"A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez", Selena Roberts: Where's My Lawyer?

I've written about this book before, over on the original site. My mother found the book for ninety-nine cents at some place and sent it to me. I decided to write about it today to coincide with a sports blog post about A-Rod trade rumors.

So...let's say you play baseball. You play hard, you practice hard, you're kicking ass all throughout high school and for a quick year at college before getting drafted in the early rounds. Finally making it and becoming a star, you're financial power secured for generations.

Then a book is published claiming you used steroids all throughout high school and in college and in the pros. Ah hell no! I don't fucking think so! Time to put that financial power to good use. If you're clean, you're suing the writer, the publisher, the parent company, every-damn-body, right? I would. I would grind everybody's face to dust over that shit, just like Curt Schilling said.

That's what this book is about; the little child that was abandoned by his dad, always needing reassurance, always needing to be the best, and using every opportunity to get to that spot. Selena Robert's book alleges is pretty exacting detail how steroid use appears to have started for Alex Rodriguez in high school, and continued all the way through his years with the Yankees.

She spoke with him directly more than once, trying to get some kind of reaction from him...and got nothing. At least not in the form of contradictory fightin' words. Or lawsuits.

So take it how you want. I don't put stock into the "that's so wrong I won't dignify it with a response" line of reasoning. We're talking about a baseball player who's totally obsessed with his stats and his place in baseball's history and his legacy, and that these allegations could compromise all that, but he's already admitted to doping at one point! How hard is it to jump to the conclusion that this book is accurate?

Undeniable fact: A-Rod came back after an off-season during high school with more than thirty pounds of lean muscle added to his frame. The odds of adding thirty-plus pounds of lean muscle in a few months even for high school aged kids is pretty low (read: nigh impossible)(unless you're Andre the Giant, maybe).

Alex Rodriguez is strange case. His numbers are through the roof. But the Bronx fans...I've been at games where they boo him. Possibly the greatest player ever (before the steroid revelations, of course) getting booed at his home park. I've even been at games where he hits a homer, and was groaned at, a nearby middle aged lady hollering, "Do it when it matters!" with a shake of her head.

You can't be a fake asshole in New York. They sniff that shit out right away. And that's one of the main reasons they don't like the West Coast. Being a fake asshole is the leading industry in LA.

"Noa Noa", Paul Guaguin: Leaving it All Behind

I don't know where I bought this, but I'm sure I didn't spend more than a buck.

Paul Gauguin was one of the great initiators of Post-Impressionism,which makes him one of the fathers of Modern Art. Although he wasn't well regarded in his lifetime, now his works are sought after and prized.

Tired of city life in Paris, Gauguin left (as a forty-three year old), and went off to live in the South Pacific, specifically Tahiti. Pulling a "French Thoreau" I guess; going all the way to the So. Pacific.

The cover image from this copy is from a wood cutting from Paul's time during this, his first, visit.

At first he's disappointed. Europe has long fingers, and they've reached all the way to the Tahitian "metropolises". Eventually he gets further and further from the major towns, into the backwoods of Tahiti, which sound pretty fucking in the cut.

"Do you want to live in my hut for always?" is how he realized that the young beautiful native girl in his hut was now his wife. She was arranging food on a banana leaf.

The type set is strange in that the printed words may cover only slightly more than half the white-space on each page. But the tone, the angst, the feeling of leaving it all behind and fleeing for the tropics...that's the truth behind wanderlust. That's all there.

There's also the inevitable feeling of disappointment, since the world you're fleeing is too tempting not to replicate (it creates wealth), and thus infects anything of significant size.

Gauguin did it. He was one of the few that actually did it. This journal is breezy and quick, and as it unfolds, you can see his awestruck eye move into cynicism, and then into practicalities of life in the jungle.

It's one of the blueprints, if you're all about ditching your families and bills and running away to the jungle...at least philosophically, anyway.

"South", Shackleton: Boo Yah! A Story for the Ages

What's the craziest true story you've ever heard of? There are some wild ones, like anything involving either Nikola Tesla or Evariste Galois or Chuck Yeager.

Or Ernie Shackleton.

