by Lillian Ross
2000
AN ODE TO GOLF — John Updike
I FELL in love with golf when I was twenty-five. It would have been a healthier relationship had it been an adolescent romance or, better yet, a childhood crush. Though I’d like to think we’ve had a lot of laughs together, and even some lyrical moments, I have never felt quite adequate to her demands, and she has secrets she keeps from me. More secrets than I can keep track of; when I’ve found out one, another one comes out, and then three more, and by this time I’ve forgotten what the first one was. They are sexy little secrets that flitter around my body—a twitch of the left hip, a pronation of the right wrist, a cock of the head one way, a turn of the shoulders the other—and they torment me like fire ants in my togs; I can’t get them out of my mind, or quite wrap my mind around them. Sometimes I wish she and I had never met. She leads me on, but deep down I suspect—this is my secret—that I’m just not her type.
Who is her type? Well, go figure. Fat guys like Craig Stadler and Tim Herron, and skinny wispy guys like Corey Pavin, and lanky skinny guys like Tiger Woods, and grim intense guys like Jack Nicklaus and Ben Hogan, and laid-back jokers like Fuzzy Zoeller and Walter Hagen and Lee Trevino. Golf isn’t exactly choosy, you’d have to say, but she can turn a cold shoulder to anybody on a given date. If there’s one kind of suitor she consistently rejects, it’s the jittery, overanxious types, worrywarts who for all their lessons and driving-range prowess whiff on the first tee and stub a crucial three-foot putt on the eighteenth green. Golf likes a bit of sang-froid, the “What, me worry?” slouch, and spurns those who care too much and try too hard. I’ve tried not caring, but maybe I’ve tried too hard. She’s an intuitive old girl; she sniffs you out. Those extra ten yards you think you can squeeze out of your swing—she’s onto you while the club is still approaching horizontal. She likes guys (gals, too—she’s through with gender hangups) who keep things simple and don’t mind repeating themselves. And that, it breaks my heart to have concluded, lets me out.
So, why do I still love her? Why do I continue to pour hours and treasure into a futile and unreciprocated courtship? Well, she’s awfully pretty. All those green curves, and dewy swales, and snug little sand traps; and the way she grassily stretches here and there and then some. She makes you think big, and lifts your head up to face the sky. When you connect, it’s the whistle of a quail, it’s the soar of a hawk, it’s the sighting of a planet hitherto unseen; it’s mathematical perfection wrested from a half-buried lie; it’s absolute. And golf never lets you go a round without your connecting once or twice. You think she’s turned her back, but, with a little smile over her nicely mowed shoulder, she lets a long putt rattle in, or a chip settle up close, or a seven-iron take a lucky kick off a greenside mound. Another foot to the right, and . . . oh, she is quite the tease.
And quite the accountant, too. How can you not love a game where a three-hundred-yard drive and a two-inch putt count the same? I mean, that’s a sport with a sense of proportion. And the shapely, rhythmic way a round dwindles down, hole after hole, far and then closer, and closer yet and in, a journey ending in a burial and—whoa!—up out of the grave again, eighteen times in all, twice a cat’s number of lives. In other games, somebody else is always getting in your way, all elbows and trash talk, brushing you back from the plate, serving to your backhand, giving you aggravation. Golf lets you do the aggravation all by yourself; there is nothing between you and the hole but what you’ve managed to put there. She’s no flatterer, but she doesn’t grudge credit where it’s due, either: a scuffed drive, a skulled approach, and a putt that would have rolled ten feet past still make a par 3 on the scorecard.
The tools—is it too intimate to talk about the tools, the tender way the leather grips invite the fingers to curl around them and adhere, the grainy grooved faces of the irons, the slither of a club being withdrawn from the bag, the flexing elegance of the tapered graphite shafts, even the merry dimples on the ball and the tiny sensation of give when the wooden tee penetrates the turf? Golf has the equipment to please a man, and she’s not ashamed to use it. She’s been around since the Scots monarchs were stymieing the English and old Tom Morris would spend a drizzly afternoon stuffing a single feathery with duck down; but you’re as young as you feel, and my sweetheart still runs me ragged. And ragged, she keeps letting me know, isn’t good enough. We’d break up in a flash, except we never really got together.
