Mandela – Many Things Considered

It Ain’t Over…

Posted on September 24, 2015by christian

“It ain’t over till it’s over.”

– Yogi Berra, 1925-2015

– – – – –

Let’s get this disclaimer out of the way. I ain’t no Yankee fan, but who could not love baseball and not also love Yogi.

I have nothing original to say about the squat, barrel chested catcher, the Hall of Famer, the guy behind the dish who won ten World Championships with – OK, the Yankees – the best bad ball hitter in the history of the great game, a guy who managed champions in both leagues, the maestro of mangled syntax. It’s all been said.

After reading and listening to all the appropriate tributes for the late Lawrence Peter Berra, laughing out loud again at the “Yogi-isms” – my favorite, which might well be appropriated by Donald Trump, “I didn’t say all the things I said” – and again quietly reflecting on his abilities as a ballplayer, human being and D-Day veteran, I’m left only with this: Yogi was the real deal.

No chiseled, cheating hunk like A-Rod, no arrogant bat flipper like Harper, no trash talking, no umpire baiting – well maybe a little umpire baiting – and no apparent ego. What comes through time and again in the stories about Berra is that the little backstop was a great guy. A genuine guy. A warm and funny guy. A teammate, the term ballplayers and office co-workers use when they describe someone they really like and value. Yogi was a great teammate. That about says it all.

Yogi Berra leaps into the arms of Don Larsen after Larsen pitched the Perfect Game against the Brooklyn dodgers in the fifth game of the 1956 World Series at Yankee Stadium October 8, 1956.

The best and most enduring photo of Berra, when Yogi leapt into the arms of perfect game World Series pitcher Don Larsen in 1956, should have focused on the other guy in the picture – the only guy still and ever to pitch a perfect freaking game in the World Series. But the eye automatically goes to Yogi.

He, of course, called and caught the Larsen perfect game and gets some of the credit for that remarkable performance, but it was Yogi’s exuberance, his sheer joy in the moment of that historic moment that makes the picture so wonderful.

In a game that is too often dominated by talented individuals you wouldn’t invite over for dinner, Yogi was the guy we would have all invited to a Sunday barbecue. You suspect Yogi would have brought a six-pack.

When Berra had his famous feud with George Steinbrenner you didn’t need a psychology degree to know that Yogi was right and that it was The Boss who was being the jerk. Now we know, big surprise, which Yankee received the outpouring of affection, the tears and the laughs when the last line-up was handed in.

The catcher’s position is the unique position on the diamond. The catcher is involved in almost every play. The entire game unfolds in front of the catcher. The catcher has the greatest opportunity to screw up and get banged up. It’s not an accident that the catcher’s protective gear was long ago dubbed “the tools of ignorance.” But there is nothing dim or dull about a truly good receiver and Berra was one of a handful of the games truly great catchers. The record speaks for Yogi’s place among the elites even if he might not have made the case so smoothly himself. Berra was simply a great, great catcher and a superb hitter.

You gotta love this from a hitter, and Berra was a hitter with both power and average, who was once asked if he was in a slump. “I’m not in a slump,” Yogi says, “I’m just not hitting…”

Yogi's 1953 Topps baseball card — Yogi’s 1953 Topps baseball card

Yogi’s passing is sad in many, many ways. He had of course a full life of 90 long years, but I’m sure he would have enjoyed one more post season, particularly with the pinstripers in contention. But the real sadness, at least for my generation, is that Yogi’s passing marks another fading away of that generation of post-war ballplayers who now mostly flicker back to us in black and white, suited up in their baggy flannels and properly worn socks.

Whether it was or not, it seems like a more innocent time. Guys wore hats, the snap brim type, to ballparks and doubleheaders were played on Sunday. Washington was in the American League and Texas wasn’t in either league. Players weren’t perpetually fastening and unfastening their batting gloves because no one wore a batting glove. The facial hair consisted of day old beards what would inevitably face a razor once the last out was recorded. And a 5’7” catcher could be the biggest man on the field.

Yogi was right about many things, some of which he even said, but he was wrong about it being over when it’s over. Some things and some people are so special that they just go on and on. Yogi isn’t gone. They’ll be taking about him, quoting him, laughing along with him, smiling at him in Don Larsen’s embrace for as long as little boys toss around the horsehide.

