vindicated. There are three pull quotes in there: Alex was after my wife, I shot up Ordóñez with drugs, and Roger Clemens never did take drugs. That’s it. And that’s the basis for the book. The same thing with magazine articles, like the John Rocker story that ran in SI years ago? I read the story. There was no story except for Rocker’s crazy quote.

BC:
The subway quote.

PJ:
Right. I write stories. I’m not looking for pull quotes. If I get a quote that’s really dynamic, I’ll run it. I certainly won’t hide it, but I’m not really looking for it. If I do a story on Derek Jeter, I want you to know Derek Jeter in a way no other writer will ever be able to let you know who Derek Jeter is as a person, that’s my goal. I just did a long piece on Ricky Williams, and it’s gonna be in Playboy probably in the fall. I spent a lot of time with Ricky, and I think I nailed Ricky more than anybody who has ever written a story about him ever has or will.

BC:
That’s interesting, because I think most people see him as a total mystery.

PJ:
He’s not a mystery, he’s easy.

BC:
What’s your perception? When he was in college, aside from this great talent, the biggest image I had of him was that he was this great kid. He won the Doak Walker Award, so he went to meet Doak Walker and started this friendship. It seemed like he was pretty down to earth, and then suddenly he gets overwhelmed by the NFL and the media attention and he turns into something else.

PJ:
He’s alright, he’s a good kid. The best way I can describe Ricky is there was a girl hanging around a bar when I was in my twenties, a college girl. A real attractive girl. Guys would talk to her for a couple minutes and then they’d vanish, they wouldn’t have anything to do with her. Finally I said to my bartender, “You know, she’s a good looking head. How come nobody’s hitting on her?” He says, “She thinks she’s a mystery that the rest of us should unravel, and after talking to her for ten minutes most people figure they don’t wanna waste their time.” That’s the best way I could describe Ricky. He wants the world to think he’s a mystery they should unravel, and he’s really not. His drugs were less about drugs than it was about ego and being a mysterious counter culture guy. He works pretty hard at it. That’s my take on Ricky. I liked him, I liked his girlfriend. You ever meet those guys who are trying to be deeper than they are?

BC:
Yeah.

PJ:
That’s what he’s trying to do.

BC:
Focusing on your book, I wanted to talk about a couple of the pieces that really stayed with me. First has to be Clemens. I gotta say that reading that piece now in light of what’s happened over the past six months, was on the one hand revealing, but also not surprising, if that makes any sense.

PJ:
Yeah. The drug thing didn’t come up then.

BC:
Right, this was written long ago.

PJ:
But I was confused by one thing that I never put in the story. I work out hard. I’m sixty-seven, but I go to the gym every morning and I lift weights and I can bury guys half my age. I do physical stuff. And what I was shocked at was, Clemens wasn’t lifting heavy weights or anything, I was shocked at the amount of time that he worked out throughout a day. He was constantly working out. And as I’ve gotten older I’ve learned it’s not the strength that goes, it’s the energy level. I can do what I did when I was thirty, I just can’t do it as long – that’s what my wife says anyway! So anyway, I was saying, how the hell does he maintain his energy? The thing I thought is he eats a ton of food. So I thought maybe that’s it, because I’m always dieting because I don’t want to get heavy. Maybe all those calories he ingests gives him the energy. But then I did a story for Playboy on HGH. I went to an anti-aging convention in Vegas, did a lot of research on it, talked to doctors and everything. Where most people have missed the boat on HGH and testosterone, they keep talking about steroids and HGH as if they’re interchangeable, but they’re not. Steroids give you strength and muscle; HGH gives you energy. HGH was originally devised to use for people who had aged prematurely and had lost their energy. It also increases your libido, and it does cosmetic stuff too. It’s almost like a fountain of youth drug – it makes you look younger, gets rid of wrinkles, grows hair, all that. But it doesn’t give you increased strength, it gives you increased energy. Now what does a starting pitcher need more than anything?

BC:
Stamina.

PJ:
Right, he needs energy. A relief pitcher doesn’t need it. They had talked to [Eric] Gagné, who has taken testosterone. Well that makes perfect sense. If he’s only gonna pitch an inning or an inning and a half, he needs to be strong. But if he was gonna pitch eight innings in ninety degree heat, then he needs that kind of energy. So the possibility that Clemens was taking HGH, once I did my research on it, became very real to me. I figured, sure, if he’s gonna take any drug it’s gonna be HGH.

BC:
So what do you think of the circus that ensued over these last few months?

PJ:
With Clemens? I followed like everybody else. Clemens does what he knows how to do, which is to be a pit bull and dig in and throw harder. Like Clinton: deny, deny, deny, delay, delay, delay. He’s hoping that sooner or later it’ll evaporate because there’s no concrete proof. It’s him against McNamee. Until they come up with blood on a vial with HGH and steroids in it that’s got Roger’s DNA, it’s gonna be difficult for anybody to convict him.

BC:
You said it was Clemens vs. McNamee, and watching that whole thing I felt like I was watching a high school wannabe who’s kissing up to the homecoming king.

PJ:
That’s exactly what I felt when I wrote the story. McNamee was playing this fatherly figure to Clemens telling him he could eat a potato but he couldn’t put butter on it. And I was like, who the fuck is this guy dictating to Clemens what kind of workout he should do. Clemens was so beholden to him. I cannot imagine Clemens doing anything that McNamee didn’t instigate or help him with.

BC:
I wanted to ask you about one more before I let you go, and that was the piece on Toe Nash. It was actually the first one I read, because I knew about the myth – the little things that Peter Gammons would drop in his columns or on ESPN about this kid who walked out of the sugar cane fields and is hitting five hundred foot home runs, and then he just kind of disappeared and I had no idea what had happened.

PJ:
That’s going back to your question about sports writing today. I investigated it, Gammons never even went to New Orleans, never saw Toe Nash, never talked to anybody except the scout who signed him.

BC:
To be honest with you, I almost wish that I hadn’t read that story, as good as it was. I felt like I needed to take a shower after I finished it.

PJ:
Well, you should have, because he’s a bad kid.

BC:
Well, my question is, what’s your reaction to the Toe Nash saga, and more generally, are you ever surprised by what you find when you scratch beneath the surface like this?

PJ:
Yeah. You have perceptions when you go in to do a story, everybody does. And you’re always surprised: sometimes delighted, sometimes disappointed. I went to do a story on Bo Belinsky, who I thought I was an idiot. I went to do him, I thought he was the best guy I had met. I love Bo. I thought Tom Selleck was a good guy from what I’d read about him, and then I went there and he was a wimpy guy and I was really disappointed. Marilyn Chambers, the porn actress, I thought she was just another dumb bimbo, she was a great girl. We still get Christmas cards from her. So she likes to have sex in front of a camera, so what? She’s still a great girl. Toe Nash, I had no feelings about it one way or another. As a matter of fact it wasn’t even my idea. I had a researcher in Kansas City who’s a friend, the guy I dedicated the book to, Mike Sharpe. He sent me the ESPN story. He says, Pat, you should do a story on this guy. I originally did it for the New York Times, but they didn’t run it. So I got the assignment, I go to the story. I didn’t know anything. I got names of everybody. I wanted to see Toe Nash. I got his scout, who got me Hot Rod Williams, and Hot Rod Williams got me the father, and the father got me into the jail to talk to Toe Nash. Then I got the arresting officer, I got the prosecutor, I got the defense attorney, I got the probation officer. I was going up and down between New Orleans and Baton Rouge for five days, then I went back two other times. So I did a lot of reporting on that, and that’s the picture I got. That’s the picture I got of Nash. And then the final thing is I got the girl that he supposedly raped, and I got medical reports about the girl from the district attorney. Even his defense attorney didn’t like him. The idea that nobody knew about Toe Nash's past when they signed him was ridiculous. Everybody knew about him, every team. The Pittsburgh Pirates passed on him because of his bad reputation. So no, it didn't bother me, that was the story. I don’t care where the story goes. It could’ve been the myth, it could’ve been true. This whole myth of sugar cane, he couldn’t cut Hot Rod’s lawn for more than two days without quitting because he didn’t like the work. The idea that he was cutting sugar cane and that’s how he got his muscles, well I saw the guy and he didn’t have a muscle on his body. He was fat. He was big, but he was fat. I’m sure he might have been a talent, but the idea that he just appeared one day, well he had been playing in that sugar cane league, which was not one of these horseshit leagues, they had a beautiful stadium that Hot Rod Williams built with his own money. Gammons never left his office doing that story. Gammons and the Reynolds brothers were cutting up that pie. They were gonna do a movie, The Myth of Toe Nash.

BC:
And Gammons was involved in that too?

PJ:
Oh, yeah. Gammons and Reynolds were gonna promote this guy to do a movie, a Disney movie, you know. The natural coming out the sugar cane field. A whole lot of people had a lot of things invested in that story. Not after I finished.

BC:
Well, it still might be an interesting movie.

PJ:
It might be now. You can begin with the myth and how everybody blew it up and then go back and track it down. I’m sorry I ruined if for you, Hank!

BC:
That’s alright.

PJ:
See, that’s one of those instances where I wasn’t starry-eyed going in.

BC:
Right. But like I said, I don’t know that I’d thought of him in, I don’t know how long it’s been, five years? And I picked up the book and I’m skimming through the table of contents and I see Toe Nash. I wonder what happened to him? And there you go.

PJ:
Shit, I still keep in touch with the probation officer. He tells me that Toe’s still in and out of jail every week.

BC:
From what I read it doesn’t surprise me. Hey, I’ve got one last question for you. I’m wondering if there’s anybody out there that you’re dying to profile.

PJ:
Martina Navratilova.

BC:
Yeah?

PJ:
My favorite. I would love to do Martina. I admire her, I think she’s great. I interviewed her recently for a nothing story for AARP, just a little workout story you know. She was turning fifty. She was every bit as interesting as I thought she would be, and she’s the one I would love to do. She escaped me. I can’t seem to sell it to anybody.

BC:
I’m sure people would be interested. I’d be interested in reading it.

An Interview with Jayson Stark

You probably know Jayson Stark from his writing at ESPN.com or his frequent appearances on Baseball Tonight. Recently he found time to write a book, The Stark Truth: The Most Overrated and Underrated Players in Baseball History. Stark's book is essentially an organized listing of the conversation which occurs in bleachers and barrooms on a nightly basis: which players aren't really as good as most people think? Which players are secretly much better than advertised? Some of the names aren't too surprizing (everyone knows Juan Pierre is overrated), but others are shocking (how can Babe Ruth be underrated?). Stark hits every position on the field, always maintaining the sense of humor which will be familiar to frequent readers of his work.

Last Friday morning Jayson took the time to talk to me about the book and a few other issues. Enjoy...

BrokenCowboy:
Thanks for taking the time to do this. I know you must be pretty busy since we’re smack in the middle of baseball season.

Jayson Stark:
You know, there’s no time in baseball where you can kick back and say, “I think I’ll go to the beach for about four days,” unless you carve that time out. That’s all I do is juggle. I should join the circus.

BC:
What about during the off-season? How much does it slow down for you then?

JS:
In a typical off-season? Not a whole lot. Right after the World Series, and that week between Christmas and New Year’s, and generally right before Spring Training it’s not too crazy.

BC:
One thing I like to ask, especially of reporters, is that I assume you got into this gig because of a love of baseball?

JS:
Sure.

BC:
So I’m wondering, how has being a journalist, especially since you covered the Phillies for a while real closely, being that close to the game and the players, how does that affect your ability to relax and just be a fan?

JS:
Well, it changes it a little bit. I’m not a fan of any team. My family hates going to games with me. I love being there, but I don’t root for anybody, and that frustrates them.

BC:
Is that something that’s changed as a result of your job?

JS:
Yeah, sure. I think that’s a natural part of being a professional. You can’t root. But I’m a human being, and there are certain people, certain players, certain teams I like being around more than others. But I basically root for the best stories, I don’t root for any team. One thing you learn when you cover baseball is that every game you attend, there’s a winner, there’s a loser, there’s a hero, and there’s probably a goat. So they’re all a big part of the story, so you root for the story. You don’t root for any team. So that part has certainly changed the way I’m a fan, but I also think baseball is one of those games where the more you invest in it, the better it gets. The more you understand, the more you see. The more you put in, the more you get back. There are just so many levels to the game. I think I love the game as much as I ever have, if not more. I’m probably a different kind of fan of baseball than your average fan, but that doesn’t mean I’m not a fan of it. One of the things that I consider to be the greatest compliment that people in the sport give me is when they tell me they can see by the things I write or say on the air how much I care about the sport. And that means a lot to me, because that’s true. I really do come at it with a lot of passion for the sport.

BC:
One reason I ask that is because I would agree that from seeing you on ESPN and reading your work, that love definitely comes across. But there are reporters or on-air personalities where there’s a cynicism that you can taste, and I wonder sometimes if that comes from being too close. It’s easy for me to be a fan of the Yankees, for instance, because I’ve never been in their clubhouse and I may not know everything that goes on. And so I wonder sometimes -- if you’re up close and personal do you lose something?

JS:
That can happen. Everybody’s different. You start with that -- people are different, and everybody’s got a different way of coming at it and a different perspective, which is what makes it great. And I think that depending on where you work, what the reportorial culture is where you work, that can color the way you look at things, too. There’s a much different mentality covering baseball in New York than there is covering baseball in, say, St. Louis, Milwaukee, San Diego, right? And so I think that can have a lot to do with it, too. I know that Philadelphia is one of those cynical kinds of places, too, but what you see and what you read from me, it’s just a reflection of me. Sometimes people ask me if I really do come from Philadelphia. I’m a much more positive personality, I think, than you’ll find walking the streets of this town.

BC:
Now on to this book. When I first heard what you were doing with this book, it intrigued me because I think every fan has had this conversation at some point. When did it start for you? When did you get the idea to turn it into a book, and what was the process? Did this all come off the top of your head, did you speak to other people about it? How did that go?

