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Ekim Xuddam

October 27, 2011

The Cardboard Gods Ass Backwards ABCs of Parenting

X Is for Xuddam

After a few weeks of being a father, I have everything pretty much figured out and am certainly among the world’s foremost experts on the subject, but I am as yet undecided on which of the following theories should become the central pillar in my philosophy of fathering:

1. The Theory of Cancellation: To be a father, one must accept a large X across the version of oneself that existed up to the point of becoming a father.

2. The Theory of Total Upheaval: To be a father, one must accept that everything has been so completely upended that one’s anus is now one’s brain and vice versa, and in this upheaval nothing will really seem to work, and it will be as if one has been a right-handed pitcher all one’s life and is now being asked to escape late-inning jams while pitching left-handed.

Let me hasten to add that these theories, now that they are written out and not merely thoughts in my mind, both strike me as repugnant in that they focus self-pityingly on the father and not on the child or even the fathering of the child. I can’t help it, it seems. I have to complain, it seems. Acquaintances, friends, family members all ask about the baby, and while I may be able to briefly mouth a platitude about the child’s well-being and my genuine loving feelings for him, I then can’t help myself from trying to channel at least some of my darker thoughts into a conversational exchange set up to bear only platitudes.

“He doesn’t sleep,” I say.

Depending on my mood at the moment and on how well I know the person I’m speaking to, I might say this cheerfully, as if it’s just “one of those things,” or I might say it more weightily, like I’m trying to communicate over the phone that I am in a dire hostage situation, my captor pressing the barrel of a gun to my head.

My actual captor would not be able to hold a gun yet, but if you place a rattle near his fingers he’ll grab hold of it and grip it in his fist. He can’t control the rattle, but he’ll hold onto it pretty tightly. He usually ends up flailing his arm and bopping himself in the head with the thing. And yet, despite his inability to control a rattle or wield a gun, he’s got me wrapped up as securely as if I were mummified to a chair with several yards of duct tape. He doesn’t sleep, he wails, all day, all night, I hold him and stand and bounce and rock him in my arms and go “shhh” until my legs ache and I’m covered in sweat and I’m so low on saliva that my “shhh” sound is no more impactful than the scrape of a dry leaf on concrete several blocks away, and he’s still there, staring wide-eyed at the wall or up at me.

Here I am, he is saying.

It’s a statement that I am able to appreciate at certain times as the greatest gift of my entire life. The statement takes on a different meaning when I’ve been rocking him uselessly for a long time and my poor wife—who bears an exponentially larger amount of the brunt of the ravages of this sleepless hostage situation than I do—is staring at the wall like she just got carted home after storming the beach at Anzio. In those moments, which are so plentiful as to suggest themselves as the norm, my son’s “here I am” is more like the living, breathing embodiment of the kind of math problem that shows up in nightmares, an unsolvable complexity designed expressly to confound, frustrate, and defeat.

And another problem is that everything I try to write on this subject misses the mark. For example, just as I was finishing off the above paragraph, I heard my son making “talking” sounds upstairs with my wife, and I stopped writing and went upstairs and played with him on a blanket on the floor and took a video of him using his legs to push off his mom’s hands and slide across the blanket and smile. He has been trying to laugh lately, but he doesn’t quite know how to do it. He smiles and goes “uuuuh,” not getting how to break the sound up into laughs. Whenever he does this I laugh so hard my face hurts. I came back downstairs from that and the words I’ve written so far make me want to carve a big X over the writing. This is how the writing has been going lately—everything I say seems within moments like it deserves cancellation. Whatever used to work or appeared to work doesn’t work anymore. Parenting is like that for me. Whatever worked the day before doesn’t work today, so you have to write a big X through it and start over. One moment doesn’t seem to offer much relation or support to the next.

I had a moment on the bus a few days ago, coming home. I can’t really access it now, but the whole world seemed to be glowing and I was thinking about writing, thinking about how the way to do it is like Van Gogh and approach form in a siege of messy feeling instead of caution and hesitating care. I was thinking about my son, hoping and praying for him to have moments when the world is all possibility, a sunflower the same as a creator deity’s cupped hands full of brand-new stars. The bus groaned past a guy standing in a sandwich board in the growing dusk outside a muffler shop, advertising $10 off something, and even that or especially that in conjunction with an inexplicable burst of a memory of watching the sun set in China at dusk when I was 21 years old moved me almost to tears, to think that my son will have the feel of life inside him, the weight of a sandwich board on his shoulders, maybe, or the glow of a sunset in a faraway place, the memory of his mother’s soft words, all of it, the highs and lows, and I wanted to find words for this and started wondering whether I could find a way to use it in this post about Ekim Xuddam, left-handed unassuming pencil-mustached journeyman and representative of a world turned upside down.

The X in the surname of this player, Xuddam, is pronounced as an “sh” sound, as if it is an X in pinyin, the pronunciation system used for the rendering of the Chinese language into our alphabet. Also in keeping with the upside down nature of the player, and in line with the Chinese custom, this surname is listed first on the player’s card. I studied Chinese for a few months in Shanghai when I was 21, and this study pinnacled one day in a public park with a conversation I was able to hold, barely, with a Chinese toddler. Almost all the words I learned are gone from my mind now, cancelled like most things that come and go in a life. I sometimes worry about my memory, my purchase on life, my lack of expertise about anything, even baseball, that primary lifelong means of escape from life, but in a way it is good to be—at least in terms of baseball fandom—in possession of a porous, faulty memory, because it allows the game to retain the vastness and mystery it had when I was first discovering it. The day before my glowing bus-ride moment, when still trying to figure out who I could possibly write an “X is for” essay about in the world of baseball, I started casting around baseball-reference.com, and for several minutes I lingered on the player with the most X’s in his name in baseball history, plus a nickname (“Double X”—one of two nicknames, along with “The Beast”) that made reference to the X’s. As I was studying Jimmie Foxx’s page on baseball-reference.com I was remembering the particular pleasure or even joy in first discovering his numbers, back when I was a little boy just beginning to explore baseball history. I knew Ruth and Aaron and Dimaggio, but in those early days there was actually a moment when I loved baseball yet still didn’t know Jimmie Foxx, who was tucked away just a little, a surprise for the young baseball explorer to find. And what a find.

The game never stops offering up these surprises, though in different ways, no monumental icons like Foxx left to discover but plenty of other discoveries to be made, even in the recent past. I drift into and out of the game. Years go by where it seems in retrospect that I was hardly paying attention at all. I don’t know what the fuck else I was doing but somehow I couldn’t even get it together to grasp the details of whatever baseball season was unfolding somewhere beyond my personal fog. For example, after I left Jimmie Foxx’s page in order to search for more candidates for the “X is for” post, my search brought me to Xavier Nady, and though I then searched my shoebox for cards for this player and found I had none (and none for Xavier Hernandez, either), I lingered on the Xavier Nady page because I guess I don’t want to entirely cancel my former self in these strange new sleepless days and instead want to linger and digress and waste time, just a little, please, and I poked around Xavier Nady’s page until I got to his first at-bat, which turned out to be against a pitcher whose first name, incredibly, was Onan. What is incredible about this is that I had never heard of this Onan, despite his presence in box scores for a couple of years and despite Onanism being very near the foundation of the cluster of practices and habits and compulsions that have ferried me haphazardly through 43 years and that more or less make up the self that is known as Josh Wilker and that seem now under the duress and angst and joy of parenthood in need of either cancellation or total upheaval, depending upon which of my self-pitying theories of fatherhood is holding sway at any given time.

