Showing posts with label Book Research. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Book Research. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
MLB playoffs- Yankees, Rays; Question for Red Sox fans
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I know I’ve said it here often but I really do love baseball. And the best thing about the first round of the playoffs is that they actually play afternoon and early evening games—the kind you can watch to conclusion without worrying about being tired the next morning. Of course if you are a fan of the New York Yankees only a rain out is going to give you the chance to see your team play in the afternoon because they are locked into that primetime slot at 8:37 p.m. every night.
(Am I the only one who has noticed that in the MLB promo about memories being made in postseason about 90 percent of those memories involve the Yankees? I’m convinced if there had been the kind of video available in 1951 that we have today we would have seen the Yankees WATCHING Bobby Thompson’s shot rather than the home run itself).
The Yankees do provide almost unique theater—I say almost unique because the soap opera that is always the Red Sox is right up there. As of this morning, A.J. Burnett is now worth the $82 million the Yankees paid him because he managed to deliver 5 and 1/3 innings of one run baseball in Detroit last night. Sandy Koufax or Bob Gibson would have retired in disgust if they ever came out after 5 and 1/3 innings in a postseason game, but these days any pitcher who can go five innings without getting shelled is a future Hall of Famer.
What’s funny about Burnett’s performance is that if Curtis Granderson doesn’t make a catch that DOES belong on next year’s October promo with the bases loaded in the first inning, he probably doesn’t get out of that inning and may never be able to pitch again in New York. Seriously. That’s how close it was. It sounds funny to say about anyone who plays for the Yankees, but Granderson (who made another terrific catch in the sixth inning) is underrated. In fact, he and Robinson Cano are both underrated because there’s so much focus on Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez and, to a lesser degree, Mark Teixeira.
Cano and Granderson are, without any doubt, the Yankees two best players—C.C. Sabathia and Mariano Rivera are in a different category as pitchers—and Granderson is, from what I can read and hear, the best talker in the clubhouse. Regardless, if the Yankees end up in The World Series, people can point to his catch as the reason. He saved their season.
One other Yankees note: I had to drive to Comcast SportsNet last night because Washington Post Live is now on at 10:30 p.m. (WAY past my bedtime) and, as I always do, I flipped on the Yankees broadcast because John Sterling and Suzyn Waldman crack me up. I like them both personally, but it is truly funny to hear the panic in their voices when the Yankees falter.
When Burnett gave up the home run to Victor Martinez in the fourth inning to close the gap to 2-1, Suzyn was semi-hysterical. “This is the problem with A.J. Burnett,” she said. “He’s like the little girl with the curl. When he’s good, he’s very good, when he’s bad, he’s very bad. In fact, he’s HORRID.” (The home run was the first hit Burnett had given up). Watching the replay, she added, “Uch, look at that. If you put it on a tee you couldn’t have laid it in there any better for him.”
She and Sterling spent the rest of the inning taking deep breaths as Burnett maneuvered through trouble. “Think he’s on a short lease?” Sterling said at one point. “You bet he’s on a short lease. This is an elimination game.”
Sadly, by the time I got back in the car after the show, the Yankees had the game in hand and Sterling was reduced to wondering if Joe Girardi might give, ‘Mariano,’ (he says it with about seven syllables and never uses a last name) an inning.
So, TBS gets a Yankees-Tiger game 5 and all the executives at Fox will be praying that the Yankees advance.
All four series have had some drama to this point—although I admit there was no way I could stay up for all of Milwaukee-Arizona last night.
I honestly don’t know how to feel about The Tampa Bay Rays. As Tyler Kepner, who writes so well about baseball for The New York Times, pointed out this morning, their seasons are almost always the same: they compete superbly because their front office is so good and because Joe Maddon is such a good manager, and they come up short at some point because they simply don’t spend enough money to get that extra key player—the way the Texas Rangers spent $80 million last winter to get Adrian Beltre.
The Rays have now been in the playoffs three of the last four years—truly remarkable given that they play in the same division as the Yankees and Red Sox, each of whom probably spends more on its postgame clubhouse buffet budget than the Rays spend on players.
What’s sad is to see fewer than 30,000 fans in the ballpark for a postseason game. The Rays drew less than 1.6 million fans this year. The ballpark is absolutely awful and that’s a big part of the problem. The other problem is that there are more Yankee fans living in the Tampa Bay area than Rays fans.
Major League Baseball never should have put a team in Tampa—not without a promise to build a stadium with a retractable roof, the kind the Marlins are getting next year after almost 20 years of playing in a football stadium that’s ALMOST as awful as the dome in St. Petersburg.
And yet, somehow, the Rays, after being truly terrible for 10 years, have made it work the last four years. It’s just a shame almost no one down there cares.
Finally, I have a question for any of you out there who are Red Sox fans: As soon as the last day of the regular season concluded, I was convinced there was a book to be done that would focus strictly on that final day, arguably the most dramatic in regular season baseball history. I thought—think—that if you go back to the eight teams involved in those four deciding games, focusing on the four teams fighting for the playoffs but also including the other four teams and get players, managers, coaches, broadcasters to walk you through that day in detail, you have one hell of a story.
My agent, Esther Newberg, who is one of those Red Sox fans who is STILL mad at Bill Buckner, says the story might be good but no Red Sox fan will buy the book even if you get really good stuff from Theo Epstein, Terry Francona, Dustin Pedroia, David Ortiz et al.
I understand that feeling. In 2008 when my book on Tom Glavine and Mike Mussina came out, I got a really nice note during spring training from Gary Cohen, the Mets longtime play-by-play announcer who is a good friend. Gary wrote that he loved the book, in fact thought it was the best one I’d written.
I wrote back, thanked him and asked him if it might be possible to come on for an inning or two one night to talk about the book, the process of writing it, why I chose Glavine and Mussina—typical promo stuff.
Gary’s answer was to the point: “John, I loved the book and you know I’d love to help in any way. But after the way last season ended (Glavine getting shelled for seven runs in 1/3 of an inning with the season on the line on the last day) there’s not a Mets fan alive who wants to hear the name Tom Glavine again anytime soon.”
He was, of course, right.
So, Red Sox fans, is Esther right on this one too?
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Steve Williams taking the low road; Odds and ends
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A couple of weeks ago in a column for Golfchannel.com I suggested that the title of the book Steve Williams was proposing to write should be, “Somebody Had to Carry the Bag.” I have now revised the title. The book should be called, “The Low Road ALWAYS Taken.”
Let’s give old Stevie some credit. He did the impossible: Turned Tiger Woods into a semi-sympathetic figure for at least a couple of days. Some people have said he should have turned down CBS’s request for a post-round interview after his new man, Adam Scott, cruised to an impressive four-stroke victory at The WGC-Bridgestone Invitational.
I had no problem with CBS asking to talk to him or in Williams talking. He was clearly part of the story: His split with Woods had been much talked about (mostly by Williams) since it happened and the fact that his new player won in the first week he was officially his full time caddie while Woods was struggling along to a 37th place finish in his first week back since May, was clearly a story.
Now, I’ve been around Williams enough to know he’s not stupid. Obnoxious, yes. Arrogant beyond belief, yes. Rude…You get the picture. But stupid? No. And he’s talked to the media enough in recent years that the notion that he was overwhelmed by it all doesn’t play. He said what he wanted to say; what he had planned to say. Let’s remember he repeated the whole thing a few minutes later behind the green talking to the rest of the media.
His message was clear: F--- you Tiger. Look, everyone gets upset about being fired and you can certainly make the case that Woods had no actual cause to fire Williams. He’s clearly a very good caddie and if Woods was going to fire him it should have been years ago when he was breaking cameras and screaming profanities at fans and publicly abusing Phil Mickelson.
He didn’t. This was a change made for change sake because Woods is struggling and perhaps because the relationship between the two men had cooled since Woods’ fall from grace almost two years ago. Williams had a right to feel wronged….Except for this: Caddies are like baseball managers. Ninety-nine percent of the time they are hired to be fired. Bruce Edwards with Tom Watson was an exception and so is Jim Mackay with Mickelson. There are a few others, but not many.
Williams knows that. He also knows that working for Woods made him rich beyond his wildest dreams even if the ending was graceless—whether it happened in person as Woods claims or by phone as Williams claims. When David Feherty practically fell on top of himself trying to ask a question in a way that would set Williams up to say something nice about Woods while taking his own post-victory bow, Williams wanted no part of it.
He talked about this being the greatest win of his career and the greatest week of his career. The 13 majors with Woods never happened. Then he went into a long diatribe about what a great front-runner HE was. My God, how many shots exactly did he hit on Sunday? Was Scott even there?
As Jim Nantz said when it was over, “wow.” Exactly—wow. In a moment of triumph, Steve Williams left no doubt about just who he is for millions to witness.
Oh, one more note on Stevie’s week. On Wednesday he was told by a PGA Tour official that he would need to abandon his habit of yanking off his caddie bib on the 18th green. He’d been doing it for years to show off the corporate logo he’s paid to wear by an oil company. Because The Tour didn’t want to mess with Tiger, he was allowed to do it in spite of complaints from sponsors—who want THEIR logo on TV in return for the $8 million they pony up annually—and from other caddies who had to follow the rule that says the bibs stay on until you are in the scoring area.
Gracious as ever, Stevie growled something about the fact that, “the sponsors have never done anything for ME.” Really? Does he think the huge purses that he got a cut of from all of Tiger’s winnings the last 12 years came from the heavens or from those sponsors? When that was pointed out to him, he whined about how uncomfortable the bibs were. Only then did he agree to keep his on—because if he didn’t, his new boss would get fined and that probably wasn’t the best way to start a new job.
I reported this on Golf Channel on both Thursday and Friday. Apparently Nick Faldo, who WORKS for Golf Channel some of the time doesn’t watch the network very much and neither do his researchers at CBS because when Faldo saw Stevie still wearing the bib on Sunday afternoon he said, “Well, it used to be Steve’s tradition to take off his bib on the 18th green. Maybe he’s starting a new tradition.”
Yeah, that’s it, he’s starting a new tradition.
******
Some odds and ends on different subjects:
Jose Reyes must really be hurt this time. Usually the Mets announce that he is ‘day-to-day,’ when he gets hurt and then put him on the DL two weeks later. This time he went straight to the DL. All kidding aside: Terry Collins deserves some manager-of-the-year consideration given the way he has held this team together with David Wright and Reyes and now Daniel Murphy (who was having an excellent year) hurt for long stretches; the trades of Francisco Rodriguez and Carlos Beltran and Johan Santana not throwing a single pitch…
Gordon Gee of Ohio State is one of the 50 NCAA Presidents invited to the ‘summit,’ on big-time college athletics called by the NCAA. Isn’t that a little bit like asking Gee’s former coach Jim Tressel to chair a committee on transparency when dealing with a difficult situation?...
Someone asked recently why more of my books aren’t on tape. Good question: All my kids books are available on tape in their entirety. I am blessed to work with great people at Knopf. The non-fiction books, especially the more recent ones, are hit and miss largely because the people I’ve dealt with at Hachette Audio seem to be more interested in saving a few dollars on production costs than in putting out a quality product. To be honest, I stopped dealing with them about six books ago because it wasn’t worth the effort…
Finally: A belated Happy Birthday to my pal Jackson Diehl, who is the Deputy Editor of The Washington Post’s editorial page. Even though we last agreed political in, I think, 1979, we’ve been friends forever, dating to our days working in The Post’s Prince George’s County bureau in Upper Marlboro, Maryland. Most important, Jackson is aging up and I fully expect to see him swim the 200 fly at next spring’s short course nationals…
A couple of weeks ago in a column for Golfchannel.com I suggested that the title of the book Steve Williams was proposing to write should be, “Somebody Had to Carry the Bag.” I have now revised the title. The book should be called, “The Low Road ALWAYS Taken.”
Let’s give old Stevie some credit. He did the impossible: Turned Tiger Woods into a semi-sympathetic figure for at least a couple of days. Some people have said he should have turned down CBS’s request for a post-round interview after his new man, Adam Scott, cruised to an impressive four-stroke victory at The WGC-Bridgestone Invitational.
I had no problem with CBS asking to talk to him or in Williams talking. He was clearly part of the story: His split with Woods had been much talked about (mostly by Williams) since it happened and the fact that his new player won in the first week he was officially his full time caddie while Woods was struggling along to a 37th place finish in his first week back since May, was clearly a story.
Now, I’ve been around Williams enough to know he’s not stupid. Obnoxious, yes. Arrogant beyond belief, yes. Rude…You get the picture. But stupid? No. And he’s talked to the media enough in recent years that the notion that he was overwhelmed by it all doesn’t play. He said what he wanted to say; what he had planned to say. Let’s remember he repeated the whole thing a few minutes later behind the green talking to the rest of the media.
His message was clear: F--- you Tiger. Look, everyone gets upset about being fired and you can certainly make the case that Woods had no actual cause to fire Williams. He’s clearly a very good caddie and if Woods was going to fire him it should have been years ago when he was breaking cameras and screaming profanities at fans and publicly abusing Phil Mickelson.
He didn’t. This was a change made for change sake because Woods is struggling and perhaps because the relationship between the two men had cooled since Woods’ fall from grace almost two years ago. Williams had a right to feel wronged….Except for this: Caddies are like baseball managers. Ninety-nine percent of the time they are hired to be fired. Bruce Edwards with Tom Watson was an exception and so is Jim Mackay with Mickelson. There are a few others, but not many.
Williams knows that. He also knows that working for Woods made him rich beyond his wildest dreams even if the ending was graceless—whether it happened in person as Woods claims or by phone as Williams claims. When David Feherty practically fell on top of himself trying to ask a question in a way that would set Williams up to say something nice about Woods while taking his own post-victory bow, Williams wanted no part of it.
He talked about this being the greatest win of his career and the greatest week of his career. The 13 majors with Woods never happened. Then he went into a long diatribe about what a great front-runner HE was. My God, how many shots exactly did he hit on Sunday? Was Scott even there?
As Jim Nantz said when it was over, “wow.” Exactly—wow. In a moment of triumph, Steve Williams left no doubt about just who he is for millions to witness.
Oh, one more note on Stevie’s week. On Wednesday he was told by a PGA Tour official that he would need to abandon his habit of yanking off his caddie bib on the 18th green. He’d been doing it for years to show off the corporate logo he’s paid to wear by an oil company. Because The Tour didn’t want to mess with Tiger, he was allowed to do it in spite of complaints from sponsors—who want THEIR logo on TV in return for the $8 million they pony up annually—and from other caddies who had to follow the rule that says the bibs stay on until you are in the scoring area.
Gracious as ever, Stevie growled something about the fact that, “the sponsors have never done anything for ME.” Really? Does he think the huge purses that he got a cut of from all of Tiger’s winnings the last 12 years came from the heavens or from those sponsors? When that was pointed out to him, he whined about how uncomfortable the bibs were. Only then did he agree to keep his on—because if he didn’t, his new boss would get fined and that probably wasn’t the best way to start a new job.
I reported this on Golf Channel on both Thursday and Friday. Apparently Nick Faldo, who WORKS for Golf Channel some of the time doesn’t watch the network very much and neither do his researchers at CBS because when Faldo saw Stevie still wearing the bib on Sunday afternoon he said, “Well, it used to be Steve’s tradition to take off his bib on the 18th green. Maybe he’s starting a new tradition.”
Yeah, that’s it, he’s starting a new tradition.
