I'm Back for More Cash

by Tony Kornheiser

  The University of Cincinnati has been the Bearcats for one hundred years. And Cincinnati is a good athletic school. Its basketball team is number one in the country now. Everyone will assume that Binghamton stole the nickname from Cincinnati. And, let’s face it, stealing from Cincinnati is about as desperate as it gets. I mean, what a dump. If Binghamton is the way your foot smells, Cincinnati is the way your foot tastes.

  If you’re going to steal somebody’s nickname, steal something with power and majesty. Call yourselves the New York Yankees.

  (The Smelt is looking better, isn’t it?)

  Not only isn’t “Bearcats” original, but the logo they picked is almost exactly the same as that of the NHL’s Florida Panthers. So we’ve got a phony-baloney animal and a rip-off logo. It’s all schmutz.

  As an alumnus in good standing (well, okay, an alumnus still standing), I am herewith ripping up the $50,000 check I had just written to the Binghamton Alumni Association.

  And they can forget about a major donation until they come up with a nickname that stands for something. Something that says it all. How about the Binghamton Balding Kornhuskers!

  I Dig a Pony

  When I was a kid reading comic books, I used to see an ad in the back for something called White Cloverine Brand Salve. There were pictures of swell things you could get, depending on how many tins of salve you sold. Stuff any nine-year-old would want: an Army helmet, a pail, a penknife to kill Hitler with.

  Most of the gifts you could get for selling fifty to one hundred tins. But under a big picture of a happy, towheaded boy in a cowboy hat petting a pony was the magic number: eight hundred. Sell eight hundred tins of salve and get a pony! While the other kids walked to school, I could come gallivanting in on a horse. That was my first real fantasy. Hey, I was nine.

  I would gaze at the picture and think: Man, that kid must be Dale Carnegie combined with Dwight Eisenhower to unload eight hundred tins. I couldn’t imagine selling White Cloverine Brand Salve to anybody with an IQ higher than a head of lettuce. To this day, I’ve never seen a single tin of salve in anyone’s home. I doubt that I’ve even heard the word “salve” since 1962. It went out with Fabian.

  Everybody in my family was big on getting something for nothing. My mom used to save S&H Green Stamps. We only bought groceries in stores that gave stamps, even if it meant we had to buy the disfigured potatoes stamped “Disinfect Before Cooking” and dented cans of waxed beans. I can’t remember what we were saving for—no doubt something impractical like a vacuum cleaner, instead of a pony. It was my job to lick the stamps and paste them in books. The stamps tasted like the backseat of a Studebaker. I used to wonder how many books I’d need to get a new tongue.

  Anyway, that was in a simpler America, an America where a guy named John Glenn was about to blast off into outer space, an America where your president wasn’t playing hide the White Owl with an intern. (But who knows? He may have been playing it with Marilyn Monroe.) Back then, when you got gifts in return for opening up an account at a bank, you got an alarm clock or a scratchy horse blanket—not a pretentious bottle of oak-barreled Australian chardonnay. (Your old man would’ve said, “Gimme the clock. I don’t want anything made from grapes some kangaroo stepped on.”)

  This may be a more complicated America, but the gimmick never changes. The lure of getting something for nothing has been going on all my life. Today, the gimmick is “points” you accumulate for using a certain credit card, or staying at a certain hotel chain, or choosing a certain long-distance carrier.

  I have one credit card where for 15,000 points I can get a cordless drill; for 59,500 I can get a PalmPilot. Oh, did I mention that to get each point you have to spend one dollar? So I can get this PalmPilot for almost $60,000, or I can drive to a store and buy it for about $500. I guess it depends on when I need it—now, or in the year 2525.

  The problem with these gift programs is that I don’t need any of the junk they offer. I already have a cordless drill. Give me something I need. How many points for a hair transplant?

  Or a hip replacement?

  How about a night at the Mustang Ranch?

  I also have all kinds of miles on airlines, but airline tickets are wasted on me, since I hate to fly. It’s like offering free antlers to an Oldsmobile.