JS:
I’ve been aspiring to write a book for a long time, but I could never find the right match of idea and publisher. I talked to different agents and different publishers with different ideas, but it never happened. The people at Triumph Books are fans of mine, and they actually approached me with this. I got a call last summer from a guy at Triumph Books who said, “We came up with this idea and think you’d be the perfect person in America to write it.” I didn’t think about it very long before I said, you know, you might be right. I think this is really right up my alley. I would love to do this book. The more we talked it over, the more excited we all got. It came together really quickly, for the most part. I would say I didn’t agree to write the book until some time late last July, and the fact that it’s out this spring is a miracle. I got three chapters done during the season last year, and then when the World Series ended I worked seven days a week until spring training to get it done, because that was the only way to do it. But it was such a fun project that it kept me going. Plus, there wasn’t time for writer’s block... The idea itself, overrated/underrated, is really fun. As you said, it’s one of those classic sports arguments, and we’ve all found ourselves in the middle of it on a talk radio dial or sitting on a barstool. It’s amazing that nobody ever wrote a book on it. Actually after I finished mine, Triumph approached me and said, “How’d you like to write a football version of it?” There’s no way I could possibly do that. So there’s actually a football version of it coming out in a week or two written mostly by Sal Paolantonio of ESPN. We all stumbled onto something here. It’s incredible that nobody ever did it before.

BC:
So were there people that you spoke to about this, or did you have a lot of these rankings already in your head?

JS:
Well, some of ‘em. I always say these selections were nominated by a distinguished committee consisting of me. Because it really did come down to me, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t talk to a million people about all different aspects of this book. Certain chapters, certain passages, certain names came much easier than other names. I really struggled with some of these choices. I spent a lot of time talking to people about some of them. I describe in the book how difficult center field was for me. Center field, I kicked around for weeks. Weeks! I couldn’t find any great center fielder from the past who I considered to be drastically overrated to the point where I could put him number one in the chapter. If we’re calling somebody the most overrated player in history at his position, I didn’t think it was right to put Juan Pierre or Mickey Rivers at a position like center field, so I really spent a lot of time on that chapter. I remember going around the winter meetings asking everybody I ran into about center field. I spent a lot of time actually listening to people talking about Joe DiMaggio. This is a different kind of argument than he’s great, no he stinks. This is really a relative term, overrated/underrated. It’s about perception vs. reality. Myth vs. reality. There were people arguing that there were a lot of myths that evolved around Joe DiMaggio that we know about now that we didn’t know about then. If it was a myth vs. reality book, why not him? But I just couldn’t bring myself to go there. I couldn’t bring myself to call Kirby Puckett the most overrated in history. So it really took me a long time before I settled on Andruw Jones. I tell people all the time that if I were doing this book differently and it was the fifty most overrated players in history, I don’t think Andruw would be in there. But because it was position by position, it’s a little different concept. So those are the kinds of debates, those are the kinds of challenges that I ran across as I went about writing the book. Every position and every name had its own set of complications, criteria, and differing needs to interview a lot of people or do the research than others.

BC:
I think for me the underrated side of the chapters tended to be more interesting. Sometimes confirming things that I believed, but other times there were some names that really surprized me. There were a few guys that I wanted to talk to you about. First of all, how can Babe Ruth -- the Bambino, the Sultan of Swat -- how can he possibly be underrated?

JS:
(Laughing) Well, obviously he wasn’t underrated as a hitter, but do you really think that many people are walking around with a working knowledge of just how dominating a pitcher Babe Ruth was?

BC:
I’d have to say no. I consider myself a big fan, a Babe Ruth fan, but there were some things that you pointed out in that section that -- you really have to say, wow! Thinking about Babe Ruth, it’s interesting to think about, what if he had never picked up a bat? How would history view him today?

JS:
Right. Exactly! It’s very possible we’d be looking at him as the greatest left-handed pitcher ever. Very possible! This was so much fun to do this chapter. This was one of the really fun chapters in the book, because I learned a lot myself. I didn’t know that those six seasons that Babe Ruth pitched he had the highest winning percentage of every left-handed pitcher. I didn’t know that! And when I started stacking him up against Walter Johnson...

BC:
That was amazing to me.

JS:
I realized that in his two full seasons as a pitcher, Babe Ruth was better than Walter Johnson! That blew my mind! Walter Johnson’s the greatest pitcher that ever lived, probably, right? And then the fact that they faced each other seven times and Babe won six and would’ve won the seventh, right, if he hadn’t blown that lead in the ninth inning? Unbelievable. The World Series dominance? Incredible. Again, this is about perception vs. reality. If all this was going on, and people haven’t noticed it, then that’s the definition of underrated or overrated for me, and that’s the way I went about the book. The other thing that was really important to me is that every name who was number one in a chapter, underrated or overrated, my criteria was it can’t be somebody that the reader will say, “who the heck is that?” Nobody cares if Hippo Vaughn was underrated or overrated, but Babe Ruth? That can get your attention. It’s a book written with the idea that people are supposed to react to it. That doesn’t mean I threw names out there for effect, it means I wanted this to stimulate debate. I wanted people to read this book and think. I want them to bring it to their next session with their buddies sittin’ around watching a game and say what about this guy? Can this guy really be underrated, or can this guy really be overrated? I wanted to make them think and debate and laugh. A lot of people think I wrote it to make people mad. That really was never the intent. It was really to make you think.

BC:
And what about Bert Blyleven? Recently, in the last -- I don’t know, it feels like the last three or four years -- it’s become kind of popular to champion his cause for the Hall of Fame.

JS:
Right.

BC:
Do you think he’s ever gonna get into the Hall of Fame?

JS:
I think he’s heading in that direction now, I’m not sure. I don’t think it’s a slam dunk, yet. There was a time I thought he’d never make it. I admit, he’s one of the hardest candidates ever to appear on a Hall of Fame ballot for me. I have spent more time agonizing over Bert Blyleven than any pitcher who’s ever been on the ballot. But deciding whether he’s a Hall of Famer is a different process than deciding whether he’s underrated or overrated. He shares a lot of the same characteristics as Nolan Ryan, the stuff that caused me to say that Nolan Ryan was overrated, a lot of that applies to Bert Blyleven. I understand that. Two all-star teams in 23 years, right? Never won a Cy Young, finished in the top three only two times. Didn’t have a real good winning percentage compared to his teams. Those are the things that stopped me from voting for Bert Blyleven for a long time. I finally did come around to the point where I got nudged over the edge by people that I respect. But here’s the difference between Bert Blyleven and Nolan Ryan for the purposes of this book. You have a lot of people walking around who think Nolan Ryan’s the greatest pitcher who ever lived. If he were the greatest pitcher who ever lived, you have to think he’d have won one Cy Young Award, right? Or he would’ve finished in the top three more times than Dan Quisenberry, or his winning percentage would’ve been more than twenty-seven points higher than his team. And so I recognize how great Nolan Ryan was, I only jump off the train when people start calling him the greatest pitcher of modern times. But in Bert Blyleven’s case, you know, those 287 wins, if you look closely at them, could very easily have translated into well over three hundred. And the fact that he was thirty-seven games over .500, it very easily could’ve been a better record with better run support. Bill James has documented this exhaustively. So because of just a slight difference in the numbers, Bert Blyleven is not in the Hall of Fame. Even though if you look at that division play era, look at shutouts and strikeouts, it’s basically Nolan Ryan and Bert Blyleven. Their numbers are so similar, and yet one guy is regarded as the greatest pitcher of his time and the other guy’s not even in the Hall of Fame? That’s where the overrated/underrated disparity comes from.

BC:
This is hardly scientific, this whole process. One of the guys who violates all the rules of the overrated/underrated paradigm, I guess we can call it, is Derek Jeter.

JS:
Absolutely.

BC:
He’s the ultimate glamour boy, playing shortstop in New York for teams that have been winning, and yet you’ve got him on the underrated side of the coin. At the same time you could find dozens of guys who could talk for hours about how overrated he is. How is it possible that he could be seen in both lights?

JS:
(Laughing) Yeah, good question. Derek Jeter was the reason to write a book like this. When I first started researching the book, trying to come up with definitions and examples, I Googled “overrated” and “baseball”, and Derek Jeter came up right away. And then I Googled “underrated” and “baseball”, and Derek Jeter came up right away. And the more I thought about it, the more I talked to people, it really became clear he was the classic case because you’ve got people out there saying he’s so overrated he’s underrated, so underrated he’s overrated. It’s hilarious, because he’s that kind of figure. In some ways his numbers are spectacular. In other ways, there are people who just look at numbers who think he’s not that good. But the reason that I called him underrated was I just feel like there are certain players, in this sport and every sport, whose numbers can’t tell you what they are, and Derek Jeter is one of those players. The argument that drives me crazy is when people say if Derek Jeter was a Royal, you wouldn’t even know his name. That, to me, is the most irrelevant argument in the history of mankind. Because he’s not just a guy who happened to pass through the Yankees while they were winning rings. He wasn’t mopping up the clubhouse until they gave him a World Series ring just because he was hanging around. He was a major difference maker. He was the heart of the Yankees. You know, I’ve done a lot of appearances for this book in the New York area, and when I ask people how many rings they think those Yankees would have if Derek Jeter had never been a member of that team, they say, I don’t really know -- one? Nobody says all of them. This little section of the book was a response, basically, to all those people who think he’s overrated, who think he’s just a great player because he was a Yankee. For me, guys who love the moment, and have that feel for how to rise to the moment... You have to be a Yankee to get to that moment, I acknowledge that, but I don’t know how you can deny the fact that this guy loves the moment.

BC:
I agree. He’s been my favorite player, probably since the day he was drafted. I’ve followed him that long, so when I picked up the book, the first thing I did was turn to the shortstop section, and I expected to find him on the other side. I was already getting angry before I even found him...

JS:
Yeah, he was one of those people that a lot of people have asked me about. Originally he was gonna be the most underrated, but then last year it looked like he was gonna win the MVP award as I was working on that chapter, and thought I better not put him number one if he wins the MVP, so I couldn’t take that chance.

BC:
Well, you could’ve bumped him up as it turned out.

JS:
Easily.

BC:
I have some numbers for you. You have sixty overrated players, and twenty of them were Yankees. And then of your number ones, twelve number one overrated, and half of them -- six -- were Yankees. Can you explain yourself to me please?

JS:
(Laughter)

BC:
Is there an axe you have to grind?

JS:
No. I can’t remember which chapter it was that I went into this. It might’ve been the Graig Nettles chapter?

BC:
Yeah, it was.

JS:
When you’re looking for overrated, the Yankees just have more opportunities for overratedness than any other team! Think about all the different ways you can get to be overrated. One of the classic ways is one swing, one game, one week, one stretch in October can vastly inflate the national perception of what a guy is, right? That goes for any team, but the Yankees show up in October every year. And because of that, I think quite a lot of their players are just lucky. They get this opportunity to seize that moment and become far greater figures than they probably otherwise would be. Now I know I just used a similar argument to explain why Derek Jeter’s underrated, but being in the spotlight the way they are, it’s almost like the Yankees are in color and everybody else is in black and white. It just creates those unparalleled opportunities for overratedness. When everything was equal, it was often hard not to pick a Yankee.

BC:
I think I agree with you, I just thought I’d give you a chance to say it out loud.

JS:
I’m glad you did. But you know, the fact that Yogi Berra is probably the most well-known living ex-Yankee could be considered underrated. That tells you I don’t have any axe to grind. The fact that Derek Jeter is in there tells you that I don’t have any axe to grind. Certain players, just because they were Yankees, are regarded by the world as superstars, when that’s probably not what they were.

BC:
One guy I wanted to talk to you about also is Steve Garvey. I grew up out here in LA, and watched him as a player, you hear a lot out here about how great he was, and isn’t it a crime that he’s not in the Hall of Fame. What’s your response to that?

JS:
Well, the fact that he’s gone through fifteen years on the ballot, and the voters never saw it, he never got close, would tell me that the general public agrees with me. Look, Steve Garvey was a real good player, and just because he’s in this book as overrated doesn’t mean I don’t think he was a real good player. But the reason that he obtained this lofty status as most overrated first baseman is that somehow, and in great part because he was a Dodger, he really became the face of the sport. He was a guy who started the all-star game every year, he was the guy who was yucking it up on the Tonight Show every time you turned it on. He was the first player in history to attract four million all-star votes. Was he a good player? Yeah, he was. He was a real good player. Steve Garvey, in a lot of ways, was a reflection of his times. Back in the seventies, the early eighties, the stuff people looked at was batting average, home runs, RBIs, fielding percentage. Very basic kinds of stats. Nowadays we live in a much more sophisticated age where you look beyond those stats. And when you look beyond those stats, it’s clear that Steve Garvey wasn’t the player that people perceived him to be. If he was a feared slugger, he probably would’ve slugged .500 in a season once, right? Once. If he was really a complete offensive player, he would’ve averaged more than twenty-nine walks a year, right? Out of six 200-hit seasons, he would’ve scored a hundred runs once, right? He’s the only player in history to have more than two 200-hit seasons and not score a hundred runs in any of them. And the fielding percentage? Hey, it’s great that he won those Gold Gloves. It’s great that he owns that record for the longest errorless streak by a first baseman, but anybody from that era will tell you that the reason he never made an error is that he would not throw the ball. And so this is stuff that didn’t always show up on the stat sheet at the time. Now we can look back at it with more perspective and understand what the limitations of the player were. In this book, at times, I guess I play reality police. And again, it doesn’t mean I think Steve Garvey was some kind of bum who never should’ve played a day in the big leagues. He was a really good player, but the fact that he became the face of the sport, that’s where perception and reality, to me, diverge.

BC:
Who do you think needs to be in the Hall of Fame? I know this isn’t necessarily an overrated/underrated thing, but you mentioned in a few chapters some of the guys -- Blyleven and Gossage -- are there other guys on your radar?

