Bud Collins’ widow posted the other day that it was the 10th anniversary of her husband’s death. People who follow tennis remember Bud as the man with the colorful pants, yet he was sweet and unassuming; he let his knowledge of the game (he wrote the Tennis Encyclopedia) and his loud trousers do all the talking. When I was at the Sun-Sentinel he’d send me travel stories he would write while driving to tournaments (that spring-summer migration from Rome to Paris to London) and then, every March, he’d get me a one-day press pass for the Miami Open (in those days it had a corporate name) and I’d join him and his wife Anita in the media center. Watching matches with Bud – a man who had watched thousands of matches – I always wondered what he was seeing that I wasn’t. Yet more impressive than his vast knowledge of the sport was the fact that he called everyone in the cafeteria by their name.
Yesterday I finally saw “One Battle After Another” – because I suspect it’s going to win the Oscar and I wanted to be au courant – and I’m still a little traumatized by Sean Penn’s haircut. But that was one of the least preposterous things in the movie. I thought, because of all the buzz, I was going to get a serious movie, one perhaps with an important message, and the first 10 minutes gave me that impression. But it quickly descended into an implausible entertainment. Maybe because I write nonfiction, I like stories that have a basis in reality. More and more, it seems, screenwriters sit in their writers’ rooms and come up with narratives, characters, dialogues, scenes simply because they are cool or outrageous; the fact that they have no relation to the real world, logical behavior, means nothing to them. As long as it will make for great viewing. (I suspect we have Tarantino to thank for this.) “One Battle After Another” is often gripping, and occasionally funny – an action-packed movie of the type that appeals to adolescents – but it is not in the least bit plausible. I mean, why would a man who’s on the run continue to wear a plaid bathrobe?
In the spring of 1977, when I worked at the Trenton Times, a group of us would sometimes knock off work early and go play basketball in the driveway of Michael Norman, who had left the paper a few months earlier but was still available for pick-up games and conversation. Michael would go on to write a book about his experiences as a Marine in Vietnam (These Good Men), cover stories for the New York Times Magazine, and eventually a column for the Times that was sprinkled with quotations from the Greeks. He and his wife Beth would also raise two fine sons.
I stopped to see them just before our move to Fort Lauderdale, and – unlike all my other friends – Michael told me that he liked Florida. I had been feeling uncertain about our move, and Michael’s endorsement made me feel a lot better about it. A few years later, shortly after my first book came out, he and Beth came to visit and Michael, standing in our kitchen, looked me in the eye and told me I had written a very fine book. Then he gave me a congratulatory handshake.
Over the weekend I heard from Beth that Michael had died. The cause was lung cancer, quite possibly the result of exposure to Agent Orange. I thought back to those golden afternoons in Lawrenceville, and Michael’s thoughtfulness. Writers can be such jealous fools, stingy with praise, and now a good one who wasn’t has left us.
What is it about the Winter Olympics? Four days after the close of the winter games in Beijing, Putin invaded Ukraine. Five days after the close of the games in Milan, Trump attacked Iran.
(Googling to find the exact date, I typed the words “Russian invasion” and popping up below came: ‘russian invasion of ukraine,” “russian invasion of afghanistan,” “russian invasion of georgia,” “russian invasion of crimea,” “russian invasion of poland 1939,” “russian invasion of manchuria,” and “russian invasion of finland.)
Phil Rosenthal was at the Fort Lauderdale Travel & Adventure Show on Saturday and he came across just as he does on his show, Somebody Feed Phil: warm, wide-eyed, joyful. He steered clear of politics, though, in reference to the border, he said that, instead of a wall, we should build a table. He gave a little insight into the show, mentioning that he doesn’t eat until the scenes of him eating, a situation similar, he said, to dogs in commercials. Somebody asked him if the show was going to be renewed for another season, and he said he didn’t know. He added that network executives don’t just look at ratings; they consider shows that people binge watch. So he suggested that everyone go home that evening, tune in to his show on Amsterdam – the first in the series – and just leave it on through the night. “You don’t have to watch it,” he said. “Just let it run all the way through.”
My friend David Kirby, a longtime English professor at FSU, wrote an article recently on what makes for a good professor. David listed three qualities: expertise, sense of humor, and enthusiasm.
I thought of my favorite college professors, and David’s trinity resonated with me. (I also thought of my own teaching stints.) Then, considering the subject further, and the times – when government intrusion into academia has grown exponentially – David added a fourth quality: courage.