  My neuroses are killing me in today’s travel-oriented gift market. I once cashed in enough hotel points to get a six-night stay in Florida, and the hotel chain threw in a free airplane ticket (afraid to fly), a free cruise ticket (afraid of boats), a free amusement park package (afraid of roller coasters and other airborne rides), a free hang-gliding lesson (you gotta be kidding me), and two free dinners at the hotel restaurant. (I should drive all the way to Miami and eat in the hotel?)

  My sportswriter colleague Michael Wilbon informs me he has 1.6 million miles with American Airlines. I believe this entitles Wilbon to actually fly the plane. But that’s bupkus compared with the number of miles John Glenn must have accumulated over the last thirty-five years in order to get a free trip on the space shuttle.

  My editor Rich says he wants to earn points toward a “guaranteed majestic afterlife.” Rich wants a reincarnation card. “I don’t want to come back as a dung beetle.” (Actually, people who know Rich think it would be a step up for him to be a dung beetle.)

  I want to go back to the old days, when “something-for-nothing” meant you really got something. Before the Real Estate Agent from Hell came up with the idea of a “free” weekend in a resort community, with golf, boating, and gourmet dining—and all you have to do is attend a “brief seminar.” So you drive two hundred miles, and after three hours of being trapped in a room with a guy trying to sell you a time share in this mudhole, where the mosquitoes are as big as Al Roker, you flee for your life without even picking up the free bonus gas grill.

  My friend Nancy remembers clipping coupons from the back of cereal boxes that got her land in Alaska. This was in the ’50s, before they discovered oil, when nobody thought of living in Alaska, not even Ted Kaczynski.

  “I’m guessing somebody has built on my land,” Nancy said.

  How much land do you think you have?

  “I think you got one square foot per cereal box,” Nancy said. “So I probably have eight square feet. But it could be right on the pipeline. I could be the next Jed Clampett!”

  She can have Alaska.

  I’m fifty. I don’t have much time left.

  I want the pony.

  The Kornheiser Papers

  Note to readers: The following manuscript was discovered in a doorway in an abandoned building on Fifteenth Street, where it was being used as bedding. Apparently, the document was written by Tony Kornheiser during his “vacation period” last August. Presented to literary historians, the “Kornheiser papers” have been tentatively authenticated (pending DNA tests on the suspicious stains) and published here for the first time. Now we ALL have something to be thankful for.

  My doctor, Lester, likes to introduce me as his “marginally famous friend.”

  I once asked him to define “marginally famous,” and he responded, “Do you remember the Turtles?”

  I did. They had a few hits in the ’60s, including “Happy Together,” which featured these unforgettable lyrics: “We’re happy together … How is the weather?”

  “Well,” Lester said, “now, thirty years later, you might be more famous than their drummer.”

  So I am marginally famous. How marginal became clear to me when I was a “celebrity” in a golf tournament recently featuring former great athletes like Bo Jackson, Dave DeBusschere, Yogi Berra, Jerry Kramer, Bobby Thomson, and Ralph Branca.

  As the golfers gathered by the first tee, I walked over to the people in my group and introduced myself.

  “I’m Tony Kornheiser,” I said, thinking that was sufficient.

  There were four of them: Gene, Edgar, Jeff, and Ryan. Four players and one celebrity is the usual format.

  We stood there a while, the five of us,
and then Edgar asked Gene, “Who is our celebrity?”

  I said softly, “Um, I am.”

  They regarded me curiously, the way they might regard a big bowl of cranberry sauce on a city bus.

  “What do you do?” Edgar asked me.

  I explained that I write a column that appears in many fine newspapers throughout North America, including the Rhinoceros Times in North Carolina, the Sebring Shopping Guide in Florida, and the Daily News of Prince Rupert, British Columbia. I also do a daily radio show for ESPN, and I am occasionally on TV. I offered to provide Edgar with references.

  Edgar gave me a blank stare. “I’ve never heard of you,” he said.

  I felt like I was the mystery guest on What’s My Line? and the panelists were still stumped even after they’d removed their blindfolds. Or maybe I was the million-dollar question on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (Who is Tony Kornheiser?) and not even Regis Philbin, who had the answer in front of him, was confident.

  “I was hoping for Yogi Berra,” Edgar said.