******
Some odds and ends on different subjects:
Jose Reyes must really be hurt this time. Usually the Mets announce that he is ‘day-to-day,’ when he gets hurt and then put him on the DL two weeks later. This time he went straight to the DL. All kidding aside: Terry Collins deserves some manager-of-the-year consideration given the way he has held this team together with David Wright and Reyes and now Daniel Murphy (who was having an excellent year) hurt for long stretches; the trades of Francisco Rodriguez and Carlos Beltran and Johan Santana not throwing a single pitch…
Gordon Gee of Ohio State is one of the 50 NCAA Presidents invited to the ‘summit,’ on big-time college athletics called by the NCAA. Isn’t that a little bit like asking Gee’s former coach Jim Tressel to chair a committee on transparency when dealing with a difficult situation?...
Someone asked recently why more of my books aren’t on tape. Good question: All my kids books are available on tape in their entirety. I am blessed to work with great people at Knopf. The non-fiction books, especially the more recent ones, are hit and miss largely because the people I’ve dealt with at Hachette Audio seem to be more interested in saving a few dollars on production costs than in putting out a quality product. To be honest, I stopped dealing with them about six books ago because it wasn’t worth the effort…
Finally: A belated Happy Birthday to my pal Jackson Diehl, who is the Deputy Editor of The Washington Post’s editorial page. Even though we last agreed political in, I think, 1979, we’ve been friends forever, dating to our days working in The Post’s Prince George’s County bureau in Upper Marlboro, Maryland. Most important, Jackson is aging up and I fully expect to see him swim the 200 fly at next spring’s short course nationals…
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Tiger Woods and the leveraging of ‘access’; Blog comment helps change upcoming book title
It was 42 years ago today that man landed on the moon. I am—for both better and worse—old enough to remember the day vividly. I remember Walter Cronkite wiping his brow and saying, ‘man on the moon,’ in disbelief and I remember my father saying we would tell our children and grandchildren about this someday. I’ve told my kids about it on a number of occasions. They look at me and say something like, ‘okay fine, can you leave us alone now so we can go back online.’
C’est la vie.
Of course three months after Neill Armstrong took those historic first steps, the Mets won the World Series. Now THAT was impressive. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Tom Seaver, Cleon Jones, Tommie Agee—they are all historic figures to me.
Where have you gone Rod Gasper, I turn my lonely eyes to you.
Okay, so that was a bunch of meaningless drivel to start the day but the moon landing and the Mets first World Series title (of two as all Mets fans know) remain seminal events in my life.
So was covering my first British Open—which was at Royal St. George’s in 1985. Look, no one is ever going to mistake the place for St. Andrews or Muirfield but if you didn’t enjoy Darren Clarke’s victory on Sunday then you probably shouldn’t be wasting your time watching golf.
If you’re reading this you no doubt know Clarke’s backstory and the genuine tragedy he’s dealt with. Plus, he’s just a decent guy, someone who is about as close to normal as the multi-millionaires who play the game at its highest levels can be. I know all the Tiger lovers don’t want to hear this but I think golf is heading into an era that will truly be fun.
You can love Tiger Woods as much as you want or you can be like me and not like him but recognize his brilliance. Either way, it is impossible to attach the word fun to his 15 years of dominance. Yes, you can say it was FUN to watch him pull off impossible shots but there certainly wasn’t any fun in the man. He loved to win, he loved to make money but the only thing that was fun to him was winning trophies and cashing checks. It was part of his greatness.
The newer stars aren’t going to be as good as Woods was at his best. Not even close. There’s only one player in history who belongs in the same sentence with Woods and that’s Jack Nicklaus.
That said, Woods held his sport hostage—and to some degree still does—for 15 years. It wasn’t that he won so much it was that everything had to be HIS way. Remember those bogus night matches he played in as part of his Disney contract a few years ago? Technically, those events were run by The PGA Tour. When Steve Williams showed up wearing shorts one year—this was before caddies were allowed to wear shorts on tour—a tour official told Woods that Williams had to put on long pants.
Woods told him in no uncertain terms that not only would Williams wear shorts but if Tim Finchem didn’t like it he might just go play in Europe the following year.
Forget the fact that the Tour should have allowed caddies to wear shorts years ago—heck, they should let players wear shorts if they want to—or that Woods was right to stand up for his caddie in that situation. The point is this: The instant Woods threatened to go to Europe, even in a brief moment of anger, the Tour backed down faster than I can eat an order of McDonald’s french fries.
Woods bullied the media constantly. Some TV announcers were allowed to interview him, others were not. At different times he boycotted Peter Kostis and Jimmy Roberts. Their networks dutifully sent someone else to talk to Woods. People were constantly telling me that they let Woods dictate terms of interviews or backed off when his people got angry about something because, ‘we don’t want to lose our access to him.’
WHAT ACCESS? To get him to stop long enough to say nothing? Seriously, think about this for a second: When was the last time Tiger Woods said something that was really interesting. I’m not talking about announcing he’s playing or not playing a tournament or admitting he cheated on his wife—which everyone knew by the time he talked about it anyway. I’m talking about saying something that gave you some insight into him, into his game, into his view of the world.
Never happened. Not because he wasn’t capable, he’s more than capable but because Tiger Woods never gives away anything. That’s the way his father taught him and he learned his lessons well.
Anyway, this isn’t meant to be another anti-Tiger diatribe. I’m really criticizing all the people who simply took it from him—including Finchem—all those years. That said, in a sense they had no choice. He was that good and that powerful.
And, for the record, for those of you who think I criticize Woods because he wouldn’t talk to me for a book or one-on-one at some point, I swear to God that has nothing to do with it. I just don’t like the way he treats people. And, for the record, the ONE time I asked him to sit down and talk one-on-one he said yes. If you want details, well, read my next book. (Hey, I feel like an ESPN guy now: “After the break, we’ll tell you the real reason Tiger Woods and John Feinstein don’t get along.” Only problem is there is no real reason but the story about the one-on-one is kind of interesting).
A few other notes today on random topics. First—foremost—THANK YOU to the poster who sarcastically pointed out that the title of my new book was the same as titles used in the past by (among others) Spike Lee and Christine Brennan. Bad title searching on my part because I never knew. I could live with sharing a title with Spike Lee. At least he’s brilliant. Christine Brennan, not so much. So, since there was still time to change the title, it’s been changed. The new title is: “One on One: Behind The Scenes With The Greats of The Game.” There are also a number of non-greats in the book but what the heck. So, thanks for the tip. I was clueless.
To the Golf Channel poster who responded to my tongue-in-cheek column saying that the key to Tiger’s comeback would be hiring Chubby Chandler (some apparently missed the humor) by pointing out that I’m not exactly thin: Ya think? Thanks for pointing it out. As if I don’t look in the mirror every morning and moan out loud. But I HAVE lost six pounds this summer. Only about 25 more to go. Finally swimming regularly again. Not fast, but regularly.
C’est la vie.
Of course three months after Neill Armstrong took those historic first steps, the Mets won the World Series. Now THAT was impressive. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Tom Seaver, Cleon Jones, Tommie Agee—they are all historic figures to me.
Where have you gone Rod Gasper, I turn my lonely eyes to you.
Okay, so that was a bunch of meaningless drivel to start the day but the moon landing and the Mets first World Series title (of two as all Mets fans know) remain seminal events in my life.
So was covering my first British Open—which was at Royal St. George’s in 1985. Look, no one is ever going to mistake the place for St. Andrews or Muirfield but if you didn’t enjoy Darren Clarke’s victory on Sunday then you probably shouldn’t be wasting your time watching golf.
If you’re reading this you no doubt know Clarke’s backstory and the genuine tragedy he’s dealt with. Plus, he’s just a decent guy, someone who is about as close to normal as the multi-millionaires who play the game at its highest levels can be. I know all the Tiger lovers don’t want to hear this but I think golf is heading into an era that will truly be fun.
You can love Tiger Woods as much as you want or you can be like me and not like him but recognize his brilliance. Either way, it is impossible to attach the word fun to his 15 years of dominance. Yes, you can say it was FUN to watch him pull off impossible shots but there certainly wasn’t any fun in the man. He loved to win, he loved to make money but the only thing that was fun to him was winning trophies and cashing checks. It was part of his greatness.
The newer stars aren’t going to be as good as Woods was at his best. Not even close. There’s only one player in history who belongs in the same sentence with Woods and that’s Jack Nicklaus.
That said, Woods held his sport hostage—and to some degree still does—for 15 years. It wasn’t that he won so much it was that everything had to be HIS way. Remember those bogus night matches he played in as part of his Disney contract a few years ago? Technically, those events were run by The PGA Tour. When Steve Williams showed up wearing shorts one year—this was before caddies were allowed to wear shorts on tour—a tour official told Woods that Williams had to put on long pants.
Woods told him in no uncertain terms that not only would Williams wear shorts but if Tim Finchem didn’t like it he might just go play in Europe the following year.
Forget the fact that the Tour should have allowed caddies to wear shorts years ago—heck, they should let players wear shorts if they want to—or that Woods was right to stand up for his caddie in that situation. The point is this: The instant Woods threatened to go to Europe, even in a brief moment of anger, the Tour backed down faster than I can eat an order of McDonald’s french fries.
Woods bullied the media constantly. Some TV announcers were allowed to interview him, others were not. At different times he boycotted Peter Kostis and Jimmy Roberts. Their networks dutifully sent someone else to talk to Woods. People were constantly telling me that they let Woods dictate terms of interviews or backed off when his people got angry about something because, ‘we don’t want to lose our access to him.’
WHAT ACCESS? To get him to stop long enough to say nothing? Seriously, think about this for a second: When was the last time Tiger Woods said something that was really interesting. I’m not talking about announcing he’s playing or not playing a tournament or admitting he cheated on his wife—which everyone knew by the time he talked about it anyway. I’m talking about saying something that gave you some insight into him, into his game, into his view of the world.
Never happened. Not because he wasn’t capable, he’s more than capable but because Tiger Woods never gives away anything. That’s the way his father taught him and he learned his lessons well.
Anyway, this isn’t meant to be another anti-Tiger diatribe. I’m really criticizing all the people who simply took it from him—including Finchem—all those years. That said, in a sense they had no choice. He was that good and that powerful.
And, for the record, for those of you who think I criticize Woods because he wouldn’t talk to me for a book or one-on-one at some point, I swear to God that has nothing to do with it. I just don’t like the way he treats people. And, for the record, the ONE time I asked him to sit down and talk one-on-one he said yes. If you want details, well, read my next book. (Hey, I feel like an ESPN guy now: “After the break, we’ll tell you the real reason Tiger Woods and John Feinstein don’t get along.” Only problem is there is no real reason but the story about the one-on-one is kind of interesting).
A few other notes today on random topics. First—foremost—THANK YOU to the poster who sarcastically pointed out that the title of my new book was the same as titles used in the past by (among others) Spike Lee and Christine Brennan. Bad title searching on my part because I never knew. I could live with sharing a title with Spike Lee. At least he’s brilliant. Christine Brennan, not so much. So, since there was still time to change the title, it’s been changed. The new title is: “One on One: Behind The Scenes With The Greats of The Game.” There are also a number of non-greats in the book but what the heck. So, thanks for the tip. I was clueless.
To the Golf Channel poster who responded to my tongue-in-cheek column saying that the key to Tiger’s comeback would be hiring Chubby Chandler (some apparently missed the humor) by pointing out that I’m not exactly thin: Ya think? Thanks for pointing it out. As if I don’t look in the mirror every morning and moan out loud. But I HAVE lost six pounds this summer. Only about 25 more to go. Finally swimming regularly again. Not fast, but regularly.
Monday, January 24, 2011
Playoff weekend, including focus on Rex Ryan and the Jets, analysis on Cutler too quick; Update on new book
The New York Times had a perfect headline at the top of its sports front this morning: ‘Bluster Busters.’ That’s exactly what the Pittsburgh Steelers were on Sunday.
That said, reading and hearing all the comments about how Rex Ryan needs to shut up, made me laugh. First of all, Rex isn’t shutting up anytime soon. It just isn’t who he is and I’ve never met anyone in any walk of life who is successful trying to be someone who they aren’t. Hell, I’ve tried to do it on a few occasions and failed miserably.
I like Rex and it isn’t because the Jets were my boyhood team. I got to know him well in 2004 when I wrote, ‘Next Man Up,’ and liked him from day one. I still remember sitting in the Ravens war room—much to the horror of GM Ozzie Newsome who to this day shudders when he thinks of my presence in his draft room—when the Ravens turn finally came up on the draft board. (They had traded their No. 1 pick a year earlier to get Kyle Boller, a rare Newsome move that didn’t pan out). As soon as the team ahead of the Ravens made their pick, I heard a loud ‘WHOOEE!’ come from the room across the hall where all the assistant coaches were located.
It was Rex. The Ravens had a list of 150 players ranked from 1-150 and the highest player left on the board at that moment was Dwan Edwards, a defensive lineman. Always ‘true to the board,’ he would be Newsome’s pick. That meant two things to Rex: he had gotten a player he thought could help his line and he had beaten out the other position coaches to get his player chosen first. Yes, coaches on the same staff DO compete with one another at times.
Edwards never turned out to be much of a player—Bob Sanders, who the Ravens would have taken if they’d been able to move up six picks, which they came within seconds of doing, DID turn out to be pretty good—but that was my first exposure to Rex’s genuine enthusiasm. Without doubt he was the best-liked coach on the staff and there was no doubt he would become the defensive coordinator when Mike Nolan left at the end of the season to become the head coach in San Francisco.
So, Rex is going to be Rex. Of course there an old saying in sports, ‘it ain’t braggin’ if you can do it.’ The Jets haven’t done it—win the Super Bowl—in Rex’s two years and I have no doubt he’s going to be hammered in some quarters for not delivering on his promise. There’s also no doubt that something went wrong between warmups and kickoff on Sunday because the Steelers kicked the Jets butt in every possible category for the first 29 minutes of the game.
Let me step back for a second though and put on my Jets-fan cap: Does anyone want to bring back Eric Mangini? Even when the team was good during the Mangini –‘era,’ there wasn’t a whole lot of fun going on was there? Mangini makes Bill Belichick look like Rex. Two years; no playoff victories (one appearance) and zero laughs. Rex? Two years; FOUR playoff victories and about a million laughs.
Even if I’d never met him, I’d take Rex in a heartbeat. Herm Edwards was (is) a terrific guy but he got to how many conference championship games? If you want, I can go back through the whole sad history. The only Jets coach you can POSSIBLY make a case for being better than Rex since Weeb Ewbank retired is Bill Parcells and he fled after a couple of years to write the eighth installment of his ongoing series, ‘My Final Season.’ I think the 12th installment comes out in another year or so.
As for the NFC game, was it just me or did it feel a little bit like the JV game? Don’t get me wrong, I think the Packers have a great chance to win The Super Bowl. Any team in any sport that plays lousy and still advances is very dangerous. Aaron Rodgers was awful on Sunday. The only reason the Packers won was because Jay Cutler was worse before he got hurt and the Bears were never all that good to begin with. Lovey Smith did an amazing job to coax 12 wins from that team.
One note on Cutler: I’m not a fan of his. I think he’s arrogant and obnoxious and he’s an interception waiting to happen at any key moment. That said, to question his knee injury is unfair. Unless there’s real evidence that he was faking it, people should shut up. None of us knows how someone ELSE feels when they get hit or are in some kind of pain—especially playing in zero degrees with Clay Matthews bearing down on you. Those who question someone for saying they’re hurt should try doing that one time in their lives.
I do have one question on the Packers: Am I the only one who continues to be amazed at how players risk disaster by show-boating? B.J. Raji made a great play when he intercepted Caleb Hanie and went in for a touchdown but what was he thinking holding the ball out before he got to the goal line? If Hanie had arrived a step earlier he might have knocked the ball loose from him on the one-yard line. Ridiculous? Really? As in it has never happened in the past?
