NBA Quiz: Where did the following go to school? [Something
for each skill level.] Alvan Adams (1975-88), Kenny Anderson,
Greg Anthony, John Bagley, Mike Bantom (1973-82), Rick
Barry, Walt Bellamy, Otis Birdsong, Dave Bing, Bill Cartwright,
Tom Chambers. Answers below.
Steve Martin…another chapter
So I just picked up this new book by Richard Zoglin titled
“Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-up in the 1970s changed
America,” hoping for a little Bar Chat, and in light of my bit on
Steve Martin the other week, I just have to pass along a few more
tales, these from Zoglin’s book. Granted, maybe only a handful
of you find these funny….but I paid for this site!
In the mid-1970s, Martin’s popularity was beginning to grow as
“he was expanding his satire to include the whole distorted,
narcissistic worldview of the showbiz star,” as Zoglin writes.
“I’m so mad at my mother,” Martin griped. “She’s a hundred
and two years old. She called me up the other day – she wanted
to borrow ten dollars for some food. I said, Hey, I work for a
living!” During concerts, Martin would ask the lighting people
for a ‘blue spot’ (he’d instruct them beforehand to ignore any
orders he might shout from the stage), then do a slow-burn
tantrum when the lights didn’t change:
“I am onstage. And it’s my ass out there, you know what I
mean? And I come out, and I’m giving, and I’m giving, and I
keep on giving, and I give some more. And I make a simple
request. I say, hey, can I possibly have a blue spot? But I guess
the lighting crew feels they know a little bit more about show
business than I do! Although I’ve been in this business a few
years, and I think I know what works best! [Really hot now]
I’m sorry, but I am angry! I come here, and I can’t get a little
cooperation from the backstage crew?! Excuuuuuse me!”
And that’s how the last expression became a national
catchphrase; as Zoglin notes, “the encapsulation of Martin’s
portrait of the celebrity as asshole.”
“Martin went further, playing with the whole power relationship
between performer and audience. When he appeared in big halls,
he’d offer sympathy for the folks at the top of the balcony,
reassuring them that they’d be able to see everything. Then, for
his first bit, he would introduce ‘the magic dime trick.’ When
someone up front would leave to go to the bathroom, Martin
would enlist the rest of the crowd in a practical joke: when the
poor sap came back, Martin instructed them to laugh at
everything he said even before the punch lines. Three thousand
people playing a prank on one suspecting schlub. It was brilliant
lunacy.”
I mentioned the other day that I saw Martin at Wake Forest after
he had made his name on “Saturday Night Live.” Zoglin writes,
though, that Lorne Michaels had no interest in Martin hosting at
first. But when Martin’s club and talk show career took off,
Michaels booked him as guest host in October 1976. Martin
didn’t do well in the sketches, but his stand-up scored big.
“It’s great to be here,” he announced in his opening monologue.
Then, moving a bit to the side: “No, it’s great to be here!” The
sheer class-clown simplicity of the gag seemed to cut through all
the layers of National Lampoon hipness and star ego that were
enveloping the show, notes Zoglin. “He was a breath of fresh air
in a very stale room at that point,” says Michaels. “We were
burned-out. He was sunshine. We were very much about being
taken seriously. And Steve was braver than that. He didn’t
care.”
But his breakthrough performance on SNL was the third time he
hosted, the following September. Two sketches became Martin
signatures.
“In one, he donned black-framed glasses to play a sleazy defense
attorney who mercilessly grills a rape victim (Gilda Radner),
bringing her to tears on a witness stand. After the case is
dismissed and the courtroom has emptied, he swaggers up to
Radner and asks for a date. She breaks down all over again,
lashes out at him for his shameless ethics, and leaves in tears.
Alone in the courtroom, the chastened lawyer soberly reflects on
her words. ‘Gee, maybe she’s right,’ he says. ‘Maybe I got off
the track somewhere along the line in the pursuit of a buck.
Maybe I lost sight of my ideals…’ Then, after a short pause,
snapping out of it: ‘Naaah!’
“In the other sketch, Martin and Dan Akroyd played two
hopelessly unswinging singles from Czechoslovakia, coming on
clumsily to a couple of women in an apartment-house rec room.
They dubbed themselves ‘two wild and crazy guys,’ and the
appellation became Martin’s calling card, as he returned to
reprise the character several times. ‘Saturday Night Live’ did for
Martin what it couldn’t do for the other leading stand-ups of the
decade: it enhanced and ripened his comedy persona, rather than
diminishing it. The show grew because of him, and he grew
because of the show.”
