Last Call: Spit It Out
Carnegie, M . D .
"Last Call: Spit It Out" by M.D. Carnegie Spit It Out THE PRESIDENTIAL DEBATES REMINDED ME why so many Americans are more interested in sports than politics. As Frederick Exley wrote so memorably in A...
...More than two decades later I can still see that snowy Buffalo afternoon, and O.J...
...Such a preposterous claim couldn't help but turn the stomach, never mind that, in his desperation to grab the brass ring, Dole also disavowed a long-standing commitment not to use his war wound as a political prop...
...Like any "writer's bar," it had its share of fakes, not to mention the standard-issue pisspots...
...His strategists ought to be drawn and quartered, though it's five-to-two they'll be ruining the GOP campaign in zooo instead...
...Well, not talking so much as cluck-clucking and moralizing...
...IT WAS ALSO IN ExLEY's PAGES that I first heard about the Lion's Head, a fabulous dump of a saloon in New York's Greenwich Village that closed forever in mid-October...
...In any case, sport pushes people to an often furious intensity of competition...
...L A S T C A L L by M.D...
...Pretty soon we're going to be like English soccer," moaned ump Ken Kaiser, "where if you don't like the game, you shoot the official...
...NBC's supremely fatuous Bob Costas even called Alomar's action a "crime...
...As hokey and hackneyed as it sounds, it's nevertheless true that great athletes emanate an aura of perfection incompatible with human fallibility...
...I almost stopped reading after one rampaging fan sucks an eyeball out of a policeman's head and bites it off, but the book is too fascinating to put down...
...As I WRITE, BASEBALL IS DEEP in the throes of the playoffs, yet all fans and commentators are talking about is the Roberto Alomar incident...
...The far crueler joke is having to put up with Bob Costas...
...Why the real issue of the trial-that a man just about hacked off his wife's head in a fit of rage-got lost in the shuffle has never been properly addressed, and the knee-jerk explanation (the "media circus") rings hollow...
...4.1 94 November 19 9 6 . The American Spectator...
...I can't condone spitting in an umpire's face, but Alomar's version of events has some merit...
...Alomar is a great competitor, which he proved beyond a doubt by overcoming the furore and single-handedly lifting his Orioles to the championship series with ninthand then twelfth-inning heroics...
...I ask them in reply how many hours they've spent absorbed in the O.J...
...The Fourth Estate has a laundry list of evils to answer for, but everyone forgetting the gruesome double-murder isn't one of them...
...We play and we know that we play," the historian Johan Huizinga wrote in his famous study of mankind at its recreations...
...Next time some bore cranks up the wind machine about the decline of civility in the United States, hand him a copy...
...It is chockablock with Clockwork Orange-style ultraviolence, all of it actual and horrifying...
...How could Bob Dole-a man by dint of his thirtysomething years on Capitol Hill as responsible as any other politician for the state of the nation today-try to tell the American people that suddenly he has a vision for the country's future...
...Simpson saga...
...ANGRY AT ALOMAR'S RELATIVELY LIGHT PUNISHMENT- a fivegame suspension, not to be served until next season-the umpires' union threatened to strike during the all-important playoff games...
...Like Exley's maniacal worship of Frank Gifford, and the English football supporters' maiming and mayhem, the part of me that struggles to reconcile the open-field glory of number 32 and the pathetic murderer I saw every day on CNN is the part of me tempted beyond logic by the thrill of sport...
...Predictably, that elicited a lot of belly-aching about how Alomar ending up as the hero was cosmically unfair, some cruel joke by the baseball gods...
...Exley found something reassuring in the clash of bodies, in the immutable certainty of the won and lost columns...
...Just so...
...WHEN I TELL PEOPLE ABOUT that unlucky policeman, they often suggest that I must have a morbid fascination with blood and gore...
...The third strike was an atrocious call, and who can doubt that, in their shouting match, ump John Hirschbeck heaped some stinging verbal abuse on the second baseman...
...Modern politics offers the very opposite: an incessant repositioning, an inscrutable babble of empty rhetoric and unverifiable statistics...
...American baseball fans, pampered by a ridiculous array of stadium amenities (like the ability to put their hot dogs on the credit card), are far too lazy for such an inspired act...
...I used to make the hadj there, convinced that each scotch brought me closer to getting my own book jacket on the temple wall, right next to Exley's...
...Alomar's subsequent claim that Hirschbeck has not been the same since the death of his son, while a bit tactless, is entirely plausible...
...So we must be more than merely rational beings, for play is irrational...
...There's not a trace of the social angst that fuels England's football rioting, and if you doubt it pick up Bill Buford's excellent Among the Thugs, his account of four years spent running amok with "the lads" on Saturday afternoons...
...As Exley understood, that's one of its chief appeals...
...tearing up the Jets defense, breaking the long-thought-unbreakable barrier of 2,ooo yards in one season...
...Doubtless it has something profound and inexplicable to do with the figure of the sports hero...
...As Frederick Exley wrote so memorably in A Fan's Notes, his drunken paean to the thrill and bitterness of the spectator's life, "In pro football a man is asked to do a brutal and difficult job, and he either does that job or gets out...
...Talk about irrational...
Vol. 29 • November 1996 • No. 11