And when will defensive backs learn that when you make an interception with the lead and the other team is out of time outs in the last two minutes you GO DOWN. And yet, there was Sam Shields running around after the last interception with everyone screaming at him to get down—which he finally did. Again, the only way you can lose the game at that point is if you fumble while being tackled. Again, tell me it has never happened in the past and I’ll withdraw the comment.
I have no idea who will win The Super Bowl. But if the Steelers win there had better be a lot more people putting Mike Tomlin in the same sentence with Bill Belichick and Bill Parcells than with Tom Coughlin and Bill Cowher. The guy is really good at what he does and often doesn’t get credit because he’s, well, no Rex Ryan.
You have to be yourself, right?
*****
One note on the book I’m currently working on about my 25 years of writing books. A number of people have asked if who I’m writing about is a secret. Not at all. You can probably guess if you’ve read my work at all in the past. The book begins with Bob Knight because that’s where my book-writing career began. It also ends with Bob Knight. In between I write about some of the famous people I’ve known: Dean Smith, Jim Valvano, Mike Krzyzewski, David Robinson, Steve Kerr, John McEnroe, Ivan Lendl, Martina Navratilova, Tiger Woods (there’s a Tiger story that MAY surprise you) Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Greg Norman, Joe Torre, Bobby Cox and others. There are also lots of stories about not-so-famous people I’ve known but who I’ve liked and found fascinating. Have I spoken to everyone mentioned: almost. Have I spoken to Knight? Yes. As I said, the book ends with him—just don’t read it expecting hugs, kisses or tears when you get to the finish line. They come earlier.
That said, reading and hearing all the comments about how Rex Ryan needs to shut up, made me laugh. First of all, Rex isn’t shutting up anytime soon. It just isn’t who he is and I’ve never met anyone in any walk of life who is successful trying to be someone who they aren’t. Hell, I’ve tried to do it on a few occasions and failed miserably.
I like Rex and it isn’t because the Jets were my boyhood team. I got to know him well in 2004 when I wrote, ‘Next Man Up,’ and liked him from day one. I still remember sitting in the Ravens war room—much to the horror of GM Ozzie Newsome who to this day shudders when he thinks of my presence in his draft room—when the Ravens turn finally came up on the draft board. (They had traded their No. 1 pick a year earlier to get Kyle Boller, a rare Newsome move that didn’t pan out). As soon as the team ahead of the Ravens made their pick, I heard a loud ‘WHOOEE!’ come from the room across the hall where all the assistant coaches were located.
It was Rex. The Ravens had a list of 150 players ranked from 1-150 and the highest player left on the board at that moment was Dwan Edwards, a defensive lineman. Always ‘true to the board,’ he would be Newsome’s pick. That meant two things to Rex: he had gotten a player he thought could help his line and he had beaten out the other position coaches to get his player chosen first. Yes, coaches on the same staff DO compete with one another at times.
Edwards never turned out to be much of a player—Bob Sanders, who the Ravens would have taken if they’d been able to move up six picks, which they came within seconds of doing, DID turn out to be pretty good—but that was my first exposure to Rex’s genuine enthusiasm. Without doubt he was the best-liked coach on the staff and there was no doubt he would become the defensive coordinator when Mike Nolan left at the end of the season to become the head coach in San Francisco.
So, Rex is going to be Rex. Of course there an old saying in sports, ‘it ain’t braggin’ if you can do it.’ The Jets haven’t done it—win the Super Bowl—in Rex’s two years and I have no doubt he’s going to be hammered in some quarters for not delivering on his promise. There’s also no doubt that something went wrong between warmups and kickoff on Sunday because the Steelers kicked the Jets butt in every possible category for the first 29 minutes of the game.
Let me step back for a second though and put on my Jets-fan cap: Does anyone want to bring back Eric Mangini? Even when the team was good during the Mangini –‘era,’ there wasn’t a whole lot of fun going on was there? Mangini makes Bill Belichick look like Rex. Two years; no playoff victories (one appearance) and zero laughs. Rex? Two years; FOUR playoff victories and about a million laughs.
Even if I’d never met him, I’d take Rex in a heartbeat. Herm Edwards was (is) a terrific guy but he got to how many conference championship games? If you want, I can go back through the whole sad history. The only Jets coach you can POSSIBLY make a case for being better than Rex since Weeb Ewbank retired is Bill Parcells and he fled after a couple of years to write the eighth installment of his ongoing series, ‘My Final Season.’ I think the 12th installment comes out in another year or so.
As for the NFC game, was it just me or did it feel a little bit like the JV game? Don’t get me wrong, I think the Packers have a great chance to win The Super Bowl. Any team in any sport that plays lousy and still advances is very dangerous. Aaron Rodgers was awful on Sunday. The only reason the Packers won was because Jay Cutler was worse before he got hurt and the Bears were never all that good to begin with. Lovey Smith did an amazing job to coax 12 wins from that team.
One note on Cutler: I’m not a fan of his. I think he’s arrogant and obnoxious and he’s an interception waiting to happen at any key moment. That said, to question his knee injury is unfair. Unless there’s real evidence that he was faking it, people should shut up. None of us knows how someone ELSE feels when they get hit or are in some kind of pain—especially playing in zero degrees with Clay Matthews bearing down on you. Those who question someone for saying they’re hurt should try doing that one time in their lives.
I do have one question on the Packers: Am I the only one who continues to be amazed at how players risk disaster by show-boating? B.J. Raji made a great play when he intercepted Caleb Hanie and went in for a touchdown but what was he thinking holding the ball out before he got to the goal line? If Hanie had arrived a step earlier he might have knocked the ball loose from him on the one-yard line. Ridiculous? Really? As in it has never happened in the past?
And when will defensive backs learn that when you make an interception with the lead and the other team is out of time outs in the last two minutes you GO DOWN. And yet, there was Sam Shields running around after the last interception with everyone screaming at him to get down—which he finally did. Again, the only way you can lose the game at that point is if you fumble while being tackled. Again, tell me it has never happened in the past and I’ll withdraw the comment.
I have no idea who will win The Super Bowl. But if the Steelers win there had better be a lot more people putting Mike Tomlin in the same sentence with Bill Belichick and Bill Parcells than with Tom Coughlin and Bill Cowher. The guy is really good at what he does and often doesn’t get credit because he’s, well, no Rex Ryan.
You have to be yourself, right?
*****
One note on the book I’m currently working on about my 25 years of writing books. A number of people have asked if who I’m writing about is a secret. Not at all. You can probably guess if you’ve read my work at all in the past. The book begins with Bob Knight because that’s where my book-writing career began. It also ends with Bob Knight. In between I write about some of the famous people I’ve known: Dean Smith, Jim Valvano, Mike Krzyzewski, David Robinson, Steve Kerr, John McEnroe, Ivan Lendl, Martina Navratilova, Tiger Woods (there’s a Tiger story that MAY surprise you) Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Greg Norman, Joe Torre, Bobby Cox and others. There are also lots of stories about not-so-famous people I’ve known but who I’ve liked and found fascinating. Have I spoken to everyone mentioned: almost. Have I spoken to Knight? Yes. As I said, the book ends with him—just don’t read it expecting hugs, kisses or tears when you get to the finish line. They come earlier.
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Today is the official publication date for “Moment of Glory” -- I sincerely hope that people will enjoy reading it
Today is the official publication date for my new book, “Moment of Glory—The Year Underdogs Ruled The Majors.”
Pub date—as it is called in the book business—is always nerve-wracking for me, even though this is my 26th book. There’s always a lot of work to do—radio and TV interviews—working with the publicist to figure out where you should go and when you should go to different cities, but beyond that there’s one very simple thing: you want people to like the book.
I’m not talking about reviewers; you want good reviews of course but after a while you get used to the vagaries of reviews. I’m talking about people who go out and buy the book. I still have every single letter I’ve ever been sent about any of the books I’ve written. Most are very nice and complimentary. Occasionally you get one that is complimentary but points out things you might have missed or even mistakes (I’ve never written a perfect book as hard as I have tried) that you’ve made. Every once in a while someone writes to tell you they hated the book. Doesn’t happen often, but it does happen.
I guess the most mail I’ve ever received on a book was my first one, “A Season on the Brink,”—a lot of it from fans of Bob Knight and Indiana wondering why in the world Knight was so angry that I’d left his profanity in the book—as if that had ever been a secret. A close second was, “A Civil War,” and, after that, the mysteries I’ve written for 11-and-up young adult readers. The letters from kids who have read and liked the books may be the most gratifying of all.
That said, 15 years after it was published, I still get mail regularly about, “A Good Walk Spoiled,” which was my first golf book. I’m surprised (though pleased) when people write that they’ve just bought it and read it. Sometimes I get a follow-up note from people who have gone on to read the other golf books saying that they enjoyed those too. The letters that most often make me cry are about, “Caddy For Life,” the book I wrote on my friend Bruce Edwards, who was Tom Watson’s caddy for most of 30 years before dying of ALS in 2004. Many are from people who have been touched by ALS—which is as awful a disease as have ever existed.
That was, by far, the most intensely emotional book I’ve ever been involved in because I was watching a friend die while researching and writing the book. Next month, The Golf Channel is going to air a documentary based on ‘Caddy,’ that I had the chance to work on with Watson and Bruce’s family and many of the same people I interviewed while doing the book. The documentary (which first airs June 14th the week of the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach, the site of Tom and Bruce’s most famous moment at the ’82 Open when Tom chipped in on 17 to beat Jack Nicklaus) stirred a lot of the old emotions. There were—as you will see—plenty of tears during the taping of the interviews.
‘Moment of Glory,’ is a book I’m really proud of for a number of reasons. To begin with, I really like the IDEA, which first came to me walking down the 10th fairway at Augusta during the Mike Weir-Len Mattiace playoff at The Masters in 2003. I knew both men and liked them both a lot and was having a good deal of trouble deciding who I wanted to see win.
It occurred to me as I walked down the hill—the 10th at August slopes downward by about 100 feet from tee to green—to where they had hit their tee shots, that in the next few minutes their lives were going to go in very different directions. One would be a Masters champion and that would be part of his life and his legacy. As Weir said to me later, “it almost becomes part of your name: ‘Masters champion Mike Weir.’ The other would be left to wonder ‘what-if,’ perhaps for the rest of his life. Both men were good players but they weren’t Tiger Woods, they weren’t guys who could just assume that they would have another chance at this sort of moment.
So, when Weir won I was thrilled for him, but saddened for Mattiace, especially when he broke down and cried talking to the media—not so much about losing but about the entire experience; the notion of shooting 65 on Sunday at Augusta, arguably your greatest day in golf, but not winning. Kristen Mattiace, Len’s wife, pulled up in a cart while Len was talking and saw her husband turning in to a puddle. “It didn’t surprise me,” she said later. “Len’s Italian. Everything makes him cry. But I knew this was different.”
I tucked the idea that there was a story in the divergent routes of Weir and Mattiace in the back of mind and then watched in surprise the way the rest of that year unfolded: Jim Furyk winning the U.S. Open was no shock since he’d been a good player who had contended in majors for a while, but it was nice to see him win because I’d worked closely with him on, “The Majors,” and knew how much he wanted to get over that hump. Quick, can you name the runner-up that year? How about Stephen Leaney, an Australian—really nice guy—who saw the second place finish as his chance to get onto the U.S. Tour.
Then there was Ben Curtis at The British. A year earlier, Curtis had been playing on The Hooters Tour. He had finally made it through Q-School the previous December and was playing in his first major championship ever. Quick, give me the list of guys who won the first time they ever teed it up in a major. How about Francis Ouimet and Ben Curtis? That’s the list.
The night before The British began, Curtis and his then-fiancée Candace Beatty were eating dinner at a house IMG (the agency that represents half the world’s golfers) had rented for the week. Weir sat down across from them. Curtis introduced himself and Candace and congratulated him on his win at Augusta.
“Oh thanks a lot,” Weir said. “So what brings you guys over here?”
“Um, I’m playing in the tournament,” Curtis said.
Weir was horrified. “I was so embarrassed,” he said. “But I had no idea who he was. Four days later he won The British Open.”
Talk about a change of life. Curtis went from un-recognized by another golfer to appearing on Letterman in a period of six days.
Shaun Micheel’s win the next month at The PGA wasn’t quite as shocking but it was close. He had never won a PGA Tour event, his highest finish had been a tie for third at The B.C. Open. He had only gone through one year on tour where he had played well enough to keep his playing rights for the next year. And then he hit one of the great shots in golf history—a 7-iron to two inches on the 18th hole at Oak Hill with a one shot lead over Chad Campbell—to become a major champion.
He hasn’t won a tournament since. In fact, in 2010 he isn’t even a fully exempt player on the tour having battled injuries (shoulder surgery); issues with the tour over a drug he needed to take and personal problems—his mom is battling cancer. All the players involved in those majors in 2003, with the possible exception of Furyk, have been through issues on and off the golf course; all have had to deal with sudden fame radically changing their lives and none has won another major.
That’s really what the book is about. To me it’s a little bit, “A Good Walk Spoiled,”—what life is like on tour—a little bit, “The Majors,”—for obvious reasons—and a little bit, “Tales From Q-School,”—since everyone involved except for Furyk made more than one trip to Q-School and one of them (Micheel) has been back SINCE winning a major.
Ironically, the book begins with Tiger Woods firing a swing coach: His firing of Butch Harmon at The British Open in 2002 led to a two-and-a-half year slump during which he didn’t win a major (after winning seven of the previous 11). That opened the door for these guys and others to have their chance to make history.
I really enjoyed doing the book because the guys involved were good guys with very good stories to tell and all (wives included) were very honest about all that went on. I’m grateful to them for their patience. This book had some fits and starts getting done: it was first delayed when Rocco Mediate asked me to do a book on his 2008 U.S. Open experience and delayed again by my heart surgery last summer. But it is finished now and it is out there and I am really happy I had the chance to report it, write and complete it. I sincerely hope that people will enjoy reading it.
If the reviewers like it, all the better. But, as I said, they’re not the readers I care about most.
--------------------------------
John's new book: "Moment of Glory--The Year Underdogs Ruled The Majors,"--is now available online and in bookstores nationwide. Visit your favorite retailer, or click here for online purchases
Pub date—as it is called in the book business—is always nerve-wracking for me, even though this is my 26th book. There’s always a lot of work to do—radio and TV interviews—working with the publicist to figure out where you should go and when you should go to different cities, but beyond that there’s one very simple thing: you want people to like the book.
I’m not talking about reviewers; you want good reviews of course but after a while you get used to the vagaries of reviews. I’m talking about people who go out and buy the book. I still have every single letter I’ve ever been sent about any of the books I’ve written. Most are very nice and complimentary. Occasionally you get one that is complimentary but points out things you might have missed or even mistakes (I’ve never written a perfect book as hard as I have tried) that you’ve made. Every once in a while someone writes to tell you they hated the book. Doesn’t happen often, but it does happen.
I guess the most mail I’ve ever received on a book was my first one, “A Season on the Brink,”—a lot of it from fans of Bob Knight and Indiana wondering why in the world Knight was so angry that I’d left his profanity in the book—as if that had ever been a secret. A close second was, “A Civil War,” and, after that, the mysteries I’ve written for 11-and-up young adult readers. The letters from kids who have read and liked the books may be the most gratifying of all.