2000
A RUBIN’S GUIDE TO GETTING IT ALL — Nick Paumgarten
FINISH your own sentences, indulge in intimidating rages, mete out arbitrary punishments, look as tall as possible, wear sunglasses, weed a flower bed, boast about how little sleep you need. These are some of the things that Gretchen Craft Rubin would have you do in the pursuit of power, money, fame, and sex. But Rubin resorted to nothing so obvious last week as she sat against the zebra-adorned wallpaper at Gino, the crusty Upper East Side cash-only relic.
Rubin, the daughter-in-law of former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, has just published “Power Money Fame Sex: A User’s Guide.” In form and tone, it is related, distantly, to the “Official Preppy Handbook,” and in content, not so distantly, to primers like Michael Korda’s “Power! How to Get It, How to Use It.” The book lays bare the contrivances of power and gives tips on how to do things right—for example, “curry favor with someone who can protect you from your faults” (page 20) or waste something to signal your wealth: “Try ordering an expensive wine in a restaurant, then leaving it opened and untouched when you leave” (page 129).
Rubin, who is a slim, freckled thirty-four-year-old redhead, was doing a little signalling herself at Gino, however inadvertently. She did not finish her spaghetti (see “waste,” page 129); she unclasped her Filofax to write down an address (how full it was!); and she wore a sleeveless cotton dress with a cool Mondrian pattern (she admitted that she’d thought it would suit the restaurant’s fifties aesthetic). “People become very self-conscious when they read this book,” she said. “A lot of it is pretty reprehensible. But I have definitely applied things from it that I wouldn’t have thought of before, like the self-promotion checklist.”
She has, without apparent embarrassment, thrown herself into the task. She used her Rubin connections to secure blurbs from Kurt Andersen, Ken Auletta, and Harold Evans. She laced her acknowledgments page with the names of powerful people, among them Steven Spielberg and Warren Buffett— though a tip on page 196 indicates that their presence there is a hoax: “Pack your acknowledgements with thanks to several stars in your field. . . . How could anyone ever know that you’ve never spoken to them? (See acknowledgements page.)” And she has helped arrange a book party for herself, later this month, to be hosted by Bob and Judy Rubin, at Michael’s, on West Fifty-fifth Street—a perfect arena for what she calls “proximity power” (page 21).
Gretchen Rubin knows a thing or two about proximity power. Having been the editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal, she clerked for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and served at the Federal Communications Commission as an adviser to its then chairman, Reed Hundt, with whom she now teaches courses at Yale and Columbia on the business and regulation of television. She met her husband, Jamie Rubin, an investment banker at Allen & Company, in the library at Yale Law School: “Our carrels were back to back, just like Bill and Hillary.” Then there’s her father-in-law, who has just signed a $3.3-million contract to do a book of his own.
“Bob Rubin’s a great example, and I’m not just saying this because I’m his daughter-in-law,” she said. “Bob has what I like to call ‘the attraction of prowess.’ He has this air of not having to try so hard. And ‘the attraction of presence’—not having a lot of needs, not being insecure. One of the stories that was told about him in Washington was that every week he was given a certain allotment of the President’s time. But when he didn’t have to see the President he would cede his time and use it for something else. And everybody around him was, like, ‘Oh my God, giving up your time w
ith the President is so amazing!’ ” In the right circumstances, relinquishing proximity power can be the real power move.
“I think Gretchen is enormously talented, but this is her project,” Bob Rubin said the other day, explaining that he didn’t really want to say much about “Power Money Fame Sex.” Here, he was abiding by one of the “pillars of power”: “control information” (page 28). He added, “I have a feeling that her book is going to sell a lot better than mine.” That’s self-deprecation (page 70).
