While I generally don’t think writers and actors have that much in common, I do think we share a capacity (or at least a desire) to “inhabit” a subject, in other words to get inside a character and see/feel/think what the character feels. It's a challenge.
In Young Woman and the Sea, my book about Trudy Ederle, (aka Gertrude Ederle) the first woman to swim the English Channel, my biggest fear was that I would be unable to “inhabit” her and translate her experience as a Channel swimmer with authenticity. After all, I am not only not a nineteen year old girl, but - at best - I’m a pedestrian swimmer. What do I know about that experience?
All I could do was all I could do, steep myself in research and use my life experience to try to gain access to her experience, and by that I mean the physical discomfort and mental gymnastics I’ve experienced from a variety of activities – running regularly for more than thirty years, pouring concrete for fourteen hours a day, pitching a baseball, kayaking on Lake Champlain in a wide variety of weather conditions, and other things I’ve done that have required real discipline, focus and physical stamina (like writing a book). That being said, I was still worried I’d get something wrong, and that an experienced open water swimmer would roll his or her eyes and call me on it.
Yesterday I received an e-mail from someone who has read the book, a person who has swum the Channel several times, both in relays and alone. She wrote of the book that, “It is wonderful. You really were able to capture open water swimming and what it is all about.” And then she went on to cite specific examples, scenes from the book that resonated with her own experiences both swimming the Channel and training for it.
Writing a book is a long slog, and that e-mail made me feel like I'd just made it across an English Channel of my own. It is already my favorite review.
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
ON ORTIZ AND AGE
How do you know when you’re done? That’s the question.
I was never much of a ballplayer, but after not playing for seventeen years, at age thirty four I re-habbed my torn rotator cuff, got in shape and started playing in some pretty competitive over-30 baseball leagues. Almost every team had a few guys who played division one in college, a few teams had guys who had played minor league ball, and there was even the occasional cup of coffee major league straggler. I did okay against these guys, made the league all-star team three or four times and won more games than I lost for teams that usually lost more than they won
I’ll never forget my first game back, a doubleheader, actually. I thought I was in pretty good shape. I was running about thirty miles a week, spending several hours lifting weights in the gym, and had participated in regular practice for about a month. We played a doubleheader. I pitched a complete game, went something like 5-9 at the plate and walked a couple times, a good day.
And the next morning I could not get out of a chair without pushing myself up with my arms. Or go down the steps more than one at a time.
Fans, sports writers and even the athletes themselves drastically underestimate the physical demands of playing. Fans and sportswriters do so because most of them haven’t really played since they were kids, when baseball was easy, and they have no conception what it is like to play even three or four games a week (which I did when playing in two over-thirty leagues) much less every day, as they do for long stretches in the major leagues, an incredibly grueling schedule. Players themselves even underestimate the physical demands because when you are in the midst of a career, or even a season, it’s hard to see what slips away from one season to another, or even day by day.
Here’s an example. After playing for several years I went out one spring to discover that I could no longer sprint, at least not every fast. Before, I’d always been able to steal bases, take the extra base, and had never grounded into a double play. All of a sudden - gone. Same weight, same workout, but the gear was gone. After being thrown out a half dozen times in our first couple games, I learned to go station-to-station.
After that, a little went every year. I couldn’t stay out late and play the next day without paying the price. If I skipped a pre-hab day at the gym, (building my arm back up between starts by a controlled lifting program) my arm felt it. One year I couldn’t pull the ball anymore. Then I lost most of my power. I went from a guy who threw hard and hit third or fourth to a junkballer who slapped the ball the opposite way. And there was nothing, absolutely nothing, I could do about it, and I tried everything. Then the reflexes went, and soon after I got hit in the head by an 85 mph pitch I never saw, and essentially got folded in half by a wicked comebacker that hit me in the side and left a grape-purple bruise the size of a dinner plate, I stopped playing. I was forty-four.
Leaving aside rumors about his age, PED use, and off field activities, all of which might make Ortiz’s decline more pronounced, I think we’re seeing the inexorable and effect of age, what Kerouac called “the forlorn rags of growing old.” There have always been players, particularly power hitter, who seem to lose it fast, often in their early to mid-thirties, guys like Bob Allison and Rocky Colavito, who were both basically done at age 33, and Ortiz’s identical twin, Mo Vaughan. Add an injury or two and the decline can be even more pronounced and instantaneous, particularly if some PED enhancement gets taken away at the same time.