JS:
I think Gossage is gonna get in. The guy I worry about is Ron Santo. I think of all the players who are not in the Hall of Fame, and who may never get in the Hall of Fame, he is the most deserving. I think that Ron Santo is not in the Hall of Fame basically for one reason. Because people say, well how can you have four Hall of Famers from a team like the Cubs that never won anything? I don’t know. There’s no quota, there’s no government quota on Hall of Famers from one team. I guess there’s quotas on pimento imports or something, but not on Hall of Famers from one team! And it’s not Ron Santo's fault that he happened to play with Ernie Banks and Billy Williams and Ferguson Jenkins. And the thing that’s revealing to me is, who was the guy who hit cleanup on those teams that had Banks and Williams on them? It wasn’t Banks, it wasn’t Williams, it was Ron Santo, year after year after year. That should tell us all something. And then if you really look at Ron Santo and compare him to his peers -- I don’t want to compare him to A-Rod or Mike Schmidt or Brooks Robinson -- compare him to his peers in that league. It’s obvious he was the greatest offensive and defensive third baseman in the National League in his time, without anybody really being close. So I guess I just don’t understand this. And Ron Santo has been through so much, personally. He went through so much as a baseball player. It just really pains me that this is a guy who should be in the Hall of Fame, and I would really love to see him get elected while he’s alive. All that he’s been through, if he ever gets to that podium, that’ll be a special moment. I’m not talking about a baseball moment, I’m talking about a human moment. That turned out to be a really emotional chapter. I didn’t think of myself as a guy who had a big emotional investment in Ron Santo, but I just think that’s a huge injustice that I don’t understand.

BC:
I did appreciate that chapter because he was not a guy that I really knew a lot about, except you would hear his name mentioned as a guy who should be in the Hall, so I appreciated that chapter. I guess the last thing I’ve got for you then is that as we sit here on August 17th, how do you see the rest of the year shaking out? Who are your playoff teams and who do you see winning the World Series?

JS:
Well, a lot has changed over the last couple of weeks, don’t you think?

BC:
Yeah, in both leagues.

JS:
Tim Kurkjian said the other night that it’s the first year in history where we got to the 15th of August and all six divisions and the wild card races were within five games. So it really is a free-for-all. I was among the group who thought the Yankees were done, and the Cardinals were done, and the Rockies were done, but they’re not so done. Right now, I think the Yankees are gonna make the playoffs. I don’t think they’re gonna unseat the Red Sox, but I think they are gonna be the wild card. I think the Cubs are gonna wind up winning the Central, but who the heck knows anymore? I think the Red Sox are gonna get to the World Series, but in the National League I’ve never been more confused. If you can tell me what Pedro’s gonna be like when he comes back... I’m very tempted to pick the Mets still, even though I don’t think they’ve had a great year compared to their talent level. I think that’s probably the most talented team in the league. I think they’re a team that was constructed unlike any other, to win the World Series. I don’t think they can do that unless Pedro can make an impact, but if I were gonna pick right now, I’d say Mets-Red Sox, and I guess I’d say Red Sox win.

BC:
Alright. That’d be something to see.

JS:
Bill Buckner better not watch his TV that week. He’s liable to show up in a film clip or two.

BC:
Yeah, talk about emotional investment right there...

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.

An Interview with Jeff Pearlman

A few weeks ago Jeff Pearlman was kind enough to spend part of his day talking to me about his recent Barry Bonds biography, Love Me, Hate Me.  Following the themes addressed in the book (review forthcoming), our conversation focused on Bonds the person as well as the baseball player, and we also talked about steroids for a while.  Enjoy...

BrokenCowboy:
I think I’m almost as interested in the process as in the resulting book.  In your acknowledgment section you spoke a little bit about it -- the 524 people you interviewed, the investigators you hired, etc. -- what was this whole experience like?  When you did you first get the idea to write about Bonds, and how long did the research portion of the project take?

Jeff Pearlman:
It took about two years overall.  I started the whole thing about two years ago.  I got into it with the idea that I’d interview everybody.  I didn’t know what everybody meant, but I wanted to interview everybody -- anyone who had interaction with Bonds, the people who knew Bonds best.  I didn’t even think about interviewing Bonds himself, because I knew he probably wouldn’t talk, but I wanted to interview everybody who knew him.  And the truth of the matter is, when you write a biography interviewing the main subject doesn’t matter that much, because people have skewed visions of themselves.  You really learn more about someone by talking to the people who know them well and interact with them.  So that was my goal.  The best thing for someone in my position is word of mouth, and you just start.  Who knows Barry Bonds?  You talk to his first grade teacher, you say, do you know any other teachers?  You talk to the Cub Scout den mother, oh, do you know any of the other kids?  One name usually begat five others, and five begat ten, and I ended up with 524, which is a pretty good number.

BC:
Yeah.  I obviously haven’t written a biography, but that seems like a really big number.  Based on what you’ve heard, or what you know about, did you go above and beyond, or is this kind of par for the course?

JP:
It’s probably above and beyond, but I’m not sure.  My first book, I wrote a book about the Mets, and I interviewed about 150 people.  I probably should’ve done more, looking back, but I don’t know.  The thing is this. A friend of mine is Leigh Montville, who has a Babe Ruth book coming out.  Babe Ruth is dead, so that’s more of a historical analysis.  You’re not gonna get a million new stories about Babe Ruth now because his contemporaries are dead, but Barry Bonds, his contemporaries are all still alive.  I know that sounds real simplistic, but it makes you interview more people than a biography of someone who’s been dead for a long time.

BC:
That makes sense.  Something that’s always intrigued me about professional athletes, especially the great ones, is that they must’ve been insanely dominant as kids when they were playing against people who grew up to be teachers, say, instead of linebackers.  What kind of an athlete was Bonds back when he was just Bobby Bonds’s kid?

JP:
Oh, he was great.  Great.  He was only Bobby Bonds’s kid for a very short time because he was such a good athlete that he kind of jumped off the page at you.  He was four years old, actually two and a half years old when he shattered his first window.  His mom used to go down to the window pane store all the time because he was breaking so many windows with a wiffle ball off of a bat.  He went to a school called the Kerry School, which was his elementary-slash-middle school.  He was the catcher in baseball, he was a great catcher, strong arm.  He was the star forward in baseball.  He was above and beyond, I’m not doing it justice.  He was the fastest kid, he was the strongest kid, he was the biggest kid, he was the quickest kid.  Across the board, he was he best athlete.  Nobody you talk to is really surprized that he is a major league ballplayer.  It would be hard to expect 700 home runs, but he was just so advanced, so beyond everybody else, he was legit.  He was the kid.  You know how every school, or every school district has that kid?  He was the kid, times a thousand.

BC:
Growing up like that, not only as the greatest athlete anyone had ever seen, but also as the privileged son of a major league all-star, it almost seems like the end result is obvious.  Again, I’m not talking about the seven hundred home runs, but it might have been something of an upset if Bonds had turned out to be polite, well-adjusted, and compassionate.  How did his experiences as a player at Serra High School and Arizona State affect the man he would become?

JP:
I think the first place you have to look for him is his dad and his godfather, too, Willie Mays.  He was watching these two guys who were just adored by the public, these two guys who were worshipped by people.  When you see that great athleticism equals worship and adulation, that registers with that eight-year-old kid.  So he learned from a very, very early age that if you perform athletically, everything will be taken care of for you.  When he was at Serra High School, he was the kid who during batting practice would be napping in the outfield.  He was the kid who wore his dad’s jerseys during practices, who would expect that his glove would be run out to him into the outfield...

BC:
He was a major leaguer already...

JP:
He the major league attitude at fourteen that takes others at least another ten years to get.  You learn from an early age that if you walk the walk, people will treat you a certain way.  It’s hard to blame him.  I always say it’s kind of hard to blame him for being who he is.  He’s easy to dislike, because he is dislikable, but it’s hard to blame him because this is what he was raised to be, essentially.

BC:
I think that’s my feeling as well.  There are a lot of great guys, I’m sure, but it’s almost expected that he’d turn out this way.

JP:
Like David Bell, as an example, was raised in a major league clubhouse, and he’s a great guy.  Aaron Boone is a real good guy.  So it’s not that it’s hopeless, but I think your odds of becoming normal...  I would be interested to see what Celene Dion’s kids are gonna be like one day, you know?  It’s not a normal way of growing up.  You don’t learn to interact with people normally, you don’t see your parents coming home from a nine to five job exhausted and cooking dinner.  It doesn’t work that way.  You have your dinners made for you.  Barry Bonds signed his first autograph when he was, like, ten.  Just for being the son of.

BC:
Wow.  I have to admit that there were times when I cringed when reading something Bonds had said or done.  Before reading this book, to be honest, I would sometimes dismiss some of the stories you’d hear about Bonds.  You mentioned the incident reported in Ron Kittle’s book, about Bonds saying he wouldn’t sign autographs for white people. 

JP:
Right.

BC:
When I first heard that reported in the press, it didn’t even occur to me that it might be true, because I couldn’t imagine anyone actually saying something like that. 

JP:
It’s so funny you say that, because as soon as I heard that, I knew it was true.

BC:
Really?  I was gonna ask you that, because my perspective is obviously different from yours, so I was wondering -- what was your response to all this?  Were you shocked by anything you heard, or was this, based on your different experiences and perceptions, was this what you expected to find out?

JP:
Good question.  I didn’t expect the depth of bad behavior, I would say.  You hear a guy is a bad guy, you hear he’s difficult, and you see instances... Like for example, the one thing that blows my mind in the book, two grounds keepers for the Pirates die... did you read the whole book?

BC:
Oh, yeah, I loved it.

JP:
Thanks.  Two grounds keepers from the Pirates die, and they hold this auction and Bonds refuses to sign autographs.  Brian Fisher’s son has cystic fibrosis and there’s a fundraiser...

BC:
This is what I’m talking about.

JP:
Right.

BC:
I can’t imagine a human being reacting that way.

JP:
I know, it’s hard to believe a human being that big of an asshole.

BC:
What about the good things he did?  Sometimes it seemed like he could actually go out of his way to do the right thing.  Was that what was surprizing to you?  Were you surprized by those things?

JP:
No, because I think everybody has humanity in them, you know?  I was more surprized... you hear the story about the grounds keepers, and you think, god, that’s a crappy thing to do.  And then you hear the thing about Brian Fisher, and you realize the guy’s done it more than once!  That’s what’s surprizing sometimes.  I can understand you being a jerk to someone, but he really can totally emotionally distance himself from situations and detach himself, not just distance himself, but detach himself from the feelings of other people and not read the feelings of other people.  And the depth of that, his ability to do that, I’ve never come across anybody like that.  We’ve all met jerks in our life, and I’m not even saying he is a jerk... Well, it’s unbelievable to me.

BC:
I think what surprized me is that, kind of like how we were talking about his upbringing, I can completely understand that there can be an athlete or an entertainer or whoever, when you have microphones in your face every day, and people questioning you every single day, I can understand how you could become a jerk.  You could get tired of that, and you could -- to the press -- really be a jackass.  But in these situations where it’s someone he knows coming to him saying people have died, can you help us out?  And he responds that way.  There’s something deeper going on.

JP:
I agree with you.  I agree with you a hundred percent.  If you ask me what surprized me, that did surprize me.  You hear one story, and you think maybe it’s an isolated incident.  You hear two, and you think, well maybe he’s had two bad days.  Then you hear seventeen of them, and you think, man, this is a different kind of guy.  He just handles things in a different way, sees things in a different light, doesn’t have the emotional maturity.  You can only hear, “Oh, nobody knows what it’s like to walk in my shoes” how many times before you realize that, if I was walking in your shoes, I still wouldn’t handle that situation that way.  There could be a million people asking me for my autograph when I find out that some grounds keeper died and he didn’t have health insurance and all I have to do is sign three baseballs to make his life a little easier, I have to question the person that doesn’t make that move.

BC:
Another thing about his personality, I think people generally feel a need to make connections, you know, when you’re talking to somebody new. For instance, you mentioned that you became friends with Brian Johnson?

JP:
Right.

BC:
Immediately I want to tell you that, hey I once played basketball against Brian Johnson.  With Bonds, though, it seems the opposite -- he even denies connections that actually exist.  Is this just a superstar trying to maintain distance from his fans, or do you feel like there’s something -- I know I’m asking you to kind of psychoanalyze a little bit -- but do you feel like there’s something more going on with Bonds?

JP:
I do.  Yes, there’s a distance thing.  One thing that really interested me in the book, and I almost wish I had gotten more into, is how when guys are traded all of the sudden he opens up to them.  Darryl Hamilton spends two years as a Giant, they barely talk, and then he gets traded and Barry says, “I love you, man,” and gives him a hug.

BC:
It’s like he doesn’t have to worry that now there’s a friendship.

JP:
Right, but I also think there’s an element to Bonds that he’s always thinking in his head, “What is a superstar?  How is a superstar supposed to be perceived?  How is a superstar supposed to handle this situation?”  When Richard Hoffer of Sports Illustrated in 1993 comes to do a profile of Bonds and Bonds blows him off for eight days in a row.  Now, that’s not just him being too busy, because if he was too busy he was busy picking scabs and watching Growing Pains or whatever on TV.  He wanted to give this impression that I am haughtier than you are, I am higher than you, you’re gonna have to wait for me, and I know you’re gonna wait for me.  It’s not that he wants to be guarded, he wants to give a certain impression to people.  Bonds tries to tell people that he doesn’t care what people think.  To me, it’s just the opposite.  He cares tremendously what people think, and he’s working hard to show that he doesn’t care.  It’s almost like he’s doing reverse psychology on himself.

BC:
Yeah, I thought it was interesting -- there was a point in the book where you talk about when players were leaving from the hotel to the bus to get to the game on the road, talking about how all the players would just kind of hole up in the hotel to avoid the crowds, and Bonds would stand on the sidewalk just so that he could wait for the crowds and then tell them to get the hell out of his face.

JP:
Vintage Bonds.  Vintage.

BC:
I think you did a great job in the book of really driving home the fact that Barry Bonds was a phenomenal player long before he became the Bonds we now know.  What was he like as Pirate, during those days before he was chasing history as he is now?

JP:
Do you mean personality-wise, or playing-wise?

BC:
Just as a player, just on the playing field.

