When asked the other night what it would mean going forward, or something like that, to him and his fellow Phillies that they had just been held without a single base hit by the Houston Astros, Kyle Schwarber replied, on network TV, "I don't give a shit."
For polite consumption the shit was bleeped, but for replay -- for the ages -- there it is. Generally ballplayers interviewed on TV don't say shit, in the sense that they don't say anything of interest. But with regard to either shit or shit, you know they're holding back. Will the new candor catch on?
Once a sportswriting friend of mine asked a player how he was doing and the player said, "I couldn't hit my motherfucking grandmother." The strongest thing that player ever said on camera was probably something about his timing being off. When Dick Young, a cranky old baseball writer, needed to keep a TV competitor out of his way, he would say, "Back up or I'll put fuck's on your audio."
In movies these days, of course, there is no ceiling on swears. So the old standard blasphemies lack all punch.
If Gone With the Wind were remade today, would Rhett Butler say to Scarlet O'Hara, "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a shit"?" And cue the swelling strings?
In Network, would Howard Beale say, "I'm mad as fuck, and I'm not going to take this anymore"?
All I know is, I watched that World Series no-hitter, and I didn't give much of a shit. It was a good game, but it wasn't a gem. A gem is when a single pitcher keeps us on the edge of our seat for a solid game. The Astros' appealing young starter, Cristian Javier, pitched only six innings. There is no such thing as two-thirds of a gem. The last three innings were pitched by three relievers. That's baseball these days.
Baseball isn't legendary anymore. It's on TV. You can't lie about it. William Hewlettte "Tubby" Walton, who was a 355-pound "stationary catcher" for the Atlanta Crackers in the old Southern Association, could lie.
Tubby would tell you he once came to terms with a restaurant artichoke by pouring syrup over it:
"I ain't tackled nothing I couldn't eat, if I covered it with syrup." But he preferred chitlins: "I could eat one as long as from Atlanta to Grifin." (That would be a chitlin forty-five miles long.) After his playing career, he worked as a scout. He claimed he discovered Luke Appling, Cecil Travis, Johnny Mize, Hugh Casey --
You've probably never heard of those guys. Hugh Casey pitched for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Dem Bums, they were called, and proud of it. Hugh Casey would go to bed with a cigar, comic books, and a bottle of whiskey. One night during spring training in Cuba, Hugh Casey and Ernest Hemingway got to drinking and boxing and -- it is said -- Hemingway had to resort to a punch in the groin.
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