That said, 15 years after it was published, I still get mail regularly about, “A Good Walk Spoiled,” which was my first golf book. I’m surprised (though pleased) when people write that they’ve just bought it and read it. Sometimes I get a follow-up note from people who have gone on to read the other golf books saying that they enjoyed those too. The letters that most often make me cry are about, “Caddy For Life,” the book I wrote on my friend Bruce Edwards, who was Tom Watson’s caddy for most of 30 years before dying of ALS in 2004. Many are from people who have been touched by ALS—which is as awful a disease as have ever existed.
That was, by far, the most intensely emotional book I’ve ever been involved in because I was watching a friend die while researching and writing the book. Next month, The Golf Channel is going to air a documentary based on ‘Caddy,’ that I had the chance to work on with Watson and Bruce’s family and many of the same people I interviewed while doing the book. The documentary (which first airs June 14th the week of the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach, the site of Tom and Bruce’s most famous moment at the ’82 Open when Tom chipped in on 17 to beat Jack Nicklaus) stirred a lot of the old emotions. There were—as you will see—plenty of tears during the taping of the interviews.
‘Moment of Glory,’ is a book I’m really proud of for a number of reasons. To begin with, I really like the IDEA, which first came to me walking down the 10th fairway at Augusta during the Mike Weir-Len Mattiace playoff at The Masters in 2003. I knew both men and liked them both a lot and was having a good deal of trouble deciding who I wanted to see win.
It occurred to me as I walked down the hill—the 10th at August slopes downward by about 100 feet from tee to green—to where they had hit their tee shots, that in the next few minutes their lives were going to go in very different directions. One would be a Masters champion and that would be part of his life and his legacy. As Weir said to me later, “it almost becomes part of your name: ‘Masters champion Mike Weir.’ The other would be left to wonder ‘what-if,’ perhaps for the rest of his life. Both men were good players but they weren’t Tiger Woods, they weren’t guys who could just assume that they would have another chance at this sort of moment.
So, when Weir won I was thrilled for him, but saddened for Mattiace, especially when he broke down and cried talking to the media—not so much about losing but about the entire experience; the notion of shooting 65 on Sunday at Augusta, arguably your greatest day in golf, but not winning. Kristen Mattiace, Len’s wife, pulled up in a cart while Len was talking and saw her husband turning in to a puddle. “It didn’t surprise me,” she said later. “Len’s Italian. Everything makes him cry. But I knew this was different.”
I tucked the idea that there was a story in the divergent routes of Weir and Mattiace in the back of mind and then watched in surprise the way the rest of that year unfolded: Jim Furyk winning the U.S. Open was no shock since he’d been a good player who had contended in majors for a while, but it was nice to see him win because I’d worked closely with him on, “The Majors,” and knew how much he wanted to get over that hump. Quick, can you name the runner-up that year? How about Stephen Leaney, an Australian—really nice guy—who saw the second place finish as his chance to get onto the U.S. Tour.
Then there was Ben Curtis at The British. A year earlier, Curtis had been playing on The Hooters Tour. He had finally made it through Q-School the previous December and was playing in his first major championship ever. Quick, give me the list of guys who won the first time they ever teed it up in a major. How about Francis Ouimet and Ben Curtis? That’s the list.
The night before The British began, Curtis and his then-fiancée Candace Beatty were eating dinner at a house IMG (the agency that represents half the world’s golfers) had rented for the week. Weir sat down across from them. Curtis introduced himself and Candace and congratulated him on his win at Augusta.
“Oh thanks a lot,” Weir said. “So what brings you guys over here?”
“Um, I’m playing in the tournament,” Curtis said.
Weir was horrified. “I was so embarrassed,” he said. “But I had no idea who he was. Four days later he won The British Open.”
Talk about a change of life. Curtis went from un-recognized by another golfer to appearing on Letterman in a period of six days.
Shaun Micheel’s win the next month at The PGA wasn’t quite as shocking but it was close. He had never won a PGA Tour event, his highest finish had been a tie for third at The B.C. Open. He had only gone through one year on tour where he had played well enough to keep his playing rights for the next year. And then he hit one of the great shots in golf history—a 7-iron to two inches on the 18th hole at Oak Hill with a one shot lead over Chad Campbell—to become a major champion.
He hasn’t won a tournament since. In fact, in 2010 he isn’t even a fully exempt player on the tour having battled injuries (shoulder surgery); issues with the tour over a drug he needed to take and personal problems—his mom is battling cancer. All the players involved in those majors in 2003, with the possible exception of Furyk, have been through issues on and off the golf course; all have had to deal with sudden fame radically changing their lives and none has won another major.
That’s really what the book is about. To me it’s a little bit, “A Good Walk Spoiled,”—what life is like on tour—a little bit, “The Majors,”—for obvious reasons—and a little bit, “Tales From Q-School,”—since everyone involved except for Furyk made more than one trip to Q-School and one of them (Micheel) has been back SINCE winning a major.
Ironically, the book begins with Tiger Woods firing a swing coach: His firing of Butch Harmon at The British Open in 2002 led to a two-and-a-half year slump during which he didn’t win a major (after winning seven of the previous 11). That opened the door for these guys and others to have their chance to make history.
I really enjoyed doing the book because the guys involved were good guys with very good stories to tell and all (wives included) were very honest about all that went on. I’m grateful to them for their patience. This book had some fits and starts getting done: it was first delayed when Rocco Mediate asked me to do a book on his 2008 U.S. Open experience and delayed again by my heart surgery last summer. But it is finished now and it is out there and I am really happy I had the chance to report it, write and complete it. I sincerely hope that people will enjoy reading it.
If the reviewers like it, all the better. But, as I said, they’re not the readers I care about most.
--------------------------------
John's new book: "Moment of Glory--The Year Underdogs Ruled The Majors,"--is now available online and in bookstores nationwide. Visit your favorite retailer, or click here for online purchases
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Moment of Glory--The Year Underdogs Ruled Golf
What inspired me to do the book was Mike Donald, who people may remember came within one roll of the golf ball of winning the U.S. Open in 1990. I worked with Donald in 1993 and 1994 while researching, ‘A Good Walk Spoiled,’ and couldn’t get out of my mind how completely different his life would have been had he won the Open. When Mike Weir and Len Mattiace played off at the 2003 Masters, I was struck walking down the 10th hole how different life was going to be for the winner as opposed to the loser. That was really the genesis of the idea.
Fortunately, the guys I worked with were terrific and did have fascinating stories to tell about what happened to their lives after their win or their near-win. Some of the near-winners—specifically Mattiace and Thomas Bjorn who probably should have won The British Open that year—are still haunted by what happened and have trouble talking about it. Overall, it was as much fun as I’ve had doing a golf book perhaps since ‘A Good Walk Spoiled.’ I see it as sort of ‘A Good Walk Spoiled,’ meets, ‘Tales From Q-School.’ Two of the characters have been BACK to Q-School since their ‘Moment,’ in 2003.
I think you can find it on Amazon for pre-order now. Obviously I’ll be talking and writing about it more as we get closer to the publication date, which is May 13th.
Note: Please check with your favorite retailer for details, or click here to pre-order from Amazon: Moment of Glory: The Year Underdogs Ruled Golf
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Returning to Indiana always puts a smile on my face; A look back at 'A Season on the Brink'
ON THE ROAD TO INDIANA—Okay, about to be on the road. I’m not so crazy that I’d try to write while driving. I have enough trouble with it while sitting in a chair.
I always enjoy going back (home again) to Indiana. It brings back lots of fond memories. You see, regardless of what Bob Knight thought about ‘Season on the Brink,’—we have a civil, ‘hi, how’s it going,’ relationship these days for those who wonder—I made a lot of good friends while doing the book and still enjoy visiting there because most people I encounter could not be nicer. The reaction I have gotten through the years from most Indiana fans is, “gee, why was Coach Knight so upset, it isn’t as if it was a surprise to anyone that he uses profanity.”
You have to understand Knight—and I’m not claiming I do even though I was with him for 14 to 16 hours a day for most of six months—to figure out the answer to that question. I knew when I left Bloomington that Bob was going to find something not to like in the book. That’s the way he is. I never for a second expected him to call me when I sent him an advance copy and say, “Wow John, this is great, you really captured what it’s like to be inside the program.”
That’s just not who he is. On the night Indiana won the national championship in 1976, finishing the season undefeated (the last team to do that) Knight walked out of The Philadelphia Spectrum with a friend who was practically jumping up and down with excitement.
“You did it,” he said. “You won the national championship!”
This was Knight’s response: “Shoulda been two.”
He was still pouting because his 1975 team, which was probably better than the 1976 team had lost to Kentucky in the regional final after Scott May broke his arm and came back to play at far less than 100 percent.
All that said, when Royce Waltman, then an Indiana assistant called me and said, “Coach is angry because you left his profanity in the book,” my first reaction was, “Okay, now tell me what he’s really angry about.”
I honestly thought Royce was kidding or that Knight had said something like, “Do I really say f---- that often?”
Knight is great at denial. In fact, during the season I was there, he got into a big argument one night with a pal named Bob Murrey because he asked Bob to assess how he was doing at controlling his temper. When Murrey said he was doing okay, but not great, Knight got angry and insisted that Murrey was wrong that he was doing a GREAT job of controlling his temper.
Royce said he was completely serious that Knight thought I had agreed to leave his profanity out of the book. In fact, I vividly remember discussing the issue one night with Bob while we ate dinner at Chili’s, one of his favorite restaurants. He’d been especially uptight in practice that day and had called one player a word that women find especially offensive 14 times during one sequence. That’s an exact number. I counted when I listened to the tape.
I jokingly commented that night that the book might be the first sports book that had to be wrapped in brown paper with a warning for parents. Bob laughed and said something like, “Yeah I know, but you aren’t going to leave all my profanity in are you?”
My exact answer was this: “No Bob I’m not. I want the book to be shorter than War and Peace. But you understand that writing a book about you without the word f--- would be like writing a book about you without the word basketball.”
He said, “I understand that.”
But he didn’t understand nine months later. Looking back, I believe he honestly thought I had said I’d leave out his profanity. That’s another thing about Knight: as good as his memory is on some things (it isn’t nearly as good as he would have you believe it is) he often skews the past in his mind.
I remember early that season when Waltman and another assistant, Julio Salazar, had driven to South Bend to tape the local telecast of Notre Dame’s game on a Saturday afternoon—yup, in those days you had to dostuff like that—and Knight wanted it broken down (offense, defense, certain plays and players) that night. Waltman told Knight that Salazar was working on it but it would be the next morning before it was ready.
A few hours later (after Indiana had played that night) Knight demanded to know where the tape was that Waltman had promised he would have right after the game.
Knight THOUGHT Waltman had said he’d have it after the game because that’s what he wanted. There are lots of other examples that anyone who has spent time with Knight can recite for you.
But enough on Knight. As I’ve often said, I will always be grateful to him for giving me the access that allowed me to write ‘Season.’ The book changed my life and allowed me to pick and choose my book topics from that day forward.
Plus, I did make a lot of friends that year, including the players and the coaches and a lot of people I met at IU and around the state. I’m still friends with Bob’s son Pat (who was 15 that year and still jokingly refers to me as his, ‘former babysitter,’ since I picked him up at school quite a bit) and the school, the town and the whole state will always have a warm spot in my heart.
I have one memory that stays with me—among many—perhaps above all the others. After Indiana lost in the NCAA Tournament that year to Cleveland State in Syracuse I walked from the locker room to the interview room with Knight who was, to say the least, mad at the world. After he finished with the media, he headed straight to the bus having left orders that his players were to clear out of the locker room immediately to fly home.
I wasn’t going back to Bloomington that night because I had to stay to cover Navy that evening (David Robinson) for The Washington Post. I walked back to the locker room where I was accosted by a security guard who told me not only could I not go in the locker room I couldn’t be in the hallway. The guy saw my media credentials and started literally shoving me from the door.
As luck would have it, Brian Sloan, who was a redshirt that year but would go on to be very solid player, was coming out of the locker room at that moment. Seeing what was happening, he came over, put his hand on the guy’s shoulder and said, “leave him alone, he’s with us.”
The guard—stunned—backed off instantly. I shook hands with Brian, thanked him and went into the locker room to see everyone who was still there—I didn’t know if I’d see a lot of them when I got back to Bloomington since the season was over—and, in some cases, say goodbye.
I’ve never forgotten Brian Sloan for doing that. Even now, 24 years later, it puts a smile on my face. Just as returning to Indiana always puts a smile on my face.
***********
Two quick notes: To those of you who wrote in to ‘correct,’ my Post column in which I said that, according to the NCAA, John Calipari has never coached in a Final Four game: I was making a point. Of course I know about U-Mass in ’96 and Memphis in ’08—I WAS THERE. But when your appearance is ‘vacated,’ by the NCAA it never happened as far as they are concerned…
And: There was a question yesterday from a poster and we’ve had quite a few e-mails about the publication of my next book: It will officially be published on May 12th and the title is: “Moment of Glory—The Year Unknowns Ruled The Majors.” It focuses on 2003 when among the major champions (and runners-up) only Jim Furyk (U.S. Open) had ever come close to contending in a major—and he had never won one. It is about how one’s life changes radically after achieving sudden fame or just missing that moment. I really enjoyed doing it because I found the guys involved had great stories to tell. I believe it can be pre-ordered at Amazon right now. Thanks to all those who asked.
I always enjoy going back (home again) to Indiana. It brings back lots of fond memories. You see, regardless of what Bob Knight thought about ‘Season on the Brink,’—we have a civil, ‘hi, how’s it going,’ relationship these days for those who wonder—I made a lot of good friends while doing the book and still enjoy visiting there because most people I encounter could not be nicer. The reaction I have gotten through the years from most Indiana fans is, “gee, why was Coach Knight so upset, it isn’t as if it was a surprise to anyone that he uses profanity.”
You have to understand Knight—and I’m not claiming I do even though I was with him for 14 to 16 hours a day for most of six months—to figure out the answer to that question. I knew when I left Bloomington that Bob was going to find something not to like in the book. That’s the way he is. I never for a second expected him to call me when I sent him an advance copy and say, “Wow John, this is great, you really captured what it’s like to be inside the program.”
That’s just not who he is. On the night Indiana won the national championship in 1976, finishing the season undefeated (the last team to do that) Knight walked out of The Philadelphia Spectrum with a friend who was practically jumping up and down with excitement.
“You did it,” he said. “You won the national championship!”
This was Knight’s response: “Shoulda been two.”
He was still pouting because his 1975 team, which was probably better than the 1976 team had lost to Kentucky in the regional final after Scott May broke his arm and came back to play at far less than 100 percent.
All that said, when Royce Waltman, then an Indiana assistant called me and said, “Coach is angry because you left his profanity in the book,” my first reaction was, “Okay, now tell me what he’s really angry about.”
I honestly thought Royce was kidding or that Knight had said something like, “Do I really say f---- that often?”
Knight is great at denial. In fact, during the season I was there, he got into a big argument one night with a pal named Bob Murrey because he asked Bob to assess how he was doing at controlling his temper. When Murrey said he was doing okay, but not great, Knight got angry and insisted that Murrey was wrong that he was doing a GREAT job of controlling his temper.
Royce said he was completely serious that Knight thought I had agreed to leave his profanity out of the book. In fact, I vividly remember discussing the issue one night with Bob while we ate dinner at Chili’s, one of his favorite restaurants. He’d been especially uptight in practice that day and had called one player a word that women find especially offensive 14 times during one sequence. That’s an exact number. I counted when I listened to the tape.
I jokingly commented that night that the book might be the first sports book that had to be wrapped in brown paper with a warning for parents. Bob laughed and said something like, “Yeah I know, but you aren’t going to leave all my profanity in are you?”
