The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town (Modern Library Paperbacks)
Page 50
They’re amazing, these scenes. No one’s died, everyone’s rich, it’s a kid’s game, and yet . . . For a few minutes, for the cameras, partly out of joy, partly from a sense of ritual, the winners douse each other with champagne. They drench the mayor, toast the owner. But it breaks up pretty quickly, and even some of the players, most of them not yet as careworn as Torre, look strung-out, overtired, impatient to go home. It was as if they were beginning to realize that the smell coming up from the locker-room rug was worse than a frat house on a Sunday morning. Enough. “Can’t a guy get a shower around here?” Derek Jeter said. It was time to go get lost.
ROGER Clemens tore back the plastic sheeting that covered his locker, grabbed his pants, and said to no one in particular, “This champagne is burning my eyes.” And that was pretty much all he’d said in days.
Like it or not, the lasting image of this World Series will undoubtedly be that of Clemens winging that broken bat back at Piazza in the first inning of Game Two. Aesthetes and true fans everywhere will prefer to talk into the night about the more elevated moments: how two of the most brilliant pitching performances of the Series—El Duque’s in Game Three and Leiter’s in Game Five— were, in fact, defeats; we’ll look to Paul O’Neill’s triples and masterfully long at-bats, to his helmet-slamming moments of frustration even as he hit for a Series average of .474. But the broken-bat tape is forever. Baseball’s Zapruder film, some of the TV guys called it. The next morning, Don Imus was on WFAN joking about the “second-bat theory” and some columnists were talking in terms of a psychotic episode. In the News, Mike Lupica referred to Clemens and his “Mike Tyson moment.” Some beat writers and columnists for the dailies even felt that Piazza and the Mets had betrayed the imperatives of retribution and machismo in failing to rush the mound and pummel the pulp out of Clemens. “Meek the Mets” was the headline over Wallace Matthews’s attack in the Post.
The sanest reaction, I thought, came from Piazza himself. For World Series week, Piazza had agreed to an old tabloid tradition. He would “write” a daily column for the Post; that is, he would let the paper run his postgame quotes in the form of a bylined article. He was angry, but mainly he was bewildered by the “bizarre” incident; most of all, he resented that the press was asking him why he had not gone after Clemens. Grow up, Piazza counselled the hysterics: “The situation happened. It’s done. Argue it left and right. O.K., should I go out and bleeping kill the guy? It’s the World bleeping Series and I get suspended, now I can’t bleeping play in the World Series. So I go out and kill the guy, I’m bleeping selfish and I look like a hero to some guys. Meanwhile we go out and bleeping lose the World Series ’cause I’m suspended for a couple of games. Anybody else who is not in that position doesn’t know what the bleep they’re talking about. Sorry about the bleeps. The more I write, the more emotional I get.” (Join the bleeping club, Mike.)
“Emotion” was the very word Clemens used to describe his (a) confusion, (b) transgression, (c) regression, (d) all of the above. Ever since Clemens beaned Piazza in July, the great tabloid narrative had been building to this confrontation. He was in a frazzle prior to the game and worse when the first inning ended. Before coming out for the second, Clemens was like an overwrought kid giving himself a “timeout”: he went off to a special room to be alone and settle down.
Clemens is thirty-eight now, and he has been tightly wound for as long as he has been in the majors. Lupica’s Tyson analogy—with its hint of gnawed-upon ears—is extreme, but Clemens does gear up for his starts like a fighter. To strengthen his hands, he fills a big bowl with uncooked rice and squeezes handfuls of it. His house is filled with exercise machines. Every time he pitches, he comes close to destroying his arm. His freezer is loaded with bags of ice that he uses to stem the inflammation. When Clemens was pitching for the Red Sox, the team’s physical therapist, Rich Zawacki, said, “I’ve never seen a pitcher whose body breaks down the way his does in a game. . . . Basically, we wind up piecing him back together from game to game.” And that was ten years ago. “If someone met me on a game day, he wouldn’t like me,” Clemens told Sports Illustrated back then, and things haven’t changed at all. “The days in between, I’m the goodest guy you can find. On the day of a game? If I’m watching television with you, I’m not hearing you, and I’m not hearing the television. . . . I want to be relentless. I want to pound guys. Once you pound guys, everything is quicker. I know how it is. I know how I felt those times when I started out against Nolan Ryan or Tom Seaver or Dwight Gooden. I know how guys feel when they face me now.”
