Golf, Romney, Rural America, Updike

The Master

Spring, Golf and Poetry

They are playing golf at Augusta today and that is occasion enough to connect the ancient game with the season of the azaleas and a writer who both loved golf and wrote about it – if didn’t always play it – with the grace of a poet.

The late, great John Updike is best remembered for his novels, but golfers who love the language, as well as the game, remember him for his singular ability to write exceedingly well about golf, while capturing the feel of the individual confronting the game.

Asked to write about golf as a hobby Updike said it wasn’t. “Hobbies take place in the cellar and smell of airplane glue. Nor is golf, though some men turn it into such, meant to be a profession or a pleasure. Indeed, few sights are more odious on the golf course than a sauntering, beered-up foursome obviously having a good time. Some golfers, we are told, enjoy the landscape; but properly the landscape shrivels and compresses into the grim, surrealistically vivid patch of grass directly under the golfer’s eyes as he morosely walks toward where he thinks his ball might be.”

Everyone who has played golf knows that feeling.

Updike wrote like a Masters champion, but like most of us played like a duffer; an 18 handicap duffer who could put into words what it means – against all odds and despite any real ability – when you finally strike the perfect shot.

“Once in a while,” Updike wrote in 1973 in a piece for The New York Times, “a 7-iron rips off the clubface with that pleasant tearing sound, as if pulling a zipper in space, and falls toward the hole like a raindrop down a well; or a drive draws sweetly with the bend of the fairway and disappears, still rolling, far beyond the applauding sprinkler, these things happen in spite of me, and not because of me, and in that sense I am free, on the golf course, as nowhere else.”

Michael Bamberger, a senior writer at Sports Illustrated, wrote a sweet little piece in 2009 about playing a round of golf with Updike. The great writer had written Bamberger a fan letter – he liked a book Bamberger had done – and suggested a game. What a thrill.

So, golfers everywhere will wonder this week if Tiger is really back? Will a European – or an Argentine, or Irishman – capture a loud green jacket this Sunday? While Bobby Jones’ ghost stalks the fairways in Georgia, John Updike’s ghost reminds us of the eternal grace of the simplest, yet most difficult game.

“There was clearly great charm and worth in a sport so quaintly perverse in its basic instructions,” Updike once wrote. “Hit down to make the ball rise. Swing easy to make it go far. Finish high to make it go straight.”

If only we could do it as well as he wrote about it.

  

Andrus Center, Baseball

Catchers

One Tough Job

Now that the pundits have finally agreed that Mitt Romney is going to be the Republican presidential nominee, we can devote attention to something really important – the start of the baseball season.

The guy in the photo is Hall of Famer Mickie Cochrane who, according to no less an authority than my baseball loving father, was the greatest catcher who ever put on shin guards. Cochrane played 13 seasons for the Philadelphia Athletics and the Detroit Tigers, including two years as player-manager for Detroit. His lifetime average was .320, he was twice the American League MVP and his durability behind the plate was legendary.

Black Mike, as Cochrane was nicknamed, had perhaps his best year on the legendary 1930’s A’s team that included several other future Hall of Famers. He hit .357 that year, had 85 runs batted in, 10 homers and 42 doubles. He caught 130 games and struck out only 18 times all season. His career came to an early end in 1937 when he was beaned – pre-batting helmet days – by a pitch at Yankee Stadium. His skull was fractured in three places.

Cochrane died in 1962. He was only 59. The Associated Press wrote in his obituary that “it was said of him that as a master of the mechanics of catching, he had no peer.”

I go to baseball games for lots of reasons, but I spend a lot of time watching the catchers. Once again it was my dad who pointed out to me for the first time that the catcher is the only player on the diamond who has the entire game in front of him. The catchers perspective on the field is unique. Good catchers help establish the pace of the game. A really good catcher, one respected by his pitching staff, is probably worth five or six wins a season, at least, just because he’ll know when to make a trip to the mound or insist on a particular pitch at a critical moment.

The great Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Feller said it well: “If you believe your catcher is intelligent and you know that he has considerable experience, it is a good thing to leave the game almost entirely in his hands.”

Catchers also have the toughest, the physically toughest, job on the field. Just ask the Giants’ great young catcher Buster Posey who is thankfully recovering from a horrid injury last season. Yankee Hall of Fame catcher Bill Dickey, another candidate for greatest ever at the position, once said: “A catcher must want to catch. He must make up his mind that it isn’t the terrible job it is painted, and that he isn’t going to say every day, Why, oh why with so many other positions in baseball did I take up this one.”

Most catchers don’t have great speed. Would you if you were up and down, squatting and bending a couple hundred times a game? Catchers hands are often all beat up. They suffer split nails, broken fingers, bruises. It’s a tough job. The fact that a Mickie Cochrane, or a Yogi Berra, a Johnny Bench or a Dickey could play the position so well for so long is remarkable. There are only 16 catchers are in the Hall and only three of them played since the late 1960’s. It’s both a tough position and one at which it is exceeding difficult to excel.

The baseball season begins in earnest Thursday. Watch the catchers. Pitchers are a dime a dozen. Home run hitters get the ink. Catchers make great teams.