Real deals like Yogi Berra get remembered even for things they didn’t say.

Britain, Foreign Policy, John Kennedy, Mandela, Reagan, Veterans

Mandela and Us

Posted on December 7, 2013by christian

Most of the world is rightly celebrating the life and lessons of Nelson Mandela. Warts and all Mandela will go down as a pivotal figure in the last decades of the 20th Century and will no doubt remain the gold standard for the difficult, seemingly impossible politics of racial reconciliation.

Still it’s fascinating to see the broad and deep bipartisan out pouring of respect for a man that the Reagan Administration contended in the 1980’s was head of a terrorist organization, a designation that was not formally changed until 2008. There is some reason to believe the CIA tipped off South Africa’s whites-only government to Mandela’s whereabouts in 1962, a tip that ultimately led to his trial and lengthy incarceration.

I’m reminded of the intense and passionate debates in the early 1980’s over whether Ronald Reagan could be pressured to impose economic sanctions on the apartheid government of South Africa. Then-Congressman Dick Cheney voted in 1985 against a resolution that called for Mandela’s release from jail and commentators from George Will to William F. Buckley defended the white South African government and condemned Mandela and his African National Congress (ANC) as just a pawn of the Soviet Union.

After much debate the Congress in 1986 voted to do what the Reagan Administration wouldn’t and imposed economic sanctions on the apartheid government of South Africa. The president vetoed the legislation. Reagan, knowing he held a weak hand in the face of growing public outcry over the continued oppression of blacks in South Africa, pulled out all the stops in order to sustain his veto.

As the New York Times reported at the time, “Mr. Reagan made a major effort…to salvage his veto, and he called a number of Senators personally, arguing that he would appear weak and ineffective” in an upcoming summit meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev “if he were rebuffed by the Republican-controlled Senate on a major foreign policy question.”

The Senate eventually voted 78-21 to override Reagan’s veto of the sanctions legislation, but not before Sen. Jesse Helms, the North Carolina Republican, warned that “the thrust of this legislation is to bring about violent, revolutionary change, and after that, tyranny.” Helms and Mandela are now both dead and we know who was right.

For the record, the Northwest delegation in 1986 was entirely Republican. Oregon’s senators – Mark Hatfield and Bob Packwood – and Washington’s senators – Dan Evans and Slade Gorton voted for the sanctions against South Africa and to override Reagan’s veto. Idaho’s senators Steve Symms and Jim McClure voted with Jesse Helms.

The U.S. was actually quite late in adopting a policy of isolating South Africa in part because the country’s leaders spent so much of the post-war world viewing every event in every corner of the world through the narrow prism of the Cold War. The logic was simple and wrong: Soviets supplied backing to the African National Congress, Nelson Mandela was in jail for being a leader of the ANC, therefore it must logically follow that we had to oppose the ANC. But the larger lesson here is simply that time and again in the post-war world the United States misread, from Vietnam to South Africa and even on to Iraq, the nature of national struggles over self-determination.

Successive State Departments and CIA wise guys framed nearly every issue as a struggle pitting the democratic West versus the Evil Empire, when often, as Nelson Mandela showed us, the great twilight struggles of the last half of the 20th Century were typically about more basic and more enduring things – the right to vote, the right to self determination, the right to throw off colonial shackles, the right to make your own way, the right to be treated with dignity. We too often lacked the imagination that might have allowed us envision that a man imprisoned for 27 years might walk out of his prison cell, Gandhi or King-like, and embrace a type of political and racial reconciliation that would usher in a peaceful revolution the likes of which a Jesse Helms simply could not fathom.

For most of his too short life, we must recall, his own government spied on the revolutionary Dr. King, convinced he must be a Communist agent.

As the world – and almost every American politician – rushes to get right with Mandela, we would do well to remember at least two things. Mandela was not a saint, but rather a remarkably pragmatic politician and a damn good one too, and in many ways a much better politician than some of the Americans who for so long failed to understand his motivations and talents.