My exact answer was this: “No Bob I’m not. I want the book to be shorter than War and Peace. But you understand that writing a book about you without the word f--- would be like writing a book about you without the word basketball.”
He said, “I understand that.”
But he didn’t understand nine months later. Looking back, I believe he honestly thought I had said I’d leave out his profanity. That’s another thing about Knight: as good as his memory is on some things (it isn’t nearly as good as he would have you believe it is) he often skews the past in his mind.
I remember early that season when Waltman and another assistant, Julio Salazar, had driven to South Bend to tape the local telecast of Notre Dame’s game on a Saturday afternoon—yup, in those days you had to dostuff like that—and Knight wanted it broken down (offense, defense, certain plays and players) that night. Waltman told Knight that Salazar was working on it but it would be the next morning before it was ready.
A few hours later (after Indiana had played that night) Knight demanded to know where the tape was that Waltman had promised he would have right after the game.
Knight THOUGHT Waltman had said he’d have it after the game because that’s what he wanted. There are lots of other examples that anyone who has spent time with Knight can recite for you.
But enough on Knight. As I’ve often said, I will always be grateful to him for giving me the access that allowed me to write ‘Season.’ The book changed my life and allowed me to pick and choose my book topics from that day forward.
Plus, I did make a lot of friends that year, including the players and the coaches and a lot of people I met at IU and around the state. I’m still friends with Bob’s son Pat (who was 15 that year and still jokingly refers to me as his, ‘former babysitter,’ since I picked him up at school quite a bit) and the school, the town and the whole state will always have a warm spot in my heart.
I have one memory that stays with me—among many—perhaps above all the others. After Indiana lost in the NCAA Tournament that year to Cleveland State in Syracuse I walked from the locker room to the interview room with Knight who was, to say the least, mad at the world. After he finished with the media, he headed straight to the bus having left orders that his players were to clear out of the locker room immediately to fly home.
I wasn’t going back to Bloomington that night because I had to stay to cover Navy that evening (David Robinson) for The Washington Post. I walked back to the locker room where I was accosted by a security guard who told me not only could I not go in the locker room I couldn’t be in the hallway. The guy saw my media credentials and started literally shoving me from the door.
As luck would have it, Brian Sloan, who was a redshirt that year but would go on to be very solid player, was coming out of the locker room at that moment. Seeing what was happening, he came over, put his hand on the guy’s shoulder and said, “leave him alone, he’s with us.”
The guard—stunned—backed off instantly. I shook hands with Brian, thanked him and went into the locker room to see everyone who was still there—I didn’t know if I’d see a lot of them when I got back to Bloomington since the season was over—and, in some cases, say goodbye.
I’ve never forgotten Brian Sloan for doing that. Even now, 24 years later, it puts a smile on my face. Just as returning to Indiana always puts a smile on my face.
***********
Two quick notes: To those of you who wrote in to ‘correct,’ my Post column in which I said that, according to the NCAA, John Calipari has never coached in a Final Four game: I was making a point. Of course I know about U-Mass in ’96 and Memphis in ’08—I WAS THERE. But when your appearance is ‘vacated,’ by the NCAA it never happened as far as they are concerned…
And: There was a question yesterday from a poster and we’ve had quite a few e-mails about the publication of my next book: It will officially be published on May 12th and the title is: “Moment of Glory—The Year Unknowns Ruled The Majors.” It focuses on 2003 when among the major champions (and runners-up) only Jim Furyk (U.S. Open) had ever come close to contending in a major—and he had never won one. It is about how one’s life changes radically after achieving sudden fame or just missing that moment. I really enjoyed doing it because I found the guys involved had great stories to tell. I believe it can be pre-ordered at Amazon right now. Thanks to all those who asked.
Monday, October 26, 2009
A Lot to Talk About After This Weekend, Including a Book Dedication
I'm honestly not exactly sure where to begin this morning.
I could begin with The World Series, which should be a great matchup if everyone involved doesn't freeze to death thanks to Major League Baseball's brilliant decision to push the climax of its season into November. I could also talk about how fortunate Yankees manager Joe Girardi is that Andy Pettitte got him close enough to Mariana Rivera that his middle relief pitchers (in this case Joba Chamberlain) only had to get him two outs in game six. If the Yankees lose that game--and for a while there it looked as if they might leave 100 men on base before the night was over--even with CC Sabathia pitching game seven the spectra of another ALCS collapse would have had people in New York in panic mode. An Angels victory might have caused the stock market to go down 400 points.
I'm honestly not sure if Girardi is that good a manager. He's so by-the-book (witness the pitching change with two outs and no one on in game 3 that led to the Angels win not to mention leaving A.J. Burnett out there WAY too long in game 5) and when he talks I swear to God I feel like I'm listening to Jim Zorn. The difference, of course, is that Girardi has so much talent that he could be the best or worst manager in history and it might not matter. What's more, if he wins, it DOESN'T matter. So we'll see what happens in The World Series. I'll also be fascinated to see how Alex Rodriguez does now that he's finally on the game's biggest stage. His numbers in postseason are great but how tight did he look to you with the bases loaded in the fourth inning. He fouled off a batting practice fastball on 2-0 and looked absolutely relieved when Dale Scott gave him ball four on a borderline pitch a moment later. Maybe I'm imagining things. We'll see. I'll say this, Sabathia vs. Cliff Lee is about as good a game 1 matchup as we've seen in a World Series in a long time. The key though may be how the guys pitching behind the studs pitch. The x-factors could end up being Pettitte and, believe it or not, Pedro Martinez.
In the meantime, I've tried to swear off writing anything about The Washington Redskins because it's become a little bit like battering a piñata that's already burst open and fallen to the ground. Still, after Vinny Cerrato's performance on Friday, I have to say something. Let's start with this: Who does this guy think he's kidding. His boss/lord and master, Dan Snyder, simply refused to speak to the media during the season. Cerrato spends the whole week ducking the media then goes on his own radio show (how did he get a radio show? Snyder owns the station) and "makes news," by saying Zorn won't be fired during the season. Whether that's true or not remains to be seen but then the guy has the NERVE to criticize the media. I'm sorry did the media lose to the Detroit Lions, the Carolina Panthers and the Kansas City Chiefs? Did the media completely fail to understand the importance of an offensive line? Did the media put itself in a position where it had to hire Zorn as head coach because no one with experience wanted the job? Has the media been so arrogant, so obnoxious and so money-gouging in almost 11 years of ownership that it has turned one of the great NFL towns against its NFL team?
I have suggested to some of my Washington Post colleagues that someone from the paper should be assigned after every game--win or lose--to walk up to Snyder and say, "what's your comment on today's game?" Snyder can refuse comment, can sick his bodyguards on the guy, can scream profanities (something he's famous for--ask Norv Turner among others) or he can discuss the game like an adult. His call. But MAKE him do it. Don't just accept the, "I don't speak to the media in-season," copout. He OWNS the team. He put together this team. Poor Zorn tried to claim a couple weeks ago that "most," NFL coaches meet with their owner during the week. NO THEY DON'T. Not the good coaches with good owners that's for sure. Do you think Bill Belichick spends a lot of time game-planning with Robert Kraft? If Snyder wants to run the team--which he clearly does--then he needs to respond to the public when the team goes bad.
Who knows, maybe the Redskins will win tonight with the bingo-caller running the offense. Then Snyder and Cerrato will spend all week sneering at people even more than normal. The Eagles are banged up and coming off an awful loss at Oakland so who knows if they're any good. Regardless, it won't fix a broken organization and that's what the Redskins are right now. And Vinny Cerrato--smarmy little mouthpiece that he is for Snyder--should shut up. If Snyder wants to speak to the media, legitimate media not people who work for him, fine. But that's it.
Onto more pleasant topics. No wait, I have to say something about officiating first. I was watching a college football game this weekend and a kid made a spectacular catch in the end zone. He stood up, put the ball between his legs twice and then dropped it on the ground. He was whistled for excessive celebration. Hello? What are these guys thinking. Is there NO common sense out there anymore. My God. There are only two reasons to flag someone for excessive celebration: If a group of players get together for something that's stage or if there's taunting--I mean in-your-face taunting. That's it. Or if someone pulls out a cell phone. One other thing: there needs to be a rule that if a replay official can't make a decision within two minutes, the call on the field stands. The delays have become ridiculous.
Okay, NOW a more pleasant topic. It's a long way from bad owners and bad officials to this but I want to thank everyone who wrote in either through a post or an e-mail to comment on the blog I wrote last week on my friend Patty Conway. It was especially nice to hear from friends from Shelter Island I hadn't talked to in a long time and to know that so many people shared the feelings that my kids and I had for Patty. Bob DeStefano, Patty's teacher and long-time boss at Gardiner's Bay Country Club reminded me that Patty was presented this summer with a junior, "Lifetime Achievement," Award during the annual junior awards banquet. Too often in life we honor people after they're gone. I'm glad Bob and his daughter Nancy thought to honor Patty in August--even before she was diagnosed with lung cancer.
I can almost hear Patty's voice right now talking about Rickie Fowler, the 20-year-old phenom who almost won on The PGA Tour yesterday. "Hey, he's kind of cute isn't he?" Then a pause. "Of course I like his golf swing too."
As luck would have it, I finished a golf book I've been working on for a good long while this weekend. It'll be out in the spring. It's called, "Moment of Glory," and it chronicles the 2003 majors when four first-time winners won the four majors: Mike Weir, Jim Furyk, Ben Curtis and Shaun Micheel. Furyk was well known when he won the U.S. Open; Weir was known when he won The Masters but Curtis and Micheel were complete unknowns when they won The British Open and The PGA having never won before on tour. The book's about how life changes when you are suddenly thrust into the public eye in ways you couldn't possibly have imagined.
The dedication for the book reads as follows: "This book is dedicated to the memory of Patty Conway who was loved by so many but none more than Brigid, who will always think of her when she hits it past the big kids."
I could begin with The World Series, which should be a great matchup if everyone involved doesn't freeze to death thanks to Major League Baseball's brilliant decision to push the climax of its season into November. I could also talk about how fortunate Yankees manager Joe Girardi is that Andy Pettitte got him close enough to Mariana Rivera that his middle relief pitchers (in this case Joba Chamberlain) only had to get him two outs in game six. If the Yankees lose that game--and for a while there it looked as if they might leave 100 men on base before the night was over--even with CC Sabathia pitching game seven the spectra of another ALCS collapse would have had people in New York in panic mode. An Angels victory might have caused the stock market to go down 400 points.
I'm honestly not sure if Girardi is that good a manager. He's so by-the-book (witness the pitching change with two outs and no one on in game 3 that led to the Angels win not to mention leaving A.J. Burnett out there WAY too long in game 5) and when he talks I swear to God I feel like I'm listening to Jim Zorn. The difference, of course, is that Girardi has so much talent that he could be the best or worst manager in history and it might not matter. What's more, if he wins, it DOESN'T matter. So we'll see what happens in The World Series. I'll also be fascinated to see how Alex Rodriguez does now that he's finally on the game's biggest stage. His numbers in postseason are great but how tight did he look to you with the bases loaded in the fourth inning. He fouled off a batting practice fastball on 2-0 and looked absolutely relieved when Dale Scott gave him ball four on a borderline pitch a moment later. Maybe I'm imagining things. We'll see. I'll say this, Sabathia vs. Cliff Lee is about as good a game 1 matchup as we've seen in a World Series in a long time. The key though may be how the guys pitching behind the studs pitch. The x-factors could end up being Pettitte and, believe it or not, Pedro Martinez.
In the meantime, I've tried to swear off writing anything about The Washington Redskins because it's become a little bit like battering a piñata that's already burst open and fallen to the ground. Still, after Vinny Cerrato's performance on Friday, I have to say something. Let's start with this: Who does this guy think he's kidding. His boss/lord and master, Dan Snyder, simply refused to speak to the media during the season. Cerrato spends the whole week ducking the media then goes on his own radio show (how did he get a radio show? Snyder owns the station) and "makes news," by saying Zorn won't be fired during the season. Whether that's true or not remains to be seen but then the guy has the NERVE to criticize the media. I'm sorry did the media lose to the Detroit Lions, the Carolina Panthers and the Kansas City Chiefs? Did the media completely fail to understand the importance of an offensive line? Did the media put itself in a position where it had to hire Zorn as head coach because no one with experience wanted the job? Has the media been so arrogant, so obnoxious and so money-gouging in almost 11 years of ownership that it has turned one of the great NFL towns against its NFL team?
I have suggested to some of my Washington Post colleagues that someone from the paper should be assigned after every game--win or lose--to walk up to Snyder and say, "what's your comment on today's game?" Snyder can refuse comment, can sick his bodyguards on the guy, can scream profanities (something he's famous for--ask Norv Turner among others) or he can discuss the game like an adult. His call. But MAKE him do it. Don't just accept the, "I don't speak to the media in-season," copout. He OWNS the team. He put together this team. Poor Zorn tried to claim a couple weeks ago that "most," NFL coaches meet with their owner during the week. NO THEY DON'T. Not the good coaches with good owners that's for sure. Do you think Bill Belichick spends a lot of time game-planning with Robert Kraft? If Snyder wants to run the team--which he clearly does--then he needs to respond to the public when the team goes bad.
Who knows, maybe the Redskins will win tonight with the bingo-caller running the offense. Then Snyder and Cerrato will spend all week sneering at people even more than normal. The Eagles are banged up and coming off an awful loss at Oakland so who knows if they're any good. Regardless, it won't fix a broken organization and that's what the Redskins are right now. And Vinny Cerrato--smarmy little mouthpiece that he is for Snyder--should shut up. If Snyder wants to speak to the media, legitimate media not people who work for him, fine. But that's it.
Onto more pleasant topics. No wait, I have to say something about officiating first. I was watching a college football game this weekend and a kid made a spectacular catch in the end zone. He stood up, put the ball between his legs twice and then dropped it on the ground. He was whistled for excessive celebration. Hello? What are these guys thinking. Is there NO common sense out there anymore. My God. There are only two reasons to flag someone for excessive celebration: If a group of players get together for something that's stage or if there's taunting--I mean in-your-face taunting. That's it. Or if someone pulls out a cell phone. One other thing: there needs to be a rule that if a replay official can't make a decision within two minutes, the call on the field stands. The delays have become ridiculous.
Okay, NOW a more pleasant topic. It's a long way from bad owners and bad officials to this but I want to thank everyone who wrote in either through a post or an e-mail to comment on the blog I wrote last week on my friend Patty Conway. It was especially nice to hear from friends from Shelter Island I hadn't talked to in a long time and to know that so many people shared the feelings that my kids and I had for Patty. Bob DeStefano, Patty's teacher and long-time boss at Gardiner's Bay Country Club reminded me that Patty was presented this summer with a junior, "Lifetime Achievement," Award during the annual junior awards banquet. Too often in life we honor people after they're gone. I'm glad Bob and his daughter Nancy thought to honor Patty in August--even before she was diagnosed with lung cancer.
I can almost hear Patty's voice right now talking about Rickie Fowler, the 20-year-old phenom who almost won on The PGA Tour yesterday. "Hey, he's kind of cute isn't he?" Then a pause. "Of course I like his golf swing too."
As luck would have it, I finished a golf book I've been working on for a good long while this weekend. It'll be out in the spring. It's called, "Moment of Glory," and it chronicles the 2003 majors when four first-time winners won the four majors: Mike Weir, Jim Furyk, Ben Curtis and Shaun Micheel. Furyk was well known when he won the U.S. Open; Weir was known when he won The Masters but Curtis and Micheel were complete unknowns when they won The British Open and The PGA having never won before on tour. The book's about how life changes when you are suddenly thrust into the public eye in ways you couldn't possibly have imagined.