Add it all up, and I think he’s finished. Short of releasing him, over the remainder of his contract the best the Red Sox can hope for, I think, is to platoon Ortiz or use him as a pinch hitter, spotting him against certain pitchers in certain ballparks, and hope that he can be reasonably productive in limited duty.
Because here’s the thing - even when I was in my quick decline, there were those times that the guy on the mound (or when I was pitching, the batter) was battling the same thing I was.
In those situations, I still had a chance. For a moment, I was who I used to be.
I was never much of a ballplayer, but after not playing for seventeen years, at age thirty four I re-habbed my torn rotator cuff, got in shape and started playing in some pretty competitive over-30 baseball leagues. Almost every team had a few guys who played division one in college, a few teams had guys who had played minor league ball, and there was even the occasional cup of coffee major league straggler. I did okay against these guys, made the league all-star team three or four times and won more games than I lost for teams that usually lost more than they won
I’ll never forget my first game back, a doubleheader, actually. I thought I was in pretty good shape. I was running about thirty miles a week, spending several hours lifting weights in the gym, and had participated in regular practice for about a month. We played a doubleheader. I pitched a complete game, went something like 5-9 at the plate and walked a couple times, a good day.
And the next morning I could not get out of a chair without pushing myself up with my arms. Or go down the steps more than one at a time.
Fans, sports writers and even the athletes themselves drastically underestimate the physical demands of playing. Fans and sportswriters do so because most of them haven’t really played since they were kids, when baseball was easy, and they have no conception what it is like to play even three or four games a week (which I did when playing in two over-thirty leagues) much less every day, as they do for long stretches in the major leagues, an incredibly grueling schedule. Players themselves even underestimate the physical demands because when you are in the midst of a career, or even a season, it’s hard to see what slips away from one season to another, or even day by day.
Here’s an example. After playing for several years I went out one spring to discover that I could no longer sprint, at least not every fast. Before, I’d always been able to steal bases, take the extra base, and had never grounded into a double play. All of a sudden - gone. Same weight, same workout, but the gear was gone. After being thrown out a half dozen times in our first couple games, I learned to go station-to-station.
After that, a little went every year. I couldn’t stay out late and play the next day without paying the price. If I skipped a pre-hab day at the gym, (building my arm back up between starts by a controlled lifting program) my arm felt it. One year I couldn’t pull the ball anymore. Then I lost most of my power. I went from a guy who threw hard and hit third or fourth to a junkballer who slapped the ball the opposite way. And there was nothing, absolutely nothing, I could do about it, and I tried everything. Then the reflexes went, and soon after I got hit in the head by an 85 mph pitch I never saw, and essentially got folded in half by a wicked comebacker that hit me in the side and left a grape-purple bruise the size of a dinner plate, I stopped playing. I was forty-four.
Leaving aside rumors about his age, PED use, and off field activities, all of which might make Ortiz’s decline more pronounced, I think we’re seeing the inexorable and effect of age, what Kerouac called “the forlorn rags of growing old.” There have always been players, particularly power hitter, who seem to lose it fast, often in their early to mid-thirties, guys like Bob Allison and Rocky Colavito, who were both basically done at age 33, and Ortiz’s identical twin, Mo Vaughan. Add an injury or two and the decline can be even more pronounced and instantaneous, particularly if some PED enhancement gets taken away at the same time.
Add it all up, and I think he’s finished. Short of releasing him, over the remainder of his contract the best the Red Sox can hope for, I think, is to platoon Ortiz or use him as a pinch hitter, spotting him against certain pitchers in certain ballparks, and hope that he can be reasonably productive in limited duty.
Because here’s the thing - even when I was in my quick decline, there were those times that the guy on the mound (or when I was pitching, the batter) was battling the same thing I was.
In those situations, I still had a chance. For a moment, I was who I used to be.
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
The Buzz
I can almost hear it.
All you can ask for from writing a book is the chance for people to hear about it and read it. The sad fact is that for most books, by the time they are published, the audience is already known, the niche has been defined and it is extraordinarily difficult to break out of that.
It might be different for "YOUNG WOMAN & THE SEA," my biography of Gertrude Ederle, aka Trudy Ederle, the first woman to swim the English Channel. A couple of really, really good pre-pub reviews have attracted some attention and given the book a bit of a profile. It was selected as a "Best Summer Read" by the Wall Street Journal, which appears to be attracting even more attention. None of this is bad with the pub date still some weeks off.