The next two to three years, Martin was as hot as any comedian
in history. Richard Zoglin:
“Comedians like Pryor and Richard Lewis poured out all their
angst about women; Martin set up the angst, then pulled out the
rug. He related the sad story of the death of his girlfriend.
“I guess I kinda blame myself for her death,” he said, then
recounted their last night together, when she had too much to
drink at a party and he wouldn’t drive her home:
“She ran out to the car, and I followed her out. And I guess I
didn’t realize how much she had been drinking. She asked me to
drive her home, and I refused. We argued a little bit further, and
she asked me once again. ‘Would you please drive me home?’ I
didn’t want to. [Beat] So I shot her.”
For you folks who were too young to remember Martin then,
understand he was selling out 20,000-seat coliseums. He was
hotter than the best rock groups in 1978 and 79. But he simply
burned out and quit stand-up for good in 1981.
Next Bar Chat, Johnny Carson’s influence on various careers.
Andy Pettitte
Hopefully this is the last chapter for awhile, at least until the
Clemens indictment. What ticks a lot of us off these days is how
hundreds of players are getting off scot-free. Only one
clubhouse guy and a trainer, after all, were responsible for the
lion’s share of the names in the Mitchell report. But every team
had its culprits. So will others come forward? My guess is not
anytime soon.
Gene Wojciechowski / ESPN.com
“Everybody wants to hit the gas pedal on the steroids era and not
even bother to look in the rearview mirror.
“ ‘I think you learn from the past, but you just can’t keep
revisiting the past,’ (manager Lou) Piniella told reporters. ‘I
don’t know who’s done what. But I do know the quicker that
this problem gets cleaned up and rectified, the better for
everybody.’
“He’s right, but he’s also wrong. It’s true: The quicker baseball
resolves the performance-enhancing drugs issue, the better for
the owners, the players, the advertisers, the networks, the record
books and, somewhere down the list, the actual working stiffs
who buy all those tickets.
“But before you can move forward, you have to reconcile the
past. The past defines the future, and as much as everyone wants
to get to the business of sliders, sunflower seeds and Santana,
there’s still this little matter of accountability.
“Sorry, but baseball owes its fans an explanation, an apology and
some patience. Just because the firm of Mitchell, Torre and
Piniella is ready to turn the page doesn’t mean the rest of us are
good to go.
“The Mitchell report was a start, nothing more. It was more
gums than teeth, but at least it prompted a congressional
investigation and hearing into the alleged needle legacy of a
seven-time Cy Young winner….
“But now that spring training has begun, we’re supposed to – all
together now – move forward? I’d love to. And as soon as we
learn whether the greatest pitcher and the greatest hitter of our
generation (and maybe of all time) were on the juice, I’ll be
happy to join Mitchell, Torre, (Cubs general manager) Hendry
and Piniella on the MLB promo tour. But until then, I think fans
and, say, Henry Aaron deserve some sort of legitimate closure.
“Moving forward isn’t doing what Washington Nationals catcher
Paul Lo Duca did this past Saturday. Lo Duca, named repeatedly
in the Mitchell report, appeared in front of reporters and issued
the Near Beer Lite of apologies. He said he had ‘come to grips’
with ‘a mistake’ he had made. When someone asked what
exactly he was apologizing for, Lo Duca said, ‘Come on, bro.
Next question.’
“This is what passes for accountability these days. Come on,
bro. Then again, it was better than the verbal mush Milwaukee
Brewers reliever Eric Gagne – another Mitchell report alum –
delivered Monday. I’d summarize it for you, but he didn’t say
anything of substance. He made Lo Duca look like a statesman.”
Jayson Stark / ESPN.com
[On Andy Pettitte’s performance before the press]
“This wasn’t Jason Giambi or Paul Lo Duca, confessing and/or
apologizing for who the heck knew what.
“This wasn’t Rafael Palmeiro, tossing out conspiracy theories
about how those evil poisons mysteriously appeared in his
bloodstream.
“No, this was a real person, caught red-handed by the proper
authorities, who then did what we wish more of these guys
would do:
“Actually act like a real person. And talk like a real person. And
paint a picture, for the world to see, of how an otherwise level-
headed human being somehow got sucked into the depths of
baseball’s magic-syringe culture.
“Look, would Pettitte have sat there Monday and said any of this
if he hadn’t been caught? You don’t need a Ph.D. in psychology
or criminology to know the answer to that one: No chance. No
way.