JP:
Oh, unbelievable.  Absolutely unbelievable.  That’s the thing.  To me, he was a better player as a Pirate than he has been as a Giant, because he was so multi-facetted.  The only thing he didn’t have for him was an arm.  Even the guys who hated him -- Van Slyke, R.J. Reynolds to some degree -- nobody denies the fact that he was ungodly as a baseball player.  The saddest thing to me about the steroid thing isn’t, “oh, the youth of America,” which sucks, or other areas that are terrible about it.  What’s saddest to me is he was just driven by greed.  If he had just never touched the steroids, he still could’ve been one the ten best baseball players of all time.  And that whole legacy, those Pittsburgh years are now just totally forgotten.  They aren’t even a factor anymore, and that’s sad, because he could do everything when he was a Pirate.  Absolutely everything as a Pirate.  When he came up with the Pirates, he was a terrible, indifferent outfielder, and pitchers hated having that guy playing center field behind him.  When he moved to left, and he started feeling a little jealous over Andy Van Slyke’s defense, he became the best left fielder in the game.  He went from being a horrible outfielder, to the best left fielder in baseball, and probably one of the ten best left fielders ever in baseball, defensively.

BC:
That, of course, brings us to San Francisco and everything that he has become.  I don’t think you can look at Barry Bonds without thinking of three things, all addressed significantly in your book.  First, his personality; second, his greatness as a player; and finally, the steroids.  You can make this answer as long or as short as you like.  How sure are you that Bonds took performance-enhancing drugs?

JP:
A hundred percent.  A hundred percent.

BC:
There are two issues I wanted to talk to you about concerning steroids, both of which you addressed in the book.  First, and I loved that you had this in there, about the role of the press.  For the last year or so, reporters have been like rabid dogs pursuing this story, but where were they in 1998?  Do you think they were in denial?

JP:
Well, first I have to say “they” includes me, so I can’t bash the media and not include myself.  I was not there either.  I was a baseball writer at the time, too.  I think there are a few things I have to say.  One of the guys I interviewed is a great writer, great guy, Jeff Bradley from ESPN the Magazine.  Jeff was saying that when he would be in these meetings in ‘98 -- and Jeff Bradley’s brother, Scott, played with the Mariners as a catcher -- and Jeff Bradley would be in these magazines at ESPN the Magazine saying, “This is all bullshit.  Maybe we should do something about this.”  And I gotta say, at [Sports Illustrated], there were times when I brought up, or [Tom] Verducci would bring up, or different people would bring up steroids, and “don’t you think we should be looking into this more?”  And there wasn’t that much interest.  I think  a lot of writers were beginning to be skeptical of it, but I don’t know, there was this big love train going on with McGwire and Sosa, do you remember it?  It was almost like we all drank the Kool-Aid.  It was just happy-happy time.

BC:
For me, definitely, I’ve been a huge baseball fan all my life, and during those times when you’d hear people talk about steroids, I just didn’t want to believe it.  Even though I’m 35, there’s still a part of me that looks at these baseball players, even still today, the same way I did when I was ten.  That’s from a fan’s perspective, so I wonder: is there some of that still with reporters?

JP:
I will say this.  I don’t know if the fan thing is so much.  Bill Madden, a guy who writes for the Daily News, I think I quote him in the book.  He said something that’s stuck with me which was, nobody who covers baseball is happy covering this stuff.

BC:
Yeah, you did mention that.

JP:
Right.  Nobody wants this stuff to happen.  A lot of these guys it tears apart, myself in a lot of ways.  It hurts you in a lot of ways, because this is a game you love.  When baseball players act like we’re outsiders, you know, what are we doing in the clubhouse?  We’re not outsiders.  We’re as much insiders as they are ‘cause we freakin’ love this game, too.  Nobody wants this stuff to happening to baseball.  It tears them up.  So I don’t think writers were ignoring it.  I think part of it was ignorance; I just don’t think we knew a hundred percent what was going on.  And I also think we just got caught up in it all, you know?  The game was sinking, McGwire and Sosa come along, they go crazy... Yeah, Sosa used to be a pretzel and now he was the Incredible Hulk, but he was hitting home runs, and I don’t know, it just wasn’t there.  People weren’t talking about it.  I don’t know. 

BC:
Second, tell me what you think about this argument.  I’ve speculated that it might be a bit hypocritical to criticize Bonds and others for taking steroids.  Being a professional athlete is nothing but performance enhancement.  We’re talking about a sport in which pitchers have tendons from cadavers sewn into their elbows and batters have surgery to improve their vision beyond 20/20.  What’s your response to this slippery slope argument?  I’m not looking for you to say, yes, steroids are okay, but where does it fit in that spectrum?

JP:
The number one thing for me, is steroids without a prescription are illegal, factually illegal.  So you’re talking about breaking the law.  They say in Christianity that all sins are the same, so whether you rape a kid or you steal a gumdrop, it’s the same thing.  But to me in baseball -- I’m not a religious guy, by the way, I just use that example -- to me in baseball, it’s not all the same.  Gaylord Perry...

BC:
I like that you added that.  I agree completely with that whole thing.  I’m sorry to step on you but...

JP:
No, no.  Gaylord Perry is totally different to me.  He didn’t break the law.  That’s the thing that bothers me, the argument where people say steroids weren’t illegal in baseball.  Yeah, they weren’t illegal in baseball, they were illegal in the United States of America.  You can go anywhere in America, play a pickup game of baseball and use pine tar on your bat, and they can’t arrest you for it.  But anywhere in America, when you use steroids without a prescription, you will get arrested for it.  The laws of the United States umbrella major league baseball, not vice versa.

BC:
I found it interesting that in the midst of your talk about the steroid issue, you were still able to step back from it and discuss the historical numbers Bonds was putting up at the time.  Five or ten years from now, do you think we’ll be able to make that division between what Bonds did on the field and what he’s alleged to have done to get there?

JP:
No, it’s hard for me to make the division.  I did it because I didn’t really know another way to go about it.  No matter what happens, the asterisk is there.  No matter what happens, he’ll be known as a steroid guy.  If he gets into the Hall of Fame, it has to be on his plaque in Cooperstown.  Maybe it won’t be, but it should be.  It’s him.  Barry Bonds and steroids now are linked like anything else.

BC:
Baseball’s clearly struggling with that issue also.  He hit his 711th home run the other night, and it’s a matter of time until he passes Babe Ruth.  Just today I saw that Selig says there will be no celebration, and his argument is that he’s not setting a record, but it’s not like he’s passing Harmon Killebrew or something.  My guess is that if there were no suspicion, this would be a huge love fest going on.

JP:
Definitely, definitely.

BC:
So what do you think baseball should be doing?  Whether it’s Ruth, or if he hangs on and next year he’s chasing Aaron?

JP:
Very, very, very, very tough.  Selig pretty much dug his own grave here by just ignoring the problem for too long.  It’s funny, when he held the press conference when he named George Mitchell, he started the press conference and I was convinced that he was gonna start the press conference by saying, “I’m gonna be honest here.  We’ve screwed this up, we have not done a good job here, and that’s why we’re taking action.”  Instead he does the exact opposite.  He opens up by listing his accomplishments on steroids, which is just laughable.  What can they do now?  I don’t know what they can do now.  If I am Selig, this is what I do.  Number one, I don’t count Bonds’s record because we just know for a fact that he cheated to do it.  Factually, he cheated to do it.  I don’t count the McGwire/Sosa records, because we didn’t know.  It’s like track and field.  They don’t go by blood tests anymore.  They don’t need a steroid test anymore to ban you from competition because some things are just so crystal clear obvious.  You have an appeals committee where you let the guy appeal a suspension or whatever.  [In baseball], you’re just bastardizing the record book.  That’s all they’re doing.  The record book is a joke now.  And it kills me, guys like Griffey, McGriff, even a guy like Shawn Green, guys who have had very good careers who didn’t use -- Frank Thomas -- and are now just like afterthoughts in the whole baseball thing.  That’s very upsetting.  I don’t know what he can do, but if it’s me?  I don’t count the records.

BC:
Finally, two questions.  Will he catch Aaron?

JP:
I don’t think so.  I just think he’s too banged up more than anything.  I think he even knows that’s a can of worms.  I think Bonds knows that’s a can of worms he does not want to open.

BC:
Last one.  You addressed this a little bit in the book.  If you had a Hall of Fame ballot, whether it’s today or, if he retires and it’s five years from now, would Bonds get your vote?

JP:
No.

BC:
No?

JP:
He would not.  There’s a clause people don’t always mention in the criteria for Hall of Fame voting, basically a morality clause, a “good of the game” clause -- which was used against Pete Rose -- and to me what Bonds has done to the record book...  You know, I’m still amazed, I still don’t understand, and this book is not a slam Bonds book, you read it, it’s not a kill Bonds book...

BC:
Yeah, I described it someone yesterday.  Someone asked me, “Was it a hatchet job?”  And I said, well, yes it was, but I don’t think that’s how it started. I don’t feel like there was an agenda, it was only a hatchet job because that was the only way that it could’ve turned out.  That was my feeling.

JP:
Right, that’s his life.  Right.  I just don’t know how he’s able to look Hank Aaron in the eye, or Willie Mays in the eye, or Willie McCovey in the eye, or any of these guys.  I just don’t know how you do it.  It’s the same thing with McGwire.  How did McGwire, how did he go up to Maris’s family, after all Maris went through to break that record?  It’s just amazing how completely devoid of compassion these guys are, and morality.

BC:
I feel like there’s something about being an athlete, and I’m certainly, certainly not speaking from experience, but if you’re an elite athlete, and your whole life has been driven towards being the best you can possibly be, I bet that deep down these guys believe that they’re not doing anything different than twenty years ago when guys started to work out for the first time.  Maybe that’s naïve to think, and I’m not making excuses for them, but I think that’s how McGwire looks the Maris family in the eye.  He’s being the best that he can be, even if he’s getting help from a bottle.

JP:
You just summed  up why I am happy my daughter has no athleticism.

BC:
I think it would be kind of scary.  For instance if you’re an Olympic sprinter, and your whole life is based on ten seconds four years from now, I guess I’m glad I never had to make those decisions.

JP:
I guess, I don’t know.  This is weak, but I ran cross country and track in college, and I feel very confident in saying that if someone came along and said here’s a drug that’ll make you faster.  It’ll make your testicles shrink, it’ll put acne on your back, it’ll increase your head size, and it’s illegal, but it’ll make you faster, I’m pretty certain I... You know I actually get made when people make the argument, “Well, what about if you’re a low level minor leaguer, and you’re not good enough to make it and then this steroid comes along.  What’re you gonna do?”  I’ll tell you what can do.  You go to freakin’ college and you get a job in another field.  If you’re not good enough, you’re not good enough.  I’ve wanted to write for GQ.  I never got asked to write for GQ.  I’m not gonna cheat or find some way to write for them.  It’s a bad example, but you don’t have to cheat.  Some things in life are not meant to be.  I’d love to have a great physique.  I don’t have a great physique.  Some things you just don’t do.  You just don’t do it.  It’s wrong.  Some things are WRONG.  That’s what bothers me about this.  We have lost our compass of right and wrong, a lot of people have.  People make the argument that steroids weren’t banned by baseball, but they’re still wrong.  Is that how lost we are, that it’s not obvious, completely obvious that they is wrong?  And if they weren’t wrong, wouldn’t you be bragging that you were taking steroids, not trying to hide it from everybody?

BC:
I agree, that’s a good point.

JP:
It pisses me off, makes me mad.  I feel like this isn’t the kind of stuff that I’m trying to raise my daughter in where right and wrong is just whether you get caught or not, essentially.

An Interview with Alex Belth

Last week Alex Belth was generous enough to spend a good portion of his Thursday evening chatting with me about his recent book, Stepping Up: The Story of All-Star Curt Flood and His Fight For Baseball Players' Rights. (In case you missed my review of the book, here it is.) We spoke extensively about the writing process, Flood's career as a ballplayer, his struggle against baseball's reserve clause, and finally his ultimate legacy. There's something for everyone -- enjoy!

BrokenCowboy
After reading this book, it’s clear that Curt Flood was a great player and a great man, but probably one that most baseball fans know very little about. What was it that first drew you to him as a subject for your first book?

Alex Belth
The first time I really became aware of him was when I was working on the Ken Burns baseball documentary. Still even now in my mind’s eye thinking about it, in those talking head interviews with him, there was something just very... I don’t know if arresting is too strong a word, but immediately compelling about him. There was clearly a sensitivity to him, even in the way he phrased things. He was a thoughtful guy, what an interesting guy. And obviously in the Burns movie he was telling his story, so it became even more interesting. But there was also something about looking at him where you could just tell, I don’t know what really happened, but this guy’s been through a lot. His eyes were a little glassy. It didn’t look like he was drunk or stoned, but it looked like he’d been shellshocked or something like that.

That was I guess the spring of ‘94 that I first became acquainted with his story, and over the following years my interest in baseball, which had been really strong as a kid but was kind of dormant during my college years, just continued to grow and grow and grow. I probably started getting into reading baseball books again pretty seriously by like ‘99 or 2000, and I found Flood’s autobiography and gobbled it up. And by the time I started writing the blog, Flood was just one of those stories that continued to be of interest to me, and one of the reasons was because I felt like there was something mysterious about it because it just wasn’t talked about that much. And if you did hear people talk about it, they would talk about it in these kind of vague generalities: Curt Flood, he was the first free agent; Curt Flood, his case led to free agency; he was a great guy, he was a very important person to remember.

But what was his case? Antitrust legislation and all these legalities. And he lost his case. What bearings did his case have on the Peter Seitz, Messersmith-McNally decision, and how could you really quantify his influence. So there were all these kind of things that were really kind of unknown to me about him, and that made him even more interesting, and there was just tremendously little written about him. His autobiography is an interesting portrait of a ballplayer in the 1960s, and it gives you an idea of his life, but it’s very sketchy. It’s a very impressionistic view of his life, and it ended in 1970. His case hadn’t even made it to the Supreme Court yet. Then he leaves the country for five years. Jeez, what happened there?