Could be it has some "buzz."
Monday, June 1, 2009
The Taint
"Chin Music" Boston Baseball, June 2009
From Curt Schilling’s blog, 38 Pitches, May 8, 2009:
“For the past 19 years or so I’ve had suspicions, some stronger than others, but to sit here today and say I played on even one team that was totally clean would be denying reality… I played pretty much my entire career in the Steroid Era.”
Those words are pretty damning. Although Schilling goes on to stridently proclaim his own innocence, denying he ever used any PED in any form, and calls the notion that Boston’s two most recent world championships were tainted “a load of crap,” his own admission provides evidence to those who feel otherwise.
As I have written before, I find every championship of the last twenty years, if not tainted, then certainly tarnished. But that is something for each of us to decide how we feel for ourselves, and I respect those who disagree with me on this point.
But the Steroid Era did leave a taint, one that may not diminish the accomplishment of any one team but certainly does leave a stain upon certain individuals.
Make that every individual. No player of the era, clean or not, comes away untarnished, and that includes Schilling. While he may have been the only virgin in the whorehouse, as those around him were putting anything and everything into their systems, Schilling nevertheless benefitted – quite a few of those home runs won him some pretty big ballgames - and for the vast bulk of his career, he kept his suspicions to himself while he accepted the glory – and the championship rings – that might not have been acquired totally on the square. Schilling, like most players, states in effect that so many guys were using it all evens up and even though he had suspicions he never actually saw anyone take anything, and gosh darn it, you just can’t accuse someone because of some darn suspicion.
True enough. But he might as well be wearing one of those “Stop Snitching” t-shirts that were all the rage in gangland a few years ago. Because a person of conviction might have stood up and taken a stand, gone public and proclaimed long and loudly that the game was dirty and something should be done, the personal consequences be damned. Schilling may have ended up a pariah among his peers, but he could have looked himself in the mirror without doing a moral back flip. Yet Schilling, like virtually every other professional ballplayer, stayed silent, took the money, looked the other way and became adept at the same kind of self delusion that allows corruption to flourish in any institution.
At its core, that’s what the Steroid Era represents – corruption. Everyone agreed to go along to get along because the turnstiles were spinning and the contracts were getting bigger and more lucrative every year and fans were so swept up in the spectacle that no price was too high to pay for the privilege of watching. All players who knew better and stayed silent are no better than the residents of any community that look the other way as criminal syndicates or gangs act with impunity. Only no one was going to kill a ballplayer for speaking out – they just wouldn’t get asked to dinner. The corruption of the Steroid Era floated all financial boats. Only a sucker would have turned down that, right?
Those in the front office fare no better. Uber GM’s like Billy Beane and Theo Epstein, and managers like Tony LaRussa, Joe Torre and, yes, Terry Francona are also tarnished. Who is Billy Beane minus Giambi and Tejada, or Joe Torre without Pettitte and Clemens, or LaRussa without Canseco and McGwire?
Epstein and Francona without Manny, that’s who. Simply two more names whose personal success is so inexorably bound up with the Steroid Era that, like Schilling and Manny, it is impossible to measure their accomplishments with any certainty. And that is what, in the end, taints everything and everyone. Ask yourself, would any of these men have succeeded in an era without steroids? We will never, ever know.
And neither will they.
Glenn Stout hopes he won’t have to write about this again, but suspects he may have to. His next book Young Woman & Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World, will be published in July. You may contact Glenn at glennstout.net
From Curt Schilling’s blog, 38 Pitches, May 8, 2009:
“For the past 19 years or so I’ve had suspicions, some stronger than others, but to sit here today and say I played on even one team that was totally clean would be denying reality… I played pretty much my entire career in the Steroid Era.”
Those words are pretty damning. Although Schilling goes on to stridently proclaim his own innocence, denying he ever used any PED in any form, and calls the notion that Boston’s two most recent world championships were tainted “a load of crap,” his own admission provides evidence to those who feel otherwise.
As I have written before, I find every championship of the last twenty years, if not tainted, then certainly tarnished. But that is something for each of us to decide how we feel for ourselves, and I respect those who disagree with me on this point.
But the Steroid Era did leave a taint, one that may not diminish the accomplishment of any one team but certainly does leave a stain upon certain individuals.