The second is that Mandela was a revolutionary; a revolutionary who, fortunately for his country and the world, made the transition from advocate of armed struggle to champion of constitutional democracy. For too long his movement and the man were seen in the United States through the foggy lens of what some call American exceptionalism, the idea that our system and our approach is automatically superior to every other system or approach. This notion, that political legitimacy can only come about as the result of a fully baked western-style Jeffersonian democracy, has driven American foreign policy since at least Woodrow Wilson and has often left us blind to the real motivations of nationalist or anti-colonial movements from Vietnam to Soweto.

Part of the legacy of Mandela and us is that the United States has often been exceptionally wrong for too long about movements like the fight to end apartheid in South Africa and wrong about the people who lead those fights. So, by all means, celebrate the life of a man who now belongs to the ages and whose name fits in the same sentence with Gandhi and Dr. King, and while doing so remember that our own history as a nation traces its origins to a messy and bloody revolution and the vision and leadership of determined, political men whose real motive was freedom.

Andrus Center, Baseball, Mandela

Baseball in 1921

Posted on April 14, 2011by christian

Yankees, Giants and New York Baseball

The late, great Baseball Commissioner Bart Giamatti once said one of the important things he learned by working on the inside of baseball was “the enormous grip this game has on people…it goes way down deep.”

I learned that lesson all over again reading a wonderful new baseball book telling the story of how the game came to be defined in 1921 as a New York game – the Yankees and Giants faced off in the 1921 World Series – and how that spectacular rivalry helped the great game bounce back from the Black Sox Scandal of 1919.

As the Los Angeles Times said in a recent review of 1921 – The Yankees, the Giants and the Battle for Baseball Supremacy in New York, “1921 was a transitional one. The nation had only recently emerged from the horrors of World War I. Prohibition was in place, although that didn’t stop Ruth and company from indulging. And why not? Ruth was widely regarded as baseball’s savior for restoring the credibility and allure of the national pastime in the aftermath of the 1919 Black Sox gambling scandal, in which members of the Chicago White Sox took money to throw the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. By 1921, he was the game’s pre-eminent superstar, acquiring an agent — the ubiquitous Christy Walsh — and igniting the first home-run boom.”

For a baseball junkie – and someone who loves history – 1921 is a great retreat into the formative days of the game so many of us enjoy today. And that is the value of a fine book like this – it connects my history (and yours, perhaps) to the game our fathers also loved.

My dad, a knowledgeable baseball fan, used to talk about the great Yankee teams of the 1920’s and 1930’s. No Yankee fan he, his admiration was for the franchise’s success and for the supporting cast around Ruth and Gehrig and later DiMaggio. He admired a Yankee outfielder by name of Bob Meusel, a guy with a lifetime .309 batting average, 156 career home runs and more than a thousand RBI’s. Meusel played only 11 seasons, all but one for the Yankees and often hit fifth in the line-up behind Ruth and Gehrig.

In 1921, Meusel hit .321, had 24 homers (Ruth hit a remarkable 59) and drove in 135 runs. Meusel and his brother Emil (nicknamed Irish), played against each other in the World Series that year. In 1921, these guys – and their substantial accomplishments – come alive and I can almost hear my dad, the baseball fan, weaving a story about the “old days” in baseball. A wonderful aspect of the game is that the history of baseball really allows us to appreciate an entirely different era.

Baseball in New York in 1921, with writers like Damon Runyon and Heywood Broun doing the daily reporting, was something special. (Runyon once wrote, “The race may not always be to the swift nor the victory to the strong, but that’s how you bet.”) Ruth appropriately received a lot of newspaper ink, but so too did the managers of the Yankees – Miller Huggins – and the Giants – John McGraw.

After the Yankees came on late in the session to win the American League pennant, Runyon wrote of Huggins, who rarely received the credit he was due for the success of this heavy hitters and slick pitchers, “the little manager of the New York club, tramped across the yard in the wake of his men, his head bowed in characteristic attitude. In happiness or sorrow Huggins is ever something a picture of dejection. The crowd cheered him as his familiar Charley Chapin feet lugged his small body along, and Huggins had to keep doffing his cap.”

Good book about great characters and the American game in a very interesting time.