I Liked It Better When... #5

-- By Tom Phillips

An elegy for the baseball season:  I liked it better when it was about winning the pennant.

Fenway Park, Boston 

Up until 1969, when Major League Baseball began divisional play, there were just two leagues, and two champions at the end of the 162-game regular season.  The two pennant winners then met in the World Series, a best-of-seven playoff, to crown one or the other.  But both were legitimate champions, and flew their banners proudly at their home fields.

Today, big-league baseball has 30 teams in six divisions, but just one winner.  The regular season is no longer a race to the finish line, but more like the starting line. Teams spend all spring and summer jockeying for position in the October post-season, where ten teams compete for the final two slots in the World Series.  Six times in the last 20 years, the World Series winner didn't even win its division, but sneaked in as a wild card in the playoffs.  Any team that's healthy after the grueling regular season stands a chance.

It's been good for fans, and baseball as a business.  Fans stay engaged when their team stays in contention, and more playoff spots mean more games, bigger crowds and TV audiences.

It's not so good for players.  The season used to end early in October, but now it goes until Halloween, 20-odd playoff games added to an already punishing schedule.  World Series teams face a short winter, less time to rest and recuperate.  Not once in this century has a World Series winner been able to repeat.

I Liked It Better When ... #4

-- By Tom Phillips

West 13th Street

I liked it better when you could sit on people's stoops.  The latest "security" measure in New York is landlords installing chains and gates on the front stairs of apartment houses, to keep off people looking to sit a spell.

Stoop-sitting is not a right -- the landlord owns the stairs -- but it is a tradition in New York.   Anybody's stairs were public space, with a few unwritten rules; you moved aside politely when a resident was entering or leaving -- you didn't make too much noise or leave a mess.  Any resident of the building could ask you to leave, but they rarely did.

The stoop was a crucial vantage point -- to observe the life of the block, to see the world go by, to take advantage of chance encounters.  I spotted my future wife on the sidewalk as I sat on a stoop in Chelsea.

I Liked It Better When ... #3

-- By Tom Phillips

I liked it better when shifting gears was the driver's job.

The hardest part of learning to drive on my parents' 1958 Rambler was the co-ordination of clutch, brake, gas pedal and stick.  Hundreds of times over, the car shuddered and stalled in the empty parking lot where my father and I practiced.  Give it a little more gas, let the clutch out easy, he would say, and eventually I learned to feel the gears engaging deep in the transmission, starting to turn the driveshaft, the wheels, picking up speed.  We were on our way!

Driving a stick shift meant your sense of touch was extended out in four directions, to where the rubber met the road.  Meanwhile you scanned the landscape, anticipating the next shift -- power down to rev the engine, speed-shift up to accelerate.  Janet Guthrie, the first woman to race in the Indianapolis 500, said:  "There is very little in civilized life that demands everything you've got intellectually, physically and emotionally.  Driving is living. It's aggressive, rather than passive living."

You didn't have to race in the 500 to appreciate that.  But you did need to shift for yourself.

Today, driving is passive living.  The automatic transmission and power steering made driving easy;   the GPS made it mindless.  Now, we're entering the age of the driverless vehicle.  You can still get a high-performance car, with four or five gears on the floor. They're probably better than ever, and they'll never disappear.  But hardly anyone knows how to drive one.

I Liked It Better When ... #2

By Tom Phillips

To say "I liked it better when .." is NOT to argue that life in general was better long ago.  Many things are better now.  But as the song says, "something's lost, and something gained, in living every day.."  This occasional feature is a catalog of things lost, or on the way out, that used to make life richer or more enjoyable.

Today's contribution is from Linda Given of Somerville, MA.  She writes: 

I liked it better when you didn’t know who would answer the phone, or have to choose one person to call when you wanted to leave a message for a group.  I often wound up chatting with a friend’s father, or sister back in high school days, and later with friend’s children or spouses or roommates - it was a nice, casual and occasional way to develop a relationship.  And a corollary notion: I liked it when my phone rang and I had no idea who was calling.  Saying hello before I heard the caller’s voice. There was anticipation - it could be anyone, someone I hadn’t heard from for years, or - it might be something completely mundane. 

I Liked It Better When ...

 -- By Tom Phillips

1949 Buick Roadmaster

Today the Road to Dotage embarks on a new path, a dead end.  It's entitled "I Liked It Better When..."  

WAIT!  Let me explain...

