Bob Barker Snaps

A story in honor of Bob Barker's 90th birthday……….

“Come on down,” they yell, “Come on down!” “Come on down.” I can’t walk five steps before someone shouts, “come on down!” some total stranger who thinks he’s my best buddy (or I am his) because he watches me on TV every morning while eating Cocoa Puffs straight from the box. “Come on down!” “Come on down!” On sidewalks and beaches. In malls and restaurants and movie theaters. Even my doctor while checking my prostate and my dentist while scraping plaque off my teeth. I can’t leave my house without a cataract of “come on downs!” thundering onto me like water off Niagara Falls.

And they look at me with these stupid smiles and winks like they’re oh so clever, as if nobody has ever come up to me before and shouted “come on down!” As if I’m going to hire them on the spot to design challenging new pricing games for my show because they are so brilliantly creative. But because I have a favorable public image to protect, I can only smile politely and say “good one,” as if this is the first time in my long career as a TV game show host anyone has shouted “come on down!” at me.

But 30 years of “come on downs!” can take their toll. So when that lummox came up to me in the men’s room and shouted in a voice that rang off the white tiled walls, “come on down!” I couldn’t help myself anymore. I just hauled off and slugged the guy, right square in the face.

I have to admit it felt good to see his head snap to the will of my fist, to feel the soft cartilage of his nose squish under my hard knuckles into a gooey mass. I took note of the irony of a man who opposes pain and suffering on principle, who refuses to give away fur coats, who uses his daily national forum to advocate the spaying and neutering of pets, now taking pleasure inflicting pain and suffering on another human being. It was a definite moral contradiction, that was true. A conundrum. But I paid it no mind because it felt good to let three decades of frustration drive my fist into the man’s face. And as I watched him crumple to the floor and whimper pathetically while holding his hands to his mangled, blood-drenched nose, I knew I had endured my final “come on down!”

1989 was a great year for dinosaurs

When I saw that Lou Reed died a few days ago, my thoughts immediately brought me back to 1989, the year I finally bought my first Lou Reed album, “New York” (cassette actually—this was 1989, after all). I’d always admired Reed up to that point, appreciated his music, identified with many of his characters, was intrigued with those I didn’t. I liked “Transformer” and the VU albums, but I didn’t own any of them. Maybe that was because by the time I came of age and started paying attention to music, Lou was struggling. His past music was a museum piece to me, his new music missing my target. I remember hearing his single “I Love YouSuzanne” in 1984, played over and over again on MTV because it was the first video Lou Reed ever produced and they finally had an excuse to play him. It was a good song, a fun piece of pop that showed Reed had the chops to produce some decent dance music, but it wasn’t the type of album I was going to rush out to buy.

And Lou wasn’t the only one struggling creatively throughout the 1980s, a decade that was not kind to many of the rock and roll pioneers who dramatically re-landscaped music in the 1960s and 1970s. So many of those acts ran out of gas in that decade, producing albums that ranged from bland to bad, pale shells of their former selves that made you wonder if maybe rock and roll stars who didn’t lifestyle themselves into an early grave should have expiration dates on them, a point where they just stop trying to be rock and roll stars anymore and are denied any more studio time.

There was Bob Dylan, continuing the funk he’d entered in the late 1970s, bottoming out with “Knocked Out Loaded” and “Down in The Groove,” two albums that are not just bad for Dylan, but are just plain bad. Neil Young bounced from style to style, from doo-wop to country to electronica, with a string of records so lackluster that his label sued him. The Rolling Stones started the 1980s off well with “Emotional Rescue” and “Tattoo You,” before a newly cleaned up Keith started to re-assert his authority within the band and touched off a feud with Mick that led to “Undercover” and “Dirty Work,” two albums that weren’t necessarily bad, but that desperately needed focus and direction.

David Bowie, after the triumph of 1983’s “Let’s Dance,” seemed to run away and hide from his superstardom, unable to cope with a market demographic suddenly made up of significant numbers of screaming teenage girls. Eric Clapton just quit, climbing out of bed once in awhile to record another dull, forgettable song.

