Willie Mays at 90

[Frayed Knot]

I personally think he brought up Elvis just to get the Elvis in excelsis line in, and if he did it was totally worth it.

[dinosaur jesus]

Edgy MD wrote: Well, he tries to draw the parallel with detailed points.

But the points are meaningless. They're too specious even to be clever. Mays went into the army as a hugely promising young player and came out as a great one. Elvis went in at the peak of his career and came out as someone who made shitty movies--and still made great music, but only when he felt like it. For Mays "holed up in California" just means he played in San Francisco. For Elvis it means he was stuck making those movies. For Mays "artistic decline" means he was an aging athlete but still a hell of a player into his forties. For Elvis it means he'd got his head and body so fucked up he could barely function most of the time. For Mays "employed by casinos" means he took some easy money when he couldn't play baseball anymore. For Elvis it meant he played music for people--the one point where Mays comes off sadder in comparison.



They were both transformative. But in completely different ways. And great as Elvis was, I think the comparison is demeaning to Mays, who never betrayed his talent.

[G-Fafif]

Another passage.

He was everywhere, in uniform, because baseball was still in the national water supply, even as late as 1967, when Mays played in a celebrity softball game at Dodger Stadium. The game was televised in prime time on NBC, with Dodgers announcer Vin Scully on play-by-play and comedian Jerry Lewis on color. In the fourth inning, while facing actor Dale Robertson, Mays hit a towering fly to left field, where Woody Allen called off center fielder Peter Falk and made the catch. The Brooklyn-born Allen, 16 when Mays made the majors, would describe the moment in later interviews as a dream come to life. “Why is life worth living?” Allen's character, screenwriter Isaac Davis, asks in the 1979 film Manhattan. “That's a very good question. Well, there are certain things I guess that make it worthwhile. Like what? O.K., I would say, what, Groucho Marx, to name one thing, and Willie Mays, and the second movement of the Jupiter Symphony, and uh, Louis Armstrong, recording of ‘Potato Head Blues,' uh, Swedish movies naturally. Sentimental Education by Flaubert. Uh, Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, those incredible apples and pears by Cézanne ...” Deciding who is the reigning cultural colossus of any age is always a multiple-choice exam. But the possible answers are not infinite. “Some men define a generation,” the sportswriter Jimmy Cannon wrote in 1969. “It may be the Beatles or Lenny Bernstein or Frank Sinatra or Picasso or Willie Mays or Wilt Chamberlain or Marlon Brando or Tennessee Williams.” Or Bob Dylan, who, like the rest of TV-watching America, saw Green Bay Packers quarterback Bart Starr in a commercial in the early 1960s. A young man was applying Brylcreem at a locker room sink when Starr intervened: “Sam,” Starr asked, “You still using that greasy kid stuff?” Old Bart knew what Young Sam didn't: “Vitalis keeps your hair neat all day without grease.” Brylcreem and Vitalis were hair-care products for white men. “Out of the shower comes the football man, with a bottle of oil in his hand,” Dylan sang in “I Shall Be Free” in 1964. “Greasy kid stuff. What I wanna know, Mr. Football Man, is what do you do about Willie Mays, Martin Luther King [and the Nigerian drummer Babtunde] Olatunji?

[G-Fafif]

Late entrant in the general election?

[Frayed Knot]

HEY, the NY Governor's chair is up for grabs.