This is NOT a sentimental series about how life was better in the old days.  Many things are much better now, such as cars that last 10-15 years;  such as free, instant self-publishing, rather than begging some commercial publication for a few inches of space to share your thoughts.  Still, as the song says. "there's something lost, and something gained, in living every day .."  This occasional feature will be a catalog of things lost, or on the way out, that used to make life richer or more enjoyable.  For starters, here's mine:

A Place to Lie Down

-- By Tom Phillips

New York is a great place to make money, and art, friends, and trouble -- a place to write and talk, to compete in the marketplace of ideas.  For all these reasons, it's not a great place to die.  To die in New York -- this is my fantasy -- is to feel like a loser, a dropout, a runner falling by the wayside while others speed on.

Most of my working career was spent at the New York headquarters of CBS.  There, high-powered executives duked it out to become president of this or that division, and ultimately the whole company.  The game was to destroy your enemies and cultivate your allies, until the winner stood atop the mountain, the jewel they called the Tiffany Network.  There, of course, he became the target of vicious attacks until he too fell by the wayside.

Only two men ever survived at the top -- William Paley, the company founder, and the current kingpin, Sumner Redstone.  And the price of their survival was the delusion of immortality.  A biographer quoted Paley in his late eighties, in failing health, demanding of a nurse: "Why do I have to die?"

Redstone goes further.  According the The New York Times, this 93-year-old bare-knuckle billionaire -- though he can barely stand up or speak -- plans to live forever.  This is the premise of his fight to keep control of the company.

I was never president of anything bigger than our co-op apartment building, and while that job failed to kill me, it did not grant the illusion of immortality.  Life will end -- I just don't want to feel like a failure when it does.  So I'm looking for a place where dying is part of life.  Lest my friends despair or my enemies exult -- I'm not expecting to die, or even move, any time  soon.  Still, at 75, one needs a destination.

Ali and Me

--  By Tom Phillips

Muhammad Ali, 1942 - 2016

Muhammad Ali and I were born one day apart -- January 17 and 18, 1942 -- and I always felt a close kinship with him.

The difference, of course, is that he was the greatest, the champion of the world.  Not once but twice, he defied predictions by beating the supposedly invincible heavyweight king.  Both Sonny Liston and George Foreman had devastating knockout punches.  But both were slow of foot and hand.  Ali was a heavyweight who moved like a flyweight and boasted of his insect instincts:  "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee."

He was a vicious, slashing puncher  -- "I whup 'em so bad they call me cruel," he said --  who sacrificed his heavyweight title for peace.  "I ain't got nothing against them Viet Cong," was his protest when the US military tried to draft him during the Vietnam war.  And even in the ring, he showed that you can win a round without striking a blow.

I saw him in action twice, the first time training for his title defense against Zora Folley in 1967.   Sparring with Jimmy Ellis, a heavyweight contender, Ali dropped his hands to his sides, danced, ducked and dodged for a full three-minute round, flicking his head just enough to avoid a barrage of leather.  Ellis never touched him.  

He did the same against Ken Norton in 1976, at Yankee Stadium.  At age 34 he was fighting mostly flat-footed, but in the final, 15th round, he came out and danced for the full three minutes, jabbing and running, displaying his mastery of the ring.  The judges gave him a razor-close unanimous decision.  Norton thought he was robbed, left the ring cursing and crying.  But I agreed with the judges, and it was the fifteenth round that sealed the decision.

Some people thought of Ali as a great strategist, or gave the credit to his trainer Angelo Dundee.  But I always felt he was making it up as he went, looking to Allah for inspiration.

The rope-a-dope was his ultimate piece of defensive wizardry.  Dancing didn't work against heavyweight champ George Foreman in Zaire, in 1974.  Fighting in a cramped 19-foot ring, Foreman was advancing relentlessly, cutting off Ali's escape routes.  So he backed up against the ropes, laying out with his head out over the apron.  With Dundee screaming at him to get off the ropes, he covered up and let Foreman flail away, absorbing thunderous blows to the arms and ribs, taunting the champ:  "You disappoint me, George!"  Ali knocked out the exhausted Foreman in the eighth.  After the fight, he said "staying on the ropes is a beautiful place for a heavyweight.  When you make him shoot his best punches and he can't hurt you, you know you're going to win."

Of all Ali's spontaneous aphorisms, this is my favorite:  "On the ropes is a beautiful place for a heavyweight."  Boxing is a brutal sport, and probably should be banned.  But it never will be, because a boxing match is an incomparable piece of theater -- not an imitation of life, but life itself, with all its glory and disgrace.

-- Copyright 2016 by Tom Phillips