The dedication for the book reads as follows: "This book is dedicated to the memory of Patty Conway who was loved by so many but none more than Brigid, who will always think of her when she hits it past the big kids."
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Payne Stewart -- My View of His Evolution
Having written yesterday about the death of a friend, I hesitate (and no I'm not apologizing for today's blog-subject I just like readers to understand my thinking) to write today about Payne Stewart. But with the 10th anniversary of his death coming on Sunday and the airwaves filling up with tributes to him, I'd like to share some thoughts on him. Especially since I just can't bring myself to write AGAIN about how bad the umpiring has been in baseball this postseason.
As often happens when someone dies prematurely and tragically the way Payne did there is a tendency to remember him only in the best light. I get all that. In truth, Payne was a far more interesting person than the saint he has been portrayed as by many since his death. He struggled with his temperament, sought help when his wife, Tracy, all but demanded it and probably changed and evolved more than any athlete I've ever known.
When I first began covering golf in 1993, Payne was far from being a favorite with the media. He was one of those guys who could be charming when things went well, snappish when they didn't go well. I was first introduced to him by Paul Azinger, walking down a fairway at The Belfry during a practice round prior to the '93 Ryder Cup. Azinger explained I was writing a book about life on the PGA Tour and Payne looked at me and said, "Are you APing it?" Baffled I said, "APing it?" He said, "you know, filing it through the AP."
Okay, so he didn't exactly understand how books worked. That didn't make him a bad guy. To be honest, I never had any problems with Payne. Mike Hicks, his caddy, was a friend of mine largely because Mike is a fanatic college basketball fan. When I would stop on the range to talk hoops with Mike, Payne would inevitably walk over and want to talk about the Orlando Magic. We had a friendly, but hardly close relationship.
In 1998, I was working on my second golf book, "The Majors." That was the year Payne blew a four shot lead at The Olympic Club and lost by one shot to Lee Janzen. I was very impressed with the way he handled himself in defeat that day: no snapping at anyone, no excuses, no cutting short questioners. Still, I dreaded asking him to talk about it in even more detail. I had never once asked him for a long sitdown interview and now I had to ask him to sit and talk about what had to be his most painful loss. Still, there was no choice. I had to ask. Payne and Mike were on the putting green at Royal Birkdale on the Tuesday before The British Open when I decided to make the request. I explained to Payne what I was doing and said, "I know this isn't going to be your favorite subject but..."
He was waving me off before I finished the sentence. "It sounds like you're going to need some serious time to do this," he said. "Why don't we just have dinner one night and get it done that way."
Wow, I thought, he certainly understands books a lot more now than in 1993. We agreed to get together the week of The PGA Championship, played that year outside Seattle, at Sahalee Country Club. As it turned out, Payne was staying in a house near the golf course. I went over there on Tuesday night and he cooked steaks for several people. When dinner was over he and I sat on the back deck and I turned on the tape recorder.
It was one of the more remarkable evenings I've had as a reporter. He talked in detail about the loss at The Open. But he also talked about his dad, who had died of cancer very young and how the last thing he had ever told him was that Tracy was pregnant with his first grandchild. He then told me about an incident at Augusta in 1996 when he had missed the cut and was walking to his car with Tracy when a man approached him and asked for an autograph for his young son, who was standing next to him.
"I went off on the guy," Payne said. "I screamed at him that he didn't know the rules, that you weren't allowed to ask for autographs on the parking lot side of the clubhouse. I just went off on him with his son standing there.”
“When we got in the car, Tracy went off on ME. She reminded me first of all that you WERE allowed to ask for autographs on the parking lot side of the clubhouse and, regardless, how could I possibly behave that way in front of the little boy. She said to me, 'Payne, you need help. This has to stop. You embarrassed me back there, worse than that you really embarrassed yourself.'"
To make a long story short, Payne listened to his wife. He got counseling and learned to understand that with the perks of celebrity come responsibilities. The media had a job to do even when you played poorly. Treating fans well was vitally important, not just because it might make you money, but because it was the RIGHT thing to do. Payne came through the counseling a different man, far more appreciative of how lucky he was to be able to swing a golf club the way he did.
Everyone noticed: other players, the media certainly and his family. On that August evening in 1998 we talked long into the night and long after I'd turned my tape recorder off. We talked about having children who had never met one of their grandparents (in my case my mother) and how it made you cry sometimes.
When 'The Majors,' came out one player who played an important role in the book wrote to me to tell me how much he enjoyed it: Payne Stewart. That's not a knock on the other guys, you don't expect thank-you notes doing what I do. In fact, more often, it is appropriate to write them when people give you time. Still, it was nice to receive.
The second to last time I saw Payne alive was at the '99 Ryder Cup. He played singles against Colin Montgomerie and I walked with the match because it was the last one out and I thought it was possible it would decide the Cup. (I was wrong of course). The behavior of the American crowd was awful. At one point as I followed the two players from the ninth green to the tenth tee, some drunk jumped out at Montgomerie and began screaming the worst possible profanities at him. Montgomerie kept going. Payne didn't. He went back and told the guy he was an embarrassment and to shut up.
After Justin Leonard clinched the Cup for the U.S. Payne and Montgomerie came to the 18th hole even, the match meaning nothing at that point except to their Ryder Cup records and egos. Montgomerie hit the green in two and had a 25-foot birdie putt. Payne missed the green and had about an eight-footer for par. Payne walked over to Montgomerie and said, "pick it up, it's good," thus giving him the match.
The last time I saw Payne alive was a few weeks later at the Disney Tournament. I asked him why he'd given the putt to Montgomerie. "It didn't matter to the team," he said. "After what the guy had been through all day I had no problem giving him the win as long as it didn't affect the team outcome."
Pretty damn classy. The last thing he said to me that day was, "Next year bring your family down here for the week. Your kids can do the (Disney) parks and you can all come to the house one night for dinner. We'll even invite (Jon) Brendle, (Jon Brendle is a rules official who is a good friend of mine who lived right next to Payne). I'll cook you another steak."
Three days later he was dead.
I still talk to Mike Hicks about Payne (he's working for Jonathan Byrd these days) whenever I see him. We laugh about him getting on referees at Magic games and sitting as far away as possible when watching his kids because he didn't want to embarrass them with his yelling. Mike loved Payne, always loved him long before his 1996 self makeover.
One day Mike asked me, "how would you describe him in one sentence?"
I thought for a moment and then came up with the answer: "MIP," I said--"Most Improved Person."
As often happens when someone dies prematurely and tragically the way Payne did there is a tendency to remember him only in the best light. I get all that. In truth, Payne was a far more interesting person than the saint he has been portrayed as by many since his death. He struggled with his temperament, sought help when his wife, Tracy, all but demanded it and probably changed and evolved more than any athlete I've ever known.
When I first began covering golf in 1993, Payne was far from being a favorite with the media. He was one of those guys who could be charming when things went well, snappish when they didn't go well. I was first introduced to him by Paul Azinger, walking down a fairway at The Belfry during a practice round prior to the '93 Ryder Cup. Azinger explained I was writing a book about life on the PGA Tour and Payne looked at me and said, "Are you APing it?" Baffled I said, "APing it?" He said, "you know, filing it through the AP."
Okay, so he didn't exactly understand how books worked. That didn't make him a bad guy. To be honest, I never had any problems with Payne. Mike Hicks, his caddy, was a friend of mine largely because Mike is a fanatic college basketball fan. When I would stop on the range to talk hoops with Mike, Payne would inevitably walk over and want to talk about the Orlando Magic. We had a friendly, but hardly close relationship.
In 1998, I was working on my second golf book, "The Majors." That was the year Payne blew a four shot lead at The Olympic Club and lost by one shot to Lee Janzen. I was very impressed with the way he handled himself in defeat that day: no snapping at anyone, no excuses, no cutting short questioners. Still, I dreaded asking him to talk about it in even more detail. I had never once asked him for a long sitdown interview and now I had to ask him to sit and talk about what had to be his most painful loss. Still, there was no choice. I had to ask. Payne and Mike were on the putting green at Royal Birkdale on the Tuesday before The British Open when I decided to make the request. I explained to Payne what I was doing and said, "I know this isn't going to be your favorite subject but..."
He was waving me off before I finished the sentence. "It sounds like you're going to need some serious time to do this," he said. "Why don't we just have dinner one night and get it done that way."
Wow, I thought, he certainly understands books a lot more now than in 1993. We agreed to get together the week of The PGA Championship, played that year outside Seattle, at Sahalee Country Club. As it turned out, Payne was staying in a house near the golf course. I went over there on Tuesday night and he cooked steaks for several people. When dinner was over he and I sat on the back deck and I turned on the tape recorder.
It was one of the more remarkable evenings I've had as a reporter. He talked in detail about the loss at The Open. But he also talked about his dad, who had died of cancer very young and how the last thing he had ever told him was that Tracy was pregnant with his first grandchild. He then told me about an incident at Augusta in 1996 when he had missed the cut and was walking to his car with Tracy when a man approached him and asked for an autograph for his young son, who was standing next to him.
"I went off on the guy," Payne said. "I screamed at him that he didn't know the rules, that you weren't allowed to ask for autographs on the parking lot side of the clubhouse. I just went off on him with his son standing there.”
“When we got in the car, Tracy went off on ME. She reminded me first of all that you WERE allowed to ask for autographs on the parking lot side of the clubhouse and, regardless, how could I possibly behave that way in front of the little boy. She said to me, 'Payne, you need help. This has to stop. You embarrassed me back there, worse than that you really embarrassed yourself.'"
To make a long story short, Payne listened to his wife. He got counseling and learned to understand that with the perks of celebrity come responsibilities. The media had a job to do even when you played poorly. Treating fans well was vitally important, not just because it might make you money, but because it was the RIGHT thing to do. Payne came through the counseling a different man, far more appreciative of how lucky he was to be able to swing a golf club the way he did.
Everyone noticed: other players, the media certainly and his family. On that August evening in 1998 we talked long into the night and long after I'd turned my tape recorder off. We talked about having children who had never met one of their grandparents (in my case my mother) and how it made you cry sometimes.
When 'The Majors,' came out one player who played an important role in the book wrote to me to tell me how much he enjoyed it: Payne Stewart. That's not a knock on the other guys, you don't expect thank-you notes doing what I do. In fact, more often, it is appropriate to write them when people give you time. Still, it was nice to receive.
The second to last time I saw Payne alive was at the '99 Ryder Cup. He played singles against Colin Montgomerie and I walked with the match because it was the last one out and I thought it was possible it would decide the Cup. (I was wrong of course). The behavior of the American crowd was awful. At one point as I followed the two players from the ninth green to the tenth tee, some drunk jumped out at Montgomerie and began screaming the worst possible profanities at him. Montgomerie kept going. Payne didn't. He went back and told the guy he was an embarrassment and to shut up.
After Justin Leonard clinched the Cup for the U.S. Payne and Montgomerie came to the 18th hole even, the match meaning nothing at that point except to their Ryder Cup records and egos. Montgomerie hit the green in two and had a 25-foot birdie putt. Payne missed the green and had about an eight-footer for par. Payne walked over to Montgomerie and said, "pick it up, it's good," thus giving him the match.
The last time I saw Payne alive was a few weeks later at the Disney Tournament. I asked him why he'd given the putt to Montgomerie. "It didn't matter to the team," he said. "After what the guy had been through all day I had no problem giving him the win as long as it didn't affect the team outcome."
Pretty damn classy. The last thing he said to me that day was, "Next year bring your family down here for the week. Your kids can do the (Disney) parks and you can all come to the house one night for dinner. We'll even invite (Jon) Brendle, (Jon Brendle is a rules official who is a good friend of mine who lived right next to Payne). I'll cook you another steak."
Three days later he was dead.
I still talk to Mike Hicks about Payne (he's working for Jonathan Byrd these days) whenever I see him. We laugh about him getting on referees at Magic games and sitting as far away as possible when watching his kids because he didn't want to embarrass them with his yelling. Mike loved Payne, always loved him long before his 1996 self makeover.
One day Mike asked me, "how would you describe him in one sentence?"
I thought for a moment and then came up with the answer: "MIP," I said--"Most Improved Person."
Thursday, September 24, 2009
The McEnroe Column that Ended with Me Being ‘Junior’; What Do You Want to See Written About?
My friend Tony Kornheiser is back on the radio which is a good thing for several reasons. First, there's something worth listening to in the morning when I'm the car in DC besides the incessant droning on about the Redskins. Second, I always enjoy going on with him once a week because the segments are usually different than your typical sports talk radio interviews. My regular spot, if anyone's interested, will be 11:05 on Thursday mornings.
This morning I had breakfast with Larry Dorman, the truly gifted golf writer for The New York Times--also a friend of Tony's--and we were discussing the nickname Tony hung on me almost 30 years ago: Junior. As luck would have it, Larry had just watched the tennis match that spawned the nickname (I get asked how it came about frequently) the 1980 U.S. Open final between John McEnroe and Bjorn Borg. Larry had been amazed at how different tennis was in the wood racquet era. He asked if I had seen that match.
Actually, it was the first U.S. Open I covered and the first time I met McEnroe. What I remember about the match is that McEnroe won the first two sets, Borg the next two. When Borg won the fourth set, the entire crowd in Louis Armstrong Stadium was on its feet screaming for Borg. "I'm in my hometown and 20,000 people are cheering against me for a guy from Sweden," McEnroe said later "It was not a good feeling."
McEnroe somehow regrouped and won the fifth set and the match. As it turned out, Borg would never beat him again in a tournament that mattered. My assignment that evening was to write a sidebar since Barry Lorge, then The Post's tennis writer, was doing the lead. Since I had some extra time I followed McEnroe back to the locker room. In those days, you could actually go in the locker room at the Open. Most of the other guys had gone upstairs to write and when I walked in McEnroe was sitting in front of his locker all by himself. I introduced myself and asked him how he had felt at the end of the fourth set.
He started talking. Then he kept talking. No one was a better talker once he got started than McEnroe. He talked about how much it hurt to be the bad guy, but he understood why people felt the way they did. He talked about how he was NOT going to lose to Borg again in five sets and how his feeling when the match was over was relief, not joy. When He finished, I raced back upstairs and wrote 35 inches. I was budgeted for 16. I pleaded with the editors to at least read what McEnroe had said before chopping the story to pieces.
For once, they did. Not only did they run the whole story, they put it on the sports front--very rare for a sidebar. The next day when I was back in the office a number of people were asking me how in the world I'd gotten McEnroe to talk that way. The answer was pretty simple: I was there. It wasn't exactly a brilliant line of questioning.
Kornheiser had come to The Post a year earlier and was working then for both sports and style. I was in awe of him then because I thought he was the best sports feature writer this side of Frank Deford in the world. Now, he walked into the conversation and heard people asking how I'd gotten McEnroe to talk.
"What's the big deal?" he said. "They're the same person. It was Junior talking to Junior."
McEnroe's nickname was Junior because he was John Patrick McEnroe Jr. and because he had arrived on the tennis scene as the enfant terrible at Wimbledon in 1977. We did have a good deal in common: both from New York, both left-handed, both temperamental (hard to believe, huh?) and one of us was a good tennis player.
