Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit

by Andy Rooney

  The one rule I would most like to see put into effect—and never will as long as coaches dominate the rules committee—is one that would require a man on the field to call plays. If football is a game of mind and body and there are only eleven men from each team on the field, one of those players should be responsible for making the decision about which play to run. It should be illegal for a coach or anyone on the sidelines or in a booth up in the stadium to send in or signal a play.

  If that seems like a rule that would be too difficult to enforce, make it the honor system. It’s an honorable game.

  Position names have changed over the years. We played with a quarterback, two halfbacks, a fullback, two ends, two guards, two tackles, and a center. In today’s Super Bowl, each team will have forty-five players available and the position names are different. There won’t be anyone called a center on defense. He’s a nose tackle now, assuming the team lines up an odd number of defensive linemen. On offense, the big, slower ends are tight ends and the smaller, fast ones are wide receivers. The tight ends block a lot, and, while they also catch (or drop) passes, they aren’t called tight receivers.

  Originally the quarterback was so called because he didn’t stand back as far as the tailback and fullback in the Single-Wing. His position name has remained the same even though he usually no longer stands even a quarter of the way back.

  Even the language of the game has evolved. Most of the football words used by fans have been popularized by radio and television commentators. Some assistant coach starts using a word in practice as a code for some action. The word is picked up by players and, eventually, by commentators and newspaper reporters hungry for authenticsounding color.

  Most of the words stick for a few years and then disappear in the lexicon of long ago. A few seem to have long lives. During the 1960s, the popular word for what a linebacker did when he abandoned his responsibility for a short pass and tried to break through the offensive line to get the quarterback was “red dog.” I haven’t heard “red dog” in years. Now, what they do is “blitz” and the word seems to be having a longer life than “red dog.”

  One phrase that’s just come into its own this year is “red zone.” Until a few years ago, the area inside the twenty-yard line was simply that, “the area inside the twenty-yard line.” Now it’s regularly being referred to as “the red zone.”

  “Run-and-Shoot” and the “hurry-up offense” are big these days, just the way the “flea flicker” pass and “the Statue of Liberty” used to be, but you can bet those phrases will be put out of their misery just the way “red dog” was. It’s the kind thing to do to an old dog.

  In spite of my failure to be chosen as an All-America during my playing days, I have great memories of it. Football locker rooms are good places. The talk is good, the feeling is good. Even the smell gets to you if you love the game.

  When I go to the stadium, I bring either a small black-and-white television set or a radio. I don’t watch the television set but sometimes, depending on who’s doing the broadcasting, I prefer it to listening to the radio. Other times I stick with radio exclusively. All of the announcers broaden my knowledge of the game I’m watching by pointing out things I didn’t see. Of course, I often feel like pointing out to them things I saw that they didn’t. “Hey, Pat!” I yell to Summerall in my mind. “You missed the block Elliott put on so and so.”

  In addition to the radio and television sets with earplugs, I bring a small pair of good binoculars, a tuna fish sandwich on rye, and a thermos of chicken soup when it’s cold. I am indifferent to the weather. I come prepared, and, except for a few early games when it can be too hot, I don’t care what the temperature is.

  When Sunday dawns cold, gray, and rainy, I invariably am asked whether I’m going to the game anyway. For forty-five years I’ve had the same answer to that question. “Why wouldn’t I go?”

  Rain or snow are of no concern to me at a game. I actually enjoy sitting there, properly dressed and shielded, in a cold rain. The only minor problem I have with rain is that water tends to run up my sleeves when I hold the binoculars to my eyes for long periods.

  Having sat with 70,000-odd strangers every Sunday for all these years, I think I understand fans better than the players do. Players seem to take fans more seriously than fans take themselves.

  While it has become popular to suggest that anyone who spends time watching someone else play a game is an idiot, I happily profess to being one of those idiots. The Super Bowl is one of the highlights of my year.