So there was this whole combination of things. This is one of those pet guys that you end up getting, that you really get interested in. And after I had started writing the blog, BronxBanter, in the fall of 2002, by the spring of ‘03 I was approached by Persea Books who at the time was going to start doing some young adult books, nonfiction young adult books. And I was approached by them, and they said, “Could you think of a sports figure that would be good for high school kids?” You and I spoke about that a couple years ago. Flood would be the perfect choice. For the first year and a half of the project, the book was going to be for high school kids. Ultimately what happened, WW Norton is the distributor of Persea, and it sort of dawned on all of us that because there aren’t any books out on Flood, why necessarily limit ourselves to a YA audience? At which point the book became geared towards just a general sports audience. Even though it’s not strictly for kids any longer, I think it’s one of these books that we intended to make it readable for anyone seventh grade and up, and that includes maybe a middle aged woman who’s a casual fan.

But as you know it’s a lot leaner than a lot of baseball biographies would be, it’s just a little over 200 pages. Part of what can make baseball books so great are the digressions, but we really shied away from that. If we had three pages introducing Bob Gibson, we tried to cut it down to two paragraphs because we really wanted to make the story as accessible to as wide an audience as possible. And quite frankly, it’s also my first book so I didn’t really want to bite off more than I could chew, just in the breadth of something. You know what I mean? And my editor and I both agreed in the philosophy that if we’re gonna err on the side of anything, we’re gonna leave the reader wanting more rather than someone saying it was good, but it was about fifteen or twenty pages too long, or he’s losing me here. But it was the Ken Burns experience that first got me interested in Flood.

BC:
So you started in 2003?

Alex
We put together a proposal in 2003, and by that summer I started doing research for the project.

BC:
And what was that like? I assume you were doing an awful lot of reading and interviewing some people. How did that go?

Alex
It was the first time that I had ever done anything like this, so I didn’t really have a roadmap. What do you do, do you spend eight months doing research and then start writing? So what I ended up doing -- having learned what I did the first time around, I would have a better sense of how to organize myself the second time around, but I essentially did research and started writing at the same time. Part of the research was trying to contact former players, which I did primarily through the Player’s Association, talking to baseball historians and writers, trying to get in touch with family and friends of Flood. I wrote this book essentially in and around a nine to five job in addition to writing the blog. So I got to work early in the morning, stayed late at night, wrote on the weekends, but it wasn’t like I was making a lot of money doing it, so it wasn’t a situation where I could afford to fly to Oakland and spend a week there or go to St. Louis and look people up, so I didn’t have that kind of accessibility.

And also because it was my first book, it wasn’t as if I could just say, “Hey, this is David Halberstam, I’m writing such and such book,” and people are generally gonna want to speak to you. There were some of Flood’s teammates who responded to my letter immediately. Orlando Cepeda called me, and Dick Groat called me immediately, and Tim McCarver responded, and they were all very cordial and helpful. And there were other people like Lou Brock and Gibson and Bill White who didn’t want to participate at all. Flood is survived by five children from his first marriage and then also a wife from a third marriage, Judy Pace. Judy Pace Flood was an actress. I think she was in Ironside, and she was in Brian’s Song actually. But Judy Pace and Flood’s children don’t get along very well, and I think there’s been a lot of bad blood between them. Apparently, at least the word that I heard, was that some of Flood’s old teammates are very loyal to Judy Pace, and if she didn’t sanction the project, they wouldn’t necessarily participate. And she didn’t. She wasn’t particularly willing to get involved, which again I’m respectful of. She has a project of her own that she wants to work on, and that’s fair enough.

But that presented, I guess, both sort of an obstacle and maybe created a sense of freedom at the same time. It was an obstacle because the primary source material for Flood’s childhood was his autobiography, which was very, as I said before, impressionistic. So I had to really try to create what it was like for Flood growing up in Oakland when he did, having spoken to some friends who grew up with him, which was very helpful. So there was that sort of telling detail that I missed, that his family could’ve provided. At the same time, I was free from having to serve anyone’s agenda within the family. I did speak to Flood’s eldest daughter, Debbie Flood, and she was as helpful as she could be, and she was a nice person. From what she told me, he was at times a troubled guy, and it wasn’t such a happy family situation.

And when I did learn the details of that kind of stuff, yeah, I suppose there was part of me that was titillated because I was learning about the dirt, so to speak. But simultaneously another part of me was really sort of nauseous, because this family’s been through a tough time. They’ve been through enough pain. My intention here isn’t to drag them through the mud. The most critical things that I learned about Flood, to be general about it, were things that you could probably find in a lot of ballplayers -- that he was self-centered, that he liked to party and chase skirts, and that he wasn’t a particularly attentive father or responsible husband. Well, that doesn’t really make him much different than a lot of other entertainers. So that as an angle didn’t seem like something that was really worth pursuing when the whole point of my book... I couldn’t ignore it, I couldn’t just gloss over it, I had to mention that, because I don’t think you’re being fair looking at him as a human being otherwise, but that certainly wasn’t the point of the book.

BC:
I think that you did that well, and like you say, it humanizes him a little bit. He’s not just Curt Flood, this hero who fought for baseball players’ rights, but he also had all these other issues. I think it maybe even makes it easier for people to relate to.

Alex:
Well, I think that was a really important thing for me because one of the things that made me very leery about Flood when I first started the project was a kind of generalization of what he had done, sort of looking back in a real romantic way at what he did as somebody who was a real martyr, so to speak. I come from a left-wing sensibility, I come from a liberal family, so it’s not like I would be against Curt Flood’s politics, do you know what I mean? At the same time, whether you’re conservative or liberal, creatively I’ve always reacted against glorifying people in an overly simplistic way. With Flood, when you learn about his vulnerabilities and frailties as a person, I think that helps really kind of balance painting him in a broad stroke in heroic terms. As it turns out, that was really one of my main questions doing the book. Why did he do this? Did he really do it as a selfless act? Is that really true? Is that myth-making actually accurate? And ultimately I think it was. I think he really did do what he did for very personal reasons, you could say selfish reasons. He did it for himself, he did it because...

BC:
Well, but I don’t think he did it for financial gain, necessarily.

Alex:
But he didn’t do it for his own personal, cynical gain. It wasn’t like a lot of the sportswriters of the moment thought, oh he’s just trying to hold out for more money or something like that. I think when you put Flood’s story in a larger context, Flood was one of a lot of people of his generation that were acting for the better of the community or for people other than just themselves. You know, it’s funny, in the Clemente book there’s something that Maraniss brings up that Clemente said all the time. I forget the exact phrasing, but Clemente would say, “Your life is only as valuable as the impact it has on other people’s lives.” And Clemente was true to that, I think, and so was Flood. Flood was of that same time. He did something very similar to that. But I think what makes Flood, when you’re looking at him more as a person, I think what makes his story, gives it depth and complexity, is when you look at it and say, this guy did a noble thing. He did the right thing and he got raked over the coals for it. But at the same time, Flood knew going into it how tough his chances were going to be to win. Flood went into this knowingly.

So there are these other questions that you ask yourself all the sudden. Okay, he did do the noble thing. But in the process, he sacrificed his livelihood. He sacrificed his ability to support his family in the way he had become accustomed to. And you can understand why other ballplayers wouldn’t have been willing to do that, and not as a knock against them. That’s a really legitimate reason, a guy had a family to feed. Given the realities of what life was like for ballplayers at that time with the reserve clause, the fears that they could be sent down to the minors or blackballed were very real. So I think that’s one of the things that ended up becoming really fascinating about Flood’s story because in a way, I think, intellectually he really understood what he was getting into. This is just what I sort of gathered, I can’t read his mind, I didn’t speak with him about it. But I think on some level he probably was mentally up to the task, but I don’t know if emotionally he had the constitution to handle the repercussions of what he did. He was a sensitive guy. He was a sensitive guy who didn’t have a lot of emotional support. And he was really taking on... the David and Goliath thing. And he was really all out there by himself. Yes, the Players’ Association supported him financially, which is something that shouldn’t be overlooked or discounted, nevertheless he was out there by himself. Here was a guy who was an excellent player, and had a terrific reputation as a team player, as an artist, as a good guy, who suddenly when from team player, great guy to uppity so-and-so. A guy who’s trying to ruin America’s pastime. And I think that was something that was really tough for him to get over.

Flood himself called himself a child of the sixties, a man of the sixties, but even more than that, I think that his taking on baseball... it’s not only a sixties move, I mean, it’s a late sixties move. You have to look at what he did in the context of okay, ‘67, ‘68, ‘69. Even start in ‘66, when things start to become very tumultuous, every summer becoming more and more volatile around the country. The civil rights movement breaking down into the Black Power movement and Black Nationalism. As a result this sort of reaction of the silent majority and conservatism that starts to rise with Nixon coming in ‘68. I think in some ways Flood was at this moment in his life where he had really achieved everything that he could’ve hoped for in baseball. He had made it. He had been an all-star, he had won World Series, he was successful outside of it. He was making a lot of money. He really reaped the benefit of playing on that great St. Louis team. His salary jumped almost forty thousand dollars from ‘65 to ‘69. He’s making thirty-five or something like that, and all the sudden by ‘69 he’s making $90,000 a year. So I think in a strange way for him, he had really reached the pinnacle of everything that he could’ve achieved. I wouldn’t say that he was played out or bored, but I think all of the sudden having really accomplished certain goals that you would want to as a ballplayer made him more aware of what was going on with Marvin Miller and the relationship between the players and the owners. He was this conscientious guy who became much more aware of the inequities of what was actually going on in the game. McCarver told me at one point that he thought Flood would’ve done the same thing had he been traded in ‘67 or ‘68. Not that he was waiting to get traded like it was a premeditated act -- okay, I’m gonna take baseball to court -- I don’t think it was like that for him.

But I think that considering everything that had happened in his life, considering that also by ‘69 he was on the outs with Cardinal management to a certain extent, he had been separated from his wife, he’s not with his kids, he’s living a bachelor lifestyle. Someone who I had interviewed said maybe he felt like things were kind of awry in his life, and this was something that he could do, and he could do the right thing, you know what I mean? Again, I can’t read Flood’s mind, but he certainly expressed some ambivalence by ‘69 about the rest of his career. I mean, certainly at the age of 31, you would’ve figured he could’ve played four or five more years had he stayed healthy. He had some good money, even if he had only played one or two more years. Just on his reputation, he was gonna get paid. At the same time, I think he was probably a very old 31, given how old ballplayers in general, but Black and Spanish players were particularly driven during that time to play through injuries, and Flood was such a small guy. He played through injuries constantly, so he might’ve been getting tired. He’d been to Denmark, he was a painter, he really could’ve seen life beyond baseball. I think that the rub for it, for him, was how does he walk away from that money? But ultimately when he does get traded, he gets traded to Philadelphia, which is initially the slap in the face. Philadelphia had such a bad reputation as a town for black ballplayers.

BC:
He’s getting sold down the river.

Alex:
Yeah, exactly. What if he had been traded to the Dodgers? Hey, you can’t answer that question. That’s a what if. If Flood were given a hundred thousand dollars to play for the Dodgers, it could’ve been a very different story. Maybe he wouldn’t have done what he did. At the same time, very quickly after his trade to Philadelphia, it did become less about being traded to Philadelphia, and it became more about what a terrible system the reserve system was. So in a way getting traded to Philadelphia made it easier for him, whereas if he had been traded to someplace favorable like Los Angeles, it might’ve made it a lot tougher to walk away from that money. But I really think that for him at least, at that moment, in 1969, there was really no other logical thing for him to do. That was the logical thing for him to do. He said in the Ken Burns documentary, he couldn’t see what was happening to his brothers in the civil rights movement, and his brothers fighting, and I don’t mean just black, but black and white, fighting in Vietnam, and not think that that kind of spirit didn’t apply to his own industry. So I just think he was somebody who took that seriously at a time when not everybody did. He certainly didn’t act in a vacuum, particularly amongst black athletes. This was already after Ali...

BC:
One thing that struck me was that here you had this man fighting all alone against America’s pastime. What can’t be overlooked, though, is that Flood was a black man essentially fighting against twenty-four white owners.

Alex:
Oh, yeah.

BC:
How significant was that aspect of it?

Alex:
In terms of the outcome of the case?

BC:
Not in terms of the outcome, just in terms of the fight. Tell me if you agree with this or not. From reading it, it seemed like it still would’ve been a huge deal if this had been a white player fighting this same fight. The owners still would’ve been in an uproar, they still would’ve thought it was ruining the game, etc., etc. But this was just something extra.

Alex:
Yeah, look at the grief Bouton caught in 1970 when he came out with Ball Four, and he was a white ballplayer. I don’t think... on the one hand, it’s hard to fathom a white ballplayer doing what Flood did at that time. At the same time, heck, you had pioneering black ballplayers -- Frank Robinson, Aaron, Clemente, Bob Gibson -- who didn’t do what Flood did. So it wasn’t only because he was black, I think it was because he was a remarkable guy in a way.

One of the things that sort of occurred to me after thinking about it more, is that Flood really possessed a real nice combination of toughness and vulnerability. His toughness was evident in what he had to put up with, and the fact that he achieved, but the vulnerability enabled him to act on his conscience. I think the rub of it for Flood was it was also this vulnerability, this sensitivity as a person that made dealing with the fallout of it so damaging to him. And I also think that, even if, let’s say, Carl Yastrzemski -- which is really hard to believe -- if he had done what Flood had done, I still don’t think a white player would’ve won, however the reception amongst the public, the perception in the media might’ve been different. Flood did have enough sports writers who were supportive of him. However, I think that without characterizing Flood as a radical, Flood was probably perceived as a radical. We’re talking about the late sixties, where Black Power is becoming Black Panthers with shotguns, so this is an alarming thing to white middle class baseball fans.