  I got prepared for a long afternoon, but after a few holes it all smoothed out. Edgar pulled out a cell phone and called his sister in Washington, where I am widely known as a media whore, and she’d heard of me, so I was aces with Edgar. More important, Gene turned out to be a partner in the famous steak house Smith & Wollensky, which just opened downtown, and he gave me his card and told me to be his guest. What good would that have done Yogi Berra? At his age, he shouldn’t eat red meat.

  To show the flip side of marginal fame, the next week I went to Syracuse, New York, to do my radio show from our affiliate there, and I was treated like a god. I was chauffeured around in a stretch limousine. The Hotel Syracuse put me in the Governor’s Suite—and it’s a good thing the governor wasn’t there, because it could have gotten very crowded in the bathroom, bada-boom.

  The greatest honor of all was: I was asked to throw out the first pitch before a Syracuse Sky Chiefs baseball game. I heard I was chosen ahead of the bass player from the Turtles. The Sky Chiefs are a farm team for the Toronto Blue Jays, and the best part was I got one of those satin warm-up jackets the players wear. It’s blue with red sleeves and SKY CHIEFS is written in script across the chest. But my eyes are so bad I thought it said “Sky Chefs,” and I assumed the team was sponsored by an airline caterer.

  When I got to the ballpark, I panicked that I wouldn’t be able to reach home plate from the pitcher’s mound. So I began throwing baseballs in the tunnel leading to the dugout. I was horribly wild. A couple of Sky Chiefs walked by and looked at me—fat and fifty, straining to throw strikes in a satin jacket—and one said to the other, “Man, this geezer better not give up his day job.”

  After five minutes, I had completely thrown out my arm, of course, and I was estimating how much rotator cuff surgery would cost me when I was led to the dugout and introduced to the Syracuse manager. I told him I was afraid I might be so wild that my pitch might sail past the catcher and hit the screen behind home plate. He laughed and said, “You’ll fit right in. Most of my pitchers do that.” Then he told me, “Stick around, I might use you in the late innings.”

  I heard the public address announcer call my name, and to my great relief some people cheered for me—the others weren’t saying, “Booooo,” they were asking, “Whooo?” I walked out to the pitcher’s mound and waved to the crowd like I imagined a real celebrity, someone like Leeza, would.

  As the catcher knelt at home plate getting ready for the pitch, I wound up—and hummed a fastball at the mascot, a grown man dressed like a fuzzy parrot, who was standing twenty feet up the third-base line. I popped him in the stomach, and he took an elegant pratfall. Folks in the stands laughed, which was music to my ears. The only discouraging word came from the mascot, who said, “I was hoping for Yogi Berra.”

  A Genuine Anthony, and What a Bargain

  Okay, here is my drawing. Actual size. I call it Cat on Lined Paper.

  How much am I bid for it?

  I show you my drawing because the other day a drawing of a horse by Leonardo da Vinci, a drawing not much bigger than my stunning Cat on Lined Paper, went for $11.48 million.

  This set a record for works by Leonardo. And I quote from The Washington Post story now: “It also tied the record for Old Master drawings, established just last year for Michelangelo’s Study for the Risen Christ.”

  “Old Master” drawings? This is an official category? There’s like, what, an “Old Masters” committee that meets and votes these guys in?

  “I’d like Old Masters for five hundred, Alex.”

  Who else is in the Old Masters—other than Jack Nicklaus?

  No, really, someone actually came up with an official art category “Old Masters”? How old do you have to be to be an Old Master? Is it very stringent, like “Dead, buried, rotted, to dust”? Or can you be automatically notified of your membership with a form letter, like with AARP?

  “Congratulations, Mr. LeRoy Neiman, over the protests of art critics everywhere you just achieved Old Master status.”

  Now I understand that art is a specialized taste. A lot of people skim right over the art stories. When I mentioned that some small drawing by Leonardo da Vinci sold for big bucks, my friend Cindy shrugged it off, saying, “Big deal. It’s not like it’s a Leonardo DiCaprio.” But my position is: We can all use a little more culture.