“But how many players before him have been fingered or been
outed or tested positive or showed up on the wrong prescription
list…and taken a whole different route? Pretty much all of them.
Right?
“So when Pettitte spoke into those microphones Monday and
said he’d taken these drugs out of ‘stupidity’ and ‘desperation,’
he seemed as believable as any baseball drug culprit ever has.
“When he talked about how he made the torturous decision to tell
congressional investigators about how his father injected him in
2004 because ‘If I didn’t bring it up, I couldn’t sleep at night,’ he
sounded as genuine as any of these guys has ever sounded….
“A phony doesn’t say: ‘Part of me was a nervous wreck and
scared to death to come up here today.’
“A phony doesn’t tell you stories about his wife’s referring him
to a Bible passage on the plane ride to Washington, a passage
that reinforced the lesson that ‘I needed to tell the truth under
oath.’
“A phony doesn’t say: ‘If people think I’m lying, they should
call me a cheater.’”
Joel Sherman / New York Post
“(Though) Pettitte still showed signs yesterday of idolizing
Clemens – still being entranced by the ‘Rocket’ myth – he also
unleashed subtle, yet powerful damage on Clemens. He
mentioned several times that McNamee ‘told the truth about me.’
So the subliminal message continued to be: Why would
McNamee be honest about Pettitte’s drug involvement and lie
about Clemens?
“And though Pettitte lawyered up, refusing to elaborate on
Clemens’ drug history, he did reiterate to check out the
deposition he gave under oath to the House Oversight
Committee. Pettitte’s sworn declaration was that Clemens had
admitted steroid use to him.
“Clemens has strayed toward ruthlessness to try clearing his
name, and Pettitte should not feel fully safe from Rocket’s wrath,
now when he is siding with McNamee and exposing Clemens as
a cheater.”
Stuff
–Finally, good news on the mountain gorilla front. Rwanda, the
Dem. Rep. of Congo and Uganda have agreed on a joint security
effort to save one of the world’s most endangered species, with
the largest population of the gorillas living at a point where the
three countries meet. Only 700 are left in the world, with about
350 living in the Virunga national park and surrounding region.
It was just last July that five were shot, execution style, inside the
park.
The gorillas are a large source of tourist income for the three
nations, some $5 million a year, and I still say the U.S. and UN
should contribute to the effort by putting together a group of
mercenaries; veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.
–“Saturday Night Live” returns this week after being in re-runs
since Nov. 3 as a result of the writers’ strike. Tina Fey is hosting
with Carrie Underwood as the musical guest. I wonder if Carrie
will wear those boots from the Grammys? I mention SNL only
because you can imagine how frustrated Lorne Michaels and Co.
have been in not being able to comment on the election. Well, I
bet the gloves are off now. Believe it or not, the coming skits
could actually influence the November vote.
–As Jorge Ortiz of USA Today writes, the transfer of power in
Cuba could have a real impact on the island’s baseball players.
Cuban defector/pitcher Jose Contreras of the White Sox said
“Hopefully, there will be a day that players will be allowed to
play here without defecting.” Others aren’t as optimistic.
–Stu W. wanted me to consider Rusty Staub’s case for the Hall
of Fame. Actually, to be fair his argument is that Rusty is the
best player who will never get in.
Now I loved Rusty myself, but there are others such as Dave
Parker, with slightly better numbers than Rusty in many
important categories, including one more All-Star team and five
top 5’s in the MVP voting (with one MVP award) to Staub’s
single top-5 MVP vote, who won’t get in either. Andre Dawson
also has better numbers than Rusty in most big categories and
I’m thinking his chances aren’t getting any better.
I still bemoan the fact Ron Santo isn’t in, but I’m convinced at
some point the Veterans Committee will select him. As for Jim
Rice, I think he gets in next time in his final opportunity.
–I loved watching Jason Kidd when he was with the Nets, but I
agree with those who say he has simply abandoned the team in
forcing the trade to Dallas.
–Before I went to bed Tuesday evening I saw that the Rangers
had a 5-0 lead over Montreal. Nice win, I mused, as I’ve been
mildly following the Rangers’ stretch drive for a playoff berth.
Then I wake up and learn Montreal won 6-5 in a shootout.
Goodness gracious, I thought, you never hear of a comeback like
that in hockey. Turns out it was the biggest comeback in
Montreal’s 99-year history.
–Philip Terzian / The Weekly Standard on Uno the beagle.
