My Mariano Rivera Story

During the first weekend of June, 2003, my Yankees came to the North Side of Chicago for the first time since the 1938 World Series. It was a tough ticket to get.  But the Friday game was delayed over an hour by rain, so I got on the Red Line and hoped for the best. I went to the Day of Game window and got lucky. Apparently some folks decided to skip the game on account of rain. I wound up with a seat in Aisle 36, ten rows behind the Yankees bullpen.

The first sight of a Yankees squad in Road Greys at Wrigley since the last year of Lou Gehrig's career began with Derek Jeter popping out of the visitor's dugout.  There was no batting practicethat day,  but the skys parted and all was clear before the first pitch. It was a lovely day for baseball after all.

The Yankees got out to a 5-0 lead early. David damn Wells hit a double! (Full disclosure-I was in line for a beer and watched that play on the TV above the right field line concession stand.)

Mariano Rivera was known to take naps during the early innings of a game. He liked to take the mound when he was at his peak-about an hour after the clubhouse boys woke him. In about the sixth inning he came out to join his bulpen mates. It didn't look like he would be needed that day, but stranger things have happened.

A little boy of about seven was sitting in the row in front of me with his dad. His dad pointed out Rivera to him and told him about what a special player he was. In between innings, the boy ran down to the famous brick wall with a small disposable camera. Mariano noticed him and smiled as the child line up his photograph.  The kid ran back to his dad and was full of excitement. "That's great," the dad said. "Maybe next innning you can get his autograph.

After the next half inning, the boy ran back down with a ball and pen in hand. Mariano saw him again, but politely explained that he wasn't allowed to sign autographs during the game.  "Come down after the last out of the game. I'll sign it then."

The score at the time was five to two. David Wells was in command of all his stuff.  But then in the bottom of the eight inning, Corey Patterson hit a solo home run to tighten up the game. Antonio Asuna came in to get the last out of the inning, and Mariano began to warm up in earnest. He might just be needed after all.

The Yankees did not score in the top of the 9th, so Joe Torre brought in his big gun for the bottom half of the inning.  Mariano was not perfect that day. He gave up two singles, but didn't allow a run. He Sop Choi struck out for the final out of the game. Final Score, Yankees 5, Cubs 3.

The Yankees dugout emptied and all the players casually slapped high fives in single-file. As the brief celebration ended, the players headed into to the clubhouse by way of the dugout.  The boy was holding out hope for an autograph. The father of this kid was trying to let his son down easy. "Look, Mr. Rivera didn't know that he would be pitching when he promised to sign your ball." The kid looked devastated. I never wanted an autograph, even as a child trying to get Don Mattingly's attention, as I wanted this kid to get Mariano Rivera's signature. But it seemed not to be.

We all watched the Yankees file towards their dugout. Except one. Mariano Rivera, instead of heading for the dugout steps, turned toward right field and slowly walked out toward the bullpen. For a second I worried that he was just going to get his jacket or sunflower sseeds. But no, he was headed straight for the little kid in Aisle 36, Row 9.

When he got out by us, he pointed right at the kid and told him to come down to the railing. Mariano took the ball, signed his name on it and flipped it back to him.  The boy ran back to his father, filled with joy.

A few grown ups started yelling for Mo to sign their stuff. He ignored them and trotted back to the dugout. More than one of the grown ups called him a name or two.  They didn't know the whole story.

I've been a Yankees fan for over 40 yers. I can recite the name and statistics of my favorite players. I have their succession memorized: first Reggie Jackson, then Graig Nettles, followed by Don Mattingly, followed by Bernie Williams, followed by Mariano Rivera and then, for one year only, Derek Jeter. After that it's a little hazy. Favorite players are less important to adults. I am only a few years younger than Mariano Rivera. But when I heard the news today that he is the first unanimously chosen member of the baseball Hall of Fame, I got choked up.

The indelible image of Mariano Rivera is him trotting through the Bronx night while "Enter Sandman" plays over The Staidum's sound system, so he could put out a proverbial fire from the mound. But my strongest memory of  him will always be him calmly walking down the right field line of the Friendly Confines with "Go Cubs Go" playing, so he could keep a promise to a kid in the stands.

The last 42 is the first 100. Congratulations, Mo.

Harpo Speaks! by Harpo Marx
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a remarkable book. It is the memoir of a second grade drop out, who eventually rubbed shoulders with the great literary figures of his day. It is also the memoir of one of the most famous movie stars of the first few decades of talkies. But he barely mentions his movies.