Perhaps the most egregious example greatness gone bad was Paul McCartney, who kept playing to his worst pop instincts until hitting the bottom with the theme song to the movie “Spies Like Us,” a song so dismal it prompted a friend to say at the time that every last drop of talent had drained from the man’s body. If you want to hear it, you’ll have to find it yourself on YouTube because I’m sure not going to link to it. If you dare watch it, you’ll be stunned that this guy was once in The Beatles.

I didn't know what white privilege was, but this is when I knew I had it

I was living in a town in western Iowa at the time and stopped by a bookstore in the local mall, a middle-brow chain that had stores in malls all over the country and was one of the first to go bankrupt after Amazon started taking over the industry.

I was the only customer in the store just then and perusing magazines at the newsstand, just killing time because there wasn’t much else to do in this town in western Iowa. The clerk behind the counter was the only employee and I can’t remember exactly what he was doing but I assume it was just general clerk-y things because he was paying no attention to me.

After a few minutes idly flipping through magazines, I was joined by another customer, his presence only vaguely registering with me because I was engrossed enough in my Time or Newsweek or whatever magazine I was reading—probably one that isn’t published anymore—to pay attention. Within seconds, a third person joined us: the clerk, who hadn’t been paying attention at all for the last five minutes. He stood next to us suddenly, rearranging magazines on the shelves that seemed to have been arranged just fine the whole time I’d been standing there. He didn’t quit, either, pushing magazines around until he became such a distraction that I noticed he just kept rearranging the same magazines over and over.

I also noticed, at that point, that the customer next to me was black, a young man so run of the mill in his overall appearance that his color is the only distinguishing feature in my memory. Nothing stood out about his clothes, his hair, his manner, at least nothing for me to remember, 20-some years later. Certainly nothing about his appearance should have lead a clerk to suspect he would walk out with a magazine stuffed inside his shirt anymore than a clerk would suspect I would do that.

Mike Pelfrey dominates......too bad it's against Single A players

Mike Pelfrey is not a very good pitcher. To call him mediocre is generous. His numbers this year (3-6, a whopping 6.11 ERA) make him one of the worst starting pitchers in the majors this season. He spent a few weeks on the DL and is back with the Twins for a start this weekend against Toronto, but his first game back was a rehab start with the Class A Cedar Rapids Kernels last Monday that I was at.

It was in all likelihood his best start in years, a crisply pitched, 6-inning win against Peoria, with six strikeouts, just two earned runs given up and lots of baffled 20 year old kids who aren’t used to seeing a major league pitcher. The game showed in stark relief the difference between a pitcher in the majors—even a bad one—and a pitcher at Single A.

Pelfrey was a man among boys out there. Before the game even began you noticed a difference in their size. Pelfrey is a 29-year old 8-year veteran, and puberty is long in his past. He’s thick and muscular, wide shouldered, and struck an imposing figure on the mound. Compare his adulthood to a typical Single A pitcher who is thin and scrawny, a wisp on the mound, all arms and legs, still close enough to puberty to be embarrassed by it.

Pelfrey also moved with an efficiency and purpose that most Single A pitchers lack as they try to figure out how to get their bodies to do what they want them to do. He didn’t waste energy moving unless that movement helped him get the ball to plate. Pelfrey pitched with haste, too, getting the ball and throwing it, getting the ball and throwing it, and avoiding three ball counts (he had only two all game).

Single A pitchers take so much time it’s like they’re reciting the Gettysburg Address to themselves between pitches, and three ball counts are the rule.

Announcing my retirement from hockey

The summer rec league hockey season started in Iowa City this weekend so this is as good a time as any to announce my retirement from hockey. Granted, there really isn’t much to retire from; my career lasted all of one year and I played in a recreational league in the hockey boondocks of Iowa. Also, I sucked. But I didn’t just suck, I sucked in a way that put myself and others in danger. I spent way too much time laying face down on the ice, flailing in pain with some bizarre injury or another. There was the wayward wrist shot to the face. The shoulder v. jaw collision. And the last straw, when I butt-ended myself in the gut with my own stick in a wreck that’s too convoluted to explain.