Since I was the kid in the Post sports department at the time and DID have a temper and now (supposedly) a relationship with McEnroe, the nickname stuck. I didn't mind it back then. But that was a long, long time ago. I have asked Tony repeatedly to not use it on the radio for at least five years and he ignores me. I've given up. I do roll my eyes when strangers walk up and address me that way. I never call people I don't know by a nickname. When someone comes up and says, "Hey Junior!" I just say, "it's John," and usually keep on going. Most of the time they're well-intended and I know that but I'm over 50 for crying out loud and my son will be driving in a few months.
I'm not sure anyone even calls McEnroe by the nickname anymore.
Let me close with one more McEnroe story. Toward the end of his career I was doing a magazine piece on him and flew to Los Angeles to spend a day with him. This is when he was still married to Tatum O'Neil. We were sitting at the kitchen table in his house and I asked him if head any regrets about how his career had turned out.
He nodded his head. "I shouldn't have spent so much time arguing with the umpires and linesmen," he said. "I hurt myself with that in a lot of different ways, probably cost myself some matches because I got distracted or out of a rhythm and lost my focus." He mentioned The French Open final in 1984 when he had been up two sets on Ivan Lendl and started bickering with the officials and ended up losing in five sets. He also brought up the match in Australia where he had gotten himself defaulted when it looked as if he was playing better than anyone in the field.
After he had talked for awhile--he ALWAYS talked for awhile--I nodded my head and said, "yeah and the fact is, they probably had the calls right more often than not.”
"NO THEY DIDN'T!" He jumped to his feet. "THEY DID NOT GET THE CALLS RIGHT. THEY WERE WRONG! MY EYES WERE BETTER THAN THEIRS!" He sat down. "I just shouldn't have wasted all that energy on them."
You had to love the guy.
------------------------------------------------
After the great response the other day when I raised the question about what people would like to see on the blog, I've decided to throw out an occasional question for people to digest and also to ask all of you to throw questions at me from time to time. I will answer them whenever I can. Here's today's question: Putting aside your natural biases what is a topic or a person in sports that you would like to see a book on that you think hasn't been written yet? Mine, as I think people now know, was Dean Smith and I'm thrilled to get the chance to write about him. But I'd love to hear other thoughts and ideas.
This morning I had breakfast with Larry Dorman, the truly gifted golf writer for The New York Times--also a friend of Tony's--and we were discussing the nickname Tony hung on me almost 30 years ago: Junior. As luck would have it, Larry had just watched the tennis match that spawned the nickname (I get asked how it came about frequently) the 1980 U.S. Open final between John McEnroe and Bjorn Borg. Larry had been amazed at how different tennis was in the wood racquet era. He asked if I had seen that match.
Actually, it was the first U.S. Open I covered and the first time I met McEnroe. What I remember about the match is that McEnroe won the first two sets, Borg the next two. When Borg won the fourth set, the entire crowd in Louis Armstrong Stadium was on its feet screaming for Borg. "I'm in my hometown and 20,000 people are cheering against me for a guy from Sweden," McEnroe said later "It was not a good feeling."
McEnroe somehow regrouped and won the fifth set and the match. As it turned out, Borg would never beat him again in a tournament that mattered. My assignment that evening was to write a sidebar since Barry Lorge, then The Post's tennis writer, was doing the lead. Since I had some extra time I followed McEnroe back to the locker room. In those days, you could actually go in the locker room at the Open. Most of the other guys had gone upstairs to write and when I walked in McEnroe was sitting in front of his locker all by himself. I introduced myself and asked him how he had felt at the end of the fourth set.
He started talking. Then he kept talking. No one was a better talker once he got started than McEnroe. He talked about how much it hurt to be the bad guy, but he understood why people felt the way they did. He talked about how he was NOT going to lose to Borg again in five sets and how his feeling when the match was over was relief, not joy. When He finished, I raced back upstairs and wrote 35 inches. I was budgeted for 16. I pleaded with the editors to at least read what McEnroe had said before chopping the story to pieces.
For once, they did. Not only did they run the whole story, they put it on the sports front--very rare for a sidebar. The next day when I was back in the office a number of people were asking me how in the world I'd gotten McEnroe to talk that way. The answer was pretty simple: I was there. It wasn't exactly a brilliant line of questioning.
Kornheiser had come to The Post a year earlier and was working then for both sports and style. I was in awe of him then because I thought he was the best sports feature writer this side of Frank Deford in the world. Now, he walked into the conversation and heard people asking how I'd gotten McEnroe to talk.
"What's the big deal?" he said. "They're the same person. It was Junior talking to Junior."
McEnroe's nickname was Junior because he was John Patrick McEnroe Jr. and because he had arrived on the tennis scene as the enfant terrible at Wimbledon in 1977. We did have a good deal in common: both from New York, both left-handed, both temperamental (hard to believe, huh?) and one of us was a good tennis player.
Since I was the kid in the Post sports department at the time and DID have a temper and now (supposedly) a relationship with McEnroe, the nickname stuck. I didn't mind it back then. But that was a long, long time ago. I have asked Tony repeatedly to not use it on the radio for at least five years and he ignores me. I've given up. I do roll my eyes when strangers walk up and address me that way. I never call people I don't know by a nickname. When someone comes up and says, "Hey Junior!" I just say, "it's John," and usually keep on going. Most of the time they're well-intended and I know that but I'm over 50 for crying out loud and my son will be driving in a few months.
I'm not sure anyone even calls McEnroe by the nickname anymore.
Let me close with one more McEnroe story. Toward the end of his career I was doing a magazine piece on him and flew to Los Angeles to spend a day with him. This is when he was still married to Tatum O'Neil. We were sitting at the kitchen table in his house and I asked him if head any regrets about how his career had turned out.
He nodded his head. "I shouldn't have spent so much time arguing with the umpires and linesmen," he said. "I hurt myself with that in a lot of different ways, probably cost myself some matches because I got distracted or out of a rhythm and lost my focus." He mentioned The French Open final in 1984 when he had been up two sets on Ivan Lendl and started bickering with the officials and ended up losing in five sets. He also brought up the match in Australia where he had gotten himself defaulted when it looked as if he was playing better than anyone in the field.
After he had talked for awhile--he ALWAYS talked for awhile--I nodded my head and said, "yeah and the fact is, they probably had the calls right more often than not.”
"NO THEY DIDN'T!" He jumped to his feet. "THEY DID NOT GET THE CALLS RIGHT. THEY WERE WRONG! MY EYES WERE BETTER THAN THEIRS!" He sat down. "I just shouldn't have wasted all that energy on them."
You had to love the guy.
------------------------------------------------
After the great response the other day when I raised the question about what people would like to see on the blog, I've decided to throw out an occasional question for people to digest and also to ask all of you to throw questions at me from time to time. I will answer them whenever I can. Here's today's question: Putting aside your natural biases what is a topic or a person in sports that you would like to see a book on that you think hasn't been written yet? Mine, as I think people now know, was Dean Smith and I'm thrilled to get the chance to write about him. But I'd love to hear other thoughts and ideas.
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Announcing My 28th Book, a Long Sought-After and Respected Subject --- Dean Smith
Some time today, Little-Brown and Company, my non-fiction publisher (Random house publishes my kids mysteries) will put out a press release announcing my next book. It will be my 28th book and I can honestly say that I’m as fired up about this project as I’ve been since my first book—which did not merit a press release back in 1985.
That book, as most people know, was responsible for a lot of things in my life, including the name of this blog. But Bob Knight wasn’t the first coach about whom I wanted to write a book.
Dean Smith was.
Yes, I went to Duke and if you believe all the silly hype built up in recent years around that rivalry, people from Duke and people from North Carolina have to be physically restrained whenever they’re in the same room. I’ve never seen it that way. In fact, when I was a junior in college and Bill Foster was trying to rebuild the Duke program, I wrote a column in The Chronicle, the Duke student newspaper, saying if he was looking for a model, he need look no farther than 10 miles (it is TEN miles not eight as legend has it) down the road to Chapel Hill.
Soon after that, Duke played at Carolina. The Tar Heels won—they were 10-1 against Duke in my undergraduate days—and after the game I approached The Great Man (I remember the day vividly, it was his 45th birthday and everyone in Carmichael Auditorium sang ‘Happy Birthday,’ while he cowered in embarrassment) to ask him a question about Tate Armstrong’s chances to make The Olympic team he would coach that summer.
When I introduced myself, without batting an eye, he said, “I know you. I read your column the other day. I thought you were very fair to us—especially for a Duke student.”
I was, needless to say, stunned. Dean Smith had read something that I wrote? Later I learned that the Carolina basketball office had subscriptions to every ACC student newspaper, every paper that covered the ACC and every major newspaper in the country. One of the assistants was assigned to go through them and clip anything that he thought Smith should read or know about. Roy Williams had the job for several years. My column had made it into Smith’s briefcase at some point.
“I usually do the reading on airplanes,” he told me years later. “It kills the time and I might pick up something interesting."
By then I knew there was no attention to detail too small for him. When I went to The Washington Post after graduation we developed a good relationship although the running joke was that I was, “fair for a Duke graduate.” I would argue that I was fair—period.
Dean constantly chided me about my casual dress. “Why blue jeans all the time,” he said once. “You represent one of the great papers in the country. If you can’t afford a jacket and tie, I’ll buy you one. I can do it for you since you aren’t a player.”
I told him I could afford a jacket and tie, but appreciated the offer. I just liked to look non-threatening when interviewing athletes who were about my age. “Well,” he said, “I suppose I should be grateful, given where you went to college, that you don’t show up in sandals.”
THAT, he didn’t have to worry about.
In 1981, I wrote a lengthy two-part series in The Post about Smith. It took me several sessions just to get him to agree to be interviewed. “Write about the players,” he kept saying. No, I kept answering, I want to write about YOU. He finally gave in, agreeing to let me drive with him from Chapel Hill to Charlotte en route to the old North-South doubleheader. There were only two problems: he still smoked in those days and, in a closed car in February I almost choked to death. Then there was the trip back: I had to cover a Duke-Maryland game in Durham the next day so I was going to drive his car back to Chapel Hill and pick up my car there.
When we got to the hotel in Charlotte, Dean told me where the registration was in case I got stopped. “Dean, if I get stopped in this state driving your car, I’m going to jail,” I said.
He laughed. “Yeah, and with your luck it’ll be a State fan.”
I never went one mile over the speed limit on the way back. The interview went surprisingly well—when he was engaged and willing, no one was a better interview. It was while researching that piece that I became convinced that I HAD to do a book on Dean. He set me up to interview his pastor, Dr. Robert Seymour, at The Binkley Baptist Church. Dr. Seymour told me the story about Dean, still an assistant coach, walking into a segregated Chapel Hill restaurant in 1958 with a black member of the church and, for all intents and purposes, daring management not to serve them. They did. De-segregation began to take hold soon after that.
When I went back to Dean to ask him his memories of that night he shook his head. “I wish he hadn’t told you that story,” he said.
“Why?” I asked, very surprised. “You should be very proud of what you did.”
He looked me right in the eye and said: “You should never be proud of doing the right thing. You should just do it.”
I still remember the shiver that ran through me when he said it. A year later, Carolina finally won Dean’s first national title. I called him. “You’ve done it all now,” I said. “I’d really like to do that book we’ve talked about. (I had brought it up to him after The Post piece). He said he’d think about it, talk to his wife, Linnea. A week later he called back.
“I can’t do it,” he said. “I’m still an active coach and I’m just not ready to be as frank about some things as I know you’ll want me to be.”
I was disappointed, but thought that was a fair answer. I thanked him for thinking about it. “I feel badly,” he said. “Can I do anything—maybe get you some tickets?”
I didn’t need tickets.
For years, the idea that I should write the book stayed with me, even after I began writing books. Rick Brewer, who has worked with Dean since the mid-60s, and I would periodically talk about it. This year at The Final Four, Rick said to me, “You should take one more shot at it.”
So, in May I drove to Chapel Hill to see Dean. He’s 78 now and gets frustrated because his memory, once encyclopedic to put it mildly, isn’t what it used to be. “Sometimes it just makes me angry,” he said. But he still remembers a LOT. “I’m glad to see you still talk with your hands,” he said about five minutes after I sat down.
I brought up the book, reminding him we had first talked about it twenty-seven years ago. Again, he wanted to think about it. Almost as soon as I left the office I was tracking Roy Williams down on vacation, trying to enlist his support. When Roy called back he said, “this is a book that needs to be done. People just don’t know all this man did. I’ll talk to him.”
Fortunately, I didn’t need Roy to have that talk. Dean agreed to the book a couple days after I’d been in Chapel Hill. We had our first lengthy session last week. There’s a lot of work to do to get it out by March of 2011, but I’m truly excited.
While I was in Dean’s office last week, Lefty Driesell, Dean’s old rival and now friend, called. “You gonna let a Duke guy write a book on you?” Lefty (a Duke guy) said to Dean.
“I don’t think of him as a Duke guy,” Dean said to Lefty. “I just think of him as a pretty good guy.”
That may be the nicest thing anyone’s ever said about me.
That book, as most people know, was responsible for a lot of things in my life, including the name of this blog. But Bob Knight wasn’t the first coach about whom I wanted to write a book.
Dean Smith was.
Yes, I went to Duke and if you believe all the silly hype built up in recent years around that rivalry, people from Duke and people from North Carolina have to be physically restrained whenever they’re in the same room. I’ve never seen it that way. In fact, when I was a junior in college and Bill Foster was trying to rebuild the Duke program, I wrote a column in The Chronicle, the Duke student newspaper, saying if he was looking for a model, he need look no farther than 10 miles (it is TEN miles not eight as legend has it) down the road to Chapel Hill.
Soon after that, Duke played at Carolina. The Tar Heels won—they were 10-1 against Duke in my undergraduate days—and after the game I approached The Great Man (I remember the day vividly, it was his 45th birthday and everyone in Carmichael Auditorium sang ‘Happy Birthday,’ while he cowered in embarrassment) to ask him a question about Tate Armstrong’s chances to make The Olympic team he would coach that summer.
When I introduced myself, without batting an eye, he said, “I know you. I read your column the other day. I thought you were very fair to us—especially for a Duke student.”
I was, needless to say, stunned. Dean Smith had read something that I wrote? Later I learned that the Carolina basketball office had subscriptions to every ACC student newspaper, every paper that covered the ACC and every major newspaper in the country. One of the assistants was assigned to go through them and clip anything that he thought Smith should read or know about. Roy Williams had the job for several years. My column had made it into Smith’s briefcase at some point.
“I usually do the reading on airplanes,” he told me years later. “It kills the time and I might pick up something interesting."
By then I knew there was no attention to detail too small for him. When I went to The Washington Post after graduation we developed a good relationship although the running joke was that I was, “fair for a Duke graduate.” I would argue that I was fair—period.
Dean constantly chided me about my casual dress. “Why blue jeans all the time,” he said once. “You represent one of the great papers in the country. If you can’t afford a jacket and tie, I’ll buy you one. I can do it for you since you aren’t a player.”
I told him I could afford a jacket and tie, but appreciated the offer. I just liked to look non-threatening when interviewing athletes who were about my age. “Well,” he said, “I suppose I should be grateful, given where you went to college, that you don’t show up in sandals.”
THAT, he didn’t have to worry about.
In 1981, I wrote a lengthy two-part series in The Post about Smith. It took me several sessions just to get him to agree to be interviewed. “Write about the players,” he kept saying. No, I kept answering, I want to write about YOU. He finally gave in, agreeing to let me drive with him from Chapel Hill to Charlotte en route to the old North-South doubleheader. There were only two problems: he still smoked in those days and, in a closed car in February I almost choked to death. Then there was the trip back: I had to cover a Duke-Maryland game in Durham the next day so I was going to drive his car back to Chapel Hill and pick up my car there.