So this is going on when Flood does what he does, and I think that that burgeoning silent majority was probably very prominent amongst your average sports fans, particularly because the union had started to assert itself, so in the winters in the late sixties you started hearing about labor as much as you start hearing about the hot stove league. The gap between what common guys are earning and what ballplayers are earning is starting to grow, and the idea of Flood giving up $90,000 a year and considering himself a well-paid slave was just something that some people could not get around. Joe Early wrote a presentation about Flood, an African-American history professor, and he says at the time that he remembers people in the black community people not understanding what Flood was doing, and also thinking he was a damn fool for giving up $90,000 a year for doing what he was doing. When Flood was asked by Tom Haller, the Dodgers player rep, when Flood sought the financial support and get the approval of the players’ association, Tom Haller asked him if it was a Black Power move on Flood’s part. And Flood made it quite clear that what he was doing was for the benefit of all players, but he also said that his being black made him extremely sensitive to those matters, perhaps more so than most. So I think the racial part of it is very interesting in the way Flood was embraced or not embraced by the black community.

When you look at what happens with Ali, you can say, okay, the United States government is reclassifying this guy because he’s the heavyweight champion of the world, and he is a black Muslim. He is a clear political threat, so what happened to Ali happened because of the color of his skin, but you can’t say that implicitly about Flood, because it was happening to any ballplayer, no matter who you are. And Flood’s case is not something that you can easily surmise in a tidy sound bite. It’s complicated. And believe me, one of the things that I found in researching the book and reading a lot of legal documents. Shit, that was really complicated for me.

BC:
I was wondering about that. Did you read through all the rulings and everything?

Alex:
Yes, I certainly read the Supreme Court ruling and the court of appeals ruling, and I read through most of the transcripts from the trial, and it was really tedious stuff. It was tedious stuff, and I was able to speak to a couple of Flood’s lawyers. A fella named Jay Topkiss, who was one of his trial lawyers and is a professor at Columbia, was particularly gracious with me and helpful. There was a guy who actually reads BronxBanter who is the librarian at Fordham Law School who was very helpful to me in explaining antitrust and the language that they used in legalese. When I was writing that portion of the book I tried to make it understandable and accessible to somebody who might not know that much about the law, and because of that I didn’t go into a lot of digressions about certain aspects of the legal rulings. Flood’s legal story is a book onto itself, and as a matter of fact there are two books that I know that are coming out later this year that focus on the legalities of Flood’s case, which I think is great. Because reading this stuff, it merits a book of its own.

But for my purposes, it was a challenge to try to read through all that stuff and sift out what is really important and what isn’t. That’s why I just feel fortunate that I had a good editor who helped guide me, because there would be certain times when I would get almost lost in reading so much information I didn’t know how to really properly digest it. But when we had a solid framework for our story and a philosophy of how to tell the story -- get out of the way and let the story tell itself and really keep it lean. Then it just became easier at certain points. You read the book -- when I described either the George Toolson ruling, or the previous stories, or the Federal Baseball 1922 Supreme Court decision, I didn’t spend five or six pages on each one of those things. I tried to keep it short and sweet without making it frivolous or trivial, but keeping a consistent tone throughout the book, I suppose. But yeah, that stuff was a little daunting, because the trial stuff is not particularly dramatic. Without having a lot of specifics about what the scene looked like, it was hard to recreate a dramatic scene. Even in Flood’s autobiography he claims that it was pretty boring and he spending a lot of time drinking and chasing skirts while the trial was going on.

BC:
As I’m reading the book I’m wondering if modern ballplayers even know who they should be thanking. I think you mentioned this story in your book about when Jackie Robinson was honored in Cincinnati that day, speaking on the field. I guess it was probably the 25th anniversary of his arrival in the major leagues, and he was honored on the field in Cincinnati, and I guess he walked into the clubhouse afterwards and none of the black players had anything to say to him. It was this really sad moment. He was towards the end of his life, and he didn’t really get that recognition. There was an anecdote that you included in the book from, I don’t think it was the ‘94 strike...

Alex:
Yeah!

BC:
It was the ‘94 strike? When Flood came in and spoke to the players? Who did you speak to on that?

Alex:
I had read about it, but I also spoke to Gene Orza about it, who was the general counsel of the players’ association, and I think that Marvin Miller had certainly made it a point to remind his constituency of the importance of Curt Flood, certainly while he was on the job. And afterwards, too. Gene Orza said to me that he thinks a lot of the current players are familiar with who Flood is, and whether you agree with that or not, I think there at least a lot of people in the union who probably do. And certainly that was probably even more true in 1994 when Flood was obviously still alive, but just when there was a lot more connection. Now, when you think about the connections to Flood, and you’re thinking about Torre and Dusty Baker, guys who are like the older guys in the game now. Remember that story in the 80s, talking about Jackie Robinson, and Vince Coleman didn’t know who Jackie Robinson was?

BC:
Yeah, I remember that.

Alex:
If people don’t remember who Jackie Robinson was, they sure ain’t gonna remember who Curt Flood is. But I think his name is significant enough in the history of the union that the union has always been acknowledging of him. Could they be more so? Sure, that would be great. It would be great to see a Curt Flood statue someplace, or even better yet, it would be great to see a Curt Flood scholarship, something that would be really useful, in Curt Flood’s name. One question that I’ve been asked a bunch recently as I’ve been doing interviews is, how much do you think modern ballplayers are aware of who Curt Flood is? I don’t think that Curt Flood is as well-remembered as he should be, but I don’t know if baseball players are any worse at remembering the past than the average person.

BC:
I think the problem is, you know we talked about writers having a love of baseball. I think that the people who are judging baseball players are the people who love baseball so much that they can tell you how many home runs Mickey Mantle hit, and all this minutiae, so to hear a player say, “I don’t know anything about Mickey Mantle, or I don’t know what kind of a player Jackie Robinson was, or did Joe Torre ever play?” These kinds of questions, most Americans don’t know the answers to, but it’s the people who are reporting on baseball and buying the tickets by and large, that’s what we live and breathe.

Alex:
Yeah, exactly, much more so than most players. It’s probably the exception when you have a Mike Piazza, who is a great player, or Clemens or Schilling, who are great fans as well. They love the history. But that was probably always the case. There was probably a lot more baseball talk. When you talk about how things have changed, now guys are on planes on their iPods and DVDs and stuff like that. That’s changed from fifty years ago, but how many players of Torre’s generation were readily familiar with what Frankie Frisch had done? So for me it’s hard to go out and just blast the ballplayers for not having remembered Flood.

And look, Hank, the bottom line is Flood lost. We don’t tend to remember the “losers.” We don’t tend to remember the guys who come in second. My father, who will humbly say that he is second to none as an admirer of Jackie Robinson, one of his pet rants for years has been, what about Larry Doby? You really just don’t hear about Doby in the same... obviously Doby’s story was slightly different from Robinson’s, but Doby has really been undervalued in comparison. But Doby came second, and not just by a couple of months. People knew about Jackie Robinson and the Great Experiment the year before when he was playing in Montreal. But I think that’s just the nature of our culture.

One of the quotes in the book that I loved was from Dick Young. Dick Young is someone that I remember as a kid as just being one of these real old cranks, “Ah, you young punks, making all this money...” There’s much about Dick Young that I don’t like, but he certainly was very influential, and when he wrote about Flood’s case, he said if Flood wins this case, he’ll be more famous than anyone in the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. But if he loses, well, when was the last time anyone heard of George Toolson? George Toolson was the minor leaguer in the Yankee system who had challenged baseball’s antitrust exemption.

Yeah, the analogy is a little exaggerated, but it does hold some weight. Like you mentioned, other than hardcore baseball fans, your average sports fan isn’t gonna remember who Flood was. And like I said earlier on, a lot of fans that I talked too would say, “Oh, yeah, Curt Flood, sure. He was the first free agent... He started it all... His case led to free agency.” Which is really inaccurate. Literally speaking, his case didn’t lead to anything but a legal dead-end for himself. But the one thing I think that you can say indisputably about Flood’s case, was that he was the most prominent player to ever challenge the reserve system, and by doing that, even though he lost his case, he put the inequities of that system onto page one. He took it from the back page, he put it on the front page. He got baseball back into the Supreme Court. So it wasn’t all for naught.

But it was, I suppose, if you want to be literal about it, it’s almost like the numbers, right? When you look at baseball numbers, you talk about a guy’s intangibles. Well, Flood’s legacy is all the intangibles. It’s like raising people’s awareness about it. Well how do you quantify that? Well, you can’t really. You just have to believe that he helped educate people and open a lot of people’s eyes up by throwing himself on the tracks for what he felt was the right thing to do. When I was first doing the book I really wanted to find that literal thing, I wanted to find the numbers that would work to prove it, that it’s not just this ethereal, “Oh, well, he just did a lot.” But ultimately, that’s what you’re left with, and if that’s not satisfying to the stats part of you as a baseball fan or as a person, it makes it strangely more compelling and powerful that you have to say that Flood’s greatest contribution was educational. I think at one point I would’ve been disappointed with that. Is that it? As if that’s a bad thing. And now I look on it much more admiringly. He didn’t gain financially, he just lost. Even Miller said, after the case lost in the Supreme Court, all of these sort of things getting more attention was moving the players closer to being able to get something that was fairer to them, and he said, “Yeah, everyone’s gonna gain in this. The players will gain in this. The only one who will lose is Flood.” Which makes him more sympathetic in a way. Mike Epstein, who played with him on the Senators, said he saw him later and he described Flood as somebody who had been tied to the mast and taken one lash too many.

I don’t want to be overly nostalgic or romantic about a guy who’s noble and gets crushed because of it. I don’t mean to celebrate that in a disrespectful way, I more want to look at in a sympathetic way and say, this is what happened. It’s upsetting...

BC:
I think you can’t ignore that. One thing I liked was one of the writers that you quoted after the decision had come down said something to the effect that, yes, Flood had struck out...

Alex:
Yes! Larry Merchant said that. He fouled off so many pitches that he got the pitcher tired, or something like that.

BC:
Right, and probably if it were today maybe they would talk about it being a productive out or something like that.

Alex:
Yeah, you know the funny thing, it almost sounds a little corny or trite to say something like that, but for me personally in real life, if I don’t understand something and you use a baseball analogy or sports analogy, I’ll get it. That’s just me. When I read that, it not only makes sense, but it’s so in line with Flood’s sensibilities as a player. I mean, here was a guy who was known as the ultimate team guy, batting behind Lou Brock all those years, having been mentored particularly by Dick Groat on how to hit the other way, how to sacrifice yourself for the good of the team.

That was his personality on the field, so the fact that he ended up doing that off the field really makes a lot of sense. I think that one of the really wonderful things about baseball is that it’s this team game, and yet it’s such a lonely, isolating game. And that’s one of the major themes of Flood’s life, alienation and anxiety. Those experiences playing in the South, I can’t imagine how lonely that must’ve been for him, how isolating that must’ve been. And think of the position he played. He played center field. He was farthest away from everyone, and he’s 5’8”. Especially when you think about it in the context of the time, there’s no padded walls. There’s that one picture in the book when he had Jackie Robinson’s number and he’s in Sportsman’s Park and he’s leaping up to catch a ball, and the fence is huge. You get the sense of this small little guy against all this space, and that theme played itself out in what he did. In everything in baseball, whether you’re making a play in the field or you’re up at bat, yeah, you have teammates who are rooting for you, but you’re all on your own. And I think that’s what happened to Flood in court, too.

BC:
Yeah, that’s interesting.

Alex:
He was all on his own. These guys were behind him, but Bob Gibson said, “Yeah, I told Curt I’ll support him, but I’m gonna be about a hundred yards away from him because I don’t want any of the fallout to hit me.” I think it’s easy to be backward looking and criticize players for not coming out publicly in support of Flood, and Marvin Miller himself has taken responsibility for not encouraging the players to support him publicly, but I think the reality of the time was that even if you were a superstar you were afraid that if you were too mouthy that your career could be put in jeopardy. Baseball players had not been tested by a strike yet, so their solidarity wasn’t proven, so I think you really have to be understanding of their position at the time. And okay, if you play the fantasy out -- say Gibson and Willie Stargell and Joe Morgan and Hank Aaron and half a dozen or a dozen of the great ballplayers had showed up in court with Flood, would that have changed things? I think it would’ve definitely brought more attention and notoriety to Flood’s suit, but I don’t think it would’ve changed the ruling of it. Look at the way history played itself out. The owners didn’t budge until Seitz rules against him. They didn’t budge until they were legally forced to, and I don’t think that would’ve changed no matter what. I mean, shit, he goes to the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court agrees to hear the case, which gave Flood’s lawyers a pretty good feeling that, hey, why would they hear the case unless they were going to plan to overturn it. And the ruling itself, it’s a narrow loss, he loses 5-3, and even in the decision you have them saying, look, baseball’s antitrust exemption is an anomaly, it’s a complete aberration, but we’re not gonna get our hands dirty, we’re gonna pass the buck to congress. So even in losing, Flood wasn’t discredited. So I just think that there was a great reluctance on the part of the legal establishment to overturn a decision by someone as venerated as Oliver Wendell Holmes. And just as Holmes’s decision was really tinged with nostalgia and romance for the game, I think that was also the case in the Court’s Flood decision, too. Flood probably to his dying day believed that on some level it was racial, that there was no way that the powers that be, the establishment, so to speak, was gonna let a little black guy overturn their way, their system. And you can’t blame him for coming from that perspective. At the same time, I also think that legally he was just fighting an uphill battle that was too hard to overcome.

BC:
Let me ask you one more question.

Alex:
Sure.

BC:
This is something that just occurred to me today as I was getting ready for this. The NHL, in their Hall of Fame they have a Builders category -- I’m not a hockey fan, so I might be remembering wrong -- just guys who have contributed to the game that they’ll induct into the Hall of Fame. What do you think about something like that for Curt Flood? Do you think his impact on the game is that great? Does he deserve to be in the Hall of Fame just for fighting this fight?

Alex:
Personally, I think so, because he was a creditable player. He wasn’t just a scrub.

BC:
Right, that’s something that we really didn’t even get a chance to talk about.