The first injury wasn’t at all serious—I was wearing a mouthguard that no doubt saved me from lost teeth and a concussion, so the only pain was a welt and a bruise (always wear your mouthguard when playing hockey). The shoulder/jaw collision left me unable to eat much more than soup, yogurt and soft fruit for a few days, but again, it turned out to be more inconvenience than serious (always wear your mouthguard when playing hockey).

The third injury, though, was more freakish—the butt end of the stock was rammed up underneath my bottom rib and tore an abdominal muscle. Two months later, it still isn’t quite right. All of these collisions could have less happy outcomes—an inch this way or that and I would have been screwed. So I’ve decided that rather than insist on putting myself into situations that could potentially end in my own death, I will hang up the skates. I’ve got a kid and a mortgage. My money should be going to take care of them, not medical bills to repair the damage from some freakish hockey injury.

Which is too bad, because I love to play. Even though I suck (and trust me, I really suck), the thrill of those few moments when I didn’t suck, when it actually seemed as if I knew what I was doing, outweighed the far more frequent pain and humiliation of failure. Putting a pass perfectly on a teammate’s tape, swatting the puck away from the guy trying to get around me, clearing out the puck that got past my goalie just before it crossed the goal line, charged me up in ways that few other things can. Even if that good thing you do leads to nothing, no goal or assist or anything but a finished shift and you’re back on the bench, you can say you accomplished at least something.

I can only imagine what it’s like to actually have some talent, with a much higher ratio of good things to bad things, so that you feel good about your play almost as often as you think damn, what the hell was I thinking (and, at best, that ratio is probably about 1:1, and that’s only for players like Lemieux or Gretzy or Howe or Tretiak. For a good pro-level player, I would guess it’s about 3:1. Or maybe 5:1. Let’s face it, I’m just pulling numbers out of my butt here).

I scored four goals in a game once—FOUR!—which was a quarter of my scoring output for my career, in a SINGLE GAME, and the fourth of them won the game in overtime. I’m sure that’s one of the memories I’ll be thinking about as the last oxygenated blood cell leaves my brain.

Sadly, most games weren’t even a tenth as productive as that one. Some games I somehow violated the laws of quantum physics and was negatively productive. I played for a team called the Clam Slappers because the captain needed a warm body on his roster and I qualified, though that was the extent of my qualification. I was too slow to keep up with the play, too small to hold my own against bigger, stronger players, too unskilled generally to really know what I was doing. I never played organized hockey as a kid, just rink rat stuff and street hockey, so I never learned the finer points of positioning, strategy or technique. I knew the basics from watching but little more, and I’m sure that was obvious to anyone who saw me on the ice.

And so I end my experiment as a hockey player. I see they’re starting a curling club in Cedar Rapids. Maybe I’ll trade my stick for a broom. I’ll still make a fool of myself, I just won’t get hurt doing it.

Geraldine Mary McGirl (Cootie) Snee

I've noticed some abridged versions of my mom's obituary online. Here's the full version for those who want to read more......

Geraldine Mary McGirl (Cootie) Snee , 69, of Duluth, Minn., and Lake Wales, Fla., died peacefully and unexpectedly in her sleep at her home on Sunday, May 5.

A funeral Mass will be held on Friday, May 10 at 9 a.m. at St. Matthew Catholic Church, 1991 Overlook Dr., Winter Haven, Fla.

She was born Nov. 13, 1943 in St. Mary’s Hospital in Duluth, Minn., to Thomas and Marjorie Miller McGirl. She was educated at Holy Rosary School, graduated from the former Stanbrook Hall High School in 1961 and attended the University of Minnesota-Duluth. She was a member of St. Michael’s Catholic parish in Duluth and St. Matthew in Winter Haven, Fla.

She married John Russell Snee of Wadena, Minn., on Oct. 3, 1963, and they did pretty much everything together for the rest of her life, showing by example how a successful marriage works for their two sons, Thomas, now 47, and Michael, 44. She worked at Bridgeman’s restaurant, the downtown Sear’s store and Norwest Bank before retiring as credit manager from Advanstar Communications in 2000.

