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Tuesday, March 31, 2009

He's no Phil Rizzuto, that's for sure
Posted by Jill | 5:29 AM
Baseball fans are familiar with the kind of stuff that used to come out of the mouth of Phil Rizzuto during his years in the Yankees broadcast booth. Hart Seely and Tom Peyer saw the observations of the Scooter as a kind of free verse, and in 1994 compiled it into a book called O Holy Cow: The Selected Poems of P.F. Rizzuto, which is, alas, out of print but contained such pearls of Scooter wisdom as this, spoken after the death of catcher Thurman Munson in a plane crash:

Prayer for the Captain

There's a little prayer I always say

Whenever I think of my family or when I'm flying

When I'm afraid, and I am afraid of flying.

It's just a little one. You can say it no matter what,

Whether you're Catholic or Jewish or Protestant or whatever.

And I've probably said it a thousand times

Since I heard the news about Thurman Munson...

It's just something to keep you from really going bananas.

Because if you let this,

If you keep thinking about what happened, and you can't understand it,

That's what really drives you to despair.

Faith. You gotta have faith.

You know, they say time heals all wounds,

And I don't quite agree with that a hundred percent.

It gets you to cope with wounds.

You carry them the rest of your life.


A few years ago I used to post on a particular message board. One of the regular posters was a feisty Latina from Harlem, who similarly posted in a form that was a kind of free verse. One day I copied some of her posts into Wordpad, formatted them into a kind of poetic form, and sent them back to her saying "You should self-publish these." So the idea that some people with a quirky style utter a form of poetry is hardly news, certainly not in the age of hip-hop. But Seely and Peyer are at it again, but this time the subject of their poetic musings isn't a universally beloved figure like Scooter. No, instead they use their talents in recognizing free verse to try to turn the preposterous and dangerous Glenn Beck into a kind of poet laureate for the haterati:
DISGRUNTLED

As they were describing him, what they said was,
Here is a guy who felt that he had been wronged.
He didn't feel comfortable talking to anybody.
He was disgruntled and everything else.
And then he went out and shot a bunch of people.

As they were describing him, and they said,
You got to go, now more than ever,
You got to start talking to people,
You have to start connecting with people
Because, they're going in hard times, yada, yada, yada.

As I'm listening to the description,
First of all, this guy is a psycho, clearly, he's a psycho.
But as I'm listening to him, I'm thinking
About the American people that feel disenfranchised
Right now, that feel like nobody's hearing their voice.

The government isn't hearing their voice; even if you call,
They don't listen to you on both sides; if you're a conservative,
You are called a racist; you want to starve children,
Yada, yada, yada, they're, and every time they do speak out,
They are shut down by political correctness.

How do you not have those people turn into that guy?

("Glenn Beck," Fox News, March 12, 2009)


Mr. Beck, I used to listen to Phil Rizzuto. Everyone loved Phil Rizzuto. And Mr. Beck, you, sir, are no Phil Rizzuto.

(UPDATE: Tom Peyer wrote to inform us that O Holy Cow is back in print, so I've changed the link above to the new release. Father's Day is just around the corner after all, and the baseball season opens next week.)

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2 Comments:
Anonymous Anonymous said...
the scooter was not afraid to go where no announcer had ever gone...during one interminable rain delay, the conversation with bill robinson drifted ever farther from baseball...they began to argue over which bronte sister wrote 'wuthering heights'...'no scooter it was emily'...'no you huckleberry, it was charlotte'
3/31/09, 11:45 AM  
Blogger Jill said...
It was Bill White, not Bill Robinson. Bill Robinson was the 1st base coach for the 1986 World Series-winning Mets.
4/1/09, 5:21 AM  
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