Tag: nostalgia (Page 6 of 11)

Tabloid News

June 26, 2012 / DB

First, a quick story from my youth.

I once had a babysitter who had stacks of newsstand tabloid magazines. I recall them mostly being The National Enquirer but I believe she had some of the really crazy ones, too. Anyway, I liked to read and since the TV was usually on soaps or the news, I would hide in the corner and work through the latest celebrity gossip.

At some point I began throwing the things I learned into casual conversations elsewhere. Given the timeframe, 1980-81, I would imagine I shared a lot of Loni Anderson news. Anyway, one day I said something especially ridiculous around my mom and she pointedly asked where in the hell I heard that. I shared my source and she then gave me a long talk about how those magazines were full of garbage that wasn’t true and I needed to stop reading them.

I don’t know if I stopped reading them or not; there wasn’t much else to do at the sitter’s. But I am pretty sure I kept my mouth shut about what I learned in them. And I never looked at someone who had their own copy of the Enquirer etc. again.¹

Monday the girls and I were at the grocery store and as I moved our purchases from the cart to the conveyor, M. noticed Prince William and Princess Kate on the cover of one of those magazines. She asked, “Dad, what does ‘be-try-eed’ mean?”

“What?”

“Bee-tray-eed,” and she pointed at the cover of the Enquirer.

“Oh, betrayed. That means you lied.” I went back to loading the conveyor.

“Why did Prince William and Princess Kate lie to each other?”

I sighed. “M., those magazines make stories up about famous people. That isn’t real, Prince William and Princess Kate did not lie to each other. Don’t read those or pay attention to them, ok?”

“Oh.”

C. had been digging around in the candy shelves, as she likes to do, but finally tuned into our conversation. With a gasp she asked, “Dad! Why are Prince William and Princess Kate lying to each other?”

Bigger sigh.

Another reason not to take the girls to the grocery store.

ↁ

Including, ironically, my mom’s mom. ↩

The Greatest

June 13, 2012 / DB

One of the many cultural icons of my generation is the 1992 US men’s Olympic basketball team: The Dream Team. While this oral history of the greatest team ever is good, I must admit I was a little disappointed by it. It doesn’t seem nearly long enough. I know there were more great stories that could have been repeated.

Johnson: Oh man, the best basketball I ever played was during those practices. Because everybody said, “Let’s strap up.”
Wilkens: Our last scrimmage, Magic’s team was dominating Michael’s team. And the guys were teasing Michael, because he was playing golf every morning. Well, that did it. The whole thing turned around.
Thorn: He got upset, so he started to score every time down the floor. One time he drove, and the refs called, like, a real tick-tack foul. So Magic booted the ball up to the ceiling: “This is ridiculous! Just like the NBA! He gets every call!”
Hubbard: Magic was saying, “This must be what it’s like playing in Chicago Stadium,” because Michael was getting the calls. And Michael said, “Well, this is the ’90s, not the ’80s.”

Don Cornelius

February 2, 2012 / DB

One of the greatest of the many gifts my parents gave me was my appreciation for music. Part of my musical education was our weekly, family viewing of Soul Train. For a white kid growing up in a small, Kansas college town, the show opened my eyes to not only a different kind of music than was commonly played in Hays, KS¹, but also to the broader world in general. There were people out there who looked different than me, talked different than me, dressed different than me. Soul Train helped my parents teach me that while there are all kinds of different people around the world, we’re all humans and worthy of respect.

Don Cornelius, the man behind Soul Train, took his own life yesterday. I know I wasn’t the only person of my generation, of all backgrounds, that was influenced by his creation. Thank you, Don.

But for the most part Mr. Cornelius didn’t preach about civil rights or the marvels of African-American art. He was manifesting them. With a smile he’d sign off each show wishing his audiences “love, peace and soul.”