She never took to the snow and cold and long dark winters of Duluth. From November to March, she mostly cocooned in the house, bundled up in a comforter reading novels and spy thrillers and ventured outside only when necessary—for work, Mass, shopping, and to spend Christmas Eve with her extended family. Before retiring, she started taking annual spring vacations in Florida—Sanibel Island was her favorite—until finally, in 2005, she could endure Minnesota winters no longer and she moved to Florida to spend her final seven years basking in the sun and heat she loved.

She still spent her summers in Duluth, the lake-cooled weather providing the same kind of relief from the torrid Florida summer that Florida provided from a Minnesota winter. And since Duluth is where she was from, she could not cut the cord permanently. The lake, the hills, the woods drew her back, along with her many friends who still lived there, and it’s where she wished to have her final resting place.

When Boston booed a 2-year old

I was at a Red Sox game once—this was when I lived in New England, better than 20 years ago, before the Red Sox became THE  Red Sox and you could still buy tickets at the box office on most game days—and it happened to be its annual family day for the season. Like most teams’ family days, the players bring their kids on the field before the game and they get to run the bases and have their names announced over the Fenway public address system and play a game, just like dad, if dad played with a wiffle ball. It was the 1989 season, the year Red Sox fans turned on Rich Gedman, the team’s long-time catcher who should have been remembered as a hero for his role in the Sox’ ninth inning comeback against the Angels in Game 5 of the 1986 ALCS (he had been hit by a pitch and scored on Dave Henderson’s subsequent go-ahead home run, and the Sox went on to win the epic series in seven games).

He was hardly a hero by 1989, though, when Gedman’s performance had dropped to the point where he was playing part-time and still hitting only .212, and the notorious Boston fans decided it was time to forget 1986 and ride him out of town. Earlier in this same season, he hit a home run and the boos cascaded down so loudly that he sprinted around the bases as fast as he could to get back in the dugout and shut the fans up. It must have been the only home run sprint in history.

So on family day 1989, the team’s kids line up on the field to get in their hacks with a wiffle bat and to make it even cuter, the public address announcer introduces each kid. Awwwww. And then up toddled little Mike Gedman, 2-year old son of Rich, and when his name was announced, thousands of fans did what had become instinct when they heard the word Gedman, and they launched into a round of lusty boos.

So if a city boos a 2-year old kid whose dad can’t hit anymore, it’s not likely they’re going to feel much pity for a Chechen immigrant with a weak personality and a bullying, alienated older brother. 

A review of "42"

Good, not great. Certainly entertaining, and a good introduction for a new generation to Robinson and what he had to endure. It wasn’t sublime, and I was hoping for sublime, but I’ll take pretty good. It’s a helluva lot better than the only other Robinson biography on film, “The Jackie Robinson Story,” the 1950 movie that starred Robinson himself and showed that he was as bad an actor as he was great as a ballplayer and human being.

Which might have been part of the problem with this movie, too. In life, Robinson was distant and quiet and kept his emotions out of public life, a habit learned no doubt during that 1947 season. That made it difficult to play even himself in his biopic, and Chadwick Boseman has his work cut out for him, too. Here, Robinson comes across as two dimensional and (no pun intended) colorless, no doubt because he was so distant and showed so little of himself. Credit to Boseman for giving it what he can, especially in the meltdown scene after the vicious taunting from Ben Chapman (more on that later), but bringing an inscrutable personality like Robinson to life is difficult.

The best work here is by Harrison Ford, who disappears into a role for the first time since……..um……..Well, yeah. Anyway, Ford takes the secondary role of Branch Rickey and gives him heart and humanity, showing us little glimpses of his motivations in breaking the color line. Yes, he wanted to sell tickets and make money and win the World Series for the Dodgers, but his Methodist motivations and Christian decency also drove him—he wanted to save baseball from itself—and Ford brings that out in nicely subtle touches.

The supporting roles are well acted, and the film doesn’t shy from the ugly moments as Robinson tried to drag baseball and the country forward. The scenes with the Phillies’ monstrously racist manager Chapman are especially uncomfortable, but they’re effective in accurately showing what African-Americans had to endure in the days before integration.

Also great is the CGI. I feel like I can now add Ebbets Field to the list of ballparks I’ve visited.