I am a life-long fan of the Marx Brothers. I can't really say why I didn't get around to reading this one sooner but I'm glad that I did. Unlike a lot of celebrity memoirs, Harpo does not skip the details of his youth. He writes at length about an impoversished existence on the Upper East Side of Manhattan at the close of the 19th century. He was the middle child of five boys, but spent his days in an odd solitude roaming the streets in hopes of finding adventur and maybe hustling somethin of value.

The best part of the book is when he writes about the Marx Brothers years as traveling vaudevillians. He writes about how their act came together, in fits and starts, and the various flop houses that they brothers stayed in between 1910 and their first Broadway show in 1924.

Then he becomes famous. But not, strictly speaking, a celebrity. No one recognized him out of costume and no one knew what he sounded like. But he fell in with the Algonquin Round Table and was more than content to be their listening partner. He writes with real affection for that crowd, and with reverence even for litary figures who have been mostly forgotten 90 years later.

The transition to movies and the move to Hollywood are given cursory coverage. He does not dissect Duck Soup or tell the tale of how Irving Thalberg got them over to MGM to make A Night at the Opera and a day at the Races before dying young and leaving them without a champion in the studio. He spends more time talking about his USO tours and night club engagements with his brother Chico.

He writes about the brothers in more or less inverse proportion to their celebrity. Gummo was his agent and very dear friend. He writes about Zeppo's business acumen with big brotherly pride. Chico is mostly seen as a scamp who stole from him as a kid and as an adult. But there's almost no judgment there. Groucho is really only spoken of as a wit. There's almost no sense of their bein friends, although he does mention that some combination of the five brothers ate lunch almost every day in their later years.

Harpo loves to drop names. And some of the anecdotes are a little too good to be true. But they are funny and warm. The last few chapers deal with his happy marriage and the joy he and his wife took in raising four children, all of them adopted. The passage about how they raised their children to view the act of adoption as an adventure is truly poignant.

Harpo might have written a more serious memoir where he exposed the grit of his relationships with Groucho and Chico or where he divulged the process that caused him to make Love Happy, the last Marx Brothers movie most famous for being the first Marilyn Monrore movie. Harpo not only leaves that story out, he actually seems to forget he made it! (He refers to A Night in Casablanca as the last Marx Brothers movie.)

But these are the quips of a die-hard Marxist of the Groucho variety. Anyone who loves comedy or show business or Dorothy Parker and her crowd, will get a lot out of reading this one.



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Uncovering the Dome by Amy Klobuchar
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I read this book because I wanted to get a sense of what Amy Klobuchar's writing and thinking were like before she entered the national political stage. This book is a beefed-up version of her senior undegraduate thesis at Yale. It tells the rather dry story of how the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrdome was built by the people and government of Minnesota.

The story unfolds in a pretty straight-forward manner. The governor recognizes that the Twins and Vikings might leave for sunnier climes if they do not get a new stadium (or two) but no one wants to commit tens of millionis of public dollars to subsidize two particular private corporations. Eventually the state legislature appoints a seven person commission to study the issue and to decide where such a stadium should be built. The result was the HHH Metrodome, a functional but unloved stadium that served as home to the Twins and Vikings for 30 years.

As prose, the writing suffers a bit from the hallmarks of undergraduate research. There is a lot of exposition and the drama is light, although the future Senator does an admirable job of describing the motivations of the various pols with sympathy. The books feels like it was written by someone who already knew it was a good idea not to step on anyone's toes.

She dodges ansering the biggest question teased by the book, whether it serves the public interest to build such stadiums with tax payer money. Her pragmatic conclusion seems to imply that probably isn't, but at least these particular public servants did it in a way that was on time and under budge and that prevented the Vikings from having to change their name to something more tropical for a spot in the sunbelt.

The Metrodome was an exotic part of baseball to me as a kid. In the conclusion of the book she quotes Yankees manager Billy Martin as saying the dome should be banned from baseball. As I recall he lamented that the people of Minnesota had plastered the name of a great man on a dump such as this unattractive stadium on the edge of downtown Minneapolis.

Battlin' Billy was a lot less kind than Senator Amy Klobuchar. The book is forgetable. But I left with the impression that I hope some day a stadium in the Twin Cities is named for her too.


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