THE rest of the country, or much of it, according to the TV ratings, thought of the Subway Series as the ballyard equivalent of the Iran-Iraq war: “A pox on ’em both.” “At least, one New York team has to lose.” That sort of thing. And, truth be told, there were moments that you didn’t necessarily want aired west of the Hudson. It was not a source of great pride, for example, to see the governor, George Pataki, sitting in his box at Game One wearing a Yankee sweatshirt and taking as his ballpark refreshment . . . white wine. Nor was there any happy explanation for the way some Yankee fans discovered a rationale for booing Piazza every time he came to bat.
But there were countless true fans, crazed fans, intelligent fans everywhere, all over the city. For Game Five, at Shea, I sat up in the mezzanine near the left-field foul pole. I had on my right a friend who saw his first World Series game in 1941, the Mickey Owen dropped-third-strike game. He had the equanimity of his years, dividing his admiration between O’Neill’s twilight struggles and Leiter’s march to Waterloo. On my left was a Mets fan, one Joyce Mandelkern, of Port Washington, Long Island, whose comments to her husband all night were so quick and insightful, and whose emotions were so raw, that I couldn’t resist getting to know her. She told me that when she watched the Mets at home, she turned off the sound to keep the tension at a manageable level, and that when things got out of control she’d go to her garage and sit in the car.
“Sometimes, it’s just too unbearable,” she said.
The awful moment came Thursday night at 11:42 P.M. Top of the ninth. Yankees up. Men on first and second. Luis Sojo at bat. Al Leiter readied himself on the mound. Joyce Mandelkern of Port Washington buried her face in her arm.
“I can’t watch this!” she said.
Then came the pitch.
2000
AN ANALOG TO AST TO THE DIGITAL AGE — Lillian Ross
IT was name-dropping paradise the other night in the Four Seasons Grill Room, at a party thrown by Toni Goodale—identified in impressively comprehensive publicity handouts as a big-time fund-raising and management consultant for social services, performing arts, education, and whatnot; and as a competitive tennis player, youth hockey coach, and an awful lot more. Her husband, James Goodale, was identified likewise as a big-time First Amendment lawyer, Times general counsel during the Pentagon Papers case, Yale grad, and host of the PBS talk show “The Digital Age.” The purpose of the party was to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the show.
The ceiling of the Grill Room was covered with thousands of giant balloons, and the floor held a lot of the people who had appeared on Goodale’s show discussing such “Digital Age” topics as “Is There a Place for Two Tabloids in N.Y.C.?” (Mort Zuckerman); “If I Were to Do It All Over Again in the Digital Age” (Dan Rather); and “Can an All-Newspaper Company Make It?” (Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.). Right off the bat, the “Digital Age” alumna Robin Byrd turned up, grinning to beat the band and partaking of the lobster and caviar canapés. She was wearing an Austrian-crystal-studded leather bustier, black leather pants, and black patent-leather mules with six-inch stiletto heels.
“This is a great mix,” she said enthusiastically, looking around the room and spotting Dan Rather, William Bratton, Howell Raines, Charlie Rose, Peter Duchin, Carl Bernstein, and Kenneth Starr. “It looks like not many are under the age of fifty or sixty. Nobody’s talking digital to me,” she said. “I was one of Jim’s first guests. I pioneered cable
twenty-five years ago. Time Warner tried, but failed, to get me off the air. I’m not digital, but I have a Web site and I want to get a Webcam at my house on Fire Island. I could be in my apartment on Sixty-seventh Street and see the ocean waves in front of my house. Otherwise, all that digital means to me is higher electric bills.”