Make that every individual. No player of the era, clean or not, comes away untarnished, and that includes Schilling. While he may have been the only virgin in the whorehouse, as those around him were putting anything and everything into their systems, Schilling nevertheless benefitted – quite a few of those home runs won him some pretty big ballgames - and for the vast bulk of his career, he kept his suspicions to himself while he accepted the glory – and the championship rings – that might not have been acquired totally on the square. Schilling, like most players, states in effect that so many guys were using it all evens up and even though he had suspicions he never actually saw anyone take anything, and gosh darn it, you just can’t accuse someone because of some darn suspicion.
True enough. But he might as well be wearing one of those “Stop Snitching” t-shirts that were all the rage in gangland a few years ago. Because a person of conviction might have stood up and taken a stand, gone public and proclaimed long and loudly that the game was dirty and something should be done, the personal consequences be damned. Schilling may have ended up a pariah among his peers, but he could have looked himself in the mirror without doing a moral back flip. Yet Schilling, like virtually every other professional ballplayer, stayed silent, took the money, looked the other way and became adept at the same kind of self delusion that allows corruption to flourish in any institution.
At its core, that’s what the Steroid Era represents – corruption. Everyone agreed to go along to get along because the turnstiles were spinning and the contracts were getting bigger and more lucrative every year and fans were so swept up in the spectacle that no price was too high to pay for the privilege of watching. All players who knew better and stayed silent are no better than the residents of any community that look the other way as criminal syndicates or gangs act with impunity. Only no one was going to kill a ballplayer for speaking out – they just wouldn’t get asked to dinner. The corruption of the Steroid Era floated all financial boats. Only a sucker would have turned down that, right?
Those in the front office fare no better. Uber GM’s like Billy Beane and Theo Epstein, and managers like Tony LaRussa, Joe Torre and, yes, Terry Francona are also tarnished. Who is Billy Beane minus Giambi and Tejada, or Joe Torre without Pettitte and Clemens, or LaRussa without Canseco and McGwire?
Epstein and Francona without Manny, that’s who. Simply two more names whose personal success is so inexorably bound up with the Steroid Era that, like Schilling and Manny, it is impossible to measure their accomplishments with any certainty. And that is what, in the end, taints everything and everyone. Ask yourself, would any of these men have succeeded in an era without steroids? We will never, ever know.
And neither will they.
Glenn Stout hopes he won’t have to write about this again, but suspects he may have to. His next book Young Woman & Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World, will be published in July. You may contact Glenn at glennstout.net
Friday, May 29, 2009
Ultimate Beach Read
And I mean it. My new book Young Woman & the Sea (see previous posts) was just selected a “Best Summer Read” by the Wall Street Journal, one of only five non-fiction books so designated. They even ran an excerpt:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203431004574194003685860522.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203431004574194003685860522.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Researching Trudy
Once upon a time when I was beginning to write sports and social history, the print portion of what flacks and reviewers usually call “exhaustive research" was just that. Even ten or twelve years ago, writing a two or three thousand word profile on a historical sports topic was grueling. Apart from interviews, which, depending on the time period in which one writes, are not always central to the process, you had to try to find every book on the subject – or close to the subject – and hope each had an index, and spend hours looking for useful information. Research in newspapers consisted of scrolling though mountains of microfilm, and either taking notes or taking your chances with copy systems that were rarely satisfying. Even the most basic information was almost impossible to come by. For instance, in those pre Retrosheet days even reconstructing the play by play of an inning of a baseball game was almost impossible.
Now of course the wealth of material available online is staggering. In one full day online I can often access and print (if necessary) more material than I could have physically looked up and copied in several months a decade ago. It has dramatically changed the amount of time it takes to research a contemporary topic, and write a book about it. But here’s the catch. As the wealth of online material grows, I think many researchers just stop doing the old grunt work I just described. There is a tendency to dismiss sources that are not available online through Proquest, some magazine database or Google books. Not true. The result can be a great deal of faux research that ignores as much material as it includes.
