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OUT OF LEFT FIELD |
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 BABE RUTH ...hit the first home run in All-Star game history in 1933. |
All-Star Huckstering;
Great Tennis Matches
of TheColumnists.com
What is the record number of times anybody voted in the marketing extravaganza known as the baseball All Star Game?
There is no way of knowing because any computer genius worthy of his/her laptop was not going to stop at the so-called limit of 28 times set by baseball. Commissioner Bud Selig and the teams promoted a slaphappy, more-the-merrier approach to the voting that dared computer sharpies to go for broke.
After the initial voting, baseball set up a second round to add a final player to the roster selected by the fans and the managers for Tuesday’s game. Teams actively promoted their players with shameless exhortations in ball parks and on the internet.
I am indebted to Bob Ford of The Philadelphia Inquirer, who is more of a computernik than I am, for seeing through the game for the marketing scam it has become.
He wrote:
“If you vote online choosing among [the five nominees for the final National League spot] baseball will thoughtfully add you to its commercial e-mail list and will put you on Monster.com’s mailing list as well if you neglected to uncheck the little boxes. Bud Selig will then take your e-mail address and sell it to identity thieves around the world. He doesn’t publicize that part, but I’m almost certain of it. Always remember if someone calls your house and identifies himself as Bud Selig and asks for your Social Security number, don’t give it to him.”
The All Star games of yore are rich with heroics: Babe Ruth hit the first All Star Game home run in the first game, 1933; Carl Hubbell struck out Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jimmy Foxx, Al Simmons and Joe Cronin in succession in 1934; Lefty Gomez pitched the first six innings in a 4-2 American League victory in 1935; in 1941, after the Nationals, Arky Vaughan hit two home runs, Ted Williams hit a two-run homer in the bottom of the ninth for a 7-4 American League victory.
The symbol of the deterioration of the game through the years culminated with the farce in 2002 when managers Bob Brenly of the National League and Joe Torre of the Americans used all 19 pitchers by the 11th inning and the game was called as a 7-7 tie after the 11th.
Voting has always been suspect. It was taken to a new low this year. The situation is ripe now for a caper that can truly underscore what a burlesque the whole enterprise has become.
The suggestion from Out of Left Field is that next year a cabal of savvy fans choose a relatively obscure player--it could have been outfielder Shin-Soo Choo of the Cleveland Indians this year--and load the ballot box selecting him so he would be in the starting lineup for the 2009 game. It would be a noble “now is the time for all squirrely baseball fans to stick it to the barons and their marketing hides” gesture.
It is just a thought.
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The superlatives that came out for the stirring men’s final at Wimbledon were much deserved. But methinks a few people rattled the hyperbole meter when they went overboard on Rafael Nadal’s five-set victory over Roger Federer.
This from L. Jon Wertheim in Sports Illustrated.
"In a spellbinding men’s final that will stand as the benchmark against which all future tennis matches will be measured, Nadal dethroned Federer, 6-4, 6-4, 6-7, 6-7, 9-7. Let’s be unequivocal: This was the greatest match ever played."
Wertheim is a fine writer, but I think he is on the sunny side of 40 and a little wet behind the ears when attempting to put any current match in a historical perspective. Bud Collins, the dean of tennis journalists, would be the best arbiter about such a matter. Collins is incapacitated these days, but his “Tennis Encyclopedia” provided meaty material for me to dare make my own declaration about great tennis matches.
I have ranked my best five matches and list them on the chart below.
No. 1 is the 1969 first-round match at Wimbledon because of Pancho Gonzalez’ achievement. He was 41 years at the time, yet was able to come back against 25-year-old Charley Pasarell, after losing the grueling first set, 22-24 (no tiebreaks then). He lost the second set, 6-1, grousing because the officials wouldn’t call the match because of darkness. He then came back the next day with more marathon sets. He won, 16-14, 6-3 and finally, 11-9. (Whew!).
No. 2, the 1980 Bjorn Borg-John McEnroe Wimbledon final, is memorable for the fourth set tiebreaker, won by McEnroe, 18-16, one of the first marathon tiebreakers in a significant match. Many people think McEnroe won the match because he won the tiebreaker, but Borg came back to win the fifth set for his fifth straight Wimbledon. McEnroe broke his streak the next year.
No. 3 featured fireworks between two dynamic figures, Boris Becker and McEnroe, battling it out for more than six hours in the 1987 Davis Cup tournament.
In No. 4, the 1937 Davis Cup semi-final, Gottfried von Cramm won the first two sets. Don Budge took the next two and fell behind, 4-1, before rallying to win the fifth set, 8-6. Just before the match von Cramm got a call from Adolf Hitler exhorting him to win. (Von Cramm would later be imprisoned for anti-Nazi views). Tilden later told Budge this was the greatest tennis match ever played.
No. 5 is the Nadal-Federer thriller. It
ranks high, but not highest, in my book.
The matches: (with year, scores, time and number of games):
Gonzalez…. 22 1 16 6 11 1969
Pasarell…… 24 6 14 3 9 5:12 112 games
Borg……. 1 7 6 6 (16) 8 1980
McEnroe….. 6 5 3 7 (18) 6 3:53 54 games
Becker……… 4 15* 8 6 6 1987
Davis Cup
McEnroe….. 6 13 10 2 2 6:20 72 games
(*--2:05 set)
Budge……… 6 5 6 6 6 1937 Davis Cup
Von Cramm… 8 7 4 4 2 2:33 58 games
Nadel…… 6 6 6(3) 6(8) 9 2008
Federer….. 4 4 7(7) 7(10) 7 4:48 60 games
Also of note would be McEnroe’s 1982
Davis Cup victory over
Mats Wilander, 9-7, 6-2, 15-17, 3-6, 8-6. It took six hours and
32 minutes, and 79 games, but didn’t have the grit of other
matches because the mild Wilander did not inspire many tantrums
from in McEnroe.
A match that has a special place because it produced one of the most startling comebacks of all time was Henri Cochet’s upset of Bill Tilden in the 1927 Wimbledon semi-finals. Who could possibly imagine the great Tilden losing when he won the first two sets and led the third set, 5-1 and 15-all? But Cochet scored 17 straight points and went on to win, 2-6, 4-6, 7-5, 6-4, 6-3.
Tennis anyone, indeed.
©2008 by Stan Isaacs. The Stan Isaacs caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. This column first posted July 14, 2008.
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