The power of television to make the world smaller cannot be understated. For one thing, it can make a girl from Warrenton, Ga., who not only had never been to Chicago but didn't know anyone from Chicago and didn't know anyone who had ever been to Chicago, into a Chicago Cubs fan.
Yes, my Braves have always had my greatest loyalty. I was taught to pull for them by my grandfather, who despite his sheet-metal-plant worker's paycheck and his dislike of expense on himself, was one of the first people I knew in Warrenton to subscribe to cable television -- all so he could watch the Braves games without bad weather disrupting the signal from what used to be Channel 17 out of Atlanta.
But the coax cable that carried the Braves games to Warrenton also carried the Cubs games on WGN, and especially in those pre-lights days at Wrigley Field, the two teams' games rarely overlapped. In summertime, I could watch the Cubs on WGN in the afternoon and then watch the Braves that evening.
It's the mid-1980s from which my Cubs memories are strongest. While I got my Braves loyalty from my grandfather, but when I think of the Cubs, I remember watching with my dad. He was police chief then and, about four days a week, he reported for his shift very, very early in the morning and got off at 1 or 2 in the afternoon. "Ryno is God" was one regular Bleacher Bum sign we loved to chuckle at -- of course, that's in reference to Ryne Sandberg, the second baseman who was the Cubs' major star of that era; he's now in Cooperstown (.289 career batting average, 282 HRs). And there was another, the "Shawon-O-Meter," a frequently appearing sign that sought to keep track of the offensive exploits of a younger player, shortstop Shawon Dunston (.269 career batting average, 150 HRs).
The Cubs' manager of that time was Don Zimmer, who would later be one of Joe Torre's helper-coaches in the Yankee dugout, maybe most famous for his awkward attempt at fistcuffs with Pedro Martinez, which got him impersonated on the next broadcast of Saturday Night Live. (By Horatio Sanz, as I recall.) I tend to think that's more public exposure than any bench coach had ever gotten in the history of all baseball.
I remember Mark Grace was the first baseman. And one of our favorite players was the catcher, Joe Girardi, who has since replaced Torre as skipper of the Yankees.
My memory may be fuzzy on this, but I remember watching Girardi perform a tremendous feat one day, one that -- sadly -- I never did see written about by the baseball press when Girardi was hired in New York.
Girardi started the game at his normal position, catcher. As the game progressed, some other Cubs players had to be stricken from the game, and Girardi was called on to fill in elsewhere on the field -- I want to say he subbed for one of the infielders, but he might have been in the outfield. Then, as innings passed, the Cubs confronted another staffing dilemma, and Girardi was dispatched to the mound to pitch. I remember Harry Caray saying Girardi had broken a major league record for most positions played in a single game. I think he may actually have gotten a batter out as pitcher, but I'm not certain of that. (Any baseball savants out there remember this? Am I mis-remembering?)
Needless to say, Harry Caray was as much a part of watching a Cubs game as the players on the field. (An interesting, and sometimes funny, thing to do: When the Braves played the Cubs, sometimes my dad and I would turn on two TVs, one tuned to the Cubs' broadcast on WGN, and the other tuned to the Braves' broadcast on TBS, where the play-by-play announcer was Harry's son, Skip Caray.) I also remember that the WGN broadcast team seemed as intent on finding attractive young women in the stands displaying their cleavage as they were interested in the progress of the game.
I bring all this up because I finally got to see the Cubs play, live and in person, last night -- in Houston, against the hapless Astros. Rino is a minor league manager now, and Minute Maid Park doesn't quite exude the vibe that I imagine comes fromf the bleachers at Wrigley Field, but it was good to finally see them play. They won, 7-1, on a night when the Astros, not the Cubs, looked like the doormat of the National League.
Wouldn't Steve Goodman be proud?
Showing posts with label television. Show all posts
Showing posts with label television. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Saturday, June 7, 2008
Update from IRE
Weather is nice here, conference is great. Some random thoughts:
* Great stories often involve a little bit of luck, but are more the product of hard work than anything else. That's one thing I'm picking up from all the speakers at these sessions.
* Our system of government was created with checks and balances - the ones we all learned about in civics class - but there is no greater, stronger check on our government than the press. I thought about that while listening to a reporter from the Detroit Free Press talk about his coverage of the mayor up there and the private e-mails/text message scandal there, which has led to further revelations about contract-steering and nepotism/cronyism in city government. The legislative branch of city government would never have worked to ferret out that story. The courts? Well, the courts are involved NOW, but only because the press fought so hard to run the story/stories down.
* Editors talking about editing can be really boring. Editors talking about stories is much more interesting. The process of editing, although it is my job, is not that interesting to me. Stories, and finding out new facts or making some great revelation or realization, are what interests me.