If I had one big beef about the movie, it’s the way it insists on beating the audience over the head by artificially heightening scenes that are already inherently dramatic (this was the birth of the modern civil rights movement, after all, what’s more dramatic than that?). The ridiculously swelling score, the corny lines (“maybe the kid really is superhuman after all”) only added a phony and unneeded gloss on what was dramatic to begin with.

“42” didn’t live up to my expectations (it’s no “The Natural” or “Field of Dreams”), and there’s really nothing new here for anyone who’s already read a decent Robinson biography or baseball history. But it brings the familiar to life well, and is worth seeing.

Spinning Tales

(Note: This was originally published in the 2007 edition of The Wapsipinicon Almanac, a literary annual that’s published not far from here in Anamosa, and if you haven’t read it, you should. The publisher—Tim Fay—still sets the type by hand and uses only woodcut illustrations, so not only is it fun to read, it looks great, too. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

By the way, the tornado mentioned below hit Iowa City in 2006.)

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The radio announcer’s words were calm, reasoned, routine:  “The National Weather Service has issued a tornado watch for coastal counties in southeastern New Hampshire and southern Maine.”

His tone, though, was anything but: “Ohmigod! Run! Everyone! Run for your lives! The National Weather Service has issued a tornado watch for coastal counties in southeastern New Hampshire and southern Maine! Do you know what that means? We’re gonna die! That’s what it means! We’re all gonna die!”

Within seconds the phone rang. It was the city editor in the main newsroom, breathlessly assigning me a story about the tornado for that afternoon’s editions.

“What tornado?” I asked.

“The tornado they just issued the watch for, find out where it is and if it’s caused any damage...”

As this was going on, the receptionist made plans to bolt for the basement the second she saw the tornado spinning down the street, and an advertising rep rescheduled a sales call because she didn’t want to be outside when the tornado hit. I could only scratch my head. Having grown up in the Midwest, the difference between a tornado watch and a tornado warning was bred into my bones. A watch meant merely that “conditions are favorable for the development of a tornado,” as the dry, scientific/bureaucratic language of the National Weather Service puts it. In other words, it’s merely a yellow light, the weatherman’s way of saying “oh, by the way, keep an eye out.” Besides, in the Midwest, we don’t need government agency telling us to watch out for tornadoes. All we need do is look out the window at those summer clouds juiced up by heat and humidity into soaring towers of gray-tinged muscle, stalking across the sky with bad-ass cockiness because they know they can’t be stopped. They’re menacing, ominous things that trigger our collective memories of muggy summer days and remind us any one of them might explode into a tornado at any time. Sometimes it seems like tornado watch announcements are on TV as often as re-runs of Friends, complete with color-coded maps and crawls listing all the affected counties. A tornado warning? Now that was something to worry about. But a watch? Please. Don’t bother me until I actually need to hide in the basement.

But in New England, where tornadoes appear about as often as the Red Sox win the World Series, that watch/warning distinction is lost. The clouds there are thin, wispy things that drift across the sky, as light as a....well, a cloud. They look like the fluffy, friendly clouds that kids draw in elementary school art classes, hovering over their houses with a happy-faced sun. So for a typical New Englander, tornadoes are completely off the radar, unless they’re spawned by a passing hurricane, in which case a tornado is just one more bad thing that can happen that day.

Despite a life lived largely in the Midwest, I’ve seen only one tornado up close. I was a college student in St. Paul at the time and I watched from my apartment as a thin, gray string hanging from a cloud a mile off shilly-shallied across a golf course, then lifted off the ground and snaked back and forth like an unmanned fire hose until breaking apart. As tornadoes go, it wasn’t very dramatic and a few downed tree limbs, chewed up fairways and missing pin flags were the extent of its damage. No green sky or freight train rumble, as so many witnesses describe a tornado’s presence. Meteorologically speaking, it probably wasn’t much more than a glorified dust devil and despite the screaming air raid siren and stern-voiced TV weatherman urging me to take cover, I never for a moment felt compelled to hide in the basement.