“The Westminster show has been held annually since 1877, and
‘Best in Show’ has been awarded to one fortunate purebred each
year since 1907. The scene, nationally televised is now familiar:
the Garden filled to the rafters with fans, in evening dress
clutching high-priced tickets, while ladies and gentlemen parade
their dogs, and judges squeeze testicles and fold back ears for
close inspection (of the dogs).
“It is, perhaps, a little unfair, but over the decades the
Westminster show has tended to conform to stereotype. There is
a preponderance of well-bred, well-fed female owners and
trainers, and exquisitely groomed male handlers, and the lucky
dogs chosen for Best in Show have had a tendency to resemble
the humans surrounding them. Needless to say, certain breeds –
particularly of the delicate, long-haired, extravagantly barbered
classes – have dominated the proceedings, and with wearisome
regularity.
“That is, until last week. On February 11, a fetching 15-inch
male beagle from Columbia, S.C., named Uno won the
competition within the hound class, and all hell broke loose…
“When the finalists were called upon to prance around the ring,
the cheers for Uno were conspicuously louder; and when he won,
the spectators roared and stood in ovation….
“ ‘He’s the most perfect beagle I’ve ever seen,’ (said J. Donald
Jones, the judge). ‘Look at his face, you melt right away.’ Uno
bayed more than once as Jones looked him over – a swift
disqualification in most instances, but endearing this time….
“After 132 years, the venerable Westminster Kennel Club came
to its senses, and recognized the beagle as the extraordinary
creature that it is. Uno, who is nothing if not typical, is the lucky
beneficiary of this great awakening.”
–Holy Toledo! Did you see the story on the prehistoric frog
scientists have identified? “An ancient amphibian big enough to
prey on young dinosaurs”? It was said to be the size of a
beachball as it terrorized Earth 70 million years ago.
But I don’t believe that this beast is extinct, so from here on I’m
not walking near any swamps the rest of my life.
–I told you those four paintings stolen from the Zurich museum
were overrated. Police found two of the four in an unlocked car
parked at a mental hospital near the scene of the crime. I’m
guessing when the thieves realized they wouldn’t get more than
$39.95 for the works, they went nuts.
–OK, re the above, there is the possibility that a ransom may
have been paid to get the paintings back, but I’m sticking to my
original story.
Top 3 songs for the week of 2/23/74: #1 “The Way We Were”
(Barbra Streisand) #2 “Seasons In The Sun” (Terry Jacks) #3
“Until You Come Back To Me (That’s What I’m Gonna Do)”
(Aretha Franklin…one of her two best along with “Day
Dreaming”…but those were 35 years ago, Aretha!)…and…#4
“Spiders & Snakes” (Jim Stafford…saw him in Branson, Mo.,
about five years ago. Seriously, good show) #5 “Love’s Theme”
(Love Unlimited Orchestra) #6 “Jungle Boogie” (Kool & The
Gang…get down, get down…) #7 “Boogie Down” (Eddie
Kendricks…everyone be boogieing and (stuff) back then) #8
“Rock On” (David Essex) #9 “You’re Sixteen” (Ringo Starr)
#10 “Let Me Be There” (Olivia Newton-John)
NBA Quiz Answers: Alvan (sic) Adams…Oklahoma; Kenny
Anderson…Georgia Tech; Greg Anthony…UNLV; John Bagley
…Boston College; Mike Bantom…St. Joseph’s; Rick Barry…
Miami; Walt Bellamy…Indiana; Otis Birdsong…Houston; Dave
Bing…Syracuse; Bill Cartwright…San Francisco; Tom
Chambers…Utah.
*Just a note on Bellamy (“Bells”) for you hoops history junkies.
He burst on the scene with a phenomenal rookie season, 1961-
62, for Chicago; 31.6 pts., 19 rebounds. But then his avg. went
to 27.9, 27.0, 24.8, 22.8, and 19.0 over successive seasons.
Motivation was a factor, so some say.
Next Bar Chat, Monday.
**If you live in the Summit, N.J., area, stop by Thursday, March
6, The Grand Summit Hotel (570 Springfield Ave.), 7:00-
9:00pm, for a fun discussion with one of the great athletes of all
time, Summit’s own Willie Wilson. [If you think this is an
overstatement, understand that baseball, where he ended up
making his name, was his third sport and as a senior, Willie’s
backfield mate on the All-American high school football team
was none other than Earl Campbell.] I’m sponsoring the event.
Admission is free. No reservations required.