Alex:
You’re talking about a very good player. You’re not talking about a superstar, but you’re talking about a star player. You look at his years, I would say ‘62 to ‘65, but you could even say the second half of ‘61. Here’s a guy that’s hitting .300 plus and getting roughly 200 hits every year. He’s a good offensive player, one of the five or ten best defensive players ever at his position, arguably the most important defensive position on the field. So you’re not talking about a lightweight. You’re not talking about Frank Robinson, on one hand, but you’re not talking about someone who’s insignificant. And certainly I think that just the fact that he made the kind of money he did makes him very significant as well. Makes the sacrifice that much more significant. When you realize the guy did give up a hundred thousand dollars a year. In 1970 there were ten guys in the league that made a hundred thousand dollars or more. And Flood, kind of ironically, was probably overpaid getting a hundred thousand dollars a year as a singles hitter who was a fine defensive player.

But nevertheless, that’s the position that he found himself in. That’s what he was willing to give up to change something that was patently wrong, patently wrong. I’ve also had a question where people say, well, players are making all this money now, sort of implying that baseball is horrible and sports and everything is ruined. You see the grips of that old myth that the owners spieled out that the game would be ruined without the reserve clause still exists, and it applies to baseball particularly, but to sports in a way that it doesn’t apply to, say, the entertainment industry. So you’ll hear people saying, well, is what Flood did right when it just led to the current situation today which is deemed as somehow inappropriate or awful. The answer to that has to be, of course what he did was right. Because even if getting rid of the reserve clause did ruin baseball, it still would’ve been the right thing , because the reserve clause was just patently wrong. And another thing I want to add about the kind of irony of that late sixties moment when things are getting more radical. You have guys in SDS who are either totally burned out, or they’re in Weatherman throwing bombs, you know what I mean? It’s not about reforming American ideals anymore, it’s just far more intense than that. But I think what Flood did, and this is what might’ve made him a radical in sporting circles but certainly not as a person, what Flood did, he did because he believed in the American Dream. He believed in American principles of having the right to choose your own employer. Those are very basic American ideals that he was acting upon, that he strongly believed in. And here was a guy who really had lived out the American Dream, right Hank?

BC:
Right, from where he started, certainly.

Alex:
From where he started, he believed that hard work and determination would lead to success. And Hank, if Flood had been Pete Rose, if he had been Richie Ashburn, if he had been white, he would’ve been considered the all-American hero. And he was considered a good guy, until...

BC:
He bit the hand.

Alex:
He bit the hand that fed him, so to speak. And then no one had any use for him anymore. And that was an era when black athletes acutely felt that after their playing days were over, they were gonna get kicked to the curb, that no one gave a shit about them. You didn’t have black coaches or assistant-head coaches or assistant to the assistant-head coaches at the time. It wasn’t like these guys were thinking, oh yeah, there’s a career for me after this in the game. So Flood, even when he had achieved a degree of success in the major leagues when his team won the World Series in 1964, okay, boom, he tries to get a house in a white suburb and has to run into a whole bunch of racist crap. When he starts becoming much more of a celebrity around St. Louis, he and the other black ballplayers are all the sudden being treated like heroes, whereas two or three years earlier they wouldn’t have been able to get in the place. Or even when they are being hailed by everyone in the place, the only other black people working there are bussers. He lived the American Dream, but he also lived the underside of the American Dream. He believed in it, I think, idealistically, but he also suffered the realities of it. And I think that’s why he was angry. When you read his autobiography, that’s why it comes off as angry. He probably wasn’t in the most coherent state of mind when he had that book written. It was a very particular time in his life, but for me, I can be sympathetic to why he would be pissed off.

BC:
As far as his impact, I didn’t get the sense that he fought this fight so that one day a kid from Miami could sign a contract for $250 million.

Alex:
No, that was probably the furthest...

BC:
He’s thinking about, basically, I’d like to be able to buy house and not worry that I’m gonna be traded next week. Or, if I’m tired of playing in St. Louis, I could have a choice.

Alex:
Now if the Cardinals had come to him and said, “Okay, this is what we’re thinking about. What do you think of this, this, or this?” that would’ve been different, I think, to him. But the fact that it was just, “Okay, you’re going here because we said so, and we said so now. Get going.” He’s just, “I can’t abide by this, this is just ridiculous.” And he was just at that perfect -- I don’t know if perfect is the right word -- but he was at that moment in his career where he had accomplished enough that he was willing to sacrifice it. Who know, maybe five years earlier, maybe he wouldn’t have been ready, but there were all these events that were happening. Like I said, Miller coming along and making them all aware of this stuff. I don’t want to sound too trite about this, but you know when you think of like, dramatically, this was the defining moment in his life, at least what he’s most remembered for, and it’s almost as if everything in his life led up to that moment. Everything he had gone through informed him making that decision. So there’s no other way to imagine him doing anything differently. His experiences completely informed what he did. I think what happens is that, as you mentioned, one of the things that gets obscured is what a wonderful ballplayer he was. And I think for him, because it took him so long to get over it, and because he didn’t really have a huge public life, and was never really embraced officially back into the game. He went to old timers days later on, and things like this, but he never got a real job working for a team again. I think he probably moved on from it and felt, jeez, this is the only thing I’m known for? His kids would go and get financial aid at college, and they’d be like, “Your dad’s Curt Flood? You’re rich!” And they’d be like, no, not really... So I think the legacy because he lost, and because he was so hurt by it, I think that he really felt like, gosh, people really think I tried to screw something up that I loved. And what’s lost in it is how much he did love baseball, how great he was at it. But at the same time, one of the things -- I don’t know if you caught it in the book -- but one of the things that really struck me was that from a pretty young age, Flood was pretty clear-eyed about baseball being a vocation.

BC:
Yeah, that was interesting to me actually, that he talked about “going to work.”

Alex:
And I think that that was very true for him, because he had talent in other areas, maybe, but also because he saw the situation for what it was. He was not a dummy. He made a comment when he came back to play for the Senators, that he was in a tough spot. He didn’t want to look like a hypocrite, at the same time he needed the dough. Someone asked him, do you play because you love the game, or because you need the money? And says, “Well, both, but this is work for me. I don’t think I’d play for free. I wouldn’t play for fun.” As intense a competitor as Flood was, he wasn’t Pete Rose who was gonna run through hell in the proverbial gasoline suit to play the game. This was the way he made a living, and that was it.

An Interview with Josh Peter

Josh Peter, author of Fried Twinkies, Buckle Bunnies, and Bull Riders: A Year Inside the Professional Bull Riders Tour, recently was kind enough to talk to me about his book. (Here's my review.) What follows is a transcript of our conversation. Enjoy.

BrokenCowboy:
When we were first exchanging e-mails before the book was published you mentioned that this whole experience was kind of like Bull Riding 101. I was wondering, what kind of background did you have? Were you a fan? Did you have any kind of experience? And if not, how did you get involved with this? What was the whole experience like? If you could just talk about all that...

Josh Peter:
I, like you, went to the rodeo maybe when I was ten or fifteen years old, probably closer to ten, and just vaguely remember the different events. And subsequent to that had no exposure until the professional bull riders came to New Orleans in 2000. I saw a media kit on my boss’s desk, it caught my eye and I picked it up. I was always looking for offbeat stories, and I thought it looked like an interesting one. It turns out that Chris Shivers, two-time champion, lived four hours from New Orleans. I asked my boss if I could take on the story, and he gave me a week to work on it, and I went and I did a profile on Chris Shivers, did something on the bull industry, the bull breeding industry, and then I covered the event. As soon as I covered the event, or that night, I just knew instantly that there was a book there. I had never written one, but it just struck me as such fascinating but alien culture. A sport that was thrilling, and yet one that I needed to know more about, and , I thought, that the general public would find interesting. So I tried to call the PBR, never really got a return call, and I sort of dropped the idea until four years later when a literary agency called and asked me if I wanted to write a book. It was sort of incredible how quickly it all came together: the proposal, the publisher, getting started. And I sort of assumed this is how publishing works. (I’m finding out that’s not quite how publishing works.) But it was great for the first run. So I really had no bull riding background. I had covered the primary sports for fifteen years. I had been to the NBA finals, been to the Summer Olympics in Sydney, the Ryder Cup, the Final Four. I had been to a lot of the majors, and had sort of grown a little bit bored of covering those events, so this was something that just piqued my curiosity. I really enjoy getting off the beaten path and immersing myself in a culture that I know little about and try to figure it out as fast as I can.

BC:
One thing you talked about, the “alien culture” of this, and that was something that definitely struck me as I was reading it. When I was a kid, all I wanted to do was be a baseball player. I remember just for hours throwing the ball against the garage or playing with whomever would play, and I just kind of always assumed that that’s what every kid was doing when he was six, seven, eight, ten years old. And so then I’m reading your book, and you’re talking about all these riders who when they were six years old were strapping barrels up to trees, and it absolutely blew my mind. As you talk about this “alien culture” -- it was so completely different. What was that like? Did you get a sense of that from talking to these guys? I assume it’s just the same as me throwing a ball against a garage?

JP:
Well it’s a great observation, and I’m embarrassed to say I never really thought of it in those terms. I never really considered my childhood in a parallel sense to theirs and thought, “My god, what was I doing when they were out riding that bucking bull?” I guess I thought of it in terms of who they were today, and how the culture shaped them. But it is interesting. I tend to agree with you that growing up I was never aware that there were kids out there who didn’t want to become a baseball player, a basketball player, a football player. But you do see that same passion, and I think that most great athletes did grow up with becoming a star of a sport in mind, so it’s not hard to believe that the same passion drove these kids to the point where they get to the PBR.

BC:
Another thing kind of to go with that -- this book, first and foremost, is obviously about the PBR and everything that surrounds it, but I think it’s really at its heart about athletes and competition. In that sense it’s not a whole lot different than a book that might’ve been written about the PGA Tour or major league baseball. Is that kind of what you expected going in? When you envisioned this book were you thinking about just writing about what happens, or all of these individual stories that came out from the different riders?

JP:
I really did go into it a little bit blindly in that I didn’t know exactly what to expect or what it was going to look like in its final form. What intrigued me was getting to know these guys and getting behind the scenes and finding out what this tour was all about. And you’re right, in the end it did unfold like many seasons might unfold, whether it’s baseball, basketball, football. Ultimately maybe I shouldn’t have been surprized. Maybe I fell into that stereotyping of who these guys were and who they might be, and yet there was an incredible variety of personalities and lifestyles on the tour. And in the end I think you do find yourself rooting for certain athletes and identifying with athletes the same way we do when we’re watching the NBA, NFL, or major league baseball. That in a way was kind of refreshing. I think that most people who are flipping through the channels and see bull riding might automatically assume, “Oh, just a bunch of cowboys,” because they don’t know much about that sport or these people. And yet they’re just as diverse -- the athletes -- as you’d find in any sport. Different, but just as diverse. That’s my take anyway.

BC:
One guy I wanted to ask you about because he seemed to occupy a good chunk of the book as well, was Adriano Moraes. What was your experience with him like? He came across in the book as one of the pretty admirable characters.

JP:
Larger than life. Fascinating person. To have dropped out of high school in the ninth grade, and simply to have gotten to the United States and achieved something in his chosen sport I think would be remarkable enough. But to have dropped out in the ninth grade, come to the United States and become an absolute star in that circuit, and someone who’s beloved by the fans, and to have really developed an incredible command of the language is just astounding to me. I guess it sort of reinforces the idea that there are people whose intelligence isn’t necessarily measured well by public schools, or it’s never really channeled in school, because this is one of the most intelligent guys I’ve ever met. Now I’m not sure he could sit down and right you a thesis, but he just had incredible powers of observation which apparently nearly drove him crazy. I remember he came to visit me before the book signing in Beverly Hills, and we were walking along the Santa Monica Pier, and he made a remark about this portrait artist who was drawing some woman’s portrait. He said, "Her eyes are set too wide apart." And we were really walking by pretty briskly. And I stopped and said, “What are you talking about?” And he said, “Well, you know there are some people whose eyes are set apart wider than most of us? I saw that her eyes had been drawn that way, but it wasn’t the case. Her eyes are not set that wide apart.” We went back and we looked, and I was just astonished. He was right. The Learning Channel had some cameras following him because they’re doing a reality series that airs starting in January, and at one point they stopped him. They said, “Adriano, tell us where you are and who you’re with and what you’re doing.” And he said, “Well, right now I’m on the pier in Santa Monica.” And we had just come from Venice. And I’m thinking, Adriano, how did you even know we were in Santa Monica? He said, “Oh, I looked down at the manhole cover and saw it said Santa Monica.” It amazed me, and I was almost embarrassed that we had never had an experience until that point that had really driven home the point that he saw things in snapshots, that really time froze for him. As I walked past that portrait artist and the manhole cover either I saw it as a blur, or I didn’t see it all, and he couldn’t help but see every detail. And then I sort of fully understood why it was that what drove Adriano insane was he couldn’t figure out how he would stay on a bull if it flipped in midair, hooves over head. At first when he told me that, I’m like, well it makes sense that he dropped out of school in the ninth grade. This guy’s an idiot, but he’s fun, so let’s keep talking to him. And then I later discovered that he has this obsession that ties in with an ability. An obsessive quality, I don’t know how I would characterize it, that he can’t help but absorb everything he sees. So I was just blown away by the fact that he didn’t make it through high school, and that we’d typically sort of dismiss him as well, he’s not a very bright guy, and he was a very bright guy.

BC:
It seems like you’re describing someone who’s incredibly detail oriented. As a sports fan I’ve read tons of sports books, and it seems like if there’s anything that great athletes have in common it’s attention to detail, an obsession with detail. You’d think that it would be good enough for Tiger Woods to go to bed at night and tell himself that he’s the best golfer in the world, but instead he has to hit a thousand balls a day or whatever it is that he does. And it seems like it’s probably, from what you’re describing, no different from what Adriano is doing. There was a scene in the book where you described him sitting in a hotel room mentally going over the ride and convincing himself that he had to keep his head over the bull. I guess it’s no different than any world class athlete. Would you agree with that?