Oh Onan, I can’t believe I missed you. What am I missing now? I guess I never catch much on the first go-round anyway but only ever find anything in the detritus after the fact, little treasures left behind and forgotten. Onan was born in Hawaii but the name suggests Japanese descent. I was in Japan once, but only for a night, a stopover on my trip to Shanghai, the night after I wept in a weakened state at the in-flight movie Field of Dreams while thousands of feet above the Pacific. The next day I arrived in China and knew no words at all, not even hello. One of the words I learned early on, and one of the few that haven’t been X-ed out in the acid-bath barrel of my memory, is the word for thank you, which is written as “xie xie” in pinyin and is pronounced with the same “sh” sound that begins Xuddam, so the word to express gratitude sounds like waves or like the sound I use to try to get my son to sleep.

Here I am, he keeps telling me, eyes wide open.

Xie xie, I say. I’ll keep saying it. I’ll say it to him the rest of my life. I’ll never forget what it means.

***

Previous installments in the Cardboard Gods Ass Backwards ABCs of Parenting:
Z Is for Zisk
Y is For Yeager

Posted in by Josh Wilker, Ekim Xuddam, San Diego Padres | 6 Comments »

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Steve Yeager

October 17, 2011

The Cardboard Gods Ass Backwards ABCs of Parenting

Y Is for Yeager

Baseball is often used to define fatherhood, and fatherhood is often used to define baseball. Somewhere it was said that baseball is fathers playing catch with sons, or something like that (I don’t know if he coined the phrase, but the great poet—and Dock Ellis collaborator—Donald Hall wrote a book of essays about sports using that title). Feeding into that notion is the familial bond strengthened and even defined through a shared love of the game, the game being passed down from generation to generation, and, last but not least, the literal act of fathers playing catch with sons, an act perhaps as sacramental as any other in secular America. What above that would a new father think of when imagining his relationship with his son? What else could more firmly lock father and son together and lock them both to the most tender and joyful element in the myth of the nation? This notion of fathers playing catch with sons has become an epicenter of sentimentality, too, a way toward weeping hot, nostalgic tears for, depending on the weeper, the distance in time from such a catch, the absence of such a catch, the absence, in part or in full, of the father. This is the myth of the land, too: the absent father, the catch that never was.

The elevated notion of fathers playing catch with sons crested in the popular imagination in Field of Dreams, a movie about a guy named Ray Kinsella hitting middle-age and still looking for that catch with his dad. In the end, the ghost of the long-gone father, John Kinsella, emerges from the corn, and he’s a catcher, that’s his position, his role during his time on earth playing baseball as well as in eternity: he is a father and he catches. The movie climaxes with this exchange between father and son:

John Kinsella: Well, good night Ray.
Ray Kinsella: Good night, John.
[They shake hands and John begins to walk away]
Ray Kinsella: Hey… Dad?
[John turns]
Ray Kinsella: [choked up] “You wanna have a catch?”
John Kinsella: I’d like that.

The second time I saw Field of Dreams I wasn’t having any of this, rejecting it as I would the idea of eating a bucket of sugar. By the time of the climactic catch between father and son, I had already come to this conclusion about and rejection of the movie, and Costner’s phrasing—“have a catch”—put me over the top. I’d never to that point heard of the act of throwing a ball back and forth as “having” a catch, and the term made the act sound all the more precious and sentimental, almost unbearably childish, even though the term my brother and I used when we wanted to do throw a ball around, if we had to use one at all beyond just eye contact and the waggle of a glove—“play catch”—was also childlike. I don’t know, “playing catch” just sounds, still sounds, less like a big production with swelling orchestral strings than “having a catch.” I understand now that it’s probably just a regional thing—in some places this is just what people say when they want to throw a ball back and forth. (But, still, I for one will never use the phrase “have a catch.”) Anyway, that second viewing of Field of Dreams formed my official stance on the movie, but I must admit that my first viewing of the movie went much differently.

I first saw it on an airplane over the Pacific Ocean. I was at one of the more vulnerable moments of my life, as I was on my way to spend a few months in China with the idea that I would study there, but I had no real plan beyond the notion that I was going to meet up with my college writing professor, who was teaching there for a year, and together we would “figure something out.” I had never left the continent before, and I didn’t know a single word of Chinese or anything about Chinese culture. It was a leap into the unknown. And here, during the longest flight of my life, into this unknown, came a soothing story about baseball and the American Dream and fathers playing catch with sons, and I fell into it completely, desperately, and at the end, during the “have a catch” scene, I started to lose it. I was sitting next to a young Japanese guy, and he was starting to lose it, too, and the two of us turned to one another and grinned sheepishly.

Japanese guy: It is nice.
Josh: [choked up] Yes.

So, let’s face it, I’m as deeply snared as anyone in the myth of baseball and America and fathers “having” catches with sons. Now that I’m a father I have already thought repeatedly about such a catch with my own son, even though his command of his hands and limbs is minimal, but it is not nonexistent, and he is able to grip onto my finger, which has more than once made me feel choked up. Anyway, it’s a long way off. In the meantime, however, everything but everything, or so I’ve been told, maybe not in so many words, is fathers playing catch with sons, and in this my role is to be a catcher. I have to catch what he throws. I have to be there. I have to be sturdy and balanced and relaxed but ready. Like Steve Yeager in this 1977 card, an impossible ideal of relaxed readiness, the supreme catcher. Whenever you’re ready, Yeager seems to be saying. I can crouch here all day. Whenever you’re ready, I’ll be here.

***

Previous installments in the Cardboard Gods Ass Backwards ABCs of Parenting:

Z Is for Zisk

Posted in by Josh Wilker, Los Angeles Dodgers, Steve Yeager | 20 Comments »

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Luis Tiant

October 5, 2011

Last Wednesday, my wife and I took our son to the doctor for his two-month checkup. Two months seems too insubstantial. Parents of older children tell me to enjoy every moment because “it goes by so fast,” but I find myself yearning for a quicker passage of time so that the boy can stack up the days and weeks and months and become more and more fully and safely here. I don’t know how to explain that feeling (or feelings in general) except in baseball card terms. Most players, like most things, come and go with very little trace or even no trace at all, but certain cards, such as this 1979 Luis Tiant, seem to be invincible, despite their inherent flimsiness, and it has to do with all the many seasons on the back of the card anchoring the player into place as a star, a bright constant in an ever-shifting world.