* Walt Bogdanich, NY Times reporter and Pulitzer winner, looks incredibly like my friend and former colleague Jay Hamburg.
* When trying to decide which sessions to attend at a professional conference, don't decide based on topic. Decide on the quality of the speakers doing the presentation. A session with some folks on the panel for whom you've never heard of or you've never heard of their work, there's a chance it'll be a really good session, but it also has a good chance of being a dud. A session with great speakers, it'll be a good session, no matter what the topic is.
* I really enjoyed the session last night that included an advance screening of an episode of the upcoming HBO miniseries "Generation Kill," which is based on a book by a Rolling Stone reporter who was embedded with the Marines in Iraq. I think I'll watch the miniseries now.
* I have been thinking for several weeks now about document retention and filing for journalists. Covering government, we routinely get 1,000-page document dumps in response to our FOIAs. Some of that material is immediately useful, some is more useful weeks or months down the road and some is, quiet honestly, not useful at all for our journalistic efforts. But keeping that material, keeping it organized, and keeping it findable over a long term is a challenge. Filing was one of the major issues talked about yesterday on the very good panel about "building the ongoing investigation," in which all the participants shared their personal memories of the late, great Bob Greene. And someone just asked a notes-storage/retention question in the session I was just in about coaxing great writing from reporters. A common piece of advice: Always type up your notes and write memos to yourself after interviews.
* Everyone, everywhere, seems to be being asked to do more with less. Why is it that we live in an era where, thanks to new technology, we have more and more media in the world, but there are less and less resources for the most important work the media does, which draws the greatest attention from the readers/audience and has the greatest impact (see bullet point above about Detroit)?
* The conference hotel is super-nice. I am so excited to hear Dave Barry speak at lunch!
NOTE: I went through this post Sunday afternoon, fixed some typos and added some links, so it's changed a little bit since I first posted it.
* Great stories often involve a little bit of luck, but are more the product of hard work than anything else. That's one thing I'm picking up from all the speakers at these sessions.
* Our system of government was created with checks and balances - the ones we all learned about in civics class - but there is no greater, stronger check on our government than the press. I thought about that while listening to a reporter from the Detroit Free Press talk about his coverage of the mayor up there and the private e-mails/text message scandal there, which has led to further revelations about contract-steering and nepotism/cronyism in city government. The legislative branch of city government would never have worked to ferret out that story. The courts? Well, the courts are involved NOW, but only because the press fought so hard to run the story/stories down.
* Editors talking about editing can be really boring. Editors talking about stories is much more interesting. The process of editing, although it is my job, is not that interesting to me. Stories, and finding out new facts or making some great revelation or realization, are what interests me.
* Walt Bogdanich, NY Times reporter and Pulitzer winner, looks incredibly like my friend and former colleague Jay Hamburg.
* When trying to decide which sessions to attend at a professional conference, don't decide based on topic. Decide on the quality of the speakers doing the presentation. A session with some folks on the panel for whom you've never heard of or you've never heard of their work, there's a chance it'll be a really good session, but it also has a good chance of being a dud. A session with great speakers, it'll be a good session, no matter what the topic is.
* I really enjoyed the session last night that included an advance screening of an episode of the upcoming HBO miniseries "Generation Kill," which is based on a book by a Rolling Stone reporter who was embedded with the Marines in Iraq. I think I'll watch the miniseries now.
* I have been thinking for several weeks now about document retention and filing for journalists. Covering government, we routinely get 1,000-page document dumps in response to our FOIAs. Some of that material is immediately useful, some is more useful weeks or months down the road and some is, quiet honestly, not useful at all for our journalistic efforts. But keeping that material, keeping it organized, and keeping it findable over a long term is a challenge. Filing was one of the major issues talked about yesterday on the very good panel about "building the ongoing investigation," in which all the participants shared their personal memories of the late, great Bob Greene. And someone just asked a notes-storage/retention question in the session I was just in about coaxing great writing from reporters. A common piece of advice: Always type up your notes and write memos to yourself after interviews.
* Everyone, everywhere, seems to be being asked to do more with less. Why is it that we live in an era where, thanks to new technology, we have more and more media in the world, but there are less and less resources for the most important work the media does, which draws the greatest attention from the readers/audience and has the greatest impact (see bullet point above about Detroit)?
* The conference hotel is super-nice. I am so excited to hear Dave Barry speak at lunch!
NOTE: I went through this post Sunday afternoon, fixed some typos and added some links, so it's changed a little bit since I first posted it.
Thursday, May 29, 2008
It would be too obvious to say 'I'm so glad we had this time together,' but I'll say it
There were few things I enjoyed as a child more than the beat-up swingset in our back yard. I swang and I swang and I swang. I swang in cold weather, with a jacket on. I swang in warm weather in shorts and flip-flops. Some of my best childhood memories are of swinging in the late summer afternoons, with the shadows growing long, and being surrounded by the sound of the cicadas buzzing in the trees.