2000
QUIZ WHIZ — Nancy Franklin
YOU may be a person of vast knowledge, able to rattle off answers— Yalta, 1066, the Taft-Hartley Act, Olduvai Gorge, Rogers Hornsby—to all kinds of questions, but unless you’ve been on a television game show you don’t know this: it’s all about the pickle. Several journalists found this out a few weeks ago when they were invited to be mock contestants on “History IQ,” a new quiz show that began in early October on the History Channel and is on at seven-thirty every weeknight. Standing under bright lights in a Manhattan television studio, wired for sound, and with noses and foreheads deglazed by a makeup woman, three writers from three magazines practiced with the pickle, struggled with the pickle, and eventually came to terms with the pickle—the little button on the top of the handheld plastic buzzer (its business end, if you will), the mastery of which can make all the difference between walking away with a twenty-five-thousand-dollar grand prize and walking away wishing you hadn’t told everyone you know that you were going to be on TV.
Before the taping began (the proceedings weren’t going to be broadcast, and no real money was to be given away that day, but the game was taped anyway, to heighten the writers’ feelings of excitement, hopefulness, and nausea), an assistant gave the players a brief tutorial in pickle-handling. She stressed the importance of waiting until the host finished asking a question before applying thumb to pickle, and warned that each time it’s pressed there’s a three-second “lockout,” during which any further pressing won’t register. This forced silence discourages contestants from frantically pressing the buzzer, machine-gun style—like a kid in class going “ Oh oh oh me me me me me!” when the teacher asks a question—and gives the other contestants a chance to have a fair crack at things. Then Marc Summers, the host of “History IQ,” came into the studio and greeted the writers, who were lined up on three platforms set just far enough apart to make fist-fights between the competitors difficult. Summers, a youthful-looking man in his late forties with wavy blond hair, has a substantial résumé as a TV host, and is well remembered by the greatest generation’s grandchildren for his nearly decade-long association with Nickelodeon’s “Double Dare,” a game show for kids that featured messy physical challenges and generous dumpings of green slime (an amalgam of vanilla pudding, apple-sauce, oatmeal, and food coloring) on the little darlings’ heads when they answered questions incorrectly.
“History IQ” consists of three rounds, with one contestant being eliminated after each of the first two rounds. In order to shield the identities of the participants, the three seekers after glory shall be referred to here as A, from Brill’s Content; B, from Newsweek; and Killer, from the magazine that was, as those with a high history I.Q. will know, founded in 1925 by Harold Ross. To satisfy himself that their pickle-pushing skills were up to snuff, Summers asked some warmup questions, such as “Who played the part of Fred Mertz on ‘I Love Lucy’?” Killer got this one, and seemed well on her way to establishing herself as lord of the pickle, but when the pressure was on—when Summers started asking the real questions—it appeared that A had the best mind-thumb coordination, and he got to answer the first question, which was about Ford’s famous fifties dud, the Edsel. In an aside to each other, B and Killer, huddling together for warmth in their cave of failure, confirmed that they, too, knew the answer, and tacitly agreed to blame the equipment. Things were all A and B for a while, and B had an impressive run with some questions related to Caesar (the emperor and the salad), but Killer made an unexpected surge when the subject turned to the Dust Bowl, and before B knew what had hit him he was walking away with an empty wallet and a consolatory “History IQ” T-shirt, muttering the kind of thing people in his position always mutter—you know, something about how he had to get back to the office anyway, because he had a deadline.
Killer began the second round with four hundred dollars and A with three hundred and fifty, and it would be too cruel to explain in detail exactly how it was that Killer ended the round with a thousand dollars and A with two hundred and fifty. Perhaps it had to do with Killer’s having some twenty years on A, or perhaps A was having a problem with his pickle; all that really needs to be said is that by the time a question about the Titanic came around—a subject whose lore Killer happens to know fore and aft—A was beginning to understand how Ernie Els must feel when he’s paired up with Tiger Woods.