JP:
I would definitely agree. I admire it, but it’s also frightening. I haven’t spent time with Tiger Woods, and I haven’t spent time with Barry Bonds, and yet I think having gotten the chance to spend time with Adriano, I know what it’s all about. They simply can’t turn it off. They can’t stop. It’s what makes them great. It’s what also drives them to the edge at times, because they’re so consumed with it. And that’s what I think happened with Adriano. When he went through that horrific season, or at least relatively for him it was horrific, in 2003, that to have failed to measure up to his standards as a bull rider meant he had failed in life. When you’re consumed by something like that I think you tend to let it identify who you are and your worth. But even as he started to succeed I could see him battling that again, his obsession with the whole thing and whatever it was that propelled him to need to be the best at the moment, the best ever. And I think the battle that Adriano fought was one to remember that there was more to life than just being a bull rider, but at the same time allowing himself to concentrate at a level that would allow him to be the best bull rider he could be.

BC:
Before I read this book, like I said, I had very superficial opinions and ideas about bull riding. Another thing that surprized me, both in reading your book and also in watching some of this on TV, was the whole perception of the bulls. I always looked at it as, these bulls are just all the same and these guys are up there riding the bulls. It was really interesting how the bulls are seen -- they’re getting equal billing with the riders. Little Yellow Jacket is actually a star, and I watched a whole half-hour show all about Little Yellow Jacket. And the analysts are talking about them as if they’re athletes, and the other day -- I don’t remember which bull they were talking about...

JP (laughing):
Not as if they were athletes, they really are athletes! Like a horse that’s a thoroughbred!

BC:
You’re right, you’re right! I don’t remember which bull it was, but they were describing how “this bull really gets it. As soon as he throws the rider, he never goes after the rider, he understands the game, he understands the sport. He just goes back into the chute.” And I’m listening to that, and it doesn’t make any sense to me. It’s just a bull, and he’s bucking people off. Can you talk about that a little bit, the “bull as athlete” idea?

JP:
The place you see it come into play most is riders’ styles. Most would prefer to have a bull that spins into their hand, it’s just easier to stay on and maintain their balance that way. And the bucking action. There are certain guys that, because of their size, would prefer a smaller bull, prefer a larger bull, prefer one that spins, prefer one that’s a hard bucker. You probably saw things at one point called “belly rolls,” where the bull sort of jumps up in mid air and twists his body. And funny thing is, the riders say, “Oh, he’s cheating.” As if the bull knows he’s intentionally cheating -- it’s hysterical. “That’s not an honest bull, that’s not an honest bucker,” they’d say. The thing that makes it interesting about the bulls is to see their styles. Some are very predictable in their trip, they’ll always turn out to the left, or always four jumps before they turn back. And that’s where Adriano can really get an advantage because he knows, and has memorized every trip. But there are others that are unpredictable and seem to really have an understanding that they need to surprize the rider, or whatever it is they think is on their back, because their goal is, obviously, to dismount the rider. They clearly don’t like to have anything on their backs, and they understand what it takes to get the thing off their back, the rider. So I think the smarter bulls -- and there’s no question that there’s some difference in level of intelligence among the bulls -- the smarter ones understand what they have to do to get that guy off, it’s not just pure power. There are some great small bulls. I really think, though I haven’t had a chance to interview a bull, that they sense when a rider’s leaning one way, how a rider’s trying to sit up, and I think it’s fascinating. But beyond that as far as, “this bull really gets it,” he threw the guy and that’s all he needs, that’s enough. The one thing you do see, like the riders themselves, these bulls have different dispositions. Little Yellow Jacket’s amazing. I mean, he stands there so regally. Like, “Did you see what I just did? I’m the king.” And then there are other bulls that look like they wanna take out everybody in the arena before they head back into the pen. They’re so damn angry. So it really is fascinating I think, the different personalities. And maybe that’s one thing that helps them market it. I don’t quite understand it, because for my money, and after a year on tour, I never felt myself identifying with a certain bull. For me it was always about the riders and the human connection. But their marketing department obviously knows what it’s doing, because they’re selling a ton of these beanie bulls and people for some reason love the bulls.

BC:
On NBC’s coverage the last day of the finals, Little Yellow Jacket was coming out for his last ride, and you’ll probably remember who the rider was aboard, but the announcer basically said he was clearly rooting for the bull, that a bull like Little Yellow Jacket should not be covered on his last ride. He should be able to buck this guy off and stand in the ring one more time and then walk off into the sunset basically. It was just really interesting to me. We want Michael Jordan to make his last shot and win a championship and retire, and Little Yellow Jacket is obviously on that same plane. That’s how he’s being pitched.

JP:
I’m just gonna contradict something I just said. While I’m not out there saying, “These are my top ten favorite bulls, can’t wait to see this one,” there is something special about Little Yellow Jacket. But again, for me it was the human connection and what the animal had done for the Berger family. And also, I was drawn to that indifference he showed to the rider after the ride. I remember one time Rob Smith, I think I wrote about this in the book, it was in Indianapolis and he had bucked off some rider. And Rob Smith, the bullfighter, tossed his hat at the bull and it just bounced off him. Little Yellow Jacket never even glanced over at Rob. He was so unperturbed, unbothered by the whole thing. I don’t know, there was some majesty about him. Maybe that’s one time where you almost would tip your hat to the bull. I remember Tuff Hedeman -- and maybe it stems a little bit from the riders -- Tuff Hedeman probably almost lost his head and needed hours and hours of facial reconstruction after his collision with Bodacious, the famous bull.

BC:
I remember this, you wrote about this as well right?

JP:
Right. On his next ride he was at the NFR Bull Riding finals, and I believe it was the ninth round where he had drawn Bodacious.

BC:
And this is when he just let him go?

JP:
He turned him out. And although the video doesn’t show this, Tuff tipped his hat to him, which is a pretty remarkable thing. The bull didn’t see him, and I don’t know who the hell else he thought was gonna see him, and yet there was this show of respect. Because the riders somehow see these bulls as more than just animals, or maybe they view them with greater respect than most people would. And he really did see him as a fellow athlete, it was his opposition. I’m still kind of amazed by that. He took his hat off and tipped it at the bull. I don’t think it was a show, I don’t think it was for the fans. It’s clear to me it was a signal like, “I respect you. I respect the hell out of you, and I’m not riding you ever again.”

BC:
Where’s the line between respect and fear? In the book there was one line that stuck out to me, you described this as “the greatest mismatch in sports.” And later on you quoted the tour’s medical director Tandy Freeman saying, “It’s not if you’ll get hurt, but when and how bad.” I wonder if you could talk about that. Is it something the riders can even talk about? Can they talk about the fear, or the idea that every time they sit on a bull they could be killed? Is that something that they can let themselves think? Did that come up at all?

JP:
It did come up. Some of them, I guess, fall back on the machismo and don’t speak about it openly. You’ll often hear Justin McBride say, “I’m not afraid of dying, I’m afraid of losing.” And I’m thinking, “Well, guess what. I bet you’re afraid of dying.” I’m sure there was also a fear of defeat and what that would mean to him. But Adriano told me that every time he got onto a bull, he was afraid, and that’s what kept him sharp. And maybe it’s the same thing for another athlete. I would imagine that every time Barry Bonds walks to the plate there’s a little tension there, and if you’re too relaxed, you’re not going to be at your best. And of course there’s a different situation where if you’re too relaxed you’re really putting yourself at great risk. So in talking to the riders my sense was that fear created this incredible surge of adrenaline that could almost become addictive. And they call them adrenaline junkies, and I think for some of them it absolutely applies. They love that sensation, and it’s one of the reasons they do it.

BC:
So do you think these guys... obviously they’re athletes, but it would be easy to classify them as daredevils, which would maybe kind of diminish what they’re doing, but is there something to that as well?

JP:
Definitely, definitely. They’re willing to do something that, what? Ninety-eight percent of the population, maybe ninety-nine percent of the population wouldn’t dare do. And I think there are certainly a number of them that relish that, and that’s why they are kind of a closed off community. They’ll let you in, but unless you’re a bull rider, you’re really never in. You’re always in interloper. There’s a common denominator: do you have the balls to get on this thing; do you have the balls to get on it again? There are definitely a select few. But you’re right, it does diminish the athleticism involved, and I think that’s an unfortunate thing if it were to happen because one thing I did understand by the end of the year was that it requires an incredible amount of athleticism. These bulls move so fast, and are so powerful, that unless you have amazing agility and strength and quickness, there’s no way you can possibly do it. It’s not just a nutcase trying to hold onto a rope for eight seconds. Maybe these guys don’t have the same regimens, disciplined workout programs you’d see football players going through, but they were great athletes. Justin McBride’s a terrific wrestler, was a decent football player. Adriano Moraes would get in his cowboy boots, would walk along the panels in the pen. I don’t think many people could do it in sneakers, and he did it just as a matter of course. I think at some times he was trying to show people that he was more than a power rider. He has such an enormous left arm and biceps that people think that he’s gonna overpower the bull, which is at some level ludicrous. You’re still riding animals that weigh up to 2,000 pounds, so he might have a little bit of an advantage but you still need incredible balance and intelligence. So I think that sport requires many of the same athletic gifts as any other sport, so marketing the sport as an extreme sport with just a bunch of crazy daredevils, that might widen the audience but I think it does do a disservice to the riders, because they really are athletes.

BC:
Some of the riders were wearing helmets. And it struck me that in this type of a sport that might be frowned upon. Is there any of that going on, or is there gonna be a day when everyone’s wearing a helmet? I see they’re all wearing vests now, I think everybody’s wearing a vest now, is that correct?

JP:
Yes.

BC:
Is there gonna be a day when everybody’s wearing a helmet? It just seems like when you can do everything right and then get kicked in the head, it seems like a helmet might be a good thing.

JP:
Yeah, it certainly does. I think I’d be wearing a couple of helmets. But I don’t think you’ll ever see a day in bull riding where everyone is wearing helmets, because that hat...

BC:
The other thing, even though the helmet seems like a good thing, as I’m watching it on TV -- and I’ve read the book, I’m seeing these 2,000 pound bulls -- as I’m watching it and some guy comes out with a helmet, I’m thinking, this guy looks kind of dorky with this helmet and mask. It’s not nearly as cool, I guess. You can’t flip the helmet.

JP:
Yeah, sadly it’s not. You can’t sail that through the air. It’s unfortunate, considering the risks they’re already taking and the injuries they’re already suffering, it’s totally understandable. They probably should push for these guys to wear the helmet, but it’s a jarring sight. You’re not at a rodeo, but you’re still watching cowboys, and you do think cowboys should be wearing cowboy hats, and that’s what most of these guys think. They’ll come up with all sorts of excuses: I can’t see through the bars, it throws off my balance... And Tandy Freeman the orthopedist is always saying, “Bullshit. We all know what it’s about.” It’s an image thing. And I think that more of the younger guys are wearing them now that they’re required at the junior level. So we will see an increasing number of riders wearing the helmets. And maybe it’ll evolve a little bit like helmets did in the NHL, but I think ultimately we’ll still see some of those cowboys wearing cowboy hats, if only for endorsement purposes. I’m not sure you can sell Marlboros, I’m not sure you can sell Bud Light in a helmet, but you sure as hell can sell it in a cowboy hat.

BC:
I’ve got one last question. As I was reading the book I kept waiting for the chapter to come where you were gonna get on a bull. Either you never got on a bull, or you edited it out at some point.

JP (laughing):
Believe me, I wouldn’t have edited that thing out!

BC:
Were you ever tempted to maybe at least sit on a bull in a shoot or to ride some smaller bull? I’m not saying that I would’ve been, but I’m just curious, I guess, how much George Plimpton is in you.

JP:
Towards the end of the season I wanted to do it, and at the time I got started with this my wife was pregnant and not really excited about the idea of my riding a bull. I’ll cite that as the primary reason rather than my own fear.

BC:
So you wanted to ride a real bull?

JP:
Yeah, a real one.

BC:
Little Yellow Jacket?

JP:
I didn’t want to ride a steer, I didn’t want to ride a sheep, I wanted to ride a bull. And I told Adriano this, and I said, “Look, after the season I want to come down and ride a bull with you.” He said, “At your age you’ll probably die.” The conversation went on, and I thought he was kidding, but I realized he really wasn’t. He was discouraging me because he really thought that I was gonna put myself in danger, and unnecessarily so. I wanted to, I was going to at one point ride early in the process before I started the book, but I had to start it so quickly there wasn’t time to get to a riding school. And then I just sort of got caught up in the season. So to write the book I didn’t really feel like it was necessary. When he discouraged it, I thought, you know, what am I doing here? Do I wanna break my back? Do I wanna come home with both legs? And I guess the impulse or the intrigue sort of faded. I admire these guys, but I don’t feel the itch when I’m back behind the chutes. I imagine it’s an amazing experience, but I would’ve had to suppress so much fear, it’s not like I would’ve done it with incredible enthusiasm. It would’ve been, I’m just gonna try it, but it’s gonna be the scariest damn thing in my life. Had I been younger, I probably would have, but I’m too old and brittle. I’ve covered all sorts of sports without having played them. I don’t think it’s necessary if you do really solid reporting and get to know your subjects.

BC:
I assure you, if this had been a book about, I don’t know, baseball, I certainly wouldn’t have asked you if you had stepped in against Roger Clemens or something, but I figured there was probably a temptation to ride a bull, so I was just curious about that.

JP:
I think it would’ve been more that I did it. And I don’t find myself wondering right now. During the season I did, but not now.

BC:
It could’ve been something that you would’ve regretted.

JP (laughing):
Exactly. Very well put.

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.

My Friend Milton

Here are a few photos from Milton Bradley's visit to my school. Click on the image to see the full-sized photo. Hope you like 'em. For the entire story, click over to my post at OBM.

An inspiring Milton Bradley.

Here's the media crush. We had camera crews from four different local channels as well as a video team from the Dodgers. You might recognize Jim Hill in the front row.

After his talk, Milton took time to sign some autographs.

Me and Milton. I'm the one on the left. The one wearing the tie.

Three students -- and their teacher, of course -- earned a trip to Dodger Stadium the next day. We got to hang out on the field during batting practice, which was nice...

Milton.

Hee Seop Choi, fresh from the batting cage.

Might this be the answer to the Dodgers' current pitching woes?

Milton was nice enough to introduce us to his friend Eric.

My favorite picture. The Dodger dugout just minutes before the national anthem.

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