At the doctor, my son got two shots, one in each leg, to protect him from several diseases. When we got home his legs began to swell up, and he started screaming. We couldn’t find any way to help him. Finally, around dusk, we put him in a stroller and went to the drug store to get some baby Tylenol. The walk seemed to distract him a little, and the screaming tapered off to little grunts and groans. When we got to the store I stayed outside and rolled the stroller up and down a patch of sidewalk while my wife went in to buy the pain-killer. The store is in an area where there are some sketchy characters, and on the way out of the store my wife was harassed by a pack of them.

“Fuck you,” my wife shouted over her shoulder at them.

“What’d they say?” I asked.

“Whatever,” she muttered and started leading the way back toward home, where our son would start screaming again. She held the Tylenol, and I pushed the stroller containing our suffering baby away from the pack of harassers, salving my feelings of powerlessness with fantasies of violent revenge.

***

This is Luis Tiant’s last card with the Red Sox. He left the Red Sox a little over a month after a one-game playoff defeat ended the team’s 1978 season. Players on the Red Sox lamented that the heart of the team was gone, and the team’s immediate plummet into uninspired mediocrity bore those claims out. I was only 11, but I didn’t blame Tiant for leaving. I don’t think other fans did, either, even though he went to the Yankees; the general feeling about the exodus of many players from the star-studded 1970s team was that the incompetency and cheapness of the front office was to blame, not the players. This last card of him as a Red Sox player seems fitting to me, a quiet, almost meditative shot of him doing what he did as well as any player ever has: connecting with a fan. We want to feel solid and capable and powerful. We need that connection.

***

I am fairly certain that I would lose to almost everyone on earth if ever pitted against them in a fight, so it was difficult for me to come up with realistic fantasies in which I was able to run up toward the street-hardened harassers of my wife and cause them all grave pain. I decided I’d have to rely on a lot of surprise groin-kicks, as many as I could fit in before their superior strength, fighting skills, and generalized rage at the unjust world kicked in and left me fractured and bleeding on the sidewalk (at best). Really what I needed, I reasoned while pushing my baby home, was a large and powerful weapon, not a gun but some kind of industrial-strength many-barreled taser capable of subduing with agonizing force several members of a gang of harassers, but even armed with that in my fantasy I saw myself somehow fumbling my grip on the weapon and having it used against me in horrible ways. Finally I surrendered to that old standby of my life and of the impotent and powerless everywhere: the impossible fantasy of having super-strength. Oh, they would laugh and heckle as I approached in my glasses and my drab middle-aged ectomorphic garments, but then wham and ca-crush and b-doouuzzzh and bodies flying everywhere, jaws cracking, eye sockets caving in. Oh, the weeping and begging. Oh, my great and awesome power! Fear me!

“What’s the matter with you?” my wife asked as we neared the entrance to our building. I guess I had a look on my face.

It was a rough night with the baby, but not as bad as the day had been, and finally he settled into a shallow sleep. I was free to follow the progress of game 162 of the 2011 baseball season. I have nothing to say about that game, but the departure the following day of Terry Francona from the Red Sox reminds me a little of Luis Tiant’s in the fall of 1978, just after the end of a Red Sox collapse that until the night of baby Tylenol and groin-kick fantasies was inarguably the worst regular season flop in franchise history. That 1978 team, like all 86 yearly editions of the Red Sox that had failed to win the World Series from 1919 to 2003, was redeemed in 2004, thanks in considerable part to the leadership of Terry Francona. Once the Red Sox finally won the World Series, everyone who had ever played for the Red Sox got to ride in the victory parade (figuratively if not literally), which to a lifelong fan was supremely gratifying. It helped give me back my childhood, the sheer fun of rooting for Lynn and Rice and Yaz and that warm ancient wizard, Luis Tiant, of believing he was going to lead them all the way. Until 2004, I avoided my summery childhood memories because they were tangled in a slanting October twilight that made all the players from the 1970s team seem forever doomed to fail, and since my identification with them was so deeply rooted and intimate—they were the projections of my deepest wishes in the world—I felt forever doomed to fail, too. Terry Francona was the leader of the team that lifted that burden. I will always be grateful to him. Fan is short for fanatic but it might as well be short for fantasy. In being a fan we hope to become more powerful, more victorious, than we are in real life. Amazing that sometimes it actually turns out to really feel that way. It certainly didn’t last Wednesday night for me, and the next day Terry Francona was no longer the manager of the Red Sox, but two times in my life I really did have super-strength, and both of those times Terry Francona presided.

Posted in Boston Red Sox, by Josh Wilker, Luis Tiant (Bos.) | 6 Comments »

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September 29, 2011

Posted in Boston Red Sox, by Josh Wilker | 3 Comments »

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Richie Zisk

September 16, 2011

The Cardboard Gods Ass Backwards ABCs of Parenting

Z Is for Zisk

This morning, the start of my 48th day as a parent, while groping around in my shoebox of cards, exhausted, unmoored, looking for some kind of anchor, I randomly pulled free this Richie Zisk card and started thinking—because of the unusual first letter of his surname—about the alphabet, and at that moment in another room of my home my son began to cry, a sound that spikes the air with barbed invisible question marks, and I began to wonder as I hurried toward the sound what it might be like to know everything I need to know. What if—instead of knowing nothing at all—I knew the terrain of parenting backward and forward? My life has been nothing if not an exercise in palliative fantasies, so why stop now? And so we begin a Cardboard Gods ABCs of parenting at the end, with Z, first things fuckin’ last, to use the phrasing of Nice Guy Eddie in Reservoir Dogs, when he was trying to piece together the details of a situation that had gone completely to shit and was clearly only going to get worse. Am I hinting with this cinematic reference that parenting for me has been like a botched, bloody heist scheme threatening to destroy everyone involved? Are you imagining that me, my wife, and our baby are currently in a Mexican stand-off, weapons drawn and cocked, shirts stained with the liquid of soured internal processes, eyes reddened with fatigue and weeping? Well, it hasn’t been like that, or at least not all the time. It is one moment at a time, some better than others, each a volatile enigma. Yesterday, the boy took a break from a long stint of red-faced grunting unhappiness and smiled up at me for a few minutes. Two days ago, he gnawed on a Red Sox pacifier and seemed content, briefly. Three days ago, when I was almost done with my bike ride home from my commute, I spotted my wife on the sidewalk, carrying the boy in a baby bjorn. I got off the bike and fell in slow step with them, the three of us meandering around the neighborhood for a while on a mild fall evening, an awareness falling down on me that in moments like this I could not be more blessed. (Key detail: just before my arrival, the boy had abruptly stopped screaming and fallen unconscious.)