Not to mention an important balance to shows like Hee Haw and Lawrence Welk, which were weekend staples at my grandparents’ homes ↩

Sounds Of The Game

May 24, 2011 / DB

Piggy-backing a bit on my post about cloud-based music systems last week, my baseball post for this week will focus on the changing broadcast technology of the game.

I first became a baseball fan in 1978. But I really went head-over-heels for the game in 1980, when we moved to Kansas City. Suddenly I could listen to every single Royals game. Every week or so a couple road games were on TV. When I opened the paper each morning (and afternoon!), the lead story was about George Brett’s hitting streak and his flirtation with .400, the Royals’ lead in the AL West, and if this was the year they could finally slay the Yankees dragon in the playoffs.

It was a pretty great time to be a Royals fan.

My other early memories of baseball involve my visits to my grandparents’ homes in central Kansas. Out there, the house radio was pretty much always tuned to the local station, which just happened to be a Royals affiliate. My mom’s parents weren’t big sports fans, so often when the Royals would come on, they turned the radio off and I retreated to my room to listen. My dad’s parents, however, were big fans. There were always at least two radios tuned to the game in their home. There was the main radio in the kitchen/eating area, which was on approximately 23 hours a day. And Grandpa always carried his own radio around with him while he was working in the yard or on projects around the house. When he took his afternoon nap, he would place the radio on the coffee table and turn it just loud enough so he could hear Denny Matthews and Fred White while he dozed. I loved walking through their house on Sunday afternoons, never being out of earshot of the game.

I think most baseball fans my age, and older, have similar memories about baseball on the radio.

The rise of ubiquitous, high-speed Internet access has made the entire country like my Grandparents’ home. For the third straight summer, I have the fantastic MLB iPhone app. This year I purchased the MLB.TV package as well. Between them, I am never out of earshot of the Royals.

Each time I’m lying in bed with my two-year-old trying to get her to sleep, sitting in the driveway monitoring the girls playing, or doing something else with a game streaming through my iPhone, I’m amazed at the magic of modern technology. No longer am I restricted by the range of AM radio signals or broadcast territories or the Royals sucking and never being on national TV. I can live 500 miles away from Kansas City (or more) and still hear the game just as if I lived in the KC suburbs and was sitting on my back deck, drinking a beer while the girls played on their swing set. I can sit anywhere in my house and watch the live broadcast of the game on my TV or on my computer, as if I was plugged into a KC-area cable provider. And going on vacation does not mean losing contact with your team for a week.

Thirty years ago, you would have relied on morning box scores to follow your favorite team. Twenty years ago you could catch highlights on Sportscenter or CNN. Ten years ago you could follow text play-by-play of games on Yahoo! or stare at the ESPN ticker all night.

Today, thanks to broadband pipes, 3G networks, and incredibly powerful handheld devices, we can control what game we watch and when and where we watch it. For those of us who grew up listening to baseball on the radio, having the audio option is especially sweet.

Once upon a time, being a fan of an out-of-market team was a difficult and tenuous thing. It was easy to lose touch with the teams of your youth when careers and family took you to other parts of the country. But thanks to MLB’s embrace of technology, it can feel like you never left home. At least while the game is on.

❖

When Len Went Off

February 23, 2011 / DB

A terrific essay about a legendary night and how things have changed.

Twenty-five years ago was another world. The game was over and I was by myself—my parents and brother presumably asleep—alone in the late night with the incredible fact that had just come into being. Len Bias beat Carolina. There was no one to shout it to, nothing to do with the joy but wrap it up and hold it, reverberating, inside the ribcage. Len Bias beat Carolina. It was true, and if you were lucky enough to know it, you would know it forever.

I remember this game clearly. Rather, I remember watching the highlights over-and-over late that night and early the next morning.

But I remember this feeling well, too. A lot of my sports memories involve sitting in a room, alone, listening to a radio, free to make the scene look however I wanted it to.

Len Bias in Chapel Hill

Darnell Vs. Jacque

January 26, 2011 / DB

More thoughts on the Coolest Athlete thread on Twitter.

