Not the same situation, but I remember when Bradshaw was injured at the end of his career, couldn't play, but was undermining Cliff Stoudt by throwing passes on the sidelines, causing the crowd to chant for him and to boo Stoudt even more.
I have a Terry Bradshaw story. I probably told it before, but I'll tell it again. It's really my dad's story, but I tell it better than him.
January 1985. Parkersburg, West Virginia. We had just moved there and didn't have a house yet, so my dad's employer was putting us up in the Holiday Inn, which was the nicest place in town. A snowstorm hits. Sort of paralyzes the area.
My dad went down to the bar -- which is still odd to me because he really doesn't drink. A half hour or so after he got there, he calls up to the room "Curt, Craig, if you have any Terry Bradshaw cards, grab 'em and come down here."
Terry Bradshaw, not too deep into retirement, is in town to sign autographs or make some appearance someplace. He got stuck in the snowstorm and checked into the Holliday Inn. He's in the bar. My dad walked over to him, said "hi" sat down with him and the two of them hung out.
My brother and I go down, for some reason an 11 and 13 year-old kid are let into the bar. We find them, Terry says hi to us, signs our cards, and was really nice about it. We leave.
Turns out that ALSO that night in the bar, there's a lingerie truck show/fashion show kind of thing happening? Like, for real, on a stage, with models. Bradshaw and my dad watch the thing for a while, drinking beers. Then it gets fun . . .
The MC of the show recognizes Bradshaw and tries to get him to come on stage to model a men's robe/smoking jacket kind of thing. Bradshaw laughs and declines. Then says "my buddy here will do it," pointing to my dad.
My dad goes up on stage -- probably had two beers in him so he was GONE -- and models a damn smoking jacket with Terry Bradshaw hooting and hollering for him.
Somewhere in my parents' house there's a polaroid photo of a half-crocked Terry Bradshaw and a fully-crocked Richard Calcaterra in the Holiday Inn lounge in Parkersburg, WV, with my dad in a smoking jacket. I still have the Bradshaw autographs. 1976, 1977, 1978, and 1984 Topps.
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The article also gets at a thing that I have mentioned often in the past but which does not make me very popular among journalists my age or older: that our understanding of how journalism works is based on a relatively transitory period in the history of American journalism.
Before people chime in with fan crap, I have a lot of hats. Currently I have this, Atlanta, Dodgers, Cleveland (Block C), A's, Cardinals, and Tigers. At any given time I have a good half-dozen hats in rotation and have probably owned 20-25 different team caps in recent years.
Nah. There are some I've never bought or worn, but not because of some hard or noble stand. You're not likely to see me in other NL East caps than Atlanta, or Yankees or Red Sox, but I've had some.
When GOPers get riled re: most things it *seems* like they're full of shit but requires some research to see exactly why. Them being full of shit about baseball, a thing I know about more than them, is a clarifying reminder of how blatantly full of shit they are from the get-go.
Their assumptions about the economic impact of things like the All-Star Game, their beliefs about MLB's racial/political orientation, both historical and current, the antitrust exemption -- they just comically have no idea what the hell they're talking about.
If you're lucky enough to see this in your own bailiwick the bad faith on their part is as plain as day. And a good reminder to never their take their bad faith on on its own terms elsewhere. It's not worthy of engagement most of the time. It's like bargaining with a child.
Baseball getting called out as "woke" is the most hilarious shit I've seen in a dog's age. There is none less woke a thing than baseball this side of the Eisenhower era.
There are blue 1952 DeSoto Diplomats that are more woke than Major League Baseball.
The primordial time of the mid-to-late 2000s were a golden age for blogging collectives. Most of them have gone extinct. Victims of small environmental factors like social media or large impacts from pivot-to-video or gambling #content asteroids. [cont'd]
Many of us from that world were wiped out. Others retreated to caves. Others adapted. Either way, massive upheaval was the order of the age.
From the rubble-strewn wasteland of that apocalypse emerges . . . the O.G. Big League Stew crew! With @AnswerDave reunited with @KevinKaduk at @MidwayMinute! So cool to see Dave back with 'Duk like it was the damn Bush years again! midwayminute.win
I know that I'm promoting a shit-ton today. Which, given how hard I promote, is saying something. In my defense it's Opening Day, so I'm stoked. But I'm also stoked for a different reason.
When I launched this newsletter, I had a modest short term goal and a bolder longer term goal. The modest goal was that it'd provide enough money that, combined with my NBC severance, I'd be able to ride out a tough job search and not have to consider reactivating my law license.
The bolder long term goal was that it'd be my full time job forever. To that end, I set a subscriber/income goal that I felt could make that work. I pegged that goal to August 3, 2021, the anniversary of the day NBC shitcanned me.