Anyway, on to today’s lesson, while I still am within this narrow gap of time between tasks that have otherwise banished my writing to regions so distant and hypothetical as to border the hoary regions of frustration in which occurred my long-gone pubescent imaginings of sexual intercourse with the intangible pop culture sex symbols of my youth, such as Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman and Bailey and Jennifer from WKRP in Cincinnati (yes, the gnawing ache of knowing that in reality I would never be able to fondle Cheryl Tiegs’ boobs has now reentered my life as a yearning for having time to sit down and write, say, a literary ode to Cheryl Tiegs’ boobs): Z is for Zisk. Z is also for zero, as in nothing. When I became a parent, I suffered the feeling of being back at zero, knowing nothing. I suffered unto feelings of despair, no lie, sprinting past fantasies of Cheryl Tiegs or writing about Cheryl Tiegs to imagine scenarios of sheer desperation involving the witness protection program or the foreign legion. And it’s not accurate to put these statements in the past tense. That feeling of zero is with me right now and from now on, probably. I will always be at zero as a parent, always knowing nothing, a tenuous and agonizing way to be when someone is looking to you and depending on you to know what to do.

So Z is for zero but Z is also for Zisk, and in terms of this 1977 Richie Zisk card this can only mean good things, possibilities, unpredictable but not necessarily negative changes. The year this card came out, Zisk, after logging a few years as a prototypical good-hitting, dubious-gloved member of Pittsburgh’s vaunted Lumber Company, shifted over to the city where I now happen to live and where my son was born, Chicago, and had the best season of his career. Sometime during that season, Topps included Zisk in its line of cloth stickers, and in that product the picture shown here has been airbrushed so that Zisk is shown as a member of the White Sox. That year was the best of the decade for the White Sox, as they led the American League West deep into the summer before succumbing to the charge of the dynastic Royals. The team was one of the oddest in history, in that it had been consciously built by owner Bill Veeck as a desperate one-off, the roster fortified through trades for players acquired at bargain prices because they were on the brink of free agency. Veeck knew he would soon lose these players (most significantly Zisk and Oscar Gamble, the heart of the team’s slugging attack), but he apparently figured one brief shot at glory was better than none at all. And it almost worked. The following year, Zisk indeed cashed in on a free agency deal with the Texas Rangers, and White Sox fans had to pack away the bedsheets that they’d carried with them to the ballpark in 1977 festooned with these words: “Pitch at risk to Richie Zisk.” This slogan has stayed with me since I was a boy, and has always imbued the name of the player shown at the top of this page with a sense of sizzling hazardous excitement, all the good qualities of the unknowable and unknown.

Posted in by Josh Wilker, Pittsburgh Pirates, Richie Zisk | 3 Comments »

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Mike Flanagan

August 29, 2011

When I got this card in 1978, I would have had no wish for my life above being a major league baseball player. Back then I would have envisioned myself as a member of my favorite team, which was not the Orioles, but now, in my early 40s, looking back on that purposeful team and on my own often purposeless life, looking also at this card of a young focused left-hander throwing free and easy, a year from winning the Cy Young award and the first game of the World Series, I am thinking that if I could have been a baseball player, someone with a rare and beautiful gift, and I could have chosen an organization to come up in as a player, I would have been an Oriole during the golden years of that franchise.

I would have learned the right way to do things, the Oriole Way, and I would have learned what my place was in the world, my role, and I would have learned how to play that role. I would have been surrounded by others with rare and beautiful gifts doing the same thing, all of us coming together instead of pulling apart. Life is in constant disintegration, but to be an Oriole during those years must have felt like something close to that opposite of that, as if a life could be led, at least for a while, as an integral part of a song.

Some years after the Orioles fell from that grace into a more familiar kind of perpetual disintegration, I spent four seasons in a primitive cabin in the woods. I’ve been thinking about that cabin lately. Sometimes, at dusk, there was a symphony. I don’t want to romanticize it: more likely than not, I would have been depressed, aching with loneliness, guilty for wasting another day, angry at my inability to write anything worthwhile, wishing not that I was part of a song but that I had more batteries for my handheld battery-powered television so that I could watch sitcom reruns on the screen the size of a baseball card. That is, I was not in a lotus position peacefully drinking in the majesty of the forest. But now, many years later, I can discard the fetid personal demons fouling the moment and remember that there were two main parts of the symphony: frogs and a wood thrush. The frogs honked along dumbly, one-note simpletons, and then every once in a while the wood thrush would let loose with that watery many-noted call that I wish I could describe but can only say that whenever I heard it I loosened up just a little on the chronic grip that held me to my misery.

I thought about that symphony a few days ago when I heard that Mike Flanagan had been found dead, that he’d done himself in with a shotgun. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this site, one of my more memorable trips to the ballpark was when I saw the Red Sox play the Orioles and a pack of drunk guys behind us spent the whole game honking at the opposing pitcher, “Mike Flanagan: UMASS!” They were fellow UMASS guys, I guess, trumpeting their pride, but what I was thinking about a few days ago was how their drunken monotonous croaking was to the graceful pitching of the victorious Flanagan like the frogs’ guttural belching to the song of the wood thrush. Those guys were fans, like I am a fan, and we fans are of this earth, simple and dull, limited, unblessed by the rare and beautiful gift that inspires our croaking, and all we can do is call out to those we believe are part of something higher.

And if there’s such a thing as prayer, let me send mine into the sky like a frog croaking at dusk, and let the words of the prayer be “Mike Flanagan: UMASS!” and let the prayer find Mike Flanagan somewhere with the wish that such a thing, blunt and absurd, but sincere, could help spirit him back into the center of the harmony he once knew, a blessed note in the center of a swinging, indestructible song.

Posted in Baltimore Orioles, by Josh Wilker, Mike Flanagan | 6 Comments »

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Carmen Ronzonni

August 17, 2011

Chico’s Bail Bonds Player of the Week: Carmen Ronzonni

Ever since my air conditioner died a few weeks ago I don’t trust any of the things humming and groaning in my home—the dishwasher, the fridge, the microwave, the computer: each seems on the brink of having some small, cheap, vitally important cog snap and cause the whole mechanism to seize up and go silent. I’ve lived a meandering life, awake only in stories, never forging any kind of direct, pragmatic connection to actual events, and my tendency for anxiety feeds into my literary dreaminess so that every possible setback seems not simply one problem to solve but an omen foreboding the inevitable unraveling of daily life into a tragedy, as if a broken toaster will lead, eventually, to me freezing to death on an ice chunk in Antarctica or gagging fatally on Elizabethan poison. More than once in the last few days I’ve thought of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the horrifying novel in which the whole of human civilization as we know it is shown in smoldering irrevocable cinders, in a state of tragic fall, and a father and a son walk through it together, barely surviving. I am a father now and I have a son. I am nervous; everything seems provisional; at the core of it all as always I feel fake.