 

2012 Election, 2016 Election, American Presidents, Campaign Finance, Health Care, Minnick, Obama, Supreme Court

Supreme Power

Courts, Controversy and Conservatives

There is an old and respected approach to judicial review of controversial and essentially political issues that holds that judges should do almost everything possible to avoid wading into the dense thicket of politics.

If Chief Justice John Roberts and his fellow conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court were really conservative they would rule on the controversial Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) on the narrowest possible grounds. They might even seriously considered not ruling on the merits of the law under the old and accepted principle that the case is simply “not ripe” for adjudication since no one – at least not yet – has been “harmed” in the legal sense by the health insurance mandate and other aspects of the still new law.

Hardly anyone thinks either of those approaches is likely from the Roberts Court, particularly after last week’s marathon hearings. You will get even money today that Roberts will lead his thin 5-4 conservative majority in the direction of at least ruling the mandate unconstitutional. The odds are a bit longer that the Court will throw out the entire law. As they say, time will tell.

What interests me today is what President Obama, the former constitutional law professor, will do if the high court strikes down all or part of his signature accomplishment? A little history may be instructive; history I suspect Professor Obama knows well.

The most striking parallel to the current situation happened in 1935. The then conservative dominated Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the signature domestic piece of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s legislation to battle the Great Depression. Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, every bit as much if not more a politician than Roberts, assembled a unanimous Court – including three real liberals – to deep six key features of FDR’s National Industrial Recovery Act.

Roosevelt was brought low by a famously modest case –Schechter Poultry Company v. United States – a decision that prompted the great liberal Justice Louis Brandeis to remark to an FDR associate that the case marked the end of “this business of centralization, and I want you to go back and tell the president that we’re not going to let this government centralize everything.” Given that sentiment, Brandeis, were he on the Court today, might just be a vote against Obamacare.

Roosevelt’s reaction was, of course, to blast the Court as living in “a horse and buggy” era with regard to the Commerce Clause of the Constitution and after his re-election FDR attempted, with disastrous consequences, to enlarge the Supreme Court. Roosevelt’s ideas about “judicial reform” were so outrageous that no president since has dare even suggest action to limit the scope or change the make-up of the Supreme Court. Instead we now fight epic battles over every new justice who is appointed and partisan political considerations, never far removed from judicial nominations, is now guaranteed to be front and center.

Obama will not, I predict, pull a Roosevelt. He knows, as the wise Jon Meacham wrote recently, “Justified or not, the Supreme Court has a kind of sacred status in American life. For whatever reason, Presidents can safely run against Congress, and vice versa, but I think there is an inherent popular aversion to assaults on the court itself. Perhaps it has to do with an instinctive belief that life needs umpires, even ones who blow calls now and then.”

Obama could, in theory, dust off some really old ideas and suggest a Constitutional amendment, as the great Wisconsin Sen. Robert La Follette did in the 1920’s, that would allow Congress to overturn Court decisions or, under certain circumstances, put Supreme Court decisions up to a popular vote. Of course, President Obama won’t do anything of the sort.

Obama is then really only left with the power of persuasion. He might suggest, as one wag did, that when the opportunity for insurance coverage for millions disappears they take their complaints to Antonin Scalia. Better yet, Obama could begin a real national conversation – including involing United States Senators who approve Supreme Court nominees – about the kind of Supreme Court the nation needs in the 21st Century.

You have to hand it to Republicans, they have been running against the Court for years. What prominent GOP lawmaker doesn’t have the talking points down regarding “activist, liberal judges” who legislate from the bench? That line of political positioning has been enormously successful in positioning a very conservative majority on the current Supreme Court to get away with precisely what conservatives have been critical of for years – legislating from the bench.

Set aside for a moment the merits of the Affordable Care Act and merely consider what some of the justices from the left and right said last week. As columnist E.J. Dionne noted, Justice Samuel Alito sounded like a House subcommittee chairman quoting Congressional Budget Office figures and wondered whether the government could mandate that we all have burial insurance, while Scalia went off with a weird analogy about the government mandating broccoli. The liberals didn’t comport themselves much better with some commentators noting that they tried to come to the rhetorical aide of the Obama Administration’s Solicitor General who had trouble at times articulating the best arguments in favor of the law.

But judges aren’t supposed to be super legislators, they shouldn’t care about policy or vote counting (beyond counting to five) and they have no business trying to bail out a lawyer who is fumbling his case. Such behavior paints the entire Court with an activist brush. What is needed with the current case, and I would suggest with the money in politics case Citizens United and the who will be president case Bush v. Gore is real, reasoned judicial restraint.

The Court has a legitimate role in the health care case in defining – or refining – the scope of the Commerce Clause, but the justice could also acknowledge the obvious. We’ll have an election in a few months where Obamacare will be one of the fundamental issues. All the Republican candidates say they want to repeal the law. Democrats will fight to keep it. That is the kind of messy and important debate we have elections to resolve. Real judicial restraint would find the Supreme Court – conservatives and liberals – searching for a super majority way to rule narrowly and leave the politics to those who are elected to vote on policy questions.

If the Court overturns the health care legislation, the president will undoubtedly take issue with the decision, but he ought also to use the moment to educate more broadly about how judges should approach their jobs, the Court’s sacred status notwithstanding.