This isn’t an original observation – I even think I’ve written about it before – but something else struck me about how we view athletes while reading through the Coolest Kansas City Athletes meme on Twitter over the weekend: athletes are a lot cooler when we’re kids.

The reasons are pretty obvious. We don’t see the flaws as clearly when we’re little. We don’t hear the rumors about how players act off the court/field. We don’t see selfishness and instead see superior talent. We have less technical understanding of sports so we see their raw physical accomplishments outside the realm of what is proper and what is not.

I thought of two clear examples from my own fandom that show how our perception of athletes changes as we grow: Darnell Valentine and Jacque Vaughn.

We moved to Kansas City when I was nine. At the time Darnell Valentine was about to begin his senior year at KU. All I knew about him was that he was KU’s best player, so he immediately became my favorite. His number, 14, became my favorite number (still is). I wanted to be 6’2″ when I grew up, like him. (I should have wished for 6’6″!) When I listened to games on the radio (this was back in the day when it was rare that games were on TV before March), I paid closest attention to what he did. When I heard that he earned Academic All-American status for the third-straight year, I decided next to George Brett, there was no better example for a young boy to follow than Darnell.

Fast forward 15 or so years. By then, I had discovered the Internet and discussion groups and had latched onto a group of likeminded KU fans. At some point, we were listing our all time favorite Jayhawks. I put together my list, which included Darnell. I expected that to elicit all kinds of cool stories about him from people who were in school at the same time he was.

Instead I got a bunch of “Mehs”.¹

I didn’t understand it. He was clearly the best player in the program between the early 70s and Danny Manning’s arrival. He was an All-Conference and All-American player. He hit the books. He was a first round draft pick. What wasn’t to like?

I asked a few of the older fans and the responses were similar: Darnell was a good enough player, but he was supposed to carry KU back to the Final Four. He never got the Jayhawks past the Sweet 16 and could only win one conference championship, when he was a freshman. Many mentioned his failure late in the Battle of New Orleans, when he missed the front end of a one-and-one and then blew an open layup as KU let a late lead slip away against Wichita State in the 1981 Sweet 16. ² He was good, but he didn’t deserve a spot as one of the greatest players in the program’s history, according to them.

Idiots, I thought.

Then Jacque Vaughn came along. He entered KU with a similar amount of hype that Darnell did. He was also an outstanding student who, for four years, was used an example of all that was right with college sports. And he, too, had an awful end to his KU career, playing like garbage for 39 minutes against Arizona then passing the ball rather than taking the shot that would have tied it up after a furious comeback.

All the good feelings I had for Jacque went away in an instant. That night, in the bars of Sacramento, fellow KU fans and I cursed Vaughn. We erased all the good things he had done over four years and replaced them with his two big failures: never getting KU to a Final Four and choking in the biggest game of his career. Suddenly, what those alums from the 70s said about Darnell made sense.

When I was young, I could follow Darnell and revel in his accomplishments without seeing the flaws. I didn’t know about the promise he arrived with, the expectations that fans hoisted upon him. I just knew that he was my favorite player on my favorite team, and for that he earned my adulation.

By the time Jacque came along, I was older, wiser, and getting more jaded. Still, I believed the hype he carried with him. I bought into the myths surrounding him that the program pushed to the public. Even when I saw flaws in his game, I could look past them.

But, for the first time in my life as a fan, I was seeing those flaws. The Arizona game was a tipping point in how I viewed players. No longer was I blindly loyal. I began to view games more like a coach, always finding something to pick apart even in an otherwise excellent performance. “Sure, that guy scored 20 points and grabbed 10 rebounds, but he missed that block out that nearly cost us the game.” ³

I think that’s a change we all go through, to one extent or another, as we get older. It’s especially rough in the age of hyper-information. Back in the day, athletes could cover up all but their worst misdeeds. Now, even the smallest transgression gets broadcast across a slew of information outlets. Our cynicism and the scars we’ve developed over the years make it hard enough to be a fan, but the onslaught of data makes it even harder.