I turn and have always turned to stories. Yesterday various stories travelled alongside me by chance or design. I read a book about how to calm unhappy babies, the story there being that several methods must be mastered and executed perfectly or there will be a house full of suffering. My son is too young still, just a couple weeks into his life, to have hit the period when some babies start wailing for hours on end, but he has had his fussy moments, and I’ve tried to bring the story of the book to life and have felt like I wasn’t quite doing it right, and my own son felt awkward in my hands and in the gap between the ideal story and the real fakery of life. I read that book on the bus but kept getting my attention coaxed away by two guys talking nearby, trading stories of things gone wrong to the point that litigation ensued. The story one of them told that I can recall now involved a man with cancer in one eye who went in for surgery to get the eye removed and the surgeon removed the other eye by mistake. Later, at lunch, I read a couple articles sent to me by my father and a friend, respectively, both articles concerned with identifying the narrative embedded behind certain current events. In the column my dad sent, the author traced the roots of the London riots to a sense of profound desperation, the riots a grab for power by the powerless. In the column my friend sent, the author criticized President Obama for failing to tell a pointed story in his words and actions, instead attempting to placate both sides and in doing so satisfying no one. My thought when I read the former article was that the roots of riot are everywhere now, and my thought when I read the second was that even the President is faking it, and not even that well. On the long, bumpy bus ride home I stared out the window at what seemed like imminent ruins.

In my mind, the specter of Carmen Ronzonni presides over the anxious flimsiness of all things. He is, as his teammates in The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training quickly realize, a fake. That he is friends with Kelly Leak buys him a lot of time and credit with the team, but once he actually has to start pitching in game conditions, the ineptitude beneath his fakery becomes apparent, and it begins to dawn on the Bears that he and they are all doomed. He’s supposed to be their pitcher, the center of their hopes, but he is only a collection of imitations and bluster. He is insubstantial, a scarecrow stuffed only with stories.

Still, maybe there’s a place for guys like Carmen Ronzonni. When I first saw the movie back in 1977, I was drawn first and most strongly to Kelly, Ogilvie, and Tanner, and I think I sided with the general feelings of the team regarding Carmen. Even though I hadn’t even seen the first Bears movie yet, I understood that Carmen was an outsider, and though (or maybe because) I saw some of myself in his tendency to use imitation in place of anything real, I kept Carmen at arm’s length. He wasn’t quite one of us. But as I’ve watched the movie more recently and repeatedly, I’ve come to think of Carmen as a deeply important member of the team in terms of the sequel. I see him this way not only because the team needs a pitcher and not even because his persona of recycled bullshit is a crystalline microcosm of that deeply American genre, the sequel. It’s this: maybe a guy saturated in stories can help things feel more like a story and not just part of some mundane conveyer belt toward the bone yard.

This is not just an abstract thing, either. There are a couple of cases in which Carmen livens things up in a concrete way, such as when he swipes a couple of Playboys and brings them back to the guys in the hotel room. More importantly, he’s a key figure, along with Kelly, in procuring the van that takes the boys to Houston. Kelly is the driver of the van and we assume he was the driving force in the ballsy move to take possession of the van, but it seems there would be no van without Carmen’s mysterious connections (I believe Carmen’s explanation about where they got the van is an uncharacteristically terse statement along the lines of “From a guy I know”). Carmen, albeit a bullshitter, has bullshitted his way into the darker, more grown-up world that Kelly rides through. Though he comes off as a fake as a baseball-playing boy among the other boys, he seems, at least according to Kelly’s estimation of him as “cool,” as if he has been more successful at finding a legitimate place among the older hoodlums that we assume Kelly hangs out with when not smashing home runs with the Bears.

Carmen’s legitimacy as an experienced outlaw reaches its apex in one of the film’s best scenes. The Bears have made their getaway from their parents, but they still need to pass through one more barrier before truly embarking upon the Open Road, that barrier being a police car that starts to follow the van (this scene starts at about 6:30 in the clip below). When this police car is noticed by the team, almost everyone begins to panic. Kelly will become the hero of the moment, acting quickly and coolly, lighting a cigarette and putting on his hat and shades to make himself look older. (This transformation worked on me as a kid—back then, he really did suddenly look like an adult—but when I watch the film now Kelly’s stoned, acned leer as he salutes the cops marks him hilariously as the single most suspicious-looking driver in history). But while Kelly is leaping into action, Carmen is encouraging everyone to “stay cool.” It could read like another blowhard moment from the imitating interloper, but something about it rings true, as if Carmen, the boy made up entirely of stories, has been through moments like this before, charged moments, the heartbeats of a storied life. When the police move on without pulling the boys over, Kelly slumps and exhales, betraying a nervousness he had kept hidden, the boys exult, and Carmen smiles and nods in the center of it all like a happy maestro who knew how the song would go all along.

And speaking of songs, the makers of the sequel chose this happy moment (about 7:30 in the clip below) to unleash what they surely hoped (in vain, it turned out) would be a runaway hit song, James Rolleston’s “Life Is Looking Good.” Soaring, cheesy freedom! I chase that sweet lie through all disintegrations.

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Special thanks to nunyer for creating Carmen’s card.

For more on the skewed, illuminating America of the Bears, please check out my ode to The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training.

Posted in Bad News Bears, by Josh Wilker, Carmen Ronzonni | 1 Comment »

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Mark Fidrych

August 14, 2011

Today would be Mark Fidrych’s 57th birthday. At left is the autograph of the 1976 Rookie of the Year, a great gift sent along to me recently by Carl A., a fan of my book. Carl’s father got him the autograph one early spring at a motor inn in Lansing, Michigan, along with a few other Tigers autographs. In all but one of the other Tigers autographs, the players mentioned the father’s son by name and included a brief message:

To Carl
My Best Regards
Always
Ron LeFlore

To Carl
BEST Wishes!
Benjamin Oglivie

To Carl,
Best Always
Gates Brown

In addition to those signatures, all written on Hospitality Motor Inn stationery, Carl’s dad also got Al Kaline’s autograph (no message) on a smaller slip. But the scrawl of a Tiger all-time great could not have had more impact than the sideways scribble of Mark Fidrych. I imagine he and Kaline were unable to include personal wishes because their tables were besieged by fans, and if they were to personalize every message they would have been there all night. The presence among the signers of Ben Oglivie suggests that the signing occurred in 1977, Oglivie’s last with the Tigers, and a spring 1977 sighting of Fidrych, the reigning Rookie of the Year, must have caused quite a stir. He wouldn’t have had time to write the name of every father’s son on a slip of paper or to wish them the best, but he didn’t have to. Every father’s son from those days knew that the Bird was pitching for us and sending us his best. He was our way into the center of the action because he was exactly like us, a boy in love with the game.

This morning I roamed the Internet a bit in search of stories about meeting Mark Fidrych. There were glimpses of him long after his playing days were over, giving himself over to charity work, and glimpses of him crossing over into the world of comic books, and glimpses of him gazing backward with some hurt and confusion but also humility and gratitude.

The best glimpse of him that I found on this day, his birthday, was one taken by a photographer, Joe McNally, who—like most who ever seemed to spend even a little time with Fidrych—came to think of the big-hearted pitcher as his friend. Check out McNally’s touching tribute if you’ve got a second, and raise a glass today to the Bird.

