|
OUT OF LEFT FIELD |
 |
|
From Dog-Eared Notebooks  |
How about a big dose
of Thisa and Thata?
By STAN ISAACS
of TheColumnists.com
Friends tell me they like columns with short items. Hence these jottings from dog-eared notebooks.
Tommy LaSorda managed the Los Angeles Dodgers for more than two decades. I don’t know if it was because he was a good manager or because he was such a colorful baloney artist. When I speak before groups I always get a laugh with this line about him and his wife. “My wife and I have been married more than 40 years and we still go dancing six times a week. She goes Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I go Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.”
One Sunday morning at a church before a game, LaSorda spotted his opposite number, Cincinnati manager John McNamara lighting a candle. When McNamara left, LaSorda, figuring McNamara prayed for a Reds victory over his Dodgers, and wanting to play all the angles, went over and snuffed out McNamara’s candle. He told him about it later. Years later McNamara, in Rome, visited St. Peter’s. He sent LaSorda a post card with a picture of the candles there and wrote, “Let’s see you blow these out.
|
|
I spoke one afternoon at a library in East Meadow, Long Island. I reviewed “Friday Night Lights,” the excellent book about high school football in Texas by Buzz Bissinger. I talked about the hold high school football had on small communities--the politics and sociology of it aside from football. When I finished, a little, old Jewish lady came up to me and told me she had enjoyed my talk. When I thanked her, she said, “But to tell you the truth, with that title, I thought the book would be about Jewish customs.”
|
|
Jockey Ted Atkinson was one of the most erudite of athletes, intelligent, thoughtful and colorfully incisive. After a hustling, actively whipping-ride to win a race, he explained his actions. “I wanted,” he said, “to impress upon him the urgency of the situation.”
|
|
Lou Effrat, a garrulous un-Times-like New York Times sports reporter, was notorious for losing bets no matter how sure his play. Stories grew up about him, including this one: One day at a New York racetrack Effrat had a bet on a steeplechase horse that was leading by a wide margin as he approached one of the last jumps. The horse, faltered, fell, and was hurt so badly he had to be destroyed. Effrat was seen tearing up his mutual ticket with disgust. A colleague asked, “Did you have him for show?” “Nah,” Effrat said with disgust. “I had him to live.”
|
|
One of the best ballpark banners I ever heard about was this inspired salvo from a Chicago White Sox fan in right field at Comiskey Park, making a brilliant point about the defensive lapses of right fielder Claudel Washington. It read: “Washington slept here.”
|
|
Harold Rosenthal, a longtime New York Herald Tribune sports reporter who evolved into a publicist for the National Football League, was a jolly guy much loved by his colleagues. It disturbed us no end that The New York Times didn’t see fit to run an obituary on him when he died. He had a distinctive chuckle which he exhibited often. He told about the old guy who went to the urologist with a problem.
“I have trouble urinating,” he
told the doctor.
“How old are you?” the doctor asked.
“Eighty-five,” said the man.
“You’ve pissed enough,” the doctor said.
|
|
Once, when I was in Baltimore to cover the Preakness, there was talk that the local paper, The Baltimore Evening Sun, might fold. Joe Hirsch of the Racing Form said, “Gee, I’d hate to see the Evening Sun go down.”
|
|
I like this message on a T-shirt I saw while watching a stream of Boston Marathon runners going by one year. “Just when you start winning the rat race, they throw in faster rats.”
And I did a doubletake in the parking lot
at a New Jersey Turnpike rest stop when I spotted this T-shirt
message: “I know Nixon is dead, but I still think he should
have been impeached.”
|
|
Early in his career when I didn’t know much about Tiger Woods, I read that he had mixed parentage that included black and Thai parents. When I noted that to my wife, she said, “Then I guess he must be invited to many black Thai affairs.”
|
|
Edward Morgan, the late broadcaster, said, “Our country’s coat of arms is a glass of beer rampant on a field of Super Bowls.”
|
|
|
|
Pedro Guerrero, the ball player, once said, “The writers write what I say, not what I mean.”
|
|
©2008 by Stan Isaacs.
The Stan Isaacs caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. The illustration
is from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd.
E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. This column first posted
June 23, 2008.
You
can comment on this column online. Please address your message
to either "The Editors" or Stan Isaacs . To send an
email, click here and don't forget to mention Stan's name: talkback@thecolumnists.com
|
|
|
Archives |
|
|