We all know people who are still blindly loyal as they grow older. They can be annoying, especially when they constantly defend a point guard who turns the ball over every other possession or a receiver who will always drop a pass in a key situation. But there are times when I wish I still had that innocence I had when I was younger. The belief that my teams and players were unconditionally good and their opponents were unconditionally bad. It was a lot easier to watch games when I could view the world through that kind of lens.

❖

Well, not Mehs. That term wasn’t in en vogue yet. So whatever the mid-90s equivalent was. ↩
Worth noting, I cried shortly after Darnell blew the layup and Mike Jones drilled his second-straight long jumper to win the game for the Shockers. ↩
See: Darrell Arthur, 2008 National Championship game. ↩

The Coolest

January 24, 2011 / DB

There was a thread on Twitter Sunday soliciting suggestions as to who the coolest Kansas City athletes of all time were. While I was never a true Chiefs fan, I did spend 23 years in the city and have some thoughts on the subject.

First, let’s go ahead and admit this covers the 30-35 years that I’ve been aware of Kansas City athletes. So there won’t be any members of the Scouts or A’s included. And Tom Watson dominated golf for a few years, but I wouldn’t ever say he was cool.

I think I was seven, and not yet a KC resident, when an uncle mentioned the name Amos Otis to me. I didn’t know anything about AO, but his name sure sounded cool. And the way Willie Wilson ran was cool. Phil Ford and Otis Birdsong were cool when the Kings were still in town. Gino Schiraldi, Enzo Di Pede, and Yilmaz Orhan all seemed cool for about five minutes when the MISL was hot. But none of those guys were transcendently cool. Well, maybe Willie was, but he had some competition on his own team for coolest guy status.

Anyway, this are the guys who stood out for me. I’m sure I’m forgetting one or two people who are obvious to others.

Bo Jackson. One of the coolest athletes ever, in any sport, in any city. It wasn’t just that he could, seemingly, do anything. It was that he didn’t act like any of his freakish accomplishments were that big of a deal. To him, throwing a ball 400 feet on a rope¹ was like you or me tossing a wadded up piece of paper three feet into a trashcan. Bo was so cool that when I was debating what Royals jersey to have Santa bring me for Christmas this year, I spent a lot of time with a Jackson 16 jersey at the top of my list.
Joe Montana. He wasn’t really Kansas City’s, the city just rented him for the final two years of his career. But it was a big freaking deal when he arrived. The city tried desperately to claim him, and he politely kept his mouth shut. He knew it was silly. No matter how the 49ers treated him in his final year there, he was always going to be associated with San Francisco. But there’s no doubting that when the Chiefs acquired him, they went from just being a good team to being one of the NFL’s marquee teams.
Frank White. He wasn’t cool in an awe-inspiring way. He was cool in a smooth way that made you admire the way he went about his business. I love the shot of him right before George Brett exploded in the Pine Tar game: casually sitting next to Brett with one foot up on the bench. Brett was already stewing, telling teammates that if they called him out he was going to go kick someone’s ass. Frank just chilled, not seeing any reason to get worked up about something that hadn’t happened yet. He exuded cool.
Derrick Thomas. DT had all kinds of issues off the field. But he was so good on the field that most Chiefs fans looked the other way. Even non-Chiefs fans could not help buy admire the havoc he brought to the football field. Once George Brett began to fade, DT was the most nationally recognized athlete from KC. Unlike Montana, he always seemed to embrace the city as it embraced him, giving him some bonus coolness.
George Brett. The coolest ever. There was a 10-15 year period where every little boy in Kansas City wanted to be him. He was one of the five best players in baseball and played every game all-out. Fathers would point to Brett and say to their sons, “That’s how you play the game.” That style cost him numerous games to injuries each season, but you knew when he was on the field he was going to try to stretch every single into a double, break up every double-play ball, and not take any shit from anyone in the other dugout. Throw in his well known hard partying ways off-the-field, and to a little boy he seemed like everything you wanted to be when you grew up. In many ways, Thomas mimicked his career as his popularity made people overlook a lot of sins in Westport.
Buck O’Neil. OK, this is a stretch. He became famous and cool well after his playing and managing career ended. So I suppose he was more of a cool sports figure than an actual athlete. The dignity with which he lived his life, and the causes that he embraced, were a way of life we can all aspire to.