This book I bought somewhere after hearing about the story. I think I asked for it for Decemberween one year also, and I think I actually have two copies at the apartment. I think this copy has a font that's easier on my eyes.

Okay, so the story: this book is the memoir and partial journal of Shackleton's ill-fated journey to the South Pole.

It was the time of the last great explorers, and as the North Pole had just been mobbed, the South Pole was next. Shackleton's team was in a race with another team, a second team that, as a SPOILER, actually beat Shackleton to the Pole. In fact, Shackleton never made the Pole. But that doesn't matter to the story; it's incidental.

The picture on the front of the book is from their first trial, when their vessel got caught, and then crushed, in the pack ice miles away from shore. The crew drug the supplies--including the twenty-foot-long lifeboats--600 miles across the floes. Six-hundred-miles. When they got to a rock formation called Elephant Island Shackleton took three of his strongest men and set out again in one of those long-boats on a patch of sea. In order to save his crew, he knew he needed to get away from Antarctica, and cross the angriest ocean on the planet, the Southern Ocean, to get word out and have at least a chance.

The four of them rocked and rolled on unbelievably heavy seas in a 20' open long-boat---basically a glorified canoe. And they eventually landed on a small island near South America, were picked up by a larger vessel, went to Argentina, got supplies and another ship, and went back for the crew members that were left behind.

They found them, and saved them.

Ernest Shackleton did not lose a single man from his floe-crushed ship Endurance. They spent months surviving and waiting, and Cap'n came back.

If four guys riding sixty-foot waves of stormy frigid ocean for 850 miles in twenty-foot long open canoes doesn't get your excitement meter running, then you should stop snorting meth from bony hooker asscracks.

"Hell's Angels", Hunter Thompson: An Example from a Hero

I bought this copy in 2009 from the Housing Works bookstore in SoHo. I think it was a quarter. The cover wasn't as jacked up as that when I bought it; that all happened as I'd have the book in my pocket as I walked around. See, in the City, you need something to read on the subway, and I always tried to have a book or a newspaper handy.

Hunter Thompson is one of my intellectual heroes, and I've modeled different projects as direct inspirations from Hunter's work.

Hell's Angels is a history of the returning WWII vets finding solace in groups, all riding motorcycles like they had during the war. They took club names from their old military divisions, and occasionally got into scrapes with other clubs and small-town constabulatory forces.

They weren't always seen as a public danger. They didn't really keep up with society's level of hygiene, but they did enjoy a brief level of notoriety as being a public commentator of political issues--no joke.

The rise and fall of Sonny Barger's group, being invited to an unwitting Kesey acid party at La Honda, getting onto television and in print interviews was all pretty good and heady for the group. Then reports of brutal rapes filtered in, mostly unsubstantiated, and then a fight between two guys spilled over into a small coastal California town, and the Angels were from then on outlaws in the bad sense, not in the romantic good sense.

This book also showed off Hunter's take on Tom Wolfe and Plimpton's New Journalism. With the other proponents, Wolfe set about establishing New Journalism as a thing where writers could use the methods of story-telling normally reserved for fiction in telling a non-fiction story. Hunter's take on that topic is usually called Gonzo Journalism, but is only shown here in his approach. It was Hunter's contention that the author of any piece was inextricable from said piece, and would eventually become part of the story.

Tom Wofle's The Right Stuff is an example of New Journalism. Using plot and character development, Wolfe weaves an exciting story of bat-shit crazy test pilots fighting for the chance to sit on a rocket and light a match.

George Plimpton's One For the Record shows his attempt, an approach a little closer to Hunter's, where the author has a part in the story of one man and his attempt to survive his march to history.

Hell's Angels isn't Gonzo Journalism exactly, but how is it set up? Hunter joins them, and reports the world as how he sees it, not even feigning impartiality. He just accepts that being impartial is an illusion, and that's the legacy that I'm a part of, at least with the blogging anyway.

"The Game", Ken Dryden: One of the Best Sports Books Ever

I was reading out sports books online a few months ago, and came across a passionate fan of Ken Dryden's seminal The Game. I found it for sale online for very cheap, so cheap that the shipping cost more, something I've been finding lately with some of my purchases.