  If anyone here at the game is one of a small but inevitable number of people who come to every Super Bowl game, not because he or she wishes to but because a husband or friend had an extra ticket, you may wonder why some of us derive so much pleasure from a mere game. I ask you to look for a minute at the headlines in your newspaper any day of the week.

  “RAGING FIRE KILLS 16!”

  “AIRLINER DOWN IN MOUNTAINOUS AREA. ALL 237 ABOARD BELIEVED LOST.”

  “BANKRUPTCIES RISE AS ECONOMY FAILS TO RESPOND.”

  “PARENTS ARRESTED FOR CHILD ABUSE FOR THIRD TIME.”

  “AIDS EPIDEMIC ON INCREASE.”

  Do these tragic events make your day? Does the recent local murder make you happy all over for the rest of the week? Is reading about a raging flood or of corruption in government your idea of a good time?

  It’s for relief from such depressing world events and from the daily pressure of living our own lives that we turn to sports for entertainment. For many of us, there is nothing in all of sports quite as diverting as football . . . and no sporting event as much fun to watch as the Super Bowl.

  The Urge to Eat

  Ice Cream

  Because of the seriousness of our national and international situations, I’d like to say some things about ice cream.

  The three things I have spent the most time thinking about and working with are words, wood and ice cream. Of those three things, it is possible that I’m best with the last.

  Several times a year I fly into a rage as I’m reading a newspaper or magazine article on how to make ice cream. You may notice my hands are shaking this minute. The August issue of a good magazine about food called Bon Appétit arrived in the mail, and I’ve been reading a long feature story in it.

  On the cover the story is called “The Best Homemade Ice Cream.” Inside, the story is called “Ice Cream Greats.” Magazines have gotten in the habit of calling their articles by one name on the cover and by a different name in the table of contents so they’re hard to find. But this is not my complaint. My complaint is about their advice on how to make ice cream.

  Under the heading “Easy Basic Vanilla Ice Cream,” the writer gives this recipe: “2 cups half and half, 2 cups whipping cream, 1 vanilla bean, 8 egg yolks,2/3 cup sugar, 4 tablespoons unsalted butter.”

  This recipe is not easy, it’s not basic and it is not ice cream, it’s frozen custard. The writer gets off to a bad start with me right away when she recommends “half and half.” The assumption everyone makes is that it’s half milk and half cream, but no one really knows what either half is.

  I will tell you right now what easy, basic vanilla ice cream is. It is as much heavy cream as you can afford, enough sugar to make it sweet and enough pure vanilla extract to make it taste like vanilla. That is absolutely all you need to make great vanilla ice cream, and anyone who tells you something different hasn’t made as much ice cream at home as I have.

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  I don’t know why advice on how to make ice cream has been so bad over the years. The freezers they’re selling have gotten a lot better just recently, but articles on how to make it are as bad as ever. When I was young, there were five kids in my summer group. We often made ice cream on hot evenings and it was no big deal. We’d decide to make it at 8:00, have it made by 8:30 and have the whole freezerful eaten by 8:40. The five of us ate it right out of the can with long spoons. It cut down on the dishwashing.

  In the days before hom
ogenized milk, about four inches of cream came to the top of each bottle. The five of us came from three families. We’d go to each icebox and take the top off whatever milk bottles were there, being careful to refill each skimmed bottle to the top with milk from another skimmed bottle. We thought this gave our parents the illusion that we hadn’t taken the cream.

  We used about a quart and a half of liquid, and if we didn’t have enough cream, we filled in with milk or a can of evaporated milk. So, don’t tell me about easy, basic vanilla ice cream that has eight egg yolks, half a stick of butter and a vanilla bean in it.

  Bad or difficult ice cream recipes anger me for an obvious reason, I guess. We all like other people to enjoy what we enjoy, and these recipes are scaring people off homemade ice cream. I’d like everyone to enjoy making it and eating it as much as I do.

