Coach's Corner
By Andy "Coach" Cotton, Fri., Sept. 18, 1998
Can you remember when taking a trip on an airplane was a glamorous thing? You got dressed up. The planes were like flying living rooms. The stewardesses (now, to be PC, flight attendants) were nice, didn't serve only peanuts, and always had time for beverage service. Overhead bins were for your winter coat. The seat in front of you didn't crush your knees into your chest. I remember those days.
The journey to and from Denver was a nightmare, and this was just an ordinary, mid-week, September day. Four flights and not a single empty seat on the suffocating luxury chariots of the skies. Small children, who were supposed to be back in nursery school, make up 40% (or so it seems) of the passenger manifest. From behind, a "cute" four-something kicked my seat for three hours, a third of which was spent sweating in the airless, claustrophobic airplane while mechanics fixed a light. In front was another child, younger than the tike behind me. "Potty, Potty Potty," she sang, standing on her seat looking me in the eye, "I have to go to potty." When she tired of "The Potty Song," she switched, rather disconcertingly, I must say, to "Jesus Loves Me." A migraine headache, spurred along by a nasty, altitude-enhanced hangover, blossomed quickly. Any "beverage service," if we got any, would come well after my aneurysm imploded. I swallowed the Vicodin dry.
I'm in the sandwich business. Turkey's a popular item these healthy days. So the turkey folk thought I'd want to see how they produce the most excellent product we serve to you. Recalling Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, a turn-of-the-century exposé on the Chicago stockyards, I'd advise, as a general rule, against seeing how your food gets to the supermarket.
This was a "full service" processing plant, which means they do everything, from breeding the turkeys, all the way to the packaging you buy in the store. Between the farm and the store, however, is some nasty, gross stuff. The blood, mush, gore, smell, and fantastically efficient, wholesale slaughter of this innocent but stupid bird (60,000 40-pound birds, six days a week, 52 weeks a year) is totally revolting in an arresting kind of way. You don't want to know the things they do to those wretched birds. By way of consolation, our guide, noticing my unnatural green pallor, put his arm around me and assured me this was nothing -- I "ought to see a meat processing plant."
This laborious chronicle is my way of saying it's more natural for me to bitch and carp about something, (even a free trip!) than to write something nice. Bitching and carping is what I'm about, so this summer a dilemma ensues. The gigantic sports story of the summer -- and of the year -- is the assault on the home run record. What if Albert Belle were Mark McGwire? What if Bobby Bonds were Sammy Sosa? Oh yes, I'd have fun, as would the rest of the media, writing "heroes ain't what they used to be" stories. Can you imagine the Clinton/ Belle jokes?
Instead, we have Mr. Rogers and Captain Kangaroo -- and it's nice. See, that's the best I can do: nice. Rogers and Kangaroo, exhibiting rarely seen sportsmanship, humor, grace, and genuine support for each other, to go along with the prodigious feats they're accomplishing, are so perfect for the ailing game it's spooky. Like Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Churchill, who were there just when we needed them most, so it is for baseball. These guys are gentlemen, which makes rooting for both of them so easy.
Parting Shots: Oddly, the destruction of his home run record is, thanks to McGwire's considerate and genuine embracing of the Maris family, the best thing to ever happen to Roger Maris. Maris, scorned in his day by an older generation who wanted to turn back the clock, much as Muhammad Ali would be a few years later, was brought back to life and introduced to two generations of fans, who knew him only as a small, black-and-white figure. Maris' considerable baseball accomplishments, and his travails with a hostile and unrestrained media, are now, thanks to the onslaught on his sacred record, far better understood and appreciated -- much more so than when he was alive. This is sad. Maris, who died too young at 51, should've been there to revel and bask in the sweet light of too-long-delayed glory. McGwire, with an appreciation of history that's rare for an athlete, brought the Maris family into the center of this national festival. They reveled in the honor of their fatherand husband, and this is a fine thing. It brought a tear to even my jaded eye. Better late, so goes the cliché, than never. Nice. Very nice.
Write me: Coach36@aol.com