Posted in by Josh Wilker, Detroit Tigers, Mark Fidrych | 5 Comments »

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Steve Foucault

August 9, 2011

All right, I’m up, showered, fed; the kid is asleep, the dishes are all clean, and I’ve got a half hour to write before I have to climb on my bicycle and pedal to the bus stop and ride to work. This is it from here on out for a while, more or less, so I am not going to mess around with craft too much. Jack Kerouac, who my kid is named after, said that craft in writing is a kind of subterfuge, a way of avoiding honesty anyway. Then again, well, I don’t totally believe that and see that it can be a way out of doing the work needed to make a piece of writing be more than just someone’s spit-up. (Sorry, I have spit-up on my mind.) Also, Jack Kerouac’s writing lost momentum as the years went on, his writing lost life I mean, and his greatest book was written and rewritten many times and suffered for despite the myth that he spontaneously created the whole thing in a few weeks with no forethought or even any effort beyond what it took to crack open a bottle of benzedrine. Still, there is a time for carefully crafting stuff, maybe, and a time to just report from the bunker as fast as possible so as to keep a semblance of sanity and the human voice alive. This situation I am in is not—is actually the farthest thing from—holing up in a bunker. But it is relentless, dealing with a newborn. Of course, I am far from the front lines on this one (back to the battle metaphors again, I know) and am more like a guy running supplies to the ranks on the front lines, those ranks being my wife, a beleaguered army of one who nonetheless is all softness and love with the baby, and when he’s sleeping and giving her a chance to think, her mind is racing with worries that something might happen to him, to his tiny fragile life. As for me (I almost stopped writing to consider my next thought instead of just slamming it down first thought best thought beatnik style) I am coming down from the first high of the kid being born, when I thought I would be a different guy altogether forever, someone able to give myself over totally to complete holy sacrifice all the time, like fucking Gandhi or something, transformed by my love of the boy. Turns out I am the same as always, just more tired. I live for the kid now though. But when I get a little time here and there, I want to figure out what the hell is the shape of my mind. So here I am, staring at the third and final Steve Foucault card in my collection. My three Steve Foucault cards form a progression through the years, the 1975 card showing him looking in for a sign, the 1976 card showing him coming to a set position, and this 1977 card showing him just after delivering a phantom pitch. No ball is visible in any of the cards. Foucault wears a Texas Rangers uniform in various combinations, a long-sleeve undershirt disappearing then reappearing. His right pointer finger pokes out of his glove in all the photos. He has the same long mustache and thick sideburns every year. He looks off to his left in the first picture, off to his right in the second picture, and in the last picture he gazes straight at the viewer. The imaginary ball is out of his hands now and out in the world. Your turn now. He is looking at me, and looking at you. His right hand is in a fist, but it is loosening just a little, his middle finger itching to unfurl. The days are long and exhausting. The years fly by. You can’t touch this pitch. You can grow a splendid walrus mustache and sideburns but you can’t know what’s next. You can’t ever know.

Posted in by Josh Wilker, Steve Foucault, Texas Rangers | 2 Comments »

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Kelly Leak

August 5, 2011

Chico’s Bail Bonds Player of the Week: Kelly Leak

Giving Kelly Leak a player of the week award is kind of like handing Jesse Owens a “participant” ribbon at the end of the 1936 Summer Olympics. But this has been the happiest week of my life, so the player of this week could only go to Kelly Leak. I don’t have many words or much time to say them at the moment, but you can read some of my thoughts about Kelly Leak over at Deadspin, in a chapter from my book on The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training called “The Coolest Kid Who Ever Lived.”

The back of Kelly’s baseball card would be mind-boggling, judging from the glimpses of his performances seen in The Bad News Bears and The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training. Here’s what we know from those glimpses: in the seven plate appearances shown in those films, Kelly homered three times, tripled, doubled, singled, and was intentionally walked. These results suggest that he may have actually been underselling himself when he tried to hit on a woman in Amanda’s dance class by saying that he was hitting .841. Player of the week, player of the year, player of all recorded time. 

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Special thanks to nunyer for creating Kelly’s card.

For more on the skewed, illuminating America of the Bears, please check out my ode to The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training.

Posted in Bad News Bears, by Josh Wilker, Kelly Leak | 5 Comments »

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Joe Nuxhall

August 3, 2011

My wife gave birth to our first kid a few days ago on July 30. The boy is a few feet away, sleeping. I have no idea how to write about how he makes me feel. So here’s a baseball card. It features Joe Nuxhall, who was also born on July 30. Joe Nuxhall was nearing 37 and had played his last game when this card of him as a gray-haired hurler in what looks to be a rubber undershirt came out. It appeared the year before I was born, so I wasn’t familiar with it until I got it along with some other old cards as a gift from my wife’s mother a few years ago. But when I was a kid I knew about Joe Nuxhall as the youngest to ever play in a major league game, making his debut as a 15-year-old. I remember holding on to that image of him as he was on his first day in the majors, everything in front of him, even as I learned about his actual career, a good one and a long one but one without that purity of a boy standing on a big league mound, readying to fire his first pitch.

After his playing career ended, Joe Nuxhall served as a broadcaster for many years, becoming arguably the most beloved figure in the world of the Cincinnati Reds. My boy has some Reds blood in him, his mother born in Cincinnati to a large clan of rabid Reds fans. His first live baseball game, which he snuck into inside his mother’s belly, was a Reds victory over the Cubs at Wrigley earlier this year. Below is a picture of his first contact with baseball outside the uterus. The Red Sox were in town, so the hospital room picked up the local coverage. I whispered into my son’s tiny ear. Youk, I whispered. Yooooouuk.

Posted in by Josh Wilker, Cincinnati Reds, Joe Nuxhall | 18 Comments »

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John Knox

July 26, 2011

Lately, I’ve added a check of baseball-reference.com’s “players born on this day” page to my morning rituals. Today, July 26, now four days beyond my wife’s due date, offers some interesting baseball birthdays. Perhaps the most peculiar career to ever lead to induction into the baseball Hall of Fame got its start on this date in 1922 when knuckleballing journeyman reliever-turned-starter-turned-reliever Hoyt Wilhelm was born. Wilhelm did not even reach the majors until he was 29, surely the oldest rookie besides Satchel Paige to ever wind up in Cooperstown. He lasted until he was 49. If any prediction about the life of someone born on this date could be gleaned from the most accomplished baseball player to be born today, it would be that life is strange and beautiful.

On Sunday my wife and I went to the beach near our house. There was some kind of large Hare Krishna gathering going on in the park bordering the beach. We walked past it and put down our folding chairs on the sand. Oddly, no one else was around. I walked over to ask the lifeguard, a teenage girl, what was going on, and she said that heavy rains a couple days earlier had caused raw sewage to spill into the lake, and she was waiting to hear if the beach would be closed or not. I walked back, and Abby and I sat there and watched a seagull pick at something slick and rubbery that once was alive. The music of the Hare Krishnas wafted intermittently over the beach, along with the groans of a garbage truck and the sound of the little waves of Lake Michigan.