  The first recipe in this magazine article after basic vanilla is one for “Prune and Armagnac Ice Cream.” What would you serve with that, white clam sauce or ketchup? The magazine doesn’t even give a recipe for the best ice cream to make in August, peach. To make peach ice cream, add mashed peaches to cream and sugar. Please don’t put a lot of other stuff in it.

  Part of the fascination of making ice cream is the physical principle involved. I know so few physical principles I get great satisfaction in knowing this one. The outside container of an ice cream freezer is wood or plastic. The container that holds the mixture is metal. You pack ice mixed with salt around the metal container. Salt converts ice to water without lowering its temperature. Any action like this consumes energy (heat). Neither wood nor plastic conducts heat the way metal does, so the energy to accomplish the conversion of the ice to water is drawn from the mixture inside the metal can, and when its heat is gone, it’s frozen.

  I’m not as sure about that, of course, as I am about how to make ice cream.

  The Andy Rooney Upside-Down Diet

  T he two biggest sellers in any bookstore are the cookbooks and the diet books. The cookbooks tell you how to prepare the food and the diet books tell you how not to eat any of it.

  The quickest way for a writer to get rich is to write a diet book. A cookbook is more difficult. With a diet book all you need is one bad idea and a lot of statistics on what has how many calories. If you want to make the book thicker, you put in a whole series of typical meals that adhere to your idea.

  As someone who’s been eating too much all his life, I think I’m as qualified to write a diet book as anyone, and as a writer I’m twice as ready to get rich. Not only that, I have an idea. My book would be called The Andy Rooney Upside-Down Diet Book.

  My theory is based on the idea that the average overweight person has to change his eating habits drastically. The overweight man or woman has fallen into a pattern of eating that is making him or her fat, and the only way that person is going to lose weight is for him to turn his eating habits upside down.

  The appetite itself (I’ll say in the Foreword to my book) is a strange mechanism. Our stomach often signals our brain that it’s ready to have something sent down when our body doesn’t really need anything yet.

  As I understand it—and you don’t have to understand things very well to write a diet book—the appetite is depressed as the blood sugar

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  level rises. The trouble is that the blood sugar level rises slowly as your digestive processes start taking apart the food you’ve consumed, so that you can still feel hungry for quite a while after you’ve had enough because your blood sugar level hasn’t caught up to your stomach.

  So much for theory. Here, in brief, is my diet. You’ll want to buy the book later, I imagine.

  Basically, what I’m suggesting you do is reverse the order in which you eat things at a meal, and change the habits you have in regard to what you eat for what meal.

  Forget cereal, pancakes or bacon and eggs for breakfast. We’re going to start the morning with a bowl of chicken soup. Chicken soup will serve a dual purpose. It’s nourishing, not fattening, and because it’s a hot drink you won’t need coffee. If you don’t have coffee, you won’t need sugar. No one is going to be tempted to put sugar in chicken soup.

  The beauty of my diet—and I want them to make this clear on the jacket of my book—is that you don’t have to deny yourself anything. Eat absolutely anything you feel like eating. The magic of my diet is in making sure you don’t feel like eating much.

  Before dinner many of us consume what we call appetizers. Don’t take appetizers off your diet if you like them, just don’t eat them first. In our Upside-Down Diet Book we’ll be laying out more than one hundred weight losing model meals. A typical breakfast might consist of half a grape, a bowl of chicken soup and plain butter, no toast.

  Lunch might consist of ketchup, a Fig Newton, two Oreo Creme Sandwiches and lukewarm Ovaltine. In other words, Eat All You Want, but Change What You Want.

  Your main meal will be dinner. Classic cuisine has called for an appetizer first, soup, a fish dish, meat, vegetables and potatoes, followed by cheese and then dessert. We’re going to ask you to shake that up if you want to lose weight.

  Each of our Upside-Down Diet meals will start with a bowl of ice cream or a chocolate eclair. Follow this with a small fish dish or oysters, clams or shrimp with a chocolate sauce. This will have the effect of raising your blood sugar level abruptly, and by the time the main course of oatmeal, corn flakes or Fruit Loops with buttermilk comes, you may not want any at all.