This copy was one of the Canadian paperbacks, which I thought was pretty cool, since this is one of the best selling books in Canada's history.

Ken Dryden played goalie for the Montreal Canadiens hockey team during one of their dynastic runs. The Canadiens are the NHL's version of the Yankees, having separate dynasties and winning the most championships in the league's history. Dryden went on to become a lawyer and lawmaker, and served in an elected position in their parliament.

The book was described by various sources as the best book about hockey by far, and possibly the best sports book ever. Well, I like reading, and I like sports, so there was the natural-ness of the whole shebang.

Reading in the introduction about how Dryden would scratch out notes on pads at his locker after periods, or on receipts or on random hotel stationary, but then he had a sickening realization that those thoughts and feelings he'd written wouldn't comprise a book in the sense he'd originally thought when he started the project. That topic is in the first few sentences in the introduction, letting readers know what they're getting into.

Touching on philosophy, memories, teamwork, leadership, and the drive for excellence, The Game is a classic in any discipline.

The last three books have been examples from my sports-book pocketbooks collections, and each covers a different iconic player from their sport: Hank, Pele and Dryden. This book is best of the three in terms of the writing.

"Pele: My Life and the Beautiful Game": The Greatest

This book was wrongly delivered to a house I lived in, and where we were in our lives, we opened the package up, and I ended up keeping it.

It's really good, and helped me understand Pele, Brazilian soccer, the late '50s through the '70s in international soccer, and the effect soccer---and Pele---has on the world, still today.

And that's pretty much it. This book has many pages for such a light collection of anecdotes. They're all very entertaining, and you get a tiny glimmer of what life in Brazil might be like, a country that's not fed the politics of the threat of global war.

In Brazil it's all about integration, dancing, soccer, and bathing suits made out of dental floss...a more magical place couldn't be created in fiction. Except for those murder rates...

"Hank Aaron: One for the Record", George Plimpton: This is Why the Hammer is One of My Favortites

I can't remember where I got this, but I'm thinking I picked it up for a quarter or fifty cents from some paperback pile.

Oh man, oh man, oh man! I'm a baseball fan, and a Yankee fan at that, which pretty much makes me an asshole (I do my best to not be obnoxious), but I'd never really considered Hank for a top spot in my pantheon of baseball heroes.

That's changed.

Now I go and preach the merits of "the Hammer" to baseball fan and non- alike.

In this tiny book George Plimpton, of Mousterpiece Theater cartoons from the Disney Channel, of the New Journalism school of intellectual thought with Tom Wolfe, the Intellivision video game console shill, et al, focused his attention on the event of Henry passing Babe Ruth's career homerun record. It reads mostly like an article for the New Yorker or an artsy piece from Rolling Stone.

It's one of my favorite sports books: it's breezy yet deep, it never lingers, and it introduced me to a new world where Hank Aaron was one of the greats. I always knew that, you know, from the stats alone (when he retired he had the most homeruns, RBIs, runs, and was second for hits, and hit over .300 for his career). This book opened up my eyes to the visceral impact of his life (he started in the Negro Leagues!)(his life was threatened everyday for months) had on the game and America.

Plimpton, knowing that he has really only one fleeting moment around which to build an entire writing project--one pitch that gets hit over the fence for homer #715, eclipsing the Babe's 714 career mark, up to recently figured untouchable--decides to focus on different aspects of that fleeting moment.

His subjects are The Observer, The Pitcher, The Hitter, The Ball, The Retriever, The Fan, The Announcer. He visits a baseball factory; the guy who plays Chief Nok-a-Homer, the mascot in full headdress and costume; a wild fan in Atlanta that makes statues of Hank; Hanks's folks.

The world in which Hank Aaron played baseball was far different from today's. The country was still very segregated and it was more accepted to be obviously hostile and prejudiced toward black players. One of my favorite parts of the book is a telling quote from Hank's father:

"Henry was in baseball for work."

It was a job.

I've been one of the few who talk up Hank's status as underrated. The guy isn't ranked nearly high enough in most All-Time lists.

Go Hammer!