Such nonchalance wasn’t the case last April, though, when a tornado viciously tore apart parts of Iowa City, where I live now. The images of the rubble of St. Patrick’s Church and the walls-laid-bare sorority house have become iconic and will live forever in the town’s history. Fortunately, my neighborhood didn’t suffer any damage, but the steady, eery roar of the freight train sounded close enough that I took my kid and my cat and headed to the basement.

The next morning, when I boarded my bus for downtown, the driver suggested I bring my camera because we were heading into a “war zone.” I thought it was intentionally over-the-top rhetoric on his part to build dramatic effect until we arrived downtown and it did, indeed, look like a war zone. Construction scaffolding folded up and dropped in a pile. A convenience store canopy blown over. A pizza joint flattened. Brick facades hung perilously from the roofs of buildings. The streets littered with glass, limbs, whole trees, loose power lines and traffic lights. I was awe-struck. I knew it was bad, the pictures broadcast on the news the night before told us that, but no TV news pictures could convey the extent of it all. This was no fault of the photojournalists. Like real war, the damage simply overwhelmed the limited frame of a TV camera.

To show how capricious a tornado can be, when I arrived at my office I found my building was utterly undamaged. Not a scratch. Not a single broken window. Nothing. But right across the pedestrian mall, not 100 feet away, an entire block of buildings had their roofs torn off and their brick facades were scattered on the sidewalk. Months later, some of the businesses in those buildings still had not re-opened.

Later, I walked to the residential neighborhood east of downtown and saw the emotional damage that accompanied the physical. One homeowner stood in his second-floor bedroom, now fully exposed to the world, and shouted to no one in particular, “my house ain’t got no fuckin’ roof.” Over and over he shouted it, “my house ain’t got no fuckin’ roof,” as if it was only through repetition he could make himself understand that his house no longer had a fucking roof.

I also passed by a young woman sweeping broken glass off the sidewalk, her motions robotic, her face empty and expressionless. Behind her stood her house, now with no roof, no windows, and a pine tree lying horizontally across the demolished porch. Faced with the enormity of the re-building task that now faced her, she chose to sweep broken glass off the sidewalk. At least it was one thing she could scratch off her to-do list.

Fortunately, my own then-4-year old son seems to have escaped the evening without too much trauma, despite the fact we spent a good portion of it huddled in the basement bathroom with a terrified cat. He still gets a little skittish when lightning flashes, the wind picks up and brightly colored maps appear on TV, but after a few deep breaths, he goes on. When I was a child, I felt impervious to tornadoes, at least at home, because we lived just a few blocks from Lake Superior and my parents assured me that such close proximity to water protected us. Tornadoes, they said, don’t come near water. I wasn’t sure why tornadoes were afraid of water because it didn’t seem to make much sense, but it gave me one less bogey man to worry about so I happily believed. I know better now, but I’m still not sure where this myth comes from, and even more mystified by the fact it still hangs on. For instance, many of my Iowa City acquaintances were surprised that our tornado crossed the Iowa River last April, blowing apart the venerable Dairy Queen on the west side, then crossing the water and heading downtown on the east. Tornadoes, they had convinced themselves, don’t come near water.

I wonder sometimes if believing in this myth is a conscious choice because a tornado’s uncontrollable rage strikes a nerve in all of us—we usually can’t detect them until the last minute, we don’t know when they’re going to hit and we don’t know what direction they’ll move. In the end, if a tornado has us in its sights, we’re screwed. It’s that kind of fear that causes such an emotional reaction to Dorothy’s plight in “The Wizard of Oz,” as she scrambles around the farm desperately looking for safety as the badly animated tornado bears down and then carries her away from all that she loves. They remind us that in the eternal conflict of Man versus Nature, Man almost always gets pinned. We like to think we’ve got nature licked—that dams control floods, chemicals control bugs, medicines prevent disease. Modern technology gives us an edge against even hurricanes, because we can see them coming days in advance, plenty of time to batten down the hatches (though folks in New Orleans may question that one). But it’s hard to kid ourselves when it comes to a tornado because with tornadoes there are no such illusions of control. Our only real defense is to run like hell and hope you can find a place to hide. But we don’t like to run and hide, our nature is to stand and fight and it’s frustrating to know that if we try that with a tornado, we’ll get our butts kicked. So we believe in myths like the shield of water, convincing ourselves that there is a defense against tornadoes, and we all have one less bogey man to worry about.