Still my favorite Bo moment that I witnessed first hand. Anyone who follows baseball knows about his famous throw in Seattle that nailed Harold Reynolds at the plate. I was at a game when he grabbed a ball at the wall, turned, and fired home. The ball didn’t just reach home in the air. It went 20 feet over Mike Macfarlane’s head and hit the screen another 25 feet behind him. And it was still at least 10 feet off the ground. So Bo threw a ball at least 400 feet and it still had another 15-20 feet of range if the net hadn’t interrupted its flight. ↩

Young Jordan

October 27, 2010 / DB

Much to my generation’s chagrin, Michael Jordan has not aged well. He came back one time too many, and when he finally left the league was a rather ordinary professional baller. Since his retirement, he’s had mixed success, at best, as an NBA executive. He offered a mean, bitter Hall of Fame induction speech. And he seems to be constantly cruising the party circuit with younger women. Kind of a dirty old man, not what we expected of the allegedly regal Jordan of his prime.

The linked article is an interesting excerpt from a new NBA book, the Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball History, from the makers of the Free Darko website. It recalls NBA Jordan Version 1.0, the unstoppable, revolutionary force that took the league by storm. That Jordan was something to see, not yet the polished, complete package he would become, but a long, lean bundle of energy, raw ability, and competitiveness. He mesmerized me, and a lot of fans my age, and we were sucked into one of the greatest myth-making machines ever.

Michael Jordan wasn’t the first player to jump to the rim or abuse defenders. But there was something different about MJ. Not only could he get higher and do more while hanging in the air than anyone who had come before, Jordan was outright vicious in the way he used this exquisite ability, careening around the court and knifing his way to the basket with recklessness—as expansive as Magic, but replacing Johnson’s glee with a kind of freewheeling, vigilante menace.

Pyromania 27 Years Later

October 14, 2010 / DB

Recently I picked up a copy of Def Leppard’s seminal 1983 album Pyromania. I had been waiting for years for it to show up in the iTunes or Amazon MP3 stores, to no avail. After hearing a couple songs in the pregame mix at a high school football game, I thought it was time to finally take the plunge and order the CD.

This was a big deal. First, I don’t buy CDs anymore. Second, Pyromania was the first cassette tape I ever bought, back in the summer of 1983. It’s a very important album in my musical development.

Fortunately, it holds up very well.¹ It’s still a first-class rocker and an essential album for someone interested in the hard rock with a healthy dose of pop scene of the early 80s.

Listening to it nearly 30 years after its release opened up a whole new perspective on its songs. I had always believed it to be a straight-up heavy metal album. When you dig into it, though, you realize that it is much more than that. In fact, it is a deep rumination on the state of the British Empire in the early 80s.

What follows is by no measure a complete review, but I thought it would be interesting to dive into a few of the songs to support this assertion.

“Rock Rock (Till you Drop)” – They started off slow. This is a pretty standard plea to embrace every moment.

“Photograph” – Now we’re getting somewhere. This explores the temporal nature of our relationship with the world because of the controls government and big business place on the media. The device the band uses is the infamous Page Three girls, who were tools to distract the masses from the massive issues facing Britain.

“Foolin'” – Even in the early 80s, technology was already beginning to separate us. When Joe Elliott makes his plea, “Is anybody out there? Anybody there?” he speaks of a world where the traditional bonds of community have been destroyed by television and pop culture. The pain of his isolation when he asks, “Won’t you stay with me awhile?” is almost too much to take.