Victor Navasky, who is the publisher and editorial director of The Nation, and who has an elegant, patriarchal white beard, said he wasn’t digital, either: “Everything starts with print on paper.” Navasky said that he had assigned one of his students at the Columbia School of Journalism to come to the party. “I asked her to find out if the media élite go to parties with each other in order to do business together,” he said. “And, if so, is that a good thing or a bad thing?”
Ben Bradlee was in no mood to consider such philosophical questions. “I’m here because my wife, Sally, was Toni Goodale’s roommate at Smith,” he said. He opened his hands, spread his fingers, and held them up as though in surrender. “It has nothing to do with the digital age, if that’s what we’re in. I use my computer only as a word processor. I don’t do E-mail or go on-line.”
“Me, neither,” said Morley Safer, the “60 Minutes” man. “I’m not giving up my typewriter.”
“Me, neither,” said Avery Corman, the author. “I’m here for Toni. I met her in tennis. She was a fourth in doubles. I’m working on a musical with Cy Cole-man about the American Yiddish theatre. But I’m not a computer person. I don’t even know anybody at this party except Toni. Who’s the new media?”
“Me,” answered a skinny young man. He was the youngest-looking person in the room. “Jeffrey Dachis,” he said, offering his hand to anyone who would take it. He offered it to Michael Bloomberg, who took it coolly. “I’m Razorfish. C.E.O.,” Dachis said.
“Razorfish?” a woman nearby asked. “What is it?”
“We design Web sites for companies,” Dachis said.
“I know what you do,” Bloomberg said evenly.
Dachis blossomed.
“The digital divide is closing between the haves and the have-nots,” a man in a dark suit murmured to the young C.E.O.
Bloomberg turned and headed in the direction of Ben Bradlee and Harold Evans and Tina Brown and Arthur Sulzberger and Tom Brokaw.
A gentleman introduced himself as Tom Goodale, the brother of James. Tom, unlike his sibling, looked well rested, tanned, and carefree. He said that he knew hardly anybody at the party. “I go on cruise ships and dance with all the single ladies,” he said. “I don’t worry about the digital age. I’m out of it.”
Robin Byrd approached, and Tom Goodale stared hard at her bustier.
“Somebody said I was just talking to Kofi Annan,” she said. “But I wasn’t. It was Carl McCall. Everybody is addressing him as ‘Governor.’ Is he running, or something?”
“The Goodales are taking the McCalls to St. Bart’s after Thanksgiving,” somebody said.
James Goodale got up to make a speech. “For a media lawyer, this is media fantasy camp,” he said. “My friend Ben Bradlee has been bucking me up by saying, ‘Hey, Goodale! There are more people here tonight than watch your show.’ ” (Much laughter.) He plowed gamely on: “We are truly in the digital age. I like to think I am in the middle of the greatest revolution since the Industrial Revolution.” (Much applause.)
Victor Navasky paused at the head of the stairs leading to the exit. He said that his student had reported back to him about whether the media élite did business with one another at parties. The answer, she had told him, was yes, and when she and Navasky were back in class, somebody would decide whether this was a good thing or a bad thing.
2000
ABOUT THE EDITOR
LILLIAN ROSS was hired by Harold Ross, the founder and first editor of The New Yorker, to work on factual stories, including those for The Talk of the Town. She was the last of four women reporters chosen to fill the places of men reporters still in the armed forces. To date, she has written about two hundred Talk stories, in addition to many long articles for the magazine, and still finds the short-form piece the most enjoyable to do. She is the author of ten books, including Picture; Portrait of Hemingway; Vertical and Horizontal, a novel; and her recent memoir, Here But Not Here.
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2001 Modern Library Paperback Edition
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The fun of it: stories from “The talk of the town”: The New
Yorker / edited by Lillian Ross;
introduction by David Remnick.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-0-307-43223-0
I. Ross, Lillian. II. New Yorker (New York, N.Y.: 1925)
AC5 .F86 2001
00068237—dc21 00-068237
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