The third round of “History IQ” is the hardest, or so Killer has reported. After the second-round loser, smiling politely on the outside and crying like a baby on the inside, has been led away, the remaining contestant sits alone at a console with an electronic touch screen on it and attempts, in sixty seconds, to match ten headlines of a given decade with the correct year. Killer’s ten headlines covered the years 1931–40, and she got only three of them right: the years that Prohibition ended (1933), Huey Long was shot (1935), and “The Wizard of Oz” was released (1939). Still, each correct matchup was worth five hundred dollars, so the sting of Killer’s ignorance was supplanted almost immediately by the glow of having earned twenty-five hundred theoretical dollars in a half hour—enough to buy some really nice theoretical clothes or go on a theoretical romantic vacation for two. And Killer, having climbed out of the dustbin of history once, has declared that she could do it again any old time. A and B, however, have not answered calls for a rematch, which, in truth, is completely understandable—they are only human, and there are few among us who could stand losing to a pickle twice.
2000
PROVERBS ACCORDING TO DENNIS MILLER — Johnny Carson
1. A rolling stone . . . if not acted upon by any force will keep rolling in a straight line at the same speed.
2. Every cloud has . . . water vapor that has the potential of producing ice crystals or raindrops, depending on the Bergeron or coalescence process.
3. The grass is always greener . . . if it receives an adequate supply of C55H70MgN4O6.
4. A penny saved . . . if doubled every day for two months would be worth more than the combined GNP of the industrialized nations of the world.
5. A bird in the hand . . . is dead or alive, depending on one’s will.
6. What goes up . . . will stay up if it has an escape velocity of 11.3 kilometres per second.
7. When the cat’s away . . . the mice will play cautiously if it’s Schrödinger’s cat.
8. People who live in glass houses . . . are surrounded by a strange hybrid of solid liquids or liquid solids.
9. Nothing is certain but death and . . . Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.
10. There’s a time and place . . . but not before the big bang.
2000
THE GOODEST GUYS — David Remnick
SOMETIME after midnight, Joe Torre walked slowly into a low-slung “media room” in the bowels of Shea Stadium carrying a flute of champagne. He held his glass with pinkie-out panache, as if he had trained all his life for a role in “Design for Living,” but his face registered nothing like serenity or elation. His jowls slumped, his eyes were funereal, red-rimmed. He’d been crying for a while now, unashamed, burying his face in the crook of his arm, hugging his wife, his players, even George Streinbrenner (what a man must do!). Now he eased into his chair with an exhausted old-guy sigh. It was as if this victory—leading the Yankees to their third straight World Series title, the first team to three-peat since the Oakland A’s did it, twenty-six years ago—was merely a relief, the relief of not failing.
Where was the crowing? Wher
e was the joy? Even now, flanked by Andy Petitte, who had pitched the night through with such intelligence and gall, and Luis Sojo, the lumpy role player who’d whacked home the winning runs off Al Leiter in the top of the ninth, Torre focussed most keenly not on the highlights, the big hits, but, rather, on the game’s slender margins. His hair slick with Mumm’s and Bud, the shampoo of champions, he sensed the abyss. With two out in in the bottom of the ninth, the Yanks leading 4–2, and a man on base for the Mets, Mike Piazza had cracked one to center field off the most indomitable man on the Yankee payroll, Mariano Rivera.
“I screamed, ‘No!’ ” Torre said. “It was probably the most scared I’ve been.”
Only when Bernie Williams trotted back nearly to the warning track, looked up into the cool hazy night for the ball, and found it spinning into his glove for the last out—only then could Torre afford to think something other than the worst.
“Anytime Piazza hits a ball in the air, it’s a home run in my mind,” he said.
It was infinitely worse, of course, down the hall. One after another—Piazza, Leiter, Benny, Fonzie—the Mets tromped heavily through Shea’s tunnels. They had that vacant, battle-weary stare you see in First World War prints. They didn’t speak, didn’t acknowledge their wives, their heartbroken kids. Their steel spikes clicked on the concrete floor.
Bobby Valentine, the Mets manager, answered for them all, but he blamed only himself. He’d left his pitcher in too long. Leiter, like all true starters, had promised his manager everlasting endurance, and so Valentine followed his heart and not the cold logic of the scorecard. “I was wrong,” Valentine said. “It was the wrong decision, obviously. If I’d brought somebody else in, they definitely would have gotten the guy out, and we’d still be playing.” And then he walked off and hugged the Mets co-owner, Fred Wilpon, hugged him hard, a terrible embrace.