When we got to the hotel in Charlotte, Dean told me where the registration was in case I got stopped. “Dean, if I get stopped in this state driving your car, I’m going to jail,” I said.
He laughed. “Yeah, and with your luck it’ll be a State fan.”
I never went one mile over the speed limit on the way back. The interview went surprisingly well—when he was engaged and willing, no one was a better interview. It was while researching that piece that I became convinced that I HAD to do a book on Dean. He set me up to interview his pastor, Dr. Robert Seymour, at The Binkley Baptist Church. Dr. Seymour told me the story about Dean, still an assistant coach, walking into a segregated Chapel Hill restaurant in 1958 with a black member of the church and, for all intents and purposes, daring management not to serve them. They did. De-segregation began to take hold soon after that.
When I went back to Dean to ask him his memories of that night he shook his head. “I wish he hadn’t told you that story,” he said.
“Why?” I asked, very surprised. “You should be very proud of what you did.”
He looked me right in the eye and said: “You should never be proud of doing the right thing. You should just do it.”
I still remember the shiver that ran through me when he said it. A year later, Carolina finally won Dean’s first national title. I called him. “You’ve done it all now,” I said. “I’d really like to do that book we’ve talked about. (I had brought it up to him after The Post piece). He said he’d think about it, talk to his wife, Linnea. A week later he called back.
“I can’t do it,” he said. “I’m still an active coach and I’m just not ready to be as frank about some things as I know you’ll want me to be.”
I was disappointed, but thought that was a fair answer. I thanked him for thinking about it. “I feel badly,” he said. “Can I do anything—maybe get you some tickets?”
I didn’t need tickets.
For years, the idea that I should write the book stayed with me, even after I began writing books. Rick Brewer, who has worked with Dean since the mid-60s, and I would periodically talk about it. This year at The Final Four, Rick said to me, “You should take one more shot at it.”
So, in May I drove to Chapel Hill to see Dean. He’s 78 now and gets frustrated because his memory, once encyclopedic to put it mildly, isn’t what it used to be. “Sometimes it just makes me angry,” he said. But he still remembers a LOT. “I’m glad to see you still talk with your hands,” he said about five minutes after I sat down.
I brought up the book, reminding him we had first talked about it twenty-seven years ago. Again, he wanted to think about it. Almost as soon as I left the office I was tracking Roy Williams down on vacation, trying to enlist his support. When Roy called back he said, “this is a book that needs to be done. People just don’t know all this man did. I’ll talk to him.”
Fortunately, I didn’t need Roy to have that talk. Dean agreed to the book a couple days after I’d been in Chapel Hill. We had our first lengthy session last week. There’s a lot of work to do to get it out by March of 2011, but I’m truly excited.
While I was in Dean’s office last week, Lefty Driesell, Dean’s old rival and now friend, called. “You gonna let a Duke guy write a book on you?” Lefty (a Duke guy) said to Dean.
“I don’t think of him as a Duke guy,” Dean said to Lefty. “I just think of him as a pretty good guy.”
That may be the nicest thing anyone’s ever said about me.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Back to Sedgefield, Original Host of Where I First Covered the PGA Tour Invokes Memories
Sometime this afternoon I will arrive at Sedgefield Country Club and I suspect a lot of memories will come flooding back to me. Sedgefield is the site for The Wyndham Classic---which to me will always be The Greater Greensboro Open (GGO). The GGO at Sedgefield was the first PGA Tour event I ever attended or covered. I was a Duke junior and I applied for credentials to the event figuring the worst that could happen was that I'd get turned down. The pass, which looked like gold as far as I was concerned, arrived in the mail about two weeks before the tournament--which was held in April back then.
I drove down on Saturday morning and spent a few holes following Arnie's Army, then picked up the tournament leader, Al Geiberger. My goal though was to interview Doug Sanders because I'd read he was a real character and I knew was a very good player. People forget that Sanders won 21 times on The PGA Tour although his career and life were changed forever when he missed a three-foot putt on the 18th green at St. Andrews that would have won the 1970 British Open. He lost in a playoff the next day to Jack Nicklaus.
I walked back to the clubhouse as Sanders was finishing but, being new to how golf worked, somehow lost him as he came off the 18th green. I walked into the locker room--stunned that no one tried to stop me--and found Sanders standing at the bar in the grill with several people. Gingerly I introduced myself and asked if it might be possible to talk.
"Who do you work for?" Sanders asked, sounding incredulous.
"The Chronicle," I said (we never called it The Duke Chronicle, the proper name was just The Chronicle). "It's the student newspaper at Duke."
I was fairly convinced he was going to laugh at the thought of talking to me and I was going to find myself back outside trying to think of another column idea in about five minutes.
"Would you like a beer," he said. "Pull up a seat. We can talk here."
So we did. He was funny and honest and didn't bridle at all when I brought up the putt at The British. "Don't think about it much," he said. "No more than three, four times a day."
That was my first foray into golf writing. A year later I went back to The GGO and interviewed a player named Gary Groh. He had won The Hawaiian Open earlier that year and Bob Green, the veteran golf writer for The AP had written, "Arnie lost again," as his lead. Groh had beaten Arnold Palmer by two shots and Green knew the story was more about Palmer losing--just like Sunday when Y.E. Yang beat Tiger Woods--than it was about Gary Groh winning.
"I made $40,000 for winning that tournament," Groh said, sitting at almost the same spot at the bar where I'd sat with Sanders a year earlier. We were drinking sodas, not beer. "If not for Arnold Palmer I probably wouldn't have won half that much. I have no problem with him being the story. He IS the story."
The interesting thing is I liked both Sanders and Groh even though they could not have been more different. I also enjoyed the fact that, with my media credential, I could go almost anywhere on the grounds without being hassled by anyone. I didn't even realize at the time that I could request an armband in the media room that would have allowed me to walk inside the ropes. Those GGO experiences stayed with me after I went to The Washington Post and I always wanted the chance to cover more golf. I didn't get many opportunities early on but eventually I did and found that my initial instinct--that golfers were good guys to deal with--had been correct.
The GGO left Sedgefield a few years after I graduated and moved to Forest Oaks Country Club. By the time I began covering golf on a regular basis that's where it was held. But it's moved back to Sedgefield now--and to this stifling August date--and today I'll be there for the first time in (gasp!) 32 years. I wonder if I'll remember the place at all.
I'm going there to do my last long interview for the book I'm doing on the winners of the '03 major championships. Interestingly, '03 was a year not unlike this year. Tiger Woods didn't win any of the majors. The four winners--Mike Weir, Jim Furyk, Ben Curtis and Shaun Micheel--were all first time major champions and in the case of the latter two, first time tournament winners. Curtis, like Y.E. Yang, had been at Q-School the previous September. The only real difference is that Cabrera won his second major when he won The Masters this year. The book is about sudden fame and how it changes your life--for good and bad.
I'm supposed to talk down here with Shaun Micheel, who has been through major shoulder surgery and is dealing with his mom's cancer right now. As of this moment, Micheel isn't even in the field--third alternate--and is fighting to keep his exempt status on the tour for next year. Golf is really a hard game--even for major champions, even, as we saw on Sunday, for Tiger Woods.
Tonight, before I leave the clubhouse, I'm going to walk down to the grill room--which probably doesn't look at all like it did in 1976. But I'm going to stop in there anyway and have a beer and drink a toast to Doug Sanders.
I drove down on Saturday morning and spent a few holes following Arnie's Army, then picked up the tournament leader, Al Geiberger. My goal though was to interview Doug Sanders because I'd read he was a real character and I knew was a very good player. People forget that Sanders won 21 times on The PGA Tour although his career and life were changed forever when he missed a three-foot putt on the 18th green at St. Andrews that would have won the 1970 British Open. He lost in a playoff the next day to Jack Nicklaus.
I walked back to the clubhouse as Sanders was finishing but, being new to how golf worked, somehow lost him as he came off the 18th green. I walked into the locker room--stunned that no one tried to stop me--and found Sanders standing at the bar in the grill with several people. Gingerly I introduced myself and asked if it might be possible to talk.
"Who do you work for?" Sanders asked, sounding incredulous.
"The Chronicle," I said (we never called it The Duke Chronicle, the proper name was just The Chronicle). "It's the student newspaper at Duke."
I was fairly convinced he was going to laugh at the thought of talking to me and I was going to find myself back outside trying to think of another column idea in about five minutes.
"Would you like a beer," he said. "Pull up a seat. We can talk here."
So we did. He was funny and honest and didn't bridle at all when I brought up the putt at The British. "Don't think about it much," he said. "No more than three, four times a day."
That was my first foray into golf writing. A year later I went back to The GGO and interviewed a player named Gary Groh. He had won The Hawaiian Open earlier that year and Bob Green, the veteran golf writer for The AP had written, "Arnie lost again," as his lead. Groh had beaten Arnold Palmer by two shots and Green knew the story was more about Palmer losing--just like Sunday when Y.E. Yang beat Tiger Woods--than it was about Gary Groh winning.
"I made $40,000 for winning that tournament," Groh said, sitting at almost the same spot at the bar where I'd sat with Sanders a year earlier. We were drinking sodas, not beer. "If not for Arnold Palmer I probably wouldn't have won half that much. I have no problem with him being the story. He IS the story."
The interesting thing is I liked both Sanders and Groh even though they could not have been more different. I also enjoyed the fact that, with my media credential, I could go almost anywhere on the grounds without being hassled by anyone. I didn't even realize at the time that I could request an armband in the media room that would have allowed me to walk inside the ropes. Those GGO experiences stayed with me after I went to The Washington Post and I always wanted the chance to cover more golf. I didn't get many opportunities early on but eventually I did and found that my initial instinct--that golfers were good guys to deal with--had been correct.
The GGO left Sedgefield a few years after I graduated and moved to Forest Oaks Country Club. By the time I began covering golf on a regular basis that's where it was held. But it's moved back to Sedgefield now--and to this stifling August date--and today I'll be there for the first time in (gasp!) 32 years. I wonder if I'll remember the place at all.
I'm going there to do my last long interview for the book I'm doing on the winners of the '03 major championships. Interestingly, '03 was a year not unlike this year. Tiger Woods didn't win any of the majors. The four winners--Mike Weir, Jim Furyk, Ben Curtis and Shaun Micheel--were all first time major champions and in the case of the latter two, first time tournament winners. Curtis, like Y.E. Yang, had been at Q-School the previous September. The only real difference is that Cabrera won his second major when he won The Masters this year. The book is about sudden fame and how it changes your life--for good and bad.
I'm supposed to talk down here with Shaun Micheel, who has been through major shoulder surgery and is dealing with his mom's cancer right now. As of this moment, Micheel isn't even in the field--third alternate--and is fighting to keep his exempt status on the tour for next year. Golf is really a hard game--even for major champions, even, as we saw on Sunday, for Tiger Woods.
Tonight, before I leave the clubhouse, I'm going to walk down to the grill room--which probably doesn't look at all like it did in 1976. But I'm going to stop in there anyway and have a beer and drink a toast to Doug Sanders.
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Finishing Up Book Research in Akron; Parking Passes are Key for Me (and Kornheiser and Jenkins)
I am in Akron, Ohio today at what is now called—let’s see if I get this right, “The World Golf Championships—Bridgestone Invitational.”
Once, this was The World Series of golf and it was a four man event—the four players being the winners of that year’s majors. Now it has a field of about 100, a huge purse and—much to the delight of the locals and CBS—Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson. Woods is here because he loves the golf course (six wins) and decided to play two straight tournaments prior to next week’s PGA since his win two weeks out, skip a week and then play a major strategy has bombed this year. Mickelson, of course, is coming back after his wife Amy’s surgery for breast cancer and will be treated—as he should—as a returning hero.
That’s not why I’m here though. In fact, for me, the presence of Tiger and Phil just means more security, more crowds and more media. I understand their importance to the game—CBS’s rating for the Buick Open went up a ridiculous 167 percent with Woods leading on Sunday—but more often than not, they aren’t my job.
My job the next two days is Ben Curtis and Mike Weir. I am wrapping up the research on a book I’m writing on the 2003 major championships. The winners that year were Weir, Jim Furyk, Curtis and Shaun Micheel. The latter two had never won on the PGA Tour and came completely out of nowhere; Weir had won but wasn’t known anywhere outside Canada except by golf geeks. People knew Furyk, but he’d never won a major. The book is about sudden fame and how it changes your life and how people—including family, friends, agents—deal with it.
It’s been fascinating to work on. I was supposed to do what I call my “exit,” interviews—the wrap-up talks to tie up all loose ends—with Curtis, Micheel and Weir at Congressional five weeks ago, very convenient since Congressional is two miles from my house. Heart surgery got in the way that week so here I am. I’ll have to go to Greensboro in a couple weeks to catch up with Micheel because he’s not playing here.
The great thing about covering golf is that, in most cases, the guys are almost always cooperative. They give you their cell numbers and return your calls—eventually. With luck, I will finish the reporting in two weeks and, since the book is about 60 percent written, finish writing it by the end of September for publication in the spring.
Since I’m back at a golf tournament, a word today on parking. At any sports event, parking is an issue. Some places—like the Masters—its simple: you have a press credential they give you parking, easy walking distance to the front gate. Other places—the U.S. Open for example—there is, for all intents and purposes, no media parking.
I’m a control freak. I don’t like waiting for shuttle buses or being dependent on others. I like to walk out after a day of work and get me in my car. Am I spoiled? You bet. The only person more spoiled than I am is my friend Tony Kornheiser who won’t go to an event unless he gets what he calls, “Feinstein parking.”
Last February on a Saturday morning I’d just finished working out when my phone rang. It was my pal Sally Jenkins. She was in town and she and Tony wanted to go to that day’s Maryland game to, “show Gary support.” No doubt the two of them walking in would mean the end of any further controversy involving Coach Gary Williams.
“Why don’t you go with us?” she said.
“I’m going to another game,” I said.
There was a pause. “Can we have your parking pass?”
The real reason for the call. “Sure you can,” I said. “But it isn’t on the loading dock (right next to the back door) where Tony likes to park. You’ll have to walk about 50 yards.” (Since I rarely go to Maryland games these days the only time I’d ask Gary for a spot on the loading dock would be if I HAD to go and it was snowing or freezing cold).
Sally called back soon after to say they didn’t need the pass. Tony had called Gary a few hours before tipoff and Gary had gotten him onto the loading dock.
Here in Akron, my friend Slugger White, who is a long-time rules official, handed me my parking lot at dinner last night. That meant I slept well. I wouldn’t have to go to a will call window and have someone look at me blankly, or try to talk my way through to get to the media center and be handed a pass. I just get in the car and go.
My favorite parking memory took place at the 2002 U.S. Open. That’s the one at Bethpage Black I wrote the book about called, “Open.” When David Fay, the executive director of the USGA agreed to give me access to his staff and meetings before and during the Open I told him I needed one more thing: clubhouse parking. I was going to be arriving before 6 a.m. each morning and not leaving until very late. I wasn’t going to mess with shuttles.
He agreed. And so, at the most secure event in sports history—it was 35 miles from ground zero nine months after 9-11—I made it through about eight check points each morning to the clubhouse lot. One morning as I pulled into a mostly empty lot, I saw a Buick pulling in a few spots down from where I was pulling in.
Tiger Woods, arriving early to practice. I gave him a casual wave as I got out of the car. I can only imagine what thoughts ran through his mind. I guarantee you they weren’t, ‘gee, I’m sure glad the USGA took care of John.”
Of course he couldn’t have been TOO upset. He won that week going away.
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