A couple other notables born on this day were known by adjectival nicknames: Sad Sam Jones and Fat Freddie Fitzsimmons, a couple of 200 game winners from the Ruth era. To get one of these memorable adjectival nicknames, you have to have a personal trait that can be described with a word that shares the same first letter as your first name. I have never attained such a nickname. Maybe there’s still time. Jumpy Josh Wilker? Jittery Josh Wilker? Jaundiced Josh Wilker? I actually did come out jaundiced when I was born, and the nonmedical definition of the term might also apply: “exhibiting or influenced by envy, distaste, or hostility.” Unfortunately, none of these words is as elemental and catchy as “Fat” or “Sad.”

Eventually, a green flag was raised on a pole beside the lifeguard chair, and people here and there began appearing on the beach and wading out into the water. “My dream was to sit with my feet in the water,” Abby said. This is the kind of dream that seems manageable. Other dreams have side effects. But this one: easy. We picked up our chairs and moved down to the water and sat and let the ends of the little waves wash over our feet. The sound of the water was now all we heard. We ate Pringles and stared out at the water and made each other laugh. Jumpy Jittery Jaundiced Josh Wilker relaxed.

Other notables born on July 26 include Norm Siebern, the date’s leading hitter, key part in the trade that brought Roger Maris to the Yankees, and bit player, at the end of his career, with the 1967 Impossible Dream Red Sox; Ellis Kinder, tireless country boy Red Sox hurler from the team’s late 1940s-early 1950s excruciating bridesmaid years; and Sibby Sisti, who despite or in part because of his underwhelming hitting skills served as the cleanup batter in one of the greatest baseball books ever written.

On the way back from the beach, I felt very tired, as if instead of sitting in a beach chair with my feet in cool water I had crossed over to Michigan and back doing the Australian crawl. I think most of the time I live as if I’m braced against an invisible but somehow crucial wall that seems as if it will crumble down and let in all manner of ruin if I let up for one second. It’s exhausting. Probably pretty stupid, too. There’s nothing you can do anyway. No wall to hold up I mean. Ruin, chaos, it’ll just come. Other things will come, too, good things, but probably if you’re spending all your time and strength bracing against a nonexistent wall you might miss it.

John Knox is like most of the baseball players born on this date. He played for a little while, didn’t really attach himself to any particularly significant moment in baseball history (though he did appear in a game in which Hank Aaron set the career record for RBI), and then moved on to other things. He was not a bad player, at least as far as his stats show, his .274 lifetime batting average one that most players would be proud of, especially if they were, like Knox, utility infielders, who usually spend their solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short major league existences foraging for enough basehits to push them over the Mendoza line. It’s actually a bit of a mystery why Knox didn’t stick around any longer than he did. He even looks confident in this 1976 card, his last. The Tigers sold him to the Reds early in 1976, but he never cracked the major league roster of the reigning World Champions, who were with Joe Morgan and Pete Rose about as covered at second base and third base, Knox’s two positions, as any team ever has been. Knox knocked around in the minors that year, hitting poorly, and that was that. Occasionally a player who skirts across the margins of the majors will for some reason or another impress himself on the collective memory of the game. But most guys who play the game are just names with dates and numbers attached to them. Still, they had their day. They got to move their chair down close to the water and for a little while live a dream.

Posted in by Josh Wilker, Detroit Tigers, John Knox | 9 Comments »

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Scott Sanderson

July 22, 2011

When I was younger I assumed that human history was like a ladder, leading upward. But the whole span of it from cave paintings to internet porn is an illusion, at least when you consider the temporary nature of the sun, which will implode or whatever eventually and sweep everything that’s ever been done, every word, every kiss, back into the void from which it came. Even if you kind of shield your eyes from that obliterating eventuality and focus on human history as if it were somehow indelibly real, you can see that we more often disintegrate than advance.

My wife has two shelves of books about the space program. On our first big road trip together, nine years ago, when Abby was in the full bloom of her obsession with the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs, we digressed from the primary focus of the trip—attending a series of baseball games in different cities—to spend a day at the Neil Armstrong museum in Ohio, where the narrative of a Midwestern boy intensely interested in flight gradually connected with a collective central human quest to explore the unknown and then, more specifically, to perhaps the greatest or at least most iconic moment of that quest, when Neil Armstrong walked on the fucking moon.

He took that giant leap 42 years ago Wednesday. I was rooting for our first kid to arrive on that date, July 20, but no dice. On the bright side, our busted air conditioner was working again, so the pretty miserable last mile of my wife’s pregnancy was not as bad as it could be that day. The air conditioner worked yesterday, too, and then last night it conked out. Oddly enough, it may or may not be working again this morning, but even if it is it seems to be laboring like a shopping cart with a busted wheel, cockeyed, groaning. Maybe that’s what history is, a half-broken thing, haltingly moving.

Scott Sanderson was born 55 years ago today, on July 22, 1956. Today is my wife’s due date. Today I’m waiting for the air conditioning repairman, Maurice, to come back and try to figure out why it keeps breaking, which seems as if it will be particularly difficult to determine now that it’s sort of working again.

In the last room of the Neil Armstrong museum, nine summers ago, Abby and I each played in a simulator booth in which you could pretend to steer a lunar landing module down onto the surface of the moon. The simulator piped in a voice as if from Mission Control that reacted encouragingly to the progress of the landing. I believe on one of my successful moon landings I was told that NASA would be calling me soon. There were kids behind us in line, waiting to use the simulators, so after helming a couple last miraculous leaps forward in human progress we exited the simulators and left the museum to get back into the Dodge Neon we had rented for the trip.

Landing on the moon in a simulator is as close as anyone is going to get to the real thing for a long, long time, or maybe ever. Yesterday, the space shuttle Atlantis landed, ending the space shuttle program. When we got to the moon a little over 42 years ago, it seemed like we were stepping onto a rung that would only lead higher. Mercury to Gemini to Apollo to who knows? But Apollo turned out to be the pinnacle, and after it came Skylab, then as Skylab was falling in flaming chunks back to earth in 1979, the year the photo on this Scott Sanderson card was taken, the space shuttle program was underway. The space shuttle program is over, and there’s not really anything lined up to replace it. No money, no vision. No ladder. Makes me think, perversely, of a Bob Dylan song: “May you build a ladder to the stars and climb on every rung/and may you stay forever young.”

Or maybe it’s not so perverse. The song is a prayer Dylan wrote to his newborn child. I know how to strum the song on my guitar and probably will when the kid finally gets here. I’m not religious but I find ways to pray. So here’s one to Scott Sanderson, or at least to the cardboard version of him from 1980, when I was 12 and thought life would be a ladder to the stars, and here’s a thank you to the world that made me feel that way back then, and to my loved ones, and to the kid on the way from the stars, a reminder.