Which is probably why my New England co-workers were so frantic about the thought of a tornado. Their only frame of reference is Dorothy helplessly spinning away from her Kansas farm, or TV news pictures of the flattened houses and demolished lives in the most recent tornado-squashed Midwest town. They think of that awesome power and wonder how their quintessential colonial New England coastal town can stand up, the whitewashed church steeple, the colonial inn where George Washington ate, the fleet of lobster boats docked in the harbor.

In the end, all of that was safe because, predictably, there was no tornado. Eventually I convinced our receptionist to stop looking out the door every few minutes, the ad rep there was no need to cancel her client meetings, and my editors they should stop planning the big package of tornado stories and not expect photos of flattened houses anytime soon. The watch was still the day’s lead story, though, probably the first time that “there was no tornado” made the front page.

--30--

Jackie Robinson: Civil rights icon, angry second baseman

Next weekend, Jackie Robinson's life gets the silver screen treatment when "42" is released,  and whenever I think of Jackie Robinson, this is the image that immediately comes to mind……..

There are no shortage of photos of Jackie Robinson. When you are a civil rights pioneer and one of the Most Important Americans Ever, there will be lots of photos. But with Jackie, so many of those photos lack a human element, something that shows Robinson as something other than the pedestal-dweller that we make of him today. Not that he doesn’t belong on a pedestal, but by nature people in a pedestal lose a part of their humanity, we don’t see them as one of us anymore, and that doesn’t do any good for us or the person on the pedestal.

So many of Robinson’s photos are stage managed by the Dodgers’ public relations machine, like so many player photos were back then, to the point where their humanity is scrubbed right out of them. The ridiculous posed shots of him pretending to field a ground ball……..

or “swinging” a bat with a motion that no major leaguer would ever use……

hanging out with Duke and Gil……

 

stealing home aginst Yogi in the World Series…….

  

 or speaking at the March on Washington…….

 

All these photos are great for establishing Robinson’s place in history, but they only contribute to turning him into an almost mythological figure, not a person, not a ballplayer. He has been given this heroic sheen that is only reinforced by time and that sets him apart from most anyone else.

That’s why I like this photo so much (a reminder of what it looks like)......

It’s taken at one of baseball's most famous moments, when Bobby Thomson's “shot heard ‘round the world” won the NL championship for the Giants in the 1951 playoff with the Dodgers (the “the Giants win the pennant, the Giants win the pennant, the Giants win the pennant….” game). For starters, the picture is just a great piece of journalism. You can tell what’s happening immediately, by the mob of Giants surrounding Thomson at home plate, and by poor Ralph Branca walking away from the mound, his shoulders slumped, already groaning under the weight of history. Giants win, Dodgers lose.

And then there’s Jackie Robinson, wearing a number you rarely see anymore (and won’t for much longer because Mariano Rivera can’t pitch forever) in a position we’ve rarely seen him—a human being, overshadowed by an historic moment, one in which he played no significant role.

He’s not the man who broke color line in this photo, not a civil rights icon, not one of the Greatest Americans Who Ever Lived. He’s off his pedestal here, the sheen is gone. He’s just a ballplayer who is confused, stunned, pissed off. He seems to be willfully ignoring Branca, angry with that son of a bitch who just gave up the winning home run. He is not thinking in this picture that he is the man who broke the color barrier, or that he is a civil rights pioneer, or that he carries the hopes and dreams of millions of African-Americans. What he’s thinking in this photo is that the Dodgers will not play in the World Series because they just lost the game, a game it should have won, and lost in the most painful way possible.

And that makes him immediately relatable, one of the few things that most of us will ever have in common with Jackie Robinson. We will never know what it’s like to be a myth or be placed on a pedestal or see our names on the list of Greatest Americans Ever. We will never know what it’s like to play major league baseball. But we all know what it’s like to stand there with our hands on our hips, wondering “how the hell did that just happen?”