  Not that money should be the reason we artists—Leonardo and I—draw. But I feel compelled to report that this particular drawing, which will now line art historian J. Carter Brown’s pockets with 11 million simoleons, was originally bought by Brown’s father for $2,800. This is known in the art trade as “letting the big dog eat.” Incidentally, the drawing was purchased by an anonymous buyer who reportedly said he was “looking for a small horse thing to hang in [his] den, near the lithographs of the dogs playing poker to, you know, pull the whole room together.”

  After the sale, Brown described himself as “beaming from ear to ear.” Duh! Brown said he would have liked to give the Leonardo to a public institution, but it represented too big a portion of his estate. I understand completely. That’s why I sell my used pants.

  Let me continue with the news story: “His tiny drawing, only five inches by three, may not be the ‘great world masterpiece’ that Michelangelo created in his Risen Christ. It isn’t one of Leonardo’s top ten drawings, as one expert pointed out. It may not even be in his top forty, or one hundred.”

  Hmmm. “Only five inches by three.”

  This is not a size we generally associate with art; this is a size we generally associate with MotoPhoto. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but when I spend $11.5 million on a drawing I don’t expect it to be the size of some cheesy Dale Earnhardt commemorative stamp from Mordovia. Come on, three by five? I have refrigerator magnets bigger than that. This thing is the size of a Post-it. When Brown’s father originally bought it, did he use it as a coaster?

  You know what most people call a three-by-five-inch drawing on paper?

  A freakin’ doodle!

  I can do that. I did do that. See Cat on Lined Paper.

  Now what about the assessment that this particular Leonardo drawing of a boy on a horse—a horse that isn’t completely finished, as opposed to my fully realized cat—“isn’t one of Leonardo’s top ten drawings … may not even be in his top … one hundred”? (There’s a list of Leonardo’s top one hundred drawings? Where does the list run, USA Today?)

  I can assure you Cat on Lined Paper is in my top ten.

  And Cat … is not a sketch for another painting, like this Leonardo: “The drawing is a study for a figure in the background of Leonardo’s Adoration of the Magi.” I’m not giving you cheap background-filler figures here. You get the whole cat. And you get it on paper just like Leonardo. Plus, I will personally deliver it to your home, with an order of kung pao chicken. Let’s see Leo do that.

  And here’s what people who know art have said of my work: My friend Sally, a sophisticated New Yorker who ate lunch on the
steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art every Thursday for four years while attending the Clara B. Spence School for Young Ladies (motto: “You’ll Wear These Kilts and Like ’em, Missy”), called Cat on Lined Paper “a work of casual magnificence … emblematic of Mr. Tony’s oeuvre.” She added: “It shares with Leonardo’s masterpiece an unstudied nonchalance.”

  And when I asked her, just for the historical record, of course, “What will future generations make of my cat?” Sally said without hesitation, “They’ll look back and see the art that was concealed within your art.”

  So there.

  Let’s start at $2 million.

  You Get What You Vote For

  Dubya’s Dumb Luck

  Hi, I’m George W. Bush, and I’m running for president.

  Admittedly, my campaign has been in trouble lately. Near as I can figure, the criticism boils down to three things: I’m distant and I’m dumb.

  I’m going to change all that.

  I have a new strategy. I’m not going to be distant anymore. I’m going to let America see me for who I am. I’m just like you, a hard worker who learned his business from the ground up, by starting out as the humble owner of a major league baseball team.

  So I went on Oprah.

  Wasn’t I great?

  I didn’t even fall for that trick question she asked me: “What’s your favorite sandwich?”

  Are you kidding me? Take a look at Oprah. Like Oprah could care what anyone else likes to eat. She was just hoping I’d brought a sandwich with me.

  I had only one slip-up. I told her my favorite song was “Wake Up Little Susie” and that Buddy Holly sang it. But I quickly corrected myself and said it was the Everly Brothers. Everyone knows Buddy Holly sang “Chances Are.” Even Adam Clymer. I love the Everly Brothers. I’m told they played a concert at the Birchmere a few weeks back. I don’t want to say the crowd was old, but when they gathered around the stage to try to get the Everly Brothers to do an encore by lighting matches, their oxygen tanks exploded.