Posted in by Josh Wilker, Montreal Expos, Scott Sanderson | 7 Comments »

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Mike LaValliere

July 19, 2011

The Pittsburgh Pirates are in first place today. Though they spent a few days in first place in 1997, they haven’t really been a first place team—or even finished a season above .500—since 1992, Mike LaValliere’s last full season with the team. He had come to Pittsburgh in 1987 along with Andy Van Slyke in return for Tony Pena. LaValliere won a Gold Glove his first season in Pittsburgh and anchored the Bucs’ defense through three straight division titles from 1990 through 1992. After that last season, the team’s superstar, Barry Bonds, left for San Francisco, and the franchise fell into one of the most dismal droughts in baseball history: eighteen years of unrelenting losing.

It makes for a good, clear story to say that the Pirates were never the same after losing Bonds, one of the greatest athletes to ever play the sport. What couldn’t he do? He stole bases, smashed home runs, gazelled across the outfield to chase down would-be doubles and triples in the outfield. Mike LaValliere, who was released by the team in early April of 1993, was something of a polar opposite to the blazing, explosive Bonds. LaValliere was short and tubby and slow and couldn’t hit for power. But he’s probably the kind of guy you don’t miss until he’s gone. He wasn’t a total black hole on offense. He was a good contact hitter, drew some walks. In a couple of seasons he even hit .300. For what it’s worth, he could lay down a bunt. Mostly though, he could catch. I am not sure what the stats say about the overall worth of having a catcher who can field his position and shut down the opposition’s running game, but as a fan I know that having a catcher who is bumbling and fumbling around behind the plate seems to doom the team, the ineptitude at the center of the action casting a pall of ineptitude over everything.

Speaking of disintegrating situations, the air conditioning in my home is broken, and it’s hot and getting hotter. I can’t write much lately anyway, but the heat is reducing me to barely literate. So how about we end this lackluster congrats to the first-place Pirates with the thought that Mike LaValliere was for the Pirates in their last winning era like the air-conditioning unit in your home. It chugs along quietly and effectively most of the time, allowing you to focus on all sorts of other lofty endeavors, but then when it’s gone, you’re screwed.

Posted in by Josh Wilker, Mike LaValliere, Pittsburgh Pirates | 5 Comments »

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Ahmad Abdul Rahim

July 14, 2011

Chico’s Bail Bonds Player of the Week: Ahmad Abdul Rahim

“Don’t give me none of your honky bullshit, Buttermaker.” –Ahmad Abdul Rahim

Every once in a while over the last few months I’ve read to my wife’s belly. A friend suggested this would be a way to familiarize the kid in there with the sound of my voice. I recite from On the Road, at random, a page or so at a time. It is either my favorite book or one of my favorite books, depending on whether I’m in the thrall of one of my other bibles at a given time. When I first read it, as a seventeen-year-old freshly ejected from high school and with no marketable skills or college plans, it gave me some hope for the possibility of a joyous life. But I can’t really argue with anyone who would say that it is, as Ahmad Abdul Rahim might put it, at least if he was a grown-up extension of the incarnation of his character in the first Bears movie, honky bullshit. I would argue back that no matter how the book hits you, it’s at least a sincere attempt by the author to write what felt true, and taken in the context of the times it was a great leap forward in the pursuit of honest art, but it’s hard to miss now that it can also easily be summarized as a story of a bunch of white dudes with the privilege of that great but selective American power, mobility, careening around the country as tourists gawking at and romanticizing classes of people locked into societal positions that don’t allow mobility: south of the border or in the ghetto Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty “dig” the fellaheen masses. To their credit, Jack Kerouac and the protagonists in his book are pioneers of mainstream American culture in their championing—or even noticing—of people outside the margins of the prevailing popular conception of “real” America, that Leave It to Beaver fever dream. But the book entered that mainstream not on the strength of any reformative tendencies but because it tapped into and even defined a myth at the very heart of America, the road tale, breathing new life into the Whitmanesque lyricism of taking to the open highway just when the highway system was literally opening up the entire country, and just as the baby boom generation was on the cusp of reaching driving age. The book had great timing in proclaiming this message: the world is yours to explore. This message is why I read the book to the wriggling bulge inside my wife’s belly. The world should be open to everyone to explore.

Of course, the world is not open to everyone to explore, or rather there are varying degrees of openness, depending on who you are and where you are. If you’re a white guy, yes, certainly, have at it, explore. Who’s going to stop you? However, if you’re not white, certain restrictions may apply. You can try to explore, but at some point you’re probably going to be stopped, questioned, and in various other ways, some merely annoying and others terrible, reminded of the limitations of your mobility.

One of the reasons the Bears sequel resonated with me when I was a kid and still moves me now, despite its many flaws, is that it taps into that myth of the open road. More than that, it even could be seen to expand that myth to some extent, showing new protagonists at the wheel: children. This was more of a case of a film reflecting society than shaping it, however, as the movie was made primarily to continue cashing in on the success of the first movie, hence the decision to shape the plot to please the target audience: 9-year-old boys like I was at the time of the film’s release. Besides this profit-driven novelty of unsupervised youth loose on the road, the road narrative element of the movie was more or less inherited honky bullshit, a little white boy’s dream of unfettered, junk-food-glutted freedom. Unfortunately, Ahmad Abdul Rahim is no longer aware enough in his dumbed-down sequelized incarnation to make any kinds of cultural critiques of the going’s-on around him. In fact, practically the only moments in which his character is able to rise above the boisterous noise of the team chorus is when he squawks at various times that the Bears are about to get caught and will be “goin’ to the joint.”

There’s some aptness to his character, the only black player on the team, being the most aware that unauthorized mobility around America would seem destined to end up not in beatnick-style “kicks” but in the lockstep progression of suspicion, apprehension, and incarceration. Unfortunately, the “real” Ahmad Abdul Rahim—a sensitive and ebullient individual—is replaced in the sequel by a facsimile whose range of emotions has been diminished in most cases to a couple of broad strokes: wide-eyed enthusiasm and wide-eyed fear.

Underneath the limiting script, he’s still Ahmad. There are echoes of the liveliness of his character from the first film here and there, such as in his last at-bat of the Astrodome game when he smacks a triple, recites a Muhammad Ali rhyme at third base, and slaps five with probably the most awkward low-five slapper in history, third base coach Rudi Stein. An even better glimpse of Ahmad, perhaps the only true glimpse of the real three-dimensional Ahmad from the first movie, comes in the very beginning of the movie, when the new, militaristic coach of the team tells him that instead of bothering with Ahmad he’s going to be calling him Andy. Ahmad mouths the name to himself. Andy? You can see him thinking, wondering, worrying. It’s not easy to live in a world of honky bullshit.

***

Special thanks to nunyer for creating Ahmad’s card.

For more on the skewed, illuminating America of the Bears, please check out my ode to The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training.

Posted in Ahmad Abdul Rahim, Bad News Bears, by Josh Wilker | 3 Comments »

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