It’s not hard to hear the monotonous thwack of the cowbell in the chorus as the protagonist pounding on the walls that separate him from those around him. I would not be surprised if this served as an important point of inspiration for Radiohead when they were recording OK Computer.

“Rock of Ages” – This is clearly a warning that if the economic imbalance in British society didn’t change, and fast, the working class of cities like Leppard’s Sheffield were ready to take radical, destructive action to ensure their demands were heard. Was the burning sound at the end 10 Downing Street or Parliament or Buckingham Palace or just the working class neighborhoods of every British city left behind as the economy fell apart?

“Stagefright” – This is about being at a pub with your mates and needing to piss but some drunk bloke next to you in the men’s room keeps yammering on about Manchester United and you can’t get started.

“Too Late for Love” – An ode to the death of the idealism of the 1960s.

“Die Hard the Hunter” – Most take this to be the story of a soldier returned from combat who struggles to find his place in society. They key line “Put down your pistol, put down your toy” reveals the true message of this song. It is about the fears that a generation of youths were being turned into zombies by video games, and they were no longer able to differentiate fantasy from reality.

“Action Not Words” – A withering indictment of both Labour and Tory politicians who yammered endlessly in Parliament about what was wrong with Great Britain but did little to actually fix those problems.

“Billy’s Got a Gun” – A case against the reckless, cowboy militarism of the Thatcher-Reagan era.

Perhaps you hear different things when you listen to these songs. There is no doubting, though, that Pyromania is an all-time classic that carries much more weight that I realized when I was 12.

Unlike the band’s next album Hysteria. That album sounds like shit today. ↩

Going Through The Bones

August 19, 2010 / DB

I’ve been doing some closet and attic cleaning this week. Digging through old boxes of stuff, looking for things that can/need to be thrown away, or items that can be sent to my sister-in-law for her up-coming garage sale.

I dug through a huge pile of Far Side books that I’ll be flipping through in the next few weeks. Those should be fun. Was there a surer Christmas gift in the late 80s through mid 90s than Far Side collections?

I found an old scrapbook, mostly from the fall of 1980 and that year’s playoffs and World Series. But a bunch of other random items have been stuffed into it over the years. I found a program from my third grade play. The roster from my fourth grade football team. The year-end stats from my seventh grade baseball team. All kinds of certificates of achievement for various school activities. The funny thing about the rosters and programs is that I circled my name in all of them. It was especially amusing in the play program. I had the big part of Davy Crockett, so my name appeared twice. I circled it both times.

Why the hell was I circling my own name in elementary school lists? In case someone broke into my room, dug through my box of scraps, and wanted to know who all this belonged to? In case of amnesia or old age and I needed a reminder of my identity? Or just the early signs of my gigantic ego?

Among the boxes of books that will be going to the garage sale will be a large collection of Hardy Boys books. I guess I hung onto them all these years in case I had a son. I doubt the girls will be very interested in boys high school mystery stories from the 1950s. Thanks to Happy Days I had some idea of 50s culture when I was reading the books in third and fourth grades. I knew what a jalopy was, for example. Do kids today have any understanding of the context of the stories, or is it almost like reading Chaucer, where it was kind of English but nothing like what we speak?

It was also funny to see the covers of the later books in the series. Mirroring the TV show of the late 70s, Frank and Joe had feathered hair and preppy clothes on. Sadly, it looks like they finally killed the series five years ago, although the series has been rebooted to modernize them.

Finally, the funniest thing I found was in an old Star Wars comic book. I was flipping through it, as it was probably one of the first comic books I ever owned, and came across an ad for Grit magazine. Apparently little seven-year-old me wanted to get a subscription, because I had filled in the order blank. In the space labelled “Male or Female?” I filled in “Boy”. I’m not sure if I didn’t know what those words meant, yet, or if I thought you weren’t a male until you’re a man.