6.30.2008

THIRTY SECONDS WITH JACK McDOWELL

I didn’t ask Jack McDowell about the thrill of winning a Cy Young. I didn’t ask him about growing up in Van Nuys California in the San Fernando Valley where I worked for eleven years and I didn’t ask him about getting to the bigs after only 27 innings of minor league ball. Didn’t ask him about Stanford or being a number one draft choice of the White Sox in 1987, fifth overall.

I asked him about the four albums he’d recorded with his band Stickfigure and he smiled and laughed. He said no, there’s no music to download in the internet, no records likely floating around in the bin racks at used record stores.

“I wish guys like you could play forever,” I said. I shook his huge hand, his fingers almost crawling up to my elbow. He’d thrown out the first pitch at the Epicenter on a sunny hot Sunday afternoon and the long right arm ended up almost in the dirt, the trademark Black Jack delivery still going strong.

He had the ‘live’ arm as they called it, nasty stuff coming down off his six foot five inch frame and he hid the ball as well as anyone, ninety-plus with movement shooting out of his hip or his elbow that he’d whip at you.

I don’t think pitchers ever shave, at least not when they’re scheduled to go live, and Black Jack had gray going in the scruff spreading on his face and on his head.

He was ready for me, for anyone wanting to shake hands and get autographs. I’d asked the girl at the table out front about Jack’s career and she smiled but said ‘don’t know’ when I mentioned the music and I pointed to the program guide and the mention of Stickfigure and Yahoo sports and the Cy Young.

I’d take that resume. Baseball and music and writing.

I didn’t ask him about Roger Clemens, I didn’t ask him about Barry Bonds. I didn’t ask him if he wishes he was still playing, in US Cellular Field instead of old Comiskey, but I don’t think he minds a bit. Didn’t ask him how he might like to play with the Sox today under Ozzie Guillen with players like Orlando Cabrera and Jim Thome and Alexei Ramirez and A J Pierzynski and maybe the best team in baseball.

Didn’t’ have time. I only had thirty seconds.

6.15.2008

DOWNSIZING

The salesman at Van Nuys Chevy was twenty eight years old, tops, two diamond stud earrings. He grinned too much.

He did it again, as we walked off the back lot into the office.

“You are what you drive,” he reminded me. All those teeth. Then he motioned me in to his felt-lined gray cubicle with the elegance of an intern about to examine my prostate.

A half-hour later and I was a 1992 Chevy Silverado Club Cab pickup. An hour ago I was a 1998 Corvette. The difference in cost between being a Corvette and being a used Silverado Club Cab? Twelve thousand dollars. I folded the check and put it in my pocket.

Maybe, not so much like a prostate examination. More like a sex-change. With a rebate.

I love LA.

6.12.2008

UNFINISHED

We don’t really know what to do with deserts. They just sit there, and we drive by them or fly over them or drop bombs on them. We feel a little uncomfortable, out of place in the heat and the desolation. They're lonely and unforgiving.

Three big deserts, huge geological works in-progress, spread out east of Los Angeles all the way to Utah, New Mexico and Colorado, and extend south deep into Mexico.

For certain climactic and esthetic reasons, Southern Californians mostly live on the coast, in Los Angeles and the beach towns, San Diego, Santa Barbara. I like the ocean. I like beach towns. I like sand-in-the-bikini kinds of days where you watch girls spreading tanning oil over smooth brown skin and all of that clandestine eroticism that takes place at the shore.

I get away to the middle of nothing, though, escape into desert, where pavement falls apart a mile or two from the interstate and you’re on your own, hoping you’ve brought along enough water and maybe food and a blanket or bag to crawl into if you get stuck with a flat tire or you bog down on a trail, get stuck in the sand. I stop the Jeep in the middle of a dusty road and turn off the engine to hear how hard the wind blows and to catch up on the calls of the ravens and the buzz of crickets and the hum of desert survival and the creatures who work this land for a living.

The burned out Joshua Trees and creosote turned crisp in a fire blackens rusty land and etches an outline against evening sky. Breeze crawls up the back of my neck, a puff of sound against my sleeve and the rush of a kestrel flying low along the brush. Jackrabbits stand at every corner, tall ears and long legs, scrambling for cover as I drive by. Lizards take to the rocks for shade and cool air, taking no time to cross the road in straight lines. Nobody is up here but me. No vehicles, no campers, no one hiking or driving or settled in with tents or shelters. It is barren, rough, untouched, pure. It’s mine.

I’ll see no one for close to two hours, no person, just a few houses a half-mile off the road, a few cows grazing, one that scrambles over some loose barbed wire she knows how to negotiate.

Get gas in Ludlow, the girl at the Mojave Preserve office in Barstow advised. Stay away from Essex, she said, you’ll pay $5.59. Wild Horse Canyon is beautiful, she says, changing colors and decent roads, some sandy spots but the Jeep will handle it fine. I get to Hole in The Wall an hour and a half later, a campground and visitor center compound with an equestrian camp. The Ranger’s Tahoe is parked at the visitor center but it’s closed and no one comes out to greet me. It’s after four-thirty, the sun’s dropping in the west, still enough light for a cruise up to the Mid Hills camp and around back the long way to Essex.