In my soon to be published book on Gertrude Ederle, "Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World," I did both kinds of research, days and months online and similar time in libraries. In 1926 Ederle became the sixth person – and first woman - to swim the English Channel, beating the men’s record by nearly two hours, a staggering achievement that proved, once and for all, that women could compete as athletes. My challenge was to animate her and her era. The result was, I think, informative. In the end I uncovered more than six thousand articles and stories about Ederle over an eighty-year period. That doesn’t include the wealth of background information on topics such as swimwear, swimming, the geology of the English Channel and other topics I dove into. In the end I collected more information on a single confined subject than I have ever used in any of my previous books. I am certain that I now have the largest collection of print material in Gertrude Ederle in existence, absolutely critical in reconstructing her life and times. And some of the best of that information was acquired at the very end of the research process, which continued even as I was writing and even revising the manuscript in galley form.
The difference between research then and now is as dramatic as the difference between writing out in long hand and using a word processor. Having done both, I prefer the way it is today, but I am reminded by the process that just as writing today generally requires using both a pen and a PC, research requires both access to online resources and the discipline to spend weeks and months squinting in a corner of the library.
Not unlike the discipline it takes to train to swim the English Channel.
Now of course the wealth of material available online is staggering. In one full day online I can often access and print (if necessary) more material than I could have physically looked up and copied in several months a decade ago. It has dramatically changed the amount of time it takes to research a contemporary topic, and write a book about it. But here’s the catch. As the wealth of online material grows, I think many researchers just stop doing the old grunt work I just described. There is a tendency to dismiss sources that are not available online through Proquest, some magazine database or Google books. Not true. The result can be a great deal of faux research that ignores as much material as it includes.
In my soon to be published book on Gertrude Ederle, "Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World," I did both kinds of research, days and months online and similar time in libraries. In 1926 Ederle became the sixth person – and first woman - to swim the English Channel, beating the men’s record by nearly two hours, a staggering achievement that proved, once and for all, that women could compete as athletes. My challenge was to animate her and her era. The result was, I think, informative. In the end I uncovered more than six thousand articles and stories about Ederle over an eighty-year period. That doesn’t include the wealth of background information on topics such as swimwear, swimming, the geology of the English Channel and other topics I dove into. In the end I collected more information on a single confined subject than I have ever used in any of my previous books. I am certain that I now have the largest collection of print material in Gertrude Ederle in existence, absolutely critical in reconstructing her life and times. And some of the best of that information was acquired at the very end of the research process, which continued even as I was writing and even revising the manuscript in galley form.
The difference between research then and now is as dramatic as the difference between writing out in long hand and using a word processor. Having done both, I prefer the way it is today, but I am reminded by the process that just as writing today generally requires using both a pen and a PC, research requires both access to online resources and the discipline to spend weeks and months squinting in a corner of the library.
Not unlike the discipline it takes to train to swim the English Channel.
Monday, May 25, 2009
It's Memorial Day...
P.O.W.
Two weeks since the war started
and I have already surrendered
thrown up the white flag
relinquished my gun, and turned myself over.
Caught between my own lines, captured.
Private, I am confined
with others of my kind; solitary,
chained to my oaths and promises
and no thought or words of home.
I keep no military secret but this:
We should not live this way.
My name, my number, my place and rank in this world
is not enough to say. I have given up
to love; to fight
is to start the battle
and the beatings I still feel
all bad training, say for me to stop.
I’ll admit to anything, yet confess
to nothing else. There is no war crime
no malice in my heart, but one true target
and I refuse to hate the one that keeps me.
We war for reason, and there is none here.
It is fear and loneliness, the feeling of our separate cells
we fight, and not each other.
I will cooperate with my captor
and join in the resistance the only way I can,
make invasion from imprisonment
trying to escape, freeing myself, through the head
the heart, and then the body
of the only true, real enemy
we have ever known.
Two weeks since the war started
and I have already surrendered
thrown up the white flag
relinquished my gun, and turned myself over.
Caught between my own lines, captured.
Private, I am confined
with others of my kind; solitary,
chained to my oaths and promises
and no thought or words of home.
I keep no military secret but this:
We should not live this way.
My name, my number, my place and rank in this world
is not enough to say. I have given up
to love; to fight
is to start the battle
and the beatings I still feel
all bad training, say for me to stop.
I’ll admit to anything, yet confess
to nothing else. There is no war crime
no malice in my heart, but one true target
and I refuse to hate the one that keeps me.
We war for reason, and there is none here.
It is fear and loneliness, the feeling of our separate cells
we fight, and not each other.
I will cooperate with my captor
and join in the resistance the only way I can,
make invasion from imprisonment
trying to escape, freeing myself, through the head
the heart, and then the body
of the only true, real enemy
we have ever known.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