  I don’t want to be greedy, but after the book is published I have high hopes that it will be made into a movie.

  Thin for Christmas

  I’d buy a new suit if I wasn’t about to lose weight. There’s no sense buying a new suit and then having it hang on me after I’ve lost twenty pounds. That’s about what I’ll probably lose, twenty pounds.

  Unlike some people, I know how to lose weight. I’m not going in for any crazy diets. I weigh too much because I eat too much. It’s that simple. I’m not going to count calories or watch carbohydrates, fats and proteins. I’m just going to cut down on food.

  It’s time I did something. All my shoes seem a little short and not as wide as they were when I bought them and I think it’s because I have more weight on my feet. The extra weight makes my feet longer and wider.

  The only thing I’m going to cut out completely is ice cream. I may have a dish of ice cream after dinner tonight but after that, that’s it. No more ice cream until I drop twenty pounds. Or bread. I know who makes the best loaf of bread in America and I eat too much of it. No more bread, either.

  Another thing I’ll do is cut out second helpings. When I’m asked if I want more, I’ll be strong. “Couldn’t eat another bite,” I’ll say.

  It’s the middle of December. The average person would probably wait until after Christmas to start losing weight but not me. Those people don’t have any strength of character. I’m going to start right now . . . tomorrow, probably.

  I read that it’s a good idea to drink a glass of water before a meal, so I’ll start doing that. Maybe I’ll drink several glasses because I want to drop off some weight in a hurry. The kids will all be home for Christ

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  In his Hacker boat, on Lake George

  mas and I don’t want to hear them saying, “Boy, Dad, you’ve really put on some weight since summer.”

  What made me decide to lose all this weight I’m going to take off, beginning tomorrow, is that for the second day in a row I popped the top button on my pants, the one right above the zipper. It might be that I just happened to get two bad buttons but I don’t think so. Anyway, I’m not taking any chances. I’m going to make it easier on the pants.

  For the past few months I’ve been wearing wider ties because my suit jackets don’t come together and button the way they used to. The wide tie helps fill the gap so that people don’t see a big expanse of shirt in front. Thank goodness I’ll be able to go back to wearing thin ties again pretty so
on.

  It’s going to seem funny being as thin as I plan to get. Some people probably won’t even recognize me, I’ll be so thin.

  “You look great, Andy,” everyone will be saying.

  The least I ever weighed after I got out of college was 183 pounds. The most I ever weighed was yesterday when I hit 221 without even my socks on. I don’t develop a great paunch that sticks out, I gain weight all over. Even my ears are heavier.

  It’s easy to see why a lot of people aren’t as successful at losing weight as I’m going to be. They go for some crazy scheme that doesn’t work. Not me. I’m going to do it the old-fashioned way and simply cut down on everything. After I’ve lost twenty pounds, I may write a book about it.

  Come to think of it, later today I may call my publisher and ask if they’d be interested in a book about my weight loss. How I Lost 20 Pounds in 20 Days, I may call it. That would be a good title, give or take a few days.

  It might even be a good idea if I started a diary the same day I start losing weight. Maybe I’ll start the diary tomorrow, too, then I’ll have the book done at the same time I’m twenty pounds lighter.

  Of course, I don’t want to get too thin. I don’t want to look drawn. Doctors advise against going up and down too fast, so I don’t want to overdo it. Maybe I’ll have an occasional dish of ice cream. It might be better if I didn’t try to get too thin too soon. If I lose weight gradually, it might be a good idea if I didn’t start the book right away, either. I wouldn’t want to finish the book before I’m finished losing weight.

  The Urge to Eat

  No number of books or magazine articles detailing the kind or amount of food I should eat to lose weight will ever convince me that I’m not a person who is just naturally overweight.

  I don’t have a potbelly or great globs of fat hanging from me anywhere in particular. I’m just overweight. There’s too much of me everywhere. Right now I’m up around 210. That may not sound bad but I’m not six foot three.