There wasn't much that could tear me away from that swingset. But at 6:35 p.m. every weeknight when there wasn't a Braves game on, I had to be in front of the TV.
Carol Burnett was on.
Now, I'm a child of the '80s. Pac-Man. Michael Jackson and Thriller. MTV. All that. But for whatever reason, TBS, for several of my most formative years, decided to air decade-old re-runs of Carol Burnett and Friends at 6:35 p.m. every weeknight when they weren't showing a Braves baseball game. I rarely missed it.
As the Stomach Turns. Tim Conway as the character known in my house as The Little Old Man. Carol Burnett as Miss Wiggins, who couldn't operate the intercom, and Conway as her stressed-out boss. They were as familiar to me as any characters on any of the popular television shows of the mid-1980s, if not more so. They were a fixture in my house. Even my parents, who were busy people and stayed stressed out most of the time, would sometimes watch.
And we weren't the only ones. At school the following day, the kids in my class would be reciting lines or funny scenes from the previous night's re-run. I don't think we really understood that ol' Carol and her crew had been cancelled by CBS some years before. The loud '70s clothing, the wide ties and leisure suits -- well, we weren't really old enough to catch on how out-of-date they were. Carol and company might as well have been still on the air, along with The Dukes of Hazzard, Knight Rider or whatever else 10-year-olds were watching in the mid-'80s.
But I think we understood, or at least I know I did, that Carol Burnett's show was awesome.
I remember when Tim Conway, as the little old white-haired man who always shuffled around, appeared as a dentist trying to treat patient Harvey Korman, only to stick himself with the Novocaine needle and put all his limbs to sleep. I remember laughing at Carol and Harvey Korman doing their version of Max, the baldheaded butler, and Nora Desmond, aging movie star with her overly stretched-out face, years before I ever saw the original film Sunset Boulevard that they were parodying. And this punchline stood on its own in my house: "Stroke! Stroke! I'm having a stroke!" I won't even bother to try to explain it. You had to see it to understand.
But the highlight of any Carol Burnett episode in my house was The Point At Which Tim Conway Would Make Harvey Korman Crack Up. It was never a question of whether Harvey would lose it. It was a question of when he would lose it. If Tim Conway were on that night, it was coming. You just had to wait for it.
Today, out in California, Harvey Korman died. He was 81. He was awesome, and I just wanted to write this.
There wasn't much that could tear me away from that swingset. But at 6:35 p.m. every weeknight when there wasn't a Braves game on, I had to be in front of the TV.
Carol Burnett was on.
Now, I'm a child of the '80s. Pac-Man. Michael Jackson and Thriller. MTV. All that. But for whatever reason, TBS, for several of my most formative years, decided to air decade-old re-runs of Carol Burnett and Friends at 6:35 p.m. every weeknight when they weren't showing a Braves baseball game. I rarely missed it.
As the Stomach Turns. Tim Conway as the character known in my house as The Little Old Man. Carol Burnett as Miss Wiggins, who couldn't operate the intercom, and Conway as her stressed-out boss. They were as familiar to me as any characters on any of the popular television shows of the mid-1980s, if not more so. They were a fixture in my house. Even my parents, who were busy people and stayed stressed out most of the time, would sometimes watch.
And we weren't the only ones. At school the following day, the kids in my class would be reciting lines or funny scenes from the previous night's re-run. I don't think we really understood that ol' Carol and her crew had been cancelled by CBS some years before. The loud '70s clothing, the wide ties and leisure suits -- well, we weren't really old enough to catch on how out-of-date they were. Carol and company might as well have been still on the air, along with The Dukes of Hazzard, Knight Rider or whatever else 10-year-olds were watching in the mid-'80s.
But I think we understood, or at least I know I did, that Carol Burnett's show was awesome.
I remember when Tim Conway, as the little old white-haired man who always shuffled around, appeared as a dentist trying to treat patient Harvey Korman, only to stick himself with the Novocaine needle and put all his limbs to sleep. I remember laughing at Carol and Harvey Korman doing their version of Max, the baldheaded butler, and Nora Desmond, aging movie star with her overly stretched-out face, years before I ever saw the original film Sunset Boulevard that they were parodying. And this punchline stood on its own in my house: "Stroke! Stroke! I'm having a stroke!" I won't even bother to try to explain it. You had to see it to understand.
But the highlight of any Carol Burnett episode in my house was The Point At Which Tim Conway Would Make Harvey Korman Crack Up. It was never a question of whether Harvey would lose it. It was a question of when he would lose it. If Tim Conway were on that night, it was coming. You just had to wait for it.
Today, out in California, Harvey Korman died. He was 81. He was awesome, and I just wanted to write this.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)