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OUT OF LEFT FIELD |
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A Browser’s View of Fare
From the World of Sports
of TheColumnists.com
Some excerpts from the Out of Left Field library:
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“It’s a funny thing about people. People will hate a guy all his life for what he is, but the minute he dies for it they make him out a hero and they go around saying that maybe he wasn’t such a bad guy after all because he sure was willing to go the distance for whatever he believed or whatever he was.
“That’s the way it was with
Bummy Davis. The night Bummy fought Fritzie Zivic in the Garden
and Zivic started giving him the business and Bummy hit Zivic
low maybe 30 times and kicked the referee, they wanted to hang
him for it. The night those four guys came into Duddy’s
bar and tried the same thing, only with rods, Bummy went nuts
again. He flattened the first one and then they shot him, and
when everybody read about it, and how Bummy fought guns with
only his left hook and died lying in the rain in front of the
place, they all said he really was something and you sure had
to give him credit at that.”
…H.C. Heinz in
True Magazine about fighter Al (Bummy) Davis
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“Branch Rickey and iconoclastic, atheistic lawyer Clarence Darrow were not exactly friends but were certainly admiring acquaintances who had much in common despite their obvious differences on religion. Both had been raised in rural Ohio, where playing baseball had been one of their great recreational delights. Both loved books and ideas and shared a passionate desire to talk and argue about them. They were free of racial prejudice, and Rickey undoubtedly applauded Darrow’s defense of Ossian Sweet, a black Detroit physician who had been charged with murder in 1925 for defending his home from a mob of bigots. At sometime in the mid-1920s Rickey had chaired a debate on atheism versus religion between Darrow and Methodist bishop Donald Hughes, Rickey’s Ohio Wesleyan classmate and Delta Tau Delta fraternity brother.
“There is a possibility that Rickey
himself once thought of publicly debating Darrow…A Rickey
debate with Darrow never happened, though he certainly was intrigued
with the idea and kiddingly suggested that he could pack the
room with his friends. It was probably [his wife] Jane Rickey
who told her husband that Darrow was too proficient a debater
to tangle with in public.”
…Lee Lowenfish
in “Branch Rickey: Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman”
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“I once said that I would rather be
a lamppost in New York than a millionaire in any other city.
And that is so. I loved New York from one end to the other and
everyone in it. I thrilled to surging current of events that
the city paraded day and night, grateful day and night for my
own good luck to be alive and moving to the beat of its tempo,
to be one of its citizens. I am always encouraged how much good
will is gained not by calculation but by common courtesy, simple
good manners and affording any man the dignity that is his natural
right. I’m sometimes disappointed that some among us think
that rude and offensive public behavior is a better defense against
whatever it is we’re defensive about, and I wish more of
us had the courage to be polite, to know that toughness lies
in good fiber, not in disagreeable behavior, to understand that
courtesy is a matter of choice, not submission. I am always surprised
that more of us don’t appreciate how much favor is won so
effortlessly."
….Michael Burke (former
Yankee president) in ”Outrageous Good Fortune.”
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MENU
“The killer shark, voracious fish,
Finds human being a tasty dish
Devouring them without regret
And very little etiquette
Now some who think this conduct odd
Can cast a very nifty rod,
And dine on rainbow trout and cod.
…Len Bernstein, “The Black Snowman and Other Poems”
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“Darling looked around him. This was the spot. O’Connor’s pass had come sliding out just to here…the high point. Darling put up his hands, felt all over again the flat slap of the ball. He shook his hips to throw off the halfback, cut back inside center, picked his knees high as he ran gracefully over two men jumbled on the ground at the line of scrimmage, ran easily, gaining speed, for ten yards, holding he ball lightly in his two hands, swung away from the halfback diving at him, ran, swinging his hips in the almost girlish manner of a back in the broken field, tore into the safety man, his shoes drumming heavily on the turf, stiff-armed, elbow locked, pivoted, raced lightly and exultantly for the goal line.
“It was only after he had sped
over the goal line and slowed to a trot that he saw the boy and
girl sitting together on the turf, looking at him wonderingly.
He stopped short, dropping his arms. ‘I..’ he said,
gasping a little, though his condition was fine and the run hadn’t
winded him. ‘I once played here.’ The boy and the girl
said nothing. Darling laughed embarrassedly, looking hard at
them sitting there, close to each other, shrugged, turned and
went toward his hotel, the sweat breaking out on his face and
running down his collar.”
…conclusion of
Irwin Shaw’s “The Eighty-Yard Run”
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“[on vacation] Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens swims every day in the ocean, plays tennis three times a week and plays golf two or three times a week. ...He tries to maintain this vigorous exercise schedule when he is in Washington, playing tennis two or three times a week, often with one of his three daughters…He is in such good physical shape that, in 2005, at age of 85, he threw the first pitch at a Cubs-Reds game at Wrigley Field and got it right over the plate.”
…Jeffrey Rosen, NY Times Magazine, Sept. 23, 2007
©2009 by Stan Isaacs. The Stan Isaacs caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. This column first posted April 13, 2009.
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