Two hundred yards back down the road Wild Horse Canyon road turns up into a dirt trail that crosses a couple of cow catchers painted turquoise and a small enclave with a windmill spinning in the breeze. A raven flushes on my left and flies low through a hollow for a while, guiding me up the grade until he finishes his duty, pulls up into a perch and I continue past the wash and up towards the crest. Burnt brush, sage and creosote and Joshua have a crust of fire and the survival instinct of something that has been through worse. A daily battle with harsh elements of extreme heat and thirst and dry wind will fossilize some, and who will hold them one day? Say here, there was a tree, a bush, some pre-historic remnant that one day was prescient on this vast plain? Who will come, look back on where I was today, alone on this empty plateau, wandering like some newborn thing searching the desert for a new way to see? And what did I see?

I saw the earth, unfinished, raw, empty.

The breeze kicked up and the sun slanted in against piles of granite and fine grain of sand. The dry air, drawn in across the scrapings of geologic time. I saw the earth, working itself, becoming. And full of life.

6.01.2008

JOHN WOODEN

Larry Jones saved me. I was scrolling e-mails and punching up conference calls in another desperate day of tactical corporate survival, until Larry called. John Wooden was in the studio.

'John Wooden? I'll be right down.'

Connie Martinson had just finished up interviewing John Wooden for her show 'Connie Martinson Talks Books' and the Wizard of Westwood was sitting alone on the set. The legendary UCLA basketball coach's book on leadership was hitting stores and the coach was on the talk circuit. Mr. Wooden shook my hand with his strong, soft grip, stared me in the eye with that steady, hawk-like gaze. He looked like my grandfather.

I told him I'd seen some of his championship teams play up in Berkeley. In high school we'd gone up to Cal and bought scalped tickets in the top row of Harmon Gym and watched the Bruins play in front of a rowdy Berkeley crowd.

Mr. Wooden was so nice and polite to me, saying he hoped that I'd enjoyed the games.

I remember the Bruins in their light blue warm-up jackets and white pants coming out and taking the court. The old expression for a basketball team coming out for the game was 'the team took the court.' It meant simply that the starting five went out for the opening tip. Not for the Bruins. They came out early, and literally, took the court, as in took it away from the other team with their opening passing drills.

Lew Alcindor, Lynn Shackleford, Mike Warren and the rest of that team ran a four corners passing drill to start out, with three or four balls, two or three players moving to the center of the half court, pulling in passes, pivoting and firing passes to the other corner, the balls never touching the ground. Crisp, precision, like James Brown coming out on stage and working through dance moves in front of the rhythm section before ever handling the microphone. Just teasing the crowd. They'd break the passing drill with a mock 'dunk' drill with the players just dropping the ball into the hoop, the slam being outlawed when Alcindor arrived in college.

They took the court.

Mr. Wooden was lingering in the studio, in no hurry, so I asked him if I could ask him a couple of basketball questions.

'Sure,' he said, 'go ahead.'

'I've been wondering,' I said, 'in college basketball these days, why no teams use the full court press as their base defense.' The press was the Bruins trademark, a zone press when they made a basket or free throw, turning the tempo up and forcing a fast paced game that favored the quick, tireless Bruins. No one plays defense like that anymore.

'Well', Mr. Wooden said, 'I can't speak for other coaches today, but I can tell you why it took us a long time to get where we could do it.'

I thought I knew the answer. I asked, like a student in the back row, 'because you didn't have the players'?

'Right,' and his eyes twinkled, those killer eyes that have charmed interviewers and players and opponents for decades with that ruthless fundamental approach to the game of basketball. His Bruins made it look simple. Brutal, attacking full court defense, beautiful positioning both on offense and defense and a fast break that preyed upon opponents that tired under relentless pressure.

'We didn't have the players for a long time to be able to play that way,' he continued.

For a starting five to play every night with a pressing full court zone after every basket requires absolute discipline and superior conditioning. Did he mean that he didn't think today's players were up to it?

The eyes sparkled, and he shrugged. 'I can only tell you how we got to develop it,' he said.

So, I gathered, either he didn't think today's players were up to it or the coaches lacked the will to impose a zone press. That was my take, but he wouldn't elaborate.

But I know what I saw in those games up at Cal. Even late in the second half with the game on the line and the crowd screaming, sensing an upset, the Bruins held their poise and made every big play, every defensive stop that they needed to, never leaving their positions and using relentless pressure to force mistakes and turnovers. That comes from daily practice, gym time under a coach who demands all out effort and dedication to detail. Hour after hour of passing drills, fast breaks and outlet passes, stifling defensive pressure without committing fouls. Mr. Wooden didn't use a lot of substitutes to rest his stars. He worked them.

Listen to players like Bill Walton and Kareem talk about 'Coach' like he's a supreme being. He is. He didn't know any more about the game than Bobby Knight or Dean Smith. But he knew how to get more out of his players by demanding that they play a certain way, a way where no one else could keep up with them. That was his genius.

Everyone at the top college level has great athletes. It's the coach who has the guts to turn them into predators on the court, and who can get players to play that hard that dominates. The Bruins overpowered teams before they even got on the court. In the animal kingdom a creature knows when he's dominated by a predator, and submits.

John Wooden was a power coach who walked the sideline in a blazer holding a rolled up program as a foil. Now, Mr. Wooden has the kindly air, the friendly smile and the dimples that crinkle his cheeks. But he still has those piercing hawk-like eyes.